Now reissued on vinyl! Here is what we said about it when the cd version was available (which it isn't anymore, sadly):
Hippy Renfaire Britfolk from 1968, featuring a 15 year old, pre-"Tubular Bells" Michael Oldfield and his older sister Sally Oldfield! This was really Sally's project -- apparently she had some sort of sudden spiritual revelation that caused her to break off her University studies in literature and philosophy, and pick up a guitar to write what became the "Children of the Sun" album! Of course, musical talent and creativity wasn't unknown to the Oldfield family, as history later showed.
This brother-sister duo both sang (Sally better than Mike) and played acoustic guitar, accompanied by session musicians -- flute, and harpsichord and chamber string arrangements on two songs. While much of this album is quite twee indeed, portions are rather dark and melancholic... A song title like "The Murder of the Children of San Francisco" kinda tells you where they were at. Sadness, beauty, blue birds and evening mists...that sort of thing. Contacts with British folk-rock act Pentangle got the determined Sally the recording deal for The Sallyangie's one and only album, reissued now as a delightful artifact of a long-lost era, when lush psychedelic pagan madrigal music was at its prime!
Sally sang on several of Mike's popular albums in the early/mid seventies before striking out on a successful solo vocal career of her own in the New Age field. But this album, with Sally's lovely wavering voice, Mike's adept guitar picking, and an abundance of youthful, period charm, is certainly worth checking out regardless of the Oldfield siblings' later careers.
Wow, were we completely surprised by this record! We all remember not really being that into the UK's Sand when we first heard them a few years ago. But then it seems like maybe they underwent some sort of serious sonic transformation. Gone are almost all traces of their dance-y path. Sure some of the rhythms on the Dalston Shroud could still fill up the dancefloor, but their whole electronic / techno / dance / funk vibe has been transformed into some sort of fuzzed out industrial garage rock stomp.
Their past is littered with remixes and performances for dance troupes and providing alternate soundtracks for films and performing with a who's who of techno heavyweights, but we have to say this new direction is seriously kicking our ass.
The opener is a groovy fuzzy punk rock jam, all angular guitar and HUGE throbbing basslines, moaning horns, buzzing synths and pounding drums. It almost sounds like Interpol doing space rock. Maybe Hawkwind if they formed in NYC in the last several years. Fuzzed out and spacey, but pulsing and relentlessly groove. The second track is a buzzing industrial garage funk electro work out, with FAT fuzz bass and weird sung/spoken vocals and a throbbing beat. The rest of the record manages to meld the two sides of the band, their groovy side, and their freaked out psych rock side, resulting in a sound like some impossible cross between Spacemen 3, Jesus And Mary Chain, old Ministry, Loop, Swans, Hawkwind and with maybe just a little of that Manchester sound swirled in.
Occasionally the band dips back into their electronic bag of tricks resulting in weird free jazz funky breakdowns, or blissed out Shadow style downtempo grooves, but they always return to the riff, and said riff is usually wrapped in thick swirls of delay and echo and all sorts of other FX. Sand are like a gas masked, camouflaged krautrock krew piloting some space rock dancefloor, drifting through the galaxy, directly into the sun.
Killer three way split, two parts Japanese, one part USA. Essential for Sludge doom fanatics, as this features a brand new unreleased track from Japan's mighty, unsung doomlords Dot [.]. Maybe it's the weird spelling, maybe it's the paucity of available material, but Dot [.] are every bit as cool and weird and heavy as Boris or Corrupted and this track proves that once again. But the big surprise here are the two bands we have never heard of before. both amazing, one quite possibly our new favorite band!
Up first are Japanese black thrash outfit Sete Star Sept who spew forth 4 tracks of super downtuned, blackened thrashing grind metal insanity, super low cookie monster growls, furious riffing, massive blown out production, thick swaths of shrieking white noise. Like a killer old school UK crust band super charged and run through some cracked Japanese blackgrind filter. So cool.
But holy fuck, Watch Me Burn just totally and completely knocked us on our asses. So heavy, so weird, so utterly damaged and freaked out. Imagine the Boredoms circa Vision Creation New Sun, mixed with later tripped out trancier spacerock Solar Anus (even though they're American), then imagine that band playing some super schizophrenic what-the-fuck grindcore, with tons of totally unhinged studio weirdness, random snatches of Swedish death metal guitar leads, swirling drifts of acoustic guitar and garbled beats, bizarre ambient stretches peppered with hand drums and guttural vocalizations, abstract percussion super tripped out malfunctioning studio FX, occasional plodding processed death metal chug, super spastic drum machine, bits of slowed down doom groove, weird jangly guitars, super processed slabs of rhythmic interference, blinding super brief blasts of Merzbowian face melting grind and too much other confusional fucked up randomness to even begin describing. Like Soilent Green or Brutal Truth chopped up and reassembled by a very high jungle DJ with two broken turntables. So fucking amazing.
And finally Dot [.], who give us just what we need, an absolutely crushing slow motion stoned doom drone groovescape. Starting out more Church Of Misery than Corrupted, the band sways and swings before stumbling into a druggy glacial lurch, a sick Eyehategod dirge, that crawls and slithers, wrapped in thick peals of feedback, a harsh, rasped super demonic vocal over gloriously murky downtuned sludge. Absolutely essential.
Any record that is an homage to Eric Dolphy and his (possibly imagined) interaction and fascination with birds is pretty much guaranteed to hit the spot.
But when said record is wrapped in some of the most striking cd artwork we've seen in ages, and is in fact a strange sort of jazz drone collage constructed from samples of Dolphy records, field recordings and some added percussion, well, it's almost like they came to us and asked us what sort of record we wanted to hear, and we told them "Let's see, drones for sure, some field recordings, and heck, why not include some Dolphy..."
The cover art is amazing. Like the illustrations for some childrens' book. A big eyed, horned, bat-bird-witch flying over a forest of angular trees, sitting in the clouds over a sea filled with ships manned by black headed rabbits with water pouring from their eyes, and spiriting away with a dry eyed black headed rabbit in his claws, while below, another rabbit fills a chalice with one eye, and the sea with the other. The artwork alone sets the bar pretty high. Dark and dreamy, playful but slightly ominous...
Thankfully, the music is also all of those things. And then some. The brief opening track is a tangle of bass clarinet, smeared into a deep expanse of low end shimmer, while above, melodies and melodic fragments drift and splinter. Very evocative of a cloudy day, wet streets and soft sheets of rain.
The second track introduces a simple motorik rhythm, that shuffles and skitters beneath a constant shifting drone woven from looped horns. Super hypnotic and dreamy. Almost like a stripped down, drone-y jazzy Pharaoh Overlord. As the drums peter out, the horns begin to bounce and dance, chirp and flutter, and suddenly the sky is clear and full of birds, or is it just Dolphy playing the sounds of birds?
The final track is an epic, clocking in at almost 20 minutes, Dolphy's horns surface here and there, but most of the track has them stretched and smoothed out into ultra minimal low end drifts, warm swells of muted melody, a totally mesmerizing abstract drift.
This is one of those records, that had we not known the story behind it, we probably wouldn't have necessarily made the Dolphy connection, or the bird connection for that matter, and actually the jazz element is subtle and quite minimal, but as a chunk of dreamy dark drone drift, it's really quite fantastic. And as far as we're concerned there can never be too much tribute paid to the late great Eric Dolphy!
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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!!!
Yes, this is a brand new recording by the same Alan Sondheim who made records on ESP and Riverboat in the late 1960's. A multi-intrumentalist, a poet and a visual artists, Sondheim has been making culture a little more interesting and innovative for the last four decades. Ski/nn finds his fingers navigating vintage instruments like a 19th century parlor guitar and a prime alpine zither from the 1920's. The results are so amazing! Primitive psych-folk that is sometimes really pretty and at other times freaked out and menacing. Sharing a similar spirit and freedom as the late Derek Bailey. Short pieces that together create a ghostly and timeless sensation.
Here's another great collection of tunes from a band that never quite got its due, Detroit's psych-soulsters SRC. Coming out of the burgeoning Ann Arbor garage scene, SRC (short for Scott Richardson Case, the name of the singer) worked their way up through the rigamarole of early band struggles and of band name and lineup changes before they got signed to Capitol in 1968. Influenced by Motown soul and British Invasion rock like the Yardbirds and the Pretty Things, SRC utilized doomy organ, angelic vocal harmonies, and searing electric guitar with cave stomp beats. Yet being in Detroit in the late sixties amongst heavyweights such as MC5, The Stooges, and the Amboy Dukes, SRC's brand of Brit-inflected soul-psych, though heralded by John Peel in Britain, made little headway in the states. SRC struggled through three albums before calling it a day in 1971. This collection features 19 tracks from their three albums, including the stellar tracks, "Black Sheep", "Daystar" and their classical rip off of the Peer Gynt Suite, "Morning Mood". Essential for fans of The Pretty Things, MC5 and hard psych soul-rock from the fringes!
It's no secret that our pop sweet tooth has a serious soft spot for Gwen Stefani, in fact a few years ago we even made No Doubt's best-of collection our record of the week! We were pretty smitten by her solo debut and we've been anxious and curious to hear what this new batch of pop-hits might sound like. There are definitely a few killer tracks here, songs that whether you admit it or not will be stuck in your head and have yo shaking it just a little when no one is looking. But with the follow up to Love.Angel.Music.Baby she seems to have fallen a bit behind. In the short time she was away, other artists have been turning out some highly addictive pop that is way sweeter and way catchier than almost anything on The Sweet Escape. Parts of The Sweet Escape actually kind of sound like a watered down version of Beyonce's amazing new record or like a wannabe Fergie, join the small club of white girls going for L'Trimm gold. So yeah, a couple winners, but overall, we're a little disappointed.
It was inevitable really. The Japanese masters of Orange Amp-powered drone-sludge and the robed priests of low end doom. How could it not happen? In fact, if you remember the 2005 April Fool's AQ list, we actually jokingly predicted this epochal event! Although in our version it also included Earth, each band playing one note of the world's heaviest E chord.
The real question was never IF it would happen, it was when. And how. Especially how. C'mon, how on earth can you fit that many amps in a recording studio. They must have used an airplane hanger, either that or they filled a high school gymnasium with Sunn and Orange stacks and microphones, and actually played in an entirely different room.
Regardless, it happened, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Both bands completely compliment each other. SUNNO))), whose slow motion riffing borders on pure ambience, is given a serious propulsive shove, with more structured riffing and the addition of DRUMS!!! Boris get dragged back into the gloriously glacial tarpit of their older records, discarding their current garage rock rrrooooaaar for that classic slow motion doom trudge. However you look at it, it's basically the best record either band has put out. It's like an EVEN heavier SUNNO))), with bigger riffs and pulverizing doom rock drums, and of course wailing psychedelic leads. For Boris, they've taken their blown out grooves and dipped them in tar, added a million more pounds of guitar firepower and made the best Boris record since Flood.
But it's not all pulverizing doom riffage. There's plenty of dark droning ambience too. Huge stretches of swirling guitar rumble, dreamy swaths of wispy steel string shimmer. murky and haunting, processed vocals and minor key melodies swimming in a black sea of echoey ambient guitars and sizzling cymbal shimmer. The strangest track is probably "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)", sort of the Boris / SUNNO))) version of a torch song, with FX smeared piano, strange buried rhythms, and hushed vocals, like a doom metal Mazzy Star.
The closer "Bloodswamp" is 14 minutes of churning downtuned guitars and shimmering Sunroof! like ambience. No riffs really, or if they are there, they're stretched into thick streaks of black fuzz. A furiously epic coda to a fucking amazing record.
The first 5000 copies come with a bonus disc titled SatanOscillateMyMetallicSonatas (a nod to Soundgarden, there?) that features a single 28 minute track called "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom" guest starring Dylan Carlson from Earth! Before we go any further... are you thinking what we're thinking... April Fools? SUNNO))) and Boris And Earth!!! And I bet you at least some of the bonus track is in E!! Boy, did we call it. And actually Atsuo from Boris confided in a friend of AQ that indeed, part of the reason they got Dylan to guest was because of that April Fool's review! How cool is that?!?
Anyway, the bonus track is a monstrous wall of churning guitars, with occasional howled almost death metal vocals buried way down in the mix, and languorous Earth Hex-like twang guitar draped lazily above a churning blackhole ambience. So good.
Besides Dylan Carlson of Earth, there are lots of other guest performers including Jesse Sykes, Joe Preston from Thrones (also ex-Melvins, ex-Earth), Kim Thayil from Soundgarden (aha) and Rex Ritter from Jessamine.
Packaged beautifully in a mini cd style gatefold, with AMAZING cover art, black on black with weird muted color and text printed in glossy varnish and metallic gold, both bands be-robed and standing in a cornfield, a full color booklet attached to the inside, a metallic sticker on the front, each copy individually numbered.
Students Of Decay label head honcho Alex Cobb returns one final time (well, not final, he's not dead or anything) with the last installment in the Ribbons Of Dust trilogy, a series of 3"cd-r's, each featuring gorgeous dreamy late night solo guitar excursions performed under the name Taiga Remains...
If you have the first two, or he long out of print cassette tape, you'll know what this is all about and probably want this too.
But for those who have missed out on last few, Taiga Remains is all about late night, disembodied slow shifting guitar glimmer. Huge soft clouds of warm chords, thick swells of reverberating steel strings, minor key drifts of shimmer and whir, very oceanic, like drifting on some soft sleep sea, each note another gentle swell, lulling you into a state of complete bliss out.
So beautiful.
Packaged in a mini jewel case, with a pretty black on dark maroon sleeve. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. These will be gone in no time!
Another release in Tiliqua's Erotic Oriental Sunshine series of Japanese erotic music from the sixties and seventies. We reviewed Kokotsu No Sekai from Japanese sexy action heroine Ike Reiko a few lists back, and now we have Modae No Heya from seventies bondage / S&M queen Naomi Tani, who recorded and released this album in 1979 to commemorate her withdrawal (ahem) from the world of porn.
And what better way to commemorate that sort of life change than with a record of Iroke Kayoyoku, a bastardized version of a more popular Asian music of the time, sexed up with chanteuse like crooning, and most important of all, an amazing array of moaning and groaning and cooing and giggling, as if in the throes of EXTREME passion.
Tani's take on Iroke Kayoyoku is similar to Reiko's (in fact it's not tough to imagine a sort of Eastern hit factory, churning out these discs, ready made for some sexy thing to croon and purr over...), a strange blend of easy listening soundtrack music and spaghetti Western themes, with lots of soaring strings and epic arrangements, sultry saxophones and twangy guitar, but unlike Reiko's disc, Modae No Heya is much more Asian sounding, with plenty of distinctly Asian instrumentation and Eastern melodies.
Anyone who has seen their fair share of Asian cinema and classic kung fu movies, will find the sound instantly recognizable. And for a record that is supposedly a vehicle for her sexy presence, Tani surprisingly spends a lot of time just hanging back and letting the music swoon and soar. But when she does take part, it's in a super intimate whisper in the ear, a playful purr with plenty of giggling and occasional bouts of passionate groaning.
Erotic and wild, moody and mysterious. And pretty darn bizarre. And of course, highly recommended for all fans of sounds both strange and sexy!
Packaged in a super deluxe Japanese miniature gatefold style cd sleeve, with a printed obi, saucy nude photos of Tani on the cover, and extensive liner notes in English and Japanese!
ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 1300 copies pressed. Already almost sold out, so don't dawdle...
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We remember first getting a glimpse of the sweet charm of Japan's Tenniscoats a year or so ago when we heard their track on the children's comp Songs For Nao. We had only been able to get a copy or two of Live Wanderus, never enough to list until now. Before we had even heard the record, the dreamy cover art had us super curious as to what we might find inside.
We ended up loving Tenniscoats' take on naive pop. A LOT. A little more dreamy and meandering than some of their sonic brethren like Maher Shal Hash Baz and Nagisa Ni Ti, Saya's sweet hushed vocals and tasteful trumpets and sax, guitar, drums and piano help to create a nice dreamlike atmosphere, a perfect serving of daydream twee. These are live recordings from shows throughout Japan over the last few years, and the recordings sound great, nice and warm, like you were right there in the room while they were playing, sitting on a blanket in the dark with your head on the shoulder of a good friend. So nice!
CLASSIC DOOM METAL. Can't get much more classic short of being one of the original Black Sabbath albums, really. Here's the long-awaited reissue of this, the 1984 debut from legendary Chicago doom-mongers Trouble. Alongside Candlemass and Pentagram and Saint Vitus, Trouble were the true heirs in the '80s to the Sabbath throne. And their mild case of Christianity only adds to the doomed vibe (ever read Revelations?) without being overtly preachy and goodytwoshoes like some other "white metal" bands were (Stryper ferinstance). And anyway, we really feel that religious belief totally adds to doom metal. Sabbath's "After Forever" made that official long before Trouble's Psalm 9... which isn't this album's original title, actually. It was self-titled when it first came out, but then they self-titled their fourth, Rick Rubin produced effort as well, so this got renamed. The Rick Rubin one is yet to be reissued, we're hoping it will 'cause it's quite possibly our favorite Trouble album, but this certainly is also an essential, containing several of their most awesome, best-loved tunes, including "The Tempter", "Assassin", "Bastards Will Pay" and eventual title track "Psalm 9". Plus it's also got the instrumental "Endtime" (later covered by Confessor), and their own cover of "Tales Of Brave Ulysses" by Cream!
If you haven't heard Trouble before, well... think Black Sabbath, yes, but different. They've got their own stamp on the trad. doom metal thing. It's fastern'd you'd think. And heavier than their forebears, due to the twin guitar lineup. And already here on Psalm 9, singer Eric Wagner has his raspy (almost Axl Rose-ish, actually) pipes tuned-up proper. It's one of those so recommended, that we're jealous of those of you who'll be hearing it for the first time things!
And this new, deluxe, digitally remastered edition comes with not only a booklet full of photos and liner notes, but also a bonus DVD disc featuring the band performing on a local Chicago Public Access TV show way back in 1982! They're lip-synching, but they look cool -- and the interview portions are so inadvertently hilarious we're actually impressed that these guys weren't too embarrassed to allow it on here. So even if you already have this album, true Trouble fans would be wise to invest in this reissue as well.
Previously a dvd-only periodical, now with its fourth issue, TV Eye DVD Magazine comes with a print component as well. So it's an 82 page magazine + a 1.5 hour dvd, all for just $12.98, and better yet, it's got everyone's favorite berobed dronesters SUNNO))) on the cover (and in the magazine, and on the dvd) along with a bunch of other bands that we know a lot of AQ customers care about: Isis, the Melvins, High On Fire, Comets On Fire, Void, Joe "Thrones" Preston, Phantom Family Halo, and lots more. Mostly on the heavy side, yep. There's even an "in the studio" photo-essay on Mastodon. But you'll also find stuff about the Touch & Go 20th anniversary, a Louisville scene report, and (of course) record and dvd reviews, and even a fuzz pedal profile. And that's just the print portion. On the DVD: again SUNNO))), High On Fire, the Melvins, Isis, and Comets On Fire, plus Radio Birdman, The Bronx, Murder City Devils, and more. Mostly a mix of both live footage and interviews. So if the metallier side of the indie/psych/drone deal is your thing, a little bit of punk rock too, and you can read and have a dvd player, then TV Eye is looking for you!
HOLEEEEEE SHIT! You better tie down your speakers, strap on a helmet, put on some safety goggles and stand WAY back before you drop the needle on this. Three bands, doing super blown out fuzzed out needle in the red psychedelic space rock interpretations of, well, some psychedelic space rock.
The Heads take up a whole side with their rendition of Hawkwind's "Born To Go", and if you need anything more than the words "The Heads play Hawkwind" then there is something seriously wrong with you. It's almost exponential, like instead of Hawkwind filtered through the Heads, it becomes Hawkwind TIMES the Heads TIMES lots of drugs and TIMES about a million amplifiers. Super blown out acid fired drug drenched space rock nirvana!!!
And if you survive side one, side two will certainly do you in, Plastic Crimewave Sound starts it up with a smoking version of the Edgar Broughton Band's "Why Can't Somebody Love Me?" which is damn near as fierce as the Heads' track, needle pegged to the red, guitars set to stun, controls set for the heart of the sun, a furiously face-melting blast of outer space rock and roll. Finally, Lillydamwhite, who we had never heard before, cover the Pink Fairies' "Uncle Harry's Last Freakout" and while not as fierce as either of the two other tracks, is still pretty rocking with a super propulsive groove and killer riffs wrapped in spacey FX.
Total space rock overload and WE LOVE IT!!!
Comes in a cool Crimewave designed sleeve (designed to look like an old psychedelic flyer) with a bunch of printed inserts.
SUPER LIMITED. we only got a handful and we may not be able to get more...
As some of you might know, last March, Tarantula Hill, the home-base and performance center of Baltimore's Nautical Almanac burned down in a fire. Luckily some of their friends in the wide world of the noise/experimental music scene have been coming to their rescue. This double-cd comp put out by Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace is a benefit for them with all proceeds going directly to Tarantula Hill. With folks like Aaron Dilloway, Chris Corsano, Burning Star Core and Mouthus you know there will be some serious havoc waiting for your ears. But there are some other folks like Jack Rose, The Haunting and Pengo to bring some more mesmerizing trance inducing sounds into the mix. Good noise for a good cause.
With 2006 coming to an end, one of the things we are happiest about this year is that now, seven years after his passing, Moondog is finally starting to get some of the recognition, praise, and attention his amazing music deserves. This tribute album put out by the French label, trAce, is one of those rare compilations, which feature mostly artists we had never heard of (we already liked Jean-Jacque Birge and Ilitch, but Groupe d'Essai 3, Konki Duet, Stefan Laktos, Xenia Narati, Dragibus, et.al. are new to us) all of which ended up blowing us away! A lot of Moondog's uniqueness, comes from his highly individual use of percussion, his strong Native American and African influence as well as his deep appreciation of classical music, and the artists on this homage to Moondog totally get it. A wide range of sounds and perspectives capturing the great scope of sound that Moondog employed. Being both challenging and rewarding, experimental yet so totally listenable and pleasing.
Interspersed with short snippets of Moondog speaking, culled from an interview for Radio Triad in 1971, it's so nice to actually feel his presence on this record. Moondog's music has this way of being able to totally entrance, romance, and sweep one off their feet. Creating a world that is playful yet totally intense. We're so happy to report that this tribute to the genius of Moondog reaches that special space. So rare that a tribute album is able to do that, but in this case, this is not merely some people playing someone else's songs, this is the work of people whose souls and way of looking at music have been totally enriched by the magic of Moondog and this record feels like such a perfect way to celebrate his legacy.
This is a super elaborate tribute to one of our favorite labels, Germany's Hausmusik label. Just have a quick gander at some of the records they've released: Village Of Savoonga, Cakekitchen, Notwist, Lali Puna, Fred Is Dead, Alles We Gross, Calexico, Smog, Palace, and loads more, as well as one of our favorite compilations EVER: The Day My Favorite Insect Died. Always mysterious and amazing. Often in some deluxe sort of packaging. And thus we have "You Can't Always Listen To Hausmusik, But...", a 2lp collection of some of Hausmusik's brightest and best, loveliest and strangest. But there's more to it than that. The massive book includes fourteen writers paired up together to write short stories, each starting with the same sentence, each story started by one writer and finished by another, exquisite corpse style. The music was approcahed the same way, with one band supplying raw material, with another band crafting the material into a song. Pairings include Calexico / Notwist, Console / Loopspool, Sodastream / Ms. John Soda, Villaage Of Savoonga / Jersey, Fonoda / Deaf Center, Squares On Both Sides / Village Of Savoonga, Fred Is Dead / Couch, A Million Mercies / Calexico and a bunch more. Packaged in a thick, gorgeously printed book-like gatefold sleeve, with a huge build in pocket to hold the book, eighty pages, perfect bound, tons of art, some of it full color, unfortunately all the text and stories is in German, but it hardly matters. An amazing tribute to an amazing label. ----* ----* New DVD's : ----*
Renaissance music? Field recordings? Palindromes? A photo of sex toys on the back of the cd booklet? Creative Dutch composer and lute player Jozef van Wissem both mystifies and delights us with this original and unusual album of avant-garde lute music. He has a background in the Renaissance lute, which he applies here by taking historical lute pieces and rewriting them as mirror-image palindromes, that sound the same played either forwards or backwards (hence the mirror of the title). Further distancing the material from his early sources, van Wissem adds electronics and computer-processed (again, mirror-image flipped) field recordings of ambient airport sounds (in homage to Brian Eno, perhaps). One track also features a guest playing "palindrome percussion". The sex toys, we're still not sure about though. This combination of classical lute plucking and the ambient airfield recordings reveals a wealth of placid beauty... it's minimal and melancholic music that recalls the trance-inducing work of avant-acoustic guitarists like late period John Fahey and just-intonation guitarist Rod Poole. We're also reminded of the likes of Giuseppe Ielasi and Tetuzi Akiyama (the latter with whom van Wissem has recorded an improv duet, reviewed here a few months ago). So very pretty -and- intriguing, both sparse and detailed, van Wissem's conceptual compositions thwart traditional idioms without abandoning the tranquil beauty for which the Renaissance lute is known... Recommended. If you're gonna own just one avant-garde lute and electronics album, this is it!!
There seems to be a whole 'nother world of black metal lurking below the underground. An under-underground. A world that seems to exist only on the seemingly antiquated medium of the cassette tape. There seems to be a serious resurgence lately in people's interest in tapes, as if cd-r's are now too mainstream... but we kinda dig it, not only does releasing a tape require a bit more effort (only a bit) but if it sucks, you can tape over it! And you can get a tape walkman on Mission Street for $10!!
Out latest discovery comes courtesy of SF black metal tape label the Funeral Agency, and is a mysterious band called Varghkoghargasmal. Printed in big letters on the tape sleeve are the words WOODEN METAL! Weird. But we were still unprepared for just how completely wacked and weird this record is.
It's basically black metal with no distortion. Maybe Wooden Metal means 'acoustic' metal. But the guitars here are electric, although recorded through what sounds like a practice amp with no distortion. And the drums, HOLY SHIT, don't even get us started. A stumbling struggling drum beat that wavers away from the actual beat more often than not. And it's recorded in some impossibly reverby way that gives it a really haunting otherworldly sound. The first track here is rapidly becoming one of our favorite 'black metal' tracks ever. A very simple spare, un-distorted riff, almost like a slowed down Dick Dale or Link Wray, with a strangely motorik drum beat, that is just off enough to sound like some weird Kompakt style techno beat. In fact, this could totally be some weird black metal surf rock techno track. Eventually, some strange minor key melody joins the fray, and a warbly fuzzed our keyboard, which only serve to make the sound more confusional.
The rest of the record is just as great. And bizarre. Stumbling reverbed clean guitar picking out blackened surf rock riffs, weird keyboard drones. The fast songs are the strangest, with the clean guitar blurring into swaths of damaged melody and the drums a chaotic blasting rumbling murky throb way down in the mix.
Hard to explain the damaged magic of Varghkoghargasmal other than to say you have NEVER heard anything like this. Fucking amazing!!!!
Wooden Metal!!!
More Finnish musical madness in the form of this, the third and latest release from Verde, who just happens to be the musical alter ego of one Mika Rintala, who occasionally plays with Finnish dronerock legends Circle, as well as their jazzier offshoot Ektroverde. But when he's not helping with the rock or the jazz, he's holed up in his mad scientist laboratory, building homemade instruments, and using them to create incredibly demented, droney and druggy, beautifully abstract spaced out electronic soundscapes, that totally blow our minds.
Think Tangerine Dream, Space Machine, Christine 23 Onna, Hawkwind, Popol Vuh, Circle, it's some sort of Alien Krautrock, long drawn out buzzing blissful soundscapes, drenched in homemade FX, buzzing and blurry, super affected rhythms wrapped in slippery shifting whorls of dizzying synthesized sound. Like an android Can, all motorik and propulsive, shiny but always teetering on the verge of collapse. A complicated mechanical band, assembled from spare parts in the basement, wound up and wheeled into the studio. Angular melodies, abstract music box tinkles, simple shuffling drums, warm washes of synthesizer swoosh, skronky horns, splattery garage rock funk rhythms, bits of found sounds and field recordings, long stretches of primitive synth warble, bits of warped horns all tangled up in strange little space rock epics. Verde really shines when the sound is in full on far out space rock mode: a simple rhythm is unleashed, barrelling relentlessly toward infinity, leaving a swirling trail of junked FX, clouds of clank and clatter, thick whirls of bleep and bloop and whoosh, jagged fragments of melody left to drift weightless, angular guitar grit, a shimmering sparkling contrail of divine sonic detritus.
So cool.
How many metal black metal bands can you name from the Faroe Islands? How many of you even know where the Faroe Islands are?
Well, the answer to the first one as far as we can tell is exactly one. The answer to the second is somewhere between Iceland and Norway. Ehich sort of makes sense when you hear Vhernen. You can almost imagine them as the perfect mix of grim frosty Norwegian black metal (Gorgoroth, Immortal, Satryricon), and Icelandic cinematic blissrock (Sigur Ros). Although Vhernen definitely lean toward the metallic....
Self described as funeral black metal, and counting among their influences, Bethlehem, Skepticism, Deinonychus and Nortt we were expecting something a lot slower and dirgier, but Vhernen definitely have some fierce fury in them, often buzzing and blasting like a band possessed. But even when they're blasting away, the riffs sometimes smear into dense clouds of mournful guitar, barely obscuring strange super epic melodies, and thick swaths of moody ambience.
A lot of that ambience comes from the use of some distinctly un-black metal instruments, namely, the electric cello, and the orchestral harp, which add a lot of haunting texture and an extra bit of low end shimmer to the fuzzed out buzz.
In addition to the odd instrumentation, there's some seriously strange arrangements and bizarre bits of production fuckery that help this ep fall squarely into the amazing fucked up black metal category. Each track tends to break down or bliss out into strange abstract soundscapes or haunting chamber pieces. The opening track, about halfway through. suddenly switches gears, almost like someone flipped a switch, and what was moments before a thick, LOUD buzzing blackness, immediately becomes a murky subterranean drone, like some weird black metal Basinski, all muted and roiling and droning and buzzing. Track three is a long slow burning rumble, thick with slowed down guitars and moaning cello melodies over the top. The final track breaks into a super intense minor key string section, sweeping and epic, before launching back into a pounding funeral black buzz trudge.
Weird and heavy and fucking awesome!
You know we like repetition here at Aquarius. We like repetition. We like it. Repetition. Whether it's the motorik pulses of Neu! and Circle, or the minimalist throb of Steve Reich and The Necks, or the crackling loops of Philip Jeck and Thomas Brinkmann, or the headnodding riffs of Om and Les Rallizes Denudes, or the blurring buzz of Wigrid and Wold... we like it! Keep it goin' and we'll keep listening. Well of course one of the many musical forms that makes good use of repetition is dance music, and although sometimes we give the impression that techno and house music "isn't our thing" that's definitely not true about all techno music. Not when it's really, really about the mesmeric repetition, and in an interesting way, like the clicks and cuts of Ryoji Ikeda or the "heroin house" of Fluxion. Or the whole Kompakt catalog of pop ambient drone and beats.
Or this new disc by critical darling Ricardo Villalobos! Which is probably getting a lot of attention because of the sheer length of the tracks on it -- there's two of 'em, clocking in at more than a half-an-hour each! The title cut, "Fizheuer Zieheuer" is truly hypnotic, based on endless, slightly altered iterations of the same happy little horn riff (sampled from a Balkan brass band?), expertly joined to echoing four-on-the-floor techno beats, slowly morphing and shifting over time -- 37 minutes! Deceptively simple, but brilliantly crafted. And yes, totally, totally mesmerizing. Allan turned on the "visualizer" function on his iTunes while playing this and we all got totally tranced-out watching the flashing lights...
This album is maybe really sort of an extreme maxi-single, as the 35 and a half minute second track "Fizbeast" is a stripped-down (minus the horns) recap of the first track -- yay, more repetition! But you might also just hit play on track one again, 'cause you're gonna want to hear that infectious Balkan horn part again and again and again. Recommended, recommended, recommended...
FYI this cd is intentionally packaged by Playhouse without a tray card in the jewel case. Either 'cause it's sort-of a single, or 'cause they feel that electronic music is so modern it doesn't need a back cover, we don't know. Just mentioning this fact so that if you mailorder it, you won't think there's something wrong with your copy...
Year end issue of the UK's premier modern music magazine, and one of our favorite rags for sure.
On the cover: a big ol' pile of shredded Wire magazines! Inside: Invisible Jukebox with Faust! Guitarist Gary Smith, Matt Valentine & Erika Elder, Wire's 50 records of the year, year end lists from all the Wire contributors, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, trumpeter Peter Evans, Global Ear on Beijing, short pieces on the year in the song, dubstep, improv and noise, as well as the usual massive batch of reviews, record, shows, installations, books and otherwise...
Production And Decay Of Spacial Relations was the very first studio recording (circa 1981) from the avant-percussionist Z'ev, whose heavy metal bashing and interest in occult literature has often earned him a perceived association with industrial culture even though Z'ev is far too much of an individualist to allow himself to be aligned with any particular movement. Definitely far removed from industrial bashers Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept., Z'ev wasn't interested at all in how the atonal qualities of his metal percussion could be fused with the context of a song. His work has always been much more about the exploration of sound and spirituality, no matter how convoluted that quest might seem. On this reissue of his first album, Z'ev has joined the seven tracks from the original album with six 'recordings' from 2006 which integrate much of the original source material and incorporate Z'ev's new found interest in digital technology. While Z'ev's digital work resulted in some interesting DSP convolution adding glassy textures to his metallic clang and drone, the original sounds are the reason to check this out. In those percussive metal workouts, Z'ev presents complex interwoven forms that can sometimes be hard to understand, but Z'ev does offer small grooves throughout here and there, scattered throughout his polyrhythmic attacks, which allow the listener access from time to time. Despite the density of these clinks and hammerings, there's something almost tranquil and hypnotic to the work. At the moment, we've got the limited edition version of this release, with the cd in an LP sized package and which comes with a bonus disc of rare and unreleased material from back in the day.
