We had never heard of Lossmaker, aka video artist / musician Luke Wyatt, but this new 12" on recent Record of The Weekers Nihiti's Lo Bit Landscapes label is pretty fantastic, a strange assemblage of mini-soundscapes, cinematic and lush, textured and layered, the vibe sort of mellow and melancholic, a little Boards Of Canada for sure, but way more twisted and experimental. The opener is a brief bit of crackle wreathed chamber folk, sort of old timey, but definitely strangely soundtracky, piano and fiddle, swoonsome strings, a little haunting and dreamlike, which leads directly into the sort of Boards Of Canada style minimal electronic groovescapery, minor key melodies, over softly pulsing rhythms, the sound sweeping and darkly epic, while at the same time pensive and personal, lots of strange production happening, but it's all woven into some dreamy dark electronica.
There's more of that hazy, softly psychedelic chamber music, again haunting and cinematic, this time laced with strange electronic glitches and mysterious pulsations, a dreamy, melancholy coda to the first side.
The flipside begins with a brief bit of backwards melodic swirl, dreamy and super psychedelic, super hypnotic, sorta wish it was more than an intro. That leads directly into another stretch of minimal moody electronic skitter, this time, laced with acoustic instruments, some guitar strum here and there, but also some ominous synth swells, some robotic squelches, some cool super distorted melodies, all warped and warbly, the song epic and intense, getting more and more psychedelic and intense, but remaining warm and woozy and dreamlike.
This is somehow the first record by The Lost Domain we've listed, even though we've been digging their music for a while now. You may have heard some Lost Domain on the killer Gold Leaf Branches compilation a while back, and this is more of the same, long expanses of non-ambient ambience. Delicate layers of raga like buzz, gentle distant drones and lots and lots of space. This sounds like some sort of alien temple music. You can imagine some strange structure on a rocky outcropping on some distant planet, inside mysterious hooded figures kneel in prayer, a gorgeous spacious meditative drone drifting like insence smoke through the temple. This is so lovely and thick with strange sonic subtleties. Music for fading into sleep, or slowly emerging from a dream world. Definitely the perfect music to lull you into a trancelike state and allow your soul to come loose from your body and drift off into other dimensions. So nice.
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Caves is the latest sonic ritual from this mysterious Greek horde whose sounds is a blackened doomdrone, that seems to have more in common with the strangely hypnotic solo guitar psychedelia of aQ faves Blackwolfgoat that any of the more typical black/doom metal outfits we've reviewed in the past. No drummer, we can only assume LC is a one man band, and his M.O. is the sort of thing we love. A sort of post SUNNO))) sort of doomdronedirge, unfurling a churning slo-mo riff, and then looping it, over and over and over, a mesmerizingly cyclical core, around which various other sounds are arranged, blurred streaks of rumbling buzz, haunting chantlike vocals, clouds of FX drenched chordal whir, streaks of high end, buried melodies, bits of murk other sonic detritus, the result is indeed very ritualistic, record opener "�To Witness Under The Stars" spends a good four minutes chugging away, before the riff drops out, leaving just a strange swirl of overlapping voices, very liturgical, wreathed in crackle and hiss, before a new riff takes over, this one more brittle, wrapped in feedback, and more distinctly metal, but still essentially a slow motion bit of doom-ed riffery, one that seems to grow more downtuned as the surrounding sounds grow more horrific and blackened.
And so it goes, "Dawn Of A Dead Sun" follows a similar pattern, but wraps it's droned out feedback soaked riff in banshee wails and blackened vokills, and as the track progresses, it seems to grow more psychedelic, more raga like, inspiring a sort of trance state, a gloriously droned out blackriff ritual that is utterly entrancing. "Secret Entities" is the most 'rock' of the bunch, sounding like it might explode into proper song form at any time, but instead the chords ring out into the ether, the melodies fading into blackness, while "From The Depths" wraps the core riff in a weirdly processed almost slappy synth sound, which at first sounds odd, but soon more effects join the fray, and it becomes a strangely heady hypnotic crawl, and finally "Plutonian Funeral", finishes things off with the creepiest and most minimal sprawl of the bunch, layering a sort of creepy carnivalesque synth, beneath an oozing layer of crumbling low end, peppered with weird reverbed twang, and wrapped in distant melodic shimmers, as well as the occasional hellish shriek, a dark, occultic coda for sure.
Gorgeous haunting heaviness, that just might appeal to fans of black psychedelia and abstract guitardrones more than metalheads...
With an avant-metal / metalcore membership of superstar proportions with Stephen O'Malley (Sunn 0))), Burning Witch, Teeth Of The Lion Rule The Divine, Khanate, etc.), James Plotkin (Old, Atomsmasher / Phantomsmasher, Khanate, etc.), and Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, HydraHead Records, etc.), the Lotus Eaters locate themselves quite far away from the archetypes of metal. Actually, their sound is more of re-contextualization of remnants from the disintegration of metal into fragments of ominous spectres of atmosphere, distant orchestrations of acousmatic sound, and slivers of guitar drones. With very spartan arrangements, the Lotus Eater's first CD (after a couple of super limited vinyl only releases) invokes the archaic ritualist behavior, gnostic alchemical symbolism, and dark ambient transgressions of the post-industrial work from Troum, Cranioclast, and even Coil's "How To Destroy Angels" album. However, throughout the suitably nightmarish activities, the trio of guitarists reveal very simple two or three note melodies; and on more than one occasion, "Mind Control For Infants" loosens its iron fisted grip on a dark atmospheres, exploring some pristine, glistening bell tones, rich acoustic guitar fingerpicking, and gossamer threads of feedback. This album makes for wonderful late-night listening, and is certainly recommended!
As if these guys weren't busy enough with their 'day jobs',�Stephen O'Malley (Khanate, SUNNO))), Burning Witch, KTL, Thorr's Hammer),�James Plotkin (Atomsmasher, Phantomsmasher, Khanate, OLD, Flux, Romance) and�Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, House of Low Culture) still somehow managed to find time to get together and do something a little less... heavy, or sludgy, or crushing, or even drone-y for that matter.�
Wurmwulv is the latest chunk of ambient drift, minimal clatter, and abstract soundscaping from the trio known as Lotus Eaters. Three looooong songs, 50 minutes of strange drifting sound.�
The opening track is a slowed down pipe fight. A warped wander through a sea of chimes and bells, of resonant metal and shimmering metallic drones. Avarus, Anaksimandros, have got nothing on these guys. Ominous and dark, but strangely melodic. From delicate tinkling to dense metal on metal pound, single notes fluttering in space, to flurries of clang and clatter, all the while, way in the background, a deep swirling tidal low end shifts and shimmers.�
The second track is brief, 5 minutes of high end drift, strange electronic interference, gristly rumbles and hissy whirs, while beneath it all, machines creak and groan, mysterious objects scrape and rattle until near the end, the track is suddenly overtaken by a lush wall of warm guitar whorl.
The final track, another lengthy exploration, is an effects laden trawl through a world of constantly shifting low end. Nearly static, layers of rumble and whir, gently and almost imperceptibly shuffling, while over the top, drift tiny alien sonic events and muted squiggles of FX, helicopter like whup-whup-whup's, and faux animal calls, clicks and thumps, all manner of mysterious sound. Eventually, a flurry of high end streaks takes the form of some sort of effervescent symphony, glistening in their own all high end universe, before the low end returns, bringing with it a muted folky drift, a lazy sun dappled slow burning outro...
Gorgeously�packaged in an oversized 6 panel A5 sized digibook, with paintings by Stephen Kasner, layout and design by Aaron Turner. So nice.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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With an album on the horizon from Neurot Records, the Lotus Eaters are bound to have an interesting future. This is the psychoacoustic drone project for several well-known metalcore artists (James Plotkin, Stephen O'Malley, and Aaron Turner) offering two tracks of Organum-like events with scraping metals, encroaching drones, and acoustic guitar finger picking. Destined to be the most sought after Drone single, and we've only got a few copies left. Limited to 250 copies and pressed on white vinyl, with an elaborate design from O'Malley.
We were pretty much sold before we'd even heard a single note from the bizarrely name Lou Champagne System, which is indeed the work of Mr. Lou Champagne, and that 'System' is actually a thing, not just a cool band name appellation, it's some sort of "guitar and hookup" invented by Lou himself which "allows him to play guitar and sound like a whole band with no tapes!" There's a picture of him on the cover too, skinny mustache, and skinny Cylon style new wave shades. Plus it's on Medical Records, who were responsible for another recent Record Of The Week, Novels For The Moons by Axxess. And if you thought that one was weird, this one is gonna blow your mind.
"The Lou Champagne System is a real time guitar synth solo act" the original liner notes go on to explain, who with the help of that aforementioned system, whipped up some of the coolest, weirdest post punk / new wave we've heard in ages. A rare private press lp from Canada, originally released in 1983 on Champagne's own label, this unearthed gem, on first listen, elicited a whole range of reactions, ranging from "this is freaking amazing?!" to "what the fuck is this?!", and in most cases it was a little bit of both, cuz while this stuff is pretty weird and a little bit goofy, it's also totally kick ass. And the fact that he played this stuff live using a whole array of pedals and switches and that system. Just check out the opener "Don't Say I'm Here", which takes crunchy almost metallic guitars, swirling analog synths, and primitive skeletal drum machines, and crams it all into some dense, claustrophobic punk wave weirdness. Ranting vocals, hysterical laughter, a bizarre back and forth dialogue between someone called "Fred" and a "Narrator", there's also some rad shredding psychedelic leads. It's the sort of retro weirdness that the current crop of outsider synth wave revivalists are channeling, but nothing compares to the sheer madness/brilliance of the original. "Broken Hearts" is a bit more poppy, the same sonic layout as "Don't Say I'm Here", but for a brief minute it sounds way more commercial like it could have been some obscure eighties hit, but then BAM, the synths get all squiggly, the vocals get even more unhinged, a woozy weirdly psychedelic synth punk freakout that is so fucked and bizarrely brilliant, there's another wild squall of guitar leads, this time sounding like some tangle of malfunctioning electronics.
The other jam here we're obsessing on is the awesomely titled "Propaganda Frustration", with its smoldering slow build synth intro, that explodes into a droned out sprawl of skeletal drum skitter and pulsing synths, and when the song proper kicks in, it's all dark and heavy and propulsive, a sort of Goblin / Carpenter sound transformed into something much more electro-pop, the vocal heavily effected and buried in the mix, a driving late night future groove that sound like those sunglasses on the cover. Then there's "Another Dimension", with a sort of faux synth horn intro, that gives way to some chugging metallic guitars, that almost sounds like Motorhead or something, until those primitive programmed drums come in, then it becomes this weirdly metallic driving synth punk, the vocals over the top and dramatic, you can almost imagine the sort of low budget cable access video that would have accompanied this jam. Oh and did we mention the insane chorus, where the drums go all wobbly and chaotic and sound like they're totally malfunctioning beneath the howled vox? So fucking nuts!
From there on out it doesn't get any less weird, in fact, if anything it continues on its warped trajectory, squiggly synths, skittery stuttery drums, strange synth melodies, the vocals unhinged and maniacal, the songs heavy and punky and fuzzy and synth and totally catchy and baffling bizarre, but we definitely have to mention the awesomely brooding closer, which is quickly becoming our favorite, sounding like some outsider synth dirge version of Blue Oyster Cult's "Veteran Of The Psychic Wars" from the Heavy Metal soundtrack, with it's haunting creep and weird field recorded honking horns and crickets, all beneath super psychedelic swirls of synth and some seriously tripped out gorgeously multi-tracked harmonized vocals, including the way too appropriate lyric "I'm like a man in a fantasy, maybe I should just get stoned..."
Totally and utterly amazing, and baffling, and so obviously absolutely recommended. Total fractured genius outsider post-punk synth wave weirdness that is threatening to become the only thing we want to listen to!
Pressed on white vinyl, LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Includes a 12" x 12" insert with liner notes / lyrics.
Another transmission from the strange sonic universe of UK psychedelic space rock weirdos Gnod, this one from a particular member of the group and his friends, a twisted offshoot of the mothership's sound, we first heard via the Gnod record Presents Dwellings & Druss, and at the time, we had yet to realize, that both Dwellings and Druss were in fact each single members of the group. Which in retrospect is a bit obvious considering how freaked out and UNlike Gnod that record really was. Well Druss returns, this time teamed up with a mysterious Russian duo called Love Cult, and the three of them craft a truly creepy soundscape of drones and psychedelic collages, of twistedly rhythmic anti-grooves, and wild experimental FX drenched noise. Apparently the tracks are split up between the groups, some Druss, some Love Cult, some both, but really you'd be hard pressed to tell, as all the songs bleed into one constantly shifting whole.
Deep rumbles ooze ominously out of the speakers, before a voices is chopped up and layered into a maddeningly looped pulse, wrapped in streaks of hiss and static, peppered with abstract percussive thwacks, eventually coalescing into a sort of abstract, drugged out alien house music maybe? From there the sound darkens and drift even further into the shadows, the vibe distinctly hauntological, fans of Demdike Stare will find much to dig, dense pulsations, synth squelch blurred into chordal thrum, multiple voices whispering ominously, a strange fractured rhythm anchoring the proceedings, a softly churning, ritualistic, blackened electronica that gradually grows more and more tweaked and twisted.
Elsewhere, the sound slips into a hazy almost Pop Ambience, all washed out and ethereal, a motorik throb, buried beneath layers of shimmer and softly gristly gauze, the sound disappearing beneath a cascade of blurry, bleary low end, before blossoming into some spaced out electro. The record fragments into wild psychedelic soundscapery, jittery and frenetic, before devolving into a weird retro electronica, that sounds like a super creepy, damaged take on Paul Hardcastles's "19", the final trilogy of tracks slips from grim, rib cage rattling buzz, wreathed in cinematic swirls, to another batch of electro, but something more akin to John Carpenter electro, with a little witch house mixed in, and then finally, some super minimal dubbed out electronica, all blurred voices, wobbly almost dubstep bass, and a hazy voice like melody, the vibe simultaneously tense and intense, washed out and dreamy!
As always, includes a download with the whole record, as well as two extra digital tracks. And as always, very very limited!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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I've actually been waiting for Lovely Midget's debut album for some time, after a brilliant 10" on Ecstatic Peace a couple of years back. Lovely Midget is the work of New Zealand's Rachel Shearer, whose resume includes a few releases for Siltbreeze and Xpressway as Queen Meanie Puss and Angelhead. Whereas those projects were firmly entrenched in the magical avant-pop strum shared by fellow NZ musicians like Alastair Galbraith, Lovely Midget's gritty drones barely have anything to do with the song, capturing a antiquated sound similar to Movietone or Kjetil Brandsdal's Corpus Hermeticum release. The layers of guitar feedback, slowly tumbling percussion, and sunbleached vibrations could easily have resulted in the crystalline sleepiness of My Bloody Valentine but instead have been covered with 10 years of dust and cobwebs blurring the melodies with murk and mire. Interestingly, this muddy, droning din was created digitally, although there certainly isn't any indication that any digital production was used, and Lovely Midget would never get confused with the sterile electronica found on Raster or 12K. Rather this has all the trappings of a fantastic lo-fi 4-track recording... it's beautiful, dreamy, and highly recommended.
Lovely Midget is Rachel Shearer, a long time player/participant in the New Zealand noise/drone/free rock underground. Lovely Midget, her one woman project, falls squarely in the ambient drone side of that NZ scene, along with likeminded Kiwis Flies Inside The Sun, Omit, etc. Dark and langorous soundscapes of gently rippling reverb, heartbeat like pulses buried beneath barely played guitars, rumbling almost-not-there bass, occasional percussive clatter, and ultra minimal vocalisations. Some of the most beautiful, serene, dreamy ambient noise we've heard in a while.
Chorus was a record by the post-shoegazing duo Lovesliescrushing that was released via an obscure Peruvian imprint called Automatic Entertainment sometime in 2007. Needless to say, it's an album that practically nobody has heard, barring a download from a blog or something. Despite the novelty of this incredibly rare record, Chorus was also a major departure for the duo in that voice was the only source material for all of the blissed out driftscapes, with Scott Cortez eschewing the fizzed, opiated, and blurred guitar in favor of effects-heavy treatments upon the wordless vocals of Mellisa Arpin-Duimstra. Crwth is a re-edit of the raw material used for Chorus, emerging with a very similar muted hue of softed loops and delicate drones that hang gently upon the backdrop of digital dust blown upon a velvet surface. For those of you who had gotten a hold of the limited 2cd boxset on Projekt (or had been familiar with the last couple of Lovesliescrushing albums for that matter), this sole use of voice isn't all that much of a stretch, as Lovesliescrushing has been pushing a trajectory away from the beautiful noises of their MBV-inspired Bloweyelashwish and toward an angelic, slightly melancholy ambience with only the flicker of a song structure hovering at the bottom of their echo chamber. It's been said that Lovesliescrushing finds themselves between Slowdive and Fennesz; yes, that's true, but the reductionism down to an essential beautiful sound is taken even further than that imagined hybrid. Really, this is quite fantastic.
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Here's a record that we had been excited about for well over a year, back when Projekt announced that they would be releasing a 2cd set by Loveliescrushing. This is a band that should warrant a much bigger pressing than the 300 copies of this elaborate box; but, at least we have a few copies to offer.
Loveliescrushing is a shoegaze duo out of Tuscon, Arizona who made a surprise debut on the darkwave / goth label Projekt around 1993 or so, with the cassette Bloweyelashwish (which later did get a cd release). This album took the My Bloody Valentine overdrive of distortion, reverb, more distortion, and more reverb to a deconstructed end, further blurring the notion of song structure and entirely getting rid of the rhythm section. The duo has slowly been releasing work over the past two decades, gradually smoothing out the distortion and leaving an almost Tim Hecker like mass of droned texture from ethereal female vocals and once heavily distorted guitar wash.
The two discs of Girl Echo Suns Veils are split between the crunched shoegaze density of their earliest recordings and the most recent explorations of their narcotized drone-pop. Those early recordings are remastered from demo tapes dating back to 1990, when 'the noise' and 'the pretty' were coming together in equal resolve. The later material is certainly nothing to scoff at, and would make for a great addition to the next Pop Ambient compilation.
Brilliant stuff, and packaged in an oversized wooden box, hand silkscreened by Loveliescrushing's Scott Cortez, with some collaged art work, and a feather or two found within. AND CRAZY LIMITED. We have less than 10 copies, and can NOT get more, so grab one while you can...
Ooh! A hyperlimited LP from Robert Lowe, better known now for his work as Lichens and with Om, better known than for being in nineties indie noise rockers 90 Day Men. Recently, those Lichens recordings have oozed a cosmic vibe of enveloping transcendence through looping vocals and shimmering guitars; and through Om, he's been instrumental in furthering the Middle Eastern dervish vibe in Om's live sets (as of this writing, it's unclear if he'll join the band in the studio). That said, it's all electronics for Lowe on this LP-only, micro-edition pressing. The first side sinks into a side-long excursion that glides along a sedate hypnotic groove of downer electronic bass pulses, which almost has a hyper stripped down Tricky-meets-Conrad Schnitzler slinkiness to the rhythm. Filter swept tonal bendings and pixie-dusted melodies float about the laid back rhythms. Chill-out music, indeed. The second side contains five shorter cuts of library music redux with spiralling arpeggiations and weird-science bloopiness that fits perfectly into the Oneohtrix Point Never / Pulse Emitter camp of electronic meditations. The titles all give you a chance to bone up on your Esperanto! Only 300 copies!
This one hardly needs a review. Space rockers Bardo Pond, jamming with Japanese psych-rockers LSD-March! Two discs, looooooooong songs, plenty of sprawling druggy psychedelia, throbbing serpentine basslines, busy groovy drumming, and lots and lots and lots of guitars, buzzing and whirring, grinding and roaring, wailing and howling.
Culled from two stoned, late-night recording sessions on days off from the 2006 Bardo Pond / LSD-March / Masami Kawaguchi's New Rock Syndicate East Coast tour, these tracks were edited together by Bardo Pond-er Michael Gibbons with no overdubs, just a document of epic, swirling, lurching, grooving spaced out psych rock.
Incredible recording, super clear, almost studio quality, multiple drummers, multiple guitar players, the sound is loud, and intense, sometimes blissing out into laid back stretches of near ambient tranquility, but always building back up into howling squalls of freaked out psychrock nirvana. The first disc is the more jammy of the two, more loose and improvised sounding, even the opening track fades in with the track already in full swing, like they had already been jamming for a while before we even got to the part.
The second disc introduces flute, and some electronics, and begins with a looped lick, over some skittery drumming, and some serious grinding growling low end, it goes on for ages, and we never really wanted it to stop. It does eventually, which is okay as the band has already moved on, locking into some new looped rhythm, the guitars fiery arcs of sound, that low end continuing to grind and buzz, the multiple guitars and guitar parts careening wildly over a roiling backdrop of howling moaning distorted buzz.
The second track on disc two is almost entirely ambient, sounding more like Toho Sara or something, the guitars smeared and blurred, everything buzzy and rumbling, clouds of tinkling shimmer and random percussive clatter, hand drums, glitchy electronics, streaks of feedback, thick swaths of distorted abstract riffing, culminating in a soaring blown out multiple guitar-ed Ur-drone. The disc finishes off with a 20 minute scorcher that goes from furious psych skree meltdown, to stumbling abstract freeform flutter and back, the players locked in a battle to the death, full freakout, ultra-noise mode, vocals scrambling over a dogpile of grinding electronics, a sea of shrieking feedback, an avalanche of drum chaos, and about a ton of blown out guitar damage. Phew.
Every time we play this in the store, someone buys one, or someone comes out from the back to see what the heck is playing. This might just be one of the most played discs in the store recently. And rightfully so.
As always, aRCHIVE spares no expense on the packaging, but they may have outdone themselves this time. A thick textured black ink on cream cardstock gatefold sleeve, the words LSD and POND embossed and printed in reflective silver ink, inside an 8 page black and white booklet affixed to the sleeve, with live photos and liner notes, each disc in it's own black sleeve, printed in silver ink, Japanese characters, the two discs held together by a Japanese style obi, in the same style as the cover. WOW.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. A one time pressing, so don't miss out�
Along with the Light Of Shipwreck and Aidan Baker discs reviewed elsewhere on this list, Luasa Raelon is the third of three killer new releases from Crucial Bliss, the Crucial Blast sub-label focusing on things equally as crucial, but way more blissful than the mothership label.
Luasa Raelon is the work of David Reed, the same guy responsible for Envenomist (whose Black Bile tape we raved about on the last list, and which we have very few copies of�) and has a similarly bleak and black feel. In fact, the label describes the sound as "Cthulhian ambient death" and who are we to argue�
A concept record about a lost expedition left to die in space, the sound is appropriately spacious and massive, buzzing and grim, black and foreboding. Massive swells of billowing buzz, wrapped around slow shifting expanses of near static whir, over the top, thunderous industrial crashes and sputtering shortwave transmissions, distant keening melodies, muted klaxons sending sonic ripples out in the emptiness of space, long stretches of downtuned brutality draped over epic minimal smears of barely there blur. Mournful melodies pulled apart and tangled up with grinding distorted crumbling decaying riffage, everything lumbering and drifting into the bottomless depths of some sonic black hole.
Like Wolf Eyes doing the score for the remake of 2001 A Space Odyssey, a bleak wasteland of tones that grind and buzz and rumble, stretching out into infinity, an epic sonic blackness, from coruscating doomdronedirge to soft shimmery black ambience, the soundtrack to your cold corpse floating through the great black void.
And as with all Crucial Bliss releases, the packaging is super striking, an oversized fold over thick cardstock sleeve, full color inside and out, creepy alien tendril artwork, the cd attached to a plastic hub affixed to the sleeve...
LIMITED TO ONLY 200 COPIES!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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After playing second fiddle (literally) for psych folk luminaries like Metabalismus and the Tower Recordings for the last decade Smara Lubelski finally steps out and releases her first proper solo record. And boy is it lovely. Dark meandering folk, with hints of psychedelic swirl and Appalachian twang. Ms Lubelski's drowsy murmurred vocals are sorta reminiscent of the Pastels' Katrina and Aggi (but much more self-assured and in tune) or even more so Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley. Delicate chimes and fluttering flutes compliment her voice perfectly.
Oh, and P.G. Six drops in to play along on a couple of songs.
And here we go, further into the shadows, down the black hole of minimal mutant techno. We've become downright obsessed with this twisted, grim, bleak strain of electronic sound, as is evidenced by recent Record Of The Weekers Akkord and Basic House and this week's Echologist, also killer releases by Vatican Shadow, Silent Servant, Prurient, Haxan Cloak, Terrence Dixon, Shed, we could go on, but needless to say, even the former technophobes here at aQ, have been fully converted and indoctrinated into the cult, now we find ourselves on a mission to dig up the darkest of blackened house, the wooziest, warped techno, the sound of spare skeletal skitter and haunting electro-creep mood music, all that we crave. Our latest discovery is provocatively titled Churches Schools And comes to us from Lucy, who is not in fact a woman named Lucy, but some mysterious guy, who is a master and crafting suffocatingly sinister techno, pulsing sprawls of blurred murk, looped and layered rhythms, opener "The Horror" is indeed horrifying, a grim field of glitch and gristle, laid over a field of rumbling swells and wreathed in grinding black static, super tense and intense, an intro maybe, but the sound oozes ominously into the rest of the record, which plays out like some alien mutant dub, long stretches of muted thrum, peppered with fractured beats, and swirling synths, bizarre samples, geiger counter like sputter, all blurred into something hazy, and dreamily druggy. "Leave Us Alone", sounds like a more blissed out Silent Servant, or a Kompakt track gone very very bad. "The Self As Another", buries its beats under ethereal swaths of chordal shimmer, the whole thing gauzey and ephemeral, as if being listened to from a great distance.
"Human Triage" is like electro-dub melted down to its very essence, laced with weird bits of crumbling FX, and gradually growing more and more frenetic, but simultaneously, the sounds getting more and more indistinct, as of the whole thing would eventually blur into a single smear of sound. "Follow The Leader" is all gristly slo-mo house, throat singing, record crackle, and muted pulsations, fashioned into something hauntingly hypnotic, while "Catch Twenty Two" might be the grooviest of the bunch, but its still all crackle wreathed minimal murk. The rest of the tracks, deliver fantastic variations of Lucy's crumbling, crackly, techno-dub creep, culminating in the surprisingly blissful closer "Falling", which stretches ethereal female vocals, into a spectral chorale, all over soft focus flurries of glistening finger picked guitars, and swirling clouds of prismatic glimmer, wreathed in fuzzy barely there shimmer, and crafted into gentle swells, the end result sounding almost like a Grouper track, produced by The Field!
Gorgeous, lo-fi, space-y, almost ambient free-rock, dark and langorous. Minor key and strangely melodic, almost sitar-ish guitars crawl lazily over deep reflective drones and muted feedback. Late night, bliss out, doped up dream music. Think the Dead C
Lugois were responsible for one of my favorite CPP cd-r's, Golden Five Aluminum Lake. But fear not, Monarch is just as fantastic. Originally released as a cassette in 1988, Monarchg features CPP head honcho Campbell Kneale and his cohorts Andrew Savage and Leon Schultz. These four tracks were recorded in a NZ church and the sound reflects it, sort of liturgical and spiritual. Using guitars and synth mostly, these three offer up their worship, not to God or Buddah, but to their forefathers, the gods of NZ noise: the Dead C, Omit, & Gate, and make their offerings to that holy trinity. (Or the other holy trinity: Cale /Conrad / Maclise.) Simple, whirring drones, sounding like an army of slow motion squeezeboxes, with plaitive little melodies fighting to get their tiny heads above the thick ocean of drones.
2005 may turn out to be the year of Campbell Kneale. Earlier this year, the New Zealand drone engineer brought his Birchville Cat Motel to the Bay Area where he played about a gazillion shows of jawdropping, mindscraping minimalism; then he released the monstrous album of post-Earth / Sunn O))) heaviosity under the moniker, and you can't forget that he also released the album Chi Vampires which may be the best Birchville Cat Motel album to date. Now, there's one more album that bolsters our already high esteem of Mr. Kneale: the first proper CD from Lugosi. This dense psych-drone ensemble was fronted by Kneale and operated throughout the '90s in Wellington, New Zealand. Kneale flushed out the line-up of fellow New Zealand guitarists and multi-instrumentalists including Andrew Savage from Sunship, Leon Schutz, and Clayton Noone from CJA and Armpit. Lugosi conjured hypnotic, radioluminscent, billowing washes that reflect the damaged, rural psychedelic urges of early Flying Saucer Attack and the late-period, ecstatic minimalism of Spacemen 3. They actually recorded the bulk of their doped-up dream music in the Lower Hutt Baptist Church, furthering the transcendent metaphors their work already embraced. Drone on. Bliss out.
From the punishing speed of Napalm Death through the narcotic dubstep of Scorn and into the isolationism of Lull, all of the projects from Mick Harris are connected by an utterly bleak outlook on the world and the human condition. This album was released in 2008, marking it the first proper Lull album in something like 8 years (outside of a one-off collaboration and two collections of rarities); and Like A Slow River stands as one of the better releases in his entire discography and it's certainly the best Lull album to date. The five pieces unfold into grey masses of mist, fog, and shadow without much in the way of delineation of shape or form. There are heavy rumbles of distorted basstones as if thunderous explosions were being set off many miles away, and there are slight filigrees of melody coaxed out of the purposefully amorphous drone passages. Ambient music has long favored a reductionist approach, and Harris (like Thomas Koner, BJ Nilsen, and at times Lustmord) instills his dramatic absences with an existential dourness that is signature of the isolationist aesthetic. It's very very cold, very very slow, and very very well done.
We only got a handful of these, and it was limited to only 100 or so copies anyway, so we won't get into too much detail. Most folks just need to see the name Lull and they'll be sold. Lull, aka Mick Harris, collaborates here with Beta Cloud, who a while back teamed up with Aidan Baker for a killer disc of dark buzzing dronemusic. But on Circadian Rhythm Disturbance, Harris and Beta Cloud team up for one 20 minute track of extreme dark ambience, loose barely there rhythms drift in and out occasionally, but this is all about the atmospheric low end, and it is LOW, a deep subterranean rumble that seems to swallow up all light, like the sound of some massive behemoth drifting slowly through the blackened deep, or some mysterious black shape drifting across the midnight sky, huge groaning drones and massive swells of rib cage rattling bass, smeared and blurred into a tidal sort of barely-rhythm, that subtly pulses and throbs, sucking the listener under, filling you ears with gorgeous soft black sound.�
SUPER LIMITED. Most likely already out of print at the label.
One of our fave new Bay Area indie labels Dynamophone close out 2007 with a fresh batch of aural treats. They are four installments in their limited edition 3" cd-r ep Parcel series by the likes of Lullaby League (nice Wizard Of Oz reference there!), Curium, Science Teacher and Sleep Robot. Chances are if you've been paying attention to our recent aQ lists you're probably already as enchanted with this label's richly atmospheric hazily dreamy roster as we are, and will welcome these four into your music collection. This one features one new nineteen minute long piece for you to sink into.
Don't delay though! Each release comes in a diminutive square cardboard box festooned with a full color cover art sticker, and is limited to 100 each. We only have a couple handfuls. Once they're gone, they're gone!
Psst: Cantus comes with a cinnamon apple-y scented votive candle!
Here's another addition to always dreamy sounding and delightfully packaged Dynamophone Parcel series (psst, we still have one final copy in stock of the now out of print Science Teacher edition... please let us know if you're interested in it or any of the others!).
Filia Melusine is a lovely spoken word piece read by Ms Phyllida Law. Her tender voice floats atop a soundscape of Evan Sornstein's soft drones and Jacob Phelps' delicate piano and guitar. The words can be traced back to a 15th century tale. Achingly intimate and deeply romantic, 'tis a magical bedtime story of personal quest and loss. The limited edition cd-r comes in a sweet little 3" box along with an added little treasure.
We're pleased to present three inaugural cassette releases from psych/noise label Holodeck, championing the exploding underground electronic experimental scene in Austin, Texas, with beautifully packaged and designed cassettes. have a look elsewhere on this list for other releases by Smokey Emery and Thousand Foot Whale Claw.
Lumens is a mysterious collaborative effort featuring members of Smokey Emery, Silent Land Time Machine and Troller, and is very much what you might expect when you put those three bands together. Murky cavernous industrial drones slowly bloom into all kinds of decaying ambiance, piano tones, viola and looping vocal whispers. Looming and dark clusters of layered organic sounds and field recordings, scraping rhythms and buried melodies, carefully arranged to hypnotically listenable effect. Over 4 long tracks, the compositions build from abstracted soundscapes to krautrock tinged build-ups, the final track merging into No Pussyfooting territory with layered repeating tape loops that float up towards the stars away from the murk they originally came from. Mesmerizing! Limited to 100!
It's been a long time coming. After the tease of a 7" and a 12" ep, both tantalizingly KILLER, and a ton of incredible live shows, including a show stealing performance at the aQuarius records 40th anniversary party, comes this, the full length debut from SF psychedelic hypno drone psychedelic space rockers Lumerians, and it's just as good as we'd hoped and imagined. For those who've yet to hear these guys, have a look at this list of bands: Wooden Shjips, Hawkwind, Circle, Spacemen 3, Loop, Cave, Cloudland Canyon, The Heads, White Hills, Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, 3 Leafs, Mugstar. Does that look anything like your record collection? Then odds are you've just found your new favorite band. And if there's any justice in the world, these guys will get the same sort of hype and adoration that Wooden Shjips do. Not necessarily because they sound the same, they definitely don't, but they both DO explore similar territory, spaced out buzzy, fuzzy droney psychedelic rock, but where the Shjips are minimal, Lumerians are maximal, with multiple keyboards, even a percussionist, their sound more lush and layered, similarly propulsive and driving, but maybe with more of a nod to Spacemen 3 and Hawkwind, creating super mesmerizing cyclical hypnorock epics. And these tracks are indeed epic, slow building, smoldering, hypnotic, totally trancelike but still super heavy and rocking.
Opener "Burning Mirrors" pretty much sums it up, loopy low slung bass, simple motorik drumming, crunchy super distorted fuzz guitars, and thick swaths of spacey keyboards, not to mention drawled laid back vox, all appropriately reverby and echoey, these guys traffic in the sort of sound, where every song, whether 5 minutes or nearly 10, sound like live, they could go on for 20, 30, even 40 minutes, druggy, lysergic, tripped out and psychedelic, head nodding, body moving drone rock bliss.
"Black Tusk" gets all sixties, the drums shuffly and busy, the keyboards crunchy and fuzzy, lots of percussion, the bass driving everything, swirly and psychedelic and minus the killer production, and the super distorted stuttery organ buzz could be some lost psych jam from back in the day. "XuluX" is another sprawling droned out jam, that gets seriously groovy, with all sorts of heavily effected guitars, and more crunchy organs, before blissing out into some seriously swoonsome keyboard driven psychedelic drift.
And so it goes, "Atlanta Brook" definitely conjures up the spirit of Spacemen 3, the vocals a dead ringer, the hazy warped buzz the perfect prescription, but Lumerians add their own twist, infusing it with some strange rhythmic bridges, and buzzing sitar melodies, before slipping back into a washed out almost Beatles-esque outro.
"Calalini Rises" might be the heaviest track, murky and muddy, the drums locked tight, tribal and propulsive, all the other instruments loose and chaotic, a constant sonic swirl, totally spaced out and abstract, definitely a song that could have stretched out for another couple hours. But one of our favorite jams might just have to be "Longwave" which sounds like Lumerians at the wrong speed (which we presume it must be), Neu! style, the band unfurl a droney dirgey spacerock jam, slowed to a crawl, the guitars even thicker and grungier than usual, the drums lumbering, but then the vocals come in, and they're perfectly melodic and dreamy, and drift over the undulating psychedelic murk below, culminating in a gorgeously tripped out second half, with lots of rumble and whir and buzz and drone and swirl and shimmer (but be warned vinyl folks, in order to fit the whole album on a single lp, they had to speed this song back up, shortening it quite a bit, everything is essentially the same, just the murky background music is a little less murky). So good.
Seriously. If any of the above bands are your cup of tea, try spiking that tea with some Lumerians, you won't be sorry. Easily, THEE space drone psychedelic hypno rock record of the year. Drop out, and dig in!
If it weren't for the lack of smug attitude and thankfully missing Chicks on Speed artwork, "Flourescent" could easily be mistaken for anything on Mego. This collaboration between Danish composer Rasmus Lunding and the increasingly active Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis is a fanciful, dynamic abstraction of digitized fragments culled from field recordings and purely digital granular synthesis. The two artists have built reputations on nearly opposing ends of the electro-acoustic spectrum, with Samartzis operating as an austere musique-concrete composer steeped in a post-Industrial tradition. On the other hand, Lunding has tinked with programmable Lego constructions in some of his compositions, lending to far more childlike readings than Samartzis' work. "Flourescent" - their first collaboration - brings Samartzis' technical prowess to those playful spaces which Lunding inhabits. Many of the sounds have the expressivity of the electronic improv that has been running amok in the European art / jazz circuits; however, Lunding and Samartzis tighten their grip on those electronic 'solos' by crafting the digital errata into terse melodic passages and occasionally structured patterns. The two composers top it all off with digitally treated interjections of indeterminant conversations, the screams of children at play, and Vietnamese temple songs.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Swedish composer's collection of 60s and 70s electronic music recorded in his home studio, that is, in his "Castle Frankenburg." Apparently better known for 70s synthesizer records about elves, this 4cd set contains beautiful, skittery soundscapes, fancy clickery and warbly madness. Recommended.
For those of you who just skim the list or only read the first few sentences of reviews, let us get your attention real quick. Lurker Of Chalice, in case you didn't realize, is the work of one WREST, aka SF black metal overlord LEVIATHAN. Paying attention now? Good. let's proceed. Lurker Of Chalice has existed in one form or another for several years now, but outside a cassette or two this is the only recorded evidence and man will it blow your mind. Originally conceived as a less black metal, more experimental musical outlet (and possibly inspired by Leviathan / AQ faves Benighted Leams) Lurker Of Chalice is constructed from lots of black metal parts as might be expected, but lot of very un-black metal bits as well: arpeggiated post rock guitars, martial percussion, simple propulsive krautrock rhythms, swirling droning ambience, strange haunting vocals, obscure found sounds and samples, doomy slow motion dirges, reverb drenched, almost sun dappled melodies over creepy warbly soundscapes, warm thick keyboards, heavily strummed steel string guitars, rich throaty crooning, super overblown distorted guitars, all smeared into a warm fuzzed out, dreamy and melancholy, mostly midtempo blackened doomscape. Occasionally, Lurker blasts into full on black metal, like on the second track "Piercing Where They Might", but even in a BM context, things are beautifully way off kilter, rumbling bizarrely affected vocals, dizzying riffs that swirl and slither and make it impossible to focus, huge jangly guitars over miltaristic snare drums and warbly Michael Gira like vocals. So weird. But so perfect. Imagine Leviathan and Benighted Leams and the Swans and Ved Buens Ende, all somehow mixed into some darkly evolving, gothic tinged expanse of moody metallic melancholia. This is maybe the best sounding record Wrest has made which is saying a lot. And it's definitely the weirdest, and most certainly the saddest. The whole record is dripping with intense emotion, minor key and slowly stretching toward some bleak future of broken promise and crushed spirit. From slowly evolving, almost cinematic instrumentals to massive and majestic dirges to woozy effect drenched post rockisms to ultra bleak ballads to damaged black metal crush, Lurker Of Chalice evokes total and utter misery, a musical invocation to the lost and alone, wandering in search of hope, under the suffocating black cloak of night, crushed beneath a starless sky and adrift in a soulless universe, exposing every raw nerve and dark corner of Wrest's twisted musical soul. So fucking good!
Originally released in 2012, as three cassettes, each limited to just 99 copies, this sprawling collection of hauntological rhythmic black ambience / post industrial soundscapery is finally collected into one double lp set, slightly less limited than the tapes, but needless to say, these will probably disappear before too long. Like Lussuria's Ghost Entanglement lp we reviewed a while back, American Babylon is another stunning assemblage of hazy grey ambience, murky tribal rhythms, ominous low end thrum, a continually mutating landscape of slow shifting tectonic layers, heaving swells of chordal crumble, processed vocals, electronic shards, sinister pulsations and percolations, a world of burnt black gauzy grimness, assembled from fractured loops and woozily woven into epic stretches of cinematic creep and caustic electronic shimmer.
Most of the tracks evoke a deep dread, exploring some harsh sonic innerspace, where death and destruction are rendered as gauzy smears, minor key chordal streaks the bleed and ooze, occasionally tethered to lurching, lumbering rhythms, but just as often, loosed and set adrift, a sky filled with black clouds, a sea stained blood red. Here and there, strange samples surface from the murk and offer glimpses of the often obfuscated source material, allowing the listener to experience a world now dead and gone, in the form of these faded musical memories, while elsewhere, the music is simply a ghostlike impression of loss and sadness, hazy, washed out, indistinct, a swirling stretch of hushed thrum and found sound detritus, like The Caretaker, if he somehow survived the end of the world, and was left in some buried bunker, creating these slowly fading sketches of the world as it once was, pocked with slabs of ribcage rattling rumble, and churning low end throb, the whole thing culminating in the crushing emotional and sonic heft of the title track, which pairs a weird bit of video diary narration, with shimmery wraithlike ambience, all of which eventually is swallowed up by a final squall of blackened near metallic noise.
Debut lp of hauntological drift and cinematic electronic ambience from this mysterious outfit. A single epic exploration, split up over two sides, the sonic equivalent of exploring some strange old house blindfolded, according the the label, but to us it sound more like some sort of subterranean cavern, a seriously abject slice of Cold Meat ambient creep, a hazy hushed drift, lots of low end thrum and whirring shimmer, everything muted and washed out, strange reverbed drips, buried barely audible looped melodies, distant squalls of feedback, the occasional heavily effected pulse, buried rhythms, soft focus melodic swells, what sounds like a passing train off in the distance, this is definite headphone listening. Murky, sinister, blurry, muddy, haunting and disorienting. At one point a childlike music box melody drifts to the surface, but is quickly swallowed up by the final movement, a fantastic sprawl of gorgeous blurred Caretaker-esque crumble. So divinely creepy and harrowingly cinematic.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, with paste on covers and a nice printed insert on heavy cardstock.
First album proper from this shadowy purveyor of hauntological industrial ambience, after a handful of releases which were more like singles collections. Industriale Illuminato functions as a continuous songsuite, one that plays out like the soundtrack to some eerily romantic art film, or the score to a trip down the rabbit hole, or more accurately, some strange miix of the two. A mix of electronic and organic instruments, the sound lush, and cinematic, but also murky and mysterious, strange voices are looped into hiccuping rhythms, other voices seem to decay and crumble into the ether, while thick waves of rumbling thrum ebb and flow, synths swirl, clouds of cymbal shimmer sizzle and dissipate, clouds of blurred ambience drift lazily over a bleary, washed out landscape of bleak atmospheric sprawl. Beats surface throughout, conjuring a vibe similar to Boards Of Canada, but cast with a deathly pallor, the sounds and the beats more rough edged, the sounds oozing and bleeding, the needle pegged, and that in-the-red grit a part of the atmosphere. The vibe shifts constantly throughout, from churning industrial techno gloom, to creeping soundtrack shimmer, to straight up cinematic ambience, replete with what sound like field recordings (or clips from whatever imaginary movie it's from), while other tracks are tangled stretches of mangled beats, that seem to roil restlessly, as if trying to desperately untangle themselves. The majority of the record though is darkly serene, ominously tranquil, dreamlike bordering on nightmarish, rhythmic, and hypnotic, with some tracks slipping into downright beauty, albeit a sort of faded decaying beauty, a strangely lovely sinister sonic rot that seems to be slowly eating away at all of Industriale Illuminato, and transforming it into a fantastic collection of crumbling black hearted drone-gloom bliss.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Believe it or not, Lustmord's Heresy was the first cd I (Allan) ever bought, back in 1990 when it was first released. (Not my first tape or LP, but my first cd -- the second, if I recollect correctly, was either Nirvana's Bleach or Lights...Camera...Revolution by the Suicidal Tendencies...someday I'm gonna do a 'zine on the subject of 'first records purchased', but I digress). I think I'd read about it in some magazine, and was intrigued that it was apparently recorded deep underground in some cave or crypt. These subterranean origins are certainly believable when you listen -- it's dark and deep indeed, an ambient well of sound echoing with what sounds like the cries of buried, ghostly whales, a fog-shrouded hour of droning unease. Haunting, beautiful, something enjoyably scary to listen to alone at night. As the first-ever cd in my collection, of course it's near and dear to my heart, but it's the music that prompts me to tell you it's a great album. We're glad that it's finally now been reissued (in a spiffy digipack, still sporting the fantastic, apocalyptic cover piece "The Great Day Of His Wrath" by English Romantic painter John Martin), all tracks remastered by Brian Lustmord in 2004. Highly recommended. If you're at all into dark/ambient/drone musics, you ought to have one or two or more Lustmord discs in your collection, and I'd say Heresy should be one of them.
Back in 2004, Lustmord and The Melvins released what turned out to be a truly magnificent collaboration in the form of the album Pigs Of The Roman Empire. For Juggernaut, Brian Lustmord entered the studio with the Melvins' King Buzzo once again. The result is less of a collaborative project and more of a Lustmord album with Buzzo contributing vocals and guitars to Lustmord's dark, dark ambient sound design. The album opens with some signature Lustmord moves: cavernous bass drones, tectonic plods for a rhythmic underbelly, and loops of weeping violin. All of this points to the same creep show ambience that worked so well on Lustmord's seminal albums Heresy and The Monstrous Soul; yet, when King Buzzo's guitar comes into focus, the two signatures couldn't sound any more mismatched. It's really quite baffling: a hardly distorted chug of the guitar that sounds more like a teenager who's just figured out that you can downtune an E chord rather than a legend of dirge and doom. And Lustmord just lets it sit there; no manipulation, no augmenting sounds, nothing else. And so it goes. Towards the end of the record, Lustmord brings in some screeching Ligeti strings that do improve upon the previous 30+ minutes of tedium. Given that Stephen O'Malley and Pita raised the bar pretty high for avant-garde doom metal hybrids with their recent KTL collaboration, Juggernaut needed to be a hell of a lot better than this.
Perhaps beginning with the soundtracks that Throbbing Gristle supplied to Derek Jarman films and Coil's rejected score to "Hellraiser," industrial culture has slowly been creeping into more and more mainstream venues through its affiliation with film. Brian "Lustmord" Williams' work is certainly no exception as he began his musical career during SPK's most devistating period back
In the mid '90s, Williams followed the lead of SPK's Graeme Revell by working on the sound design for big Hollywood movies. Revell, in fact, is credited with scoring the "Tombraider" soundtrack (amongst 30+ others)... Quite a long way from the autopsy imagery of SPK's "Information Overload Unit!!!" Anyway, "Metavoid" marks the first proper Lustmord album in almost seven years, and the time that Wiliams has spent toiling for Hollywood has undoubtably affected his own work as Lustmord. While the slashing drills and unnerving screeches blast from his gaping drones, Lustmord has laced these already threatening pieces with unneccessarily theatrical synthetic strings and mystical flutes that seem better suited for "Xena" than a Lustmord album. A disappointing return.
Under his moniker Lustmord, Brian Williams has authored a signature sound that has become the pinnacle of the dark ambient sub-genre, even if he is loathe to that accept that catagorization. Williams began recording in the early '80s with the seminal industrial project SPK for the Leichenschrei album. While often working with SPK live, Williams began trawling subterranean locations and coupling field recordings from those spaces with a scientific rigor into the very low frequencies that hovered just on the threshold of audibility but could clearly be felt if not heard. Paradise Disowned was the second Lustmord record originally released back in 1984. Working with John Murphy (best known for his contributions to early Current 93 recordings), Williams crafted eerie soundscapes from his field recordings of deep nuclear shelters, Welsh caves, French crypts, and slaughterhouses. The haunting wails of Tibetan horns and mysterious ritualistic incantations further darkens the mood, although some of the drum machine tracks toward the end of the record do more to date the record than add mechanical paranoia. Nevertheless, the concepts and recording methods for Paradise Disowned are in fact very similar to those found on Heresy, which is still Lustmord's masterpiece.
Purifying Fire collects a handful of rarities and unreleased pieces from the legendary dark ambient composer Brian Lustmord. Those of you familiar with his masterpieces Heresy and The Monstrous Soul, won't find this to be a huge jump (forward/backward/anywhere) in Lustmord's aesthetics of deep space isolationism and psychic deterioration, but that's no complaint. It's still amazing stuff.
Earlier this year, Brian Williams (aka Lustmord) was commissioned by the Church of Satan to perform at the first ever public Satanic High Mass. Of course the date of that event was June 6, 2006, coinciding with the release of the Omen remake and a Slayer album, all trying to maximize the evil that can be ascribed to a trio of sixes. For his score of the event, Williams culled choice elements from his impressive career of dark ambient soundscaping. The Tibetan horns, melodic phrases, and monstrous vocal bellows from Heresy are prominent in the mix, as is the vast expanse of anti-gravitational drone which dominates The Place Where The Black Stars Hang. Tesla coil discharges, metallic airlocks slamming shut, hallowed plainsongs drenched in cathedral reverb, down-pitched electrical crackle, and elongated gong resonance also feature into the mix of the score. It's a thoroughly blackened sound of the self-made individual gaping at a vast emptiness of creation.
The Dark Places Of The Earth is a collection of re-compositions using some of the source material that went into Lustmord's 2008 album [Other]. Where that album featured the guitar work of Aaron Turner and King Buzzo set amidst a signature dark ambience, The Dark Places Of The Earth is a magnificent piece of black-clad minimalism without any hint of those guitars in the mix, which weirdly seems to make the sounds that much more abject and haunting. And even for an artist known for bleak sustained tones and psychologically charged stillness, this album is particularly sparse. In the gaping silences which linger around the slow-burning arcs of tectonic rumblings, Lustmord seems to be tapping more into the highly spatialized minimalism of late period Morton Feldman. Seriously. As hard as it may seem to imagine Feldman adorning a black leather trenchcoat and paratrooper jump boots, that's pretty much where this album ends up. Much of the sonic palette has been reduced to a few recurring sounds originating from [Other] and quite possibly from previous albums like The Place Where The Black Stars Hang and The Monstrous Soul. Billowing reverberations appear as distant vapor trails that streak against blackened skies, with those huge growling notes that have appeared in every single Lustmord album since Heresy to lend a suitably Lovecraftian air of horror. Lustmord cycles through these varying elements with strategies of repetition and difference, articulating these chromatic variations of in degrees of blackness. Very subtle drones and nervous vibrations occasionally surpass the event horizon of Lustmord's emptiness, and on a few tracks, the air-lock compression clanks reprise from [Other] alongside the crackling of frozen tundra with cold silences spilling out everywhere else. Easily the best work Lustmord has produced since The Place Where The Black Stars Hang.
Lustmord's nightmare aesthetic continues to map out aural manifestations of subconscious terror. "The Monstrous Soul" was originally released through World Serpant in 1990. While the earlier Lustmord records had been acoutic in nature, this time, the digital prowess of Adi Newton (Clock DVA, T.A.G.C.) was enlisted to add a digital clarity to the psychoacoustic malevolence.
"The Monstrous Soul" is a series of
dark ambient environments sounding like some Lovecraftian haunted forest ready to send its trees tumbling on top of any trespassers. Ominous tectonic plods, loops of Crowley's incantations, and samples pronouncing the intention of demonic possession are interspersed between the dark ambient passages rich in deep reverberations. A perfect bridge between the avant black-metal of Skepticism and the dadaist dirges of early Current 93.
Curious that we hadn't reviewed Lustmord's impressive 1994 album The Place Where The Black Stars Hang until now. One reason for that is that this is one of those records that has slipped in and out of print over the years; but thankfully Soleilmoon has just released this remastered version of the dark ambient classic. Brian "Lustmord" Williams began his musical career in the late '70s as a member of SPK, whose early Industrial albums set a very high standard for aggressive electronics, shock tactics, and raw aggression, definite sonic inspiration for current darlings such as Wolf Eyes and Prurient although those groups have never quite surpassed the original. While Williams and SPK's frontman Graeme Revell have remained close friends and occasional partners for Hollywood sound design projects, Williams struck out on his own in the early '90s as Lustmord, taking SPK's psychoacoustic intensity, noise, and ill-temper with him. While the early Lustmord records have the finger on the SPK template, Williams really made his first big impact with 1990's Heresy -- an overwhelmingly bleak album that literally fused the reverberations from catacombs and underground passages with a spectral ambience whose influence can be felt from the acoustically inclined realms of sound art to the infernal expressionism of black metal. While the follow up album to Heresy (The Monstrous Soul) pushed further toward the occult and horrific with incredible panache, it never received the universal acclaim that Heresy did; but The Place Where The Black Stars is the other verifiable masterpiece in his catalogue of recordings. Taking poetic license from the astrophysical studies of black holes as well as from archaic solar cults, Williams has crafted an electronic album that is as nightmarishly bleak as it is Wagnerian in scope. Long passages of irradiated dark matter stream into eternal drones reflecting the vastness of empty space; and subdued half-melodies and siren-song chantings slowly churn into ever deepening rumbles and the blackest of ambient drift. Absolutely essential.
The Word As Power is the first Lustmord record to incorporate the human voice with such prominence. Sure, Brian Williams - dark lord of ambient music behind the Lustmord project - has used vocal samples and disembodied screams to punctuate his cavernous drones and atmospheric horror in the past; but here on The Word As Power, he's crafted an entire album around the eerie ululations, glissandos, vibrato, and harmonic vocalizations from a handful of vocalists, none of whom fortunately utter a single recognizable lyric. Instead, these vocalists offer their talents as a secular (or Satanic, given Lustmord's alignment with the dark arts) form of sacred music. The hybridization of wordless vocalizations and dark ambient music is nothing new, as it's a common trope within Hollywood filmscores to combine the two in the sound design for anything mystically exotic and / or darkly enigmatic.
Lustmord's production sensibility is as impeccable as ever, with a judicious use of reverb dripping over the vocals, which hover above ghostly shadows and echos with subharmonic drones and leviathan rhythmic plods interspersed throughout. Lustmord has employed the talents of four vocalists - the most prominently featured one being the hitherto unknown Aina Skinnes Olsen, who does have pipes akin to Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance. The Butoh-trained vocalist Soriah offers his thrumming throat singing, Jarboe provides the best work she's done since the World Of Skin albums from back in the late '80s as a Swans side project, and Maynard Keenan of Tool pulls out some impressive Gregorian chanting for Lustmord's blackened ambience. We have to admit being very skeptical of this record before hearing it, but it turns out to be much better than we could have ever thought.
Lustmord began in the early '80s, when Brian Williams was a member of the seminal Industrial ensemble SPK. The first Lustmord records followed suit from SPK's brutish dark noise with rhythmic underpinnings; however, the Lustmord aesthetic was fully realized in 1990 with Heresy. This has long been one of the best examples of dark ambient composition with plenty of occultish references and absolutely terrifying soundscaping. The two albums that came afterward - The Monstrous Soul and The Place Where The Black Stars Hang - formed something of an ersatz trilogy of essential Lustmord recordings. The initial ideas behind these albums were a bridge between psychoacoustic research and the metaphors of horror, definitely in keeping with the Industrial roots which spawned Coil and Psychic TV. But in recent years, Lustmord has been a huge influence upon the ambient sides of metal - black, doom, or otherwise. So, Hydra Head has now commissioned their second album from Lustmord in [Other]. This is a much better record than the previous album on Hydra Head, although the things that work for [Other] have been the staple in Lustmord's productions past -- murmuring rumbles of blackened energy, downpitched Tibetan horns blasted through catacomb reverb, and slashed noises cast in shadow. Like on Juggernaut, Lustmord augments his nightmarish sound design with guests and their guitars. Lustmord revisits one of the problematic tracks from Juggernaut which found King Buzzo from the Melvins chugging out a downtuned riff, and which sat somewhat flatly against an ocean of dark drones. Where this track fails, the collaborations with Aaron Turner are pretty damn awesome, with some slow-motion desolate notes reflecting a similar vibe found on the recent Earth albums (i.e. Hex and The Bees Made Honey). A little uneven, but when this is good, [Other] is really good.
