Two more sidelong tracks from these masters of metallic psychedelic and blown out krautnoise bliss. And as always it's a glorious earful.
The first side starts out all woozy and contemplative, spaced out, but somehow already epic, doused in distortion and feedback, the band build the sound into a dense tangle of muted riffs, murky and washed out, bleary and buzzy, they stretch it out, total trancerock for sure, before eventually blissing out into deep swells of smeared and streaked feedback and warm crystalline shimmer, finally exploding into some full on chaotic supernova psychnoise. But even at it's most freaked out, the sound is still warm and enveloping, all the jagged edges smoothed off, creating a mysterious cloud of sound that manages to be both heavy and intense, laid back and serene.
The second side offers up more of the same, but with the introduction of some dizzying machinelike chugging, draped over long strands of drifty cinematic whir, peppered with bits of spare percussive skitter, all very looped and hypnotic and very very krautrocky. Gradually, the sound expands into a fiery ball of chaotic drummage, wild steaks of psychedelic guitar skywriting and a thick, drone-y, sprawling looped churn that unfurls gradually to the end of the side.
Impossibly both heavy and dreamlike, as if the band we're playing full bore, amps to 11, but we're listening from the room next door, our ear pressed to the wall, or the sound being projected through loudspeakers inside a massive fogbank. Similar to how Skepticism turned doom into something more murky and choral then downtuned and depressive, Heavy Winged continue to drag their psychedelic krautrock through some underwater otherworld, the result something still psychedelic and heavy, but also truly transcendent.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Pressed on heavy transparent grey vinyl, in super thick full color sleeves.
Yet another blast of blown out psychedelic guitar rock from this East Coast space-psych trio, who in the past have given us extended slabs of doomy heaviness, of kraut flecked psychedelic grooves, of motorik in the red hypnorock, and often some mix of the three, but the opening few minutes of Sunspotted had us thinking the band had abandoned all that, as it's a furious, super rocking, ultra propulsive almost mathy post rock blow out, the drums frantic and frenetic, the guitars chiming and distorted the bass thick and heavy and DENSE, the band flinging themselves headlong into what has to be the most rocking blast of freaked out crunch and soar that we've ever heard from these guys, the sound is epic, lush, so heavy, definitely a step up from past muddier murkier outings, and it suits them, that first blast goes on for ages, and we didn't really want it to ever end. But about 4 minutes in, the song seems to collapse, leaving a wreckage of drum skitter, and atonal guitar strum, not to mention sheets of feedback, the band settle down into a weirdo bit of spare drift, the guitars atonal and angular, the drums splattery and abstract, with weird bursts of electronic crunch, only to finally settle into a weird woozy lumber, the guitars rubbery and all twisted up, the drums a caveman plod, everything still wreathed in sheets of buzz and feedback, the doom eventually dissipating, leaving a sky full of tangled high end guitar skree, peppered with chiming guitar chords, and spare drum crashes, growing more and more abstract, before fading out completely.
Holy shit! So free and loose and wild, but still so tight and composed sounding, easily the coolest stuff we've heard from these guys, and hell, we're only halfway through.
The second track is even longer (clocking in at close to 25 minutes), and begins with less of a bang, but it doesn't take these guys long to get things going, with some crumbling distortion, some throbbing downtuned riffage, some churning low end crush, a whirling, swirling dronescape of roiling dirge-y guitar rumble, which after close to 10 minutes gives way to some squealing feedback drenched dirgery, the band pounding, and lumbering, a weird sort of spaced out Sunroof!-y almost doom, that grows gradually more blissed out and hypnotic, while remaining super abstract and drifty, the band slip into a strange meandery lope, the guitars shimmery and layered and washed out and sort of dreamy, the drums laid back and loose, the sound hazy and hypnotic, never coalescing into anything rocking, instead, playing out like more of a decompressing wind down from the first track, gorgeously minimal, and understated, textural and surprisingly lovely.
The interesting thing about the cd-r underground, is that very few of the artists are actual bands. There is drone, and dreamy folk, electronic experimentation, collectives who together create folky drones, solo guitar, huge blasts of sludgy dirge, but rare is the actual band, a bunch of folks in a studio with guitars and drums and whatever else. Sure, the cd-r is perfect for the bedroom composer and home based experimentalist, but c'mon, cd-r's are the perfect way to discover some fucked up band who never plays out of their home town, or to take an inexpensive chance on some group that may or may not be cool.
Well, one BAND who have existed pretty much exclusively in the world of limited cd-r releases, is NYC's Heavy Winged, a psych rock space noise duo, who whip up a pretty serious squall of blown out guitarnoise and spastic drum sputter.
Take all the noisiest parts of the Dead C, Hawkwind, Loop, Spacemen 3, My Bloody Valentine, White Hills, Burnt Hills, and any other spaced out drug crazed combo you can think of, run those through about a million distortion pedals, record it onto a busted 4 track and you've got Heavy Winged. Originally released as a super limited (20 copies) release for Terrastock, Taking The Veil is two half hour tracks of wild and wooly, blown out, noise drenched space rock. A murky spastic sprawl, that pulses like Hawkwind on a busted car stereo with the bass all the way up and the treble all the way down, before someone flicks a switch and the band LIGHTS UP, suddenly the sound is incandescent, a barrage of psychedelic solar flares, blinding and deafening, the drums a sizzling splattery beast, spraying percussive shards in all directions, the guitar an beast unleashed, whipping from pulsing krauty riffage to exploding sky melting skree, all in the blink of an eye. And that's just the first track. The second track is like the darker dirgier side of the same coin, murky and stumbling through a dense cloud of unhinged psych guitar freakout, and drum-kit-down-the-cellar-stairs percussive punishment. WAY recommended.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
We won't go into too much detail with this one as it was limited to 75 copies of which we got the last 20. Heavy Winged are a NY psychedelic, dronerock combo with lots of buzzing drone guitar, tribal drums, blissed out riffing, think Dead C, recent aQ faves Burnt Hills, Hawkwind, plenty of that Loop/Spacemen 3 droning riffage, lots of My Bloody Valentine shimmer, and plenty of strange and wonderful ambient guitar action, swoops and swoons, buzzing and droning, looping and squealing. Pretty fucking awesome.
Limited to 75 copies, each one hand numbered, packaged with a cool little prehistoric looking little plant frond, tied shut with a little piece of twine.
Seems like these days, the devastating improv trio Heavy Winged is abandoning their more metal roots, and heading into a more harsh psych realm, not unlike Japanese noise-rockers Mainliner. And here they team up with West-coast, one woman band Inca Ore for two sides of free-psych meltdown. So side A is thick and crushing, mostly weighed down by Heavy Winged's relentless fury. Little glimpses of keyboard haze and distant vocals trail in and out, just in case you forgot Inca Ore was floating somewhere in the sea of chaos. Side B is an actual live recording of the two outfits playing together at the late North Six in Brooklyn. Here's were Inca Ore's vocals are very prominent in a lead singer type of way, sounding like Damo Suzuki possessed by a muppet demon. A blistering, somehow awesome document of what these two psych powerhouses can do as a team, not to be missed by fans of crushing psych bliss or the Not Not Fun label. Dig it, now!
Less a split, than a sort of adjustable collaboration, Monolith: Earth is the first in a series of single sided lps, where two bands are paired together, and each contributes a single mono track, one track stereo left, the other stereo right, so depending on how the listener dials it in, he or she can listen to just one of the bands' tracks, or some easily adjusted blend of the two. Thankfully, the lp comes with a cd featuring stereo version of both the tracks, as well as an extra track or two.
For the first volume, the to bands are pretty stellar choices, dreamdrone duo Windy & Carl, and distorto psych rock trio Heavy Winged. For this experiment to really work, without turning into a sonic clusterfuck, one or both of the bands has to be the ambient half, and Windy & Carl are more than happy to take on that role, their track being a slow burning shimmer, all processed and effected guitars, smeared and blurred into long smeary streaks, layered and woven into subtle soft melodies and warm gauzy expanses, there's some buzz buried way down in the mix, but for the most part it's all glorious drone and drift.
Heavy Winged take on the other role, which is not that different from their usual sound, super blown out distorted guitars, pounding drums, super lo-fi and high end, the guitars not riffing so much as offering up thick sheets of sound and dense squalls of feedback and psychdrone freakout. Which suits the concept perfectly, as it's basically like two drones wrapped around each other, leaving the drums to meander and skitter and do what they will. Perfectly happy to listen to each track on its own, but they do sound pretty badass together, and the picture disc image spinning round and round is quite mesmerizing.
The extra track on the cd is an actual collaboration, or seems to be as far as we can tell, but ends up sounding more like a Heavy Winged track with some extra texture and ambience, as HW's super blown out distorted heaviness overwhelms the Windy & Carl's shimmery sounds, but with the picture disc, you can control the levels, creating quite possibly one of the few instances where Windy & Carl sonically overwhelm Heavy Winged!
We only have a dozen of these, the label was sold out, we got all the copies the band had too, so once these are gone, that's probably it...
Amazing live collaboration between Kieran Hebden of Four Tet, and (formerly) frequent collaborator, the late jazz drummer Steve Reid, who were joined by talented Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, the recording/performance taking place just a year before Reid's passing, in 2009 in the foyer of Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's Southbank Centre, as part of the Ornette Coleman curated Meltdown Festival.
As documented on this double disc set, the synergy between these three is something to behold, although the track that is worth the price of admission alone, features barely any Gustafsson (if any at all): that's the 17 minute opener "Morning Prayer", which sounds like a more kinetic propulsive Necks, dark and cyclical, droney and psychedelic, mesmerizingly textured, Hebden providing lush textures and dark melodies, over which Reid plays his heart out, subtle and minimal and abstract, yet forceful and intense, it's the sort of transcendental performance that happens rarely, and to actually capture it on tape, is incredible. And listening to it now, it's hard to imagine this being performed live. Totally hypnotic, the sort of sound you don't ever want to end, we've played this track about 20 times since this first came in, and we show no signs of stopping now. But in the interest of reviewing the record as a whole, we'll take a break from repeat listens.
The vibe throughout is pretty similar to that opener, with Hebden providing all the low end, as well as all manner of swirling effects, constantly shifting layers, melodies and strange electronic percussion, with Gustafsson adding his own powerful melodies, and we were actually expecting more skronk, but he really plays to his two collaborators, coaxing all sorts of buzzes and drones from his horn, a few of the tracks sound more traditionally jazz, but where these three really shine is where they weave a sort of droned out jazzy minimalism, mirroring that opening track, and letting Reid do his thing, and Reid's drumming here is just so amazing, you could literally strip away everything the other guys are doing and it would still be totally mesmerizing. But as a trio, these guys are powerful and emotional and dynamic and these are definitely some of the coolest jams we've heard, jazz or otherwise. A fantastic and moving swansong for Reid too, and a monument to his emotional innovative drumming and his legacy as a jazz icon. Totally recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Florian Hecker's "Sun Pandamonium" is a noxious album of digital abstraction, not uncommon for the Austrian label Mego that specializes in damaged electronics. Hecker centers on the internal logic of the digitized glitch, building swarming sounds of timestretched masses into puzzling digital vibrations; these work best when Hecker pays homage to the bleeps, boings, and clangs of the electronic pioneers such as Tod Dockstader.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The second in the CDr-only, limited series from Or (a sublabel of Touch Records) is from the Mego apprentice, Hecker. While this laptop fuckery could have its origins in Metasynth (the visual-to-aural program that would have hyperminimalists like RLW and Achim Wollscheid groaning at the ease at which it takes to fabricate alien blips), Hecker manages to construct a particularly interesting array of piercing peaks, skipping CD manipulation, and various blurs,whirs, & buzzes.
It's been almost two years since the last proper full length from Canadian soundscaper Tim Hecker, and while tons of other artists have spewed out cd-r after cd-r after limited cassette in that same time, one listen to An Imaginary Country is all it takes to illustrate the difference. Why it took so long, why it was worth the wait, how the 'noise' and 'drones' and 'sounds' Hecker produces are so much more then just the words that describe them, it's all evident in every single second of this record, in fact, 10 seconds in, it's already obvious that this is indeed something special.
As demonstrated on numerous past recordings, Hecker is a master sonic alchemist, who with a handful of effects, a computer and a guitar and who knows what else, is able to construct this, a time machine of sound, a set of recordings that while simply pleasing to the ear, are also transcendent, they soothe, they entrance, they mesmerize, but more importantly, and more magically, they transport. Hecker and headphones is pretty much a ticket to some otherworld, not of sights but sounds, and not just sounds, but streaks and blurs and buzzes, soft layers and blinding crystalline shimmers, thick whirring textures and barely there delicate melodies, a sound that slips from breathless whisper to caustic roar, but each end of that spectrum fully infused with elements of the other, at its heaviest, the sound still manages to be darkly delicate, dreamy and ghostly, and at its most minimal and abstract, the sound is still imbued with some weight, a sense of import, of sounds and perhaps worlds hidden behind and within the actual music.
If anything, the sound of An Imaginary Country is heavier, and thicker, more lush, and with more heft, altogether more powerful, the sort of sound that performed live, through a massive P.A., could summon angels, or perhaps demons. But for all this added sonic weight, nothing is lost, the sounds are not just loud, they are multihued, every note, every chord, every bit of sound is alive with energy, it's as if Hecker has created a living breathing sound sculpture, made of transparent spheres, from afar, it's a gorgeous assemblage, the spheres shifting and dancing, playing out some elaborate composition, but pick one sphere, get up close and look inside, and there is a whole 'nother constellation of smaller glass spheres, engaged in a similarly beautiful and elaborate dance, and so on and so on. The magic is that every single set of movements, whether consciously or not, is visible and audible even with the slightest glance, which is what makes Hecker's sound so dense and deep and emotional and lush and utterly breathtaking.
A closer examination of each song reveals the presence of thick warm whirring organs, or some instruments and sounds transformed into organs, thus much of the record sound choral, the music of some crumbling empty church, left to play on into eternity, long long tones, blurred into slow motion epics, other tracks play out like watching some old filmstrip come to life, the newly living things still surrounded by grit and hiss and buzz, but that distorted haze that surrounds them seem to have come alive as well, moving like some organic living thing, the lives and actions of the newly living things inexorably tangled up with the movements of this other newly living things, a blurry ballet of soft sound and of mysterious sonic events. There are a few moments of relative tranquility, where the sounds are tamped down, wrangled into manageable shapes, allowed to shimmer and rippled and billow, held in check by an atmosphere of reverb and delay, but even then, off in the distance, a storm seems to be coming, and the closer it gets, the more our ears want it, and as the next song swallows the song before it, we can't help but close our eyes, open our ears, and let ourselves drift off into some other place, like walking into a warm waterfall and emerging on the other side, in a world made up entirely of warm waterfalls, our whole existence there, wreathed in torrents of sweet buzz and washed out soft focus sound, the headphone cord a tether, the only way home, if we ever felt the need to return home at all.
Revisiting the recently reissued Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again album from sonic sculptor and hazy dronescaper Tim Hecker made us realize just how long it's been since we'd heard any new music from this long time fave. And how badly we wanted, nay NEEDED more. Well, actually, it's only been a year or two, but for all the groups who kick out release after release at a ridiculous clip, why is that folks like Hecker, who we actually would want a new record every few months, forces us to wait years? The obvious reason is that unlike the legion of hack drone outfits who just tape down a key on their keyboard and run it through a delay pedal, Hecker's music is carefully crafted and meticulous, deep and lush and layered, it not only sounds beautiful, but it sounds alive, infused with emotion and energy, soft noise that manages to sound both organic and melodic, a deftly assembled landscape of crumbling distortion and processed guitars, smeared samples blurred into woozy expanses of whir and haze and buzz and shimmer. In a scene that now seems to be overflowing with wannabes, it's easy to see who they all wanna be, cuz Hecker still makes it sound so easy, and magical, and mysterious.
On this welcome new (and quite limited) 7", Hecker made a 9 minute track called "Apondalfia" and split it in half, spreading it out over two sides. If you're a fan, you already know what to expect, if you're not yet, this will definitely convince you, and yeah $15 is pretty intense for a single song 7", but when you consider that you'll most likely listen to this about a million times, well, $15 divided by a million is not so bad after all is it?
Price tag aside, Apondalfia is a gloriously washed out sprawl of warm fuzz and softly swirling melodic squalls, all of the edges smoothed out, but leaving plenty of grit, the guitars way more obvious than in the past, but it's hard to tell exactly what they're doing, they seem to be unfurling stange little woozy warped melodies, that seem to loop and layer and shift constantly, ringing out and bleeding into the various sounds around them, all beneath the thick sonic swells and a glacially churning shimmery sonic gauze. So beautiful and deliriously hypnotic, we've already listened to it 4 times just writing this review, so it's already down to less than $4 a spin, but we're not about to stop now!
WAY recommended. We just wish there was WAY more than 9 minutes...
By now we shouldn't have to go into too much detail about our undying love for the mysterious music of Tim Hecker. Just have a gander at the AQ website for much gushing over Hecker and his gorgeously gauzy sonic soundscapes. This new 10" is no different. One single epic, split into two movements, two sides, both dramatically different, but both absolutely beautiful.
Part one, side A, is the more intense of the two. Looped and processed guitars overlapping and all tangled up into gloriously softly roiling swirls of sound, melodies like snakes squirming and slithering and wrapping themselves around each other. Sitar like buzzing keening metallic high end, swooping backwards then drifting forward again. Here and there gentle lilting bits of finger picked guitar surface as do thick washes of distant crumble, everything deftly woven into a blurred slow moving dense and detailed sonic drift. At times it almost sounds like a symphony for tuning orchestras, a soft cacophony melted down into something, gauzy, dreamily indistinct and otherworldly.
The second half, which takes up all of side two, is much more glistening and effervescent, sparkling glimmery high end, little melodic trills fluttering and pulled apart, allowing the notes to drift and settle , the various elements gradually blurring into one another, the streaks and smears like slow burning comet tails of sound. Plucked guitars pepper the night sky like twinkling stars, all viewed through a cracked kaleidoscope, a washed out fog of hushed shimmer and slow moving blurs of indistinct beauty. Absolutely gorgeous.
Canadian dronescaper and ambient deconstructionist Tim Hecker's most recent record, Ravedeath 1972, was, as we proclaimed in out review of that record a few lists back, probably our favorite yet, which is all the more notable for belonging to a body of work that impossibly seems to consist of nothing BUT favorites, but there it is, Hecker has tapped into a unique sound that manages to evoke feelings of loss and memory, of some otherworld, some othertime, a music both modern and experimental, but still classic and timeless, deftly casting ambient music as something so much more than simple ambience. Lush and textural, haunting and emotional, the rare sort of sounds that the listner can't help but get gloriously lost in, this latest manages yet another remarkable feat, offering a glimpse into the process Hecker goes through to create his record, the most recent in this case, and offering those 'sketches' as just that, sketches, while presenting what is essentially, to these ears at least, another fully formed Tim Hecker record, one that had it been presented as just that, we most certainly wouldn't have batted an eye. Which again speaks to Hecker's sublime mastery over sound. That these tracks are 'works in progress', not the finished product they so appear to be.
As the title suggests, the focus here is on the piano, the sound minimal and spare by Hecker's standards, trading the often think gristly walls of buzz and crumbling thrum, for something much more stately and sparse, washed out and delicate. But even so, this is not a collection of raw piano recordings, the sounds are already blurred and bleary, sun dappled and crystalline, seems impossible these could be untouched original recordings, but even with a minimal amount of processing, the tracks here have already been transformed, gauzy soft focus squalls of swirling piano, give way to haunting funereal ballads, rife with creaks and thumps and various other room sounds, the low notes stretched out into deep resonant rumbles, laced with the subtle swoop of muted backwards melodies, hazy old timey shimmer drifts on the tinkling of music box like melodies, the notes heavy with effects, the sound seeming to melt under a warm summer sun. There are what appear to be solo piano pieces, but close listening reveals all manner of subtle sonic weirdness just below the surface, in many cases, those strange subtleties taking over completely, swallowing the piano whole, while other times the notes seem to bleed into one another, blurring into dramatic swirls of sound, tense and dark and very cinematic.
Most of the pieces here are brief, all of them could have been stretched out to fill up the whole record, and we would have happily blissed out to any or all of them, but even so, Dropped Pianos does not sound fragmented, the various pieces, even in their 'sketch' form, woven into an album in its own right, culminating in the final sketch, which is probably the most fully formed proper Hecker piece, the piano, maudlin and mournful, buried in buzz, a crumbling distortion that comes in swells, those heaving washes infused with their own melody, the sound shifting dreamily from blurred muted crunch, to ethereal drift, occasionally fusing the two into something darkly divine.
Vinyl version forthcoming, maybe later this month.
Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be Tim Hecker's Harmony In Ultraviolet.
We often reference Hecker when reviewing records by other practitioners of a similar soundmaking process, but there's something so pure and organic about the way Hecker composes and creates, how he deftly assembles and degrades his sounds and songs and melodies. Managing to sound modern but antiquated at the same time, viewing the world through sleep filled eyes, everything soft and fuzzy, sometimes intense and ominous, sometimes even dark and downright scary, but always suffused with a shimmering radiant warmth, making all of his sounds glow from within. Each song a weather worn snapshot, frayed and dusty, comfortable and lived in sounding. It's a music that requires close listening, a subtly immersive sound, but once inside it, once the sound is all around you, only then can you pick out all of the details, hear the hidden melodies, only then can you let go, and get completely lost in Hecker's gorgeous world of mysterious sound. Some of the most beautiful music in the world indeed.
With a couple of recordings under his belt as Jetone on Force Inc, Tim Hecker has temporarily shelved his Chain Reactive, techno-minimalist pseudonym to experiment with sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" is easily Hecker's best album
THIS ALBUM FROM AQ FAVE HECKER, ON VINYL FOR THE FIRST TIME, VIA KRANKY!!! Here's what we wrote about the now out of print Alien8 cd version back in 2004:
Yet another gorgeous missive from the ether, courtesy of AQ fave Tim Hecker. Hecker, along with Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz and a handful of others, crafts the kind of music we here at Aquarius think is absolutely perfect. Lost transmissions from another world. Dark ambience pregnant with the possibilities of wide eyed discovery and fleeting glimpses into the beyond. Fuzzy and scratchy and indistinct. Gorgeously haunting soundscapes crafted from the sounds often discarded by "more discerning" musicians, fuzz, amp buzz, distortion, record static, radio interference all lending the proceedings a foggy, dreamlike hue. This is the sound of our dreams. We watch other lives, and other people, move in slow motion, drifting through a staticky haze, while we are left to peer as if through a frosty window, at once safe and warm, but also wishing we could step through the looking glass and feel the warm ambient blur wash over us like a spring shower, or feel the shards of sound gather on our coat like snowflakes. Fuzzy melodies drift through the grey skies like ribbons loosed from their moorings and left to twist lazily in the breeze. Occasionally storm clouds gather, unleashing squalls of crumbling digital decay, obscuring the afternoon tranquility with a fine layer of dusty crackle. An absolutely stunning world of sound.
Extra sonic contributions from le Fly Pan Am, Christof Migone, David Bryant and Oren Ambarchi.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We're starting to feel the same way about Tim Hecker as we do about Philip Jeck. We wait anxiously for the next musical offering, not wondering IF it will be amazing, just HOW amazing. And pretty much every time, it's even better than we could have imagined. Where Jeck employs customised turntables to imagine sepia toned fuzzy soundscapes, antique and blurry at the edges, Hecker, with his mysterious soundmaking methods, takes those same sonic snapshots, only later in the day, sometimes at dusk, when everything is cloaked in grey, the evening mist obscuring and blurring everything we hear and see, streetlights struggling to penetrate the gloom, and sometimes in the dead of night, thick with mystery and the unseen, clouds parting occasionally to paint the town with a light dusting of muted starlight, where every passing car or neon sign is a burst of incandescence, briefly pushing back the inky blackness, until it is all subsumed again by night's black cloak. As always, an absolutely sublime, gorgeously otherworldly collection of droning beauty! As with all Mort Aux Vaches releases, VERY LIMITED!
Unlike the majority of other soundmakers, Canadian Tim Hecker takes his sweet time with releases, a 10" here, a full length there, rarely more than a single release a year, which makes the appearance of a new Hecker record a huge deal, even if it's just a live ep, like this one.
Recorded in Sweden, this ep covers more ground in 20 minutes than most other artists cover over several records, in fact, much of these parts, in lesser hands would be milked and stretched out to fill up a whole album. But Hecker lets the sounds dictate the direction. Almost as if the sounds were alive, growing, blossoming, dying, changing shape transforming, endlessly shifting with Hecker there simply to nurture and guide.
The sound is one that has become familiar to us, gauzy, blurry, buzzy expanses of muted digital glitch, disembodied melodies, sepia toned ambience, organic and electronic woven into swirling shimmering soundscapes.
Here what begins as an Oval like sweep of glimmering chimes and washed out whir, quickly develops into something much more weighty, the chimes swallowed up by a warm whirring blur, a softly churning, slowly crumbling wall of blissed out guitar buzz, the buzz very gradually dissipating, leaving just the hiss and the whir, to drift like gossamer clouds in a deep blue sky. The sounds become softer and softer, muted and murky, underwater sounding, allowed to pulse and ebb and flow and sway softly back and forth, under a delicate patina of electronic crackle, an ultra distorted guitar way down in the mix unfurling ribbons of gnarled prismatic crunch, spread out over the hushed shimmer below, like the icy crust on a dying sun. Finally the hiss takes on a life of it's own, pushing all of the other sounds under the surface, the hiss made up of all manner of skipping static and layered white noise, impossible musical in its own right, the perfect climax to a surprisingly bracing expanse of buzzing blissful ambient sound.
As commonplace as glitched electronica is these days (even rock bands are now 'glitching things up' to sound more avant garde), a handful of these abstractionists have dedicated themselves to understanding the parameters of their tools and attempting to improve upon that which has come before. For several years now, this elite has included Fennesz and Stephan Mathieu, with Ekkehard Ehlers often exhibiting glimmers of similar electronic brilliance; however, Canadian electron wrangler Tim Hecker has come into his own with an equally strong aesthetic and a series of amazing releases. Outside his microhouse moniker Jetone, Hecker has released three records to date under his own name, beginning with the exceptional Fennesz worship of "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" and the shellshocked obliteration of Van Halen (quite literally!) on "My Love Is Rotten To The Core", however, "Radio Amor," Hecker's third album, may be even his best yet. Through an immensely rich set of reverb and granular synthesis patches, Tim Hecker has rendered the digital blip into a blissed out field of electric drones and warm, white noise. Throughout "Radio Amor," Hecker has ripped apart clustered notes from a piano and suspended them in the ether of an electricity, and occasionally the warm buzzings of analogue distortion emerge from the rippling, digitized vibrations. Half melodies, algorithmic ping-pong tones, and hard disc skips are all bathed with a radiant luster of electrified golds and coppers. Totally gorgeous.
MPEG Download: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.m3u]
MPEG Download: "I'm Transmitting Tonight" [/audio/timheckerimtrans.mp3]
Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced artists on the aQ website. Whenever we need to describe something fuzzy and gauzy and washed out and blurred and bleary, smeared and shimmery, woozy and mesmerizingly dreamlike, we tend to always look to Hecker, whose gorgeous crumbling otherworldly soundscapes manages to transcend their constituent parts. When listening to Tim Hecker, it's practically impossible to hear samples, or instruments, or anything really, other than the amazing organic soundworld that Hecker has created, the constituent parts rendered wholly unrecognizable, instead, they are layers, or colors, or pieces of the new whole, a sound that's transformative and transcendent, evocative as always of other times, and other places, lost worlds, lost loves and forgotten memories, conjuring up many of the same emotions as folks like Leyland Kirby and Indignant Senility. But whereas those folks' sounds are distinctly old fashioned, the sound of Hecker's music is timeless. It does of course have elements of a forgotten past, in its crumbling decayed sound quality, and washed out ethereal ambience, but it also manages to be melodic, and active, and alive it its own way. It has energy, and vitality, as if some bit of glowing modern sound, was left in a corner to collect dust, and fade a bit, before being rediscovered, brushed off, only to find it's glow, while not diminished, has definitely been altered by the passage of time. Like the most magical of musics, Hecker's is hard to describe, and even harder to imagine how it was created, even if we know the instrumentation, whatever arcane sonic alchemy Hecker employs makes even that knowledge useless in trying to understand how his music works. But then, like magic, not knowing how it works is part of the joy of experiencing these sounds, it's as if they were created from the elements, conjured up from the spirit world, beamed in from another dimension, it's not knowing, or understanding, but feeling, and experiencing, and enjoying, letting the music work its magic, and transport you to whatever imaginary other world they were intended to invoke.
With every Hecker record, we seem to proclaim, 'best one yet!' and it looks like we'll have to again with Ravedeath, 1972, recorded in a church in Iceland, and with a pipe organ as its main instrument, augmented by synthesizer, piano, microphone and feedback, this is the richest and most lush Hecker record yet, not just atmospheric, but emotional and infused with a definite pathos, even moreso, than on past records.
The record opens with a super corrosive bit of blurred ambience, the sound decaying and crumbling, the melodies pulsing and undulating just below the surface, a gorgeous balance between warm melodic drift, and caustic psychedelic haze, but woven together, they create something impossibly gorgeous.
From there on out, the sound and the songs sprawl and shimmer, epic expanses of warm whirring melodies, of lush layered ever shifting textures, the organ, while not always distinctly organ like, does lend the sound a certain choral gravitas, that makes all the sounds here darkly cinematic, the score for some lost art film, all deep shadows and strange shapes, of empty streets and abandoned cities, it's almost like the sound of Super 8 film if that film had 'a sound', all the lens flares, and warm distorted flutter, the fuzzy out of focus over saturated colors, all translated into sound, a sound that slips deftly from murky and moody and muted to blown out and sun blasted, from under water woozy melodic thrum, to super crunchy distorted buzz, to music box like tinkle to epic almost liturgical majesty, the whole record, so perfectly and uniquely Tim Hecker, again the reason we refer to him so often, when describing the often futile attempts of others trying to evoke sounds this powerful and moving, fuzzy, gauzy, washed out, blurred, bleary, smeared, shimmery, woozy, mesmerizing, dreamlike, crumbling, otherworldly, and so utterly and breathtakingly gorgeous.
We dug up an old review we wrote for another Hecker record, where we managed to describe Hecker's sound about as perfectly as we'll probably ever be able to, and reading it over again now, it applies to Ravedeath as much as any of Hecker's other records:
"Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique Victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be the music of Tim Hecker."
Easily his best yet, and one of our new favorite records, and for sure, a contender for record of the year, even just a little over a month in...
Canadian soundscaper and noise sculptor Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced musicians on the aQ list. Whenever we try to describe something that's gristly and pixelated, blown out and noisy, yet somehow still impossibly lovely and lilting and warm and lush, Hecker is the man we point to. And why not, record after record, Hecker performs impossible sonic alchemy, harnessing often harsh noise, and somehow transforming it into lush, layered dreaminess, weaving all manner of textures and fractured drones, warped samples and manipulated recordings, into something stunning and fantastical - including at one point a whole record using nothing but Van Halen records as source material! That in particular sounds like one of those instances where the process is more interesting than the music itself, but nothing could be further from the truth, that disc was in fact utterly and heartbreakingly gorgeous, and even with no knowledge of the music's provenance, you'd have to be dead inside to not be totally blown away.
With every record, we found ourselves more and more in awe of Hecker's ability to create these impossibly pretty dronescapes, to constantly conjure up worlds of sound that evoke truly deep emotion in the listener, a rarity in music for sure. And then even beyond that, every record is quite different. Sure some of the sounds and processes remain the same, but each album, most definitely stands alone, even after a dramatic sonic shift. That said, Virgins might be the most dramatic shift so far in Hecker's catalog, utilizing what seems to be an entirely new sonic palette, which includes live, intimate recordings of woodwinds, pianos, synthesizers and electronics, and working together with other musicians, including another aQ fave, Ben Frost. The results are dramatically different, so much so, that on multiple occasions, someone would be playing this in the store, and we'd have to go see what was playing. Which not only speaks to the uniqueness of the sound, but also to the fact that whatever it was playing, was so good we felt compelled to find out what it was. And every time, once we discovered it was Tim Hecker, we were somehow simultaneously surprised, and not really all that surprised. So after all that, what exactly does Virgins sound like? Like all great records, it's really difficult to describe, it still sounds like a Tim Hecker record, sort of, but this time around, much of the music has a modern minimalist vibe, the influence of both Terry Riley and Steve Reich loom large, especially in the opening salvo, the brief almost psychedelic sounding loopscape of "Prism", which sounds like a strange Philip Jeck / Steve Reich mash up. Repetitive and hypnotic, with subtle (and not so subtle) pitch shifts, making the whole thing woozy and slightly off kilter, but still lush and prismatic, and that sonic template set up in the first song, is elaborated in "Virginal I", which brings the piano to the fore, reminding us of Melnyk and Batagov and the Necks, all our favorite modern minimal pianists, but here, the piano is layered and looped and accretes into a seriously dizzying jumble, which is soon joined by what sounds like cello, and then the tape speed begins fluctuating, and it gets noisier and noisier, and soon, it's not that far removed from past Hecker efforts as we thought, a swirling, dense squall of sound, that manages to be both impossibly tangled and intricate, and at the same time totally mesmerizing and dreamlike.
Some tracks here, like "Radiance", definitely harken back to the Hecker sound of old, airy and ethereal, warm and lush, a dreamy bit of manipulated sound, a smeary sonic blur that's softly psychedelic and utterly mesmerising, but others, like the two part "Live Room" suite, deviate dramatically from what we're used to. The title obviously referring to the room in which the piece was recorded, the sounds wreathed in natural reverb, a haunting melody pecked out on a prepared piano, over a lush swirl of strings and synths, the sounds gristly and distorted, even some seemingly inadvertent feedback, the sound here reminiscent of Ben Frost's more harrowing sound design for sure, but again, Hecker and his cohorts manage to wrangle the disparate and often caustic sounds into something that sounds strangely composed, atmospheric, haunting, moving, emotional, it seems impossible that these sounds could be harnessed into something so lovely, but the sound ends up being truly, and impossibly lovely. A sort of fractured chamber music, that for the second part of the 'suite' slips into something much more hushed and heavenly, symphonic sounds wreathed in tape hiss and static, with seemingly no effort to remove the various non musical sounds, voices, conversations, the effect is quite intimate, and again, strangely moving.
The rest of the record unfolds in an equally unorthodox manner, slow somber piano pieces are flecked with scrapes and shuffles, the notes slightly detuned, plenty of pitch warble, and subtle sonic tweaks, while elsewhere the previous plinked piano sounds are piled atop one another, along with bleating horns and woozy synths, resulting in a warped chamber kosmische that really sounds unlike anything we've heard. The record closes with a dreamlike sequence, that begins with fluttering flutes blurred into an ethereal drone-like shimmer, before splintering into what sounds like a Steve Reich piece broadcast through a malfunctioning transmitter, accompanied by pointillist piano and wrapped in gauze-y hiss and hum, only to shed the hiss and hum, and unfurl a dreamily hypnotic sprawl of slowly cascading pulsations, and finally, one last abstract blowout, all moaning strings, metallic buzz, keening high end, buried melodies, sitar like shimmer, all gradually blurred into an abstract smear of prismatic sound. Stunning!
Longtime aQ favorite Tim Hecker, who might be one of THEE most referenced performers on the aQ list, who for us has set the bar for all things fuzzy and gauzy and dreamily washed out, teams up here with another aQ fave, Daniel Lopatin, the man behind the psychedelic space-synth outfit Oneohtrix Point Never, for a fantastic songsuite of smoldering cinematic ambience, and heavily textured psychedelia, the resulting collaboration one of those rare occurrences where it's nearly impossible to tell who contributed what, where Hecker's sounds end and Lopatin's begin, and vice versa. The resulting sounds seem to land more toward Hecker's side of the sonic spectrum, everything ghostly and spectral, laced with squalls of glitch and squelch, underpinned by warm swirls of chordal thrum and swoonsome stringlike shimmer, the one/two punch of the opening tracks "Uptown Psychedelia" and "Scene From A French Zoo" set the stage for the rest of the record perfectly. Opening with a swirling field of zig zagging melodies, zipping from speaker to speaker, draped over mysterious Eastern melodies, everything wreathed in a fuzzy layered haze, and peppered with constantly shifting blasts of synth buzz and fragments of strange stringed instruments, the whole thing gorgeously bleary, and seeming to slowly ooze into one pulsating and prismatic whole. It's another case, where had that opening track been 60 minutes long and filled up the whole record, we definitely would have been perfectly happy. But there's much more to discover here, as "Scene From A French Zoo" reveals, ditching much of the distorted glitchery of the opener, for something much more lush and serene, a tranquil landscape of long smooth, soft tones, undulating over a bed of crackling static, struggling to break through, but inevitably sinking back below the softly swirling surface. Much of the record plays out like variations of those two tracks, slipping easily from dark brooding moodiness, soaring, swoonsome and melodic, almost choral and symphonic in places, to blurts of gristly static, and sculpted short wave interference, noise deftly transformed into melody, often swaddled in soft focus squalls of blurred buzz, just as often nestled in a bed of dreamlike melodies, and smeared shimmer.
We do hear hints of Oneohtrix on tracks like "GRM Blue II", with Lopatin unfurling a mysterious sprawl of kosmische synth melody, but if that is indeed the work of Lopatin, Hecker seems to be crafting an alien aura in which to place Lopatin's more melodic sensibilities.
Much of the sound here is downright soundtracky. "Racist Drone" sounds like some classic Hollywood score mangled and mutated, while "Grey Geisha", sounds like it was plucked straight off some old VHS tape, and run through Hecker's mysterious bank of alien FX. The record plays out like some perfect hybrid of Lopatin's psychedelic synth melodies and Hecker's master of moody texturalism, the title track sounding almost like a Oneohtrix jam remixed by Hecker, while "Ritual For Consumption" takes some mad scientist exotica, and melds it to some heartbreakingly lovely and lilting melodic drift, and then finally, "Vaccination No. 2" finishes things off with a slow building buzz, a dreamy drift that gradually grows more and more dense and distorted, culminating in a gorgeously blown out sprawl of dreamdrone shimmer.
A while back we reviewed a mysterious lp that had just showed up in the mail one day. It was sort of tough not to notice, a plain black sleeve with an upside down cross, crafted from old twigs, affixed to the front. As we mentioned in that review, of Clint Heidorn's Atwater, we were expecting some super grim kvlt black metal, but instead were treated to some dark, haunting dronefolk, a gorgeous collection of minimal guitar ambience and field recording flecked abstract Appalachia.
So we were super excited to get this new release from Heidorn, an extremely limited tape, available in three formats, two of which we have, more on the third in a second, but first the music. The title is mostly a handful of numbers, obviously a latitude and longitude, the location of what we assume is the oak tree that the piece here is about, a tree near where Heidorn grew up, an anomaly in his suburban existence, and one that came to be symbolic of many things, most importantly of what the future might have held for a young Heidorn, but now, also as a place to return to, with Heidorn musically musing on having his ashes spread there, a return of sorts to a simpler time, to the beginning.
The sounds are appropriately wistful and melancholy, stately and darkly dreamy, somber acoustic guitar and fluttering woodwinds over a drifting drone, lots of reverb, hushed and minimal, a bit twangy, but also a little abstract, the sound intimate and loose, as if the musicians were set up right in front of you, just sort of improvising, unfurling a dark tapestry of thrum and skitter, of muted sputter and washed out shimmer, the sounds do eventually coalesce into something much more song-like, a washed out dreamily doomy dirge, driven by a simple pulse, female vocals joining the instruments for a gorgeously languid ebb and flow, a sweetly psychedelic coda, that then gives way to a hushed, haunting outro. So lovely.
The flipside of the tape contains a field recording captured at the titular oak tree, and is a strangely moving sonic analogue to Heidorn and Co.'s piece, the sounds of a neighborhood, of lives, of Heidorn's past, and perhaps future.
The packaging it equally lovely. There's a standard cassette version, limited to 154 copies, housed in a silkscreened cardboard case. There's a deluxe version, the cassette in a canvas bag, that bag along with six photographs, housed in a hand stained and silkscreened wooden box, along with oak leaves, that one limited to just 92 copies, of which we have very few. And finally, there IS a third version, and it's a doozy, which requires the listener to download a map, and dig up one of four copies, located near the Salton Sea, beside a 19th century cemetery outside Onyx, in the Los Padres National Forest and behind the abandoned cages of the old LA Zoo. For more info on those, go here: http://clintheidorn.blogspot.com.
This record just showed up in the mail one day, and before we even listened to it, we were totally blown away, a black lp, hand stained, with an upside down cross made out of branches attached to the front, with a sticker bearing a very black metal looking logo, that simply said Atwater. We were obviously expecting some super grim, cult black metal, but instead were treated to some gorgeous blackened dronefolk, haunting and hushed, mysterious and quite lovely. After a brief intro of dense billowing drones, beneath field recordings of a train, and the occasional birdcall, the sound shifts to a dark, droney, drifty, super minimal folk, simple melodies plucked out on a guitar, over a subtle swirl of creaks and groans, of moaning strings and streaks of feedback, not to mention subtle bits of percussion, a dark, brooding, haunting loveliness that is black metal only in spirit, the sound reminding us more of Earth, Barn Owl, Ulaan Khol, Godspeed and the like, the recording super intimate and intense, every sound in the room picked up by the mix, feet shuffling, fingers sliding on frets, the buzz of the snare drum, but it all is perfectly woven into Atwater's mournful dreamlike isolationist Appalachia, the subtle strum, and spare fingerpicking, occasionally wreathed in tendrils of distorted electric guitar, the sound shifting dreamily from twang flecked slowcore, to glacial bluegrass shimmer, from spare skeletal ghostfolk to washed out droneguitar thrum, the guitar is the focal point throughout, spending much of the record hovering in black expanses and unfurling dark skeletal melodies, but the recording, the ambience, all play a huge part, as do the strings, the very occasional drumming, there's even saxophone at one point, everything woven into an ominously gorgeous songsuite of ghostly mesmer and dolorous drift.
LIMITED TO 148 COPIES!!! Each one hand stained, numbered and silkscreened, with an upside down cross made from branches affixed to the front, includes a thick printed cardstock insert, with a color photo on one side, liner notes on the other. Also includes a download coupon. WARNING: these are very fragile, and there's a good chance that the branches/cross may come loose during shipping, if that happens, it can be easily reaffixed with a hot glue gun.
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"Sketchbook" is an apt title for the debut recording for Swedish lowercase composer Johannes Helden, as this album is an earnest collection of fragmented and processed field recordings, which originated during Helden's travels from his native Sweden through Norway and into Russia. There's an up and coming school of travelogue field recordists operating under the broad banner of 'phonography.' While it's possible to qualify this album as a travelogue, Helden has composed these field recordings as a series of empathic impressions of the environment's desolate beauty and numbing cold; furthermore, "Sketchbook" shares little of that aforementioned aesthetic's specificity of references (i.e. rain, cars, market sounds, etc.). This album very comfortably situates itself within the parameters of the Trente Oiseaux label and the productions of Bernhard Gunter: slow moving structures bracketed by pronounced silences, muted tonalities and blurred sounds as if the sounds were 'out of focus' (to use a visual analogy), and pointillist digital markings that don't quite manifest as the granular based glitch-electronica. Somatic pulsations flicker, and drones evolve into symphonic swells resembling Feldman's handling of woodwinds more than any given field recording. Makes for good headphone listening.
2nd album from this seminal French electronic rock act lead by Richard Pinhas (Guitars, ARP, VCS 3, Mellotron and tapes). With Pinhas on this record is
Georges Grunblatt (Mellotron, Guitar and ARP). Features the Pinhas composition "In The Wake Of King Fripp" -- tells you his big influence, don't it?
Hellvete is the work of one of the members of Belgian funeral folk collective Sylvester Anfang, and while in many ways, the two outfits are similar, Hellvete takes the loose abstraction, and stumbling freeform mystery of SA, and tightens it up, into epic slow burning pieces that sound and feel more composed, majestic one moment, haunting and hushed the next, strings and subtle percussion, buzzing steel string guitar and thick undulating drones, a sprawling epic soundtrack to an imaginary film, flickering images of some forgotten world, a time lapse exploration of the birth and death of the black forest.
Long drawn out, almost sitar like buzz, drifts beneath ethereal female vocals, super minimal Eastern sounding percussion underpins some skeletal folky twang, a slow building bit of dronemusic, like Godspeed gone black Appalachia. Strings swoop in, upping the cinematic vibe, minor key, tense, dramatic, echoey vocals wrap around buzzing steel strings, transforming into thick raga like drones, laced with druggy space rock pulses, a sort of Spacemen 3 vibe, buried beneath the smoldering black shimmer. Tinkling chimes dapple the soaring strings, all wound into bursts of Sunroof! like skree.
Abstract free drumming hurls out swirling clouds of cymbal shimmer, fields of speckled skitter, way off in the distance, wordless voices moan and chant and hum, eventually swallowed up by thick grinding sheets of coruscating guitar buzz, a furious explosive crescendo, slipping back into that black Appalachia, before finishing off with a muted, but still intense burst of full on swirling psychedelic drug rock. Awesome stuff. In many ways even better than the Sylvester Anfang jams that came before, as if SA had somehow evolved, the sounds and compositions grown more lush, more expansive, while at the same time, gotten even darker, heavier, and more epic. WAY recommended.
Sint-Denijs is the second solo record from Glen Steenkiste, he of Belgian psych-kraut collective Silvester Anfang / Sylvester Anfang II, and much like the Hellvete debut, De Gek, released on Kraak back in 2009, Sint-Denijs finds Steenkiste continuing to explore his love of modern minimalism, ditching still more of the folky, krauty shamble of the Anfang mothership and delving deeper into longform dronemusic. With an arsenal consisting of harmonium, bowed banjo, electric tampura and analog synths Steenkiste fills both sides of this lp with gorgeously lush layered shimmer, softly pulsing tones, constantly sifting textures and ghostly overtones, the oddly titled "C-142" is some primo kosmische bliss out, beginning as a simple drone, but gradually blossoming into something much more, a dense tangle of melodies, that seem to gradually peel off, the slowly swirling super nova of sound releasing melodic flares, with headphones, it's easy to sink deep into the sound, lush, and lustrous and luxurious, super melodic, but with the various melodies bleeding and oozing into one another, a constantly evolving molten sonic core, that gives us glimpses of those melodies, as they softly shift and slowly swirl.
There's a brief interlude of sorts, the equally oddly titled "MDD-409", which must be an interlude based entirely on space limitations, cuz it's another gorgeous layered dronescape, one that given another side of vinyl, would most definitely transformed into yet another epic sprawl of ur-drone majesty. But instead, it acts as a bridge, keeping us suitably entranced, before culminating in the B side filling "G-356", which begins a bit more minimally, with sitar like drones, over soft low end pulsations, reminding us of local outfit Date Palms, the same sort of classic modern minimalism fused with a sort of Spacemen 3 like druggy drift, drowsy and dreamily divine, the low end growing more dense and dark as the track progresses, before the melodies once again begin to peel away, filling the sky with arcs of prismatic shimmer, grounded by the warm, liquid pulsations beneath, slowly building to a swirling tangle of softly psychedelic sound, totally tranced out tranquility of the highest order. Fantastic!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, on 180 gram vinyl. Includes a digital download code too!
More fantastic electronic weirdness from the Pan label, this one, the latest from Luke Younger, aka Helm, who crafts a dizzying expanse of blunted post industrial rhythms, and blurred psychedelic ambience, lazer blast blurts that sound like light sabers are tangled into strange shapes over throbbing low end pulsations, while all around clouds of hiss and static and thrum swirl and shimmer, noisy and psychedelic, but darkly hypnotic. Elsewhere the sounds splinter into weird avant musique concrete, blasts of noise swooping from speaker to speaker, a wildly ecstatic 'pipe fight', sculpted into an abstract psych-noise groove. Younger also delves into power electronics, with keening arcs of feedback, draped over a churning chordal thrum, peppered with bursts of strangely melodic static, sounding almost like Skullflower attempting to make dance music, and failing fantastically, before finally finishing things off with a haunting bit of deep drone loveliness, sinister shimmering clouds of muted rumbles ripple out in soft clouds, an ominous, haunting and harrowing sprawl of hushed mesmeric murk that might be the dreamiest bit of grim black ambience we've heard in ages!
Like all Pan releases, the packaging is stunning, a plain white sleeve in a clear PVC plastic jacket, printed in purple ink, liner notes on one side, the band name all tangly and geometric on the other. And yeah, limited too!
Good grief, it's become a running joke 'round these parts about John Zorn's never-ending 50th birthday sell-a-bration. I mean, of course he gets our best wishes and everything, but it seems like Tzadik's still gonna be releasing Zorn 50th Birthday cds when the man turns 60! Certainly it might take us that long to review all of 'em. But, that's no complaint, when we get to check out via compact disc shows we probably would have been stoked to see had we been in NYC during Zorn's month-long birthday concert happenins' in September 2003. Like this one, a rare recording from Hemophiliac, a trio made up of John Zorn (on sax), Mike Patton (voice) and Ikue Mori (laptop electronics). How's that for avant-cool? Crazed chaos ensues of course...squeals and squeeks and squalling squonk. Surely an endurance test for some, but sticking with it we're hearing some interestin' textures -- and even calm drones and beautiful sax lines -- alongside the exciting improv cartoon carnage dished out by these pros.
Two simpatico noisescapers from Austin square off for this limited split cassette release. We're well familiar with Smokey Emery from his many releases on Holodeck, Indian Queen, and his own Kiamesha Drive imprints, but Andy Hendrix & the Skwaarmalar Machine are new to us. We can't imagine what a Skwaarmalar Machine would look like or how it operates, but the sounds contained on that side of the cassette are cavernously industrial sounding like a go-cart race slowed down for intense drama. The slowly throbbing rev of an echoing motor as it swerves and skids around a warehouse, speeding up to an intense climax then slowing down to a deep bass pendulous pulse. The Smokey Emery side is from four live edits and contain his trademark hazy murk of built up tape loops of infinitely recycled recordings. Using an arsenal of personal recording devices including cell phones, and digital video cameras, it's a rich cloud of tunneling drones containing smoldering pockets of murmurs and atmospheric rumbles that are sublime and at times quite terrifying.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Henke - software engineer for Ableton and one time Chain Reaction recording artist - had been approached by the Swedish installation artist Fredrik Wretman to use his track Indigo, which Henke had offered as a free download on his own website. This was a softened piece of nocturnal ambience that Henke had sourced from the drips of his own bathtub! Out of that original material, Henke stretched out a Brian Eno meets Thomas Koner driftscape of rumbling tones, sustained washes of dark, grey/blue sounds, and occasional interjections of the dripping water itself. While Henke did not feel it was appropriate for Wretman's installation to merely broadcast a stereo feed of Indigo, he recontextualized the composition through six-channels (i.e. three cds with different mixes, all in stereo); and as he instructed that those three cds would be started at different times, the loops of the cd would thus warrant a constantly evolving composition to match the rippling pools of water and light which Wretman had installed in the Fargfabrieken Gallery in Sweden. Yeah, this is pretty commonplace for a sound installation strategy; but the sounds that had come together for this re-re-composed stereo mix is pretty entrancing. Certainly for fans of Koner, the darker Brian Eno records, and Bass Communion.
We love the Buddha Machine, but we have to admit, we're still a tiny bit surprised at just how popular it became. For those of you who somehow missed the whole Buddha Machine hubub, basically, it's a small plastic soundmaker, with a tiny speaker, a volume knob, and an output jack, and it can store a handful of sounds. In Asia, it's used to store prayers and teachings of the Buddha, but the musicians in FM3 realized they could store their own little ambient loops on there, and thus we have the Buddha Machine.
We've barely been able to keep them 'em in stock. Most folks buy 2 or 3 (Brian Eno famously bought 8, Alan Bishop from the Sun City Girls bought 24!! -- not from us, unfortunately). It's the perfect gift. And you can use multiple machines to create super interesting sonic effects. And thus, we have Robert Henke's Layering Buddha. A project for which he used the built in inconsistency of each machine, and took the sounds, slowed them down to expose still more sonic nuances, and wove them together into lengthy textured drones. The results are fantastic. Fuzzy, whirring, gurgling expanses of muted murky sound. Drone fiends will love it for sure. The only drag is, that in no way can you tell that the sound source is a Buddha Machine. Had the record been called something different, and had no mention been made of the process, you'd just think this was a really gorgeous drone record. We almost would have preferred Henke had approached this project in the style of an installation. Like a thousand Buddha Boxes, all set up in some huge hall, recorded in some ingenious way, so the sounds overlapped and got all tangled up. A much more organic approach, staying more true to the spirit of the machine. That said, this is still a wonderful record. The looped dronescapes are dense with sonic detail, lots of fuzz and grit and lo-fi detritus, all wrapped in billowy clouds of warm whir, making Layering Buddha sound both lush and sort raw. Really cool.
Available as a cd in a digipak, or on vinyl, as five 7"s, pressed on grey vinyl, with gorgeous center labels, packaged in a beautiful cardboard box.
What else can we say about a recording that guitar great Glenn Branca describes as "A gigantic piece, a killer, a work which exists outside of style or genre. It is unbelievable. It creates blacks of sound that move in and out of each other to create the effects. It is a pure, perfect piece of music that resonates and resounds and creates a universe that it is impossible by other means. In our primitive and unenlightened culture, it becomes a work of transcendent power." Very little. Or more accurately, more of the same. A legendary yet relatively obscure document of modern minimalism, recorded in 1976, Hennix, who studied with Pandit Pran Nath and LaMonte Young, and recorded with Henry Flynt, crafted The Electric Harpsichord using just-intonated keyboards and time lag accumulators, a la Terry Riley, creating a lush layered expanse of raga like dronemusic, buzzing strangely melodic, rife with overtones and rhythmic fluctuations, dark and psychedelic, mesmerizing and hypnotic, a sound active and alive, organic, yet electronic, this is the sort of sound that a million floorcore wannabes strive for, but will never achieve, absolute blissed out, mind expanding, ur-drone, sonic transcendence for sure. Brief, at only 25 minutes, but the power and energy and depth of sound, makes it feel way longer. And of course, if you're like us, you'll just set your stereo to repeat, and drift off...
Second pressing, packaged in a nice mini white cardstock box, with a foil stamped cover, and an extensive booklet inside, featuring two poems by La Monte Young, a piece on the Electric Harpsichord written by Henry Flynt, and some very confusing liner notes from Hennix herself, an excerpt from "notes on the composite sine-wave drone over which The Electric Harpsichord is performed."
Ooooh. Muted jazz trumpet. Breathy and gentle. Improvising melodically o'er shimmering background ambience... Well that's certainly part of what Supersilent's Arve Henriksen brings to this new "solo" album for the legendary German new music label ECM. But he's not really solo here, rather the bandleader of a (virtual?) ensemble that includes percussion, sampling, strings, double-bass, guitar, synth, field recordings, etc. Many folks are credited with sampling, programming, and "treatments", with vocals contributed by Trio Medieval and David Sylvian (whose fans will most likely enjoy this record). The twelve tracks here include much in the way of mysterious, somnolent electronic textures, crackling Philip Jeck style loopings, layered and effected spoken word interludes, and of course the gorgeous, feathery caresses of Henriksen's trumpet. It's all very moody, and certainly soundtrack-ready, a Scandinavian chill-out album that's part Miles Davis, part Portishead, part Djivan Gasparyan... Imagine an "easy listening" edition of Supersilent, a lot of the same sorts of sounds and glitchery but all on the mellow side. Also this would be easy to imagine, if you've heard any of Henriksen's previous lovely soundscapey solo discs on Rune Grammofon (which featured several of the same collaborators). And we'd recommend this too, for those who dig stuff on the Type and Miasmah labels.
On his own, trumpeter for Norwegian "death-jazz" geniuses Supersilent Arve Henriksen seems like a big softie, blowing and singing wordless soundscapes that are eerily pretty and entrancing. Arve's 2001 solo debut Sakuteiki merged his haunting horn with minimal abstract electronics. Now he's back with his 2nd solo for Rune Grammofon, Chiaroscuro, on which Arve's breathy playing and ever-so-slightly Bjorkish singing are joined by the live sampling of Jan Bang and the drums and percussion of Audun Kleive. The results, yet again, are gorgeous.
Here's another set of moody abstract electro-acoustic soundscapes from Supersilent trumpeter Arve Henriksen, his third solo outing on the Rune Grammophon label, as lovely as the other two. In addition to his calm, melodic, breathy "glacial Miles Davis" horn playing, he also utilizes electronics and keyboards and wordless singing. Plus Supersilent bandmates Stale Storlokeen Helge "Deathprod" Sten (on production duties as well) contribute on keys and guitars respectively, adding to the overall mysterious drone-factor of this music, some of it very Supersilent-sounding (as you might expect with this lineup), some parts particularly reminiscent of the austere Arctic tranquility of Henriksen's solo debut on Rune G, Sakuteiki. Overall, there's an air of olden mystic ceremony, with tracks like "Glacier Descent" building to white-light shining bliss. Ominous relaxation... definitely for fans of Supersilent and Deathprod.
Latest on Rune Grammofon from Supersilent's trumpeter Arve Henriksen. Here Henriksen eschews the glitch and electronics, these tracks purely acoustic and untreated as far as we can tell, but still beautifully layered with sweet sounds from Arve's instrumental ensemble - in addition to his own breathy trumpet playing, and piano, there's violin, hardanger fiddle and viola d'amore from Nils Okland, cello played by Svante Henryson, double bass by Mats Eilertsen, subtle drumming from Audun Kleive, and more violin and hardanger fiddle courtesy of Gjermund Larsen. Together, this group creates some quietly melodic, rather melancholic, slow-moving chamber music, the aural equivalent of watching drops of water slowly streaking down a windowpane on a rainy day, as tree branches gently sway in the wind outside, against the whiteness of the overcast sky beyond. It seems very Scandinavian, indeed, and aligned with classic ECM "jazz" stylings. Loveliness incarnate. Most of the tracks are calm and restful, though a few towards the end of the disc display some more active, uptempo inclinations. The perfect soundtrack to a sleepy Sunday sitting in the garden.
Electro-acoustic composer Orjan Henriksson has found a good home for his debut album on the eccentric sound art label Firework Edition which has also released albums from Leif Elggren, Kent Tankred, Zbigniew Karkowski, and Mikael Stavostrand. His album
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Are you a musique concrete connoiseur who already has the Pierre Henry box sets "Mix 01.0" and "Mix 02.0"? Then wethinks you'll have to pick this one up too! Again, a hefty helping of Henry's brilliant music. Contains 4 discs: "Variations Pour Une Porte Et
Pierre Henry's musique concrete gets the remix treatment, contributors include William Orbit, Fatboy Slim, Coldcut, Funki Porcini, Dimitri from Paris, and others.
We reviewed a record from local garage pop indie rockers the Herms way back in 2006, and if memory serves, we did dig it, but Castle Face head honcho and Oh Sees mainman John Dwyer insisted we forget all about that old record, and revel in this new one, which is not actually a proper record so much as a collection of demos and outtakes and unreleased rarities, but all the songs were hand picked by Dwyer, and definitely demonstrate the sort of lo-fi outsider pop what-the-fuck weirdness these guys were capable of, which wasn't really even hinted at on that way more polished record proper from back in the day. In fact, all it should take is a quick listen to the first track, the awesomely titled "Power Joystick", which sounds like some alternate universe Kinks, with way more bass buzz, some trippy psychedelic keyboard noodling, everything just a bit detuned, maybe recorded on a boombox, and with a totally unexpected midsong burst of blown out super distorted baroque pop majesty, before lurching right back into more of their noisy, jangly, wobbly Velvets-y groove. Fuck, so good. We had to listen to that track 5 or 6 times before letting it play any further. And if you dig that first one, pretty much all of Drop Out Vol. 1 is gonna push all the same buttons. "The Organisation" sounds like some weird archival track from the sixties, replete with dramatic spoken word vox, over warbly whirring organ, crunchy trebly jangle and simple drum pound. "Volleyball" ups the fidelity a bit, hinting at the band's more polished potential, but it all still sounds just a bit off kilter, the mix kind of just slightly wrong, the vox down in the mix, the keyboard melodies WAY up front. Hooky, and fuzzy, and jangly, and pretty much a perfect fit on Castle Face. Fans of Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, the Mallard, Bare Wires, and of course Thee Oh Sees will definitely dig. We're also reminded a bit of the idiosyncratic home brewed poppiness of Cleaners Of Venus, albeit the Herms are a bit more ramshackle and garage-y. For every moment of classic garage pop jangle, or fuzzy hooky indie pop crunch, there's some twisted, almost avant sounding blast of fractured art rock to balance it out, or sometimes completely cancel it out, often in the same song. A new (old) aQ fave for sure!
