We first heard Pat Maher's Indignant Senility project via last year's Plays Wagner, where he created haunting and murky atmospheric compositions sourced from a thrift store copy of a Wagner opera, which we loved. Maher, who also creates music under the guises of DJ Yo-Yo Dieting and Diamond Catalog, returns with his second Indignant Senility release and his source material is wider, but even more mysterious. Industrial ambiance is still the primary mode of his music making, but the sounds take on a more tweaked concrete mode of vintage avant garde composition, sometimes invoking the metallic shard like sounds of Iannis Xenakis or Harry Bertoia. Towards the end of the third track, "No One", the listener can make out the far off plaintive strands of a string quartet seeping through the foggy murk, adding a funeral tension and gloom to the proceedings. Beautifully bleak!
Now both volumes of this previously vinyl only deconstructed classical epic are available on one cd with new artwork! Here is what we recently said about 'em:
If the recent Leyland Kirby 3cd epic, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was, left you jonesing for more washed out spectral ambience culled from classical sources, than here's the next best thing.
Indignant Senility is one of many monikers of Portland-based tape-manipulator, Pat Maherr, who also operates as DJ Yo-Yo Dieting, Sisprum Vish, and Moms Who Chop. For this project, Plays Wagner takes its obvious source material from old found thrift store records of Richard Wagner symphonies and operas. With all the dust and wear still intact, Maherr runs the source material through layers of filters and processing until they are mere specters of their original sound, stretching and distorting these inspirational masterpieces of classical music into something altogether alien and dark, but strangely familiar. Murky deep-pitched strings, ghostly choral voices slowed, and blurred into tremulously washed out and ephemeral murmurs, slow-rising intensities and tonal vibrations. These were then recorded on to cassette tape from which this recording was mastered from, adding to the slow, mournful decay of the ruined grandeur of the original source material.
It's easy to see why classical music always seems to be haunted, even without much manipulation. But their is something to be said about the grandeur and power of classical music's biggest ego deconstructed into something so unearthly and spectral and yet so beautifully sad that even at it's most reduced, one still can't remove the huge flow of powerful feeling inherent in the recording. The ghosts can be exorcised but never fully banished. Highly Recommended!!
If the recent Leyland Kirby 3cd epic, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was, left you jonesing for more washed out spectral ambience culled from classical sources, than here's the next best thing.
Indignant Senility is one of many monikers of Portland-based tape-manipulator, Pat Maherr, who also operates as DJ Yo-Yo Dieting, Sisprum Vish, and Moms Who Chop. For this project, which will be released in two separate vinyl volumes but compiled together in one cd, takes its obvious source material from old found records of Richard Wagner symphonies. Stretching and distorting these inspirational masterpieces of classical music into something altogether alien and dark, but strangely familiar. Leaving the sounds of crackle, dirt and grime of the records intact, adding to the slow, mournful decay of the ruined grandeur of the original source material, these were then recorded on to cassette tape from which this recording was mastered from, adding another wash of sonic decay to the already distorted proceedings. So beautiful and sad!
The second volume of Pat Maherr's deconstructed classical epic culled from thrift store records of Wagner symphonies and operas. With all the dust and wear still intact, Maherr runs the source material through layers of filters and processing until they are mere specters of their original sound. Slowed, and blurred into tremulously washed out and ephemeral murmurs, slow-rising intensities and tonal vibrations, it's easy to see why classical music always seems to be haunted, even without much manipulation. But their is something to be said about the grandeur and power of classical music's biggest ego deconstructed into something so unearthly and spectral and yet so beautifully sad that even at it's most reduced, one still can't remove the huge flow of powerful feeling inherent in the recording. The ghosts can be exorcised but never fully banished. Both part one and part two will be soon released on one cd, but like all of Type's vinyl, it won't be around too long. Highly Recommended!!
Canadian sound artist Jim Dejong has been recontextualizing all sorts of sounds into thoroughly abstracted compositions and ashen dark ambience for well over a decade as The Infant Cycle. This Zoviet-France inspired set of looping hypnosis, echoplex-riddled events, and grim sound design strategies heralds from the Drone Records series of singles, curated by Stefan Knappe of Troum / Maeror Tri. Trombone, birdcage, marimba, guitar, and chimes are some of the instruments that Dejong sites as the origins to the sounds on Secret Hidden Message, but little of those sources are made evident behind the veil of chilled atmospheres and infernal howlings, blended to a very well constructed set of electro-acoustic manipulation. Limited to 300 copies!
A few years back we were intrigued and amazed by a disc entitled Case Studies In Bioentropy, the debut from this very strange band. Experimental drone prog noise textural rock weirdness. We went on and on about how "strange" it was. Now Infidel?/Castro! are back, on the Crucial Blast label, with what might be an even stranger album. Maybe twice as strange in fact 'cause it's two discs instead of one! An overwhelming sprawl of chaotic geek-tech glitch abstraction, lovely melodic improvisations, and conceptual nerdy noisenik metal-riffed surreal insanity... is it serious? Is it science? Can't tell. The music is accompanied by equally hard-to-grok computer art and text. Song titles include "Temporarily Desolving Into Plasma During A Moment To One's Self" and "Bedsores (for G.W.B.)". Hmm. At least we know who G.W.B. is.
These two discs are certainly interesting, sometimes beautiful, and yes most definitely strange. Recommended to anyone who doesn't mind spinning from ambient drone to fractured prog to electronic mayhem -- like a collison of Fantomas and irr. app. (ext.), maybe. Or Isis, Merzbow, MBV, and Behold The Arctopus, perhaps. The latter of which features Colin Marston, also a member of Infidel?/Castro! by the way. So that might give you an idea...just an idea... of what this is all about. The real answer, we're still looking for. But in the meantime, we're enjoying this album!
This is a very strange record. And you know that around here, for something to strike us as strange, it's gotta be really weird. A strange 'rock' record is a much more rare creature than just a strange record. I mean, at AQ we have been known to carry elephants
My first inclination is to say O.L.D. meets Tool meets Fantomas meets Scanner meets Lustmord. But that doesn't quite capture it. There seems to be some sort of linear narrative, based on germs, or sickness or at least some sort of conspiracy. Dark rumbling drones and endlessly sustaining horror movie upper register skree underpin mumbled dialogue, panicked arguments whispered in a dark alleys, and computer voices offering plot exposition and ominous warnings. Then bursts of chugging distorted guitars, and spastic drumming (as well as computerized beats) explode through the thick curtain of gloomy drone bringing to mind the grinding rhythm of the Ruins. The record continues with monstrous slow core sludge splattered with fucked up noise and malfunctioning electronics that slowly mutates into a buzzing oversaturated electronic rhythm. And it just keeps getting weirder and weirder with dreamy gauzy nightmarescapes, huge pounding hyper distorted big beat electro, more confusing chopped and processed dialogue, repetitive and grinding almost-metal rhythms and the record ends with a totally crushing track of multi layered guitars, distorted and buzzing, squealing and pounding relentlessly as the story continues to its appropriately doomed ending. This record is so epic and intense, right down to the striking cover art: a close up painting of some sort of ocular surgery! Fans of any of the bands I mentioned above should definitely check this out as well as you 'dronologists' and even you jaded rockers. This record is definitely one of the best surprises of the year. An 'Operation Mindcrime' for the experimental set!
Just a few copies are available of this vinyl only release from Kyle Parker's Infinite Body project, from which we got a nice introduction into his soft-noise / heavy-ambient sounds on the split LP with Emaciator. He picks up where he left off there with a blissed-out distortion billowing out of a glistening cyclical drone from what sounds like a overdriven pump organ. The heavy waves of distortion gradually fade away, and a pastoral, Cluster like melody is left behind to effortlessly glide through a warm set of ambient melodies. This gives way to a crunchier version of what Oneohtrix Point Never has been offering through luminous arpeggiations that trick themselves out of anything remotely new age sounding; and here, it's the heavy patina of distortion which saves Infinite Body's mantra. Parker furthers the shimmer with some floating-in-outer-space driftscaping bristling with bleary noises just beneath the surface, only to find these collapsing into a throbbing drone that reconstitutes itself through a kaleidoscope of that same pump organ sound. At first this emerges as a eerie fog horn only to overtake the sound field in a growing mass of crunched noise. Limited to 300 copies and pressed on clear vinyl.
LA's Kyle Parker, working here under the name Infinite Body, is a tireless performer of blissed-out noise and heavily synthesized powerdrone workouts, which accompany a pretty effective light show triggered by various stepped decibel meters. So the louder Parker gets during a piece, the more kaleidoscopic light floods the stage. Simple, but very effective for what the man does. The Infinite Body sound is also simple but very effective, as we've previously enjoyed a couple of amazing (and limited) LPs and a really great split lp with like-minded beautiful malcontent Emaciator. Parker / Infinite Body is one to take off from the post-MBV practice of burying simple melodies and rudimentary structures deep beneath a hyperdelic surface of tactile white noise. The overall timbre of these sounds is a blinding sparkle of sunburst reflection jacked through rudimentary electronics. Intense for sure, and even violent at times; but there's a rarefied beauty to Infinite Body's work that combined with those elegantly violent allusions into a sound sort of like a deconstructed A.R. Kane, as if the dream-pop womb of sound is to envelop the listener and slowly suffocate him or her with cotton candy. It's not quite what David Keenan had in mind when trying to work out a definition for the American aesthetic of Hypnogogic Pop, but both hypnogogia and pop operate well within the boundaries of this Infinite Body. Very nice.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is a really nice split LP from two up-and-comers in the ever blossoming US post-noise scene. Infinite Body is the work of Kyle Parker, who constructs sustained swarms of sun-blinding guitar noise that sparkles upon undulating surfaces from crosshatched delay patterns. Belong and White Rainbow stand as Parker's closest neighbors, yet his crystal cracked noise enjoys a knife sharpening quality to the overblown distortion that nudges the work just a little bit outside the realm of post-shoegazing psychedelics. A brief Devendra Banhart-like falsetto recorded on a crappy tape recorder emerges between two extended fuzz tracks as a teasing piece of emotional excess despite its brevity of barely 15 seconds.
It's nice to hear more from Emaciator (aka Jon Borges), who had blown us away with his Reflection 2lp not that long ago. Like Parker's Infinite Body, Emaciator transmits a constant stream of overblown noise, but sourced from analog synth and crusty filter boxes. Deftly transitioning through his distorted, shimmering drone with a dense harmonic interplay and almost subliminal melodic passages, Borges creates an entrancing and hypnotic piece that's equal parts Birchville Cat Motel and LaMonte Young. As his blizzard of electricity draws to an end, Borges picks up the guitar with a sadly elliptical chord that winds down gradually.
Excellent stuff to be sure!
It should be only a matter of time before somebody pulls the obscurant folk miserablist Terrors from the cassette netherworld, as his bleakly rendered minimalism for guitar, voice, and hell of a lot of reverb captures the spirit of the first few Smog records. But at the same time, Terrors has been sharing the same LA post-noise haunts as Pedestrian Deposit and now Infinite Body; so maybe, that's where Terrors should stay lest he / they start to suck. Terrors' cassette Inequipose was one of the best tapes that we heard in 2009, so anything new (that wasn't immediately out of print!) would certainly pique our interest. Hence, this twenty-minute cassette with one Terrors track, one Infinite Body track, and one collaborative track with guest vocals from Laena Myers-Ionita; and it's a gem!
Infinite Body opens the tape with a vocal edit of a piece that really sounds like it's all synth, following upon what he produced on the recent album Carve The Face Out Of My God. Brightly shimmering synth percolations extended through delay and reverb all of which are very sharp in attack. The Terrors solo track is a mopey cover of Billie Holiday's "God Bless The Child" with downer guitar strums and reverb drenched vocals breaking up the empty tape hiss spaces. And that collaborative track is really quite special, sort of sounding like a very lo-fi version of Mazzy Star as remixed by Wavves, with overblown synth drones softly abrading against Terrors repetitive guitar chord and Myers-Ionita maudlin vocals. Limited to a mere 100 copies, or thereabouts.
The last thing we would have expected from UK tape label The Tapeworm, who pretty much traffic in the unexpected, was a hip hop record, but if they were gonna release a hip hop record, it makes sense that it would be weirdo UK MC Infinite Lives, whose Bush Meat full-length we reviewed way back in 2004, and flipped over, describing him as "equal parts Ol' Dirty Bastard, De La Soul, Outkast and Ali G." And if anything this live set is even weirder. A super spacey abstract set of dubbed out, free-from electro hop, all woozy synth stabs, footwork like beats, warped loops, and more singing than rapping, Infinite's vocals a soulful croon, drenched in reverb, and all tangled up with dubby shimmer and stuttery melodies, eventually, the rapping comes in, and it's appropriately jagged and twisted and rapidfire, with the music switching gears and following along, the various beats and loops splintering into a head spinning barrage of jumbled collaged chaos before slipping right back into that twisted dubby soul, sounding more like something we might hear from Hype Williams, a fractured future funk, laced with some dubstep bass wobble, smooth synthy shimmer, relentless programmed beats, and some killer next level flow, but always returning to Infinite's whatthefuck echo drenched soul dub hip-pop. Cool.
Like the perenially amazing PseudoArcana and Celebrate Psi Phenonemon, the Auckland based art-noise-drone label CMR has taken to releasing super limited cd-r editions from relatively unknown New Zealand musicians. This eponymous album from Infinitesimal is the second cd-r release for CMR, following the exceptional feedback dronescraping of Nigel Wright. Of course, the Infinitesimal duo of Mark Sadgrove (from MHFS) and Paul Winstanley (from Sci Hi) has a couple of even smaller cd-r editions on even harder to find labels. Using no-input mixing board techniques and a self-triggering computer algorithms, Infinitesimal crafts a metal machine music where the machine does all the work and the technicians make sure things don't run too amok. Hence, this album bristles with fizzing blasts of white-hot electric noise sputter against leaden feedback drones. Super limited to 100 copies, of which we only have a handful!
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Armed with two analog synths and an alliance of effects pedals, this NY duo conjure forth a deep cleansing slab of grim new agey bliss. In the same droney vein as newcomers Emeralds, Infinity Window delve deep into the divine world of heavy synth wizardry to unveil two sides of all-encompassing aural blitzkrieg. To say their sound is thick would be a total understatement. These guys know how to lay it down heavy, but there is a lighter side to their heaviness, not really a dooomy type of heaviness, more a melodic and shimmering type of heavy that reminds us of the earlier Growing albums. Both sides build from wondrously minimal, video game-y bleeps and bloops to huge walls of trance inducing, glacial radiance. Like staring directly into the blaring sun, these tracks are celestial and huge but damaged and textured. Fuzz and noise subtly encapsulate the reverberating tones to swiftly steer away from any new-agey cheesiness.
Well, this is a first for the aQ list, at least as far as we remember. We're hitting list #469 so forgive us our senility if it's happened before, but we do believe this is the very first 7" we have made Record Of The Week! And it's not just any 7" but a double 7", one that hasn't seen the light of day since it was first released in 1981 right here in San Francisco by Subterranean Records, containing the sole recordings (five songs) of legendary all female art punk eccentrics, Inflatable Boy Clams. Long sought after by collectors of bizarre music and fetching indecent prices online, it's amazing to have this left-field punk artifact available again.
Featuring Carol Detweiler and Judy Gittlesohn of local new wave heroes Pink Section (whose collected recordings were just released as well and reviewed on this list), Jo Jo Planteen and saxophonist Genevieve Boutet de Monvel of Longshoreman and Club Foot Orchestra, Inflatable Boy Clams were not so much a traditional band as they were a performance art collective, rotating instruments and vocal duties for each song. Barebones arrangements with minimal musicianship of carnival organ, saxophone, angular bass riffs and incredibly oft-kilter singing put them in a kinship with bands like Monitor, Flying Lizards, The Art Bears, and The Raincoats, and later with bands like The Double U, Thinking Fellers, and Smack Dab, but the Inflatable Boy Clams were even weirder, funnier and much more cooly deranged.
The first 7" features "Skeletons", a Halloweenish children's song made by what sounds like very unhinged children, with the B-side "Snoteleks" being, you guessed it, "Skeletons" played backward making a weird surreal song even more fun-house like and disorientating.
The second 7" has three songs, starting with the satirical "Marin", a sort of send-up of richness and comfort of the affluent county north of San Francisco, sung by Gittlesohn in an arch French accent. The next track, "I'm Sorry", was perhaps the Clams most well-known song, often getting airplay on Dr. Demento's radio show. A sort of cover of Walter Donaldson's 1926 hit "What Can I Say After I've Said I'm Sorry" (Donaldson gets a writing credit), a chorus of voices sing a slow refrain of the main lyrics, while Gittlesohn and Planteen trade confessional stories of mutual bad friendship to each other (stealing boyfriends - or maybe girlfriends, electrocuting pets, ruining a dress, destroying beloved cassette tapes), with very disingenuous apology. The final song on the B-side, "Boystown" is a curious martial dirge about boys going back to Boystown with their guns and knives as the gals sing with slow sinister "good-riddance" tra-la-la glee.
But really, words and descriptions can't quite quantify what a bizarre, hermetic and wholly contained piece of DIY musical art from content to packaging this is. One whose mystery and unexplainable attraction would likely have been diluted had the group attempted to continue and make more recordings. That shirk of commercial success brand identity and skewering of gender politics is in turn what makes San Francisco punk stand apart and sound so fucking great right now. Thanks to Superior Viaduct for making this and the Pink Section recordings available again! Highly Recommended!
Information is the subdued electronica Norwegian duo of Per Henrik Svalastog and Jorgen Knudsen, sharing more than a passing resemblance to their fellow countryman Geir Jensen (aka Biosphere). "Biomekano" is Information's third album, and has found a perfect home on the exceptional Rune Grammofon label. The Biosphere references are quite obvious in the duo's construction of arctic atmospheres through an active exploration into the rich tonal colors of ambient washes; yet Information's music is far from pure ambience as they provide a greater intensity to their music through the throbbing micro-techno pulsations often associated with Vladislav Delay and Thomas Jirku. This may not be as good as the recent Biosphere album (a tough venture for any artist), but is way better than the current Mille Plateaux output of glitch happy neo-dub.
Ingenting is Swedish for 'nothing,' and this American collective (half living in California, the other in North Carolina) pays homage to all of the varied meanings that Ingmar Bergman ascribes to the state of 'nothingness.' This certainly entails all of the dark and heavy aspects of Bergman's nihilism and the long pregnant silences that are sporadically interrupted by dialogue; but they also dig into Bergman's films finding poetry in such banal phrases as "I want nothing to eat." Around this conceptual framework, Ingenting Kollektiva recorded their first album in "direct response to music recorded or released in 1969" from which they announce something akin to the Nurse With Wound list, with entries including Holger Czukay, Amon Duul, Ornette Coleman, Pentangle, King Crimson, Alan Silva, etc. None of those artists mentioned seem to offer the construction of Ingenting Kolletiva's darkly kaleidoscopic abstractions and acoustically driven drones; but the ghosts of those sounds certainly haunt the grooves of this record.
The two long-form pieces of Fragments Of Night allude to more contemporary practitioners of the avant-drone, especially Mirror, Thuja, zoviet*france, and Taj Mahal Travellers (to throw things somewhat near the 1969 year-zero mark). The instruments of the collective's choosing include harmonium, cello, guitar, flute, old 78s, psaltry, etc; and the collective deftly obscure those sources through interwoven harmonics, dense layering, and plenty of delay & reverb. The first side opens with gaping, deep thrums of low frequencies that ripples as if dialed into the reflective black ice from some distant moon around Saturn. The plucked notes from the psaltry gracefully pulls back the gloom of that opening passage and sets off a slow-motion dissolve of foghorn bellows, come across somewhere between Deathprod and Caretaker. The flipside is more acoustically sourced, or at least the guitars and horns can be heard amidst the time-delay effects and tape-decay loops, from which melodies form through rasping Tibetan bowls, guitars amass in dense vibrating chunks of space, and a rather dramatic crescendo of agitated violin scrapes builds to a crashing end of tense noise and drone. Limited pressing in a gatefold sleeve, what else could you want from this fantastic record? Oh yeah, there's a download code, too!
Here's one of those beautiful drone albums that should resonate with anyone keen on something to follow Stars Of The Lid, The Caretaker, or Basinski. The Ingenting Kollektiva remains something of a mystery both to us and, so it seems, to the rest of the world. Some information about their ideas are available (thanks to the impressionistic "art of memory" blog run by the Kollectiva's M. Swiezynski), but much remains purposefully arcane, which suits their smoke and mirror approach to sound design. The Kollectiva's first album seemed an homage to Ingmar Bergman's definition of nothingness, in spanning the existential gap between the mundane and the eternal void. It also channelled a zeitgeist that threaded together various pieces of music and film from 1969, but the results of that project formed an ethereal set of dronemuzik that found a particular voice that transcended the cultural references.
The ghostly mood and nocturnal spell of their first album continues here on Lost Beyond Telling, tracking further back in time with references to Messiaen and Baudelaire. And again, the Kollecktiva finds itself making a slow, almost liturgical album of minimalist serenades through heavy processed instruments (guitar, cello, psaltry, etc.), field recordings, and manipulated pieces of crusty vinyl. A beautiful night sea music opens the album with pools of deep drones that gradually fracture into Basinski-like looping patterns phased through a refined use tremolo and delay. Comparatively scabrous textures churn through spiralling bird-song-like twitter on "The Dark Backward Abysm Of Time" all leading up to the somber, twenty-three minute conclusion of damp field recordings and backmasked bells dragging through a darkened loveliness of oceanic driftscaping getting close to a Salt Marie Celeste vibe. So nice!
The dvd portion of the program features two distinct visual aesthetics from within the Kollektiva. The first four short films come by way of Tarrl Lightowler, who operates with an intense stroboscopic flickering of ever magnifying, ever vibrant images. Thickets of wire, bright petals, chunks of ice, and piles of leaves are just a scant number of the images that Lightowler projects in his videos, all siphoning out of a violent vortex of pulsing light. For all of its natural source materials, his videos are quite violent, countering the hypnotic wash of the sound, much of which originates from the material on the cd. Brilliant stuff for sure, but please watch carefully, as retinal fatigue comes on very quickly with these films. The two latter films are from Matthew Swiezynski, whose videos are far murkier with whisps of fire and shadows of the landscape dominating the darkened field of vision. On both of his films, the sounds are wholly unique based on creepy sounding loops that could have been culled from Tibetan horns and harmonium.
It's a whole new world now, discovering music. MySpace, Youtube, people emailing MP3's and JPEG's. Easier maybe, but not nearly as romantic or as exciting as receiving some mysterious package in the mail, or stumbling upon some strange looking record in a dusty old bin and some tiny record store. And to be totally honest, almost all of the amazing discoveries that have ended up being big AQ faves, began life as a weird little package that just showed up in the mail one day.
None maybe weirder than the package we got from a band called, wait for it, Inh Halentropy. Yep. They had us at Inh Halentropy. It's a weird enough name, but it's two words?!? So inside the package was a cd with that classic image of Bigfoot, walking through the clearing, staring at the camera, and over the top, the band logo, very eighties metal looking, in the middle of a hand drawn spiderweb. Still we had no idea what to expect inside. But we did discover a note. Which read in part: "Dark Greetings. For your grimnatious becryptlement�" signed appropriately enough: "In ancient solemnity, none so grimm�"
OK. We were sold, now all that was left was to actually listen to the cd-r. And as with most things, certainly the most exciting and satisfying things, the music was nothing at all like what we expected�
Inh Halentropy seem to be a metal band, black metal more specifically, yet most of the disc is distinctly not metal. Or at least not typically metal. Beginning with the sound of surf on the shore, the calls of sea birds, the band crawls into action, a huge rumbling bass tone, clouds of electronic FX, a simple drawn out melody, clean guitars unwinding in an expanse of dark shimmer, when suddenly, a massive speaker destroying low end growl surfaces, and as far as we can tell, maybe those are the vocals. Church bells toll, the ambience gets thicker and more grim, the closest comparison might be funereal doom, but it's sort of ethereal. And sort of pretty. But definitely ominous and creepy. Like Low crossed with Goblin crossed with Esoteric. Elsewhere, the black clouded skies are filled with the clatter of chimes, strange harmonics ringing out, all over thick lustrous black ambience, the sound of rain, at times it almost sounds like a blackened new age, which sounds weird but is most definitely a very good thing.
"Golden Beast Altered Axe" might be the most trippy, a simple drum plod, spread out over a slowly squirming synthscape, everything wreathed in ephemeral clouds of twinkling electronic effects, a mournful melody drifts over the top, while running through the entire a track, a creepy ominous low end melody of buzz and whir, all beneath a constant sheet of rain. Very cinematic and evocative.
Our favorite track might be "A Door Is A Tomb", thee most propulsive of the bunch, but we're still talking a glacial crawl, more ambient forest sounds, water and wind, insects in the background, but here, flutes flutter over a backdrop of downtuned riffage, but smeared into a warm moaning blur, over the top, bells chime, mysterious vocals croak and growl, the drums a simple machinelike rhythm, everything eventually breaking down into a plodding bass-ic doom, wrapped in a midnight storm, and suffused with thick ropy drones and grinding minimal low end whir.
Really pretty fantastic, and totally baffling. New age doom? Black ambient nature music? Not sure what to call it, but it's completely killing us. Add to that, the fact that the date on the back of the disc says 1980, and other than the song titles and an email address (oh and a few more pictures of giant hairy beasts) there's really not much else to go on. But the music is plenty. A perfectly freaky, haunting cinematic slowcore new age black doom sprawl that should for sure hit the spot for those of you who could barely make it through that descriptor without thinking that this might already be your new favorite record. We are suitably grimnatiously becryptled. As shall you be, wethinks�
The long anticipated return of Inh Halentropy, a band we know very little about, other than they make a sound like almost nothing we've EVER heard before. A band who introduced themselves to us with a random package in the mail, containing a cd-r, and these simple words: "Dark Greetings. For your grimnatious becryptlement�" as well as the similarly mysterious sign off: "In ancient solemnity, none so grimm�".
We expected black metal, and that's what we got. sort of. Their sound was most definitely black, but not metal in any way we were familiar with, instead they unfurled a cinematic new age-y black ambient doom, equal parts Esoteric, Goblin, and Low, a sort of mysterious blissed out yet grim slowcore. Or something. Their cd-r release disappeared in no time, and no word from the band until recently, a new cd-r just showed up one day, that familiar two part band name, an owl and all sorts of strange symbols, we were soooo excited. We originally thought it was a record called Dull Knife, but soon discovered Inh Halentropy were sharing the cds with another like minded horde CALLED Dull Knife.
So what has changed in the last two years, if anything? Well, the sound is still grim, and haunting, a swirling slo-mo mix of atmospheric doom and creepy crawly slowcore, an eighties horror movie soundtrack vibe infused with a shimmery drifty bit of new age ambience, two tracks, the first a plodding cinematic sprawl, with abstract programmed drums, dark swells of distant rumble, smears of almost cheesy sounding synths, what sounds like faux horns (also probably synths), deeeeeeep bass that throbs underneath, all wrapped up with super lyrical, haunting minor key melodies, definitely like the soundtrack to some lost 30 year old European horror film.
The second Inh Halentropy jam is even trippier and more spaced out, beginning with heavily effected falsetto vocals, that almost sound like wild animal calls or that little 'cooo' sound from Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie & Clyde" albeit way more evil, some woozy detuned guitars, and some shimmery squalls of warped warble, eventually spreading out into a slow burning sprawl of spidery guitars, hushed whir and glistening tinkles, and some seriously disturbing slowed down samples. So creepy and kick ass. Hate to think we might have to wait 2 more years for another full length.
Inh Halentropy set the bar pretty high, but Dull Knife are undeterred, and offer up their own sort of creepy ambience, deep warped low end tones, unfurling grimly in an expanse of muted buzz and crumbling distortion, reminding us quite a bit of Trollmann, in its minimal low end heaviness, over the course of the track, the low end grows more abrasive, and more active, fluctuating more wildly, like some weirdly distorted symphony for foghorn and black buzz. The second DK track's another bleak bit of minimal grimness, this time even more harrowingly dense, the sounds thick and corrosive, the swells coming faster and faster, eventually blurring into a single oozing slab of blackdrone, shot through with shards of crunch and strange bits of glitch. Wow. Guess we need to hear more from these guys as well.
Needless to say, anyone into sounds slow, low, grim and black, spaced out and atmospheric, haunting and heavy, should grab one of these right quick.
SUPER LIMITED of course. Each one hand screened, different colored ink, on different colored textured paper, every one different.
The latest release from Pacific City Sound Visions, the label run by Spencer Clark, one half of the late great floorcore noise duo The Skaters. He's in Inner Tube, joined by none other than Mark McGuire of Emeralds, and the results are pretty baffling, but brilliant in their own way. The sounds of Inner Tube seems to hew much closer to those of the OTHER Skater, James Ferraro, with a wildly fractured recapitulation of the cheesiest music of the eighties, in this case, what sounds like the theme music from BayWatch or Miami Vice, but with more shredding guitar. What? Yep, imagine Joe Satriani via Ariel Pink, and you'll be getting warmer, fuzzy guitars, propulsive beats, synthy swirls, some seriously retro eighties pop, but with endlessly shredding psychedelic leads, total shredfest, but wedded to old school sort of electro pop synth rock. There are a few tracks, where things get a bit murkier and moodier, and a little bit soundtracky, but the majority of the record sets itself firmly in shredding eighties retro pop, but suitably warped and weird. Might shed some light on the proceedings to have Clark himself explain the impetus / genesis of Inner Tube:
"The bliss and ecstatic power of Australian beach music has kept me in this positive mental attitude that I wanted to communicate to everyone around me. Mark and I began to be in touch, and started to really connect in our exotic fascination with Australia and its surf culture. We decided to record an album together with impressions from these private movies and their tunes. Mark travelled numerous times to Pacific City Studios so that we could make this album together (and eventually moved here). At one point, a woman visiting Hotel California who I hadn't met before, mentioned she thought it was strange that I played so much Australian music. I told her about my fascination with Storm Riders, the sickest Australian movie of all time. She immediately told me that her Uncle had a big part in the movie.�The guy's name is Rabbit Bartholomew. He is a magical person in this Storm Riders movie and has been an inspirational to surfers everywhere. He wrote this letter to Mark and I: 'Hey Spencer, Great to get ya letter. Christel gave me a bit of insight. Really cool how you guys were talking about Storm Riders and our family connection, that's meant to be bra. For sure, send me a demo, I'll give ya some feedback. That's really cool about Inner Tube and the beloved zone, that's it mate, right on the money.' We then realized that we were to travel to the Gold Coast in Australia to record Inner Tube Part Deux, and play a Surf Festival put on by Rabbit Bartholomew's sister. The story just keeps on going, so Mark and I are really stoked to have you guys check this out with us..."
Ummm, yep. Doesn't make a whole lot more sense now does it. Or does it? Regardless, we dig it!
Comes in suitably garish dayglo surfer style jacket, and includes a huge equally garish / dayglo poster of Clark and McGuire.
Ultra limited, sprawling triple cassette collection of murky, mechanical hypnogogic loopscapes, from Belgian soundscaper and synth minimalist Innercity aka Hans Dens. While on his previous cd-r for Ruralfaune, he crafted a sound more in keeping with the current movement of blissed out synthkraut dronemusic makers, on Arupa Travels, Dens' sound falls more in line with the other Innercity releases we've heard. Gloriously tripped out lo-fi blisscapes, rife with decaying loops, streaks of blurred noise, buried rhythms, strange sped up voices, crumbling low end drones, field recordings, Jeck like skipping-record landscapes of dusty crackle and muted melody, ethereal expanses of gorgeous hazy ambience and heaving slabs of rhythmic crunch, lush swells of soft noise, peppered with mechanical creaks and layered whirs, a bleary eyed soft focus drift, rendered in chunks of low fidelity hum, mysterious bits of soundtracky post rock meander, gauzy clouds of sci-fi synth, haunting stretches of ominous cinematic shimmer, and deep dense slabs of otherworldly psychedelic minimalist drift. So fantastic.
ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 30 copies, we have about a dozen left. Comes in a cool oversized plastic clamshell case (like they use for language tapes), with a printed fold out insert.
One of two new releases this week from Belgian synthscaper Hans Dens. Innercity's In Fetal Aura, released on Oneohtrix Point Never's Upstairs label, was a dizzying assemblage of garbled and processed voices, fractured super distorted beats, and of course hazy washed out synth drones, and on the misleadingly titled Cop Killer, Dens offers up more of the same, but the sounds here, while an obvious continuation of In Fetal Aura, manage to be even more dense and layered and tripped out and chaotic.
Beginning with a tangle of sped up voices, the sounds soon veers into crumbling crunch, distorted and blown out, before slipping back into something a bit more hypnotic and woozy, sounding almost like a synthier Avarus, looped melodies, random clattery rhythms, layer after layer of pulses and shimmers and drones, the vibe definitely future retro, the sound super abstract, a little sci-fi, very mesmerizing, and then it slips even further off the rails, swirling squalls of franticly buzzing electronics, swirls of sped up sound and a return of those voices that opened the record (and again intoning comically sped up profanities).
The flipside starts out much more mellow, a sort of nursery rhyme style space age music box, unfurling corroded melodies over thick rumbles and metallic groans, slowly shifting, the melodies seeming to drag, as if the track was gradually melding before your very ears, only to eventually morph into a gorgeously murky muddy pulsescape, warped and warbly and hauntingly beautiful, almost like some sort of Chain Reaction heroin house filtered through a more modern lo-fi psych-drone-synth-wave aesthetic. Cool.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Full color covers, each with a tiny numbered insert...
Another fantastic collection of murky, sci-fi, new ageish, synth-wave, soft-noise dronescapes from this Belgian audio alchemist. Low fidelity mad scientist concoctions of muted mechanical crunch, woozy myopic shimmer, hazy soft focus whir, buried hypnogogic melodies, sonically similar to countrymen Dolphins Into The Future, as well as folks like High Wolf, Skaters, etc. Innercity, aka Hans Dens, takes all those elements and blends them into retro-futuristic miniature soundtracks, each track evoking some strange alternate universe, some long lost and buried civilization, decaying tape loops unwind crookedly, bunching up into warped soft squalls of blurred melody, cacophonous collisions of metallic crunch and layered thrum, bleed into each other, and are seemingly viewed through broken panes of frosted glass, everything gorgeously shadowy and indistinct, fractured rhythms stutter and stumble beneath clouds of Eastern melodies and effects drenched squiggles, occasionally locking into total Goblin/Carpenter sinister synthscaped ambience, or lurching machinelike robo-funk, the motorik pulses skittering over buried slowed down vocals all wreathed in a fuzzy haze, sometimes overtaken by heaving walls of crumbling shoegazey crunch, other times gradually blissing out into barely there swirls.
The lp comes with a cassette, featuring nearly an extra hour of music, parts 3 and 4 of Innercity's Future Life songsuite, one part washed out gauzy minimal drift, a darkly meditative sprawl of hushed shimmer, the other a futuristic bit of ultra lo-fi loopage, murky and blurred, which eventually gives a way to a fantastically lysergic bit of hypnotic electronic minimalism.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
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Another of three new releases this week on the Upstairs label run by Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Innercity, the work of Belgian synthscaper Hans Dens, sounds right at home here, in fact, had we not known, we very well might have assumed this was Lopatin himself, as Innercity traffics in the same sort of spacey futuristic sci-fi synthscapery, although Dens has a few tricks up his sleeve. Like taking sampled sped up voices, and adding a flurry of looped beats, creating a dizzying minimal abstract dance music, stripped down and skeletal, but it's around track three that Dens stops messing around and gets down the the business of crafting some murky synthy weirdness, fuzzy crumbling bits of clipped synth are lopped into warped seasick rhythms, the tape threatening to crumble, as the drop outs and hiss add all sorts of texture to the proceedings. Other tracks take murky almost heroin house sound throbs, and douses them in fuzzed out muddy glo-fi warble, the sweet melodies barely audible through the haze, but the sum total gorgeously hypnotic. Elsewhere, seventies cop show meets eighties late night cable thriller via a melted synth with a malfunctioning motherboard, reminding us of James Ferraro or Monopoly Child Star Searchers, total lysergic hypnogogic pop. The disc offers up all sorts of variations on outer space / inner space synth damage, bleeps and bloops, distorted low end thrums, warped chordal whir, twinkling prismatic and cinematic pulses, and in the last track, some serious Carpenter / Goblin / Oneohtrix retro soundtrackery. Weird and wonderful, and definitely a new favorite.
LIMITED TO LESS THAN 100 COPIES. We got a handful, but those will probably disappear pretty quick.
Of all the currently operating cd-r microlabels, we're tempted to pick RuralFaune as our favorite, no offense to any of the other labels we love, but Bruno P. and his weirdo label have unleashed some serious and awesome sonic strangeness over the last few years, all sorts of free folk and drone music, outsider soundscapes and minimal abstract weirdness, but then he went ahead and launched Faunasabbatha a RuralFaune offshoot specializing in extreme heaviness, the fringes of ultra doom and damaged black metal, blackdrones and grimnoise, and if that wasn't enough, there's now a new series, the Synth Series, or as the label puts it "the new new synth age", which makes sense, all of these blossoming and burgeoning krautdrone synthscapers need a home, and why not Ruralfaune, with a whole stable of synth unknowns, but among these unknowns, lurk some serious aQ faves, like Innercity, aka Belgian synthscaper Hans Dens, whose sound is like a twisted, more fractured take on groups like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, case in point, the twisted dizzying synth driven freakout that is the Cop Killer tape reviewed elsewhere on this list, but for his contribution to Ruralfaune's Synth Series, Dens has dialed back his penchant for freakiness, and delivered some seriously hypnotic and mesmerizing synth minimalism, not at all like the above mentioned groups, instead, a strangely gnarled synthesized dronemusic, lush layered loops, stretched out into gorgeous hazy warped landscapes of sound, some like weird processed burbling brooks wreathed in softly static whir, others like tangles of complex melody looped into stuttering rhythms, almost like Avarus samples collaged into alien dronefolk, while still others sound like the buzz of swarming bees, others like some sort of woozy ambient chamber music, and others like twisted IDM filtered through super lo-fi heroin house. Somehow Dens has managed to craft a sound that bucks all the conventions of the current kraut-drone-synth craze, while creating a unique sound that somehow still manages to fit into the very same movement, albeit awkwardly, which continues to situate Innercity as outsiders in an already outside sonic subculture. So great.
LIMITED TO JUST 70 COPIES!!! We got 20 of those and that's it!!!
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Innode is the project of Stefan Nemeth, an Austrian electronica engineer aQers might be more familiar with as a member of glitchily elliptical, post-rock trio Radian. Here, he's working with Steven Hess (that jetsetting percussionist who seems to be everywhere these days) and Bernhard Breuer (responsible for the drums in the shockingly good 'live' techno ensemble Elektro Guzzi). The idea behind Gridshifter was to incorporate live drums as counterpoints to a rigid latticework of electronic patterns - hence, the title. But the results from Nemeth and his drummers totally transcend any formalist concept, as Gridshifter is full of some serious noise crunching swagger. The live and / or electronic breakbeats stalk through all of the tracks on this fantastic album with glistening waves of controlled, tonal feedback, jarring bursts of whipcracked noise, and ominous rumbled pulsations. In otherwords, it sounds just like Pan Sonic or Alva Noto played with a 'live' drummer. Even some of the analog synths have a bit of a warmer hue as well as if there could be something akin to a chord organ or wurlitzer tossed in for good measure. This would actually be an incredible performance to see live! Let's hope Nemeth can pull off a tour and not just of the European festivals, but into the US as well. Kudos to Editions Mego once again for a killer record.
Mostly known for his deep space, ambient work that was released on Pete Namlook's Fax label, Tetsu Inoue has collaborated with Andrew Deutsch for an uncharacteristic album of recombinant computer music on par with the current algorithimic procedures of Kim
We first heard from Insect Factory on a recent split with NZ droneguitar master RST, the Insect Factory side of the split a gorgeous sprawl of woozy collaged psychedelia, not all that far removed from Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World, with a similar knack for taking multiple layers of sounds, and dizzying rhythms, and somehow fusing them into something more organic and blissed out. We dug those tracks like crazy, and were super excited to discover there was in fact a full length, which essentially takes the sound from the 7" and recasts it as something more longform, which is ideal for this sort of soundscaping, allowing the sounds and textures to gradually change shape and remain in constant motion.
The record opens with a brief bit of warm washed out pulsating shimmer, all overlapping swaths of buzz and hum and smoldering blur, heady and darkly psychedelic, it could have easily been stretched out to fill up the whole side and we would have been please as punch. But instead, the sound shifts to sky full of sine wave tones, drifting in and out, minimal swells, that seem to blossom like some time lapse nature film, glistening and glimmering, the sound laced with little melodic flourishes, little percussive high end blips, it's not until about 8 minutes in, that some low end surfaces, adding some lush heft to the proceedings, letting those glimmers and shimmers, drift atop subtly undulating sprawl of smeared sound. The sound grows gradually rhythmic, before splintering into prismatic distortion drenched ur-drone, a blow out of white noise sculpted into something much more dreamlike and shoegazey.
The near 20 minute "New Incision" begins with a spacious expanse of near silence, and shimmering dreamily dubbed out tones drifting to and fro, swooping backwards guitars drifting in and out, a dreamy melodic tangle, that seems to grow more and more dense, softly noisy, becoming a sort of soft focus shoegaze Reich/Riley style workout, before slipping back into a woozy bit of backwards drift, rife with warm buzz and streaks of high end shimmer.
The record finishes with a strange sort of lo-fi dreamfolk coda, a super lo-fi recording of a guitar, unfurling a lush and lovely bit of spare balladry, wreathed in tape hiss and wrapped in a cloud of crystalline metallic tinkles.
Gorgeous stuff. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Pressed on 140 gram vinyl.
Inside is Kiwi soundmaker Sandy Schaare and Celestial Telepathy is his debut. Twenty minutes of gorgeous psychedelic solo guitar. But don't be expecting any sort of wailing shredding freakouts, Schaare takes the guitar and manages to make some of the most beautiful un-guitarlike sounds you've ever heard. Soft billowy drifts, gentle shimmering clouds of sound, and what sounds like Tibetan bowls or distant chiming bells, a resonant ringing that spreads delicately like tiny ripples in a still pond. So gorgeous and tranquil.
Limited to 100 copies, packaged in a full color mini sleeve with original psychedelic artwork by Schaare himself, in a mini PVC plastic pouch with a printed insert. Already sold out at the label, so once these are gone, they are gone for good.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
'The Institute for Precision Motoricity' manipulates the run out grooves on 6 to 8 records with rubber bands, adhesive tape, toothbrushes, etc... to generate acoustic signals from what should simply be the empty pops of the stylus in an infinite termination of its course. The resulting pulses resemble a super lo-fi yet quite successful reconstitution of Thomas Brinkmann / Mike Ink's minimal techno.
Quite possibly the reason for Intersystem's being was to re-create John Cage's "Indeterminancy" but with a hell of a lot more drugs involved. "Peachy" is the first album from Intersystems and dates back to 1967. While the group had expanded throughout their brief career with the addition of several visual artists (such as the installation artist Michael Hayden), Intersystems' core members were poet / acid prohet Blake Parker and electronic knob twiddler John Mills-Cockrell. "Peachy" simply featured that core duo with Parker offering his best John Cage impression in the recitation of emphatically spoken vignettes of lysergically apocalyptic poetry, and Mills-Cockrell playing David Tudor with his surreal punctuations through electronic noise and musique concrete elements. The end result is very strange, even for Aquarius' tastes, and is certainly worth checking out if you're into Nurse With Wound.
W e d o n ' t k n o w h o w T i m e R e l e a s e d S o u n d d o e s i t . F i r s t , t h e y ' r e a l w a y s f i n d i n g s o m e n e w , i n t e r e s t i n g e x p e r i m e n t a l a r t i s t w e ' v e n e v e r h e a r d o f b e f o r e . T h e n , c o m i n g u p w i t h a n e l a b o r a t e & u n i q u e i d e a f o r d e l u x e , l i m i t e d e d i t i o n p a c k a g i n g , t h a t m u s t r e q u i r e h o u r s a n d h o u r s o f w o r k t o m a k e a n d a s s e m b l e . T h e r e ' s a R E A S O N t h e d e l u x e v e r s i o n s c o s t , l i k e , f o r t y - f i v e d o l l a r s , f o l k s !
O n T R S ' s l a t e s t r e l e a s e , t h e y ' r e i n t r o d u c i n g u s t o a B r i t i s h a r t i s t c a l l e d T h e I n v e n t o r s O f A i r c r a f t , w h o s e d i s c W h e r e T h e L i g h t S t o p s i s i n s p i r e d b y a n o t h e r m o d e o f t r a n s p o r t i o n - t r a i n s . M o r e s p e c i f i c a l l y , b y " t h e d e c l i n e a n d p r i v a t i z a t i o n o f t h e r a i l w a y i n d u s t r y i n t h e U K " w h i c h h a v e h a s l e f t m a n y o b s o l e t e , a b a n d o n e d r a i l w a y s t a t i o n s a c r o s s t h e l a n d . S o i t h a s a n o s t a l g i c , m e l a n c h o n i c v i b e . T h e b e a u t i f u l , d r o n i n g , d r a m a t i c s h i m m e r o f T I O A ' s m u s i c e v o k e s b o t h t h e p a s s i n g o f l a n d c a p e s o u t o f a r a i l c a r w i n d o w , b u t a l s o t h e p a s s i n g o f b e l o v e d t h i n g s o u t o f u s e , i n t o t h e m i s t s o f t i m e . M a d e w i t h i n s t r u m e n t s a n d f i e l d r e c o r d i n g s e l e c t r o n i c a l l y s a m p l e d a n d p r o c e s s e d , t h e s e c o m p o s i t i o n s a r e s l o w - m o v i n g , b l i s s f u l b u t s a d , f u l l o f e c h o i n g b i t s o f s t a t i c a n d n e a r - a m b i e n t m e l o d i e s , m o v i n g i n c y c l i c w a v e s . O c c a s i o n a l l y y o u c a n t e l l , t h a t ' s a p i a n o i n t h e r e , o r a b l u r r e d s u g g e s t i o n o f a c h u g g i n g t r a i n f r o m a t r e a t e d f i e l d r e c o r d i n g, I t ' s a t m o s p h e r i c e l e c t r o n i c a t h a t w o u l d p r o b a b l y a l s o b e a t h o m e o n t h e M i a s m a h l a b e l , o r U t e c h . Q u i t e d r e a m y , a n d a g o o d l i s t e n f o r a n y o n e t i r e d o f t h e f a s t p a c e o f m o d e r n l i f e , y e a n i n g f o r s i m p l e r d a y s . W e ' d r e c o m m e n d t h i s t o f a n s o f T h e C a r e t a k e r , R e i g n s , a n d J a s p e r T X a m o n g s t o t h e r s .
S o t h a t c o v e r s t h e m u s i c , w h i c h b y i t s e l f i s c o m p l e t e l y w o r t h w h i l e , a n d i f t h a t ' s e n o u g h f o r y o u , t h e n g e t t h e " s t a n d a r d " c d e d i t i o n , w h i c h c o m e s i n a w h i t e , h a n d - s t a m p e d s l e e v e . B U T , a s f o l l o w e r s o f T i m e R e l e a s e d S o u n d l a b e l k n o w , t h e r e ' s a l s o a d e l u x e , s p e c i a l l y p a c k a g e d v e r s i o n t h a t ' s b e e n c r e a t e d o f t h i s t o o . S u p e r l i m i t e d , t o j u s t 1 0 0 c o p i e s , a l r e a d y s o l d o u t a t t h e l a b e l - w e h a v e j u s t 5 a n d t h a t ' s I T . A n d w h e n w e s a y " s p e c i a l l y p a c k a g e d " , w e m e a n i t . T R S h a s d o n e s o m e o v e r - t h e - t o p p a c k a g i n g b e f o r e b u t t h i s o n e i s r e a l l y i m p r e s s i v e . L e t ' s q u o t e t h e i r m e t i c u l o u s d e s c r i p t i o n o f i t : " E a c h o f t h e s e c o m e s i n a h a n d s e w n , 5 . 5" x 1 4" f o l d i n g w a l l e t t y p e s l e e v e & f r o n t e d w i t h a n u m b e r e d , 1 0 0 y e a r o l d s t o c k c e r t i f i c a t e f r o m t h e n o w d e f u n c t T i m e R e l e a s e d S o u n d R a i l w a y s L t d . E a c h i s h e l d c l o s e d w i t h a s t r e t c h o f t r a i n t r a c k , a n d t i e d o f f w i t h s t r i n g . I n s i d e a r e a n t i q u e g r a v u r e s o f t h e p a s s i n g c o u n t r y s i d e , v i n t a g e s i g n a l d i a g r a m s a n d d e s c r i p t i o n s , a n d a w o r k i n g r e d l i g h t ! E a c h w i l l c o m e i n a h a n d l a b e l l e d b l a c k e n v e l o p e . A l s o, e v e r y o n e t h a t p u r c h a s e s a c o p y w i l l b e s e p a r a t e l y m a i l e d a u n i q u e , a n t i q u e s t e a m t r a i n p o s t c a r d w / h a n d w o r k i n g s, w h i c h u p o n a r r i v a l w i l l f i t n i c e l y i n t o t h e s l e e v e , a n d b e c o m e a p e r s o n a l i z e d p a r t o f t h e p a c k a g e ! "
Y e s , t h a t ' s r i g h t . T h e r e ' s a l i g h t i n t h e r e t h a t b l i n k s ! A n d a p i e c e o f a t o y t r a i n t r a c k . A n d a s t o c k c e r t i f i c a t e . A n d , y e s , i f y o u p r o v i d e u s w i t h y o u r m a i l i n g a d d r e s s ( w h i c h y o u n a t u r a l l y w i l l d o i f y o u a r e a m a i l o r d e r c u s t o m e r a n y w a y ) , w e ' l l p a s s y o u r i n f o a l o n g t o T R S s o t h e y c a n s e n d y o u t h a t p o s t c a r d ! A n d t h u s y o u ' l l h a v e a t r u l y o n e o f a k i n d , p e r s o n a l i z e d a r t e d i t i o n o f t h i s l o v e l y c d .
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
W e d o n ' t k n o w h o w T i m e R e l e a s e d S o u n d d o e s i t . F i r s t , t h e y ' r e a l w a y s f i n d i n g s o m e n e w , i n t e r e s t i n g e x p e r i m e n t a l a r t i s t w e ' v e n e v e r h e a r d o f b e f o r e . T h e n , c o m i n g u p w i t h a n e l a b o r a t e & u n i q u e i d e a f o r d e l u x e , l i m i t e d e d i t i o n p a c k a g i n g , t h a t m u s t r e q u i r e h o u r s a n d h o u r s o f w o r k t o m a k e a n d a s s e m b l e . T h e r e ' s a R E A S O N t h e d e l u x e v e r s i o n s c o s t , l i k e , f o r t y - f i v e d o l l a r s , f o l k s !
O n T R S ' s l a t e s t r e l e a s e , t h e y ' r e i n t r o d u c i n g u s t o a B r i t i s h a r t i s t c a l l e d T h e I n v e n t o r s O f A i r c r a f t , w h o s e d i s c W h e r e T h e L i g h t S t o p s i s i n s p i r e d b y a n o t h e r m o d e o f t r a n s p o r t i o n - t r a i n s . M o r e s p e c i f i c a l l y , b y " t h e d e c l i n e a n d p r i v a t i z a t i o n o f t h e r a i l w a y i n d u s t r y i n t h e U K " w h i c h h a v e h a s l e f t m a n y o b s o l e t e , a b a n d o n e d r a i l w a y s t a t i o n s a c r o s s t h e l a n d . S o i t h a s a n o s t a l g i c , m e l a n c h o n i c v i b e . T h e b e a u t i f u l , d r o n i n g , d r a m a t i c s h i m m e r o f T I O A ' s m u s i c e v o k e s b o t h t h e p a s s i n g o f l a n d c a p e s o u t o f a r a i l c a r w i n d o w , b u t a l s o t h e p a s s i n g o f b e l o v e d t h i n g s o u t o f u s e , i n t o t h e m i s t s o f t i m e . M a d e w i t h i n s t r u m e n t s a n d f i e l d r e c o r d i n g s e l e c t r o n i c a l l y s a m p l e d a n d p r o c e s s e d , t h e s e c o m p o s i t i o n s a r e s l o w - m o v i n g , b l i s s f u l b u t s a d , f u l l o f e c h o i n g b i t s o f s t a t i c a n d n e a r - a m b i e n t m e l o d i e s , m o v i n g i n c y c l i c w a v e s . O c c a s i o n a l l y y o u c a n t e l l , t h a t ' s a p i a n o i n t h e r e , o r a b l u r r e d s u g g e s t i o n o f a c h u g g i n g t r a i n f r o m a t r e a t e d f i e l d r e c o r d i n g, I t ' s a t m o s p h e r i c e l e c t r o n i c a t h a t w o u l d p r o b a b l y a l s o b e a t h o m e o n t h e M i a s m a h l a b e l , o r U t e c h . Q u i t e d r e a m y , a n d a g o o d l i s t e n f o r a n y o n e t i r e d o f t h e f a s t p a c e o f m o d e r n l i f e , y e a n i n g f o r s i m p l e r d a y s . W e ' d r e c o m m e n d t h i s t o f a n s o f T h e C a r e t a k e r , R e i g n s , a n d J a s p e r T X a m o n g s t o t h e r s .
S o t h a t c o v e r s t h e m u s i c , w h i c h b y i t s e l f i s c o m p l e t e l y w o r t h w h i l e , a n d i f t h a t ' s e n o u g h f o r y o u , t h e n g e t t h e " s t a n d a r d " c d e d i t i o n , w h i c h c o m e s i n a w h i t e , h a n d - s t a m p e d s l e e v e . B U T , a s f o l l o w e r s o f T i m e R e l e a s e d S o u n d l a b e l k n o w , t h e r e ' s a l s o a d e l u x e , s p e c i a l l y p a c k a g e d v e r s i o n t h a t ' s b e e n c r e a t e d o f t h i s t o o . S u p e r l i m i t e d , t o j u s t 1 0 0 c o p i e s , a l r e a d y s o l d o u t a t t h e l a b e l - w e h a v e j u s t 5 a n d t h a t ' s I T . A n d w h e n w e s a y " s p e c i a l l y p a c k a g e d " , w e m e a n i t . T R S h a s d o n e s o m e o v e r - t h e - t o p p a c k a g i n g b e f o r e b u t t h i s o n e i s r e a l l y i m p r e s s i v e . L e t ' s q u o t e t h e i r m e t i c u l o u s d e s c r i p t i o n o f i t : " E a c h o f t h e s e c o m e s i n a h a n d s e w n , 5 . 5" x 1 4" f o l d i n g w a l l e t t y p e s l e e v e & f r o n t e d w i t h a n u m b e r e d , 1 0 0 y e a r o l d s t o c k c e r t i f i c a t e f r o m t h e n o w d e f u n c t T i m e R e l e a s e d S o u n d R a i l w a y s L t d . E a c h i s h e l d c l o s e d w i t h a s t r e t c h o f t r a i n t r a c k , a n d t i e d o f f w i t h s t r i n g . I n s i d e a r e a n t i q u e g r a v u r e s o f t h e p a s s i n g c o u n t r y s i d e , v i n t a g e s i g n a l d i a g r a m s a n d d e s c r i p t i o n s , a n d a w o r k i n g r e d l i g h t ! E a c h w i l l c o m e i n a h a n d l a b e l l e d b l a c k e n v e l o p e . A l s o, e v e r y o n e t h a t p u r c h a s e s a c o p y w i l l b e s e p a r a t e l y m a i l e d a u n i q u e , a n t i q u e s t e a m t r a i n p o s t c a r d w / h a n d w o r k i n g s, w h i c h u p o n a r r i v a l w i l l f i t n i c e l y i n t o t h e s l e e v e , a n d b e c o m e a p e r s o n a l i z e d p a r t o f t h e p a c k a g e ! "
Y e s , t h a t ' s r i g h t . T h e r e ' s a l i g h t i n t h e r e t h a t b l i n k s ! A n d a p i e c e o f a t o y t r a i n t r a c k . A n d a s t o c k c e r t i f i c a t e . A n d , y e s , i f y o u p r o v i d e u s w i t h y o u r m a i l i n g a d d r e s s ( w h i c h y o u n a t u r a l l y w i l l d o i f y o u a r e a m a i l o r d e r c u s t o m e r a n y w a y ) , w e ' l l p a s s y o u r i n f o a l o n g t o T R S s o t h e y c a n s e n d y o u t h a t p o s t c a r d ! A n d t h u s y o u ' l l h a v e a t r u l y o n e o f a k i n d , p e r s o n a l i z e d a r t e d i t i o n o f t h i s l o v e l y c d .
This is as much a piece of amazing sound art as it is a critical catalogue of environmental abuse and a tribute to the folks working to solve those problems. EVERY SINGLE CENT from sale of these discs (that's all fifteen bucks from each), will be donated by us to support Greenaction For Health & Environmental Justice (check it out: http://www.greenaction.org). But this is not just a great cause that directly affects us all, this is an amazing sonic travelogue. Essential listening for fans of sound art, as well as anyone concerned with the state of our earth and the way pollution affects our communities.
For those of us who have spent years driving up and down highway 5, all of these locations will be immediately recognizable. However, this is a depressing, but also inspiring, glimpse at spots on the map that have existed as just blurs on the side of the highway. This long in the works project plays like a series of This American Life vignettes, chronicling the environmental abuses along Highway I-5, which runs the length of California including random field recordings, incidental music and interviews with concerned families, activists, children and members of various communities. This project covers points From Hunter Point in Bayview to Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, and is a self guided critical audio tour which attempts to illuminate the "invisible toxic landscape" by focusing on the story of people and organizations struggling for environmental justice. Two discs, one focuses on North, Hunters Point to Kettleman City, the second disc is South, from Alpaugh to Boyle Heights. Each stop along the tour is infamous for some environmental violation or another. Some are obvious (Livermore), some not so. But each directly effects families, their health and homes. It's enormously inspiring to hear these folks talk about what is being done, but simultaneously so depressing to realize how shortsighted so much of modern industry and local government can be. And it's so creepy to think about all the stops along highway 5 from every road trip, just random pit stops for gas, food, bathroom breaks, whatever, and to learn what sort of thoughtless abuses were occurring in all of these places, really intense, and sad because you know these instances are merely the tip of the iceberg.
You can hear the sounds of children playing, families talking, birds chirping, cars whizzing by, wind and rain, footsteps, ambient clatter and background noise, other discussions, as well as dreamy background music, all a dense rich sonic background to this series of totally engaging interviews.
Packaged in a gorgeous full color 6 panel fold out sleeve, with a massive booklet, with maps, and liner notes, extensive notes on each location, the environmental abuse, and each interviewee. This definitely makes us want to take an Invisible 5 roadtrip, stopping to observe the carelessness of humanity, and hopefully be inspired to help bring about change.
So by all means BUY THIS NOW. It's totally amazing to hear and see and listen to. Incredibly well researched and obsessively assembled, totally timely and something that directly affects us all, especially here since in this case all of these locations are in California, but you know you could do a project like this on any highway in any state in the country, which is indeed a very sad thing.
SO DO YOUR SMALL PART. BUY THIS NOW! DIG THESE AMAZING PEOPLE, THESE FASCINATING SOUNDS, AND REMEMBER, 100 PERCENT OF THE PROCEEDS OF THIS DISC GO TO SUPPORT GREENACTION FOR HEALTH & ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE!! AND WE CAN GUARANTEE THAT AFTER LISTENING TO THESE STORIES YOU'LL FEEL LIKE DOING SO MUCH MORE. WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A gorgeous disc of drifting, moody, softly psychedelic dronefolk from this mysterious duo called Invisible Bees. Fans of all things darkly twangy, drone drenched, shimmery and haunting, will definitely want this, the sounds inside are gorgeous, the packaging is over the top luxurious, the bad news is, it's limited to only 50 copies, and we only got a handful. So we'll be brief, but needless to say, do your best to grab one of these, you won't be sorry.
Loping bass, over fragments of folky steel string guitar, plenty of swirling wheezing ambience, more folk than drone in fact, the steel strings guiding the Invisible Bees' sound. The twang and pick and strum, pulled apart, and set amidst deep soft swells of warm washed out whir, the melodies minor key and mournful, in the distance shimmering streaks of high end sway to and fro, the percussion is minimal, the ambience is thick, super moody and cinematic, creepy, and beautifully ominous, a disembodied skeletal folk music for the drone set. Really fantastic, and practically criminal that only 50 people will get to hear it.
Incredible packaging, full color, hand water colored covers with cloth binding with a full color printed inner sleeve as well!
Home Is The Sun is the debut from guitar and drums duo Invisible Things, which is made up of Mark Shippy, he of late great weirdo noise rockers U.S. Maple, and Jim Sykes of Parts & Labor. On the surface, this might initially seem like a cool chunk of slightly angular, sort of experimental avant rock, which it most definitely is, but it's also a lot more than that. While the first few minutes to explode right out of the gate in proper rock song form, complete with vocals and everything, sounding a bit like Polvo actually, or yeah, U.S. Maple, but it doesn't take long for that song to fracture into its actual form, a loose billowing cloud of abstract textured guitar noise, which is beautiful and blissed out, and we would have been happy if that's stretched out to fill up the whole record, but that's really only part of what's going on here.
Apparently, the drumming is based on Sri Lankan percussion, and is applied to a modern rock drum kit, the result is a wild and loose, polyrhythmic sprawl of free percussion freakout, flitting from rhythmic churn, to wild frenzied chaos, to abstract propulsive pummel, the guitars thus left to work their way around Sykes' constantly mutating rhythms. And Shippy is more than up to the task, his guitar unfurling frantic gouts of wildly tangled psychedelic freakouts one second, lush textural shimmer the next, the two surprisingly synchronized, what could have been a mess of free rock wankery, somehow coalesces into proper songs, albeit wildly fractured and dizzingly abstract and obtuse songs, but they're eminently listenable, the vocals drifting in and out, hazy and settled way down in the mix, the sound shifting constantly, but all of the tracks woven into one epic song suite, somehow sounding not at all improvised, it's obvious that much of this WAS, but somehow these two lock tight from the very first few minutes, and react to each other, the results super dynamic, rife with gorgeous sonic tension, and some surprising melodies. The overall somehow both loose and tight at the same time, the two players able to each drift off into the ether and let loose with dense clouds of sound, but somehow never losing sight of the other, and when everything does settle down into something more traditionally 'rock' sounding, it's pretty exhilarating, but it's not long before the sound splinters, and things warp and mutate once again. But the magic here is just that, the constant shifts, the wild tangles, the far out exploration, somehow, those seemingly free and abstract elements are part of a way bigger picture that isn't always visible, but IS always felt. Imagine the weirdest, loosest, free-est, avant indie noise rock record ever, one that includes all the stuff you love about indie/noise rock, all the tropes, all the sonic signifiers, but then ignores them completely, or more accurately, reimagines them, and somehow recontextualizes them into something at once entirely new, but also eminently beholden to what came before. A new favorite for sure!
The Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland has long been a site of blight, crime, and gang activities. It's also home to the purposefully low-profile art-noise-punk venue Life Changing Ministries, which acquired its name from a African-American revival church that had held services in that space beginning in the '60s or thereabouts. When the art-punks took over the space - probably sometime around the late '90s, maybe early '00s - the space was a shithole, with squatter residue and fetid trash strewn everywhere. The people who now run the space have done a pretty decent job of making it one of the better venues in the Bay Area for the underground, noise, metal, no-wave/costume-rock, and anti-everything scenes; but it's still a very low-profile spot and the neighborhood still is not all that savory. In cleaning out all of the debris from LCM, somebody found a bunch of cassette recordings of church services; and these tapes were then passed around to various West Oakland art-rock / noisenik types lead by Ryan Brundage of the Experimental Dental School, The Geldings, Starlight Coffins, etc. And thus, loops of gnarled tape-noise, powerdrone crescendos, back-masked vocalizations, and Le Syndicat-styled mechanical churn splash sloppily amidst the distant proclamations of the power of the Holy Spirit from the unnamed preacher whose powerful baritone led call and responses through the spirited sermons and biblical readings. Such gospel recontextualizations were commonplace in the industrial culture heyday, often with the preachers saying something culturally inflamatory or with the preacher being Jim Jones. Here, the source material is often obfuscated amidst the noise and collage techniques; and in doing so, Brundage et al seek to channel the supernatural aura of the first inhabitants of LCM. Very cool!
After a small break comes yet another record in the massive avalanche of tUMULt releases headed our way in the next few weeks (Iran, Painted Black, Leviathan, OCS, Diamatregon, Worms). This is the second missive from San Francisco's premier NOISEPOP band, not 'noise pop' in the jangly-pop-punk-San-Francisco-festival-Creeper-Lagoon-Overwhelming-Colorfast-Fastbacks sense but the gorgeous-pop-songs-buried-under-a-thick-splattery-wall-of-buzz-hum-whir-skree-guitars-set-on-self-destruct-Beatles-flitered-through-Skullflower sense. Like Sebadoh or Pavement being backed up by Throbbing Gristle or Whitehouse. Or Nurse With Wound fronted by Elliott Smith. If you get our drift. For record number two, Iran has scaled back the noise just a bit and let the pop shine through. And shine it does. Gorgeous, heart-breaking, voice-cracking lo-fi love (and un-love) songs, delivered in a wavery falsetto, over gentle guitars, naive drumming and strange but wonderful backgrounds woven from vocals, amp hum, guitar buzz, as well as rumbling low end and squealing feedback. When the noise does kick in, it's not noise for noise sake, Iran handle the squirming serpent with a deft hand, molding gorgeous sonic squalls and speaker shredding skree from overdriven amps and detuned guitars, with buried melodies and strange and mysterious rhythms laying beneath the storm, like looking through a murky pond at the secret life below. Adventurous indie rockers could very well be looking at their new favorite band, and experimetal/avant garde-niks may just find themselves developing a sweet tooth, cause everyone know the sugar goes down easier with a mouthful of medicine.
Another new release from tUMULt laboratories, finds our coworker Andee's label dipping its toes into pop, and recoiling in horror, as it pulls its feet back covered in muck and crud. Iran take 'Indie rock' and bury it in fuzz and hiss, taking ultra catchy pop, and dragging it through the detritus of lo-fi noise rock, picking up an ungodly assortment of buzz and blur and scuzz. Imagine a Pavement record on Siltbreeze. Or Sebadoh, if Lou Barlow was a jaded fuck instead of a sappy romantic. Or old Smog covering Skullflower. Or Harry Pussy playing Built To Spill. A beautifully cacophonous mess. Iran play damaged folk music, bombarded on all sides by a wild assortment of squeals and shrieks, static and hiss, and speaker clogging grit. Huge and slowly shifting, dronescapes that evolve into perfect little pop songs and then explode into jagged shards of high end skree. Iran are psychedelic and textural and noisey and totally catchy, hardcore, hook-filled low fidelity un-pop noise. Pop. Plus fucking wicked 'tiger' cover art.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
These two San Francisco bands, take their indie rock streaks, and bury them under a layer of buzz and hiss and electronic skree. Iran sound a little like the Grifters if they were on Siltbreeze, and you were listening to them through a shortwave radio. The Church Steps take the lofi, and use the hifi to make it sound even more lo fi. Both sound beautifully damaged.
You'd think Neurosis and Isis would be getting royalties at this point for the sheer number of bands that have 'borrowed' their sound. Then again, if that's how it worked, everybody in Slint and the Pixies would be millionaires. But as we've stated repeatedly in the past, maybe there's nothing new under the sun, and yeah all bands steal/borrow/are influenced by other bands, but it's what you do with those borrowed sounds afterwards that makes a difference. Sure, without Neurosis there would be no Isis, but Isis took their Neurosis obsession and went in a whole new direction and created their own super distinctive sonic world. Hence most of the Isis and Neurosis influenced bands we love, have done just that, taken certain parts, and incorporated their own angle, added their own unlikely influences, and created a sound that if not ALL their own, was at least a unique take on a familiar sound.
Irepress definitely fit right in that whole post rock metal crowd. So all you fans of Isis, Pelican, Rosetta, Mouth Of The Architect, Tides, Grails, Angel Eyes, Conifer and the like, can probably just stop right here and press that BUY button and be done with it. But for those of you who are maybe a little saturated in terns of the whole postrockmetal thing, and wonder why exactly you should free up precious space on your cd shelf for Irepress, well, we'll tell you.
First off, these songs are just awesome. angular and complex, convoluted and tense. Emotional and super catchy. Not as metal as a lot of their brethren, but still pretty dang heavy, crunchy riffs, that go from jagged and harsh, to smooth and spacey often in the same song. But what makes Irepress really stand out is their unabashed, over the top progginess. Sure the genre itself has a built in prog aspect, with long songs and lots of parts, but Irepress take it even further, with LOTS of super proggy spacey breakdowns, swoony and blissed out, but mathy and a bit noodly as well, guitars are muted and understated, weaving complex soundscapes of subtle shuffle incorporating hand drums, trumpet, spaced out FX, drifting minor key melody, lots of delay and reverb, and a whole bunch of super unexpected little flourishes before lurching back into some loping monstrous metallic groove. Some of those parts sound like Santana, others like Genesis, but the thing is, they aren't just little breaks, they are as much a part of the sound and the songs as the crushing riffage or the mathy post rock. It's a strange combination, it takes a little while to get used to, imagine some jammed out fusion breaking into some almost Maidenesque guitar over a chugging metalcore breakdown, or some blissed out percussive ambience slowly building into a massive sludgy epic. Beyond the bands unique progginess, a lot of the riffs themselves are really strange, cobbled together from or broken up into convoluted chugs and soaring high end leads, bits of indie jangle and some seriously downtuned crunch.
A super strange band for sure, pushing lots of our favorite buttons, moody math rock, crushing metallic groove, spacey proggy noodle, dreamy ambience, all pretty dizzying actually, which is exactly why we can't seem to stop listening to this!
We weren't really sure what to think when we were first exposed to the strangely named Iron Bitchface (thanks AQ pal Guy from Guelph), ostensibly a black metal band, IBF ended up being so much more than a mere metal band. In fact, barely a metal band at all, more some sort of metallic techno digital hardcore sort of thing. Needless to say, we LOVE it. And odds are you will too. That is if the idea of grim black metal crossed with spastic DHR style techno pushes your buttons. And c'mon, it really should, cuz this stuff is amazing. Completely baffling, wild and heavy and totally fucking bizarre.
Iron Bitchface is K-Rot and We Are Trolls collects four out of print releases, Return To Gran Mountain, Flirtinis All Round!, I Hate The Internet and Caffeine:Caffiend. Each one a confusional blend of relentlessly inhuman drum machine blasts, bizarre synths, buzzing blackened guitars and growled demonic vocals. The synths pluck out playful melodies over washes of guitar buzz, the drums spastic and hyperspeed. Some songs are almost straight black metal, others are weird abstract synthscapes, others are weird block rockin' techno, like some sort of lo-fi Basement Jaxx, while still others are some weird sort of alien house music. But as you might imagine, the best bits, and thankfully, that means most of the tracks here combine all of the above into totally damaged danceable black thrash techno hardcore whattheefuck. Awesome.
And even more awesome is the fact that this is a split, with the also strangely named Chaos Through Programming, who as much as we hate to admit it, might be even cooler and weirder than IBF. Where Iron Bitchface is sort of buzzy and lo-fi and home brewed, the sound of Chaos Through Programming is HUGE, a dizzying chopshop, mixing big dance beats, bizarre samples, and massive crunchy metal guitars, like a metal obsessed Chemical Brothers with ADD, but with surprising moments of melodic lucidity and killer rhythmic complexity scattered amidst the brain melting bursts of collaged metal dance weirdness.
Packaged in an oversized slimline DVD case with full color artwork and a full color insert.
Body Horror is the second record from Iron Forest, whose sound is a dizzying mix of crushing industrial rhythms, blacknoise terror, power electronics, mutated dub and churning downtuned doom dirgery. Longtime aQ list readers might have crossed paths with the man behind Iron Forest, maybe without even knowing it, with him most recently contributing a B side remix to the newest 7" from USBM weirdos Venowl, but going way further back, operating under the name Crown Of Amaranth, a harsh, harrowing drone project that was an early release on the Crucial Blast label imprint Crucial Blaze. Iron Forest definitely displays much of the same sonic malevolence as CoA, but has honed it into something more focused and rhythmic, taking thick swaths of gnarled and gristled sound, and anchoring it to blown out, almost Digital Hardcore sounding beats. The opening track is strangely lovely, a black sprawl of reverbed melodies over distant rumbles, and grinding glitched out buzz, wrapped around a skeletal stretch of dubbed out pulses, and peppered with machine gun bursts of spastic drum splatter, somehow managing to be both grim and fierce, but haunting and sort of space-y and atmospheric. And that carries over to many of the tracks here, although some like "Rust And Decay" sound a bit like the robotic machine music heaviness of Author & Punisher, lurching and lumbering Godflesh like through fields of static and churning doom-crush riffage. The sticker on the front had us prepared for more of an all out noise assault, but in reality, this could have been some weird Wordsound record, or some Alec Empire related jam from back in the day, not hard to imagine this as being some weird Kevin Martin project too (Ice, God, etc.). tracks like "The Divide" lay down warm, woozy swaths of majestic slow build thrum, and inject weird bits of fragmented rhythm, and shards of more caustic noise, but all of that is sort of smeared into the whole, making for a seriously heady and hypnotic listen. In fact barring a few moments of doom-ed heaviness, the whole second half of the record is all sinister doom-death-dub sprawl, beats for doomheadz, haunting, textured, cinematic, noisy, psychedelic, grim and totally tranced out and hypnotic. So good!
Packaged in an oversized dvd-style case, LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered, inside a printed insert, as well as a handful of full color art cards, wrapped in a black on black printed cardstock cover, and held shut by a similarly black on black printed Japanese style obi!
During recent months, the very first irr. app. (ext.) record had been popping up on eBay, going for incredibly high prices. It was assumed that this album was long out print given its original release back in 1997; those assumptions were quickly dispelled by simply getting in touch with the genius behind irr. app. (ext.) Matt Waldron, who replied, "Oh yes, I have a bunch of those! Do you think you can sell them?" There is certainly a charm to Mr. Waldron's mild-mannered self-deprication; OF COURSE we can sell these records. After all, Aquarius did host an exquisite show of Mr. Waldron's visual work, and we have sung the praises of his recent albums as well as his collaborations with Nurse With Wound. To top it all off, this is simply a fantastic album.
irr. app. (ext.) operates in a realm where many have attempted to venture but only a few have succeeded in grafting the ideals of psychic automatism, Surrealist metonymy, and Dadaist absurdity onto the context of the contemporary sound sculpture. Nurse With Wound has long been the pinnacle of such an arena; and irr. app. (ext.) has slowly built a catalogue of recordings that demonstrate his own expertise in such matters. For his debut solo recording (which we believe came after the irr. app. (ext.) / Stilluppsteypa collaboration), Waldron constructs oblique shifting sounds from the internal workings of small mechanical devices, metallic scraping, shortwave radio static, and other unknown droning sources. These slowly build as disquieting ambience that abruptly halt and detour with cacophonous crashes, wild tape machinations, and unintelligible snatches of conversation. It's a brilliant beginning to what has developed into an exceptional career.
