We NEVER see any actual documents from Opal Tapes, the cult electronica imprint run by Stephen Bishop (aka Basic House). Well, we've never seen anything until we got in a pitiful number of copies of this Ketev tape, and this one is a gem of Andy Stott / Demdike Stare / Regis inspired grimy, dirty techno seemingly composed on an overdriven 4-track whose internal gain compression creates much of the dankly phased patterns crunch along the hypnotic, sinister techno. Hopefully a preamble for another album, as this stuff is too fucking good just to exist on tiny (and currently out of print) cassette edition! Modern Love would be our bet for the label of Ketev's future.
That's a great name for this blustery dronemuzak project from Denver, Colorado. As much as we would like for the band to operate as the ambient technicians for some mountain-man cult of doomspeakers and nay-sayers akin to Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church Universal And Triumphant, the name was spawned as a drunken joke that belies the introspective atmospherics and smoke-n-mirror melancholy which oozes from their bank of pedals. A contemplative drone wafts from the collective's floorcore alchemy for guitars that blossoms into a dissonant crescendo of wintery noise sounding like a lo-fi version of Tim Hecker or Lawrence English. As the noise deflates back to a subtle ambient smear, one of the Pact wrangles with the mechanisms of a tape deck alongside some pixel-shifted noises that would make one think of Oval's skipping cd constructions given over to the Starving Weirdo's kitchen sink approach to stoned transcendence. On the second half the the 64 minute tape (thank you for not just settling for 15 or 20 minutes!), the Pact eschews the guitars for a freak-folk amalgam of bells and Finnish-inspired clatter that morphs into a balefully cinematic conclusion to the tape with deeply resonant loops that speaks to the expansive land in which these gentlemen live, as some sort of cracked, lugubrious reinterpretation of Arthur Honegger's early 20th Century symphonic ode to railroads and trains in Pacific 231. Another great find from Hooker Vision. Limited to 100 copies.
Yet another strange release on the increasingly difficult to pin down Handmade Birds label, run by R. Loren of Pyramids, White Moth and Sailors with Wax Wings. In a matter of months, Handmade Birds has more releases than most labels have over the course of years! But hell, we're not complaining. So far we've had Blut Aus Nord's Mort, Celestiial's Desolate North, Evan Caminiti's When California Falls Into The Sea, His Name Is Alive's King Of Sweet (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and about a million more on the way (Der Blutharsch, Human Quena Orchestra, The Rita, Crooked Necks, Swamp Horse, Servile Sect and more!!), but this one, this is odd even by Handmade Birds admittedly far out criteria. This is a triple 10" boxset reissue of three long out of print demo tapes from Finnish black folk weirdos Key, a duo consisting of Kaarna from drone outfit Somnivore and Rauta from outsider black metal horde Circle Of Ouroborus, and all the mentions of 'black' above could be a little misleading, as this is far from black, and not at all metal. It's more in keeping with the later Circle Of Ouroborus recordings, a sort of fractured folk, a jangly, gloomy folk pop, all clean guitars, and haunting atmospheres, the vocals plaintive and hushed one second, deep and dramatically crooned the next, the sound slipping easily from psychedelic folk, to haunting almost new wave, to creepy doomy ballads, to reverby proto punk, but all gloomy and moody and fantastically strange, sounding a lot at moments like some lost nineties New Zealand outfit, maybe a bit like the Moles, or some obscure band on Flying Nun or Xpressway, the melodies are lilting, the basslines gloomy and a little gothic, the songs minimal, but strangely catchy, and definitely haunting and otherworldly, fans of Finnish stuff like CoO and Dead Reptile Shrine will definitely dig, as will anyone into fractured freak folk, and outsider gloom pop.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, housed in a silver foil printed box, each of the three 10"s pressed on colored vinyl (white with black splatter, milky clear, ultra clear), each record in its own printed sleeve.
Very late one night in the summer of 2000, Kentuckian sound artist Keenan Lawler, metallurgist Eric Clark, and three members of the psychedelic-drone ensemble Pelt (Patrick Best, Mike Gangloff, and Jack Rose) ventured into a stone silo at a Franciscan monastery just north of Louisville. Bringing within them an arsenal of cymbals, gongs, bells, Tibetan singing bowls, bronze
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
KGB Man & Oneohtrix Point Never are both the work of Daniel Lopatin; however, neither of these tapes are marked as to what sound is to be ascribed to which project. Ultimately, it matters not; as everything that Lopatin has touched over the recent year has been golden.
So, here we've got two cassettes, each clocking in around 20 minutes in total length. The first OPN track (well at least on what was the first tape that we grabbed) is a cold undulating set of slightly modulated tones set on glacial cruise control; the flip side of this cassette (which might also be by OPN) continues in this sentiment with a more wash, blur, and synthetic shimmer, still wrangling all of those nostalgic images of a future once imagined but now abandoned. What appear to be the KGM Man tracks finds Lopatin in his subaqueous, sampledelica vein somewhat like those earlier Caretaker recordings but with Lopatin twisting and bending maudlin piano notes into seasick electronic flanges and slippery looped structures. His luminous synth melodies do occasionally flicker through these mutant constructs; and oh yeah, drum machines, you don't find that in OPN. A very nice touch!
Limited to 125 copies of which we only have 10 copies, never to restocked!!!
Whatever you do, don't let the godawful cover art fool you. This is not some crappy new age cd you'd buy in an art gallery in New Mexico, while picking up some healing crystals. This is some seriously demented, gloriously inspired outsider free jazz abstract psychedelic dub tribal weirdness. You'd never know from the cover though. A super cheesy crayon drawing of the band beneath some pyramids... ugh. Inside there's a bad ass photo of the band, killer afros, leather jackets, cravat, one guy holding a flute, leaning against a wall, looking ready to unleash some seriously cosmic musical might. Had that picture been on the cover you'd know exactly what you were getting into. Cuz this is indeed some seriously cosmic shit.
Released originally in 1973 in a run of 300 copies, this disc by vibraphonist Khan Jamal has become a jazz head free music freak holy grail. And it's easy to see why. A heady mix of vibes, marimba, clarinet, drums, glockenspiel, guitar, bass and percussion. But it's all about the drums. These four lengthy tracks are all about rhythm. If the opener doesn't totally blow your mind, there is something seriously wrong. A completely effect drenched burst of free jazz drum splatter, careening and echoing all over the place, horns bleating, reverberating into infinity, adding more tripped out percussive swirl to the already chaotic soundfield. Eventually the drums drift off, and the track morphs into some dizzying glockenspiel marimba jam, all tinkle and shimmer, still drifting in swirls of FX and random clatter. This track alone makes this disc essential. But it's only the beginning.
The second track is like a supercharged, blown out, extended version of the opener, just with more horns and a more obvious rhythm. A groovy free jazz drum jam, beneath skronking horns, shouting and hand clapping, reverb drenched horns, a total wild and wooly free for all, before the marimba comes in, and things coalesce into a slightly less abstract funky free jazz percussion blow out. So good.
Track three is the most subtle of the bunch, but that in no way means it's any less weird or tripped out. A droney bass line, some jazzy smokey guitar, all beneath a dense swirl of percussive shakers, wrapped in tons of FX, a sort of dubbed out ambient jazz. A slow mellow groove that sort of drifts and slithers, occasionally bits of freaky effects float by, but for the most part it's all late night mellowness, a slow stroll through a moonlit alley, or hold up in the dark corner of some alien jazz bar.
The final track takes the smokey moonlit ambience of track three and gives it the King Tubby treatment, Sounds are dubbed to kingdom come, melodies become distorted and crumble into pieces before they're sent careening into the ether, drums shuffle and stutter, occasionally being propelled dubwise, the whole thing sounding like some Wes Montgomery b-side produced by Lee Perry. A supreme, super laid back dub drenched free jazz freakout of the highest order.
In fact this whole disc is some sort of cosmic dub drenched free jazz from beyond. Some seriously Sun Ra meets King Tubby in the great hereafter shit. A divine jam session transmitted through some mysterious sound system and captured on tape.
Totally and completely mindblowing.
Wow, is this exciting! A killer Japanese import, that combines the most recent Khante release, the lengthy two song Capture and Release, as well as the long out of print and going-for-way-too-much-on-eBay Dead & Live Aktions DVD 2005!! Woo Haa!!! If you missed out, now's your chance. Plus it's in an all new super swanky Japanese style mini gatefold sleeve with an obi and everything!
Here's what we had to say about the cd:
A new Khanate! 'Nuff said perhaps, as all you AQ doom customers surely know what that means! Ultra-depressive dirge metal from some of the best in the biz. Capture & Release, a two-song, 43 minute "ep" (maxi-ep? mini-lp? heck, it's a full-length, really!) is the third cd release from this NYC-based band, featuring Stephen O'Malley from SUNNO))) on guitar and graphics, bassist James Plotkin of OLD, singer Alan Dubin (also from OLD), and drummer Tim Wyskida. By now, Khanate have really established a distinct style of extreme, slow, scary, art-metal. To the point that we're always citing them as a comparison when describing other bands. They're the standard by which anyone indulging in feedback-filled heaviness, anguished/evil vocalizations, creepy atmosphere, double digit song-lengths, and rumbling sub-sonics is judged -- like when we say Bunkur or Graves At Sea (reviewed on this list) are bands in the style of Khanate. So if would be easy to review Capture & Release if it were by *another* band -- we'd say it was a lot like Khanate and that'd be enough to recommend it to many of you! Of course, Khanate themselves can be compared to predecessors Corrupted and especially Eyehategod, godfathers of feedback sludge brutality. But Khanate's compositions are way more extended, dramatically ambitious, and clinically produced than EHG, and utilize "experimental" sonic textures and loud/soft dynamics in the manner of a post-rock band as well. This new disc really exemplified this approach, with the second, 25-minute track "Release" featuring lots of really quiet parts that make us think a hypothetical Khanate / Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore tour would be PERFECT. (We can dream, can't we?) Vocalist Alan Dubin makes the most of these "vulnerabilities" in the band's otherwise crushing sound barrage, with dark, cryptic, and psychologically suggestive rather than explicit lyrics wherein he seems to be inhabiting the role of the deviant antagonist from a Thomas Harris novel...but poetically enough that perhaps we can all relate, and indeed find release in their music.
And here's what we had to say about the DVD:
This captures (and limitedly releases, ha) angsty doom merchants Khanate in the live realm, sometime last year. If you've ever seen this band, you know that they don't exactly 'rock out', having a somewhat static stage presence, though vocalist Alan Dubin always puts on an impassioned performance. Fortunately for those of you who'll be lucky enough to watch this at home, this is a very 'arty' visual document -- the live video footage has been processed to be all the more grim and psychedelic. Cool to look at, while of course the music is murder-by-decibels, feedback-filled, downtuned DOOOOOOOM like you expect.
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM. Khanate return with a two song teaser from our pals at Load to hold us all over until their upcoming Southern Lord full length. Khanate, for those who don't already know, are sloooooow and looooooow and heavy as fuck. Featuring two members of the late great O.L.D. (Alan Dubin, and James Plotkin), Stephen O'Malley from Sunn 0))) and Burning Witch and the drummer from Blind Idiot God, you get just what you'd expect with a pedigree like that. "Dead" is a black hole of crushing, oppressive doom metal. Trudging along at a glacial pace, decimating everything in their path, taking THE RIFF and slowing it way down, stretching it way out, laying a thick, rotting blanket of dismal sound over out heads, filling our ears with filth and muck, and slowly suffocating us. But it's soooo good. "No Joy" is a track from Khanate's first record, and here gets the remix treatment from James Plotkin. Still doomy, but way more spacious and spare, the guitar becomes less of an unstoppable force, and more of a tattered curtain, casting sinister shadows over the proceedings while the stripped down skeleton of the song is supported by a slow motion drum and bass cadence and tortured, demonic howls. Definitely the most evil thing on Load yet!
Extreme doom here folks. I mean, these four tracks (two of 'em approaching twenty minutes each) are slower and lower and uglier even than the tunes on Khanate's immense self-titled debut from two years ago! We're not saying this tops the debut (that would be difficult) but Things Viral takes the Khanate sound into a seldom-explored realm where signs of life and hope are few and far between. This is some sparse, slow, intensely creepy metal for sure. The plod of a drum, some glitchy amplifier feedback, a crushing guitar riff, bass drone...all the perfect accompaniment to the anguished rasp of vocalist Alan Dubin, who turns this record into his own personal let-it-all-out psycho-drama session. As soon as the first track "Commuted" starts, you can imagine the band, broken, bleeding, crawling across the floor of the studio, scrabbling at their instruments, Dubin clutching the microphone like it's his last link to a world of human emotion. It's harrowing, simply put. The ravings of a disturbed man put to music by Earth would be a decent description. Downer metal was never so down, and the clarity with which this was recorded belies the term sludge. Only for the brave -- leave the lights on when you listen to this, and make sure you have the suicide hotline number handy. Includes the track "Dead" previously released on vinyl only as the b-side to the "No Joy [remix]" 12".
Khanate = slow, plodding, dark, distortion-filled, droney, dissonant DOOM, in the (sliced and bleeding) vein of Esoteric, Burning Witch, Corrupted, Earth, Boris, Eyehategod...5 looong tracks (56+ minutes total). And if you haven't heard, this new doom-metal
For those mourning the recent passing of creeping doom sludge lords Khanate, we've got the next best thing. In fact in some ways, it might almost be the next -better- thing. Khanate low-end technician James Plotkin suddenly jumped ship only to start up this dour little duo with Runhild Gammelsaeter, the Nordic goddess you might remember as the vocalist for bleak black/doom metal outfit Thorr's Hammer.
On first listen, Khlyst sounds remarkably like Khanate, huge sluggish low end doom, a thick glacial sludgey plod, while over the top a shrieking, impossibly guttural mewling howl, like a demon clearing her throat or a hysterical cheerleader possessed by the devil and spewing impossible foulness. But even at their most Khanate, Khlyst ends up sounding just a whole lot weirder. Instead of downtuned riffage, the guitars are twisted and processed into strange slippery licks, drenched in chorus and phaser, like some sort of alien guitar synth, sputtering and stumbling, a jagged series of noodly little six string blasts, fragmented metallic chunks, over ultra dense tangles of free jazz drum splatter, everything thick with buzzy guitars and ominous ambience. A super freaked out, utterly demented psychedelic doom sludge stretched and twisted into a sputtering spastic black buzz, pelted with bits of prog and wrapped in thick layers of damaged drone.
Elsewhere, the duo, stretch out into hauntingly blissful soundscapes constructed from processed vocals, swirling billows of reverb, echoey guitar shimmer, almost like a creepier Grouper. Drifty and hauntingly lovely. And sometimes the rhythmic furor builds into a vortex of impossibly dense drumming, over thick swaths of low end drone, with growling panting Diamanda-like vocalisations struggle breathlessly over the top. Like some sort of demonic sludge jazz drum solo torture session.
Imagine weirdo black metallers Rehtaf Ruo crossed with UK doomlords Moss, featuring Buddy Rich and Rashied Ali on dueling drums, and a vocalist one part Bathtub Shitter, one part Kevin Sharp from Brutal Truth and one part Dani Filth from Cradle Of Filth, the whole thing recorded by Lustmord.
Bleak and blackened, squirming and slithery, shivering and stumbling. An epic and deranged slab of ultra-ambient-doom-prog-drone-sludge splendor.
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Copper Lock Hell is the first we've heard from this UK dronedirgedoom duo, who seem to have found the perfect home on Cold Spring, their bleak, rumbling industrialisms, paired with heaving, droned out SUNNO)))-like heaviness. Churning dirges with bellowed vokills, driven by hellish machine like rhythms, plodding sprawls of clatter and hiss, grind and crunch, all set amidst a harrowing landscape of densely layered sonics, swirls of processed vox, layered tones, and swirling psychedelic squalls, a churning, noise drenched dirgery that almost sounds like Skullflower doing doom metal maybe, or an old Godflesh record spinning in slow motion.
Grinding, and corrosive, but strangely hypnotic, the tracks often shed the rhythms, leaving just cascades of crumbling distortion, wound in fields of mysterious vox, that give some of the tracks an almost alien world music vibe. There are also strangely folky bits, that seems well out of place until they're subsumed by an avalanche of oozing black riffage, grinding an corrosive, slipping into serious Moss / Bunkur ultra-dooooooooom territory for sure. But even at its most bleak, Khost will introduce some unlikely element, that transforms the sound into something weirdly beautiful, whether it's some buried melody, some fractured rhythm, fluttering flute surfacing mid metallic churn, it makes for super nuanced listening. Sure if you're just in it for the heavy noisiness and the blackened crush, odds are you won't be disappointed, but that sound is much more blurry and murky than most, the tracks here blackened psychedelic creeps, wrapped in crumbling buzz, lumbering and lurching, and pocked with all manner of sampled sounds, if you peeled away the distortion, and dialed back the vokills, you'd suddenly have something like a more malevolent Philip Jeck or a more grim, blackened Ghedalia Tazartes.
High praise perhaps, but for what we initially took for just another (admittedly kick ass) slab of industrial metal/doom crush, has revealed itself to be something infinitely more nuanced, and delivers some super satisfying deep listening, fusing ultra abject downer doom with psychedelic avant soundscapery, into some impossibly epic, avant blacknoise psychdoom deathdrone majesty. FYI, there's a guest appearance on here from Eugene Robinson of Oxbow.
The latest record from the electronic wunderkid that can seem to do no wrong these days. 'Down With the Scene', released for some reason on Mike Patton's Ipecac label, is a brutal and schizophrenic junglist hodge podge of samples, loops, crushing jungle breaks, all sorts of fucked effects, as well as a wicked sense of humor. Includes an awesome sample from 'Fear of a Black Hat' which seals the deal for me. I hate to jump on the bandwagon, but, this is an awesome and overwhelming record. Although I can't help but feel like he owes an enormous debt to local electrofucker (and Kid 606 co-hort) LESSER, who has been making records like this for years now, but fails to get the recognition he deserves. Regardless, this is a kick ass record and Kid 606 kicks ass, but definitely keep your eyes peeled for LESSER's Matador debut 'Gearhound' in the fall. It'll set everything, and everyone straight.
Along with folks like J. Lesser and Matmos, Kid 606 has been one of the key figures in bringing the world of techno and electronica to a more punk minded listenership. And over the years the music of Kid 606 has taken many twists and turns, never one to shy from diversity and eclecticism he's put out everything from hardcore four on the floor techno to drill n' bass to ambient blissed out dreamscapes.
We have to admit we haven't always been the biggest fans of all his releases, but he's hit us with enough moments of total musical bliss and magic that we make sure to at least check out every new release he puts out. And while we weren't in love with the last few, we are beyond BLOWN AWAY with what he's created on this deliciously smart-ass-titled new outing. In fact there is something to be said for how smart ass the title and back cover artwork on this record is, because for as clever and mindfucking as Kid 606 can be, it's sometimes the problem with his music. Fortunately he's gotten the snarkiness out of his system via the non musical aspects of this record, and allowed the sounds within to just totally flourish in immaculately crafted, wide ranging electronic sounds.
The albums opener, is almost like some amazing lost kosmiche kraut gem, tones that are so rich, patient and inviting. We were immediately reminded of some of our favorite Kid 606 releases from the past that get overlooked as they show off the non techno side of his musical leanings and are more about creating rich atmospheres with true emotion. Records like The Soccer Girl EP, PS I Love You, PS I Love Me, and the utterly beautiful Resilience. As the record unfolds, Kid 606 still shows that he can draw from a wide range of electronic palettes but it never veers into techno land, instead it reminds us of those glorious days when IDM actually meant something. Those records by Oval, Aphex Twin, Matmos, Autechre, that made so many of us embrace a form of music we had for so long no relationship with.
But this isn't just some kind of IDM rehash, Kid 606 also shows that he can soar, drone and bliss out with the best of them. As there are so many amazing moments on this record that you could think was coming from AQ favorites like Emeralds, Tim Hecker or Oneohtrix Point Never. He also works in some influences of some of our favorite 20th century minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich, especially on one of the album's hypnotizing standout tracks "Periled Emu God". And fear not, for those who like a bit of dissonance with their electronica, the Kid still interweaves some more challenging sounds into these tracks, yet manages to do so in a way that creates something larger and organic instead of just being difficult for the sake of being difficult. While there are brief moments with an almost Mego vibe (mostly just on the album's closer) the record while touching on many shades of electronica has an overall unique viewpoint that just sound so so perfect. This is the kind of electronica we haven't been able to find lately. Sure we love dubstep, space disco and drone, but we've been craving the kind of innovation and nuanced composition that so many of our favorite electronic albums of a prior age intoxicated us with. Somehow channeling both the best of electronica's past and creating a vision of its future at the same time, Kid 606 has proven that someone who has created something you love in the past, is surely capable of doing it again. Totally stunning!
Of all the Finnish bands we love, and all the bands on Finnish label Fonal, Kiila might just be the most traditionally indie rock. But then that's really relative, since we're talking about Finland, and the fact that Kiila is made up of members of other, much more far out bands like Es, Kemialliset Ystavat, Avarus, Anaksimadros. So you can figure that even though Kiila traffic in indie rock, it's unlike most indie rock you know.
Right off the bat the first track reminds us of a much more blissed out folkier Animal Collective, chiming guitars, delicate fingerpicking, softly tangled harmonies, reverbed abstract vocals, sunshine-y and dreamy, really quite lovely. The rest of the record is not so blissed out though, the second track is a fiddle laced bit of indie rocking, jangly guitars, propulsive drumming, lots of swirling drone-y organs, and much more traditional sounding vocals, in fact it almost reminds us a little of Wilco, albeit filtered through the cracked Finnish pop sensibility. The rest of the record continues in a simialr direction, channeling much of what we love about indie rock, but infusing it with plenty of twang, Finnish forest folkiness, and plenty of off kilter weirdness, whether it's thick sheets of undulating buzz, fluries of birdsong, streaks of tripped out effects or thick swells of rumbling low end crunch, those various elements are deftly woven into more traditional pop smithery.
A few tracks revisit the dreamy folkiness of the record opener, stripped down to just acoustic guitar, fiddle and voice, while others are almost entirely vocal harmony drive, and at least one is a gorgeous droned out synthscape, and another is a ramshackle horn flecked, chaotically percussive tripped out free jam.
The sounds are lush and beautiful, jangly and poppy, and just a little bit twisted and fractured, they may be the most 'traditional' sounding of all our Finnish faves, but that still means this is weirder and more awesomely abstract thatn 90 percent of music out there.
Gorgeous Fonal packaging as always, the cd in a full color 6 panel cardboard gatefold jacket, with a printed inner sleeve which includes liner notes and lyrics and cool printed Japanese style obi, the vinyl in a normal but quite colorful sleeve.
The minute we threw this one, we were totally captivated. The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble are a gloriously creepy crawly mutant jazz combo, equal parts DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, seventies horror movie soundtracks, late night jazz and super sluggish blown out trip hop. The KDJE originally formed to create live soundtracks for films by FM Murnau, Fritz Lang and the like, taking their inspiration from such unlikely sources as animators the Quay Brothers and artists Bosch, Picasso and Goya and boy does it show. A full on group, not one dude and his laptop, the KDJE unfurl haunting imaginary soundtracks, dark and dense, smoky and noir, everything in rich lustrous shades of black and grey, shuffling jazzy skitter underpins melancholy moaning horns bathed in reverb, pizzicato strings and minor key guitars hover and dart furtively, a drizzly rainy day jazz dirge, so creepy and mysterious and lovely, and that's just the first song. The rest of the record wanders similarly rainslicked streets, hat pulled down low, collar pulled way up, face obscured by shadows, the wet streets reflecting the orange grey glow of the streetlights, the buildings like totem poles of shadowy ghosts, the sky a blackish grey, turning the vibrant city into a lonely monochrome. This record is just so ominous and foreboding, so emotionally charged, so haunting and murky, imagine DJ Shadow collaborating with Tricky, mix in plenty of Raymond Chandler some dingy bars, some laid back jazz, some doomy dark ambience, some muted Boards Of Canada shuffle and thump, the whole thing drenched in late night ambience and warm warped M83 style whir and you'll have a rough idea. The ultimate soundtrack for late night lonely walks through the city.
Not sure why we didn't review the recent full length from Killing Sound, a trio of producers which includes aQ fave Vessel, but this remix of the opening track from that record has us thinking we better right that wrong, although here, that track gets reworked as something way more fierce and fucked up and brutal. The more chilled out original, here recast as some dark, dark jungle, all droned out ambience, brooding sonic malevolence, laced with haunting vox, that devolves into some seriously grimy, dubbed out drum and bass, all oozing low end throb, echo drenched skitter, the whole thing laced with all manner of creepy sound FX, what sounds like a power drill, stretched out into a keening tone, plenty of crunch and crumble, a slow build to a seriously bombastic finale, rib cage rattling bass and pounding beats, all wreathed in a swirl of grim atmospheric ambience. Killer!
Selected E-Missions is the first release by Kinetix (aka Gianluca Becuzzi) for Small Voices, and presents a collection of deep and wrapping digital soundscapes, dotted by micro-noisy granular material and resonant fields. Contemporary, abstract, cold, minimal, dense, intense and evocative drone music.
According to the liner notes, this 2cd set of acousmatic minimalism from the Italian composer Gianluca Becuzzi - here working under the moniker Kinetix - centers on "the relationship between physical space and acoustic space." The work certainly jumps from the classic minimalist piece "I Am Sitting In A Room" by Alvin Lucier; and the text of that piece actually gets reprised by, presumably, Becuzzi's voice at the end of disc one amidst a sea of buzzing drones. If Becuzzi is in fact rebroadcasting the same frequencies dozens, maybe hundreds of times in particular rooms, he's not applying the linear accumulation that gave the Lucier piece its telescopic psychedelia. Instead, Becuzzi slices and dices those recordings into spatialized musique concrete compositions that are halfway between the ultra-minimalist work of Ryoji Ikeda situated beneath the psychosexualized vocal delivery found on Luc Ferrari or Robert Ashley pieces. Becuzzi has certainly manipulated and filtered many of the frequencies in his recycling resonance recordings, as there are extreme low-end and high-end frequencies that could only be generated with some digital help. This artificiality is emphasized through Becuzzi's many jump cuts from various rasping drones in and out of silences, with male and female voices whispering throughout in both English and Italian. Alongside those aforementioned composers, Francisco Lopez, Bernhard Gunter, and Sachiko M might be other references to this intriguing set of electro-acoustics. Very few copies, last ones ever!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Long time readers of the aQ list no doubt remember Tetuzi Akiyama's Don't Forget To Boogie record, ostensibly, as the title suggests, a boogie rock record, but in reality, a twisted droned out hypnotic psychedelic minimal psych record, with the boogie elements stripped down to a single riff, then drenched in distortion and repeated over and over and over, creating super mesmerizing fields of layered repetition a la Reich or Riley, it quickly became a bigtime aQ favorite.
This debut lp from one man 'boogie' outfit King Blood, approaches boogie rock in a similarly oblique fashion, taking those boogie riffs and fucking them up big time. Not quite as minimal as Akiyama's opus, Eyewash Silver adds drums, and what sounds like multiple layers of guitars, not to mention WAY more distortion, a gloriously blown out chunk of experimental abstract minimal boogienoise weirdness.
Opener "Black Money" is probably the most traditionally song-y, a loping lumbering midtempo groove, a main riff locked tight and looped over a similarly tight barely there rhythm, but then all around it, guitars howl and grind, churn and crunch, loads of distortion and tangled melodies, swirling clouds of corrosive sound wrapped around that fantastically incessant groove, gradually growing more and more explosive, before the noise guitars nearly swallow up the boogie riff completely.
"End Of A Primitive" sounds like a Stooges sample dipped in distortion and left outside to crumble and decay before being brought back in and recorded onto some 20 year old 2" tape that had been stored in a wet basement. Another groovy riff, multiple guitar lines, the song gradually shifting, but so gradually, it's easy to get totally mesmerized. "Grimhaven" and "Grimhaven (A Return)" are all twang flecked dirge, like an echo drenched Earth, via the desert rock of Scenic, but again way more minimal, a single riff, a single part, looped and locked and totally hypnotic, while much of the melody is supplied by the bassline which is fluid and woozy, drifting beneath the song's core hypnodirge.
"Poison In Jest" is the killer here, super short at 2+ minutes, but an insanely super distorted chunk of garage dirge minimalism, Stooges riff and about ten tons of crumbling super blown out distortion.
The other songs follow a similar path, taking simple riffs and stretching them way out, adding layer after layer of thrum and howl and fuzz and buzz, occasionally letting the sounds slip into full of in-the-red freakout, but just as often, keeping them just this side of total chaos, the result, a gloriously hypnotic bit of riffy mesmer.
SUPER LIMITED, ONLY 100 COPIES, we got 12 or 13, and those are all we'll ever get. Way recommended for folks into droney, dirgey, hypnotic heaviness, which should most definitely be most of you!
The return of our favorite lo-fi, distorto boogie, zoner-psych one man band, King Blood! Is there even more than one? Hell, even if there was, we'd be hard pressed to dig their music more than the dirgey, distortion drenched trance-out mesmer KB kicks up, and on this new two track single, it's another couple blasts of hypno-drone, modern minimal dirge boogie bliss. We've mentioned Reich and Riley in past reviews, positing that KB sounded a bit like deconstructed, decayed guitar boogie, via modern minimalism, with each 'song' a looped cyclical sprawl crafted from single riff, or melodic line, repeated over and over and over, super mesmerizing and intensely druggy and so easily to get utterly lost in. We were extra excited for this single, knowing a little secret about both tracks here, one that becomes more obvious once you get a load of the B side, and one that's probably more fun to discover on your own, so fans of King Blood here's your SPOILER ALERT!!! Both tracks here, while not specifically 'covers', are in fact impressions of / variations on / ruminations on, tracks by none other than the mighty Guns & Roses. The A side is not so obvious, so let's start with the B side, which is essentially the main riff from "My Michelle" (the title is "Well, Well, Well" after all), slowed way down, slathered in soft swirly distortion, and wreathed in crackle and amp buzz, and transformed into a woozy, slithery, looped crawl, hazy, and druggy, and dreamily dirgey. We say this all the time, but we would have been so happy to have this track / side stretched out for the length of a whole lp, total G&R minimal boogie bliss trip out radness for sure.
And while the A side is not so immediately recognizable, it's equally rad, with a huge echoey, cavernous main riff, reminding us of a slightly better produced Les Rallizes Denudes, swaggery, snarly, slithery, with a killer distorted psychedelic melodic lead, draped over the churning distorted tarpit riff, again, some seriously woozy slo-mo glam-boogie dirgery that RULES.
And if you really wanna get dirgey and sludgey, crank it down to 33rpm... sounds even more like some lost seventies Japanese psych bootleg!
Don't let the inappropriate band name fool you. We had visions of dorky noise rock, or maybe fuzzy garage pop goofs, when in fact, King Dude is something much more haunting and enthralling, initially lumped in with the whole witch house scene, due in part to releases on witch house labels like Disaro and Clan Destine, the sound of King Dude, aka TJ Cowgill, who also does time in Book Of Black Earth, is more a dark brooding, neo-folk, think Death In June, Blood Axis, Cult Of Youth, Sol Invictus, urgently strummed guitars, deep dramatic sung/spoken vocals, the vibe haunting and otherworldly, minor key and melancholy, occasionally strident and majestic, but more often moody and mournful, the lyrics full of blood and sky, earth and fire, death and the beyond, a ritualistic doom folk, channeling the seventies British acid folk of groups like Comus and Incredible String Band through the more modern industrial folk sound of the above mentioned groups. Female vocals add dreamy harmonies here and there, but for the most part, this is dark stripped down twang flecked doom/neo folk that should also appeal to fans of Woven Hand, Sixteen Horsepower, Hexvessel, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Der Blutharsch and the like.
This record collects the out of print My Beloved Ghost ep, the out of print Black Triangle 7", and tacks on one unreleased bonus track.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
King Dude is a tough one to figure out. First there's the name which is evocative of pretty much everything KD is not, and the sound, a constant shifting mix of post industrial neo-folk, dark gothic torch songs, old time balladry, sinister apocalyptic country, and stripped down sixties girl group songsmithery, and on this latest single, a teaser for an upcoming full length, the sound shifts once again, this time, it's all acoustic guitar and vocals, wreathed in a bit of glimmery FX, the voice a deep ravaged croon, that slips occasionally into something more snarly, everything echo drenched, the 7" label bears the legend 'dungeon doo wop' which is not a bad description at all. The A side finishes off with a gorgeous lush harmony vocal-ed coda that leads directly into the even more stripped down non-album B side, a slithery, skeletal blues, nothing but voice and guitar, the voice this time an impossibly deep almost gurgly rumble, which gives the whole sound a darkly demonic vibe.
Comes lavishly packaged in a super thick jacket, and with a big fold out black and white poster. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Originally discovered by one of our pals at Root Strata, you can just imagine the emails:
"You guys gotta check out this band King Kong Ding Dong!"
"Um... really?"
"Seriously, they're so amazing, KING KONG DING DONG!"
"Ummm, okay..."
Originally we thought maybe it was all a ploy, and it was them messing with us, maybe they had recorded a bunch of stuff themselves and were trying to dupe us into heaping praises on what was essentially a joke, but we took their advice, sought out KKDD, and gave it a listen, and HOLY SHIT. All it took was about a minute of "Evil", and we were hooked. We made a sample, it's down below, we'll wait... listen, and read on...
After some woozy guitar and amp buzz and cord crackle, the band lock into a mesmerizing minimal groove, a loping melody, disembodied voices, swirls of effected buzz, simple tribal percussion, and then BAM, the main riff comes in, all languid and stoned sounding, super spaced out, just two notes, a weird sort of indie folk doom, crooned and hummed vocal harmonies underscore the warm warped riff and the stumbling drums wrapped around it. It's almost like some weird hybrid of Silvester Anfang, True Widow, Animal Collective and No Neck Blues Band or something. Raw and lo-fi, loose and shambling, but so darkly heavy and groovy and hypnotic. We listened to that track about 100 times, before we even moved on to the rest of the record, which was just chock full of sonic surprises. Nothing else on the record is quite like "Evil", the rest of the record flits all over the place from super abstract soundscapes to tuneful indie jangle, to vocal driven bliss out anti pop, to warm warped drone, but they are all somehow woven together into one organic, and constantly transforming whole.
Opener "Jample", winds a strange looped crunchy riff over a simple pounding beat, and some reverby "whooo"s, female vocals belt out an equally reverbed counterpoint, the whole thing building to a super tripped out effects heavy dream pop freakout.
Backwards guitars, lead out of that track into a gorgeous hazy acousticguitarscape, ethereal vocals definitely drifting into Animal Collective territory, but way more scrappy and lo-fi, shimmery sheets of indie jangle give way to blown out distorted drums and looped detuned melodies. Dreamy buzzy pop music gets twisted up into a strange Beach Boys dirge, all choral and chaotic, shot through with spidery high end melodies, which slips sweetly into a spare field of twinkle and twang, wrapped around distant drums and sweetly crooned falsetto vox. Then we're back to "Evil" again, which, heck, deserves yet another listen...
The final four offer up more off kilter outsider dream pop stumble, high crystalline vocals drifting over distorted drum splatter and looped guitar shimmer, soft swirls of effects drift beneath almost operatic sounding harmonies, a sort of twangy slowcore, but slowly crumbling into something much more atmospheric and abstract. After a brief fanfare, what sounds like a soft cacophony of horns, comes a strange harmonica loop, which erupts into some gorgeous, hazy, near perfect minimal space psych drone dream pop.
Shouldn't take long for the rest of the world to catch on. And wouldn't be surprised if these guys started getting hyped by Pitchfork or Matador or any other number of 'tastemakers', and heck, they deserve it, this stuff is mysterious and magical, and the fact that they're called King Kong Ding Dong, somehow only makes it that much better....
We were a little hesitant to check this out at first, even though we've loved all the tracks we've heard on various comps, because for some reason it was described as dark dubstep with "spoken word vocals". Spoken word? Ugh. Thankfully, one person's spoken word is another's woozy warbly mumbly crooning, 'spoken word' not in the crappy poetry slam sense, but as in brooding smoldering, slow motion toasting, totally reminiscent of classic Tricky, especially Nearly God, the music too, all hazy, and druggy and somnambulant, the beats, cough syrupy, gorgeous late night, rain soaked, glacial tarpit slow jam ballads. Totally dubbed out and minimal, the production hazy and gauzy and softly psychedelic. There's a new Massive Attack out this week too, and it's not bad, but listening to this, all we can think is this is how we wish Massive Attack sounded now.
Every track is a bleary eyed, druggy drift through warped, slow melting downtempo dubscapes, the rhythms, clipped and skittery, horns moaning in the background, wheezing keyboards, clouds of record crackle, the vocals, both male and female, wreathed in reverb and echo, draped over the slowly undulating grooves, sultry and sexy, so darkly languorous, murky and mysterious, the beats thick and dense and heavy, all wrapped in a laid back and lysergic, grimly psychedelic atmosphere, which makes sense considering the man behind the King Midas Sound is none other than Kevin Martin, aka The Bug!
WAY RECOMMENDED!
Certainly not a new title, but one that is new to us -- The National Anthem for The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland. In 1992, King Leif I (aka Leif Elggren) and King Michael I (aka CM von Hausswolff) declared the state of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, which annexed "All border frontier areas between all countries on earth, and all areas (up to a width of 10 nautical miles) existing outside all countries' territorial waters" as their physical domain. Furthermore, the twin kings claimed the Mental and perceptive territories such as the Hypnagogue State (civil), the Escapistic Territory (civil), and the Virtual Room (digital).
As with any legitimate nation, the first duty was to compose the national anthem... which is a lulling hypnotic composition built around a loop of a simple patriotic orchestral melody which is treated with an excess of delay and reverb. While Aquarius Records does not often voice our politics, we fully endorse the activities of The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland.
We'd never reviewed a proper record from mysterious ambient industrial folk duo Kinit Her, the only thing we'd heard before now was a collaboration with Clay Ruby's Burial Hex project, but as with most collabs it was tough to tell which sounds were contributed by which outfit... which brings us to Gratitudes, the brand new full length from Kinit Her, and right off the bat it defies easy categorization / description, beginning with a SUNNO))) like churn, all detuned chordal drift, before that sludgey riffage is joined by strange guttural monklike chanting, and what was sounding like some droney doominess is suddenly transformed into some sort of pagan ritualism. But it doesn't stop there, soon, some even strange vocals swoop in, inhuman wailing, distorted and haunting, the result a sort of No Neck Blues Band pagan folk jam, until about six minutes in when some black metal guitar buzz surfaces, fast picking, epic and majestic, as if the band might explode into a blurry blast any second, but instead, that guitar fades out leaving a folky strum, accompanied by what sounds like funereal trumpet. then some swoonsome strings, the sound becoming darkly cinematic, before devolving into some sort of high end dronescape laced with weird bird call like trills, and gurgly demonic vokills. Weird, but pretty great. And it continues on in that fashion, the whole records like some sonic document of arcane rituals, a field recording made of some strange sect, found in the darkest depths of the forest, observed surreptitiously, as they unfurl these sonic rites, the thrum of what sounds like throat singing, strange swooping effects, guttural voices, urgently strummed guitars, deep dramatic crooned vocals, the folkier bits definitely heavy on the acid folk, but then out of nowhere, some crazy squiggle distorted theremin like psychedelia will play the melody of acoustic guitar and martial snare, before slipping right back into what sounds like some mysterious medieval court music, very Renaissance Faire, but much more sinister and caustic, and the record progresses similarly, slipping from dark droney creep, the tripped out psychedelic doom folk, to jaunty medieval folk music, often with those elements bleeding into one another, culminating in the final track, a bookend of the opener, darkly liturgical, all layered drones and choral voices, mysterious and malevolent.
Most definitely for fans of the darker strains of acid folk, a la Comus, Death In June, Cromagnon, Hexvessel and other sonically similar musical cults...
God! How we love instrumental rock records! And while we'll be the first to admit that there have been some great vocalists, almost always, when we throw on a new record, we wait all tensed up, cowering, just waiting for the vocals to come in, and make or break the record. Well, thankfully we've never had that problem with Kinski (even on the rare occasions they do add vocals), a four piece mostly instrumental space rock band from Seattle, who we've loved from day one. Not just 'cuz of their killer monicker (we LOVE Klaus Kinski!) but for their blissed out shoegazey Hawkwind meets My Bloody Valentine meets Pink Floyd instrumental spaced out bliss rock. So the first thing we noticed when we threw on Alpine Static was how much, well, more rocking it was! I mean, they definitely rocked before, no doubt about it, but in much more of a laid back, stoned and moody and a little bit mellowed out way. But on Alpine Static, Kinski most definitely kick out the jams. There were moments on past records that hinted at the heavy and/or poppy rocking the band was capable of, but this is the record where uptempo RAWK is the first order of business. So take Kinski's knack for droning repetitive hypnorock, and then wrap that around some hyperdistorted Heavy Rocks (a la Boris), a bit of technical shredding (a la the Fucking Champs), some pulsing propulsive krautrock (a la Neu!), some ultra caustic squalls of guitar noise (a la Comets On Fire), some crunchy, stacatto dirgerock pound (a la Circle at their fiercest), a bit of moody post rock (a la June Of 44), some epic and blown out guitar freakouts (a la Dinosaur Jr., Swervedriver, Pixies) and then the occasional return to that blissed out cosmic dronerock Kinski are also so adept at and you've got a seriously solid slab of head banging, hip shaking space rocking kosmik heavy rock jams!
Got a super small handful of these ultra limited lps, commemorating a collaboration between Northwestern psych rockers Kinski, and British visual artist Jim Hobbs, whose most recent installation, featuring multiple 16mm projections, was scored live by Kinski, and the whole thing was captured on this here lp. Originally only available at the art show and via the band, each one of these, besides the record, comes with an original silkscreened print (hence the price). But we're a record store first and foremost, so let's talk about the music�
Three long tracks, all on the dreamy droney side, barring a few explosive psychedelic freakouts, the opener is a lush, minimal bit of slow building shimmer, hazy and dreamy, a little bit krautdrone new age-y, soft pulsations, swirling overtones, the sound getting more lush and thick as the track progresses, harmonious and lovely. The second track is more of the same, softly smoldering, muted metallic buzz, stretched out into softly undulating waves, hushed and meditative, at least for the first 7 or 8 minutes, that's when the guitar explodes, thick, and downtuned, a spidery buzz, wreathed in feedback, that quickly splinters into a full bore freakout, and is then woven into the hushed background drift, the squall dropping out briefly, only to return even more intense, the sound growling and buzzing, then the drums come in, spare at first, offering up flurries of tom fills, no rhythm, just another layer of psychedelic noise, eventually, the noisiness winds down, leaving a barely there bit of shimmer, which drifts dreamily into a haze of surf like static. The final track, a nearly 29 minute epic, is like an expanded version of the previous track, more super minimal drone leading into a wild tangle of feedback drenched frenzied psychedelia, the drums coming in almost right away, the opening and closing drones much more stretched out, the explosive psych breakdown significantly shorter, the last 10 minutes, a slow shifting, lush layered driftscape, a slow winding down to silence. Quite cool. Hard to imagine the visuals that would accompany these tracks, even harder to imagine the response of a museum crowd to those blasts of incendiary psych noise. Great stuff.
LIMITED T0 389 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. Housed in super swank, thick full color gatefold jacket, and each record includes a silkscreen print by Jim Hobbs. Includes a download coupon.
Along with the "irrational happiness" in this album's title there are also flashes of madness and brilliance throughout the proceedings. Bringing together free roaming avant jazz with elements of tiki exotica, psychedelia, post rock and so much more, the new Bay Area combo known as Kipple craft a loose, open musical weave that's often quite reminiscent of awesome fellow SF artists such as pop collagists Milk Cult and the uncategorizable keyboardist Graham Connah. Keeps you on your toes, and keeps those toes a-tapping thanks to a creative and tight rhythm section. Moodily captivating. Recommended.
We're not sure how the Students Of Decay label remained beneath our radar for so long, but we're definitely scrambling to make up for lost time. This latest blast of underground weirdness, comes from the very unassumingly named David Kirby, but don't let the lack of cool creepy moniker fool you, Inside, It Is Ringing is a serious slab of abstract industrial drones. Not pretty or drifting or dreamlike or tranquil. Well, actually it sort of is all of those things, but not in the soft super blissed out ambient way. Well, okay, the second track here sort of is. The first track though, is dense and thick and caustic and abrasive. Not to say it's not listenable because it most certainly is, in fact that's the magic of it. The parts are hard and sharp and harsh, but they are combined in such a way, that those disparate noise elements become a rich slowly shifting, organic whole. Imagine bits of Organum, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and bands like that, sort of melted down and poured into a giant cauldron, where they are slowly swirled until they take on the consistency of molasses, or tar. Dark and menacing. Bowed metals reverberate, buzzing steel strings are smeared into glistening streaks of metallic shimmer, thick layers of sun baked fuzz are spread out over glacial grooves. The first track is metallic and cold. The sound is all ice and barren landscapes. The second is much more warm and organic, the perfect balance to the frosty drift of the first track. It's an epic 24 minute subterranean stream turned into music. Like any of the cd-r bands you know and love, given a seriously heavy duty M83 makeover. NICE!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. You know the drill...
While we've been treated to numerous divine sonic excursions from Mr. Leyland Kirby (aka The Caretaker) over the last couple years, since the release of the mind blowing and unanimous all time aQ fave Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was lp trilogy, which included the all-over-the-map Intrigue & Stuff series, and the old timey mixtape that was the Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, this latest mysterious missive, evocatively (or provocatively?) titled Eager To Tear Apart The Stars, most definitely seems to be the first record that sonically acts as a logical follow up, to that sprawling triptych, delving into the same sort of hauntological soundcaping, but with a distinctive shift in sound. Which becomes obvious from the first track, and continues throughout, the mood is somber, the vibe darkly cinematic, easily the most patient and painterly thing we've heard from Kirby,
ominous piano stabs wreathed in thick surface noise, a warm muted hissy buzz, hovering over softly soaring strings, a weightless chordal thrum, that seems hopeful and lit from within, but manages to still remain earthbound, as if tethered to some unseeable darkness. The first two tracks and the haunting closer, seem to be a suite of sorts, some lost soundtrack, driven by melancholy piano and wreathed in those sweetly sorrowful strings, initially the sounds buried in grit and crackle, but by the record's end, that noise seems to have abated, leaving the sound crystalline and prismatic, almost as if the receding noise reflects a sort of sonic hopefulness, a light at the end of a very long tunnel.
But between these cinematic bookends, lurk several tracks that rank among our favorite Kirby jams yet. "To Reject The World" is a sonic trifle, an intro of sorts, the piano from the opening movements carry over, this time over a thick rumbling swirl of blackened buzz, drifting on sinister swells, before giving way to "No Longer Distance Than Death", which sounds like it could have been lifted from Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was, a slow motion creep, everything hazy and blissed out, rumbling distortion and muted buzz smeared into bleary streaks of dreamlike sound, like an M83 track spinning at 6rpm on an old Victrola, so moving and haunting, and that's when The Caretaker pays a visit, his "They Are All Dead, There Are No Skip At All", another haunted ballroom slow dance, all murky strings, muddied chiming melodies, woozy strings, some sort of slow motion waltz, a dance of the damned captured on wax cylinder and played back in an alternate future, mysterious and utterly lovely.
Once again, Kirby continues to explore the hauntological sonic underworld, and gives us just a glimpse of the musical mysteries that reside there.
Leyland Kirby's sprawling Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was collection, which compiled the vinyl double lps When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die, When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart, and Memories Live Longer Than Dreams, sounded exactly how those titles would lead you to believe: wistful, melancholy, a blurred sonic approximation of fading memories and tarnished dreams, of lost loves and long lonely nights, the sounds so achingly beautiful, a bleary collage of loops and field recordings and layered ambience, lush drones, and fragmented melodies, it easily became a unanimous favorite, and a record we couldn't keep in stock. We had a similar response to the Caretaker, an alter ego of Kirby's, who as the Caretaker explored a similarly obfuscated, antique filmstrip sound, but culled from slowed down jazz records, ancient chunks of vinyl reimagined, rendered in blurred and smeared streaks, and evoking a similarly emotional response. Thus we, and lots of you, became OBSESSED, needing to own everything Leyland Kirby or the Caretaker released, and always hankering for more.
So now, after a protracted silence, Leyland Kirby returns, with yet another series, this one entitled Intrigue & Stuff, spread out over 4 separate lps, this being volume 1, and this time, with a whole different sound. And we mean WAY different. Gone is all the scratchy ambience, the warped and warbly loops, the haunting minor key pianos, the mysterious moody textures, the blurred bleary beauty, and in its place is a strange chunk of warped electronica. Yep. Just have a listener to opener "Video 2000", which plays like a super distorted, slightly fractured Boards Of Canada, or like some techno record slowed waaay down, and run through a handful of effects pedals with dying batteries, the sound are super distorted, buzzy and fuzzy, the beat drags, gloriously, the rhythm loping, the melodies sun dappled and glimmering, a sort of blown out lo-fi downtempo avant IDM, which leads directly into the bloopy bleepy moody drift of "Re-Record Not Fade Away" with majestic synth shimmer laid beneath a blooping alien melody. "Neon-Lit Atoms" is up next, and again, is super distorted, the beats crumbling and crunchy, even the synth sounds seem to crumble, the sound a bit like some strange DJ Screw jam, but here wreathed in swirling sci-fi synths, lush and Eighties sounding, but when wedded to the weird crunch and crumble, it becomes something else entirely, eventually blossoming into something that definitely borrows from the whole Carpenter / Goblin soundtrack sound, but then twists it all up into something fractured and fantastically fucked up.
"Live For The Future, Long For The Past" was apparently used for a BBC documentary, which is a little surprising, because, while it is stately and elegant, majestic and moody, it's also dark, and droney, super distorted, and creepy as hell, the grinding distorted buzz that seems to wreath all the sounds make the vibe downright apocalyptic, the synths slightly new wave-y, but here stretched into long tense tones, and buried in thick layers of distorted sonic rubble, like the theme music for some futuristic sporting event, recorded and stored on some way too fragile media, only to be dug up hundreds of years later and played back in all it's decayed and nearly destroyed glory, seeming to slowly fall apart as it plays. "Low Entropy" sounds like an interlude of sorts, a descending plink plonk piano melody coupled with a blown out ultra distorted counter melody, the two in a woozy, tangled otherworldly harmony, which finally leads into the final track, "Ruined Visions", which is perhaps a reinterpretation of a John Denver song, but regardless, is a fantastically abject chunk of slo-mo, cough syrup synth, dreamdrone drag, the sounds seeming to melt and ooze and crumble and fracture, the melodies wavery and woozy, the main melody so mournful and melancholic, but all the sounds slightly off kilter, a little bit witch house-y, its a gloriously warped and druggy electro-ballad, a chopped and screwed synthscape, stretched into streaks and warbles, and winding down like a battery of synths being played on some old, slowly dying Victrola.
Ultra minimal packaging, plain black big-hole disco style 12" sleeve, and of course, very very limited.
As we mentioned in the review of volume one of Leyland Kirby's new four part series Intrigue & Stuff, his work has become a bit of an obsession for us around, here, and from what we can gather, many of you out there. His sprawling Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was collection was and is definitely a unanimous aQ favorite. And don't even get us started on The Caretaker, his hauntological mixtapes of crackly old jazz records, mysterious, haunting and otherwordly sonic studies on memory and loss. So it's not surprising that the first volume of this new series threw us for a bit of a loop. But hell, if there's anybody you SHOULD expect the unexpected from, it's Kirby. Thus we grew to love Intrigue & Stuff volume 1, which was in fact a collection of twisted murky electronics, fractured reimagined IDM, crumbling synth shimmer, not to mention some grinding distorted buzz and some dreamy droned out electro warble, and just from the above descriptions, you begin to realize that maybe it wasn't so sonically out of character after all.
But then what to expect from the second volume? Surely not more of the same we imagined. And in fact, it's definitely not, it's more of a return to the sound we imagine most folks were hoping for with volume one, sonic decay, warped slo-mo samples, crumbling distortion, everything woozy and warped. This time, separated into just three tracks, the shortest a little over 4 minutes, the longest nearly 20, Kirby slips back into his hauntological guise, with the opening track, the provocatively titled "Eventually, It Eats Your Lungs", unfurling as a super distorted slo-mo soulful creep, a deep crooned vocal suspended in fields of churning staticky buzz, of blurred chordal shimmer, the sounds all wreathed in effects, and crumbling from the speakers, it's almost like a Caretaker remix of some Burial track, the same sort of creepy murky soul, the vibe is so mysterious and hauntingly sinister, laced with super cinematic cues, it's WAY too short at 12 minutes, this is the sort of thing we could listen to FOREVER, and found ourselves wishing Kirby had stretched that track into a whole record.
The relatively brief "Speeded Up Slow Motion" sort of sounds exactly like the title implies, a dizzying spatial shimmer, with pulses of distorted ambience, careening back and forth between the left and right stereo fields, while in the background, new agey melodies tinkle and chime, and as amazing as this one sounds, we definitely could not handle a whole record of this. But in fact, it seems to be a bit of a palate cleanser, preparing our ears for the epic sprawl of the final track, "Complex Expedition", which begins with a long slow drift, wreathed in a haze of hushed static, driven by subtle muted low end pulsations, and rife with bits of abstract dub, sounding a little like some super ambient abstract version of Pole, every sound wrapped in echo and sent drifting into the ether, it's not until about 5 minutes in, that the main melody surfaces, a playful darkly distorted bit of carnivalesque bleep and bloop, that quickly turns sinister, and minor key, and we're in definite Goblin territory, the track slips back into the initial ultra minimal drift, and the sound slowly and dreamily slips back and forth, that second melody returning, but each time more greyed out and grim, until finally the process seems to reverse itself, and the track seems to emerge from darkness, luxuriating in the light, only to moments later disappear into darkness for good.
Fantastic, of course, and already we're hankering for volume three...
The third volume in Kirby's four part Intrigue & Stuff lp series is another brilliant and baffling collection of sounds, one which manages to stay true to Kirby's trademark 'sound', which is to say a sort of warped and warbly, decayed and memory-faded, looped and layered mystery, while at the same time continuing to drag that sound into new and ever more fantastically confusing directions, which is what the Intrigue & Stuff seems to be for. An outlet for the various pieces that didn't quite fit into the woozy old timey vibe of the Caretaker, or the hauntological alchemy of Kirby's records proper.
But like the previous volumes, those elements still exist, they're just all twisted up and tangled up with a whole mess of new sounds. Just take the opener, "The Start Of Wars And The End Of Eras", which plays like the soundtrack to a planetarium show gone utterly haywire, it's glistening and kosmische and celestial, but it's also distorted and rhythmic, soaring and majestic, blurred and muddied and smeared into woozily warped shapes, slipping from angular and intense to washed out and sweetly melodic, occasionally it sounds like the organ player in a theater, albeit filtered through a ceiling high bank of malfunctioning effects, but it is pretty fantastic, swirling and heady and fractured, textural and tense and psychedelic.
The second track immediately changes tack, although some of the sounds are similar, it's a sort of muted whirl of melodies, peppered with a strange rhythmic squelch, and underpinned by whirling wind like hiss and hum, like a crumbling lo-fi Goblin / John Carpenter.
The flipside starts off with some James Ferraro style retro eighties style pop, all cheesy synths, and handclap rhythms, Casio grooves and swirling synths, but Kirby pulls it apart, the sounds seemingly transferred from a 10th generation VHS tape onto a 20th generation VHS tape, and played back on one of those VCR/TV combos, it's fantastically retro, and druggily warped and crumbling before our very ears.
That weird eighties vibe oozes into the next track, where Kirby ditches much of the buzz and crumble, and instead weaves an almost funky, eighties made for TV movie soundtrack groove, all electronic percussion, swoonsome synths and fuzzy basslines. Which leads to the final movement, a dreamy bit of new age drift, all prismatic shimmer and soft swelling chordal whir, laced with tinkling chiming melodies, and brief bits of rumble and crunch, dreamy and meditative, and just a little twisted and tweaked.
If you have the first two volumes, you're obviously gonna want this one too, and more than the others, this might be the one to appeal to fans of all things retro eighties synth: James Ferraro, Dylan Ettinger, Xander Harris, Gatekeeper, Innercity and the like, although this stuff is a fair bit more warped.
The final (?) installment in the Intrigue & Stuff 12" series from Leyland Kirby (aka The Caretaker). Unlike The Caretaker records, which delve into washed out wastelands of sepia toned shimmer, and faded memory ambient drift, Kirby's Intrigue & Stuff records are twisted jumbles of experimental electronica, sonically all over the map, and the 4th volume is no different, beginning with a strange bit of almost classical sounding synth tangle, all cascading pizzicato melodies, and clipped sonic fragments, woven into a relentlessly tranced out rhythmic stutterscape, that manages to be both dizzying and mesmerizing. From there on out, the sound flits from creepy, eighties styled, soundtrack dirgery, all blunted drum machines, soft synth swirls, strange industrial sound effects and moody atmospherics, to fuzzy avant synth pop, shimmery swirls draped over hiccuping drum loops, and still more eighties style new wave-isms, blurred into dreamy, bleary smears, to strange sprawls of drum driven murk, echoey handclaps, and throbbing bass, all buried beneath gristly swells of whirring static, and surf-like thrum, and finally, a gorgeous kosmische closer, all distort synth melodies, blurred human voices, a drifty overdriven lullaby-like chorale, hazy and haunting and dementedly lovely.
Like the other installments, super limited, and housed in plain black sleeves, with hand stamped center labels.
The third and final volume of this sprawling 6lp (two lps in each volume) drone haze ambient masterpiece from the man behind the Caretaker, and V/VM! All three 2lps have been compiled onto a triple cd, this week's Record Of The Week, but for vinyl folks, who have the first two, grab part three while you can...
For a couple of years now, Leyland James Kirby has been releasing a highly acclaimed catalog of maudlin ambient recordings culled from melodic phrases looped and blurred from old 78s. The bulk of these recordings (typically released under the Caretaker moniker) didn't seem to leave England or at least they didn't arrive in California. Now that the distribution has improved, we've finally been able to hear what the fuss has been all about. This album belongs to a trilogy called Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was that Kirby has made now that he finds himself living under the grey skies of Berlin having relocated from grey skied Manchester; lo and behold, he's still making cold, rainy grey music for cold, rainy days. And yeah, he's pretty damn good at it.
As a piece of vinyl, When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die eschews titles and doesn't even give us any information what so ever on the artwork, a paint-smeared canvas. It works as an endless loop of flipping the two records, forgetting which track you've drifted in and out of, and wondering where to start next. These pieces of blurred ambience, obfuscated field recordings, and sad piano melodies hint at the furniture music of Erik Satie, the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti, and the emotional resonance of William Basinski. Limited to 450 copies, these will not last.
It had to be an aQ Record Of The Week. Nearly four hours of warbly and washed out ambient beauty spread out over 3 cds (and 6 lps!), from the man behind the looped and warped ambient jazz minimalism of The Caretaker and the electronic fuckery of V/VM. We've been listing/reviewing the vinyl versions as they were released, part one: When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die, part two: When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart, and part three: Memories Live Longer Than Dreams (elsewhere on this week's list). We would have made the vinyl ROTW too, but we thought it was a lot to ask, 6 lps, nearly $80, so we held off, for THIS. A gorgeous compact collection of all 6 lps on 3 discs, in super minimal sleeves, gathered in an equally minimal and mysterious slipcover, printed to look like an old wooden crate. The art and the sound are all inexorably linked. The music of Kirby is mournful and mysterious, melancholy and otherworldly, everything shot through with a certain degree of sadness. Check the song titles: "When We Parted, My Heart Wanted To Die", "The Beauty Of The Impending Tragedy Of My Existence", "And As I Sat Beside You I Felt The Great Sadness That Day", "Tonight Is The Last Night Of The World", and the sounds those words represent, impart the same sense of heartbreak and loneliness, the music feels grey, like looking through a rain speckled dust coated window, at an old abandoned lot, the metal rusted, broken swingsets, collapsing barns, dead grass, mud and old pieces of wood, artifacts of a happier time, all reflecting the blackened sky above. But somehow, this isn't miserable music, it manages to be warm, and thick, and rich, and deceptively simple, lots of layers constantly shifting. It's definitely dronemusic, but not minimal or static, these sounds are alive, record crackle, buried voices, old record, warped instrumentation, sounds are looped and stretched and inverted, tied into knots and then pulled slowly and delicately apart. Fans of Philip Jeck, and Tim Hecker, and William Basinski, this is another gorgeously decayed artifact to add to your collection, evoking many of the same emotions as those like minded soundscapers, yet, the music of Leyland Kirby manages to sound unlike any of them.
This is the perfect soundtrack for introspection, for long nights, candlelight, grey days, windswept storm drenched hillsides, for drifting off, for huddling up with another and sharing warmth, dark, delicate and so beautiful. An incredible, sprawling collection of blurred ambience, obfuscated field recordings, and sad piano melodies hint at the furniture music of Erik Satie, the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti, and the emotional resonance of Basinski's Disintegration Loops.
While technically the vinyl wasn't Record Of The Week, it essentially has been, for a couple months now, just delivered in installments, each one a mysterious missive from some otherworld, those who have been keeping up, no doubt understand, and are surely already utterly and inexorably tangled up in Kirby's magical and mournful world of sound, but for the rest of you, who have yet to delve, to climb through, to step beyond, to lose yourself completely. Now is the time, and the message is clear, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was...
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Volume two of this sprawling 6lp (two lps in each volume) drone haze ambient masterpiece from the man behind the Caretaker, and V/VM!
For a couple of years now, Leyland James Kirby has been releasing a highly acclaimed catalog of maudlin ambient recordings culled from melodic phrases looped and blurred from old 78s. The bulk of these recordings (typically released under the Caretaker moniker) didn't seem to leave England or at least they didn't arrive in California. Now that the distribution has improved, we've finally been able to hear what the fuss has been all about. This double lp is the second in a trilogy called Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was, and finds Kirby now living under the grey skies of Berlin having relocated from grey skied Manchester; lo and behold, he's still making cold, rainy grey music for cold, rainy days. And yeah, he's pretty damn good at it.
Like the first volume, When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die, Memories Live Longer Than Dreams also eschews titles and doesn't even give us any information what so ever on the artwork, a paint-smeared canvas. It works as an endless loop of flipping the two records, forgetting which track you've drifted in and out of, and wondering where to start next. These pieces of blurred ambience, obfuscated field recordings, and sad piano melodies hint at the furniture music of Erik Satie, the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti, and the emotional resonance of William Basinski. Limited to 450 copies, these will not last. However, we have been told that a 3cd set will be emerging at sometime in the future containing the whole vinyl trilogy.
For a couple of years now, Leyland James Kirby has been releasing a highly acclaimed catalogue of maudlin ambient recordings culled from melodic phrases looped and blurred from old 78s. The bulk of these recordings (typically released under the Caretaker moniker) didn't seem to leave England or at least they didn't arrive in California. Now that the distribution has improved, we've finally been able to hear what the fuss has been all about. This album belongs to a trilogy called Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was that Kirby has made now that he finds himself living under the grey skies of Berlin having relocated from grey skied Manchester; lo and behold, he's still making cold, rainy grey music for cold, rainy days. And yeah, he's pretty damn good at it.
As a piece of vinyl, When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die eschews titles and doesn't even give us any information what so ever on the artwork, a paint-smeared canvas. It works as an endless loop of flipping the two records, forgetting which track you've drifted in and out of, and wondering where to start next. These pieces of blurred ambience, obfuscated field recordings, and sad piano melodies hint at the furniture music of Erik Satie, the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti, and the emotional resonance of William Basinski. Limited to 450 copies, these will not last. However, we have been told that a 3cd set will be emerging at sometime in the future containing the whole vinyl trilogy.
There's been quite a resurgence in folks' interest in the career and records of Basil Kirchin of late. Not sure if it's his inclusion on Nurse With Wound's legendary list of influences, or just more access to lost recordings, but we're pleased as punch either way. Kirchin was not JUST a legendary outsider producer of obscure musical madness -- like most of us he had to pay the bills. Not many of us are lucky enough to pay the bills by scoring one of the greatest 'horror' films ever, The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Unlike the insanity of his legendary Quantum record reviewed a few months back, Kirchin pretty much plays it straight here. Well, as straight as a mad musical genius can. From creepy pipe organ overtures, to dreamy, flute-flecked fantasy ambience, to grand sweeping cinematic epics, with pizzicatto strings and soaring strings to minor key spine tingling creep-outs. Fans of his more obscure recordings won't find the weirdness they may have been expecting, but fans of Morricone, Barry, Nicolai and their ilk will be quite pleased. Extensive liner notes detail the convoluted history of the film and the soundtrack.
If this keeps up Basil Kirchin could become the underground avant garde Tupac. The only problem is that Kirchin is still alive. After years of complete silence and a series of recording either impossible to find and hear or unreleased, seems that the floodgates have opened and reissue after reissue come tuumbling forth. We're not complaining though, as everything we've heard so far has been pretty amazing. For those of you new to Kirchin, this composer / arranger / musician, is probably best known in underground circles for being namechecked on that legendary Nurse With Wound list that came with their first record. This here cd is not a reissue, rather the first time these two mini albums have ever been released. The first three tracks, or 'Sketches' consist of rough ideas and works in progress that Kirchin composed and recorded before his legendary Quantum record (reviewed on the AQ list last year). These sketches are jazzy and dreamy, meldoic and almost traditional sounding, EXCEPT for the fact that the tinkling pianos and muted trumpets are competeting with a wild panoply of exotic bird calls, chirping and cheeping and occasionally shrieking. The second half of this disc, States Of Mind, is an unreleased soundtrack to a documentary about mental illness and features Evan Parker making one of his first appearances with his new 'free' style. Which is perfectly suited to the music. Dark and creepy, atonal and confusional, haunting and cinematic, swirling backdrops of manic piano, rumbling bass, and swirling horns with Parker's sax skronking atop it all. Really curious liner notes too, describing song by song, the different mental ailments related by the music. Weird.
The Ukraine has an incredibly vibrant underground music scene. From the black metal side of the spectrum, Drudkh, Hate Forest, Nokturnal Mortum, Dub Buk, Astrofaes, Lucifugum all the way over to the abstract minimalist free noise side of things, most notably The Moglass, but also Andrey Kiritchenko, who runs the amazing Nexsound label, and also creates some beautiful music himself.
Using guitars, field recordings and a bit of processing, Kiritchenko conjures up a fuzzy world of haunting reverberations, dense swarms of metallic buzzings, mysterious harmonica like wheezes, and a a swirling spacey ambience. You can't help but hear Fennesz, Ambarchi, and other avant guitarscapers, as well as folks like Tim Hecker and Phillip Jeck, with all the fuzz soft focus murk and dreamlike abstraction. But there's something very particular about Kiritchenko's sound, it is always obviously a guitar. The steel strings are the centerpiece of each track, sometimes the buzzing strings get pulled apart into weird wisps of sound, other times it's the background that skitters and loops, stretches out and gradually darkens, while the guitar continues to strum above the swirling morass. A gorgeous and modern, dark foresty folk, an otherworldly take on classic Appalachia. Fahey left to wander through some ancient Ukrainian forest, the results fed into a computer and allowed to spill out, a glitchy expanse of steel strings and skittery buzz, swirls of rich deep ambient flutter, while within little ripples of steel string shimmer slowly spread out, way in the distance bursts of malfunctioning digital melody race across the horizon like clouds in those time lapse nature films, while just underneath lies a soft and serene bed of lilting acoustic guitar and a world of glistening iridescence.
Absolutely amazing packaging. The disc is visible through die cut circles, each one slightly bigger than the one before it, each panel of the brown card stock digipak adorned with dense tangles of abstract text and fuzzy indistinct animal shapes. So cool.
Another of the quartet of fine new Bottrop-Boy releases, "01.02" is the solo debut from Danish composer Jacob Kirkegaard, collecting material recorded over the past two years in Cologne (where he lives), Paris, and elsewhere. You might know Kirkegaard's name from his collaboration with AQ-fave turntable experimentalist Philip Jeck, the "Soaked" cd that came out last year on the Touch label. The sound of Jeck-style radioactive crackle from antique vinyl carries over to this release, along with gentle melodies, beats, drones, and vague samples. Recognizable, fragmented bits of guitar and piano surface occasionally, and field recordings or environmental sounds also are utilized. The disc as a whole is a very pretty n' abstract glitch-scape. True, you might feel that you already have a few albums like this in your collection -- but it's a slippery slope arguing that more lovely, glitchy, ambient, droney, dreamy electronic music is an unneccessary thing, and this one is certainly a nice listen, particularily if you're a Jeck fan!
Over his past few releases, Jacob Kirkegaard has exhibited a noticeable shift in his work away from the early experiments with the antiquated residue of Jeckian avant-turntablism towards a clinical conceptualism. His last release, Eldfjall, found Kirkegaard wandering Iceland and documenting the numerous geothermal vents for their tumultuous growlings and tectonic rumbles. On 4 Rooms, Kirkegaard is again wandering in a foreign land, as this Danish born / German resident took off to the "Zone of Exclusion" in the still irradiated town of Chernobyl! There, Kirkegaard employed the same techniques of recording and rebroadcasting sound that Alvin Lucier used on his groundbreaking piece I Am Sitting In A Room, but instead of introducing his own voice into the accumulated room ambience, Kirkegaard simply records the ghostly reverberations from a church, an auditorium, a swimming pool, and a gymnasium. Given the weight of the Chernobyl disaster, it's impossible not to hear these timbral vibrations as anything but radioactive shadows of those who died some 20 years ago; but on a phenomenological level, the sounds that Kirkegaard collects are eerily beautiful falling somewhere between the techgnostic work of recent Hafler Trio and the stoic vibrations of Toshiya Tsunoda.
