Holy crap! MORE Jazzfinger. For a band who was averaging one record every 3 or 4 years, they've really been cranking 'em out lately. They're like the UK's answer to the Yellow Swans or the Skaters, what with their monthly, and sometimes bi-weekly releases. And sonically too, they're certainly exploring similar territory. But just like those two other groups we're sure as hell not complaining. We don't want this avalanche of Jazzfinger to ever let up. And it sure doesn't look like it will, with THREE releases on this list and more on the way!
Jazzfinger, while definitely similar to the Skaters and the Yellow Swans in some ways, are a much subtler proposition. Less a noise outfit, or a free rock ensemble as they are drifting dark drone explorers. They can definitely kick up a serious sonic fuss, but they spend most of their time, lurking in the shadows, creeping around corners, and drifting well below the surface, their sounds muted and mumbled, a wonderfully twisted world of abstract soundscapes and mournful minor key minimalist laments, peppered with all sorts of random sonic irregularities and subtle shadings.
Los Band Magicos is two lengthy tracks, the first might be our favorite JF track EVER. A fuzzy barely there crawl, all lo-fi tape hiss, and manipulated static, a slithering ambient whir, that is gradually disrupted by weird Conet Project like shortwave interference, and distant sonic dust devils of keening feedback and grinding glitchery, the whole thing super fuzzy, mumbly and muted. Almost like some weird Chain Reaction heroin house 12" being transmitted from the beyond, and being picked up on a crappy transistor radio tuned between stations. So weird and wonderful. The second track is an abstract clattery soundscape, of shimmering guitars, scraping reverberating metal, strange percussive thumps and creaks and clangs, everything draped in thick webs of room sound and natural reverb, sort of like a more damaged, WAY more abstract No Neck / Dead C mash up. Cool!
Packaged in a cool mini 3" DVD like plastic case with printed red and black insert. And as always, SUPER LIMITED!!!
It's true. THREE new Jazzfinger releases! On this list alone. If it was any other band, we might scoff, but hell, Jazzfinger are making up for some serious lost time. In a big way. And while there are plenty of bands we can't get enough of, Jazzfinger are one of our favorites. For years we subsisted on their debut, assuming the band had broken up or disappeared, until discovering that they were indeed still a band, just not a very prolific one. But that all changed fairly recently, and the band has been spitting out new releases, like one a month. But we're not complaining. Not at all. In fact we've been waiting for the Glass Key for ages, having heard rumors of it's existence. The second in a series of insanely elaborately packaged cd-r's. The first, The Well Of Used Dreams is long gone, and when we did have it, it flew out of here in to time flat. Which makes sense once you see it. And hear it.
For those new to Jazzfinger, they exist in the same sonic orbit as groups like Skullflower, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sunroof! crafting epic worlds of drone and buzz, strange little fragments of some undefinable musical whole. Unlike their sonic brethren, they are not as concerned with massive walls of sound, or huge swirls of guitar or clouds of keening reeds, instead, Jazzfinger explore texture and shape, shrinking themselves down and crawling physically through the minutiae of music, drifting through strange alien worlds of sounds, surrounded on all sides by vast expanses of sonic wonder.
The Glass key is a wonderfully mysterious song suite, a varied sampling of Jazzfinger's musical wares. With all the songs and sounds connected, a distinctive, yet hard to describe musical thread running clean through. Spread out over 70+ minute the band takes us along, on their tripped out psychedelic journey. Haunting pianos drift beneath a thick layer of fuzzy grit, distant warbly organ, and a scraped violin that either sounds like a crying baby or a meddlesome mosquito. Jack Hammers are muted and smeared into soothingly rhythmic flutters, epic expanses of cavernous echo and cymbal shimmer underpin buzzing distorted guitars that slither dirgelike through fields of chimes and coruscating feedback. Voices are chopped up and spread out over wheezing smears of huffing harmonica, warm clouds of Eastern melodies and raga like buzz hovering like a storm cloud over a loping funereal piano. So totally amazing.
Packaged in a massive oversized cardboard sleeve with super tripped out collages affixed to the front and the back, while on the inside the liner notes are affixed to the rocket shaped cardboard insert that functions as a sort of pull out tray, with the black cd-r in a sleeve attached to the front. Quite stunning. And incredibly elaborate, and totally time consuming to hand assemble. Needless to say, there were very few of these made, they are already sold out from the band, we only got about 20 and will never be able to get more, so don't blow it. You'll definitely be sorry.
The UK's Jazzfinger hit us again with another slab of their gorgeous free rock abstract drone wonder, but here they're sharing sonic space with a band we had never heard before. A Way are from Finland, and seem to fit somewhere between their countrymen Avarus, Anaksimandros, Kemialliset Ystavat and like-minded groups like No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Ghosting, Bonus and of course Jazzfinger. A Way's 4 tracks are brief little snippets of low end weirdness. Drones, but dense with disembodied non-melodies, fragmented chunks of rumble and shimmer, rhythms, but the sort of rhythms you can only see when you stand way back, up close, they're just dizzying whirls of random percussive shuffle and stumbling flutter, the warm whir of machinery, a smeared industrial drift, sparkling with tiny harmonics and muted tonal color. An ambient world of soft and spooky sweet submerged.
Jazzfinger counter with a 20 minute wall of crumbling guitar. Layer after layer of pealing, keening, roaring, buzzing amps and strings. Dense but also sort of lo-fi. It almost sounds like some sort of installation where a gallery was outfitted with 1000 crappy tape players, all playing poorly dubbed copies of live Sunroof! bootlegs. A gloriously epic tangle of high end guitars, a massive sun dappled Ur-drone, hovering and shimmering, while beneath lurks a swirling world of tinkling music boxes, plucked strings, sing songy melodies, random percussion, thick strum and abstract riffage. Nice!
SUPER LIMITED. We only have a dozen or thereabouts, so act fast. Packaged in thick plastic pouches with two hand screened squares of textured paper and secured with a tiny piece of twine.
Oh how we love Jenny Piccolo. They were screamo before there was such a thing. Before screamo meant big hair and eyeliner. Jenny Piccolo were a whirling white hot ball of furious grinding power-violence. A live set would be 20 minutes long and feature 40 songs, not to mention a mess of broken guitars, smashed drums, sweat, blood and utter chaos. This disc collects pretty much everything, including splits and comps, and is a head crushing ear splitting anvil to the back of the head. 30 second bursts of black hole grindmetal mayhem, super dense, ultra complex blasts of dizzying blurry hypergrind. So fucking furious and so goddamn AWESOME! You like the Locust? Pig Destroyer? Man Is The Bastard? Mohinder? Agoraphobic Nosebleed? Drop Dead? Crossed Out? And somehow you missed out on Jenny Piccolo? It's time to make things right.
52 songs. 36 minutes.
Hailing from the cold climate of Ontario, Canada, Junior Boys are back with their second full length to add some warm sleek soul to the too often cold and icy dance floor. This is is how you always wished the Pet Shop Boys sounded. With his irresistibly smooth vocal stylings Jeremy Greenspan perfectly lays that laid back inviting voice atop synths, guitar, bass, drums and a laptop, creating a fully realized electronic pop sound. While so many others playing so called electro-pop are smothered in irony and look-at-us-we're-so-hip garb it's so refreshing to listen to the Junior Boys as they mean what they play and do it so so well. If you miss the magic of early Depeche Mode and Japan records this could be a welcome addition to your collection. The kind of sounds that you want to hear after a long night out, it not only keeps the beat on the dance floor, but when you finally get home, it slows things down and lets unwind as you take off your dance shoes and sink into some new romantic dreams. So nice!
Wow, is this exciting! A killer Japanese import, that combines the most recent Khante release, the lengthy two song Capture and Release, as well as the long out of print and going-for-way-too-much-on-eBay Dead & Live Aktions DVD 2005!! Woo Haa!!! If you missed out, now's your chance. Plus it's in an all new super swanky Japanese style mini gatefold sleeve with an obi and everything!
Here's what we had to say about the cd:
A new Khanate! 'Nuff said perhaps, as all you AQ doom customers surely know what that means! Ultra-depressive dirge metal from some of the best in the biz. Capture & Release, a two-song, 43 minute "ep" (maxi-ep? mini-lp? heck, it's a full-length, really!) is the third cd release from this NYC-based band, featuring Stephen O'Malley from SUNNO))) on guitar and graphics, bassist James Plotkin of OLD, singer Alan Dubin (also from OLD), and drummer Tim Wyskida. By now, Khanate have really established a distinct style of extreme, slow, scary, art-metal. To the point that we're always citing them as a comparison when describing other bands. They're the standard by which anyone indulging in feedback-filled heaviness, anguished/evil vocalizations, creepy atmosphere, double digit song-lengths, and rumbling sub-sonics is judged -- like when we say Bunkur or Graves At Sea (reviewed on this list) are bands in the style of Khanate. So if would be easy to review Capture & Release if it were by *another* band -- we'd say it was a lot like Khanate and that'd be enough to recommend it to many of you! Of course, Khanate themselves can be compared to predecessors Corrupted and especially Eyehategod, godfathers of feedback sludge brutality. But Khanate's compositions are way more extended, dramatically ambitious, and clinically produced than EHG, and utilize "experimental" sonic textures and loud/soft dynamics in the manner of a post-rock band as well. This new disc really exemplified this approach, with the second, 25-minute track "Release" featuring lots of really quiet parts that make us think a hypothetical Khanate / Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore tour would be PERFECT. (We can dream, can't we?) Vocalist Alan Dubin makes the most of these "vulnerabilities" in the band's otherwise crushing sound barrage, with dark, cryptic, and psychologically suggestive rather than explicit lyrics wherein he seems to be inhabiting the role of the deviant antagonist from a Thomas Harris novel...but poetically enough that perhaps we can all relate, and indeed find release in their music.
And here's what we had to say about the DVD:
This captures (and limitedly releases, ha) angsty doom merchants Khanate in the live realm, sometime last year. If you've ever seen this band, you know that they don't exactly 'rock out', having a somewhat static stage presence, though vocalist Alan Dubin always puts on an impassioned performance. Fortunately for those of you who'll be lucky enough to watch this at home, this is a very 'arty' visual document -- the live video footage has been processed to be all the more grim and psychedelic. Cool to look at, while of course the music is murder-by-decibels, feedback-filled, downtuned DOOOOOOOM like you expect.
We're not sure how the Students Of Decay label remained beneath our radar for so long, but we're definitely scrambling to make up for lost time. This latest blast of underground weirdness, comes from the very unassumingly named David Kirby, but don't let the lack of cool creepy moniker fool you, Inside, It Is Ringing is a serious slab of abstract industrial drones. Not pretty or drifting or dreamlike or tranquil. Well, actually it sort of is all of those things, but not in the soft super blissed out ambient way. Well, okay, the second track here sort of is. The first track though, is dense and thick and caustic and abrasive. Not to say it's not listenable because it most certainly is, in fact that's the magic of it. The parts are hard and sharp and harsh, but they are combined in such a way, that those disparate noise elements become a rich slowly shifting, organic whole. Imagine bits of Organum, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and bands like that, sort of melted down and poured into a giant cauldron, where they are slowly swirled until they take on the consistency of molasses, or tar. Dark and menacing. Bowed metals reverberate, buzzing steel strings are smeared into glistening streaks of metallic shimmer, thick layers of sun baked fuzz are spread out over glacial grooves. The first track is metallic and cold. The sound is all ice and barren landscapes. The second is much more warm and organic, the perfect balance to the frosty drift of the first track. It's an epic 24 minute subterranean stream turned into music. Like any of the cd-r bands you know and love, given a seriously heavy duty M83 makeover. NICE!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. You know the drill...
The Ukraine has an incredibly vibrant underground music scene. From the black metal side of the spectrum, Drudkh, Hate Forest, Nokturnal Mortum, Dub Buk, Astrofaes, Lucifugum all the way over to the abstract minimalist free noise side of things, most notably The Moglass, but also Andrey Kiritchenko, who runs the amazing Nexsound label, and also creates some beautiful music himself.
Using guitars, field recordings and a bit of processing, Kiritchenko conjures up a fuzzy world of haunting reverberations, dense swarms of metallic buzzings, mysterious harmonica like wheezes, and a a swirling spacey ambience. You can't help but hear Fennesz, Ambarchi, and other avant guitarscapers, as well as folks like Tim Hecker and Phillip Jeck, with all the fuzz soft focus murk and dreamlike abstraction. But there's something very particular about Kiritchenko's sound, it is always obviously a guitar. The steel strings are the centerpiece of each track, sometimes the buzzing strings get pulled apart into weird wisps of sound, other times it's the background that skitters and loops, stretches out and gradually darkens, while the guitar continues to strum above the swirling morass. A gorgeous and modern, dark foresty folk, an otherworldly take on classic Appalachia. Fahey left to wander through some ancient Ukrainian forest, the results fed into a computer and allowed to spill out, a glitchy expanse of steel strings and skittery buzz, swirls of rich deep ambient flutter, while within little ripples of steel string shimmer slowly spread out, way in the distance bursts of malfunctioning digital melody race across the horizon like clouds in those time lapse nature films, while just underneath lies a soft and serene bed of lilting acoustic guitar and a world of glistening iridescence.
Absolutely amazing packaging. The disc is visible through die cut circles, each one slightly bigger than the one before it, each panel of the brown card stock digipak adorned with dense tangles of abstract text and fuzzy indistinct animal shapes. So cool.
It's about time! The Skin Graft label does all fans of crazed prog and (to be specific) Japanese band the Ruins a big favor by reissuing this long out of print album by Ruins side-project Koenjihyakkei. Not only is it available again, but it's at a domestic, cheaper price! Yay!
Originally released on Hoppy Kamiyama's God Mountain label in 1996, Viva Koenji!! (also known as II) was the second album from drummer Tatsuya Yoshida's Koenjihakkei unit (aka Hundred Sights Of Koenji, Koenji being the district of Tokyo wherein Yoshida lives). Yoshida, if Allan hasn't yet already indoctrinated you on this truth, is Japan's answer to Christian Vander (French drummer/musical mastermind behind the '70s prog band Magma). Yoshida's well-known main band Ruins is a drum and bass duo heavily influenced by Vander's band, but those influences become even more apparent with this project. Keyboards, operatic male and female vocals, guitar, bass, and drums expand the Ruins palette into a realm of almost symphonic "death progressive" madness. Crazed instrumental prowess, mindboggling changes, utterly heavy and amazing. Pretty much essential to all fans of Ruins or Magma, surpassing both both in some select ways! Those who've only heard this band's later albums, Nivraym and Angherr Shisspa, will be bowled over by how much more HEAVY and intense this disc is even than those (and those records aren't exactly mellow or wimpy!). Seriously.
So if you missed this before, give thanks to Skin Graft! Let's hope that they'll also be adding the first, also now impossible to find, Hundred Sights Of Koenji album to their catalog someday soon too...
We first discovered Krohm after Wrest from Leviathan suggested we check them out, if we were in the mood for some super dirgey, cold and miserable, almost doom-like suicidal black metal. When aren't we? And whaddayaknow? He was right. Nortt, Xasthur, even some Leviathan are the main touchstones for Krohm's super mournful doomic black metal. Nary a blast or furious riff to be found. Instead this is midtempo buzzing blackness. Like Malefic from Xasthur, Numinas from Krohm, weaves a bleak depressive instrumental back drop, all fuzzed out guitars, simple martial drumming, thick slabs of bass rumble, above which he drizzles haunting and heart breaking guitar melodies, peppered with his way down in the mix howls. This is a sea sick drift across a pitch black sonic ocean. Lurching and loping, riding the gentle swells, each track a sort of sea sick waltz, or a death march across a muddy swamp, trudging head down, eyes cast Earthward, body racked with sorrow, a sky full of cold rain. A soul as black as your broken heart, dead and done beating forever, walking and wandering and waiting for the ground to swallow you whole. So awesome.
Essential for fans of Xasthur and Nortt and all manner of depressive black doom...
As we mentioned in the last list, we just can't get enough Grime. We absolutely dug Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Virus Syndicate, and even M.I.A. who had a bit of grime going on. But over in the UK, grime is the shit, happening on loads of 12"s, in clubs, and on underground radio stations, but very little of it has made it over here, unfortunately, outside of a few comps. It makes perfect sense that Lady Soveriegn would be the one to follow Dizzee and M.I.A. from undergound hype to next big thing. EVERY time we play this in the store at least one person buys it, and usually half the people in the store come up to see what we're listening to. It's that catchy and funky and fucked up, and totally unlike anything else you've heard -- okay, other than M.I.A. maybe, but Lady Sovereign sounds so much more raw and gritty and weird, maybe like M.I.A.'s snotty, sexy little sister. The grooves are grime for sure, super stuttery and repetitive, with thick swaths of fuzzy synth and huge rolling basslines, but the arrangements are really damaged and complex, with plenty of start and stops, twisty and tangled, the tonguetwisting vocals careening at breakneck speed all over the place, riding a huge synth line, skipping nimbly over a spastic drum break, like a musical version of a Jackie Chan action sequence. Lady Sovereign is ducking and dodging and spitting madly over funky beats and all manner of samples. But no matter how crazy the tunes are, it's all about Lady Sov's flow. The sticker on the front of the disc describes her as "Eminem if he was an 18 year old female from South London" which makes for good copy but isn't entirely accurate. She's got a really unique voice, sometimes squeaky and feminine, but more often a bit scruffy and growly, and it's amazing how many syllables she can spit per minute, dizzying! And she can easily slip into some strange melodic vocalization for a song's chorus before slipping back into her Cockney growly snotty delivery. And her lyrics are really funny, plenty of shit talking of course, but lots of self deprecating references to her slight stature (5'1", hence the title) and her baggy clothes, and lots of other really silly randomness. Although sometimes the delivery is so rapid fire it's hard to catch anything but a word here and there. Hardly matters though, you'lll be too busy bouncing or dancing or whatever you do with these tunes blasting in the background.
Vertically Challenged may be an ep, but it's pretty long, eight tracks, 35 minutes, features a handful of remixes, one from the Beastie Boys' Adrock and one from Ghislain Poiror, and features guest vocal spots from UK grimies Shystie, Frost P., Zuz Rock.
Also includes a DVD with an interview, live footage, all the videos and other goodies.
So though an ep it's definitely all killer and no filler, unlike most hip hop records, and it definitely lays the groundwork for Lady Sovereign to blow up M.I.A. big in the not too distant future. And we're definitely psyched for that. The more GRIME the better, and we'd sure as hell rather hear Lady Sovereign on the radio and on MTV than J-Lo or Madonna or Ashlee Simpson!
HOLY SHIT! A new Lemonheads record. We can not tell you how absolutely thrilling that is. Sure, their last record sucked. And Evan Dando's solo stuff was pretty mediocre. And maybe he is kind of a prick. But c'mon! So what?! It's A Shame About Ray was one of the world's most perfect slabs of heartbreaking indie jangle. I don't even really do drugs but "My Drug Buddy" had me absolutely wishing I had my own drug buddy. Could anything be more romantic? Go a little further back, Lovey, Lick, Hate Your Friends, the perfect collision of punk rock brattiness and pop song perfection. And they just kept getting better and better. I can't really think of another band that occupied so much space on pretty much every single mix tape I ever made. Even covering Suzanne Vega's "Luka" which could have and should have been a disaster, ended up sounding miles better than the original. Anyway, any pop kid worth anything is at their very heart, a huge Lemonheads obsessive. How could you not be?
So a brand new Lemonheads record is a seriously big deal. And as if we couldn't be more excited, the other 2/3 of the Lemonheads is basically the Descendents!!! Bill Stevenson and Karl Alvarez, FUCK YEAH.
So now we've pretty much got the dream band. So how does the new Lemonheads stack up? Well, we've only had this record for a few days, but since the second it's come in we've been listening to it nonstop, and it's growing on us like crazy. Dando's voice is a little deeper, a little more scratchy and weathered sounding, but it suits him, and the new material. The sound is just so instantly familiar it's like a big ol' indie rock hug.
Shit, we've been in indie rock heaven lately. Sebadoh III, Archers Of Loaf's Icky Mettle, and now a new Lemonheads. Almost makes us feel like we're in college again. Anyway, imagine It's A Shame About Ray, a little less laid back, a little more mature, but the same sort of mix of sweet jangly minor key laments and super rocking kick ass power pop. The hooks aren't as immediately obvious as they were on Ray, but the more we listen, the more we find ourselves getting bits and pieces lodged firmly in our heads. We're guessing that after spending a few more weeks with it, this might be one of our favorite pop records of the year.
Wrest and his one-man-black-metal-band Leviathan return, with the corpses of Christians and poseurs littering the bleak landscape evoked by his sonic barrage of inhuman vokills, majestic riffing, and punishing drums. Pure misanthropic musical mayhem. Surely you remember Leviathan -- Andee put out the debut double cd Verrater on tUMULt only nine months ago, and that's been a very successful release. But Verrater was only the tip of the blackened iceberg that is Wrest/Leviathan's ability and need to make intelligent and emotional extreme rock music. Hence, this suicidal statement spawned so soon. At AQ, we fancy ourselves connoisseurs of this kind of stuff, and believe us -- this guy is good (and evil)!! What we mean is, as raw as it gets, there's some intense talent on display here. Lots of San Francisco bands have gotten hyped recently, but here's one that really deserves worship. Chaotically complex, pitilessly crafted tracks like the nine-minute long "Sardoniscorn" somehow maintain this music's one-foot-in-the-grave old school spikes n' corpsepaint directive while simultaneously getting totally arty and out there with epic, prog, avant-garde elements. Doomy drone, weird downtempo percussive interludes, atonal piano, ambient psychedelia, extreme vocal unpleasantness, lots of distortion and feedback. Yes! So it's no surprise that tUMULt and Aquarius (and our customers) weren't the only entities to appreciate the grim genius of Leviathan, as Wrest's project has now been signed to multi-album deals with two black metal specialists, Moribund in the States and Drakkar over in Europe, this album being the first fruit of that deal. We even recently discovered that none other than pagan pop star and psych/krautrock maniac Julian Cope is a big Leviathan fan, recommending Verrater on his website! So, this is another one for both black metal freaks (who will find this worthy of keeping company with your Burzum, Satyricon, Immortal, etc. records) as well as any other adventurous music-lovers unafraid of dabbling in the weird and wretched...
This is actually the first record we've reviewed by Lucero, which is a little surprising for a couple of reasons. One being that this is their 5th or 6th record in almost as many years. The other being that they are really fucking awesome. Where as most young folks, emo kids, punk rockers, who are trying to rock some country, they end up not really rocking at all. Instead focusing on the moody dreaminess, the lilting loveliness, Sparklehorse, Court And Spark, Nick Drake, all fuzzy and twangy, sweet slippery lap steel, you know what we're talking about. Part of it is, that's it's really tough to mix hard rocking with country twang. One wrong move and you're in young country territory. But done right, it's as furiously infectious and wildly invigorating as all get out. Lucero are obviously shooting for Uncle Tupelo's No Depression, probably the most fiery rockingest country record we can remember. Huge guitars, a whiskey soaked howl, pounding drums, killer catchy hooks, and plenty of twang. And to be honest Lucero do get pretty darn close. A lot closer than most folks. The result falls somewhere between a way more aggro Springsteen and a slightly less rocking No Depression era Tupelo. But as far as places a band could land, you can't do a whole lot better than that.
And very much how Mike from the Court And Spark is that band's ace in the hole, with his impossibly warm honeyed whiskey soaked croon, Lucero has Ben Nichols, who makes Mike sound like a sweetly singing songbird. Super ragged and scratchy, like a more country Shane MacGowan, a raspy gravelly howl that can soar into a gorgeous banshee like wail. And that's half the battle right there. He has one of those voices that could sing the phone book and you'd be smashing bottles and banging your head and bouncing around like crazy. The band backs it up with some super rocking twang, some occasional barrelhouse piano and warm warbly organ, but it's all about guitar bass and drums, and these cats are tight as fuck. And can rock with the best of 'em.
A few years back, there was a documentary about Lucero, one of those year in the life on the road sort of things. And they looked like, and talked like any punk rock band, sleeping on floors, driving a shitty van, getting drunk, getting tattoos, maybe getting laid, not getting enough sleep, wondering about the future, rocking as hard as they can. But on stage, they didn't sound like any punk rock band you ever heard. A gloriously rambunctious, super rocking, sweaty and bloody and twangy and wild and wooly countrified rock and roll band. Which is exactly what they are.
Oh yeah! Our FAVORITE BLACK METAL BAND EVER (well, favorite black metal band ever who are heavily into carrots and beer and saxophones, that's for sure) has added to their lengthy and puzzling discography this brilliant live album, for all of us who haven't yet hijacked a jet to get to Belgium to drink beer and eat carrots with these maniacs in person. And they're someone else's favorites too -- this disc documents a show they played in Amsterdam last year, as support for a SUNNO))) performance by special request. And we know the SUNNO))) guys have good taste in weird black metal, right? Well they do, they got freaking Lugubrum to open for 'em!!
And what do Lugubrum start things off with? A version of their doomiest droniest bit of bombastic Beelzebubic bludgeon, "Haunted Ordure", from their out of print split with Finsternis!! YEEEAAH! (that would be us in the crowd, had we been there). It's laced with "prepared saxophone", unlike the studio version. Different but cool, which is what you want from a live album anyway (along with excellent loud sound and tight playing, which this also possesses). And all through this set, as on their insane masterpiece from last year, Heilige Dwazen, the saxophone is fully, usefully integrated into the grunting, groaning, lurching, churning, HEAVY CHAOTIC ART of their music. It's no novelty record, it's simply fucked up, is-it-black-metal-or-jazz-of-Hell?, live and raw and mind blowing, like an anguished black metal Painkiller. Forget SUNNO))), these guys should be co-headlining a bill with the Brainbombs!
All fans of Lugubrum definitely need this, and even if you've never heard 'em before this is surely worth checking out if the above has made you curious!
46 monstrous minutes, eight songs.
We all knew the Meads Of Asphodel were a weird bunch. Every record was a baffling slab of confusional black metal, often laced with all manner of VERY non-black metal sounds and ideas. Well, no matter how weird we though they were in the past, they've totally outdone themselves this time. So much so that we would hesitate to even classify this as black metal.
There's a lot to be confused by here, from a bizarre collage of military speeches and snippets of random dialogue, to huge swelling synths, super dramatic and over the top, to strange synthesized spaghetti western jams, to not-all-that-metal blasts of propulsive spaced out rock and roll, with groovy Stooges-y riffing, simple pounding drumming, some serious guitar leads, and over the top some Motorhead gone black metal vocals... but that's not all. There are lots of lots of pianos, and soaring female vocals, blissed out stretches of space rock whoosh, some full on old school punk rock. And then there's the completely fucked final track, called "Aborted Stygian Foetus", a sort of industrial electronic metal jam, drum machines, heavy riffing, weird vocals, like some weird mix of Ministry and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. But it's not over. After about 20 minutes of silence you'll find the secret track, an intense and seriously silly and fucked up stretch of testifying, over a swirl of church organs, a heavily (British) accented 'preacher' gives a fiery sermon on how we are all wankers and how we are all full of shit. Woah.
The new sound could have something to do with the addition of a whole mess of new Meads: Alan Davey of Hawkwind, Mirai from Japanes metal weirdos Sigh, Lesion from Worms Of Sabnock, as well as some synth, trumpet, and not one but TWO female vocalists.
The more likely reason for this new direction should be obvious from the cover, all sepia toned, with a crucifix, and piles of dead bodies and that instantly recognizable Crass style text. Like maybe they were going for some sort of Flux Of Pink Indians / Crass / Rudimentary Peni sort of crust vibe!! Although on the inside they're still clad in their armor and chainmail and helmets...
So fucking weird.
This is the fourth record we've reviewed from Lubomyr Melnyk, pianist and inventor of the Continuous Music technique. A customer suggest we check him out describing him as sounding like three Terry Riley records being played at once. And it does. And it's amazing. Anyone who owns any of the other three will most likely want this one too. It's definitely similar as are all the pieces utilizing Melnyk's technique, but it has its own unique sound and arrangement that makes it just as special as any of the other recordings we've had. And as with many things we just can't get enough.
For those of you who missed the titles we already listed or are new to the AQ list, here's a little info about Melnyk and his amazing technique:
In the early '70s Melnyk developed a unique approach to the piano called Continuous Music, a physical and mental technique that allowed Melnyk to play an incredible amount of notes at an incredible speed. In fact he holds two world records, one as the fastest pianist in the world, sustaining speeds of over 19.5 notes per second in each hand, simultaneously! And two, for the most number of notes played in one hour! In 60 minutes, Melnyk sustained an average speed of over 13 notes per second in each hand, yielding a total of 93,650 INDIVIDUAL notes. Holy shit!! But don't be mislead, this is not some Yngwie bullshit, where songs and composition are sacrificed for mere shredding. No, there is a method to Melnyk's madness, and the result says all that needs to be said. Continuous Music as you might have surmised, involves generating an extremely rapid flow of notes, with the pedal sustained non stop, patterns, broken chords, the sound is dense and dizzying, like glimpsing the inner workings of some tiny lifeform and watching atoms and molecules spin and swirl. The result of so many notes, played so quickly and so close together, with the overtones drifting and bleeding into each other, is some of the most breathtaking music we've ever heard. It's almost like a waterfall of piano notes, a frothy cascade of tinkling sparkling melody, or a laying beneath a perfectly black night sky, watching a million fireflies dance and flit, a sky full of tiny little streaks of light. At once chaotic and soothing, confusional yet serene. Close listening yields so much detail, like looking at a piano concerto through a microscope, not so close listening offers the listener a glorious abstract soundscape on which to drift away.
Just re-reading that gets us excited all over again. This music is indeed amazing and incredibly unique. A dizzying swirl of solo piano. So dense and deep it doesn't sound like it could possibly be coming from just two pianos. It's almost like someone took a million pianos, removed every note from each piano, placed them in some sort of giant container, shook it up, and then dumped all the notes over our heads. But somehow, the notes fall in perfectly predetermined patterns creating impossibly complex melodies and totally breathtakingly lovely textures and arrangements.
"Remnants Of A Man" was recorded in Stockholm in 1985 and is probably the least abstract and most directly dramatic piece we've heard. Beneath the flurries of high notes are huge resounding minor key chords. So dark and ominous. Within the piece is included a direct melodic reference to Beethoven, a short bit from his 9th symphony, Melnyk's tribute to Beethoven and his unhappy life. In fact the piece is themed around the futility of love, and you can totally hear it in the notes. Sad and sorrowful, intense and so emotional.
"The Fountain" is more of what we might consider traditional Melnyk, the cascade of notes composed to sound like the water of a fountain. And unlike most of his pieces, the first half of "The Fountain" is performed without the sustain pedal depressed, which means the notes are dry and there are no drawn out overtones, it's remarkable to hear the complexity of performance and composition. Almost like looking up into a sky full or raindrops or snowflakes.
The final track "Niche" is an excerpt from a longer piece and is an example of solo piano in the Continuous Mode, a glistening, sparkling, shimmering world of lighter than air melodies, gentle drifts of notes, cobwebby tangles of delicate melody, completely effervescent and dreamlike. Awesome.
Lots of super technical liner notes as always, with a brief history of Melnyk and the Continuous Music technique. Be sure to check out Wave-Lox, The Voice Of Trees and the Legend And Song Of Galadriel too!
It's been a while since we've heard from Ukrainian abstract free folk ensemble The Moglass, who in the past have spun darkly delicate webs of creaking ambience, rumbling disembodied drones, stumbling tribal primitivism, all tangled up in a massive swirl of dreamlike ether.
Thankfully not too much has changed. Incorporating bits of jazz (via subtle sax) and all sorts of found sound and field recordings, The Moglass spread simple guitars out over skeletal frameworks of not-quite-rhythms, glistening sonic sparkle, and moody murk, creating slow swirls of ominous sound. The thing about The Moglass, is that they don't just create noises and sounds, little sonic events that 'happen' and then fade away, their music has a purpose, a drive, a direction, the guitars, and the spare riffs they unleash are propulsive, they carry us forward, pulling us by the ear into a world that sounds simultaneously fascinating and frightening. Bits of intercepted shortwave radio, the sounds of families talking, and children playing, are slowly subsumed by thick low end melodies, warm bowed warbles, glistening with bits of glitch and buzz, sleepy and serene, but always gorgeously melancholy. Maybe more than any of their other records, Sparrow Juice has a bit more twang, a little spaghetti western, a little Morricone, although they do a fantastic job of stripping those sounds down and stretching them out into abstract desertscapes. Elsewhere, music boxes hover weightless above creaks and scrapes, thick swirls of molasses like sound crawl glacier-like, swallowing all the sounds it encounters and building to an almost roar, thick fuzzy sun dappled buzz slithers and shimmers like purloined slabs of some long lost M83 single, and guitars and computers and synthesizers are wrapped into rightly wound knots and allowed to slowly unravel, becoming big billowy clouds of rumbling whir and keening skree. So good.
With each album Mouse On Mars have consistently tried something a little different. The German duo follow up their 2004 full length, the almost dance-pop leaning, unexpectedly vocal-laden Radical Connector, with this gregarious IDM mover'n'shaker. Their newfound chunky aggression is surprisingly well-suited on the usually obnoxi-noiso Ipecac label (the vinyl still a Sonig import, tho). Still despite all of Varcharz's jutting shards and bassy shots to the solar plexus, the tracks maintain a groovy, engaging approachability. Actually their muscle-flexing comes across as quite fun, not at all frightening.
Wow! Assuming that the My Morning Jacket production crew didn't do much doctoring up on the original live recordings (hey, it's not an uncommon procedure!), their rootsy pop rock orchestrations come across splendidly well from the stage, and likewise the ecstatic response from the audience. Regardless of possible post-recording tweaks and embellishments, this is an excellent sounding live concept album. It's a super pleasurable MMJ listening experience that, yes, does almost make you feel like you were there in person. Gaze at the back cover photo of the band performing on stage in a lush foresty setting, and you'll wish you really were.
Jim James' vocals are captivatingly on his trademark emotional brink, and the rest of the band deliver the delicious harmonies. The awesome rhythm section of Two-Tone Tommy and Patrick Hallahan keep many a toe tapping and head bobbing in the crowd. James and Carl Broemel's raw and full electric guitars raise the hairs on the back of your neck, while Bo Koster's keyboards and Broemel's saxophone meld it all together. Dare we say Okonokos surpasses any of the band's previous studio albums in both its breadth and vitality? Indeed we do! It finds the band making themselves right at home at the crossroads of Uncle Tupelo, Coldplay and Flaming Lips -- extending a welcoming hand to their broadest audience to date -- and that seems to be a fine place to be. Recommended!
A quick look at the Aidan Baker / Nadja website reveals 100 or more recordings, most super limited cd-r's and almost all of them out of print. With that much recorded output, and of what we've heard all amazing, you'd think Baker and Nadja would be household names, at least among the drone-doom-death-dirge set. That day might fast be approaching with so many new, much more readily available releases. This list alone features THREE new Baker releases (two of course incredibly limited, DOH!): two separate Nadja's as well as a solo record.
This Nadja, released on the Utech cd-r label, is limited to 200 copies and comes in a cool stamped and numbered cardstock sleeve and is, guess what? Totally beautiful. The reason we love Nadja so much is that your every day run of the mill doomy sludge is somehow rendered, lovely, pretty, gorgeous even. The sound is thick and heavy and low, but it's suffused with some ineffable warmth, something that makes the sludge sound impossibly sun dappled. Could be the lilting melodies, the drifting disembodied vocals, the fuzzy blissed out production. Regardless, the sound of Nadja almost has more in common with My Bloody Valentine and M83 than SUNNO))) or Boris. It is definitely dirgey, but it's also subtly poppy and just so pretty. Nadja are so good at crafting that perfect otherworldly, drifting away, sinking to the bottom of a fuzz filled sea sort of sound, that we can never ever ever get enough of.
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Wow! We haven't heard from Noggin in forever. This guitar and violin duo have been kicking up a storm for years now. More than a decade! The last time we had a record from these guys it was before there was even an AQ list! But we loved 'em. They even played an instore at the old store on 24th Street. And they weren't your average free noise duo, even back in the day. Eric O. on guitar, scrabbling and scraping and creating some glorious chaos, and Michael G. who was probably already in his late fifties or early sixties when Noggin played at AQ on violin, so now... in 2006... WOW. The definitive elder statesman of North Western Noise for sure!! you might also remember Michael from his stint playing violin in the killer aggro-post-punk rock combo Behead The Prophet No Lord Shall Live.
So what's the modern day Noggin all about? Pretty much exactly what they were all about 10 years ago. An angular scrapescape, a tangled web of Derek Bailey, Hans Reichel, Lee Ranaldo and Keith Rowe, like a table full of household objects and broken steel strings and fried amps, but all stuffed into a single guitar. A throbbing, angular, rasping. clanging swirl of drone and clatter, with the processed violin, slithering and squealing, keening and braying, and sometimes even scraping right alongside the guitar. A glorious burst of unfettered instrumental deconstruction, playful and wild, dark and deliriously damaged. Cool stuff.
Packaged in a mini 3" jewel case and as with all Jyrk stuff super limited, in this case...
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!!
We are big fans of the Brazilian pastoral psych of Lula Cortes, whether it be the phenomenal Satwa record or his later legendary mid-'70s masterpiece with Ze Ramalho, Paebiru, So you can imagine how our hearts went all aflutter when we got this latest Time-Lag reissue of the sole release by Marconi Notaro, a revolutionary Brazilian poet who recorded this album with both Cortes and Ramalho in 1973, the same year the Satwa record was released. Almost reading like a second Satwa album while at the same time predicting the later ecstatic fuzz experimental rock of Paebiru, the sunbaked exuberance and joy of these recordings belie their political spirit. Miraculously recorded and independently released amongst the harsh authority of the 1970's Brazilian government, Notaro, Cortes and Ramalho and others in the small and previously little-known Recife music scene were somehow able to bypass restrictions on music that was viewed as vehemently anti-state. Using acidy tape loop effects, electric and acoustic guitars, trancy folk percussion and the tricordio, a sitar/dulcimer hybrid that Cortes built himself, the songs here are mind-meltingly beautiful. Sadly Notaro passed away in 2000 of Hepatitis C leaving behind this record and seven published books of poetry. But with the authorization of Notaro's daughter and Lula Cortes himself, this classic masterpiece of protest is finally unearthed for us all. Totally Recommended!!
NSU's record taught me (Allan) a little lesson. I came across a cd reissue of the lone LP by this obscure Scottish sixties psych band a couple years ago, and picked it up for its heaviness potential (it had been described as being really heavy by an overseas dealer). At first hearing, though, the heaviness I wanted wasn't really there. I had been hoping for a proto-metal album like, say, Toad or Leaf Hound, and so was disappointed and set the NSU aside. But then, some weeks later, I gave it another chance and, as so often happens when you aren't judging something by your wishful expectations but instead taking it on its own terms, I ended up really really liking it. I realized, this was a pretty nifty album with some marvelous songs and vibe from a pretty cool band, that while not quite competition for Black Sabbath or Blue Cheer, still operates on the cusp of proto-metal heavy, sixties style, and surely provides lots of wailing guitar! So now we're quite happy to have this in stock, a new nice digipack cd reissue of what we've come to regard as a bit of a gem, if you have any sort of a soft spot for Cream-y British '60s guitar blues psychedelia! Originally released in 1969 on Stable, the same label (and year) as the record by Lemmy's old band Sam Gopal that we love so much, and that this reminds us of just a bit, especially the more mellow and laid back parts, and they also share a penchant for lyrical subject matter that tends towards the dark and/or druggy! One song is even simply titled "Stoned".
So again, a lesson, give stuff more than one listen! You never know what you might like better then second time... We're still wondering, though: N.S.U.? What's it stand for?
When Japanese guitarist Null isn't bludgeoning skulls in his heavy prog power trio Zeni Geva (which maybe he isn't, anymore -- we never know if they're disbanded or just taking a long time between albums, as we haven't heard from ZG since, like, 2001) he's been known to indulge in abstract soundscapes via solo guitar and electronics, such as what's presented here, on this new Important release, Kosmista Noisea. Our description, stream-of-consciousness style, goes something like this: Merzbow techno video game insect swarm vacuum cleaner phaser fire! Ultra distortion!! OK!!!
There's two tracks, one long (24:25) and one really long (45:15), recorded live and then further processed in the studio. The longer track has more stretches of night-time ambience, electronic chattering cricket drones and high-pitched testy tones. Definitely, though, both tracks are practically and aesthetically quite computer-y and sci-fi sounding, with moments of pulsing beauty, what sound like encrypted outer-space transmissions, and overloading space-battle SFX. Kosmista Noisea is indeed quite "noisea", but it's deftly woven noisea! If you're in need of a Japanese noise fix, don't wait (ha!) for the next Merzbow release, give ol' KK a try.
Raver Techno DJs like their psych music too! That's the idea with this disc, wherein two edgy Scottish DJs who spin as Optimo (JG Wilkes and JD Twitch are their names), present a mix of spaced-out grooves from the past and present, some danceable, some towards the "chill-out" side of things. Everything from old school freak rock like Silver Apples' "Oscillations" and Hawkwind's "Hash Cake '77" to club trax like "Acid Thunder (Fast Eddie Mix)" and a Carl Craig remix of Throbbing Gristle... It's pretty varied, actually, mashing the Chambers Brothers' psychedelic R&B anthem "Time Has Come Today" right next to "Johnny Cash" by Scottish indie-rockers the Sons & Daughters, for instance. However, bewarned a lot of this is pretty house-y and electro-y, maybe not for someone normally shies away from dance music (though who knows, maybe you'll find you like some of it -- and it could cross-over the other way too). It's not clear to us what makes a bunch of this so "psychedelic" after all.
But then we thought of this: Nanjo Asahito, bassist for Japanese garage psych acts High Rise and Mainliner, told us once that, for breakfast, he preferred sausage to bacon because sausage was "more psychedelic"... we think what he meant (aside from a joke) is that sausage is mix of things, and that a mix is always more psychedelic... well there you go. Ingredients in Psyche Out's sausage include, besides the aforementioned: Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Vapourspace, The Stranglers, Acid Test, The Temptations, Sinnamon, Herbie Hancock, Simple Minds, Systeme Imaginique, Dinosaur, Dorau/Kohncke, Sweet Exorcist, Mr. Fingers, Chris and Cosey, Damien Donato, Koenig Cylinders, Hole In One, The Step, and Skatt Bros.
Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites by Tower Recordings member P.G. Six (aka Pat Gulber), released in 2001, is definitely one of our very favorite albums from amongst the current crop of acid-folk revivalists, melding trad folksiness with 4-track DIY experimentation, something like the Incredible String Band checking into the Neutral Milk Hotel! And P.G.'s 2004 follow-up, The Well of Memory, was pretty great too. So that now the Amish label has brought out another P.G. Six album has us all excited. But wait, there's no singing? And no guitar?
Yet, what we're hearing is quite lovely, late-night string shimmer... dark and delicate... just something rather more abstract (and instrumental) than what we expected. Turns out that Music From The Sherman Box Series is all -harp- music, seven tracks for various sorts of harps and effects. For instance: "#2 For Prepared Wire Strung Harp With Tremolo Pedal", "#5 For Two Bray Harps", etc. We're told P.G. recorded these to accompany an exhibition of paintings and collages (made from Nat Sherman cigarette boxes, hence the title) by artist Christine Krol, on display in a Jersey City gallery for a month last year. P.G.'s mellifluous, electronically processed strummings and pluckings of these droning, buzzing harps must have sounded wonderful as a sonic installation, looped in the gallery space, but are surely just as nice heard on this disc. We're reminded of Steven R. Smith's work as Hala Strana, and also the unfolding atmospheres of James Blackshaw's steel string improvisations. Which means, quite recommended! And it still sounds like P.G., too -- in fact Kerry, not knowing what was playing on the stereo here, correctly guessed that this was the new P.G. Six just 'cause she recalled a particularly harp-y part from Parlor Tricks, and made the connection.
As a bonus, this disc concludes with two extra tracks. From P.G. Six's long out of print 1995 debut solo 7" there's the twelve-minute, hauntingly droney and drifting "The Book Of Rayguns For 6 Electric Guitars". And then there's also "Cartographies For Piano And Electronics", a stark piece in an avant-garde, 20th Century classical style. Both fit nicely with the seven harp explorations, which themselves bring some 20th century compositional (minimalist) adventurousness to folkier-feeling music.
After two cd-r's and a proper cd of completely gorgeous improvised Sitar music from Erik Amlee, we pretty much got to the point where we'd buy anything he put out. But we definitely weren't prepared for this Paradise Camp 23 disc. Sitar is still his instrument of choice, that and electric guitar. But PC23 is not another Amlee solo venture, PC23 is a 4 piece. A real band. Sort of.
All improvised, these tracks sound a bit like Amlee's solo material but WAY heavier, WAY darker, WAY more dense, and a lot thicker, and more slithery and almost metal at times. You can definitely hear lots of Bardo Pond, and SUNNO)), and Sunroof! and even some NNCK or Sunburned Hand. But with a haunting Eastern buzz, and way more of a blissed out psychedelic sprawl. Some tracks are monsters, huge churning walls of downtuned guitars, others are dreamy and shimmery, with the buzz of the sitar spreading out like a late morning fog, while guitars and electronics just drift lazily by, others are weird primal tribal jams, rife with deconstructed riffs, bits of random percussion, lots of buzz and clang and clatter, and still others are straight up sun dappled, strummy dream folk. So great. A definite contender for psych-dirge-dream-buzz-drone record of the year!
Still at it after all these years. One of the forefathers of Reggae and Dub is back with another album. This one recorded as he neared the age of 70 in 2004 and seeing a wider release thanks to Narnack who have included a bonus disc which includes a few remixes by the likes of DJ Spooky and Dave Sitek (TV On The Radio). With Swiss group White Belly Rats as his back up band, Panic In Babylon is a record of seriously solid reggae beats and funky soulful groove but as always, the focus is on Perry's amazing ramblings, insights into and delusions of madness and brilliance. Definitely one of the best Perry records in a long while. In fact we know loads of folks half Perry's age that sound totally tired and past their prime, but here is Mr. Lee 'Scratch' Perry, well into his 70's and kicking up a serious dubbed out shitstorm and showing everyone how it's STILL done!
I can tell you this about Priestess: they're one kick ass live rock n' roll band. I saw 'em on a bill not long ago with heavy metal revivalists The Sword -and- Early Man (both of those bands hotly tipped, and by us too!), and y'know what? Priestess simply DESTROYED both The Sword and Early Man, good as they were. Priestess were just the better live performers, working the crowd and wowing with musicianship and showmanship both. They had rock star swagger, and the skills to back it up -- guitar pyrotechnics, harmony vocals, and some darn catchy real riffy rock n' roll songs. Oh yeah, and a really frickin' good drummer, whose non-sucky *drum solo* definitely put Priestess over the top (in more ways than one) in competition with their tourmates that night.
I'd never heard of 'em before and was pretty darn impressed. Turns out they were from Montreal, and had an album out in Canada, not yet out in the States... well it's here now, this is it. I bought the Canadian version at the show, and didn't even listen to it for a long time 'cause I figured that they couldn't really live up to that live experience. And it's true to some extent, the album doesn't blow away Early Man's album, for instance, the way they did to the band in person. But it's definitely a good, honest-to-God hard rock album that you'd want to blare loudly from your (hypothetical, in all likelihood) Camaro as you put the pedal to the metal.
And having said that, get this: it's non-ironic too, near as we can tell, which also might explain why they had the advantage over those other two bands at that show (and by the way, it wasn't just that show, I saw 'em again opening for Dinosaur Jr. and Comets On Fire, and they were pretty good too, though suffering from the usual opener's lack of energetic crowd response, specifically due to the lack of a crowd at that early hour). Now how can a band like this be non-ironic, you ask? A band so partial to the cowbell, and clearly with visions of stadium-sized showmanship already hard-wired into their songwriting? Maybe 'cause they're Canadian? For whatever reason, their punchy and emotional three-minute pop hard rockin' songs are presented with more authentic feeling (to these ears) than, say, obvious comparison Wolfmother does it.
More about their sound: despite their name (which, unfortunately, conjures the image of an all-female Judas Priest cover band, doesn't it?) they're far from being an '80s retro metal band. More bluesy '70s, and less metal than that. The stoner/grunge thing is closer to the mark. Yeah, a bit White Stripesy at times like Wolfmother, also all AC/DC and QOTSA at others. Can't wait to see 'em again! In the meantime, we'll be spinning this...
BLACK SABBATH! There. Got your attention. Now let's explain.
We thought we were pretty up on all the bands that followed the Sabbatherian path: Witchfinder General, Angel Witch, Trouble, Saint Vitus, Cathedral, Candlemass, Pentagram, etc. etc. But we'd missed out on one -- Quartz, from Sabbath's hometown of Birmingham, England, in fact. Turns out that this New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) band definitely also deserves a place in that list -- because they're very, VERY Sabbathy and also an awesome band! First off, this, their self-titled debut LP from 1977 (ok, predating the NWOBHM explosion by a couple years actually, though their later records were in the thick of it) was produced by none other than Black Sabbath's riff king Tony Iommi!! And, also, one of the Quartz guys, Geoff Nichols, ended up playing keyboards for the Sabs later on...
Yet Quartz don't sound very much like any of those other aforementioned Sabbath-worshiping bands. Not at all. That's because, with Iommi at the helm, this takes after what Sabbath sounded like at the time, albums like Sabotage (1975), Technical Ecstasy ('76), and Never Say Die ('78). If you're familiar with those, you'll definitely hear their influence here! This later '70s Sabbath sound isn't as often emulated, being so much more proggy and polished than their rawer, earlier, doomier LPs. Which is great, 'cause it's not a done-to-death sort of Sabbath sound. As the Sabbath clones proliferate, even today, -these- guys still sound fresh. It also helps that they seemingly share the Sabbath attitude that they're just playing rock music, not something as strictly defined as 'heavy metal'. There's no metal formula being followed. So while this IS heavy and metallic '70s style, there's bombastic prog and pretty pop and acoustic folkiness here too, with Tony Iommi contributing an uncredited flute solo to "Sugar Rain". (Ozzy apparently also sang back-up on that track!) Furthermore, Quartz, formerly known as Bandy Legs, had their roots in '60s psych-pop (featuring members of obscure acts Idle Race and World Of Oz). Though sounding -most- like Sabbath, you'll also hear Yes and Queen and Rush and the Beatles and more...
But if it's Sabbath parallels you want, you got 'em: their vocalist exudes sincerity and emotion, echoing Ozzy's loss-of-control laments. And Tony's mid-seventies guitar (and synth) sound is reproduced perfectly...apparently he's playing on a couple tracks, in fact. The riffs on here could have been written by the man -- "Around and Around" sounds like it should have been on Sabotage! And leadoff track "Mainline Riders", one of the heaviest here, sounds remarkably like Sabbath's "Heaven And Hell" even though the latter wasn't recorded until three years later... hmm, who was influencing whom?
Ultimately, Quartz' debut is a great, varied, hard-rockin' album that uniquely captures all the energetic yet melancholic charm of the latter days of Ozzy's original tenure with the Sabs, unlike any other band ever did. A lost classic for sure. We wish someone had told us about Quartz before, which is why we're duty bound to tell you about 'em now that we have this new reissue!!
While the Essence Music press release doesn't make this proclamation, any self-respecting :zoviet*france: fan will be able to recognize the source material for Rapoon's From Shadow Sleep. Essentially this album is a remix of the source material taken from two of the finest :zoviet*france: recordings of all times -- the diptych centerpiece of "Ascend The Fall" and "Caught In The Square" found on the album Just An Illusion. That 1990 :zoviet*france: album was essentially a solo record by Robin Storey, who later split from :zoviet*france: rather acrimoniously and formed Rapoon, a project whose work has been fairly hit or miss.
True to the old adage: when Rapoon has been good, he's been very very good; but when he's been bad, he's horrid. From Shadows Sleep find Storey in top form, partially because the source material is so exquisite -- back from when he was dealing with convoluted tape loop machines, time-lag accumulators, and the best non-Dub use of delay pedals of all time. These aerated sounds tinged with metallic resonance cobble together swelling masses of hypnotic drift, underscored by a brooding atmosphere. Sonorous pings and aggregates of swirling tape hiss spackle Rapoon's mighty drone which ends up being both unsettling and transcendent at the same time. Given how many are dabbling in the fine art of grizzled dronescaping, the back catalogue of :zoviet*france: should be required listening. But given that nearly all of those recordings of alchemical ritualism are out of print (thanks to that unfortunate acrimony mentioned above), this Rapoon album is the next best thing. Very highly recommended.
Album number two from this New York duo picks up right where their refreshing debut left off. Bringing all sorts of seemingly unrelated sounds and ideas perfectly together. The danceability of electronica, the organic emotion of guitars and the limitless possibilities of what can happen when you re-imagine different ways to create melody. With Classics they continue to create a world that makes you feel like you are some powerful character in a video game that you just want to play forever. There is something so endearing and instantly likable about this group. The way they make fun sounding music without being cheesy or gimmicky. The way they force you to use your imagination, it's almost impossible to hear these songs and not create elaborate shapes, colors and stories in your mind. Classics is the kind of record that can break through to even the most jaded hipster as well as hitting the spot for those who are always ready to have a good time. So fresh and fun!
We like a label that is totally upfront about their intentions, no beating around the bush, a label like 100 Copies, who are simply and succinctly letting us know, that this is in fact, a drastically limited release, and once we run out, we will not be able to get more. So be warned, we tried to order a ton of these, and ended up with a little more than a dozen. So why should you care? Well for the 12 or 13 of you who are quickest on the BUY IT NOW button, the work of Mahmoud Refat is a series of soundscapes crafted from the sounds of daily life in Egypt, conversations, calls to prayer, street musicians, portable power stations, the sounds of children playing, the bustling market, all woven into fuzzy glitchy dronescapes, some dark and lugubrious and barely moving, others skittering and looped sounding, while still others are funky jazzy Autechre-ish jams. Chopped up voices, sampled instruments, soft indistinct drifts of ambient sound, ultra minimal abstract glitch and rumbling cavernous whirs all woven into a gorgeously mesmerizing whole, from the distinct sonic threads of people's lives, halfway around the world.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES (duh) and we have less than ten...
Finally available on cd, Emitt Rhodes' first record after disbanding his '60s baroque-pop group The Merry-Go-Round. Since The Merry-Go Round only recorded one album, Rhodes was contractually obligated to give A&M another record, marking the beginning of a promising solo career plagued by similar obligations and label pressures. While Rhodes voice sounds very much like Paul McCartney, uncanny for a Californian, American Dream's pop-perfection arrangements actually read likes a lost Beatles record on most of the songs, that is if John Lennon decided to sit that one out. His use of session musicians on this record gives this a different feel from the sound he developed later for his absolutely amazing self-titled album on Dunhill a year later, where he built his own studio and recorded all the instruments himself. So American Dream sounds closer to a second Merry-Go-Round record than a proper debut solo record (In fact, the only other available release of American Dream is on a best of The Merry-Go Round compilation). But that shouldn't take away from the fact that this is a great record from an incredible talent who never really got his due. That's a shame because his early records are soooo good!! Much better than Paul McCartney's solo records we daresay. Seek them out!
Being on a split record with another band can be rough. If the other band sucks, your band gets dragged right down with them. If the other band is great, they can make the listener completely forget that your half of the split even exists. So imagine being a black metal band, a pretty darn good black metal band, and doing a split with the current king of USBM Leviathan. You can't pass it up. It's fucking Leviathan man! But talk about pressure. But heck, it's gotta say something that Sapthuran shared a split with Leviathan a while back, and not only did we not ignore them, but we actually dug their half of the split quite a bit. So much so that when we learned they had a new full length, we got a bunch for the store.
Not nearly as weird as Leviathan, Sapthuran traffic in a more sort of trance like Burzumy buzz, single riffs are repeated and looped into a mesmerizing black metal hypnorock. Vocals howl and shriek, drums pound and blast, but it's all about the riffs, dense and fuzzy, a thick blanket of buzz laid over everything. Almost like a black metal Circle or Gore. Not a whole lot of parts, in fact, often just one or two, but the riffs are so good, and they are recorded so hot and blown out. It's like dipping your head in a furnace of black flames. Probably the weirdest thing about Sapthuran is all the acoustic guitars. It seems like almost half the record is not metal at all, instead a sort of lilting dark folk, fingerpicked minor key melodies, simple strumming, often placed in dark soundscapes of ambient drone, or distant black buzz, or crackling campfires, or the sound of howling wind, or burbling streams and chirping birds. Pastoral and tranquil, but still dark and ominous, the perfect sonic counterpoint to the hypnotic buzzing blackness surrounding that fragile serenity on all sides and perpetually threatening to swallow it whole.
Saros, featuring the (amazing, need we say?) drummer from the legendary Weakling, is one of San Francisco's up and coming heavy metal outfits, playing a blend of thrash, black and speed metal that takes no prisoners live (and now, on record). Saros are all about old school rippage mixed with weird black metal epic experimentation... On their debut full-length Five Pointed Tongue you get a fierce lesson in modern metal melding, the band both galloping and trudging (depending) through five fairly long tracks (43 minutes total) that mix up blackened rasps, clean vocal melodies, some acoustic guitar, prog-rock song structures, widdly solos, and plenty of traditional Bay Area 'banging. No matter the twists and turns, in one of Saros' songs you're never far from a blast of icy riffage. And quite a beating when it comes to the drums! Requisite obscure metal nerd reference: I wonder if these guys are at all familiar with French Canadian tech metallers Obliveon? I think they'd like them.
We have no idea how Campbell Kneale, overlord of the mighty Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, finds time to keep discovering so much amazing, unheard music. He plays in loads of bands, Black Boned Angel, Birchville Cat Motel, he plays shows, makes record after record after record, goes on tour, has a family, kids, maybe even a real job. It's a wonder he can even run a label at all. Especially one where most of the discs are hand made and assembled. We don't want to jinx it. Not sure what we would do if there was no Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Miss out on a whole lot of kick ass music that's for sure. We've discovered so many amazing groups, lots of all time AQ faves too: Birchville Cat Motel obviously, Dialing In, 1/3 Octave Band, Peter Wright, Lugosi, Seht, MHFS, Black Boned Angel, Ming, Mrtyu, With Throats As Fine As Needles, Ming, Mirag and more.
And we can now add Seaworthy to the list. This Australian combo sound just like their name would lead you to believe. Serrata is a blissful oceanic exploration, a swoonsome soundscape of distant drones and shimmering sonic surf, lapping waves of sound causing the listener to gently rock back and forth, like floating on your back in a clear tranquil ocean, delicate clouds drifting far above, your body at one with the rolling swells beneath. So serene and peaceful, soft focused and meditative, a dreamy droning meditation on the deep blue sea, a sonic sending off, eyes closed as you drift toward the horizon. Wow.
Wow! He sounds like Johnny Cash! OK, sometimes we compare things in reviews or note similarities but it's not often that we come across a record that sounds almost identical to another artist we love. Such is the case with this archival release of Kentucky country crooner Johnny Seay who recorded in the late '50s-early '60s and sounds EXACTLY like Johnny Cash. We swear every single time we play this someone asks which Johnny Cash record this is and often one of us working will wonder the same thing. Luckily Seay sounded like all the best parts of Cash. The deep rich baritone sung atop a perfect rockin roots country backdrop. Story has it, that when Mercury records head honcho Shelby Singleton got his ears on the Irish Cash soundalike he made some convenient changes to the pronunciation of Seay's last name. While it had always been pronounced Shay, Singelton started saying it like Sea, further confusing the worlds of Cash and Seay. Johnny C and Johnny Sea. And confusing it is as we can't emphasize enough how uncanny the resemblance is. Some of us even find ourselves leaning towards Johnny Seay, as this was playing the other day and Christine came up front and of course asked if this was a Johnny Cash record she never heard and when told the story she concluded that she might even like this Johnny more. For curious minds and Cash fans alike this is an essential listen!
Few artists' music can guarantee to brighten your days and nights the way Atom Heart (and his numerous aliases) can. Any new release from this fella is received with a huge aQ grin! If you dug the recent Yellow Magic Fever tribute from the always deliriously delightful Senor Coconut and Los Negritos' Speed-Merengue Mega-Mix, you know what we're talking about and you definitely won't wanna miss these freshly reissued earlier Senor Coconut releases including this, his awesome Kraftwerk tribute! Even if you got 'em the first time around, heck, we're sure you know somebody who'd benefit from this festive treat!
Back in 2000, we had this to say about El Baile Aleman: Senor Coconut is actually the guy better known as techno/electronica artist Atom Heart. He's moved to Chile and gone all Latin and groovy on us. However, all the songs on this (high-) concept album are Kraftwerk covers! So this joins a long line of weird and wonderful tributes to Kraftwerk. Soon we'll be able to have a whole bin at Aquarius dedicated to such endeavors: the Balenescu Quartet one, the Terre Thaemlitz one, the one with all the Slovenian acts, the Japanese import one, the Miami Bass one, etc. etc. Anyways, so incredibly executed down to the tiniest detail, this one will sit at the top of the heap! Super duper fun.
Few artists' music can guarantee to brighten your days and nights the way Atom Heart (and his numerous aliases) can. Any new release from this fella is received with a huge aQ grin! If you dug the recent Yellow Magic Fever tribute from the always deliriously delightful Senor Coconut and Los Negritos' Speed-Merengue Mega-Mix, you know what we're talking about and you definitely won't wanna miss these freshly reissued earlier Senor Coconut releases including his awesome Kraftwerk tribute El Baile Aleman! Even if you got 'em the first time around, heck, we're sure you know somebody who'd benefit from this festive treat!
Back in 2000, we had this to say about Gran Baile Con Senor Coconut: Mambo-electronica-fuckery from German cum Chilean Atom Heart. Much more skittery and abrasive than his more recent Kraftwerk covers record, really innovative work that has more staying power without that gimmick. Think V/VM meets Stock, Hausen & Walkman, meets Rancho Relaxo All-Stars. Heavily entrenched in the drill & bass laptop / breakbeat damage employed by Aphex Twin and early Squarepusher, but using samples culled from the rich Cuban traditions of Cha Cha and Mambo. Highly recommended.
This mysterious East Bay noisemaker known simple as Sixes makes his Jyrk debut with this dense little 3" disc. For being so small, it definitely packs a serious wallop. Ultra massive low end drones, huge reverberating continent shifting tectonic rumbles, crushing, pulsing black fuzz. An incredibly dense black hole of sound. Impossible to say what the sound source is, it sounds like someone took a bunch of analog synths, about a hundred guitars, the same number of wildly malfunctioning amps, and dropped them in a tar pit. Churning gut rumbling brutality laced with jagged streaks of clipped and stuttering high end, everything burnt to a crumbling black, like watching some massive black tower, slowly crumble to pieces, the sound absolutely deafening, a physical presence that threatens to not only blow out your ear drums, but blow a gaping hole clean through your chest, take your head off, incinerate you and leave a tiny pile of smoldering cinders. The sound eventually settles down to a low level rumble, still crumbling and super distorted, before beginning a slow build, thickening, getting more distorted, the high end streaks spreading and brightening, eclipsing the low end pummel, until the two sounds, the earthquake low and shooting star high, are all tangled up, an ancient battle in sound, the two eventually becoming indistinguishable, all that's left, a huge snarling grey cloud of fuzz and grit and grind that threatens to blot out all other sound before quickly fading to black. Phew.
Packaged in swanky silver metallic on black sleeve, housed in a mini 3" jewel case.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!
Up from the ashes of the beloved and astounding spectacle known as Idiot Flesh comes Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. At times, thunderously heavy carnivalesque metal like Mr. Bungle wrestling with SlipKnot. At others, minimal piano plinketry, disjointed
A super limited lp only release from AQ fave Steven R. Smith (Thuja, Mirza, Hala Strana). This is part SEVEN in Important Records' "Arts & Crafts" series, and is essentially a brand new full length album. The sticker on the front name drops Popol Vuh and Arvo Part, and while we do hear some of that, we also hear lots of Nadja and Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck and that sort of foggy fuzzy dreamy drift. The magic of Smith is that he creates those impossibly gauzy sound worlds without a computer or loads of processing, just a bizarre arsenal of sound making implements and a dangerously deft hand. Fretted spike fiddle, fretted hurdy gurdy, psaltery, cello, xaphoon, bombard, ney, bouzouki, glcokenspiel, organ, hand drum, cymbal, shaker, noah bells, tambourine, kaen, melodica, electric guitar mandolute and tapes are all woven into a rich and washed out soundworld of wheezing melancholy melodies, thick slabs of distorted guitar crumble, haunting simple strums, thick low end reverberations all wrapped up in a dense sonic fog. Some ancient otherworld observed through old photographs or a dusty old oracle. Lovely and mysterious.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Packaged in gorgeous hand screened sleeves, with an original linocut, created, printed, signed and numbered by Smith, affixed to the front.
Hard to believe it's been five years since we last heard from Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse. It seems like every record has involved some sort of struggle or personal tragedy. Linkous has had a seriously rough life, an accident that almost killed him, and which left him crippled for life, struggles with anxiety and depression, but the result of all that anguish is one of the most incredible bodies of work in modern music. Sparklehorse is sort of like the country rock Flaming Lips. Starting life out as a super scrappy rock band, and then discovering the joys of the studio, learning to use the studio like another instrument, creating an incredibly expansive sound palette, and eventually creating a unique world of unbelievably lush sounds, like a modern day Brian Wilson. And this record is no different. It's rich and dense and lush and sweet, the vocals, a plaintive heartstring pulling croon, guitars strum and shimmer, melodies drift, harmonies float and glisten, everything woven together into gorgeously perfect twang flecked pop. The vocals are multi tracked, doused in effects, swathed in reverb, guitar parts are simple and spare, the record is dotted with bits of strange digital glitch, or fuzzy record crackle. Some tracks are crystal clear, simple and straight forward, others are dense and dizzying, with strange edits, and extreme stereo panning, there are a few super fuzzed out rockers, but for the most part Dreamt For Light Years is a record of sun dappled divinity and sweetly melancholy drift. A gloriously and dreamily psychedelic excursion into the heart of darkness. So lovely.
BACK IN STOCK!! LAST COPIES EVER!!!
Who would have though that a little cd-r from some unknown group called the Starving Weirdos would have caused such a ruckus? But stir up a ruckus it did! We have been selling that first disc like hotcakes, and why the heck not, a glorious noisy blast of free rock avant drone, No Neck by way of the Dead C by way of the Yellow Swans by way of Avarus by way of Sunroof! by way of Birchville Cat Motel. Or something like that. For more on how we discovered the Starving Weirdos, or more precisely how they discovered us, check out the review of their debut cd elsewhere on the site. So now we have this here brand new double cd-r and it's as good as if not better than the first (it features one track that was on the first record, but everything else is new and previously unreleased). The duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay is truly adept at crafting ramshackle conglomerations of clattery percussion, weird warbling guitars, abstract ambient soundscapes, moaning horns, shuffling almost-rhythms, wide open expanses of random sounds, soothing and mesmerizing, a gloriously shimmery clatter and shuffle, rattle and wheeze. Five lengthy tracks spread out over two discs. Fans of ANY of the above mentioned bands will be in drone rock free folk bliss out heaven!
Released on the Root Strata label (run by Tarentel's Jef Cantu) each double disc is packaged in a hand painted gatefold cd sleeve, quite beautiful!
We don't know too much about Stormcrow, besides that they're from Italy... beyond that we don't know if this is their first record, or if there are any folks from other bands in the band. Hardly matters really when you get right down to it. It's the music that matters and holy shit is this a serious blast of ultra black buzz. The sticker on the cover mentions Emperor, Dark Funeral and 1349, and while any super fast, super tight black metal band will most likely sound a little bit like one or all off those, Stormcrow somehow have a little bit more groove. It's still super fast and grim and true and blah blah blah, but the riffs sort of swing, and instead of being nothing but a black blur, it sort of lopes and lurches at lightning speed. Some killer blast beats underpinning a serious dose of killer riffing. Definitely worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the above mentioned hordes, with a little something special to set them apart. Don't be mislead though by the 'swing' and the 'groove', this is first and foremost, ultra fast, harsh as fuck, brutal and raw black metal, but there are a bunch of little sonic subtleties, weird composition, subtly strange song structure, and that killer drumming, combined with slightly twisted riffs, that makes us dig this way more than we expected to.
By now, we probably don't need to mention how much we love the turntable as instrument. And to that end, how much we love the sounds of damaged vinyl, or modified turntables, the hiss and skipping and pops and crackles and loops... Or how much we love Jeck and Tetreault and Yoshihide and Bastien and Brumit and Gum and Loop Orchestra and Marclay and anyone who ever smashed up or scraped up their records and then played them anyway, and maybe did that with two turntables or three or a hundred, creating whole new wonderful pieces of music out of misused and abused players and scratched and screwed up fragments of other folks' music. So when we discovered Strotter, aka Swiss turntablist Christoph Hess, we were already sold. Here's an older gentleman, who adds pieces of metal, and elastic bands, and extra needles and multiple tone arms to his turntables. And then uses old records and these customized turntable to create gorgeously hypnotic looped minimal soundscapes. It was only a matter of time before he decided to fuck with the actual pressing process as well. Thus we have two new vinyl only releases, an etched 12" and a super deluxe 7".
From the same label that brought us the beautifully packaged and amazing sounding Aluk Todolo 7" comes a brand new 7" from Hess and hiss Strotter project. Two tracks on each side, the outer track plays normally, outside to in, but the inside track plays backwards from inside to out, and in between, separating each track is a locked groove. Awesome.
The outside track on side A begins with thick fuzzed out low end that is quickly joined by hypnotic looped scraping that warbles and shifts in pitch. It begins to sound like the yelp of an old man and is eventually eclipsed by a simple beating pulse, thick and heavy, that almost sounds like some purloined SUNNO))) guitars. The Inside track on side A is super dense with all sorts of record crackle and rhythmic pops. Scrapes and skips and hiccuping loops. Starting off as a super spare minimal glitchy scraped vinylscape, it quickly builds in intensity, the buried music on the scratched vinyl offering up a haunting distant minor key melody. So creepy.
The outside track on side B is a totally hypnotic mechanized minimal jazzscape, a simple throbbing bass pulse over abstract rhythmic clicking like some old jazz intro chopped and looped. The inside track on side B is a dense staticky rhythm constructed from distant moans, crackling surface noise, the "bass line" getting busier and busier until it becomes a squirming tangle beneath tiny sparkling high end squiggles.
Plain black vinyl with no label, packaged in a thick clear sleeve, with white text and diagrams, printed forwards and backwards. Nice!
The turntable has to be the greatest instrument ever invented. At least the greatest instrument that was never actually intended to -be- an instrument, or to be -played- at all. What was a revolutionary breakthrough in the playback of popular music, eventually became the ultimate plunderphonic device, with a sonic palette only as limited as your record collection, and then not even limited by that. Broken records, shards of different records glued together, discs made out of wax, or sand paper, or stone, or plastic, or even no records at all, just the sounds of the turntable and the needle. We're not talking DJ's playing records either. Sure we dig that stuff too, but we're talking about people MAKING music out of bits and pieces, scraps and shards, creating whole new worlds of sound. Hard to say what it is exactly about the sound of a needle on vinyl that moves us so, it's warm, and fuzzy, and imperfect, maybe it's the sound of our childhoods, our early musical discoveries, but whatever it is, we love that sound, the whir and hiss, the pop and crackle, for all the striving for pristine perfect digital sound, we can't help but lean in the exact opposite direction, loving our music to be rough and murky, thick with warm warble and rain like static, a hiss that is all age and character and texture.
A small group of like minded artists have been exploring the possibilities of the turntable for years, the early experiments of Milan Knizak and his broken music, the grand and gorgeous soundscapes of Phillip Jeck, the vinyl sculptures of Christian Marclay and Martin Tetreault, the rhythmic playfulness of Pierre Bastien, Otomo Yoshihide's turntable explorations in Ground Zero, the minimal compositions of Institut Fuer Feinmotorik, utilizing the runoff grooves, and between song ambience to construct their pieces, and on and on.
For over a decade Swiss sound artist Christoph Hess had been experimenting with turntables, tape loops, skipping records, before deciding to jettison any and all music made by other musicians, and instead using just the turntable itself to create sound. Thus was born Strotter Inst. Five customized turntables, each rigged up with pieces of metal, strings and wires, elastic bands, allowed to spin at different RPMs, each turntable contributing a subtle element, creating dense tangled soundscapes of rhythm and texture. Loping and hypnotic, repetitive and mesmerizing. Low rumbling reverberations, slow stuttering twangs, these modified turntables sound remarkably like some sort of long stringed instrument with strings tightened just enough to stay on, but loose enough that they sort of buzz and rumble, pulse and throb. The framework for each track is a sort of lowend turntable riff, the wires and bands and cords are struck and plucked by the revolving turntable, creating slow slithery rhythms, within each a very subtle muted melody, everything slowly morphs and shifts as the various turntables sync up and then drift apart. Imagine the sound of five bass players, all playing simple slow melodies on primitive one string basses, and imagine them playing similar parts, but at slightly different tempos. A slow moving, motorik soundscape of thump and thrum. And around these loping rhythms are soft fuzzy clouds of crackle and hiss, the sound of the needles scraping the surface of the turntables, or skidding across pieces of metal, these contrasting sounds are dense and rich, sounding almost like super distorted vocals at one moment, thick washes of feedback the next. The sound may be simple and subtle, but it's also intense and overwhelming, like Jeck spinning Skullflower, or Marclay armed with only some Mingus bass solo dubplates, or a Tiermes / Bastien soundclash. So dark and mysterious and totally pure and primal sounding. This is SOUND as much as it is music. This is the turntable as musical instrument. This is rhythm and rhythms, this is machine music, but a machine freed from it's shackles, a new instrument, born, loosed, unleashed. Amazing.
Amazingly packaged in a die cut cardstock digipak, a large circular hole cut in the front, a smaller hole in the back, so you can see straight through. The front cover has imbedded in it an actual piece of plastic with record grooves etched into it, playable on your turntable! In fact when you listen to the cd you'll notice the first track is all silence, that's because the first track is actually on the sleeve, while the final track is only downloadable from the Strotter website, managing to subtly connect our history of recorded music, a release that is only complete as a record, a cd and an mp3.
- MPEG stream: #2
- MPEG stream: #3
By now, we probably don't need to mention how much we love the turntable as instrument. And to that end, how much we love the sounds of damaged vinyl, or modified turntables, the hiss and skipping and pops and crackles and loops... Or how much we love Jeck and Tetriault and Yoshihide and Bastien and Brumit and Gum and Loop Orchestra and Marclay and anyone who ever smashed up or scraped up their records and then played them anyway, and maybe did that with two turntables or three or a hundred, creating whole new wonderful pieces of music out of misused and abused players and scratched and screwed up fragments of other folks' music. So when we discovered Strotter, aka Swiss turntablist Christoph Hess, we were already sold. Here's an older gentleman, who adds pieces of metal, and elastic bands, and extra needles and multiple tone arms to his turntables. And then uses old records and these customized turntable to create gorgeously hypnotic looped minimal soundscapes. It was only a matter of time before he decided to fuck with the actual pressing process as well. Thus we have two new vinyl only releases, an etched 12" and a strangely cut and mastered 7".
The 12" consists of 4 short tracks spread out over 12 vast inches of vinyl. The A side features the grooveless outer few inches, minus one locked groove every few centimeters, instead, the name of the record and the artist have been written there in silver marker. The first track is a strange world of stuttering static and slowly growing glitches and pops that build into a mini cacophony. The second track is a clattery array of clicks over a propuslive throbbing bass thud, that also builds, but in this case to an abstract low end jazz dirge, like the upright bass breakdown of some old blue note standard, chopped up and skipped into a little stutter.
The B side has no grooves on the inside half of the lp, instead it has a super detailed etching of two rats. The first track on side B sounds almost like CIrcle, if they were rendered in the simplest possible sonic manifestation, basic lines and shapes, super stripped down tonal colors, an ultra skeletal krautrock groove assembled from nothing but clicks and glitches and rumbling bass pulses. Track two is all reverberating low end, pulses coming rapid fire until they almost become a drone, tempered by tiny distant upper register sparkles.
The disc is housed in a thick plastic sleeve, bound to a printed, embossed thick card stock panel by an elastic band, just like the ones used on the Strotter turntables. So cool.
