After several records exploring the internal mechanics of turntables (including a collaboration with Philip Jeck), the Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard turns to the earth itself as the source material for Eldfjall. Using a host of accelerometers, vibration sensors, and contact microphones that he buried in the earth during several trips to Iceland, Kirkegaard maps the sonic terrain of that island-country's volatile geothermal activity. Given the magnitude of his subject matter (the geological sites of rupture where two continental plates are slowly splitting apart), Kirkegaard's recordings are suitably rumbling drones of raw liquifaction. At the more subdued moments, wind can be heard whipping around these rocks (or could that be scalding hot water percolating through porous material?); but for the most part, Kirkegaard documents dense aggregates of vulcanized sound, pressurized water, and agitated vibrations that give the impression of some monumental seismic catastrophe. Kirkegaard's recordings impose a rigorous, clinical taxonomy upon sound, as each chunk of sound slams up against each other without the graceful transitions of a crossfade. Perhaps this is more true to the original source material, but such compositional decisions put Eldfjall closer to the dissonant jump-cuts of Daniel Menche's work. Nevertheless, fans of Toshiya Tsunoda and Chris Watson's Weather Report album should definitely take note! Very good.
We have been anxiously awaiting the return of the strangely named Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, the apocalyptic folk project of Stef Heeren, a Belgian instrument builder and musician, who managed to create one of the darkest, most compelling 'folk' records in recent memory. A dark world of strum and buzz, equal parts Comus, Current 93, Woven Hand, Swans and the like. His voice a strange strangled croon, venomous and dramatic, over intensely strummed acoustic guitars and all manner of ambient backdrops.
Things have changed quite a bit on An Interlude To The Outermost, much of the sound is the same, the aggressive acoustic guitars, the vocals, the apocalyptic foreboding, but now there are drums, drums that anchor and drive each song, giving the record a much different vibe, not at all unappealing, just a lot different. Where If The Sky Falls, We Shall Catch Larks seemed to drift, unhinged and unmoored, no distinct rhythms to pin it down, each song hovering like black smoke from a forest campfire, An Interlude To The Outermost is much more structured, songs, arrangements, the drums are an obvious shift, but the tempos too, and the overall sound, this is distinctly more rocking, a sort of near-rollicking campfire folk jam, bringing to mind 16 Horsepower and even the Pogues here and there, albeit much more nihilistic and dark. And the sound is a lot more lush as well, with a wider array of instrumentation, the drums, but also accordion, and electric guitar. In fact, more than ever KTAOABC sounds like some impossible mix of Current 93, 16 Horsepower and New Model Army. If that makes any sense. But it's awesome. Epic and intense, brooding and moody, but a bit rocking as well.
The melodies are still lilting and minor key, the mood is most definitely miserablist, a dour dreary black folk, but with epic blasts of full on, heavily instrument-ed folk ROCK. It takes some getting used to, but once you do, it does make perfect sense. There are still some moments reminiscent of the first record, the funereal crawl of "You Will Reap A Whirlwind", the wheezing dirge of "Beyond The Tanarian Hills"... And actually, even at its most rocking this disc is just as dark and sinister sounding. It's just slightly more lush and upbeat, but it suits the sound. And the more we listen to it, the less we can imagine it sounding any other way. Where the first record channeled dark forests, and leafless trees, crows on abandoned farmhouses, open expanses of barren fields, the new record is the thunder of horse hooves, the rumble of thunder, the shadow of storm clouds, a fierce and furious, subtly rocking, epic and intense divine doom folk. And like the first disc, essential for fans of all things C93, Nick Cave, Death In June, Comus, Swans, Der Blutharsch, Richard Youngs, Woven Hand and 16HP.
Beautifully packaged in a minimally screenprinted fold over cardboard sleeve, with a striking image on the cover, an old fashioned looking drawing of a bedraggled kitten and a big ball of yarn...
It's been ages and ages since we last heard from Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. All three of the previous KTAOABC records: An Interlude To The Outermost, If the Sky Falls, We Shall Catch Larks and The Nebulous Dreams, were all huge hits around here. KTAOABC, aka Stef Heeren is a Belgian musician, who also builds his own instruments, and past records have all played out like some impossible mix of Comus, Woven Hand, Swans and Current 93. A brooding, dark apocalyptic folk, that has definitely evolved over the years, always spare and haunting, but also always mysterious and ominous, slightly sinister, and a little witchy. Heeren employed quite a varied sonic palette as well, the core vocals and acoustic guitar augmented by piano, bells, strings, and on the last record, even drums, transforming the more drifty vibe of past records into something more rocking and propulsive.
But on Hewers Of Wood, Heeren seems to pull back a bit, there are still drums, but the songs seem more subdued, hauntingly minimal, back to the creepy dirgey folk of Kiss The Anus records of old. In fact, more than ever, KTAOABC is sounding like Woven Hand / Sixteen Horsepower, a similar knack for melody, the same sort of strident vocalizing, at times his voice a dead ringer for David Eugene Edwards, the swampy bluesy folk, it's a sound we love, and Heeren is a master, and these songs are super intense and emotional, hypnotic and mesmerizing, and so catchy and gorgeously creepy.
The first three songs are practically perfect, the slo-mo Comus-y waltz of the title track, the buzz flecked urgency of "All Your Ghosts Are Worried", and "Argonaut And Magneto" which could easily mistaken for a Woven Hand song (if it wasn't for that Belgian accent), so much so that it almost sounds like a cover, but also means it's gorgeous and powerful intensely moving.
The whole record oozes with a sense of foreboding, as if each song was some sort of cautionary tale, stories of lives lost, loves lost, forgotten memories and other, better times, and this sense of loss and regret, as well as some hope for redemption and forgiveness, that all seems to seep into every note, every lyric, helping transform this swampy bluegrassy folk music into something more, acid tinged, subtly psychedelic, emotionally powerful, sonically revelatory, dark meaningful music. Gorgeous!
One song, spread out over two sides, each a distinctly different movement, from one of our favorite modern apocalyptic freak folks, Kiss The Anus Of The Black Cat, aka, Belgian bard Stef Irritant.
We raved about the KTAOABC full lengths, and if you don't have those you should get them now, but if you need a taster, this is the perfect place to start.
The A side is a slow burning slab of simple spare strumming, stripped down percussion, hovering over a sea of creaks and background buzzes, brief flurries of muted tribal percussion. The song builds and builds into a super impassioned climax, the vocals wailing, the drums pounding, sounding like the perfect mix of Current 93 and the Woven Hand.
The flipside, is the same song, and begins already a bit revved up, but here the vocals are wrapped in effects and processed into strange ghostly whispers, the guitars, the vocals, everything is stretched into streaks of droney buzz, again working its way up to an epic bombastic finale, all chaotic percussion, crashing drums and thick sheets of feeding back guitars.
Gorgeously packaged in a white textured paper sleeve, printed inside and out, with a Japanese style obi and pressed on white vinyl.
Wow! An amazingly weird Swedish new wave punk band that burned bright for one short year way back in 1980. Kitchen & The Plastic Spoons were herky jerky, full of demented pep and enough deranged energy to make themselves a seriously freaked out and super unique proposition. Sort of how we always wished new wave sounded, not overly polished but instead kind of demented and mad in all the right ways. Like The Pop Group and the Dead Kennedys all mixed up with Siouxsie and Johnny Lydon taking turns on vocals. As much as this makes us think of some of the more well known (relatively) bands of the era like The Slits, Raincoats, Au Pairs, Liliput and Maximum Joy, there is something so singular and unique about Kitchen And The Plastic Spoons that makes it kind of surprising that this i the first time these tracks have been dug up in almost 30 years. It's amazing how vibrant and timely this still sounds. It's hard not to imagine that bands like Erase Errata had somehoww gotten their hands on one of the few hundred original lp's and used it as a sort of template or inspiration. With all the hype in recent years over lost punk reissues from the likes of The Homosexuals, Crime and The Metal Boys this might just take the cake for a long overdue rediscovery of a truly weird punk classic!
"Organic free metal from Malaysia" is what we had heard about Klangmutationen. Wow, really? Utech doesn't provide much information at all about this band, other than to describe them as a "mystery" (how helpful), and compare their music to the work of outside '70s free improv artists from Europe (the FMP label) and Japan (Masayuki Takayangi, Kaoru Abe). We're also told that this mysterious group hails from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Do we believe it? Maybe. We'd like to.
Certainly their music has a dark, strange vibe - literally, vibrations - cycles of low-end droning, sounding like giant metal springs being vibrated... or more likely, electric guitars, detuned. Strings/springs flapping loosely, arcing with electricity. Weird and atmospheric. Like Harry Bertoia meets Caspar Brotzmann!?
That's the first track (2:19) and part of the second into which it flows (25:05). But before long, the lengthy track two develops a serious case of screaming, saxophone/flute/clarinet skree, definitely giving some skronked-out substance to those free jazz comparisons. It's pretty intense and extreme, right on for those into Rudolph Grey's Blue Humans, John Zorn's Painkiller, Peter Brotzmann, Charles Gayle, Arthur Doyle, Albert Ayler, cats like that... yet it's definitely not, y'know, jazz. More like "jazz" for fans of SUNNO))) and Aufgehoben... or drone music for fans of Borbetomagus. Dense and distorted, this is the sound of plunging into the abyss, with a witches' chorus of reed-squealing cacophony as company.
The third track, clocking in at 19:42, is almost as much of a juggernaut. More whale-call feedback guitar grind, murk and moodiness. And then this disc comes to a close with the brief (1:58), relatively quiet caresses of fourth, final track. An eerie, wispy coda that could be the soundtrack music heard as a landing party from TV's Star Trek beams down to some strange, oddly lit world... and they should be glad they don't have to face whatever alien threats the album's earlier tracks would provide cues for!
Curious stuff, this Klangmutationen. Heavy too. We're enjoying repeat spins of this disc, and also should mention we have another release of theirs, yet to be reviewed - an LP on the Holy Mountain label (which affiliation in itself is a recommendation).
A match made in heaven (or maybe hell), one of our favorite noise makers / soundscapers, Mr. Dan Vallor, aka Clarinette, or in this case, Klarinette with a K, tries his hand at 'metal', the end result sounding less like metal proper, and more like some twisted, super distorted, ultra heavy, hypno rock, avant noise rock dirgery, which of course means we're digging it big time. We weren't sure what to expect when Vallor told of us this impending metalocalypse, but it definitely wasn't this. We were expecting something more dronedoomdirge-y, sort of noise style drones, but delivered with some extra heft. But instead, The Path Of Sisyphus reveals itself as something much more subtle, rhythmic and hypnotic, a simple skeletal drum beat (programmed perhaps?) locks into a stripped down krautrock like groove, and seems to set the controls on autopilot, while the surrounding sounds explode in wild gouts of crumbling distortion, keening moaning swaths of blown out buzz, murky tangled melodies, undulating swells of layered guitar fuzz, that pulsing propulsive beat, keeping this from being straight up abstract noise, and helping transform it into something that sounds not all that far removed from a past Record Of The Week by Torlesse Super Group, which features another longtime aQ fave Roy Montgomery. That TSG record was a fantastic assemblage of murky ambience, and minimal rhythms, tranced out and super hypnotic, and the vibe is similar here, but with a hefty helping of Dead C style guitarnoise over the top, as well as some super catchy melodies buried in the murk, all deftly woven into billowing clouds of soft focus psych guitar and bleary distorted tangles of blissed out noise, and all anchored to that beat, that persistent rhythm, which somehow holds it all together.
Those guitars, and it sounds like there's lots of 'em, as in swarms and swarms of em, are what this is all about, and they swoop wildly from angry buzzing barrage to keening Sunroof! like skree, to grinding metallic churn, to weird Butthole Surfers like distorto melody dirge, in fact, at some points, this sounds like it could be some lost live BH recording, that simple tribal rhythm, and the super distorted melody infused guitar freakouts over the top, all wreathed in a sort of fuzzy haze.
Fantastic stuff! And while maybe not strictly metal enough for metalheads, it's still plenty heavy, not to mention psychedelic, dark and rhythmic, tranced out and utterly hypnotic, which means, of course, absolutely recommended! And it's dedicate to our very own Andee!!
LIMITED TO 60 COPIES!! Of which we have almost half, but it's very likely these will be go pretty quick, and once they're gone, that's it. Each one hand numbered.
One of two new tapes from Root Strata, this one comes from Arrow Kleeman, who we know very little about other than the fact that he's a visual artist and musician/composer, on Phase Reps And Builds, he pretty much does exactly what the title suggests, repeating electronic phrases, looped rhythms, and layering them into lush, gorgeously mesmerizing sci-fi synthscapes. Percolating rhythms, overlapping melodies, the sound simultaneously futuristic and retro, definitely tapping into the whole Blade Runner / John Carpenter / Logan's Run vibe that folks like Majeure and Zombi and Umberto have been exploring lately. But where those folks seem to be pushing the eighties soundtrack / Euro dancefloor, Kleeman's explorations are more minimal, more academic. Not to say they're lacking in emotion, they're just darker, and more contemplative, the sounds cyclical, mesmerizingly repetitious, each track and experimental loopscape, trancelike and tranquil, infusing its rhythmic and electronic elements with the compositional approach of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, creating a sort of modern minimalism / sci-fi retro-futuristic space synth hybrid.
Needless to say, recommended for fans of Lichens, Grasslung, Oneohtrix Point Never, Pulse Emitter, Le Revelateur, etc.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
What is more amazing than discovering a whole movement in music that had never been documented, let alone even heard of. EVER! No mention in any books, magazines, not a single trace. What if that music was in fact the music of Funerary violins. A music created and composed to be performed at funerals. The only evidence of these musics, some scratchy old wax cylinder recordings, some faded photos, and brittle sheafs of old sheet music. A music that flourished in the 1800's and disappeared almost completely by the 1900's after the Catholic church's Great Funerary Purges. Only recently discovered in a locked trunk was the music of Herr Gratchenfleiss, recorded to wax cylinder by Wilhelm Kleinbach. The sound a mournful miserable, gorgeously minor key dirge. So completely moving and emotional, the recordings thick with static and crackle, only adding to the power and timelessness of the music. What could be more amazing?
How about making the whole thing up? Constructing an elaborate history of a genre that never existed. Populating this history with lifelike characters, creating photos, sheet music, historical documents, but most amazingly, recording all the music, and treating it to sound as if it was some old wax cylinder recording.
Hard to say which would be more amazing, a wholly undiscovered hidden dark corner of musical history, quashed by the church and relegated to be lost forever, or an insanely detailed project, the ultimate conceptual art piece. Either way, we are in love with this stuff.
Simply from a musical standpoint, this is everything we could hope for. The recordings are fuzzy and staticky, bathed in layers of crackle and grit, and years of neglect and decay, but beneath the recording inconsistencies we love so much, are some truly moving and emotionally rich performances, the melodies are so intense and sad, minor key and mournful. truly funereal. It's impossible not to imagine some old funeral procession, a row of black clad mourners, trudging down a dirt road, with their deceased atop an old wooden cart, the sky grey, the music of the Funerary violinist winding around the procession like wreaths of black smoke. So goddamn lovely. We have been listening to this non-stop since we got it.
And then there's the story. The "history". Is it real? Is it possible that a musical movement could disappear so completely. So much so that not a single person anywhere EVER had heard of the Guild Of Funerary Violinists? Or is it all a huge put-on? A massive made up world? The ultimate outsider art project. Either way, we are completely blown away. If this is indeed real, HOLY SHIT! How utterly mysterious and romantic!! We do sort of want to believe it's real. It's so perfectly evocative of some other time, of death and sadness throughout the ages. But if it is in fact made up, it has to be one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed hoaxes of all time. There's even a book (you can probably find at you local bookstore), filled with photos and sheet music, and histories of all the players, the birth and death of the genre, it's so detailed and elaborate, so much so it almost seems impossible that someone could have created all of this from thin air, if it was made up, it must have been the creator's life's work. Years and years of methodical planning and writing and recording for sure. But either way, it's magical and fascinating, and 'real' or not, the music is truly gorgeous, and the story completely captivating, both intertwined into some sort of time machine, perfectly transporting us to that rain splattered dirt road, the soaring sad sounds of the Funerary violin drifting into the black sky...
Legendary UK noise merchant Gary Mundy (Ramleh, Skullflower, Broken Flag collective) returns with Kleistwahr, a project that fits nicely within the legacy of a man known for harsh electronic noise. While we struggled to find any detailed information on Kleistwahr, we can say that anyone digging Skullflower's more recent forays into blown out guitar skree (and we know there are plenty of you out there) will find much to love here. The four songs making up The Return contain all the air raid siren guitars and eardrum pulverizing feedback we have come to love, but things take a surprisingly beautiful turn on side two, with warm droney keyboards weaving a haunting melody that perfectly compliments the album cover, a stark photocopied image of a building foundation sitting exposed in the snow surrounded by dead trees. Though the songs are instrumental, Mundy is able to perfectly convey a feeling of despondency and sadness, genuine emotions that definitely set Kleistwahr apart from the multitudes of floorcore outfits, all hunkered over effects pedals making lots of noise, but very little of it as compelling and emotionally charged as this.
Part of Noiseville's awesome Outer Bounds Of Sound series, with each lp limited to a one time pressing of 300. We received 20, so you know what that means...
Kleistwahr is the lesser known project of Gary Mundy, probably better known for his long running industrial/noise/psych project Ramleh, and probably even better known for his occasional membership in Skullflower. Kleistwahr began life with a couple early tape release, and has been active sporadically over the last few decades, this however, is in fact new music from Mundy, and is a sonic stunner, much like past missives, a massive sprawl of psychedelic power electronics and dense distorted industrial-drone atmospheres, blown out and harrowingly heavy, the first few seconds are misleading in a way, a warm hazy melodic swirl that had us thinking Mundy might be going soft, but fear not, soon that hushed shimmer is swallowed whole by a blizzard of gristled guitar, distorted samples, disembodied voices, grinding textures, a dizzying assemblage of noise drenched sound that like much of this stuff, to the casual listener, might just sound like noise. And let's not kid ourselves, noise it is, but Mundy is surprisingly deft at sculpting these sheets of furious guitarnoise into something strangely lovely. A roiling blackbuzz howl on the surface, but beneath, all manner of murky melodies, and fractured chordal drift, even the bellowed, echo drenched vocals contribute to transforming white/grey/pink/black noise into something more.
And it's not all speaker melting crush, this 39 minute songsuite, seven tracks fused into a single epic, moves through all sorts of sonic permutations, even returning to that opening shimmer, at about 11 minutes in, sounding like the Caretaker by way of Skullflower, a warm, undulating chordal thrum barraged by a cacophony of clatter and crunch. From there, the sound blossoms into prismatic flurries of crumbling distortion, before coalescing into a sort of burnished kosmische ur-drone, pulsing and pulsating, drifting atop a bed of gnarled buzzing blur, and pocked with strange rhythmic throbs, but again, it's all somehow prismatic and glistening and glimmering, even the final movement which finds everything slipping into keening sheets of high end and crooned distort-vox buried beneath, the sound is shimmery and mesmerizing, very reminiscent of the prettiest moments from Our Love Will Destroy The World, a bleary, smeared soft-noise that manages to be dense and completely crushing, while somehow washed out, ethereal and totally transcendent.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! In cool Broken Flag style packaging.
Yeah, the project name and the record's title are gratuitously faux-German in their neologisms alluding to the imagined litanies broadcast from the Temple Of Psychick Youth; but fortunately, the content of Negativ Psykotelepathi Surveillanz transcends whatever lame archetype you might have toward the industrial culture and dials in picture perfect recapitulation of the psychically disturbed electronics of SPK, Factrix, Premature Ejaculation, and the Death Factory facets from Throbbing Gristle. Klinikal Skum is one of the monikers for bad-vibe monger Ryan Oppermann, whose other numerous projects run the gamut of the power electronics / black noise / death industrial spectrum. Slow plodding rhythms, static electricity charges, hammered metal bashing stomps, divebombing/doppler-effected/soul-draining tonal declensions and plenty of Videodrome brain drilling electronic sequences that point to septic surgeries, botched gravedigging excursions, and the psychic uncleanliness of derelict mental wards. Scary as shit and totally worth it. Limited to 100 copies on the seminal noise / electronic label Chondritic.
From the same label that brought us the old school electro synth lo-fi party jams of the oddly monickered Oxykitten, comes this, the latest from PDX via SF audio alchemist Garth Klippert, who while living in SF and working as a cab driver, spent his free time creating dreamy abstract melodic soundscapes, cobbled together from field recordings, twangy guitars, electric pianos, assorted homemade instruments and toys, as well as all manner of junk (plastic guns, saw blades, pot lids, shoes, etc). These disparate elements are smeared and blurred into warm, fluid, layered sonic drifts, from woozy piano driven sunshiney kraut shimmer, to twang flecked Negativland-esque vocal collages, to slow burning skeletal blues wrapped around mysterious voices and fields of click and chitter, to windswept expanses of almost Eastern sounding sort-of-ragas, rife with sped up voices, croaking frogs, muted murky looped and lo-fi rhythms, everything very hazy, a little haunting, cinematic and subtly psychedelic. Cool stuff for sure.
Pressed on bright yellow tapes, housed in full color sleeves, LIMITED to 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and comes with a digital download.
The French ensemble Klood was responsible for one of the best releases from the Drone Records series of limited edition seven inches, coming very close to sounding like a lost track of melancholic guitar ambience by Maeror Tri. "P4.2: A Collection of Drones" is much grittier and more distorted than the rather lilting sound of that aforementioned single, but does live up to its
A second generation krautrock anomaly created in 1985, Home-Taping is Killing Music is the first and only collaborative lp by Pyrolator (Ata Tak label operative and member of Der Plan) and tape loop tinkerer Arnd Kai Klosowski, now reissued by the always reliable German electronic resurrectionists Bureau B. Using the then burgeoning technology of sampling, this duo created raw sound experiments and whimsical almost Dada-ish musical forms and rhythms, spliced from prerecorded tapes. Not sure if it's a response or parallel to what hip-hop producers like Double Dee and Steinski were doing, but it seems like a precursor to the sample-based dance tracks groups like Colourbox and M.A.R.R.S would mine heavily just a couple of years after this. The Pyrolator / Klosowski material, though, is far weirder, as anyone familiar with Der Plan would expect! Sometimes sounding like the tropical groove of Can's Flow Motion mixed with bits of Penguin Cafe Orchestra colonial exotica and Holger Czukay style song-craft, this may be too odd of a record for the casual listener. But for those who dig the strange and eccentric with the technically innovative, a very cool and unique release. (FYI, the vinyl version includes the cd with it.)
Fifty three year old Guy Klucsevek is one of the world's foremost accordionists who consistently pushes outward the conventional notions of what an accordion must sound like. Described as possessing "poker-faced wit", his many recordings invite listeners to take delight in the many forms of music which can benefit from accordion intrumentation. This newest record features collaborations with or tributes to composers Klucsevek admires, including Burt Bacharach (covering a rare song Bacharach wrote for a B-horror film which he first heard on a tape John Zorn made for him), the esteemed Japanese composer Somei Satoh, and Lars Hollmer of AQ-beloved cult Swedish folk-prog band Samla Mammas Manna. Ranges from intense drones to fucked-up polka to some of the fastest most impressive fingers-flying-over-the-keyboard arpeggiated notes that I didn't even know were possible on the accordion! Klucsevek is one of a kind.
After a whole slew of recent releases, this is the first new record in a while from Mr. Kneale presented under his given name. Not sure what makes this a Campbell Kneale record and not a Birchville Cat Motel record, but who cares, fans of either will dig this heavily. Seems like Kneale's focus lately has been almost exclusively on his black sludge doom project Black Boned Angel, and we're not complaining, we definitely can't get enough of that stuff. But Kneale has quite a deft hand when it comes to free ambient drone as well, and oddly enough we can't seem to get enough of that stuff either. So here we have the new Kneale record, which could have just as easily been a Birchville record, based on the sounds within, and is shot through with plenty of Black Boned Angel-isms, delicate drones are thicker, heavier, more dense and volatile, sludge metal blissed out into expansive stretches of shimmer and swirl. Four lengthy tracks, each a barely moving slab of molten sonic grrrrwwwwrrrrrrrrvvvvvmmmmmm. Layers atop layers, delicate melodies buried beneath, rumbling churning slow shifting sound, keening high end skree all tangled up with subsonic reverberations, the whole thing a slow moving vibrational flow, a massive abstract multiphonic spaced out downtuned tranced our Ur-drone.
It's been a while since we heard from our noisy pal Campbell Kneale. When we last checked in, he had retired the Birchville Cat moniker, and had rechristened himself Our Love Will Destroy The World, but then after a Birchville-worthy torrent of releases with OLWDTW, sort of just disappeared for a bit.
So we were super excited to get a missive from the man, informing us of a new release, the first on his Don't Fuck With Magic imprint in ages, and so ordered a bunch, and are one of the only (if not the only) places in the US carrying it. We were of course curious what this latest name change meant, going back to his given name, we made a guess, but we were wrong. We had sort of expected something pretty and tranquil, but instead, Kneale as Kneale explodes right out of the gate with a face melting, ear shredding barrage of caustic Japanoise style crunch, cascades of grinding high end, and swirling shards of jagged skree. As always, Kneale is a master noisemaker, so while a glancing listen reveals and army of blends and vacuum cleaners set to stun, dig deeper, and beneath the surface, lurk all manner of moaning low need melodies, deftly stylized textures, but that said if your tolerance for noise is low, this might be a bit much for you. The first track does go through multiple permutations, drifting through a field of shrieking feedback, before emerging on the other side as a murky, albeit still crunchy, noisy jumble, before eventually blossoming into a strange psychedelic skree, that sounds like multiple Sunroof! records spinning at once.
The second track flirts with nuance in the first few seconds, but quickly splinters into another furious flurry of white/grey/black/pink noise, more buried voices and sounds, swirls of glitched out grind, and malfunctioning electronics, whipped up into a fervor, and sent spinning in some sort of soul shearing sonic whirlwind, pocked with weird moaning metallic howls, before sputtering out into something a bit more restrained, a lush textured bit of gristly, muted soft noise, a comparatively dreamy comedown to a record that is definitely one of Kneale's fiercest.
Crazy limited as always, and in the usual swank Don't Fuck With Magic packaging, an oversized full color sleeve, adorned with original Kneale artwork.
Another batch of super limited and beautifully packaged cd-r's from Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel) Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label. The finest in underground free noise / drone, culled mostly from New Zealand but all around the world as well. For those of you new to the CpsiP label, imagine classic Siltbreeze (Dead C, etc.) mixed with Jewelled Antler (Thuja, Blithe Sons etc.), dark and deep listening that sometimes verges on all out noise, but more often than not remains subtle experiments in avant drone and abstract sound. And when we say limited we mean LIMITED. Thes babies come in pressings of 30-80, out of which we get a whopping 10 copies!!
A veritable New Zealand noise super group, featuring one member from each: Birchville Cat Motel, Sandoz Lab Technicians, and Flies Inside The Sun, the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts, with three cooks in the kitchen, making barely audible microscopic soundscapes of whir and scrape, skitter and whisper, hum and tinkle. Huge expanses of barely-there sound, vast and wide open, only the occasional tiny bell or reverbed clunk letting you know the action is still on. This is some definite headphone listening.
It must be pretty fun being Campbell Kneale's kids. Not only is he a cool guy, funny, weird taste, he also gathers his offspring together once in a while and records an album!! Man, when we were 7 or 8 years old, I'm not sure we would have even understood what was going on if our Dad asked us to start a band or record an album. But the younger Kneales, Winter, aged 7, and Caspar, aged 9, are old hands at this recording business. In fact this is record number two, for this familial ensemble, rounded out by Campbell, aged 33. The last Kneale-Cubed record, Myriapod, was a chaotic freeforall blast of noise, a wall of sound very reminiscent of Papa Kneale's harsher Birchville albums. But part of that may have been cuz the kids were too young to know better, nothing more fun than making loud noise after all. But it seems Winter and Caspar have matured, both physically and musically, as Majestic Header is a much more refined affair, two lengthy tracks of skittery beated drone, with Winter and Caspar handling most of the instruments: beats, electronics, and percussion, leaving Dad to violin and guitar. The result is pretty cool. Both tracks are long free form drone workouts, a thick layer of fuzz beneath squealing peals of violin skree, while nestled amongst the fuzzy drone and thick whirs, a simple propulsive drum machine pulses along and the whole thing is pelted with strange alien squelches and abstract FX. The second track has an almost-house music thing going on, although it's buried under some Black Boned guitars. Like a techno Total or a heavy metal Neu! or some sort of primitive Birchville remix record. Cool stuff. Can't wait to hear what sort of sonic trouble these boys will get up to in their teens!! We're sure Campbell is bracing himself as well!!
SUPER LIMITED! WE GOT ABOUT 30 COPIES, WHEN THOSE ARE GONE THEY MAY BE GONE FOR GOOD, SO ACT FAST!
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Yet again, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon / Birchville Cat Motel madman Campbelll Kneale risks the wrath of child services by enlisting his offspring, Casper and WInter, in a 30 minute noise drenched free for all. Record number two from the Kneale family, this one is a speaker shredding burst of jagged noise and crumbling distortion. There might be songs and singing and other music type things present, but if they are, the kids have thrown them to the floor and stomped them to bits, then tossed them into the air, a massive swirling cloud of industrial rrroooaaar, like a battle royale between Total, Birchville Cat Motel and Hijokaidan. SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
Another batch of super limited and beautifully packaged cd-r's from Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel) Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label. The finest in underground free noise / drone, culled mostly from New Zealand but all around the world as well. For those of you new to the CpsiP label, imagine classic Siltbreeze (Dead C, etc.) mixed with Jewelled Antler (Thuja, Blithe Sons etc.), dark and deep listening that sometimes verges on all out noise, but more often than not remains subtle experiments in avant drone and abstract sound. And when we say limited we mean LIMITED. Thes babies come in pressings of 30-80, out of which we get a whopping 10 copies!!
This triple K release is definitely a family affair, with the Kneales -- Campbell (age 30), Caspar (age 7) and Winter (aged 4) -- all getting together to make a sweetly innocent racket. Stumbling acoustic guitars, caterwauling violins, chimes and shakers and splattery percussion, distorted guitar fuzz, squiggly synthesizers, squeaking horns and toys, almost new wave keyboard pulses, primitive four on the floor techno beats and all sorts of other business. Sounds like it must have been a blast to make, and thankfully it's just as fun to listen to. Primitive, abstract New Zealand all ages noise rock. Nice.
Knell comes from the same mold that has shaped the work of Jasper TX and Machinefabriek. While it remains to be seen if Knell will take the course of cd-r infinitude as both of the aforementioned artists have, it's clear from this debut recording that Knell (aka Johannes Buff) has the chops to pull off that expressive blur between art-drone soundsmear and elliptical patterns of darkened songwriting broken and stretched into lengthy constructs. Piano and harmonizing echoes set a shadowy stage at the onset of Last Ten Meters which Buff flushes out with unsettling squishes of sound as if aquatic creatures were unduly having their contents squeezed out of their pores. Eventually, a singular detuned guitar strum begins a melancholy dirge which steadily doubles and interweaves into a minor-key crescendo that all together falls somewhere between Larsen's post-rock hypnosis and the molten, subharmonic doom of Corrupted. After one of these smoldering peaks of downer rock riffs burns out in distant washes of distortion, the pools of metallic drone begin to coalesce once again and a fragmented song emerges once again. Yeah, Knell really does conjure the grim yet beautiful atmospheres as found in the best work of Jasper TX and Machinefabriek; hopefully, Buff will continue on with the Knell recordings in same exemplary fashion as his aesthetic contemporaries.
First release we've managed to get from this weirdo from the Northwest, whose sound is a sort of abstract doom / outsider electronica? Or something, kinda tough to describe, but if you can imagine some fucked up hybrid of Wolf Eyes and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer you might be getting close, oh but only if you imagine they sometimes made techno music, which sounds weird, and it is, but it a good way.
After a weird vocal intro, the sound is all detuned bass warble, thick rumbling dronemusic, wreathed in buzzing and flecked with little mysterious sonic events, sorta creepy and abstract and spaced out, that is until 'the beat' comes in, a simple pulse, over a bed of gurgled vocals and what sounds like bleating sheep, or maybe quacking ducks, all of which is soon overwhelmed by sheets of staticky noise, and super processed demonic vokills. And that's just the beginning, soon the sound blossoms into a super distorted down tuned creep, a noisy industrial doom death march, that quickly transforms into another weird stretch of beat driven electro-noise, strange pitch-shifted tones and unsettling vocal mewlings draft atop a bed of undulating buzz, all anchored by that beat. Soon the sound becomes sort of Butthole Surfers-ish, woozy, melty riffage, dirge caveman thump, and processed vocal drawls, lo-fi and again, laced with all kinds of FX and creepy voices. Finally, things finish off with a 10 minute epic, that might be the least weird of the bunch, at least at first, all simple spidery guitar melody, moody cello rumbling in the background, which is soon joined by more tweaked and twisted vox, the sound devolving into a churning morass of distant drones, electronic squelches, malfunctioning FX, and just a creepy grim ambience, before exploding again into some sort of pounding industrial noise-psych finale, echoey howled vocals, pounding drum machines, all wrapped in the tracks suffocating blackness and fractured prismatic psychedelia.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Latest release from the UK's Aurora Borealis label, responsible for the KTL double lp elsewhere on this list, as well as records from Moss, Ginnungagap, Wolfmangler, Guapo, the Grails, even Crebain!
Knives Ov Resistance are a European ensemble who weave dense soundscapes of blissed out ambience and abstract guitar shimmer, Channeling the spirit of Popol Vuh, Spacemen 3, Godspeed, Jackie O Motherfucker, and other like minded sonic explorationists.
A lush blend of field recordings, glistening guitars, rumbling drones, warbling turntables, all woven into drifting sun dappled sonic tapestries of sound. An ambient post rock drift, that flits and flutters amidst the sounds of children laughing, the lush din of the forest, chittering birds, the sound of leaves and water, a dense and thick backdrop, rife with turntabled fragments of sound, bits of opera, soaring strings, muted squiggles, slowed down ambience, warm whirs, mixed in with simple percussion, everything smeared into fuzzy blurs, all beneath an abstract summery folk, that glimmers and drifts, gradually changing shape and color, texture and timbre. Epic and expansive, yet subtle and simple. Some sort of abstract avant ambient folk perhaps... really really nice.
Fans of the above mentioned bands will definitely dig this, as well as fans of new weird America, modern free folk, and all things Jewelled Antler.
Packaged in a thick vinyl pouch, housed in a cool textured paper sleeve that folds out into a poster.
The Czech artist Milan Knizak began his art career without much success, getting himself thrown out of Pedagogic Uni Prague, Preliminary Art School Prague, and Art Academy Prague in quick succession. But during the mid '60s, Knizak affiliated himself with
Michael Northam and Hitoshi Koko are Kodama, producing a tangle of acoustic drone, active ecological sound art, and vibrantly tactile noise.
It's hard to believe we're on volume 22 of this long running series of DJ mixes from the venerable UK radio station (online and terrestrial) Rinse FM. It might be even harder to believe that of those 22, we've only previously reviewed ONE, the recent Roska installment. Which is crazy, cuz we're all big fans of these mixes, and previous installments have featured a who's who of the modern electronic/garage/dubstep scene, including Skream, Skepta, Plastician and loads more. And while our favorites in the series were definitely heavy on the dubstep, that is after all the genesis of this series, the individual mixes are all over the map, mixing in everything from house music to techno, dub to electro. Obviously when we discovered the new one was curated by Hyperdub label head honcho Kode9, we knew we had to hear it. And we were not disappointed. Just a quick flit through the tracks here, jams by Burial, Kode9 himself, Theo Parrish, The Bug, Rustie, Terror Danjah, and even RP Boo (whose new full length on Planet Mu is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list). So yeah, heavy on the dubstep, and of course plenty of Hyperdub artists, past, present, and we're presuming future, not to mention some seriously rare dubplates and sneak peaks of new up and comers.
It starts off super string with Burial's "Turant", perfectly setting the mood with the murky slo-mo soul, sinister and skittery, but after that, pretty much all bets are off, playful super melodic house music collides with shimmery, prismatic electro pop, which bleeds right into some Kompakt style house-dub, which in turn leads into a killer dubstep groover, with rad sped up soul vocal samples, and a killer bass drop. And that's just the first 10 minutes. It's a DJ set after all, so similar sonics come in clumps, our favorite, of course are the Hyperdubby dubstep stretches, like the one that starts with Jam City's "Her", a dizzyingly stuttery hip hop dubstep mash up, which mutates into Kode9's ominous "Uh", or later when Faze Miyake weaves strange theremin like melodies, and what sounds like barking dogs into a sultry sprawl of dubbed out skitter and stutter, which blossoms into Cashmere Cat's weirdly Eastern synth heavy lurching stutter-groove "Aurora", big beats, and weird chooped vocals, like a revved up Burial sort of, but definitely wanna here more from him (her? them?).
Still later, we're treated to one of the best songs we've heard from Rustie, sick ribcage rattling bass, distorted and laced with siren like high end squiggles, a crunked out beat, and some epic almost M83 sounding flourishes. That launches a killer dubstep stretch, with Terror Danjah, S-type and Kode9 offering up variations of that low slung dubbed out groove we can't seem to get enough of.
The Bug pops up too with some of that supercharged dubbed out dancehall, and then some wildly funky and maddeningly repetitive footwork from RP Boo, a strangely perfect fit with some of the other dubstep jams here.
The last ten minutes or so is mostly DJ Rashad and friends, who spin a whirling web of revved up garage, stuttery techno-house breakdowns, sliced and diced vocals, recontextualized into twisted melodies, and stuttering free form vocal freakouts, draped over and wrapped around chaotic rhythmic skitter, swirling soft focus synth pads, some tracks slow burn electro-soul, some laced with little blurts of jungle, others stretched out into some seriously hypnotic dancefloor mesmer.
Bunch of killer stuff on this installment we'd never heard (or even heard of) before, here's hoping more of that stuff will be coming out on Hyperdub in the near future...
We first discovered Kohn, aka Jurgen DeBlonde, via his contribution to the Western Vinyl 'Portrait' series, in which each artist was to pick an individual, write songs about said individual, and provide a drawing for the cover. Kohn picked Bruce Willis, so we could hardly resist when we saw this weird record in the racks with this scrawled portrait of BW on the cover. We were then pleasantly surprised to discover that there was more to the record that the concept/cover, and in fact, it was a gorgeous disc of glitched out folkiness and droney melodic abstractions, trippy loops and blurred collaged soundscapes, it was so good that we went searching for every release we could find.
And not soon after, this showed up, the latest from Kohn, an lp on Kraak and one that finds him exploring the concept, as the title suggests, of random patterns, recorded with just an organ, and with minimal edits, improvised variations on simple random patterns, designed to be listened to, again according to the liner notes, while doing something else, reading, meditating, driving, and it does sound perfect for that. Obviously influenced by Reich, Riley, Glass and the like, this is moody hypnotic, almost new age sounding kosmische mesmer, four long tracks, that over the course of each, gradually shift and transform, from murky looped churn, to glistening melodic shimmer, and from lush chordal thrum, to percolating sci-fi arpeggiations, that sound very cosmic and soundtracky, the sort of stuff that should definitely appeal to everyone into the current crop of retro futurism, Zombi, Umberto, Majeure, Blizaro, etc, although this is definitely more minimal, and in places definitely has a Zomes vibe, a similar sort of spaced out zoner vibe, perfect drift off, zone out, late night soundtrack for sure.
Housed in a super swank four color silkscreened fold over jacket, with a printed insert with liner notes detailing the motives behind the music, and Kohn's ideas and intentions in creating these random patterns.
More from this avant-garde Japanese vocalist.
Japanese avant-vocalist Koichi and Swiss voice/tape experimentalist Bruhin team up on an array of home-built electric jaw harps! Extended techniques (based on Tuvan throat-singing) abound, the two harpists creating an amazing & amusing symphony of some very bizarre, unlikely sounds. Plus, it's practically three records in one, as Koichi is heard in one speaker and Bruhin in the other--so you can listen in stereo or have the option to hear each man individually!
Occasionally working in the past as Spiracle, Hitoshi Kojo presents this thoroughly amazing piece of ancient-sounding drone music. No doubt, Kojo's work will be compared to that of the classic Organum sound; but considering that very few have even come close to replicating the power and mystery of such classic Organum recordings as Ikon or Horii, such parallels should be taken as the highest praise. Kojo claims that all of the sounds originated from various found objects. He doesn't specify beyond that, but all of the objects must be metal in origin, probably large pieces of sheet metal, or flexible rods of steel, or long pieces of wire, or something equally resonant and with a dynamic timbral quality. Each of these objects is bowed in order to coax a controlled dissonance of metallic screeches, protracted tonal bellows, and various acoustic drones. The two compositions are simple in their moderate pacing of the ebb and flow between all of these sounds, not too slow... but certainly not too fast. Through these recordings, Kojo offers very little in the way of digital treatments or effects of any nature. Just a terse edit of one layer here, or a reversing of a metallic gong decay there. The results are a timeless set of interlocking metallic rasps and gasping drones that rivals what Harry Bertoia, Taj Mahal Travellers, LaMonte Young, and of course Organum had done so impeccably in the past. Beautiful, mysterious, and very highly recommended!
More breathtaking cosmic music from the Japanese artist Hitoshi Kojo, whose densely layered constructions once found company with the brutal, malcontent sounds of Maurizio Bianchi. Where that collaboration was suitably apocalyptic and bleak, this solo album (made just six year later) is remarkably light and airy. Such a move could easily be anticipated through the waking dreamscape of the stratospheric Ananta 2cd under his moniker Spiracle as well as the freak-folk clatter of his ensemble Juppala Kaapio. Like all of Kojo's work, High Tide Mirror holds to a single vision, pulling facets and variations from his stratified sounds. So the fundamental drones and tactile happenings all still occupy a strong presence in his compositional agenda, but the sources for all of his sounds are far more bright. So when he gets a little more feral with a droning set for chord organ and Jew's harp on "Seminal Weavers", he intertwines the holy minimalist drive for overtones and rich harmonics with rapturous psychedelic romps akin to Kojo frolicking through the woods with bacchanalian glee. Elsewhere, you'll find plenty of allusions to Terry Riley trills on analogue electronics and the swirling vocal intonations of Pandit Pran Nath amidst Kojo's slippery phasing electronics and liquid shimmer. He saves his best work for last with the sunrise of a title track that gasps with blurry tones stretched from a shakuhachi and layered on ever blossoming ambient radiance. Lovely hand packaging and limited to 200 copies!
This brilliant, super-limited cassette from Hitoshi Kojo collects various pieces that the Japanese psychedelic-drone-noise artist recorded on cassette back in the early to mid '90s, making the media especially suitable to the material. While Kojo's recent output as Juppala Kaapio and Spiracle has embodied a shamanistic ritualism through freak-folk instrumentation and cracked-drone expressionism, his earliest work was more of a feral beast with full-spectrum clattering of acoustic sounds and ecstatic noise shimmer. The six tracks densely pack the 45 minute cassette, with slippery references between the hallowed percussive dronescaping of Angus MacLise and the bloodcurdling wash of Matthew Bower's Sunroof! There are definitely glimpses of the psychedelic density that Kojo later refined through his luminous Juppala Kaapio recordings, but we would never decry the howling skree, ghostly harmonics, and vertiginous grit that sprawl across Lux Ova. Comes housed in a handsomely die-cut O-card.
Gorgeously packaged, gorgeous dronemusik!
Hitoshi Kojo is a Japanese sound artist and drone-centric expressionist who has recorded in the past under the moniker Spiracle and performs in the jubilantly psychedelic but still quite droned-out project Juupala Kaapio. Omnimoment is a collection of edits from Kojo's sound installations and site-specific work dating from 2006 - 2009, all of which extract and manipulate elemental forces of wind, fire, water, metal, wood, sand, etc. into blossoming thrums of sublime minimalism which run parallel to the works of Andrew Chalk, Loren Chasse, and John Grzinich. "Shiranui" was originally conceived at the MoKS residency program in Estonia, sourced mostly from the blades of an abandoned Soviet turbine left inexplicably out in the countryside. Kojo extracts pensive, metallic overtones from those blades that sound more like an ancient gong than some hulking industrial machine; and he amasses those sounds into semi-melodic phrases and ritualized acoustic dronings that Organum mastered in the mid-'80s. "Sea Migration" is an excerpt from an installation involving a feedback system and a bunch PVC pipes that hung from the top window of Germanic castle, looking sort of like a weird plastic octopus playing the part of Rapunzel. Those pipes captured the sound of the wind and the various frequencies of that feedback system creating a tactile, generative composition of pure tones and haptic events not too far from those far more composed works from Andrew Chalk's once prolific project Ora. The last three tracks demonstrate Kojo's ongoing strategies involving found objects through a process which he calls 'molecular communication' where extended vibrations and dense beds of accreted drone broadcast outward from Kojo's scraped metals, clinked glass, and rubbed sand. There's definitely some type of alchemy at work in Kojo's sound design, with mysterious energies transforming the commonplace into something sublime, otherworldly, or divine.
This is the limited art-edition of Omnimoment, which comes in a thick cardstock folio with a 24-page book and die-cut artwork. Certainly on par with what Faraway Press has done in their packaging department! Limited to just 88 copies! We most likely won't be able to restock the limited version, but will have the standard version soon.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The first in what seems to be a very promising series from the already exceptional Noton label. Packaged in an odd slimline case looking more like something to put birth control pills in rather than a CD, this series will consist of limited edition releases from twelve of minimalists, each composing 20 minutes of music for the end of the millenium. In theory, all of these will be released before this deadline...
Komet's contribution is one of the best examples of 'bleep blip minimalism' we've encountered in a while. While barely audible on one level, it is exquisitely dynamic...
Audio.NL was an offshoot of the stalwart avant-garde label Korm Plastics, which released an impressive catalogue of adventurously minimalistic techno from 1998 - 2007 from the likes of Taylor Deupree, Motor, Goem, Tomas Jirku, and Komet. The label was at the forefront of the blossoming 'clicks + cuts' aesthetic of jittery electronica built almost one electron at a time; and that reputation was solidified through the two singles that Komet produced for the label. Komet, of course, is the work of Frank Bretschneider, one of the principals behind the seminal label Raster-Noton. While he's probably not as well known as his partner Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), Bretschneider has a similar knack for injecting the blip and bleep with as much of a slippery grooviness as one could muster from sine-tone pulses and phase patterns. This cd compiles all of the material that Bretschneider produced for Audio.NL, including those two singles and a compilation track. Everything has been out of print for years, so to have it all in one place makes a considerable amount of sense. On these 9 tracks, Bretschneider laces subtle glitchiness upon his reductive techno rhythms - little more than a drum machine high-hat and kick gliding at a metronomic pace. That digital errata is bent and twisted through delay patterns, flanging metallic gleams, EQ-fluctuation, and time suspension tricks, giving each of the tracks an unmistakable, if muted slinkiness that keeps the tracks from becoming dehumanized. Sterile, this may be; but Bretschneider makes all of the surgical tools dance on the operating table.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Full length release from Raster-Noton head, and Signal collaborator Frank Bretschneider. Still working from a palette of aseptic beeps and clicks, but composing pieces that are surprizingly catchy in an utterly minimal way. Without stepping into the dubby, and almost (I said "almost") organic ballpark of Stefan Betke (Pole) and steering clear of the borderline housey territory of Thomas Brinkmann, Bretschneider none the less harkens the works of both in his own way. The tracks on this disk even have a slowly evolving quality, starting with very minimal pulse beats and short tones (typical of Raster-Noton) and developing to the point where, by the time you reach the end of the disk, you convince yourself you're hearing pop songs and hooks. Bretschneider has the knack of making the sterile swing.
Three new tapes from Black Horizons, all of them mysterious, and mysteriously wonderful, this one from a German married couple who call themselves Kommissar Hjuler Und Mama Baer, and the label drops a Fluxus comparison, and we'd be hard pressed to disagree, a strange assemblage of lilting melodies, abstract lo-fi collages, field recordings, the opening track, sounds a bit like someone humming to themselves as they do things around the apartment, but somehow the sounds are blurred and abstract, and are transformed into some strange otherworldly mantra, the label description goes on at great length about the roots of this project/recording, much of which we won't even pretend to understand, but these were dropped off around Halloween, and we were told by label head honcho James that these were all very Halloween worthy, this one especially, in that it's sort of bizarre and subtly terrifying, like the soundtrack to some nightmarish dream sequence, warped and warbly, woozy melodies, fragmented pop songs, industrial creak and whir, hushed whispering, panicked vocalizations, lots of distortion, tape hiss, feedback, screaming, speaking in German, the mind conjures up some seriously chilling imagery to accompany these strange and alien sounds. Woah.
Gorgeous packaging too, purple and gold offset printing on green vellum, held together by a riveted obi strip, all housed in a green case. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Fans of the late great Japanese free improv guitar master Masayuki Takayanagi take note of this release. Guitarist Kondo and his group pay tribute with a version of Takayangi's gorgeous, gradually projected "Herdsman's Pipe Of Spain". And the rest of this is quite in keeping with the spirit of Takayangi's pioneering New Directions Unit. And while therefore pretty "out" sounding, it's also quite a bit different from some of the more extreme offerings we've heard from Kondo's other band, the electronics n' computers plus free jazz noisemaking ensemble Exias-J, known for their droning and distorted Borbetomagus-like jams. Here things are often calmer and more, dare we say, melodic. Though this is still pretty darn avant-garde. It opens with a solo guitar piece, finding Kondo playing a "ten-string gut guitar", which is an impressively large, plank-like instrument. Later on, he's accompanied by a group featuring flute, percussion and contrabass.
And this is called Structures for a reason. Even though there's a large improvisational element to Kondo's music (with certain tracks designated as such) he's really into experimenting with improvisations within particularly strict and unusual theoretical structures. Or at least that's the idea we get from what we've read about it, and certainly the very meticulous music here, full of moody pink-plonk, rumble-fumble, and scritch-scrape, seems like it could creatively stem from such complex, intellectualized musical methodologies...
Currently, Thomas Koner has been stepping outside of the heroin house persona that absorbed his work within Porter Ricks as the defining force for the Chain Reaction sound. Complementing his recent low-end frequency collaborations with Asmus Teitchens as Kontakt Der Junglinge, Thomas Koner's "Daikan" is a return to the isolationist aesthetics that were indicative of his earliest work (such as "Teimo" and the aptly titled "Permafrost"). Koner opens the album by breaking a pristini, black silence with deep bass rumbles that ominously plod, as if made by some Promethean creature from a Lovecraft horror story. Amidst these distant pulses (which resemble a 909 kick slowed way the hell down), cold washes of densely layered synthethic drones intrude into the audible realm, only to pass back into silence, but with an altered acoustic teleology, sounding sort of like the doppler effect. These fluctuations in and out of silence build up to a rather subtle climax in which Koner introduces a very simple descending three note melody composed out of those same synthetic drones. As simple a compositional technique, this melody, which only appears twice throughout the 54 minutes, is incredibly dramatic. For all of the metaphors and allusions that Koner implies in this work, it is a little odd that he would claim that it "will create a presence of sounds which do not refer to anything, and not only allow, but stimulates a complete awareness, free of dramatized illusion." While he's obviously intended something other than his end results, "Daikan" is a breathtaking vision into an existential void, just as powerful as anything Lustmord or Main has created in the realms of dark acoustic soundscapes. Very nice indeed!
My goodness. The arrival of a Thomas Koner recording has become an incredibly rare event, with the 2003 Zyklop album being the last album he released outside of his busy schedule traveling the world as a video/installation artist. La Barca parallels his globetrotting, as a travelogue presented through the glacial hush of his frozen ambient productions. Each of the tracks designates a GPS coordinate of a particular location, with ghostly remnants of human voices echoing in deep reverb amidst his signature darkened backdrops and slow-motion melodic phrasing. Many of the voices seem to be taken from the announcements from train stations, airports, and other non-placed environments that easily detach from the psychogeographic details of those specific places he designates in those coordinates. So, as much as this album is a travel narrative through various places, Koner intentionally presents the sonic artifacts as connected and unifying rather than endemic and localized. It's a feeling a profound melancholy and detachment that Koner succeeds in embedding into these pieces.
The cd of La Barca went out of print before anybody really had the opportunity to get a hold of it; and that will definitely be the fate of the 2lp version of the album, which features 4 extra tracks not on the cd, making up the entirely of Side D!!
Novaya Zemlya is a grand statement. But then again, Thomas Koner doesn't operate in any scale other than monumental. All of his albums (barring the somewhat lackluster La Barca from 2003) speak through the gasping drones of a bleak existentialism. For Koner, the human condition is mirrored in the environment around us, especially those rugged, barren locales at the poles, with his isolationist smears of grey sounds alluding to water, ice, permafrost, wind, radiation, and vast empty spaces above the Arctic Circle. The environmental site for this album is a suitably inhospitable Russian archipelago jutting far out into the Arctic Ocean toward the North Pole. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet Union used Novaya Zemlya as a nuclear test site, dropping the Tsar Bomba in 1961 on the landmass, which was permanently scarred by the largest atomic detonation in the history of the world. The thin layer of nuclear fallout which has buried itself in the frozen tundra of Novaya Zemlya commingles with radioactive isotopes from poorly managed storage facilities, sunken reactors, and scuttled submarines.
Koner describes this landscape through its hazardous potential, which is so much worse than the current situation. With global warming, the methane gas spewed from a melted permafrost will lift all of that radioactive material into the atmosphere and send that along the prevailing winds across western Russian over Scandinavia and into continental Europe. Perhaps, a greater catastrophe than Chernobyl. In speaking to that potential, Koner manifests pockets of near silence throughout the album with his signature tectonic rumblings and stealth-bomber frequencies gliding beyond the event horizon into the realm of the audible. Darkened crumblings of earthen material pocks the beginning of the first in a trilogy of tracks, sounding almost like slabs of ice thunderously collapsing into the sea. Drones swell and collapse into pools of resonant emptiness, broken on the second track by a disembodied shortwave radio transmission of garbled voices. The album returns to those cold, contemplative sounds until the end of the album draws near, when Koner introduces a few elegant, melodic plucks from what might be a harp. For all of the foreboding that looms throughout, the end is almost hopeful that humanity might just sort out this global warming puzzle. But then again, we might not; and then, we're fucked.
An easy contender for 2012's album of the year.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Thomas Koner's debut album Nunatak Gongamur was a record that quietly emerged on the Dutch label Barooni in 1990. With works from Nurse With Wound, Charlemagne Palestine, Roland Kayn, and Christoph Heemann also released by that same imprint, Koner's debut had some very good neighbors trafficking in a somewhat similar post-industrial murk and bleak minimalism. Unfortunately, the label went out of business after a ten year run, rendering many of those amazing records impossible to find. Two of Koner's other albums on Barooni - Teimo and Permafrost - were reissued on Mille Plateaux in 1997, only to suffer the same fate, when that company dissolved. In 2010, Type Records enters the picture and reissues Nunatak (now without the Gongamur) on vinyl, hopefully ushering in eventual reissues of all of Koner's early out of print material.
The German isolationist Koner has always been known for his dark, haunting ambient music which further froze the already chilly strategies that Brian Eno set forth on his seminal album On Land. Almost all of Koner's recordings (at least his solo recordings), speak to the tundra of the Northern environs, with a lot of allusions to the expanses of Greenland in particular. Nuuk was the name of one Koner record, which happens to the capital and largest city of that frigid island; and Nunatak is an Inuit word describing any rocky outcropping not covered in snow. And of course, Koner excels in the producing of cold cold music. There is a considerable difference between this album and the rest of his catalogue, as Nunatak is an electro-acoustic album entirely sourced from huge gongs. His other records definitely obliterated the source material (some of which was cited as being the sound channel on blank 16mm film stock) into deep space shadow and blackened noise. Here on Nunatak, Koner leaves the resonance of his metal gongs alone, occasionally catching them in languid loops but always focusing on vast deep rumbling overtones and the vast subharmonic frequencies. Given the rasping textures from the gongs, this one is less the all-consuming isolationism and more of an adventurous dronescrape as if extracted from the hull of a cargo ship. As with all Type vinyl, this one is strictly limited...
