On our pal Jussi of Circle's Ektro label, here's the debut from a Finnish band called Plain Ride, who are sorta psychedelic and folky but are also sorta plain ol' alt-rock. Nothing wrong with that though -- and Circle fans should note that this band features the guitar and vocals of Janne Westerlund, currently the lead guitarist in Circle (if you saw 'em on tour in the States this year, he was the one least likely to be wearing a shirt). Citing Nick Drake and the Soft Boys (among others) as influences, he sings in English, and perhaps only his Finnish accent and the occasional echoes of Circle's propulsive krautrocky rhythms and prog-friendly keyboards will betray this album's origins, as it's for sure one of the most "mainstream" things we've heard yet from the Circle camp. Not top 40 radio mainstream of course, but also not freaky hypnotic spacerock or stoner drone either! Janne & co.'s songs are moody and dramatic, conventionally melodic with verse-chorus-verse structures... quite nice indie-rock for the most part if you're not looking for Circle's brand of weirdness. We might like this a bit better if the lyrics weren't in English, but that might just be our bias against...um...lyrics.
The band is a quartet, plus guests. So in addition to your basic guitar/bass/drums and keys, you get some lapsteel, piano (ivories tinkled by Mika Ratto of Circle), and even a little trombone.
Two massive slabs of modern psychedelic space rock. Plastic Crimewave are about the closest any modern band has come to channeling the spirit and the sound of vintage Hawkwind, which means FUCK YEAH! Slow burning, psychedelic dirges, thick sinewy basslines, tripped out acid guitars, dense with reverb and echo, a brain melting excursion to the outer reaches of the galaxy, each track a slow building epic, a droning druggy dirge rock, eventually exploding into jagged shards of spastic feedback freakout. Occasionally they'll burst into corrosive chunks of Stooges style stomp and swagger, still doused in reverb and wrapped in layer after layer of thick psychedelic fuzz. Features a who's who of new weird underground psych folk superstar guests: Devendra Banhart, Tara Burke (Fursaxa), Josephine Foster, Spires That In The Sunset Rise, as well as Michael Yonkers!!
Super thick vinyl in an unbelievably deluxe gatefold.
Hmmm, rhythm and sound. What else is there? What else do you need? Especially when the rhythm is a shuffling dubbed out reggae filtered through that Berlin minimal techno heroin-house aesthetic we love so much, and the sound is the gorgeous vocals of reggae vocalists like Sugar Minott, Paul St. Hilaire (aka Tikiman), Jah Cotton and others. Thus we have this latest outing from Rhythm & Sound, the German production team of Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald. On their last record from a few years back, With The Artists, Ernestus and von Oswald teamed up with various reggae vocalists, and See Mi Yah is a bit of a continuation of that, a modern minimalist version of the 'one rhythm' album, where each vocalist takes a turn singing over the same rhythm. But unlike most one rhythm records, Ernestus and von Oswald arrange and mix the rhythm differently for each track, so See Mi Yah ends up sounding like one totally gorgeous, 46 minute long, druggy, drifty, shimmery, hypnotic slab of blissed out dub. Which it basically is. The See Mi Yah rhythm is a lush bit of heroin-reggae (think Chain Reaction heroin house meets the dubbiest of reggae) a drifting skeletal pulse above a murky and dense soundscape, shuffling and throbbing, slowly shifting and stretching farther and farther out. So completely mesmerizing. Vocalists include: Sugar Minott, Paul St. Hilaire, Freddy Mellow, Bobbo Shanti, Ras Donovan, Ras Perez, Koki, Walda Gabriel, Rod Of Iron, Jah Cotton and Willi Williams. So glad we finally were able to get this in, been waiting for it for a while due to lame distribution problems!
Second release from Silentist, a bizarre grindcore twentieth century classical hybrid. At least that's what they used to sound like. Originally described to us as a classical pianist playing with a relentlessly blast beating drummer, their sound ended up being more like a grind band with a pianist and no guitarist. Which was still pretty darn amazing. This time around it's a whole different beast. All the metal and the downtuned fury, the blast beats, the shrieked vocals, all gone. In their place is a strangely avant garde piano, vocals and drum cabaret. Wild and splattery, ultra dramatic and completely unlike anything we've ever heard. Wild atonal piano intertwined with pounding tribal drumming, accompanied by over the top super dramatic vocals. A brief flurry of manic and impossibly intricate piano drum interplay before the drums drop out and the piano becomes a multiphonic blur, a lush jazzscape of shimmering cymbals, repetitive piano figures and crooning keening vocals. A strange pop song with fuzzed out rhythms, affected vocals, shuffling jazz drums, sounding a bit like a jazzier Animal Collective... But it's the final track that kicks in with a bit of Silentist's old heaviness. But only a bit. A super distorted low end rhythmic buzz over haunting creepy piano melodies, and wailed mournful vocals, all drenched in reverb, laced loosely to a lurching loping tempo, a weirdly catchy minor key epic that builds and builds with manic drumming surfacing beneath the seasick tempo and turning an already harrowing sounding track more and more intense. Really really strange and completely amazing!
What do you do when the rules are simply: compose a piece of music using only one note? Well, the folks at SF label Tell-All Records decided to explore the possibilities with a 3" cd-r series titled "Twelve". Each of the participants was assigned (or perhaps chose for themselves) one note of the 12-note scale. Here's one of the first two volumes released thus far, it's Liam Singer in 'F' (the other is Dave Zohrob's compositions in 'E').
He utilizes octave jumps, tempo changes and rhythmic shifts and syncopation to bring movement and shape to the lone note. The proceedings are punctuated by sparse percussion and vocal utterances (cues?). A lively beginning to this series.
Number six in their SYR series. This time Sonic Youth show their support and love of avant-garde cinema as this was from a live show they played at The Anthology Film Archives Center for a celebration of the life and legacy of Stan Brakhage. Joined by percussionist Tim Barnes (Tower Recordings, P.G. Six, Nagisa Ni Te, Dean Roberts, Essex Green, Silver Jews, Jukeboxer, etc.) these are three long "heady jams" as the band calls it. You can hear and feel the influence of the NYC avant-film scene on these jams and can imagine them being a perfect accompaniment to the flickering projection of light and color. The packaging includes a nice poster from the concert and the cover image is a beautiful still of a young, mustachioed Stan Brakhage taken from a Jones Megas film from the 60's. NYC avant-cinema given the soundtrack it deserves.
Perhaps taking a cue from SF's Doug Hilsinger & Caroleen Beatty who lovingly crafted a complete reinterpretation of their favorite Brian Eno album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), fellow Bay Area artist Kelley Stoltz has tackled Echo & The Bunnymen's Crocodiles album in its entirety. Stoltz did all the performin' and recordin' on his faithful ol' 8-track with impressive, full fledged results. Surprisingly gritty and raucous! So, while we eagerly await his new album out soon on Sub Pop, we can delight in his right-on rendition of one of Echo & The Bunnymen's bestest albums!
We had been hearing rumors about an art installation at the Whitney Museum in New York that featured original music from cult Norwegian black metallers Thorns. So as you might imagine we were pretty excited and intrigued, and went on a little quest to find out if it was indeed true. So it was indeed true, the installation featured artwork is by a guy named Banks Violette, and the music was indeed by Thorns Ltd. (Snorre Ruch of the original Thorns plus two other folks). The exciting part was that there just so happened to be a recording of the Thorns material for sale!! So we ordered a bunch direct from the museum and they just finally showed up.
So this isn't actually a cd, but a dvd, and it's more of a dvd-audio disc, just with still images accompanying the music. Each image displays for about 5 or 10 minutes, which means just a handful to go along with the 80 plus minutes of music. It's a little hard to get a feeling for Violette's art, as it's presented here in a series of blurred stills, but it seems to be mysteriously abstract, blurry images of lights and wires, faces and latex clad bodies, cords and strange machine shapes, over exposed faces, fuzzy close ups, the back of the cd case is a decaying wooden framework that looks decidedly like the remnants of a burned church, not sure if that has anything to do with Violette's choice of musical accompaniment or not...
Thorns Ltd. seems to be a whole 'nother beast, no buzzing black riffs or pounding drums here, instead Snorre and his musical partners explore a series of abstract soundscapes, sometimes noisy and chaotic, but more often than not dark and droney.
Slow drifting minimalist smears of sound, extended tonal rumbles, thick washes of gauzy high end, layers upon layers, slowly shifting revealing different overtones and strange reverberations with creepy almost inaudible melodies buried within. Machinelike whir, smeared into a pulsating blur, a wash of descending drones, like a series of turbines slowly losing steam, before more start up, only to rumble to a halt moments later. Crackling electronic splutter, keening feedback, piercing sinewaves, ambient clatter, tape hiss and crackly staticky noise, all woven into haunting dronescapes of distorted melody and abstract sound. Metalheads might not dig this (although they should, it's plenty dark and creepy enough) but it will definitely please fans of the dirge and the drone and the drift and the clatter, as well as the whir and the rumble and the creak and the creep (ie: folks who dig Coleclough, Mirror, Ora, Birchvile Cat Motel, Avarus, Axolotl, Skaters, Yellow Swans, Double Leopards, Hototogisu, Jazzfinger, Pelt Total, etc.)
ULTRA LIMITED!!!
If there was ever going to be a band to FINALLY steal the slow-building-atmospheric-cinematic-post-rock-soundscape crown from Godspeed! You Black Emperor it would definitely have to be The Timeout Drawer. Sure there's Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, the Grails, Mono, Silver Mt Zion and about a million Godspeed! side projects, but as good as those bands are, and as much as we love them, we'd definitely be hard pressed to pass a blind listening test. Sure, they all do their own thing, with subtle differences, but there's plenty of times we couldn't tell you if a certain track was a Mogwai song or an Explosions In The Sky track, even with a gun to our head (okay, -maybe- with a gun to our head). Which brings us to Nowonmai by The Timeout Drawer. A quick listen will reveal all the stuff we love about post rock, pulsing hypnotic rhythms, languorous soundscapes, moody melancholia, intricate arrangements, no vocals, slow building epics. What can we say? We love that stuff. But listen a little closer and you'll begin to understand how the Timeout Drawer manage to avoid sounding like just another post rock band. We haven't actually been this blown away by an instrumental rock band since we discovered German post rockers Fuehler (no longer available sad to say) way back when.
Drifting dreamy atmospheric bliss builds and builds beneath fuzzy synthesizer melodies and throbbing propulsive rhythms, before super blown out distorted guitars explode the whole thing into a dense wall of white hot fuzz, a thick slab of rumbling buzzing guitar drone, that then crumbles to pieces and from the wreckage emerges a groovy jazzy shuffle, meandering lazily through a gauzy soundfield of throbbing low-end and barely-there synthesizer chirps. And that's just the first track! Phew. Not every track runs the sonic gamut like that, some just sort of drift along, dreamy and shimmering, some explode with feverish intensity and never let up, but they all manage to be dense and complex and make every part seem totally essential to the whole, no matter how convoluted or how simple they seem on the surface.
Sonically it's the synthesizer really that is the most noticeable addition to the Timeout Drawer's post rock pallet, not that most bands don't use a synthesizer, it's just that the Timeout Drawer use it for everything. Weird warbly melodies, rumbling drones, wild wigged out space rock swoops, every track is laced with that warm synth fuzz, sometimes replacing the guitar or the bass, sometimes just adding more and more layers of sound. Add to that a penchant for unlikely stretches of Calexico-ish deserty twang, pounding metal guitar crunch, bursts of manic angular riffing, lonely moaning horns and even shuffling programmed beats. Programmed beats? Well, that sort of makes sense when you realize the band started out on hip hop label Chocolate Industries when they were more of a post rock / IDM hybrid, and that skittery shuffling IDM sensibility translates strangely well to these brooding epic instrumentals.
Plus how can you not love a band with song titles like: "What Looked Like Morning Was The Beginning Of Endless Night", "Bursting With Tears I Commit To Destroying You", "I Fall So Far And I Fall So High" and "Blue Eyed And FIlled With Horror"!
This is a tough one...it's hard to imagine that we're gonna convince anyone who isn't already a fan of Japanese avant-folk troubadour Tomokawa Kazuki to purchase this live DVD of his. Yet, it just might be the best way to get into his music. Wish we could include streaming *video* samples on our website! Rarely would I freak out about a live DVD... but this one's really great. It features 18 songs drawn from four 2003 performances recorded at Tokyo's Apia folk club, Tomokawa's stomping grounds for the past three decades.
Tomokawa (who has the looks of a Japanese movie star, and apparently has been on the big screen) strums rhythmic acoustic guitar and belts out his angst in emotive Japanese, backed by a drummer and a piano/mandolin/accordion player. The drummer, who really is incredible, plays in a free jazz, yet discernably rhythmic style, and serves to underscore Tomokawa's outbursts. The two of them share a certain wild energy. Meanwhile, the trio's third, multi-instrumental musician fills in the more melodic side of the music, which (in large part due to his contributions) has a sort of European chamber music or cafe vibe. The combination of the beautiful music, intense emotion, and dazzling musicianship makes this an essential live document for fans and other curious, adventurous music lovers (who don't mind *feeling* the songs without actually understanding the lyrics, assuming you don't speak Japanese).
One of my former housemates and I watched it over and over, skipping back to watch certain portions repeatedly. That's how much we liked it. We were obsessed.
This actually came out at the beginning of the year, and I've been meaning to review it forever, but it seemed difficult to do it justice and it sorta fell by the wayside... but then while making my year-end "best of" list, I realized that this was truly one of 2005's best music-dvds and had to be in our catalog!!
Welcome to the happy-go-lucky side of Fonal records!! A shiny pop-rock gem of a band from Turku, Finland, TV-Resistori play electronic toy pop with wide-eyed wit and unadulterated exuberance. Could be likened to a younger and rougher Stereolab, a Finnish Stereo Total, or a happier Cyann & Ben. Also for fans of '90s Shibuya-Kei bands, snowsuited indie pop, and wonderfully silly synths. Intiaanidisko is warm and scratchy as a brand new scarf. Charmingly dorky. Enthusiastically recommended.
This volume of the All Tomorrow's Parties compilation series was curated by the gent behind the cartoon phenomenon for which many of us here at AQ have a particular soft spot! Yup, Matt Groening not only took the compiling reins for Version 3.1., but he also provided a fine illustration of Sonic Youth for the cover. We're sure you're also already well acquainted with his work as well as that of the musical folks he invited: the abovementioned Thurston & co. ("Simpson's Theme"), The Stooges ("Fun House"), The Magic Band ("Dropout Boogie"), Spoon ("The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine"), The Shins ("Young Pilgrims"), Modest Mouse ("Bukowski"), Elliott Smith ("Pictures Of Me"), Daniel Johnston ("Syrup Of Tears"), American Analog Set ("Come Home Baby Julie, Come Home"), Electrelane ("The Valleys"), and Jackie-O Motherfucker ("Drake Hotel"). Oh yeah, and they don't mention it on the digipak's track listing, but there's also a Deerhoof track too!
What? Another collection of Cambodian pop? But you just listed two volumes of Cambodian Rocks? (And, get ready for two more in that series!) It's true, Cambodian music seems to be the flavor of the moment on the obscure world music scene. But bear with us, as this one deserves all the attention afforded the Cambodian Rocks series... and then some. The history of Cambodia's flourishing and rich music scene was -- like the greater culture and society of the country in general -- cruelly severed in the early seventies by the Khmer Rouge during their "cleansing" program. All our favorite performers, anonymous until Khmer Rocks' own collections were recently released, were undoubtedly victims of the Khmer Rouge during this period. In the following years Cambodians who fled the country set up communities around the globe and among the other parts of their culture they treasured, the music of these lost performers was not forgotten. Throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties the scattered communities set up recording studios and continued to produce music just as amazing as those lost golden years. Enter Mark Gergis (of Neung Phak / Mono Pause and the man who brought us I Remember Syria). From 1999 to 2004 Mark diligently scoured the Asian branch of the Oakland Public Library, checking out each and every Cassette of Cambodian music produced in the period from the early seventies to the present. Many of the cassettes were unfortunately unlistenable; not merely because they'd been played thousands of times, or left on hot car dashboards, but because they were being slowly bulk erased by the library employees themselves as they would unwittingly pass them over the magnetic security system used to prevent book theft. Even with the best intentions of the public library as a repository for culture, Cambodian music was slowly being erased one cassette at a time. Of course there was no public outcry, at this point people had moved on to the newest thing (no doubt something recorded by one person with an electronic keyboard and other MIDI gear). It seems to happen everywhere: recent history is wiped clean for whatever happens to be hot at the moment. So it was that Mark culled together a collection of songs that are as amazing as they are rare. One thing particularly striking about many of the tracks is that, unlike what you'll hear on the Cambodian Rocks collections (all of which were actually recorded in Cambodia), they include both traditional Cambodian instruments alongside western instruments. There are tracks with Khan (the inimitable mouth organ of Southeast Asia) playing alongside electric guitar (which is often times being played in the style of a traditional Cambodian stringed instrument), saxophone, drums, electric bass and organ. Some of the combinations and bizarre genre bends are truly off the wall -- such as the track, unfortunately to remain untitled for now, a proto-metal Cambodian pop ditty featuring echoey and brash female vocals and a Queen-era guitar solo. While there are a few of the more modern pop tunes -- of the primarily keyboards and drum machine variety -- here, none are of the overly westernized Asian pop that is so ubiquitous these days. There are also 6 tracks of older tunes that were recorded in Phnom Penh between the mid-1960's and the early 70's (one of which was overdubbed by an American operated studio with a drum machine beat!) This is a truly amazing collection, certainly the best disc to be released by Sublime Frequencies to date, and Byram's top pick for 2004 thus far. Highly recommended!
From Dust To Digital, the label that brought us the absolutely breathtaking Goodbye Babylon collection of early gospel music comes this exhaustive collection of lost 78's released between 1956-1969 on Fonotone Records, the last 78-RPM record label in the land. None of these tracks has ever been available on cd before, but now, after years and years of extensive research, digging through old records, sifting through old photographs and tracking down musicians, we're finally able to hear these amazing recordings. 5 discs, 131 tracks of some of the most amazing and long unheard latter-day American Primitive music, bluegrass, blues, folk, country and more. Housed in a cigar box, this set includes five cds in full color printed sleeves, a massive 160 page book with photos, liner notes, notes on each track and each artist, seventeen full color postcards, three record label reproductions, a souvenir folder and a Fonotone bottle opener!
Most of the artists were new to us with the notable exception of Mr. John Fahey recording as Blind Thomas and as the Mississippi Swampers (with Mike Stewart) and of course Fonotone head honcho Joe Bussard. But that almost makes it cooler. So many unheard and unheard of artists. Fans of Goodbye Babylon, the American Primitive compilations, and American Folkways will most likely find this pretty darn essential!
We've said it before, but let's say it again. WE LOVE FINLAND. We know you do too. That's why we get along so well. C'mon, Circle, Pharoah Overlord, Avarus, Anaksimadros, Paavaharju, Islaja, Kemialliset Ystavat, Aavikko, Doktor Kettu, Ektroverde, Es, Lau Nau, Kuupuu, Keuhkot, Kiila, Tiermes, Worms, Magyar Posse Pan Sonic, Uton, Thergothon, Skepticism, Finntroll, heck we could go on and on an on. And that's just the music. All the Finnish folks we know are amazing, the art and the films, the places, and don't get Andee started on Finnish pizza (the best thing I have ever eaten says Andee!!). So okay, we've established that we're all a little mad for things Finnish, especially music. Which goes a little toward explaining why we all dug the Arktinen Hysteria compilation of early experimental Finnish music from the 60's and 70's (now back in print and available again, by the way!). A perfect collection to help understand where the modern crop of Finnish experimental musicians were coming from. So maybe it was inevitable that there would be a second volume, this time covering the seventies, eighties and early nineties, and drawing an even more direct line between the above mentioned bands and their sonic forefathers. A glance at the cover, a photo of the group Reinin Myrkky (featuring a young Jimi Tenor) nude, heavily made up and all sporting tubas, is pretty much all it takes to convince you you're in for a wild ride.
The tracks on this second volume are a bit more musical and a lot less primitive than the first volume, but no less strange and wonderful. From Pekka Streng's haunting psychedelic spoken word soundscapes to the Sun City Girlish avant garde folk of Karelia, to the skronky abstract jazz of the Samsa Trio, to the droning free jazz freakout of the Omar Williams Experience (sounding not a little bit like the No Neck Blues Band) to the award winning electronic experimentation of Osmo Lindeman and on and on. None of these names were at all familiar to us (outside of Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio, and Jimi Tenor, who before making it big with his cheesy easy listening music fronted a noisy industrial outfit!) but the sounds are amazing and perplexing and you can definitely hear glimpses here and there of what the musical future held for Finland, swooping analog synths, ominous space drones, full on analog synth freakout, Beefheartian jazz rock, rumbling droning free jazz skree, bizarre cabaret, pusling lo-fi proto-techno, haunting abstract ambience, Schwitters style vocalizations, gritty gauzy plunderphonic cut-ups and more!
Includes a huge booklet with tons of photos, extensive liner notes as well as notes on each track, all in English this time!
This here dvd is a cool compilation from the Tino Corp. featuring videos by Ben Stokes, Davy Force!, Mission Control and Eric Koziol for tracks by DJ Shadow, Meat Beat Manifesto, Jack Dangers, D.H.S. (Dimensional Holophonic Sound), Afrunk, Davy Force!, DJ Radar, Enitokwa and Tino himself! Also includes bonus material in the form of a Tino Live segment shot at various 2000-2003 shows as well as four additional videos and more.
Latest issue in this amazing sound art magazine box series. Each issue comes in beautiful printed box, and contains a cd and a series of full color cards printed on thick card stock. Very nice. Published twice a year by a team of artists and journalists in France, Vibro is, as it says on the box, "A cross between an art piece and a specialized magazine. A sonic object, a chronicle of electroacoustic and lo-fi experiments." Indeed! This issue contains pieces by Stephen Vitiello, Kinglet, Joan Schuman, Mark Vernon, Eva Sjuve, Christian Zanesi, Zoe Irvine, Aland Dunn & Jeff Young, Tonic Train, Pete Stollery, SI_COM and Tereza Neuma and features a full color card for each artist, with a full color reproduction of the artist's original artwork on one side, and on the other a description of the artist, a description of the piece, and assorted other information about the artist and their work. The tracks on this issue's cd are really amazing, beautifully haunting music concrete crafted from the sounds of waterfalls, snatches of conversations, brief snatches of music, warm rich drones, strange chopped up soundscapes, haunting intercepted phone calls, creaking machinery, buzzing insects, chimes, crickets, short wave radio, mutated speech, footsteps, passing cars, piano, sine waves and tone generators, synthesizers, radio broadcasts and all manner of found sound.
You know what the January issue of the Wire means dontcha? 2005 top ten lists!!! And as always a big ol' chunk of this issue is dedicated to all the best and weirdest records of the year, as well as individual picks from all your favorite Wire scribes. Time to catch up on all the stuff you may have missed or kick yourseld for leaving stuff off of your end of year list! Alos this month, Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton takes on the Invisible Jukebox, articles on Noah Howard, Burning Star Core, Volcano The Bear and more, and as always a whole bunch of reviews, records, books, shows, installations, and otherwise!
A super limited tour only ep head to head matchup between Australia's Grey Daturas (whose most recent record Dead In The Woods was an aQ record of the week a while back) and Bay Area free noise duo the Yellow Swans, who just returned from a month on the road with their pals in the Daturas. This ep was only on sale at their shows in Australia and New Zealand, but we managed to get the last of their left over copies.
The first track is the Yellow Swans along with their pal White Rainbow, and together they stir up a static expanse of white noise and amp buzz and pink fuzz, a swirling ambient shhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrr with various melodies and bits of guitar feedback and little snippets of noise and shards of sound drifting above and below and within the muted skree. Darn near tranquil in the Yellow Swans' universe, but by any one else's standards this is still a blast of white noise.
The Daturas take track two and they offer up a dual guitar dronefest, that sounds quite a bit like that weird tuning fork interdimensional transport thingie in the movie Phantasm. The sound of that thing was so appealing even when we were kids, maybe that's why we grew up to enjoy thick slabs of distorted guitar droning endlessly. But that's only the first half of the track, the second 8 minutes or so is a throbbing pummeling downtuned dirge with guitars squealing and churning and chugging and shrieking like two wild beats in a battle to the death over a fiercely pounding beat. An amazing slab of dreamy droney minimal stoner psych rock, for sure. Packaged in a cool oversize cardboard sleeve.
SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE OUT OF PRINT AND LONG GONE. WE HAVE THE LAST 30 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
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Wow. The retun of Yeti. This makes 3 issues in 4 or 5 years, pretty crazy. Supposedly Yeti will now be a thrice a year concern but we'll believe it when we see it. Either way, we're thrilled to have a new issue of Yeti in our grubby little paws, one of our favorite music magazines for sure. Strangely esoteric but also emminently readable. This time around there are comics, photo essays, fiction, pieces on West Coast art and spiritual collage, anonymous crime scene reporting in African American Los Angeles in the 1940's, writer Eileen Myles, musicians Henry Flynt, CC Hennix and the "Electric Harpsichord", psych folk outfit Timesbold, an animated history of spaz rockers the Apes, a conversation between William S. Burroughs and Alan Greenberg, aQ faves Goldcard interviewing the Blues Goblins and vice versa, Devendra Banhart as well as interviews with with Neko Case, Schneider TM, marine / con-artist Sebastian Matthew Branno and Naomi Yang of Damon And Naomi. Whew! As always, there is a companion cd full of rare and unreleased tracks from Iron And Wine, Jolie Holland, Devendra Banhart, Fruit Bats, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, the Apes, Henry Flynt, Timesbold, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Postal Service, Blues Goblins, the Mad Scene, Ian Nagoski, Washington Phillips and a bunch more. Here's hoping we don't have to wait years and years for the next issue!
What do you do when the rules are simply: compose a piece of music using only one note? Well, the folks at SF label Tell-All Records decided to explore the possibilities with a 3" cd-r series titled "Twelve". Each of the participants was assigned (or perhaps chose for themselves) one note of the 12-note scale. Here's one of the first two volumes released thus far, it's Dave Zohrob in 'E' (the other is Liam Singer's compositions in 'F').
While Singer's treatment of his note is quite an active and rhythmic affair, Zohrob takes a very different approach. There are no hard lines in these aural sketches. Zohrob draws out his 'E' in a fog of drones. Solemn and calming.
