It's been a long time since we've heard from Hoor-Paar-Kraat, aka Anthony Mangicapra, whose records have definitely been big time faves around here, each one a series of delicately crafted dronescapes and ambient atmospheres, of abstract Dada-ist sound, modern minimal acoustics and of course strangely twisted sonic rituals. This is not in fact a new record, instead it's a compilation, collecting various ultra limited and long out of print releases, as well as at least one unreleased track.
Previously released on Small Doses, Peasant Magick and his own Goat Eater Arts label, these three volumes of what is essentially now The Eureka Tapes, find Mangicapra and crew digging deep into sounds both haunting and horrifying, mysterious and minimal, haunting expanses of keening high end shimmer, tinkling chimes, strange voices, deep tectonic rumbles, piercing tones, churning industrial crunch, strange field recordings wedded to barely there rhythms and disembodied riffage, twisted tape experiments, rumbling guitardrone, warped audio collages, all blurring and bleeding into one another creating a fantastically fantastical world of sound. The closest comparison would maybe be irr. app. (ext.), who has a similarly Dadaist aesthetic, or maybe Nurse With Wound, although Mangicapra definitely takes his own route, deftly weaving difficult listening into lush hypnotic soundscapes, and turning dreamlike expanses of sound into something a bit more nightmarish. These two discs are a pretty great sampling of Mangicapra's activities over the last few years. And it will be interesting to hear the sounds he conjures up from here on out, now that he has finally left Eureka behind.
A brief burst of mysterious musical abstraction, from one of our favorite purveyors of strange sound and minimal dronemusic. Two tracks, clocking in at about 18 minutes total, this is another gorgeously abstract and spacious drift through some lost alien soundscape .
Thee first track is all tinkling melodies, glistening high end, strange rumbling fluctuations way off in the distance, bits of creak and scrape, everything bathed in foggy reverb and warm wet swirls of tape hiss and atmospheric whir. Melodies creep in and out, as do bits of field recordings, it all feels like some cinematic bleary eyed wander through a hazy druggy flashback, a washed out world of lost memories and fragmented dreams. Here and there guitars grind and reverberate, and strange percussive sonic events drift into earshot, like an even more abstract Wolf Eyes maybe. Quite gorgeous and dreamlike.
The second track starts out the same, a smear of high end shimmer, but instead of spreading out into languid pools of blurry sound, things get decidedly more abrasive, the high end becomes sharper, the percussion is more clattery and jarring, a disembodied voice intones some creepy monologue over the top, effects swirl and swoop, deconstructed riffs chug and churn, everything dizzying and disorienting, like the nightmare analogue to the opening track's dream. Cool cool stuff.
Limited to 153 copies! Packaged in a super deluxe mini sleeve. A die cut two sided thick colored paper sleeve, screen printed, folded around a full color vellum inner sleeve, the cd face, the vellum inner sleeve, and the outer sleeve all visible in a super striking layered affect, so nice.
Another way too limited cd-r release from the mysterious Hoor-Paar-Kraat, who we have been digging pretty heavily as of late. It's time for someone to step up and do a proper unlimited actual cd release for these guys, cuz this stuff is to dark and weird and cool to only be hear by a handful of folks. But for now, this is what we got. And what we got is the last 30 copies of this 16 minute 3" cd-r, a single track of slow moving, textural creepiness, ambient maybe, but there's a whole lot going on. Grinding distorted slow motion guitars lumbering glacially way off in the distance, murky mumbled vocals meandering amidst the tangled strands of low end buzz. Up front, still more low end, but sort of glistening and shimmering, nearly transparent, barely obscuring soft barely-there melodies drifting nearly inaudibly low in the mix.
The guitars build and build, a huge lumbering wall of slow motion riffing, the low end is gradually sucked out of the mix, leaving a snarling buzzing brittle wall of hissing fuzz and coruscating guitar grind, that becomes more and more noisy and muddy, eventually the buzz splinters into abrasive shards, and song collapses into blackness.
Easily the most aggressive thing we've heard from these guys, might appeal to fans of SUNNO))) and Birchville Cat Motel and other modern noiseniks as well as the ambient drone set...
LIMITED TO 40 COPIES!! WE GOT 30!!! After that they are gone for good....
Hard to know what to expect from a new batch of tapes from The Tapeworm, one of our favorite outsider/experimental/whatthefuck cassette labels, sometimes it's drone, sometimes some lost downtempo electronic record, or a mysterious unreleased jazz gem, the soundtrack to an avant garde art installation, or... some harmonica driven blues. Huh? Yeah, even for The Tapeworm, this one is a little out of left field. Or maybe in this case right field. Peter Hope-Evans was a member of seventies blues band Medicine Head, a favorite of John Peel, and here, offers up some skeletal home recorded stripped down blues, just guitar and harmonica, recorded on a boat, floating on a canal, sometime in 2010. The liner notes point to some relevant precursors / inspirations: The Coasters/Donovan/Sleepy John Estes/Blind Mamie Forehand/The Fugs/Skip James/Peggy Lee/Lotte Lenya/Sherrie Levine/Uncle Dave Macon/Moby Grape, and we definitely buy that, but this is essentially some acoustic blues, the guitars minimal, the harmonica soulful, the vocals sung/spoken, the vibe is super intimate, easy to imagine, windows open, the sounds seeping in from all around the canal, candles lit, much alcohol imbibed, and a long night of just jamming in the dark, simpler stripped down old school blues...
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Featuring original cover art by Savage Pencil.
One of two cassettes that we're listing from Serbian cassette / objet d'art label No Basement Is Deep Enough. This one comes by way of local wackadoodle Hora Flora (nee Raub Roy); and the tape itself is buried within a large knot of rope braided out of plastic bags that stands in as the ready made artwork. Annoying? Awesome? Stupid? Brilliant? Yes to all of the above. The two twenty minute pieces document one of Roy's sound installations that involve a series of simple aeolian harps constructed out of flexible bamboo rods and giftwrapping ribbon which resonates with all of the eerie harmonics of Egyptian reeds. The first side is a straight field recordings of these objects through a couple of well-placed condenser microphones that never get overblown by the wind itself, with the sounds of passing trucks and wind-chimes swirling around the constant raga-drone flutter from Roy's aeolian harp. The second side finds the objects recorded by contact microphones, offering less of the harmonic interplay and more of a dichotomy between death-knell rattlings and deep thrumming vibrations. This is one of those pieces that falls into the Fluxus category of sound research alongside the works of Gordon Monahan, Alvin Lucier, and George Macunias. We've got five of these; and it's VERY unlikely to be restocked.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Bay Area sound artist Raub Roy goes by the name of Horaflora; and his performances are really impressive exercises in controlled electro-acoustic chaos, with low-tech electronics skittering above various tactile scrapes counterpointed by reversed currents of placid bass frequencies and tonal undulation. One of his best performance stunts is to fill up large balloons, shove a trumpet mouthpiece inside the balloon, and drop the metal mouthpiece on a large drumhead. With two of these devices going, Horaflora can generate prolonged vibration and acoustically phased drones that are really amazing.
Gland Canyon is a small run edition released by Instal Records (which had released a Caretaker disc a while back, although this shares little aesthetic similarity), and works through many of the clamorous, decomposing sounds that Horaflora generates in a live setting. It can't be qualified as 'noise' as these collages are more in keeping with a tradition of automatic writing through sound, with idiosyncratic juxtapositions of electronic bloops, ring modulated flanges, minuscule clatter of wood and metal, mad-scientist weirdo percolations, and those sublimated balloon drones. As such it's more in keeping with some of the HNAS collages or something deconstructed from Small Cruel Party and old P.16.D4 tapes. The various tracks ebb and flow with an unhurried pace that slowly magnifies some of the many sounds into more sparse hypno-repetitive passages and then sweep everything into rather dense crescendos of scattershot sediment. Limited to 100 copies.
San Francisco's Raub Roy (aka Horaflora) met Ryan Martin (aka Secret Boyfriend), during an ambitious Horaflora tour in 2008, whereby he biked from Georgia to Maine, playing his unique brand of acoustic noise along the way with just what he could carry and what he could scrape together at each show. Martin hosted one of these shows in his hometown of Carrboro, NC; being impressed by the performance, he offered Roy a split release on his own Hot Releases imprint. While it would have been cool to have a document from the Horaflora bike tour, this is a damn fine split release of nocturnal murk linking the two projects. The Horaflora side is actually a recording of a live radio broadcast at KALX in Berkeley, with Roy being accompanied by Andrea Williams. One of Roy's best tricks - expanded balloons expelling their innards across drum heads and metal surfaces - is on display here; and it's great to hear the variety of these blustery elongated textures in an audio environment when it has been such a great visual aspect to his live performances. Amidst these sounds, Roy and Williams interweave acoustic noise-junk textures from found metal, tin cans, and hypercompressed recordings from hand-held tape decks, spluttering towards a dense climax of floor rattling low end and aerated acoustic noise.
The Secret Boyfriend side opens with a meandering set of Roy Montgomery styled noise-drone guitar melodies collapsing into a murky spectral-decay wash of no-fi shoegazing. Fuzzy piano tones begin to emerge as graceful calliope like melodies, still hung with enough grit and cobwebs to make these sound haunted. All of this comes to an end with a menacing burst of noise grafted upon a cheap synth melody that tone bends from the depths of cavernous cistern, but the noise begets a couple of darkened mope-folk tunes of just acoustic guitar and voice buried in echoplex.
300 copies and that's it for this great split!
Quiet/loud saxophone squealing and squawking, over a background ambience of ominous clatter and drone...piano, percussion, tape hiss...
Free jazz fairy tale music from France circa 1971. It's very moody and dark, but then there will be eruptions of Warner Bros cartoon music, almost. You could imagine a cartoon mouse tip-toeing around to some of this. A very scared little mouse. This ultra-rare Futura LP now sees cd reissue via Italian label Mellow, and fans of skronky Euro-improv as well as the more cosmic psych soundscapes of, say, Taj Mahal Travellers, should investigate.
We have a long history of obsession with strange sounds from Scandinavia, whether it's all the hypnorock weirdness from Finland, grim blackness from Norway and Sweden or music performed on instruments made from ice, there's something about that stuff that we find irresistible. Not just sonically, but also conceptually. Which makes the provenance of this disc's arrival at aQ all the more wonderful. One day in the mail, a cd with a moose, standing in front of an open refrigerator, set amidst a sunset lit landscape of snow. On the back, drawings of men all wearing white hooded body suits, and all seemingly holding deer skulls and antlers. We were already sold, but the deal was sealed with the legend: "Originals and traditionals performed on stringed reindeer antlers." Which is exactly what this is, a series of haunting soundscapes, performed primarily on stringed and contact mic'd reindeer antlers, the strings and antlers bowed and plucked and scraped, those mysterious sounds accompanied by all manner of sticks, logs, rocks, bones and various field recordings, those field recordings giving the proceedings the air of some surreptitiously captured ancient ritual. There are more traditional instruments as well, drums, flutes, fiddles, guitars, but those are employed judiciously, and most often merely to color the background over which the antler skulls hum and thrum, shimmer and moan.
It's no surprise that David Tibet of Current 93 is a fan, and maybe even less of a surprise that so is�Fenriz of Darkthrone (who even did a '90s acid techno remix of 'em which works surprisingly well! Not included here, sadly...), the sound of Hornorkesteret definitely plays into C93's ritualistic ambient folk, and Darkthrone's Norwegian pride, but beyond that, the sounds here are unlike anything you've heard. If we had to compare it to anything, we might mention Avarus, No Neck Blues Band, the aforementioned ice instruments of Terje Isungset, there's definitely a murky, primitive, tribal krautrock vibe, not to mention a certain hauntological bent, especially on the first track (more on that in a second), but ultimately, this is some fantastic raw sonic exploration, a mysterious songsuite, atmospheric, haunting and strangely psychedelic in its own way.
This disc collects the group's best recordings from the last ten years, and begins with what might be the weirdest one, "Elegi For Roald Amundsen", which begins with a staticky shortwave broadcast, a lost radio transmission of a voices speaking in Norwegian, beneath which, the stringed antlers rumble and hum, weaving a dark shimmery drift, driven by a low pulsing thrum, all the while wreathed in a warm crackle, totally mesmerizing and strangely evocative of some impossible melding of ancient tribal ritual and 'modern' technology. It had us imaging some ancient Norwegian tribe, who discovered an old transistor radio, which they assumed must have come from the gods, and every mysterious broadcast was a message from beyond, which they paid tribute by accompanying on their bowed skulls and stringed antlers. Elsewhere, the group weave darkly meditative and ominously rhythmic soundscapes of thrum and rumble, over beds of rushing water and birdsong, or pounding stretches of almost Dead C worthy abstract atmospheric psychedelia, or groaning surreal ambience that reminds us quite a bit of an even more abstract take on Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. The tracks vary greatly, from spare and minimal, to dense and rhythmic, at one point detouring into pure Norwegian folk, and at another into something almost funky, a sort of super rhythmic kraut-groove, but for the most part, spends the majority of its time in some haunting sonic otherworld, a transmission from a lost time, delivered in a lost language of sound, the stories and lives and memories conveyed via this strange music, performed on skulls and bones, captured here for eternity.
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get more (or even subscribe to the series) from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
Horns are a Belgian super group of sorts, drawn from all sorts of legendary outfits, not a single one we'd heard of. But this slab of freaked out sonic weirdness has us making lists of all these bands we need to track down. Cuz Horns are one mighty damaged super fucked up and gloriously noisy beast. The band describe their sound as "wild and free improvisations. 78 bpm wounded prog from hell's children's corner. An encyclopedia of fatal mistakes crammed into a power ballad's intro" or alternately a "dirty avantnoiseambientbitchesbrew", both of which come pretty dang close. A seriously demented outrock psychedelic free for all, super angular guitar, killer pounding Albini-ish drums, throbbing low end bass rumble, everything doused in swirling fuzzed out super distorted affects, a dense cloud of malfunctioning electronics and processed vocals. Like some insane tagteam match between Shellac, Whitehouse and Acid Mothers Temple while some misguided DJ keeps dropping in bits of black metal and Hawkwind, and another Dj does his best to scratch and beat match, using nothing but the two bloody stumps where his hands used to be. Awesome!
Original artwork by artist Jella Crama, who also hand silkscreened each copy. The LP's are pressed on super thick 180 gram vinyl and housed in thick plastic sleeves.
Baltimore's Horse Lords scrawl delightfully squiggly line drawings of instrumental motorik jams that might look sort of like Laddio Bollocko, early Circle, Faust, Neu, or even This Heat if you were squint hard enough. This four-piece interweaves hillbilly-raga guitar tangles and droning stabs of saxophone through a daisy-chain of delay pedals and tape-loop accumulators that top their archetypal kraut rhythm section of one-the-one bassline throb and some serious Jaki Leibezeit worship going on behind the drum kit. Saxophonist Andrew Bernstein keeps the expository investigations through his instrument to a minimum, and he's at his best when he nestles all of the blurting / bleating notes into harmonious interlocking patterns that ripple through the echoing electronics. Similarly, Owen Gardner's guitar settles into hypno-rock, jitterbug jangle that rings with the harmonic dissonance of Chatham, Branca, or Conrad. The two of them never fight over each other, instead working to balance and complement the two instruments in their mutual pursuit of groovy art-rock. Each of the tracks exhibit a couple of start-stop-start-again-in-another-direction big changes to what Horse Lords do, but it never sounds self-indulgent or wanky. It all comes together as a profoundly jubilant mess that works very, very well. Yup, download included with this piece of wax.
A while back we reviewed a crazy limited tape from Horseback, aka Jenks Miller, called Stolen Fire, which was a crazy good collection of odds and ends, random demos, electronic experiments, weird warped pop songs, the sort of stuff that's slowly been finding its way on to more and more Horseback records proper. Sadly, we were only able to get ten copies of the tape, which disappeared in a flash. When we contacted Miller to get more, after informing us the tape was gone, he did let us know that it would be coming out cd eventually. And here it is, as part of a triple cd set! Including said tape, a whole disc of live recordings, and a disc of rarities, splits and singles, from splits with Voltigeurs, Pyramids, Locrian and other aQ faves. Might as well start with Stolen Fire since that's what got us all excited about this set in the first place.
The opening track is a super minimal, drum machine driven chunk of stripped down skeletal kraut-pop, woozy and laid back, spidery guitar melodies, a weary crooned vocal, darkly dreamy and subtly psychedelic. The follow up is a strange chunk of gristly industrial ambience, all hiss and crackle and high end skree, like an amp feeding back in the rain, with just a bit of those weird garbled vocals that were all over the last Horseback record, doused in FX and reverb. The rest of the side unfurls like the opener, looped rhythms, subtle shifting textures, a little bit tribal, sometimes sounding like recent aQ faves Silent Servant, a definite dark techno vibe to some of the proceedings, everything wreathed in a softly distorted haze, all kinda krauty and darkly hypnotic, with the occasional even poppier jams emerging from the murk, all Casio drum machine and shimmery eighties chords, one of those jams sounds a bit like the love theme from some mysterious B-movie, when the main melody comes in, it's almost like James Ferraro or Ariel Pink, which is not a bad thing at all, just unexpected. There's weirdly crooned vox popping up throughout, that suits the music to a T. There are brief bits of super distorted atmospheric heaviness, blissed out blackened, and in some cases quite dreamy.
The 'Destroyed Demo Version' of "North Star Struck", which we dug so much on the tape, is present, and still has us envisioning blown out crumble and in-the-red crunch, and while it's not quite that, it is pretty awesomely dirgey and fuzzy, a dark sprawl of tranced out hypno-rock, like Circle on downers, the whole thing wreathed in clouds of cosmic FX and wild sci-fi squiggles, woozy organ melodies, all around that churning kraut-drone groove, and it never lets up, the sound locks in and plays out until the rock begins to fade, leaving just pulsing electronics and a staticky cloud of gristly haze. So great! And "Transparency (Murdered Again)", another track from the tape we loved, is more of the same, a gauze-y, heady drift of psychedelic shimmer, wheezing chords and spidery twang, which is soon joined by a strangely looped rhythm, the sounds all coalescing into a strangely stuttering minimal zoner groove, another track that sounds like warped, zombified Circle, slowed way down, a seriously hypnotic sprawl of hypno kraut mesmer. In addition to the tracks from the tape, there are a bunch of extra unreleased tracks and previously unreleased versions, and even though they aren't proper Horseback songs, like we said in our review of the tape,they might be some of the coolest stuff we've heard from Horseback yet!
And heck, that's just one of the three discs! The singles and rarities disc is pretty stellar as well, and includes a bunch of tracks from singles we never knew existed, as well as tracks from a few we've reviewed, not to mention a Stooges cover!! The two tracks from the split with Voltigeurs are some sort of alien black prog. The first all buzzing guitars, pounding drums, harsh hellish vokills, and lots of ELP style organs (!), which transforms the sound into something way weirder, and frankly way cooler. The organs swirl and pulse and buzz over murky drum pound and those blackened shrieks, those blackened sounds slowed down, like some bizarre mash up of Burzum at 16rpm and ELP at 33, the keyboards make the sound more psychedelic and spacey, and fuse perfectly into a gloriously twisted hybrid, one that is peppered with squalls of freaked out psychedelic noise, and culminates in a gorgeous Burzumic outro, all blown out drone riffage and buried anguished howls, mesmerizing and mysterious. The second track is soaring and epic and a little blackened, but sounds more static, more like a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone, draped over blasting beats nearly lost in the churn and swirl, harsh vox here too, the overall sound extra distorted, glimmery and glistening and downtuned and crumbling, as if the signal is way too hot for the speakers, which makes it sound noisier for sure, but also mesmerizingly psychedelic. The HB track from the split with Pyramids is a feral blast of black metal, a frantic blast beat beneath buzzing guitars that almost sounds more like blackened gypsy folk than black metal proper, until the vokills come in, and the demonic shriek clears that all up, before changing gears half way through and transitioning into a gorgeously decayed crumbling distorted dronescape. Then there's the track from their split 7" with Locrian, a hazy droned out raga, centered around a glorious high end drone, all shimmer and reverberation, the sound sun dappled and gloriously effulgent, very much like Sunroof!, mesmerizing and dreamlike, to which HB adds, some twisted gnarled vocals, all hissy and demonic, wreathing the whole thing in little melodic tendrils, the sound blissed out and gauzy, the blackness seemingly held at bay by this shining sonic light, the sort of track that we could listen to forEVER. HB's track from the 4 way split tape on Handmade Birds with Njiqahdda, Venowl and Cara Neir is also included, sounding like it could have come right off of their Half Blood record. Rhythmic and hypnotic, bass and drum locked into a sort of hypnorock groove, laced with fluttering flutes, weird electronics, swirling shimmering melodies, when the guitar comes in, it's sort of washed out and droney, giving the track an almost Earth-like vibe, the overall sound is like a super cyclical krautrock styled minimalism, with an epic second half, replete with those shrieked black metal vox. And there's of course more more more!!
Finally, the third disc features two long tracks, the first a 20 minute live performance of the first HB record, "Impale Golden Horn", recorded in 2007 in North Carolina, and it's a dreamy sprawl of softly smoldering burnished thrum and rumble, laced with dreamike psychedelic filigree and soft chordal swells, which leads perfectly into the previously unreleased 40+ minute "A Plague Of Knowing", which is a gorgeous sprawling Sunroof-style ur-drone, a dreamy psychedelic soft noise haze that swirls and shimmers and blurs into billowing clouds of blissed out drift!
Comes in a fold out 8 panel digipak style sleeve, withe some seriously extensive liner notes!!!
It's always difficult to know exactly what to expect from Horseback, the one man black metal / drone / psych project of Jenks Miller, every record is different, and every record over the course of the album shifts constantly, yet we're always pretty blown away. And this new one, just like the last few, confuses from the get-go. Opening with a mathy sort of post rock groove, all clean guitar jangle, churning distorted bassline, and warbly organ, and then the vocals, a weirdly distorted black metal rasp, which is only really weird paired with post rock. But it sounds killer, the record sounds massive, the drums crushing, the instruments lush and layered, the vocals the only thing pointing to anything other than post rock. Minus those, it sounds more like Skull Defekts or maybe Lungfish or even Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. But that was just the first track, which as we've learned is hardly an indicator of what's to come. But here it sort of is, as the second track is another lumbering post rock groove, all big drums and spidery guitar melodies, and again driven by some serious distorted bass heft. Replace those vokills with say Dan Higgs, and this WOULD be a dead ringer for an as yet unreleased Skull Defekts record. A strange twist for sure, but it suits him, as so any seemingly disparate sounds do.
And so it goes, we were steeled for the eventual crush, the track that would suddenly splinter into some brooding black dirgery, or some furious blasting blackness, but nope, this is the sound of the new Horseback, a twisted slightly blackened post rock, and we dig it. The rest of the record is peppered with a handful of tracks that slip back into a more blissed out drone sound, at one point blossoming into a glorious Sunroof!-like ur-drone rife with strange shortwave interference and dreamy drifty melodies, while another track drags those raspy vokills in and rapes them over some ethereal shimmer, making for even stranger bedfellows. The post rock jams get even stranger, when Miller switches to clean vocals, and it couldn't be further removed from the Horseback(s) of old, and then there's the gorgeously blissed out final track, a 12 minute raga, that laces stuttery melodies and processed vox over a simple pulsing krautrock like beat, all wreathed in a haze of synth shimmer and guitar buzz, sounding a bit like Stereolab crossed with Amps For Christ, which if you couldn't tell by that description, might make it our favorite track of the bunch.
Drone records are a dime a dozen these days. Not that we don't love drone records, we do. In fact, often we're way too easy on the purveyors of drone, since the very essence of that sound, is so simple, and yet so completely satisfying to listen to. A guitar against the amp, a handful of keys on a keyboard held down, a loop cycled over and over and over, almost any sound smeared into a near static drift, we could listen to that stuff forever, and often do. But it's the rare drone record that uses the drone as just the jumping off point, as a foundation upon which to build a fragile and ephemeral structure of minimal melody and movement, instead of the beginning AND end. Stars Of The Lid are a good example, as is William Basinski, Tim Hecker and a handful of others.�
Horseback too. We were sent this disc out of the blue and immediately fell in love. Only later to discover that this was the work of a faithful AQ mailorder customer by the name of Jenks Miller! Small world. Horseback is most definitely a drone record, but manages to incorporate plenty of not specifically drone-like sounds. At once massive and dense, dark and distorted, but also ephemeral and airy, soaring and dreamlike. The root of the sound is a guitar, or guitars, allowed to reverberate and ring out, unfurling billowing clouds of distorted buzz and whir, that settles on the speaker like a thick blanket of snow, glistening and blinding, but at the same time warm and enveloping. The guitars pulse and swell, melodies drifting in and out, streaks of feedback, all wound up into a huge softly roiling glowing orb of sound.�
It's almost unfair to call this a drone record, as it's so lush, and rich, and full of motion, sprawling out like some sort of sonic sunrise, the sounds gradually changing color, everything shifting and shimmering and transforming subtly as the record progresses. So much more than just a simple 'drone' record. In fact, it's easy to hear Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Loop, Flying Saucer Attack, that sort of spaced out doped up drift, all smeared into Horseback's haunting sun dappled world of slow burning sound.
Elsewhere piano drifts amidst the dense guitar swells, and rhythms are provided by pulsing guitars and various sounds beating against one another. Vocals hover way below the surface, barely audible, but adding another layer of lilting mystery, near the end, the guitars peel back gradually revealing a blurry expanse of swirling cymbals and splattery free jazz percussion, all spread out into a buzzy sizzling swirl, over which the final haunting piano notes drift and fade. So gorgeous. Absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc, and quite an auspicious start for this brand new label...
It's not just us that thought Horseback's latest album was so awesome. A blurb taken from the following review of ours does appear on this Relapse-reissued and repackaged top obi, alongside similarly enthusiastic quotes from both The Wire magazine and Invisible Oranges blog.
Originally released by the amazing Utech label, this album garnered the attention of the corporate metal overlords (just kidding) at Relapse, who obviously thought it could, and should, find a wider audience. Good for Horseback! Definitely pick this one up if you missed the Utech edition. Here's what we said about it before:
Something very strange must have transpired since the last Horseback disc. Something traumatic maybe? Some spiritual crisis of sonic faith? Where that record was a glistening, glimmering, dreamy, drifty drone record, this one is, well, much heavier, and more rocking, and WAY more intense and EVIL sounding. So much so that it almost sounds like a different band. That said, we dig it. A LOT.
Super intense, and super heavy psychedelic twang flecked metallic post rock. The guitars buzz, and drone, and occasionally twang, the drums are powerful, tight, the instruments locked into slow burning build ups, some strange hybrid of newer Earth, Godspeed, Circle, the Necks and maybe a little Scenic. There's a sort of krautrock vibe going on too. Sun baked, a little lysergic, space-y hypnotic, repetitive, the tracks looooooong, with mostly a single part, that gradually builds and builds. The cool thing is it never explodes into a metal coda, a la Isis or Neurosis or a million other bands, it's all about the journey not the destination, and the journey is riveting enough without tacking on an explosive blow out.
But then there's the vocals, a harsh demonic rasp totally at odds with the music beneath, which in some ways makes the combination sound that much more intense and evil. Especially when the rasps are locked in a sort of call and response with the guitars, really strange but definitely compelling.
The first three tracks are variations on a theme, each an incredible slab of brooding, mesmerizing hypno-rock, lush and layered, with tons of cool little extra guitar flourishes, the drums busy enough to be interesting, but still locked tight into the groove, those vocals, adding menace for sure, but also a strange element that as mentioned above changes the whole feel. A track will be moody and woozy and will suddenly sound a bit evil, or at least a little ominous, before slipping back into the loping, pounding crush of the main riffs.
The strangest thing about this record is that the track with the most overtly evil title, the closer "Hatecloud Dissolving Into Nothing", is the least heavy or evil of the bunch, and the only track that sounds like the first Horseback record. A 16+ minute drift of soft focus new age-y ambience, of dreamy drift, sun dappled guitars draped over long stretches of gauzy whir, the sound delicate and crystalline, definitely dreamy and blissed out, the only remnant of the tracks that came before, are some barely audible harsh vokills, way way way down in the mix, that almost sound like a slow shifting layer of hiss or buzz, beneath the kaleidoscopic shimmer of blurred guitar hum and melancholic melody, another strange combination, but similar to the vocals on the first three tracks, they lend a very subtle hint of menace to the otherwise tranquil proceedings.
The new jewelcase packaging is still quite nice, though not as gorgeous as the original Utech sleeve.
This is not brand new, we somehow missed out on this when it first came out, but seeing as we're such huge fans of North Carolina's Horseback, we figured we'd get a handful of these, and holy shit, it's good. Two tracks, perfectly straddling the two sides of the group, the gorgeous blackened ambient drift, and the buzzing abstract avant black metal crush. Which makes sense as it came out right before their full length on Utech.
The A-side is a gorgeous cloud of mournful melodic drift, a haunting slow motion melody, played out in a haze of shimmering distortion and strange sonic grit, wreathed by streaks of cascading feedback, while buried vox howl in the ether. Some serious dreamlike black ambience, softly propulsive, definitely intense and caustic, but simultaneously languid and lovely.
The flipside takes the same sonic template, but blurs the sounds even further into a continuous black buzz, adding some murky blasting rhythms, a heaving, churning stretch of abstract black hole heaviness. LIMITED TO ONLY 250 COPIES! Comes with a Horseback sticker, quite possibly the last copies we'll be able to get.
We only got a tiny handful of these, about ten, direct from the band, AND it was limited to just 150 copies, AND is basically already sold out, which of course means grab one of these before they're gone!
Stolen Fire is a collection of odds and ends, random demos, electronic experiments, weird warped pop songs, a lot of stuff that has slowly been finding its way on to more and more Horseback records proper, the opening track here is a super minimal, drum machine driven chunk of stripped down skeletal kraut-pop, woozy and laid back, spidery guitar melodies, a weary crooned vocal, darkly dreamy and subtly psychedelic. The follow up is a strange chunk of gristly industrial ambience, all hiss and crackle and high end skree, like an amp feeding back in the rain, with just a bit of those weird garbled vocals that were all over the last Horseback, doused in FX and reverb. The rest of the side unfurls like the opener, looped rhythms, subtle shifting textures, a little bit tribal, wreathed in a softly distorted haze, again kinda krauty and darkly hypnotic, before an even poppier jam emerges from the murk, all Casio drum machine and shimmery eighties chords, it sounds a bit like the love theme from some mysterious B-movie, when the main melody comes in, it's almost like James Ferraro or Ariel Pink, which is not a bad thing at all, just unexpected. Here too, there's weirdly crooned vox, that suit the music to a T. There's a brief bit of super distorted atmospheric heaviness finishing things off, blissed out blackend dreaminess that is WAY too brief.
The B side is split into two lengthy tracks, the first a 'Destroyed Demo Version' which had us envisioning blown out crumble and in-the-red crunch, and while it's not quite that, it is pretty awesomely dirgey and fuzzy, a dark sprawl of tranced out hypno-rock, like Circle on downers, the whole thing wreathed in clouds of cosmic FX and wild sci-fi squiggles, woozy organ melodies, all around that churning kraut-drone groove, and it never lets up, the sound locks in and plays out until the rock begins to fade, leaving just pulsing electronics and a staticky cloud of gristly haze. So great! And the closer is more of the same, a gauze-y, heady drift of psychedelic shimmer, wheezing chords and spidery twang, which is soon joined by a strangely looped rhythm, the sounds all coalescing into a strangely stuttering minimal zoner groove, another track that sounds like warped, zombified Circle, slowed way down, a seriously hypnotic sprawl of hypno kraut mesmer, and even those these aren't proper Horseback songs, they might be some of the coolest stuff we've heard from him/them. Too bad it's so limited.
ONLY 150 COPIES!!! And as we mentioned before it's already sold out, and these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
We initially reviewed the first disc of this 2cd set way back in 2007 and proclaimed it "absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc", and lest we forget, Relapse has printed that right on the front of this reissue, which takes that record, and bundles it with a super limited cassette release from 2010 called Forbidden Planet, available on cd for the very first time, originally a tape that was so limited we never actually got ANY copies at all. So this reissue seemed destined to be a Record Of The Week, that classic Horseback debut available again, and what essentially amounts to a whole new full length that most folks never got their hands on either. Here's what we had to say about Impale Golden Horn when we first heard it way back in 2007:
Drone records are a dime a dozen. Not that we don't love drone records, we do. In fact, often we're way too easy on the purveyors of drone, since the very essence of that sound, is so simple, and yet so completely satisfying to listen to. A guitar against the amp, a handful of keys on a keyboard held down, a loop cycled over and over and over, almost any sound smeared into a near static drift, we could listen to that stuff forever, and often do. But it's the rare drone record that uses the drone as just the jumping off point, as a foundation upon which to build a fragile and ephemeral structure of minimal melody and movement, instead of the beginning AND end. Stars Of The Lid are a good example, as is William Basinski, Tim Hecker and a handful of others.
Horseback too. We were sent this disc out of the blue and immediately fell in love. Only later to discover that this was the work of a faithful AQ mailorder customer by the name of Jenks Miller! Small world. Horseback is most definitely a drone record, but manages to incorporate plenty of not specifically drone-like sounds. At once massive and dense, dark and distorted, but also ephemeral and airy, soaring and dreamlike. The root of the sound is a guitar, or guitars, allowed to reverberate and ring out, unfurling billowing clouds of distorted buzz and whir, that settles on the speaker like a thick blanket of snow, glistening and blinding, but at the same time warm and enveloping. The guitars pulse and swell, melodies drifting in and out, streaks of feedback, all wound up into a huge softly roiling glowing orb of sound.
It's almost unfair to call this a drone record, as it's so lush, and rich, and full of motion, sprawling out like some sort of sonic sunrise, the sounds gradually changing color, everything shifting and shimmering and transforming subtly as the record progresses. So much more than just a simple 'drone' record. In fact, it's easy to hear Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Loop, Flying Saucer Attack, that sort of spaced out doped up drift, all smeared into Horseback's haunting sun dappled world of slow burning sound.
Elsewhere piano drifts amidst the dense guitar swells, and rhythms are provided by pulsing guitars and various sounds beating against one another. Vocals hover way below the surface, barely audible, but adding another layer of lilting mystery, near the end, the guitars peel back gradually revealing a blurry expanse of swirling cymbals and splattery free jazz percussion, all spread out into a buzzy sizzling swirl, over which the final haunting piano notes drift and fade. So gorgeous. Absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc
Then there's Forbidden Planet. By now, the one thing we've learned about Horseback is that their sound seems to change dramatically with every record, gorgeous hazy drones on one release, buzzing blasting black metal on the next, so it's really impossible to predict what the next record will sound like. Which makes pairing two Horseback records together an interesting challenge. Forbidden Planet opens up with what might be the perfect balance of the two, buzzing layered guitars, wound into a heavy slice of dark metallic drone, but laced with hellishly growled black metal vokills, as if that weren't far out enough, there's also shards of glitchy electronics, a weird industrial component, which just adds a whole other vibe. Cuz minus those strange sounds, it begins to sound like black metal loosed from any rhythms and slowed way down, and thus transformed into a sort of buzzing black dronemusic, which does seems to be the theme of the whole record, blackened riffing pulled apart and stretched into sprawling expanses of majestic buzz, laced with weird vox, rumbling basslines, and streaks of feedback. In some ways it reminds us of Mick Barr's Ocrilim, which did something similar, taking just the riffs, that distinctly epic and majestic minor key black metal style riffery, and repeating, looping, layering, and transforming it into something much more abstract and minimal. Which is definitely what's going on here. But Horseback sounds more organic, the sounds more raw, bleeding into each other, the distinction between notes and riffs gradually blurring, until these tracks are transformed into something much more woozy and psychedelic, heavy and heady. Thankfully, the vocals are way down in the mix, so while their presence does indeed further the black metal vibe, they gradually blend into the background, becoming just another layer of sound, woven into Horseback's thick undulating blackened buzzscape. And it's not until the final track, a brief 3 minute outro, that the buzz and howl are peeled back, leaving a gorgeously hazy bit of soft focus shimmer to finish things off. Quite gorgeous, and in its own way, a pretty perfect companion to Impale Golden Horn. Needless to say, absolutely recommended...
It's tough to argue with this one. Two recent aQ Record Of The Week-ers, Chicago blackened doom-drone-metal trio Locrian, teamed up with one man psychedelic-black-drone outfit Horseback, for two tracks of brooding, smoldering, blackened psychedelia, the perfect fusion of the two sounds into something darkly mysterious and hauntingly beautiful.
The shorter opening track, "The Gift", definitely sounds like it could be either band, and most definitely sounds like a hybrid of the two, hazy blurred ambience, haunting melodies, deep rumbling shimmer, a sort of gauzy post industrial black ambient drift, streaks of high end hovering over soft slow whirls and strange bits of clatter, laced with what sounds like someone playing the inside of a piano, buzzing metallic strums way down in the mix, beneath heaving groaning slabs of low end, billowing clouds of washed out thrum, distant drums, some harsh vokills, a slow build, with everything fading out EXCEPT the drums, which just get louder and more powerful, leading directly into the nearly 14 minute "Our Epitaph" which sounds fantastically like neither. At least on the surface. After a brief flurry of tolling bells, the song unwinds like a gloomy pop song, all fuzzy low end synth buzz, shuffling minimal drumming, all wreathed in swirling streaks of dreamlike haze, and wrapped around a darkly hypnotic main melody, and then there are the vocals, a softly distorted croon, wreathed in reverb, the result is pretty fantastic, sounding almost like an Interpol B-side or some lost live Joy Division track, spinning at 16rpm, but way more abstract and washed out and blackly psychedelic. Over the course of the track, the surrounding sounds grow more and more intense, an ever expanding squall of swirling high end and blurred and smeared melodic tangles, but that rhythm, and that relentless dirge stay locked solid, totally mesmerizing, a gorgeously trancelike chunk of noise-drenched blackened krautpsych that while obviously essential for Utech obsessives, and lovers of all things dark and droney, heavy and haunting, it's also just melodic enough to maybe lure some dabblers over to the dark sonic side for good�
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Features super striking artwork from longtime collaborator artist Denis Forkas Kostromitin, who also did the etching on the B-side, and on the printed insert.
A few lists back we reviewed a 12" collaboration between blackened metallic dronelord Horseback, and blackdoomdrone duo (and sometimes trio) Locrian, which was a gorgeous slab of black drone heaviness, fusing the power of both groups. Here, in a sort of sonic coda, each group goes it alone.
Horseback unfurl a hazy droned out raga, the track centered around a glorious high end drone, all shimmer and reverberation, the sound sun dappled and gloriously effulgent, very much like Sunroof!, mesmerizing and dreamlike, to which HB adds, some twisted gnarled vocals, all hissy and demonic, wreathing the whole thing in little melodic tendrils, the sound blissed out and gauzy, the blackness seemingly held at bay by this shining sonic light, the sort of track that is WAY too short on a 7", we could listen to stuff like this forEVER.
Locrian counter with something much more dark and grim, a churning bit of blurred tarpit riffage, a dirgey bit of SUNNO))) like thrum, but that low end creep is soon swaddled in delicate crystalline melodies, and thick hazy streaks of high end shimmer, that weird doomy dirge immediately transformed into something more dreamlike and ethereal. Vocals drift in, deep liturgical chanting, draped over the dirgey riffage and swaddled in the chiming melodies, the sound seeming to grow ever hazier and more ephemeral before fading out completely.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
We won't go into too much detail about this, as it's limited to just 200 copies, we got about 15, and can NOT get any more once they're gone, so if you want one, stop reading now and ADD TO CART! But if you're feeling daring, and are curious for a little more into, read on to find out more about this limited tape.
Two of the names will no doubt be familiar to most readers of the aQ list, blackened drone outfit Horseback, whose sound recently has shifted more toward a rhythmic post rock a la Skull Defekts, and of course, the unpronounceable Njiqahdda, whose twisted strain of (un) black metal we've been big fans of for a while now. Also included are Venowl and Cara Neir, both new to us, more on them in a second. Up first though are Horseback, whose sound continues to evolve, moving further away from the murky drone and black buzz of their early records, and sounds like it could have come right off of their Half Blood record. Rhythmic and hypnotic, bass and drum locked into a sort of hypnorock groove, laced with fluttering flutes, weird electronics, swirling shimmering melodies, when the guitar comes in, it's sort of washed out and droney, giving the track an almost Earth-like vive, the overall sound is like a super cyclical krautrock styled minimalism, with an epic second half, replete with those shrieked black metal vox. Great stuff, and definitely worth the price of admission all on its own. Njiqahdda fill up the rest of the A side with an epic multipart jam, that slips easily from softly psychedelic and melodic, all clean guitars and shimmering ambience, to churning intricate mathmetal, to doomic sludgey heaviness, to wildly convoluted progged out blackness and back again, with some cool (and surprising) clean vocals, the sound majestic and heavy as hell, and seriously epic.
Venowl start things off on the B side, offering up a stumbling super lo-fi doom/sludge sprawl, creeping and woozy, laced with anguished vocals (that slip into that weird sort of oinking pig vox, which here are terrifying), chaotic and in-the-red, total rehearsal space sound, but it suits their crusty creep, the drumming impossibly damaged and totally off kilter, the whole thing sounding on the verge of constant collapse, so super fractured and fucked up, like a sludge metal version of Dead Reptile Shrine, or Circle Of Ouroborus, which is definitely a good thing. Finally, Cara Neir finish things off with three short-ish tracks of blasting black metal, the sound appropriately brittle and buzzy, but weirdly melodic, the fast picked guitar unfurling some surprising catchiness throughout, at least on the first track, the other two tracks are much more grim, and dense and mathy, the sound gradually revealing itself as not your typical black metal, with all sorts of weird shit going on within their black buzz. Awesome stuff.
Again, this is LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!! and we only have a handful, so act fast if you want one.
It's frustrating how long it takes us sometimes to get around to reviewing stuff, especially when it's something we've had for a while and have been digging a lot. Such is the case with the strangely named Horseflesh, a one man band from right here in SF, who weaves some alchemical musical magic that sounds a little like a cross between�Wolf Eyes and Expo 70, which is not a bad thing at all. Long tracks that are equal parts seventies space kraut, spare industrial ambience, and guitar based free noise dronemusic...
Opening with some�murky minimal folk, with simple looped acoustic guitar figures, strange rattling percussion, all wreathed in a fuzzy smokey ambience�eventually growing more and more droney and subtly blurred as the track progresses. The disc slowly mutates, each track setting up the next,�warm smears of soft edged distortion draped over barely there guitar curlicues, shimmering resonant thrum, and streaks of muted feedback. A super reverbed soundscape of delayed scrape and grind, all washed out, looped metallic shimmer, that gives way to a lugubrious low end drift, all fluttering harmonics, distant melodies, muffled percussive chimes, and gradually become more and more distorted and becomes a dense Fenneszian buzz,�a crunchy slow motion abstract doom, a plodding downtuned riff, pulled into long low strips strewn�over the top of drunkenly keening jagged melodies that swoon and warble. A grinding hissy harsh landscape of stumbling percussion and processed guitar whir, swirling chaotic space FX and rumbling reverberant drones, like some noise band set up and performing in the crashing surf of some alien sea... The closer is a gorgeous lilting folky prog jam, with fluttering flutes, steel string guitars, summery melodies, that becomes less and less cohesive as the track progresses, the instruments dropping off one by one, until all that is left is a dreamy drifting super high end melody, a soft shimmer of feedback sculpted into something ethereal and lovely...
Packaged in cool hand screened chip board sleeves, with a photocopies insert.�
Brand new disc from local kraut-drone dreamweavers Horseflesh, who in our review of their last record we compared to a cross between Expo 70 and Wolf Eyes, which is not so much the case anymore. They're still drone-y and dreamy, but here, the sound has been pushed even farther out, and from the opening few minutes alone, you know you're in for something different, a gurgling low end shimmer builds in pitch and intensity, faster and faster and louder and louder, until the band locks into a high end Ur-drone, a symphony of synthesized skree, Sunroof! set to stun, difficult and dense, bordering on full on noise, but handled so deftly, we almost don't want it to end. Thankfully, instead of ending, it just sort of changes, the high end drops out leaving a strange pulsing dynamic sea of synth notes, chords, whirring buzzy warbly throbs, creating a strange staggered rhythm, haunting and off kilter, but strangely arresting too, unlike almost anything we've heard but we dig it. This constantly shifting sonic field is anything but ambient, synths and guitars fade in and fade out, reverberating metallic shimmer becomes grinding industrial crunch, warm muted tones become a burbling sea of fragmented melody, it all sort of builds and intensifies into a churning doomdrone finale, dense and effulgent, and strangely majestic. Most bands would probably hang it up there and call it a day, but we're not even 1/3 of the way through yet.
The second track is much more spacious, the high clarion tones clear and resonant, ringing out like car horns and fog horns, the long notes beating against each other, occasionally slipping into strange distorted crunch, but slipping just as effortlessly back into swirling tendrils of warble and whir, the track continues to get more and more dense, the synths more and more like horns, more dissonant, the notes more rapid and closer together, resembling some sped up Hermann Nitsch piece or some other droning atonal chunk of modern classical.
The final track is much more melodic, at least in the beginning, deep washed out blissy tones wreathed in crumbling warm fuzz, the fuzz quickly dissipating, leaving another strange sea of almost chiming upper register tones, their color slowly shifting from whites and yellows and reds, to greys and browns and blacks, growing more ominous and more darkly clouded by the second, the layers peeling back one at a time, eventually leaving a single tone, that drifts and warbles and shimmers and whirs finally fades out completely.
Not nearly as krautrocky or dreamily drone-y as the last Horseflesh, but it would have been too easy to just make another same sounding record. Synthenesia is a much wilder collection of sounds, much more intense and inventive, challenging and difficult, and ultimately, because of that, even more magical and mysterious.
These cd-rs are packaged in super striking handscreened digipaks, with a printed cardstock insert and a sticker.
Two of our favorite local bands team up for some serious noisemaking. Horseflesh usually traffic in longform dronescapes and epic post industrial kraut drone, while Borneo specialize in a sort of pop infused heaviness, that we described as Harvey Milk or Jesu covering Lync or Seam or even Codeine. So the question is not necessarily why these guys decided to get together, the real question is what happened when they did. And Courage Rock is the answer.
A twisted post rock hybrid, not in the sense of post rock the genre, but rather POST-rock, beyond rock, beyond even post rock, the opening salvo finds the Borneo duo unfurling thick, repetitive anti-grooves, thick chugging metallic riffage, pounding motorik thumps, while Horseflesh bathes the whole thing is thick swaths of tripped out kosmische effects, streaks of white noise, layers upon layers of hiss and buzz and crunch, tossing in the occasional squall of bleeps and bloops and swoops. As the record continues, Borneo dial it back a little contributing some more minimal pulse like rhythmic minimalism, while the guitars rumble and buzz, and Horseflesh keeps things thick and murky and spaced out.
Elsewhere, full on bursts of white noise give way to hazy sun baked riffage, a doomy crawl, almost like Earth, wrapped in a speaker rattling undercurrent of tectonic rumbles, long stretches of layered haze wrapped around incendiary feedback, that pulse like thump holding it together, a gloriously noise flecked spaced out druggy drift, rife with stuttery loops, shards of FX and buried melodies, crushing downtuned doomy sludge, almost stonery, with heavy Neanderthal drumming, and woozy minor key guitars, pounding through a cloud of black fuzz and twisted effects, a seriously fierce psych-drone blowout, so good that it makes us almost think these guys should ALWAYS play together...
SUPER LIMITED, in hand painted and hand assembled packaging....
Sometimes we want to grab Robert Horton, and shake him like crazy, screaming "For God's sake man, slow down with the releases!!! Even if we listened to one very day for the rest of our lives, we're not sure we'd get to all of them!!" But sometimes, we want to grab Robert Horton, and shake him like crazy, screaming "For God's sake man, DON'T EVER slow down with the releases!!! We are going to listen to one every day for the rest of our lives, and we never ever want to run out!!" So by now, you're take on this latest cd-r (number 34,221 by last count) will depend on which sort of shaking you want to do. To be totally honest, we tend to lean toward the latter, sure, it's exhausting keeping up with this man's prolific output, but pretty much every thing we've heard has been absolutely fantastic. I guess that's why we have entire rooms of our houses dedicated to storing all of our records and cds. -sigh-
Anyway, Diamond-Beak-Hornet-Hell finds Horton employing the same bizarre array of soundmakers (including boot, vibrator, sex machine, raven, rubber band and more) to create his thick soundworlds. DBHH is a bit heavier than past outings, all of the swirling bits of sound coalescing into a seriously propulsive riff, like a less drifty Sunroof! but that's just the first track. The rest of the disc dabbles in deep drone, flecked with bits of disembodied slide guitar and what sounds like processed didgeridoo, swirling abstract psychedelia, thick warped rhythmscapes of warped backwards guitars and strange keening reeds and clattery deconstructed blues, transformed into some sort of almost industrial looped dronescape. Cool.
And we managed to make it through the whole disc before the next one was released. So now we're ready Horton! Bring it on!!!
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Holy crap, we weren't kidding when we mentioned in the -other- Robert Horton review on this list, that this man has been busy busy busy. Releasing records for going on 30 years now, but everything we've heard has been absolutely amazing. So we're not complaining, we're just scrambling to keep up, and to make enough room on our shelves at home. You pretty much need a dedicated Horton shelf by now, but it's well worth it. As we said, everything we've heard has been great, and this latest release is no exception.
Horton seems to derive perverse pleasure in getting pretty sounds of some of the most unlikely sources. Even at his droniest and dreamiest, it's not uncommon to discover he was using vibrators and electric toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners or footwear. And this disc follows suit. He employs the usual array of soundmakers: Boot, sex machine, pump organ, dulcimer, vibrator, turntables, contact mics and on and on. Weaving all of the disparate sounds these items produce deftly into gorgeous dronelike shapes. This record in particular sound especially guitar heavy, one track with buzzing slipper slide, another with repetitive strum, over some deconstructed Appalachia, some weird blown out fuzzy psych, but these 'jams' are balanced by a delicate world of drone, pulses and shimmers, some truly lovely stuff. The most far out track has to be "Tern", where Horton performs solo on a barometer, creating a clattery clanging percussive workout. As always, super stuff!!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Packaged in a screen-printed/photo cover, with a photocopied insert, pressed on cool black cd-r's and housed in a heavy vinyl sleeve.
It's not always necessary to list all the instruments used in the construction of a record, but sometimes it's the only way to help wrap your head around the strange sounds found on a certain wonderful and mysterious recording. Just Before Setting The Sky On Fire was created using the following instruments and items: "guitar, boot, cassette recorder, sex machine, el barometer, casio mt-68, computer, theremin, vibrators, el toothbrush, dulcimer organ, dulcimer, prepared boot, sheep's toes, percussion, cd's, turntable, minidisk manipulations, sine waves, feedback circuit, soundedit loops, bells, practice bagpipe chanter, filters, and noise-canceling-head-phones-microphone." But as the saying goes, it's not only what you use, it's how! From the same label that brought us recent reissues from James Blackshaw and Rameses III comes this newest release from Robert Horton. To be honest we don't know a whole lot about Horton, other than he has a previous release on Finnish cd-r label 267 Lattajjaa and is apparently from right here in SF, but judging from this here record, that won't be the case for long. A curiously appealing mix of modern free folk, abstract drone, and twentieth century computer music, Just Before Setting The Sky On FIre is a warm dense tangle of steel string guitars, humming and wheezing drones, majestic Sunroof!-like skree, lilting neo-Appalachia fingerpicking, extended shimmering ragas, random tribal clatter, and delicately swoonsome ambience. So gorgeous. Will fit perfectly right there next to all your Jewelled Antler, Avarus, Pelt, No Neck Blues Band, Tower Recordings, Excepter, Jackie O Motherfucker and Sunburned Hand Of The Man! LIMITED TO 120 COPIES!!!
The Bay Area's very own Robert Horton has been a very busy beaver, and it hasn't just been lately, as is evidenced by this, volume THREE in the Horton archives, collecting various bits and baubles recorded between 1985 and 1988, all of it just as stunning on anything from the last few years.
The opener is a massive 12 minute epic utilizing 8 guitars, using just intonation, producing harmonics by vibrating the strings with vibrators and electric razors, the result a gorgeous keening high end drift, slow peals of upper register drone slowly shifting and shimmering. The rest of the tracks here are also drone based, with subtle variations, dancers swinging rocks together for percussion, various unlikely stringed instruments, chanted vocals, even horns, the results without exception, lovely and serene. It's frustrating sometimes, trying to keep up with the prolific output of many artists and labels today, now that putting out a cd-r is as easy as stopping at Office Depot on your way home from work, but whenever we almost give up, we throw a new disc on and are whisked away to some droney dreamy sonic wonderland and just drift away, wondering how the heck we could have been thinking about giving up...
Includes full color insert and extensive liner notes, Horton history and info on each track.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES. WE GOT 30 COPIES, ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD, IT'S ALREADY OUT OF PRINT AT THE LABEL!
Another new record from Robert Horton, whose Just Before Setting The Sky On Fire cd-r we raved about recently. And even though we had never heard of him until that cd-r, he hails from right here in San Francisco. Which makes a lot of sense actuallly, as his sound is the perfect mix of New Zealand style free noise (hence his releases on CPsiP and other microlabels) and Jewelled Antler folk ambience (there's even a song on this disc titled "Jewelled Antler Basement", dedicated to the JA folks whom he recently performed with). Horton's music is truly lovely to listen to, and the strange sounds he uses to create those songs are at once totally familiar, but also completely perplexing. A quick look at the list of instruments used makes it obvious why: mbira, turntable, casio, wah wah pedal, bike pump trumpet, washing machine full of superballs, trash can lid, grass, leaf, bark, boot, vibrator, calliope, teasle, field recordings of hummingbirds, turntable-hurdy-gurdy-sexmachine, turntable-hurdy-gurdy-guitar and more. We could fill up a whole page with the stuff Horton used to make this record. In most hands all that crap would make a big ol' mess, but here's it's all carefully and delicately composed and laid out for maximum dreaminess and droniness. Every track is a smear of droned out bliss, with abstract folkisms and stretched out melodies, dense and challenging, but also simple and tripped out in that perfect close your eyes and drift off sort of way. One of the coolest and weirdest tracks is definitely the washing machine superball track, with the boinging rubber balls creating a furious tangle of free jazz rhythms, that are complimented by some REAL drums, skittering around and about the chaotic rubber balls, like a super distorted, sped up drum battle between Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. So cool.
SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
Some of us who hadn't heard The Hospitals before always assumed they were just some ordinary garage rock band, at least based on the context of how we had heard about them or flyers we had seen, but when we finally got to hear Hairdryer Peace we quickly discovered that something much more fucked up and unique was at play!
This ain't no garage rock, in fact we think most folks into your ordinary punky garage rock wouldn't know what to do with this record and that's a very good thing. Dense with layers of fuzz, junk and some serious noise, The Hospitals have created an album that is always just on the verge of self-destruction and which often erupts into something brilliant just when you thought the ship was about to go down.
This is some full on weirdo-rock, we hear hints of the most extreme lo-fi wonder of the New Zealand scene as well as the freakout psychedelics of the Japanese underground. Jandek on meth playing High Rise covers?! A pumped up Pumice joining forces with The Shining Path, Black Dice and Excepter!? The Skaters covering the first Comets On Fire album?! If you can start to imagine any of those scenarios then you start getting an idea of the charged and bizarre world in which Hospitals are operating. We slept on this album when it came out last year and you may have seen it listed as the number 3 record of the year picked by the Bible of the avant underground, The Wire. While a cd release of the album is in the works, this is your last chance to snag a copy of the vinyl as the band is down to it's last batch. Get it while you can!
What might one find on the Island Of Jocks And Jazz? You might be surprised to discover it's mostly amp buzz, and cord crackle, snare drums that sounds like someone throwing stones at a trash can lid from across a yard, vocals that sound like they were recorded from the bottom of a sheet metal pit, all that cacophany broadcast through a bank of 200 broken car speakers, recorded on a handheld cassette recorder, and then mastered to aluminum foil. WTF?!? The Hospitals make Guitar Wolf sound like the Osmonds. There are some killer riffs, some warbly organ, some almost dubby rhythms, even some hooks, but they're all barely discernible, wrapped in sonic barbed wire, lit afire and set careening down an obstacle course of empty metal trash cans, aluminum shed siding and all matter of rusty scrap metal. Ultra chaotic and wild and scuzzy screechy blown out garage rock blur. Just the thing for all of you mourning the end of SF's Coachwhips, and will probably also tickle the ruined eardrums of folks who love stuff like the Country Teasers, The Fall, Black-Eyed Snakes, Liquor Ball, Guitar Wolf and any of that acid fried, amp melting speaker blowing garage trash-n-roll!
It was never any big secret that AQ faves Hotel Alexis sounded a LOT like Sparklehorse. How could it be really. After all, both groups crafted gorgeously lush low key country soundscapes, more whisper and hum than twang in most cases, with sweetly crooned vocals, nestled among rich worlds of minor key misery and soft lonely blues. And Hotel Alexis' Sidney Lindner (brother to Flying Canyon's Cayce, who both play together as Golden Hotel) has a voice that's a dead ringer for Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse. But for every similarity, there are some crucial differences. Lately, Sparklehorse has moved on, Danger Mouse production, super star guest spots, and a new sound closer to a countrified Flaming Lips, which is great, don't get us wrong, but it's not the sound we fell in love with. Lindner and his Hotel Alexis still wander those same rain swept streets, are still lost and alone, recording by lamp light, finding solace in each lonely note. The sound is similar, but there is definite progression.
Lindner has continued to look inward, expanding his dark personal universe, getting more and more lush and expansive certainly, but without losing the hushed intimacy that made the debut, The Shining Example is Lying On The Floor such an absolute gem. If anything, Goliath, I'm On Your Side is even better, which is saying a lot considering how much we LOVED the first record.
The sound is simple: strummed steel string guitars, heavily reverbed piano, Lindner's sweetly soulful vocals, brushed shuffling percussion, occasional flourishes of vibraphone, mellotron, lap steel, but the magic is in the songs, and the arrangements. These are the kind of songs that would sound just as good plucked out on a beat up old acoustic guitar by a crackling fire as they would recorded with a symphony orchestra at Abbey Road. Maybe even better. The sound is crisp and alive, it sounds like Lindner is right there, head on your shoulder, singing right in your ear, melodies drift and swoon, sometimes thick and vibrant, other times muted and mumbled.
Every song on Goliath, I'm On Your Side is practically perfect, but the centerpiece has to bee the nearly 20 minute long blissed out FX drenched countrified space rock epic "Hummingbird / Indian Dog". Beginning with a vocal mantra repeated over and over amidst swirling keyboards, a sing songy melody and whirls of murky whir, the song eventually transforms into an ambient soundscape of backwards guitars, field recordings, running water, barking dogs, snippets of conversation lifted on the wind, hushed breathless vocals wrapped in reverb and buried in the mix, insistent atonal guitars, struggling to be hear over the muted whir, everything building into a super druggy blown out space rock drift, guitars warp and warble, buzzing and pulsing over the same swirling backdrop, splattery percussion drifts in and out of the mix, eventually fading out into a twangy No Neck sort of tribal drift, barely there vocals, simple hand drums, steel string buzz, some sort of indie twang "Revolution #9". And it's that sort of spirit, that pervades even the most straight forward song on Goliath, I'm On Your Side. What on first listen might sound like just a sweet country ditty, is more often than not, rife with unlikely melodies, strange sonic subtleties, and deep dark emotion. But then again, more often than not, most of these songs don't actually sound like just sweet country ditties, instead, instead, they tend to be lush worlds of soft focus twang, druggy dreaminess and sweet melancholy bliss.
It's always frustrating when we get an amazing cd-r, that we all buy, and then later have to buy again when it comes out as a proper cd. We try to make sure we know about those sort of impending plans before listing limited cd-r's. But sometimes it just happens, not much you can do. And in the case of a record as fantastic as this one, all we can do is be grateful that it is finally getting properly released, and urge all of you who missed out last time to buy it now! And as a consolation for those of us who already own the first version, the new packaging may be quite spiffy, but it's not as sweetly and nicely handmade as the cd-r's.
This is the first solo record from Sidney Linder, who plays in AQ faves Golden Hotel (with his brother Cayce) and fronts the hauntingly gorgeous Torrez. We've raved about both Golden Hotel and Torrez in the past, both bands exploring the dark and mysterious corners of ambient folk, druggy psychedelia, alt country and dreamy slowcore. So we had an idea of what to expect from Sidney's first solo effort, but there was little to prepare us for just how goshdarn breathtaking this record is.
Pefectly recorded, intimate and crystal clear, with steel string guitars, shuffling brushed drums, shimmery vibes, haunting slide guitar, hushed raspy vocals (sounding quite a bit like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco at times, and Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse at others), and perfectly melancholy melodies. This record is just so completely beautiful and utterly heartbreaking, it's a little hard to know how to describe it in a way that does it justice. Everytime we put this on, it sucks us into another world, sepia toned and twighlit, dark and dusty, lonely and mysterious. This is the kind of record that is SO evocative, that really does make you feel the music in your heart and soul. You can hear some Sparklehorse, some Court And Spark, some Wilco, some Souled American, some of Sidney's other bands, but it all sounds so personal and intimate, filtered through Sidney's psyche, his triumphs and failures, his hopes and dreams, his loves and his heartbreaks. So so so good it just kills us.
From the same little Finnish label that brought us Kemialliset Ystavat's Varisevien Tanssi / Silmujen Marssi LP comes... Hotguitars! Hotguitars? That's Teemu Korpipaa and Jyrki Laiho, both men members of Circle (Jyrki currently, Teemu formerly). Not that this sounds anything like Circle. It's a home-made abstract improv instrumental noise kind of thing, with titles like "Gamelan Sausage" and "Thurston Does Something Jazz". Just Teemu and Jyrki screwing around with guitars and a four-track...though they're both credited with other instruments, like mandolin and 'banjolin', what I hear, mostly, is guitar noise. A la Japanese noisician Solmania. Or Mitsuru Tabata. Or Merzbow, not that he uses guitars that much. It's sometimes quite pleasant noise though. And actually occasionally there's some structure, beats and melodic content...what you could almost call 'song'! But a lot of this is washy, textural, droney, abstract, varied guitar-splurge. Imagine two distorted electric guitars that were actually animals, let loose in your home, running rampant, scurrying about, leaping up on the furniture, tumbling down the stairs, getting trapped in the dryer, sneaking into the kitchen and knocking over the cookie jar... They're really nice animals, really they are, but maybe too wild and not suitable as pets even though they're so cute. Of course this cd-r is quite limited, we've got 15 and that's it. For ever. Nice full-colour covers by the way.
Another brand new release, this one another actual cd release (not a cd-r), and again featuring Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower, etc.) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ, etc.) as they coax an endless flow of molten sounds from their array of instruments and noisemakers.
On Chimerendammerung, like most of the Hototogisu releases, the pair seem to be taking the dreamy drift of Bower's Sunroof! project, and supercharging it, giving it some serious teeth, what was once meditative and hypnotic, is now a serious slab of sound. A swirling vortex of distorted guitars, and bowed strings, all furiously whipped into a frothy psychedelic wash of buzzing overtones and blurring timbres. Within this dense chaotic miasma, are all sorts of raga like drones, muted rhythms, fragmented melodies, a veritable sea of strange sonic occurrences, blended together, piled atop one another, layer after layer. It's like exploring some alien ocean and drifting through the inky blackness, the only illumination coming from a panoply of mysteriously iridescent undersea oddities, the light and the subtle colors all blending into a dizzyingly overwhelming whole.
This may be noise music, and to the casual listener it may sound harsh and unmelodic, but the magic of this band, and these players, is the ability to create this music, this sort of noise, from distinctly un-noisy elements, which is why the final blast of sound, the disc you hold in your hands, is anything BUT noise, a beautiful and hypnotically captivating sound, so rich and textured and completely mesmerizing.
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This double disc from The Hototogisu, the occasional project of Sunroof!/Skullflower mainman Matthew Bower (Hototogisu is in fact Bower teamed up with Marcia Bassett from Double Leopards), isn't exactly new, as it was originally released as a super limited cd-r back in 2002 on Matthew Bower's Rural Electrification Program, then reissued as an insanely extravagant and expensive triple lp on DeStijl in 2004, both of which went out of print in a heartbeat.
We always lamented the fact, that this record remained out of print, considering it's most definitely one of Hototogisu's finest moments, thankfully Important Records has now (finally) reissued it as a double cd! So if you missed it before, get it now!
Unlike many of the other Hototogisu records, which can drift into areas more abrasive and chaotic, still droney and lovely in most cases, but often the drones are assembled from noise and skree and blurred crunch, but 'Floating Japanese Oof!' plays out like one massive 140 minute dronescape (regardless of how it's tracked, or on what format it's released on). This is pure, transcendent, heart-of-the-sun, bliss out, drone music the way it was meant to be experienced, in massive mind expanding chunks. Shimmery clouds of ambient high end guitar drone and squiggly brain tickling twinkles, hushed glacial space folk blur with pulsing low end, and distant clatter. Shimmery and abstract, hypnotic and hushed, lysergic and transcendent. Gorgeous, otherworldly and totally essential.
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
There's really no point in beating around the bush anymore, Hototogisu are in fact a noise band. Before the cd-r boom, and the micro-label explosion, Hototogisu would have been releasing records on RRR. Not that there's anything wrong with being a noise band, but the duo that make up Hototogisu get described as drone, and free-rock, and black ambient, and all manner of descriptors, but basically this is in fact noise music. Soft noise for sure, and pretty noise almost certainly, but the drone and ambient elements are just that, elements of the big thick layered noise these two can make.
Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards and GHQ, Matthew Bower of Skullflower and Sunroof!, together fuse all of their various sonic proclivities into one huge heaving organic whole. That while drone-y and dreamy and ambient and shimmery, will be a tough sound to get lost in if you don't have at least a tiny soft spot for noise.
But the key here is the way the noise is shaped and crafted, this is now power electronics or face melting Japanoise, instead, this is a dense brew mixing the blurred crush of Total, the upper register ur-drone of Sunroof! and a big ol' chunk of swirling free guitar psych, a bit like a room full of Keiji Hainos jamming wildly, but slowed way down and layered and layered into a whirring buzzing howling free psych drone noise blur.
Like much music of this ilk, a glancing listen will reveal nothing but sound, a wall of deconstructed guitar noise, sheets of feedback, all garbled and chaotic and intense, but listen close, climb right in there, and you'll find yourself in a soundworld alive with melodies and rhythms, textures and harmonies, swirling skies of overlapping overtones, of crunchy buzzy anti-riffing, of warm whirring psychedelic ambience, a sounds as hypnotic and as mesmerizing as records much more mellow and subdued. Sort of like how the buzz of black metal can lull the listener, this caustic 4 sided slab of abstract guitarscapery, this heady and heavy blown out psychedelic din, can be strangely soothing and dreamy, while somehow miraculously managing to be noisy and abrasive and brutally blown out at the same time!
Gorgeous, super deluxe matte finish gatefold sleeves, and of course ULTRA LIMITED. ONLY 700 COPIES!
Holy crap, it seems like the Hototogisu is taking cues from the almighty Acid Mothers Temple as far as release schedules go. What is this their 5th, 6th, 10th release this year? Not that we're complaining. In fact we wouldn't mind a new one very week, just a little amazed and overwhelmed. Part of it is that they're all good. All great in fact, and Prayer Rug Exorcism is no exception. Hototogisu seems to be getting harsher and noisier with every release. The brooding droning shimmer of earlier excursions has given way to thick spiky walls of coruscating feedback, incandescent streaks of supernova guitar, keening high end skree, all layered on top of one another into a huge glacial wall of brain melting guitar pummel. A lot more Total than Sunroof! for sure. All four tracks on Prayer Rug Exorcism quickly build into chaotic squalls, and then hover there, not really building or shifting, just sort of spinning wildly in place, shooting sparks in all directions, a massive ball of super hot guitar fury, fierce and furious, like a transcendent six stringed sun, slowly growing hotter and hotter, not really changing in size or in color, just building pressure until finally the whole thing bursts into a million sparkling pieces, and we're left laying in silence, our hearing a thing of the past, the sound of Hototogisu permanently burned into the back of our skulls.
Another vinyl only missive from the dynamic duo that is Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Sunroof!, Total, etc.) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ, etc.) and this one's a loud one. Well, they're all loud ones really, but this one is especially intense and aggressive, a serious slab of guitarnoise as only these two seem to do it.
It begins with thick washes of processed strum and grind, looped and layered, guitars and guitars and guitars, thick and viscous, swirling and whirling and eventually building to a Total like fervor, a keening coruscating high end raga, white hot and blown out, a seriously divine chunk of noisy psychedelia for sure. The rest of the record is just as dense and heavy and thick with guitars, but the high end explorations are scaled back, and the duo instead crawl through a swamp of murky muddy thrum and throb, a caustic morass of crumbling distortion and washed out sonics, with the occasional riff surfacing here and there, but never for long, just long enough to establish that it's an actual riff and not just another layer of droning guitar, before it slips away and once again -is- another layer of droning guitar. There are brief solar flares of high end effulgence, but they too flash briefly before being subsumed by the chaotic distorted black sea below.
Skullflower / Total / Bower / Bassett freaks need this bad. Thick vinyl, beautiful full color sleeves. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Supposedly already sold out at the label, so you know what that means...
Yet another blast of sweet sonic skree from Mr. Matthew Bower and Ms. Marcia Bassett otherwise known as Hototogisu, which in case you didn't know is a type of Japanese Cuckoo. But by now, as we should all well know, the sound of -this- Hototogisu is a far cry from the sweet lilting birdsongs one might hear in the woods, that is unless of course you normally stroll through forests populated by ninety foot high armored bird monsters spewing fire and laying flat huge swaths of trees with it's crushing unstoppable stomp and melting skulls with its brutally screeching song!
This time around we've got another one of the super limited cd-r type releases, so act fast if you want one of these!! Sardonic Wooden Moonlight is a massive, seriously noisy two part epic, two half hour chunks of thick prickly fuzzy brrrrrrroooaaaaaarrr. You know what we're talking about, the sort of din Bower used to kick up in Total, like an orchestra of tuned vacuum cleaners spitting out thick sheets of soothing sonic sandpaper, a smoothed out industrial whir, like listening over the telephone to a massive metal forest collapsing in on itself, creaking and shrieking and howling, punctuated by jagged shards of guitar squeal, like pieces of sonic shrapnel floating across a thick black sea.
SUPER LIMITED. Cool poster style cover with transparent insert!
Another slab of swirling sonic thickness from the duo of Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, GHQ, Zaimph). Huge whirls of guitar woven into dense tangles and staticky squalls. But WAY limited so probably gone before you know it.
These guys are killing us. It almost seems like a contest to see who can release the most material in the shortest amount of time. The main problem being that it's all so goddamn good. Especially when we're talking about Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower) and his partner in sonic subversion Marcia Bassett (GHQ, Double Leopards, Zaimph).
This is the thirteenth release (that we know about) between these two since February, which is a lot to take in for sure, but if you're a fan of their particular brand of slow shifting wall of guitar dirge, then another massive blast is more than welcome.
The weird thing is, outside of Skullflower and Sunroof!, most of the music these two make is very sonically similar, which begs the question, why Hototogisu and Zaimph and GHQ, if the sound is fairly consistent. Sure each has it's own subtle nuances, and involves different folks, but it almost seems like everyone from all of the Bower/Bassett offshoots should just get together and form the world's most formidable free-noise ensemble. Then again, that might be a bit too much for anybody to handle. especially considering the sort of ruckus just the duo of Bassett and Bower can whip up.
On Some Blood Will Stick, the two are at their most caustic and metallic, huge washes of coruscating guitar, shrieking feedback, droning buzz, a massive roiling black sea of sound, peppered with all manner of industrial grind and corrosive crunch, and for the first time the vocals are actually audible, just barely, still buried way down in the mix like just another layer of furious freaked out sound, but occasionally the howling, shrieking super distorted black-metal-meets-Whitehouse yowl manages to rear it's ugly head before being sucked back under. Intense!
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There seems to be a bit of a noise renaissance going on these days. Not only are there more and more outfits whose specialty seems to be kicking up serious squalls of sonic chaos, but groups who dabbled in noise, or originators of noise music who had perhaps moved on, and often pushed the boundaries of what noise music was or could be, seem to be reverting to sounds much more primal and cathartic. Witness the most recent Skullflower. A blast of coruscating blown out skree. And here we have the latest from the duo Hototogisu, which just so happens to feature Mr. Bower. Hmmm. Maybe it's just Bower then. Skullflower briefly returned to THE RIFF recently, most notably with Exquisite Fucking Boredom, a series of looped seventies drug rock riffs, rendered increasingly disjointed and disembodied. And back in the day, Skullflower were a serious riff heavy thudrock combo. But over the last few records, the sound of Skullflower has gotten increasingly noisier. The cool thing though is that the noise is infused with a melodic sensibility Bower just can't seem to kick. Or maybe doesn't want to.
Now, Hototogisu, Bower's group with Marcia Bassett from GHQ and Double Leopards was always a noisy proposition, and that hasn't really changed much. here and there, the group would slip into something more drone-y or raga like, but noise was their reason for being. So it should com as no surprise that this latest lp is very very noisy. Two side long tracks, the first of which is seriously caustic, as always close listening reveals much going on, texture and rhythm and timbre, but it is very much a serious slab of noisemusic.
The B side however, is much more nuanced. And while still noisy, is much more melodic, drones and layers of buzz shifting and transforming, streaks of feedback, bits of rumble and whir, all wound around accidental melodies, and stretches of almost blissful noise. But noise it remains.
Thus, this is another one for the iron eared. Fans of Hototogisu and Bower and Bassett's various projects will most definitely dig, but those with sensitive ears or a low tolerance for sonic skree, tread very carefully...
This collaboration could have gone one of two ways, both equally appealing, blissed out and drone-y like the Burning Star Core albums that we've made records of the week in the past, or noisy and chaotic like most of the Hototogisu records we've reviewed. And while here and there this definitely falls somewhere right in between, for the most part, this falls squarely on the noisy side of things. Which is to be expected, guitars, electronics, voices, drums, percussion violin, Moog, objects (!), acoustic appraiser (!!), it would be no small feat to tie all that stuff up into something droney and composed. But then these folks excel at letting loose, unleashing sounds, unfurling huge clouds of blurred buzz, sending streaks of high end sparking into the atmosphere, conjuring up all manner of sonic demons with these slow shifting ur-drone rituals.
The drums are mostly scattered and abstract, but when they do lock into a groove, the sound briefly transforms into a sort of krautnoise jam, before coming loose again and drifting heavenward, sprawling out and raining sonic debris upon the swirling sea of abstract clatter and pulsing buzz drenched hum below.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!!
Originally for sale as a tour only release, this little chunk of ear drum punishing goodness is finally available to the noise starved masses.�Most AQ customers should be pretty familiar with Hototogisu by now, the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Sunroof! and more) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, GHQ, Zaimph) as well as Burning Star Core, aka C. Spencer Yeh (although here, BSC is expanded to a trio including some folks from Hair Police), and thus are probably pretty excited to hear what might happen when these two freenoise behemoths join forces.
And what in fact happens, is a big sprawling chaotic blown out spaced out free rock noise jam. The addition of drums makes a huge difference, grounding the sound in 'rock', but said drumming is free and abstract enough to let the music breath and expand and spread out like a black fog. The opener is a static Dead C style jam, a simple plodding beat, cymbals and kick drum mostly, while all around, dizzying swirls of guitar fuzz and thick swaths of distorted synth, and in there to some damaged electronics and of course some of Yeh's FX drenched violin. The backdrop is a constantly shifting swirl of noise and sound, but the simple plodding rhythm makes it sound like some ultra gritty lost krautrock rehearsal tape.�
The second track is a bit more unhinged, the background of the first song, brought to the fore and allowed to swallow everything up. The drums this time are just an incessant clanging buried in the mix, like a railroad crossing bell heard from within a tornado. Part way through some of the noise seems to coalesce into sort-of-riffs, and suddenly it a strangely propulsive slab of white hot white noise, albeit with a bit of groove to it. The next track is the most melodic, a gothy, doomy sort of glacial dirge, almost like an ultra lo-fi Hawkwind, crushing drums and more of that noisy blown out squall jammed into every crevice. The drums drop out almost entirely for the next number, the guitars and synths and violins and vocals spread out into long effulgent streaks, super noisy, but strangely hypnotic and dreamy.�
The final track is a sort of throwaway, a brief sputter of creaks and clatter, scrape and grind, angular and atonal, a blown out noise coda, but it's the loooooong tracks that make up the rest of the record that really hit the drone-dirge-noise spot.�
Packaged in a cool, black plastic case with a black and white cover, black and white insert, and each copy includes a button, one of 5 different designs chosen at random.�
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We never really thought of Hototogisu as a 'noise' band. Sure they're noisy, sometimes REALLY noisy, but there is always a certain raga drone element to their thick-sheet-of-sound rooooaaaar, which makes perfect sense since the two members also make sounds in the Double Leopards and as Sunroof! / Skullflower. And in Hototogisu, you could always hear that struggle, between the Double Leopards' minimal murky crawl, the high end ur-drone of Sunroof! and Skullflower's coruscating wall of feedback pummel. And the results were divine, at once harsh and beautiful, glistening but jagged and brutal.
Then there's Prurient, who we ALWAYS considered to be a noise band. Shrieking feedback, industrial grind, primitive percussion, maniacal howling vocals, all wrapped in buzzing clouds of glitch and hiss and buzz and screech. A seriously intense and pulverizing onslaught of sound. BUT, Prurient also has that special something that keeps their records from sounding like third rate Merzbow or a wannabe Whitehouse. Sure it's noise music, but it's layered and textural and weird and in a really difficult harsh way, pretty dang listenable.
So what happens when you take those two completely different approaches to noise music and make them one? Well, to begin with, as you may have surmised, you get something pretty fucking noisy, and just a cursory listen reveals a thick squirming snarl of harsh hateful sound. And in fact, the first few listens had folks in the store wondering if this was actually blacknoise terrorists Stalaggh, and that's not all that far off the mark. But closer listening reveals a deep dark cavernous world of noise(s), deep resonant washes of rumbling buzz, foghorn-like blares of jagged grinding throb, thick waves of staticky hum, blinding flares of shrieking feedback, epic squalls of chest rattling low end moan, grinding industrial clatter blasted into glistening shards. all constantly pulsing, and throbbing, swaying and shifting, like drifting aimlessly across a stormy obsidian sea, where the water is a roiling swirl of black buzz, and the storm clouds above are thick smears of throbbing metallic crunch, the wind like gusts of ear splitting feedback, and you the listener clinging desperately to your stereo, lest you be hurled into blackness and swallowed whole. Pretty fucking cool.
