Initially, it's difficult to appreciate Water Curses on its own merits, and not as the follow up to staggering records like Feels, Sung Tongs, and Panda Bear's Person Pitch, whose influence on contemporary indie music will be felt for a long time to come. In this context, it falls flat, but if you can find the patience to discover it on its own terms, it's not really a bad little ep, and quite possibly even a good one. Fans of Panda Bear's distinctive croon will be disappointed however, as Avey Tare is at the vocal helm of every track, though PB's influence is certainly felt through the nobs and dials of his Dr. Sample. Truly, the title track is as perfect a piece of out-there pop as Animal Collective have ever made, barring perhaps the classic "Who Could Win A Rabbit." It's intoxicatingly catchy, and sends you through a captivating gauntlet of shifts in momentum leaving you delightfully exhausted. The remaining three tracks are all spare in comparison, but each with its own specific charm. "Street Flash" is spacious with sudden screaming accents, and some fantastically wacked vocal processing. Also memorable perhaps for its pathos-enriched lyrics including the standout: "Does anyone in here get hit with inside fevers?"
"Cobwebs" has its roots in sampling, with only a little bit of guitar work, but some fantastic vocal hooks, and exalted whoops and hollers. The final track, "Seal Eyeing", the only track that wasn't tracked in the Strawberry Jam sessions, is a gentle tour of aquatic tableaus and marine communiques, perhaps most noteworthy for its mournfully placid tone, a place Animal Collective hasn't really taken us since the latter half of Sung Tongs. Each song on this ep has its own distinct allure, but in comparison to the revelations embedded in the band's previous work, it's a bit limp. What's difficult to determine, is whether unseasoned ears would find this work as mesmerizing as earlier Animal Collective, or whether there really is something missing. We're not sure. But needless to say, Water Curses will get its far share of spins, if only because it is so damn pleasant.
Following the incredibly tiny improvisations with carefully chosen sticks, rocks, and shells on his "Second Attention" solo album, the Seattle sound artist Jeph Jerman expanded those actions within the context of a larger ensemble called the Animist Orchestra with Dave Knott, Jeffery Taylor, Marina Granger, Mike Shannon, and Robert Mills. As before, the sounds on the Animist Orchestra's "Wuwei" are entirely caught up in the spontenaeity of the moment paralleling the pure, expressive goals of free-jazz. But as Jerman explained in the press release to the album, "the use of natural objects (stones, shells, pine cones etc.) as opposed to more conventional musical instruments, can help the players to not fall back on learned habits of musical play." The activities of Jerman's Animist Orchestra are sustained yet hushed rustings of those natural elements, unveiling a vast array of interwoven patterns and textures. Concentrated listenings are neccessary.
We went a little crazy for Aaron Spectre's Drumcorps project, a crazed manic electronic workout featuring live metal guitars and chopped to bits metal and grindcore, all mashed up into some incredibly head spinning, neck snapping, dancefloor destroying moshpit annihilating heaviness.
So the latest bit of Drumcorps brutality, finds Spectre teaming up with Bay Area thrashmetal titans Animosity for a 3 track one sided 10", which takes up right where the Drumcorps record left off and pushes this whole metal / electronic hybrid even further out. This time, Animosity wrote three tracks, and Spectre got to fuck them up. But weirdly enough, unlike on the last Drumcorps disc, where it sounded like a record assembled from bits of metal and grind and breakbeats, this disc sounds more like an Animosity record, where they just happen to be incorporating bits of jungle and techno and drill+bass and whatever grinding buzzing weirdness Spectre could come up with. And the results are pretty stellar. And its core, this is a grindmetal record, but the guitars are super clipped and processed, often stuttering and chopped up into impossible rhythms, the beats are revved up and transformed into frantic breakbeats, some of the super fast blast beats just keep getting faster and faster until they turn into impossible digital stutters. Huge riffs grind and churn, often separated by squalls of jungle, freaky beats, it's a mash up, but neither side is in control, it veers back and forth from metal to jungle to grind to breakbeat often exploding into everything at once. This is the sort of shit that could get us non dancers out on the floor. Or maybe get you dancers into the pit. Either way, fucking awesome.
And we talk about insane packaging all the time, but once again, holy shit, these guys are pushing the limits of how over the top you can get - eye popping full color screened sleeves, incredible, garish illustrations, inside and out, but it's the vinyl, some are clear and white swirled, some are red and blue and clear swirled, but then the non playing side features and abstract thick metallic ink silkscreened image, either gold or silver, it's hard to explain, but the first time we slipped one out of the sleeve, everyone working had to gather around to see.
CRAZY LIMITED. We got a bunch, but odds are these are the last copies we'll be able to get.
This "live" drone recording is the debut solo cd from Berlin-based installation artist Thomas Ankersmit, who has previously collaborated/played with the likes of Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, and Kevin Drumm. One single 39 minute track, this is some dense, abstract, trance-inducing drone indeed, and certainly sounds like more than a mere one-man operation. Ankersmit's drones are like multiple trains running on more or less parallel tracks, diverging and then joining together again, racing ever onwards towards a self-generated brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel.
There's some squeal and squiggle to these sounds, that arise from their origin within Ankersmit's saxophone - that's right, he plays the sax, so these are saxophone drones - but there's really only a few places where you can tell for sure the source is a sax, thanks to all the electronics and processing involved. In addition to alto sax, Ankersmit makes use of a computer, analog synth, and pre-recorded reel-to-reel tape. So his sax is set amidst much mysterious glitch and crackle, and takes on an ominously distorted, grinding quality that's quite unlike what you might expect to hear from a saxophone. Although it makes sense that he's also had some sort of association with the notoriously noisy sax and guitar outfit Borbetomagus, the music here isn't assaultive, and far from free jazz, no, it's simply, or perhaps not so simply, a gorgeous and varied dronework, one that passes through some quieter stretches of eerie subsonic hum and hiss, while ultimately massing towards the end into full-bodied solid drone purity, blissful and glorious. Pretty darn satisfying, we think our fellow drone-heads will agree. Looking forward to hearing more from Mr. Ankersmit as well. Recommended!
A very interesting split LP for several reasons, not the least of which being the almost 20 years separating the two recordings. Thomas Ankersmit is a young composer, who splits his time between the saxophone and analogue synthesizers, having spent a good portion of his young career touring the globe with Phill Niblock. His performances are as transcendent as they are physical, with him tugging and re-plugging patch cables into his modular synth at a dizzying speed all the while generating a refined blur of arcing drones and potent electricity. Despite the sax, jazz, this is not! In many ways, Ankersmit's loping compositions resemble those early pieces by Jim O'Rourke, especially his impressive Scend and Tamper albums from the early '90s. So perhaps that's why a contemporary Ankersmit composition got teamed up with an archival (and possibly unreleased until now) piece from O'Rourke from that very time period.
Ankersmit's piece incorporates both sax and synth, with cracked electricity fizzing and popping with electroshock capacity only to be consumed by a laser beam of analogue synth tones swarmed by searing hiss of white noise. The saxophone appears as a sustained squawk of circular breathing techniques with the edges thoroughly roughed up by a litany of distortion pedals. O'Rourke's piece seems to be all guitar, with a midrange distortion enveloping the choppy riffs that eventually coalesce into a thick morass of drone-dirge that looks forward to the likes of Ambarchi and O'Malley, although not nearly as heavy. We've been told this is rare. We've been told this is limited. We can tell you this is great!
The UK's Anna Planeta (a band) presents a double cd of recordings they made in a derelict Catholic school house that has been empty since 1980. The band improvises on a number of acoustic instruments and guitars powered by cheap battery powered amps in the once-grandiose assembly hall of the school that is now filled with shattered glass, empty beercans, and spent glue-sniffing bags. It sounds like any number of, to use our coined terminology, "pipe fight" or "lithium drone" bands (No Neck Blues Band, Organum, or Skullflower) recording one of their albums with the microphone right next to a electric transformer or a buzzing light bulb. Very nice work, combining improv "outsider rock" with atmospheric environmental recording. Oversized silkscreened cardboard packaging, and a nice price for 2 cds!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
About 10 years ago, Robert Hampson dissolved his incendiary psych-rock outfit Loop, and ever since has been gradually shedding the layers of his once volatile sound. Recorded under the moniker Main, the first experiments in Hampson's dismantling process succeeded through their swarming guitar drones and rolling basslines, and were heralded as the vanguard recordings for the early 90's Isolationist school. Since then, Hampson has continued to distance himself from the structuralism of rock, removing rhythm, melody, and anything that could be qualified as part of a song. Unfortunately, Main's recent output has merely sounded indifferent, rather than pensive or restrained. Perhaps he's realized this design flaw and has therefore been looking for inspiration by actively collaborating with a number of artists such as Organum, Janek Schaeffer, and now Antenna Farm. In all three instances, Hampson's previous success in creating dis-quiet and dis-ease through a sparse use of sound have once again returned.
Hampson's collaboration with Antenna Farm (the duo of Alastair Leslie and David Howell, recently responsible for a very good album on Phthalo) marks the first release on Staalplaat's Brombrom series of collaborative works. "AF_M" originates from recordings of VLF crackle, shortwave modulations, and various domestic events, yet the three slowly pixillate these sounds into spiralling collages of smoldering electronics and muddled glitches. Quite nice.
Anthroprophh is a new solo project from Paul Allen, frontman for longtime aQ faves, psychedelic space rockers The Heads. Unlike another recent Heads offshoot project, Kandodo (from Allen's bandmate Simon Price), the sound of Anthroprophh is way less drifty and dreamy and really not all that far removed from the Heads mothership.
It starts off with a bang, in the form of a dense cloud of psychedelic guitarnoise, swirling and roiling chaotically, before transforming into a driving, sprawl of motorik kraut-psych heaviness, the biggest difference, is the pounding drums of Heads jams here replaced with a sort of looped Muslimgauze like percussion, which gives it a seriously tranced out vibe. The sound soon shifts to something more stripped down and minimal, an echo drenched voice drifts over flanged swirls, the sound building back up to a squall of murky, churning percussion. The rest of the side unfurls similarly, after a brief acoustic interlude, the sound blossoms into a droned out electric flecked stretch of trance-y psychedelic drift, more minimal looped rhythms, swirls of shimmery ambience, all drifting beneath keening soaring streaks of guitar shred, before settling into some gauze-y ambience, dark whorls of blurred dreamlike sound, all hazy and dreamily washed out.
The bulk of the flipside is taken up by a single epic psych jam, still more of that looped Muslimgauze like percussion, dense clouds of FX, glimmering electronics, long stretches of muted riffage and more wild squalls of guitarnoise, this jam more propulsive, a dense kraut-infused space rock mesmer, all wreathed in spidery guitar melodies and billowing clouds of cymbal shimmer. The final track is a brief coda, all clanging guitar chords and Hawkwind-ish riffy churn wreathed in swirls of effects and keening high end tones, all blurred into a fuzzy washed out smear of psychedelic shimmer.
Imagine a more abstract, minimal Heads, which means this is obviously essential for Heads fans, but for folks into the psychedelic spaciness of Carlton Melton, 3 Leafs and the like, this will definitely hit the spot too.
Super cool silver reflective jacket. Vinyl-only as far as we know. No download with it though.
Antimatter is the work of Bay Area sound artist Xopher Davidson, whose intense, psychoacoustically challenging compositions earn noble comparisons to fellow Northern Californians like Scott Arford, R.H.Y. Yau, Michael Gendreau, and Joe Colley. Furthermore, Davidson has worked extensively with Zbigniew Karkowski, generating gnarled maelstroms of digital grit and volcanic noise on a handful of albums and live performances. Reset is Antimatter's first album in close to 6 years, after he released a couple of albums on the now defunct Asphodel label. It begins with a nasty low-end throb from phased oscillators, obsolete synthesizers, and integral-logic feedback systems, whose generative tension is heightened through metallic slashes and electrical bursts of white noise static. The vigor of Davidson's grim electronics dissolves on the curiously beautiful ambient construction "Sea Of Tranquility," whose vaporous atmospherics recall more of the mesmerism of Tim Hecker and Leyland Kirby emerging out of queasy sick tones and vibrational splutter. The next track "Sverdlovsk-45" was named for a Soviet secret city that enriched uranium throughout the Cold War, and it has all of the claustrophobic industrial metaphors one would expect through the belching hiss and churning centrifuge actions. The crumbling noises glow once again with a spectral beauty found on the aforementioned "Sea Of Tranquility" by the end of the record. Even so, this album is one for those keen on The Hafler Trio and John Duncan, especially since neither of those two have released anything in quite a while.
A one sided vinyl monster. Grinding splattery chaos. Super distorted rhythms beneath thick slabs of ultra distorted hiss and waves of crumbling crunch. That is the sound of Australia's Antipan, a fourpiece that traffics in spaced out aggressive free rock ambience. Or Neu! metal minimalism. Either way it's a gloriously unholy racket. Echoey guitars and streaks of feedback, all tangled up into a dense wall of krautrocky chaos, with buried vocals, and dense squalls of acid fried guitar malfunction and jagged melodic fragments. Those harsher moments are balanced by long stretches of distorted drone and glitchy throb, very reminiscent of their equally noisy countrymen Aufgehoben and Shit And Shine.
Pressed on SUPER thick bubblegum pink vinyl, one sided, the other side features an etching by Rizili from the Menstruation Sisters. Includes a dayglo pink insert, packaged in a hand screened, individually numbered pink on black sleeve.
LIMITED TO 275 COPIES. We only got eight, so you do the math...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Demdike Stare fans listen up! There's a new dark mysterious stranger in town by the name of Anworth Kirk, and for fans of Demdike Stare's haunted dub sound paintings or that Broadcast and The Focus Group record we keep raving about, or any of the vintage horror soundtracks from Trunk Records, you will surely want to give this a listen. No, Anworth Kirk is not really a person, or a band, as far as we can tell, but it's the first release on the new archival imprint Pre-Cert Home Entertainment that will be devoted to releasing a series of limited vinyl missives of contemporary musical and non-musical strangeness. Most definitely associated with DJ Andy Votel and the B-Music crew as well as Demdike Stare themselves (in fact, we're pretty sure Anworth Kirk IS Andy Votel and Sean Canty of Demdike, who run the Pre-Cert label), the music presented here is a mind-bending collage of haunting creaking loops, far away noises of babies crying and dogs barking, slow motion creeping synths, library music, and eldritch incantations culled from dusty corners of British horror. So haunting and beautiful! Limited to 500 copies, it is basically already out of print, so grab one of the few we have while you can!
From the fellow who brought us the lovely accordian interpretations of Erik Satie on a prior cd! From the back: "Compositions such as these - unquestionably go a long way in re-defining the accordian, in liberating it from its relatively short, but heavily cliche-ridden history. In a way, the accordian's role may be compared with that of the saxophone: both children of the industrialisation of musical instrument manufacture in the 19th century, both aesthetically defined by certain popular idioms, both re-discovered and re-defined by the composers of New Music. But while I must confess that the re-invention of the saxophone has, as yet, rarely convinced me - too often the wealth of timbres and articulations created by the master jazz saxophonists has been traded for a relative sterility and blandness of tone -, I do feel that these (and other) new works for accordian have enriched the sound world of the accordian immensely, and I hope that you will share my sense of discovery."
Former Cradle of Filth guitarist Stuart Anstis offers a solo album on the experimental Iris Light label (Szeki Kurva, Aube, Maeror Tri, Band of Pain, etc.). It's not black metal, but more of an electronic soundscape thing with beats...not bad, but not too
Selected Ambient Works Volume II has been required listening since the album was originally released in 1994 right as the Aphex Twin was poised to capture the world's imagination with his mutant electronica, self-immolating techno, and acid laden drill 'n' bass. Here, the second chapter of Aphex's ambient works (sadly, no third volume followed this) is exactly what is claims to be, a brilliant collection of ambient works that re-engineered and re-interpreted Brian Eno's definition of ambient as a convoluted Phillip K. Dick cosmology of dreaming androids and quixotic sentient machines. This album stands at a crossroads of a number of musicological strains, with Aphex Twin's Richard D. James self-aware and self-conscious of the broader implications of making not just a collection of ambient music, but in making *this* collection of ambient music at *that* particular time. In the post-rave aftermath in the UK of the early '90s, chill-rooms were the zones for all sorts of lightweight collages of directionless new age musics and much of the 'ambient' music that was being produced around those chill-rooms was essentially amphorous techno that tempered the rhythm to a soft pulse and added a bird song here or there (e.g. The Orb, Future Sound Of London); but an ambient music that spoke to a community that was beginning to shape their digital / virtual selves was lacking.
Enter Richard D. James and the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume Two. The album follows the direction of Eno's Music For Airports with 24 vignettes that ascribe to a constant atmosphere of gilded tones and lugubrious rhythms, which are more often sequenced patterns and cybernetic echoes through mercurial pools of sound. Tracks glisten, lurch, dissolve, morph, materialize, crystallize, bloom, and collapse amidst a subtle latticework of beguiling electronic melody, something that the Aphex Twin has always had in spades. It was a brilliant record when it came out, and it's still brilliant today. This is especially true with the resurgance of new age wallpaper music, as this album outshines pretty much everything on the current landscape.
For nostalgia's sake, we'll reprise what we wrote nearly twenty years ago about this record: "James sonically replicated the post-slumber / pre-waking state when sunlight first strikes the dream riddled eye within the memory banks of his rewired samplers. A beautiful, synaesthetic and haunting post-techno ambient album that really must be heard!" How true. How true.
Aphid Palisades is the Canadian duo of Ryan Connolly and Lee Tindall, offering up an obtuse and abstracted take on lo-fi kosmische dronescaping. Soft focused guitar and synth drones float out of the introduction of the first track, whose placid nature gradually gets consumed within dub-inflected echos of electrified skitter and murky ice-floes of erratic noise. The feral slump of the Celebrate Psi Phenomenon ethos girds the second track, with a half-melodic din of languid guitar noise that would make Michael Morley proud, with the general torpor of such sounds giving way to a radiant bloom of stratospheric arches from the guitars, synths, pedals, etc. The tape's B side is a side-long sparkle of Ashra / Popul Vuh atmospherics graced with subtle melodies and pastoral, yet stoned vibes. Another nice find from Hooker Vision!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Chris Atkins, Colin Potter, and Phil Mouldycliff are the British drone / field recording collective working as APM. Potter is a brilliant technician whose work we are well acquainted with through his long-standing contributions to Nurse With Wound, Ora, and Monos, not to mention his impressive solo work of processed field recordings and sinister electronics. Mouldycliff is a multimedia artist whose has worked with Loren Chasse, Michael Nyman, and Keith Rowe, and we've had a few of his recordings pass through here. But this Chris Atkins is a character we cannot impart much in the way of a shorthand biography. In any case, APM had travelled to the rustic environs of the Sprint Mill in the northwest of England. This Mill is currently inhabited by one Edward Acland, an eccentric artist who had recently opened up the Mill to various installations and performances. Presumably, APM had performed at Sprint Mill; but it's equally likely that they just collected a plethora of field recordings from all of the Industrial Revolution-era machinery, antiquated plumbing, drafty windows, and the overgrown gardens from the grounds of the Mill. This becomes a beautifully rendered collage slipping between the natural detritus surrounding the Mill and the haunted resonance of the tools in the Mill. Thus, massed aggregates of leaves, sticks, and branches coagulate into watery field recordings of rain, wind, and rushing streams. Throughout, the trio gently intrudes with looping structures of rasping metal where the bell-like chiming of the metal is tempered by the years of use. Where you might expect the drone to be dominant given Potter and Mouldycliff's previous work, it's far more rustic and less all-consuming than we might have thought, although there are some mighty fine drone elements to this album! An excellent piece of manipulated field recording for sure along with the likes of Murmer, Tarab, Jgrzinich, and Loren Chasse!
This disc by the one man dark ambient drum ensemble Apoptose has long been a favorite around these parts, but as it was a few years old, we were never able to get enough to list. And eventually it just went out of print completely. We were thrilled recently to discover however, that it had just been reissued, and thus, now all can share in our mass musical obsession with this amazing slab of percussive overload.
In a small village in Spain called Calanda, the villages gather each year during the holy week of the Christian Easter festival. The villages, clad in purple robes, are all carrying drums, of various shapes and sizes and sounds. The villages all stand completely still, in near silence, until all at once, the whole lot erupt in a frenzy of wild drumming, which continues practically nonstop for 36 hours, the rhythms of the thousands of drums finding their way into every corner of daily life, mundane activities are suddenly performed to some hypnotic rhythm, many of the players enter some sort of fugue state, a trancelike stupor, many passing out, some oblivious to their hands being rubbed raw and beginning to bleed.
The festival is nearly 100 years old, and predates its current Christian orientation, with heathen roots in a tradition of warning of danger outside the cities walls. Sounds almost like A Hermann Nitcsh action. And it must sound like it as well.
Blutopfer is a tribute, a musical homage, an impression of what that festival might sound like. Filtered through a distinctly dark ambient lens, but still dense and complex and hyper rhythmic.
The opening track begins with a low droning hum, as if to imitate the opening hush of the actual ceremony, a dark smoky swirl, which hardly prepares you for the massive crush of a million snare drums, all tangled and intertwined, various distinct rhythms surfacing amongst the dense drum line cacophony. It's so dense in fact, that the drums almost begin to resemble radio static. But unlike the actual festival, there are all sorts of other sounds, huge throbbing bass melodies, rumbling pulses, the drums locked into a super hypnotic martial rhythm, while the buzzing bass propels it forward. So epic and heavy and majestic and dense with drums!
The sound is almost like LUSTMORD JAMMING WITH A MARCHING BAND DRUM LINE, which we shouldn't have to tell you sounds AMAZING.
While that first track is ultra heavy, and rhythmically fucking fierce, much of the rest of the record is more skeletal, more spare, with long stretched out black ambience, slowly unfurling barely there melodies, all beneath totally intense, completely mesmerizing drumming. A relentless militaristic drum corps, weaving killer complex snare rolls. At it's darkest and most intense, it sounds like some drum heavy Toroidh or Folkstorm track, a teutonic industrial throb, the snares just adding to the intensity, but most of the record, it really does sound like a drum line transported to some wasted bleak doomscape, their insistent rhythms just barely keeping the blackness at bay. SO GODDAMN GOOD.
All new packaging, a dark purple, six panel, thick card stock folded sleeve, with liner notes detailing the Spanish festival that inspired this record.
Finally, the seemingly impossible to get full length release from this amazing Icelandic organ-synthesizer-keyboard combo gets a proper widespread release! Think Stereolab, Trans Am, Kraftwerk, M83, mix in a little Add N To (X), a little Postal Service and you'll be in the ballpark. From straight-up Stereolab worship, the first track is the best Stereolab song that never was (albeit with a Speak And Spell on lead vocals), to full on synth-rock with buzzy guitars and huge thick burping fuzz organ basslines with cool Kraftwerky computer vocals, to blissy M83 style romantic fuzzscapes, to goofy burbly loungy bleep and bloop, to some distinctly Kraftwerkian krautrock. AOQ's quadruple organ attack is tough to beat. You know how when a band had two guitarists, maybe three, it just made the guitar sound that much thicker and in your face, well, just imagine FOUR ORGANS rocking full on! Woah! And one of the organs just so happens to be manned by AQ fave Johan Johannsson (who also produced the record). In the past various AOQ members have worked with the likes of Marc Almond, Hafler Trio, Sigur Ros, Barry Adamson, Stillupsteypa, Mum, Pan Sonic and even Hermann Nitsch! But you won't find any blood soaked cacophony here. Nope, this is all warm and warbly, dreamy and bouncy, fun and fuzzy.
Gorgeous cover art featuring oil paintings of the various members of the band as Playmobile figures!!
This is definitely on the poppy side of things for the Hapna label, in our experience, Hans Appelqvist being a singer-songwriter-with-a-guitar kind of guy, but this self-described "patchwork symphony" brings in a lot of other, weirder sounds as well. It's apparently his 3rd album for Hapna and 4th overall, and we're sorry we missed the others 'cause this is really nice, delightful even, though with a sinister underbelly... it's music that someone like Bjork might hear in her dreams, magical and moody, with singing (in Swedish) and guitar strum and piano and bells and also all sorts of cartoony sound effects, playful children's voices, dogs barking, birds cawing, crickets chirping... all woven into a gorgeous patchwork indeed.
If you like your Swedish indie pop to conjure an intimate, mysterious and quirky soundworld, Hans Appelqvist is your man. There's 12 tracks, but many of them are interludes only a bit over a minute, so it's about 25 mins total. As a bonus, though, you get a Quicktime video clip for "Tank Att Himlens Alla Stjarnor", which puts Appelqvist into a colorful and enchanting animated visual representation of that soundworld... you'll get to "see" some of the stranger sounds that crop up on that track!
The strangely named duo Applehead is in fact one part the duo (?) Anworth Kirk (which we're pretty sure is at least one part former Record Of The Weekers Demdike Stare (also a duo, confused yet?)), and Applehead's debut record is the second release on Pre-Cert, a label run by Finders Keepers' Andy Votel and the guys in Demdike Stare, focusing on, according to the label themselves, contemporary musical and nonmusical material, referencing research libraries/VHS video culture/electronic Folkways records/sound poetry/tape manipulation/European fumetti/outsider art/field recording and more. Essentially, the music on Pre-Cert, and specifically this new one by the mysterious Applehead, is in fact, some seriously twisted, far out, faux seventies Italo disco soundtrack music. At least that's what we're getting from all that. A heady collection of heavy fuzzed out grooves, strange voices, creepy ambience, all woven into what sounds like the score to the greatest, and creepiest, seventies giallo you've never seen.
The record begins with some haunting, soundtracky murk, all buried melodies, muted buzz and crunch, over which a reverbed female voice intones some mysterious message in some foreign language, all the while ominous chords ring out, until BAM, in swoops a fat funky Italo disco groove, super distorted and gloriously fuzzy, the synths heavy and in-the-red, wah guitars, but the sound is strangely washed out, the groove surrounded by streaks of ghostly shimmer, clouds of effects, the end result is a killer krautrock / space rock sci-fi funk.
The record is peppered with strange little interludes, more of that voice, like a snippet from a film, woven into creepy swirling ambience, blurred minimal dronemusic, but it's not long before the next groove comes in, and it's another buzz drenched bit of giallo style faux soundtrack funkiness, dubbed out percussion, tinkling melodies, complete with terrified gasps and shrieks of females in peril. The A side wraps up with a heavy slice of organ driven haunted house moodiness, that definitely had us thinking Goblin, Zombi, Umberto and the rest of those sci-fi retro futurists.
The flipside offers up more of the same, some pulsing thrum that gives way to another blast of seventies horror funk, chuggy wah wah guitars, muscly drums, creepy minor key melodies, spectral howls super distorted synth buzz, all woven into a heavy organ kraut-funk groove. Finally the record winds down with what is the perfect Italo horror score, another woozy groove, funky and slinky, low slung and slithery, a little dubby, a little disco-y, wreathed in a spectral haze, and rife with haunting melodies, a serious slab of classic John Carpenter style seventies style suspenseful soundtrackiness.
Awesome stuff, and WAY recommended for anyone into the current crop of sci-fi soundtrackers and retro Goblin worshippers, as well as the various strains of modern hauntological soundscaping (a la Demdike Stare)...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
We love the out-there improvs of legendary jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, and the idea of him teamed up with an equally out-there electronics maverick (Jon Appleton, natch) was enough to get us excited about this cd reissue of the duo's 1970 recording Human Music. Cherry, then a fixture on the NYC free jazz scene, was invited to be an artist-in-residence by young Dartmouth music professor Appleton -- who just happened to have a Moog-laden electronic music studio at his disposal. The resulting collaboration is an early exercise in "live" electronic-meets-acoustic music -- as the studio techniques of musique concrete, like splicing and editing tapes with razor blades, couldn't be applied to a real-time improv duet, so Appleton had to find ways for Cherry's playing (on both horns and sundry percussion) to immediately "trigger" responses from the studio's arsenal of synths. The results are VERY bleepy-blurpy-whooshy, like something from a freaky sci-fi soundtrack, and Cherry's trumpet is often obscured by the electronic effects. We can't say that Human Music is an absolutely essential Don Cherry album but it's definitely an interesting novelty in his discography and it's cool to get to hear it now!
- MPEG stream: BOA
- MPEG stream: OBA
Alex Cobb's Students Of Decay imprint must issue an edict to those who pass through its doors to deconstruct the song to particular base elements - primarily noise and drone with a ghost of melody - and rearrange them, for some truly compelling albums. Evan Caminiti, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Brendan Murray, Celer, Peter Wright, and Natural Snow Buildings (the latter being perhaps the most 'traditional' of these SoD acts) have all obeyed Cobb's edict, alongside plenty of lesser knowns.
Aquarelle (aka Ryan Potts) is not a project we've heard all that much about, but the work certainly holds up to the high Students Of Decay standards of scattered drone pocked with sculpted noise. Beginning with cyclical patterns of cello and guitars all encrusted with rough-cut shards of glass that reflect and refract sound into a consonant shimmer of white noise. The fundamental tones from the cello in particular surface through "With Verticals" brightening the space with all of the cinematic flourishes one hears in Stars Of The Lid, but produced with the granularity of a particularly discordant Christian Fennesz (e.g. Endless Summer). "The Blue Light Was My Body" sets undulating washes of static-noise upon a finger-picked acoustic guitar riff and a stately drone that forms a enveloping corona to the track. Again, the references to Fennesz, Loveliescrushing, and Tim Hecker ring true, with Aquarelle flashing Americana-hues from weathered wood and rusty nails to his grit-laden ambience. Limited to 300 copies!
Arastoo is another one of those outfits (persons, actually) who has loads of releases out, but all of them are ultra limited and thus seemingly impossible to get. The last (and only) thing we had from Arastoo was a gorgeous cd-r released on Dielectric records, and now of course out of print. So we were super excited when AQ pal Brandon decided to release a brand new Arastoo on his label Isounderscore. it's still limited of course, but we managed to get a bunch, although we imagine these won't last long.
Arastoo is Arastoo Darakhshan, and is another in the brotherhood of the drone, deftly exploring a warm and wonderful drone drenched ambience. Three is a series of deep cavernous drones, warm and rich, not so much rumbling and sort of washing over you like the sun drenched surf. But this is NOT sunny, this is like a sky devoid of sun, a blanket of rich blackness, permanent nighttime. Occasionally punctuated by haunting reverbed tones, presumably the sound of struck metal. Creepy buzzing alien melodies drift by like a broken trumpet or some sort of shortwave guitar. The heart of the record is a massive, slow building ultra dense drone, layers of low-end get thicker and thicker, while additional layers are added slowly and subtly, each of those new layers, slightly higher in pitch, the result is a rich swirl of strange overtones and hunting ghostlike melodies. Gorgeous.
Housed in an amazing gloss black on matte black sleeve.
So let's get the business stuff out of the way first. THIS IS VERY LIMITED. In fact, we have the only 17 copies left. Of the 50 ever produced. We tend to be kind of opposed to ultra limited releases, obviously if a release is good enough to release at all, and then spend loads of time and money on, then it makes sense that you would want as many people as possible to hear it. But sometimes cicumstances make that unrealistic.
Running a label is hard. Especially when you specialize in really strange music, spend a lot of money on packaging, and then don't sell a whole lot of records. Even though the records you release are amazing. This happens way more than you think. Often the result is cool little labels just giving up. Which is always a drag. In the case of Dielectric, another label with a houseful of unsold records, all of which we've raved about here, the solution was to start doing super limited, lovingly assembled cd-r's, limiting the financial risk, and of course the amount of space needed to store the damn things. So here we have the newest release by Arastoo, aka Arastoo Darakhshan, who produces some of the most haunting, gorgeously ethereal ambient music we've ever heard. Drifting and shimmering, these thirteen tracks, embrace nature, but in a totally abstract way, dark soundscapes of distant vibrations and subtle sonic shifts, late night expanses of moonlight and forest flutter, smoothed into warm, rich drones. There seems to be guitars, but the actual notes are muted and spread into dreamy ethereal wisps of sound. Really amazing. Coleclough, Mirror, Ora, Chalk and Basinski have nothing on Arastoo. Packaged with six oversized cards, printed with full colour images of industrial landscapes, mostly blown up abstract details, wrapped in a vellum outer sleeve that folds shut like the petals of a flower and is held closed with a wax seal!
Be warned, the wax seal is VERY delicate and will most likely crack or crumble in the mail, or even on the shelf, you'll just have to deal with it since you'll have to break the wax seal anyway to listen to it. So don't expect an intact one.
And again we only have 17 copies. After these are gone, it is gone for good!
Once again, we can just tell when a record is going to be a hit here. Something intangible that tells us that everyone is going to absolutely love (or absolutely hate but still need to own) this record. We felt it about the Conet Project. Hatebeak. Daddy's Curses. The Thai Elephant Orchestra. And now Arboga Teenage Riot.
The story goes like this. Our pal Nathan was on tour in Europe and while travelling through Sweden, two young ladies handed him a tape. The tape sat in the bottom of his bag, unlistened to for months. On his return to the states he remembered the tape, put it in the stereo, pushed play and had his mind promptly blown. And we'll have to admit we feel exactly the same way. Imagine ultra lo-fi, high energy techno / gabber, all four on the floor beats and cheesy synths, whistles and those kinds of melodies usually reserved for cheerleading competitions. "You All Ready For This?!?!" DONK DONK DONK DONK DONK DONK DONK! You know of what we speak. So now imagine two teenage girls, sometimes making up Swedish lyrics and chanting them in cute sing-songy harmonies, but more often, just screaming and growling hysterically in their best aproximation of black metal vocals, sounding like they were just dubbed over the music on a boombox (which they probably were). This is the real digital hard core! Or more accurately ANALOG HARD CORE!!! If Alec Empire had any balls Arboga Teenage Riot would be the next DHR superstars. ATR take techno and black metal and riot grrl and DIY recording and turn it into a totally bizarre, fascinating, fun and funny masterpiece! The cover is pretty sharp too, a huge swamp beast thing emerging from the water, beneath a hot pink totally illegible Arboga Teenage Riot black metal style logo! Fuck yeah!
We hadn't heard too much about these fluttering folk faeries, but odds are, we'll all be hearing a whole lot about these guys (and gals) in the near future. The sound they make is a gorgeous sun dappled blend of soft focus Appalachia, folky forest drift, shimmering indie shuffle, all wrapped in a warm gauzy production like a lazy summer afternoon spent on a porch swing, just sitting, and staring out at everything and nothing.�
Minor key melodies unfurl via stately steel string guitar, a lilting mix: a little blues, a little Appalachia, a little moody ambience, flecks of twang here and there, all�very spare and languorous. The female vocals are gently affected, the result a perfect mix of modern nu-folk, some Chan Marshall, some Joannna Newsom, and a healthy dose of classic old school British folk, Incredible String Band, Pentangle... the vocals very dramatic and swoonsome, perfectly complimenting the dark twangy swirl beneath. At some points the vocals become much more intense and pronounced, and we're definitely reminded of Jolie Holland, the vibe becoming decidedly country at times, but even then, the music continues to sway and shimmer, drifting and floating, the leaves in the trees above rustling, the leaves below crunching underfoot. So lovely.�
Obvious comparisons would be Devendra, Newsom, Feathers, Vetiver, Brightblack, Espers, and odds are anyone into that stuff will be quite smitten by Arborea, but even folks who aren't always sold on this new wave of folk revivalists, might find Arborea's old fashioned sounds just familiar enough to wrap up in like an favorite old blanket...
We almost managed to do a list with only ONE Aidan Baker record, but found a stash of these hidden away in the closet and have actually been meaning to list them for a while now. Only have a handful, so these might be the last copies we see for a while.
Arc just so happens to be the the drone / free jazz / krautrock improv trio Baker heads up, the three members employing guitar, flute, percussion, electronics and multiple drumkits to produce the peculiar brand of avant amorphous outsider krautdrone that made their first disc, The Circle Is Not Round, such a hit around here.
Four sixteen and seventeen minute tracks, the first a glistening glimmering long form metallic shimmer, laced with rainfall like percussion, skittery snares, long stretches of glitched out electronics, muted barely there rhythms. The second starts off like a less jazzy Necks, lots of space, softly strummed guitars, strange scattered percussion, soft swarms of electronic FX, backwards swoops, processed cymbal sizzle, subtly ominous and haunting, eventually the drums explode and the pound out a reverb drenched rhythm, while the guitars grow thicker and slightly more propulsive, eventually blissing out and fading out completely. The final two tracks are quite similar, beginning as deep soft shimmers and building in intensity until they become these reverb heavy tribal free jams, thick with droned out shimmers, and layers of fuzzy gauzy ambience, sort of like the Swans meets the Necks, or a blissed out Einsterzende.
Not the sort of stuff we're used to from Baker, but definitely cool, and certainly a bit more challenging than much of his more soothing blissed out drone / dirge output. If you dug the other one, you'll for sure dig this, and if you're looking for something a bit abstract, a bit jazzy, a bit krauty and a bit drone-y, then this could well fit the bill.
Packaged in a striking sepia tone 6 panel digipack style sleeve, and again, we have very few copies, so when we sell out, please be patient while we try to get more.
We've reviewed a couple records by Canadian drone / free jazz / krautrock improv trio Arc, probably best know for being fronted by Mr. Aidan Baker, he of doomdronedirge duo Nadja, and numerous other solo records. But Arc is definitely a group, with the three members each contributing to Arc's lovely, minimal sound. Haunting and hushed, slow building and mysterious, simple percussion, fluttering woodwinds, the distant swirl of layered drones, Arc almost sound like a more abstract Necks, which is a huge compliment. And in fact this reminds us of several recent Baker releases (Still Life, Lost In A Rat Maze), in its dark abstract sort-of-jazziness. But unlike the inherent minimal dronemusic leanings of those more recent records, Arc build into something almost propulsive, at times reminding us of Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, an almost world music sounding landscape of sound, the flutes especially evoking a world/folk music vibe, with the minimal tribal percussion, really sealing the deal, especially on the second track, with the band doing a sort of tabla driven, synth heavy bit of Muslimgauze worship, flecked with strange bits of electronic glitchery, and some twisted bits of FX drenched guitar squiggle. Folks who dig Baker's more minimal murky drone side or the heavier metalgaze of his Nadja stuff, might be a bit put off, but if you dug the other Arc records, or just like strange minimal electronic experimentalism and dreamy faux world music weirdness, this just might hit the spot.
WE ONLY HAVE SIX COPIES OF THIS, and as we mentioned, the label folded, and these are absolutely the only copies we'll be able to get, which means snap one up before they disappear.
The Canadian avant-drone guitarist Aidan Baker has been popping up quite a bit at Aquarius in recent months. While he has been quite active in producing numerous drone-based releases, we first took serious notice of his work thanks to the atmospheric doom of his project Nadja. He also turned up on an exceptional 4-way split alongside John Duncan, Z'ev, and Fear Falls Burning. Arc is another project from Baker, finding him working alongside a couple of percussionists in this pastorally psychedelic, improv ensemble. The Circle Is Not Round began as a series of live recordings that Baker blurs into a concoction that lays somewhere in between the spiralling melancholy of a non-aggressive Troum and the '70s prog-ambience of Popul Vuh. Baker's impressionist guitar drones are at the center of these recordings; and while the original live sessions probably slanted more towards the hippie and less the psychedelic end of the spectrum, Baker abstracts all of his sounds with enough backwards masking, tapeloops, and shimmering delay patterns to transform the improv noodling into slow burning dissonant crescendos, earthen throbs, and kosmiche soundscapes with more than a few references to Fennesz, Growing, and even Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, if you can imagine a guitarist doing his best impersonation of that very digitally constructed ambience.
On all twelve Arcane Device recordings, David Myers (who is AD) utilised an assortment of home-made feedback generator machines, that in lesser hands would have resulted in head-rattling noise. While much noise *was* generated, on "Also Sprach Zarathurstra" these machines create soft extended pulses of analog electricity and rich textural warmth that emerge from a black claustrophobic aural space and are processed in breathtaking fashion. Myers is certainly one of the most under-rated dronologists, deserving the same critical praise as Mika Vainio and John Duncan. A glorious reissue.
add to cart [/images/addtocart.gif]/af4105.html It's practically raining Jewlled Antler releases this time around. Who are we to complain? We can't get enough of this stuff! And now we've got this here quadruple cd-r set. Featuring four new JA bands, all weirdly featuring the exact same members, but with their names spelled slightly differently on each release. Archeological Pacemaker features Glen Donnellsen, Horticultural Compass features Glenn Donaldson. Geological Colander features Donovon Quinne, and Anthropological Bundt Cake features Donnovon Quin and so on. Strange stuff, but that's why we love those Jewlled Antler guys. All four of the bands featured on Scepter of Agricultural Indifference all tread that similar JA path, delicate, barely there ambience, nature sounds subtly intruding on the proceedings, and of course a pretty vast array of instrumentation including: mandolin, bongos, kazoo, penny whistle, player piano, bugle, jew's harp, spoons, washboard, rubberband guitar, musical saw, racoon trap, diaphragm, toilet seat (!) and much more. The sounds they get out of this disparate collection of instruments is amazing. Truly a testament to the creativity of the Jewelled Antler Collective. Packaged in a bundt cake pan filled with soil (completw with live worms), and containing (in keeping with the various bands' monickers) a pacemaker, a colander and a compass. Obviously super limited and a bitch to mail so be prepared to pay extra shipping.
Ah, Utech! Always bringing us something good. And dark. And difficult to describe. This is the first of a brand new batch of autumn Utech releases to see review here, and it's quite excellent indeed. 2nd album for this resonant experimental outfit centered on an artist from Italy (now based in Berlin).
Circling, shimmering drone pulsations start this disc off with a ominous build up of dark density, that sounds like it's somehow made not with conventional instruments, but with specialized scientific measurement equipment. Ten minutes in and you're thinking this is what this album's all about, and that wouldn't be a bad thing at all, mesmerization complete... but then the very next track introduces ghostly female vox, over quietly drifting, echo-effected bliss, and it becomes evident that Urania (named for after a venerable Italian science-fiction magazine) is deeper yet... the echoing rhythmics continue as the disc progresses, it's almost some sort of sci-fi dub-drone music, trance inducing, spooky and spaced-out. The sort of thing we KNOW a lot of you are going to love. Highly, highly recommended.
Packaged with the usual Utech care, in a slim black-on-black sleeve with fold out insert bearing inscrutable art by Reuben Sawyer.
Singapore's The Observatory totally blew us away with last year's Dark Folke record, their fantastic debut, a difficult to describe sonic concoction of soft psychedelia, lush, dark mysterious free folk, all woven from synths and vocal harmonies and angular guitars and theremins, spare and minimal, slipping from slowcore dirge to psychrock freakout to dreampop bliss and back again, often in the same song...
So we were excited to discover that two of the folks from The Observatory had another band, whose record was coming out on Utech, and we only later discovered that it was a sort of concept record about one of our favorite places we've never been, Tiger Balm Garden, a decrepit former amusement park in Asia, that is filled with strange statues, and mysterious figures, and much of it is not entirely kid friendly, exhibits displaying various characters from Chinese folkore, including concepts such as death and hell, rendered in gory and creepy detail. A friend of ours visited when she was in Asia, and it seemed like the most surreal place on earth, due in part to its crumbling decay, but beyond that, what a strange and wondrous place!
So here, Arcn Templ, aka Leslie and Vivian from The Observatory, have composed a suite of songs, musical memories of visiting this strange land of demons and warriors and animals and mythical creatures, as children, reflecting how those memories affected them, fond memories, hazy and indistinct, laced with a certain amount of menace, lurking right below the surface. And these songs are in fact like that, mysterious hazy memories rendered in sound, gorgeous minimal folkscapes, acoustic guitars laced over whirring organs, spidery guitars unfurling minor key melodies, harmonica, minimal percussion, ringing chimes, bell like tones, a sort of doom pop, slowcore, dreamfolk, each track a faded snapshot, of not just this strange place, but Leslie and Vivian's fleeting place in it. Barring the occasional burst of cacophonous crunch, for the most part, Emanations Of A New World is a tranquil trip back in time, the sounds tempered by the years, giving everything a gauzy vibe, the sounds softly surreal, and so so lovely. Folks who dug The Observatory record should definitely check this out, as well as anyone into dark moody folk flecked doom-ed minimal pop music... And mark our words, someday we'll make it to Tiger Balm Garden to experience it for ourselves, but until then, we're happy viewing it through the mysterious musical memories of Arcn Templ...
We listed Area C's debut release on Last Visible Dog a few lists back (and we're relisting it on this list for those of you who missed out), so we were psyched to discover this amazing hand made quadruple 3" cd-r set, which is limited to FORTY COPIES a bunch of which we managed to get direct from the band himself. That's right, HIMself. This is all the work of one man, but it sure doesn't sound like it, instead, it sounds like the work of some strange rock band, a band concerned more with texture and mood than actual rocking, guitars are looped and smeared, rhythms pulse and lope, a dreamy ambient post rock world of darkness and mystery. Crafted almost entirely from guitars, chopped and looped and processed, these 4 discs are each a puzzle piece, a tiny part of a grander, expansive, rich sonic soundworld. Looped guitars slither and sway, constructing dark melodies and simple propulsive rhythms, almost like a more minimal abstract Tortoise, but beneath THOSE guitars, are still more guitars, weaving elaborate backdrops of sparkling shimmer and barely audible clouds of sound. Elsewhere, tracks explode into super distorted blown out krautrockscapes, others meander lazily, slow moving and strange almost mechanical sounding melodies, over abstract industrial frameworks. But at the heart of it all, is the guitar, and a dreamy moodiness that suffuses every sound on all four discs.
And as if the sounds here weren't captivating enough, the packaging is completely gorgeous and deluxe. All hand made and assembled, the four discs are housed in an oversized thick cardboard sleeve, held shut with a Japanese style obi. Inside, each disc comes in its own elaborate sleeve, housed in its own little plastic pouch affixed to the inside of the sleeve. Disc one comes in a sleeve like a folded map, with part of it cut away to reveal the disc inside, the second and third disc are each wrapped in a transparent full color vellum sleeve, alongside a tiny square of actual wood, and the fourth disc is also a vellum sleeve, but printed with an austere winter landscape over a folded square of thick textured paper. So completely amazing.
And as we already mentioned these won't last, because of the labor and time involved in assembling these sets, it is limited to 40 COPIES!!!
Another one we first heard on that massive Invisible Pyramid: Elegy box set that Last Visible Dog put out a few months ago (Mudboy was the other Providence, RI drone artist that we discovered via the IP box). And now, like Mudboy, Area C has their own cd release on LVD. Actually a one-man guitar loops and effects (and other things besides, like farfisa organ) effort, Traffics + Discoveries starts out very blissful and calm, ambient like Eno perhaps...and as the disc goes along it stays quite beautiful but gets edgier and darker and more nervous-making. We like it quite a bit. Chalk another one up for both Providence and LVD, in the everybody-wins competition for who's got the best drones around!
Sounding something like a hybrid of Lustmord and Dopplereffekt, Trans Plutonian Transmissions is a long lost album from Brian Lustmord's one-album side project Arecibo, released back in 1994 through the Dark Vinyl imprint Atmosphere. This offshoot of its more seminal dark ambient / post-industrial main label was something of a conceit to the blossoming ambient techno scene of the early '90s, spiralling out of labels like Emit, Fax, and Reflective. Lustmord is best known for his quintessential dark ambient work of subterranean drones and deep space isolationism on the timeless and existentially bleak albums Heresy and The Place Where The Black Stars Hang. In fact, Trans Plutonian Transmissions was recorded about the same time as Black Stars, and draws from the same conceptual pool by sourcing the universe itself albeit to different ends. The dark matter and occluded hues of that album resound in Trans Plutonian Transmissions but with the major addition of stalking downtempo rhythms and acidic 303 basslines. Plenty of NASA communications with astronauts and reclaimed data from NASA research into pulsars, quasars, and black holes embue this album with paranoid aesthetic paralleling the X-Files; and those pointilistic squiggles and squelches dropped into minor key chords and judiciously bathed in blackening reverberation further those metaphors. The one Arecibo record had a few contemporaries, including the Patashnik album from Biosphere, the Pete Namlook / Richie Hawtin collaborations as From Within, as well as the early Pan Sonic and Mono Junk recordings of icey post-techno out of Finland, all from the mid '90s. The album is a product of its time, but is certainly no worse for the wear because of it. Lustmord's production touch is impeccable as always, lending that steely gaping quality to every sound, as if it were slowly getting injested by a galaxy crushing black hole. Recommended.
There's two new tapes from UK tape label the Tapeworm on this week's list; this one's from Uruguayan composer/soundscaper Gaston Arevalo, who takes traditional instruments like viola and guitar, along with all manner of abstract samples and field recordings, and somehow melts all of these sounds down into a haunting ethereal brew, the various sounds smeared into warm swirling swells, and deep lush rumbling whirs. The result a stunning series of hushed gauzy softly symphonic soundscapes, definitely reminding us of The Caretaker, or like something you might expect to hear on Type or Miasmah, that same sort of subtly ominous, blissfully bleary ambient drift, a dreamily nocturnal bit of gristly chordal thrum, rife with buried melodies, and constantly shifting layers, there's definitely a new age vibe, but that's blended with a blackened almost pop ambience, and then wreathed in starfields of crackle and hum, and washed out billows of lush shimmer, a practically perfect collection of late night, rainswept, cinematic, dreamdronedrift lullabies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
In response to the incendiary buzzes and periodic electrified gasps of sharp noise emanating from the stereo at the front of the store, Andee had to wonder if Aquarius had unbeknownst to him started offering free tattoos with every purchase. Unfortunately,
Yau opens the procedings with a muscular application of the Carsten Nicolai / Mika Vainio glitch, as jagged static cracklings collapse into low end rumblings and nervous electrical tones. Arford's follow-up incorporates similarly tense cracklings, but releases them into expansive swells of grey noise. Gradually the record's tension disperses and the lines between whose sound is whose dissolve, as the electrical hissing previously mentioned as replicating the rapid machinations from a tattoo gun slowly take over, softening further into hypnotic vibrations. Very impressive.
Operating in the legendary Cyclone warehouse space near Hunter's Point in San Francisco, 7hz has functioned as one of the few SF venues that is exclusively dedicated to experimental sound art, and also has served as the live / work spaces (in the truest sense of the term) for Scott Arford (aka Radiosonde), Randy Yau (23five), and Michael Nine (aka Death Squad). During the fall of 2002, 7hz took their show on the road, as Arford, Yau, and Nine embarked on a European tour. This disc is essentially the tour support album, offering an exclusive sampling of each artist's work. Arford's sonic reconstitutions of video static have made for stunning audio / visual performances (almost unheard of in the visually sterile realm of laptop composition). Here, his contributions spit forth digitally corrosive bits of static and noise (which resemble remote control / shortwave detritus) along mechanized grids. Altogether, Arford's tracks resemble the pained electric noise of those collaborations between Zbigniew Karkowski and Pita Rehberg. Yau defines his work as an "action concrete," in which recordings of impromptu vocal outbursts have been dissected and reanimated through a number of electro-acoustic techniques, often sounding like a mutation of Robert Ashley's classic "Automatic Writing" with far more jarring and confrontational results. Michael Nine's work comes out of the Whitehouse / Con-Dom approach of primitive noise assaults as transgressive theater. All in all, an excellent introduction to these San Francisco artists.
