It had to happen. That's right, someone naming a band Amon Dude. And it probably had to happen in Finland. Which it did. This one man band just so happens to be one of the guys from Avarus, so we were sort of expecting some damaged foresty krautrock what with the name and all, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is some super psychedelic, ultra freaked out, dense and damaged cartoonish splattery improvised noise rock weirdness. And that barely does this stuff justice.
A cacophony or heavily affected percussion, damaged electronics, primitive vocal experiments, a swirling sonic chaos, clattery and explosive, jagged and head spinning, a totally mind blowing brain melting WHAT-THE-FUCK freakout. Hard to even describe what's going on, as it changes pretty much every few seconds. Imagine Carl Stalling orchestrating the No Neck Blues Band after an all night crystal meth binge, or the soundtrack to a Bollywood movie played by Violent Onsen Geisha, or a Perrey And Kingsley recording session after having taken WAY too many drugs and having some sort of musical mental breakdown or maybe even Casiotone For the Painfully Demented and Damaged.
Whatever you call it, this is one weird and wacked and WAY OUT record. Fans of the weirdest of musics from the Finnish fringe will definitely want one of these, as will those of you looking for a party clearer, head spinner, lease breaker, or sonic palate cleanser.
SUPER LIMITED CD-R!!! We got a handful but they will probably be gone pretty fast, and once they are, that's it...
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Lal Lal Lal sent us these, though technically it's private release not on that tiny Finnish label, the reason they had 'em being that Nuslux is a project of Roope from Lal Lal Lal, who's also in Maniacs Dream, Pylon, and Avarus. Meanwhile the Amon Dude (haha) is Arttu, also from Avarus, Anaksimandros, etc. It's limited, it's weird, it's vinyl, and it's Finnish. We only have a handful. What else need we say? Oh, what's it sound like? Well the Dude's side, "In Full Flight", is a live recording of their distorted, danceable (?) electronic shenanigans, while Nuslux jam on the flip, using mostly self-built analog instruments to make their "good-humored and chilled out" electronic minimalism. Basically if you liked that Lal Lal Lal festival cassette we listed not long ago, this is for you too.
Latest from long time aQ fave one man ultra doom outfit, Amort, here expanded to a quartet, with extra members handling gong, keys, saxophone and extra guitar. Here teamed up with crusty black metal punks Ives.
Amort offer up a single 14 minute track, the begins with haunting female vocals, over deep reverberating piano, and rumbling low end drones, very ritualistic and choral, it's not until nearly 3 minutes in, that the song splinters into what sounds like some sort of abstract free jazz doom, the gong rippling out thick metallic waves of sound, the sax skronking and squeaking, all wrapped in thick whorls of rumble and thrum, a monstrous ominous slo-mo creep, until finally, the song proper kicks in after about 5 minutes, an impossibly glacial chunk of slow motion doom sludge, drumless, and surprisingly melodic, the melodies nearly pop, but the guitars oozing and blackened, the vocals a demonic gurgle, a strange combination for sure, this filthy downtuned evil sound, but the song itself almost happy, like some pop song slowed waaaaaaaay down and then filtered through Corrupted and Nortt and Bunkur, the prettiest, most melodic slab of ultradoom you'll ever hear. It does build, and get louder and louder, there are spidery guitar leads, and more piano, but the sound never gets any less melodic.
Ives are pretty much on the other end of the sonic spectrum entirely, spitting out blasting, thrashing crusty blackness, minor key riffing, furious pounding drumming, harsh vokills, sonically quite akin to the punkier Darkthrone sound, or classic Discharge, but for every bit of D-beat pound, the band unleash a blast of face melting black metal buzz, the sound lo-fi, but still heavy and frantic and frenzied, brutal and blasting, galloping and churning, crusty but plenty grim and black. Killer stuff from both bands, the Ives stuff is from an old cassette, so a little curious to hear more recent stuff, and Amort, well, we can never get enough of their/his gloriously abject slow motion piano pounding dismal doom...
Finally worked our way through the last batch of tapes from UK weirdo tape label The Tapeworm; over the last few weeks we've reviewed tapes from Wouter Van Veldhoven, Hanno Leichtmann, Robert Curgeven, and Elektro Guzzi.
Which brings us to Amy Winedeath, who's shown up once before on a Tapeworm tape, a collaboration with the Automatic Group, and like that tape, Speakeasy is another fantastically noisy and confusional affair, this new one starting off sounding a bit like a more corrosive, blown out Conet Project, all fields of gristly static, fragmented shards of high end skree, buried rhythmic pulses, a dark playful melodic sense pulled apart and recombined into a blurry, smeary, dizzyingly abstract squall, shortwave interference, low end pulsations, hiss and hum, weird intercepted female voices, the whole thing sounding like a collage of mysterious radio transmissions, haunting and otherworldly, and definitely the sort of thing Conet nerds will dig. The second side is more of the same, maybe even more abstract and textural, droned out and darkly hypnotic, a staticky landscape of slow shifting textures and murky glitched out thrum. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
It's been refreshing to see a new wave of female experimentalists emerge over the last few years. Grouper, Inca Ore, Avocet, there's something sweetly sinister about these female vocalists, like a siren's call from a distant sea. And thankfully Important records has answered this call, and brings forth a truly incredible new release from the female duo Anahita, the divine collaboration between Helena Espvall, distinguished cellist and member of the widely known Espers, and Tara Burke, also known as Fursaxa. Anahita, named after the Iranian goddess of fertility and water, together sculpt an absolutely gorgeous post-apocalyptic soundtrack, Eastern melodies bowed over layers of flute and secret hymns, deep drones emerging from cracks in the earth, the desert is still and bleak, but the air is filled with somber melody. Recorded straight to 4-track, Matrkaria was recorded between 2005 and 2008. Quiet, organic percussion sets the pace for desert dirges, and distant mirages appear and vanish all at once. Super beautiful and super bleak, Matrkaria is one of the most compelling and magical debuts we've heard in awhile. Think of a darker, dronier and more mystical Suarasma, not as rhythmic and much more transcendental and free-form. Take our advice and don't miss out on this incredible release from these two drone-folk priestesses!
Brand new full length from this South Carolinian dronelord, a sprawling two track epic of haunting bleak minimalism, each sidelong track an oozing black expanse of layered drift and roiling blackness. A Monstrous Dose Of Poison is in fact of monstrous dose of poisonous sound, the A side a billowing cloud of high end skree and bowed metals, wrapped in effects and blurred into a swirl of deep rumbling thrum, a black ambience that pulse and pulsates, and splinters into stretches of muted crumble and crunch, before again stretching out into cinematic expanses of harrowing blackened atmospheric drifts, finally culminating in a strange coda of sci-fi gurgles and buried barely there percussion.
The flipside offers up a similar soundscape, a sort of second movement, this one a bit more symphonic sounding, the opening a massive keening swell, soaring string-like melodies, the sound darkly majestic, eventually crumbling into more of a roiling blackdrone churn, shot through with more of those soaring high end shimmers, the sound growing ever more dense and blurred, a muted buzz wrapped around buried pulse and muddy abstract rhythms, smeared into nothing more than rhythmic spectral swirls.
LIMITED TO 259 COPIES. Housed in a gorgeous, intensely full color, and ultra creepy, super glossy extra heavy jacket.
A sort of sonic addendum to the Anakrid lp reviewed nearby on this week's list, this finds Anakrid teaming up with another Black Horizons mainstay, Warmth, for a brief bit of droned out mesmer. A lush expanse of thick layered thrum, pulsing beneath a field of glistening high end glimmers and soft swirls of tinkling melody, that low level background hum building ominously to something much more sinister, a blurred black buzz, that swells into soft squalls of cacophonous crunch, before settling back into that deep rumbling drone. The various elements seeming to bleed into each other, becoming a heaving wall of slowly crumbling sounds, streaked with feedback and sine wave tones, and pocked with weird chittering barely there rhythms, eventually blossoming into a cloud of soft black swirls. The flipside plays out like a field recording of some futuristic industrial wasteland, all blurred greys and streaks of smeared hiss, a Wolf Eyes-ian landscape of apocalyptic drones and swirling low end hum, the sound rife with buried melodies and hushed tonal colors, everything infused with a sense of dread, an ominous foreboding in the form of multiple layers of lower register rumbles and blackened drones. Harrowing and haunting, and strangely lovely.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Nice packaging too, black and red offset printed, metallic green cardstock 4 panel J-card, and silver stickered hi-bias chrome tapes.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another installment in stumbling, chaotic, percussive, free folk weirdness from this Finnish troupe made up of members of Avarus, Kemialliset Ystevat and more. This is dark and shambling, playful and naive, reptetive and bizarre. Like No Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand if you took away all their guitars and drums and 'real' instruments, gave them a bunch of rattles and sticks and stones and noisemakers, and let them loose in the forest with nothing but a tape recorder. Primal and primitive. Caveman drum circles punctuated by strange strumming and otherworldly chords and melodies, as well as the occasional pagan ritual chanting / vocalising. Cool.
Anaksimandros features members of Finland's wonderful Kemialliset Ystavat. Although the sound here is a bit removed from the gorgeous folk of KY. The title had us expecting some sort of noisy cross between Merzbow and Skullflower...and it's not all that far from being spot on. Although add in a little No Neck Blues Band hippie jam and some Dead C ambient roar and you'll be even
Anyone into the No Neck Blues Band, the Dead C, Birchville Cat Motel, Skullflower and anyone who bought those recent Sunroof! / Vibracathedral Orchestra cd-rs will lose their shit over this. Vinyl only and extremely limited.
Previously released as two seperate, hard to find cds ("Old Stuff Part 1" and "Old Stuff Part II") on two different labels. Now some crazy person at NG Records has gone and released this new version, compiling (as it says) the early works (i.e. demos, singles, and compilation appearances) of this notorious blurr-core, noise-metal, very un-pc band from Boston. Over 7000 "songs" to be found here, spread over two cds. That's mainly thanks to the presence here of the tracks from the infamous "5,643 Song EP"... Now for most reviews of A.C. discs, we'd simply pick the best song titles and leave it at that, 'cause offensive & funny song titles are what A.C. does best. But the material on here dates from back when A.C. didn't supply titles (or lyrics for that matter) for their "compositions". So that leaves us to make a case for the musical rather than humorous value (or musically humorous value) of these tracks. Oh boy...well for all you experimental jokers out there, the aforementioned "5,643 Song EP" features the songs playing at the same time! There's actually three hours of material compressed onto the original 7", and it took twenty hours for them to record it! Compares favorably to the Francisco Lopez disc we made record of the week last list... Then there's the "Unplugged EP" tracks, where A.C. takes their screaming metal chaos into the acoustic realm for some unique results. And, any fan of John Zorn or Masonna should really check out A.C. as well, on general principles... truly a classic band, American outsider improv "genius". If not musical genius, then comedy genius. Sure, you or I could have recorded more or less the same stuff on your parents' stereo much like these guys did for their first demo (disc one, track one), but you have to admit that you'd never record so much of it, for so many years, or play such crazy shows. We (Allan and Andee anyway--in fact, A.C. was the first interview Allan ever did for his old 'zine) love this band. For you collectors, note that there's material on these cds not found on the original singles and such. And for novices, we also recommend A.C.'s "Morbid Florist" ep and "Everyone Must Be Killed" album to start with... The cd booklet includes detailed liner notes about each track/release written by A.C. mastermind Seth Putnam. All hail!
Ah, France. Home to the sugary pop sounds of Phoenix and the stately elegance of Air... But scratch the surface to the French underground, and you're faced with the harsh realization that things may be way more fucked than you ever imagined. Festering like an open sore is the Anals, a nihilistic duo from Metz capable of whipping up an ungodly racket with only drums, synthesizers at their most basic functioning level, occasional guitars, anguished Frenchman vocals sung in English, and a whole FUCKLOAD of sheer, agonizing noise. After listening to these hateful miscreants, it makes total sense that they were shat forth from the same land that brought us the Marquis de Sade, Celine, and Gerard Depardieu.
Looking at the lyric sheet to Total Anal may be the deciding factor for just how much you can take from these guys. Those into pushing the limits of decency and comfort with bands like the Brainbombs or the Country Teasers, however, will probably find much to love with this one. The album begins with "Commando Of Love," a little ditty musing poetic on a love triangle set in a concentration camp. The song is comprised of a creepy, tense synth whir that is eventually met with pounding cave man drums and vocals that sound more exasperated than enraged. Like many of the other songs on the record, the melodies are almost perceived, as the songs are pretty much made up of earsplitting noise, carried forward by a relentless thump and cacophonous vocals. Other parts of the record sound like This Heat being beaten up and reinterpreted by a couple of French street thugs armed with sound generators and Six Finger Satellite records. The incessant drumming and unrestrained feedback make it feel like your heart might blow at any moment. Strangest of all, however, is on songs like "Vaginal Death Tunnel," where you realize that though this is noise rock with an emphasis on both the "noise" and the "rock," the Anals are creating music that somehow manages to fall within the approximation of a pop song structure, in the same way a group like the Dead C was able to achieve on some of their earlier records. Not that this would ever be mistaken for pop music...
Coming to us from the killer Chicago store/label Permanent Records, who introduced many of us to the glorious sounds of Cave, Total Anal also comes with a free download in a nod to the turntable deprived. Highly recommended listening for those who like things on the dirty side, in every imaginable way.
There was a zine produced by power electronic antagonist Mark Solotroff, back in the mid-'90s, called Rape Of The Angels. In one issue, he wrote rather poignantly about two new projects which then were mostly unknown - Brainbombs and Bodychoke, describing them as two sides of the same abject-rock coin with one side aligned with the bacchanalia of the Stooges and the other the melancholy of Joy Division. At the time, Solotroff's principal outlet for his power electronics was Intrinsic Action, which was shameless in appropriating Whitehouse's ultra-violent posturing and searing noise. But since, Solotroff has ventured into a whole host of projects with various aesthetic differences, but all of which maintain an axis of grime, sleaze, transgression, and violence. Anatomy Of Habit is Solotroff's first venture into an outright 'rock' context, after the punishing electronics of Bloodyminded and the bleak coldwave of A Vague Disquiet; and here, it all comes back around to Brainbombs and Bodychoke (although more Bodychoke than Brainbombs) with Anatomy Of Habit. Formed around Solotroff, drummer Dylan Posa (Brise-Glase, Cheer Accident), Greg Ratjczak (Winters In Osaka), Kenny Rasmusen, and Blake Edwards (Vertonen), the band is a steamroller of huge Swans / Neurosis riffs chugging out of crawling rhythms, and lots of bad vibes. Both sides of the wax are sprawling numbers that hypnotically build out of interlocking guitar and bass that steadily builds towards a distorted, crushing climax with dextrous turns toward powerdrone sludge. Solotroff, with his years of barking like William Bennett, has turned into quite a deft vocalist with his baritone in perpetual motion amidst the roiling noise-rock, coming across more like a cross between Jaz Coleman and Michael Gira. Well worth checking out.
This is a strange one for sure. A collaboration between Alva Noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, long running purveyor of Raster-Noton style click and bleep, and the legendary Blixa Bargeld, he of Einsturzende Neubauten and the Bad Seeds. And the first couple minutes won't dissuade you from that impression, a stretch of what sounds like layered screaming and sympathetic tones, a haunting, harrowing bit of dronemusic, that begins to glitch out, as Bargeld spoken vocals come in, now laid over a strange bit of high end staticky stutter, and a deep resonant rumble, before the sound shifts again, the screams returning, and Bargeld switching to moody croon, a burst of tripped out grind and crunch, some wistful piano, and a very balladic outro, sounds like the perfect intro to this collection of improvised abstraction and avant minimal soundscaping.
The second track sounds more like the Alva Noto we know and love, a clipped bit of minimal rhythm, wreathed in clouds of grit and static and hiss, and then the vocals come in, and it becomes much more musical, and moody, dramatic and intense, and as the record progresses, the sound definitely becomes less an unlikely collaboration, and more a meeting of like minded warped musical visionaries.
Bargeld is a chameleon, switching from strident bellow, to hushed whisper, to surprisingly melodic croon, and Nicolai is equally adept, alternately crafting austere minimal glitchscapes, swirling pop ambient shimmer and lush almost orchestral sounding avant pop. They even cover Harry Nilsson, and they manage to keep the spirit and mood of the original, while infusing it with all manner of thrum and hiss, crunch and skitter, and just as soon as we're in more familiarly pop territory, the record switches gears, and the two unfurl a droned out bit of cinematic drift, the layered vox creepy and ominous, the music a blur of hiss and crackle, stutter and drift. The rest of the record offers up more of the same, a sort of futuristic cabaret, glitched out balladry, minimal avant dronepop and skeletal industrial ambience, quite hard to succinctly describe, but the varied sounds here all manage to coalesce into a pretty fantastic bit of haunting avant minimal beauty, perfectly encapsulated in the string laden final track, all whispery vox, warm symphonic swells, rich mellifluous vocals, and tense dramatic minor key melodies, so gorgeous.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A mighty fine collection of improvisorial acoustic guitar solos from Bruce Anderson of MX-80 fame. That said, Anderson's solo guitar work is miles away from the sharp, incessant cacophony of the mutant-punk of MX-80 from back in the day. It's more of a Loren Mazzacane Connors feel, but played on an acoustic guitar with classical tunings. Or perhaps as our regular customer Monte opined, "sounds like Derek Bailey, if he learned to play melodically." Yeah, that's it! Anyway, with the quiet, rather ascetic nature of these recordings, we're guessing that the reference in the title is to Robert Bresson, the new wave French film director. The dulcet plucks and slow deliberate pacing of Anderson's work would certainly make for a complementary soundtrack to any number of Bresson's films even with their noted lack of musical accompaniments. Lovely stuff, and limited to just 75 copies.
This East Bay avant-guitarist quipped that Dispassion finds him in his 'death-ray' mode. We were not all that sure what he might have meant by this; and we figured his 'death-ray' would be some fucked-up Keiji Haino styled exploration of infernal guitar noise; or perhaps a power-drone of sawtooth gnashing akin to a Zbigniew Karkowski or Kevin Drumm. But no, Anderson's 'death-ray' approach is one of atonal polyphony, through layerings of heavily processed guitar tones that are sustained, filtered, modulated, and whatnot, into beguiling phrases that more resemble the dissonant chords of mismatched church organs. In fact, if Anderson hadn't stated from the onset that this was a solo electric guitar piece, we would have assumed it to be some midnight black mass piece of diabolical pipe organ orchestration. There might be Charlemagne Palestine gleefully getting drunk on blood red wine whilst completely unaware of the psychotic technician who was tone-bending all of his minimalist, clustered drones through tricked out digital means. But no, it's just Bruce with his guitar and his pedals, and it's a very unsettling mood created by this death-ray of his. Limited to 50 copies.
Bruce Anderson wandered into the store a few weeks ago, commenting in reference to Scott Walker's new Bish Bosch album that he would much rather experience subversion through beauty than something willfully ugly. While he's quite appreciative of Mr. Walker's art (in fact he has some amusing anecdotes about seeing him as a hired gun for some garage band touring the states back in his youth, wondering who that beautiful bassist with the booming voice was), the art of subversion through beauty is an apt description of where Anderson has taken his solo guitar work. Of course, Bruce Anderson was the frontman for the seminal Bay Area art-punk outfit MX-80, and this disc follows suit with the last couple of semi-improvised recordings that Anderson has graced us with. The angularity of MX-80 is here, but the tones he gets from his guitar are rounded and rich, suspended with a sustained drone that acts as a halo on his slowly paced plucks and strums. Sonically similar to Loren Mazzacane Connors, John Fahey, and Derek Bailey, and laced with a lovely, profound sadness. Limited to 75 copies.
Bruce Anderson is best known as the guitarist / frontman for Bay Area seminal avant-punk band MX-80, whose records back in the early '80s situated themselves on the suitably angular Ralph Records - home to The Residents, Snake Finger, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Tuxedomoon, etc. This 2008 composition - possibly just released, possibly never distributed until now - is a long-form, multi-tracked acoustic guitar exploration. Upon first listen, Fahey, Loren Mazzacane Connors, and Tom Carter seem the obvious references for these lilting elliptical arrangements; but as the piece develops, Anderson is insistent on hitting purposefully sharp notes, which atonally register thanks to his panned stereo distribution of layered tracks. As result, The Inherent Beauty Of Hopelessness begins to mutate into a Jandekian aesthetic of warped raga-blues, as if the Jandek standard "European Jewel" found itself tempered and elongated into a quiet, 40-minute epic.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of this inimitable New York avant garde artist's landmark album, the fine folks at the Nonesuch label have remastered and reissued it... and it sounds as mysterious and beautiful as it did the first time around! The unforgettable eight minute long single "O Superman" made a surprise showing at number 2 on the U.K. pop charts back in 1981, and the album from which it came left its own indelible mark on many of us here.
The music and spoken word pieces that comprise the album were actually drawn from Anderson's expansive eight hour long performance art stage production United States Live (which was performed over the course of two evenings). Drawing on disparate elements and themes, commentaries and critiques about life in America, Anderson's Big Science is at once bold, imaginative and artful. Dryly humorous and chillingly bleak. Starkly minimal and deeply moving. Playful and cerebral. Thoughtful and thought provoking. Challenging and engaging.
Keep in mind, the short audio samples here really don't do the whole work justice. This album should be experienced in one complete distraction-free listening session. One of Cup's all time favorite albums, she recommends you stop what you are doing right now. Big Science beckons.
Oh yes, and we should mention that this special edition includes the haunting "O Superman" music video and a (unnecessary in our opinion) bonus track "Walk The Dog".
Full length number two from Jonathan Lee, a member of big time aQ faves Souvenir's Young America, and the man behind Anduin, after two killer collaborations, one with Svarte Greiner (that track is included here!), the other with Jasper TX, which should definitely give you an idea of the sort of sound to expect from Anduin.
Dark and dreamy and dolorous, Anduin creates warm swirling rhythmic ambience, dark drones, and haunting soundscapes. Abandoned In Sleep includes many contributors either via sample contribution or live collaboration, Jasper TX again, Gareth Davis, Stephen Vitiello, Xela and a handful of others, but there's no doubt that Lee is the sonic alchemist here, taking sounds and samples, live performances, and pre-recorded works, and molding them into darkly gorgeous soundworks. Field recordings drift in and out of soft clouds of hushed shimmer, thick slabs of deep rumble are laid atop strange percussive pulses, warm whirring low end drifts beneath subtle horns, minimal rhythms skitter around slowly collapsing buzzscapes, long slow tones stretch out into disembodied harmonies, all bathed in a lush golden chordal wash, the harmonica makes an appearance, and helps turn a track into something distinctly Morricone-esque, huge subterranean drones are laced with the sound of footsteps, and creaking doors, distant machinery, and finally, horns moan and bleat in a field of delicate drones and muted rhythmic pulses.
The vinyl includes a cd, that features all the songs on the lp proper as well as three extra tracks, including the live collaboration with Svarte Greiner, all deep blackened shimmer, soft swells of feedback, dark rumbling pulsations, bleak and austere, laced with shards of high end melody, and softly grinding whirs.
Apparently, Abandoned In Sleep took the better part of a year to create, and listening to it now we can safely say it was well worth it!
It's been a while since we've heard from Anduin, the solo project of Jonathan Lee, he of late great longtime aQ faves Souvenir's Young America, whose distinctive harmonica flecked metallic post rock we we dug big time. But in Anduin, Lee focused more on the minutiae of sound, crafting lush, haunting soundscapes, that buzz and drift, smolder and shimmer. the sounds more along the lines of groups like Jasper TX or Machinefabriek, and with a distinctive cinematic flair, the sounds at once epic and majestic, while at the same time subtle and introspective.
Apparently this new record is the result of a burglary at Lee's house, which resulted in the loss of years and years worth of recordings (hence the title), and perhaps also the darkly spectral sound, infused with a deep melancholia, a spare, ghostly sonic landscape that manages to fuse field recordings, deep dronemusic, lumbering slowcore, downtempo electronica, and plenty of horns, into something soundtracky and sinister, brooding and ominous.
The record seems to spend most of its time rumbling and whirring through a sea of softly churning low end and dense layered whirs, but Lee has a delicate touch, whether it's introducing the aforementioned jazzy horns, or echo drenched flute flutter, the sounds of children playing, or a skeletal programed skitter, it transforms this dronemusic into something much more sprawling and engrossing, almost a sort of chamber music, a dark classical drone that slips easily from weirdly spaced out sci-fi shimmer, to bleak, bottomless pit mesmer, from almost new age drift to slowjazz creep, the songs all woven together into one epic songsuite, one that most definitely speaks to loss, and not just the loss of the stolen sounds, but a loss that's deeper and more personal. Powerful and haunting. Gorgeous stuff for sure.
Super swank packaging too, both the lp and the cd come housed in hand drawn, hand screened sleeves, with more hand drawn, handscreened prints inside!
What a perfect record, two of our favorite crafters of elegant ambience together for the first time, weaving an entrancing sonic spell, a lush, slow burning, sprawling expanse of burnished soft focus dronemusic. Anduin, for those who don't already know, is the experimental ambient side project of Jonathan Lee who fronts aQ metallic post rock faves Souvenir's Young America, and of course Jasper TX, is the work of Dag Rosenqvist, whose sound is a gloriously murky drift, and whose debut I'll Be Long Gone Before My Light Reaches You we made a Record Of The Week way back in 2006, and we've loved everything we've heard from him since.
The two mesh perfectly together, impossible to tell where one ends and another begins, and the resulting sound manages to not tip too far in either direction, instead, the duo have crafted a sublime collection of dark mystery, from thick, humid rumbles, to swirling layered bliss, to sun dappled dreamlike drift, to hushed minimal shimmer, to sizzling raga like buzz, to washed out woozy Pop Ambience, every track on The Bending Of Light is ripe for immersion, thick slow shifting fields of sound that just beg to envelop, perfect for listeners to get lost in, to let go, and to drift off on soft sonic clouds, sinking deeper and deeper into these sprawling soundscapes of warm deeeeep melodic warmth and woozy, bleary ambient blur. So so so nice. Fans of all things drifty and droney will be enthralled and entranced.
Pressed on extra thick vinyl, housed in thick silkscreened cardstock jackets, also includes a cd (not a cd-r) with the same music, only digital.
Two stalwarts of the industrial underground team up on this split cassette from Black Horizons. There is a vinyl version too of this album on Peripheral Records out of the UK. Sadly, we don't have the vinyl. Cassette, we do have - at least, for the time being.
This Dismal World is an apt title for these death-industrial maelstroms of suffocating blackness, malcontent noise, and hammer-smashed rhythms. The German outfit Anemone Tube graces us with "Threnody For The Dejected" whose two tracks are lumbering representations of dread and horror through ashen clouds of hiss and pitch-black synth tones. The first track rises and falls with the dying breath of a leviathan beast fully aware that its next existential moments may simply be its last or perhaps worse be trapped in infernal damnation. Hardly could this be described as pleasant listening; but those infatuated with SPK, Lustmord, and Anenzephalia should take note. Japan's Ichiro Tsuji (aka Dissecting Table) has long specialized in apocalyptic orchestrations of bone, throat, and steel; and there's no shortage of slowly bashed scrap-metal and guttural utterances here. His monotone ritualized incantations at the beginning of this track are consumed by the aggregate white noise from reverberant klang and overblown distortion with blood-garbling screams and bellows emanating throughout. It's as if Tsuji is drilling into his own skeleton, embedding machined technology and armored plates creating his own cybernetic reinterpretation of the human form, all done without the benefits of anesthesia. Early Neubauten? Missing Foundation? Yes!
It's pretty difficult to avoid being forever obsessed with a band whose debut record we described as "quite possibly one of the scariest records we have ever heard." And we weren't kidding. We were barely even engaging in hyperbole. Noehaem by Anenzephalia is literally a collection of sounds as terrifying as is physically possible. The sonic representation of utter horror and hopelessness. But beautiful and entrancing in its absolute musical negativity. And thus we haven't avoided it, not in the least. We have remained obsessed. Waiting patiently for some new transmission from whatever hellish pit this band or person called Anenzephalia calls home. And finally our patience has been rewarded.
Not a new record, but archival recordings from 1992-1995, but just as gorgeously malevolent and hatefully dark as the records proper. For those of you who have yet to bear witness to the bleak abject sonic doom of Anenzephalia's Noehaem record, or either of the other two full lengths we've reviewed here in the past, the liner notes to Ephemeral Dawn should definitely set the tone:
Here the Dream Dies!
Dominated by obsession of power and lust, led by unwritten rules from clinical birth to clinical death.
Ask the epithet of God! It still is deception.
No ideology, no progress;
NO THING.
The world smothered in absurdity.
Then how about the booklet of photos, a crucifix, Sadam Hussein, a decomposed skull, a man being set on fire, the same crucifix inverted� as visually dark and creepy as the music inside.
And the music inside is indeed gloriously insidious. A world of crawling pitch black drones, of smeared slabs of grinding industrial whir, of disembodied voices, clouds of hiss, bits of warble and muted chimes, weird grit and abstract distortion, dense fields of clanging clattery machinery, machinelike rhythms, thick swarms of insect like static, robotic vocals, crumbling distorted melodies, murky black pools of delay drenched sound fragments, collaged voices and melodies, all churned into an unrecognizable black mass (pun intended), viscous and caustic, slow moving and glacial�
Black ambience is probably the neatest descriptor for the world Anenzephalia has conjured up from the dark, but in the act of conjuring these sonic spirits it becomes so much more than ambient music. There is some internal propulsion, sometimes rendered in actual beats, other times, in a subtle yet impossible to resist forward momentum, as if some dark force was dragging you to your doom.
A gorgeously dreary, and epically miserablist world of blackened industrial drones, muted martial beats, abstract shimmer and drift, corrosive grind and soft focus low end flutter, all woven into a divine end of the world threnody for the black hearted and soulless.
Limited stock on this singles collection from Anenzephalia, one of our favorite Industrial noise projects. We had the good fortune of coming across the first Anenzephalia 7" here at the shop. Packaged in an oversized sleeve, the design featured a handwritten death certificate and supposedly various medical tools attached to the cover. Forceps, speculum, surgical scissors, razor blades, etc. were the reported objects that could have been included; but this copy of the single was missing that piece of medical ephemera. Such an object d'art came straight from the industrial culture of SPK's Information Overload Unit, complete with autopsy photos, low-rent pornography, and ghastly war footage. Anenzephalia's unsmiling plod of death-industrial orchestrations is hardly what could be considered singles fodder, yet here it is - the Anenzephalia singles collection. That medical tool single "Lyse" is featured alongside three other, long out of print singles. Anenzephalia harvests the fields of horror film design with a bloody scythe, with intermingled shortwave radio transmissions and megaphone barked vocals as the unreliable narrator of your own death and salvation, spluttering amidst lugubrious electronic crawls of heavy-as-fuck low-end throb and the creeping torpor of radioactive blood infusions, deliberately septic treatments, and other maladies of medical procedures gone horribly, horribly wrong.
An abundance of decaying noise has long weighed heavy on Anenezephalia's poetics of despair, blight, and horror, culminating in some of our favorite death-industrial albums that continue to terrify us years after their original release. On Kaltwelt, Anenzephalia returns with another monstrous electronic sermon of hellfire and brimstone, delivered in B. Moloch's signature of dehumanized coldness over nihilist industrial arrangements. The ideals and aesthetics for Anenzephalia are that of the classic industrial agenda, when Throbbing Gristle would hold up a mirror of death for the rest of society to see or when SPK would subject their audience to a barrage of squalid tone, autopsy footage, and porn or when Lustmord would open the gates of hell to allow the suffocating sound of damnation to reverberate throughout his subterranean drones. Anenzephalia may have come years after B. Moloch's influences, but his work is no less effective; and in many ways, the obsessive continuation of that aesthetic has honed his work into an even more potent language. A sinister atmosphere hangs about the entire album with B. Moloch's vocals appearing on about half the tracks, at times appearing as a detached Charon character, clinically describing the horrors of the world to his passengers and other as a consummate naysayer, condemning anything and anybody to a life of misery and disease. "Bodies Of Gold" girds a caustic, claustrophobic noise onto a squelchy, deconstructed rhythm that could almost reflect the brooding, blackened dub of Raime, but B. Moloch dispenses with any fantasies of dancing to a track like this thanks to his grimly mechanize, distorted monotone vocals. The intensity of the dread and discomfort is increased on "Mind Kalvary" through the robotic churn of Schnitzler meets Andromeda Strain step sequences. As bleak and hypnotic as ever.
We described Anenzephalia's 2004 release Noehaem, as "quite possibly one of the scariest records we have ever heard", and it really was. Some sort of a imaginary soundtrack to a movie so scary no one could see it without dying of fright. Drones, and strings, and creaking ambience, some impossible mix of Ligeti and Lustmord. We'd been anxiously awaiting a new full length when we discovered this live cd-r. We ordered as many as we could, but only managed to get 10 copies. Which of course means these will be gone in a flash, but at least ten of you will get to partake in this dark and dangerous live action.
Live Anenzephalia is a much different beast. A much noisier beast. A glowing red eyed, hunchbacked black shape, hunkered down beneath a pile of electronics, unfurling coruscating clouds of noxious black fog and processed megaphone vocals. Streaks of white hot feedback, snippets of old speeches, grinding rhythmic distortion, disembodied voices, old folk songs, white noise, shortwave interference, buzzing glitched out electronics and super distorted buzz, all ground into one huge lumbering abstract blacknoisebeast.
Still pretty damn scary, but now extra noisy to boot!
Packaged in a weird shaped booklet, containing all kinds of creepy images, drawings and diagrams. Each disc is hand numbered on the cd.
SUPER LIMITED. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. WE HAVE THE LAST 10 COPIES, SO ACT FAST...
This is quite possibly one of the scariest records we have ever heard. It's occasionally pretty, occasionally noisy, but always haunting and pregnant with the possibility of tragedy. Not sure how or why this particular record evokes such a strong reaction, but this most recent record by German ambient noise terrorists Anenzephalia pushes all of those buttons. Feeling like you're being followed, sensing you're about to die, knowing that there is nothing you can do about anything...powerful stuff.
First there are rumbling strings, reverberating in vast expanses of near silence. Like a twentieth century classical score to a horror movie, Lustmord plays Ligeti, with a dark sweeping romanticism tempered by slight unease. Soon, we're subsumed by a dense field of distorted crackle, over a simple militaristic clunk, like a mysterious stranger trudging up a flight of rickety stairs, while a super distorted voice buried in the shortwave struggles desperately to reach across from the other side. The record continues on in a similar fashion, a hair raising, lugubrious crawl through massive washes of low end throb, surrounded by a cracking field of interference, wth random distant clanks and clatter, all coalescing into a barely discernable rhythmic pulse, that mesmerises and leads you deeper. This sounds like the soundtrack to the scariest haunted house ever, but unlike normal 'haunted house records', Noehaem would have the neighborhood children having coronaries, soiling themselves, and sent soon afterwards to asylums to live out the rest of their catatonic days. This is some dark and doomy, creepy and dreary, and gorgeously frightening stuff.
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We described Anenzephalia's 2004 release Noehaem, as "quite possibly one of the scariest records we have ever heard", and it really was. Some sort of a imaginary soundtrack to a movie so scary no one could see it without dying of fright. Drones, and strings, and creaking ambience, some impossible mix of Ligeti and Lustmord. Live Anenzephalia is a much different beast. A much noisier beast. A glowing red eyed, hunchbacked black shape, hunkered down beneath a pile of electronics, unfurling coruscating clouds of noxious black fog and processed megaphone vocals. Streaks of white hot feedback, snippets of old speeches, grinding rhythmic distortion, disembodied voices, old folk songs, white noise, shortwave interference, buzzing glitched out electronics and super distorted buzz, all ground into one huge lumbering abstract blacknoisebeast.
Still pretty damn scary, but now extra noisy to boot! This is a super limited vinyl reissue of a super limited edition cd-r "Live At Karlsruhe" that we had stocked back in the day. Restocks are unlikely.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The intermittent project Angel might become something more prolific, now that Pan Sonic has decided to terminate its mission leaving Ilpo Vaisanen to pursue other matters. Since 2000, Vaisanen has collaborated with Dirk Dresselhaus of Schneider TM under the guise of Angel to produce a peculiar set of electro-acoustic abstractions, often finding them working with the avant-cellist Hildur Gudnadottir. On thie new album for Editions Mego, 26000, Angel can come across like an even more plodding and menacing Supersilent attempting to remove all of its jazz references, leaving weird squiggles and gestures within a cavernous dank reverberation offset by crystalline electronics and found object manipulation. Such events were not uncommon in the narcoleptic sound collages that Pan Sonic would wander into at the end of some of their records. Gudnadottir's cello (and something called a "halldorophone" that sends a controlled feedback loop into the strings of a modified cello) appears on the glacial finale of the album "Paradigm Shift" with isolationist passages and radiotone flicker. All of this is set in contrast with the monstrous form destruction of "Before The Rush" composed with the help of BJ Nilsen. Here, Angel takes up the sheer hellish miasma torch with an explosion of digital abuse bracketed by leaden seas of grey drones and all sorts of post-Tudor scabrous noises and nervous scratches.
Pan Sonic's Ilpo V. and partner in crime Dirk from Schneider TM return with another Angel-ic recording, their follow up to last year's excellent and epic Kalmukia, which we likened to both KTL and Earth circa Hex. This time around they're not quite so much in that digitaldoomdrone mood... There's still plenty of digital glitch and distortion, and the 20-minute "Mirrorworld" is a loud n' lovely, humming white noise dronewerk, as is the shorter and sparser "Unsymmetric Distance", for instance, but many of the 10 tracks on Hedonism indulge in electronic noise and clatter that's a lot more active and buzzing.
The broken rhythms, grinding textures, and piercing pulses of tracks like "Holding Loose" and "Dropping The Ego" contrast with the more contemplative nature-sounds field recordings heard in the mix towards the end of the album, for a much more varied listen than Kalmukia.
Oooh, moody. Ilpo Vaisanen of Pan Sonic and Dirk Dresselhaus (aka Schneider TM) have recorded as Angel before, exploring the realms of noise and drone with discs on the Bip-Hop and Oral labels, bringing in guest cellist Hildur Guonadottir for the latter. Now they're officially a trio, and offer up a fantastic third album, released on Editions Mego, where this four part, hour long, totally epic album fits in nicely alongside the digitaldoomdrone likes of O'Malley and Rehberg's KTL.
Kalmukia opens with the evocative "Bones In The Sand" which definitely has a desert-y feel, the wide open spaces, barren badlands. Desolation. Dunno about you, but it had us immediately thinking Earth (Hex-era and after Earth), with cavernous slide guitar riffs echoing forth across the wastes...
The tremulous electric humming of the title track is next, nearly 20 quietly mysterious minutes long, graced with droning cello on the edge of feedback. The creepy loveliness continues on through "Effect Of Discovery", which builds up into a shimmering drone laced with metallic electronic whip-cracks and waverings. Full on distorted rumble is kept in reserve, hinted at throughout the thick buzzing beauty of album-closer "Aftermath: The Mutation", which is also filled with delicate percussive chimings and some of this album's most melodic moments.
Packaged all fancy-like in an oversized rectangular sleeve, this is definitely one that fans of the most abstract/ambient side of Southern Lord's output (Oren Ambarchi for instance) should appreciate, along with those into Pan Sonic, KTL, etc.
Satan was an angel, once, too.
Angel is the work of Pan Sonic's Ilpo Vaisanen and Dirk Dresselhaus (aka Schneider TM); and Hildur Gudnadottir is an Icelandic cellist whose resume is dotted with numerous collaborative projects through the Reykjavik based arts collective Kitchen Motors. Back in 2004, the three musicians collaborated at the Club Transmediale in Berlin, sparking not only this album but also an ongoing collaboration between Pan Sonic and Gudnadottir. It's Gudnadottir's cello that takes the center stage on this guttural drone album of languorous acoustic scrapings and sustained monotone, with the two other gentlemen augmenting the cello drones with Kosmische electronic sweeps, nervous sinewave aggregates, and bellowing gasps of noise.
Been wanting to list this Sheffield UK band's debut four-song ep for a while now, finally got a few in stock so here goes... Angela Valid (name of band, not a person) plays improv instrumentals, a skittery post-rock stitching together of all kinds of glitch and drone, whirring and clatter and feedback, dealt out with guitars, drums, electronics (synths, drum machines, effects...) and violin. Angela Valid's music is very textural, displaying both caution and conviction. We're reminded of the likes of This Heat. Tarentel. Sinistri. A (the Italian band A). Radian. Or, Tortoise + Wolf Eyes as someone else has suggested. At times it's like there's someone building something in the next room, or doing construction work upstairs, banging tools about. But at the same time there's constant jazzy rhythmics buried beneath it all as well. If you like this sort of stuff (we sure do) these four tracks are all very satisfying and leave us wanting to hear more...
The return of one of our favorite purveyors of blissed out metallic dream doom, The Angelic Process. There is a brand new album on Profound Lore, which we do have in stock, so feel free to order that one too. We'll review that one on the next list. But we figured we oughta list this one first. ...And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey was originally released on Crucial Blast way back in 2001, in a run so limited we never even saw one. Now the band has decided to reissue all their old recordings and release them on their own Decaying Sun label, starting with this one...
The Angelic Process' M.O. was much the same here as on the incredible Coma Waering, released on Paradigms back in 2006, slow burning metallic drone epics, the guitars effulgent and blown out, woven into huge washes of dreamy bliss, over simple machinelike rhythms, with soaring emotional vocals buried and lost in thick ropy swells of sound. Everything run through some sort of amazing vacuum cleaner effect that wraps all the sounds in thick swirls of foggy whir. It's like M83 and My Bloody Valentine And Jesu blended up and mixed with some Godflesh and Neurosis, a gorgeously monstrous plodding doom, smeared into blackened shadows that somehow glow warmly from within. It's not really metal although it is most definitely heavy, it's not really pop either, even though there are hooks galore buried within the murk, it's not industrial, although it is intense and mechanical sounding at times, and it's not really doom, although it is heavy and sooooo sloooooow. It's somehow all of those things at once, yet none of those things, a constantly mutating sound that manages to also mix in tranquil ambient interludes, drawn out stretches of keening guitar and smoldering drone, and wild bursts of full on amp crushing, speaker melting noise. It's like the sonic equivalent of being doused in molten metal, every track a thick, viscous flow of sound, pouring from the speakers in black torrents, melting everything within reach, turning all to ash. So good.�
Includes two bonus tracks not on the original releases.�Packaged in slimline cases, with full color artwork, professionally printed cd-r's, each one signed by both members of the band! Probably limited, these things always seem to be, so even though we got a bunch, not sure how long they'll be around...
A new slab of glacial metallic beauty from Paradigms, one of our new favorite labels. In the past, they've brought us the drone dirge of Hjarnidaudi (an aQ Record Of The Week), the chamber gloom of Amber Asylum, the cult black metal of Throne Of Katarsis, the druggy prog of Blueprint Human Being, and now two new releases, a grim slab of icy pagan Canadian black metal from Utlagr (reviewed elsewhere on this list) and this, the newest release from dirge doomists the Angelic Process.
Described as slow motion doom drone, The Angelic Process are so much more. This is not just some series of cromagnon metal riffs slowed down and turned into 'art', nor is it a monochromatic wash of rumble and whir, not that there's anything wrong with that, we love that stuff, but the Angelic Process are more of a proper band, with songs, vocals, drums, parts, choruses, verses, all that normal band stuff. They craft simple, swoonsome dream rock, like M83 or Spacemen 3 or Cyann & Ben, albeit a lot more dark and ominous, but it's what they do with that rock, with those songs, that makes this record so special. And so mind meltingly heavy. Each of these songs is buried under a sea of warm sonic swirl. Where a normal band would kick on a distortion pedal for the chorus, The Angelic Process kick on a thousand, and it sounds like they maybe also have 30 or 40 extra guitarists standing at attention just waiting to dump a monstrous mass of churning thick blown out guitar fuzz all over everything. Closer reference points might be Jesu or My Bloody Valentine. The songs are moody plods, droney dirges, but within these songs, and beneath all the murk and fuzz and buzz, there are buried epic swells, heart rending melodies, soaring beneath the gauze and haze, it's like Low or Godspeed being backed up by Earth, performing live with Glenn Branca's guitar orchestra and produced by the Teenage Filmstars. Or maybe Swans if they made a record for French blisspop label Gooom. One of those extremely rare records that manages to be as breathtakingly lovely as it is crushingly heavy. The best blown out blissed out space rock drone guitar record since Loveless! SO RECOMMENDED!
Limited to 750 copies, packaged in a mini lp style sleeve wrapped in a hand stamped brown paper outer sleeve.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We went from discovering what we believed to be the only recording from this Southern blissed out doomdrone duo, to suddenly being inundated with a bunch of recordings, old AND new. We're not complaining, cuz if you're anything like us, you can NOT get enough of this sort of My Bloody Valentine metal, epic swaths of blown out beautiful heaviness that drifts and shimmers as much as it pounds and pummels.�
It's hard to know what to say about�We All Die Laughing that we haven't already said about all of the other Angelic Process records, if you're a fan of stuff like Jesu, Nadja, Hjarnidaudi, odds are you're already hip to the gorgeous sounds of the Angelic Process. In iTunes, the genre comes up as 'new age' which in a way it sort of is, but it's OUR sort of new age, blissy and dreamy and washed out and soft focus and blurry and abstract, but also heavy as fuck, massive and crushing and completely overwhelmingly intense.�We All Die Laughing is no exception, from the first track, which begins with a simple machinelike rhythm, and swirling ambient swells, a barely there guitar, before an avalanche of guitars drops from above, obliterating everything, somehow at once dense and heavy, yet so completely beautiful and packed with melody. Which is pretty much how the whole record stacks up, there are long stretches of low end shimmer, and simple tribal drumming, bits of ambient whir and fragmented melodies, but these are just breathers between the crushing black holes of sound, the million vacuum cleaners tuned to 'E' roar of their impossibly heavy sonic crush. You can read more of our AP gushing in any of the other reviews, but what more do we need to say, if you want it heavy, and want it beautiful, it really doesn't get more beautifully heavy than the Angelic Process.�
Packaged in slimline cases, with full color artwork, professionally printed cd-r's, each one signed by both members of the band!�
What can we say that we haven't already said about this dynamic dronedirgedoom duo? Seriously, have a look at any of the other reviews we've written about The Angelic Process, and see us gush like crazy, what's not to love? Gorgeous swirling black ambience, massive crushing metallic pummel, soaring majestic melodies, the sound somehow heavy and brutal, but washed out and gauzy, a thick My Bloody Valentine haze draped over everything, voices drift amidst the buzz like paper angels dropped into a roaring fire. Everything glistening and sparkling, glimmering and shimmering, then roaring and grinding and washing over you like some suffocating black tide.�
All�of their records are fantastic, each feels and sounds like a continuation of the one before it. As if they were all movements in some metallic black hole symphony, with each record, each movement, offering up its own subtle twist on the AP's black buzzing sound world. This latest might be the most sonically varied of the bunch. It's been out for a while now, but we had been working our way through the older titles first.
The overall sound like the others is warped and warbly, a slow crawl though an alien world, like every note and melody is being twisted and bent, tangled up into shapes that confuse and confound, the distortion so thick and viscous it seems to be able to alter the natural order, to use gravity as just another effect, ton-of-bricks downtuned guitars don't fall forward like an avalanche, they seem to drift like billowy black clouds somehow, slabs of low end fall upward, guitars slither in reverse, vocals twist inside out, a gorgeous multidimensional swirl of sound, that occasionally coalesces into a roiling propulsive thunderstorm of blissed out doom. Songs grow�from whispers into roars, a black doom Godspeed, but the heavy parts aren't just heavy, they're unearthly, unreal, melodies are pulled apart into sparkling notes that spin and soar, dancing atop a churning miasma of crush and crunch. The sound is an impossible blend of light and dark, evil and good, beauty and utter and complete horror. Like Katatonia broadcast through a wall of clothes dryers, doom metal performed by a symphony of leaf blowers tuned to drop-D, pop songs composed using cement mixers filled with gold bricks, a DJ spinning My Bloody Valentine over diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter remixed by Tim Hecker, all nestled amidst dreamy drifts of hushed shimmer and soft focus ambience.
We could go on and on and on and on and on and on.... needless to say, an absolutely essential slab of blissed out dreamdronedoooooooooooooooooooooooooom...
Seems like not a list goes by without a new release on local label Time Released Sound. And for this we are truly grateful. And once again, TRS does not disappoint, with this fantastic double disc from the oddly monikered The Angling Loser, who is in fact a fella by the name of Lee Anthony Norris, whose debut double cd The Author Of Twilight, seems to have a sort of fishing focus, hence the name, and the packaging (more on that in a moment), but really, it's not so much about the fishing, as it is, the setting, warm, summer afternoons, sun dappled trees and slow moving shadows, softly rippling water, and the gentle sway of the boat, or the hypnotic sound of the water on the shore, imagine those images created in sounds, and that's The Author Of Twilight. Softly swirling synths, billowing softly beneath mesmerizingly trance-like guitar figures, everything wreathed in field recordings, chirping birds, chittering insects, the lapping of water, the vibe is truly tranquil and dreamy, and most definitely fits perfectly with TRS's sonic aesthetic. A few of the tracks seem softly blown out, the sounds crumbling and blurring into indistinct smears of sounds, with almost a Caretaker vibe, while others are hushed and haunting. There's definitely an Appalachian vibe too, but it's an Appalachia in a much more verdant setting, green grass, and thick foliage, deep blue water, and clear cloudless skies, but always with shadows, lurking just out of site, the threat of impending darkness, and of the shadows always looming, gives the music a dark, slightly sinister tinge that imbues the sound with even more emotional heft.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, there are two different versions, there's the deluxe, which in this case, is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a square, hand stamped green translucent envelope, inside a hand sewn flip book, antique fishing photos and postcards, a page from an antique angler's journal, and a printed, two sided insert. Each envelope is also tagged with a hand stamped vintage fishing cigarette card, and each one comes with an actual vintage fishing lure! Then there's the standard version, which comes in the same green envelope, and includes the insert, but leaves out all the rest. As always, WAY recommended.
Seems like not a list goes by without a new release on local label Time Released Sound. And for this we are truly grateful. And once again, TRS does not disappoint, with this fantastic double disc from the oddly monikered The Angling Loser, who is in fact a fella by the name of Lee Anthony Norris, whose debut double cd The Author Of Twilight, seems to have a sort of fishing focus, hence the name, and the packaging (more on that in a moment), but really, it's not so much about the fishing, as it is, the setting, warm, summer afternoons, sun dappled trees and slow moving shadows, softly rippling water, and the gentle sway of the boat, or the hypnotic sound of the water on the shore, imagine those images created in sounds, and that's The Author Of Twilight. Softly swirling synths, billowing softly beneath mesmerizingly trance-like guitar figures, everything wreathed in field recordings, chirping birds, chittering insects, the lapping of water, the vibe is truly tranquil and dreamy, and most definitely fits perfectly with TRS's sonic aesthetic. A few of the tracks seem softly blown out, the sounds crumbling and blurring into indistinct smears of sounds, with almost a Caretaker vibe, while others are hushed and haunting. There's definitely an Appalachian vibe too, but it's an Appalachia in a much more verdant setting, green grass, and thick foliage, deep blue water, and clear cloudless skies, but always with shadows, lurking just out of site, the threat of impending darkness, and of the shadows always looming, gives the music a dark, slightly sinister tinge that imbues the sound with even more emotional heft.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, there are two different versions, there's the deluxe, which in this case, is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a square, hand stamped green translucent envelope, inside a hand sewn flip book, antique fishing photos and postcards, a page from an antique angler's journal, and a printed, two sided insert. Each envelope is also tagged with a hand stamped vintage fishing cigarette card, and each one comes with an actual vintage fishing lure! Then there's the standard version, which comes in the same green envelope, and includes the insert, but leaves out all the rest. As always, WAY recommended.
Trondr Nefas, aka T.B., is probably better known in black metal circles for fronting Norwegian heavyweights Urgehal and Beastcraft, among others, but odds are that might be about to change with Angst Skvadron, a blackened bastard offspring, that while still black metal is so much more.
This is record number two from this post black metal trio, whose sound, if we had to describe it, would be something more like post space black prog. And were this easier to get, don't doubt that this would have been a shoo-in for Record of The Week. For some of us it's already Record Of The Year!
Employing the usual instruments, but with an incredible arsenal of vintage and classic keyboards and synths, even a Mellotron, to add all sorts of texture and weirdness to their grim black sound. Did we mention ghostly female vocals? Yeah, these guys are a strange proposition, but have maybe catapulted themselves right to the front of the line, that line being our favorite new black metal bands.
Just take record opener "Valium Holocaust" (great title), opening with a cloud or reverbed piano rumbles, before launching into a lumbering midtempo dirge, equal parts Ved Buens Ende, Khold and Voivod at 16 rpm, the guitars warped and crumbling, the riffs woozy, the rhythm peppered with toiling bells, and laced with little glimmering tangles of melody, and super melodic basslines, and of course some haunting female vocals, that make the track either sound like some black metal Argento soundtrack, or some blackened version of Hundred Sights Of Koenji, gorgeous and creepy and far out and spacey and totally mesmerizing.
The whole record is so close to NOT being black metal. The riffs are gnarled and not at all typical, sounding almost grungy at times, like a way more grim black Skin Yard, which is definitely a good thing.
There are moments of blackness for sure, but even then, the band seem dead set on subverting any sort of true kvlt cred they might otherwise be developing, by twisting the songs all up, whether it's adding Mellotron strings, and creating weird carnivalesque slowcore, or adding all sort of strange crooning vocals, or taking an otherwise black blast beat, and transforming it into a mathy stutter. The slow atmospheric bits are incredible, not just randomly quiet for a minute or two like most BM bands, these are fully formed bits of minimal moodiness, with lush tangled melodies, ghostly harmonies, thick wheezing organs, often giving way to spaced out blackened krautrock, all clean guitars, hazy clouds of reverb, rubbery Joy Division basslines, some full on whatthefuck post industrial lumber and crunch, with thick buzzy bass riffs, and streaks of static and hiss, all wound around some incredible black metal grooves, some of the best riffs we've heard in ages, that in other hands could be the basis for perfect pop songs, but here just infuse the blackness with a weirdly irresistible pop element, that helps make these songs totally weird, totally catchy, and completely genius.
The record finishes off with an unlikely three song salvo, some warm almost sunshiney softly strummed minimal pop, all brushed snares, soaring strings, major key melodies, a lush gauzy dream pop dronescape, that gives way to possibly the most mathy and convoluted track on the record, all super tangled riffage, octopoidal math rock drums, serpentine basslines, super heavy and harrowing, with tortured super effected tripped out vocals, culminating in heaving doomic crush, before finally finishing off with the weirdly melodic title track, a wistful minor key dirge, all clean chiming guitars, simple spare drumming, strings and flutes (or at least the Mellotron version), gorgeous and dreamy and softly psychedelic, an appropriately unlikely finish to one of the most unlikely 'black metal' records in recent memory. And quickly becoming our favorite...
Anima Morte make their home in the frosty Swedish North, but you'd never know it from listening to 'em. There's no cavernous old school death metal here, and there sure ain't no glistening electropop. Instead, Anima Morte deals in the grisly trade of Italian style instrumental horror prog. The Nightmare Becomes Reality is actually their third full length, and it was released way back in 2011 on cd, but we only just found this vinyl version. In fact, Anima Morte have been dabbling in their own brand of epic blood-soaked prog rock since 2007, which by our calculations puts them right at the forefront of the current Giallo slasher revival craze that we here at aQ HQ can't get enough of.
The album opens with a brief wall of droning skittery back alley synths, barely masking the disembodied weeping, whimpering and agonized screams hiding underneath, but this is one of the few moments of relative reprieve on the record, and soon we've entered into a surreal realm of nightmarish groove and technicolor terror. The plucked dissonance of acoustic guitars chime like the monstrous bell of some crumbling ghostly church. Dizzying haunted pipe organs send the listener spiraling helplessly into a sweat-soaked lightless nether realm. Blood curdling stabs of hypnotic cyclical piano slice their way to the forefront like a straight razor gleaming in the moonlight. With its groovy bass, shuffling drums and moments of bright melodic spaciousness, the majority of this record sounds like Goblin at their most progged out, syncopated and heavy. And while the band also list progressive heavyweights like ELP, King Crimson and Rick Wakeman as influences (and justifiably so), the clean modern production almost give the album the feeling of a more contemporary group like Astra or latter-era Opeth funneled through hours of twisted video nasties and low grade slasher flicks. The more overtly gothic flourishes even recall the theatrical Transilvanian madness of a band like Notre Dame. And it almost goes without saying: if stalking the city streets in the dead of night with only the dread sounds of Blizaro, Orne or Tony Tears oozing from your headphones for company is your idea of a pleasant night out, then you should definitely check this out. Music to be murdered by indeed!
As part of their Splinter Series, Fat Cat Records have reissued these two enigmatic albums together as a double album credited to the group known as Animal Collective (aka the artists Avey Tare and Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deaken). Fragments of obscured sounds, glimpsing melodies and rhythms peek from around corners and poke out of the cracks while strange voices murmur, chant and howl from the shadows.
If the first disc's title and songs strike you as familiar, well, it might be because we were raving about it late last year. It was originally released on its own in 2000 under the moniker Avey Tare And Panda Bear. Heck, we like it very much under any name. And the wonderfully titled Danse Manatee (who doesn't love the manatee?), was their just as dandy follow-up, a subtly more fleshed out and vocal heavy album that was limited to 1000 handmade, silkscreened editions.
Here's what we had to say about the former when it was still credited to A.T.A.P.B.:
This debut album... is, well, it's really good! It's an intriguing combination of elements -- a plaintive, weak voice chirping sadly over rapidly strummed yet fractured guitar, which is normal enough but then there's these weirdly muffled, like, jungle beats in the background, so faint you barely even notice that they're there. The tension between the styles happening simultaneiously is carefully handled and forms a satisfying whole. Vocals are tremulous and tinny but somehow appealing, too, like the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne making incredibly emotional dissonant, fuzzed-out bathroom electronica. There are also gentler numbers with moody piano and delicate vocal effects. And some raucous squealing feedback guitar (like a womans wail) over Reichian arpeggiated synths. The overall effect is slightly creepy but mostly just wintry, melancholy and sad. Recommended.
Back in print on vinyl, here's what we said about it back in 2004...
The mysteriously eccentric Animal Collective have returned bearing / baring their Sung Tongs. They continue along their quirky, meandering rough-hewn path, yet on this album they seem ever so slightly more focused and (dare we say?) accessible than on previous recorded endeavors. However, that's not to say that they're not plenty 'out there'. This 'Collective is definitely not for everybody. It just sounds as though they've set aside their eclectic genre palette (psych, jazz, prog, noise, etc) for the time being, keeping their sound for the most part within the mossy folk realm. Perhaps they've spent a stretch of time deep in the woods far from civilization? This does make for a much less haphazard, much less disarming listen than those of past A.C. releases. That said, odd details still punctuate the songs like cackling laughter, whooping vocalizations, textural ambient noises - hazily drifting in and out of lucidity. Furthermore, as if to not fully alienate those who dug their Here Comes the Indian and Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished / Danse Manatee releases, they end on a more characteristically strange note with the trippy track "Whaddit I Done".
