We haven't heard from these guys in a while. Which more than likely just means we somehow missed out on about a million super limited cd-r's and cassettes and wax cylinders. But we weren't about to miss out on this one. Another in alt.vinyl's series of ultra limited 8" lathe cuts (the Prurient one is featured elsewhere on this list).
As always, the boys are in fine form, offering up confounding and confusional loveliness and sometimes not so loveliness.
Side one sounds like Nurse With Wound doing the soundtrack for an afternoon soap opera, with a melodramatic organ wheezing and whirring in a sea of partially plucked guitars and dense clouds of shimmering feedback, metallic clang and all sorts of grind and crackle and crunch and glitch and buzz. All deftly woven into something surprisingly listenable, almost like some super lo-fi dada-ist Pop Ambient jam.
The B side is a gorgeous minimal, lazy and languid, slowly unfurling Taj Mahal Travellers like organic drone, all drawn out billowy buzz, drifting over a spare stretch of low end shimmer, very meditative and serene. Occasionally over the top drift little flurries of percussion, bells and shakers, very tribal and ritualistic. Both sides are pretty dang awesome.
And like all the releases in the series, this is a custom hand cut, Peter King lathe cut, 8", and it's SQUARE!!! Packaged in gorgeous square and triangular die cut sleeves, super fancy textured paper, with a paste on front cover and a printed insert, each insert hand numbered, each release LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
It's been a while since we've heard from UK experimental drone/noise duo Jazzfinger, but that just means we probably missed about 20 super limited cassette and cd-r releases. This here is the very first 7" from JF, and offers yet another side to their sound, this one a gorgeously minimal buzz drenched lo-fi raga.
The A side is all warbly guitar scrape and scrabble, over some wheezing lo-fi buzz, the sound warped and woozy, bits of electronic grit and glitch, very hypnotic, like some alien Appalachia, but minus the twang, and way more whir and buzz.
The B side opens with a keening high end drone that sounds like a feeding back bagpipe, unfurling a strange stately raga over a buzzing static drenched melody, the sound like some crumbling tape being played back on a dictaphone, everything wreathed in glorious grit, buried beneath a lo-fi hum, very reminiscent of the more rag-like recordings of Dan Higgs, but much more minimal and abstract. Really cool.
Gorgeous full color artwork, hand assembled, pressed on clear vinyl, and of course SUPER LIMITED!!!
It's true. THREE new Jazzfinger releases! On this list alone. If it was any other band, we might scoff, but hell, Jazzfinger are making up for some serious lost time. In a big way. And while there are plenty of bands we can't get enough of, Jazzfinger are one of our favorites. For years we subsisted on their debut, assuming the band had broken up or disappeared, until discovering that they were indeed still a band, just not a very prolific one. But that all changed fairly recently, and the band has been spitting out new releases, like one a month. But we're not complaining. Not at all. In fact we've been waiting for the Glass Key for ages, having heard rumors of it's existence. The second in a series of insanely elaborately packaged cd-r's. The first, The Well Of Used Dreams is long gone, and when we did have it, it flew out of here in to time flat. Which makes sense once you see it. And hear it.
For those new to Jazzfinger, they exist in the same sonic orbit as groups like Skullflower, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sunroof! crafting epic worlds of drone and buzz, strange little fragments of some undefinable musical whole. Unlike their sonic brethren, they are not as concerned with massive walls of sound, or huge swirls of guitar or clouds of keening reeds, instead, Jazzfinger explore texture and shape, shrinking themselves down and crawling physically through the minutiae of music, drifting through strange alien worlds of sounds, surrounded on all sides by vast expanses of sonic wonder.
The Glass key is a wonderfully mysterious song suite, a varied sampling of Jazzfinger's musical wares. With all the songs and sounds connected, a distinctive, yet hard to describe musical thread running clean through. Spread out over 70+ minute the band takes us along, on their tripped out psychedelic journey. Haunting pianos drift beneath a thick layer of fuzzy grit, distant warbly organ, and a scraped violin that either sounds like a crying baby or a meddlesome mosquito. Jack Hammers are muted and smeared into soothingly rhythmic flutters, epic expanses of cavernous echo and cymbal shimmer underpin buzzing distorted guitars that slither dirgelike through fields of chimes and coruscating feedback. Voices are chopped up and spread out over wheezing smears of huffing harmonica, warm clouds of Eastern melodies and raga like buzz hovering like a storm cloud over a loping funereal piano. So totally amazing.
Packaged in a massive oversized cardboard sleeve with super tripped out collages affixed to the front and the back, while on the inside the liner notes are affixed to the rocket shaped cardboard insert that functions as a sort of pull out tray, with the black cd-r in a sleeve attached to the front. Quite stunning. And incredibly elaborate, and totally time consuming to hand assemble. Needless to say, there were very few of these made, they are already sold out from the band, we only got about 20 and will never be able to get more, so don't blow it. You'll definitely be sorry.
Jazzfinger may seem like they just burst upon the scene, what with the recent flurry of cd-r releases, but these guys have been making beautiful noises for going on a decade now. We have been LOVING everything, we just can't get enough!! So much so that we pulled out our decade old copies of The Little Girl On The Plane Who Turned Her Doll's Head Around To Look At Me, their debut from way back in 1998 (although it was recorded in 1996-97). And holy shit, did that stuff sound just as good now as it did then. We were so blown away when we first discovered this record, we were convinced Jazzfinger would be huge, then they sort of just disappeared for a while before resurfacing more recently. Anyway, we were lamenting the fact that all the folks who had been freaking out over the recent spate of Jazzfinger cd-r's would never get to hear the one that we might just consider to be the best. The lo and behold, we get a call from Ben Jazzfinger, who out of the blue lets us know that the label still has a stash of these discs! Well, needless to say, we had a little freakout, did a little dance, and ordered us up a whole mess of these amazing discs. Needless to say, if you are already a fan of any of the recent JF releases, this is ESSENTIAL. And all you cd-r nerds into Jyrk, Onomata, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, PseudoArcana are definitely gonna want to check this out!!
So what does it sound like? Well if you're hip to the Jazzfinger already, you probably have a good idea, but as this was nearly a decade ago, the sound is a lot more raw, a lot more varied, and really fucking awesome. A caustic soundscape of high end streaks, like howling dogs and balloons being rubber together morphs into a thick fuzzy dirgescape thick with industrial scrapes and warbly organ, like some long lost Dead C jam, then some damaged acoustic guitar beneath a field of buzzing electricity. A lurching sort-of doom metal free noise dirge leads into a stuttering soundscape of sliced and diced vocal and instrumental snippets, a glistening swirl of shortwave interference, found sounds and thick grinding guitar feedback gradually melts away revealing a bizarre low end landscape of gurgles and rumbles, and some stumbling percussion. A radio broadcast is transformed into a thick super distorted snarling beast, jagged and harsh, swathed in fuzz and sheets of feedback, before it drifts away replaced by a strange beeping bleeping symphony of upper register tones and haunting chimes. Finally, an epic, super dramatic, free noise freaked out psych jam, like the Dead C covering Goblin. The music for some alien horror movie. Thick and caustic and noisy but somehow so creepy and pretty. Such an amazing record.
Beautifully packaged too, in an oversized vellum sleeve, printed in metallic silver, the thick brown cardboard inner sleeve visible through the vellum, the whole thing housed in a thick vinyl sleeve.
NOT A WHOLE LOT OF THESE LEFT, SO WHEN WE RUN OUT, WE'RE NOT ENTIRELY SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Every scene has that one group that toils away in utter obscurity while their contemporaries move on to bigger and better things. And often that band is left behind not because they aren't as good as their sonic brethren, but because while they are adept at music making, the whole aspect of self promotion and releasing records and playing shows takes a backseat to the sheer joy of making wonderful noise. So you probably know Skullflower, Sunroof!, Total, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Neil Campbell and a host of others. But odds are you've never heard of Jazzfinger. Which is a pity, as JF are as good as, if not better than all of those other groups. For years Jazzfinger have skirted the UK free/psych/noise scene, crafting gorgeous slabs of ambient skree and bowel loosening rumble, all imbued with subtle melodies and unlikely dynamics. But their records have been really diffcult to track down. This new cd-r may not necessarily help their cause, but that does not make this any less essential. It's pricey at 26.00 (for a cd-r!) but once you see it, and hear it, you might not feel so bad about forking over that dough. Packaged in a massive oversized cardboard sleeve with strange photos affixed to the front and the back and the inside, different views of some sort of celestial / cellular phenomenon, multi-colored circles merging and intersecting. Quite beautiful. The music inside is sort of the sonic equivalent, with sonic spheres slowly shifting and merging, black holes of sound sucking up sonic detritus and releasing clouds of rumbling whir and warm multi-hued drones. Super limited and we only have a handful so it may take us a while to get more. So act fast.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally another sonic transmission from the mysterious and elusive Jazzfinger. The last we heard from these murky noisesmiths was a VERY expensive, super limited, gorgeously deluxe cd-r way back in 2004, and we, like you were absolutely smitten. We had long been fans, but that was the first release we were able to get enough copies of to reviews. Low profile or not, here was a band who had been lurking on the fringes of the underground, crafting their own dark and wondrous ambient drones and mumbled freerock explorations and who we wanted, nay NEEDED to hear more from. And is if in response to our prayers, what should suddenly appear? A brand new full length from this UK ensemble. And for those of you put off by the almost $30 price tag of their last release, or those of you who just missed out since it was so limited, well here's your chance to dive in.
Sonic brethren to folks like Sunroof! and Vibracathedral Orchestra, and often sharing a similar penchant for the ur-drone and various mighty swells of sound, Jazzfinger have managed to in fact carve their own, darker, more minimal path. Almost like a rock band covering Coleclough or Chalk. Jazzfinger are not so much ones for huge squalls of guitar or woodwinds, instead these guys creep and crawl, a low rumbling exploration of dark corners and shadowy otherworlds, of dusty forgotten trunks filled with old objects, abandoned buildings overgrown with foliage, and wide expanses of barren terrain, colored only by moonlight and the slow whirring drift of their gauzy sonic fog. Strings buzz and shimmer, long form drones stretch way out, while underneath subtle sounds shift and swell, percussion is minimal, a softly struck bell here, a brief clatter of tiny pipes there, only adding color, not rhythm. Melodies drift forth like distant foghorns barely audible through the clouds of a dark and stormy night, guitars are plucked, and strummed, but not to fashion riffs, more to unleash a series of reverberating waves, that build and build, layer upon layer, a thick, head spinning monochrome crawl, organs wheeze out delicate melodies over the omnipresent buzzing steel strings, creating a soft music box like raga, the sound here is definitely dark, and ominous, but suffused with warmth, and life, a subtle glow, an inner light that makes each stretch of slow shifting ambience feel alive and dense with emotion. A totally breathtaking journey through a mysterious universe of dark buzz and warm shimmer.
Super limited and so totally essential.
It's been a little while since we've heard from UK duo Jazzfinger, we've got a split lp that will be reviewed on the next list, and we found a few of these hiding out on the shelves, another cd-r from last year that we're only getting around to reviewing now. It was limited to 100 copies, we have less than ten, but sure there are way more then 10 of you out there who never got your hands on this.
Jazzfinger are always all over the map and it's no different here, from wheezing melodica, slathered in distortion and feedback, to strange percussive junkyard lope, swirling tendrils of high pitched shimmer, to haunting laughter draped over ominous church organ whir and metallic creaks, abstract detuned folk strum over more wheezing warble, and then there's the 24 minute "Caves", a noisy workout that slips between corrosive crunch, dreamy drone, fucked up confusional soft noise and ever possible combination of the three.
Bizarre, and unpredictable and sort of pretty and definitely cracked, exactly what every Jazzfinger fan expects and desires.
Once again, this was LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, we've got 8 or 9 left, it's out of print so that is definitely it, packaged in cool water colored covers...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The UK's Jazzfinger hit us again with another slab of their gorgeous free rock abstract drone wonder, but here they're sharing sonic space with a band we had never heard before. A Way are from Finland, and seem to fit somewhere between their countrymen Avarus, Anaksimandros, Kemialliset Ystavat and like-minded groups like No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Ghosting, Bonus and of course Jazzfinger. A Way's 4 tracks are brief little snippets of low end weirdness. Drones, but dense with disembodied non-melodies, fragmented chunks of rumble and shimmer, rhythms, but the sort of rhythms you can only see when you stand way back, up close, they're just dizzying whirls of random percussive shuffle and stumbling flutter, the warm whir of machinery, a smeared industrial drift, sparkling with tiny harmonics and muted tonal color. An ambient world of soft and spooky sweet submerged.
Jazzfinger counter with a 20 minute wall of crumbling guitar. Layer after layer of pealing, keening, roaring, buzzing amps and strings. Dense but also sort of lo-fi. It almost sounds like some sort of installation where a gallery was outfitted with 1000 crappy tape players, all playing poorly dubbed copies of live Sunroof! bootlegs. A gloriously epic tangle of high end guitars, a massive sun dappled Ur-drone, hovering and shimmering, while beneath lurks a swirling world of tinkling music boxes, plucked strings, sing songy melodies, random percussion, thick strum and abstract riffage. Nice!
SUPER LIMITED. We only have a dozen or thereabouts, so act fast. Packaged in thick plastic pouches with two hand screened squares of textured paper and secured with a tiny piece of twine.
We won't go into too much detail on this one, as it's an oldie, from way back in 2003, we never had enough to list it until now, and even now we probably don't have enough, but we do have a bunch, so if you want one of these act fast, cuz it's pretty dang great.�
Longtime AQ faves, UK duo Jazzfinger (at least a duo here) battle it out free rock, abstract ambient drone style with fellow noisemakers Number None, who we've actually been fans of for a while, but this will mark their first appearance on the AQ list.�
The Jazzfinger tracks, are more of what we've come to love, hissy lo-fi soundscapes of warble and shimmer, clattery chaotic percussion and rumbling drones, the eleven minute second track is the shows the band at their best, stretching way out, and meandering from soft focus drone to foresty free folk, to No Neck clatter jam and back again, washed out, grinding buzzing and so gloriously mysterious. The rest of the tracks play out similarly, like some strange mechanical music making contraption, wound up and let loose, on some old 1800's dirt road, wobbling beneath bruised purple skies and sending the villagers skittering back to their houses, to peek warily through the curtains.�
Number None, are like minded maybe, but their execution is completely different. More minimal and hushed, their tracks are stretched out streaks of muted metallic buzz, buried mumbled vocals, dark industrial hiss, haunting melodic fragments, all drifting weightless in some murky alien sea. The final track, the 15 minute long "High Noon On The Negative Plane" sounds exactly like that. Dark shimmers of ringing metal, smeared into barely shifting slabs of soft sound, an orchestra of Tibetan bells, dropped into the sea, their subtle vibrations recorded as they descend into the blackness, then broadcast toward the surface, where they arrive as a warm watery warble. So nice.�
And again, SO LIMITED, already out of print, so needless to say, these will be gone in a flash...
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Jazzkammer is the Norwegian duo of Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, typically resorting to the Voice Crack / Yoshihide-like avant-turntable collages disfigured by computer generated noise attacks. "Pancakes" is a detour down the 12K_ Line aesthetic with sub-audible, pristine low-frequencies spiked with crisp, high-end sinewave. Headphones required.
Jazzkammer's free improvisations revolve around turntables, samplers, sine waves, guitars, field recording, and the static crackle of nearly broken electronics which are prodded and poked to surprising results. At their most austere, this Swedish duo resembles an analogue equivalent of Oval... at their loudest, it's a neurotic aural assault not unlike Otomo Yoshihide or Voice Crack.
The monicker of Felicia Atkinson's solo project hails from Nico's Desert Shore, that mysteriously bleak 1970 album by the Velvet Underground's troubled chanteuse; and a similarly poetic mysteriousness oozes from Atkinsons' deconstructed songs. Age Of Wonder is the second piece of vinyl for Je Suit Le Petit Chevalier, strengthening her work through a handful of limited cassettes and cd-r out of an amorphous droning psychedelia and into a smoldering intense alchemy of allegorical post-ambience. On this spooky, hypnotic, and harrowing album conjured through ever-shifting, ever-blossoming, ever-defalting soundscapes, she references the psychotropic holiness of Fursaxa, the deep-sleep surrealism of Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, and the expository minimalism of Taj Mahal Travellers. Voice, synths, loops, and electronics are the tools at her disposal, which she uses to build sprawling passages of sodden drones brightened by twinkling synths playing half-melodies and accentuated by her narcoleptic vocals cycling through wordless, but emotively sad lullablies alternating with spectral bellowings swathed in deep, washed-out reverb. The layered accretion of plainsong vocalizations and dank atmopsherics opaquely reimagines that which is natural, mystical, metaphysical, and/or mundane, always positioned as something of a mirror looking back to the human psyche as unknowable and existentially sublime. Brilliantly done.
Dark Morse is a super limited cassette from the brilliant Belgian drone-songstress Felicia Atkinson aka Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, a moniker snatched from Nico's Desertshore album. Her synth, reverb, and vocal concoctions earn her favorable comparisons to Motion Sickness Of Time Travel and Grouper; but she's continuing to delve into deeper waters away from any psychedelic inclinations and toward a darkly psychological sentiment. Dark Morse is based on the Don Delillo collection of short stories The Angel Esmeralda, whose thematic arcs and intertwining narratives bristle with rape, murder, and surreal miracles popping up on highway billboards. Atkinson's condensation of Delillo's work adheres to a suitably sinister atmosphere. Shadowy, occluded sounds of ghost-clattering rhythms, narcoleptic vocals, and ill-tempered drone-melodies sprawl across the 38 minutes as shape-shifting amalgams that come in and out of existence through an ectoplasmic ambience. The witchiness of it all makes us think that this wouldn't be too far out of place alongside the Demdike Stare associates / affiliates of Anworth Kirk, Slant Azymuth, Suum Cuique, and David Orphan. While 200 copies may seem like a beefy production run for a cassette, this is too good to be sitting around for long.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
If there is a fault to be found in this release from Philip Jeck, it is in the cdr format and the painfully limited edition. With an arsenal of Dansette turntables (numbering up to 180!!!), Jeck sets up numerous pieces of vinyl with various delays and locked grooves fashioned directly on the vinyl with glue and razor blades. Cyclical patterns of Christmas tunes, slowed down antique 78s, and the tidal flux of surface noise are the raw elements for Jeck's collage. The result is an eerily beautiful piece that is just as good as (if not better than) Jeck�s recently released turntablist double cd masterpiece --Vinyl Coda I-III.Ê
'Tis the season for Philip Jeck, it seems! This UK sonic experimentalist is a big fave 'round these parts, so it's been a festive month indeed with the recent release of a live recording (reviewed 2 lists ago) and now this brand new 'studio' album, AND a reissue of Jeck's seminal, long out of print album Surf, reviewed nearby. Hallelujah.
Jeck is simply a wizard with the turntables, not in a hip hop DJ sense but as a sound sculptor, making ghostly slow motion looping drones and beats with crackly old vinyl and the phonograph mechanism itself. Listening to his music is to submerge oneself into a mysterious, evocative realm of sound that capitalizes on the claustrophobia of the locked groove, that dwells on the dusty textures of vinyl as if examined by a field recordist, rather than the usual needle, tone-arm, pre-amp, speaker method of sound extraction.
7 is certainly a strong Jeck showing, lacking naught for crackling, glacial drone and ominous background melodies stolen from another time and place. It's really amazing that it's a turntable (or turntables) making possible Jeck's music, which ranges from the very physical sounding action of a track like "Museum" to the simple haunting whoosh of "Wipe". Track four, "Bush Hum" deserves special mention as it's constructed soley from the "amplified hum of a Bush record-player and delay-pedal". With those tools -- no records -- Jeck creates a totally electronic sounding track of buzzing rapid rhythmic noise, loud, grinding like a swarm of robot insects. The very next track, "Now You Can Let Go" takes the opposite approach, where there are indeed LPs on Jeck's turntables, and you can actually catch traces of actual music being "sampled". Squawks of big band jazz, a bluesy lick, warped exotica -- but usually nothing really recognizable. It's almost like modern electronic dance music at moments, but worshipping the skipping LP not the digital glitch. But it's really Jeck's compositions with even less overt 'musical' content that we prefer, and 7's final track "Veil" delivers on that score with ten minutes of wonderfully droned-out sombre beauty, with no skips or scratches to interrupt its windswept trance... Of course, recommended!
Of all the sound manipulators, soundscapers and dronologists out there, few can touch Philip Jeck. A master 'turntablist', able to create whole new worlds out of sound, to transport the listener to another place, real or imaginary, with just a clutch of record players, a handful of dusty old vinyl, some cheap Casio keyboards, a couple minidisc recorders, a few mixers, a bass guitar and some effects pedals, the musical equivalent of some mad scientist, creating a time machine, or some temporal shift manipulator, out of odds and ends from the kitchen or the garage. The magic is in the process as much as the result, that result being at least partially beholden to the process, not to discount the sheer creativity and ingenuity of the artist. Because that's exactly what Jeck is, an artist, painting impressionistic landscapes with sound. Instead of colors, he deftly manipulates textures and rhythms, layers and melody, subtly mixing various elements to create something other, the various constituent parts irrelevant to the final piece, like staring at a painting up close, it's not until you step back, that the various elements coalesce into something magical, and beautiful.
An Ark For The Listener is a sonic mediation on a poem about the drowning of five exile nuns in the 1800's, and was performed in various locations throughout 2010, this recorded version incorporates bits of the live performances into the final recorded piece, a gorgeously somber soundscape of deep drones and of mysterious sonic swells, the opener "Pilot/Dark Blue Night", is a hushed drift of stretched out tones and muted sonic garble, a chorus of croaking frogs beneath moaning low end melodies, a slowly unfurling minor key drama wreathed in hiss, truncated rhythms, and clouds of click and chitter, deep bell like tones, and swirling soft focus ambience, culminating in the final few minutes with a super emotional bit of looped strings and epic almost choral swells, strangely skipping, uncharacteristically revealing their vinyl source, but it's precisely what makes it so intense and mysterious.
"Ark" is a tinkling driftscape of chiming tones, and distant melodies which gradually transforms into a weird bit of droney wah wah-ed bass flutter, "Twentyninth" is a perfect slab of Jeckian dreamdrift haze, shot through with moving minor key melodies, and cinematic like tension, a few of the tracks grow dense and turbulent, the sounds thickening, becoming almost caustic and corrosive, while others seems to grow more and more fragile, diaphanous stretches of crystalline shimmer, the record proper finishing off with the surprisingly rhythmic "The Pilot (Among Our Shoals)", with its soft avalanche of looped beats, its tangled flurries of pizzicato strings, a soft focus frenzy of dizzing turntable swirl, which gives way to a lovely outro of hushed barely there drift and breathless low end murmur.
The cd tacks on two bonus tracks, reworked versions from the Suite: Live In Liverpool record, one previously released, the other unreleased, both working surprisingly well with the record proper, "All That's Allowed (Released)" a shimmering expanse of blurred strings and disembodied melody, of softly staticky crackle, and hazy hushed drift, and "Chime, Chime (Rerung)", a crunchy and tactile stretch of tolling bells, reverberating metal, booming gongs and tinkling chimes, all wrapped in a gauze of crackle and pop, buzz and warble, the whole thing lit with some glimmering shimmering otherworldly light. So great.
Sort of in contrast to the live cd by DJ Z-Trip reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, comes this live recording by *another* AQ fave turntablist, British phonograph-drone experimentalist Philip Jeck. Completely different, of course. There's no rock/rap mash ups to be found here, that's for sure. Mash ups between crackly vinyl grooves and slowed-down ballroom waltzes, perhaps. If you haven't heard him before, we'd recommend his last studio disc Stoke or either of his Vinyl Coda releases to start with (or the upcoming reissue of his classic Surf album). Host is perhaps closest in sound to Stoke, getting into some of the more aggro yet still hypnotic sounds Jeck makes. And 'cause it's live, you might recognize some of the records Jeck is spinning from his other albums. Highlight for us is the final 24 minute cut "Skew" in which Jeck builds up some truly psychedelic levels of delay. Head-throbbing.
In addition to three tracks/44 minutes of live Jeck audio, this disc is enhanced with a cd-rom video portion, a quite cool 20 minute film of Jeck performing. It's quite well done, often with two views of Jeck and his turntables combined on the screen at one time, with fluid camera motion/zoom giving some visual appeal to the relatively static DJ performance. Nicely done.
Now here's the weird thing about this. Supposedly, according to Touch (Jeck's usual label, who are releasing a brand new Jeck album called 7 later this month), this is, or is going to be, withdrawn. Touch claims Jeck did not authorize this release, yet it still seems to be available and we can't figure out what the problem would be. Sub Rosa seems perfectly reputable as labels go. But anyway, if the rumor is reality, then this might get scarce pretty quick...
It should be frighteningly obvious by now, to everyone, that we love the sound of record crackle. Pops and clicks, buzz and fuzz. Just have a look at the last 8 or 9 years of reviews, and you'll see that we are grade-A suckers when it comes to that unmistakable sound. In fact, more than once, we posited that if we had a way, some simple system or an effects pedal even, that would render EVERY record we had, more fuzzy, turn every super clear crystal clean recording into something that sounded like it had been sitting in the garage for 50 years and was being played back on a rusty Victrola, well, you know we'd do it in a second.
And if there was one single artist, responsible for cementing that love of crackle and pop, of twisting our tastes all around, of taking a love, and turning it into an obsession, it would very likely be Mr. Philip Jeck. Ever since his Surf record, we have been smitten, no, obsessed is more like it. Desperately waiting for another missive of dreamlike murk, of looped chunks of vinyl, of pastoral bliss rendered in disembodied melodies and all manner of distortion and grit. We would later becomes similarly obsessed with soundmakers exploring similar territory, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Eric Cordier, but our fuzzy crackly little hearts will always belong to Philip Jeck.
Which is all the more ironic considering Sand, his brand new record, is perhaps the least fuzzy, the least murky, the most crystalline and clear recording we've heard from him yet. Recorded live over the last couple years and later edited into a series of slow developing soundscapes, Sand finds Jeck moving beyond the crackle and static of turntables, allowing his deft hand at arranging, at collaging various sounds, heck COMPOSING, take the center stage. That element was always present, but was often overshadowed by the sound, by the ambience, whereas here, in these SONGS, the fuzz and crackles is just one more compositional element. Fear not, there are still plenty of old fuzzy recordings, re-envisioned sonic snippets, haunting blurred loops, but here, it seems as if Jeck has chosen the parts and pieces more for their melodic content than their texture, and the results are quite surprising.
The opener is a mysterious creep, muted crackle woven into a warm whir, in the background, deep melodic swells drift in and out, soon to fade out completely, leaving just crackle like the sound of gentle rainfall. Over the track's 9+ minutes, sound shifts and changes, timbre and tone are altered dramatically, often unexpectedly, but it manages to work, finishing off with a gentle fade out peppered with intense squelchy squalls of white noise.
From then on out, the sound is surprisingly epic and majestic, the loops and snippets stretched out and tangled up into long form pulsing fanfares, some sort of sun dappled ur-drone, underpinned by strange subtle rhythms, and a constantly churning melodic undercurrent.
The end of "Residue" almost sounds like Nadja at points, with short sharp bursts of heavily delayed and effected samples, but spends much more time whispering along, delicately traversing seas of soft static. "Shining" is all low end rumble and whir, shimmer and sway, pulsing and throbbing, a churning blackened sea of sound, this time peppered with strange almost-rhythms crafted from sonic snippets, giving it an almost Chain Reaction minimal techno vibe.
The disc finished off with the 11 minute "Fanfares Over", the third and final part of Jeck's Fanfare song trilogy on sand, and begins with a splatter of crackly percussion, a woozy warbly loop, all slowly overtaken by a soft skipping record, slowly becoming a sort of ghostlike lullaby, that strange persistent percussion, making the track sound like, at times, like it could be from some forest folk or free drone cd-r. Jeck sets up a calliope like loop, wraps it in flanger, occasionally spreads a little distortion and record buzz over the top, and lets it weave and say and sprawl until it explodes near the end into a flurry of bleary eared distortion, the melody blown out, the sound jagged and intense, a subtly chaotic, in-the-red climax, that doesn't fade out, instead just blinks out, leaving the strange vacuum of silence.
At first we were a little disappointed that Sand wasn't more fuzzy, more murky and washed out, more distorted and damaged sounding, but the more we listened, the more we realized, that all of those elements WERE still present, just in ways that might not be so obvious, Sand is still fuzzy and murky and dreamlike and distorted, and it's a testament to Jeck's skill as a composer and a turntablist, that he's able to make it seem otherwise. And judging from how often this gets played in the store, we're all just as smitten as ever.
First release from this mysterious new tape only label, and it comes from long time favorite, turntablist Philip Jeck! If you're anything like us, you'll buy ANYTHING with Jeck's name on it, his record is that solid, his records are, well, that solid, every single release is gorgeous and expansive and dark and otherworldly, multiple aQ Records Of The Week, maybe more than any other artist. But that makes perfect sense as his sound, and his technique, his aesthetic is so amazing, and so demonstrates what we love about music. The unrestrained creativity, the recontextualiation of other sounds, the physicality of his performances, but mostly the sound, at once warm and crackly and familiar, at the same time, otherworldly and alien and fantastical.
Needless to say, a new record by Jeck was a no brainer, we got as many as we could of the 250 copy run, only to discover that there were in fact no turntables, that Spool instead featured Jeck on solo bass! Hmmm. Well, any trepidation we had lasted all of 5 seconds, as Spool seems to explore the exact same sonic space as Jeck's turntable records, the bass rendered unrecognizable, more a soundscaping tool than a rock instrument, run through a bank of effects, had we not been told that this was a bass record and not a turntable record we might never have known. Gorgeous hazy swirls of deep textured rumble, soft scrapes and distant keening shards of feedback, dark buried melodies, layered and textured expanses of warm fluid drift, occasionally building into an almost cacophonous squall, but always managing to settle into some sort of raga like buzz or epic glacial whir. Haunting and so beautiful. We'd love to see what this guy could do with a whole band, especially a whole band of Jecks!
WAY RECOMMENDED. And be warned, we only got about 30 of these, of the only 250 made, which means most likely these will be the only copies we can get.
What to say about Philip Jeck that we haven't already. Easily one of our favorite modern music makers. Most definitely, our favorite turntablist / old vinyl manipulator. What Jeck does is so far beyond simple DJ-ing, so much more subtle and creative than most turntablism, he is a composer, a sound sculptor, as adept live as in the studio, maybe even more so, able to create gorgeous soundscapes of crackle and hiss, to conjure up emotions, and energy, from fragments of other folks' recordings, all on the fly. The evidence is right here, a live recording from 2006, just Jeck, a roomful of turntables, a handful of effects, and a box of old records. We've yet to actually see Jeck perform live, but it must be mesmerizing, an act of not just creativity, but also agility, 5 turntables, 10, 20, more, each locked into it's own loop, all the various loops overlapping, creating rhythms, melodies, textures, SONGS.
The five lengthy tracks here, all woven together into one ever evolving whole, are masterful exercises in sound manipulation, so deftly managed, that it's nearly impossible to recognize these sounds as records on turntables. Take the opener "Press", with it's swirling sea of effected shimmer, and rain-like record crackle, the warm whirs and deep soft swells, minor key melodies surfacing from minimal background drones, all manner of reverbed percussion, like the echo of water droplets in a shower, shuffling rhythms, distant keening high end tones, snippets of voices, brief squalls of barely restrained chaos, building to a noisy finale, before slipping into a minimal hushed pulse. Totally breathtaking. "Intro Roll" takes up where "Press" left off, taking those same sounds but moving in a different direction, opting for something more ominous, darker, more textured, more rough, the crackle and hiss even more prominent, but this time rife with buried high end melodies giving the whole track a distinctly haunting vibe. "Live With Errors" adds a strange looped marimba like melody over the top, and an off kilter shuffling rhythm, which slips from murky and muted, to blown out and distorted, before slipping into "All That's Allowed", which begins with a low end pulse, that is soon surrounded by dramatic soaring strings, and streaks of shimmering crackle, very dramatic and emotive, before finishing off with "Chime Chime", which seems to be a version of "Chime Again" from Jeck's Sand album, and like the title suggests, is a sea of processed and looped chimes, glimmering, tinkling, bell like tones drifting all sun dappled over a looped abstract rhythm, bass soon drifts in, a bit of metallic percussion, some steel string fragments, before fading out, laving just a very soft, minimal drift, all the sounds muted and right beneath the surface, growing quieter and quieter until they disappear completely. So totally gorgeous, mesmerizing, and again, breathtaking.
Vinyl only, beautiful Jon Wozencroft photos and layout as always, LIMITED TO ONLY 500 COPIES, some on clear vinyl, some on colored, it's random so please don't ask for a particular color.
Finally, after waiting for ages, Philip Jeck's totally genius Surf album gets reissued. Oddly enough, perfectly coinciding with what might be his best release since Surf, the simply titled 7, which sonically sounds remarkably like Surf (see the review elsewhere on this list). For those who aren't familiar with his work, Jeck is a UK experimental turntablist who extracts sounds from old battered turntables like an archaeologist excavating some ancient vinyl burial site, using surface noise, skips and crackles, to weave dreamy sepiatone soundscapes of underwater waltzes and pastoral murk. Surf is quite possibly the perfect realization of Jeck's sonic vision. Sinister loops and minor key melodies slither through blurred landscapes of sound, rickety and decaying, shimmery and indistinct. Like blurry postcards of someplace you've never been, or a fleeting memory of someone you've never met, translated into sound. A sound so warm and thick, familiar and inviting, that it transports you to a sonic universe where a skipping record becomes your footsteps, and a repeated crackly phrase becomes the wind through the trees.
Easily one of the most transcendentally perfect records ever.
YAY, THIS BACK IN PRINT! Now in a jewel case instead of the digipack.
Why Philip Jeck isn't as famous as Oval and DJ Spooky is beyond us, as we think his brand of repetitive, crazily evocative warmth is just as good if not better than Oval, and his turntable installations are more interesting than anything Spooky ever (wet)dreamed. For instance, Jeck has subtitled his turntablist experiments "low-fi classics for the electronic generation," working with his orchestra of antique Dansette turntables - an arsenal 180 machines strong!!! With the crackling hiss of records found at flea markets, Jeck's concept for his performances / compositions involve a bottle of glue and a scalpel forcing the record needle into locked grooves at the desired points on the records.
Anyway, for the three WONDERFUL "Vinyl Coda" pieces spread across these two cds, Jeck's scratchy vinyl-derived loops fade in and out of percussive polyphony, fractured orchestral majesty, almost industrial / factory grinding, 50's pop vocal snippets, and laughably long applause. It's quiet yet there's SO MUCH going on. And some points it sounds like the quiet parts of a Godspeed or Slint record, gently but urgently loping and hiccupping. Highly recommended!
As huge Philip Jeck fans, we were super excited to see the release of this follow-up to his wonderful "Vinyl Codas I-III" double cd. And it doesn't disappoint. Jeck, with his multiple turntables and scratchy old records, is the ultimate master of blissfully
"Viny'l'isten" documents another live performance from British turntablist Philip Jeck, this time performing with likeminded German turntablist Claus Van Bebber. Here, Jeck and Van Bebber each have produced two solo pieces and one extended collaboration. Upon first (second and third) listens, Jeck and Van Bebber have remarkably similar techniques, treating the turntable and the vinyl medium like Dadaist readymades, from which they conjure texturally rich collages clattering with looped samples, locked grooves, and plenty of surface noise. Everything adds up into dense layers of antiquity, that peel back to reveal repeated melodies from ballroom waltzes or '70s rock anthems, swimming together in murky, slow motion atmospheres. The differences between the two artists primarily emerge in their respective preferences for effects, as Van Bebber uses guitar pedals like wah-wah and distortion, while Jeck uses only an echo box and a toy sampler. Both apart and together, Jeck and Van Bebber recall Jeck's masterpiece "Stoke" and his "Vinyl Coda" series at least in terms of technique and content, although not quite measuring up to those in composition and context.
Recorded during their live performance at the May 2002 electronic offshoot of the Moers Jazz Festival in Germany, "Soaked" brings together the talents of AQ-favorite, avant-turntablist Philip Jeck and the relatively unknown artist Jacob Kirkegaard, who is a member of the Danish multi-media ensemble Aeter. The lumbering drones, tiny textural ornamentations, and radioactive vinyl crackling that we've come to expect from Jeck are certainly present on "Soaked." Yet, Kirkegaard's contributions for electronics, samplers, and possibly some laptop synthesis act as interesting digitized counterpoint to the analogue antiquity normally associated with Jeck. Alongside Jeck's slow-motion fluctionations of old ballroom orchestrations (just a guess, all of his sounds have been blurred well beyond the point of recognition), Kirkegaard interjects non-repeating melodic phrases and digital glitchiness. As this 35 minute composition progresses, both Jeck and Kirkegaard incrementally push towards more jagged and abrasive sounds beyond Jeck's ghostly collages, into rather dissonant elements that sounds like gasping ventilators, clattering bicycle wheels, and straining diesel motors. A bit of a detour for Jeck, but nevertheless a very worthwhile experiment!
Most readers of the aQ list won't need much more in the way of a review here than simply this: NEW PHILIP JECK. That's the way we are certainly. Easily our favorite turntablist / sound sculptor / soundscaper, every Jeck record a new fuzzy, warbly exploration of some forgotten otherworld, the magic of his music in part due to the fact that his sounds are not so obviously created with records and turntables, like Strotter, or the Caretaker, his sounds exist as ghostly songs, broadcast from another time, or place, their construction, while fascinating and wondrous, are not critical to the enjoyment of the sound, and what a sound, warm, and lush, sepia toned, softly blurred, out of focus, woozy and warbly and daydreamy. But by now, you like us, are indeed appropriately obsessed with the music of Philip Jeck, and thus are as excited as we are about THIS. Two new songs both record live at The Museum Of Garden History in London, Jeck is teamed up with keyboardist Marcus Davidson, who we first heard on those Spire releases from a little while back , live recordings of various performances in acoustically unique spaces, often churches and cathedrals, hence Spire. The two are a perfect match, their sounds blending seamlessly into a shimmery organic whole, it's impossible to tell where the keyboards begin and the turntables end, or if that's Jeck playing bass, or just some warped old piece of vinyl, or if those washed out swirls of notes are being pulled from grooves or actually played by Davidson, but again, it hardly matters, the sound is ephemeral and spectral, slow swells of softly effected chordal swirl, fuzzy indistinct textures, a barely there rhythmic pulse, serene and so so lovely.
The flipside starts out with what we can only assume is Jeck's bass, spaced out and spidery and slooooow, a warm languid creep, the low end pulsations ringing out into the ether like ripples on a pond, until near the end when the bass(?) gathers a bit of fuzz, unleashing some softly warped crunch, and some effected synthy squelch, like a disembodied dubstep warble, slowed way down and stretched way out and allowed to undulate lethargically before settling back down into that warm washed out warble.
As always, fantastic, and again, beautiful design and layout courtesy of Touch Records head honcho Jon Wozencroft.
A new Philip Jeck record! What could be better. Well, how about adding fellow turntable experimentalist Janek Schaeffer to the mix? Then how about taking the two of them, equipped with all manner of antique record players, setting them up in an abandoned thirties office building at the foot of the Acropolis, and having them gather source material only from used record shops, a motley collection of second hand Greek and Turkish lps and 45's. Sounds like heaven. And it is. Schaeffer often seems focused on rhythm and source material, while Jeck's aim is more emotion and ambience, thus the two work perfectly together. Slowly shifting shades of darkness, move sluggishly like sonic ice floes, snippets of mubled vocals struggle against record crackle and skipping loops of distorted orchestration. The whole record is a series of fuzzed out ambient soundscapes, smeared deftly into indistinct outlines, voices float by like clouds, rhythms emerge from the murk, having fallen together seemingly randomly by the overlap of assembled sonic striations, rumbling crunch, slowed down into a thick sonic mulch, wavering melodies cloaking the horizon in glimmering sonic dew, guitar melodies deconstructed into distant frameworks, surrounding static swirls of sweetness and occasional bursts of violent skree. Horns squeal and are quickly subsumed by thick slowly bubbling pools of strummed mumbly guitars and minor key lullabies. Dreamy and heavenly. We just can't get enough of this stuff. The music of dreams. The music of darkness and light. The music of life, slowed down and observed from within.
The first release on the new label Audiosphere is also the first in a series, called Invisible Architecture, of experimental music collaborations. Despite the series' foofy highbrow title and the annoyingly oversized "super jewel box" (which merely ensures that
The soundclips chart the progression of the piece, so listen to all three.
A few months ago we received an email from a fellow in the UK asking if we were interested in a live unreleased Philip Jeck cd. And of course we said yes. Anyone who reads the AQ list regularly knows that in our eyes Jeck can pretty much do no wrong (with
AQ fave P. Jeck's 2002 masterpiece (Record Of The Week on our list number 135) has at last been repressed and is back in stock!
Philip Jeck's take on turntable experimentation involves using multiple turntables and scratchy old records to create blissfully beautiful surface-noise looping. His largely improvised compositions make the most gorgeous, repetitive, droning use of good old-fashioned record crackle and hiss. Jeck takes great care to allow for scraps of melody to emerge from the original music on the records with snippets of piano, sitar, and slow-motion vocals, popping out of crackled loops and often recalling the height of the Robin Storey era Zoviet France in the late '80s.
What differentiates this new album from the previous excellent ones in his oeuvre is its dynamics (perhaps due to the fact that these were all live performances?) -- the music is more active in terms of the elements used and their resulting emotional power. In fact, the first track "Above" is the creepiest composition I've ever heard from Jeck. The dynamism is also evident in that he uses more individual sounds that unfold over time but *not* necessarily being looped. It's nice to hear him trusting the sounds to stand on their own rather than needing the looping effect to make them beautiful. Highly recommended!!
Many moons ago, the French publishing house Metamkine curated an engaging series of short programmed musique concrete compositions under the banner Cinema Pour L'Oreille - that's 'cinema for the ear' to those of us with just one language at our disposal. There were some minor masterpieces of experimental sound design and tape splicing from the likes of Luc Ferrari, Michel Chion, Eliane Radigue, Lionel Marchetti, and many others. The series came to its end in 2002; but the work of Thibault Jehanne maps a very similar strategem of highly evocative compositions for processed field recordings. He even opines that Eskifordur is "a film with images," leaving the foley sound design as the sole driver of content and meaning. Hmm. Isn't that pretty much what every piece of recorded sound does? Conceptual bullshit artist or not, Jehanne is very talented with his field recordings, all of which come from the eastern coast of Iceland. This sparsely populated region is host to a rich sound environment where sea, land, ice, air, and ocean are thrust together with only a few human interlopers to witness this geophysical drama. After a crackling of ice and a smolder of what could be thermal vents, Thibault ruptures the environmental calm with a vulcanized rhythmic thud that continues throughout the first seven minutes of the album. It's hard not to think of this as a mystical manifestation of Thor's hammer crashing down on the glaciers here on Earth. A halo of electronic drone hovers behind more watery sounds and a rare human intrusion with the soft rhythmic purr from somebody sawing a piece of damp wood by hand. Thunderous raptures of calved ice or volcanic tumult collapse into the wintery wash of airplanes passing overhead. Yes, it must be said that Thibault's sound design is amazingly evocative of this particular and obviously cinematic location, preceded by the likes of Eric La Casa, Chris Watson, Tarab, and Murmer.
The world of 'dreamy electronica' has been polluted by those better aimed at selling you a Volvo then actually taking you to a different state of being, but thankfully there are still talented and lucid minds like Jan Jelinek who actually does create music that makes your mind wander and washes away your moment in time. The sound is much warmer and organic sounding then the super click n' cut sounding Loop-finding-jazz-records he released a few years back. This time Jelinek seems to be going beyond creating an amazing surface sound (referred to as wallpaper in an earlier AQ review) and has created an album that actually seeps through walls and time and space and slowly melts into your ears. Highly Recommended!
Crippled Intellect Production introduces us to the labyrinthine cosmic synthesis of Neil Jendon, who detours from the vaporous ambient sprawl that has encroached back into the vernacular and also eschews the Goblin / Carpenter horror pastiche that has served well as an antidote for one too many pale imitations of Klaus Schulze or Edgar Froese. Jendon is a satellite member of Chicago's languid slowcore ensemble Zelienople, and also plays in the Locrian offshoot Kwaidan; here on Corporate Laughter, Jendon dials in modular synths and bulky keyboards tossed off from the '80s for a dense, often menacing album. The sawtooth tone and white noise orchestrations teeter between gnashed violence and isolationist calm on the first two tracks, with Jendon steadily tipping the equation towards swarming density even as his electronics retain a brightened corona around the volatile electron clashes within. On "Static After Static", Jendon transmits a lumbering rhythm through the lens of Throbbing Gristle and Conrad Schnitzler with spiralling yet razor sharp synth patterns lurching outward from the rhythmic structure of the piece. Slower, looping rhythms capture the linear phase-shifting of late period Omit, complete with bleak-minded, half-melodies that crawl through "Always And Only" and the ghostly finale "Staggers And Folds". Very well done!
A cool live recording from 2002 that finds Acid Mothers Temple mainman Kawabata Makoto joining his pals in Italian psych rock combo Jennifer Gentle for some sprawling, dreamy, druggy, droney, buzzy, fuzzy psych rock workouts. The opener is a slow build from crowd sounds to thick warm undulating swells, everything wreathed in hazy effects, sun dappled and woozily laid back, some cool processed vox that sound more like the bellow of a distant horn, and then of course, after a few minutes of dreamy drift, the song blossoms into a wild tangle of dueling guitars, a sky full of jagged melodies and shards of feedback, a violent sky full of sound, floating above that churning, fuzzy motorik groove that started things off. The rest of the record follows suit, the band slipping from stripped down and minimal to totally blown out and frenzied, even dipping into what sounds like some alien folk music or some abstract 20th century experimentation, but even at its noisiest, or weirdest, the sound remains surprisingly melodic and dreamlike.
This is actually a 2008 reissue of a previous version, originally released in 2002, and tacks on a nearly 20 minute bonus track from another live collaboration the same year.
ONLY SIX COPIES IN STOCK, this is out of print, the label is no more, so once these are gone, they are gone forever.
Stromboli is an active volcano located on the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, and what we have here is a field recording of said volcano, captured by Geir Jenssen better known under his electronica moniker Biosphere. As you could imagine, a volcano sounds FUCKING RAD!!! Big explosions from molten rock hurled outward from the center of the earth, hissing clouds of sulfuric gases, rumbles and crackles of magma slowly cooling after oozing out from the mantle, and the gentle patter of hot ash falling from the sky. Jenssen's field recording, which fills the first side of the 12", is seriously impressive; and the B side (in true 12" fashion) is the dub version, which is a collaged manipulation of the sounds captured on the A side with an emphasis on the slushing, gaseous activity caught in a slow vortex of delay / echo dub effects. Yeah, it is a proper dub track, but don't expect a slow-motion Rhythm & Sound pulse popping through the mix. The recordings that Jenssen made are admittedly short and certainly were strong enough to warrant a lengthier documentation, but perhaps the brevity speaks to the inherent danger of even making an attempt at recording a volcano.
Warner Jepson was one of the pioneering electronic composers of the 1960s, working in the San Francisco Tape Music Center and later at the shortlived organization called National Center for Experiments in Television (seriously, there was such a place!). Through both of these small think-tanks, Jepson had the good fortune to work with an incredible amount of early electronics, most notably the Buchla synthesizer. Despite some choice commissions and some friends in high places, Jepson's explorations with electronics only amounted to one proper album - the avant-garde electronic Totentanz recorded as a score for the San Francisco Ballet in 1967. The album was originally pressed up in an edition of 300 copies and sold almost entirely at the stagings of that particular ballet. Nonetheless, Jepson purported to have hundreds of hours of material on cassette that he made during his heyday in the '60s and '70s.
The story behind this cassette's discovery and release is a pretty good one too, as Mr. Sanity Muffin himself was trawling through the cassette bins at Urban Ore - a storied recycling and junk shop located on the industrial outskirts of Berkeley, California, and spied the name Warner Jepson handscrawled on the spine of a tape next to the random home dubbed tapes of REO Speedwagon, Boston, and Carole King albums. The tape turned out to be one of those lost Jepson recordings, and Sanity Muffin has seen fit to release this cassette exactly as it was found. One of the many commissions on Jepson's resume was for the David William's installation Tullian. No idea really what that was, or if this is excerpted music for that piece, or if the Tullian Beach Bum was just a riff on that title. But the sounds within are a delirious polyphony of semi-rhythmic, semi-melodic squiggles across the Buchla with echoing patterns at various timbers, reverberations, and pitches swirling throughout the sound design. There are plenty of similarities in the painterly serialist and programmatic approaches that were commonplace in the high-minded works of academic composers from the mid-20th century, all mapped out on the Buchla and tape machine. But there's also plenty of wide-eyed sci-fi expansiveness through zoner-patterned synths that have all of the awe of a Jovian sunrise seen for the first time by human eyes. Fans of Daphne Oram and Tod Dockstader will have a field day with this stuff.
After making Borbetomagus-like muscular free jazz in Blowhole and doing experimental tape manipulations as Hands To, Jeph Jerman has begun releasing work under his given name, to produce a primitive response to the technologically driven "lowercase sound" of minimalism (i.e. Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden, Loren Chasse, etc.). While he has been known to use some amplification in his work,
We haven't heard anything from this oddly named Memphis duo, not since their Cooper-from-Cave-produced split lp way back in 2006, which at the time we described as sounding like a "gloriously ramshackle mess" and a "stumbling, distorted whomp of detuned hillbilly indie twang", most of which still holds true, it's a little ramshackle, a little bit messy, and packs a serious detuned whomp (or perhaps wallop), but even so, it's a much more fully realized chunk of modern twang flecked indie Americana, or maybe call it countrified punk rock, or maybe just a sweet collection of home brewed indie twang, jangly guitars that erupt into gouts of super distorted crunch, songs loping and lilting before launching into blowouts more fiery and fierce. The jangle and croon laced with sinewy streaks of distorted guitar melody, the drums bashing and crashing, effects sending sounds swooshing and wooshing, the vocals a plaintive countrified about to crack croon, the sound slipping easily from indie twang stomp, to woozy folky jangle, dreamy twangy, drowsy ballads that sound like lo-fi re-envisionings of classic Uncle Tupelo, but way more tripped out and effects drenched, that lead right into full bore psych-twang freakouts. Pretty cool.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
From the same label we got those cool petri dish Warhammer 48K cd-r, Jerusalem And The Starbaskets and Skarekrau Radio are a gloriously ramshackle mess. Produced by Warhammer 48K's Cooper Crain, both groups (hard to tell which is which) are a stumbling, distorted whomp of detuned hillbilly indie twang. Or something. Kind of hard to describe. Crunchy guitars splattered with little bits of twang, over tripped out shuffling drums. Very noisy and chaotic, sort of like some lost Velvet Underground live tape, run through a Liquorball filter and dipped in some sparkly moon dust shuffle and twang. There's even a Roky Erickson cover, which even though the bands are so wild and chaotic, should give you an idea of where their roots lie.
Packaged in handmade, silkscreened, recycled, pasted and painted sleeves. Cool.
LIMITED, we only got about a dozen!
Now this is a holiday record we can get behind. Originally released a couple years back, now reissued with a bonus remix, Justin Broadrick, of Godflesh, Ice, Techno Animal, JK Flesh, Final, Pale Sketcher, etc., tries his hand at writing a modern metalgaze Christmas carol, and pretty much pulls it off. Although the only real Christmas-y bits, are the lyrics, some chiming holiday bells, and the song's sort of wistful lullaby like vibe - otherwise, it's a primo slice of blissed out psychedelic shoegaze post metal chug and shimmer, Jesu style, with swoonsome swirling verses, all hushed vox buried beneath whorls of woozy crystalline thrum, and churning chugging downtuned choruses, laced with strange squiggly melodies and distant tangled melodic filigree, much of "Christmas" plays out like a slowed down, super distorted M83, which seems to a reasonable shorthand description of Jesu's sound in general. The song balances heartfelt melodic dreaminess, specifically the Christmas-y break midsong where the aforementioned bells toll over lush acoustic guitars, and the hazy dreamy vox, with some serious metallic heft, the results perhaps not appropriate for your family holiday get together, but perfect for that heavy holiday mixtape.
Broadrick tacks on three remixes, each by one of his other projects/alter egos. Up first is the new track, credited to JK Flesh, which hadn't really happened when this was first released, but in that guise, Broadrick, pushes the sound back a bit toward his bleak industrial roots, transforming the blissful holiday shimmer into a brooding expanse of grim blackened ambience, anchored to a plodding death march beat, which is soon augmented by some murky jungle breakbeats, the tolling bell drifting on long stretches of droned out minor key shimmer, the vocals too reimagined, and transformed into a strange alien chant, a serious slab of not very Christmas-y electro-industrial blackened jungle grimnity. The Pale Sketcher version heads for the exact opposite of the sonic spectrum, stripping the original down into a hazy swirl of barely there beats, echo drenched vox, lots of softly billowing synths, everything gauzy and sun dappled and so dreamily washed out. And finally, Broadrick slips back into his Final persona, originally more of a solo guitar project, and takes the original version of "Christmas" and Caretaker-izes it, blurring the sounds into ghostlike ambience, and long softly undulating tones, a smeared sprawl of drifting melodic fragments, of soft focus sonic shards, the track building to a sort of crescendo, a softly roiling, dreamily psychedelic climax, before settling right back down into something even more muted and minimal, a bleary stretch of shadowy, soft around the edges chordal shimmer.
SUPER LIMITED!! Once we run out, odds are we won't be able to get more.
Since we made Jesu's debut full length on Hydrahead one of our records of the week a couple lists ago, it was pretty much a no brainer that Jesu's Heart Ache ep would have to be a record of the week as well. Especially since some of us might actually even like it a little better than the full length, and unlike the Hydrahead release, this one has been impossibly difficult to track down, until now.
Heart Ache, released on Dry Run, a tiny UK independent label, was to be our first glimpse of Justin Broadrick's much anticipated post Godflesh project (but for most of us, it's actually a second glimpse since it's taken until now for us to get copies to list) and sonically it sounds exactly like you might imagine a record between the last Godflesh record and the totally amazing Jesu full length would sound.
We had all pretty much given up on Godflesh. Gone was the glorious industrial pummel of Streetcleaner and gone too was the dubbed out machine metal of Slavestate, and in their place, tired rehashed riffs, shouted atonal vocals, and uninspired songwriting. So while our age-old love of early Godflesh had us super excited to hear this Jesu everyone was talking about, we were pretty much ready to be disappointed. Which was precisely why we were so blown away when we finally heard it. Everything we loved about Godflesh was there, plus a new found love of melody, swoonsome clean vocals, expanded insturmentation (piano!) and extended slow building tracks of brooding intensity and smoldering instrumental ferocity, all smeared into dreamy industrial bliss drone epics!
Unlike the full length, on which Jesu is a full band with a live drummer, on Heart Ache, Jesu is just Broadrick, a guitar, a piano, and of course a drum machine. Ahhh, the drum machine. How it warms our Streetcleaner worshipping hearts. Clangy and clattery, brittle guitars soar over crumbling distorted rumbles, all machinelike and clinical but imbued with a weirdly organic lushness. Drifting clouds of ghostly feedback, sonic vapor trails of haunting minor key swells, all slip and shift into vast stretches of shimmering cinematic ambience, with slowly pealing guitar tones and synthesized chant-like vocals, gorgeously melancholy almost Goblin-esque in its creepy beauty. Everything held together by smooth, clean, barely affected vocals, all dreary and weary, repeating simple mantra-like lyrics, distant and otherworldly. The whole thing sheds its industrial armor as it moves forward, showing more skin, becoming more vulnerable, becoming less and less rigid, and more and more soft and indistinct. Pretty, dreamy, blissed out and sweetly sorrowful, with Broadrick's endlessly repeated, haunting refrain drifitng and fading, like a mirage that may have never been there at all. And that's just the first track.
The second track is just as surprising as the first, starting off with spare solo piano, joined eventually by simple, finger-picked guitar, eventually drifting into a simple low end piano chord, repeated over and over and over, floating in the inky blackness, until the song lurches into a sludgy crawl, with huge murky downtuned riffs (think Fudge Tunnel's "Hate Song" at 16rpm), but then Broderick confounds again with heavily delayed, clean vocals, singing in a strangely hypnotic counterpoint to the main riff. Dizzying and quite lovely. It's a constant tug of war between the black hole tar pit dirge and the almost hopeful sounding vocals. Like the first song, track two devolves into a whole 'nother beast, as it slows down and blisses out, with lilting melodies creeping into the sludge and making what was only moments before a metallic behemoth crushing all in its wake, into a creepy rickety, buzzy back porch crawl, spare and skeletal, with distorted piano, buzzing fret noise and lots of ambient reverb that's gradually smoothed out into a fuzzy smear of static, beneath a simple low end piano figure, chiming and ringing out into nothingness. One of those rare records that manages to be heavy yet pretty, beautiful but scary, sweet and sorrowful, darkly doomy and gloriously luminous!
