When M.S. Waldron is not gallivanting around the world in the touring ensemble of Nurse With Wound, this Californian audio alchemist has occasionally staged his own luminous and deranged performances as irr. app. (ext.). Waldron has been able to generate a very consistent catalogue of recordings whilst living in his humble abode in the Santa Cruz foothills, but the number of live performances from irr. app. (ext.) have been erratic (if not ecstatic) to say the least. Despite the paucity of irr. app. (ext.) gigs, Waldron has been able to wrangle plenty of talented folk into his maddening collection of sounds, including longtime irr. app. (ext.) associate R.K. Faulhaber, Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton, aQ's own Jim Haynes, the Scharpen brothers (John and Greg), and a few others who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or maybe wrong time and wrong place, depending upon how you look at it.
An irr. app. (ext.) recording can be a curiosity of audio surrealism where a sense of dread or unease or comedy or beauty bleed through the cross pollination of many sounds within the digital workstation. However, the irr. app. (ext.) live performances are purposefully theatrical, full of bizarre props, instruments, costumes, films, and even culinary delicacies. Waldron and co. operate a series of contraptions that are always on the brink of falling apart, leaving the participants dangerously close to being stuck up on stage with a bunch of broken toys that don't do anything. Perhaps even more so than Nurse With Wound, irr. app. (ext.) seeks to recreate the absurdity of surrealist and dada theater from the early 20th century in a modern day context.
Aspiring To An Empty Gesture Vol. 1 documents the handful of irr. app. (ext.) performances in recent years with one of Waldron's live contributions for Nurse With Wound thrown in for good measure. The irr. app. (ext.) live sound veers from creaky audio collage from found objects clacking away like an ill-tempered frog chorus with bursts of noise and squiggled gestures for comic relief; but Waldron throws in an oddly minimal prog freakout, tossing back to one of his other big influences alongside NWW, that being King Crimson. Hence, you'll find a very low-tech skronk of mutant basslines, analogue synth squiggle, and scraped percussion. The NWW track is stellar, in part thanks to the deft production grafted onto the sounds by Colin Potter. Waldron wraps up the collection with a version of The Residents proto-synth-punk 'hit' "Smelly Tongues." While just a cd-r, we've been told this might not be a limited production; but then again, it might be and could disappear at any time.
As with all irr. app. (ext.) productions, this one comes highly recommended.
A couple of years ago, Aquarius enjoyed a brief moonlight gig as an art space (which we hope to make happen again someday), proposing the same curious aesthetic on the visual front as we continue to do on the musical. One of the more intriguing exhibitions we hosted was from an ambitious, if under-recognized artist by the name of Matthew Waldron. His meticulously eccentric drawings, paintings, and assemblages depicted mutated beings conducting psychic surgery upon each other with all sorts of psychosexual overtones. These provocative and compelling images held their own with the classic Surrealist works of Hans Bellmer and early Salvador Dali. At the same time, Waldron introduced us to the equally ambitious catalogue of sound constructions that he had been quietly making in the Santa Cruz mountains under the moniker irr. app. (ext.). These albums followed in the deconstructed / abstracted sound collage traditions of Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, and HNAS, often times surpassing the quality of those which came before. Sadly, very few people had heard of irr. app. (ext.) because of Waldron's unfortunate round of luck with record labels and general low profile.
Jump forward to the contemporary era, and things look entirely different. Today, you will find Waldron a mainstay in the Nurse With Wound performance entourage, being whisked away to play in all sorts of unlikely European festivals; and irr. app. (ext.) has consistently released albums that build upon the successes of those which we had heard before. So for us here at Aquarius, it's very satisfying to see an artist we once supported have their career take off...
And that leads us to Cosmic Superimposition, the second in a proposed trilogy from irr. app. (ext.) of releases based upon the writings of Wilhelm Reich. Cosmic Superimposition was a book that Reich had written in 1951; and in that book, he argued how the superimposition of multiple energies is the common functioning principle throughout the natural world. It was through these ideas that Reich arrived at the ideas of Orgone, cloudbursting, etc. On the single 45-minute track that comprises Cosmis Superimposition, irr. app. (ext.) presents a revolving set of organic fluctuations that wax and wane in accordance with a well-tuned internal logic. Glassine ambient passages of processed environmental noise slide into the sustained harmonics of bowed metals which in turn couples with the off-kilter phase pattern of an exhaust fan whose motor is not quite properly aligned. All the while gurgles from streams, clatter from subterranean actions, singing bowl reverberations, and dark elliptical cycles of blackened electronics pock the stately progressions of Cosmic Superimposition's dronemusik foundation. As is stated in the liner notes, Waldron repurposed the source material from the first stage of the trilogy Ozeanische Gefuhle; but Cosmis Superimposition is hardly a replicant remix of the first. Rather, the ghosts, shadows, and ripples of his earlier album emerge in the fluid ambience of the second as bridge that points to Waldron's ambitious and highly successful undertaking. One of the best records of 2007, for sure.
More audio absurdities and surrealist aktionism from irr. app. (ext.), this double disc set collects the recorded vagaries from the practice sessions leading up to a very rare live performance from irr. app. (ext.) in Portland back in 2012. Matthew Waldron - the man behind the curtain - has long been associated with the idiosyncratic practices of Nurse With Wound, both aesthetically and as a steady member of the Nurse touring brigade. Like Nurse With Wound performances, the irr. app. (ext.) gigs loosely splay themselves upon a basic outline with plenty of opportunities for detours and dead-ends. As such, Waldron couldn't decide which was the definitive variation of this body of work, so he included three rehearsals along with the live performance itself, leaving the task of sorting everything out up to his audience. We'll start by describing the conclusion of the set which was a naked discomforting rendition of Little Peggy March's "My Teenage Castle" a bubblegum pop hit from 1963, now given an arrangement of randomly struck bells, VHF radio interference, and field recordings of cows with Waldron crooning psychotically. He only allows for one version of this song amongst all of the variations, as he prefers the abstractions to wander hither and yon. A wise choice we must say. Some of the recurring themes involve a ritualist percussive groove, the eeriness of Tibetan horn harmonics, the warbliness from a vibrator-enhanced mouth organ, Waldron's knife-on-the-guitar splutteriness, and the sound poetry of hurled spittle and sloshed saliva. The variations of the pieces are considerable. While Waldron may lament this as a 'lack of consistency', we're happy to see it as peripatetic creativity at its finest.
Invocations of Surrealism have come to reflect a Frank Zappa or Dr. Bizarro form of 'weird,' with little understanding and even less appreciation for the truly revolutionary nature of the Surrealism that dominated avant-garde culture in the early 20th Century. Fortunately, a few sound artists have truly succeeded in manifesting the spirit of Surrealism in their work. The most obvious being Nurse With Wound in keeping true to the Surrealists bawdy appropriation of Victorian aesthetics in exploring unsettling horrors; and to a lesser extent, there's the Hafler Trio who took the intense interrogrations of Surrealism to a gnostic conclusion. Somewhere in between these two giants of sound art is the work of Irr.App.(ext). For the past eight or nine years, Irr.App.(ext) has been toiling in obscurity, and producing a body of work that easily rivals his more well known compatriots.
Some of you may remember a stunning art exhibit here at Aquarius records back in the early spring of 2003 with all sorts of obtuse collages, exquisitely rendered nightmarish drawings, and shadow boxes loaded with peculiar juxtapostions and mixed messages. That was the work of Matt Waldron, who also happens to be the man behind the musical project Irr.App.(Ext) along with a couple of likeminded delinquents. Unfortunately, Matt has had a ridiculous spell of bad luck with labels folding before releasing his work, or not being able to find the funding, or just being jerks. His luck has finally changed with the release of Dust Pincher Appliances, which in turn reissues a very early 10" originally released on Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson's Something Weird label back in 1995. Waldron has extended the original recordings with those of a follow-up 10" which was never actually released.
Though some eight years old, the recordings on Dust Pincher Appliances are still stunning. The album unfolds as an ever changing drama of Surreal events, evolving through time to reveal startling revelations, disquieting progressions, and atypical juxtapositions of sound. Eerie drones and atmospheres dominate the majority of the album, haunted by distant voices bathed in reverb or unrecognizable events that scurry malevolently like tiny monsters or robotic insects. Carnivalesque episodes often interrupt the proceedings with cackling sound effects, brash trumpet blurts, and toy piano discord.
Dust Pincher Appliances is a marvelous album and should be the harbinger of a wonderful catalog that the world needs to embrace.
It has been a while since we've heard from the hermetic M.S. Waldron and his ignoble project irr. app. (ext.), and now he's released two cassettes through his Errata In Excelsis imprint, continuing his slippery alchemy of surreal collage, spiraling drone, and cracked intention.
If that title looks a little familiar (as well as the cover), it is in fact an homage to the 1987 split album between AMM's Eddie Prevost and Organum, entitled Flayed / Crux which sported a bizarre mandala of Victorian-era clip art as cover art. But it's not just the title and the cover that Waldron is riffing upon, he's created two stellar 'covers' of those two lengthy tracks. The originals found Organum's David Jackman accompanying Prevost for "Flayed" with a signature acoustic drone from Jackman's bowed cymbal underlying a reverb-saturated, free-falling excursion around Prevost's drum kit. The irr. app. (ext.) reinvention in "Flux" is nearly flawless in keeping up with Prevost's polydactyl splutter and tempestuously rolling drum fills, while building an equally impressive simulacrum of Jackman's bowed cymbal thrumm of surging electrified friction.
As good as both Prevost and Waldron's tracks are, the best work is reserved for the flipside. The original of "Crux" featured an all-star Organum line-up with Jackman surrounded by Andrew Chalk, Dinah Jane Rowe, and Steven Stapleton who's credited performing on "chair." Waldron does list the objects that went into the formation of his reinterpretation entitled "Crayfish" including the enigmatic use of a "chair" in the assembling of this rebirthing drone-construction. Was the chair particularly squeaky? Did Stapleton drag it around to create a muffled texture somewhere in the mix? Did he just sit down and get high? Those same questions can be asked of Waldron, in his use of the piece of furniture in this beautiful swarm of acoustic drones from sustained cymbal drones dappled with shortwave radio detunings and a ritualistic flute that hangs sadly above all the droning surfaces. Waldron's version rings true with the eerie, yet beautiful atmospheric construction that Organum mustered during the height of their career, with the notable differences found in Waldron's use of squishy textures and squeaks that dot the heavy-droning swarm. That said, both the original and this cover should be lauded alongside those magnificient pieces of holy minimalism by Tony Conrad, LaMonte Young, and Charlemange Palestine. Yeah, it is that good! As you know, tapes like this are usually limited, so don't wait around on this one!
Who is that "someone" who didn't want this album is not made known, but we have to wonder if he / she / it / they had any clue as to what irr. app. (ext.) was all about in the first place. We're delightfully baffled as the next when it comes to the sounds of irr. app. (ext.) and the overarching artforms from its principal, Matthew Waldron; but would be even more confused as to why anybody would commission something from Waldron and then reject it, as this album clearly falls well within his signature aesthetic of psychic turmoil, United Dairies assemblage, freeform radiophonic splutter, and primordial noise tumbling between the gaps of industrial bad trips and psychedelic wooliness. Of course, there are those albums from irr. app. (ext.) which could be considered more sensible than others - the Wilheim Reich trilogy comes to mind - and there are those which stretch against the boundaries of delirium and discomfort. I Made This For Someone Else lands in the latter category with Waldron collaging broken sounds, crippled song-fragments, and grotesquely inelegant fumblings into a portentous bombast that finds Waldron looking less to Steven Stapleton as the beacon of outre genius and more towards Igor Wakhevitch, himself a '70s prog-occultist who was a big influence on Nurse With Wound. Waldron willfully follows pretty much any and every idea that germinates within any given psychic landscape, crashing those ideas into one another, and crafting ugly hybrids that speak in completely foreign tongues.
The cd-r editions from Errata In Excelsis tend towards editions of just about 100 copies, with many of them already out of print. We expect the same, here.
Performances from irr. app. (ext.) are rare spectacles, often sporting bizarre costumes and crumbling masks, staged rituals with mutated / mutilated stuffed animals, audio collages spiralling about found object mistreatment, outer-space / prog-tastic guitar explorations, ashen black takes on scatological humor, and a choice cover or two. Josephine & Elsewhere documents the results from three performances that irr. app. (ext.) foisted upon the Seattle public in 2009, at the request of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer (who have employed irr. app. (ext.) figurehead M.S. Waldron as a producer from time to time). What's quite unique about these recordings is that Waldron did not recruit from his reliable pool of California miscreants to assist in the performance, choosing to perform alone. In pairing everything down to a guitar, a ukulele, a drawerful of kitchen utensils, some effects pedals, and some backing tracks, Waldron has done quite well to achieve the same density of sonic eccentricities and surrealist intentions found on his ever impressive recorded output.
Many of the irr. app. (ext.) live 'standards' are present including Waldron's Tuvan-throated vocalisations accompanied by the motorized purr of a vibrator rubbing against his bald head, Waldron's diabolical growls and squeals in duet with a miniature scrabblings (which here really resemble the guitar freakouts on the Nurse With Wound debut Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table), and his uncanny use of field recordings - notably a man screaming his head off in erratic bursts which doesn't seem to phase the incessant chatter of birds. Very odd. While Waldron focuses mostly upon the abstract and expressive through these atypical sonic juxtapositions, the one cover he presents is something to witness: a clippedy-clopping cover of the Aphrodite's Child tune "The Four Horsemen." Limited to 200 copies only!
Kreiselwelle is the conclusion to a superb trilogy from irr. app. (ext.) who used the words, philosophies, and eccentricities of Wilhelm Reich as the springboard into a realm of post-Surrealist, post-industrialist, post-drone arena of sound design. While a prominent European psychoanalyst, whose ideas could be seen as an occasional counterpoint to those of Freud, Reich may be best known for his parascientific research into Orgone energy, which he claimed was central and unifying force of life throughout the universe. Much of this latter research has been discredited and unfortunately shed a cloud of incredulity upon his psychoanalytic work. While Reich's claims of cloud-busting and orgone therapy offer particularly strong metaphors, M.S. Waldron - the principle architect to irr. app. (ext.) - has looked more to the psychological aspects of Reich's work. Kreiselwelle translates from the German as spiral wave or gyroscopic wave, and points to the similarities which Reich had noted in the structures of microscopic organisms, turbulent wave patterns, and spiral-arm galaxies.
Through this trilogy (which also includes Ozeanische Gefuhle and Cosmic Superimposition), Waldron mirrors Reich's early cosmology through a compositional fluidity that alludes to contemporary drone fascination, constructed through overlapping collages, occluded field recordings, sustained tones from atypical instruments, and crosshatched synthetic noises. All three of these albums were sourced from the same set of field recordings, but each detours into its own particular wandering. Kreiselwelle begins with a very slow hypnotic strum across a detuned guitar with liquid tactility and a warped distance buzz filling in the gaps. Grand sweeps of slashing drones that could originate from an echoing chainsaw deep in the woods forms an unlikely crescendo with sympathetic tones, only to collapse into the softened white noise of cars passing by. Soon after, a rhythmic tapping of agitated electronics forms a motorik rhythm against the tapestry of audio fluidity, with all of the electro-shock bursts of a tesla coil. This in turn morphs into a cauldron of slow locomotive rumbling, which beget one of many glassine drones that float throughout Kreiselwelle. For fans of any of work of Nurse With Wound (after all Mr. Waldron is in the NWW touring ensemble!), H.N.A.S., and the more esoteric recordings of Organum; and certainly of note for those of you taken by Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, Xela, Svarte Greiner, Expo '70, Emeralds, or any of the darker, weirder, more fucked-up drone ensembles of recent days. Very highly recommended!
20 minutes of drowned sound and convulsive twitches from the audio madman M.S. Waldron, known here as irr. app. (ext.). Much of his work deals in particularly odd mutations of deranged thought and philosophical ramblings, transforming those ideas into tumbling collages of mangled field recordings, discomforting drone, and broken song. On past records, there had been invocations of psychic surgery gone wrong, there had been ruminations on the intellect of dust, there are the impossible covers of Organum material, and there was a trilogy expanding on the circular logic of Wilhelm Reich. Not surprising that soundcycle has somehow expanded even further with the addition of a fourth member. Here, Waldron delves into what he describes as 'avian technology'; and we don't think he's arranging symphonies for Bower Birds and their artisanal collections of bottlecaps and beetle shells; nor does this even seem to feature much in the way of recognizable bird song (although Waldron has been known to recite the onomatopoeic descriptions of bird songs in field guides in Kurt Schwitters Ursonate style). No, this seems far more chimerical in nature, with the monstrous results something akin to the baby in Eraserhead, making disturbing utterances amidst clattering wheezes from antique machines, ur-drones of a darkened psychedelic fashion, and a despondent atmosphere. Given his ongoing contributions to Nurse With Wound, Neognath In Machina isn't too far from Stapleton's wild universe of post-Surrealist sound; but Waldron's genetic re-engineering of sound, flesh, and feather is sublimely its own. Limited to 75 copies.
Matthew Waldron, the mad genius behind irr. app. (ext.), has toiled at his unwieldy craft of sonic surrealism for close to 20 years now. His work has long paralleled that of Nurse With Wound; and yes, Waldron has graced a number of Nurse recordings and live sessions. Unfortunately, he's often confused with fellow Nurse troubadour Andrew Liles, due to both of them shearing their scalps of any and all hair. That said, the NWW ethos is clearly defined by another mad genius, Steven Stapleton, who has a slightly different take on the art of sound obfuscation. Stapleton's avant-everything amalgams hedge towards the grotesque beauty from the universal themes of the id (sex, drugs, death, yup even rock 'n' roll), where Waldron's investigation into the uncanny has a wholly personal inflection of psychic failure and futility. Neognathae is the second EP that Waldron has produced for the East Bay cottage industry Petit Mal Music; and like the first, this album is dedicated to the pursuits of 'avian technology;' in other words, the 20 minute piece is entirely sourced from bird songs. Waldron once picked up a field guide to birds (if you must know, this was the reading material in the former bathroom of the Helen Scarsdale Agency) and turned the transcriptions of birdsongs into Kurt Schwitters-like, irritable blurts of dada sound poetry as a desperate impersonation of Dr. Doolittle. It was horrifying and it was hilarious. Even as Waldron uses the lyrical trills of various warblers, doves, finches, and thrushes on Neognathae Portentosus, his concoction is far removed from Messiaen's comparatively polite invocation of the birdsong in composition. Waldron twists and mutates the sounds of these birds into eerie blurs of silvery shimmer and the sonic equivalent of a fun-house mirror. At first, the piece lumbers and creaks with the clubfooted gait of a slumping golem. He builds and layers this malformed collage into a frenzied cacophony that would clearly provoke fear and dread in the Tippy Hedrons out there in the world. Whatever genetic bastard bird Waldron has created out of his black magic and devilry, it is a miserable creature. One that is not long for this world. Just 100 copies are around...
If anyone has the ability to carry the post-Surrealist torch of Nurse With Wound, it would have to be Matt Waldron through his irr. app. (ext.) project. Like Nurse With Wound's eccentric genius Stapleton, Waldron would never qualify himself as a Surrealist, but it's a good jumping off point to describe their respective works. With Ozeanische Gefuhle, Waldron establishes irr. app. (ext.) establishes himself as one of the most gifted sound-sculptors whose work have passed through the doors of Aquarius. If you've ever picked up any drone / minimalist / ambient records or even just anything that Andee has poetically described as 'completely fucked', then you owe it yourself to pick up Ozeanische Gefuhle. This review could ramble on and on, but let's cut to the chase and state the obvious, this album is brilliant.
Strangely enough, Ozeanische Gefuhle -- as great as it is -- almost disappeared into the ether, as it was slated for release a few years back on another label who just sat on it for years, much to the chagrin of Mr. Waldron. Fortunately, the good people at the Helen Scarsdale Agency rectified the situation and made sure this album got its due recognition.
The title itself is an allusion to Wilhelm Reich, who used the term to describe the natural state of every healthy organism as connected to and engaged with the world around it. Such ideas in lesser hands would result in limp idylltronica with New Age sentimentality; but this is not the case for irr. app. (ext.), who solidly grounds this record upon a fundamental drone, which slinks its way through numerous field recordings and performative gestures. Waldron's masterpiece emerges as a tidal current of electronic sound, rumbling through blackened spaces and soaring with divine expressivity. As good if not better than anything by Nurse With Wound, Organum, :zoviet france:, Phill Niblock, and the Hafler Trio. Yeah, it's that good!
Slowly but surely, the mighty work of irr. app. (ext.) has been oozing out from the Santa Cruz mountains through various outlets such as Crouton, Helen Scarsdale, and Beta-Lactam. Perekluchenie was originally commissioned as part of a Beta-Lactam Ring subscription series (which if you were lucky enough to sign up would earn you a bonus picture disc with the LP) but the growing interest in irr. app. (ext.) warranted a regular pressing, thanks to such high-profile releases as the irr. app. (ext.) contribution to Nurse With Wound's Angry Eelectric Finger trilogy as well as the Salt Marie Celeste performances with Steven Stapleton himself! The relationship between irr. app. (ext.) and Nurse With Wound has gotten even more convoluted as Stapleton has joined irr. app. (ext.) in their last couple of performances. We should be quick to point out the irr. app. (ext.) and the genius behind the tongue-twisting project is far from a Nurse With Wound copyist. Hardly! While both projects draw inspiration from Surrealism and avant-garde composition, they both express strong divergent aesthetics that show how rich and open the field of Surrealist-tinged sound art can be.
Qualified as "a pointless theatrical exercise in one act or less," Perekluchenie actually spans four lengthy pieces of audio madness. Waldron wanders through desolate strums across a prepared piano (or some other instrument that's equally heavy and reverberant) which gives way to ill-tempered birds, ominous windswept drones, and funereal bells. Waldron shatters the grim atmosphere with an unnerving passage for tactile squeakings and poltergeist driven furniture. Elsewhere, discordant horn bleats rupture the heavenly glow of elegaic tones and genuinely baffled exclamations erupt from a very young Django Stapleton. Waldron includes other vocal contributions from Lori Anne Anne Lori Chambers, Aquarius' former owner Windy Chien, and Diana Rogerson (aka Chrystal Belle Scrodd.)
All in all, Perekluchenie is a truly wonderful album! We've been fans of Mr. Waldron for many years now, and he's yet to let us down.
It has been a while since we've heard from the hermetic M.S. Waldron and his ignoble project irr. app. (ext.), and now he's released two cassettes through his Errata In Excelsis imprint, continuing his slippery alchemy of surreal collage, spiraling drone, and cracked intention.
The 11-Year Backwards Sleepwalk is something of a detour for irr. app. (ext.), but then again what isn't a detour for irr. app. (ext.). Here, Waldron is basing his excursions upon the step sequencing of a virtual EMS VCS3, making a foray into the retro-progressive electronica of Oneohtrix Point Never and Zombi, with of course, Waldron fucking about with all of the sounds much more than anybody else in that current revivalist camp. As such, irr. app. (ext.)'s audio madness really does have a lot more in common with the classic Goblin sound whose prog-rock tricks lent to plenty of sideways glances and jarring angularity in contrast to the motoring, spooky vibes from the Goblin / John Carpenter axis of grizzly synth lines. Tense streams of intertwining electronic pulsations lead through the interconnected tracks, which ebb and flow with typical collage elements for irr. app. (ext.) -- slashing mechanoise drones, aqueous oozing field recordings, splintered No Wave guitar freakouts, distended appropriated vocal exhortations, cackles, and bellowings -- including a strange snippet of a conversation between Waldron and Steven Stapleton about a lost fruit basket. All of these mutations and disquieting moments bend those streaming electronic percolations into a surrealist fun-house exploration of the archetypal '70s sci-fi / horror score sound design. It's a weird and wild ride from irr. app. (ext.), that's for damn sure! These are stupidly limited, too; so don't wait around on this one!
One of the more sensible irr. app. (ext.) records to come across the counter of aQuarius; but this being an irr. app. (ext.) record, any qualification of 'sensible' needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Irr. app. (ext.) is the long-standing project for the Oregonian recluse M.S. Waldron, who does venture out from time to time as one of the touring minstrels in Nurse With Wound. His own work shares much of the NWW surreal tactics, queasy humor, and industrially girded psychedelia with tentacles and rhizomes that offer a parallel and equally visionary voice. The Jennies mentioned in the title refer to At Jennie Richie, a thoroughly enigmatic and anonymous project of equally obtuse sound designs.
A couple years back, the exemplary label Black Horizons released what may or may not have been a collaborative album between irr. app. (ext.) and At Jennie Richie, including an art edition boxset with a piece of vinyl and two cassettes. We had these in briefly, and they disappeared in a snap with the cassettes being split releases of like-minded work. All of the irr. app. (ext.) material from those Black Horizons split cassettes is featured here alongside another split cassette published in 2013 on Dead Accents. Originally, Waldron had released these simply as digital versions, but there was enough of a demand for physical copies, that he capitulated... and here, we have it. The first of three lengthy track finds Waldron sitting behind the drum kit, tapping out a mid-tempo motorik rhythm as an unusually stable presence for a variety of unkempt guitar buzzes, raven choruses, and kaleidoscopically liquid FX-laden glossolalia. The suitably named "Foregone and Ungotten" laces satellite beacon chirps with ur-drone purr, seasickened currents of electrical feedback and a variety of arachnid prickly textures. Subaquatic percussive phrases accompany the slow ringing of a temple bell, whose ritual solemnity is undone by a parade of assorted crumbles, rakishly skewed horror-score design, and ignoble horn blarings. Not sure how many of these Waldron has printed up, but his cd-r editions do have a way of disappearing from the physical plane rather quickly.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not much point in belaboring the issue too much on this one. There's only 100 copies. Most of them are gone. But, FUCK, if this isn't the best Organum record ever made, even if it wasn't made by David Jackman. Instead, we have a brilliant homage to the turgid acoustic dronescaping and thoughtfully composed noise arrangements of David Jackman's best period of Organum (circa 1988 - 1994), produced by the less-than-sensible irr. app. (ext.) / Matt Waldron. Quite literally, this was the album of his dreams, as one night in 2011, Waldron was overcome by a vision of encountering Jackman at an indoor shopping mall in California, where he was selling a brand-spanking new Organum LP which featured a strange bear drawing on one side and an even stranger fox drawing on the other, with the rather explanatory "The Other Side Is Blank" as the title, pointing out that the lp was a one-sided lp. While we are not all that sure if such a strategy ever came up in Organum's back catalogue, he was known for releasing 7" singles with a mere minute and half of sound on both sides. In the five tracks (four on the one sided lp, and one very short cut on the one sided 7"), Waldron dutifully creates fantastic, industrial blurs of vibrating metal, acoustic rattlings, and infernal roars of very tactile noise all very much within the aesthetic of Jackman's Organum project. Pretty fucking brilliant and pretty fucking stupid at the same time. A perfect record for aQuarius! But grab one before they're gone for good...
Potatoes. Leave it up to irr. app. (ext.) to shove some wires into a potato and get a whole album from the resultant audio mess. Well, maybe. We'll hazard a guess that M.S. Waldron (aka irr. app. (ext.)) ran with the idea of the perennial science-fair project in harnessing enough bioelectrical energy from a potato to power a small alarm clock. Many years ago, the British sound artist Michael Prime had hooked up biosensors to mushrooms, recording the erratic signals that strangely emanate from within a fungus; and Waldron's recording process could have something to do with this. Then again, he could have just made a big bowl of mashed potatoes and slopped around like Otto Muehl or Carolee Schneemann. Waldron's back catalogue features a considerable amount of irrational activities leading towards the poetics of audio surrealism. The name itself - irr. app. (ext.) - is a cumbersome shortening of irrational appendage extension, and plenty of other absurd ideas cohabitate with Waldron's knack for the oblique collage. Psychic surgery gone horribly wrong. Involuntary twitching of limbs from dead insects. The philosophical eccentricities of Wilhelm Reich wrapped up in circles upon circles. And now, potatoes. There's definitely a whole lot going on in Tuberpendicular, and the electrified potato salad concoction may only be a small portion of the album. Sharpened tones of biofeedback, squishy and clinical squiggles of indeterminate origin pock Waldron's cyclical sound design of percolating drones that transmit out of creaky old spaces. Really great, really convoluted collage based work that finds simpatico with Nurse With Wound, Michel Chion, and the weirder elements found throughout the history of electronic music. Limited to 200 copies.
No idea what to make of that title. Plop it even into a Google translation tool, and you get some nonsense about a "valentine cormorant" surrounded by a bunch of gibberish as Google wants to make this word out to be Japanese. It looks Russian to us, not that the linguistic skills at aQuarius have any command of a language beyond our own brand of English polyglot. There is a curious and eerie aura of animistic, psychic mysticism that inhabits the whirling gears, locomotive rhythms, and deeply dilated industrial clamor that might have a passing resemblance with some of the esoteric offerings from the Russian postindustrial scene.
M.S. Waldron (aka irr. app. (ext.)) has been a relative constant in the Nurse With Wound touring stable with a handful of appearances on the latter day Nurse recordings. And he did travel with Nurse on their first excursion into Russia, where we're pretty sure they played Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Much is a mystery and much is gibberish in the realm of irr. app. (ext.), so the meaningless of this title in conjunction with a tenuous aesthetic linkage to a project like Linija Mass or Vetrophonia might have absolutely nothing to with the album. At the same time, it could have everything to do with it. The album seems to be sourced from bowed metals whose slashing atonal frequencies are layered and collaged into interwoven networks of discordant textures. Waldron has worked extensively with these types of sounds, even creating a brilliant homage to the Organum / David Jackman sound with the irr. app. (ext.) album "The Other Side Is Blank". But here, slippery collage-techniques and audio layering hold a lugubrious psychedelic hue that encompasses Waldron's aquatic gurglings, walkie-talkie broadcasts, metallic glissandos, and mechanical rhythms. All of which could harken to the idiosyncrasies of everyday objects (as his live set-up could literally be any given junk drawer tumbled onto a table with contact microphones affixed randomly) or perhaps more romantically, emblematic field recordings made while he was visiting Russia a few years ago. Nonetheless, this is another great album from irr. app. (ext.); and this hand-fabricated edition runs just 200 copies.
Here's another collaboration between the surrealistically minded irr. app. (ext.) and the enigmatic At Jennie Richie, as we were recently blown away by the cassette from those two projects. And that shouldn't be a big surprise, given that irr. app. (ext.)'s work has long been championed around these parts. Lest there be any confusion, this is *NOT* the same material as found on that cassette, nor is anything reprised from that cassette either (well, at least to our ears). In fact, the first side - "Night Wearing Feathers" - was originally a 3" cd-r from 2006; and as you could probably guess, that's long been out of print. This track begins with a squeak and sigh only to snap into simple skittered rhythms that succumb to a radiant drone build from and / or occluded by various mechanical vibrations that poke through the glassy mesmerism. It's not out of step from the brilliant trilogy of Wilhelm Reich related recordings irr. app. (ext.) embarked upon around that same time period (e.g. Ozeanische Gefuhle, Cosmic Superimposition, Kreiselwelle). The B side - "Sunshine Bus Rider" - was composed six years later in 2012 and is a far angrier, more gnarled composition, with a buzzing guitar (or maybe a detuned sitar?) slowly blooming at the onset like some of the more recent OM recordings with fucked collage noise, nervous slices of diabolical laughter, and clattering found objects all getting jostled around in the true spirit of Nurse With Wound's sonic Dada. Both tracks are mind-fuckers for sure, and we mean that as the highest of compliments! Limited to 234 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ah ha! The deluxe edition of the Night Wearing Feathers collaboration between the surrealistically minded irr. app. (ext.) and the enigmatic At Jennie Richie. We previously listed the standard lp version, but this extremely limited box set edition (we have only THREE copies), in addition to the vinyl, also features the previously released but now out of print cassette Unknown Invertebrate Drama AND an entirely unreleased cassette as well, both gorgeously package in deluxe printed jackets. And to the best of our knowledge, none of the material on any of these three elements overlaps with anything else. Everything's housed in a beautiful box and includes two deluxe printed cardstock inserts, each one #'d and signed. We've not checked out the unreleased cassette (which looks to be a proper split between irr. app. (ext.) and At Jennie Richie, but probably only the members of those projects know for sure!), but here's what we said about the other two elements:
The first side of the vinyl - "Night Wearing Feathers" - was originally a 3" cd-r from 2006; and as you could probably guess, that's long been out of print. This track begins with a squeak and sigh only to snap into simple skittered rhythms that succumb to a radiant drone build from and / or occluded by various mechanical vibrations that poke through the glassy mesmerism. It's not out of step from the brilliant trilogy of Wilhelm Reich related recordings irr. app. (ext.) embarked upon around that same time period (e.g. Ozeanische Gefuhle, Cosmic Superimposition, Kreiselwelle). The B side - "Sunshine Bus Rider" - was composed six years later in 2012 and is a far angrier, more gnarled composition, with a buzzing guitar (or maybe a detuned sitar?) slowly blooming at the onset like some of the more recent OM recordings with fucked collage noise, nervous slices of diabolical laughter, and clattering found objects all getting jostled around in the true spirit of Nurse With Wound's sonic Dada.
On first half of the Unknown Invertebrate Drama cassette, At Jennie Richie's track is mysterious through and through with gray blasts of sound ebbing from silence only to blink out of existence in seconds. These are ghostly sounds, or rather these noises are treated in a ghostly way akin to the acoustic materialization that Francisco Lopez would offer forth about a decade ago. The motorized rumblings that massage themselves into a eerie cosmic purr open the second side and could be generated by no one except for irr. app. (ext.). Out of this introduction, Waldron sets up weirdly flanging, filtered tones that undulate above watery field recordings and nocturnal bumps in the night, concluding with a strange set of angular synth beacon pulses and gasped utterances. What we've heard are mind-fuckers for sure, and we mean that as the highest of compliments!
The boxset is limited to 66 copies. We have only THREE!!
Technically this is a split release between At Jennie Richie and irr. app. (ext.) with each project contributing a 16-minute, side-long track to this limited cassette on Black Horizons; but it's also a strange collaborative project as well. M.S. Waldron - the mad scientist behind irr. app. (ext.) - has worked within At Jennie Richie in the past and may have contributed to the murky, post-DADA smeared noise here; and for the irr. app. (ext.) track, Waldron has recycled elements of At Jennie Richie's track from this tape into his own composition of swirling drones and psychic miasma. Got it? Nothing is ever easy for that Waldron fellow! At Jennie Richie's track is mysterious through and through with gray blasts of sound ebbing from silence only to blink out of existence in seconds. These are ghostly sounds, or rather these noises are treated in a ghostly way akin to the acoustic materialization that Francisco Lopez would offer forth about a decade ago. The motorized rumblings that massage themselves into a eerie cosmic purr open the second side and could be generated by no one except for irr. app. (ext.). Out of this introduction, Waldron sets up weirdly flanging, filtered tones that undulate above watery field recordings and nocturnal bumps in the night, concluding with a strange set of angular synth beacon pulses and gasped utterances. Packaged very handsomely as always by Black Horizons with a full color printing on metallic paper for both o-cards that nestle together with the cassette inside. There's only 66 copies of this one!
For those of you who have had the opportunity to witness the live reincarnation of Nurse With Wound over the past couple of years, there are two bald men making funny noises usually on either side of Steven Stapleton. One is Andrew Liles, who had run the table in terms of a release schedule in 2007 releasing 14 full albums of eccentric drones and abstracted collages, some of which were pretty darn good, but could maybe have used some editing. The other bald man is M.S. Waldron, whose slowly trickled releases are impeccable constructions of modern day Surrealism through audio sorcery, clearly not in any need of an editor whatsoever. Outside of NWW, he's been toiling away in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California under the unwieldy moniker irr. app. (ext.).
This split release with Chicago's Panicsville has been in the works for many years now, finally seeing the light of day in early 2008. The irr. app. (ext.) half of the equation slowly spirals from one assemblage of discombobulated field recordings, agitated ether, and curious atmospherics into another set of equally malformed sounds, much like a black-acid kaleidoscope. Yes, it makes perfect sense that Stapleton would want Waldron to assist in Nurse performances, as he clearly has talent at taking weird noise making to a sublime level of abstraction.
With a name like Panicsville, the expectations were of an obstinant noise project; but instead, this splatter of mechanoid gestures pocking sea-sick drones is a worthy companion to irr. app. (ext.)'s sidereal brilliance. So good in fact, that we may seek out further recordings. So good in fact, that you too should pick this thing up. Limited to 500 copies.
The collaboration continues between the surrealistically inclined irr. app. (ext.) and the blackened doomdronedirge horde Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. As on the previous pairings, Discordant Convergence slants towards the irr. app. (ext.) side of the sonic spectrum with M.S. Waldron (the man behind the curtain of that cryptic project) ripping apart much of the Blue Sabbath Black Cheer sound, leaving a rumble here, a heavy-ass riff there, but mostly tossing about head-scratching scribbles of vibration, ululations, and fuckery. But unlike the solo irr. app. (ext.) albums, there are some serious bad vibes going on here. Kreiselwelle or Cosmic Superimpositions are dark records for sure, but there's a dreaminess to them that is entirely done away with here. Waldron may be piloting this ship, but Blue Sabbath Black Cheer are in the engine room, dead set on their demonic invocations, whose negative energies can't help but infect everything around.
A plodding bassline that could have been lifted straight off of Aluk Todolo's Finsternis opens the album amidst an unsettled chorus of gnarled textures, that sounds like somebody / something ripping apart flesh, sinews, tendons, and bone. Unhinged vocalizations, screeches, and screams dot the infernal atmospherics and flashes of atonal orchestrations with basslines surging sporadically through the mix. As the album unfolds, more acoustic chokings, grindings, and other misdemeanors caught on tape co-mingle with lumbering dirges of ritualized drone-doom, followed by plenty of bleak passages of horror-film synths, slashed metals, barked power-electronic vocals, and fucked-up transmissions from the center of the earth. It's all very unsettling, but it's all very highly recommended.
A fantastic new lp from the female half of freak folk duo Natural Snow Buildings, Solange Gularte, but once again, like pretty much everything NSB related, this lp was WAY too limited, it's already sold out, we got way less than we ordered. So fair warning, we'll probably run out in a heartbeat, and we will not be able to get more. Which is a huge bummer, because this record is quite lovely, and definitely deserves to be heard by more than the handful that will actually get their hands on it.
Like past Isengrind records, and much like some of the Natural Snow Buildings material, Gularte conjures up gauzy folky dreamscapes, sun dappled and shimmery, swirling clouds of distant buzz, spidery tendrils of gentle guitar melody, spread out lattice like, woodwinds flutter, definitely raga like, but washed out enough that at moments the sound is nearly ambient, while at others, the sound is more akin to some sort of Appalachia, Gularte's vocals wordless and ethereal, the steel strings buzzing warmly, the best moments where those two sides mesh, guitars strummed gently over crooned angelic vox, all over a hushed sea of layered fuzz, mesmerizing and hypnotic and dreamily druggy.
Most of the second side is spent droning and buzzing, but even the most minimal and abstract stretch is infused with subtle sweet guitar, and muted percussion, spectral vocals, and all manner of slowly unfurling melody. So gorgeous.
And again, crazy limited, already out of print, so act fast fast fast... and be prepared for us to say sorry they're already gone...
The Snowbringer Cult was a double cd originally released way back in 2008 on the Students of Decay label, and was the first proper cd release from French bedroom drone-psych-folk epic from Natural Snow Buildings, the boy/girl duo of Mehdi Amaziane and Solange Gularte, that double cd included a NSB full length, as well as an album from each of their solo projects, those being Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. That double cd is finally available again, but has also been reissued on vinyl for the first time, with each of the three parts being released separately as its own record.
Natural Snow Buildings have been a band since WAY back in 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last decade plus, have only really released a handful of records, and in the first 6 or 7 years, they only managed 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 of those releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! At the time we couldn't help wonder how a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, could generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. And thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in the case of NSB, and the two solo offshoots, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Amaziane and Gularte is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be constantly flooding the scene, this duo write actual songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psych with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
The Isengrind record begins with some deep dark ambience, huge shimmering streaks of ominous sound, like an orchestra tuning up in a cave, drawn out into warm washes of dronelike sound, processed choral vocals, and wheezing accordions. That intro gives way to a buzzing Eastern style raga, lots of percussion, shakers, bells, hand drums, buried beneath a shimmery smear of thick coruscating buzz, a sea of sitars, with Solange's vocals soaring ghostlike over the top. The next track is a dark folky drift, a simple melody, fluttering flute, more abstract percussion, definitely reminiscent of Avarus and other Finnish forest folk, but somehow more ethereal, and genuinely folky. The rest of the Isengrind tracks drift from spectre like folk, simple strums soaked in reverb and wrapped around ethereal vocals, to more raga jams, Indian style buzz filtered through a fractured folk sensibility, to haunting cinematic ambience, abstract soundscapes rife with streaks of feedback and wheezing chordal whir, disembodied strum, mysterious vocals and sporadic percussion, tribal, primal, primitive and raw, but still dreamlike and lovely.
As we commented in our review of the now out of print Laurie Bird cd-r from French bedroom drone-psych-folk duo Natural Snow Buildings, it always surprises us how bands with nothing but a MySpace page and a cd-r or two, can generate so much hype and excitement. It seems to be a common occurrence these days, with some bands even getting real live major label record deals purely on the strength of the handful of tracks on their MySpace page.
To be fair to Natural Snow Buildings, they have been a band since 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last 9 years, have only released 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! How does a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, possibly generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. But thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in this case, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Natural Snow Buildings is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be flooding the scene, this boy girl duo write songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
So here we have the very first proper cd release (others on the way, reissues of several of their various way-too limited cd-r's) from Natural Snow Buildings, bundled with an extra disc, featuring a whole record from both NSB members' solo projects, Twinsistermoon, whose last disc we reviewed recently, and Isengrind, the project of Solange, the female half of NSB.
Isengrind's half of disc one begins with some deep dark ambience, huge shimmering streaks of ominous sound, like an orchestra tuning up in a cave, drawn out into warm washes of dronelike sound, processed choral vocals, and wheezing accordions. That intro gives way to a buzzing Eastern style raga, lots of percussion, shakers, bells, hand drums, buried beneath a shimmery smear of thick coruscating buzz, a sea of sitars, with Solange's vocals soaring ghostlike over the top. The next track is a dark folky drift, a simple melody, fluttering flute, more abstract percussion, definitely reminiscent of Avarus and other Finnish forest folk, but somehow more ethereal, and genuinely folky. The rest of the Isengrind tracks drift from spectre like folk, simple strums soaked in reverb and wrapped around ethereal vocals, to more raga jams, Indian style buzz filtered through a fractured folk sensibility, to haunting cinematic ambience, abstract soundscapes rife with streaks of feedback and wheezing chordal whir, disembodied strum, mysterious vocals and sporadic percussion, tribal, primal, primitive and raw, but still dreamlike and lovely.
Mehdi begins his side of the disc, with a sound that perfectly compliments Solange's (and make it obvious why the two work so well together in NSB), long drawn out glimmering high end tones, draped over a dark minor key folky strum, and simple percussion, while Mehdi's feminine sounding falsetto soars over the top, all infused with some sort of freaky folky Wickerman vibe. Gorgeous and haunting. That track is followed up by a short chunk of perfect dreamfolk, simple folky strum, and Mehdi's crystal clear vocals, ringing out, pure and impossibly high, if you didn't know better you might think this was some rare track by some lost seventies female folkie.
And so it goes, tracks weaving back and forth, from warm washed out blissy dreamy dronescapes, to simple stripped down folk, often the two sounds drifting into each other, cross pollinating, the folk songs short and seemingly serving to separate the longer sprawling expanses of drone and shimmer, the two sounds dramatically different, but somehow complimenting one another perfectly.
So what happens when the two join forces, becoming Natural Snow Buildings? It would be way too easy to say that the sum equaled the parts, that if you took the sound of the two halves of the first disc, it would equal the whole of the second. There is certainly �some- truth to that, but it's not math, it's magic. Alchemy, musical sorcery, these are sounds not numbers, and thus are governed by forces far more magical and mysterious than physics or science. The two together join spirits, their natures become entwined, they draw from one another, each offering the other part of their soul, rendered in music. The results are truly divine. An assemblage of sounds, deftly woven into expansive shapes and hushed mystery, landscapes of drone and shimmer, of cinematic wonder and dark introspection. Some tracks are super abstract, layered near static drifts, longform movements that sonically evoke other lands, other times, the past long forgotten, the future not yet experienced, other tracks are wheezing sun dappled Appalachia, but turned inside out, the chords and notes seemingly drawn inward, toward the speakers, the vocals breathless and mournful, all laid atop a thick swirl of distorted riffage, other tracks are fragmented folk, all murky blurred piano, backwards guitars, heartsick melodies, wrapped in a thick gauzy production, smeared into snapshots glimpsed through eyes brimming with tears. Other tracks are space rock writ small, minimal dirges, drone jams, chanted vocals, strange stuttery percussion, and glorious buzzing guitars, culminating in the final track, which begins much like the others, all hazy and dreamlike, vocals ethereal, guitars spare and skeletal, until unexpectedly the band lock into some serious droned out space rock. A serious dark and druggy looped riff, a la Spacemen 3, Hawkwind, Loop, anchored by a simple pounding thudrock rhythm, driving intensely through swirling clouds of FX and warm whirring ambience, a seriously dense, propulsive krautjam, that just so happens to hide a soft drifting pop shimmer underneath, and while the track rocks with a surprising intensity, it's precisely what's underneath that turns the jam into something resplendent.
Gorgeous packaging, a fancy 4 panel gatefold digisleeve, with super striking original artwork and liner notes all drawn by Solange.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!
We sold so many of these when we made it Record Of The Week a while back, and everyone we know who bought a copy freaked out and declared it one of their new all time favorites, and for good reason it's an amazing, mind blowing, tripped out chunk of pure sonic inspiration. It's strange and beautiful and weirdly heavy, and proggy and tribal and it's funky as all get out. Well, we managed to get a final batch from the label, it's now sold out NEVER to be repressed, so if you missed out on this the first time around, you got yourself one more chance, don't blow it.
It's no longer out of the ordinary for a rock band to look beyond rock for inspiration. Or a jazz band, looking to expand their sound. It definitely makes sense as musicians are generally constantly striving to explore, to open their minds, their music, searching for unique instruments, new ideas, new sounds, even looking for something much more ineffable, something more spiritual. Psychedelic rock bands have typically looked East, The Beatles are probably the prime example of a rock band looking to India for musical AND spiritual inspiration. But on a much smaller scale, modern music develops and expands by incorporating new influences, the more 'exotic' the better. So for years, we could watch bands do just that, incorporate new instruments, sitars, tablas, whatever, alternate tunings, Eastern scales. Jazz musicians on the other hand, tended to look to Africa for inspiration, the tribal drumming, the vocal chants, all found their way onto tons of amazing records, amazing in part because of what they borrowed from the African music that was their genesis, as with many many discs by the Art Ensemble, Coltrane, Don Cherry, etc., etc.�
So if all this borrowing and influence is so commonplace, what's the big deal with this disc, a deluxe reissue of a rare 1972 LP entitled Uganda, by Japan's strangely named Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffalo? Well to begin with, imagine a Japanese jazz drummer in the early seventies, so obsessed with African music, that not only are his records already rife with African influences, but he eventually travels there, and proceeds to play with local musicians, collects indigenous instruments, and returns, driven to realize the record he knows he must make, Uganda, a record that manages to sound like African music, jazz and psychedelic rock, while sounding like nothing else. Ishikawa teamed up with fellow percussionist Larry Sunaga, a bassist and guitarist, and a saxophonist, who instead of playing sax, composed all four lengthy pieces here, the results are amazing. Dense, dizzying, abstract and tribal, fuzzy and tripped out, long stretches of solo hand drum percussion, furious acid fuzz freakouts (courtesy of guitarist Kimio Mizutani, from Love Live Life+1, People, and other freaky Japanese '70s psych units), chanting and handclaps, all woven into an expansive, sprawling divine chunk of out there Afro-fuzz-psych-jazz-rock divinity.
Take the first track "Animals and Dawn", nearly 12 minutes long, and over those 12 minutes, the song veers and drifts through about ten distinctly different sounds and styles, all held together by the relentless African drum jam that runs through all four tracks. Beginning with what sounds like some strange low end synth buzz, those drums kick in, intense and hyper rhythmic, amazingly recorded, so on headphones it sounds like drums are all around you. That buzz, pulses and undulates beneath the frenzied drumming, and this goes on for almost 3 minutes, which is when some wild super distorted acid psych guitar swoops in, jagged and freaked out, spitting out soaring wah wah drenched buzz, before the bass joins in and the drums coalesce into a more recognizable groove, and the band nails it, heavy, slithery proto-metal, churning and pounding, eventually locking into a super technical prog workout, and then dropping out completely, again leaving just the drums, which are soon joined by hand clapping, and chanted African style vocals. Finally, for the last four minutes or so, the band unwinds a groovy jazzy prog workout, still underpinned by those same rhythms, but now the bass carries the groove, letting the guitar go wild, wild psychedelic leads all tangled up in great strange shapes over the groovy rhythm below. Eventually, the song is swallowed up by effects, reverb, delay, echo, as if the band were playing on some huge elevator, as we sit on the surface, listening as the band slips further and further into darkness. Holy shit. If this were a $30 single, that track alone would make this essential for folks into psychrock, proto-metal, free jazz, avant African music or really anyone into strange and fantastical sounds.
The second track, "Asking For Love", once again begins with African drums, the two percussionists, offering up wild tangled beats for nearly two minutes, until in swoops a weird synthy buzz, which quickly transforms into a seriously Led Zep worthy riff, the drums a strange counterpoint to the distinctly rock and roll riffage, and the vocals soaring and shouting, but this kick ass riff fades out only after a minute, and we're back to more dense drumming, Mesmerizing and hypnotic, locking into incredible grooves, veering off into off kilter time signatures here and there, but always returning to that groove. This continues until about one minute from the end, when the bass and guitars explode in a buzzing psychedelic freakout, the drums mirroring the intensity of the axes, locked into an ever expanding supernova of blown out sound, until the furious explosive finish. Whew.
Track three (on the original, the start of side 2) "Battle", begins with some straight up jazz prog, angular and complex, the drums and guitars locked tight, the whole thing convoluted and intricate, stopping suddenly after 30 seconds, at which point an African thumb piano plucks out a delicate music box melody, while in the background, other strange instruments scrape and thump and honk, eventually blossoming into a full on Afro-jam, the drums pounding away, male and female vocals, call and response over the mesmeric beats below, but again, this only lasts a few minutes before switching gears and launching right back into the angular prog that opened the track. This happens a couple more times. Long stretches of abstract percussion, plenty of buzz, and rattle, melodies played out on mysterious African instruments, separated by brief blasts of that �buzzing tangled prog, which is exactly how the track finishes off.
The closer, "Pygmy" begins with a groovy walking bass line, a cowbell heavy almost-funk rhythm, eventually some acidic wah wah guitar, and suddenly we're in some serious seventies, Blaxploitation soundtrack style jazz funk, the bass a constant presence, that groove irresistible, the vocals soulful, the percussion still busy and intense, beneath the more static rhythm driving the songs. The guitar and vocals get all tangled up, the vocals more sort of scatting, the guitar offering up jagged shards of high end, or unfurling soaring psychrock leads, the bass and guitar locking into step right at the end, for one final super tight psychprog finish.
It almost seems ridiculous to describe each song in detail, as that's only part of the story. All four tracks work together, leading into one another, offering up bits from pervious songs, giving up little sonic hints as to what might come later, and it's not just the arrangements, it's the feel, the mood, the vibe, and while mere description might make some of the songs sound schizophrenic, flipping back and forth from part to part, some parts lasting only a few seconds, nothing could be further from the truth. The composition here is as deft as the performance, the arrangement is simultaneously free and abstract, yet, tight and composed. The songs breathe and open up, drift and wander, but never seem to lose their direction, and the grooves ever present, even if on the surface the band seem to be drifting though inner space.
Uganda is truly unique, freaky and far out for sure, but most definitely an essential chunk of jazzy, proggy African Japanese psych rock bliss, organic, expansive, epic, rhythmic, space-y, proggy, heavy and funky!! If you've got Julian Cope's Japrocksampler book, you'll find it in his Top 50 list of Japanese psych essentials, right above the debut from Flower Travellin' Band.
As with all Tiliqua releases, gorgeously packaged. This one is housed in a full color miniature box, printed front and back, with a Japanese style obi of course, and inside extensive liner notes in both Japanese and English, with tons of photos. And it is limited of course, not sure how limited, but judging from how quick past Tiliqua releases fly out of here, better to be safe than sorry. And this is actually the first in a new Tiliqua series called Distorted Oriental Sensory Perceptions 1969-1978 focusing on "Obscure Japanese Psychedelic rock artifacts." We can hardly wait to see what they dig up next... there's a lot of others on that Japrocksampler list we'd love to hear...
Not strictly a Secret Chiefs record, Ishraqiyun is the Chiefs' "neo-Pythagorean electro-folk" side project, which essentially consists of the non-rock based music the band routinely perform live, in non-Western tunings, and on non-Western instruments. But they're not played entirely straight, with most of the tracks sounding a bit like Master Musicians Of Jajouka by way of Don Caballero, with lots of bowed buzzing strings, tabla-like percussion, Eastern rhythms, a serious world music / international folk vibe, but then wedded to wild mathed out drumming, and swoon some cinematic strings, the arrangements intricate and the sound exotic, some mutant strain of math-prog-world music maybe?
Ishraqiyun for this debut recording is made up of various Secret Chiefs past and present, including Eyvind Kang and Ches Smith, and of course led by former Mr. Bungle weirdo and SC head honcho Trey Spruance. All the songs are exclusive to this record, although many have been performed live over the years, and anyone who's seen SC live, will definitely recognize some of the tracks here, and recorded they're just as mesmerizing and hypnotic, sprawling world-folk grooves, lush and layered and psychedelic, the sound like some alien Sublime Frequencies release. The title track is apparently the first recorded composition to feature Spruance's "evolving system of musical ideas patterned upon the specific geometrical relationships found in certain polyhedra and the tessellating patterns from which they are derived" Phew! And while maybe understanding what the heck that means might give you an insight into the mad musical genius at work here, it's not a requirement to dig these sounds. Not at all. And while most of the record is as described above, buzzing strings and will percussion, often wound around fierce propulsive proggy drumming, some tracks, like "Base Phive Futur Cossacks" mixes in some of the band's avant garde tendencies, some moments harkening back to the WTF? days of Mr. Bungle, others the band's obsession with John Carpenter style soundtrackiness, with sounds cutting in and out, swirls of mutated samples, thick buzzing synths, weird blurts of baroque pop, all draped over a woozy world music framework, and what at first sounds chaotic and on the verge of collapse, quickly becomes one of the record's highlights. And while the next two tracks (including the epic 16+ minute title track) dial back the weirdness, and deliver more whirling dervish folk prog and brooding hypnotic world music psychedelia, the final track gives us one final taste of that weird international synth-prog space-psych exotica, this time with even more synthy swirl, wild splatters of piano, blown out, distorto psychedelic guitar buzz, plenty of studio fuckery, wild edits (and if not edits, some impossibly dexterous playing), all in a swirling sonic tangle that has to be some of the most seriously dizzyingly next level, psychedelic, avant prog, faux world music we've ever heard!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Two new songs by two of favorite Finnish artists. They couldn't be more different, but this reminds us of why we love and have such a soft spot for split 7"s. Groups that sound nothing alike but share geography or friendship with each other. And with the increasing price of making vinyl, split 7"s are truly a labor of love and such a sweet token, as really its quite impossible to make money from them. First be forewarned as it will become obvious that the single was labeled wrong and the side that says Islaja is TV-Resistori and vice versa. TV-Resistori give us more of their upbeat totally fun synth pop that if we didn't know better we'd think they were another great Japanese pop band. And a new song by Islaja is of course something to rejoice about. Tiding us over until whenever her next album comes out, her track is so lovely and will for sure get you standing up every few minutes to reach for the needle to hear it over again and again.
Turtable/sampler artist Otomo Yoshihide and sampler/sine wave technician Sachiko M. (both from Ground Zero, and who are also recording as Filament) are joined by percussionist/electronics guy Ichiaku Yoshimitsu in this new, very original trio. I know we talk a lot about something we perhaps inaccurately refer to as "minimalism" around here, but this recording is HYPER minimal, alternating between near-inaudible rumble and glass-shattering sine wave squeal, interrupted only by the very, very occasional digital crapout. This, their second album, was mixed by the guy from The Homosexuals!
Pretty much any avid reader of the AQ list should be familiar with Andrew Chalk, one of our favorite modern masters of the minimal drifting drone. A while back we received a cool little 3" cd in the mail from a mysterious group called Isolde, which we later discovered was in fact a duo, Andrew Chalk and his sonic foil Robin Barnes. And as you might expect, that disc quietly and completely blew us away. Dense swirls of shimmering sound, dark and ominous crystalline and delicate, some of the best and most interesting dronemusic we'd heard in a while for sure.
But a 3" cd is hardly enough, it just whetted our appetite for more. With drones, and dark ambience, you want the sounds to stretch out forever and ever (or as long as recording media will allow) so that brief twenty minutes while still glorious, only hinted at where these guys could takes us given enough time...
So finally, here we have the brand new full length from Chalk and Barnes, 3 tracks, 50 minutes, the shortest clocking in at 14 minutes, the longest 20. And everything we loved about the first one is present here as well, but as one might expect, with the extended track lengths, the sounds are allowed to stretch out, drift further, each song an epic minimal journey through a series of wondrous darkly dramatic otherworlds. But unlike the 3", On Waving And Drowning is not all whisper and shimmer, occasionally Isolde manage to build their intimate sonic events into massive squalls of crackling static, roiling black clouds of thick corrosive guitarnoise and thick wall-of-sound grrrrr, reminding us of Birchville Cat Motel quite a bit. But these eruptions are surrounded on all sides by massive expanses of soft focus tranquility. A subtly shifting tableau, small sounds and epic soundscapes gradually dissolving into each other, fading in and out, layer after layer of sound shifting and slithering, creeping and crawling, deep still pools of barely there sound, shards of blue tinted moonlight, distant flurries of washed out staticky hum. A stunningly rendered drone world of dreamy drift.
Totally gorgeous packaging. A maroon cardboard digisleeve, on thick textured paper, printed in metallic silver, inside the gatefold, a beautiful full color image affixed to the sleeve. Like the music, understated and divine.
A tape version of these recordings came and went in 2005, pressed in an edition of 30 copies. So, perhaps like most of you, we didn't even know this thing existed until Robin Barnes (one half of Isolde and proprietor of the Penny Poppet imprint) offered us this album. It's got a different title and different artwork, but we'll trust that it's the same set of recordings. The other half of Isolde should need no introduction. Andrew Chalk has long been at the very top of our list of favorite drone composers and sound artists for many, many years now. Big thick harmonic drones of the dark and sublime variety are what we have come to expect from Mr. Chalk; and the other recordings we had been able to acquire from the Isolde duo certainly delivered on that aesthetic. But this one is considerably different. Here, Barnes and Chalk augment their narcoleptic guitar picking with little more than the gilded halo of spring reverb and some uneasy sounds situated well into the distance. The two use plenty of space between their abstracted clusters of guitar pluckings, which only barely give hints to avant-blues strategies, even more abstracted than early Loren Loren Mazzacane Conners or the quieter Keiji Haino solo offerings. Vapor trails of sustained sound linger around these simple notes, occasionally merging in a placid drone more in keeping with Chalk's more well known sensibility. Somewhere in the distance, something bellows like a pack of wolves, which immediately makes us think Dead Raven Choir; then it percolates like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or even like a snippet of EVP. This makes for a really excellent recording, although something of a detour for Chalk. Limited to a mere 300 copies.
This is the second release from the enigmatically titled duo Isolde, made up of AQ faves Andrew Chalk and Robin Barnes. Fans of Chalk and his work in Ora and Mirror will find much to love here. Two brief transmissions of chiming reverb drenched guitar, shimmering steel string buzz smoothed out into streaks of silver and grey, strange woodblock percussion scattered throughout like stones tossed into a tranquil pond. Hovering, haunting, reverberating, melodic fragments, tinkling plinks amidst an abstract swirl of ominous glimmers and muted glints of metallic resonance. So nice. Comes in miniature 3" jewel case, with gorgeous hand made inserts, and signed by both Barnes and Chalk. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES and we only got a handful!
- MPEG stream: One
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The return of perhaps the world's only musician whose main instrument is in fact ICE. That's right, ice. Fashioned into percussive instruments and horns. Listening to this, we're once again completely baffled by how ice can be made to sound so, well, musical. The sound is like a gamelan, or a xylophone, some notes deep and rich, others delicate tinkles. And then there's the horns, fashioned from ice, their sound can range from high pitched whistle to conch shell moan. We've yet to see a performance in person, but he sounds here are so fantastical, and so compelling, we're beginning to think a trip to colder climes is definitely in order.
This particular disc, one of two new ones from musician and ice sculptor Terje Isungset, is a document of the very first ice music tour, 29 concerts performed in Norway and Japan and Norway. And the liner notes cleverly point out that "No concerts were cancelled due to bad weather". Each track is from a different performance, the liner notes explain what instruments were played on each track, ice percussion, icefon, icehorn or simply ice, and who accompanied Isungset and on what, flute, trumpet, sampler, vocals. In addition, the weather conditions during the recording of each track are recorded: "3 degrees below zero, no wind, aurora borealis", "6 degrees below zero, clear sky, no wind". So cool.
While there are accompanists on most of the tracks (Supersilent's Arve Henriksen shows up on many of the tracks), some of them just ice instruments, most of the rest feature ethereal female vocals. The results are soft and shimmery, the tones rich and resonant, a sort of wintery new age drift, it's not difficult to imagine Bjork getting Isungset to play on her next record, many of the vocalists do affect a similarly Bjork-like coo. But whatever else is going on, it's the magic and the mystery of the ice, and it's impossible not to be wowed by these sounds. When we play it in the store, people literally will not believe this is the sound of ice. Check out the sound samples and you'll see what we mean.
Dreamy, delicate, soft and sleepy, and very very beautiful.
And like the two ice music releases before it, Ice Concerts also boasts some of the most amazing packaging we have ever seen. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of ice, the bubbles trapped inside the ice, in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, the front with various sized circles cut out like little bubbles, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth, and yes, we mean ACTUAL water, in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and played! So awesome!
Yet another mysterious disc of ice music, from the ice music master, Terje Isungset. What is ice music you ask? Well Isungset crafts actual musical instruments out of ice, yep, ICE instruments, all playable, from horns to vibraphones, the tones they create lustrous and surprisingly warm.
The instruments are beautiful, ice sculptures, glowing blue and white shapes that when struck, or blown, or rubbed, produce amazing sounds. Much of the music is percussive, the ice sounding like amuted gamelan, or a xylophone, the notes lustrous and deep. There are horns as well (although we won't even begin to question how someone can play an icehorn without getting their lips stuck), whose sounds range from alien cries, honking bleats, deep moans and every variation in between.
Where past discs have been super pretty, serene, and almost new age in their blissed out tranquility, Iceman Is manages to create a sound a bit more dark and ominous. The vocals on past releases, which reminded us of Bjork, here are replaced by strange mewlings, creaking falsettos, haunting ghostlike whispers, drifting amid the ice chimes and cold ambience.
In fact minus the fact that this record is played primarily on ice instruments, it wouldn't be all that surprising to hear these sounds on some super limited cd-r, some strange band of Finnish folkies or mysterious Midwestern bedroom 4-trackers. Very percussive, tribal, primitive, abstract and free, the melodies are spare and spread out, every track seems to have a definite drone element, no matter how minimal, the ice percussion offers up dreamy underwater sounding rhythms, there are some electronics, but they blend in perfectly with the sounds of the ice, in fact there are some tradition instruments mixed in here and there, but so deftly, they also end up sounding dark and delicate and icy.
Too bad it will never be cold enough out here to get Isungset and his band here to play. Maybe we should get them to do a tour of walk in freezers! Anyway, another gorgeous disc of haunting music made with ice, the darkest of the bunch, which of course means WAY recommended.
And like the three ice music releases before it, Iceman Is also boasts some of the most amazing packaging we have ever seen. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of Isungset, behind icicles, playing the ice harp, in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, printed in silver metallic ink, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth, and yes, we mean ACTUAL water, in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and played! So awesome!
Every year, in a remote part of Sweden, a group or artists and architects build a massive structure out of ice and snow, walls and arches and doorways and windows, a gorgeous glowing edifice that once completed becomes the famed Ice Hotel. A small complex of delicately crafted rooms, a bar, a chapel, every bit of which is made from ice. In some places the ice is extra thin, so light from the outside bursts through warm and brilliant, while elsewhere, the thick walls glow a burnished blue from the filtered sunlight or the soft pale moonlight. The beds are blocks of ice covered with animal pelts and arctic sleeping bags. The bar is ice, the glasses also ice, the only libations served are hard alcohol (vodka, etc.) due to the fact that they won't freeze. A totally amazing and overwhelming bit of adventurous lodging as well as being a piece of gorgeous conceptual art. In fact Andee and Heather had planned to have their wedding at the Ice Hotel, until both sides of the family refused, citing the idea of sleeping in a below zero room on a block of ice as a definite deal breaker.
Well, it gets even better: at the same time as the hotel is being planned and constructed, several of the same planners and ice artists are also designing and building musical instruments made entirely out of ice. Percussion, harps, and horns, all made from frozen water and little else. The sounds are muted and soft, strange and organic, haunting but imbued with a strange warmth totally unlike the cold and clinical sounds you might expect. All deftly intertwined with human voices, soft coos and trills, hushed and whispery, sounding not unlike a ghostlike gathering of disembodied, deconstructed Bjorks.
On Igloo, Isungset and and an assortment of performers, coax all manner of sounds from a strange phalanx of icy sound makers, ice harp, ice percussion, ice bass drum (!), iceofon, icehorn, all soft focused and dreamlike, all recorded live in the frosty interior of an igloo like ice-recording studio. From the icy scrape and shuffle of melted ice, to the deep resonant tones of the various frozen percussion instruments, sounding like vibes or chimes, sometimes even gongs, the overtones drifting and slowly fading. Dark dolorous melodies, warm and subdued, but impossibly resonant. After all, these are just chunks of ice! But obviously crafted with such care and precision to render them capable of making rich sonorous sound. Like some giant frosty thumb piano, a warm tumble of ghostlike notes, beneath the flittering flute-like sound of the icehorn, soft, delicate reedy melodies that sometimes morph into thick wheezes before dissipating back into gentle flutter. Beneath it all, thick and cavernous rumbles and whirs, deep and dense, layered with sonic subtleties, rich with tonal color, as if played on some giant cello made from ice (which we think is not far from the truth actually). Also present are a wide array of unobtrusive sonic events in and around each track, a tiny army of icicle percussion, clinking and clattering, chittering and scrabbling, a delicate crystalline backdrop for the warm wash and warble of the main ice instruments. And finally the vocals -- on first listen, at low volume, we almost didn't realize there were vocals at all, they tend toward the extremely abstract, strange little vocalizations as much about texture and timbre as tone and pitch, the sound perfectly blending into the icy landscape around them. Hints of Sigur Ros, Joan La Barbara, Sainkho Namchylak, but each voice unmoored, loosed from any sort of corporeal existence, left to flit and flicker ghostlike, almost like tiny droplets of water dripping delicately onto the already frozen landscape, allowed to seep into each and every melody, freezing into new and wonderful shapes.
At its most percussive, the music on Igloo sounds a bit like that breed of underground minimal free folk, sort of minimal and tribal, dreamy and slightly clattery, Finnish free folk ensembles Avarus and Anaksimandros definitely come to mind, while the strange underwater thumb piano sound reminds us of a much more minimal and abstract Konono No.1. For the most part though, Igloo is a dark dreamy drift, soft and meditative, warm and warbly, shimmering and sparkling and completely captivating.
And, it's mastered by AQ fave dronelord Deathprod!
Igloo also boasts some of the most amazing packaging we have ever seen. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of ice in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, the front with strips cut out like icicles, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth, and yes, we mean ACTUAL water, in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and played! WOW!
We first discovered Isungset, via Andee's obsession with Sweden's Ice Hotel. Each year, artists, build an entire hotel, complete with bar and wedding chapel, entirely out of ice. The walls, the floors, the ceiling, even the beds are all made out of ice. The whole thing is lit by candles and firelight, or by the moon shining through the transparent walls.
Coinciding with said ice hotel is an annual festival, of food and music, art and celebration. One of the activities is creating actual playable instruments out of ice, various bits of percussion and frozen horns, that can be struck or blown, creating some truly haunting an beautiful sounds. The ice percussion sounds like a more muted vibraphone, deep and resonant, rich with subtle overtones, the low end is dark and expansive, the high end tinkles like chimes. The ice horns sound like blowing on jugs, as much breath as there is tone, sometimes the players sputter and buzz making strange and alien sounds.
The vocals play a much bigger part on Two Moons as they did on Isungset's earlier album Igloo, although the sounds is still predominantly the sound of ice being blown or struck or scraped. The foundation of each track is the ice percussion, weaving dense tangles of muted melody, that occasionally spread out into abstract fields of drifting low end notes, very dark and dreamy, moody and atmospheric, the horns surface here and there, sputtering sometimes, moaning loudly at other times, some tracks are peppered with little bursts of high end clatter, rattling like a handful of icicles, the vocals vary on each track, drifting from world music croon, to guttural grunts and growls, to strange haunting animal calls, to full on primitive war cry. Two Moons almost plays like a lost field recording of some long extinct Northern tribe, very ritualistic and primitive. The whole thing is recorded in some huge, all ice igloo like ice-recording studio, which lends the recording a massive amount of natural reverb, thick with shimmer and expansive room sound, the various tones drifting briefly weightless before settling back to the ground. So gorgeous.
And like Igloo before it, Two Moons also boasts some of the most amazing packaging EVER. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of the moon and skeletal branches in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, the front with a hole cut out allowing the moon in the booklet to show through, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and turned into ice instruments!
One of three new releases on Utech this list, all collaborations of sorts, this one, the oddly named Ithi, is a duo from NY called Ithi, made up of Joshua Convey and Luke Krnkr. You might remember Convey from his Utech release Vacant Integument, which was a fantastic collection of hazy blown out psychedelia, thick shimmery guitarscapes AND processed harmonicas!
Not sure if there are any harmonicas employed in Ithi, but if there are, they must have run them through a million pedals, cuz right out of the gate, Ithi is a seriously noisy beast, a churning blackened maelstrom of tangled melodies, of thick slabs of buzz and rumble and hiss and skree, woven into some strangely rhythmic shapes, although those rhythms are almost completely subsumed by thick corrosive clouds of NOISE, although that noisy beginning is a bit misleading, cuz before long, the noise seems to fade a bit, and suddenly there's some pulsing electronics, some deep garbled crooning, the sound transformed into some strange sort of gloomy gothic electronic black noise. Or something. But once the vocals come in, everything changes, and the record blossoms into some sort of noisedrenched demonic electro-pop. Heavy on the noise.
The rest of the record is similarly twisted and off kilter, a dizzying, constantly shifting hybrid of black noise and post industrial crunch, or blurred ambient shimmer and depressive doom pop, or of austere synthwave and abstract electronic drift.
"Go Forth And Die" might be the 'hit' here, with its hazy buzz, murky low end melody, stumbly industrial rhythm, and creepy deep dramatic croon, like some lost eighties new wave jam reimagined by Wolf Eyes and Einsturzende Neubauten. But the sound is anything but static, slipping quickly into a super echoey bit of feedback laced murk, very soundtracky with lots of recorded-in-a-bunker reverb, then into a pulsing bit of glitched out thrum, before slipping into a strangely melodic bit of layered ambient dronemusic, that sounds more like Andrew Chalk or William Basinski (albeit much noisier), until finally, the record finishes off with the nineteen minute "From Caveman To Starflight", which begins a low slung and slithery, deep pulsing tones, muted rhythms, a little bit dubby, everything wreathed in some hazy space out buzz, there are even some blasts of super crunchy fuzzy synthbass buzz, making this almost sound in places like some sort of alien industrial dubstep, but the rhythms splinter, and seem to careen in all directions, the various buzzes and rumbles grow more and more intense, before finally exploding into a Technicolor psychedelic squall of glitched out grind and swirling streaks of crunchy electronics and tangled melodies, a heaving, but weirdly hypnotic blast of impossibly mesmerizing soft noise, that gradually grows more and more soft before fading out completely.
Super swank embossed jackets, with artwork and layout by Kevin Gan Yuen from SF blackmetal noise merchants Sutekh Hexen.
We raved about the first Ithi record, which came out on Utech a while back, a duo featuring Luke from sci-fi spacemetal dronelords Servile Sect, and Joshua Convey, whose Utech release was also a huge favorite around here. The two have returned with another fantastically tripped out slab of mesmerizing murk, thick corrosive synths, pulsing barebones programmed rhythms, guitars blurred into thick heaving swells, the vocals a buried croon, the result sounding like some sort of SUPER heavy lost cold wave classic. There's definitely a Suicide vibe for sure, a sort of grim swagger, but wedded to an almost Nadja/Jesu worthy wall of sound dronedoomdirge. We could listen to the opening track forever, a twisted cold wave krautrock spacedrone dirge that is as blackened and ominous as it is hypnotic and head nodding, with the rest of the record following suit, in many cases getting even more abstract and blown out, long stretches of blurred guitar drones, sprawled out over ribcage rattling bass pulses, the whole thing heaving and creeping and pulsing ominously. And in other cases, approaching the sort of crumbling slo-mo noise pop of Dead C offshoot Gate, but replacing the noise rock guitar and stumbling drum damage with sci-fi synths and alien drum programming. SO great!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
The third of the first three entries in the series of 3"cd-r's from San Francisco's acclaimed Jewelled Antler collective of psychedelic/drone/avant/folks comes from The Ivytree, a solo project of one of the Jewelled Antler's chief protagonists, Glenn Donaldson (who can also be found in Thuja, The Blithe Sons, Knit Separates, The Birdtree, etc). Donaldson has publicly announced an affinity for creating different monikers to accompany the innumerable variations of his musical productions, so The Ivytree may be just one in a number of upcoming 'tree' projects from Donaldson. Certainly this little 18 minute cd-r has a lot in common with his previous 'tree disc, The Birdtree album, which has recently been reissued on the Last Visible Dog label and garnered high praise from us. Centered around a plaintive, elliptical finger-picking guitar technique which renders every note full of melancholia, "The Sun Is The Lamp" weaves in and out of harmonium drones, field recordings of birds, and Donaldson's evocative vocals. As strong as the best Richard Youngs projects that might be the closest comparison we can make, this is another fantastic recording from Jewelled Antler!
MPEG Download: "The Withering Year" [/audio/ivytreewitheringyear.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "The Withering Year" [/audio/ivytreewitheringyear.m3u]
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Welcome again to the idyllic, enigmatic folk realm of Jewelled Antler's Glenn Donaldson. The Ivytree is but one of his sonic guises (see also Blithe Sons, Skygreen Leopards, The Birdtree, Thuja). Often collaborating with his Jewelled Antler colleagues, this Ivytree release on Catsup Plate finds Glenn all by his lonesome, but of course there's no lack of all the (wonderful) ingredients you usually find on a Jewelled Antler / GD recording... field recordings, drones, lazy acoustic reveries, and his vocals, high and drifting, not to wake the sleepers but to find harmony in the clouds. Nature, as always, is a big element here, and it seems there's also a Biblical inspiration at the roots of the Ivytree (song titles include "Flood", "Book Of Job", "Churches" and "Clay Tablets"). Anyone already mood-pleased by Glenn's previous offerings, especially by the now-out-of-print Birdtree album or his duo with Donovan Quinn in Skygreen Leopards, will find the dozen songs and soundscapes here much to their liking. Lovely. And if you're new to JA/GD, as good a place to start as any!
Comes in a nice lil' brown cardboard digipack, with Glenn's magnificent, colorful, birdy collages on the cover, the disc itself, and also on a two-siced mini poster inside... I think he's making his music for these feathered, beaked, half-birds, half-men of his imagination and they're probably devoted fans likewise. Fortunately we get to hear it too.
The most recent batch of Fat Cat 12"s couldn't be more perfectly AQ! There's the 'believe it or not' Konono No.1 / Dead C split (frustratingly, we're out of those already -- we didn't get our full order and now we have to wait for them to be repressed, argh!) and also this here slab of wax, featuring Jewelled Antler outfit The Ivytree and Australian guitarist Chris Smith. The Ivytree is the solo project of Glenn Donaldson, Jewelled Antler honcho and member of Thuja, Blither Sons, Skygreen Leopards, etc. These five tracks are delicate fragments of crystalline folk, reverb drenched acoustic guitar, warm whirring organs, tinkling chimes and shuffling percussion, and of course Donaldson's sweet falsetto croon. So gorgeous. Like a lazy summer afternoon, flowers blooming, leaves drifting lazily to the ground. grass swaying in the cool breeze, the forest whispering in the wind, with bits of melody drifting by as we lay in the shade letting the sun make random shapes, glowing a muted orange through are closed eyelids. Chris Smith has a whole different take on dreamy tranquility, choosing to instead find his special place using cascading sheets of distorted guitars, a slowly shifting smear of churning chords, roiling riffs and melodies crushed into thick sonic swirls.
Another blast of abstract weirdness from the No Neck Blues Band orbit. Izititiz is a pretty tough listen, a sloppy, slippery collison of free jazz sputter and skronk, thick corrosive crunch, and abstract 20th century tuning-up orchestra splatter. Occasionally things settle into melodic little moments of deconstructed bop, or meandering tribal tranquility, but it's never long before things drift back into abstract chaos.
Kiyoshi Izumi may or may not have had anything to do with a really early incarnation of the Boredoms, although his previous outing for Rephlex a few years back made such claims. "Orange Sunshine" is Izumi's most recent collection and has nothing really to do
Hot on the heels of the recent Black As Pitch record, one man band Jabaldav returns with a much more abstract outing... Whereas BaP, and the previous release Dead As Duck, were both homages of a sort to SF black metal legends Weakling, albeit filtered through some Black Flag damage and some fucked up black studio magic, 3K Hum sounds basically like what the title would lead you to imagine. Longform drones, drawn out expansive low end soundscapes, still black and haunting, brutal in their own way, but more hypnotic, more trancelike, owing more to SUNNO))) and Niblock than Immortal and Ildjarn.�
The opening track is nearly 15 minutes of digital burble, tape hiss and amp buzz, woven into a slow simmering stretch of glitch-pocked shimmer, like strange malfunctioning machinery, floating�along a slow flowing black river, sputtering and struggling to make more than buzzes and bzzzt's, immersed in a deep resonant sonic flow. Eventually, a riff enters the fray, but it's soooo slow, and weirdly digitized, it's more like a dense cloud of overdrive tone, thick and roiling, keening and white hot, before drifting off again, leaving nothing but a strange Morse code sort of Raster-Noton click and buzz ambience...
The second track is much more smoothed out, a gorgeous languorous sun baked crawl, long distorted notes stretched way out, flecked with sharp bits of overdriven buzz, a lazy metallic minor key threnody, burning hot but slowly, smoldering and intense, very alien, but warm and hauntingly emotional. This is followed by a brief series of Close Encounters like tones, that occasionally overheat and become super distorted swells, before reverting again to gentle drifting harmonics, before the 'bonus track' (which is NOT on the cassette), a massive 44 minute epic, a gorgeous washed out drift, shades of Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck, and other masters of soft focus blur, like the soundtrack for some weightless drift through space, distant glimmers, barely there melodies, soft warm melodic swells, little shards of FX, like lost transmissions from some dying satellite, slipping effortlessly from ominous and dark, to dreamy and hopeful, this track all on its own is like an entire record in and of itself, but of course manages to be the final part in 3K Hum's multi part epic... So lovely...
And also on the cd (and not on the tape), is a brief coda, a weird robotic blur of buzzing tones and crumbling distortion, haunting and speaker shredding, but again in its own black buzzing way quite pretty...
The cd is packaged in a DVD case, with full color cover, and two full color inserts.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!!! Each one hand numbered.
As we wait for the next Jabladav full length, the ultra brutal Atta Vinter, the band have released this ambient precursor, taking it's cue from the spacier elements of Paysage D'Hiver, but also incorporating plenty of free noise drift, new age shimmer, and abstract kraut-drone.
Unlike past Jabladav ambient missives, the focus here is less on low end, on the rumble and whir and buzz, instead, it's much airier and spacier, tinkling chimes, warm swells of soft focus synths, there are some haunting things happening below, deep bellow thuds, industrial groans and creaks, but they are so far down in the mix as to just add a bit of texture and mystery. Otherwise, the sound is strangely sun dappled, glimmering, shimmering, ethereal and effervescent, and yeah, new age-y, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, David Parsons, the whole first side is slow sprawling expanse of dreamy new age-y shimmer.
The second side slips a bit more into low end, but not rumbling or buzzing, not doom drone or dirge, instead, another warm whirring, lighter than air bit of sonic weightlessness, mesmerizingly tranquil, relaxingly otherworldly, this is the sound of drifting through space, or floating amongst the clouds, sun dappled or moonlit, the sounds on Ambience are a softly shifting soundtrack to leaving your body and exploring the vast expanses of inner, and outer space.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered....
Mysterious one man band Jabladav has proven that he is much more than just a Weakling tribute, offering up his admitted Weakling inspired black buzz infused with strange gnarled Greg Ginn-ish guitaring, and furiously fucked up post rock mathed out weirdness. Grim and buzzy, but also damaged and seriously and gloriously freaked out. He also proved he could drone with the best of them on the recent 3K Hum release, a slab of deep dark dense dronology that definitely holds its own amongst the legends of drone.
So in the spirit of 3K Hum comes this latest Jabladav release, limited to only 50 copies, so we won't get too in depth, needless to say, we were pretty much sold when Mr. Jabladav emailed us to tell us about this new release, and wrote "I've never heard a Buddha Machine sound so evil." Well, heck, what else did we need to hear? Nothing in fact.
So we got as many of the 50 as he could spare and here it is!
Recorded live, using a Buddha Machine, a piano, a Casio and a handful of effects, Jabladav has created a doomy and dark ominous drift. The Buddha Machine's loops transformed into creeping lowend sprawl, bits of distortion and decay lace these long tones, a subtle throb, a deep resonant pulse, murky and muddy and sinister, spaced out, but blurred and smeared into dark dreamlike drones.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! We got way less than that. Packaged in a slim dvd style case, full color artwork and booklet, each disc signed, and numbered, the booklet signed and the insert numbered too.
Seems like only yesterday we were listing a Jabaldav record... Well it was in fact the last list, but where that one was a Buddha Machine driven drift of dreamy dronemusic, Trostlosigkeit finds the Jabladav sound moving back to the Burzumic black buzz we love so much. And Burzumic is right, the first track begins as a sprawl of slow moving glacial buzz, laced with a haunting, very Filosefem sounding synthesizer melody, haunting and dreamy, but it's not long before Jabladav swing back into his Weakling meets Black Flag gnarled blackness. But the sound here is much more melodic, and blissful, lots of acoustic guitar woven into the proceedings, more midtempo then blast, and that synthesizer melody resurface throughout, giving the opening track a definite woozy melancholy vibe. "Loss" is similarly dark and dreary, like Jabladav got a depressive black metal makeover, spidery guitars give way to a muddy, murky dirgey doom-ed black buzz, more dreamy synth, the overall sound is way more lo-fi than usual, but it definitely suits the new mood and sound, weirdly pretty, but still grim and mysterious and heavy.
The title track is a sprawling 19 minute doomscape, all tangled glacial guitar, muted chug, hissed hellish vox, super spare drumming, lots of space, almost ambient really, peppered with bursts of insectoid riffing and buzzing black blasts, but always slipping back into that lugubrious doomdrone crawl, the guitars especially distorted, a weird warped bit of blackness that definitely ranks with the best we've heard from Jabaldav.
But if you though 19 minutes was epic and sprawling, prepare yourself for the record closer, "Reflection", clocking in at a hefty 33 minutes, no black metal to be found here, just some serene tranquil shimmering dronemusic, washed out and ethereal, a dreamlike drift, trancelike and meditative, and really quite lovely.
As always with Jabladav stuff, EXTREMELY LIMITED. This one to ONLY 50 COPIES, of which we got about half, housed in a DVD style case, with a full color cover, inside there's an elaborately folded insert, sealed with wax, the case also features a wax seal, the liner notes, case AND disc are all numbered and signed, grab one of these before they're gone, cuz these will blow out of here...
Norwegian label Miasmah has long been home to a stable of artists creating the sorts of sounds we can't ever seem to get enough of: dark, brooding, electronic flecked hauntological cinematic soundscapes, and late night mysterious classical infused dronemusic, artists like Elegi, Macus Fjellstrom, Gultskra Artikler, FNS, Kreng, Jasper TX, and of course Jacaszek, aka Polish electro-acoustic composer and soundscaper Michal Jacaszek, and while Jacaszek only made one record for Miasmah, it was such a perfect fit, that it was easy to imagine Jacaszek as emblematic of the label's sound. But here we are a few years later, and Jacaszek has already moved on to a new label, but thankfully taken that 'Miasmah' sound with him. And if anything, this new one is even more fully realized than Treny, which was already a unanimous aQ fave. And really how could it not be? Like Treny before it, Glimmer unfurls a ghostly world of blur and shadow, of hum and thrum and glitch and crackle. Operating in a darkened world not that far removed from the Caretaker or Philip Jeck or Demdike Stare, albeit with a bit more of a classical bent, Jacaszek conjures up haunting brooding soundworlds of lush shimmering strings, of echo drenched harpsichord, of woozy loops and hazy staticky record crackle, soft slow swells, that grow so distorted and intense, they slip easily into the red, transforming into something much more harrowing than the music of many of his sonic brethren. The sound threatening to collapse or explode, an urgent pulsing, nearly grinding buzz, that as quickly as it blossomed, seems to slip right back into languid expanses of soft focus drift. Horns and strings, acoustic guitars, all layered delicately into creaking faded stretched of hushed mesmer, an old timey chamber music, transmitted from the other side, much of the sound damaged and decayed as it crossed over, resulting in some darkly alien dronescaping, that slips easily from warped, looped murky moody ooze, to lush, almost pop flecked cinematic post classical drift, the sound at either end of that sonic spectrum flecked with bits of glitch, and audio detritus, the sound seeming to gradually fade and flake as the record spins, almost as if on the next play, it would sound even more washed out and hazy.
There are moments where the sound coalesce into something much more polished, and more traditionally musical, but even then, the music is underpinned by an ominous foreboding, wreathed in strange muted loops, and mysterious sonic fragments, as if being listened to through some sort of dusty old sonic veil, loveliness gradually darkening, shadows lengthening, melodies unwinding and growing subtly more menacing, the recording revealing more and more crackle, swirls of hiss like little dustdevils, all woven into some sort of otherworldly funereal threnody, dreamlike and lovely, but always on the verge of drawing the listener into the mysterious dark place from which these haunting sounds emanate...
Ah, the Miasmah label, can they do no wrong? Not if darkly moody, cinematic soundscapes are your thing. It you like stuff on Type, for whom Miasmah's boss records as Svarte Greiner, you'll like Miasmah's releases too. Previously, this Norwegian label has brought us several dreamily eerie (or eerily dreamy?) discs by the likes of Elegi, Gultskra Artikler, and (highlighted just a few lists ago) the latest from Jasper TX. Now, Polish electro-acoustic composer Michal Jacaszek makes his Miasmah debut. His rustling electronics are melded with classical strings (cello and violin played by Ania Smiszek-Wesolowska and Stefan Wesolowski) and, crucially, the lovely vocals of Maja Sieminska, which seem inspired by the liturgical chant of medieval 'early music'.
It's all quite intimately lonesome, and somber, and very beautiful. Sieminska's ghostly, gossamer singing sighs amidst those mournful chamber strings, humming glitch and crackling drone, and occasional electronic "beats" that sound more like drops of water, slowly dripping from stalactites... as if you're in some vast dark cavern, Sieminska's siren voice drawing you ever deeper into the catacombs, entranced. One of our new favorite drifting-off-to-sleep records, its many shades of grey so, so very gorgeous.
