For whatever reason, we (and lots of other folks) were convinced one man black metal band Svetovid hailed from the Great White North, when in fact, Svetovid is from right here in SF, and is a member of another local BM horde we dig Lascowiec. For the latest Brotherhood Of Light missive, Svetovid return with another sprawling psychedelic epic, which again begins with a shimmery clean guitar intro, sounding sort of psych folk, before the sound is transformed into something much more black and raw, filthy, muddy and distorted, the buzzing and blasting so washed out, that it almost sounds like some softly undulating dronemusic. The vocals the only concession to proper black metal, and even then it's less a harsh vokill shriek, and more a sinister reverbed whisper, drifting over a swirling, shimmering churn, and that vibe is all over Natures Fury, everything super tranced out and hypnotic, and when the vocals fade out, the sound is downright dreamy, and mesmerizingly blissed out.
Like we mention in our review of the previous Svetovid tape, the sound here (and there) definitely sounds just like the sort of blackened shoegaze you'd find on Starlight Temple Society or Khrysanthoney!
The second track lays down another backdrop of swirling washed out soft black buzz, buried blast beats, and smeared riffage, while over the top, strident bellowed vocals, wreathed in echo and delay, dramatic and almost industrial sounding, at least the vocals, the music remains a sort of blackened tripped out ambience, woozy tangled guitar melodies, warbly synths, hazy and hypnotic, clean guitar, shimmery and crystalline, the sound seasawing between druggy softly psychedelic drift and buzz drenched black crush, the timbre shifting constantly as well, brittle and high end one second, muddy and murky the next, and still super compressed and insectoid the next, those dramatic bellowed vox again surfacing throughout, and so it goes, Svetovid unfurling landscapes of blurred black buzz and abstract space-y drift, over which he delivers his harsh, FX heavy, anguished vokills. As always, cool, weird stuff from the local Brotherhood Of Light label!
You might recognize Mr. Dominic East as the lead vocalist for that fine Bay Area band Our Lady Of The Highway, but now please acquaint yourself with Swallow and Swallows. That's his solo indie folk songsmith alter ego and these are his personal home recordings circa 2004-2006. As we've mentioned with regards to OLOTH, East bears a striking resemblance to both Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and The Weakerthans' John K. Samson in not only his earnest vocal delivery, but also his songcraft and heart-baring lyrical intimacy. It's even more evident on this release as he keeps the arrangements to a minimum with spare and solitary guitar accompaniment. Whenever we've played this, someone invariably asks if it's a new (or long lost) Mountain Goats record. Now, we're by no means griping, but geez, these guys are virtually doppelgangers! Not a bad thing when it sounds this gooood!
The debut demo from these East Bay doomlords gets a deluxe vinyl reissue, and will be the first time most folks get an earful of Swamp Witch, and in a seriously overpopulated scene, SW definitely do their own thing, in fact, from the first few seconds, we were a bit thrown off, cuz the vibe was way more stonery and classic metal, not sludgey or really even all that doomy, we were ready for some soaring eighties style metal vocals to swoop in, they definitely would have fit, but before that can happen, the song shifts gears and slows to a lurching crawl, accompanied by some demonic vokill bellows, some serious stonery sludge, but then that opening riff resurfaces, and adds some serious melody to the proceedings, this time with added sort-of-leads, but it's what keeps this from being just another slab of boring doom, and it's that push and pull that makes the track so good, the band easily shifting from that lurching crawl, to the more propulsive classic metal rocking and back again, the cool thing being that you can almost feel the pull of the opposing sound the whole time, the sludge-y parts sound like they desperately wanna explode into melodic metal, and the melodic metal parts feel like they're on the edge of being sucked into the black tarpit dirge of the sludge parts. Then at the end it gets sort of psychedelic, with some crazy, sorta shrieked vocals. Such a killer track, definitely worth the price of admission right there. Then there's the second track, which is a bit more traditionally stonery sludge, but with a KILLER main riff, that again, slows down to an absolute slo-mo creep, a chugging, churning crawl, and so it goes again, the band lurching from stonery dirge to creepy crawl, finally culminating in an outro that's all swirling psychedelic feedback.
The sidelong flipside is a doozy, the brooding title track takes ages to get revved up, building lots of tension, the vibe super cinematic, all swirling feedback, and groaning bass rumble, keening melodies, all blurred into smeary swaths of mournful minor key sound, and when the song kicks in, it's MASSIVE, so heavy and blown out, some seriously brutal ultra doom crush, the sound remaining mostly entrenched in a tarpit dirge, the variations this time for the most time arrangement wise, some mathy chugging, a slightly more midtempo, groovy stretch, with some killer psychedelic guitars, which eventually bliss out into another feedback drenched guitardrone finale.
So killer. Not sure how we haven't heard these guys before now.
And if these three tracks are still somehow not sludgey enough for you, do some searching on the internet, and you can find a killer 'chopped & screwed' version, which finds the whole thing slowed way down, fucked with, looped and layered, stuttery and staggery, replete with weird scratching and DJ manipulations, as well as woozy, pitch shifted DJ Screw like vocals. Wish they would have pressed up an extra lp and included this version too...
Super nice packaging, a heavy gatefold sleeve, with a little baggie with two buttons, the lps pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Also includes a poster, a patch and a download code!
After a few years as a drum-machine backed two-piece, Andy Zevallos and Cynthia Mansourian have joined forces with Jim Andersen (former drummer of The Pattern & Year Future) to make an extraordinary EP of dark post-rock.
Possibly the best song on the record is the haunting "Siren Song" which shows off Andy's talents on the bass and Cynthia's rich vocals to their fullest. Backed by just a tambourine, the bass sounds like Three Mile Pilot's Zac at his finger-picking best.
The minimal pounding of the last track, "Thin and Gold", uses space and delay just as effectively as the opening track "You Were Down" uses relentless and almost breathless pounding. In addition to the bass, drums and heavily effected guitar, there's all these weird little shimmers and buzzes floating around in the backgrounds of the songs, like gothic insects. Recommended.
Brand new tape from LA's� indie headquarters, Not Not Fun, this time a debut cassette from SF's own Swanox.� We've seen a couple live sets from Anthony Bourch, aka Swanox, and he's also a regular here at aQ, so we're happy to finally give this stellar, drugged-out, cosmic-pop opus a home in our humble tape case.
Dawnrunner unfolds with deep, distorted guitar ringing out into a wash of cavernous reverb, crumbling minor leads luring you further into utter darkness, sporadic riffs and low-end sizzle offer up the perfect dose of atmospheric haze.� A dash of light leaks from the cavern's end as a shimmering guitar line fades in, the piece shifts from dark to light as the sounds gradually grow into a dense cloud of Popul Vuh-ish bliss. Just when we thought Dawnrunner was solely instrumental, "Through the Alders" rolls along with looong, Daniel Higgs-type vocal chants, slightly discernible lyrics buried in layers of distorted organ (sort of reminds us of the organ on the recent German Oak album we featured last list), moments of spritely flute and layers of murky droning build into a wall of weirdness until a quickly picked, uplifting guitar lead lifts over the psychedelic wash, the perfect summit to this monolithic track. While there's a hefty dose of washed out weirdness and droning decay, there's also a catchy, pop undercurrent flowing throughout, each song perfectly crafted with just the right amount of structure, falling somewhere between Night Control and Flying Saucer Attack, definitely not your run-of-the-mill home spun tape.� Noisy, psychedelic and super distinct, this will no doubt satisfy your fill for far out, loner bedroom weirdness.�Limited to an edition of 100, you know these will be gone in no time, so don't miss out!
Ace Of Spades is a cd-r series of live recordings showcasing the intimate acoustic music of a variety of local indie artists. The series so far boasts consistently strong performances from all participants (well played and well recorded at Mama Buzz Cafe in Oakland).
Volume 4 is from the December 12th 2004 show starring Dave Gleason's Wasted Days and Sweetbriar. You get nine songs from the former (including a great version of Gram Parsons' "A Song For You") and seven from the latter (ending with a fine medley of "The Wild Side Of Life" and "Honky Tonk Angels" originally by Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells respectively).
An excellent retrospective compiling ten long out-of-print singles and eps from this beloved SF veteran band. Bastards & Rarities resonates warmly with their distinct gritty and slightly trippy down-to-earthness. Early '90s college indie rock heaven: raw fuzzy guitars, steady shuffling drumming and drowsy boyish vocals. You can certainly hear connections between these songs and those of Swell's Bay Area contemporaries such as American Music Club or Pavement as well as their younger brethren like Grandaddy. Pretty darn great!
If you read our in-between list last Friday, the one where where highlighted some of our favorite things on the Holy Mountain label, you may remember us mentioning this new, soon-to-be-reviewed Holy Mountain release, the debut album from Swiftumz. As promised, here it is, and it's awesome. But, those of you you familiar with Holy Mountain's usual output might be expecting something deeply psychedelic, acid folky, or even experimentally abrasive... so Swiftumz might throw you for a loop, 'cause instead it's quite poppy. Hum-along, stick in your head, lalala-ishly poppy, wow! But it's lo-fi bedroom indie pop, of course, kinda on the Ariel Pink or Art Museums tip, delirious and distorted enough to find favor with the Holy Mountain mystics. REALLY distorted on opener "Don't Cha Want Me Back?" in fact.
It's the work of a local fella, super nice guy and man about town, Chris McVicker. Who until now, we hadn't realized was such a hidden pop talent. Perhaps we should have known, apparently he wrote a hit single for Hunx & His Punx, but we tend to think of him as the guy who hangs out with Oakland heavies Pigs and brings us their records (and one of the Pigs guys plays on this, as does Myles Cooper and some other folks). So, surprised were we that this was such a catchy affair, inspired by the '80s British stuff from the C86 scene, but also reminding us of all kinds of other good ol' underground indie faves like Dinosaur Jr and The Supreme Dicks. There's plenty of strummy guitar jangle, shimmering FX, tick tockin' drum machine beats, and gentle vox to lift these tracks to the top of the pops in your heart. Really good stuff, it was tough to pick which songs we liked best out of the bunch to make sound samples of, 'cause they're all so good. Some mellow and dreamy, others uptempo energetic, all hooky and hazy and full of heartache.
By the way, that cute name, Swiftumz, is that McVicker's secret nickname or something? Sounds kind of like a term of endearment - or perhaps the opposite. "Good one, Swiftumz!" one could say, sarcastically. But we will say it sincerely, this IS a good one, Swiftumz, we're impressed!! Enthusiastically recommended. And by the way, the phone number that's on the sticker on the front cover, below where it says "call me", that IS McVicker's phone number! And he really doesn't mind if you call him.
Though unfortunately vinyl-only, this does include a mp3 download code.
Yay this is making us happy! Our pal Chris McVicker aka Swiftumz is back with a blissful blast of indie pop goodness on this new two song 7". Super catchy, sunshiney love song stuff here, with jangly guitar strum and sweet tender vocals, but don't worry there's something about it, some hint of heartache around the corner, that keeps it from getting too icky gooey lovey dovey, even when he's singing the letters (and number) "I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-4-E-V-A" in the chorus on the flipside, the track "4EVA Redux", an update of a song from Swiftumz's debut lp on Holy Mountain from last year. We loved that record, and it's nice to hear more from him. He should keep it up, 'cause there's no reason why Swiftumz shouldn't have as many fans as, like, King Tuff or Best Coast.
LIMITED TO JUST 200 COPIES, FYI!
Yay! Two brand new songs from this no-longer-a-one-man-band, Swiftumz, the brainchild of local who-woulda-thunk-it indie pop genius Chris McVickers, whose debut full length on Holy Mountain, Don't Trip, we swooned over in 2011. We know he's got a 'real' band now, they're listed in the credits to this single (Brian Hamilton of aQ fave metalpunks Pigs plays guitar!) and also there was a record release show just last week at the Makeout Room around the corner from our shop. Earlier this year there was a 7" on Roadcone, entitled Love Ya 4 Eva, also a fantastic blissful blast of Swiftumz pop smarts, and now this.
The two songs on here, both the noisepoppy anthem "Willy" as well as the rollicking twanged-out romp on the flipside that asks the musical question "Can We Get Together?", are squarely in the Swiftumz tradition of super infectious, play-it-again-Swiftums, heart-tugging good times, fulla breathy sincere vox, distorted guitar, and hella catchy hooks.
Comes in a nice looking full color sleeve w/ spot varnish for the text.
Utterly gorgeous and meticulously crafted sounds infused with warmth and a glimmering, strangely tender vibe. Almost like a more melodic Jasper TX or Machinefabriek, Ben Swire intertwines traditional instruments with field recordings and electronics to create a totally seamless sound that has been the soundtrack to constant drifting, dazed daydreaming.
While Swire resides right here in San Francisco, it actually makes a lot of sense that this was released by the great Australian label Preservation, who have proven to have such immaculate taste in soft focus underground sounds (Eddie Marcon, Caethua, Aaron Martin, etc.). But we also think he would be a perfect fit for the roster of Root Strata, as his music really taps into a similarly perfect hazy, delicate, droney yet melodic sensibility. We hear hints of so many artists that we love like Philip Jeck, Es, The Fun Years, Part Timer, Mountains, as well as a more organic interpretation of early recordings by folks like Mum, Opiate and Markus Archer. While we are reminded of all those great artists, there is something so striking about Swire's soft touch, understated and assured with some pleasant surprises of a slightly darker nature, subtly tense and ominous, which unfold in the later half of the record. But for sure this the perfect soundtrack for staring out the window on long road trips as the scenery washes by and your mind floats away in a million different directions. So beautiful!
After a couple of live cd-rs, a tape, and numerous live shows, the energetic but short-lived free music trio Sword & Sandals have called it a day. Comprised of John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees), Randy Lee Sutherland (Freak Out label) and visual artist Shaun O'Dell, the trio bow out with their most layered, expansive and exciting release to date! Containing seven tracks, their normal instrumental set-up of two saxophones and a drummer is fleshed out with bells, flute, piano, bass clarinet and even a synth. Good & Plenty is definitely channeling the spirit of those BYG Actuel release from the late sixties from the likes of Don Cherry, Sun Ra or Sunny Murray. The dueling dynamic of O'Dell and Sutherland's horn interplay is not one of willful free jazz cacophony, but a means to reach a harmonic connection through disparate starting points, often sounding like the horns are worrying back and forth over the same small tonal point creating a tense movement of sound. But unlike their live shows and recordings, the horns are not always locked in battle. The overall flow of the record tempers the noisy urgent moments with quieter moody tracks of looser and more playful rhythms, sometimes ramshackle and other times more martial with strange washes of bell sounds, out of tune piano, weird bleeps, and minimal plaintive horn drones. It's one of those records where the band has finally come into their own, harnessing the ferocious energy of their live shows into something deeper and more reflective and at times quite beautiful. Limited to 300 copies, each lp comes with a download card. Highly recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Sword + Sandals are a two saxophone and drums improv jazz trio comprised of local artists Shaun O'Dell (Corn Silo of Skulls, Beak), Randylee Sutherland (head of cd-r label Freak Out) and the irascible John Dwyer (Coach Whips, The Oh Sees, etc.) on drums! The recordings on their Live #1+2 cdr are circa 2006. Get 'em while you can!
Sword + Sandals are a two saxophone and drums trio comprised of local artists Shaun O'Dell (Corn Silo of Skulls, Beak), Randylee Sutherland (head of new cd-r label Freak Out) and the irascible John Dwyer (Coach Whips, The OhSees, etc.) on drums and they have been creating quite a stir at recent art openings and cafe performance spaces. Like the angel/gladiator/Greek philosopher imagery their name implies, Sword + Sandals engage in tumultuous bouts of free interactivity, wrestling sonic foes in the name of some higher ideal. Here in this live set at 21 Grand in Oakland, the cavernous acoustics of the space allow each of the horn players room to roam without straying far from the core idea. But what is that core? Without relying on a foundation of melody, steady tempo or a calculated harmonic plan, each player manages to defy complete cacophony by intuitively overlapping across similar but microtonally separate aural paths, creating mesmerizing dynamic regimes of sound through tense build-ups with intermittent breaths of space. A refreshing new addition to this city's dearth of inspired free jazz-not-jazz performers.
It speaks much to a bands power that a drummer and three guys with saxophones can out assault a line-up of ear-splitting knob twiddling feedback makers and a band of obnoxious Portland kids on acid playing "noise-folk" and screeching "Won't you be our friends?" at the audience. Such was the case of this Sword + Sandals live set at the ARC Cafe, one of San Francisco's many strange and short-lived venues. Adding a third saxophone to their ranks for this set, S+S take full advantage of the Arc's cavernous space to spread out and create dynamic battlements of overlapping sax trills across machine-gun drumming. Seemingly cacophonous and composed at the same time, these free players have quite an intuitive knack for creating swells of tension with only occasionally some release. Bracing but always both visually and sonically compelling.
A wonderful new release by Oakland, CA electro-acoustic experimental artist Agnes Szelag! Despite this 24-minute EP's title and the fact that it was recorded during the summer and winter months of 2005 through 2007, the latter season definitely seems to have left its mark on her music. The four soundscapes do evoke frosty, overcast atmospheres - looming shadows of skeletal tree branches, moaning winds that chill to the bone, the slow flutter of snowflakes and the delicate bite of ice crystals on your cheek. Szelag's darkly dreamy compositions will surely appeal to fans of Nurse With Wound's creaky ghost ship of an album Salt Marie Celeste or the icy shimmering ambience of many releases on the SF based Dynamophone label (such as Fjordne, Balustade Ensemble, Curium). Recommended.
Upon receiving the debut release from T H E M A Y S (yes, the group specifies that there be a space between each letter)!, we were struck by the aroma of tempera paint emanating from the hand-made fold-out packaging. It immediately stirred memories of fingerpainting in elementary school, and in turn, the untethered nature of childhood creativity. Interestingly, T H E M A Y S is a project based out of a school of another sort, but with a seemingly similar sense of free-flowing exploratory openness. Nestled in the Sunset Neighborhood Beacon Center, the San Francisco Urban Music Program is "dedicated to teaching progressive and adventurous music-making of all kinds" to youths and adults. Yes, that description sounds right up our alley, doesn't it? And while it's actually not geographically so (i.e, "up our alley", heh heh!), it is still pretty close and in town (the SNBC is a wonderful community hub located a few blocks from Ocean Beach in the Outer Sunset district here in SF). Anyhoo, KNOWFI was composed in this supportive environment by eight students and instructors. The latter includes the fine Jon Bernson with whom we're all well familiar from his other musical pursuits (namely Ray's Vast Basement which morphed into Exray's a couple of years ago, and his duo with Tim Cohen called Window Twins). He is in fact the captain of this UMP ship, having founded it in back in '97.
Although the cd-r is indexed into twelve tracks, and each one is titled individually, it plays as one continuous 40-minute soundscape of lulling swells of dreamy haze. So, we'd recommend that you sit right down, settle in for a spell, and allow the heavily processed and densely layered drones, fleeting melodies, found sounds and other noise generators melt together into every crack and crevice of your ear drums. Awash with ever-evolving warbly, woobly wonderfulness!
The second release from local electronic collective T H E M A Y S (that's how it's written according to the group), and like the last one, a limited cd-r on Gigante Sound, this tape is the work of a special group of music makers, as T H E M A Y S is actually a school project, or rather a project based out of a school, in which kids are taught to make music, record, compose, play instruments, and the results are then released, this tape the product of various recording and editing sessions between students and instructors, and it's a doozy, loping electronic soundscapes, super atmospheric, like the last record, but this one way more beat heavy, sounding like something that should have come out on Anticon, the same sort of lush collaged avant hip hop soundscapery, the tones lush and warm, the beats loping and groovy, the tracks here are pretty fantastic, layered and intricate, gristly statick woven into dreamy billows of chordal shimmer, and swirling FX, all anchored to hypnotic electro-hop grooves. Super cool!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Get to second base with these ladies if you dare, you might find yourself an appendage short!
After a killer split with UK based Leopard Leg, Second Base marks the full length debut of these local San Francisco spitfires. Huge mean walls of cavey no-wave pummel and monolithic molten guitar swells steep these doom-laden garage rock stompers in layers of simmering and pulsating sonics. While the vocals sung in group chant style highlight the buried melodies deep within. It's a bit easy to describe the vocals and overall sound of an all-girl experimental band, especially one that dwells toward the extreme side of the sonic spectrum, as "witchy", but there's no real other way to describe the vocals here. Although they're not shrieked or sung in a detuned arty sort of way, the flat but clear group-intoned vocal delivery heightens the spell-binding doomy power of the songs, reminding us of the modern-day women in George Romero's Season of the Witch, rather than the nature-worshiping fairytale kind.
We're still not sure what T.I.T.S. stands for. Their MySpace page suggests Technicolor Inner Troll Syndrome(?!). We've got a better one: This Is The Shit!!!!
Over the last few years T.I.T.S. have proven to be one of the most exciting groups in the San Francisco music scene. Four woman who bring an immediacy and intensity to their off kilter post-punk jams. Theirs are songs that make you want to dance in such a fucked up way, as you smash and destroy, sweat and bleed and exorcise all the demons from your soul...
For sure taking their cues from the early No Wave scene, their sound so perfect alongside impassioned blasts from the past by folks like The Au Pairs, Liliput, DNA, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Bush Tetras, The Raincoats and The Slits. We also love how they songs feel like such kindred spirits to what Erase Errata were exploring on their final (?) album, Nightlife. We're also reminded of a similar sensation we feel when we listen to The Ex.
While they may be getting much inspiration from the past, nothing feels nostalgic about the sounds on The Girls. In fact every song jumps out with such a present, vibrant energy that they make the listener feel totally connected to that visceral moment in time. What makes T.I.T.S. so fucking great is that they don't just borrow from post punk's past, but instead they actually infuse so much true punk spirit into their songs. Smoking hot!
Intercontinental all girl noise rock tag team match up. From right here in SF come T.I.T.S. (no idea what it stands for) an all-female troupe spewing their own skewed and venomous version of damaged psychedelic fuzzy garage rock stomp. Lo-fi brittle metallic riffing butts up against simple pounding caveman drums, haunting chant-like vocals, all with a seriously pagan primal, tribal vibe. Two whole sides of furiously fuzzed out chant and buzz, psych rock garage grrrrrrrrr....
The other disc features the UK's mysterious Leopard Leg, who are a bit like a witchier, soundtrackier No Neck Blues Band. Abstract soundscapes of bells and chimes nestled amidst prickly seas of record / campfire crackle, buzzing snarls of malfunctioning electronics, clattery tribal percussion, haunting abstract vocals, a slow drift through a dark forest, folk picked apart by hungry scavengers, leaving weird skeletal shapes and fuzzy fragments of sound, until about halfway through the second side when the band drop everything, and go all out with their haunted forest drum line, spitting out a huge cacophonous wall of Crash Worship drum damage. Woah.
Incredible packaging, super thick, glossy gatefold sleeve, colored vinyl, one white, one green, so nice...
A live recording from a local outdoor performance. Tabla Beat Science pretty much typifies world beat music; emphasis on the 'world', emphasis on the 'beat'. Zakir Hussain on tabla, Bill Laswell on bass, former Skratch Pikl DJ Disk wielding turntables, plus personnel supplying sarangi, synths, vocals, etc.
Released almost two years before The Waves, Led Astray Washed Ashore is a different kind of (awesome) record. It's power lies in being direct and driving: the drums are tribal, the layers of sound are starker and sparser. Though there's still a lot of nice washy reverb in places, Tamaryn's vocals are recorded without a lot of doubling or many effects. Where The Waves makes you feel like you're floating in a dream, Led Astray Washed Ashore is grounded in the close and crisp dynamic of mostly clean vocals and tom-heavy drumming. The first song, "Return to Surrender," has echoes of the darker songs of the Eurythmics. "The Unknown" is all chanting, tribal drumming, and what sounds like an organ: a cacophonous interlude between the energy of the opening track and the colder, more stark "Sarah In The Aeadrone." "Golden Song" sounds like the best song Siouxsie and The Banshees never wrote, though the sparkly guitar work is pure Rex Shelverton. "Ashore" and "Metal Beasts" continue the lyrical themes of death and water and drowning present on the entire record (including the cover). Yes! Truly, there's nothing more nourishing for a blackened soul than beautiful music about death.
This record is a must have for anyone who bought The Waves or anyone wanting an introduction to the shoegazey brilliance of Tamaryn. It features an alternate take of "Mild Confusion," one of the best tracks on The Waves, and an unreleased song, "Light Shadows" that could have stood with pride anywhere on the full length. There's only a few of these left floating around (we got these from the artist herself) and it's doubtful if we'll ever get any more. Limited to 1000 copies and pressed on white vinyl.
We got in a limited number (five) of an exclusive Tamaryn tour t-shirt from their recent voyages with the Raveonettes! Featuring an outtake image from the cover shoot of The Waves, the shirt is screened on white cotton and won't be around for very long. Due to the limited nature of the shirt, it's ONLY available in size MEDIUM and we will NEVER have any more than we currently do, sorry petite and large people! Don't miss out, medium folks.
Latest album of fuzzy, ethereal dreampop from this aQ beloved SF songstress, and like her past efforts, Tender New Signs is another glorious collection of lush retro pop loveliness, the sound a dreamy druggy pastiche of modern goth pop and classic shoegaze bliss out, all big chiming guitars, softly propulsive rhythms, low slung basslines, all the sounds doused in echo and reverb, and wreathed in big billowing clouds of crystalline 4AD shimmer, the sound this time around bolstered by a big eighties style drum sound on the more rocking tracks, but most of the record gloriously washed out and gauzey, due in no small part to a fantastically lush, layered production, all of this woven into a luxurious sonic backdrop for Tamaryn's gorgeous vox, breathy and sultry, settled way back in the mix for much of the record, existing more as another sonic layer, but on the slower numbers, slipping to the foreground, transforming those numbers into slowcore dreampop torch songs.
The record, while sonically cohesive, definitely lets Tamaryn and her band stretch out, unfurling an evershifting super varied songscape, slipping from soft focus slowcore dreaminess, to swoonsome jangle pop balladry, to driving, surprisingly rocking shoegaze crunch, to hushed haunting broodiness. So good. And as always, recommended for fans of Beach House, My Bloody Valentine, Mazzy Star, 4AD, etc.
Krust! Nekkro! Grimm! Kvlt!!! If it's evil-sounding and spelled weirdly then it most certainly applies to this filthy oily mass of lice infested, punk infused black metal that has slithered its way through the front gates of aQ HQ. Hailing from right here in San Francisco, Tare seems to be a totally new proposition, formed just last year, and they name the Finnish orthodox hordes as their primary inspiration (i.e. Horna, Sargeist, Vordr), but their blown out brand of venomous, simplified BM will surely appeal to fans of Bone Awl and Raspberry Bulbs as well (and maybe even worshippers of black metal ultra minimalists Ildjarn!). The guitars are a staticky stab, the drums a relentless minimal caveman plod, the vocals a garbled howl. If you like your black metal dirty, nasty and truly ugly then you don't want to pass this up. Plus it's housed in a swanky oversized case that includes both a cassette and a 3" cd-r (that both feature the same music we presume??).
Tarentel's 2004 album We Move Through Weather found the San Francisco's sonic journeymen balancing their penchant for moody atmospheres and a new found spirit of improvisation, which hurtled them somewhere near Jackie-O Motherfucker meets This Heat territory. In constructing that record, Tarentel had to sift through hours and hours of recordings in order to pare down to a mere 72 minutes. Well, they could have done a Supersilent or Necks and released a massive 3 or 4 cd set of material; but instead they chose to wait and release two EPs (which both clock in well above 30 minutes each) of material that was not included on the We Move Through Weather album.
The companion to Paper White, Big Black Square is a 43 minute sprawling epic recorded at the very end of the We Move Through Weather sessions. Opening with a lengthy passage of humid drones from amplifier buzz, aqueous flutterings, organ tones, and somnambulant field recordings, Big Black Square lumbers into action after some 20 minutes as drummer Jim Redd slowly transforms an indifferent textural clatter across his drum kit into a complex elliptical groove. Multi-instrumentalists Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grodinski flesh out the skeletal rhythms with a spindly duel between their two guitars crumpled through tons of effects both high and low tech, making for a beautiful, dark, and evocative EP.
Handy cd format for some heretofore vinyl-only outta sight outta print Tarentel cuts. While we still favor Tarentel's first proper full length From Bone To Satellite as their peak moment, this is still pretty, epic instrumental work, lots of arpeggiated chords, softly shimmering cymbals and sad sack melodies. Very very slow; sometimes a heady climax finishes off a piece, and sometimes we're left hanging midair, holding our breath, waiting for redemption... ahem.
Five tracks, one from the Temporary Residence lathe cut 10", two from Resonant's "Looking for Things Searching for Things" 12", and two tracks from Static Caravan's "Two Sides of Myself" 7".
While strictly limited to the subscribers of the "Purposeful Availment" series, we have managed to get hold of a handful of this 6 song EP from the San Francisco ensemble Tarentel, which finds the group pushing even further away from the epic post / space rock that defined their "From Bone To Satellite" album. These days, Tarentel is far more content to build their barren, desert-like atmospheres out of those interwtining Slint-ish / Morricone guitar quotations, without ever having to crank up the volume. While their earlier incarnations of the quiet / LOUD dynamism mounted some furiously beautiful live shows, Tarentel's recent balancing act has been located between the traditional rock instrumentation of bass, guitars, and drums (although the drums haven't been of much use as of recent) and the Max/MSP digital tricks promoted by Fennesz, Stephan Mathieu, and Ekkehard Ehlers. "Fear Of Bridges" switches off with the spartan guitar interplay on one track and the laptop re-interpretations of Tarentel sounds into gossamer droning pieces spinning with digitally pointilistic details. If it's any indication where Tarentel is heading, guitarist Jefre Cantu has a couple of solo projects of his laptop work coming out soon and there's a Tarentel release on the electronica boutique label Bottrop-Boy also in the pipeline.
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CD finally back in stock! The debut album from San Francisco's Tarentel is a majestic affair as multiple guitars churn through slow epic songs that build slow yet catchy melodies out of a deep space sonic miasma. Follow this with super-nova explosions of radioluminescent guitar / bass / drum crash that does very well to replicate the q...u...i...e...t L!!!O!!!U!!!D!!! dynamism of the likes of Mogwai via Morricone, or Godspeed You Black Emperor without the warm strings. Sure, Tarentel may in fact be wearing their influences proudly on their sleeves. But, unlike so many 'post-rock' bands who think you have to badly rip-off Tortoise to be artful, Tarentel's admission of their their influences is anything but detrimental. A solid, quite excellent album.
We listed the individual vinyl installments of Tarentel's Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun a while back (all now out of print so don't order!), each one a mind blowing blast of druggy, psychedelic free form rhythmic bliss out, and each one could well have been an AQ record of the week. But good thing we held off, cuz here we are a year or so later, and all four slabs of wax have been digitized and compiled as a massive double cd set, and needless to say, four -possible- records of the week, all piled on top of one another, can only mean one thing! Well, yeah, obviously, this absolutely had to be a record of the week. Quite possibly (and very probably) the best music we've heard from these guys, which is saying a lot considering how much we dig most everything Tarentel does...
When we first heard the title of Tarentel's 2cd (formerly FOUR lp) set, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, Ghetto Beats IS all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrocky pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of most of these songs is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
We originally reviewed Ghetto Beats one lp at a time, and while they do work perfectly as one epic cohesive chunk of sound, they still sort of play out like the separate movements they started out as...
The first movement (lp #1) is six tracks, a little over a half an hour, a dense assemblage of abstract rhythms and brooding, swirling psychedelia, heavy on the This Heat worship, beats stretched out over huge expanses of industrial whir and jagged angular guitars, very loping and hypnotic, brooding and drone-y, mysterious tribal rituals stretched out into epic spaced out, abstract rhythmic jams.
Part two (lp #2) is 4 tracks, 40 minutes, two epic jams, both 16+ minutes, separated by two shorter tracks. The opener starts with an endlessly hypnotic, near metal drum jam, over which guitars and sound makers creak and keen, a crystalline web of high end sonics over a swirling tribal rhythm. It could seemingly go on forever, and it sort of does, but near the end it dissipates into a dark spacious soundscape of distant clatter and thick rumbling buzz. After a one minute rhythmic experiment, all freaked out psych rock effects and super distorted drum sputter, the second lengthy jam kicks in, and it's definitely the most mellow and blissed out track so far, some muted free jazz skitter, over a slow burning expanse of chiming guitars and smears of abstract melody all stretched into a near static glacial groove. So nice. As if that weren't enough, the last 5 minutes is some of that fuzzy crumbling blurry ambience we can never seem to get enough of. Soft focus and indistinct, shimmering guitars wrapped in thick crumbling guitars and a glistening sonic glow, like Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and that sort of thing, a gorgeous late night coda of dreamy drone-y bliss.
For part three (originally the third lp), the group start out by moving even further out into space (rock) on the ten minute "Stellar Envelope", blown out crumbling sheets of distorted psych guitar and dizzying FX wrapped around propulsive tribal beats, feedback everywhere, it almost sounds like Hawkwind with all the structure sucked out, leaving a huge swirling mass of psychedelic tribal ambience, while managing to still rock somehow. The rest of volume three area gorgeously obfuscated drift through a sonic landscape at once rough and lo-fi and blissfully lush, strange industrial clatter and clang is muted and smeared into mumbly ambience, guitars are looped into hypnotic stretches of throbbing drone, bits of dreamlike melody, simple spacious piano, are wreathed in fuzz and warped into gorgeous slabs of pop ambient fuzz, the whole thing is surprisingly tranquil and shimmery, especially after that opening salvo, and the dense rhythmic intensity of the first two movements, but within the context of Tarentel's seriously epic Ghetto Beat symphony, it couldn't sound more perfect.
The final movement (the 4th and last lp in the series) offers up Ghetto Beats' heaviest moment in the form of "Somebody Fucks With Everybody", a sidelong doom dirge blow out, referencing everyone from SUNNO))) to Growing to Nadja, a thick glacial swirl of downtuned guitars, wreathed in effulgent streaks of damaged outerspace FX and psychrock solar flares, all underpinned by Neurosis style tribal rhythms, constantly sounding as if any second the song will kick into the heaviest riff of all time, but instead, it stretches on and on, building and building, some sort of cosmic lo-fi krautrock ambience, massive and heavy, but strangely dreamy and blissful.
The rest of Ghetto Beats pretty much eschews the titular beats entirely, instead offering up several brief ambient drifts, the far away foresty folk hovering above slow moving slabs of glacial low end of "Where Time Forgot", the ultra brief scrape and shuffle of "Isalais Delay", the murky disembodied post rock of "You Do This. I'll Do That", a strange landscape of fuzzy melodies and indistinct song fragments, all woven into some sort of soft focus fever dream, and finally, "Lake Light", a two minute outro, the glorious final flurry of sound in this epic sonic travelogue spread out over 2cds, a gorgeously hopeful, sparkling glistening drift of shimmery harmonics, and misty minor key flutter...
Like we mentioned before, we've loved everything Tarentel has done in the past, but this is by far our favorite, and how could it not be after drifting dreamily through two plus glorious hours of Ghetto Beats, immersing ourselves in a dreamy, druggy, murky world of drifting space drones and propulsive beats, of fuzzed out shimmer and barely there ambience... So amazing!
Packaged in a super striking, full color, eight panel fold out sleeve, limited to 3000 copies, each with a numbered metallic sticker affixed to the front.
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrocky pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
Volume 1 is six tracks, a little over a half an hour, a dense assemblage of abstract rhythms and brooding, swirling psychedelia, heavy on the This Heat worship, beats stretched out over huge expanses of industrial whir and jagged angular guitars, very loping and hypnotic, brooding and drone-y, mysterious tribal rituals stretched out into epic spaced out, abstract rhythmic jams.
As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
Volume 2 is 4 tracks, 40 minutes, two epic jams, both 16+ minutes, separated by two shorter tracks. The opener starts with an endlessly hypnotic, near metal drum jam, over which guitars and sound makers creak and keen, a crystalline web of high end sonics over a swirling tribal rhythm. It could seemingly go on forever, and it sort of does, but near the end it dissipates into a dark spacious soundscape of distant clatter and thick rumbling buzz. After a one minute rhythmic experiment, all freaked out psych rock effects and super distorted drum sputter, the second lengthy jam kicks in, and it's definitely the most mellow and blissed out track on the first two volumes, some muted free jazz skitter, over a slow burning expanse of chiming guitars and smears of abstract melody all stretched into a near static glacial groove. So nice. As if that weren't enough, the last 5 minutes is some of that fuzzy crumbling blurry ambience we can never seem to get enough of. Soft focus and indistinct, shimmering guitars wrapped in thick crumbling guitars and a glistening sonic glow, like Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and that sort of thing, a gorgeous late night coda of dreamy drone-y bliss.
As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, the first two of which we raved about a little while back (both of which we still have in stock, although there are only a handful of copies left!) we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of most of these songs is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
On volume three, the group start out by moving even further out into space (rock) on the ten minute "Stellar Envelope", blown out crumbling sheets of distorted psych guitar and dizzying FX wrapped around propulsive tribal beats, feedback everywhere, it almost sounds like Hawkwind with all the structure sucked out, leaving a huge swirling mass of psychedelic tribal ambience, while managing to still rock somehow. The rest of volume three area gorgeously obfuscated drift through a sonic landscape at once rough and lo-fi and blissfully lush, strange industrial clatter and clang is muted and smeared into mumbly ambience, guitars are looped into hypnotic stretches of throbbing drone, bits of dreamlike melody, simple spacious piano, are wreathed in fuzz and warped into gorgeous slabs of pop ambient fuzz, the whole thing is surprisingly tranquil and shimmery, especially after that opening salvo, and the dense rhythmic intensity of the first two volumes, but within the context of Tarentel's epic 4 part Ghetto Beat symphony, it couldn't sound more perfect.
As much as we love pretty much everything Tarentel does, volume three of Ghetto Beats only further convinces us that this is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, the first two of which we raved about a little while back (both of which we still have in stock, although there are only a handful of copies left!) we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of most of the tracks is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
The final volume in the series, offers up Ghetto Beats' heaviest moment in the form of "Somebody Fucks With Everybody", a sidelong doom dirge blow out, referencing everyone from SUNNO))) to Growing to Nadja, a thick glacial swirl of downtuned guitars, wreathed in effulgent streaks of damaged outerspace FX and psychrock solar flares, all underpinned by Neurosis style tribal rhythms, constantly sounding as if any second the song will kick into the heaviest riff of all time, but instead, it stretches on and on, building and building, some sort of cosmic lo-fi krautrock ambience, massive and heavy, but strangely dreamy and blissful.
The second side pretty much eschews the titular beats entirely, instead offering up several brief ambient drifts, the far away foresty folk hovering above slow moving slabs of glacial low end of "Where Time Forgot", the ultra brief scrape and shuffle of "Isalais Delay", the murky disembodied post rock of "You Do This. I'll Do That", a strange landscape of fuzzy melodies and indistinct song fragments, all woven into some sort of soft focus fever dream, and finally, "Lake Light", a two minute outro, the glorious final flurry of sound in this epic sonic travelogue spread out over 4 lps, a gorgeously hopeful, sparkling glistening drift of shimmery harmonics, and misty minor key flutter. So lovely.
We've loved everything Tarentel has done in the past, but this is by far our favorite, and how could it not be after drifting dreamily through all 8 sides of Ghetto Beats, immersing ourselves in a gloriously murky world of drifting space drones and propulsive beats, of fuzzed out shimmer and barely there ambience... So amazing!
Tarentel have been on a madly prolific run, both as a group and individually -- particularly AQ pal Jef Cantu whom you can also hear in The Alps and as J.C. Ledesma. Following up the companion EPs Paper White and Big Black Square from earlier this year is another beautiful release from those dear fellows, and it's on the Acuarela label from Madrid, Spain. Barely there shifting layers of haze and shimmer punctuated by spartan plucked strings and strums. Ultra delicate and airy.
ULTRA LIMITED, HAND SILKSCREENED lp from local post-drone-rock outift Tarentel. We've had the sonic good fortune of listening to Tarentel develop over the years from a Tortoise like post-rock ensemble to a truly risk taking experimental group, who wield a deft hand with catchy melodies and clever, complex song writing, but never shy away from taking big chances, experimenting with sound and sounds, leaning lately much more toward the abstract soundscape end of the spectrum, which of course we can't get enough of. From the opening track, a downright dreamy expanse of gentle piano, warm whooshing woodwinds and delicate acoustic guitars to the much darker and abrasive second track, a super distorted rumbling dronescape, swirling and churning around a shuffling jazzy rhythm and some creaking machine like melodies. The remaining seven tracks are a mix of the two, stretched out, blissed out smears of twinkling synths, and fluttery minimal percussion, all occasionally disrupted by big fuzzy spurts of distorted rumble and sunspot like flashes of digital glitchery. So gorgeous. And again, VERY LIMITED. Beautiful hand screened sleeves, strictly limited to 500 copies, not sure how many we'll be able to get!
It's been over a year since we've heard from Tarentel. Not since their Ghetto Beats release in 2007. Since then the various members have been doing their own things, recording solo records, playing in other bands, running labels, and while this is not an actual new record it will go a long way to tiding us over until the next proper Tarentel release.
Live Edits, as the title suggests, are various recordings from their 2005 European tour, short excerpts and edits from looooong live performances. The first thing you notice, in one of the Switzerland shows, which was hinted at on Ghetto Beats, is how much more rhythmic they can get live, the drums seem to be THE driving force. Offering up dense flurries of tribal rhythms, pounding out mysterious rituals, while the rest of the band contribute sounds and textures in the background, high pitched sine waves, sheets of feedback, processed guitar scrabble, whirring drones, very abstract and tripped out. But at another show in a different Swiss city, the drums are ditched completely, or if they are present, they are processed into another layer of buzzing drone, to pile atop the already intense wall of sound being conjured up, lots of rumble and hiss, a deep mysterious pulse buried beneath, which eventually builds to something much more blissy and melodic, guitars ringing out, chiming, woven into an ethereal shimmer.
Back at the first Swiss show, the group create a mysterious soundscape of creaking machinery, haunting loops, and heavily effected guitars, left to drift through a super abstract dubby drift.
In Italy, Tarentel offer up yet more minimalism, guitars scrape and groan, creating a rough smear of textured hum, over a distant soft focus shimmer, before letting the guitars growl and buzz, building to a thick throbbing swirl.
The above were just the longer tracks, those are actually separated by brief snippets of various performances, from awesomely chaotic glitched out synthscapery, to deep FX drenched dark ambience, to creepy expanses of low end sprawl and whirring blackened rumbles, all of the tracks, are deftly placed to create the flow of a proper record, the various performances, and the varied sounds, smeared and blurred into one stretched out abstract freeform whole.
Packaged in a cool 2 color silkscreened cardstock sleeve, and LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Local ambient drone rockers Tarentel have kept a pretty low profile as of late. Jefre Cantu has focused on his solo recordings as well as running the amazing Root Strata label, while the other members have had their fingers in all sorts of Bay Area exploits. But it seems like maybe Tarentel is starting to gain momentum again, a recent tour with Pelican, a flurry of upcoming releases as well as this here live cd (a cd, NOT a cd-r, although still limited to 500 copies). Recorded last year, this 40 minute set displays some new facets of Tarentel's sound. The opening track is a dense collage of aggressively strummed acoustic guitar amidst swirls of feedback, guitar grit and what sounds like chantlike vocals. A thick cloud of tribal skree that sounds like it could be some lost NNCK track or a Sunburned Hand jam. The next track, the disc's 15 minute long centerpiece, is a murky drift of abstract percussion, haunting horns, muted melodies all in a cloud of room sound and natural reverb. Pretty and space-y and dreamily delicate. The last two tracks, each about nine minutes, find Tarentel dabbling again in New Weird America, albeit offering their own slant. Random percussion, shakers and bells, moaning horns and bits of clatter and clank, cloudy ambience, a muted scrape and scrabble, adding a drone like background texture, peals of feedback drift through a whirring sheet of amp hum and staticky FX, whistles send squiggly little melodies fluttering into the ether, the whole thing a deliriously laidback jam, free and unmoored, a deliriously druggy drift. So nice.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Packaged in beautiful brown and metallic silver hand screened cardstock sleeves, with a photocopied insert.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Two extra long songs of majestic instrumental post rock from local favorites Tarentel, who have been getting well-deserved attention from all over the world. This single is limited to 500 copies and comes from Resonant, house label of the Chunky Records shop in the West Midlands of the UK. Tarentel specialize in long emotional tracks composed of delicately strung together sections, each one a miniaturized soundscape of its own. Deep. Buy now or cry later! Orange vinyl if you're quick, black vinyl otherwise.
Newest in the Mort Aux Vaches series of live performances, here are four pieces from local boys Tarentel, in their best lineup -- when Trevor Montgomery and Jeff Rosenberg were still in the band -- during Holland's 1998 VPRO festival. If you've never heard
Note: we got these straight from the band so they're relatively inexpenisive. All future copies we may carry will be more expensive.
Tarentel's 2004 album We Move Through Weather found the San Francisco's sonic journeymen balancing their penchant for moody atmospheres and a new found spirit of improvisation, which hurtled them somewhere near Jackie-O Motherfucker meets This Heat territory. In constructing that record, Tarentel had to sift through hours and hours of recordings in order to pare down to a mere 72 minutes. Well, they could have done the Supersilent or Necks thing of releasing a massive 3 or 4 cd set of material; but instead they chose to wait and publish two EPs (which both clock in well above 30 minutes each) of material that was not included on the We Move Through Weather album.
Paper White is the four-song companion EP to the drone-rock epic EP Big Black Square. Strangulated post-Joy Division guitar chords jaggedly alternate with atonal Gastr Del Sol stabs of repeating clunky guitar melodies on top of the atypical marching percussion supplied by drummer Jim Redd. Tarentel fleshes out their skeletal sound with a subtle use of live Max-MSP patches and more conventional guitar pedals that actively transform their sounds into a aural kaleidoscope with muted colors and blue-gray hues. In comparison to Big Black Square, this could be constued as the "pop" side of Tarentel; but even so, this is a pretty avant-garde mutation of what pop music could be.
AQ has previously praised the post-rock instrumental drama of popular local kids Tarentel. Certainly fans of Mogwai, Godspeed You Black Emperor, and the like have found Tarentel quite enjoyable as well. Nearly two years after their stunning debut album, From Bone To Satellite, the band is back with The Order of Things, released on Neurosis' label Neurot. In addition to the traditional
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Rare UK import limited to 500 copies, and we have only a few left. Local spacerock group that's been compared to everyone from Ennio Morricone to Mogwai. Emotional, stretched out music that makes you wait for the climaxes.
Very little has remained constant with San Francisco's Tarentel over their seven year existence. Revolving around two core members Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grodinski, the band has shifted from their original beginnings as a slowcore, post-rock trio to an explosive radioluminescent on their debut album From Bone To Satellite to the art rock experiments with absence on The Order Of Things. We Move Through Weather marks yet another transition for Tarentel, but perhaps what is remarkably diffferent about this album is that its inspirations are far more difficult to discern. All of the previous Tarentel albums wore their influences on their sleeves: Winsdor For The Derby, Mogwai, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Radiohead, Fennesz, Stephan Mathieu, etc. Here on We Move Through Weather, the spirit of This Heat is the only thing that's recognizable. Even so, Tarentel doesn't really sound like This Heat but they share a similar lust for adventurous and risky music. Sonna's Jim Redd has been moonlighting with Tarentel for sometime on the drums, bringing vertiginous, stumbling percussive patterns that are somewhat like Charles Hayward or Jaki Leibezeit. Around Redd's centering rhythms, Grodinski and Cantu-Ledesma fill the space with a sort of humid Bark Psychosis abstraction with sad sack piano melodies, haunting tape flutterings, and twin guitar drones. After so many years of reinvention, Tarentel have finally come out the shadow of mimesis and produced an emphatic album that is uniquely their own. Well done, boys!
The third in a new series of 7" singles from some very familiar names. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the first two volumes, one from local boys Tussle and the other from A sunny Day In Glasgow, and now this one, number three, comes from another bunch of local boys, Tarentel, who have been a bit quiet as of late, the various members pursuing their various solo projects, leaving us to enjoy little bits of Tarentel here and there, archival recordings mostly, as we wait patiently for a new full length.
We recently reviewed Tarentel's Live Edits disc on Digitalis, a collection of, well, live edits from various performances, and one of the things we noticed was how rhythmic and almost heavy some of the performances were. The A side, here, or the North side, in keeping with the series theme, sounds like it could have come from the same performance, very drum heavy, a loping groove that sounds almost looped, as the drums are subtly effected and all around them swirl bits of feedback and blurred noise, very krautrocky, with that noisy backdrop surprisingly caustic at points, but just as often smoothed out into buzzing snarling dronescapes, still littered with jagged shards of feedback, and still hovering over that relentless rhythm.
Turning South (to the B side) we find the band ditching the drums completely, for a brooding soundtracky drift, spidery abstract guitars, warm whirring buzz, lush smears of hazy ambience, subtle effects and mysterious rumblings, all woven into the theme music for some late night rainy day wander through some crumbling city, culminating in a haunting bit of cacophony, a corrosive blackened drone, that plays out to the very end of the side before suddenly blinking out.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Super simple, striking covers, mint green vinyl!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
An impressive debut from this delicate spacy local group that is very reminiscent of Low and the good stuff from Kranky. A hidden bonus track features a great electronica reworking by Arrow.
Yet another collaboration between local filmmaker Paul Clipson, and musician and Root Strata co-head honcho J.C. Ledesma (although the first three of the previous collaborations were with Ledesma solo, so technically this is the first one with the whole band) and it's another fantastic feast for the eyes and the ears.
Clipson is a master of Super 8, his films more about light and shadow than the particular images, street lights, lit buildings, reflections of the moon or the sun on bodies of water, all become streaks and blurs, trains racing by, escalators, street signs, are examined close up and become textures, moving designs, Clipson often layers image upon image creating lush tapestries of dense visuals, sometimes high contrast, sometimes colorful and saturated, here, the first film is a nighttime cityscape, but rendered city-less in Clipson's able camera, instead a series of shapes and lights and textures, visuals that play like a score to some late night symphony, Tarentel offer up an equally busy sonic backdrop, mostly percussion, a tribal wash of toms and the occasional flurry of snare, shrouded by soft distant shimmers, looped guitars, also blurred and smeared, all very abstract and ethereal, a perfect match for the visuals.
The second film, Over Water, begins with shots of rivers reflecting the sunlight, photographed from a plane, clouds, edged by sunlight, a constantly shimmering slideshow of water in its various forms, already gorgeously abstract, with no help from Clipson, although he edits them and occasionally superimposes to create even more abstract impressions of water, the music this time around is equally hushed, no drums, just shimmery guitars, distant loops, lots of textural buzz, and warm barely there whirs, super delicate and dark. Finally, Tuolumne finishes off the program, the visuals impressionistic, close ups of what seems to be leaves and water, slow moving streams filmed with bubbles and a strange white scum that makes gorgeous patterns as it floats atop the nearly black water, branches offer a high contrast foreground, Tarentel counter with the most active of their scores, a muted insectoid buzz, drifting atop a deep thick smoldering thrum, which builds to a gorgeous almost metallic crescendo.
Gorgeous packaging too, sort of mimicking Clipson's films, light dappled vellum, yellow on a warm brownish backdrop, that folds over and into itself, a small Xeroxed insert inside, and like the first three installments, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Tarentel "Sets And Rises". Lilienthal "Rises And Sets".
Two new songs exclusive to this release, limited to 500 copies. Tarentel, you may already know, play majestic instrumental post rock. Lilienthal, the electronic solo project from New Yorker Arrow Kleeman, are similar in prettiness and mood to Boards of Canada.
