Sweet! Hundloka (named for a flowering weed known in English as Cow Parsley) is another wonderful, textural, abstract release on Sweden's Hapna label, the first for field recordist/sound manipulator/visual artist Anders Dahl of Sweden, who is quite at home there (on Hapna, we mean, though he's also Swedish), alongside such artists as Tape, 3/4hadbeeneliminated, and Giuseppe Ielasi. At home in a realm of dreamy, twilit soundscapery full of snap, crackle, and drone. The three untitled tracks here, all but the middle one quite long (19:45, 6:22, and 12:37 respectively) are all performed (improvised? composed?) on stringed and wind instruments like guitar, bouzouki, violin, and recorder, also with the use on one track of computer and on another of "prepared speakers", plus percussion by Henrik Olsson. Yet the mysterious buzzingness of this sounds a lot like Dahl has woven in some field recording tapes as well. However, since he's apparently constructed *fake* nature sound recordings (digital birds!) in the past, we suspect that it's all Dahl here, no help from swarming insects or twittering birds or frolicking woodland creatures... It's all very gorgeous and glitchy, with guitar pluckings and gentle electronic hums, quiet and calm but for some moments of drone drama and surprise percussive attack.
A French born composer now living in Taiwan, Yannick Dauby comes from the same school of concrete-centric field-recording as Eric LaCasa, Tarab, Jean-Francois Laporte, and to a lesser extent Francisco Lopez. As such, Dauby pulls his compositions together from a near constant investigation of the environment, with the chorales of frogs and cicadas situated next to the thrum and hiss of heavy industry. Where LaCasa in particular is interested in matching particular textures and frequencies into sympathetic collages of intertwined sounds from any number of sources, Dauby has more of an interest in emphasizing a divergence in his sounds, juxtaposing comparatively dissonant field recordings to force them into a dialogue. So you'll find rasping blurts of locusts buzzing above a constant hum of some unnamed high-speed electrical dynamo, which gradually fades against a backdrop of metallic clinking, that almost sounds like the ambience of an ancient blacksmithery, becoming a smart counterpoint between two forms of human innovation. Dauby's composition is one of slow evolution with his numerous passages of water (thunderstorms, streams, subterranean dripping), the din of distant traffic, various bird utterances, windstorms, and clattering squeaks and whirls from industry effortlessly moving in and out of each other. All of these field recordings originate from France and Taiwan, although Dauby is very cautious not to make either locale too obvious, even when the chatter of children intermixes with that of incessant insect noise. It makes for a great, psychogeographical listen!
If anything, the Estonian countryside is quiet. The clockwork schedule of the network of rural buses and the cackle of a black swan racing high above the trees is about all that you'll hear. I (Jim) had the pleasure of experiencing this Estonian quietude a few years back, and I have to say that Yannick Dauby's collection of field recordings is way more active than any i actually encountered. Estonia is known for its avian diversity, although when I was there during the brief transition from summer into winter (literally, three weeks!), the birds had all flown south... so Dauby must have been there in later spring or summertime as he does capture a number of chittering sounds from those birds passing through from Russia and Finland to Southern Europe and North Africa (or vice versa). Between these avian recordings, Dauby documents another common denizen of the Estonian countryside - the giant chunks of metal dumped unceremoniously by the Soviet agricultural industry. Even without much wind, these abandoned grain silos and oil tanks resonate with thick rumblings and subtle overtones, which Dauby dutifully records with contact microphones. These thrumming drones recall the Alan Lamb wire recordings as much as they do Thomas Koner's deep gong recordings.
Disc one of this two disc set features Dauby's "songs for birds and metal" while the second features reworkings of Dauby's source material by John Grzinich and Murmer (aka Patrick McGingley), both of whom have exceptional catalogues of electro-organic compositions based often on phonography. Grzinich's two lengthy pieces are quieter and more subtle, focusing on the patter of dripping water and melting ice with flickering drones and harmonics forming arctic halos around those aquatic textures. The two Murmer tracks intensify things comparatively against Grzinich's lowercase work, with thick drones amassed around what sounds like somebody trekking through the deep snow. Those Coleclough / Koner drones manifest ominous black clouds and unsettled vibes, not heard elsewhere on the album and turning that Estonian quiet into something haunting. All in all, a magnificent piece of manipulated field recording and sound ecology.
As many of our favorite records have demonstrated, music is where you find it, anywhere, and more often than not, the most amazing sounds are waiting to be found where one might not always look. In the past we've had straight up field recordings of drag races, a life support machine, barking sled dogs, rutting deer, cowbells in the alps... We've also had the microscopic captured vibrations of Tsunoda, the voices from beyond of the Ghost Orchid, the singing telephone wires of Alan Lamb, and we could go on and on.�
Some adventurous listeners/recordists have set their sights on the sounds BETWEEN the sounds. The continuous applause of�A Compressed History of Everything Ever Recorded, Vol. 2: Ubiquitous Eternal Live, and of course multiple 'moments of silence' strung together by Jonty Semper, and now we have Christopher DeLaurenti's Favorite Intermissions, which is just what the title indicates. At various classical performances, during the intermissions, when most folks went to the lobby to smoke, or grab a snack, visit the rest room, DeLaurenti stayed put, or wandered through the partially empty auditorium, capturing all the wonderful sounds that exist when the musicians are not playing and the crowds are not hushed and listening attentively.�
There is of course the general hubbub, foot steps, the low murmur of conversation, papers being folded, the ruffling of garments, laughter, coughing, snippets of conversation, all blended together into a surprisingly pleasant hum, a minimal multilayered drone, which on its own would be quite an excellent listen. But the other element, that is maybe the most fascinating, is capturing the musicians -- who are normally quite disciplined, playing the score perfectly, following the conductor, striving for utter perfection -- with their hair down as it were, relaxed and sort of just messing about. Lots of improvising, which they are not afforded the opportunity to do EVER, and some subtly impromptu jams, percussion and horns, weaving elaborate little sonic tableaus, fragments of the pieces they just performed, or are about to perform, removed from their context and allowed to breathe. It's loose and spirited, ramshackle, but also amazing to listen to.�
The combination of the room noise and the random bits of orchestral music are totally fascinating and sound absolutely perfect together. It's hard not to hear these excerpts as composed avant garde pieces: Symphony Number 4 for laid back oboe player, screwing around percussionist, crinkled candy wrapper, shuffling footsteps, random conversation and occasional laughter....
Sometimes the sound is quite minimal and quiet, just a few players playing scales, a handful of scattered voices, other times it's intense and cacophonous, with nearly the whole orchestra jamming wildly on some theme or another, exuding more of a wild free Sun Ra vibe than what you might normally expect from typically reserved classical performers.�
A surprisingly complex super intimate portrait of every day sounds, interactions between people transformed into performance, the noise of modern life mixed with the the mostly ignored sonic events surrounding some of the most beautiful music on earth, revealing that once again, music truly is where you find it, even if you find it while all dressed up, sitting in a plush velvet seat, with the lights up, listening to musicians tune up and the folks behind you talking about their plans for dinner.
Final release from beloved local label Dielectric, so sad, but what a way to go! After a clutch of killer releases, some simple and lovely, some high concept, all beautifully executed and assembled, each sonically breathtaking: the Dielectric Drone All-Stars, the Dielectric Minimalist All-Stars, a handful of super limited cd-r's as well as a four pack of killer 12"s, Dielectric bows out with their most expansive and sonically overwhelming release, the Dielectric Field Recording All-Stars, and like each of the Dielectric All-Stars releases, the title says it all, minimal, drone, and now field recordings. Although all three of those distinctions tend to blur together, especially here.
The All-Stars this time around are ten strong: label head honcho Drew Webster, Jen Boyd, Leticia Casteneda, Cria Cuervos, Mark Griswold, WIll Mitchell, Maggi Payne, Toby Paddock, Rudy Trubitt and Aaron Ximm. As with any record like this, there are three critical elements, the players, the sounds, and how those sounds are woven into something listenable. Sometimes a straight field recording can be as compelling as the most intricately composed piece of music, but sometimes, it's exciting to hear a piece of music only to learn later that it was actually a recording of insects or cars or sneezes or whatever. The Field Recording All-Stars got you covered either way.
The above ten recordists, compiled an incredible palette of sounds, from all over the world, there's even a chart inside the cd booklet, to see who contributed what sound to each track. The sources are overwhelming to just read, let alone hear: a floating restaurant in Barcelona, Spain, evening in Oakland, California, song on Chinese radio station, eating an apple, pigs in a pen, squeaky shoe, tomato, red ball, phasing radio, Voice of Vietnam, space shuttle, shortwave, Barcelona subway, SF 6am, freezer, blue angels, record player, various radio broadcasts, buskers in Paris Metro, under a dock Berkeley, CA, incident on subway, Chile, dog versus rattlesnake, finger-picked acoustic guitar, weird buzz, air traffic controller, storm drain, weird radio, underwater, answering machine, TV show, shortwave sweep, protest march, failing speaker, Rise up!, protest drums, Riley running, police siren, crosswalk signal, police dispersing demonstrators, turntable, creek pebbles, buoy, leaky organ oscillator tube, Wuhan taxi dispatcher, Chinese busker, wasp nest, streetlight, skipping cd, church mass on radio, unknown feedback, violin, psalter & ball bearing and a slide guitar! Phew!
Now, not all of those sounds are present on each track. Some tracks play out like straight field recordings, voices, vehicles, birds, animals, strange clatter and thumps, footsteps, dogs barking different texture and timbres presented raw and unprocessed, but on other tracks, the various sounds were woven together by Webster, aka Die Elektrischen into fantastical soundscapes, running the gamut from deep cavernous drones, grinding metallic melodies, strangely rhythmic bits of skitter and shuffle, dreamy backwards warble, slow shifting underwater shimmer, a few tracks even almost rock, the core being some sort of buzzing guitar or vibrating steel string, with the various found sounds simply adding to the texture or lurking in the background as another layer of sound, while other tracks are epic and expansive, mysterious new worlds of sonic wonder, like wandering beneath strange colored skies, or slow shifting landscapes, swimming in strange seas, every track is like a sonic road map of some unexplored territory, some soft and shimmery, some harsh and brutal, others just really really strange, but every one totally listenable and truly fascinating. This is one of those discs that is definitely amazing on first listen, but benefits from closer scrutiny, repeated listens, deeper listenings reveal so much more going on, layer after layer, each unfolding and blossoming and blurring into each other like some dizzying kaleidoscope of sound. So good.
The latest from DJ Female Convict Scorpion comes in the form of this SUPER limited cassette, one that requires some work on the part of the listener to truly enjoy, or at least enjoy as the artist intended. That artist being Josh Pollock, member of psychedelic space rockers 3 Leafs and weirdo noisescapers White Pee, among others, but as DJ Female Convict Scorpion, he concocts lush landscapes of cinematic sound, purloining various bits from other songs, and movies, playing some bits himself, a lo-fi DJ Shadow of sorts, whose past outings have blown our minds and been hugely popular around here. This new one looks to be no different, the rub this time around being, that BOTH sides of the cassette are meant to be played simultaneously, a la Zaireeka or something. So you have several options, the first of course means buying two tapes, and playing them on two tape players, the second is buying just one tape, and using the link that comes with the tape to play the other side on your computer, while you play the first side on your tape player. Phew! A third option, is to attend the upcoming debut performance of Los Balls Del Norte, happening across the street at Lost Weekend, during which, both sides will be played, accompanied by a special film created just for the occasion. More info can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/147509788771228/?fref=ts
And finally, one last option, one that isn't mutually exclusive, which is to listen to each side of the tape on its own. We did, and both sides sound great, killer breakbeats, shifting textures, mysterious voices, movie samples, vocal snippets, dizzying sonic collages that unwind like psychedelic krautrock grooves and funky heavy soul breakdowns, dreamy lullabies sung in other languages, banging gongs, shimmering FX, woozy slowed down basslines, soft symphonic swirls, muted ambient murk, loose free jazz drum freakouts, squiggly theremin like melodies, rumbling crumbling distorted low end, new wave-y electronics, swirling cosmic synths, and more more more more more!
But what does it sound like all together? A seriously warped psychedelic sonic headtrip. Check out the sample, that's a little snippet of the two sides in perfect sync, which ultimately they never will be, which is part of the joy, every listen the sounds will shift, and interact differently, a perpetually unique recording, in fact, essentially MULTIPLE recordings, all of them super cool, one side, both sides, one side started 5 minutes in, 10 minutes, hell, play one backwards, every variation is its own special warped lysergic soundworld to get lost in, over and over and over and over...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
We almost weren't able to review this one at all, as the first pressing sold out in a heartbeat in the UK. Thankfully the lovely folks at The Tapeworm label, made a whole second special pressing just for all of us over on this side of the Atlantic, a special "obsidian mirror" edition, in which the cover and the tape are white on black, instead of the more recognizable black on white of most Tapeworm releases. But what's all the hubbub about then? Well, in case you hadn't figured it out, Drcarlsonalbion is in fact Dylan Carlson, he of twang flecked desert drifters and former sludgelords Earth, who on this, his first proper solo release, explores his occult interests in capturing the sounds on the A side at the Waterloo station and along the Thames river, both apparently sites "of personal occult experience", the sounds themselves though are lovely, a gorgeous gristly drone, blurred sheets of static, and deep moaning tones, softly undulating, sort of like a crackling electrical field slowed waaaaay down. Carlson's added some guitars and vocals, but blended those seamlessly into the smeared ambience. The vibe is very Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, hazy and gauzy, washed out and dreamy, darkly meditative and hauntingly abstract, really in fact quite beautiful.
The flipside is guitar, vocals and mellotron, the lyrics according to the liner notes, are Enochian versions of those found on the A side! Those vocals are delivered like some strange sermon, the words nearly lost in the gorgeous swirling maelstrom of distorted guitars and swirling feedback, it's like some ancient ritual, some Druidic rite performed on some ancient stone plinth, on a windswept mountain top, one that just so happened to feature mounds of amplifiers and rows of distortion pedals. Meditative and psychedelic, blackened and blissed out. Sort of like old earth blurred into something more like Sunroof!, with Carlson the mysterious wild eyed shaman, his cloaked visage nearly obscure in the cloud of buzz and thrum and whir and howl. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!! These are the last and only ones we'll be able to get. Cover art by Savage Pencil.
According to the liner notes, written in (intentionally?) broken English, Petros Drecojecai was a would be anthropologist visiting California from Hungary in the mid 1990's. Drecojecai spent much of his spare time in between conferences listening to and
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Although it's definitely NOT what's on their minds, these rutting deer could make great death metal vocalists, with their astonishingly lower-than-low utterances. I mean, a band with a rutting red deer on the mic would really give such animal-fronted bands as Caninus and Hatebeak a run for their money! One of my housemates certainly thought so (as he demonstrated by "lip-synching" along to these loud, belching cries while crouching with an imaginary microphone and making death metal singer faces). But no, these braying bucks are less interested in lending their talents to the service of brutal death metal than they are in attracting the ladies. Speaking of ladies, my girlfriend found this to be so disturbing she made me turn it off... it was giving her a headache. I guess she's lucky that she's not a female red deer!! Meanwhile, I actually find this rather entrancing...hmm I wonder what that means? Well, the misty, desolate background ambience of the forest is definitely nice, with birds twittering and hooves tromping through the underbrush. And despite her reaction, I knew instantly that we definitely needed these for Aquarius (she, knowing the sort of stuff AQ folks dig, like the Thai Elephant Orchestra and the Sounds Of North American Frogs, agreed).
Anyway, as you can see, I've been playing this for a lot of people. It's impossible not to. You'll be like, "Check this out!! Yes, that's a deer!" A real deer, not some monstrous behemoth, or a creaking door, or a sick cow stuck in a well, or a Wookie, or something sampled from a Fflint Central cd-r... Though their deep, echoing, weirdly stretched-out-sounding mating calls really sound like they have some sort of electronic effect on them! Nope, these are just pure, unadulterated field recordings from a forest in France of some lonely deer looking for love.
This 70+ minute disc has 16 tracks, acquainting the listener with all manner of roars, belches, barks, coughs, and other sounds produced by these stags during the rutting season (roughly September/October, as the weather cools). Some are solo performances, others feature choruses of other deer roaring in response...there are the bellows of a stag asserting dominance over his "harem", and there are recordings of male deer in competition -- including one track of clashing antlers (which is kinda their version of the infamous AQ "pipe-fight", a term we like to use to refer to the sounds of certain experimental recordings).
This cd comes with liner notes in both English and French that are extremely detailed, telling you everything you'd care to know and more about the sexual behavior of these deer and the noises they make, including a glossary and even sound spectrographic analysis of individual rutting calls. Such throughness is typical of the Sittelle label, the same folks that also brought us this week's Record Of The Week, The Inaudible World - A Sound Guide Of The French Bats. As you might guess, there's a lot of other cool environmental recordings on this label, and now that we've gotten into the swing of importing 'em from France we'll be listing more in the near future!
***Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert!***
Originally released on Smithsonian Folkways in 1969, Ghetto Reality features songwriter and educator Nancy Dupree as she works with a group of inner-city elementary school kids from Rochester, New York. When she was initially met with resistance to participate by the kids, she dropped the state standardized music curriculum and began to write songs that were more relatable to the keenly aware and grown-up lives the young students were living as well as the various contemporary social issues they were facing. Using piano and tambourine in groovy and soulful numbers, the songs take the form of spirituals and rhyming games, but the content is more modernized as they sing songs about James Brown, civil rights, and building their own self-esteem. This method proved highly successful as the more relatable the song, the better the participation by the kids, and the more they participated, the more the kids realized their natural talents for performing, offering a critical lesson in empowerment. This is an amazing record full of charm (especially cute are the kids imitating James Brown's grunts!) and with really great songs. Fans of Langley Schools Music Project, or that proto-hiphop lp on Smithsonian Folkways, Street And Gangland Rhythms, we listed awhile back, will find lots to love here.
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The French National Institute for Agricultural Research has assembled this massive collection, documenting a multitude of sounds from a variety of grasshoppers, cicadas, katydids, beetles, ants, moths, etc. Structured in the same fashion as the "Sounds of North American Frogs" on Smithsonian/Folkways, "Entomophonia" explains the taxonomic definitions of a specific insect sound and then provides an example of the sound. For better or for worse, all of the text (both spoken and written) is in French, providing a rather odd listening experience to those of us who have forgotten our high school French. More than a educational recording, this sounds more like some weird Ryoji Ikeda or Noto electronic record, with some Frenchman reciting Gilles Deleuze philosophy amidst the buzzing clickery. And it's an unbelievably beautiful package, a full cover slipcase, an enormous and amazing book (with lots of great color photos of the insects, so it has value for the French-impaired). Another entry in the AQ-pantheon of ridiculous but essential field-recordings, along with the aforementioned "Frogs" disc.
We listed three new tapes from aQ beloved tape label The Tapeworm on the last list, of a batch of four new releases. This one, #4, got left behind by the post man and only just now showed up. Which was a bummer at the time, cuz it might just be our favorite of the bunch, and the reason why can be summed up in one word: EVP! Okay, maybe three words: Electronic Voice Phenomena, which is the sound of the spirit world communicating through radio static, or lost transmissions, little snippet of voices, often just a word here or there, seemingly reaching across from the other side.
This particular set of recordings comes to us from Michael Esposito, an experimental artist and EVP researcher, who over the course of his life has collected thousands of EVP recordings and who has appeared on various television programs and in a number of films and documentaries. According to the label, Fantom Auditory Operations is "an attempt is to take EVP research a step further, developing a body of work researchers and scientists may use in the future to unlock the mysteries of our own mortality", but to these ears, it actually sound more like EVP set to music, strange bits of dark ambience, fields of hiss and whir, tolling bells, rumbles and whirs and various layers and textures, as well as field recordings, wild animal calls, crackling fires, all set amidst a series of fractured melodies and undulating drones.
Apparently the recordings here were captured in a Kentucky cemetery, where in the 1800s a woman and daughter were convicted of witchcraft and burned alive. The daughter was buried in this cemetery, while the mother at another location. There is also apparently spectral figure that has been sighted, perhaps trying to get to the girl (or her spirit), but who is kept at bay by the crucifix decorated fence surrounding her grave.
It almost doesn't matter if you believe any of that or not, cuz ultimately it's all about the sounds, and the sounds here are truly captivating, ominous and otherworldly, woven into a soundscape that's tense and haunting and super cinematic, with snippets of classical music, looped bells, the tape speed constantly fluctuating, everything warped and woozy, the only constant, the crackling sound of the fire, that presumably haunts the girl and her mother to this day.
So cool. And if you love the Ghost Orchid, a long time unanimous aQ fave, you're gonna want this too!
We recently discovered a completely amazing Japanese label called EM Records. Pretty hard to pin down what exactly it is that they specialize in but that's precisely why we're so smitten. From not one, but -several- singing saw records, to acid psych reissues, long lost singer songwriters, early experimental tape music, bizarre robot disco, fifties rock and roll, Australian dub, Isophonic boogie woogie (?) and tons more. We've only begun to dip into the wonderful world of EM, but we're going to start listing them one at a time. This record was initially the release that convinced us to get in touch with EM. Jim Fassett's Symphony Of The Birds is bizarre and beautiful and had AQ written all over it. The liner notes are mostly in Japanese so it's hard to know too many of the details, but Symphony Of The Birds is an amazing example of early tape music, it just so happens that all the tapes used were recordings of songbirds, which Fassett chopped, and cut, spliced and sequenced into a totally unique symphony of bird calls.
The record opens with Fassett's explanatory comments featuring our favorite line: "But keep in mind, as you listen, that nothing has been added. If you think you hear something that sounds like a particular musical instrument, or a human voice, or anything else other than birdcalls, YOU'RE WRONG." The first movement is definitely the best, whistles and chirps, chopped and stretched into dense swirls of psychedelic sound, if you weren't paying close attention, you'd be hard pressed to hear that it was birds making these sounds. Very trippy and spacey and alien sounding, like some crazy analog synthesizer freakout. The second movement involves a lot more itch shifting and changes in tape speed, resulting in sort of clunky purposeful melodies, the same bird call in different pitches to assemble very simple sing songy melodies. The third movement gets back on track, with some of the bird call slowed WAY down so they becomes rumbling drones, while others are sped up and repeated rapidly making impossible trills that almost sound like some blast of Sunroof!-y skree.
The last three tracks feature Fassett narrating an imaginary trip through a meadow, allowing us to study closely the bird song of each different bird isolated from the others, with some deft mixing and stereo panning, and the affect is actually quite stunning, with each bird getting 30 seconds to a minute right up on the mic! Cool!
The whole thing comes packaged in a super tough oversized (to accommodate the massive booklet) jewel case. The booklet contains lots of great photos, liner notes in Japanese, transcriptions of Fassett's spoken word segments on the disc, the album's original liner notes, and strangest of all, a pictorial guide to various and random birdcall records, separated by theme it seems: whistling accompaniment of instruments or big band, field recordings, canary training, instrumental, experimental happening (?) etc. Weird!
Dust-To-Digital are known for their excellent reissue work, unearthing and preserving music from scratchy old shellac 78 rpm recordings and the like. Bringing us vintage blues, gospel, Tuvan throat singing, and more, all with elaborate packaging and incredible attention to detail. They've been responsible for a host of fine cds, boxsets, and books, among 'em Victrola Favorites, Opika Pende, Steve Roden's I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces, and Goodbye, Babylon.
But THIS handsome book + cd set may be their most remarkable release yet, at least in terms of radical sound-conservation technique. It's certainly their most unusual. For example: one of the tracks here is an excerpt of an after-dinner speech given by late-19th century American orator and politician Chauncy M. Depew. You can listen to it on the cd, and distinctly make out the speaker's words, voice, and phrasing, amid a thick patina of hiss, hum, and distortion. Sounds like a poorly-preserved old gramophone disc. But, that sound isn't coming from the disc itself being played (and re-recorded for release on the cd). It's actually derived from a PICTURE of that disc, reduced by 2/3rds original size, that appeared in a 1898 magazine advertisement. The spiraling grooves on the record were pictured clearly enough that with creative use of off-the-shelf computer software, author Patrick Feaster was able to "play" a fairly accurate semblance of the sounds originally encoded on the gramophone record being advertised!!! Ok, that's pretty cool! Talk about DUST-to-Digital. And it's but one example of the MANY different, quite intriguing excercises and investigations in "playing back" sound from such antique and/or unusual "recordings" that Feaster and his colleagues at the First Sounds initiative have come up with, presented in fascinating detail in this fancy (gold gilt edges!), hardback 144-page book and accompanying 28-track compact disc.
Of course, one can argue, just what IS a "sound recording" anyway? In large part, that's what this is about; in fact, Feaster's introduction is devoted to that very question, which turns out to be both a philosophical one, as well as a technical one. Even in Feaster's expansive notion of the term, the idea that "sound recordings" exist from as far back as the year 980AD is perhaps a fanciful one, as he will admit, but still fruitful to consider.
Because, what this book is also about, more generally, is how human beings have sought to understand sound phenomena (from nature, voice, and music), through the ages, how sound has been "captured" and put on paper in graphical form to be perceived and studied visually. These visual representations of sound, are essentially all in the form of graphs of frequency, or amplitude, over time: sound spectrograms, sound oscillograms, phonoautograms, melographic inscriptions, manometric flame sketches, and many more. Various techniques, applied to various subjects. Found in these chapters and tracks, there's FBI voice-recognition studies from the '70s, phonophotographs of Negro spirituals from the '20s, and examples of Athansius Kircher's "Magia Phonotatica" circa 1650 (works which bring to mind Conlon Nancarrow's Studies For Player Piano), among others.
So, this is all very historically & scientifically interesting. Also, completely compelling just for the beauty of these images alone, which may or may not directly reflect the beauty of the sounds they represent - this is a lavishly illustrated book, with full-color reproductions of these various "sound recordings" to accompany the insightful text explaining it all. And the magic really happens, when you experience the book and cd in tandem, as each track on the cd, even the briefest, has an entire several-page chapter in the book devoted to it, and it really helps to read about and look at the visual sound source, while listening. Some tracks sound like antique recordings we're used to from wax cylinders and 78s, complete with the surface static we love so much; others like strange field recordings or ghostly experimental drones or balloons being rubbed together; still others like music boxes or similar devices�
This is the sort of unusual sound document to file with such aQ faves as the mysterious Ghost Orchid EVP recordings, the VLF recordings of Stephen McGreevy, or even the famed Conet Project (soon to be available again, with a bonus 5th disc!). In fact, one of the exhibits here, an 1890 phonoautogram by Emile Berliner, kind of reminds us of a Conet "numbers station" track, being a spoken series of numbers and letters recorded at varying speeds.
All in all, an astonishing, thought-provoking, and simply gorgeous book and cd, recommended to anyone interested in sound, science, OR art; meaning, probably everybody reading this!
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Another amazing archival find from the Sanity Muffin label of unreleased interviews from one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
R. Buckminister "Bucky" Fuller (1895-1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth" and "synergetic". He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, including the widely known geodesic dome and Dymaxion car.
What's fascinating about hearing him speak is how direct and plainspoken he is, speaking about high-minded concepts in ways that make them easily accessible and question our very understanding of how the world is perceived. For example, he opens the first interview with an anecdote about speaking at a conference of scientists. He asks them how many of them had ever seen the sun come up and was flabbergasted at how many hands were raised. Here we have outstanding members of the scientific community and most still only understand the world largely in constructs that we have placed upon it, not operating in the real world where concepts like "up" and "down" do not actually exist. From there on we were hanging on every word!
This limited cassette version has 4 panels of embossed artwork and insert. Highly Recommended!
Here's a lovingly homespun assemblage of field recordings which have been altered and pieced together over the last couple years into a hushed collage of mysterious texturous scrapings and ambience. These three hazy soundscapes were created by Bay Area artist Fuzzboy (aka Dan Borstein). 'Tis the gentler side of experimental noise that he treads.
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SORRY.
Volume "2.5" of the series that shows what stars past and present say when the cameras and tape recorders *aren't* supposed to be rolling. This double disc set features just Judy Garland in all her drunken pillpopping glory, much of it purportedly from never-released home recordings she made for her autobiography.
"I'm an angry lady: I'm a lady who is angry. I've been insulted, slandered, humiliated -- but still 'America's Sweetheart.' Now I'm rather intelligent, I think, and I'm emotional -- YEAH -- I'm a woman; I'm emotional... I wanted to believe, and I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I COULDN'T... I've sung, I've entertained, I've pleased your children, I've pleased your wives, I've pleased YOU -- you SONS OF BITCHES! Now you better write it, YOU BETTER PAY FOR IT, OR DON'T LISTEN AND GET THE HELL OUT OF MY LIFE!"
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
While the photo in the liner notes of an elderly Gelmetti sporting new wave gear is worth the price of admission, the amazing shortwave radio experiments and dronology-through-musique-concrete certainly make this an excellent recording. While AQ has postulated when a remix album of Irdial Disc's triumphant Conet Project will be constructed, this will certainly keep us happy until then. Lots of academic liner notes in German and English.
FINALLY, this long out of print, all time unanimous AQ favorite gets re-pressed and is available once again!
The Conet Project from beyond the grave!?! Perhaps that's a good way of describing this baffling, terrifying, occasionally laughable, but always compelling album. It's been out of print for a very long time, and we're pleased to see The Ghost Orchid haunting our shelves once again!
To recap, The Ghost Orchid documents instances of something called "Electronic Voice Phenomenon," the paranormal appearance of strange voices (which at times sing and speak in multiple languages) on magnetic tape when there shouldn't be any voices there at all... Respected parapsychologists have postulated that these voices are those of dead people (i.e. ghosts) or possibly of extraterrestrial origin! Unlike The Conet Project, which cross referenced the audio tracks with written information, The Ghost Orchid presents these recordings with the audio commentary of one of several researchers (Nadia Fowler, Raymond Cass, and Lief Elggren -- the Swedish performance/audio artist and a part time collaborator with the Hafler Trio), explaining the findings. These recordings are the findings of a number of parapsychologists including Dr. Konstantine Raudive, Friedrich Jurgenson, and Raymond Cass.
While there is something wholly terrifying about these recordings, there is an absurd question about these ghostly voices that we have to ask: Why are the majority of these recordings in Latvian? At any rate, The Ghost Orchid manages to be both spooky and silly, and is definitely a fascinating listen from a pure sound perspective regardless of how disturbing and/or amusing you might find the alleged sound source itself. For non sequitur pop culture reference, the sample "You are sleeping, you do not want to believe" which concludes The Smith's "The Rubber Ring" hails from an old recording made by Raudive and can be found in its entirety here. Brilliant!
Jon Gibson is a multi-wind instrumentalist and an alumnus of the first school of minimalist composition alongside Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Though his name may not be as well known, his musical presence can be heard on three of the school's most outstanding releases: Terry Riley's In C, Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach, and Steve Reich's Drumming. His seventies work, Visitations and Two Solo Pieces, were both originally released on Philip Glass's Chatham Square label and while Two Solo Pieces is sonically more akin to the repetition and pattern movement of his contemporaries, his 1973 debut, Visitations, now reissued for the first time on vinyl by Superior Viaduct, is an altogether expansion of what minimalism could be.
Consisting of two long form pieces in separate parts, Visitations uses classical wind and percussion instruments and field recordings of jungle, water, insects, birdsong and wind to conjure a hybrid sound world that is both familiar and alien. Seemingly influenced by free jazz forms in its use of sonic textures and atmospheres to drive the composition, Visitations looks to the environment in an unromantic way, taking us on an uncertain journey into a darkened landscape alive with mysterious activity. Recommended!
What do Aidan Baker, Gnaw Their Tongues, Alkerdeel, Persistence In Mourning, Caina and Expo 70 all have in common? Well they've all released records on ultra cool Portuguese micro label Universal Tongue. And to that list you can add these guys, the strangely named Gorgontongue, one part Arizona black metal outfit Ganzmord, one part Oklahoma funeral doom horde Persistence In Mourning. Although the parts don't necessarily predict the whole in this case, as The Lighter Side of a Suicidal Mind is not in fact metal, black, doom or otherwise, instead this duo are exploring some grim, haunting, oppressive black ambient otherworld, blending soft noise, field recordings, mysterious murky effects, layered drones, much of this sounds like a prettier, less harsh Gnaw Their Tongues, sort of epic and cinematic and dramatically doomy, but also a bit like a more grim blackened Expo 70, that same sort of glimmering slow burn kosmische krautdrone, but laced with strange processed vox, crumbling industrial detritus, swaths of wheezing organs, buried barely audible rhythms, the occasional hellish shriek, tangled bits of detuned acoustic guitar, dubbed out electronics, ghostly vocals, woozy arpeggiated melodies, keening feedback, bits of Dead C like free rock drift, sprawling expanses of space-y ambience, various bits of crash and clank twisted and transformed into strange sonic streaks, rumbling low end pulses, crumbling walls of corrosive metallic crunch, tinkling chimes, all drifting through epic black expanses and dense squalls of psychedelic abstract effects-damaged buzz, culminating in the near meditative final track, a haunting, black ambient driftscape, hushed and haunting and weirdly lovely.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!! Housed in a Blue Ray style dvd case, with a printed two sided front cover, and a printer insert / mini poster.
We recently discovered this little German label called Gruenrekorder, who specialize in "Phonography and Audio Art" which translates to field recordings, turntablism and audio installations, which definitely sounded right up our alley. We then discovered that they had 60 or 70 releases, probably more by the time of this review, most cd-r's and all incredibly limited, usually to 50 or less. Yikes. Had to do some quick thinking, so we picked two of the most promising sounding and got a bunch of those (a bunch meaning 25 copies, which is half of the pressing). So elsewhere on this list you'll find the other Gruenrekorder release, a sound installation for turntables and plastic angels, which somehow seems to perfectly balance this one right here, a field recordings of bats, collected via ultrasound, much like the The Inaudible World cd / book we listed a while back, but while similar, the sounds here are different enough, that if you dug The Inaudible World, Fledermausrufe Im Modulationsverfahren makes a good addendum.
Collected by Matthias Gottsche, head of the NABU department for protection of the bats in Schleswig-Holstein, the sounds here were a part of an infrared film project, assembled for species analysis, but due to the overlap and chaos of the various animals recorded, it ended up useless as research material, leaving it to exist simply as sound art.
The best part is the description of this disc on Gruenrekorder's website, explaining why it is all one track "Because of the reduction to only one track the listener has to go through it all at once and with it is confronted with his one staying power." Yes! And this will definitely test your staying power. As the sounds of bats, their sonar rendered audible to human ears, sounds a bit like several people playing Yahtzee!, shaking dice in those little plastic cups, but never actually rolling them, just shaking and shaking. The percussive rattle fluctuates from baseball card in the spokes flutter to a dense clattery cacophony, a tangled rhythmic web that is constantly shifting and undulating, and is in its own weird way quite soothing and hypnotic. Still hard to believe these sounds come out of bats...
Beautifully packaged, printed cd-r, striking black and white sleeve, cool infrared photos, but again, LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! So once these are gone, we won't be able to get more.
Imagine a band that sounded like a bastard mix of UK-via-Texas, multiple drummered noise rockers Shit And Shine, grinding bass and drum duo Lightning Bolt and legendary weirdo drug rock combo Butthole Surfers. Then imagine the sort of din such a band could and would kick up and mix in all manner of mangled and freaked out electronics. Finally, imagine all of that noise being conjured up essentially by a single drum kit. And thus you have UK duo Gum Takes Tooth, which is essentially a drummer, whose drums are wired up to a dizzying array of home brewed electronics and tone bent circuit boards, with a second member tweaking and fucking with the sound in real time. 43 minutes of electronic-ed drumming might not sound that appealing to some folks, but don't make the call until you get an earful of the sounds these two whip up. Sure at times it's raw and rhythmic, noisy and chaotic, but the sounds here are all over the map, from super charged This Heat style rhythmic workouts, to blasting almost grind metal like blow outs, minimal FX fueled ambient drifts, to tripped out sci-fi psychedelia, murky, meandering distorto slow-core to frenzied noise drenched prog and pretty much every conceivable stop inbetween. Add in some Merzbow style noise, a little Psychic Paramount drum heavy post rock heaviness, some world music like tribalism, and stir it all up, and voila.
Opener "Young Mustard" is a pretty good sampling of what these guys are capable of, offering up a wild frenzy of tribal drum pound, weird processed vox, swirling electronics and FX, which eventually explode into some seriously aggro Lightning Bolt style, blast beat driven, downtuned grind, only to blossom into some Six Finer Satellite like synth-drum craziness, before the whole thing devolves into a abstract stretch of minimal clatter, random bloops and bleeps, swirling electronics, all beginning a slow build, the tribal drums swooping back in, slowly goring more distorted and intense, until finally fracturing into what sounds a bit like the Ruins crossed with Man Is The Bastard, thick blown out buzz low tones, pounding drums, howled processed vox, all woven into a seriously crushing electro-dirge.
"Tankjott" is another good one, starting out with some rapid fire kick drums, some gurgly vox, some squiggly electronics, building to a lurching, stuttery groove, soon more electronics, and more of that heavy bass buzz swoop in, and it's some sort of metallic krautpsych groove, with all manner of buzzes, strange twisted vocals, electronic pulses, before exploding into another fried and buzz drenched rhythmic workout, sounding to us like a way more chaotic / noisy / electronic version of MITB offshoot Geronimo, definitely the heaviest track here, sounding almost metal, but via Hawkwind and This Heat and Melt Banana and all blurred into some impossibly mesmerizing electrometal krautgroove, WAY too short at 7+ minutes.
And in between those two tracks, plenty of hypnotic, cyclical, rhythmic noise, progged out heaviness, stuttery drum heavy buzz and psychedelic noise rock, usually all at the same time, "Strychnine Motive" probably the most traditionally song sounding, but it's really relative, while "The Earth's Mantle Colonised" takes that same sort of sound and trips it WAY out into some sort of psychedelic space rock, the vocals chopped and processed, plenty of spacey squiggles and weird chanted vocals, the whole thing still drum driven big time, "Nomad/Monad" sounds like some bastardized gamelan orchestra, or a punk rock electronic noise version of Konono No.1, all looped thumb piano like melodies, tangled up and barraged by all manner of strange sounds, and then finally, record closer "Hermaphrodite And Nourishment" which does in fact feature a member of Shit And Shine on second drum kit, and while we were expecting a super frenzied drum heavy blowout, instead, it might be the pretties song on the record, all moody and loping and melodic, laced with ringing Tibetan bowls, crooned softly distorted vocals, squalls of feedback, and the cool thing is it never really explodes or freaks out, instead, it's just gorgeously mesmerizing and hypnotic, droned out and tribal, the perfect sort of sonic come down at a record that spends much of its time at a serious musical fever pitch.
Probably one of our most exciting recent musical discoveries (thanks Jason P.!), and with every listen this record continues to confound and delight and reveal more of the weird shit that seems to constantly be going on just below the surface, and odds are if you like any/some/all of the above mentioned bands, imagine them all mashed together and distilled into some wildly and gloriously twisted hybrid, and we imagine you'll probably be as knocked out as we were.
There's an ongoing argument at aQ headquarters about which is more preferable: a selection of a artist's musical works or the -complete- recordings. Of course that questions is completely relative to which artist one is talking about, and everyone will have a totally different opinion based on who you ask. But it instantly came to mind when we got this gorgeous new Mississippi reissue of Gurdjieff Harmonium Improvisations.
A little backstory: The fascinating Georg Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) whom some of you will know much better as a thinker and philosopher than a musician, was an early twentieth century Russian mystic (and retired hypnotist), who drew inspiration from Sufism, and was fascinated with music. Gurdjieff had composed for piano for some years, but late in life he acquired first a wire recorder, and then a tape recorder, to document his improvisations (his "moosic") on the harmonium, a sort of pump organ, that produces a sound that is rich and full, a sort of lush, wheezing melodious moan, haunting and otherworldly. He would often record these performances after hosting dinners and various social gatherings in New York and Paris both during its occupation and then right after the war had ended. Most of the surviving recordings come from the last year of his life.
Awhile back we got in a sprawling multi-disc / hardcover book box set on Basta (which is now sadly out of print), of his complete Harmonium Recordings. Over two cds, AND a third disc of mp3s, the entire output was 53 tracks and about 19 hours! That's a lot of harmonium recordings, and needless to say a bit daunting to take in and absorb, even if it was totally amazing. But what was really cool about that vast collection was the super intimate performances and long durations of the pieces (most in the 9-20 minute range), the sound of the harmonium peppered with all sorts of incidental ambience. It seems that Gurdjieff would perform a piece, slow and sad and gorgeously dreamy, enveloping all of his listeners in the mood, and when he was finished, he would then crack jokes and make small talk. Many of these performances feature this strange juxtaposition of almost religious intensity, and breezy lighthearted banter, which was somehow another part of his unique world view.
This current collection on Mississippi was originally issued as a French private press release in 1971 and is a sampling of seven performances between April and October of 1949. While taken from the vast collection of recordings, we believe they were edited down for length with much of the external ambience (banter, coughing, bellow clatter, etc) taken out, save for a final "Amen" at the very end of side 2, which is totally apropos, given the spiritual quality of the performances. The music though, is wonderful and completely mesmerizing, offering up lush, meditative, ritualistic, droney, melancholic harmonium music, a distant dark mystery, as if these minor key sounds were pulled from the ether, captured from another world and another time. Not quite ragas, more like slow and sad oceanic sea shanties. At once recognizable, but at the same time totally alien.
An early predecessor to the searching individualistic devotional recordings of Joakim Skogsberg, Daniel Higgs and Malachi, this is a perfect antidote for those seeking an immersion into Gurdjieff's mystical sound world without having to commit to a complete lifetime of listening.
A NOTE ABOUT THE SOUND SAMPLES: Due to the different title methods used between this record and the Basta collection, we couldn't find an exact match for sound samples, so we took similar sounding pieces from the same period from the Basta collection so you can get an idea of what this sounds like more or less.
Working with Raymond Scott, Bruce Haack developed his own very bizarre, though very distinct brand of electronic composition using self-built machines. These recordings, from between 1969 and 1970, are simple songs ostensibly for children (includes a strange version of "This Old Man") in the tradition of Raymond Scott. But this is no bliss for babies--this is analogue, vocoder, acid weirdness. Several of the tracks are pulled from his legendary album The Electric Lucifer, an electronic opera of the battle between Heaven and Hell. So don't buy this for your children, buy it for your next trip.
"Nineteen American Waysides" features 19 recordings from highway rest-areas made all across the US, including insect choruses, garbage truck hydraulics, twittering birds, gentle rain storms, and lots of rushing din from the nearby freeways. Occasionally, Haire played back processed versions of the "Victrola Favorites" cassettes curated from the Climax Golden Twins' collection of Victrola 78s. These murky waltzes, operatic arias, and spoken word snippets -- all swimming in the lo-fi grime of antique 78s -- are wonderful and wistful sounds, that contrast nicely with the clarity of the rest of Haire's recordings. A curious but meditative piece of recording that is well worth checking out.
Having worked as a studio engineer and producer in Seattle for the past 15 years for a broad array of musicians such as Joe McPhee, Jeff Grienke, Carl Stone, Kill Switch...Klick, and Eyvind Kang, Doug Haire is a man obsessed with the nature of sound. While professionally he deals with relatively traditional realms of composition, his obession lies in field recordings, as he explores "the ways in which we recognize, differentiate, map and navigate our sonic environment," to quote the manifesto of the Seattle organization Phonographers' Union, which Haire belongs to. Not as much a purist as Douglas Quinn or Chris Watson, but far less process oriented than Eric La Casa, Haire has built a series of pristinely recorded and produced collages which elegantly crossfade between environmental focal points.
Super limited so don't dawdle.
Darkly resonant and fascinating. The seventeen tracks of Brian Harnetty's American Winter album are like the slowly disintegrating pages of a stranger's scrapbook. Harnetty artfully and respectfully pieced together segments of dialogue, field recordings and radio transmissions among other things which he drew from the vast audio archives of Berea College where he is a member of the Appalachian Music Fellowship Program. Highlights such as "I'll Have To Go Off And Be Gone Tonight" feature fragments of oral histories from Appalachian folks accompanied by the gentle wheeze of what sounds like an accordion and the tinkling of a toy piano. The audio collages slowly drift in and out of focus, and the results are both engaging in the documentary sense and hauntingly spectral. Recommended!
The last Brian Harnetty record was a sleeper hit around here, fusing sampled bits of Appalachia and fragments of oral histories with dark brooding collaged soundscapes, the results were haunting and captivating, the two sounds working surprisingly well together, creating a sort of ghostly old world folk, the cracked and weathered voices wrapped in warm whirs and spectral ambience.
For his latest record (which has taken us a while to get in to list), Harnetty has assembled a conventional band and composed a set of gorgeous and dark chamber rock / dark jazz vignettes, utilizing piano, accordion, clarinet, trumpet, violin, drums, bells, vibes as well as vocals on a few tracks courtesy of Mr. Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy, but more on that in a second.
Harnetty hasn't abandoned his use of the strange old time samples either, they pop up throughout the record, a little burst of old timey Appalachia, a cute introduction from the bandstand of some dance, wild sawing fiddles, it sounds like a strange fit, but it weirdly sort of works. The record opens with a haunting ballad, all softly reverbed piano, and droning strings, shuffling drums, super moody and mysterious, when all of a sudden, right at the end, some old timey fiddle music fades while the song proper fades out, and the player says a few words and then we're already into the next song, another dark brooding drift. The whole record is pretty haunting and moody, a little Dirty 3, a little Max Richter, quite lovely, with the various old timey samples just adding a little bit of odd mystery.
As for the vocals, Will Oldham actually only sings on 3 of the 12 tracks, not sure it's worthy of co-credit, but his songs are in fact quite nice, his creaking about-to-break croon perfectly complimenting Harnetty's dark and dreamy arrangements. And in some ways, Oldham's songs as well as his voice manage to sound as old and dusty as the sampled songs and voices...
We barely need to write anything for this one really. Everyone we know, has wanted one of these without even hearing it. Hell, Andee even ordered one from overseas without hearing a note. They're called Harpsicorpse, which would probably be the best band name ever, even if this wasn't solo harpsichord. But it IS. SOLO HARPSICHORD. Solo ELECTRIC harpsichord, played by a guy who when he's not crafting solo electric harpsichord music, is creating crazed breakcore using samples of classical music (and yeah, that stuff rules too, will try to get copies in to review!).
So yeah, Andee got a copy of this played it on his radio show, played it for everyone he knew, and we all became a bit obsessed, and so we ordered a bunch for the store, and when they finally showed up, it was like music nerd Christmas! So what is it exactly beyond the above mentioned obvious stuff, that had us all flipping out? Well, the harpsichord is an amazing instrument, and this electronic version not only offers a weirdly buzzy distorted version of the actual sounds, it also makes the player able to unfurl impossible super fast flurries of notes, the result is somewhere between a creepy soundtrack for exploring some old abandoned house in the middle of a lightning storm, complete with levitating candelabras, cobwebs, creaking doors and wailing spirits, the music from some demented post battle feast/orgy with all the knights, in your crumbling castle in the time of King Arthur, or an 8 bit Nintendo soundtrack for some alternate universe version of Castlevania. However it strikes you, it's awesome, bizarre, beautiful, demented, baffling, but absolutely one of the most amazing things we've heard. When things really get going it almost sounds like someone took a chunk of Venetian Snares style drill and bass, and replaced all the beats with harpsichord sounds, while at it's most creepy and ambient, it couldn't be more scary, a total horror movie soundtrack, late night drive in movie freakfest bliss out. And the tracks that feature a lot of low end, those are the notes that don't really sound like a real harpsichord at all, and instead sound like some sort of ominous buzz/drone weirdness, which again, only adds to the WTF factor.
But to be fair, beyond all the weirdness (of which there is plenty), this is definitely some cool, beautiful, haunting stuff, and odds are if you're like us, and EVERYbody we've played this for, all it's gonna take is one listen, and you will be as crazy obsessed as we are!
WARNING: These lps seem to have had a long difficult journey across the ocean all the way from Europe, and the sleeves are a bit worn after such an arduous trip. So there are some dented corners, and while for the most part it's not really that dramatic at all, if you require your records to be in pristine, ultra mint, record collector nerd condition, then you just might have to pass on this, which would be a bummer, cuz it's AMAZING�
What's the last "nature sounds" disc we reviewed on our list? There was the cd-r of bat sounds we listed last time. But we'd had bats before. However, we can safely say that this is the first, and probably only recording we've ever heard... of dinosaurs!! Ok, obviously this isn't a "real" field recording. No time machines were involved. Or experimental genetic science out of a Michael Crichton novel. Nor are we being told any stories about how, through some improbable process, sound waves were frozen in amber millions of years ago, waiting to be decoded and heard by us today through the miracle of modern technology. Nope, this is fake fake fake. But it has the imprimatur of a real field recording, being brought to us by Jean-Luc Herelle, the recordist/naturalist responsible for the AQ fave Pastoral Bells, and others on the illustrious and Sittelle label, and the cover proclaims it a "scientific interpretation" (to the extent of relying on audio experiments done with fossils).
Knowing that AQ customers go gaga for environmental sounds, the weirder the better, it probably won't take much to convince you all that a disc of Jurassic Soundscapes belongs in your collection. So here it is, the grunts and growls and splashings about of the DINOSAURS! Or, they could simply be scary monsters... or, birds with a pitch shifter. That's right, since we all know that modern day birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, Herelle has constructed these imagined dinosaur calls out of genuine field recordings of birds, digitally altered to sound like what he thinks (based on the best current scientific theory) these dinosaurs would have in fact sounded like. (Is there a commercially available "Dinosaur effect"? If so, death metal bands should investigate.) Herelle also made good use of recordings of various amphibians, who also have their dinosaur connections, insects and mammals too...
The first of the four tracks on this disc is a 21+ minute number entitled "Moving Back To The Trias Period, To The Marine Environment Of Early Jurassic", between 230 and 200 million years BC. It starts of with watery drippings and what sound like backwards tape effects (!), soon joined by rumbling cries of eight meter long Plateosaurus, which is then scared off by the equally even more terrifying carnivorous Coelophysis!
Apparently, there was tons of reverb in the Jurassic period. It's a bizarre listen, for sure. The electronic effects are obvious, but one soon suspends one's disbelief, and becomes absorbed in the rather eerie world that Herelle has cleverly conjured.
The second track finds Herelle exploring a "Forest Of Giant Sequoyas Of The Later Jurassic", 170 million years BC. In the distance, *something* cries for a mate. And at one point, some sort of leathery winged flying reptile flaps by. Track three takes us to a "Swamp Forest Of The Cretaceous" (144 million years BC) for about half an hour. Scaly beasts moan and coo and moo and bellow. Our friends the Rutting Red Deers would possibly feel right at home conversing with the denizens of the Jurassic. And then as a finale, Herelle presents a "Time Slide Into Prehistory"...
In the liner notes, Herelle explains his procedures for this project, and helps to detail for the mind's eye the scenes he has set, these aural dioramas if you will. Each track is provided with a narrative, of what creature is plodding, swimming or flying about, and why, making for this imaginative, varied "natural" symphony. While the label admits that some might find it hard to take this disc seriously, it does have solid educational basis, paleontologist-approved. This is definitely the closest you're gonna get to hearing the sounds of prehistory, the cries of the baby Iguanadon and of the mighty Tyrannosaurus, the growls of the Stegosaurus and the twitterings of the Archaeopteryx... who could pass that up? Recommended of course!
A few years ago we (Andee and his fiancee Heather) were travelling in Europe and spent some time in Switzerland. We had spent the afternoon wandering around some mountain top, and decided to take one of those gondola's back down (you know the kind, a cute little train-style car suspended from a steel cable, like at Disneyland or from that one James Bond movie). As we made our way slowly and silently down the mountain side, beneath us the landscape would rise and fall, undulating just enough to obscure what was directly ahead until the ground would again recede revealing more verdant fields and breathtaking vistas. But about halfway down, strange sounds would drift up to where we were sitting, each time we came over a hill, a distant lowing, livestock obviously, but also this haunting chiming, the sound of bells reverberating and drifting lazily across the fields. We suddenly realized that it was the cowbells, worn by the slow moving cattle that wandered lazily below. So beautiful. Tranquil. Familiar obviously but somehow so strange and wonderfully unlike anything we'd ever heard. We've all heard a cowbell, or too, but the sound of hundreds is truly unique. We managed to record a brief snippet, but far too brief to really do that sound justice or to even listen to. These were sounds languid and serene, meant to be listened to over the course of hours not seconds. And then what do ya know? From the same place we got the rutting red deer cd and the recent sounds of bats record of the week, we managed to get this Pastoral Bells cd, which strangely enough just so happens to be recordings of cowbells in the mountainous regions of the Mediterranean.
The sound here is not nearly as tranquil as the sounds we remember, the result seemingly of just way more bells. But it is still lovely and evocative. But not in the same way for everyone. Where Allan and Andee imagine lazily strolling through green fields and dipping our toes in cool streams, cows wandering all around, birds chirping, thunder in the distance, Pam envisioned cows milling around outside a slaughterhouse, or the strange sort-of-calm before a twister. But then we think that may just be Pam.
The bells clang and clatter, deep and resonant, sometimes the sound is super spare, the overtones ringing out into the sounds of a country afternoon, running water, chirping birds, lowing cattle. Sometimes there are so many bells the sound becomes super dense and smears into a smoothed out droney cacophony, almost like a performance for bells, or as if Organum or Phillip Jeck had taken the sounds of hundreds of bells and layered them one on top of the other, until they stopped sounding like bells at all, and instead become a swirl of bell-like tones. Really amazing when that happens too, a simple sound of nature disc quickly and almost imperceptably begins to sound like some avant cut up sound collage, before just as quickly fading back to the normal sounds of nature.
Probably the most striking tracks here are the sounds of the bells in a thunderstorm, the thunder cracks and rolls drone-like across the soundfield, the cows obviously become agitated, thus the bells get jostled and the ringing and clanging builds and builds into a chaotic fervor, the whole while underpinned by the booming rumble of the thunder and added low end of moo-ing cows. There's also a track where distant church bells from a local abbey begin to toll, as birds chirp and tweet wildly in the foreground. So lovely. This is the best kind of nature recording, none of that cheesy new age relaxation crap, this is deep listening. You can lay back and relax if you like, letting the sounds wash over you and carry you away, as the sounds are truly relaxing, or you can really listen closely, deeply, there's so much to hear, so many different elements, so many different sounds, all interacting in ultra complex, impossibly perfect ways. Nature always seems able to deliver all sorts of amazing new sounds or previously unheard sounds, that even after centuries of pushing the sonic envelope, creating new sounds and sound making techniques, inventing instruments and constantly discovering new ways to compose and perform and record, we will never begin to approach, in terms of complexity or purity or beauty. This record however is special because it actually demonstrates an impossible and seemingly unintended collaboration. Man made bells, cowbells, church bells, 'played' by cattle moving and going about their normal lives, set in a lush ambient soundscape completely of nature's design.
John and Peter Hinds (of Sun Ra Research 'zine fame) return with their second album of hybrid jazz/electronica grooves. The mix includes drum'n'bass beats, dub elements, spacy synth, faux-classical compositions, AND incoherent interviews with homeless people
We have a long history of obsession with strange sounds from Scandinavia, whether it's all the hypnorock weirdness from Finland, grim blackness from Norway and Sweden or music performed on instruments made from ice, there's something about that stuff that we find irresistible. Not just sonically, but also conceptually. Which makes the provenance of this disc's arrival at aQ all the more wonderful. One day in the mail, a cd with a moose, standing in front of an open refrigerator, set amidst a sunset lit landscape of snow. On the back, drawings of men all wearing white hooded body suits, and all seemingly holding deer skulls and antlers. We were already sold, but the deal was sealed with the legend: "Originals and traditionals performed on stringed reindeer antlers." Which is exactly what this is, a series of haunting soundscapes, performed primarily on stringed and contact mic'd reindeer antlers, the strings and antlers bowed and plucked and scraped, those mysterious sounds accompanied by all manner of sticks, logs, rocks, bones and various field recordings, those field recordings giving the proceedings the air of some surreptitiously captured ancient ritual. There are more traditional instruments as well, drums, flutes, fiddles, guitars, but those are employed judiciously, and most often merely to color the background over which the antler skulls hum and thrum, shimmer and moan.
It's no surprise that David Tibet of Current 93 is a fan, and maybe even less of a surprise that so is�Fenriz of Darkthrone (who even did a '90s acid techno remix of 'em which works surprisingly well! Not included here, sadly...), the sound of Hornorkesteret definitely plays into C93's ritualistic ambient folk, and Darkthrone's Norwegian pride, but beyond that, the sounds here are unlike anything you've heard. If we had to compare it to anything, we might mention Avarus, No Neck Blues Band, the aforementioned ice instruments of Terje Isungset, there's definitely a murky, primitive, tribal krautrock vibe, not to mention a certain hauntological bent, especially on the first track (more on that in a second), but ultimately, this is some fantastic raw sonic exploration, a mysterious songsuite, atmospheric, haunting and strangely psychedelic in its own way.
This disc collects the group's best recordings from the last ten years, and begins with what might be the weirdest one, "Elegi For Roald Amundsen", which begins with a staticky shortwave broadcast, a lost radio transmission of a voices speaking in Norwegian, beneath which, the stringed antlers rumble and hum, weaving a dark shimmery drift, driven by a low pulsing thrum, all the while wreathed in a warm crackle, totally mesmerizing and strangely evocative of some impossible melding of ancient tribal ritual and 'modern' technology. It had us imaging some ancient Norwegian tribe, who discovered an old transistor radio, which they assumed must have come from the gods, and every mysterious broadcast was a message from beyond, which they paid tribute by accompanying on their bowed skulls and stringed antlers. Elsewhere, the group weave darkly meditative and ominously rhythmic soundscapes of thrum and rumble, over beds of rushing water and birdsong, or pounding stretches of almost Dead C worthy abstract atmospheric psychedelia, or groaning surreal ambience that reminds us quite a bit of an even more abstract take on Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. The tracks vary greatly, from spare and minimal, to dense and rhythmic, at one point detouring into pure Norwegian folk, and at another into something almost funky, a sort of super rhythmic kraut-groove, but for the most part, spends the majority of its time in some haunting sonic otherworld, a transmission from a lost time, delivered in a lost language of sound, the stories and lives and memories conveyed via this strange music, performed on skulls and bones, captured here for eternity.
We were recently fortunate enough to host a really intimate performance by Robin the Fog (one half of the duo Howlround) in the store, and despite it being a stripped down version of his normally quite intricate live setup (only two reel-to-reel machine, not the usual four or more), it still totally mesmerized everyone in the store. Dense, gorgeous, haunting, even downright menacing at times, Tales from the Black Tangle likewise engulfs you in dense soundscapes that recall the dronologists on Students of Decay or Belong's October Language. The twist here is that all the material on here is sourced from field recordings in abandoned buildings and such, many of them downright MUNDANE things like creaking doors and drawers. How he manages to conjure such beauty and vibrancy out of totally unprocessed sound sources is anyone's guess. We only got a few copies from the man himself, and as there were only 300 copies pressed, restocks are unlikely.
From the obi: "Born in Waco, Texas, Jerry Hunt was a friend of Jack Ruby, a pianist in strip clubs, a student of the occult and the founder of his own mailorder church at the age of 15. Jerry Hunt was also one of the great pioneers of live electronic music. Very much a modern-day shaman, he designed most of his own equipment and used it in ways to create backdrops for his own magical performances that referred to, among many other things, exotic ritual, the esoteric traditions of Rosicrucianism, Aleister Crowley and modern science. The SongDrapes were some of Jerry's last and greatest creations, and feature vocalists Karen Finley, Shelley Hirsch and Mike Patton."
'You have been suggested': This is the 1st of 3 in a series of what I Am Spoonbender call 'Hypnotic Trance Pamphlets' -- sort of an 'Oblique Strategies' for the memetic engineering mindset. Ten 2" by 3" cards unique to each series, imprinted with an array of provocative IAS word/image concepts, thoughts and musings enclosed in a hand-numbered red vellum envelope. Tres sublime. Each edition will be limited to 333 copies. When I snap my fingers, you will not snooze on this...
This is the 2nd series of 'Hypnotic Trance Pamphlets' by the Spoonbender Sleep Research Team (the printed-word annex of I Am Spoonbender). Enclosed in each metallic anthracite-hued paper, die-cut envelope are ten 2" by 3" cards (unique to each series), imprinted with an array of provocative IAS word/image concepts, thoughts and musings. Think a sort of 'Oblique Strategies' for the memetic-engineering mindset, although this set has some sociomagico narrative-generating possibilities... mix 'em up! Tres sublime! As with the 1st (and forthcoming 3rd edition), these are limited to 333 hand-numbered copies. Hypnotico! Arouseo! Awakeup!
Members of the hypnogogic nation state Elgaland-Vargland (one of whom is the UK Ambassador), I Saw It All Happen... present a field recording of a life support system in its relentless quest to keep the patient alive and in doing so becomes part of the patient's living flesh. As one could gather from watching any given episode from the daytime soaps on which somebody named Montana or Dakota would be in a coma for six weeks until their contracts expire, the life support machine emanates a hypnotic pumping of mechanical whirs and beeps. Packaged with grainy photos and text dropping innuendos of the patient's inevitable death, this is a conceptual listen to the end.
Thanks to Cheb I Sabbah, Talvin Singh, Tabla Beat Science, and other electronica fusions with traditional Indian music, several dozen customers have excitedly picked this album in hopes of a sitar 'n' tabla laced album of electronica. To glum expressions and sad resignations, we explain that these "Indian Soundscapes" are just field recordings made throughout the subcontinent. It's a damn shame that more people haven't gotten excited about this album, as the recordings of rushing trains, calming ebbings of the ocean, bustling marketplaces, and the album's highlight - the haunted cackling of peacocks. This follows Soleilmoon's previous collection of field recordings, "Indonesian Soundscapes," although I'm not sure if Loren Nerell was the recordist on this one, as he had collected that collection of field recordings.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"Insect Noise In Stored Foodstuffs" appears to be an industrial document produced by the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection. This cd presents the sound investigation of the French team of Bunsel and Andrieu who used sensitive microphones with narrow frequency responses made to detect and identify the sounds of insect larvae which may be inhabiting otherwise quiet containers of grains and cereals. A handful of examples of the sounds including the grain weevil, the Indian meal moth, and the Lesser mealworm are accompanied by a running narrative both explaining the techniques used and the identification of the insects. And in case you missed the first 30 minutes of the document, the kind people at the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection repeat the program in French. Hey, if that Smithsonian / Folkways "Sounds of North American Frogs" rocked your world, wait til this little gem comes your way!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
'The Institute for Precision Motoricity' manipulates the run out grooves on 6 to 8 records with rubber bands, adhesive tape, toothbrushes, etc... to generate acoustic signals from what should simply be the empty pops of the stylus in an infinite termination of its course. The resulting pulses resemble a super lo-fi yet quite successful reconstitution of Thomas Brinkmann / Mike Ink's minimal techno.
This is as much a piece of amazing sound art as it is a critical catalogue of environmental abuse and a tribute to the folks working to solve those problems. EVERY SINGLE CENT from sale of these discs (that's all fifteen bucks from each), will be donated by us to support Greenaction For Health & Environmental Justice (check it out: http://www.greenaction.org). But this is not just a great cause that directly affects us all, this is an amazing sonic travelogue. Essential listening for fans of sound art, as well as anyone concerned with the state of our earth and the way pollution affects our communities.
For those of us who have spent years driving up and down highway 5, all of these locations will be immediately recognizable. However, this is a depressing, but also inspiring, glimpse at spots on the map that have existed as just blurs on the side of the highway. This long in the works project plays like a series of This American Life vignettes, chronicling the environmental abuses along Highway I-5, which runs the length of California including random field recordings, incidental music and interviews with concerned families, activists, children and members of various communities. This project covers points From Hunter Point in Bayview to Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, and is a self guided critical audio tour which attempts to illuminate the "invisible toxic landscape" by focusing on the story of people and organizations struggling for environmental justice. Two discs, one focuses on North, Hunters Point to Kettleman City, the second disc is South, from Alpaugh to Boyle Heights. Each stop along the tour is infamous for some environmental violation or another. Some are obvious (Livermore), some not so. But each directly effects families, their health and homes. It's enormously inspiring to hear these folks talk about what is being done, but simultaneously so depressing to realize how shortsighted so much of modern industry and local government can be. And it's so creepy to think about all the stops along highway 5 from every road trip, just random pit stops for gas, food, bathroom breaks, whatever, and to learn what sort of thoughtless abuses were occurring in all of these places, really intense, and sad because you know these instances are merely the tip of the iceberg.
You can hear the sounds of children playing, families talking, birds chirping, cars whizzing by, wind and rain, footsteps, ambient clatter and background noise, other discussions, as well as dreamy background music, all a dense rich sonic background to this series of totally engaging interviews.
Packaged in a gorgeous full color 6 panel fold out sleeve, with a massive booklet, with maps, and liner notes, extensive notes on each location, the environmental abuse, and each interviewee. This definitely makes us want to take an Invisible 5 roadtrip, stopping to observe the carelessness of humanity, and hopefully be inspired to help bring about change.
So by all means BUY THIS NOW. It's totally amazing to hear and see and listen to. Incredibly well researched and obsessively assembled, totally timely and something that directly affects us all, especially here since in this case all of these locations are in California, but you know you could do a project like this on any highway in any state in the country, which is indeed a very sad thing.
SO DO YOUR SMALL PART. BUY THIS NOW! DIG THESE AMAZING PEOPLE, THESE FASCINATING SOUNDS, AND REMEMBER, 100 PERCENT OF THE PROCEEDS OF THIS DISC GO TO SUPPORT GREENACTION FOR HEALTH & ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE!! AND WE CAN GUARANTEE THAT AFTER LISTENING TO THESE STORIES YOU'LL FEEL LIKE DOING SO MUCH MORE. WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT!
Every year, in a remote part of Sweden, a group or artists and architects build a massive structure out of ice and snow, walls and arches and doorways and windows, a gorgeous glowing edifice that once completed becomes the famed Ice Hotel. A small complex of delicately crafted rooms, a bar, a chapel, every bit of which is made from ice. In some places the ice is extra thin, so light from the outside bursts through warm and brilliant, while elsewhere, the thick walls glow a burnished blue from the filtered sunlight or the soft pale moonlight. The beds are blocks of ice covered with animal pelts and arctic sleeping bags. The bar is ice, the glasses also ice, the only libations served are hard alcohol (vodka, etc.) due to the fact that they won't freeze. A totally amazing and overwhelming bit of adventurous lodging as well as being a piece of gorgeous conceptual art. In fact Andee and Heather had planned to have their wedding at the Ice Hotel, until both sides of the family refused, citing the idea of sleeping in a below zero room on a block of ice as a definite deal breaker.
Well, it gets even better: at the same time as the hotel is being planned and constructed, several of the same planners and ice artists are also designing and building musical instruments made entirely out of ice. Percussion, harps, and horns, all made from frozen water and little else. The sounds are muted and soft, strange and organic, haunting but imbued with a strange warmth totally unlike the cold and clinical sounds you might expect. All deftly intertwined with human voices, soft coos and trills, hushed and whispery, sounding not unlike a ghostlike gathering of disembodied, deconstructed Bjorks.
On Igloo, Isungset and and an assortment of performers, coax all manner of sounds from a strange phalanx of icy sound makers, ice harp, ice percussion, ice bass drum (!), iceofon, icehorn, all soft focused and dreamlike, all recorded live in the frosty interior of an igloo like ice-recording studio. From the icy scrape and shuffle of melted ice, to the deep resonant tones of the various frozen percussion instruments, sounding like vibes or chimes, sometimes even gongs, the overtones drifting and slowly fading. Dark dolorous melodies, warm and subdued, but impossibly resonant. After all, these are just chunks of ice! But obviously crafted with such care and precision to render them capable of making rich sonorous sound. Like some giant frosty thumb piano, a warm tumble of ghostlike notes, beneath the flittering flute-like sound of the icehorn, soft, delicate reedy melodies that sometimes morph into thick wheezes before dissipating back into gentle flutter. Beneath it all, thick and cavernous rumbles and whirs, deep and dense, layered with sonic subtleties, rich with tonal color, as if played on some giant cello made from ice (which we think is not far from the truth actually). Also present are a wide array of unobtrusive sonic events in and around each track, a tiny army of icicle percussion, clinking and clattering, chittering and scrabbling, a delicate crystalline backdrop for the warm wash and warble of the main ice instruments. And finally the vocals -- on first listen, at low volume, we almost didn't realize there were vocals at all, they tend toward the extremely abstract, strange little vocalizations as much about texture and timbre as tone and pitch, the sound perfectly blending into the icy landscape around them. Hints of Sigur Ros, Joan La Barbara, Sainkho Namchylak, but each voice unmoored, loosed from any sort of corporeal existence, left to flit and flicker ghostlike, almost like tiny droplets of water dripping delicately onto the already frozen landscape, allowed to seep into each and every melody, freezing into new and wonderful shapes.
At its most percussive, the music on Igloo sounds a bit like that breed of underground minimal free folk, sort of minimal and tribal, dreamy and slightly clattery, Finnish free folk ensembles Avarus and Anaksimandros definitely come to mind, while the strange underwater thumb piano sound reminds us of a much more minimal and abstract Konono No.1. For the most part though, Igloo is a dark dreamy drift, soft and meditative, warm and warbly, shimmering and sparkling and completely captivating.
And, it's mastered by AQ fave dronelord Deathprod!
Igloo also boasts some of the most amazing packaging we have ever seen. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of ice in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, the front with strips cut out like icicles, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth, and yes, we mean ACTUAL water, in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and played! WOW!
The Swedish musical oddities never cease to amaze us, whether it be the hermetic psych of Joakim Skogsberg or the voodoo heaviness of Goat, Swedish musicians always seem to extremely commit to whatever thematic conceit informs their musical output. When we first got this release by Ixtahuele, we thought it was indeed a reissue of some obscure pagan exotica record from the fifties, but a closer look at the photo of the blonde lads on the back cover decked out in forties tuxes, one wearing a fez, just seemed a tad too modern and lo and behold, we realized Ixtahhuele is indeed a modern ensemble mining the sounds of Arthur Lyman, Les Baxter and Martin Denny! Using classic exotica instrumentation, of you know, marimbas, piano, stand-up bass, and all sorts of exotic percussion: bongos, gongs, taiko drums and cymbals, this group does a pretty stellar job of performing original classic sounding music without trying to put a modern spin on the sound. Instead of overdoing the hipster tropes of tiki bars and island girls, the band does its best to get to the heart of the alluring spell-binding qualities of true exotica: ritual dances, evil flora, island fever, stone relics and sun gods, the music oceanic and dreamy, beautifully hypnotic and sometimes fraught with an uncertain sense of danger, mystery and intrigue. Nice!
