Oh, how we have been waiting for this! Finally, after years of being unavailable, both records by the mighty Necrofrost are available again. If you've been paying attention to the AQ list, you will probably recognize the name Necrofrost from citations in various reviews of damaged, demented, freaked out fucked up black metal. Striborg, Dead Reptile Shrine, Detsorgsekalf, Hidden, The One. It's pretty much impossible to talk about bizarre black metal without mentioning Necrofrost. And here's why:
Okay, we know that black metal is a serious and GRIM business. There is no place for humor or frivolity. No smiling or laughing and definitely no smirking. Just bitter bleak misanthropy. Suicidal despondency. Utter frosty misery. But absurdity is a whole 'nother story. We've championed some truly absurd/damaged/demented metal in the past, Benighted Leams, Abruptum, Vondur, and of course last week's record of the week Meads Of Asphodel. But I think Necrofrost just might take the cake. This is one of the most fucked black metal records we have ever heard. Start with the titles. The record is called Bloodstorms Voktes Over Hytrunghas Dunkle Necrotroner! Some of the song titles: "Carcass Carried By The Crawls Of Titanbats", "Me The Tundra", "Slaughtered In A Misanthropic Intent", "Nostalgia Freeze The Norse Reaper", and on and on and on. The record starts off with grunting and growling and mewling, like a legion of just birthed demons, struggling to awaken and crawling up through the murk and the mire, inexplicably accompanied by some jaunty renaissance faire minstrels! Weird. The band then launches into some buzzing stumbling, chaotic, ultra grim lo-fi black metal. Struggling blastbeats, caterwauling guitars, midtempo dirges and some truly necro grunts. But suddenly the song breaks into a bizarre acoustic/country tinged breakdown, complete with warbly wicked witch vocals shrieking and squealing above the din and later, creepy keyboards evoke some long lost Z grade horror movie, while out of tune guitars emulate some sort of scary circus music. Weird! While the core of Necrofrost's sound is definitely ultra frosty, uber grim, lo-fi black Black BLACK metal, even their metal is damaged and demented. Super spastic drumming, retarded guitar, ridiculous mixing, tape drop outs (a la Faxed Head?), vocals that threaten to overwhelm the mix and occasionally do, becoming a Merzbowian blur at full shriek, baritone chants weaving in and out of ear shredding high end blur, muffled blast beats underpin, pretty arpeggiated guitar melodies while the vocalist speak/sings a litany of evil, in his best grumpy grandma moan. There's just too much weirdness to really do this record justice in a review. You just gotta hear it. A frosty, hellish mud covered, grim chunk of brilliantly skewed outsider avant black metal!
This disc is another big mystery, but one we're thoroughly enjoying as we try to work it out. A copy was sent to us ages ago, and on first glance it looked like some disc of classic Irish music. An old sepia toned photo on the front, an Irish looking font with the text "An Evening With Danny O'Really". Hmmm. So we sort of ignored it for a while, but the photo on the front was sort of haunting, and finally we realized the man's eyes were sort of fucked up, green and alien. Bug eyed. Staring out creepily. So we had another look, and noticed the legend "Music For Unusual People". The we flipped it over to find a huge flat topped swirly eyed green demon with a forked tongue, ripping the front cover in half. Interesting. Inside a worried looking woman holding the very record we're reviewing, and then a gatefold inside, a blurred photo of a man wielding a guitar, head to the sky, hands held high. Okay, definitely weird enough to merit further investigation, so we threw it on and were totally blown away. Not at all what we expected, but not sure what we were expecting at all.
At this point we're not sure if Danny O'Really is a man or a band, or if it's a made up name or what the fuck is going on at all!! What we do know, is that this is an awesome collection of manipulated sound, of transformed guitars. It's sort of a drone record, sort of a processed guitar record, a fucked up glitched out electronic record, sort of all three of those tangled up into one chaotic whole.
The opener, sounds a bit like some sort of SUNNO))) / Fear Falls Burning style guitar experiment, but instead of murky sludge, or blissed out hum, it's an ADD explosion of skipping textures, of blown out buzz, chopped and spliced into little snippets of sound, then sewn back together into a strange grinding industrial metallic drone patchwork. Lots of hiss and shimmer, bursts of damaged crumble, aggressive and tripped out, and pretty amazing.
The second track is a tangle of skittery drums and buzzing steel strings, ringing out in clouds of metallic shimmer, bits of percussion drifting in and out, very free and abstract, eventually locking into a propulsive but unhinged buzzing blowout.
The third track, the longest at 23 minutes, is a Niblockian drone, various high end tones, sine waves, processed chords, all drawn out and stretched into slowly decaying streaks, until eventually exploding into some sort of alien jam, the guitars snarling and heaving and twisting, the drums more little bursts of hiss, the whole thing gradually growing more and more muted and gnarled, almost like the tape is decaying, the tape player's batteries dying, the speed changing, the whole song crumbling.
The last three tracks are variations on a theme, bits of high end, fragments of atonal guitar, swirls of effects, graduations of buzz and whir, disjointed melodies buried beneath, billows of metallic grind and shimmer, all spread out into a drifting cloud of soft noise.
Might be a bit much for the dronedoomdirge crowd, but definitely heady listening for free noise addicts and lovers of abstract ambience and weird dronemusic.
Back in 2006, we reviewed a record by a mysterious band (or person) called Part Timer. Whose sound was a gorgeous lush dreamfolk, overlaid with bits of glitch and electronic skitter. At the time, that sort of thing was all the rage, for a band to take their pedestrian folk or indie pop, and then cover it with electronic bits, to make it edgy or hip or whatever. But Part Timer seemed to effortlessly transcend that. Their sound organic, but with the various electronic elements an integral part of not just the sound, but the composition as well.
On a trip to Japan about a year ago, we took a long train ride through the countryside, up a mountain, to a monastery tucked way on top of a forest covered mountain. That record was the soundtrack, and it was perfect, the sound of green trees rushing past, little villages tucked into the mountain side, the movement of the train, the blue skies, the world rushing by, clouds, birds, the sound is just s soft and lovely and tranquil and beautiful.
We were super excited to discover that there was in fact another Part Timer record, which we finally managed to get from a tiny Japanese label, and we're happy to report, it's just as gorgeous as the other one.
Acoustic guitars weave tranquil little melodies, super spare rhythms are constructed from bits of glitch and record crackle, the sound of birds and children playing constantly in the background, like this is the soundtrack to some warm afternoon stroll though a tiny village, cobblestone streets, the world lush and verdant, bits of vocals surface here and there, offering the tiniest hint of melody, muted chiming bells ring out, simple melodies plucked out on old pianos, the sound of creaking machinery, moaning violins, sweeping strings, it sounds like a lot of sound, but the sound is never dense or cluttered, instead it's spacious and airy, nearly weightless at times, the sound of floating on a puffy white cloud through a crystal clear summer sky.
At its heart Blau is a simple soft folk record, but the folk drifts through strange landscapes of subtle sonic variation, the electronic bits never intrusive, gently complimenting the lilting guitars, the voices and textures and field recordings wrapped around the melodies like some soft down comforter, everything about Blau is tranquil and dreamlike, warm and so utterly soothing. Some of the prettiest pop folk we've ever heard.
Attention music geeks, music-tech nerds, cool gadget obsessives and espeically anyone who freaked out over the amazing Buddha Machine! We've got another far out musical gadget that will have you all in a tizzy.
Tristan Perich is a name we had never heard before. Turns out he's a musician and inventor, who has released this record, his debut we think, of 1-bit music (more on that in a moment) in its own self contained jewel case player. What's that? A gorgeous little electronic sculpture, made up of a plain old plastic jewel case, and a handful of colored wires and chips and tiny dials, completely self contained, a headphone jack in the jewel case offering you entry into Perich's crunchy minimal electronic sound world.
As many of you know, 8-bit music is the sound of '80s video game music, all your arcade favorites, super simple electronic sounds crafted into equally simple harmonies and melodies, so get rid of seven of those bits, and you're left with just ONE bit, the smallest increment of memory and sound. So Perich has taken these super minimal tones, and constructed some amazing electronic music, that is crunchy and raw, the sound all buzzy tones and staticky clicks, ranging from playful lullabies to grinding dense tangles of squelch and squiggle. Some of the tracks definitely sound like they could be some lost video game music, but others are drone-y and weirdly layered and textured smears of crumbling lo-fi bleep and buzz, through headphones it sounds amazing, but through your speakers, it sounds like someone is in there pulling your speakers apart with rusty blunted shears. This would destroy a dancefloor, add some booming beats and you'd have some Daft Punk jam of the year, all grinding minimalism, in fact one track sounds like Fischerspooner via your Atari 2600, while some of the others sound like a much more playful and lo-fi Ryoji Ikeda, the sound of someone playing Pac Man turned into a 1-bit techno jam, and like the ultra minimal little brother of Skweee (that Scandinavian electro we've been so obsessed with lately)!
But the music really only is half of it. The player is so striking, the whole record contained on a tiny chip, soldered to the jewel case, a battery in its little holder, two tiny volume controls, a mini on/off switch, a button to skip tracks, wires leading to a tiny headphone jack, the only liner notes a printed piece of paper that comes off with the plastic shrinkwrap, and a transparency with Perich's name and the name of the record. Before any of us had even heard the music, we all new we had to have one. It's a tiny musical sculpture, a piece of art that functions as a piece of sound art as well. Anyone who bought a Buddha Machine will want one of these. And if you were wondering what to get that weirdo music freek friend of yours, we'd be hard pressed to think of something cooler than this!
Be warned. We got ONLY 50 COPIES!!! They are super labor intensive and hand made. Perich is currently trying to sort out a way to make more, so when we run out, it may be a while before we can get more, so if you want one, and we can't imagine how you wouldn't, then act fast!!!
Cool music gadget (and minimal lo-fi 1-bit videogame glitch crunch record) of the year!
Two massive slabs of modern psychedelic space rock. Plastic Crimewave are about the closest any modern band has come to channeling the spirit and the sound of vintage Hawkwind, which means FUCK YEAH! Slow burning, psychedelic dirges, thick sinewy basslines, tripped out acid guitars, dense with reverb and echo, a brain melting excursion to the outer reaches of the galaxy, each track a slow building epic, a droning druggy dirge rock, eventually exploding into jagged shards of spastic feedback freakout. Occasionally they'll burst into corrosive chunks of Stooges style stomp and swagger, still doused in reverb and wrapped in layer after layer of thick psychedelic fuzz. Features a who's who of new weird underground psych folk superstar guests: Devendra Banhart, Tara Burke (Fursaxa), Josephine Foster, Spires That In The Sunset Rise, as well as Michael Yonkers!!
Super thick vinyl in an unbelievably deluxe gatefold.
Past record of the week honorees the Reveries return with this super limited live cd-r, and while we're not always huge fans of live recordings, this one is worth it for two reasons, one, we've been dying for more Reveries, we can't get enough of their soporific warbly alien blues, and second, their sound is so strange and woozy, that the various crowd sounds, and the lo-fi recording, only add to their mysterious ambience.
The Reveries, for those of you who missed their AQ record of the week a while back, are a minimal blues trio, who take their somewhat standard instrumentation, guitar, bass, harmonica, musical saw, nose flute, and augment them with what the band calls 'mouth speakers', a tiny cell phone speaker, that each member holds in his mouth while they play, the various instruments being fed to the speaker in one of the other players' mouths, where the sound can then be altered by that player changing the shape of their mouth, or singing along to another instrument. The result is so gorgeous and so completely strange. The sound is off kilter and abstract, woozy and druggy, and totally beautiful. This live set finds the band augmented by a drummer, and various members playing stuff like streetsweeper bristle bass and thumb reeds, which only serves to give these songs a bit more propulsion, not quite as languorous as their last disc, a bit more 'rocking', with some simulated wah guitars (using their mouth speakers we figure) and more of a focus on the vocals, gorgeous mournful melodies, plaintive falsetto harmonies, all draped over the band's blurred bluescapes.
Folks who dig Bonny Prince Billy and Iron And WIne and the like should definitely check this out. It's that sort of modern blues twang, melancholy and melodic, but the Reveries, take that sound and twist it all up into something much stranger, and somehow much more moving.
SUPER LIMITED. Totally over the top packaging, a screen printed cardboard box, each one individually augmented by various glued on pieces of paper and art fragments, inside the box is stuffed with various inserts and found paper debris, flyers, newspapers, pictures cut out from magazines, and all manner of other strange visual detritus.
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Local boys Saviours are kind of SF's answer to The Sword from Texas and Early Man from New York. The New Wave Of American Indie Ironic Hipster Metal, y'know? They're on the same label as The Sword, home also to the heavy psych likes of Dungen and Danava. Yet while an argument can be made that The Sword and Early Man are indeed indie ironic hipster metal at best (which doesn't stop 'em from rockin', we should note!), a loud listen to Saviours new full-length Into Abbadon ought to convince the most diehard metaller that these dudes are in fact fully, no foolin, METAL. If the cover art (by Joe "Motorhead" Petagno) didn't already. Nothin' ironic about it. Not that such arguments matter much anyway, what's important is, does this album rule or not? Our call: yea, and verily, it doth rule.
The sinuous guitar harmonies in the first track "Raging Embers" remind us a lot of the late great epic doomsters Solstice, whilst track two, the title track, gallops out of the gate like a mixture of The Fucking Champs and High On Fire... And on it rages, a showcase of sheer metal mastery. No ballads. No death metal monotony, or black metal makeup. No trendy emo bullshit. Just pure pedal to the metal, metal.
The riffage is righteous, the guitars shred, it's old school '80s to the max but HEAVY as heck. The only element that keeps this from attaining total true metal acclaim from the 'heads here at AQ are the punkish vocals, hoarse and shouty and not-so-melodic. Your mileage may vary, lots of folks like that style. But anyway the vocals are more than made up for by the guitars, which provide plenty of melody amidst the aggression, and atmosphere too. As well as, like we said, shred. Tasty solos abound, including guest six string tickling from Tim Lehi of Draugar and Isiah Mitchell of Earthless!
In truth, we're a little surprised by how much we dig this album (and Crucifire too, before it). Maybe because they're local we had been taking Saviours for granted, or feeling a little bit of an unwarranted NWOAIIHM backlash. Also we've seen them live many a time (they have a knack for opening for a lot of touring metal bands we want to see) but didn't really fall under their spell until hearing 'em at home, when all their true metallic grandeur could really sink in, without the distractions of shitty sound systems or somebody spilling beer on us. Songwriting nuances are revealed on record that were were perhaps numb to in person. At the end of the day, we're pretty into Into Abbadon.
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk rock label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get one from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
We sure do love Shit And Shine. Every record we get by this UK sort-of-collective is weirder, noisier and more fucked up than the last. With a massive lineup featuring multiple guitarists, multiple drummers as well as various unorthodox, non-musical noise makers, these guys manage to make beautiful sounds ugly, and ugly sounds beautiful. It's confusing actually. Their sound is so chaotic and harsh, but so totally captivating and hypnotic, this 12" is no different. Two epic, massive sidelong tracks. The first, an endless rhythmic jam, with ultra blown out drums, sounding a bit like some Butthole Surfers / Laddio Bolocko hybrid, albeit WAY more distorted and damaged. The sound is completely fried, the whole record sounding like it's crumbling through your speakers, strangled vocals drift amidst the tribal pummel, as do weird alien sounding squiggly leads that squirm and slither from speaker to speaker giving the whole track a super disorienting affect.
The second side is a bit more subdued, but only a bit. An in-the-red tribal workout, like a more metallic and way more distorted and druggy No Neck Blues Band. Thick pulses of low end drift beneath streaks of super distorted amp damage, all very krautrock sounding, but filtered through a bank of effects pedals, all broken or with dying batteries. Definitely blissed out and mesmerizing, but so ominous and creepy. A side of this stuff is not nearly enough. Set it to repeat, drink a bottle of Nyquil and let yourself get sucked under.
Cool silkscreened 'bug' cover and some amazingly problematic song titles!
Frosty, shimmering and yes, oh so distinctly Icelandic. This is the new album from Valgeir Sigurdsson. An unfamiliar name perhaps? Well, if you looked closely to the credits for some of your favorite Icelandic artists' albums, you'd probably find his name listed as the producer, engineer, collaborator among other roles... particularly for Sigur Ros, Mum and one Ms Bjork! Sigurdsson steps to the other side of the recording studio console to make his solo debut. It's a tapestry of delicate, stuttery IDM waves and chiming melodies. On tracks such as "Focal Point" the airiness is countered by the sound of heavy fingers on (toy?) piano keys. Enchanting!
Features guest appearances by Bonnie Prince Billy and Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables!
Latest from Sin Ropas, a duo consisting of Tim Hurly of aQ faves Red Red Meat and Califone, and Danni Iosello, having called Germany home briefly, settled in North Carolia, where they holed up in a library to record Fire Prizes. Originally released on cd in Europe a few years back, now available as a super limited, deluxe and gorgeously designed lp.
Sonically, Sin Ropas sound like the logical progression from Hurley's other groups, which as far as we're concerned is a very good thing. Oh how we miss Red Red Meat, and how we still love Califone. So it should come as no surprise that we love Sin Ropas too. A dark dusky mournful twang, stretched out over an abstract rock and roll frame, recalling the above mentioned outfits, but also the folky slowcore of Rex, the intimate dark country of Sparklehorse and the indie twang of the Grifters. Everything is shaded and dusty, the guitars go from spidery and slippery, to distorted and downtuned, Hurley's voice a whiskey soaked rasp, backed up by Iosello's angelic vocals, slide guitars drift and shimmer, everything dramatic and minor key, haunting vocal harmonies, muted percussion and jagged riffs, the songs going from druggy sprawl to crunchy campfire stomp, but always wreathed in teary eyed melancholy and warm washed out dreaminess. Fans of any of the above mentioned bands should definitely check this out.
Like all the Shrug releases, vinyl only, and they spare no expense. And this one has to be the fanciest one yet. A full color picture disc, pressed on super thick vinyl, housed in a thick full color innersleeve, which in turn is housed in a gorgeous diecut jacket, rich textured paper, inked and letterpressed, with the silhouette of a leafless tree cut out, on the front and the back, so the inner sleeve is visible through the branches. SO NICE! And of course limited as all get out. ONLY 485 COPIES!! We have a handful...
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk rock label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get one from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
We haven't heard much from Sweden's Skull Defekts, but what we have heard we like. A lot. In fact, if there was any justice in the world, these guys would be battling Wolf Eyes for the hipster noise rock crown for sure. It's not that these guys sound like Wolf Eyes, although they do a bit, it's more that they are exploring the same territory, but without the goofy in your face vibe of Wolf Eyes, instead choosing to open up their sound a bit more, make it lighter, more abstract, and in the process a whole lot more compelling.
The A side is a side long drift through a wondrous world of noise and noises, atmosphere and ambience. A heady ambient buzz, disrupted by little whorls of distorted crumble, endlessly shimmering, the sound twisting and mutating, changing color and texture, sometimes sounding blissful and serene, but just as quickly becoming damaged and dangerous. An epic exploration of a multi-layered glacial drift, not so much 'noise' as noisy in parts, not so much brutal as intense and dark.
Side B is split into three tracks, the first features a simple cavemen pound, around which swirl and streak stretched out sheets of grinding guitar noise and abstract sonic fields. A slowly shifting soundscapes of layer after layer of buzzing fuzzed out noises. And again, not 'noise' just dreamily noisy. The second track is the most Wolf Eyes sounding, although it's a much more blissed out spaced out version, not so aggressive, a roiling landscape of damaged electronics, abused guitars, and abstract percussion, all twisted into a slithering sonic beast. The final track is the most mellow, but even then, the sound is harrowing and ominous, the perfect blend of low end buzz and rumble, and coruscating upper register psych guitar shimmer. Very hypnotic and leaves us wanting to hear a LOT more from these guys.
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.
Yes! The Sound of Feeling were a short lived but influential avant jazz-pop vocal group who recorded one full length album called Spleen in 1969 and a split LP with Oliver Nelson in 1968. Along with a handful of unreleased bonus tracks from the early seventies, Up into Silence collects their complete recordings. Comprised of pianist / arranger / singer Gary David, the counterpoint microtonal vocal talents of twin sisters Alice Rhae and Rhae Alice Andrece and rounded out musically with 2 bassists and a drummer, The Sound of Feeling updated the jazz-scat vocal style made popular by Lambert Hendricks and Ross and The Singers Unlimited by channeling John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk instead of Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong. But at times also referencing 16th-century madrigals, Bartok, the poetry of Paul Verlaine, as well as Simon and Garfunkel and Donovan amongst their many touchstones. Beginning with their take on Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things", the first five tracks are from the split LP with Oliver Nelson. The four others are all originals including "Circe Revisited" which features the unusual instrumentation of Marxaphone, an autoharp type instrument with strings tuned to a microtonal scale. But it's their full length album, Spleen, where the group gets the most interesting. Opening with a bass and piano hook that has been sampled many times, the group's take on Donovan's "Hurdy-Gurdy Man" is one of the strangest and beautiful versions we've heard, taking the song through so many peaks and valleys (and even out on a few limbs) that never materialized in the original. With tracks like "Hex" and "Along Came Sam", it seems they left the jazz world altogether, and entered a lysergic avant chamber pop territory, with the basses, piano, vibes and drums alternating between killer breaks and restrained near-silent passages amongst the oddly tuned vocal acrobatics. The final 5 tracks were previously unreleased as the group were attempting to expand into hipper territories in the early seventies. The best of them, "Born Amongst The Eagles", continues with the amazing drum fills and some very strange vocal effects. Predicting the vocalese fusion style of Ursula Dudziak and Flora Purim, The Sound of Feeling were like a strange cocktail of Patty Water's Out vocals and the cool groove of Norwegian jazz singer Karin Krog. Their recognition is long overdue!
In the AQ pantheon of fucked up freaked out damaged weirdo black metal, we're constantly having to re-assess which band or which record is truly the MOST fucked up, the most damaged. And it can change in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, deeper listening reveals some until now hidden reserve of completely what-the-fuck-ness in a record we already considered a classic, other times, a band who maybe was never all that weird, will unleash a new record that is utterly confounding, and the bands that tend to be our favorites, seem to keep pushing the limits of the genre, continually subverting the classic sound of black metal until it's all but recognizable. In many cases, we're surprised that some of those bands continue to be loved by metalheads. Necrofrost, Furze, Striborg, Blut Aus Nord, Dead Reptile Shrine, and of course Spektr, who with each new release, jumps right to the front of the pack. Mescalyne is no different.
Were this not a 4 song ep, we'd probably already be trumpeting this as black metal record of the year, and heck, we might as well proclaim it black metal EP of the year. Even considering that black metal is only one small part of their overall, twisted and blackened sound.
As always, very little information anywhere, just some cryptic photos, and the band introduced like this: "Thus, Speller are:". One member Hth, is credited with Infra B. Distrubance, lead and rhythm anomalies, programming, sampling and vox, while kl.K is credited with percussive manifest, sampling, programming, words of spell and vox. So with all that programming and sampling, you can safely assume, that the weirdness here has much to do with electronics and processing, but it's not as simple as all that. Spektr's vision is a gnarled chaotic tangle of impossible rhythms, backwards guitars, black ambience, and FURIOUS black buzz. It sounds a bit like someone computer was hooked up to the guys in Deathspell Omega, and was sucking various black bits from their bodies and electronically weaving them into some sort of blackened beast, hellbent on destroying the world.
A mad scientist, working with black metal, in some hidden fortress, creating some Frankensteinian buzzing behemoth, a lurching, skittering blown out riffed monstrosity.
The opener, "Hollow Contact", begins with dark ambient swirls, some industrial moan and creak, a bit of metallic drumming, giving way to an incredible fierce and in the red blast of black metal fury, the drums machine gun fast, the riffs so blurred and buzzy, they're almost a continuous drone, some weird dynamics, with the guitars flipped backwards, and then chunks of tangled arpeggiated woozy blackness sent drifting into the void.
The second track is just as strange, beginning with an almost typical black metal drum beat, but beneath a layer of what sounds like record crackle, static, and hiss, and all sorts of whirring buzzing ambience off in the distance, separated by thick blasts of nearly impenetrable black buzz, until the song splinters into a stuttering hiccupping stop start breakdown, all tangled warped guitar parts, backwards drums, tons of space, and that weird blast of gnarled twisted riffage punctuating the slow crawl. The third track is all ambient, a dark confusional sprawl of black whirs, and disembodied sounds, mysterious voices, which leads perfectly into the final track, the mellowest of the bunch, still with that same sort of unhinged Deathspell sound, but more spread out, more sort of Ved Buens Ende-y, a sort of post rock groove overlaid with those woozy guitars, and some haunting industrial ambience, finally erupting into some hyperspeed buzzing blackthrash, even then, constantly pulled apart into the opening guitar vs. drums dizziness, finishing off with a haunting minute of high end drone, and hushed, panicked whispering.
Words barely do this stuff justice. Listen to the sound samples. The sound of Mescalyne manages to be futuristic, and spaced out but still grim and black. Buzzy and brutal, but atmospheric and cinematic. This is the kind of fucked up forward thinking music, filmmakers should be using to score their films. Eyes closed, Mescalyne is a terrifying nightmare ride, through some hellish futuristic underworld, and needless to say another addition to the aQ fucked up black metal pantheon. And most probably, black metal ep of the year!
The Stargazer's Assistant is the work of David J. Smith, who many of you might recognize as one of the masterminds behind modern day prog outfit Guapo, or his slightly more esoteric project Miasma & The Carousel Of Dead Horses.
The Other Side Of The Island is not just the name of this record, but a series of sculptures created by Smith from wax and coal and copper and lead (one example is the creepy image on the record's cover). A series of shapes with a deep backstory, the Earth, and the world beneath the surface, the rock and soil, the time that all of those layers of rock represent. These sculptures were part of an installation, for which The Other Side Of The Island is the soundtrack. And unlike the over the top progginess of Smith's other projects, the music here is a dark and mysterious soundworld, an audial representation of the above concepts, a journey into the depths below, and it sounds like it.
Utilizing harmonium, prepared guitars, percussion, tapes, samples, electronics and piano, Smith, along with his Miasma bandmate Daniel O'Sullivan, have crafted a truly scary chunk of buzzing doomy drone. We're not talking SUNNO))) or anything like that, no this is much more cinematic and expansive, more abstract and ambient, no riffs to be found, but guitars crunch and grind, wail and ring out.
The record opens with random bits of guitar scape and piano plonk, hovering over a deep dark swirling abyss, the track builds in intensity, the various elements growing more and more aggressive, darker and more ominous, the low end especially grows blacker and thicker, and eventually coalesces into a doomy drifting psychedelic ambience.
After a brief two minute interlude of industrial scrape and clatter, and some dreamily tripped out backwards vocals and guitars, the band slips right back into the second half of the opening track, a sort of slow burning spaced out style krautrock drift, all extended drones, and wordless vocals, buzzing coruscating electric guitars adding still more layers of psychdrone shimmer, a gorgeously smoldering ur-drone beneath a slithering slippery distorted riff, that flits and flutters like some restless spirit.
Definitely for fans of freaked out free folk, dark abstract ambience and the heart of the sun bliss out sound of krautspacedronemusick like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Expo 70, and the like...
For a while it was practically impossible to get records by our favorite one man Tasmanian rain forest black metal misanthrope Striborg. We listed one or two years ago, and constantly had a couple copies of titles in stock, but rarely were we able to get enough copies to list, or to get them at all consistently. Finally after years of trying unsuccessfully to track down all the Striborg discs for you, the faithful AQ outsider black metal elite, Displeased Records over in Holland finally began a pretty comprehensive Striborg reissue campaign recently, remastering the sound, fancying up the artwork, but most importantly, letting all you freaked out damaged black metal obsessives get your ears on some of the most amazing, most fucked up black metal music ever. And it still is as far as we're concerned. We love Furze and Necrofrost and all that, but there's something special about Striborg. All you have to do is check out some of our other reviews where we go on at length about the magical mysterious soundworld Sin-Nanna aka Striborg has crafted over the years. Thick washes of static and hiss, washed out buzz, stumbling chaotic drumming, gorgeous dreamlike atmospheres, mournful and melancholy, depressive and miserable, but at the same time, blessed out and dreamy, a haunting blackened ambience peppered with bursts of blurred buzz and abstract metallic crush.
But one thing we can guarantee you we never thought we'd see, was a Striborg DVD!!! But here it is, and while secretly we were hoping for some glimpses of the man himself, lurking in caves, and creeping across moors, instead, what you get, quite appropriately we might add, are landscapes, rocks and snow, epic vistas, dark forests, cloudy skies, gorgeous skylines, lush rain forests, vines and leaves and branches, and of course lots and lots of trees. Much of it shot night vision style, like the Blair Witch Project, but a lot of it long tracking shots, like some mysterious nature documentary. Some are overlaid with video experiments flickering shapes and formless video static, pulsing and throbbing, spinning and shifting, others are washed out or filtered, others are negative, but some are just left the way they are, lovely shots of unspoilt nature. All perfectly complimenting the sounds of Striborg, whether it be creepy ambient shimmer, or blurry buzzy stumbling blasts. It's like being some sort of wraith or spirit, floating bodiless through some lost land, devoid of humanity, drifting through dark forests and moonlit landscapes and winter wastelands.
But those hoping to catch a glimpse of the man himself will not be disappointed after all. There's a "Forest Gallery" which is a slide show see to music, a series of striking forest images, but also, TONS of photos of Sin-Nanna, be-robed and corpsepainted and wandering through the Tasmanian rain forests, as well as drawings of trees (many of which were included in past cd releases) and most shocking of all, several photos of Sin-Nanna sans corpsepaint, just a metal dude with long hair and a Darkthrone t-shirt.
As if that weren't enough, there's also a "Treeography", which we were originally hoping would be some sort of list of Striborg's favorite trees, or at least a tour of the forest complete with the information about all the trees, but instead is a discography, and then another slide show of jittery super eight images of Sin-Nanna and the forest, underlit, creepy and flickery, so beautiful.
In fact all the films here are gorgeous, were they not "black metal videos" it wouldn't be hard to imagine these as experimental short films in some obscure film festival. Definitely recommended. Essential for Striborg freeks, and weirdo black metal fanatics, but equally recommended for adventurous viewers and listeners, who might just be looking for something truly strange and creepy, blackened and beautiful.
Another excursion into the bleak, be-shadowed world of Tokyo psych-folk trio Suishou No Fune. Four long, shoegazing songs recorded live at several shows/venues. All share certain elements...
Aching, drifting guitar lines quietly howl of beauty and despair, melodies gracefully soaring and then expiring tenderly alongside the echoes of weary vocals and lethargic percussive clatter. This disc is definitely a slow-burn, late-night affair, all-embracing in its epic downer aesthetic.
While Suishou No Fune never sound like they're going to break a sweat (nodding off is more like it), they do channel an additional level of emotional energy into the pentultimate track 3, "A Rain", wherein the drum crashes and vocal cries and guitar wailings all crank it up a notch, more volume and chaos and sheer beauty. But that's the mere precursor to the wall-of-noise presence of the last and longest (21:50) track here, "The Storm Of Light / The Cherry", a grand fuzz finale of amped-up distorto drone... still gorgeously bleak and blissful!
We've all been digging the recent cassette revival. It was inevitable really, as the cd-r became more common place, the tape became the underground format of choice. And in some ways we're all for it. Nowadays you can knock out a cd and a printed cover in minutes flat, the amount of effort it takes to release a cd-r borders on NONE (apologies to the labels who do it right, with gorgeous music, and great attention to packaging, you know who you are, and we love you). But with a tape, even the copying requires more time and effort. And it seems that folks making tapes understand this and have been going way out of their way to customize their releases, and make the look as special as the sound.
But none quite as impressively as Custodian Color Zoo Containers, a new tape label, whose packaging is so intricate and over the top, each one is a work of art, stunning and intricate and incredibly time consuming. So much so that these tapes have been in the works for more than a year, and when you see them you'll understand why. Our new favorite tape label in one fell swoop.
The very first release on the label is from former SF outfit Take Up Serpents, now based in Colorado. Recorded live, the sound is gritty and lo-fi, industrial and textural. It's hard to tell what the sound sources are. But the end result is awesome. Total ghetto-tech noise rock. Tons of space, lots of hiss and whir, huge chunks of pounding percussion, sheets of blown out FX, voices buried in the mix, layers of cricket-like skitter, some muffled drumming, some total old school metal on metal pound, some subtle new wave groove. Part Wolf Eyes, part Whitehouse, think Broken Flag records, Throbbing Gristle -- if we didn't know better, we might think this stuff was recorded in a warehouse in 1982 in London. Awesome.
And the packaging is a knockout. The tape itself has text hand written all over it, liner notes on one side, random text on the other, hand numbered, LIMITED TO 43 COPIES!!! Housed in a full color hand drawn/painted fold out transparent sleeve, all simple line drawings and big blobs of markered color. COOL.
We only just reviewed the -last- Times New Viking on the most recent list, even though it had been out for a while. And now here we are two weeks later, with a brand new TNV, and it's more of the glorious blown-out in-the-red chaotic ultra catchy pop same.
As it says on the back of the record "Times New Viking play pop songs with guitar keyboards drums." Which is definitely simplifying it a bit. Since they also incorporate a huge amount of NOISE, and feedback, and buzz, and tape hiss, and all manner of distorted blur and skree and howl. That said, this new one is even poppier and catchier than Present The Paisley Reich, and even more buried under thick slabs of crumbling sonic chaos.
But even with all the noise, at it's heart, TNV is definitely a pop band through and through, the dueling boy/girl vocals, the warbly keyboard, the bouncy indie guitar jangle, sometimes it sounds like Superchunk, but if they were on Siltbreeze and recorded all their songs on a microcassette recorder and mastered it with a tin can and twine. They also sound a bit like Mates Of State, but way less polished, way more punishing, thick bolts of high end and dense clouds of hiss bombarding the lilting sweet pop, the bouncy keyboards and crooning earnest vocals. Here and there, the noise drops off a bit, revealing the pure sweet sunshine underneath, but it's quickly swallowed up again, by another wash of speaker shredding buzz and soaring hyperdistorted melodies.
We just can't get enough of this stuff. Pop record of the year contender? Absolutely, and it's still January. If there was ever a band who deserved the sobriquet of 'noise pop' it's definitely Times New Viking. And it certainly doesn't get any noisier or poppier than this. Certainly not at the same time!
Dreaming Muzak was the very first release from Troum, not long after the two members of Troum had disbanded their previous project Maeror Tri in 1998. Originally released as a cassette housed in a tiny pillow in an edition numbering a scant 100 copies, Dreaming Muzak is now available as a cd-r edition, although its long term availability remains unknown. That said, Dreaming Muzak does what Troum and Maeror Tri have always done so very well: drone-on with gritty, psychological undercurrents. If the intent for Troum was to put the listener to sleep, the lulling vibrating patterns certainly have the capacity; but the overall darkness of these sounds will never inspire the most pleasant of dreams. These are shadowy, bleak, and cold sounds which permeate the album, and lend themselves to images of desolate factories spewing a constant stream of black soot in some wintery post-Soviet country. A very nice document from one of our favorite drone acts.
Wow, is this a doozy of a reissue. The long out of print Sen record, from guitar drone outfit Troum, originally released as their entry in the Mort Aux Vaches, gets an ULTRA deluxe double vinyl reissue courtesy of the always amazing Equation label.
Before we get into the record itself, we have to talk about the packaging. Especially because the version we got is limited to 97 copies, and except for copies to the band, and a handful of Equation mailorder customers is EXCLUSIVE to aQuarius!! Two lps, both pressed on heavy vinyl, the vinyl is clear with a sepia haze emanating from the center. The lps are housed in a SUPER thick clear PVC gatefold that is sealed with a little velcro button. Inside the gatefold, a thick 7" pouch, which houses three 7" circular 2-sided satin-finish heavy-card inserts along with a sticker and all sealed with a hand-numbered oval sepia sticker. Phew! It really is one of the most breath taking chunks of vinyl we have ever seen. So gorgeous and it weighs a ton. And if that weren't enough, the music inside is equally fantastic.
Troum (Traum is "dream" in the duo's native German, but Troum is ?) mines the nether regions of the subconscious to create waking replications of their nightly visions. Their recordings are far from mere transcriptions of dreams to tape; they are the gossamer residues of once vivid memories, passed through mesmeric filters to slowly dissolve present reality into soft focus fragments of thought. Musically, these translations fall both on the sublime and, at times, on the malevolent side of the ambient divide.
Sen, originally released as part of Staalplaat's luminary-laced live-radio-recordings "Mort Aux Vaches" series, seems fixated on the North Sea, where sheets of black ice creak under the tidal currents that roll onto a rocky beach. Troum sees no need to make any direct references to that imagined metaphor, rather it's implied behind a bleak drone haze of guitars, bells, voice, and keyboards treated with a heavy dose of synthetic cathedral reverb. Troum's post-industrial background is revealed with a churning drum machine which rumbles underneath their complex tonal patterns like an antiquated seaside factory.
Troum, more so than in their previous incarnation as Maeror Tri, has the potential to invoke awe through their hypnogogic expanses of droning sound. Here they push far beyond their potential.
And again LIMITED TO 97 COPIES!!! So get it while you can.
No sound clips, but check out this gorgeous promotional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1BhFZM6MM
Egads. As usual, our favorite magazine (a thick as a brick magazine, 224 packed pages, more like a tome!) shows up on a "list week" when we're too busy writing our reviews to do what we WANT to do, which is curl up with this new issue and enjoy all of their reviews, interviews, articles, and whatnot. That's what we'll be doing Saturday for sure, this rainy weather is perfect for that. Giving it a skim (and tearing ourselves away from it to get back to work), we can tell you that this ish is, as usual, full of good stuff pertaining to garage, psych, punk, freakbeat, acid folk, and other "wild sounds from past dimensions" as it says on the cover. Some of the contents include a 1988 interview with the late Rob Tyner, singer for the legendary MC5, a history of UK folksters Trees, an extensive, informative piece on the amazing '60s Norwegian scene, another about Napa Valley's, interviews and essays about the likes of The Sons Of Adam, The Pop Rivets, Jeff Simmons, Fire, Cedars, and as always a Pretty Things update. And, unbelievably, much more. Notably, Chris Stigliano shoves Julian Cope aside to present a "Beginner's Guide To Les Rallizes Denudes". And the 13 pages devoted to Johan Kugelberg's expert fan feature on "Punk Before Punk" is probably worth the price of admission alone, looking forward to delving into that one!
Plus of course there's dozens upon dozens of reviews of reissues...and ads and playlists and columns and rants and (sadly) obits and so much much much more, as we keep sayin'. Recommended if you have any interest in the cool, cult, collectable music of yesteryear. And copious free time to spend readin' about it!
The band formerly known as a black metal band Ulver, now known as arty WTF? band Ulver, has morphed and morphed again over the years. Black metal, folk, electronica, pop, techno... some of Ulver's metamorphoses have worked better than others. They've gone through phases influenced by both Portishead and Radiohead. But lately these Norwegian tricksters have seemingly settled down to something stable, an avant-garde, electronica-infused, gloomy pop-prog identity. Their previous album Blood Inside was a bit too Tears For Fearsy for our tastes, unfortunately (though we know lots of folks loved it). Or maybe that would have been ok, but the circus-y bits really lost us. However, Shadows Of The Sun, while charting a similar course, veers mostly to the languid and lovely, which we rather like. The nine tracks here tend to flow together calmly, never breaking the twilight mood. Hints of glitchiness and distortion are interwoven with yearning melody, smooth almost New Agey blissfullness, deep breathy baritone vox. Also, a warning (to some): saxophone. A little. And at this point, needless to say, there's nothing remotely metal about any of it. Well, there is a Black Sabbath cover, but they chose one of the Sabs' most delicate and torpid songs, "Solitude", in keeping with this album's sad mood, Garm's vocals wearier even than were Ozzy's originally, uncheered by the jazz inflections included in Ulver's arrangement. Those who have followed and remained fans of Ulver thus far, though, should find this latest melancholic manifestation quite satisfying. Oh, and considering his following among the AQ crowd, we should note that Christian Fennesz makes a cameo appearance on this record.
Despite its title, there's nothing really small about this double cd Morr Music compilation! Sure it collects together a bunch of the label's 2001-2007 singles which I s'pose could be thought of as small, but only if you think seven inches is small. Whoops, was that Freud knockin' on the door? Totally unintentional, honest! Anyways, some of these songs are short and most are super sweet, but they're all big hearted and fully bearhug-able, dreamy indie pop. There's thirty six of 'em from Butcher The Bar (very reminiscent of the late Elliott Smith), Benni Hemm Hemm, Seavault, Seabear, Masha Qrella, Electric President (like a twee Weakerthans), John Yoko with Lali Puna (including a lovely cover of "Papa Was A Rodeo"... that song always makes Cup weep!) as well as the latter on their awesome own, Populous, B. Fleishmann (an old aQ fave), ISAN, Styrofoam, Teamforest, and Other People's Children. Most offer up two tunes, some four. Be forewarned though, some folks might find the instrumental numbers veering too much into the bank commercial-ish tepid docility. Downy and dewy eyed and definitely recommended if you need to mellow out with an aural snuggle!
Dust-To-Digital is quickly becoming one of the most important reissue labels going, and most definitely one of the most impressive, with every one of their releases, most extravagant box sets, a marvel not only of musical archaeology, but of ingenious design and impeccable selection.
How Low Can You Go is not actually brand new. It's a little over a year old, but it's one we've been meaning to list for ages, and are finally getting around to it. As the title alludes to, the focus of this three disc set, is the low end, the oft overlooked bass player, the band member who typically hangs in the back, but who holds everything together. For the purpose of this particular compilation, it's the string bass players, those who wielded the upright bass, an instrument that helped define the sound of jazz and dance bands in the early twentieth century.
Like all Dust-To-Digital releases, there's a huge book, with plenty of information, on the development of the string bass, its roots in 15th century Western European music, and how it supplanted the TUBA as low end provider of choice. It's a fascinating story, but it's the music that really tells the story. The focus is mostly on jazz, big band, ragtime, with brief forays into other sounds like gospel and bluegrass, but it's all fantastic, the hiss of old 78's wrapped lovingly around festive jazzy joints, folky funereal twang and soaring spirituals, smokey rhythm and blues and bustling big band jams.
Two discs packed with mostly recordings from New York City, while the third disc focuses almost exclusively on William Manuel Johnson, a ragtime and jazz pioneer, and master of the string bass. There's plenty of text on his life and musical exploits, which is great reading, but like the other two discs, the music speaks volumes, and will most likely have you wanting more.
Three discs in printed sleeves, a 100 page perfect bound book, with tons of essays and liner notes, notes on each track and every performer, a whole section just on William Johnson, tons of amazing photos, reproductions of old lp and 78 sleeves, newspaper ads and articles and lots more, all housed in a hardback book sized cardboard box.
A couple years ago we got a hold of an irresistible compilation of '60s French-pop perfection called Pop A Paris. One of the best and most fun filled collections of the golden era of suave and sassy French pop delights. Well it's time to put on your finest and most colorful outfits, stir up a tasty cocktail and gather up your favorite friends cause volume two of Pop A Paris is here (although it too came out a few years back) and it's just as fun and infectious as the first collection was. All the names you want from a topnotch French pop collection are here: Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardot, Michel Polnareff, France Gall, Eddy Mitchell, etc. Like the first outing there is not one dud in the bunch! Every single song has been making us strut our stuff and it's one of those records that's so fun to put on when the store is crowded and watch all the different kinds of AQ customers tapping their feet, shaking their hips and bobbing their heads. It's pretty damn impossible not to, when the songs are as charged, catchy and perfectly executed as these are!
We're beginning to think, in addition to our biweekly Record(s) of the Week, we might just have to institute a Box Set of the Week. There's so many amazing reissues, so many collections of lost gems, we'd probably just make them Records of the Week proper if they weren't so expensive... this item is would be a good example. But you know what, screw it, for what you get, $45 bucks is not that much, a massive gorgeous book and two cds. So much amazing music, and fascinating graphics. Let's just do it. Record of the Week!!!
Alright. Feel better already. And it makes sense. If you're anything like us, and you sort of must be since you're reading the AQ list, this kind of HAD to be record of the week, everything we love, strange sounds from all over the world, dusty record crackle, tape hiss and vinyl warble, a beautiful music related object� A total slam dunk. And there's the fact that EVERYONE who works here has one or wants one. Dust-To-Digital are like the new Smithsonian Folkways, constantly unearthing sonic treasures and then assembling them into beautifully curated collections. And we just can't get enough.
There was the Goodbye, Babylon box, collecting classic gospel music, housed in a huge wooden box with raw cotton and a huge book, the Fonotone Records box, 5 cds and a huge book in a cigar box with a bottle opener, The Art Of Field Recording set, that WAS just like a continuation of the Smithsonian Folkways series, and assorted other single disc reissues, all meticulously researched, fantastically laid out, and packed with some of the most amazing sounds you'll ever hear.
But this new one, Victrola Favorites: Artifacts From Bygone Days, just might be our favorite yet. Not only is it an amazing and head spinningly varied collection of musics, from African folk to country yodeling to Cantonese Opera, big band jazz to Hawaiian guitar to rhythm and blues, music from all over, Burma, Japan, Greece, Thailand, Portugal, China, Egypt, but the design is fantastic, a cloth bound hard cover book, with almost NO text, what text here is thoughtfully sequestered at the very end of the book. Where most boxes are packed with notes and recording info, the bulk of this handsome book is made up of gorgeous archival images, 78 labels, old record tins, posters, pamphlets, old greyed photographs, mailing labels, instruction booklets, all sort of Victrola ephemera. It would be well worth it just as an art book. Makes you dread the oncoming MP3 takeover, what will future generations discover of our music, old busted hard drives? None of these cool old sleeves, decaying from years of moisture and insects, gorgeous little visual artifacts offering clues as to the music contained inside.
But of course it's NOT just a book, included are two cds, a collection of various recordings drawn from the ongoing Victrola Favorites project, masterminded by AQ faves the Climax Golden Twins. Where old 78s are played on a vintage Victrola, and recorded with a microphone placed in front of the Victrola, none of that digitizing and cleaning up the sound, removing pops and clicks, this is all about the experience of listening to old 78's, sitting in a darkened parlor, in a big overstuffed chair, the air alive with dust motes, gorgeously crackly and timeworn sounds washing over you. And listening to these tracks, it does in fact feel just like that, or alternately, it's like hopping on a sonic time machine and traveling all over the world, different places, different times, a modern day Folkways, hopping in and out of times to capture brief snippets of sound and then moving on. So fantastic. If you love the Sublime Frequencies releases, and the Secret Museum Of Mankind series, this is essential listening. And the amazing thing is that even with all of these disparate sounds and styles, as a whole the collection flows if not seamlessly, in a way that is oh so pleasing to the ears.
Korean bamboo flute solos, amazing and amazingly insane yodeling, a bit of Arabian country dance music, super dramatic Greek folk music, super festive jug band music, Japanese kabuki, dark droning Indian ragas, recordings of Big Ben and traffic sounds in the UK and so much more. It's almost overwhelming. But not enough to keep us from wishing that there were ten more discs of this stuff!
So absolutely recommended.
And the packaging. WOW. Like we mentioned before, a clothbound hardcover book. In either red or white, with a Japanese style obi, packed with the above mentioned images, the liner notes and essay left for the final few pages, the cds, are uniquely held inside the front and back cover, in circular cut outs, beneath which lurk drawings of silverfish, the bane of all 78 collectors, as they eat up the sleeves!!
We haven't had a new solo guitar compilation in awhile. Last couple of years it seems we were inundated with them, marking the new and old waves of what is often called "American Primitive", a dubious term like "Freak folk" that no one likes to use anymore, but a more accurate or useful term to describe this genre has failed to materialize. While past comps focused on the founding touchstones of John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke, and their modern offspring, Jack Rose, Sir Richard Bishop, and James Blackshaw, there have been plenty of overlooked stop-gaps in between these generations that have failed to garner the same kind of adoration or reverence. Often unfairly relegated to the "New Age" trashbin of recording culture, solo guitarists such as Alex Degrassi, William Ackerman and Michael Hedges focused on a more melodic (and often more technically showy) pastoralism, which represented to some the death-knell of innovation for the genre from its raw and altruistic beginnings. The latest compilation in the Numero Group's Wayfaring Strangers series sets to alter that perception by focusing on 14 private press recordings of solo guitar between 1968 and 1980 that chronicle the fertile and adventurous spectrum between Fahey and Ackerman. While a couple of the names are familiar (Richard Crandell, William Eaton) most of the players we haven't heard of including: Dana Westover, Ted Lucas, Scott White, George Cromarty, Daniel Hecht, Jim Ohlschmidt, Stephen Cohen, Mark Lang, Tom Smith, Dan Lambert, Brad Chequer and Dwayne Cannon. A 40 page booklet chronicles each of the artists with reproductions of all the album covers and biographical information in a beautifully illustrated package. Another milestone in a great series from this always-awesome label!
When it comes to stunning consistency of excellence it doesn't get much better then the Ethiopiques series. Twenty plus releases and they have yet to release a dud. Last time out they focused their attention not on the vintage era of the grooves of Ethiopian pop but instead it was a brand new recording of tender and solemn solo piano by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, a record which we totally fell in love with. With volume 22 the series flashes back to the past for another big dip into the vaults of Alemayehu Eshete, one of the biggest stars from the golden-age of Ethiopian music who alongside Mahmoud Ahmed, Tlahoun Gessesse and Mulatu Astatke helped define that sound. In fact Eshete was previously the star of the ninth volume of the Ethiopiques series as well. But judging from this release, the man left a very sizable legacy, as this disc is filled with absolute treasures without a throwaway track in sight.
With instrumentation that's so tight, and breaks that would make any lover of psych/kraut/rare groove's jaw drop, this is a collection that we've already been spinning over and over ever since it came in to AQ. Eshete's voice and presence feels so sure and confident, with a unique vocal style that's been compared to an Ethiopian James Brown crossed with Elvis Presley. There are moments in these songs that catch such deep grooves and moments that sound like they could be pulled straight from a Can song. You just can't beat the warmth of these stripped down analog recordings. You want to be in a room filled with smoke and candles when you listen to this. Eshete made such amazing songs that just drip with sweat, while oozing elegance too. Highly recommended!
Blurrggghhh... Vomit!!! Believe it. That band name is perfect for these guys, who flourished (or should we say festered) in Norway for a short while at the end of the '80s, never putting out a proper album, but recorded several tape-traded demo/practice cassettes, all of 'em collected here on this archival cd release. Imagine a teenage Venom, recording in a dank basement, trying to outdo themselves at both the extremes of low-fidelity and vile Satanic shock. Some typical song titles include "Armies Of Hell", "Boiling Puke", "Orgie Of Piss", and "Rotting Flesh"...
Apparently two of the Vomit dudes were briefly members of the legendary Mayhem, early on, thus accounting in part for the cult of Vomit (being called Vomit is also probably a factor... not to mention the wretched appeal of their music). So the Lyderhorn label has rounded up Vomit's Rot In Hell demo and four even rarer rehearsal tapes, circa 1986-'87, had 'em remastered by James Plotkin, and put this out for us to enjoy today. There was also previously a vinyl version, now sold out. But this cd has more tracks than the LP anyway: twenty two vomitous cuts in all, of some truly underground late '80s metal of death.
Vomit's crude and hellish bludgeonings are captured in the raw, complete with the feedbacky plug-in-the-guitar, turn-on-the-boombox-recorder bits in between songs. Which we like! Good stuff of its ilk, easy to see why Mayhem's Euronymous hung with these dudes and why Fenriz of Darkthrone considers 'em an influence! None more Vomit-y.
Undeniably best known for his indie pop and rock studio prowess and for being the guitarist of Death Cab For Cutie, Chris Walla steps out of the latter's shadow and does mighty fine at this music making biz all by his lonesome. Mind you his vocal delivery frequently strikes a... how should we put it?... Gibbardian tone? Really it's not surprising though, and we're not complaining or pointing any fingers! Walla's been making music on his own for years (under the moniker Martin Youth Auxiliary). It just hasn't been released until now! In fact, he nestles himself in perfectly at the crossroads of Death Cab For Cutie, Built To Spill and Gin Blossoms. The latter comes across in Field Manual's broadly appealing, 'end of the school year' teen movie quality. Sweetly earnest and boyishly charming, heck, we'll stop just short of saying this is adorable!
Will probably please fans of Nada Surf and Weakerthans too!
We begin so many reviews of noise records, with disclaimers like "we don't typically like noise music" that we're beginning to think we actually DO like noise music. Although to be fair, the noise music that mostly appeals to us, is not the speaker shredding white noise, but rather the carefully crafted, dynamic soundscape sort of noise. With rhythms, however subtle, melody, mood and definitely dynamics. So it might be more fair to say we enjoy noiserock. Or noisy music. (all of this said, knowing full well, that many of us DO in fact like NOISE music, Masonna, Incapacitants, etc�)
Semantics aside, we do love our music noisy, and we love plenty of noise in whatever rock it is we're rocking, kraut, space, post, garage, a little noise goes a long way, especially when wielded deftly and applied sparingly.
We got this disc in the mail a few months ago. Self professed noise music, so it took us a while to hunker down and throw it on, and what do you know? It was awesome. A strange soundscape of fragmented rhythms and electronic whir, of crumbling drones and spaced out ambience. A more minimal take on a sort of krautrocky noise rock, not all that far removed from recent AQ records of the week by Geronimo and Aluk Todolo. In fact, anyone who bought either of those would do well to check out Orchids by Winters In Osaka.
Orchids would be worth it alone for the opening track, a ten plus minute jam that could go on forever as far as we're concerned. A spacious rhythmic noise jam, reminiscent of This Heat's Repeat. A strange electronic trill, the heart of the track, repeating throughout, sometimes panned to the right, sometimes to the left, right up front, then buried in the mix, while underneath, a rhythm skitters and shuffles, locking into a groove, and then fragmenting into strange stuttering hiccups, before settling back in again. Swirling all around are sheets of feedback, minor key synthesized basslines, crumbling static, other bits of percussive clatter, but the main rhythm keeps resurfacing, and that strangely soothing little electronic trill, the whole thing impossibly soothing and hypnotic.
And like we said above, that track would be enough, but the rest of the disc echoes that first track, as if the various songs were just movements of a bigger expansive piece, and it works. In fact the second track, is like a more percussive version of the first, the drums more pronounced, that trill still present, but the rhythm distorted and thick, with extra bits of disembodied guitar drifting in here and there. The third too is a part of that first suite, the drums growing even more distorted and insistent, the layers of noise growing more and more corrosive as well.
But from that point on the record, while still referencing the opening suite, seems much more varied, little bursts of staccato percussion, thick swaths of downtuned drone, melodies scrawled in squiggles of feedback, moody murky melodic thrums drifting nearly static and almost out of earshot, sprays of hiss, like one of those sprinklers, hooked up to an amplifier, fields of distorted chimes and resonant shimmer. But the magic being that the various songs keep revisiting themes from the song right before it, or hinting at some sonic element no yet introduced. Creating a sprawling rhythmic soundscape of buzz and hiss and skitter, of fuzz and skree and thud, that unfolds and unfurls and fills your ears with glorious glorious noise.
Once again, more Adventures In Modern Music from UK institution the Wire. On the cover, Vladislav Delay, inside, local space rockers Wooden Shjips, dancehall legend Warrior Queen, UK folkies Cath and Phil Tyler, Global Ear on Baltimore (from AQ pal and one half of Matmos, Drew Daniel, recently relocated to Baltimore from SF), Cross Platform on modern opera, Invisible Jukebox with George E. Lewis (hmm, still surprised at how many ripe-for-Invisible-Jukebox, Wire-worthy artists have yet to be tested), electronic hipsters Hot Chip, Brooklyn noise rockers Sightings, and the usual assortment of reviews, records, tapes, cds, installations, books, performances, films, dvds and loads more...
They may be thousands of miles apart, but it would take more than something like distance to keep these two forces of musical darkness from meeting and unleashing this Black Plague. AQ faves, Australian noise rockers the Grey Daturas, were visited recently by the US ambassadors of noise, Wolf Eyes. Never one to squander an opportunity to get together and kick up a ruckus, the Daturas dragged the Eyes into the studio, and both bands spent a few hours cooking up their own unique vision of sonic decay. Wolf Eyes came up with the 5 part "Post Civilization Muzak", 24 minutes of grrrrrrrrrrrinding post industrial brutality. Huge sheets of coruscating electronics, super distorted guitar, and wild streaks of white hot feedback, all tangled up into a blazing blood red supernova of sound.
The Grey Daturas counter with some musical density of their own. A bit more lo-fi, three long tracks, one a tangled freejazz grind psychnoise splatter, a blurred cloud of stuttery staggering freakout, another a slow plodding glacial sludge, with thick washes of abstract doom and simple tribal drumming and finally a full on far out post rock post punk instrumental epic, heavy and droney and massive. Pretty killer stuff.
Packaged in a glossy digipak and released on the Daturas' Heathen Skulls label. Includes a bonus Wolf Eyes track NOT included on the upcoming domestic lp version!!
Some time ago (in the fall of 2006) our Andee took a trip to Japan. When he was there, he happened to visit a few (ok, many) record stores. In one of 'em, there was some amazingly epic power metal music playing. Andee and his travel buddy Josh both were instantly intrigued. It was like, the best thing they'd ever heard. Turned out it was a Danish prog-metal band called, believe it or not, Wuthering Heights. Andee bought a copy immediately. Josh too. When Andee got back to the States, Wuthering Heights was one of the "finds" that he gloated about, though his pleasure in doing so was tempered by the fact that mere weeks later, a (much cheaper) domestic USA version was released, with an entire bonus DVD disc added on! (The dvd featuring a live performance at the ProgPower USA fest in '04.)
This is that cd, and dvd. Andee can chalk up the extra expense of the Japanese version he got as going towards the greater good of finding out about this so we can share it with all of you... Stirring, sweeping, truly powerful power metal played with virtuoso precision, blazing away at 100mph, the speed taking nothing away from their grandiose, folky melodies. And best of all, the vocals. Nils Patrik Johansson has a commanding voice, his soaring singing with a rough edge that reminds us a lot of Ronnie James Dio himself!
So, technically superb. And Wuthering Heights are also eccentric and individual enough (with their proggy/folky parts), conjuring their own fantastic world, to stand apart from the generic Euro power metal hordes. And plus, they kick ass. Heck they're even unafraid of some harsh guitar skree now and then. Definitely worthy, on the strength of this album at any rate, to join the manly vanguard of the non-cheesy (ok, slightly cheesy) and less-generic Euro power metal hordes alongside the likes of AQ faves Blind Guardian, Falconer, and Lost Horizon (RIP).
By now, Xasthur is practically a household name. Assuming your house is a cave, or painted black, or lit by torches, or painted black with the blood of your enemies, or filled with bones and skulls and a stereo pumping nothing but black metal. And actually, Xasthur, maybe more than any other one-man black metal outfit, has crossed over into the sort-of mainstream. His washed out blurred blackmetalscapes, definitely predicting the so-called "metalgaze" movement to come. His strange murky buzz, as blissed out as any of the current crop, albeit much more muddy and moody and subtly fucked up.
Finally, Xasthur's debut gets the deluxe reissue treatment, via the fine black souls at Hydra Head. Now repackaged in a spiffy deluxe gatefold, with all new artwork, improved sound, and most importantly, a whole bonus disc, the legendary Darkened Winter Promo 01, which almost no one we know has ever actually heard, which makes sense as it was limited to about ten cd-r's handed out to friends.
First the record itself. A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors was not in fact our introduction to Xasthur, that honor belongs to Nocturnal Poisoning, a record we still consider to be one of the all time greatest black metal records EVER. Released in 2002, that record was nearly perfect, a buzzing melancholy epic, as much about texture and timbre as songs and riffs. Atmospheric and intense and beautifully blackened.
A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors was in fact, the first full length Xasthur recording, never properly released until much later on Total Holocaust in 2004. And while it shares sonically a lot of what we love about Nocturnal Poisoning, it's much more raw and immediate. Less cohesive maybe, more chaotic, the recording lo-fi and way more murky, this is as dark and grim and melancholy as it gets, Buzzing riffs, rumbling bass and pounding drums are all fused into one huge organic whole, a writhing, twisting black metal beast, that swings wildly from thrashing chaos, to waltzing minor key dirges, to creepy dark ambience. The vocals are so low in the mix they just sound like another layer of fuzz, adding to the swirling roiling madness. This is everything black metal is supposed to be, intensely personal, singular in vision, utterly bleak and crushingly dark, buzzing and throbbing, hypnotic and heavy as fuck. Lots of sonic weirdness and a bizarre, very lo-fi production (tape hiss, drop outs, etc...) just add to the overall madness. The extra tracks on the THR reissue (not on the original demo) are included, demo tracks, extra tracks, covers (Mutiilation, Burzum). It would be worth it already, but then there's a whole extra disc...
The bonus disc, the Darkened Winter Promo 01, is a snapshot of Xasthur's early sound, as it was developing into the expansive epic miserable bleak beauty it would eventually become. And actually hearing this now, it's almost there, structure-wise, riff-wise, it's WAY more lo-fi, muted and muddy and smeared into blurred blackness, but all the things we love about Xasthur are already present, those mournful arpeggiated melodies, the warbly black ambience, the vocals buried in the mix, the songs heaving roiling seas of bleary black misery. The fifth track, sounds like it's from a different session, the guitars much louder, a lilting clean sound, the riffs effected, the drums a muted skitter beneath the cascading minor key chords. The final track is the heaviest, and most traditionally black sounding Xasthur recording we've heard. A definite practice space sound, the drums big and boomy (and real, not a drum machine!), the guitars crunchy and thick, the song swinging from midtempo plod to brutal black bursts, with stumbling blast beats, almost sounds like a blackened noise rock band. Almost like the Dead C covering Burzum.
What else is there to say, it's Xasthur, it's a black metal classic and there's a whole disc of unreleased material. Essential and fucking awesome.
Another prime match-up between two long time AQ favorites, who almost sound better together than they do apart. Portland's dynamic duo the Yellow Swans and one man violin terror Burning Star Core, together for this super limited lp, two shows recorded over the past couple years, both extended noise-drone fests.
The A side starts out surprisingly tranquil, sounding more like Sunroof! or the Double Leopards, here the trio are augmented by an extra member, another AQ fave, Mike Shiflet. A sea of bleary eyed faux sitar buzz beneath slippery Eastern sounding violin, sawing away in dense clouds of delay and reverb. A super hypnotic sonic sprawl that eventually explodes into a wall of psychedelic skree, blown out distorted guitars, malfunctioning electronics, jagged bursts of static, a furious freaked out noise jam.
The flipside came out a while back as a cd-r on the Yellow Swans' Jyrk label, but we only ever had 20 of those, so odds are most folks never got to hear it. Which was a shame as it is definitely some of the nicest stuff we've heard from either of these outfits. So here's one more chance to get an earful. Warm atonal guitar strum, angular and purposeful, mournful and minor key, drifts above a bed of skittery glitch and rumbling drones. Eventually the guitars disappear beneath a wild wooly sheet of shrieking sonic turbulence, a whirl of moaning melodies behind a thick curtain of freaked out feedback and squealing skree. Nice and noisy!
Pressed on thick 140 gram marbled red/purple vinyl, housed in a super swank sleeve, each one stickered and hand numbered. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Latest from this former Bay Area (now Portland based) duo, and maybe their prettiest yet. Tour only and cassette only, we got these direct from the band who stopped by before their SF show, which means not only are these probably super limited, but we can't be sure if we'll be able to get more and if so, when.
Dark and dreamy, long loping swirls of distorted guitar draped over soft billow backdrops of murky swirl, disembodied vocals and mournful melodies stretched into crumbling sonic frameworks, set adrift in a sea of thick grinding low end distortion and glistening harmonics. Fuzzy and blurry and washed out, think Jeck, Basinski, Tim Hecker... But where as those guys are happy to just drift endlessly through soft focus landscapes, the 'Swans pile on layer after layer, more and more distortion, turning a lovely lope into crumbling chaos, blown out psychedelic dronescapes, noisy and blistering, but still lovely and subtly melodic.
Pro printed cassettes, striking black and white sleeves, and again crazy limited...
Two weeks ago, we highlighted the reissue of Zeni Geva's Maximum Money Monster, which was the first cd from this ultra-heavy Japanese noise-rock-prog behemoth. In the process of reviewing Maximum Money Monster, we realized we'd never written up anything about this band's killer 1991 album Total Castration, the Albini-produced follow-up to MMM. It's our favorite ZG album, one that we always try to stock, it just predates the AQ list so it never got its due herein. It hasn't been reissued or anything, but we checked with our supplier and they said they still had about 150 copies of the original pressing still sitting and gathering dust in their warehouse, even though the Public Bath label is long defunct. Quite possibly a lot of the folks who snapped up the MMM reissue after reading about it last list don't actually also have this one either, so we figure it's our civic duty to highlight this old fave as well, while we can still get our hands on 'em!
Basically everything we said in the review of MMM applies to Total Castration as well, starting with the litany of crucial bands that ZG must be mentioned alongside: Swans. Godflesh. Big Black. Melvins. Eyehategod. Unsane... i.e. HEAVY (but not necessarily metal) and scary sounds. What else would you expect from an album with a title like Total Castration?! That's also the name of one of the songs, as are these: "Shoot Me With Your Blood", "Bloodsex", "I Hate You", and "Bigman Death". Cheery stuff, eh? Lyrics pretty much consist of these happy concepts being throatily chanted over and over. Oh and there's also "Godflesh", maybe a nod to sonic contemporaries Justin Broadrick and crew.
On each of these thunderous songs, the trio of trio of Null (guitar/vo), Tabata (guitar), and Eito (drums/metals) crash, smash, and bash, Null's guttural, nihilistic exclamations backed up by the iron fist of Zeni Geva's heavier than thou noise rockin'. The guitars chug and squall, the drums hammer down relentlessly. Screams and shrieks wail from the pounding shitstorm of metallic distortion that Zeni Geva have crafted into a throbbing, hypnotic riff-fest -- damn good riffs, with stretches of relatively restrained but still scary atmosphere now and then to heighten the impact when they eventually (as they always do) come down heavy. Meanwhile the high end guitar wielded by Tabata often unfurls intricate, catchy licks and squiggly solos over the top of all this mayhem, to make these songs even more brain-invading and body-shaking. And Steve Albini's production is killer, natch. (He would later play guitar with these guys on a live album, All Right, You Little Bastards!, that's now next to impossible to find.)
Super, super recommended to anyone into heaviness, metal or otherwise. As crucial as the Melvins' Bullhead, Neurosis' Enemy Of The Sun, Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper, Ruins' Stonehenge, Isis's Oceanic, Corrupted's Paso Inferior, Fudge Tunnel's Hate Songs In E Minor, Boris's Amplifier Worship... In other words, essential. If you missed this back in the early '90s, grab it. (By the way, Allan says the time he saw 'em on their US tour for this album was perhaps the best show he's ever been to.)
