THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A super limited repressing of this awesome 3" from a few months back. Once these are gone, there will be not be another repress. The three inch cd seems to be the format of choice these days for all things avant / drone related. I guess it's part the novelty, but also the 20 minute limit is just perfect for one big long track. Like the modern day drone rock equivalent of our old friend the seven inch single. This super limited three inch just so happens to be the latest missive from Mr. Matthew Bower of Sunroof!, Skullflower, Total, etc. Bower is the Hototogisu, and on this disc that means gorgous, pulsing free noise, taking the crushing power of Skullflower and smoothing it out with the bliss of Sunroof! Two tracks merged into one twenty minute piece of strangled guitar chords, droning and throbbing, becoming more and more machinelike, until the whole thing is a keening, looped mass of distorted grit and vibrating hum, like an industrial Steve Reich, or a noise rock Terry Riley. Caustic and abrasive, but also hypnotic and beautiful.
Brand new double cd-r release from The Hototogisu, the occasional project of Sunroof!/Skullflower mainman Matthew Bower. Unlike previous Bower efforts (and the last Hototogisu cd-r) 'Floating Japanese Oof!' plays out like one massive 140 minute piece (regardless of how it's tracked). This is 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, with pulsing low end, and distant clatter. Gorgeous, otherworldly and totally essential.
Another massive sonic document from the dynamic duo of Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Skullflower, Total, etc) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards). Ghosts From The Sun is a reissue of the super limited double cd-r of almost the same name (replace 'sun' with 'shit') released last year and finds the group drifting much closer to Bower's bliss rock outfit Sunroof!. While Hototogisu has always been a wilder and noisier beast than either member's other projects, most of the 'noise' is taken care of in the first eight minutes, a glorious burst of incendeiry feedback and churning guitar grrrrr. The rest of the first disc and all of disc two takes the Dead C and slips them some thorazine and the result is a woozy and druggy free noise workout, much heavier on the free than the noise. Each track has a thick brambly bed of distorted guitar thrum, atop which is draped streaks of high end feedback, huge slabs of low end throb and strange effected melodies stretched and twisted into yet more 'noise'. A swirling, surging morass of muscular heave and delicate flutter, an expanse of dense drifting sonic fog, a viscous flow of molten drone and rumble.
A new cd from Skullflower / Sunroof! mainman Matthew Bower's other ambient free noise outfit Hototogisu, and it's about time too, as most of the other Hototogisu and Sunroof! releases have been on cd-r and have been tough to get back in stock. Hototogisu is now, and has been for a while, a duo with Marcia Bassett of the Double Leopards, and their sound is definitely a bit more noisy and aggressive than in the past (as hinted at on the sleeve with the instrumentation listed as Bower on "oooowwwhh" and Bassett on "rrrggghh"), with sheets of corrosive guitars, spread into thick washes of screeching feedback, all over thick gurgling backgrounds of rumbling drones and glitchy malfunctioning electronics, occasionally splattered with bursts of chaotic percussion and maniacal abstract drum programming. But all of that random clatter and aggressive pummel is harnessed into an epic record of thick, throbbing guitar drone, not all that unlike Bower's old Total outift, or Skullflower at their most guitar heavy and free. Heavy and noisy indeed, but also blissfully hypnotic in that way that only a massive slab of droning guitars can be!
Another amazing project from Mr. Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof!) and his Rural Electrification Program. One has to wonder how one man can be so prolific and continually churn out such amazing sounds. But ours is not to question...
The disc starts off with what sounds like people playing ping pong accompanied by a shopping mall organ and sparsely plucked guitar, moody sparse and sort of whimsical. Track two finds Bower back in more familiar waters. A shimmering wash of high end harmonics and the sound of dripping water. Much mellower and dreamier than Sunroof!, all distant melodies, and guitar shimmers and delicate webs of feedback. Hypnotic and ethereally captivating.
Aaron Turner should win some sort of award or something. He's not only the leader of post-rock metalcore masters Isis, and also one of the contributors to the genius of both Old Man Gloom and Lotus Eaters, but he also runs the excellent Hydra Head label, AND never fails to buy stacks of stuff here at Aquarius whenever he's in town. Not only that, but his art and graphics have graced some of our other favorite releases of late. So of course we're happy to present this new 2nd album from House of Low Culture, another outfit featuring Aaron and friends, including other members of Isis, Old Man Gloom and Lotus Eaters. HoLC is in fact probably closest to the droned-out ambient sounds of Lotus Eaters. Unsettling, illusory soundscapes, haunted and desolate. Edwards Lament! starts off in a realm of industrial, boiler room drone, before ghostly strummed guitars infiltrate the mix. Their distorted, slowly unfolding melodies are buried in shallow grave of reverb, accompanied by backwards-tape-fuckery, low-end rumble, echoey effects, dragging chains... You'll hear some voices, but this remains a mostly instrumental affair, and an extremely sombre one. We don't know who Edward is, or what it is he's lamenting, but this does sound sad. Weirdly, while not overtly 'Americana' or at all 'country', somehow this still does keep making us think of an abstract, phantom echo of Woven Hand or Souled American. Maybe Edward counts Blind Joe Death among his friends.
Been a good long while since we've heard from House of Low Culture, the droney side project of Isis / Hydra Head main man Aaron Turner, and we only managed to get 10 of these so we won't go into too much detail, since odds are they'll be gone in a flash.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered, hand assembled, each one with a unique cover, made from random pages from a magazine, each with a printed obi, and wrapped in a plastic bag sealed with a sticker.
Two extended tracks, recorded live at the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles in 2007, mastered by James Plotkin, guitars, loops and tapes, woven into sprawling buzzing droning soundscapes, the first all long tones, slow shifting layers, melodic fragments drifting beneath warm low end swells, peppered with the zing of a zither like metallic shimmer. Tones like sirens wail in the distance, the pitches gradually increasing, the tension building, like the scariest part of some Italian horror movie. The second a snarling mass of blown out distortion and crumbling heaviness, thick sheets of effected guitars, processed low end, all roiling and churning and pulsing and throbbing, buried beneath it, what sounds like howled voices, seriously intense and caustic, noisy and thick and dense, but still textured and droney and weirdly soothing.
Again we only got TEN COPIES out of FIFTY, so if you want one gotta be quick on the trigger.
It's been a while since we've heard from House Of Low Culture, the one man experimental / drone / soundscaping project of Aaron Turner, he of Hydra Head Records, Sige Records, Mammifer, Isis, Twilight, etc. This one man band, now augmented by Turner's wife Faith Coloccia, has definitely blossomed into something much more abstract and minimal, at least in the opening few minutes. After some haunting monk-like vocal chants, the sounds unfurls as a super minimal expanse of barely audible sine waves, distant rumbling thrum, streaks of shortwave static, seemingly gone are the creeping low end dronedrifts of early HOLC records, the sound here is way more academic, think John Duncan or Francisco Lopez, there are some fragmented melodic moments, but sans headphones, this might be an impossible listen in a world full of ambient sounds. But the tracks here are long, so there is lots of ground to cover, and after about 6 minutes, some guitar drifts into the picture, but just barely, it's not for another few minutes, until the song proper begins, and weirdly it's a strange sort of slowcore doom, all minimal drumming, super distorted crooned vox, somber melodies, it's like a super abstract experimental Codeine, which is definitely a good thing. The rest of the record flits from hushed shimmer, to squalls of caustic noise and back again, before leading into the second track, which again begins life as a hushed glitch laced drift, before thick droned out guitars and more crooned vox surface, and then the song explodes into some strange sort of abstract pop, but very briefly, and rendered in shades of grey and black and skree, before slipping back into long stretches of deep thrum and staticky buzz, all underpinned by a muted percussive rhythm and some softly swirling disembodied vocals and gristly minimal effects.
The record finishes off with the 21+ minute "Inappropriate Body", which begins with some almost playful sounding percussion, still wreathed in crackle and static, only to give way to more drift and blur, more near silence, and pizzicato melodies, strange bursts of garbled voices, bits of skree, and more chantlike vocals, blasts of whitenoise, lush choral drifts, and finally some creeping slo-mo metallich churn, the track more like some music concrete meander, an expansive abstract sonic exploration, loosely woven into some sort of avant sonic narrative that may have Isis fans and Hydra Head obsessives scratching their chins, but has the rest of us laying in the dark, headphones strapped on tight.
Gorgeous super minimal packaging too.
NOW ON VINYL!! Limied to 500 copies, each one hand numbered...
Fantastic split release from this husband and wife duo, Aaron Turner, he of Isis, Hydra Head, and of course his solo project House Of Low Culture, and Faith Collocia, and her Mamiffer project (which also occasionally features Turner).
Mamiffer is up first, and their offering is a single 12+ minute track, constructed from piano, synthesizer, organ, tapes, field recordings, percussion, bass and effects, and it's a beauty. Stately piano drifts atop a bed of smoldering shimmer and minimal low end thrum, haunting and hazy and a little ominous, soundtracky and cinematic, the piano eventually fading out, leaving a gauzy bit of layered drift, laced with muffled explosive booms, the organ gradually swelling up from the murk and mire, building into a squall of soft psychedelic noise, before fading out once again, leaving that strange reverbed boom, to ring out into empty black space.
House Of Low Culture is mostly Turner, but here he's joined by his wife on guitar, and legendary percussionist Z'EV on, well, percussion. A hushed black ambient creep, drifting beneath dramatic multitracked vocals, everything wreathed in thick undulating black buzz, the sound switching from ambient soft noise to the vocal parts, that sound downright new wave/post punky, but those two elements bleed into each other, creating something more than its constituent parts, the track smoothes out, and becomes more and more ethereal, leaving just piano, to float in a field of hushed near silence, stately and mysterious and quite lovely, it's not until the last couple minutes that the tranquility fractures, and the fissure unleashes a cloud of noxious, crumbling distortion, and heaving blacknoise, which too fractures and peels back leaving a brief bit of clean guitar riffing and then nothing at all.
This record by the oddly monikered House Reverends was shrouded in secrecy when we first got copies, subtle hints as to the membership, references to obscure UK groups / collectives, never mentioned by name, and when we did find out who was behind this twisted slab of lo-fi outsider weirdo RnB, we have to say we never would have guessed. We thought about leaving everybody in the lurch, but this is in fact, a sort of Shit And Shine offshoot, featuring at least one member of that multiple drummered noise rock crew, but don't be expecting ANYthing like $&$ here. Instead, this is a collection of old cassette jams, improvised and recorded onto a 4-track using just drum machine, synthesizer, sampler and vocoder, and given those ingredients, it could have gone either way, totally tripped out avant psychedelia, or THIS, a warped, but still pretty straight, crooned RnB. Sounds scary, but give it a chance, you just might like it. Warbly organs, vocodered vox, minimal programmed beats, a twisted electro pop with vocals that sound like an alternate universe Justin Timberlake, albeit a much more raw and low fidelity JT, all over squelchy bass, stuttery grooves, pulsing beats, those croony vocals slipping occasionally into almost cookie monster like gurgles. But fear not, peppered throughout are some sweet experimental jams, like the skittery low rider groove of "Hype", with it's rad stuttery pitch shifted samples, or the sped up soul of "Close And Personal", which sounds like Burial at 78, and really, that's what a lot of the record sounds like, a less murky, muted Burial, but the same sort of roots in classic soul, just filtered through lots of underground murk.
There's plenty more going on too, eighties style electro, funky handclap rhythms, John Carpenter-like synth grooves, and a super beautiful almost choral sounding closer, that is easily the prettiest thing here, but for the most part, the House Reverends are all about the lo-fi electro soul murky RnB weirdness, and we dig it!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! Housed in super swank hand screened sleeves.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Latest from this master of murky psychedelic slo-mo soul, and while we were expecting another batch of that distinctive HTDW warped and warbly lo-fi soul music, all ghostly and spectral and otherworldly, this 4 song 10" has definitely thrown us for a loop. It's still soul, just not really slo-mo, in fact, the three part title track sounds more like something you'd hear from Antony & The Johnsons, lush, piano driven, with soaring strings, and dreamy falsetto vox, if anything, this proves that HTDW can really sing, cuz this is all about his voice, and the lush accompaniment only adds drama and emotion, just gorgeous soulful pop, the songs stately and elegant, building to seriously cathartic climaxes, the third part is the most intense, a fantastic slab of lush chamber soul, a little bit hazy and softly psychedelic, but other than some reverb it still seems mostly unadorned, but really, it doesn't need anything else. The final track is about as close as things get to the more murky, witchy HTDW sound, and takes the strings from the title track, and those gorgeous vox, and adds a bit of murk, some subtly twisted effects, a cool skeletal hand clap rhythm, the Prince like vocals settled amidst the blurred dreamy soul, a perfect ending to a surprising, and surprisingly satisfying sonic detour, which has us wondering if this is a one off, or if the new full length might offer more of this less twisted murky sound, either way, we're psyched to hear more.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, but almost sold out. These may be the last copies we can get. Housed in a super swank sleeve, thick textured paper, with embossed lettering.
The first we heard from British sound artist Robin The Fog (here going by the name Howlround) was the stunning and mysterious lp The Ghosts Of Bush, which was sourced entirely from audio recorded in an abandoned building in the UK. It had been the home of the BBC's world service for seventy years, now left derelict, but somehow alive with strange sounds, captured and decontextualized into a haunting world of creaks and whirs, of shifting textures and buried melodies.
For Secret Songs Of Savamala, Robin set up in an abandoned house in Belgrade, with a flooded basement, the structure itself the palette, with open beams struck, surfaces rubbed and scraped, the sounds outside the house causing walls to vibrate, doors and windows to rattle, with some deft recording, and what sounds like some sort of haunting vocalizations, the sounds are whipped up into some sort of primitive ritualism, at times barely there, at others, nearly psychedelic, small soft cacophonies, that ebb and flow, dripping water, the clang of metal on metal, but more often than not, everything blurred and smeared into dreamlike soundscapes, lush and layered, rife with miniature sound events, all woven into languorous drifts, tape hiss and warble woven into the natural sounds, giving even the most mundane moments a woozy, hazy, faded feel, with other moments transformed into almost dublike trippiness.
Heady and hypnotic, this is some fantastic, and fantastically hypnotic deep listening, that we can get enough of. But it will have to hold us over until we get the OTHER new Robin The Fog record, that one sourced entirely from a squeaky iron gate!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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HSDOM is the sporadically active project of Jochen Hartmann, who runs the equally sporadic Phaserprone label with Jonas Asher, releasing grim, obscurant electronica with plenty of blank, macabre overtures. His own work doesn't fall too far from this axis with his grids of moody step-sequencing that modulate above skeletal rhythms and alien dronescapes. The tape begins almost innocently reclaiming a pleasant synth sequence that could have come by way of Suzanne Ciani, but things take a dive down the rabbit hole from there with some aggressive synth percolations dotting a plodding rhythm, ending with a very creepy horror-film swarm of tinkling bells and disembodied voices. It's akin to the early '80s Skinny Puppy demos and the early manglings of Severed Heads from around the same time. Great stuff, in other words! The B side begins with an eerie, ghost broadcast tone that gasps with haunted melodies slowly augmented by cybernetic skitterings caught in a dub-echo miasma. As the tone collapses into a tesla-coil oscillation, HSDOM slowly pours over a boiling concoction of caustic distortion and white-hot static. The tape concludes with a darkening obfuscation of Oneohtrix Point Never's sci-fi angularity through disjointed rhythms and tone clusters. Recommended. C40. Limited to 100 copies.
The last we heard from mysterious post industrial deadtech alchemist HSDOM was on a split cd-r from way back in 2009, which he shared with likeminded noisemaker SYNB aka Mat Brinkman of Load Records infamy, but on that split, with each artist reworking the sounds of the other, it was difficult to tell whose sounds were who, and to be honest at the time, it didn't matter, as both batches of reworked sound were incredible. So this limited cassette is actually our first true glimpse of what this Brooklyn by way of Berlin soundscaper is capable of, and much like that out of print split, it's a creepy, industrial, soundworld, of disembodied reverbed voices, churning, chugging, whirling rhythms, twisted swirling fractured effects, loads of hiss and static, rumble and crunch, the sounds swooping from speaker to speaker, slipping from rhythmic pulse to white noise blast, a barrage of looped lysergic mesmer, the garbled voices transformed into rhythms of their own, while the various electronics offer up their own confusional counter rhythms, blurred sea of blackened squiggles, hazy ambient sound turned into minimal thrumscapes, bleary streaks of gristly shimmer, peppered with common every day sonic detritus, all transformed via old microphones, mouldering magnetic tape, and damaged effects into some sort of crumbling futuristic transmission, sent from the cold grey past.
The second site starts out with some pulsing cold wave synths, slightly off, occasionally seeming to falter, or stumble, a haunting hypnotic malfunctioning machine groove, still underpinned with strange whispered voices, bits of distorted electronics, the synth tones gradually changing tone and timbre, clipped and brittle one second, warm and fluid the next, everything gauzy and hazy and washed out, the vibe growing more tense and claustrophobic, a minimal cinematic loopscape that evokes dread and darkness, gradually fading out to something much more shadowy and abstract, a looped bit of synthy soundtracky murk, that locks into a motorik groove, while all around, more strange voices, brittle sine wave tones, creaking glitched out electronics, mysterious low end croaks, all seems to float and shimmer like some dying sonic particle field. Haunting, otherworldly, dreamily disturbing, quite abjectly fantastic.
And of course, SUPER LIMITED!! Very likely the last copies we'll be able to get. Beautifully packaged in deluxe letterpressed, hand stamped J-cards, pro duplicated...
Been meaning to review this for a while now, the debut full length from Hubble, aka Ben Greenberg (Z's, Pygmy Shrews), who over these three longform pieces conjures up his own tranced out modern minimalism, which according to the label is "equal parts shred-fi, cyber-dread and fired psychedelia", which really is a fair description.
The first track here "Nude Ghost", begins as a swirling tangle of guitar melodies, a warped take on Reich / Riley minimalist mesmer, and very quickly, the layered melodies grow more and more dense, the tangles more, well, tangled, the runs of notes faster, until it's a flurry of swirling notes, almost like a guitar version of Lubomyr Melnyk, the same sort of dizzying shimmer, and while we'd be perfectly happy to listen to this head spinning swirl for ten minutes, Greenberg, adds a bit of subtle percussion, and lets the loops shift and slow down, growing more melodic, and strangely more melancholy as well, and as the buried rhythm becomes more prominent, other elements begin to surface, swirls of high end shimmer, more abstract bits of percussion, all manner of drones, but instead of being a huge mess, those other sounds are employed subtly and judiciously, and the track remains utterly mesmerizing, even with the addition of what sounds like synth squelches, the whole thing manages to grow busier, and more dense, but continues to pulse hypnotically.
The second track, the 20+ minute "Glass Napkin", begins with a stretch of droned out shimmer, as some riffing begins to surface, soon the shimmer is gone completely, and we're left with this distorted looped riffage, which sort of reminds us of a more academic abstract Blackwolfgoat, the sound growing more metallic and a bit more shreddy, the sound shifting between muted riffage, and wild tangled boogie and back again, sounding a bit like a modern minimal classical piece composed for Mick Barr and Tetuzi Akiyama. And finally, the record finishes off with the sort of title track "Hubble's Hubble" which drapes looped guitar noodle over a hissy staticky drone, the sound darkening as the track progresses, the static in the background becoming a moaning low end, before nearing the record's end, the notes start to fly fast and furious again, coalescing into a celestial swirl that sounds like some sort of manic looped kosmische bliss out. So good!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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John Hudak remains one of the underappreciated dronologists/lowercase composers, despite a number of really great albums notably "Brooklyn Bridge" and this album. "Don't Worry About Anything, I'll Talk To You Tomorrow" uses as its source material a phone conversation that took place between Hudak and his mother a year before she died. But the voices have been stripped of syllabic content to a bare sonorous abstraction with only the hints at conversational rhythms. Hudak uses these sounds to create a poetic miasma of timestretched insect-like shimmers and delicate tonalities that vibrate above a solemn quietness. A beautiful record that makes the impersonal and sterile Raster-label clickery seem, somehow, lacking.
When experimental composer John Hudak began working on his minimalist piece "Don't Worry About Anything; I'll Talk To You Tomorrow," he originally thought it would be released on vinyl, and so constructed two distinct movements (for the record's two
Hudak's work maintains a tenuous relationship with language, in particular the parallel between minimalism and haiku's communication of complex imagery through self-imposed restrictions. "Don't Worry About Anything" is one of Hudak's most evocative pieces, as he has stretched out the syllabic utterances of his mother's reassuring message into a delicate latticework of slow moving crystalline frequencies that exude a restrained sadness. That said, the unreleased movement doesn't really offer much more than the previously available version (which is ok if you don't have that), and neither do the remixes / reinterpretations on disc one by Jason Lescalleet, M. Behrens, Sukora, and Peter Duimelinks. However, disc two is far more interesting, with remixes / reinterpretations by Francisco Lopez, Eric Lanzillotta, Frans De Waard, and Leif Elggren. These four have all pulverized the original source material into granular rumblings and dense textural drones that offer uneasy responses to the delicacy of the original.
John Hudak's minimalist sound experiments have often utilized single source materials. But unlike the elemental singularity of Aube where water, flourescent bulbs, and oscilators are transmogrified into almost interchangeable, dense noise fields, Hudak's choices are based upon the metaphoric content of the subject matter as in "Don't Worry About Anything..." which broke apart an
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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While the origins for Hudak's sounds are purposefully ambiguous, the high-end shimmering drones appear with a clear organic textural density to them, that could easily be digitally timestretched chirps of crickets, locusts, or other twilight insects. Hudak pushes the envelope of these crystaline sounds close to the pain threshold, but restrains from going into Whitehouse territory for a more trancendental listening experience.
Pieces of Winter was born of two compositions that the sound artists John Hudak and Stephan Mathieu recorded as holiday gifts for their friends during the 2002 Christmas season. Hudak is reknowned for his stone-faced minimalism of deconstructed acoustic phenomenon; and for -his- seasonal recording buried a contact microphone in the snow and captured the sound of the snow turning to ice. Mathieu had composed a piece with Eva-Lucy Mathieu for pump organ and ocarina, which in turn he transformed into calm and exquisitely warm piece of delicate drones. Commissioned by the Portugese label Sirr, the two married their previous recordings into a gentle exercise for minimalist grace, in which the two have removed all recognizable traces of the source material's distinctive qualities and extracted digital fragments that allude to the poetry of winter, snow, and the cold without overtly stating it. Steady cracklings form a steady stream of hushed gray textures, accentuated by crystalline pinpricks of pristine feedback whistlings. Later on, Pieces of Winter glistens with the delicate glitch collages that have become a signature for Mathieu on his celebrated Full Swing album. A word of warning, this album is very quiet, and you really have crank the volume to perceive the amount of detail found within!
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"Figure 2" is the second collaboration for sound artists John Hudak and Jason Lescalleet. Hudak's sound work is an extension of his work with delicate amplifications of emotive sounds which normally exist below the threshold of audibility, sounding like a
On an undisclosed winter night when the first blizzard of the season hit the Boston area, Hudak and Lescalleet were perfoming inside the warm confines of the Lindsay Chapel of the First Church Congregational in Cambridge. The first snow is always a mixed blessing as it offers on one hand the dramatic shift in the landscape from the drab grey of autumn to the blinding whites of early winter, yet on the other the snow obviously signifies the inevitability of cold weather. "Figure 2" subconsciously speaks of these dual emotions conjured by the encroaching winter. Using manipulations of recycled sounds from the dark old chapel itself, Hudak and Lescalleet present a series of slow sub-bass drones punctuated by eerie creakings of the wooden architecture and whistling tones from the wind rushing through cracks in the windows.
There's been so much amazing, dark minimal techno lately we can barely keep up, and so much good stuff, that even the techno haters here have come around. Recently we've been inundated with killer records from Shed, Terrence Dixon, Chasing Voices, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Kowton, Miles, Function, Silent Servant, and even techno influenced outliers like Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, etc.
You can add Huerco S. to the list. And while we know, a quick Google search, and we could tell you all about Huerco S., his real name, where he's from, what other group's he's played in, all that jazz, but sometimes not knowing anything is way better, especially when it comes to music like this. Colonial Patterns sounds so mysterious, it's murky, and moody, washed out, minimal and abstract, the sounds are crumbly and faded, the beats are barely there, more like buried pulsations, hushed rhythmic swells, a rumbling throb, wreathed in all manner of sonic detritus, so much so, that we're loathe to even really qualify this as techno. It has techno elements for sure, but to these ears it has much more in common with folks like Tim Hecker or the Caretaker, atmospheric ambience, everything wasted and decayed, even the melodies sound half formed, and ancient, as if over the course of the record, they've gradually been eroded, existing now more as sonic shadows, as audio imprints of sounds lost and faded away, some tracks are formed from fragmented vocals, looped into maddeningly tranced out soft focus stutters, which gradually blur into pure sound, the 'vocals' absorbed into something greater, like a way more arcane, abstract version of the Field, the beats are barely ever actually beats, more like skeletal arrangements of rhythmic elements, on some tracks, the beats consist of nothing more than fractured fields of static, possibly the result of gunked up tape heads, yet somehow, the results are magical, and yeah, mysterious. The tracks that do exist closer to proper techno, even those display all manner of warped sonic anomalies, swirling and psychedelic, on the verge of collapse, held together by the most skeletal of rhythmic support, while others are purely abstract arrangements of sound and rhythm, rhythm and sound, dubby, droney, drowsy, dirgey, strange samples surfacing throughout, only to be re-engineered into something wholly other, stumbling, skittering, stuttering, lurching, lumbering, woozy, meditative, hypnotic and mesmerizing, totally alien, yet strangely warm and soothing, tranquil and totally and utterly entrancing. Definitely a contender for year end lists, electronic / techno or otherwise, and a new unanimous aQ fave!!!
Silence... thunder... shudder... shadow... those are some of the things evoked even by the first minute or so of this isolationist dark ambient piece crafted by the multi-talented Scott Hull, best known as the guitarist of grind heroes Pig Destroyer, also of Agoraphobic Nosebleed fame. The whole thing, which mostly just gets darker and more disturbing as it flows on, is about 12:36 in length, one track fitting neatly on a 3" cd (not cd-r, cd). We love it when we get actual 3" cds! Though we really like it when they come in those tiny little jewel cases (like tUMULt's Bathtub Shitter and Professor 3" releases). Whereas this is packaged in a cardboard sleeve. Looks good though, with appropriately atmospheric graphics by Seldon Hunt.
Titled Audiofilm 1, this is presumably the first in a series of limited edition 3" cds on Crucial Blast. Hull's "audiofilm" is a scary one. Dramatic, sudden percussive clashings. Dronological whoosh. Nightmare heartbeat pulsations. The hiss and gurgle of some malevolent monster. Waves of whispery electronic terror... Don't worry, it's just a little 3" cd. It can't really hurt you. And some of it is actually lullingly beautiful, as with the gentle bell sounds tinkling about 7-8 minutes in.
LIMITED EDITION. 1000 copies only (which seems like a lot, but Pig Destroyer are pretty popular). We only got a few, and don't know if we'll be able to get more. (But we also have a Scott Hull solo full-length on Relapse, another imaginary soundtrack styled ambient effort, to be reviewed in future.)
Tomorrow is the first ever solo record from Carl Hultgren, aka Carl of psychedelic bliss pop drifters Windy & Carl, and we're happy to report, that even on his own, the sound doesn't fall to far from the dreamy psychedelia of W&C.
Lush, layered guitars capes, that shimmer and glimmer, soft strums are blurred into heaving billows of chordal thrum, notes chime, and harmonics ring out, distortion if muted and smeary, and gives everything a druggy, dreamy vibe, all sun dappled and blissed out. There are some subtle bits of processing, electronics here and there, even some buried rhythms, but for the most part, Tomorrow is all glistening guitars, softly soaring, sonic streaks across the heavens, that blur into hazy, prismatic driftscapes, with some tracks reminding us of the Durutti Column for sure, the same sort of soft focus melancholia, but others getting downright noisy, a bit darker, even then though, the sound has a heavenly glow, a warm, enveloping sonic center that bathes everything in a blissful soft afternoon light. Others are strummy and melodic, with spidery guitars wrapped around a skeletal Appalachia, again all softly smeared into something a bit more otherworldly, and ethereal, a wonderfully wistful collection of soft-psych, dream-drift blissout.
The cd version is limited to 350 copies and comes in a nice, hand letterpressed sleeve, with full color pasted on front cover artwork, the 2lp version is limited to 500 copies, comes in a heavy gatefold sleeve and is pressed on one black lp, and one orange. Both come with a download code, with 6 bonus tracks available only via the download!
Record number two from the mysteriously monickered Hum Of The Druid, and as we mentioned in the review of the first lp, that's exactly what you'll hear, some serious druidic hum, which is just something we made up so you'll just have to take our word for it. The follow up takes the already intense and heavy caustic drones of the first lps and takes it even further. Darker, filthier, heavier. At times it almost sounds like field recordings of a construction site chopped up and assembled into something slightly more musical, at others it sounds like Earth, circa 2, overdosed and slumped against a wall of Sunn amps cranked to 10, and at still others, it sounds a bit like someone spinning Masonna records on a busted Victrola. Indeed.
Massive swells of sound, all low end, and we mean VERY low end, super blown out, crumbling, Merzbowian, vast expanses of speaker destroying rumble, giving way to stretches of sound much more tranquil, like Masami Akita mixing Wolf Eyes. Sheets of murky industrial drift wreathed in corrosive buzz and wallowing in downtuned tectonic filth. Some parts sound like wind blowing on a microphone, but cranked to danger levels, other parts sound like a million turntables with the needle stuck in the run off groove of some super scratched up old record, peppered with the clatter and clank of some alien machinery, it's almost like a stereo test record, but instead of tones, it's a series of long, sprawling slabs of super intense drone, and speaker shredding grind and buzz. It's all very deep and abrasive, caustic and corrosive, but actually strangely mesmerizing.
Gorgeous and super creepy cover art too! We only have 15 copies and then it's gone for good...
Hum of the druid indeed. Rarely does a band name so perfectly capture the essence of a band's sound. Societal is just one massive LP length druidic hum. The name may be spot on but the cover is a bit misleading, with its creepy evil Rudimentary Peni style cover, it definitely smacks of some obscure doom metal record, or when you also figure in the name, some sort of neo folk new weird America whatever. But no, Hum Of The Druid is indeed about THE HUM, which is essentially THE DRONE, which means this is definitely going to hit the spot for drone obsessives. However, unlike the slowly shifting static quality of a lot of drone records, Societal is a thick and roiling sonic stew, about as unsmooth as you can get. Static, crackle, hum, fuzz, the sound of ocean surf, radio interference, white noise, pink noise, record run off, it's as if HOTD took every naturally and un-naturally occurring source of hum and constructed this gorgeously thick layered chunk of squirming, twisting, shifting hum. It's ambient sure, but an impossibly grinding ambience, like some long lost Japanoise record with all the edges sanded off, or like listening to My Bloody Valentine, through the one remaining blown speaker on your car stereo, with the bass all the way up and the treble all the way down, rendering everything a warm mewling rumbly hum. Imagine listening to your favorite record with EVERY single cord and cable connecting your stereo components and speakers, pulled out far enough where they're just barely in there, the connection so tenuous, that your favorite record becomes an orchestra of bad connections, with only the occasional glimpse of the melody and music beneath the suffocating smear of glitch and crackle and indeed hum!
We recently reviewed a full length lp from Hum Of The Druid, Raising The New Wing..., a mighty caustic slab of noise drenched drones and fucked up ambience. For a record that harsh and harrowing, we really couldn't stop listening to it (and yeah, we have a few copies left). So we were psyched to discover a new record by them (him?), a split with another noisemaker we dig, but have yet to review anything by.
The Hum Of The Druid side is more of what we've been hankering for. A dense sea of crumbling distortion and blown out grit, a spray of grizzled amp buzz and all manner of hum and crackle and glitch. There are brief interludes of abstract ambience, laced with bits of feedback, but those are merely brief respites from the relentless onslaught. The HotD side ends with some super creeped out blackened drones, lots of distorted in-the-red low end, and tortured anguished howls buried way down in the mix, culminating in a super jagged speaker destroying crunch and glitch outro.
Fire In The Head most definitely hold their own, opening with slithery slowed down guitar drones, underneath creepy fucked up samples, plenty of buzz and glitch, all over a thick sea of processed rumbles and whirs, there's definitely an old school industrial vibe, intense and haunting, lots of vocal samples. It all builds to a seriously fired filed of static, underpinning cool super effected demonic vokills, doused in distortion and reverb. Super super creepy. The side ends with some awesomely distorted blown out rhythms, all stuttery and chopped up, like some damaged metallic noise dub. Cool.
Super nice packaging. Thick black sleeve with paste on covers on each side, and Rudimentary Peni fans take note, the Fire In The Head side features original Nick Blinko artwork! Also includes a printed insert / lyric sheet, and of course, it's ultra limited, and we only got a handful.
Krautrock and weird music fans all around the world MUST being living right, to earn up the good karma required for something this cool and unexpected and downright uber-historic to drop into our laps. A previously unreleased, live concert recording from a pre-Cluster (and pre-Kluster) krautrock ensemble featuring Hans-Joachim Roedelius, from way back in 1968. Wow. Who knew? Maybe not even Roedelius, who apparently not long ago just received a tape of this in the mail from an "anonymous donor", someone who'd lugged recording equipment to the underground (literally) music club Zodiak several decades earlier and captured this show, then filed it away like a sonic time capsule of late '60s Berlin freakdom, i.e. Human Being, an amorphous collective of (mostly) non-musicians, a sort of "noise orchestra" that found a home at the Zodiak (a club co-organized by Roedelius's comrade Conrad Schnitzler), touring also all the way to Morocco we're told, but never releasing a record... until now!
This rare document consists of one lengthy track, 56 and a half minutes long, of utter loud "early industrial" featuring guitar, organ, drums, saxophone, cello... and tons and tons of electronic FX, lots of echo and delay, feedback and tape loops, and what sounds like shortwave radio static... proving that there's nothing new under the sun, once again, THIS WAS DONE OVER 40 YEARS AGO FOLKS! Sounds like something we'd be selling on a cd-r from some floorcore noise-drone outfit nowadays!
20th century avant garde meets the anarchic spirit of the freeform psychedelic rock scene, with murky droning pulsations and percussive clatter building building into an insistent heavy throb by the end of the piece. It's abstract out-there stuff indeed, difficult to describe (the deep foghorn like rumbles remind us of Yoshi Wada's Earth Horns, if that helps). But you should experience it for yourself, especially if you're into the more droned out, free improv, experimental side of krautrock (or of anything)!
Given that it's cool this is available at all, we really shouldn't complain about anything, but we will say the digipack doesn't look quite the way we'd like it to... the cover illustration and cd booklet frankly seem a bit cheesy to us, in fact we almost ignored this as a result when we first saw it (don't judge a book by its cover, all right all right) just 'cause, well, it's too modern generic computery designy lookin', those fonts, that art, yuck. But, the text of the extensive liner notes is informative anyway, and besides it's really the music that STILL matters, 40+ years on from when Human Being originally hit the scene, now thanks to this release more than just an obscure footnote to the career of the very much still musically active (in Cluster, solo, and other collaborations) Hans-Joachim Roedelius.
More minimal wave weirdness from the archives of Alain Neffe, who was responsible for the huge archive of Insane Music tapes which were released back in '80s with all sorts of death disco rhythms, caterwauling electronics, and Cronenberg allusions to sex, death, and the demise of modern culture. Earlier in 2012, we discovered Neffe's recordings as Cortex, with cooing French female vocals and cosmically baroque electronic ambience. Given how much we (and quite a number of you as well!) were smitten by the sidereal radiophonic explorations of Cortex, which we went so far as to make a Record Of The Week, we've found yet another of Neffe's early projects - Human Flesh. Throughout the '80s, this was pretty much a solo project of his, although the entire Insane Music catalogue finds Neffe working with a small cadre of vocalists and electronic tinkerers. Pseudo Code was another of Neffe's projects, featuring Guy-Marc Hinant (who later founded Sub Rosa Records) and Xavier S; and this trio was quite active recording and performing from 1979 to about 1983.
One day in 1982, Neffe had set up the studio for a session of Pseudo Code recordings, waiting for Guy-Marc and Xavier to show up. Instead, a friend from a distant Belgian town arrived at the studio unannounced. This fellow was named Guy de Bievre, and the two decided to use the all of the settings on the synths, sequencers, and drum machines originally for the Pseudo Code sessions to create something for Neffe's Human Flesh project. The Pseudo Code sound was much more dialed into the Cabaret Voltaire ethos of electronics with minimalist sequencing and plodding rhythms that inspired dread and horror. Neffe and Bievre add expressivist blooping electronics, scattered guitar distortion, and some punk-poet barking to the rhythmic sequences, that could almost be a Richard Pinhas & Chris Carter duet from that same period, if such as thing could be imagined. A single track of snaking electronic rhythms, splattered with cold melodies, haunted blurting noises, and those occasional vocals that all come together as a fine piece of industrial mesmerism. Limited to 300 copies!
Michael Begg's name first came to our attention through those beguiling Fovea Hex albums which smeared and obsfucated the tropes of British Folk with a crushed velvet ambience, although it was hard to discern who might have been responsible for such activities given the heavy hitters that dot the Fovea Hex line-up, including Brian Eno, Clodagh Simonds, Colin Potter, and Andrew McKenzie. Begg was obviously a very good artist to recruit for Fovea Hex as he pursues an aesthetic of extracting a beautiful melancholy from any number of acoustic and electronic instruments. All of this is majestically on display here in his Human Greed project with Deryk Thomas. Fortress Longing is a nocturnal album through and through, with subtle melodic passages coming in and out of focus through a shimmering, gauzy sheen that wouldn't be out of place on the arrangements for any given Current 93 album. Violin, psaltery, piano, bells, and wordless female vocals all enter the Human Greed smears of post-classical ambience and obscurant sound design that cross back and forth between the Caretaker's weepingly nostalgic crackling and emotionally draining yet placid interludes found in Godspeed! You Black Emperor.
NOW ON VINYL VIA HANDMADE BIRDS!! Here's the review we wrote when the cd version came out on Utech...
Part three in the Human Quena Orchestra's ever evolving sonic mission to create what could possibly be the darkest, and most intense post industrial metallic blacknoise EVER. Not like there's a lot of competition, and having worked our way now through all three records, even if there were any other outfits foolhardy to have a go at HQO, they'd most likely be dispatched in short order. As anyone who's heard either Means Without Ends or The Politics Of The Irredeemable can attest to. Easily, two of the bleakest, most abject and miserable collections of hellish hymns and burntblack dronescapes ever committed to tape. HQO's modus operandi is a combination of caustic black buzz, of pounding machine like percussion and howling anguished shrieked vokills, all wound tight into throbbing, churning, nightmarish chunks of jagged black filth, and crusty musical misanthropy. Think the usual suspects, Khanate, diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter, Skepticism, Esoteric, even Swans, and then tune it further down, slow it further down, pile on layer after layer of suffocating buzz, of oozing soul crushing low-end, and let it fester, and rot, and crumble and decay, and you'll begin to get close to the strange and sick soundworld of HQO.
A Natural History Of Failure finds HQO mastermind Ryan Unks, joined by a handful of likeminded volunteers, each adding their own secret ingredients to Unks' noxious brew, and weirdly enough, if anything, more players has not resulted in more sound, or more accurately, the sound itself does seem MORE, more dense, heavier, thicker, more filthy and fraught with emotional peril, but the songs, the structures, somehow seem even more minimal. The opening track is more a thick, pulsing drone, a dense layered funereal creep, the sounds burnt and blown out, a single riff slowed down to near static, and left to churn and chug in slow motion, while more and more buzz and thrum and hiss is piled on top, a sound so heavy and so dense, it seems constantly on the verge of collapse. The second track two is more drone than crush or pummel, beginning as a hushed distant throb, an impossibly deep low end that drifts beneath ethereal streaks of grey melody, processed voices, and textured whirs, the sound builds to a furious roil, only to settle back down into what sounds like a symphony of warped SUNNO))) records, being played simultaneously with the needle stuck in the runoff grooves. And so it continues, a warped tarpit drift, vocals only show up in track three, and even then, so low in the mix, they just sound like jagged shards of static, nearly suffocated by the heaving rumbles above.
The whole first half of the record is constant low end punishment, but part 5 is where it changes, a processed voice, stretched into a perpetual moan, a looped bit of human bred sonic texture, over a lumbering bit bit of low-end, soon subsumed by a dense cloud of corrosive hiss, of swirling white noise, which leads directly into the most minimal track on the record, a hushed minimal pulse, warm and languid, but still subtly menacing, laced with high end shimmer, and blurred tinkling melodies, leading you gently into a truly ominous and monstrous plod, a robotic pound, trudging along a series of deep buzzing swells, being slowly torn apart by some sort of static driven industrial grey noise demon, the sound rendered and recontextualized into a slowly stuttery field of deep whirs and jagged shards of crumbling static, before finally finishing off with a brief bit of muted beauty, again, the sound impossibly thick and heavy, but blurred into something almost shoegazey, but still grim and gorgeously hopeless.
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Various permutations of this disc have been floating around for a while, each in various states of completeness, but every one we'd heard sounded even better than the last. But this is the one, the final, finished product. The long in the works Human Quena Orchestra, the work of Ryan Unks, formerly of techgrind combo Creation Is Crucifixion, but don't be expecting grind, or even technicality, this all the way on the other side of the spectrum. Abject, filthy, pummeling, slow motion noise drenched doom. A plodding sonic monster, guitars, not just distorted, but treated and twisted into harsh, skin scraping, caustic slabs of sinister sound, a low end so thick, it's like dunking your head in a cement mixer, insane sounding drums, each snare crack like the recording of a million breaking windows, each kick drum the sound of a slowed down car wreck. And beneath it all, thick swells of black ambience, drifting and slithering, pulsing and swelling. A lurching, stumbling blackened doom dirge behemoth.�
Think�Swans, Godflesh, Pitchshifter, that sort of machinelike apocalyptic industrial pound, mixed with some funereal ultra doom a la Moss, Bunkur, etc., but filtered through a druggy psychedelia, with a minimal shimmery drone bent, that ends up sounding like a way more�brutal, way more harsh, tripped out, psychedelic, industrial version of Jesu, that sort of blissed out sun baked vibe, but as if played by some misanthropic black metal horde,�harsh blackened vocals, shrieking hysterically and growling demonically over the relentless amp melting metallic trudge. Every track is rife with layer after layer of undulating low end. Like being tossed about on a stormy sea, but instead of water, it's an endless expanse of roiling black sound waves, rumbling drones, and thick snarled streaks of throbbing bass.�
The magic Of Unks' Human Quena Orchestra though is that this hellish harshness is balanced with a nearly equal amount of meditative ambience, long stretches of deep shimmer, and even some of the harshest tracks are tempered by the swirling low end drift lurking beneath. So brutally gorgeous. Definitely essential listening for fans of all the above mentioned outfits, as well as Monarch, Nadja, the Angelic Process, Fear Falls Burning, Skullflower, Abruptum, Monument Of Urns, Trollmann, Khanate, The Body and all our favorite purveyors of crumbling downtuned beauty and dreamy damaged doom.
Packaged in a gorgeous hand screened multiple panel fold over sleeve with super striking ADD style microscopic super detailed artwork.�
Record number two from the strangely named Human Quena Orchestra, whose first record, Means Without Ends, was one of the most devastating slabs of blackened post industrial ultra doom ever, an abject crawl through layer upon layer of impossibly thick downtuned buzz, massive walls of crumbling distortion, pounding percussion, we mentioned groups like Godflesh and Pitchshifter and Swans, as well as Moss and Bunkur, but even on that record, HQO were going somewhere darker, and deeper, heavier and way more extreme. Take those same bands and mix in some Whitehouse, some Khanate, diSEMBOWELMENT, Thergothon, Lustmord, HQO is the soundtrack to a descent into hell, or at least sounds exactly how we imagine that must sound. Pants shittingly terrifying.
For the follow up, HQO mainman (and only man) Ryan Unks, was joined by his former Creation Is Crucifixion bandmate Nathan Berlinguette, and the two spent months and months meticulously crafting this slab of bleak aural terror. Sampling drums, recording guitars and basses, creating loops and samples, layering and assembling and arranging, recording and rerecording and mixing and remixing, two sonic alchemists poised above their slumbering golem, waiting for the perfect moment to bring it to life.
The Politics Of The Irredeemable is absolutely epic, monstrous, stunning in its scope, if the first record was the soundtrack to an earth stripped bare, of death and destruction and pestilence, then this record is the sound of the end of all life in the universe, of planets hurtling into suns, of stars collapsing into black holes, but the thing is, the music here is much more personal and emotional, it carries the weight of a universal apocalypse, but is more the sound of sadness, personal hell, not a literal trip down the rabbit hole, gnashing teeth and eternal hellfire, this is much more tactile and REAL, it's easy to describe music like this abstractly, but this is some seriously intense and brutal, and stunningly introspective heaviness.
Unlike most of the sludge and doom, where the bands play as low as they can, tune down until the stings are hanging loose on the fretboard, playing as loud as they possibly can, and as slow and they are able, the elements that make up Human Quena Orchestra's sound world are deliberate, are crafted to evoke specific emotions, to conjure up images, to help your mind relate to the message within the music. Four long long tracks, two split into distinct parts, the opener "Progress" plays out like most bands' entire records. A heaving crush of downtuned crunch, the vocals wild and hysterical, wrapped in reverb and often left to wail in the wide open, only occasionally joined by the pound of a drum, or the slow motion avalanche of the next chord. All the while the sky is streaked with feedback and long buzzing tones, all woven into undulating smears, lit from below by buried melodies and a patina of cymbal sizzle. For 13 minutes, the darkness becomes sound, and that sound swallows the listener whole, preparing him for the harrowing musical journey to come.
The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between sprawling expanses of windswept ambience, distant moaning whir and barely audible subterranean drones, deep bell like tones drifting along slow swirls of muted melodies, and lurching crushing slow motion sludge, but sludge seems too dismissive in the case of HQO, this is not filthy or crusty or lo-fi, it's definitely dark and harsh, but hauntingly beautiful, the crush and crunch are strangely lush and rich, layered and textured, the sound becoming almost orchestral at points, often receding into the background, an ominous backdrop to the slow slither of sounds up front, at its harshest, the sounds gather up into a squall of white noise, but even then the edges are dull and rounded, the noise is muted so instead of being brutal or painful, it manages to throb and pulse like the beating of a dying heart, that beating echoed by the reverbed crash of a lone drum, pounding out a simple rhythm, nearly obfuscated by the haze of rumble and buzz, the record finally coalescing into something resembling hopefulness, the last minute or so, a warm glowing ember of drone, drifting, drifting and then slowly fading out. It seems impossible that something this heavy and harsh and brutal and blackened could be so beautiful...
The duo of drummer Thomas Stronen (Food) and keyboardist Stale Storlokken (Supersilent) are back with a second album of playful, percolating improvisation on the ever-reliable Rune Grammofon label. Now these Norwegians are calling themselves Humcrush, which was the title of their album from last year, issued under their own names. Whatever they call it, the music they make is pretty neat. It's a restless blend of live instruments and electronics that somehow sounds catchy and composed, even though this is live-in-the-studio improv. Maybe it's too obscure of a reference, but Humcrush could perhaps be likened to a collision between the Shaking Ray Levis and Autechre. Inventive, very much rhythmically alive and full of glitchy abstraction, some of Hornswoogle would make groovy music for a jungle-themed lounge populated by dancing robots. Other parts feature cinematic atmospheres, or bleepy bloopy computer jingles, or sitar-y keyboards, or what sound a bit like fractured calypso beats... all very exotic and inventive and (importantly) quite listenable, considering it's just Stronen and Storlokken shaking out their respective bags of tricks, on the go. And then the final track, "Cyborg I" takes a turn for the uneasy. It's like the part of a horror film where the doll comes to life and kills everybody (sez Pam).
Years and years ago, a handful of cd-r's showed up in the mail, obviously black metal, it took us a while to figure out what or who it was, the group's logo, fantastically illegible, the artwork abstract and black and white, shapes and skulls, altars and shadows, and the music, woah, dark and ritualistic, buzzy and blackened and pretty goddamn weird, we eventually discovered it was in fact a 'band' called Homunculus, but were never able to get copies for the shop. We've been fans of Texas industrial noisescapers and black drone technicians Husere Grav for a while now, and only just discovered, that the man behind Homunculus is in fact also Husere Grav. But don't be expecting black metal here, HG traffic in a bleak, blackened, post industrial ambience, huge heaving swaths of Lustmordian rumbles, sprawling bleak soundworlds that are equal parts Wolf Eyes at their most minimal, and the grim, kvlt ritualism of Abruptum, all blurred and smeared into hazy expanses of black sonic murmur, and abstract metallic shimmer, abject soundworlds of blunted blacknoize and crumbling squalls of static, most of the tracks here surprisingly tranquil, heady, meditative soft noise minimalism, which sounds at times quite a bit like The Caretaker, albeit a bit noisier and low fidelity, or Caretaker offshoot The Stranger, sculpted static, and buried murky melodies. While folks into black metal, and black ambience, and ritualistic dronemusic will of course dig, the sound here is shot through with a buried beauty, that casts You Are Transparent, as something almost more aligned with Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker or Leyland Kirby, which is most definitely a very good thing.
Super deluxe packaging, the disc, housed in a dvd case, with a sixteen page black and white art zine, wrapped in a Japanese style obi, with a sticker and a button. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Finally some new music from aQ faves FRKSE, whose last lp, Guilt Surveillance, we made Record Of The Week, and for good reason. A stunning collection of home brewed mad scientist rhythmic experiments, all twisted loops, mutated samples, home built machines, noise and sonic detritus, somehow sculpted into heady, hypnotic, robotic soundscapes, reminding us a bit of Strotter Inst, but even more damaged and decayed, the sound gorgeously hypnotic, but at the same time, like the soundtrack to some dystopian wasteland. But before we get to the new FRKSE tracks, this here is a split, with another aQ fave, Husere Grav, a Texan one man band who specializes in harrowing, Lustmordian black ambience, and twisted industrial soundscapery, and these tracks here are some of his best yet. The opener, a haunting sonic smoldering, that sounds like a blackened Caretaker, all buried melodies, wistful and melancholic, but wreaths in crumbling, rumbling buzz, and burnished hiss and whir, hazy and hypnotic, we would have been more than happy if this dystopian drift filled up the whole side, but instead, the sound shifts into something even more abstract, what sounds like a field recording of some subterranean passage, the whir of distant machines, fragments of conversation, all blurred and smeared into a dreamlike sibilance, and amidst this sort of slow moving, near static shimmer, all manner of melody and texture seem to fade in and fade out, ghostly and ephemeral. The rest of the side is easily the most lovely stuff we've heard yet from Husere Grav, no caustic crunch, no ominous rumbling, instead, it's a darkly delicate sprawl of reverberant thrum, softly pulsing tones, all spread out into lush layers, deep dense billows of sound, softly haunting, deeply tranquil, some seriously lowercase, cinematic, slo-mo bliss out of the highest order. Fans of hushed ambient drift and deeeeeep listening drone music will be smitten for sure.
The FRKSE side is just as good as we expected/hoped. A ramshackle assemblage of beats, percussion, rhythm, some bits sound like actual drums, but mostly it sounds like found sounds, hiss and static from old records, the clang of metal on metal, the pulse and throb of an lp run off groove, what might be plucked rubber bands, or a processed heartbeat, who knows, and who cares! The sound settles into a totally hypnotic rhythm right out of the gate, and then the sound is constantly in flux, a sort of junkyard industrial, the main rhythm, gathering noise and detritus as it goes, whether that's simply more rhythm, or thick swaths of crumbling crunch, or squalls of hissy, staticky psychedelia. Like pretty much every track we've heard from FRKSE, it's so immediately mesmerizing, you sort o never want it to end, but invariably it does, only to conjure up a new rhythm, which is equally enthralling. But here, that first rhythm fades out, leaving the surrounding sounds to swirl and shimmer, a long stretch of soft-noise ambience, that like the HG side is surprisingly lovely, only to culminate in one final rhythmic stretch, a slow brooding bit of almost doom sounding lope, but it's not heavy, instead, it's a muted pulse, a lumbering, somnambulant groove, a dreamily lovely tarpit-creep, that again, sounds like it's being performed by junkyard automatons, or some strange crew of cobbled together robots, but the amazing thing is that it doesn't sound robotic, it sounds human, and emotional, the sound infused with a haunting, pathos, a melancholia, that transforms it into something otherworldly. Fantastic!
Beautiful packaging too, simple plain white covers with a piece of white plaster/gauze affixed to the front. Includes two inserts. NO download. And as you might imagine. EXTREMELY limited!
Quite possibly one of the nicest lp packages we have seen. Definitely top 10. Hard to even know how to describe it. You sort of have to hold int and unfold it and feel the texture and the heft. Wow. Thick textured cardstock, fastened all over with black rivets, the whole thing embossed and letterpressed with black ink, abstract designs and very classy looking calligraphy, the back is die cut about half way down, so it opens like a barn door, split down the middle, held shut by black string, once opened, it reveals the 180 gram lp nestled inside as well as still more embossed design and text. So gorgeous.
And the music is definitely deserving of such over the top extra attention. A reissue of a long out of print cd-r, Hush Arbors explore a dark murky side of their soul, a drifting cloudy otherworld of soft freefolk bliss, flecked with all manner of detuned guitars, warped melodies, creaking percussive clatter, shimmery effervescence, but with a definite ominous edge, a lo-fi Third eye Foundation recording for Siltbreeze maybe? But with more twang, and more shuffle, and more delicate dreaminess. So nice.
An essential dreamfolk / free folk / folknoise / dronetwang artifact beautifully preserved and offered up again for a very limited time.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each copy hand numbered, we got a bunch but these definitely won't last.
Long overdue reissue of the out of print debut from Hush Arbors, aka Keith Wood. These tracks are warm and rich, hazy and mysterious free folk explorations of the highest order, each track like some long lost artifact, buried beneath a hundred year old tree, in the middle of the forest, and only just discovered, dusted off and allowed to play...
Woozy warbly drones, thick and dense, rumble and whir over a delicate bed of foresty folk, dreamy and blissy and otherworldly. Wood's fragile falsetto soars high above, another soft swirly layer in the dense tapestry of Hush Arbors' sound. This is exactly what you would expect to hear stumbling upon a forest cathedral, a mighty structure of bent limb trees, thick foliage, a soft wet bed of leaves underfoot, dark but for occasional shafts of sunlight, somber with hushed reverence but so alive and infused with energy, warm and safe and beautiful. Some tracks are fragile dreamlike folk, reminding us a bit of the Skygreen Leopards, due in no small part to the sweet swoonsome oh so high vocals, while other tracks forego melody completely instead opting to drift lazily, wrapping the word in a wreath of sonic shimmer.
Packaged in a plastic sleeve with a cool gold metallic paper sleeve. Includes brief liner notes from Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny.
All scrap metal, all the time. Hal Hutchinson's sound demolition begins and ends with a piece of metal being dragged, bent, hammered, twisted, thrown, crushed, and generally abused within a relatively enclosed space. Industrial culture has long been enamored with abandoned warehouses rich with concrete reverberation and the transgressive thrill of breaking and entering into such a space to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting air-conditioning duct. Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Dept., Z'ev, The New Blockaders, Organum, Merzbow, and many others have collected the detritus from the urban wasteland and turned those tools into a rich vocabulary of muscularity, guttural exuberance, and violent expressionism. The British noise sculptor Hutchinson takes this obsession to the extremes in building his entire musical language on the aggregation of acoustic noise from scrap metal. In the lengthy essay mapping out the aesthetic progression of his work, Hutchinson describes a goal of occupying the space between heavily structured forms of industrial music (e.g. Test Dept., Vivenza, etc.) and the more freeform approach to noise, seeking "a kind of 'ordered chaotic' state." Hutchinson is not one for the metal-bashed rhythms, and more inclined to repeat cyclical textures into a dense miasma that is equal parts controlled symphony and demolition site collapse. Strangely meditatively in delving into this throng of metal machine music for close to 60 minutes of tumbling car-crash frenzy.
The name Huzun might not ring a bell, but for folks tuned into the experimental music scene in New Zealand or who are avid collectors of micro edition cd-r releases, you might know the names behind Huzun: Andrew Scott and Tim Coster. Andrew Scott is one half of the duo Nest, along with Nigel Wright, whose Flotter record has been a HUGE hit around here, and who shared a collaborative release last year with Mr. Coster.
So for Huzun, Scott teams up with Coster once again, this time minus Wright, for a disc of super minimal metallic melodic dronemusic. A 35 minute slow crawl through murky expanses of subterranean low end, dense clouds of slowed down whale call-like melodies buried beneath grinding swells of soft whirring blur, like exploring some lost underground city by torchlight, what sounds like bats fluttering overhead, strange sounds off in the distance like the buzz of insects, all over a deep dark rumbling like some sort of machine buried beneath the city. Haunting and harrowing, minimal and mysterious, at the same time subtly melodic and darkly mesmerizing.
More essential listening for all you dronelords and ladies...
Been waiting a long time for this one. The last two Hwyl Nofio's were and still are all time AQ faves, and judging from how many we sell, you all most likely feel the same! And a cd-r of Anatomy Of Distort has been on CONSTANT repeat play at home. Which makes sense since we described an earlier Hwyl record as being our "absolute favorite bliss out, late night, chill out record ever!". And Anatomy Of Distort takes HN's sound even farther in that direction, if that were even possible. All of the more traditional song like elements present on the first two records have been stripped away, leaving a ghostly trace, a wavering sonic imprint of some mysterious sound that once was, but that is slowly and purposefully revealing itself to us, bit by bit, slivers of sound slipping into our line of sight, distant melodies, slowly materializing at the farthest reaches of our perceptible sound field. Haunting, drifing clouds of lower register thrum,
faraway pizzicato melodies, percussion built from expansive empty room clatter, the thud of ghostly footprints, the creak and bump of rarely opened doors. Occasional slow motion monster piano plod, gorgeously suspenseful and dimly lit, over an ocean of reverberating, bowed metals, creating ominous smears of dark and indistinct sonic haze, all ocasionally engulfed in massive, warm washes of molten guitar feedback, at once fierce and full of fury, but somehow still completely dreamy and mesmerizing. It's always hard to not slip into hyperbole on the AQ list, but even harder when we're dealing with a record this good. Having said that, this is probably one of the most beautiful drone records you will hear this year. Ever maybe. So completely dense with hidden sounds and rich with sonic layers, totally blissful and perfect for drifting off, but complex enough to reward close scrutiny and active listening. Most certainly for fans of Jonathan Coleclough, Andrew Chalk, Deathprod, Total, Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sunn 0 ))), Earth, Nurse With Wound, and folks who recently picked up recent releases by Unicorn, Lugosi, Birchville Cat Motel, BJ Nilsen, and Monos will NOT want to miss this. Packaged in an oversized, slimline style DVD case, with a nice photographic insert and LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
There are always gonna be special bands, the ones that hold a unique place in your heart. That band you heard when you were on a trip. The band you have loved since the first time you heard them. The band whose songs featured heavily on that mix tape. And then any variation of the 'first' band, the band whose show you were at the first time you got drunk, laid, high, the night you met 'the one', then there's the band whose songs are always stuck in your head, the first -any genre here- band you ever liked, the band that helped you make it through that breakup / rehab / depression / that tough time in your life. But then there's the sort of band you have that weird protective proprietary selfish love for. The band only you like. The band you don't want everyone else listening to. The band you discovered and only you truly love. You know what we mean. It's a rare band that can inspire that sort of love and dedication. Well, we're a little embarrassed to admit it, but we sort of felt that way about Hwyl Nofio. A friend in the UK turned us on to them years back, and from the moment we first laid ears on them, we were smitten, obsessed even. This mysterious outfit crafting these dark and ominous worlds of strange and beautiful sound. It was hard to not keep it all to ourselves, this dark cave of sound that we could explore and call our own. But we like to think we've outgrown that sort of stuff, since we get as much satisfaction from turning other folks on to new music as we do discovering it for ourselves. More so in most cases. But it definitely speaks to the power of Hwyl Nofio, and the effect of their murky and mysterious music has on our ears, and brains, and hearts and souls.
Hounded By Fury is record number four from this UK drone outfit. The band is mostly the work of one man, Steve Parry, who handles the bulk of the sound making, utilizing all manner of guitars: strummed, plucked, bowed, adapted and otherwise, ukulele, piano, organs: church and otherwise, viola, bass and electronics, while a series of guests add their two cents with saxophone, Chinese guzheng, acoustic guitar processing, imagined banjo (?) and midi fractal image converter (!). Recorded at various locations including an old church Hounded By Fury is a definitely a drone record at its heart, but it's what the band do with those drones that makes Hwyl Nofio so special.
The sound this time around is a bit more ominous than on past outings. There's more scraping and scrabbling steel strings, a sort of grinding industrial screech that surfaces in some form or another on many of the tracks, sometimes right up front, a keening high end wail, sometimes just another element in a multilayered droneworld, subtly blended into a slow sleepy swirl with thee rest of the sounds.
The opening track is the former, with steel strings singing as they are scraped and scratched, a shrill screech stretched taut over a warm reverberant low end, strange tinkling wooden chimes and twinkling music box melodies, while in the background a moaning mournful melody, strummed softly so that the strums blend together. From that point on, it's a slow journey through a nighttime world of slow burn jazz minimalism a la Bohren, buzzing raga like rumble, and abstract ambient flutter. Layers of bowed strings sit atop minimal pulsing rhythms, a minimal throb usually constructed from one or two notes, long sustaining tones are stretched out side by side, the overtones shimmering and shifting, the resulting soundfield like drifting along some alien river, staring at a sky full of different stars, a head full of strange and unrecognizable sounds. Bizarre disembodied jangle is stripped of melody, until it's just a warm ridged texture, atonal Jandekian guitar figures warped and twisted, slowed down and sped up, sprinkled with cymbal sizzle and muted reverb ricochets, all stretched and twisted into various forms of drone.
One of the most intense tracks is "Child Woman", a choral sounding minor key lament, deep dark strings and mournful melodies, almost traditional settled as it is amidst an album of abstract experimental drone music., but very emotional and cinematic. It seems like a turning point for the record too as the next few tracks sound downright sunny, bright colors replace the dark, guitars twang, a trippy tangled slow motion free folk, the melodies not so dour, but the sunshine soon dims as black clouds fill the sky and timestretched metallic reverberations fill our ears like a million alarm clocks going off at once and then slowed down into a wall of alien trills, the mood shift is further enforced by some super sharp atonal guitars, swooping dizzily about, sounding a bit like the guitars on the Butthole Surfers' Hairway To Steven record, sort of damaged and deranged. But then the record's coda brings us back to Hwyl's soft shimmer, the delicate drone, a haunting ghostlike swoon, fuzzy and gauzey, obscured by falling rain, a dreamy drift into the void, a slow sad slide into the bright white, the pitch black left far behind.
Here we go again. Another record that I am totally obsessed with, that I listen to like mad, that I try to get all my friends to buy, but that when it comes time to review, I can't figure out how to describe in words that do justice to just how great this record is. Since we first got this in, the second release from strangely named Hwyl Nofio, a UK collective fronted by AQ pal Steve Parry, I would just fumble with superlatives and end up spitiing out something like "I don't know. It's just great. Buy it!!!" But I figure I would try to do a little better than that for the list. While the mood is similar to the first record, there seems to be a more sort of 'rock' influence. Not rock like Van Halen, but rock in the sense that there are guitars (lots of em) and really identifiable instruments. Where the first album blurred the instrumentation into a dark and dreamy wash of subterranean rumble, Hymnal achieves the same basic effect but by keeping the edges a little more distinct. Not to say this won't appeal to your droning side becaue it certainly will. But it also just might appeal to your slow motion, instrumental slow-core side as well! A very dark and sinister record. Dreamy and hypnotic, but sort of aggressive and threatening at the same time. The entire record is a nightmarescape set on a foundation of rumbling, swelling, washes of thick warm low end shimmer. Basses, and guitars and organs and horns all settle into a cloying fog of glacial downtuned thrum, slowly shifting, melodic flourishes barely visible below the surface. While pianos and guitars supply abstract melodies, their notes dropped delicately one by one, creating a pointillist map of some haunting afterlife/ghost world. Equal parts Stars Of The Lid, Sunn 0))), Jonathan Coleclough, Maeor Tri, Starfuckers, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Labradford, Morton Feldman and all the music that frightens us when we're awake, and soothes us when we're not. Definitely one of the most beautiful, haunting and original records of the year!
MPEG Download: "A Brutality Of Fact" [/audio/hwylbrutality.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "A Brutality Of Fact" [/audio/hwylbrutality.m3u]
MPEG Download: "All You Knew Were Doomed" [/audio/hwyldoomed.mp3]
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We heard about Hwyl-Nofio from AQ pal Kevin who does the amazing UK zine Salt (see elsewhere in this list) and finally managed to get our hands on a bunch. It's kind of a hard record to explain. But I've been listening to this almost every night when I go to bed, if that tells you anything. Dark and dreamy and cinematic. Somewhere between musique concrete, Stars Of The Lid, David Darling (solo cello) and drone ala Jonathan Coleclough, Troum or Mirror. Hwyl-Nofio is Steve Parry, and the records sound centers around his restrained, haunting piano, some times prepared, sometimes effected, but always simple and gorgeous. Dark slowly building somber bass swells cycle endlessly as melancholy piano hesitantly joins in. Warm washes of whispery rumble spread like thick rich fog, spilling from the speakers as distant high end notes twinkle and sparkle. Wheezing dissonance is laid beneath whirring church organs and keening guitars. Rumbling and bubbling low end floods your ears like molasses, while in the background, subtle clatter, plucked guitar and throbbing pulses. This has become my absolute favorite bliss out, late night, chill out record ever! So gorgeous and so good.
