Time to get swept away by some deep dreamy Icelandic beauty, as our favorite experimental cellist Hildur Gudnadottir teams up with composer and pianist Hauschka for a stunning collaboration. We already deeply smitten with the meditative music Gudnadottir has made on her own as well as in collaboration with Angel, BJ Nilsen, Mum, et cetera. But we hadn't spent much time with the music of Hauschka, but this pairing definitely has us wanting to hear more of his stuff. Together they create music that sounds like a solemn soundtrack for ghost towns, abandoned buildings, and isolated existence.
With elements in sound, composition and an overall feeling that reminds us of some of our favorite works by Gavin Bryars, Charlamagne Palestine, Harold Budd, Sylvain Chauveau, and The Rachels, this is one of those records we love playing early on a crisp winter morning or as it turns dark on a Sunday night and it's time to clear our heads of the distractions of the world, and start taking deep breaths and immersing ourselves in thoughtful introspection. Utterly beautiful and stirring.
Let's just get it right out in the open, first thing. This should have been record of the week. It's beautiful, weird as fuck, mysterious, it's two whole discs of far out sounds, it comes with a massive photocopied book, filled with lyrics and text from some mysterious professor, and they're called Have A Nice Life...
BUT, the band decided to not make any more copies, and let us have their last 40. It will probably be available as a download or something in the future, but for now, these are the last 40 physical copies available EVER. And the only way, as far as we know, to get the book as well.
So what's the deal with Have A Nice Life? People are always emailing us about the new wave of shoegaze bands, nu-gaze as some folks like to call it (the same ones who now have us using the term metalgaze), and someone recommended Have A Nice Life, telling us the band was some sort of doom, metal, black metal, gothic, new wave, shoe gaze outfit, so obviously we were pretty curious. So we emailed the band. No response. Emailed the label. No response. Then we just happened to be going through piles of records, and found this one just sitting on the desk, where it must have been for weeks, a cool creepy cover, a color painting of a man's arm, bleeding, the words "the plow that broke the plains" on a black field above it. And it was bundled with a book. Hmmm. With the word Deathconsciousness printed on the front. And wham. It clicked. Those guys had already sent us a copy, which had somehow slipped through the cracks. So we quickly threw it on, and it was everything we had expected, everything we had hoped for, and more. We finally got in touch with the band, who told us they were not going to make any more, but would make one final batch for us.
So here they are.
Two discs, jam packed with dark blissed out shoegazey, new wave-y, slightly metallic nearly perfect pop. The songs insanely varied, but impossible cohesive. Some sort of sprawling bliss rock opera. Each track, perfect on its own, but even more perfect as part of the bigger whole.
The first disc is the prettier and poppier of the two. The opening track is a creepy stretch of Goblin like synth ambience, peppered with simple minor key acoustic guitar, haunting and lovely, which quickly gives way to thick ropy basslines, and reverbed electronic drums, a definitely Joy Division vibe, swirls of thick guitar, gorgeous melodies and heartfelt vocals, it's dirgey and doomy and depressive, but so catchy and poppy. The next track is a big blown out pop epic, all effected vocal harmonies and washed out watercolor guitars, reminding us quite a bit of M83. The rest of the first disc slips easily from gloomy goth pop, to minimal drone, to shimmery shoegaze, often all at once. The disc finishes off with a gloomy dirge, all downtuned grindguitar and pointillist piano. Softly crooned vocals, and a surprisingly catchy melody.
Which perfect leads into the second, darker and heavier disc, which begins with a track the boasts probably the greatest song title EVER: "Waiting For Black Metal Records In The Mail". But don't be expecting any black metal, instead it's a killer slab of eighties style indie doom pop, jangly guitar, propulsive drumming, and killer vocals, all wound into an awesome blast of hooky retro gloom, very reminiscent of the Comsat Angels. Hot on the heels comes another awesomely named song: "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000", but again the title gives no clue that the song is a lilting mostly acoustic jam, with more piano, sad vocals, minor key melodies, a super reverby eighties production, all set to that Casio keyboard preset metronome rhythm. But about half way through, the track shifts and becomes a pounding rocker, the guitars thick and distorted, the drums pounding, but then all around synths buzz, vocals croon, the heaviness transformed into something much more dreamy and blissy. "The Future" is an aggro, almost no wave workout, all jagged guitars and shouted vocals, and more of that thick throbbing bass, but just like the rest of the tracks, it gets totally twisted around, his time by the addition of fake strings, and yet another killer and totally irresistible hook.
"Earthmover" finishes things off, but instead of being some dirgey doom epic, it's another blissed out popscape, lots and lots of fuzz and buzz, glistening melodies, minimal rhythms, all buried beneath layers of woozy whir and sun dappled sparkle. Almost like a much prettier and poppier Nadja.
And the thing about this record and these songs, is that, they all manage to be outrageously catchy, but not obviously so, and while they straddle about a million different genres, they manage to weave them all seamlessly into each other, making Deathconsciousness feel less like a rock band's collection of songs, and more like one massive organic mass of blackened dronepop jangle-goth bliss. Which as far as we're concerned it actually is.
The packaging is amazing. A slimline dvd case, two cd-r's each hand spray painted, full color cover, super spare and striking, and then there's the book. A dvd sized 80 page book, filled with lyrics, liner notes, woodcuts, engravings, illustrations, and a massive amount of text on the soul, spirituality, death, sorcery, Medieval heresy and more, all supposedly penned by an East Coast professor and scholar.
So awesome!
Oh yeah! Finally, a full length from the best worst rap group EVER. God Albino, Duke Crapmore and Flybot Van Damn are three skinny white guys who absolutely destroy on the mic. Fuck Paul Barman and his wacky 'college guy' shtick, this is the shit. Stupid and funky and juvenile and offensive and so so funny. HGRMWG are like the Geto Boys, if the Geto Boys were immature, whiny, skinny white art-school drop outs. We've been following these guys for a while -- they've contributed standout tracks to all three of the WordSound comps as well as cameos on the Spectre records. Primitive loops, lo-fi recording, ridiculous fake voices, and lots and lots of skits! And ANYONE who bought a Steven Schultz record off the last list, HAS to buy this. In fact, I'm just gonna go through the files and send out copies to those people. You know who you are...
... is noneother than Elephant 6 Collective member Jeremy Barnes (of Neutral Milk Hotel and Bablicon). We know very well the degree of creativity and craft that goes into all of the E6 family's musical endeavors, and Barnes' latest musical pursuits are no exception. This is his second release under this moniker, and it picks up right where his self-titled debut left off, traversing the great expanse of folk music from around the globe (of which he's done his fair share of exploring in the past year). However, whereas he made his first AHAAH album all by his lonesome, for this one he recruited a full band. Heck, we can see why! In typical E6 fashion, he's encorporated an overflowing mixed bag o' acoustic instruments (various horns, bagpipes, accordion, ouds, piano, harp and assorted percussion). Barnes invites seemingly divergent elements from distant plains to entwine on Darkness At Noon. Keep your ears peeled for moments influenced by klezmer, flamenco and mariachi as well as interludes seemingly inspired by Carl Stalling, Steve Reich, and the solo accordion work of Lars Hollmer (member of Swedish prog rock greats Samla Mammas Manna). Like musical ivy, they creep and wind their way in and around each other. Very much in a similar film soundtrack-y vein to Tin Hat Trio's most recent album, the gorgeous Book Of Silk. The lead-off track "Laughter In The Dark" is a fitting entrance point. The seven minute long, richly atmospheric piece gradually lures you away from the lights and roar of the city towards more fire-lit enchanted surroundings. Barnes allows his adventurous spirit to run free, and we're fortunate to have a front row seat on his musical caravan.
I believe that this is the first recording for Gerald Hawk, who managed to land this recording on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label. I have to say that this is more interesting than the recent series of monthly Sun City Girls releases, sounding much more like the solo recordings from either of the Bishop brothers. Simple off key acoustic guitar strum with a Jandekian vocal meandering that often has a ghostly double as an ominous whisper. Certainly for fans of No Neck Blues Band and the aforementioned Sun City Girls.
Second album from Gerald Hawk on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label. As on his first recording, King Of The River Canoe Mr. Hawk continues to delve deeper into his unique mumbling, psycho-sexual, angry-Jandek folk. However, on The Honey Guide Bird brooding experimental folk takes a back seat to dark soundscapes. Using looped recordings, guitar, processed keyboards, short wave radio blasts (even some snippets of numbers stations recordings), field recordings and ring modulated vocals this album sound much more like Zoviet-France than No Neck Blues Band.
The first we heard from these mathy noise rock heavies, was on a 7" split with Minneapolis noise rockers Buildings, and we finished that review by saying: "There's a Hawks full length out there somewhere, and these two songs have us begging for more!!" And here it is, a crushing collection of dense, mathed out heaviness, with bellowed Melvins like vox over churning downtuned riffage and big booming drums (recorded by Harvey Milk's Kyle Spence!), and that Harvey Milk connection can't be a coincidence, they're from the same state, and even though this isn't nearly as slow and low as the 'Milk, it is definitely drawn from the same sludgey well.
Think classic old school AmRep noise rock, Midwest Homestead style pigfuck, and nineties math rock, all wound tight into some serious RAWK action, the bass thick and grimey, super distorted, all tangled up with the wild, intricate drumming, while all around guitars grind and buzz, chime and chug, sometimes everything bleeds into surprisingly melodic and downright poppy shapes, but more often, it's all angular, chaotic crush and knuckle dragging caveman pummel, the finest moments here when it's a little of both.
Fans of current noise rockers like Gay Witch Abortion, Harvey Milk, the Melvins, Buildings, Seawhores, Kowloon Walled City, Hex Machine and the rest will flip for these guys. As will anyone who missed the good ol' AmRep / Homestead days...
It seems Haxan Cloak has gone through a bit of a reinvention. Up until now, we would have classified Haxan Cloak as psychedelic folk, their previous records darkly ritualistic, with urgently strummed acoustic guitars, swirling black ambience, chanted monk like vox, moaning cello rumbles, a fluttery folkiness that seemed more in keeping with industrial neo folk outfits like Death In June. Which raises the question, how did they end up on Triangle, and how did they end up sounding like Burial and Vessel and Raime? Not that we're complaining. We can't get enough of this new strain of slo-mo soul, dubbed out minimal electronic murk, and that's pretty much what Haxan Cloak deliver on their Triangle debut. Sure much of the moodiness and black ambience of their previous sound carries over, but then that's the perfect delivery system for spare, skeletal, glitched out rhythms, and Excavation definitely straddles the line between new and old Haxan Cloak, peppering black drifts of deep rumble, and keening sine wave tones, with weird sampled voices, and shimmering Tibetan bowls, but soon that tell tale Burial style wood-block snare sound comes in, all echoey and reverbed, and the song transforms into a blackened electro creep, the background sounds swooping ominously, soft swells of hiss and grit wreath the rhythm, the mix a bit warped as well, the sound pulsing, laced with thick bursts of ominous thrum cranked WAY louder than everything around it, creating a secondary rhythm, one that's even more woozy.
Which is pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, and perhaps exactly what you might expect from a formerly psych folk / black ambient technician gone electronic. In fact, strip away the beats, and this would be some harrowing black ambience, but it really is all about the beats, as much as the textures and moody ambience. In some places, the sound slips into an almost dubstep, but a hellish ultra minimal, avant dubstep, a swirling swath of fractured blurred samples, glitched out beats, and rib cage rattling low end.
The shorter tracks here seems to drift back toward the Haxan Cloak of old, with scraped cello string rumbles, keening distant melodies, echo drenched industrial plod, ominous minor key piano stabs, but the two 2-part epics here definitely have the new sound on full display, channeling a Burial like minimal dub, and the more spare haunting minimal abstract beatscaping of recent aQ faves Raime, filtering it through Haxan Cloak's sinister black ambient industrial filter, the results might be one of the darkest, meanest sounding electronic records ever. The second half of the record finds some melody filtering through, the second half of "The Mirror Reflecting", is almost pretty, although still fractured and fucked up, but it builds to a seriously psychedelic coda, before the relatively brief "Dieu" delivers the most straight ahead electro jam here, but it's really relative, freaky vocal snippets, swirling strings, buzzing bass thrum, fragmented rhythmic skitter, ominous pulsating melodies, it's almost like an intro for the massive 13 minute closer "The Drop", which ditches beats completely for the first half of the track, instead, weaving a lush undulating landscape of shimmering chiming melodies, moaning strings, deep bass pulsations, lysergic chordal swirls, everything hazy and washed out, the beats do eventually surface, but they're more like processed low end throbs, looped beneath the song's haunting almost orchestral sounding swirl, the beats becoming almost Kompakt worthy for the last half, but the blackened surrounding sounds, and the weirdly static churn of the main single beat rhythm, keeps the track from getting at all 'dance-y', the beats merely adding texture to the song's blurred and blackened abject sonic sprawl. The sort of seriously sinister, cinematic soundscaping that transform any dancefloors into a crushing, harrowing, black pit of sonic despair. Awesome!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
HERE ARE THE VERY FINAL COPIES OF THIS VERY LOVELY PICTURE DISC!!!
Yup, we do love picture discs. They may not sound the best, but they look so amazing. Especially with the right images embedded in that there vinyl. We all definitely have a little treasure trove of picture discs that we hang on to just because they're so goddamn beautiful. It's just a bonus when the music is good too. Especially when the music actually benefits from the limitations of the picture disc format.
The latest release from our very own Jim Haynes is the inaugural release in Elevator Bath's picture disc series and they couldn't have chosen better. For those of you who have never seen Haynes' artwork, he rusts things (as he always so reductively describes his process), but the truth is he coaxes impossible textures and patterns from chemicals and metals, often letting nature determine much of a pieces final look. And they are simple amazing, deep oranges and browns, streaks and smears, strange shapes where metal has rested on other metal, drips and layers where the chemicals have pooled or allowed to shift, inconsistencies in the metal revealed after having some of it's surface eaten away. The process is almost as amazing as the outcome, but needless to say, Jim's pieces are total industrial-wasteland-decay eye candy.
The two images chosen for this picture disc are no exception. And knowing that some of Haynes' music was also created utilizing the process of rusting, it's nice to think that the sounds within are in fact produced from chemical and metal interacting, the picture disc the literal visual analogue to the resultant sounds on the recording. But the sounds here are way too lush and varied to be produced so simply, so the images are left to spin, only somewhat removed from the sounds to which they are linked.
Eraldus / Eravaldus is probably Haynes' most varied and lush recording to date, whether on his own or with sound artist Loren Chasse in Coelacanth. The chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves, underpin what sounds like an airplane passing overhead, but the sound remains, too static to be an airplane, soon revealing itself to be manufactured, gradually melodies take shape, bits of glitch and little shards of electronic interference surface, tiny little sonic events pepper the slow shifting rumble. But those little sonic events eventually blossom into thick streaks of high end, which not soon after transform into strange scraping and whirrings. The rest of the record drifts from mysterious soundworld to mysterious soundworld, dark dronescapes rife with clicks and hiss and grit, like a recording of some swamp late at night, gritty landscapes of reverbed percussion, blurred into droney smudges, smeared static becomes long expanses of slow shifting sound, that slips effortlessly from corrosive to shimmery and back again. Quite nice!
LIMITED TO ONLY 260 COPIES!
Here's the latest from our very own Jim Haynes, dronologist, soundscaper, recorder of rusting metal. These two pieces both represent impressions of Kamchatka, a Russian province often referred to as the "Siberia of Siberia", which speaks to its utter isolation, which Haynes manages to evoke magnificently in the opening track "Lilith", which is a 21 minute sprawl of intercepted shortwave broadcasts, captured and reworked into brittle buzzing textures, swirling masses of crumbling sonic shimmer, and deep morasses of subterranean rumble, the sky full of tinkling chimes and blurred static, beneath it fragmented melodies drift below the surface of a tranquil sonic sea. The track seemingly drifts between two extremes, thick layered dronescapes, and spare stretches of Geiger counter like chitter, those sparse passages draped over what sounds like field recordings of boats rubbing against docks, the clatter of oars, or perhaps the slow decay of nature. Somehow these mysterious purloined sounds are captured and recontextualized as a strange field of scrape and rumble, of creak and groan, all beneath soft focus billows of distant shimmer, and those skittery Raster-Noton cricket-like chirps. Haunting and ominous, the track finally seeming to blossom into the blurred bleary final movement, an ethereal wash of blissful thrum and strangely, an almost aquatic shimmer, that evokes images of some placid body of water, surrounded by miles and miles of emptiness.
The second track, "Rocks Hills Plains", a slightly reworked version of a soundtrack Haynes performed for a film by Paul Clipson at the ATA in 2008, seems culled from the same source material, opening with a gauzy cloud of static, over a softly undulating sea of low end rumble, and continues in a similar manner, all of the rough edges and more clattery elements of the first piece here, smoothed into a swoonsome sprawl of hushed murky mesmer, haunting and cinematic, the sounds creeping and oozing ominously, until the begin to recede, leaving in the foreground a field of softly percussive scrabbling, sounding like strange ghostly rubbings against the microphone, those sounds slowly growing more ethereal and soon transforming into still more cloudy shimmer. Eventually, the sound of the whole track begins to coalesce into something much more pure tone, seeming to shed any vestiges of the low fidelity with about 7 minutes to go, the sound building to something softly caustic, with some serious sonic heft, on the recording it's still comparatively quite, but live through the proper sound system, it's easy to imagine the sort of sonic energy this passage might emit, lush and layered and darkly dense, a powerful (but still minimal) coda, which quickly subsides, winding down as a barely there bit of ambient thrum, laced with disembodied field recordings, a hushed outro that quickly becomes silence.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, housed in super swank, silkscreened, oversized 6 panel sleeves.
Feedback, shortwave, wasps! Perhaps that's all we need to say to get you to click the "add to cart" button, but let's go on...
Our own Jim Haynes may be primarily a visual artist, working within a self-actualized aesthetic of rust and decay (a small sample of which you'll get with the each-one-unique cover to this release). But his love of music, especially of the 'dronological' variety, of sound art and field recording and experimental glitchscapes, has led him to accompany his recent art shows and installations with soundtracks of his own making. He's also been collaborating with AQ-fave Loren Chasse in the duo Coelacanth, who just released the very nice Glass Sponge disc (reviewed last list), so you know he knows what he's doing. This Magnetic North cd is the audio portion of an installation of the same name and is a despairingly lovely drone-scape, constructed from feedback, shortwave radio static, and recordings of wasps, as we said. Like his visual art, it's just a little spooky and discomforting, evoking ghostly transmissions from the void. It's quiet, wind-tunnel drone that could be a wordless EVP recording of a paranormal haunting, and then begins to sound like the haunting is being itself haunted! Jim's solo work seems less microscopic in focus than what he and L. Chasse do in Coelacanth. It can be claustrophobic, but conversely also spacious and even somehow incorporeal, phantasmal. One track features sparsely chopped clips of feedback, but we like best the tracks that drift endlessly without making the listener consider the physical sound-making process. Definitely for fans of Mirror, John Duncan, Francisco Lopez, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson...or for anyone willing to plumb the abyss suggested by this sound-work.
AQ's own Jim put this disc of rather spooky and evocative drone/glitch music together as a soundtrack to his recent art installation, but even without his excellent visuals, Jim's music on this cd-r conjures the atmosphere of rust and decay that his art is all about. Down-pitched bass-rumble, eerie Conet Project samples, and looping clicks make for an impressive first release that would be at home on Trente Oiseaux or Raster. Very nice!
Right before Christmas 2014, our own Jim Haynes walked into the shop with a hunk of gauze and metal attached to one his fingers, as he had an unfortunate encounter with a table saw which lopped off the tip of his finger in the process. Jump forward a couple of months and he offers forth Scarlet - a nasty, violent piece of scabbed pulses and blasted electric corrosion. While he had finished the album earlier than this incident, the rupture of that event -- torn flesh, greasy machinery, pending sepsis, healing through cauterization - are all the inner workings of the aptly named Scarlet. The source material, it has to be said, is not that of the machine shop but the exploded-view amplification of micro-rhythms from the cheapest of strobe-lights and cooling fans; and back at the end of the summer 2014, Haynes made a lone performance of this body of work, opening for Tim Hecker here in San Francisco. The blister-popped strobes and accumulated tumult made for a much more theatrical, and dare we say, more expressive performance than that of the much beloved Tim Hecker. Scarlet it turns out is the reworkings and reconfigurations of all of the recorded variations that Haynes crafted upto that Hecker show. It's just as deliciously caustic and nervously turbulent as that performance, girded on the rhythmic, noise-pulse interlacing of those electromagnetic devices. The opening "Cerise Cerise" quicksteps from weird angular blurts into a brutal, shrill torrent of noise, like some fucked-up meeting of Factrix and Mika Vainio. The dead-tone "Alizarin" buzzes with blackened drone and brooding mesmer as an viscous, ocean sized acid-bath of bad intentions. Even as the rhythmic clatter subsides on this track, the claustrophobic intensity persists. The psychoid grit of "Venal" erupts with those rhythms in a latticework of out-of-phased patterns and gasped/gnarled loops. And so it goes for Scarlet, barrage after barrage of blown-out abstractions, supercharged locomotive grindings, irradiated hauntings as melody, and the sound of the computerized parts of a cyborg extracting itself from its human host, leaving behind all that sinew, muscle, and bone. Super fucking limited, of course.
We listed this recently as a double disc limited edition, unfortunately that is now out of print, but the single disc is well worth the price of admission. Here's our review attesting to that...
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
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What the hell? We thought these had long disappeared, but a handful of the super limited edition 2cd version of Sever / Severed were just discovered. These will most likely be the final copies we'll see of this... As for the record, here's what we had to say about it when we first reviewed it:
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
The bonus disc features recordings previously thought to originate from a sound installation, but which is in fact the reworked source material of his performance opening for Nurse With Wound back in 2009.
Totally recommended!
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Just because Jim is an AQ employee doesn't mean we can't gush like crazy about his new record. C'mon, pretty much everyone who works here plays in a band or runs a label. We like to think that the music we all make and release would be just the kind of stuff we love to listen to and sell, and just the kind of stuff you all like to listen to and buy. And such is the case with Jim's new record Telegraphy By The Sea, an album he's been working on for several years now, cobbled together from material culled from various elements used in installations and performances in New York, Australia and various locations in between.
The disc is lovely, all wrapped in an ominously blackened but totally beautiful package of silkscreen and letterpress that could at first glance be mistaken for another Jesu or Godflesh album with its telephone poles smeared into moire patterns.
The music inside is just as lovely. Rust, drones, shortwave, drones, acid rain, drones, a big pile of rocks, drones, a small pile of rocks, and more drones. Drones and drones. But like all of those great drone artists we freak out about (Chalk, Coleclough, Basinski, Organum, blah blah blah...), Jim's not one to let the drone settle as a terminal pool of inactivity. This is a dynamic album, bristling with texture amidst the shifting passages, dramatic shifts, and evocative soundscapes. The visual side of his installations has this weird eeriness as he builds dense layers of rust and debris on top of corroded photographs of abandoned buildings and desolate landscapes. Those same metaphors of abandoned, desolate spaces are musically represented in Telegraphy By The Sea. In these spaces, time is accelerated with things rusting, falling apart, getting covered in moss, and being washed away by the ocean. Scrapes and gurgles from all of those bits of metal, bricks, and rocks dissolve through radioactive sinewaves into a gorgeous magnetic wall of grey-slab tones, gradually building through half-melodic phrases, a clatter of monochrome, and squalls of crackling static. All of this snaps in an instant at the end of the album, giving way to a wondrous nocturnal ambience cobbled from luminous bell-tones and detuned shortwave radio communications.
One of Jim's good friends and collaborators Loren Chasse, said it better than we could, "A telephone cord in the sand? A message taken down using an alphabet of sea-glass, shell and carapace? It all makes sense in the last 11 minutes!"
Another mysterious sonic missive from our very own resident dronologist Jim Haynes, another excursion into the sound of decay, this time in the form of four sprawling sidelong epics, each its own self contained soundworld, culled from various field recordings, vibrating strings and other sonic errata. Recorded over the last three years, these recordings require headphones to truly explore their depth, and once strapped on, it's easy to get lost in these strange lands of decay and declines.
The A side was originally a commissioned soundtrack for a pair of films that screened at the Hauntology exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2010, and while we've yet to see either of these films, the smoldering slow moving "Ashes" does evoke a certain ontological sonic dread, the core of the sound is of course the drone, but that drone is pulled taut, and the sound seems to fray as the track progresses, shedding sonic detritus in the form of fractured melodies, strange clicks and muted buzz. At times, this begins to sound like perhaps Haynes' most overtly musical record, but that musicality is eventually picked apart, the remaining elements litter the landscape like bits of some sonic wreckage, but then the edges are smoothed, and the stray shards are reigned in, the sound is truly beautiful, whether a deep sonorous drone, or a lush layered stretch of celestial shimmer.
Named for the performance space at which the piece was debuted, "Terminal" is another sidelong soundscape, the majority of the sounds sourced from field recordings of geysers and thermal vents, the opening few minutes unfurling like a raw field recordings, playing out like some obscure scientific document, unearthed from some dusty box filed away in a warehouse, chronicling some lost expedition. The sound doesn't necessarily grow more musical, but instead, seems to blossom and display more texture, and more depth, as if more sounds were introduced and then layered or woven into one another, streaks of blurred hiss, peppered with the sound of wind on microphone or the trickle of water, the white noise of eruption balanced by the hushed murmur of calm before and after.
Side three finds Haynes exploring radioactive decay, unclear what the sound sources are, we'd like to think, that it's indeed recordings of Strontium or Uranium, the radioactivity causing the tape to warp and curdle, but in fact, it sounds more like an assemblage of intercepted short wave broadcasts, and deep bellows of bowed metal, lush chordal swells washing over strange effects, muted glitches, lush tones and surprisingly dreamy overtones, bell like chimes, chittering cricket like clicks, Geiger counter like bleeps, all blurred and smeared into a gorgeous hazy of soft focus shimmer, those clicks coalescing into an almost-rhythm, while the surrounding sounds seem to lose cohesion, the edges softening, all bleeding into one another and drifting like blackened clouds of whir and thrum.
And finally, the last movement in this crumbling sonic tetraptych is the wire recording sourced "Cold", in which Haynes captures the sympathetic buzz of wires and plays them like some sort of abstract harp, at least that's how we picture it, a huge stone room, with metal wires running across in wild tangles, Haynes at the center, wildly bowing and striking wires, creating this delicate crystalline symphony, another blurred buzzscape, that peppers the lush layered shimmer, with creaks and clatter, skitter and crunch, but those errant sounds are quickly subsumed by the warm whirls of hushed bleary drift and an unexpected eruption of caustic blown out noise, a psychedelic squall that acts as the record's coda, before the inevitable decline, the sound slipping into nothingness. Gorgeous stuff.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!! Housed in a luxurious full color gatefold sleeve, and pressed on nice thick black vinyl. Includes a download coupon as well.
After killer releases from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Grant Evans, Quiet Evenings, Afterlife and a bunch more, the Hooker Vision label gives us a brand new recording from our very own Jim Haynes, who seems to move well beyond his "I rust things" method of sonic alchemy, creating what in Haynes' world is about as close to a minimal avant garde shoegaze as we can imagine. And in fact, we had wondered if Haynes might try something more overtly melodic for his first Hooker Vision outing, and while perhaps The Incident With A Ghost isn't strictly melodic, it's much more lush and warm than past release, seemingly trading in some of the grey austerity he often traffics in for something more organic. The first side opens with a strange rhythmic tangle made up of what sounds like the warm rhythmic patter of rainfall on clay pots, geiger counter crackle and the snap of crackling fires, those sounds form the core of what becomes a slowly expanding sonic sphere, all softly swirling reverberations, lush tonal thrum, and strange pulses and pulsations. The vibe is definitely some underwater world, or the surface of some alien planet. The sound is stormy, that rhythmic crackle blurring into shapeless whorls, beneath which tones shimmer and churn, before a sudden glitch, sends the track into much more tranquil territory, a deep slow building rumble, that begins to smolder, and transform into a sort of soft focus dream-noise, eventually giving way to some Caretaker like creep, all gauzey longform tones, and timestretched ballroom dreaminess, which billows into thick droney clouds that border on serious shoegaze blissout. Maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from Haynes yet!
The flipside is much less active, a sprawl of blackened ambience, pocked with all manner of micro sonic events, scrapes and thumps, rumbles and whirs, the sound a series of slow swells, hazy and haunting, downright tranquil until the last 5 minutes or so, when those tranquil sounds begin to grow corrosive, exploding into a raw, grinding howl of sound, wrapped in junk metal clatter, and jagged shards of static, only to suddenly dissipate, unfurling a haunting outro, all mysterious sounds, voices and machines, buried beneath slow shifting layers of bleak glowing shimmer, a woozy, wraithlike drift.
Nice metallic silver packaging. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
We quipped in the review of our very own Jim Haynes' last album that when he wasn't spending time behind the counter here at aQuarius recOrds that he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker. Apparently, that wasn't far from the mark, as his studio is actually a shipping container perched in the industrial wastelands of East Oakland. Yeah, that makes sense, though he does mention that he would happily switch to a subterranean bunker if one were available. It's a landscape of diesel fuel spills, empty expanses of asphalt, soil tainted with mercury, and the ever present the echo of gunshots. The Shudder Of Velocity is the latest album from Haynes, released by the tiny Portuguese imprint Noisendo who generated the very un-Haynes like collages of '60s pin-up model June Palmer gracing the cover instead of his signature mark-making through rust. The album opens with a tectonic rumble that snaps against tone-split frequencies and electro-shock drones all of which are scraped with these harsh pricks of noise that jettison from the speakers like bolts shaken loose from a perilous decent through the atmosphere in some shoddily build spacecraft right as the fuselage of said spacecraft is about to come apart at the seams. There may be some sort of landing in the future for that spacecraft; but Haynes does puncture a massive hole, whose implosion sends shockwaves throughout the remainder of the track. The woozy, sonar-bleep tone of the second track is ominously prescient of the lost signal from the black-box transponder never to be found from the Malaysian airplane that presumably crashed into the Indian Ocean in the early spring of this year. The smoldering frequencies of overlaid drones and radioactive crackle bury those tones, replacing them with the disembodied shortwave transmissions of detuned voices. Bright electrical hums from a chorale of fluorescent lights, discarded medical equipment, poorly grounded neon build with the smoldering intensity of Phill Niblock's psychoacoustic minimalism on the final track, coupled with slashing waves from bowed metals that lend an updated version to the classic acoustic clatter of Organum, all dappled with prickly textures, corroded atmospheres, and earthmover rumblings. Awesome. Limited to just 100 copies.
Latest from our very own Jim Haynes, and his first for the esteemed Editions Mego label, and like releases past, Haynes immediately delves into a world of decay. As a visual artist, he often jokes that his art consists simply of 'rusting things', and rust is definitely a large part of his visual aesthetic, but it's evident that in some ways his goal is similar in the music making process, to take sounds and corrode them, to treat them in such a way that they crumble, and decompose, revealing whatever mysteries lurk within, those subsequent sonic mysteries also decaying, as if the process was akin to nesting dolls, layer upon layer of sound, peel one away and fall deeper into the abyss, one that seemingly has no termination point.
The source sounds here are quite varied as always (most notably this time around a particle accelerator), but Haynes tends toward the greys and browns, static and hiss molded into streaks and shimmers, melodies subverted and melted down into textures, the opening track on The Wires Cracked (another nod to decay), begins with a hushed rumble, an accretion of thrum and hum, pocked with bursts of static, and shards of granular buzz. As the track progresses, the melodic component, becomes more pronounced, but subtly so, still merely a show beneath Haynes' churning windstorm of sound, a blurred, muted squall that manages to whip up billows of caustic noise, but then tamps them down into something much more malleable.
The sprawling "X-Ray" lays down a field of field recorded crackle and spatter, foot steps on snow, broken glass, hard to say precisely, but that gristled crackle hovers beneath an opening blast of noise, before giving way, to a hushed creep, a distant keening shimmer beneath a series of near microscopic sonic events, headphones most definitely required, a hazy, gauzy expanse of windblown emptiness, the sonic approximation of a wintery tundra, transformed into sound, and again, wreathed in Haynes's slow shifting textures, and peppered with insectoid like chitter. The track seems to seesaw between thick, billowing soft noise swirl, and breathless minimal near nothingness, tense and intense, a sonic travelogue through some lost land, or perhaps as the title infers some strange network of inner pathways, not hard to imagine being shrunk down, injected into a human body, and traversing a series of blood vessels and capillaries, the previously silent sound of the body's inner workings, now rendered terrifying and overwhelming, an organic machine pulsing and throbbing, the listener lost in a world of darkness, with only these mysterious sounds as proof that the listener still exists.
The whole of the second side is taken up by the near 18 minute "November", which unfurls like ghosts in the machine, deciding to dismantle the machine before our very ears, again, the sound is seemingly being pulled apart, Haynes there to chronicle its gradual decay, the most active of the three tracks, reminding us in places of the Conet Project, not the recited numbers, or the snippets of music, but the sounds in between, the various bits of static and hum, the tense interludes between sounds, here allowed to become sounds themselves, erupting into huge droning tangles of crunch and crumble, wrapped in keening high end shimmers, occasionally dipping into serene stretches of bleary ambience, the eye of the sonic storm as it were, the sedges of the sonic field still corrosive and crumbling, lending an air of impending doom to these otherwise tranquil passages, but the hammer never falls, instead, the sounds gradually dissipate, the clouds of noise clearing, revealing a hushed landscape of whistle like tones, smoothed out into a blurred susurrus of streaked shimmer, pocked with what sounds like the rasp of stone on stone, a final moment of decay, before the record itself crumbles into silence.
It seems that when Jim Haynes is not behind the counter at aQ, he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker, or perhaps a network of caves that reach all the way into the center of the earth, or even still, some abandoned space station, drifting weightless miles above the earth. What else could explain the harrowingly abject sounds that make up his various recordings, none moreso than Ununtrium's Daughter, another fantastically and abstractly mysterious selection of deftly manipulated field recordings, and carefully crafted sounds, that Haynes weaves into mesmerizing expanses of lowercase dronemusic. But not the sort of static drift of most drone music, the drone here is often implied, the sounds active and alive, alien field recordings constructed from short wave radio dispatches, and lush, cavernous thrum built from all manner of sonic detritus.
The opening track here sounds like a muted Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, all of the metal elements stripped away, leaving just a murky sonic husk, a thick rumbling, a deep, layered whir, laced with what sounds like human breath, or perhaps that's the rumbling of distant subway cars, it never really matters where the sounds come from, since in Haynes' hands, they become something wholly other anyway. In this case, it's a geiger counter symphony, underpinned by a lush, almost melodic hum, peppered with what sounds like the clunk of someone changing the channels on an old TV, that is if every station was broadcasting some sort of glitchy electronic thrum, and then before you know it, the sound transforms into some Conet Project like transmission, voices drifting in the ether, the ether in this case of Haynes' construction, thick, blackened swirls, that over the course of the track, build to a power electronics like intensity, before settling back down into a slow smolder, all crackle and crunch, hum and hiss. The rest of Ununtrium's Daughter exists in a similarly bleak sonic wasteland, again evoking the aforementioned caverns and bunkers, abstract crumble, staticky drones, ominous black ambience, all laced with strange industrial happenings, creaks and clatter, the sounds of buttons pushed, of levers pulled, of dials twisted, all re-contextualized into abstract anti-rhythms, long expanses of barely there, whispery drifts, offset but roiling clouds of grim, grinding, crunch. A few moments evoke an underwater world, adding abandoned undersea research laboratory to the list of potential Haynes' hangouts, all warbly and woozy, blackly bloopy, respirator like rhythms woven into softly bubbling grey noise arpeggiations, often building to symphonies of chitter and skitter, the occasional insectoid chorus drifting atop black swells, settling into a final stretch, the most hushed and dreamily sinister of the bunch, a muted swirl of blackened thrum, wreathed in gristled layers, the prickly texture constructed from a tangle of processed static, smoothed out into a pulsing sonic cowl, beneath which a strange sound world winds down, gradually, toward eventual oblivion...
Packed in an oversized slim DVD style case, and as you might have figured, quite limited...
The Swedish sound artist B.J. Nilsen has been recording as Hazard since 1996 as a means of investigating the physical and psychological effects that natural sounds hold upon the human body. The pursuits of sonic research are refinements of Nilsen's Industrial heritage which began with a handful of epistomologically grim albums as Morthond for Cold Meat Industries and has continued with the Janitor collaboration with Baby Doll Lima of Deutch Nepal. Unlike those projects, Hazard engages a stronger poetic sensibility in the digital processing of field recordings from snow, ice, water, wind, etc. The resultant cold, cold, cold drones dappled with rich, textured detailing always imply a malevolence within natural phenonemona.
As on the Hazard album with its self-evident title "Wind," "Land" finds Nilsen collaborating with respected field recordist Chris Watson to capture source material worthy to be run through the Hazard bank of DSP patches. Again, it's wind that Nilsen is after, transforming the violent whippings of Arctic winds into huge rumblings of low frequencies that burst into climatic squalls of rushing drones crackling with a rough-hewn digital grit. As the album progresses, the sense of foreboding and dread which opens the album dissipates and reveals brighter tonalities that are worthy of comparison to Eno's ambient recordings.
All of these tracks on "Land" have been treated from live recordings made over the past year through Hazard's numerous performances across Europe. Another great album from Hazard!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
BJ Nilsen (the individual hiding behind this disc's grey packaging and the name Hazard) may also be hiding from his former Cold Meat Industries moniker Morthound. While the overall isolation and dispair of Swedish winters is found in both of Nilsen's projects, Hazard has shed the Satanic/Catholic themes of Morthound in favor of post-structuralist abstraction that results in shivering grey drones striated with a variety of scrapes and shimmers. We'll agree with the evocative description the Wire's Ian Penman came up with for this: the sound of a stealth bomber thinking to itself 'I'm getting too old for this shit, and I'm heading for the far away places to shiver and rust'.
Having difficulties in making wind recordings for his new project, Benny Jonas Nilsen (aka Hazard) asked field recording specialist Chris Watson for some help. Coincidentally, Watson had just finished, of all things, a radio program all about wind for
Following the approach of juxtaposing natural acoustic phenomena with synthetic computer based processing that he utilized on his "North" and "Wood / Bridge / Field" albums, Hazard here generates a wide miasmic range of deep drones and dark looping passages from the manipulated wind recordings, but not overly-structuring the material, instead favoring an organic presentation of the sounds. The addition of Watson's pro recordings add a great deal of color to Hazard's otherwise cold grey timbres, with his dynamic recordings of wind whistling through creaky window frames, environmental recordings of westerlies whipping around mountainous peaks, and violent thunderstorms! The result is a fantastic record on par with Andrew Chalk's "East Of The Sun" or Zoviet France's "Mohnomische."
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Hazard's third album sprawls across a cd and an lp, packaged together as one cohesive body of work. Moving further and further away from the industrialist tendencies that Hazard's B.J. Nilsen employed for his previous work on Cold Meat Industries as Morthound, Nilsen deftly manipulates field recordings made in various Swedish forests to evoke an unforgivingly barren Swedish landscape that normally doesn't translate so well on field recordings (unless you're Chris Watson). Hazard's grey sweeps of electronic dronescapes are sparsely punctuated by residual scrapings of what could be wood, leaves, and dirt for a spectacularly chilling work.
"Light" is an all-exclusive precursor to the 2001 Touch Tour with Hazard, Fennesz, and Biosphere. Unfortunately, that tour is only taking place in England, so the rest of us will have to make do with this CD. Hazard's track is an eerie drone that rises quickly
Some of you may know Grant Hazard from Oakland-based band The Very Hush Hush, whom we have carried records from in the past. For his first solo effort, Hazard gives us an instrumental cd of icy cool but beautifully melodic ambience. Comprised mostly of minimalist solo piano inflected with spacious textures and droning loops, Hazard's classically-trained musicianship serves him well in recalling the dulcet tones of impressionist composers such as Debussy and Satie, the modern day minimalism of Brin Eno and William Basinski, and touches of the dark-natured cinematic temperaments of Bohren & der Club of Gore. Limited to 500 copies. An excellent debut!
It's a bold move to offer a debut recording as a DVD; but that's what the East Bay improv / drone / noise HBK Trio has issued forth. Well it's DVD-R; but still! This trio features such stalwarts of the Bay Area sound community as Jim Kaiser (Petit Mal, NF Orchest, French Radio) on his trusted bowed bicycle wheel and other slabs of metal, Angela Hsu (NF Orchest) on violin and electronics, and Adrian Bayless on horns and electronics. As an ensemble, the three capture the spirit of AMM or even some of the Fonal adventurousness (minus the freak folk attributes) with all of the intertwining gestures and expressive bouts of sustained tones and softened noise generated acoustically and tempered with effects. The film comes in two distinct variations; but both of which document the biodiversity of the many creatures living in the East Bay: wasps, beetles, ravens, blackbirds, ants, and bees seen amongst the hurricane fencing, train tracks, and telephone wires. Shot digitally in video, the film enjoys some very nice static shots of insects scurrying about, then with rapid cuts of ravens marauding in the sky. You might ask yourself, is this limited? Hell, yes!
Derek Gedalecia is a man who gets around. The Bay Area synthwrangler has largely been releasing Head Boggle tapes on pretty much every cassette imprint under the sun (NNA Tapes, Fag Tapes, Rainbow Bridge, Tusco/Embassy, and his own Greedmink imprint amongst some two or three dozen others); and his two slabs of vinyl have come via pretty fucking high-profile venues. First up was his eponymous album back in 2012 via Spectrum Spools, and here's this album released through Experimedia. The titular instrument that Gedalecia used was found at the Electronic Music Lab at SF City College. For those synth-nerds, this particular model was probably built by Serge Tcherepnin sometime in the late '70s. Tcherepnin had designed this modular synth as an inexpensive alternative to the rather pricey Buchla synth that had been developed also on the West Coast around the same time. The schematics for the original synth are available for those with a soldering iron and considerable patience to build his or her own. With patchbay cables wildly pulled & plugged, knobs twiddled spasmodically, and oscillator switches toggled irregularly, Gedalecia creates a semi-improvisatory free-for-all feel akin to the pioneering work of Francoise Bayle or the polyglot analog+digital systems of Keith Fullerton Whitman. Seeing him do this stuff live where he's bopping around and literally head-banging to step-sequenced tone bursts, you get the sense that he's having a blast doing this stuff. What separates Gedalecia from every other dilettante with a synth fetish.
Headboggle is an aptly named project from Bay Area product Derek Gedalecia, who landed this polydactile, outsider/avant-electronic album on the always impressive Spectrum Spools imprint. Like much of what we've heard from John Elliott's label, Headboggle filters a historical aesthetic through a contemporary-DIY lens with pretty reliable results, and Gedalecia has a pretty different take on that agenda by looking not so much to the cosmic / post-psychedelic era of progressive electronics. He's one to apply a huge amount of studio techniques and references including Tod Dockstader, Francoise Bayle, Nurse With Wound, Caroliner, Stockhausen, as well as Dilloway, Nate Young, and much of the post-noise synth wranglers, although Gedalecia is much more keen on dumping all sorts of odd samples and live instruments into densely packed, yet wholly decentered collages. Yup, he too has the suitcase full of cassette releases that have been spilling forth over the past three or four years, with a few of those popping up in the tape case here at aQuarius even. This self-titled lp is full of way-out there synth jams - citing six or seven synths in various interviews and whatnot, that give the record an 'everything-at-once' sort of overload bursting with candy-colored tones and bright-lite plastic luminosity, all topped with erratic banjo plucks, atonal harpsichords spluttering, and ragtime piano passages. What a trip!
Formerly known as Worship (they released a small cd-r pressing under that moniker), the elusive group who now answer to the name Headdress continue their dusk lit creep through the enchanted wilderness. On Turquoise they craft a beautiful loosely woven tapestry of ivy-like guitar tendrils, lichen-encrusted percussion, solemn mossy male vocals that reside somewhere between Jandek and M. Ward. The album's fifth song "Babylon" sounds strangely like a deconstructed folk rendition of America's "Horse With No Name". Whether intentional or not, the glinting familiarity of the latter's central melody adds to the existing subtle hallucinatory atmosphere of the proceedings. The crowning jewel of rough hewn Turquoise though is the sixth track titled "Moon Of Shedding Ponies". It's a frayed, meditative instrumental populated with generous turns of a rainstick and what sounds like howling wolves or banshees.
If you dig the rustic, abstracted psych-folk sounds of Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice and the many bewitching branches of the Jewelled Antler Collective, don't miss this!
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Heads Of Pagan are a duo, just voice, guitars and effects, but their 21 minute track sounds more like a tangle of crumbling downtuned basses. Low rumbling, thunderous riffs, slowed way down and allowed to pulse and throb, reverberate and whir, slightly percussive, the sound of pick hitting string is quickly swallowed up by black billows of rib cage rattling sound, very abstract and murky, muddy and mysterious, which over the course of the track grow in intensity, becoming thicker, more grinding, more distorted, the notes and melodies becoming less indistinct, transforming into a roiling black bass drone, only occasionally offering up fragments of melody, sharp bolts of feedback entering the fray, eventually building into a full on Merzbow style noise track, but with the basses becoming fuzzy and alien, sounding instead like synths, oh but they're guitars so it's even stranger, buzzing warbly confusional chaos smeared into a dense blackened low end blur. Heavy but not metal, brutal but still sort of ambient. Definitely for fans of the sloooooow and looooooow.
LIMITED TO 66 COPIES. In a mini 3" sleeve with a mini 3" printed insert.
Health just keep getting weirder and weirder, and thus better and better. This is record number three, and all the elements that made us fall in love with these guys are still present, feral jittery rhythms, sharp angular guitars, wild chaotic drumming, spaced out effects, a sort of fractured no wave new wave dancefloor destroying post punk, and here, on Get Color, they've reigned in their propensity for freakouts, and expanded their sound dramatically, whereas before, they were more about energy and sound and mood and texture, about beats and cool effects, and while there were pop songs buried in there, or at least fragments of pop songs, they were often pretty hard to separate from the chaos around them.
Get Color is indeed still plenty chaotic and frantic, but there definitely seems to be more of a focus on songs. Opener "In Health" is a sub two minute introductory blast, but even then the song opens up revealing some dreamy vocals and some subtle hooks. But "Die Slow" is a killer rhythmic psych pop dance jam, equal parts the Boredoms, Fischerspooner and Gang Gang Dance, super melodic, and in some alternate universe this would be as big as LCD Soundsystem. "Nice Girls", is all drum driven, with more ethereal vocals, burst of jagged crunch and squalls of effected percussion, the whole thing woozy and dreamy and super hypnotic. Some of the tracks get all new wave, with low slung Joy Division basslines jacked up and distorted, with angular post punk guitars, but still all wrapped around those frenetic beats, while others are just totally far out, like record closer "In Violet" a strange soundscape of looped, chopped, clipped synth tones, swirling shimmering high end streaks, more hushed wispy vocals, the rhythm, and the whole song really constructed from digital skips and strange glitches. So awesome, dance music for only those with a super abstract idea of what dance music is, for the rest of us, total head spinning headphone bliss!
The cd (not the vinyl, sorry) might just include one of 66 handmade tickets, each redeemable for some sort of prize, the grand prize is a three night trip to LA to hang with Health, but other prizes include care packages, posters, baby photos, crank calls, knitted scarfs, astrological readings, test pressings and who knows what else. A regular post punk new wave Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Good luck!
The return of Heatdeath, record number two, and once again, just as hard to describe as the first one. A sprawling soft cacophony of buzz and whir and drone, laced with bits of glitch and hiss all woven into a multi part abstract freenoise epic, that plays out like some futuristic symphony gone haywire.
Fuzzy staticky whirs drift above warm shimmers, mechanical crunch is smoothed into blurred anti-rhythms, thick layers of distortion ripple over roiling depths of hiss and buzz, occasionally a metronomic sonar like beep keeps the time, waves of pink noise crash over shard of keening feedback, occasionally coalescing into thick roiling shoegazey sort-of-doom, all abstract and dreamy, but still rough and raw and doused with crumbling distortion, wild drum freakouts muted and muffled until they become skittery landscapes of thump and shuffle, long stretches of washed out Tim Hecker like ambience, and a long stretch of warped haunted house creep, peppered with soft chimes and deep cavernous drones. All over the place sonically, but the various parts blend perfectly, drifting into one another, taking the form of one single epic abstract chunk of noisy drone-y buzzy doomy mystery.
Gorgeous packaging, thick jackets in super thick PVC sleeves, black inner sleeves and heavy vinyl. Each record comes with a download coupon as well! LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
This band is definitely tough to pin down sonically. Their sound is equal parts black metal, industrial, free jazz and electronica, but the resulting sound resembles none of those. Or perhaps all of them simultaneously. Hard to tell.
Which is sort of what makes this band so magical. A duo from Minnesota, whose first release is on a Belgian label, continues to confound from the sound to the dearth of information on the sleeve. But as confounding as this record is, it's also fantastic. Totally vibrant and alive and freaked out and joyous, while somehow managing to be grim and brutal and weird as fuck.
But how to accurately describe them... They are a duo, so of course one is tempted to throw some reference to Lightning Bolt in there, and there is some LB to Heatdeath's sound, a relentless churning, maniacal energy, it's impossible to imagine the drummer can play like that nonstop for whole sides of an lp, but he does, and the axeman keeps up just fine thank you. A closer and slightly more accurate comparison, might be a black metal, or black industrial Necks. There is a definite element of slow shifting stasis, no distinct riffs, and no real distinct rhythms, but more a roiling black hole of chaotic drumming and denatured riffing, like the Necks covering Abruptum. Wow. Indeed. The two tracks constantly shift, moving from slightly more tranquil drift, to fullbore crash and buzz, and it sounds improvised for sure, but at the same time, it almost seems composed, the two players shifting seamlessly from part to part, mood to mood, creating gorgeously expansive soundscapes of intense instrumental interplay, and churning abstract ambience, often the two colliding and getting gloriously tangled up.
Packaged in thick plastic sleeves, black on black fold over jackets, and each lp includes a coupon so you can download the whole record for your iPod.
LIMITED TO ONLY 250 COPIES!!!!
Everybody seems to be in some sort of doom / drone / dirge state lately, with even non-metalheads obsessing over all things Boris / Corrupted / SUNNO))), Earth. And, hey, we're not complaining, we love our slow motion, 16 rpm, cough syrup tarpit guitar riffage as much as the next person, but hell, you can do a whole lot more with a guitar than just turn it up, kick on the distortion and lean it against an amp. Sure it sounds great, and we could listen to that pulsing fuzzed out throb forever, but you really have to wrestle a guitar to get certain sounds out of it. You have to use both hands, fight it kicking and screaming, hold it down, flip it over, swing it over your head, hold on for your fucking life, and then maybe you can get a guitar to make some serious sound, noises that would send most guitar dronesters running for the hills. Thus we have Heathen Shame, an unlikely trio of two guitars, drums and trumpets. Who make an absolutely amazing din, equal parts head splitting noise and gorgeous skree. You know when you turn on a hose as high as it'll go, and you just let go and it whips wildly like a convulsing snakes spraying water everywhere and threatening to bash your head in with every swing and swoop? Heathen Shame are sort of the musical version of that. To be honest, we can't really even hear the trumpet. And as a matter of fact we can't really hear the drums either. It all bleeds into one swirling, swarming, slithering mass of guitarnoise, feedback, and all sorts of amp frying sonic shrapnel. Where stuff like SUNNO))) and Earth can be soothing and almost dreamy, this stuff is just scary. Totally intense and heavy as fuck and SCARY. But also strangely beautiful at the same time. It takes a very deft hand to render NOISE like this listenable, but Heathen Shame manage to make these three tracks fun to listen to. So much so that we have found ourselves listening to this record over and over, which to be honest is pretty rare for a record this noisy and brutal. Even managed after a few spins to convert a few folks who aren't typically into this sort of stuff. One thing thing that seems to be far to rare in experimental music, especially of the HEAVY variety, is the presence of women, sure there's a few, including Wata from Boris, but now you can add Kate from Heathen Same to that way too short list. She and HS's other guitarist, Twisted VIllage regular Wayne Rogers, have to be the most brutal double axe attack since Tipton and Downing, or Smith and Murray or even Hanneman and King! While this might be a bit too harsh and brutal for the drone dirge doom rock set, fans of freaked out Japanese psych like Keiji Haino and Fushitsusha, as well as folks into full on noise like Masonna or Merzbow, and especially fans of free rock skree like Total, Hototogisu, Ashtray Navigations, Birchville Cat Motel and the like might really dig this!
The latest release on the Pan label comes from UK producer Steve Warwick, aka Heatsick, and continues to make the label hard to pigeonhole, with the last handful of releases running the gamut from experimental avant electronics, to minimal acoustic dronemusic, to Japanese psych, to weird non-jungle jungle, to ethno-experimental modern composition, to... well, to whatever Heatsick is. It's definitely electronic, maybe IDM, but even within those genre parameters, Heatsick's woozy eighties exotica, campy Euro-house Italo-disco and murky minimal techno hybrids confound and confuse in equal measure, fantastically we might add!
The opening title track sets the scene with a big banging beat, wreathed in lots of sonic detritus, some looped breathing, plenty of squiggly squelch and disco handclaps, peppered with some Kompakt style skitter, wreathed in soft focus cascades of kosmische shimmer, groovy and psychedelic, over the top a female voice recites lines, cold and clinically, giving the song a sort of cold-wave vibe, but the music itself, replete with some spidery psych guitar, is warm, and lush, and lustrous. Laid back and chilled out, but with some serious rib cage rattling thump. But really, that's just the first track, and while there is a sonic thread that runs throughout all these songs, it's very loose, allowing the sound to drift all over the place, from the stuttery alien disco of "E-Scape", rife with chiming melodies and wobbly bass swells, to the almost calypso sounding "Mimosa", that even adds horns, making it sound like some twisted James Ferraro pastiche, but instead of being tongue in cheek, Warwick seems to be conjuring some other world, and some other time, a smokey late night, in some seedy club, in some alternate past, on some other planet. Again, the sound manages to sound exotic and psychedelic, as does most of the rest of the record, with "Clear Chanel" getting all washed out and drowsily house-y, while "Speculative" recasts Right Said Fred as something much more sinister and ominous. "Emerge" channels classic eighties pop, through a warped alternate universe discoteque, before the record winds down with the tripped out experimental coda "Accelerationista", a collage of tangled bird song, distant loudspeaker broadcasts, the rumble of wind on microphones, truly creepy, and mysterious.
Like all Pan releases, the packaging is fantastic, the record housed in a clear PVC plastic sleeve, the artwork an artful arrangement of typography and iconography, over an inner sleeve adorned with a full color image of texture metal grillwork.
Heavy Winged were in town a few weeks back, and let us have a bunch of this tour only cd-r, limited to just 50 copies, and thus, we assume, already well out print.�
Like the rest of their discs, a seriously frenzied chunk of repetitive psych groove blowout. The drums and bass locked tight, looped and cyclical, pounding out fiercely hypnotic jams, while the guitar, just wigs out, soaring and squealing, and grinding and chugging, spitting out squalls of glittering high end, and unfurling churning downtuned riffage, tightly wound for sure, but also loose as hell, the rhythm section solid as shit, letting the guitar go apeshit, and go apeshit it does. This seems to be a whole live set. The opener is as described above, while the second track begins all moody and meandering, with the guitar slipping and sliding over a lazy strummed bass and a a smattering of cymbals, it does get heavier, but much more drone-y and almost dreamy. The final track is a serious blow out, the drums tribal and frenetic, the bass a super distorted throb, the guitar offering up mostly streaks of feedback, eventually launching into some high end buzz and spray, while the drums pound relentlessly, the whole thing eventually crumbling to pieces.�
These guys kick so much ass, especially live, so for a handful of you, here's a chance to hear what all the fuzz is about.�
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES. And already out of print.
Latest from this Brooklyn trio (at least they were Brooklyn based last time we checked, they may be spread out all over the country these days, but at least one of em is still in Brooklyn!) and while they still wield some serious psychedelic heaviness, they've also gotten seriously melodic. The first of two sidelong tracks on this new lp is wrapped around a main riff and looped rhythm, that is crazy catchy in addition to being blissfully blown out and weirdly hypnotic. The trio lock into this relentlessly staccato groove, a sort of machinelike groove, super repetitive and robotic, the group pounding away, while the guitar slowly builds momentum, the sheets of high end and the streaks of feedback and wall of buzz lifting ever higher, a slow burning ascendancy, it almost sounds like some scientist took a lost Fushitsusha jam and slowed it down, it the lab, to examine it more closely, like some Discovery documentary featuring a time lapse film of a 'psych jam' captured in the wild. Until finally the main chugging rhythm drops out, the whole track becoming more and more stripped down, the drums skittering away, while some tangled buzz continues to twist and contort, into various permutations, the drums remaining the only constant, the guitar offering up strange and gloriously gnarled melodies, and the bass just buzzes and rumbles heavily. Right at the end it gets super spacious and pretty, but still without losing any momentum or lysergic energy.
The flipside is another grinding buzzy psychjam, one set of strings oscillating intensely in the low end, chugging and churning, the other locking into a woozy looped riff, all draped over another blown out motorik groove, that sounds like a more loose extension of the main A side rhythm. The track has plenty of twists and turns, eventually getting all mathy and metal in the middle, the main riff becoming super spidery, the drums going spastic and free, but still all settled on a thick bed of grinding mesmerizing buzz, finishing off with a burst of resplendent epic majesty, gradually slowing down to a weird warped outro, of lurching, skittery downtuned riffs and haunting disembodied metallic buzz, weaving back and forth and finally leaving a washed out sun baked glow to fade out quietly.
The cool thing with Three Lobed releases, is that not only do you get the lp, gorgeously packaged and pressed as always, but you also get the same songs pressed on an actual cd. Including a 17 minute bonus track only on the cd. Another weirdly looped slow motion psychedelic workout, this one even more slow and bleary than the lp sides. The drums setting the skeletal framework, locked into another mesmerizing complex loop, around which thick effected buzz, scrapes and chugs and whirls fall into step, establishing another kick as motorik groove that could go on forever as far as we're concerned, and in terms of the track, actually does, while the guitar here soars weightless high above, sounding all angelic and sun dappled, almost like a wailing voice, spread out in glistening streaks over that awesomely relentless chnnk� chnnk chnnk chnnk, below, so kick ass, weirdly minimal but still so heavy and psychedelically resplendent, eventually slowing down to a lysergic, buzz drenched crawl, before finishing off in a blinding chaotic crush of blinding high end, squiggly freaked out FX and chaotic drum crush.
Gorgeous black and white packaging, with a super tripped out, crazy intricate pen and ink cover image, thick sleeve, pressed on thick vinyl, with a real cd not a cd-r, and crazy limited as always, only 647 copies, each one hand numbered, we got a bunch from the band when they were here on tour last week, so not sure we'll be able to get more once these are gone...
If there was an heir to whatever throne Japanese psych rockers High Rise occupy, probably one made out of Marshall amps and broken guitars and piled sky high, it would be US power trio Heavy Winged, whose mangled blown out take on wild eyed psych and throbbing proto metal, gets filtered though the modern avantnoise aesthetic and comes out a gloriously garbled white hot blast of propulsive grinding freaked out throb.�
Half the time the band are so supercharged, it's almost impossible to hear what the heck is going on, it's like sticking your head inside a particle accelerator, just a face melting ear shredding cloud of chaotic skree (and we won't even begin to guess how the fuck they get such a brutally beautiful guitar sound), but here and there, the band slow things down, and lumber Harvey Milk style, all stumbling low end and slowed down riffage, into a corrosive landscape of sonic wreckage and swirling fuzz and hiss, usually only to explode moments later into a black spray of deconstructed buzz drenched,� art rock damage. Phew.�
Blacc Lust collects two insanely limited out of print cd-r's, just about an hour glorious soul crushing sound, which is just about an hour more than most mere mortals can handle. Fucking awesome!
Packaged in a cool, origami like folded cardstock sleeve, printed in black inside and out, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one numbered, and seemingly already out of print, so these will probably be the only copies we'll ever be able to get...
We talk about records being heavy, and blown out, and in the red, and super distorted, and being the sort of weird music freaks we are, we're constantly on the hunt for that one record that trumps all others and out heavies and out distorts them all. THE most distorted and THE most blown out and THE HEAVIEST. And every once in a while, a new record does come along, and climbs atop the pile of bloodied and bruised bodies that made up the previous heaviest most distorted bands, and stand tall, prepared to defend the crown with axes held high and an avalanche of drums ready to drop like a ton of bricks on all comers. We'd be hard pressed to find another band that more deserves to sit atop that pile, at least for a while, than bicoastal masters of the psychmetal blowout, Heavy Winged. Now based both in Portland and Brooklyn, these guys just keep getting heavier and heavier, more and more intense and fucked up sounding. We went nuts for their recent Blacc Lust record, but if anything Feel Inside is even better. They are not metal, so comparisons to groups like SUNNO))) and the like would mean nothing. Heavy Winged are basically a psychedelic rock band, who for whatever reason, decided being loud just wasn't enough, and being distorted wasn't enough, and writing songs wasn't enough, so the band gradually transformed into some insane psychedelic noise rock behemoth, creating 10, 20, even 30 minutes soundscapes of repetitive pummel, drums pounding relentlessly, the guitars spewing white hot psych, a gorgeously hypnotic heavy heavy heavy crush. If you can imagine Les Rallizes Denudes and White Heaven crossed with Circle and Can, but mixed by Wolf Eyes and Merzbow, you wouldn't even be close.
The three tracks here begin white hot and only get hotter, sometimes locking into a groove, but more often then not, burying the groove under blistering squalls of feedback and crumbling distortion, the drums played with baseball bats instead of sticks, the whole band shoved down a mile long flight of stairs, deftly turning their chaotic tumble into some sort of psychedelic rock, but the sort of psychrock that has about as much in common with psych than it does with rock. This is freaked out, spaced out, ultra damaged, utterly gorgeous, ear drum destroying, face melting free psych heaviness.
The final track is the standout here, letting lots of space in, the drums doing some complicated dance in an epic expanse of sizzling feedback, and white hot streaks of guitar skree, damaged effects squiggle wildly, chunks of riffs fly off in all directions only to be swallowed by clouds of buzz and rrrooooaaar, there's even the occasional gorgeous warm chordal swells and creepy melodies, but it's the drums driving instead of the guitar, the whole thing surprisingly pretty and melancholy, although you have to brave a mile of prickly fuzz and explosive amp punishment to get there, but then the journey is always the best part...
Another gorgeously and extravagantly packaged release from aRCHIVE, this one comes in a six panel gatefold, decorated with angular designs in shades of black and brown and white, but that six panel gatefold is housed in another 6 panel gatefold, that one printed on vellum, so the various designs mesh into something completely new, the cd affixed to a nub on the middle panel of the inside gatefold.
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES. We probably will NOT be able to get more once these are gone...
Dronepsych trio Heavy Winged are definitely HEAVY, and have been getting moreso with every release, consistently unleashing thick blackened sprawls of psychedelic dronerock, churning guitars, and pounding tribal drumming, all wound into extended heart of a black sun freakouts / blowouts that manages to be textural and hypnotic while still being weirdly free and abstract, slipping from riffy crunch to total balls out free form heaviness.
These two new tracks find these guys pushing it about as far as it can go, ditching conventional song structure almost entirely (not that they were ever THAT songy to begin with), the A-side is all "Among The Maeori" and sounds like a supercharged, less pop Dead C, the drums a continuous anti-rhythm, almost more textural than rhythmic, while the guitars do very unguitar like things, weaving thick undulating layers of woozy drone, laced with soaring distant high end tones, the whole track seeming to pulse and throb, eventually those high end tones, leads perhaps, are transformed into dense atonal tangles, while the drums explode in a frenzy of freaked out tribal pound, up until that point everything was tight and muted and muffled but at this point the track explodes and the band stumbled into some lumbering avant doom, super in-the-red, like some space rock jam slowed way down and wreathed in buzz and skree and crunch, some seriously supreme heaviness.
The B-side, "The Hum Of The Universe", begins with a huge downtuned crash, only to fade out, leaving a strange haunting buzz (either bowed bass or viola), until the band begins a super spare, spacious doomic trudge, the drums MASSIVE, the buzzing drones getting louder and more intense, the background hum and thrum billowing like black sonic smoke, the lurching abstract slowcore doom, not heavy so much as thick and dense, the guitars layered into black hole streaks of pulsing sound, the drums a demonic throb, the various background tendrils, druggy and psychedelic, impossibly heavy and atmospheric at the same time, it's only 17 minutes, but these are the sort of sounds that surround and suffocate, you get lost and emerge on the other side, feeling exhausted and exhilarated, trancelike tripped out psych space doom drone bliss for sure!
The first batch of lps include a bonus disc, an actual cd (not a cd-r) called Infinite In Every Direction, which features another nearly 40 minutes of heavy psych jams, recorded live in the studio, the first an extended slab of psychedelic kosmische krautdrone featuring Dave W. from White Hills, the second a full bore heavy rock jam, that is way less doom and atmosphere, and way more crushing, a relentless heavy Hawkwind blackpsych drugrock freakout, that RULES...
LIMITED TO 994 COPIES, includes a download coupon, and while they last, the lps are paired with the above mentioned bonus disc (Infinite In Every Direction), which itself is limited to 434 copies, so grab one of these quick!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
SORRY.
