This is the new album from Japan's Acid Mothers Temple, that AMT leader Kawabata Makoto contends is heavier than the average heavy AMT release, going so far as to say it's in the league of something like SUNNO))). Well, is it really?? Would he bet his beard on it? (We all ask, salivatin'.)
The answer: holy shit, yes. It's like indeed kinda like SUNNO))) jamming with Amon Duul, in a relentless riff orgy. That heavy. That droney. That creepy. That kosmic. A slow screaming blackened drone-groan vomiting forth from bad trippin' hippy minds, third eyes staring dull and glassy into the spinning vortex of the void. There's about ten minutes of pure bliss-out at the end of the disc, but before that, what you get is psychedelic guitar gunk out the wazoo. Riff after plodding riff, adorned with alien electronics. Dirge, splurge and more dirge. A roar to end all roars. A space-sludge feedback fantasy.
Each clocking in at about 36 and a half minutes, there's two long tracks (with long track names) here: "Eternal Incantation Of Perpetual Nightmare" and "Recurring Dream & Apocalypse Of Darkness". Sound kinda black metal don't they? Actually they do. This is an EXTREME Acid Mothers Temple experience let me tell you. Boris, beware! Ufommamut, watch your backs! Electric Wizard, better take another hit!!
Definitely worthy of the nifty, unmistakable Seldon Hunt cover art. Also, FYI we have this in both digital and analog formats. The vinyl version, a heavy gatefold double LP affair, is limited to 1000 copies, and it includes two bonus tracks!!! So act fast...
Hot on the heels of the recently reviewed, way overdue, double disc reissue of two LONG out of print cd-r's, comes a brand new disc from one of our favorite music makers, Ilyas Ahmed.
In the past, Ahmed has found himself lumped in with lots of modern guitarists, of the neo-Appalachian persuasion, Blackshaw, Rose, etc. And while Ahmed can definitely fingerpick with the best of them, his records were never distinctly 'guitar' records in that same way, even though most of his songs are based around a guitar. And his prowess on the steel string was never really the focal point of those discs. Instead, he used the guitar and those bits of Appalachia, merely as elements in a much larger sonic picture. Vocals, raga like drones, horns, hand drums, each part of a lush lush expansive soundscape, which just happened to be draped across a framework of steel string shimmer, while all around that acoustic guitar, swirled strange and wondrous sounds.
The new disc, The Vertigo Of Dawn, while indeed rich with lustrous guitar, is even more far out, more psychedelic, more druggy, and manages to turn that guitar into something weird and wonderful, a hazy fuzzy ghostlike folk, otherworldly and haunting.
The record begins with a tripped out ESP style free jazz drone drift, all long tones and moaning horns, very serene and sedate and meditative, lots of space, warm whirling reverb, the horns hovering over a soft backdrop of deep rumbles and muted buzz, Eastern style melodies played out like snake charmer melodies, the whole thing very exotic and mysterious and free jazzy.
The second track begins with some aggressively strummed guitar, distorted crooned vocals, and some killer Eastern style melodies (again), it's like freak folk filtered through some Middle Eastern bazaar. The following track is more druggy and woozy, the acoustic guitar again the focal point, but surrounded on all sides by swooping backwards guitars, and ghostlike falsetto vocals. The next track is a sunshiney hippy folk jam, with simple subtle percussion, strummed minor key guitar, but wrapped around some truly haunting vocals and horns, high and drawn out, sometimes hard to tell if it's a horn or a voice, but they add a strange tension, and turn the fluttery folk into something much more intense and mysterious. The whole record is like a long strange trip for Ahmed's guitar, it's gentle melodies, and simple strumming, making their way through strange song after strange song, sometimes, floating unmolested, just glimmering and glistening, while other times being buffeted by thick squalls of buzz and whirring drones, and at others, slowly pulled apart into strange minimal steel stringscapes, each note a sparkling star in a constellation of minor key melancholia, often accompanied by Ahmed's lonesome falsetto wail, wrapping protectively around the guitar's fragile shimmer. So nice.
Fans of all that neo-Appalachia stuff will definitely dig this, as will folks into the freak folk cd-r scene, but even if you're into folky psych like Six Organs Of Admittance, Steven R. Smith, Scott Tuma, and other steel string soundscapers, you might find this much to your liking...
The packaging is fantastic as well, both the lp and the cd are housed in super deluxe fabric textured gatefold sleeves, both with printed insert, the lp is on 180 gram vinyl and is limited to 750 copies.
Not sure what it was about Altar Shadows that intrigued us more, the fact that they're from Lithuania, or that their record is called Speckledy Falcons. Probably a little of both, but the two taken together, well, they were virtually irresistible to the aQ weirdo black metal obsessives.
And rightfully so. Altar Shadows offer up a blend of majestic Viking tinged black metal, midtempo Burzumic buzz, traditional Lithuanian folk music, black ambience and some field recordings, burbling brooks, birdsong and other sounds of nature. A strange combination, but the band are pretty deft at assembling them into something cohesive and compelling, black and heavy, melodic and mysterious.
Many of the songs start off with field recordings, invoking the spirit of the forest, of the wilderness, which is carried through to the music, even with the riffs are buzzing blackly, they are underpinned by strummed acoustic guitars, mournful melodies, woozy waltz like tempos, often breaking down into a sort of lilting folk interlude, peppered with guitar leads, before swooping back into full buzz.
One track eschews the buzz completely, instead offering up dark brooding acoustic folk, clean crooned vocals, glistening acoustic guitars, melancholy melodies, while another blends the two, turning a folk song into a strange lurching loping blackened jam, with strange staccato drumming, and super emotive melodies, soaring leads, and growled guttural vocals. Their version of a traditional Lithuanian folk song follows a similar pattern, the guitars spread out in long streaks of downtuned buzz, the vocals a demonlike roar, but woven into a strange folky framework, big drums pounding out a rhythm over harmonized melodies, and some simple strumming, strange but quite cool.
But don't let all the folk throw you off, Altar Shadows are indeed a black metal band, who offer up some gorgeously grim black buzz, blast beats, furious riffing, it's just that their black buzz is infused with the spirit of the past, and informed by the folk music of their ancestors, which more than anything, makes their blackness all the more unique, and their sound something special. Plus, SPECKLEDY FALCONS!!!
He may be a master of droned out noise, but he's been flirting with club music on and off for the last few years, each full length hiding at least one dancefloor gem, and so Mr. Neil Campbell, ex of Vibracathedral Orchestra, now of Astral Social CLUB, at least on this here new 7", is all about the tripped out psychedelic electronic groove.
But seeing as this is Neil Campbell, his idea of what constitutes dance music, or even electronica is WAAAAY different than most folks. Just check out the A side here. Maddeningly repetitive, a flurry of bleeps and glitches, swoops and burbles, locked into a relentless loop, the main 'beat' staying steady, while all around it a cloud of FX swirls and shimmers, some seriously druggy electro psych drone for sure.
The second track is all minimal house music, sort of. The main beat a stripped down pulse and squelch, with synthy basslines, and some haunting disembodied piano drifting over the top, making for a truly creepy mash up. Maybe one of our favorite Astral tracks ever!
As with all Trensmat 7" releases, the vinyl comes bundled with a cd-r, featuring both the tracks from the 7", as well as three remixes from Richard Youngs, John Clyde-Evans and Magnetize, ranging from super spastic chopped up electronic madness, to spacey static drenched minimal house groove, to wild Bruce Haack like electronic experimentalism, playful and goofy and over the top.
Don't let all the talk of club music scare you away though, fans of recent Astral Social Club know all about Campbell's wild and off kilter take on dance music, which really ends up having more in common with tripped out psych drone and free noise weirdness than it does with -actual- club music.
Pressed on yellow vinyl, and SUPER limited.
Another slab of blissed out dreaminess from AQ fave Aidan Baker. His umpteenth release this year, every single one of them fantastic. This one, titled like a Damien Hirst piece, I Will Always And Forever Hold You In My Heart And Mind, is one single 50+ minute piece, separated into 12 parts, one for each word of the title, all woven into a single expansive whole.
The opener took us right back to Oval's Diskont 94, a shuffling shimmering underwater swirl, but instead of skipping cds as source material, Baker seems to be using some sort of loping Three Mile Pilot like bass, chopped and looped and smeared over a wash of drawn out synth drones, totally tranquil and dreamlike, but with that bass, lending the track a bit of subtle forward momentum. In fact the whole disc seems to be rooted in the interplay between droning synths and that processed bass. It's a bit krautrocky at times, a little bit Popol Vuh, ambient and abstract but propulsive at the same time. Some of the tracks are more layered, with strange muted bits of percussion, or more distinct melodies (also muted), while others get more and more distorted threatening to crumble to pieces, and still others, remain austere and minimal, throwing a shimmering sonic cloak over the hypnotic circular melodies and slow shifting sonic swells.
What more to say? As always, totally beautiful and completely hypnotic. Another perfect late night soundtrack for spacing out and drifting off...
LIMITED TO ONLY 156 COPIES, so you know what that means, each hand numbered, packaged in a super elaborate die cut sleeve, with a two sided insert, the disc, and the insert all visible around the custom cut outer sleeve. quite striking.
You read that right, this is indeed another new Nadja AND another new Aidan Baker, at the same time! Even after the world record FIVE Nadja's on a recent list. And while we joke about how prolific this guy is, even we're a bit overwhelmed by what is basically, counting reissues, maybe the 10th or 11th new release in a matter of a month or two. Sure we can whip out reviews like nobody's business, but even we're run a little ragged. But we'll do our best.
Obviously fans will need this, lots of us bought copies, after all, we've yet to hear a bad record from Baker or Nadja, and this one is no different. However it is special for two reasons, one, it's crazy limited, only 500 copies, hand numbered. When we run out of the ones we have it will be gone for good. And two, it features the first (as far as we know) solo jam from the non Aidan Baker half of Nadja, Leah Buckareff.
Three long tracks, released to coincide with a German live performance in April. The Baker solo track is a pretty glistening drift, a bit more dense and thick than past solo efforts, a surprisingly busy sonic swirl, ethereal effects, murky drones, fragments of melodies, bits of feedback and rumble and twinkle, all set in a warm whirring expanse of soft sound.
The Nadja track begins all dark and serene, but quickly builds to an incendiary blown out doom trudge, quite possibly the heaviest and most distorted we've heard the duo, the guitar thick and crumbling and so distorted it almost obscures any melody, the drum machine a chaotic splatter, the last few minutes so intense and heavy and freaked out, the squall of swirling black psych and drum machine sputter almost completely obscures the churning riffage below.
The big surprise here, although we suppose it shouldn't really be a surprise, is Buckareff's contribution. We're tempted to suggest that she start releasing her own records, but that's just what we need! More kick ass records to buy. Anyway, Buckareff's track, is all low end whir, whispery static, and barely there percussion, that builds to a caustic dirgedrone as heavy and intense as anything Nadja has released, but the cool thing is that even when the sound is a wall of heaving roiling black buzz, beneath it lurks that opening bass melody, the strange pit pat percussion, a mournful lope, slowly being swallowed by a massive swell of muted murky washed out heaviness, that quickly fades out, leaving that minimal bassy shuffle to fade out into silence.
Ok, fine, fuck it, bring it on, more Buckareff solo stuff! We can take it. Even if we can't afford more musical obsessions. But after this we need to hear more. Once again, three for three. Nadja, Baker, Buckareff, essential listening for the doomdronedirge inclined.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, hand numbered, in a cool matte paper fold over sleeve.
Not only have Barn Owl become one of our favorite musical projects right here in SF, but they are now serious contenders to the throne of best purveyors of deep hitting and soul satisfying drone anywhere in the world. While just about everything they've released up to this point has been way too limited and thus are now all sadly out of print, they finally have a release that while still limited will at least get to reach a lot more ears then anything they've put out so far. These are sounds that deserve to be heard by anyone with an appreciation for all things droney, stoney and drifty, done so totally right.
While drone-folk bands have become a somewhat common entity in the last couple years, it's actually rare when you hear one that you really feel true soul and spirited passion from. From Our Mouths A Perpetual Light finds Barn Owl striking a perfect balance between sparkling sonics and commanding doom. Imagine Sleep/OM running in the mud with sticks and stones and then meeting up with Windy & Carl, Bardo Pond and Tom Carter. The lp format suits the duo so well, as their songs are filled with deep and slowly swirling grooves. We just listened to one side over and over and over before we even moved on to the second side with which we then did the same. There is both patience and payoff in Barn Owl's sound. Music that makes you want to close your eyes because you know you are entranced by atrists that know so well what they are doing. While they pressed up way more lps than anything else they've released, it's all relative, meaning these LP's are not going to be around too long, in fact we weren't even able to get as many as we ordered. Highly recommended, but act fast!
Another matchup that had to happen eventually, it was only a matter of time. Campbell Kneale's Black Boned Angel, and Aidan Baker's Nadja. Two modern groups redefining doom metal. Filtering doom through their own dronedirge aesthetics, each with a distinctly unique take on doom, BBA's more of a glacial noise drenched dirge, Nadja's more of a blissed out metalgaze.
The two together though churn out what can only be described as epic grandiose doom pop. Or something like that. Soaring vocals, over thick churning crumbling distortion. It almost sounds like a sludge metal Queen, or a bit like recent Record Of The Week honorees Torche, or even Harvey Milk at their most dramatic and over the top.
The main riff is a slowed down classic rocker, turned sludgey and lugubrious but not losing any of its might or majesty. Guitars screech and soar and grind all around it, what sounds like a piano plinks along with the vocals, a sunshiney melody, but it's the vocals, that turn this into glorious sludgepop, a minor key lament, delivered in a plaintive wail, way down in the mix as well, but loud enough to totally carry the song, that main melody lodged in your head, forever!
Not really sure what else to say. If the math of Nadja + Black Boned Angel = Harvey Milk + Torche + Queen x loads of blown out distortion and sun baked buzz doesn't add up for you, you just might be reading the wrong list�
This is an ep teaser for the forthcoming full length from the same team on 20 Buck Spin, but fear not, this song, all 21+ minutes of it, is available only on this disc!!
There's two types of people in this world. People who like Borbetomagus, and those who don't. Probably there's many more of the latter. But for the former, each and every Borbetomagus album is pretty much a must have. Kinda the same way with the likes of Merzbow and Jandek, many of whose fans are doubtless shared.
So, for whom it may concern: here's a new album from the notorious New York wall of noise sax/sax/guitar improv trio! Well, not exactly new, this is actually a reissue (first time on cd) of a cassette originally released back in 1986, now including an entire bonus 22 minute second set, live in Allentown, Pennsylvania (home to renowned fantasy artist Boris Vallejo we just happened to randomly learn today as well).
The usual Borbeto-trio of Sauter/Dietrich/Miller is augmented here by the bass of Adam Nodelman and the electronics of Scott Legrath, as if they needed more noise-making help! Apparently this was upon the occasion of a "3rd annual Halloween extravaganza" 10/29/86 and in the pictures everyone's wearing weird masks and stuff.
The boasted-of "killer" sound is indeed pretty much so, every bit of sax blurt and guitar skree is ear-piercingly present and accounted for. Scary. As is the way with Borbetomagus, their squealing squall of sonic intensity shall soon send the appropriate sort of listener into rapturous trance. Stress on "appropriate" (see paragraph one).
Every once in a while, we sort of wish we could just move on musically, forget whatever it was we super into, no matter how magical. Find a new band to fall in love with. To obsess over. To slavishly track down every single shred of recorded music by. Buying multiple versions of the same record just to get one extra song, or a just a few more minutes of glorious drone and buzz. But then along comes a record like this, and wipes that wish away. Boris are indeed the rarest of bands. Few groups engender such utter devotion. If it wasn't Boris, sure it would probably be someone else, but it wouldn't be the same.
Not sure if it's the fact that they're Japanese, or that their early records were so shrouded in mystery, or guitarist Wata's utter bad ass coolness, the increasingly elaborate and insane packaging, the outrageously limited releases, it's probably a combination of all of those things, but the overriding factor is ultimately, that they're an amazing band, who are not afraid to change their sound at the drop of a hat, going from shoe gazing dronelords, to crushing sludge doom destroyers, to wild thrashing rock and rollers, with all sorts of unexpected stops in between. Some folks prefer the droning beauty of Flood, others the Stooges-y stomp of Pink, still others the glacial guitar crush of Absolutego, most folks love them all, and who can blame them?
Smile, the latest from this mighty power trio, takes elements of Pink (arguably, most new fans' favorite Boris record, and most old fans' least favorite) and stretches them way out, turning a record that most of us were expecting to be Pink part two, into easily the group's weirdest and most chaotic. Which is in fact a VERY good thing. Add in some guest action from SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley and Japanese guitarist and Rainbow collaborator Michio Kurihara and away we go...
The record opens with "Message", a dramatically redone version of the A side from the now out of print Statement 7". We described "Statement" like this: fans of Boris' Pink will feel right at home. A serious KISS like riff, some cowbell, and then some ridiculously blown out in the red acid psych lead guitar. It's weirdly lo-fi sounding, but still fierce, and if the band sounds a bit fuzzy and muddy, the leads sound like Wata is IN your headphones, ramming her guitar straight into your ears. It's pretty amazing actually. The music is a wild wooly garage metal stomp, tons of FX, wah wah, the vocals though are a bit of surprise. Weirdly poppy. Double tracked. Super melodic, almost sing-along-able. But it's all about the riffy groove and those impossibly acidic guitar freakouts.
But in the stretched out "Message" version, the track begins with some throbbing sub sonic bass, some seventies "woo-hoo" vocals, some hypnotic tribal drumming, a killer minimal groove that never stops, and even when the track kicks in, it's way more sludge-y and gritty with head spinning stereo panning and an awesomely fucked up mix (another reason to pick up the Japanese version, besides the artwork, more on that later).
The second track, most folks should recognize from seeing the band live. A killer riff, some wailing lead vox, wild thrashy drumming, the various parts spiced up with swoops of backwards guitars, and a crumbling super distorted tripped out FX drenched outro. The next track is THE killer of the disc. With guitars so blown out, they threaten to FRY your headphones, a killer stop start groove, weird blown speaker bass, all wrapped around a pretty sweet pop hook, but the band do their best to bury it in crumbling distortion, and acid fried psych freakouts. Until the last half of the track, where things devolve into some super minimal dronescape with soft strummed whispery guitars, a damaged percussive thud, and lots of barely there shimmer.
Our favorite track, oddly enough, is probably the next one, a cover of legendary Japanese group PYG's "Flower Sun Rain", a gorgeously languorous drift, all reverby clean guitars, soulful vocals, simple subtle percussion, a brief squall of gorgeous sun blasted psychguitar, slipping smoothly back into that slow dreamy drift. We'd have been just as happy to hear Boris do a whole record of PYG covers after that one. But then comes "Next Saturn" another weirdly blissed out pop song, muted tones drifting over muted programmed drums and a thick sheet of distorted guitar, and the vocals, which in the past have often detracted from Boris' power, have definitely become an intricate part of their new sound and have improved vastly, now able to carry a song, and in some ways this whole record, and here they soar and croon, a wicked hook and a lilting moody melody. But it wouldn't be Boris if they didn't smash it to bits part way through, and they do, unleashing huge sheets of heavily delayed guitar and dubbed out drums, throbbing bass, all tangled up into glorious psychedelic meltdowns.
Even the heaviest songs on Smile are infused with hooks and offer up brief glimpses of the poppiness underlying the crunch and rrroooar, no truer than on "Dead Destination" (by the way, some of the song titles in this review are probably wrong, as they are in Japanese on the sleeve, and various sources had different titles, arggh), a thick droned out, bliss blast of thick corrosive guitars, wild sinewy, buzz drenched leads, drums literally buried beneath layer after layer of whir and hiss and a dense wall of guitar. Eventually simple finger picked guitar and more dreamy sad vocals surface from within the roiling psychscape, offering a haunting counterpoint to the fierce fury all around. Even here, at it's thickest and most intense, the song is imbued with a certain melancholy, deftly woven into the freaked out guitars and stuttering mostly buried rhythms.
The second to last track, for its first half at least, is a gorgeous slowcore crawl, just plaintive vocals, delicate guitar, soft cymbal shimmer, a gauzy dreamy drift, that eventually fades to silence, before streaks of feedback fall from the sky, an avalanche of drums follow, until an incredibly emotive main riff, heavy and blown out, takes over, dragging the rest of the track with it, slowly churning, a sort of metallicized krautrock jam, the main guitar thick and distorted, but all around it glimmering harmonics and whirling melodies, those soaring vocals, and of course an appropriately majestic, dramatic in-the-red coda.
The record finishes with a massive 20 minute track, untitled, that almost sounds like a single song synopsis of Boris' new sound. Beginning with tripped out backwards guitar, and skeletal melodies, briefly interrupted by a fierce squall of intense psychedelia, only to bliss back out, giving way to a dreamy dirgey shoegazey dirge, all cascading distorted guitars and hazy lazy vocals, eventually overtaken by huge crumbling slabs of slow motion distortion and blinding streaks of high end skree and moaning feedback, finally drifting off into a slow shimmery feedback infused fadeout.
Be prepared for plenty of confusion in the coming months, this is the Japanese version, the domestic Southern Lord version will have a slightly different track listing, including some different mixes, the lp versions too, will be different, we're not exactly sure how yet, but we'll do our best to keep you informed.
But as is usually the case, the Japanese version has knock out packaging, WAY better than the US version. A puffy plastic gatefold, like something you'd buy at the Hello Kitty store, or a bath toy, a yellow transparent heart cut out of the sponge-like background, all the text printed in metallic silver, inside liner notes printed silver ink on yellow vellum, a silver metallic ink on yellow vellum obi.
If you're a crazy Boris obsessive, you're probably gonna need to buy both the Japanese version and the Southern Lord version, and maybe one of the lp versions as well when they come out, but if you're just here for the music, and you were gonna get just one, we'd probably lean toward this one, for the packaging especially, but also for the revamped opening track.
As always, WAY recommended.
Basic Channel. Jyrk. Free jazz. Put those things together and you've got an idea of what's in store with Light Ships, the band's first release on Pete Swanson's new label Freedom to Spend. Fellow noiseniks out there will definitely remember Swanson's old label Jyrk, but whereas that label seemed to revolve mostly around his Yellow Swans related releases, this seems more of a label proper. Getting back to the record at hand, Bulbs is a two man collaboration between former Axolotl member William Sabiston (some of you might have been lucky enough to get a copy of his super limited release under the name Ball Lightning) and John Almaraz, who left San Francisco earlier this year to embark on some backpacking across the globe. We checked out what a few people had to say about the record, and the one thing that keeps coming up is techno, techno, techno. Well, to be fair, there is a propulsive element to this record, which may be the only truly linear thing present. And yes, sometimes it is an electronic kick drum. Still, it seems that the greatest influences here are free jazz and African polyrhythms and syncopation. Those who checked out any of the recent Monopoly Child Star Searchers albums, then you're maybe understanding what we're talking about, though Light Ships features significantly higher production quality. Still, if this record is any indication as to what's in store for Freedom to Spend, then we're confident that we will be recommending a healthy dose of their bands and/or projects.
Second dvd collaboration from film maker Paul Clipson and Root Strata / Tarentel head honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Another gorgeous and sonically blissed out tag team, Clipson's films this time around, again on Super-8, shot entirely in NYC, impressionistic shots of cityscapes, rolling hills, the texture of water, sun dappled evening skies, many of the shots textural, extreme close ups, patterns as much as images and shapes, sunspots, shadows, reflections, very active, the world flying past out the window of a train, power lines and bridges slipping out of eyeshot, setting suns and colored clouds, so lovely and dreamy.
Cantu-Ledesma offers up the perfect soundtrack, music culled from the same sessions that produced the huge aQ fave Shining Skull Breath, so even folks who don't care about the dvd, will want this for the sounds, which are thick and dense, whirring dronescapes, textured and layered, slipping from minimal shimmer to buzzing roar and back again, very much active, the intensity and propulsion of the sounds perfectly matching the motion of the visuals, in some cases, seemingly slowing it down, the drone dragging the landscape flashing by into sudden focus before letting it go again.
Either of these elements would be fantastic on their own, we can only imagine seeing these films projected against the side of a building, or on a huge movie screen, and these sounds would kill broadcast through some massive PA, the thick roiling drones washing over us, filling our ears with grit and grime, but together they work even better, even just viewed on the tiny screen of our computer, sonically and visually evoking all sorts of deep feelings and lost memories, of places never visited, of better times, of lost loves and of a past that keeps slipping further and further away. So lovely.
Packaged in an folded up origami style vellum sleeve with a printed insert. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Already sold out at the label so these are the last copies EVER!
Celestial Sea is the unlikely collaboration between God Is Myth head honcho Todd Paulson, who is also responsible for Dormant, reviewed elsewhere on the aQ site, and Andrew Curtis-Brignell, of UK black metal one man band Caina. Not unlikely because of the folks involved, it's not hard to draw lines connecting Caina Dormant and God Is Myth, but more for the sound they produce. An epic cinematic post rock more influenced by folks like Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, Isis and Mono than any black metal or even metal in particular.
Granted the crossover between metal and post rock is pretty common these days with folks on both sides of the sonic divide borrowing freely from the folks opposite. And we're never ones to complain, we love both sounds, pummeling metallic crunch, and loping mathy instrumental jams, and the two together, well, you know where we stand.
So here we Have Celestial Sea, a (perhaps) one off, that finds the duo getting super spacey for the opening 5 minutes, simple minor key guitar figures unfurling over long drawn out drones, ratcheting up the tension, creating a brooding post rock ambience, that to be honest, we'd be happy to hear continue for the length of the whole record.
Instead, the band launch into the first proper song, soaring crystalline chords, breathless vocals, simple drumming, all swept up in a shimmering swell, building to a crescendo that instead of introducing crushing downtuned riffage, offers up some super proggy organs, but only for a moment, a few seconds later, the guitars drop, and the band is soaring majestically, and heavily through some epic major key chords, the drumming wilder and more chaotic, before blissing back out soon after.
Track three, "William Bentley's Grave" is another slow burner, with a definite prog vibe, lots of glistening shimmer, finally exploding in another epic climax, not crushing or heavy, just expansive and cathartic.
The closer, "Deep Inside The Cold" is the darkest of the bunch, and the most overtly heavy, sounding a bit like Opeth or Katatonia but more mathy and introspective. The guitars thick, ringing out, long passages of droning looped riffage, and finally the record's big payoff, high end guitars spiraling heavenward, the drums double time, a serious final blowout.
Definitely for fans of rock both post and math, and of course metalheads not averse to some sonic subtlety and lots of pretty pretty melody
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, housed in a plain white sleeve with a paste on cover and a printed insert.
Akita. Menche. Blankenship. Dilloway. These are the men of noise with discographies the size of small town phone books, proving their might in the international noise community by the sheer audaciousness of their output. But then again, you might really only need a single testament to stake your claim as one of the greatest noise musicians. Chop Shop has chosen the latter tactic, with Oxide being that sole document, after a relatively tiny back catalogue of cassette only releases, a couple of cdrs, and two infamous 10"s. Both released through RRR, the first was the Steel Plate 2x10" that was literally bound to a steel plate; and the second was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party that was literally cut in half, making playback a dangerous proposition for the needle on your record player. Both of those releases have long been out of print; and despite the hushed respect that those 10"s demand, Chop Shop has kept a low profile. A very low profile. Hence, after a career that has spanned nearly two decades, Oxide is his first proper CD. And it's stunning.
The sole proprietor of Chop Shop is New York based noise technician Scott Konzelmann, whose audio demolition revolves around speaker constructions forged out of hammered plate metal and disfigured commercial grade pipes, which focus particular frequencies and resonant overtones into swarming orchestras of rust, noise, drone, and static. Tape has long been Konzelmann's medium of choice for recording; and like William Basinski before him, Konzelmann endures the self-disintegration of the medium whilst transcribing the sounds of Oxide digitally. Where Basinski's vocabulary of decay is all romance and melancholy, Konzelmann's is muscular and urgently present. Oxide offers a metallurgist's din where compressed air strikes hard steel and machine vibrations generate noxious resonant frequencies in neighboring vents. Konzelmann composes the old school way, with a razor blade and pieces of tape, generating jump cut edits alongside the self-generated debris from the magnetic literally falling apart. These grey, dead-tech drones thus rupture and explode along the faultlines of those edits, and Oxide emerges as a forceful, dynamic album without resorting to purile shock tactics. This is a seriously great noise album for anybody with a passing interest in Broken Flag, Hansen Records, or early Hafler Trio.
Lie in Light shows Cloudland Canyon wearing their Krautrock worshiping influences fully on sleeve.
We have previously mentioned their cosmic-kraut influence on their debut and follow-up ep. But on those, the lysergic free music of Ash Ra Tempel, Faust, Hawkwind, and Amon Duul II, mixed with more contemporary experimental shimmers of Dead C and This Heat were the key influential touchstones. On Lie In Light, with song titles like "Krautwerk" (how obvious can you get??), "You & I" and "Scheiss Schatzi, Auf Wiedersehn!", Cloudland Canyon this time around channel the Kosmiche and Motorik pulse of Neu!, Can, Cluster, La Dusseldorf and Popol Vuh. More song-structured than their debut, but no less cosmically atmospheric, Cloudland Canyon have upped the ante on their sound and production. While their Krautrock inspirations and tongue-in-cheek song titles may sound derivative on the surface, they bring enough of their own unique perspective on things to make for a highly engaging listen. Recommended!!
When we think of Bill Cosby we usually think of amazing bold pattern sweaters, undeniably funny PG-rated humor and the dad we kind of all wish was ours. Maybe Fat Albert too. What doesn't usually come to our mind is deep hitting, groove heavy, spiritual jazz akin to early '70s Miles Davis. But damn we sure will be thinking about those things now after hearing this previously super impossible to find recording of Cosby on the keys along with a very strong yet mysteriously uncredited band by his side. Some of us had heard Cosby's vocal jazz albums which were likable in their own right, but this is an entirely different and much more potent beast. Believe us when we say this record goes way beyond the novelty of who created it. No matter who was behind this recording, these two long tracks sizzle with fiery passion and flawless execution. Inspired heavily by Bitches Brew era-Miles as well as the likes of Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus and Herbie Hancock, Cosby was tapping into some serious mind expanding and soulful funk infused jazz.
The cd comes with Cosby's thoughtful original liner notes where he talks about the origins of these tracks. The first track "Martin's Funeral" came from his and so many other's experience with coping with the sadness and depression that followed in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination and his personal experience attending King's funeral. The record is all instrumental, and who knew that listening to Bill Cosby and being stoned could be a perfect combination?? While he might still be known best for his TV persona and funny skits about going to the dentist office, there is no doubt after listening to this album that Cosby also has some major depth and musical talent under those amazing large sweaters. Highly recommended!
Cuddle-core lives! Here's the newly remastered reissue of Cub's 1992 debut album Betti-Cola which comes with four bonus tracks. First things first, yes, the remastering did make a difference. This cd does sound a whole lot better than the original!
For those unfamiliar... Once upon a time, three Canadian college friends (including our own Cup, pre-I Am Sponbender and AQ!) with little or no previous band experience got together to have fun trying something new for themselves (yeah, you might think "big deal!", but back then things were different... the indie music scene was even more of a boys club for one thing!). Taking the spirit & ethics of DIY punk rock, but understanding the undeniable joy of '60s girl groups, Cub's basement rehearsal space was where the musical genre cuddlecore was born. Releasing a slew of 7" eps (the bulk of which comprise Betti-Cola) and touring extensively, the three gals were definitely kindred spirits with the scene happening just a few hours south at Olympia' WA's K Records (Beat Happening, Tiger Trap, Lois, etc). They even cover Beat Happening's "Cast A Shadow".
A decade and a half later, Betti-Cola's still burstin' with youthful exuberance and blithe spirit (and topping the college radio charts once again to boot!). The tunes are sweet, peppy, rough around the edges, and a bit unsteady at times just like, yes, a cub! On the surface it may seem a little silly or childlike, but looks can be deceiving. It takes guts to throw caution to the wind like they did. As a result, the trio inspired countless young girls and women to pick up guitars or drumsticks or... Heck, look no further than Ms Neko Case who drummed with the band for a spell!
With each album they grew in confidence, skill and composition (personally we favor their second and third albums Come Out Come Out and Box Of Hair), but this is where it all began. Their bright, playful pop is perfect matched with the cover art custom drawn for them by noneother than Dan DeCarlo of Archie Comics fame!
FYI: Come Out Come Out has also been remastered and reissued, and the band's third and final album Box Of Hair has also been rereleased with a bonus fan-pleasin' item.
Cub's newly remastered and reissued third and final album, Box of Hair, plays up the edgier and urgent side of their cuddle-core ethos. The distortion is upped, the song-writing more heartbroken, the lyrics more snarly in their delivery. Stiffer 'real world experience' influences are more pervasive here than on previous releases, and there's an overall feeling that the band is going for broke, and sensing an end coming, want to leave things with a bang. And that's definitely what Box of Hair is, a maturing sum up of priorities, showcasing their best song-writing and musical craft and taking it as far as it can go. One mesmerizing and charming highlight on the album, "Magic 8 Ball", captures all the Cub essentials - infectious pop hooks and clever, bittersweet lyrics. Box of Hair's not as carefree as their previous releases, but it's probably their most meaningful and resonant. Includes a bonus fan-pleasin' item -- a bright, embroidered patch of the band's sunshiney logo!
Note: If you can endure the seemingly endless chair creakiness ("it's not bed squeaks!" says Cup) at the album's end you'll be rewarded with a truly retarded punk rock finish.
FYI: Along with Box of Hair, Betti-Cola and Come Out Come Out, have also been rereleased with bonus tracks!
Come Out Come Out is Cub's masterpiece. Newly remastered with bonus tracks (a couple of them hidden), it is the culmination of all the DIY spirit of their debut but also shows the band honing their skills as musicians and songwriters into a tight set of upbeat tunes with a joyful edge - although Cub was often skillfully bittersweet. Self-proclaimed cuddle-core trio from Vancouver, BC, Lisa, Lisa and Robynn veered away from the battle cries of their more raucous riot grrrl contemporaries preferring to wave the 'home-crafted' flag with a more confident (and varied) direction. Obviously, legions of fanatic cubsters (likely whipped into a frenzy during thir sugar-pop-overload live shows) got the message. On this their second full length, wonder along to "Everything's Geometry", "New York City" (later covered by They Might Be Giants), and covers of the Go-Gos' "Vacation" and Yoko Ono's "I'm Your Angel"!
Originally released as a triple 7" colored vinyl fiesta with some wonderfully twisted cover art by Canadian artist Fiona Smyth, the extra bonus tracks here include a live version of "Cast A Shadow" featuring some Italian dude who jumped on stage to play harmonica, and a sweet phoned-in version of "My Chinchilla" on Canadian Radio, that really captures the band's energetic live spirit. Another key groop in a line of influential DIY femme trios from The Shaggs, Kleenex, and The Raincoats, to The Marine Girls, Shonen Knife and Le Tigre, it's time once again for Cub!!
FYI: Betti-Cola has also been remastered and reissued, and the band's third and final album Box Of Hair has also been rereleased with a bonus fan-pleasin' item.
We're not sure if this is the first proper full length from this local soundscaper / field recordist, but it's definitely the first one we've ever had. We raved about the last two Davis discs we carried, both cd-r's both now unfortunately out of print.
But this is an actual cd, so it should be around for a while, which is a very good thing, as it's just as fantastic as those long gone cd-r's, so hopefully this time a few more folks will get a chance to lay their ears on Davis' minimal loveliness.
And minimal and lovely is precisely what this is. In past reviews we've mentioned Niblock and Coleclough, and obviously those comparisons still apply, but the cool thing about Davis is that he is not nearly so precise. His sounds have grit and static, there is room sound, tape hiss, not to a distracting degree, but only in so much as it adds a bit of warmth and texture.
Davis' music, while deep and shimmery, mysterious and dark, is also natural, captured and created in its environment, not in some vacuum, so a nearly static drone is often peppered with bits of glitch, strange percussion, slivers of feedback. Sounds pulse and waver, drift and shift, often creating incidental rhythms. Those more rhythmic tracks are like some darker dronier pop ambient music, subtly throbbing beneath slow shifting layers of sound, not murky as much as washed out and soft around the edges.
A few tracks stick out here and there, like the warbly almost jazzy interlude "Half Consumed" with it haunting trumpet melody and strange backwards rhythm, but for the most part, The Gold Hooped Nature is simply another breathtaking collection of minimal dronemusic, from an unsung modern master.
Packaged in a beautiful silkscreened gold on white gatefold cardstock sleeve and LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
This is the first time we've reviewed anything by Swedish dronescaper Thomas Ekelund, aka Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, which is weird as folks around here are big fans. It's not for lack of releases, he's been pretty prolific, it just one of those things, so many releases, artists, records, so little time.
Well, we aim to change that all right now, with this, the latest from Ekelund, a limited cd-r released on night-ocean-drone label Mystery Sea, and Ekelund's sounds here sound right at home. Three looooong tracks, the first, ultra minimal, it takes minutes to get going, but once it does, it's a fantastic expanse of ultra minimalism, so minimal in fact that much of it borders on Francisco Lopez territory. But turn it up, and listen close, and Ekelund's soundworld will reveal itself to you. A washed out murmur, peppered part way through with footsteps, the sound of metal on metal, some sort of random field recording, of men working, the clang and clatter overshadowing the whispery sounds beneath, but by the end of the first track, those whispery sounds have built into growling swells, thick smears of muted melody, crumbling and almost industrial sounding when paired with the grind and creak of the workmen.
The second track starts off in a similar fashion, strange super close mic'd sounds, thumps and scrapes, crinkles and cracks, over a super busy microscopic dronescape, all hisses and whirs and little bits of almost invisible melody, but it doesn't take long for that track to also swell into something dense and thick, high end tones rest atop a pulsing sea swell like drone, the low end fading out leaving a strangely dreamy high end shimmer, eventually fading out and leaving just those strange clunks and scrapes and that whirling swirling whisper beneath.
The closing track is a continuation of track two, in fact, they all sort of fit together into one sprawling soundscape, but the closer remains murky and minimal, a subtle scraping floating on a thick, but soft and smeared low end rumble, it's only in the last minute or two that other sounds join in, strange twinkles and glimmers, like laying on the ocean floor and watching bits of sunlight slowly make their way through the swirling blue grey sea.
Amazing packaging too, full color tray card, numbered, the booklet a half booklet, leaving half of the cd face exposed. Very striking.
And as always LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
The return of Deadsea, not to be confused with New Zealand noise rockers the Dead C. But of course the second you laid ears on this, there would be no confusing the two. Not a chance.
Deadsea were born out of the late great tech grind outfit Three Studies For A Crucifixion, and while the grind is pretty much gone, Deadsea are for sure technical, so much so that much of their music is utterly dizzying in its complexity. Maybe that's the reason these guys aren't huge already. Cuz man, if there was any justice in the world, these guys would be touring with Mastodon or Neurosis or playing Ozzfest or something. Not only are Deadsea heavy as fuck, but the songs are crazy catchy, over the top proggy, an impossible blend of Iron Maiden, Carcass, Voivod, with a million parts, tons of awesome harmonies, incredible drumming, insane riffing, tracks shift from thrashing fury to groovy chugging to woozy breakdown to mathy freak out to sludgey doom all in the blink of an eye. Some tracks get all Champs-like, others are almost Southern sounding. The vocals are generally a guttural sort of shout, but here and there they will soar majestically, usually coinciding with a similarly soaring guitar line.
This is just epic and majestic and brutal and blasting and heavy and we hope that the rest of the world catches on soon, not just for the band's sake, although hell, they deserve it, but for all the heavy music obsessives out there whose lives are less full, and whose iPods are that much shittier, and whose headbanging can only be less frenzied for being without Deadsea. Easily remedied though. So do it!!!
Colorado quartet Devotchka do a lively jig down the path between the tweaked baroque pop of The Arcade Fire and the nouveau Balkan gypsy stylings of Beirut and Gogol Bordello. A Mad & Faithful Telling is a beauty capturing the band at its best, brisky tempo'd and impassioned with very Adrian Belew-esque swooping vocals and sweeping horns and strings following suit. This is music that'll leave your ears fevered and your cheeks flushed!
We loved this record when we first got it on LP which is sadly out of print now. But luckily it's finally been re-released on cd with a long bonus track tacked on for good measure!
Two AQ favorites team up together for one great record that demonstrates a more pensive side to these noise rock heavyweights: Aaron Dilloway (Wolf Eyes) and C Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core). Squid delivers on its title as the sounds on this lp make you feel like you're deep underwater tangled up in the undersea world. Using tape loops, bowed tape, tape delay, violin, voice and electronics, Dilloway and Yeh create dark, moody textures brimming with mystery, suspense and restraint. We could totally hear this as the score to some Matthew Barney piece, as it shares much of the same influence as his films. As much as we love Wolf Eyes there is something pretty magical and always unexpected about what happens when Dilloway steps away from his main band. And C Spencer Yeh continues to show us that he has one of the most unique visions in the noise scene. And together it's pretty fucking magical. Excellent!
One gets the sense that grime needs a serious shot in the arm. The genre's inception was so vastly novel, it seems it's almost fated to an awkward or even boring adolescence. What is surprising about Maths + English, is that while it's great, it's still oddly significant of this transformation, by virtue of the fact that it excels, but also relies, on the grime formulas without really pushing the boundaries consistently. It having been over half a year since any of the grime elders made a contribution to our racks, things have been pretty sleepy, and no young upstarts have capitalized on the vacant spotlight. However, for a time, Dizzee will be America's grime darling again, because despite the groaning above, the record is pretty irresistible. At its worst its totally riveting pump-up music, with Dizzee's foul mouth regaling us with sexual escapades, and dissing imitators amusingly. At its best it wonders into some genre-bending, borrowing more heavily from dub-step, punk, and even no wave. The record's opening has gorgeously icy and murky synths evocative of recent favorites M83 and Brenda Ray's intoxicating Walatta, juxtaposed with some very Skull Disco beats that we assume are the sounds of knives being sharpened. The records best track "Wanna Be," features female backing vocals immediately evocative of X-Ray Spex or the Slits, while the instrumentation is a totally buoyant and throbbing synth line that would have been found on a mid-nineties grime video game, had we been that lucky. At least there's Wu Tang. There's also plenty of crunchy, gritty, and totally rabid tracks to satisfy the grime classicist, and most retain their urgency, with only a few misses. The record is a qualified classic, given the short history of the style, though we think someone needs to come along soon to turn grime upside down, otherwise the conventions may begin to pall.
We first were introduced to Edu K on the second installment of the party starting, raw booty shaking Rio Baile Funk collection. His two tracks on that comp really stood out and grabbed our attention and our bodies as we couldn't help but smile and shake it everytime they came on. So we've been wanting to hear more and we finally were able to get our hands on a new 12" from him. Teamed up with Marina of Bonde De Role fame they make a potent one-two punch of raw and sizzling fun. Edu K brings the sweaty ass shakin' bombastic bounce of Baile Funk better then almost anyone. With Marina on vocals it's kind of like if Peaches got hyphy or if Timberland hooked up with CSS. The Crookers edit on the 'b' side kills, making this a must have 12" for anyone who wants to sweat and shake it all summer long.
Rich has the pleasure been, of late, to sit down with a new issuance from the stellar Digitalis Limited label. Sean Mccann's wobbly wonder "Flutter Oasis," and the last gem from the ever-unfolding Natural Snow Building's saga have had our ears smiling. And not least of all because they are cassettes. It seems re-aquaintance with any medium is accompanied by a degree of intentionality that peaks you to the details of the experience. And particularly in this case, the warmth of the cassette has been on display, with each of these releases huddling up close to the glowing embers of their mic settings slingshotting into the red. The effect can be quite comforting, as though panned to the far reaches are the sounds and feelings of a few angels blowing on a contact mic. We think it might be worth mentioning too, that the scientific name digitalis means "finger-like," and refers to the ease with which a flower of digitalis purpurea can be fitted over a human fingertip. If the music were fingers, and the flowers your ears, you'd be starting to get the picture.
And so, with all that said, it was with obvious excitement that we received a new installment from Digitalis. And from a store favorite and friend no less, Evan of Barn Owl! Elsewhere on this list you'll find their new full length lp on the awesome Not Not Fun label from LA. Buried Light is a decidedly more droney affair than the last two Barn Owl full lengths, but still very much in keeping with their broader vocabulary. The opening track is like listening to the oscillating resonance frequencies of a massive bell breathing. And in time, its host emerges, an ambiguous and ghostly voice, weaving and wandering on broad syllables through the dense murk. On other tracks, this dynamic is extended to the accompaniment of some Tacoma-like guitar picking, giving the tape a faint western vibe. In fact there are parts of the tape that could be comfortably inserted into one of the more recent Earth records or even Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack. In all cases the pace and depths of the tone relationships are entirely transporting. Evan excels in evoking the texture, pace, and scale of the elements, without attaching the songs to anything too specific. In this manner we are free to imagine them as the soundtracks to a kind of collapsed landscape where the wind of water blows ripples across a lake of sand. What is miraculous about Evan, and Barn Owl, at their most abstract and disintegrated, is the profound ambiguity of their temper. They live at the 360th degree, when you've wandered all the way to end of the light, and things start getting dark. What's more engrossing, perhaps, is you may not even remember if you started out towards the dark or the light in the first place. It's the liminal plane on which we witness the gathering of a cadre of genres; folk, metal, and drone, and watch them sculpt with the naked vibrational core of sound. It's purity, and spiritually relative qualities, align it with the antecedents of some new age music, but rather than easy listening, we might beg you to follow us out onto the thin branch of a pun and call it hard blisstening. It's what it is.
We've only got fifteen of these, so act fast. After that they are gone FOREVER!
Yet another disc from one of our favorite cd-r dronelords, Encomiast. Last heard from on the divine Bathed In Sunlight released on Crucial Bliss earlier this year, this disc is actually an archival recording from way back in 1999, gussied up in 2006, finally seeing the light of day right now.
Bathed In Sunlight was a big surprise as It featured more actual songs, with singing, acoustic guitars, even drums, we still dug it, but definitely nothing like the rest of the Encomiast catalog. This disc however returns us to the brooding slow motion dronescapes that made us dig Encomiast in the first place. Unclear what exactly the instrumentation is, but whatever the source, it's obscured enough that it really doesn't matter. The original sounds are offered up in streaks and blurs, whirs and rumbles, melody here is muted and subdued, this is not nearly as tranquil as some drone records, much of this is harrowing and ominous, sinister and downright scary, Lustmord, Wolf Eyes, you're not far off, some sort of post industrial sprawl, the rumble of distant machines, of subterranean engines, thunder filled skies, a world in ruins, painted in blacks and greys.
Later on in the record, strange percussion is introduced, a lurching distorted crunch, that gives the record some sort of strange propulsion, once again, trudging through an eerie wasteland, while all around strange sonic events occur, shining brightly and briefly before fading away.
"Concupere" is the record's nearly half hour centerpiece, an ultra minimal low end drift, shifting slowly beneath warm metallic swells, and haunting black ambience, eventually the track morphs into something much softer and dreamier, sounding almost angelic up against the bleak sonic sprawl that came before.
Incredibly dark, but also incredibly beautiful. Fans of the slow and low, of deep drones and of dark miserablism, this is your stop.
Few can express utter gut wrenching, hand wringing torment while still embracing a melodic beauty like Carla Bozulich. Diamanda Galas and P.J. Harvey are the only others who immediately come to mind. Evangelista is her new project which also features members of A Silver Mt. Zion whose presence is definitely felt throughout. Their debut full length Hello, Voyager threaten to drown the listener in the overwhelming current of despairing bleakness and broken beauty. Some songs swagger in bluesy defiance, some plod on in a saturnine somnabulism, some assault with gritty dissonance ("Truth Is Dark Like Outer Space" which recalls the untethered drama of bands such as the sadly defunct Pleasure Forever), some sweep you up in a lush stringed devastation ("The Blue Room"). No sunlight reaches the deep recesses of this music, you get the sense that the voyager in the title will never come up for air. No happy endings here, Evangelista haunts long after the final gloomy notes have faded... awesome.
Ex-Boyfriends' latest full length kicks off in full college rock fashion. Yeah, it's the infectiously hook laden kind that immediately gives you the warm nostalgic fuzzies for '90s indie bands like Tree People, Velocity Girl or Tsunami... but with Robert Smith style dour singing and post-punky edged guitar crunch! The first three songs on In With in particular have 'highschool movie soundtrack' written all over it, and you know that's a good thing in our books! A terrific spring-summer pop album!
Is it even necessary to point out that Noise nerds and Free Jazz freaks tend to keep the sort of the same company? Probably not, but if it were, then we would just play you this record and say goodnight. Those of you who don't like jazz, don't get scared off! The sensibility coloring this record with that spirit is really just one of genuinely free improvisation, so don't expect Coltrane or anything like that, this is still largely a Noise affair. Ex-Cocaine starts off with a loose instrumental guitar piece, accompanied by various drum sounds. The second track follows a similar trajectory, with the addition of vocals. If Aztec Camera were a lo-fi art rock band, this is what it might sound like. Side two features none other than the prolific -- and soon to be extinct -- Yellow Swans. Yes, it's true, after 7 years or so of trying to destroy both your ears and your speakers, Gabriel Saloman and Pete Swanson are calling it quits. They're not exactly going to disappear though, just saying goodbye to the Swans and starting some new things. If you saw our last list, then you probably noticed Mr. Saloman's collaborative effort with Aja Rose of In Flux. As for Pete Swanson, he's got a new label called Freedom to Spend -- check our review of it's first release, the album "Light Ships" by Axolotl off-shoot Bulbs. Okay, you're all caught up, now: the second side of the record. From mindfuck analog meltdown to blissful psych incantations, YS have certainly changed over the years, and, perhaps for the best, their final days have drifted into a more melodic, psychedelic direction. This track could not possibly better demonstrate that trend. In fact, if you didn't know who this actually was, it would be pretty dang impressive if you could guess. Meandering guitars, buried vocals, and a final showdown that dissolves into beautiful sheets of noise. Recommended!
Forget for a second that this is a Faust album. What if it was just some unknown new band, some cd-r we got in the mail, some limited edition cassette release? Heck we've tried that thought experiment, and we'd be all over it! Telling you that it's a mysteriously murky, throbbing psychedelic freak-scene, fraught with krautrocky rhythms and tense textures. Sorta reminds us of a mix of Blues Control and Wooden Shjips... or White Hills and Expo 70... there's a druggy '60s garage vibe, industrial electronic atmosphere, blissful moodiness, and clockwork Circle-like propulsivity, all crammed into one crazy counter-intuitive whole, raw and live! Everything in the way of organ drones, harmonica blurt, echoing voices, shuffling drums, and serious dosage of searing psych-rock geetar found here were all taken from various European performances in 2006, later mixed and edited at fauststudio. We'd assume most of the tracks are pretty much unique to this disc...
Yeah, we'd be pretty into it if it was some new group! Does the fact it's a new disc by krautrock legends Faust, released by Circle's Ektro label, make it any cooler? It doesn't need to. Though if that's what it takes to get you to check it out, that's ok. Conversely, if you were like, oh just another umpteenth Faust reunion album, don't be like that. First off, Faust rule. Even today. Sure, this isn't the original line up. In fact, it's not even the ONLY current line up! Apparently, in the grand tradition of, uh, Saxon and others, there's now more than one version of Faust, each featuring different original band members, going around touring under the name. Weird. Not sure if this fractured factioning is an agreed-upon thing (to cover more ground?) or if they're in competition. Hopefully the former! It would be sad to hear that there's litigation pending.
So anyway, THIS Faust consists of Jan Wolbrandt on drums, Michael Stoll on bass (and flute), Lars Paukstat on percussion and vocals, Steven Wray Lobdell on guitar, and Hans Joachim Irmler on organ, keyboards and vocals. That's a good line up all right, they've got Lobdell in the band after all! Hence the dosage of searing psych-rock geetar previously mentioned...
Recommended, as one of the two very different and very cool live albums newly issued by Ektro that we're reviewing this list (the other one is by '80s strong-man metaller Thor, believe it or not!). Hmmm. Faust + Thor, does that sort of = Circle??
(And note, there's another new live Faust 2cd that we have in stock and hope to review soon, Od Serca Do Duszy, that's the work of the OTHER active Faust unit, featuring Jean-Herve Peron, Zappi Diermaier, and Amaury Cambuzat.)
Drums are maybe the last thing you might expect to hear on a Fear Falls Burning record, which makes the opening of the new FFB, Frenzy Of The Absolute, all the more fascinating, since it opens with JUST drums, a huge crash, a doomy drum plod all spread out, spacious and spare. But eventually guitars enter the mix, and slowly take over.
Fear Falls Burning is the one man guitardrone project of axeman Dirk Serries, and over the last year has released numerous cds and lps, each filled with his unique take on the otherwise played out doomdronedirge sound. Fear Falls Burning is a much more musical take, no less thick or corrosive or caustic or heavy, but Serries makes his walls of downtuned drone, and whirring buzz, glisten and shimmer, shot through with melody and unlikely texture, about as poppy as a music this un-poppy can get. And it's no different here. Well minus the HUGE difference of having a drummer. Or should we say drummerS! Serries is joined by a series of guests on Frenzy, most notable the drummers from Swedish post-metallers Switchblade and Cult Of Luna.
At first we were worried that adding drums would just turn FFB's ethereal doomic drift into something much more generic and run of the mill, but just the opposite is true. Serries and his guests subtly transform the sound of FFB into something wholly different, the opening track says it all. That sprawling simple, spread out drumming, continues on throughout the first three quarters of the track, pounding away, not pummeling, but pounding, almost delicately if that were even possible, while Serries introduces soft shimmery delicate melodies, that drift dreamily in the background, the whole thing underpinned by a thick, gradually building Niblock like static guitar drone. But that little lullaby like melody, keeps the track from becoming pure dirge. There's way too much space. It's almost like a seriously metallicized and doomed up slowcore band. This is Low covering SUNNO))), a dreamy droney soporific downtuned dreamlike creep.
The guitars thicken, the ambience grows ever more woozy and buzzy, the various swells of distorted buzz, wash in and out, various melodies surface and then drift off, the song slowly transforming into something much blackened and sinister. Until with about 5 minutes left, the track switches gears and becomes a roiling blur of washed out industrial buzz, muted picked apart riffage, processed percussion, the drums slowly surfacing from below, creeping into earshot, like some black beast clawing its way up from the abyss, creating a dirgey sort of Godflesh / Jesu jam, but way more muddy and murky blown out, blurred and soft focused, and somehow still weirdly pretty.
The second track is way more in line with past FFB recordings, huge heaving slabs of buzzing low end, a vast expanse of fluttering, reverberating guitar growl, slow motion swells of whir, peppered with clouds of cymbal shimmer, shooting star streaks of high end, all blearily blurred into one fluid, constantly shifting dronescape. This track too grows in intensity, becoming more cacophonous, more ominous and atonal, a deep black hole of swirling black melody and thick textured guitarscapery. Like a dreamier, blissier Wolf Eyes.
The final track begins like some super charged Spacemen 3 jam, a crumbling distorted space rock riff, doused in delay, the last note allowed to pulse and skitter off into the ether, before the riff re-engages. Over the top, in swoop more layers of guitar buzz, synth sounding whir and warble, all very trancelike and mesmerizing, the drums don't even kick in until near the end, and even then, they just offer up a huge pulse like pound, a skeletal framework for the swirling buzzing blissy blackness above, the drums finally exploding into an actual rhythm with about 2 minutes to go, the guitars soaring into a serious frenzy, suddenly it sounds like the climax of an Explosions In The Sky song AND the finale of a Godspeed song all woven together into one explosive blown out finish.
As much as we love pretty much everything Fear Falls Burning, this record has us hoping this drum thing is not just a one off, but even if it is, we'll dig it while we can.
Huzzah! Our favorite instrumental down-under doom-bringers return (to disruption) with this new
full-length, the prolific Melbourne trio's debut for Neurosis' Neurot label. It's a good fit, of course, this should go over well with the whole post-rock/metal crowd, this album often grindingly hypnotic, the Grey Daturas' lumbering sheets of distorto-drone skullflowering forth over a roiling bed of precision percussive clangor right from the get-go! Their threatening waves of pure heaviness, sharpened into a drill-drone of an attack, also occasionally take detours into areas of abstract ambience, the guitars of Bonnie Mercer and Rob MacManus carving psychedelic feedback sculptures, then tightening again back into full metallic impact, driven by the skittering drums of Robert Manson.
As heavy as they are (which is HEAVY) you can't really call the Grey Dats a metal band. They're in that quasi-metal realm with the likes of SUNNO))), Boris, Harvey Milk, and Nadja, perhaps, with a certain amount of experimental lo-fi fuckery going on that reminds us of many of their freenoise comrades over in nearby New Zealand... The title track itself is a clattering, pottering about, like something the Dead C would come up with, while the track called "Undisturbed" is anything but, sounding like a violin or creaking door hinge dying a slow and dismal death. And the high-end scraping skree of "Balance Of Convenience" should peel some paint. And then, as already mentioned, there's all the juggernaut, trance-inducing, spaced-out, instrumental doom rock post rock surging through tracks like "Beyond And Into The Ulimate" and "Neuralgia".
The Grey Daturas definitely like all the varieties of drone! And fans of, what should we call it, avant-doom, or drone-doom, or whatever, should like all varieties of the Grey Daturas, starting with this disc if you haven't already made their acquaintance, covering all the bases as it does!
We could easily fill several paragraphs talking about the historical significance of Hellhammer (speaking of metal history, not world history, of course, though for some of us the two are of equal importance). But if you're reading this, and possibly already considering buying a deluxe double cd (or triple vinyl!) set of the band's early demo recordings, you probably already know something about the seminal significance of Swiss primal metal trio Hellhammer, the precursors to Celtic Frost. If you do want to know more, we'd point you to the liner notes to this release, written by HH/CF mainman Thomas Gabriel Fischer (aka Tom G. Warrior, aka Satanic Slaughter), which were adapted from his forthcoming book Only Death Is Real, all about the early '80s origins of those two bands.
As you probably know, Hellhammer started off as an amateur but enthusiastic exercise in teenage worship of NWOBHM black metal originators Venom, but took Venom's defining sound to further extremes, becoming a pioneering band not only in the black metal genre, but also for death metal and sludgy doom metal as well. And all this without much of a recorded legacy, just the 1984 Apocalyptic Raids ep and some compilation tracks and these demos, the band's initial recording sessions at long last presented officially on cd and vinyl, remastered from the original master tapes.
These three demo cassettes -- Satanic Rites, Death Fiend, and Triumph Of Death -- were released in mere handmade handfuls back in 1983. Including raw(er) versions of such later classics as "The Third Of The Storms", "Triumph Of Death", and "Revelations Of Doom", as well as many otherwise unheard Hellhammer hammerings, such morbid morsels as "Dark Warriors", "Crucifixion", "Decapitator", "Ready For Slaughter", and, er, "Bloody Pussies", it's 29 tracks, 102 minutes of truly ancient evil that any self respecting black/death/doom metaller should revel in. With a twanging low-end of rubbery bass, lurching riffs, pogoing rhythms, echoed vocals, these decidedly lo-fi recordings sound almost like a no-wave take on metal. Accidentally avant-garde (unlike Celtic Frost's later efforts to intentionally be so), Hellhammer were so wretched and fucked up that they've defined "necro" for all time. Hear here how they began.
The limited edition double cd version is packaged in a handsome, slipcased hardback digibook, 5.5" x 7.5", with a 36 page booklet bound inside, plus a small poster. Within the booklet, you'll find hella vintage black and white necro photography, xeroxed flier artwork, the original cassette covers, lyrics and liner notes from the band. Along with occult artwork, including a previously unpublished demonic pencil sketch by bassist Martin Eric Ain that, since it's rendered on graph paper, has us speculating that these guys probably were playing D&D in their bunker as well as recording the metal of death.
Meanwhile, the vinyl edition (also quite LIMITED, the eight we have are probably all we'll ever have) is a truly weighty proposition, 180 gram vinyl in a thick gatefold package with the aforementioned booklet, etc. as well.
Once the deluxe cd edition is gone, we'll have the regular, less-deluxe (but also less expensive) version.
Yet another archival release from grim suicidal one man black metal outfit I Shalt Become, aka S. Holliman, who hails from Illinois of all grim places, and who, as far as we can tell, has been pretty much inactive for the last decade. This release was recorded way back in 1998 and was originally released as a demo credited to Birkenau, the name Holliman used before switching to I Shalt Become.
Like Wanderings before it, In The Falling Snow is a fantastic, and fantastically twisted chunk of sorrowful black misery. As doomy as it is black, heavily indebted to Burzum of course, but I Shalt Become shares much in common with other more modern practitioners of this sort of ultra grim, plodding midtempo blackness, Xasthur, Krohm, Nortt, Make A Change Kill Yourself, the riffs buzzing and crumbling, the temps loping and dirgey, the mood grim and dour, super atmospheric, not lo-fi necessarily, but murky and muddy and washed out sounding, dreary and drone-y, sweeping swaths of epic keyboard, and the vocals, an exhausted miserable sounding croak, as if most of the lifeforce has already drained away, not leaving enough vitriol to howl or shriek, just enough energy to barely get out these last words from a moldering old deathbed, the wasted, dead quality of the vocals perfectly matching the depressive mood of the music.
But even as miserable and despondent and depressive as these sounds are, they're also hauntingly and harrowingly beautiful, soaring strings, minor key melodies, super dramatic and ultra personal, everything weirdly soft focus and dreamlike, the buzz and plod blurred into gauzy dronemetal soundscapes, the double kick, a pulse buried beneath thick layers of billowing fuzz, the riffs looped and repeated into black buzzing mantras. Way recommended of course, for the miserable and the black hearted.
As we commented in our review of the now out of print Laurie Bird cd-r from French bedroom drone-psych-folk duo Natural Snow Buildings, it always surprises us how bands with nothing but a MySpace page and a cd-r or two, can generate so much hype and excitement. It seems to be a common occurrence these days, with some bands even getting real live major label record deals purely on the strength of the handful of tracks on their MySpace page.
To be fair to Natural Snow Buildings, they have been a band since 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last 9 years, have only released 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! How does a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, possibly generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. But thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in this case, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Natural Snow Buildings is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be flooding the scene, this boy girl duo write songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
So here we have the very first proper cd release (others on the way, reissues of several of their various way-too limited cd-r's) from Natural Snow Buildings, bundled with an extra disc, featuring a whole record from both NSB members' solo projects, Twinsistermoon, whose last disc we reviewed recently, and Isengrind, the project of Solange, the female half of NSB.
Isengrind's half of disc one begins with some deep dark ambience, huge shimmering streaks of ominous sound, like an orchestra tuning up in a cave, drawn out into warm washes of dronelike sound, processed choral vocals, and wheezing accordions. That intro gives way to a buzzing Eastern style raga, lots of percussion, shakers, bells, hand drums, buried beneath a shimmery smear of thick coruscating buzz, a sea of sitars, with Solange's vocals soaring ghostlike over the top. The next track is a dark folky drift, a simple melody, fluttering flute, more abstract percussion, definitely reminiscent of Avarus and other Finnish forest folk, but somehow more ethereal, and genuinely folky. The rest of the Isengrind tracks drift from spectre like folk, simple strums soaked in reverb and wrapped around ethereal vocals, to more raga jams, Indian style buzz filtered through a fractured folk sensibility, to haunting cinematic ambience, abstract soundscapes rife with streaks of feedback and wheezing chordal whir, disembodied strum, mysterious vocals and sporadic percussion, tribal, primal, primitive and raw, but still dreamlike and lovely.
Mehdi begins his side of the disc, with a sound that perfectly compliments Solange's (and make it obvious why the two work so well together in NSB), long drawn out glimmering high end tones, draped over a dark minor key folky strum, and simple percussion, while Mehdi's feminine sounding falsetto soars over the top, all infused with some sort of freaky folky Wickerman vibe. Gorgeous and haunting. That track is followed up by a short chunk of perfect dreamfolk, simple folky strum, and Mehdi's crystal clear vocals, ringing out, pure and impossibly high, if you didn't know better you might think this was some rare track by some lost seventies female folkie.
And so it goes, tracks weaving back and forth, from warm washed out blissy dreamy dronescapes, to simple stripped down folk, often the two sounds drifting into each other, cross pollinating, the folk songs short and seemingly serving to separate the longer sprawling expanses of drone and shimmer, the two sounds dramatically different, but somehow complimenting one another perfectly.
So what happens when the two join forces, becoming Natural Snow Buildings? It would be way too easy to say that the sum equaled the parts, that if you took the sound of the two halves of the first disc, it would equal the whole of the second. There is certainly �some- truth to that, but it's not math, it's magic. Alchemy, musical sorcery, these are sounds not numbers, and thus are governed by forces far more magical and mysterious than physics or science. The two together join spirits, their natures become entwined, they draw from one another, each offering the other part of their soul, rendered in music. The results are truly divine. An assemblage of sounds, deftly woven into expansive shapes and hushed mystery, landscapes of drone and shimmer, of cinematic wonder and dark introspection. Some tracks are super abstract, layered near static drifts, longform movements that sonically evoke other lands, other times, the past long forgotten, the future not yet experienced, other tracks are wheezing sun dappled Appalachia, but turned inside out, the chords and notes seemingly drawn inward, toward the speakers, the vocals breathless and mournful, all laid atop a thick swirl of distorted riffage, other tracks are fragmented folk, all murky blurred piano, backwards guitars, heartsick melodies, wrapped in a thick gauzy production, smeared into snapshots glimpsed through eyes brimming with tears. Other tracks are space rock writ small, minimal dirges, drone jams, chanted vocals, strange stuttery percussion, and glorious buzzing guitars, culminating in the final track, which begins much like the others, all hazy and dreamlike, vocals ethereal, guitars spare and skeletal, until unexpectedly the band lock into some serious droned out space rock. A serious dark and druggy looped riff, a la Spacemen 3, Hawkwind, Loop, anchored by a simple pounding thudrock rhythm, driving intensely through swirling clouds of FX and warm whirring ambience, a seriously dense, propulsive krautjam, that just so happens to hide a soft drifting pop shimmer underneath, and while the track rocks with a surprising intensity, it's precisely what's underneath that turns the jam into something resplendent.
Gorgeous packaging, a fancy 4 panel gatefold digisleeve, with super striking original artwork and liner notes all drawn by Solange.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!
Yet another mysterious disc of ice music, from the ice music master, Terje Isungset. What is ice music you ask? Well Isungset crafts actual musical instruments out of ice, yep, ICE instruments, all playable, from horns to vibraphones, the tones they create lustrous and surprisingly warm.
The instruments are beautiful, ice sculptures, glowing blue and white shapes that when struck, or blown, or rubbed, produce amazing sounds. Much of the music is percussive, the ice sounding like amuted gamelan, or a xylophone, the notes lustrous and deep. There are horns as well (although we won't even begin to question how someone can play an icehorn without getting their lips stuck), whose sounds range from alien cries, honking bleats, deep moans and every variation in between.
Where past discs have been super pretty, serene, and almost new age in their blissed out tranquility, Iceman Is manages to create a sound a bit more dark and ominous. The vocals on past releases, which reminded us of Bjork, here are replaced by strange mewlings, creaking falsettos, haunting ghostlike whispers, drifting amid the ice chimes and cold ambience.
In fact minus the fact that this record is played primarily on ice instruments, it wouldn't be all that surprising to hear these sounds on some super limited cd-r, some strange band of Finnish folkies or mysterious Midwestern bedroom 4-trackers. Very percussive, tribal, primitive, abstract and free, the melodies are spare and spread out, every track seems to have a definite drone element, no matter how minimal, the ice percussion offers up dreamy underwater sounding rhythms, there are some electronics, but they blend in perfectly with the sounds of the ice, in fact there are some tradition instruments mixed in here and there, but so deftly, they also end up sounding dark and delicate and icy.
Too bad it will never be cold enough out here to get Isungset and his band here to play. Maybe we should get them to do a tour of walk in freezers! Anyway, another gorgeous disc of haunting music made with ice, the darkest of the bunch, which of course means WAY recommended.
And like the three ice music releases before it, Iceman Is also boasts some of the most amazing packaging we have ever seen. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of Isungset, behind icicles, playing the ice harp, in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, printed in silver metallic ink, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth, and yes, we mean ACTUAL water, in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and played! So awesome!
Another three inch chunk of demented black metal weirdness from the UK. If you love the grim bizarre buzz of Old Forest, who recently returned after nearly 7 years, and whose own 3" cd-r we reviewed a few lists back, or the medieval madness of Meads Of Asphodel, then odds are you're gonna love Jaldoboath. From the same strange land, and featuring at least one dark knight who has done time in both Meads and Old Forest, Jaldoboath sound a bit like the Meads mixed with power metal thrashers Bal Sagoth, if they were a bit less serious and had recorded a holiday album. Seriously. The guitars gallop, the riffs and melodies are soaring and triumphant, the vocals are gurgly and growly, but there are horns, fanfares, fluttering flutes, jaunty little jigs, strange little sound effects, proggy organs, it's almost like listening to the strangely metal court musicians of King Arthur's court in some alternate reality.
Songs like "Bring Me The Head Of Metatron", "Seek The Grail", "Hark The Herald" and "Da Vinci's Code", each track plays like the theme music for some insane medieval Monty Python metal sitcom. On "Seek The Grail" you can almost picture the credits, the freeze frames as each character is introduced, and the horns, make it sound almost ska at times. "Jargue De Molay" is the least goofy, playing instead like some metallized Emerson Lake And Palmer, with awesome organ jams, creepy crackly breakdowns, a wicked main riff, all peppered with hand claps, blasting double kick, minor key trumpets, throbbing bass.
But then right after that comes the title track, which has a strange sing song vocal line, over a lopped trumpet fanfare, and a very holiday sounding main melody. Like a legion of musical mall Santa's gone metal and marauding through the hordes of innocent holiday shoppers. But then the last track swoops in, sounding a bit like Tool filtered through UK black metal buzz, all brooding buzz, Eastern sitar like melodies, and crooned baritone vocals. Over the top and dramatic, and weirdly hooky. WTF?
So fucking far out. But if like us, you're already a loyal knight of the Meads round table and sometime dweller in the Old Forest, well then this is just the sort of thing you can't get enough of.
WAY recommended, but only for truly twisted musical souls...
And like the Old Forest 3"cd-r also on Death To Music, SUPER LIMITED!!!
Holy geeze. 'Nother day, 'nother Jandek. We reviewed the representative from Corwood's fine new studio album The Myth Of Blue Icicles just last list, now here's another in his series of live recordings. It's Jandek album number 53 overall!! As the title indicates, 'twas recorded in Glasgow, Scotland, on a Friday. Specifically, Friday 10/14/05.
His usual Glasgow crew of Richard Youngs (bass) and Alex Neilson (drums) backs him up. The all new tracks include "This Wasted Life", "Slave Of The River", "If I Could Be With You", "My Plan", and eight more, all ditties in the Jandekian stylee of extreme outsider rock improv, the music atonally skronky and stompy, or hauntingly spare and strummy, the man's vocals a dismal and disturbed presence.
This is THE perfect purchase for anyone looking to add a 53rd item to their Jandek collection. And even if you don't have that many Jandek discs, we'd recommended it merely for the presence of AQ fave Youngs. How 'bout a full-on Jandek/Youngs collaboration next time, guys?
Apparently this album hit the Billboard "New Age" charts! Not sure how or why, you wouldn't think that a collaboration between one of the Swans and a member of Godflesh would qualify as New Age (and it really isn't!). Downtempo electronica with some avant-garde elements, more like, with hints of doomic menace. If you're looking for the crushing metallic guitars of Godflesh, you won't quite find them, though many passages are deep and dark and spooky enough to remind us of Broadrick's current project Jesu.
The deal with this perhaps inevitable collaboration (inevitable given Broadrick's obvious Swans fandom, and Jarboe's openness to collaborative ventures, witness her earlier disc with Neurosis), is that it's JB making mostly electronic backgrounds for Jarboe to do her thing vocally... operatic excesses, and mewlings and moanings... so obviously you've got to be into "her thing". Some are, some aren't. The ambient, layered and looped wailings of the opener, "Decay", should separate the two camps pretty clearly. Some will find Jarboe's vocals to be full of mystery and emotion, others, simply irritating (though it's only on "Tribal Limo" that we really got annoyed with her, the track featuring weird Diamanda Galas yodelling over junky Gang Gang Dance-ish beats).
That said, for those into Jarboe, there's a lot to like here. And we can kind of see how, New Age or not, this could crack the charts on the strength some of the better cuts, like "Let Go" which sounds a lot like Portishead or Bjork, Jarboe effecting a babygirl voice under a blanket of crackley drone, accompanied by a spare snare thwack...
You hear that? That echoing, droning, heavy psych jamming destroying your mind? Yep, at last, we've got 'em. Real cds, not cd-rs. Reasonably priced. More than a handful in stock (for now). The distorto-delic seventies Japanese guitar psych holy grail known as "Live '77", previously released only in an absurdly expensive, impossible to track down double cd-r edition, and in part on long-gone vinyl bootlegs, is now within your grasp (almost). This we expect to have around for more than two seconds at least, and is a comparative steal at only $25. Nicely done too, with a die cut cover revealing a blurry b&w photo of Les Rallizes Denudes guitarist Mizutani Takashi in action.
Disc one starts off exploring Les Rallizes mellow side, all sensitive and lovely, with "Enter The Mirror", but then soon explodes into sheer amplified overload, with throbbing mantric rhythms Circle fans should dig. It's a searing wash of guitars in the most far out VU, Neil Young, Fushitsusha realm, but taken way further out. Rough, raw live sound, but really all the fuzz and distortion and grit sounds just right. There's four long tracks on disc one, three looong tracks on disc two. By the time the epic 20+ minute "The Last One" on disc two marches into white noise oblivion, you -- and maybe your speakers -- will be fried.
Apparently, Takashi and co. are still out there, somewhere in Japan, making music as they have been for the past 30-odd years, but rarely leaving a recorded trace. But this 1977 live set isn't just about the only thing really available, it's also proof of their obscure genius. Next to 60's beat-psych legends the Jacks, they are maybe THE pioneering Japanese psychedelic outfit, obviously a BIG influence on today's underground Japanese psych bands, like Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha, High Rise and Mainliner, Acid Mothers Temple, Nagisa Ni Te, maybe even noiseniks Hijokaidan... All of 'em could simply be Les Rallizes tributes, really. We'd have to imagine that Keiji Haino and co. caught some Rallizes shows back in the day. So, if you like any of that stuff, you need this...and if you're the sort who buys every admittedly fine Kawabata Makoto/AMT cd or LP released every goddamn week, you have to get this just to help with the cosmic balance, man. Get 'em now, while you can!
Uh, what?? If you would have told us that our favorite Belgian carrots n' beer obsessed black metal weirdoes Lugubrum (who are also one of our favorite black metal bands, period!) would title their new album Albino de Congo and incorporate African thumb-piano music a la AQ faves Konono No.1, we'd have thought you were pulling our legs, trying to up the ante on our made-up album April Fool's jokes from a few years back.
But of course, it's no longer April, and the band being Lugubrum, we have to believe it. Heck, we're HEARING it. The new Lugubrum is here, and it does indeed take their raw black metal attack into "Extreme Music from Africa" territory, with song titles like "Lugwampinga", "Bwikalubalume" and "Kurlerha Omugongo". There's a picture of a thumb piano in the cd booklet, and they claim this album was in fact recorded in the Congo. Is it a joke? With these guys, it always is AND it always isn't, which is why we love 'em so much... also 'cause their music is invariably awesome. (And with Belgium's colonial history in the Congo, we can perhaps assume there's specific cultural/political dimensions to Lugubrum's interest in that part of the world.)
We see no reason why Conrad's Heart of Darkness can't be just as useful a black metal inspiration as Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. So in exploring their own hearts of darkness, the metallic component here is FIERCE. But they've given it a Congolese context. Thus, for instance, they'll be tearing through the vicious riffage of "Kabondobondo, Muborobondo" and then some hand-drumming will rise to the surface. Or the sounds of the jungle at night make an appearance in the midst of "Kurlerha Omugongo". A lot of the time it seems they'll save the polyrhythmic hand drums and tinkling thumb pianos and shamanistic chanting and other ethnic instrumental elements for the beginnings and ends of songs, though maybe they're there the whole time but just can't be heard above the din of buzzing black metal guitars and blasting drum battery and Frosty death-grunts.
And, remember that Lugubrum can be (and always has been) plenty odd without the addition of this African influence. So there's some very strange beets, we mean beats, and lovely jazzy or post-rocky interludes (like the dreamy "Mushole"), and other weirdness to be heard here unrelated to the Congo concept. When this is playing, at times you could easily forget that you had a "black metal" record on, and think you were listening to, say, the krauty rhythms of Circle instead. Lugubrum have a knack for mixing all sorts of strange stuff into a cohesive whole, it all flows somehow without any jarring juxtapositions actually spoiling your, uh, suspension of disbelief.
While we don't really believe that this was recorded in the Congo, we'd like to think it was true, and can't prove otherwise. What we will assert is that this is another excellent, eccentric Lugubrum album, and quite recommended!
Oh, and another note: this is one time we're happy we DIDN'T get the limited edition, as supposedly the first 100 copies of this were "cursed and pissed on by pygmy medicine men". Believe it, or don't, but don't ask us for one of those!
With most noise bands you can usually figure out how the sounds are made, where they come from. Even if the source is run through a bank of effects, totally processed and distorted, it's usually pretty easy to tell if it's a synthesizer, or a guitar or just a voice.
But with Monopoly Child Star Searchers, we are just confounded, gloriously and utterly so. MCSS is a side project of the uber prolific Skaters, and as we mentioned in the last MCSS review, we might dig Monopoly even more than the mother ship. Precisely because their sounds are so totally tweaked. So completely alien. It sounds impossible that these sounds could just be conjured up. They are so rich and textured but the sound is so completely lo fidelity.
Besides all that, the sounds themselves are really hard to describe. It sounds like some dusty old African 78s, being played at 156rpm, broadcast through a spinning Leslie speaker. Everything warbly and murky, lots of high end percussive melody, almost like sped up marimbas or thumb pianos, speaking of which it also sort of sounds like a way sped up shortwave broadcast of some lost Konono live jam.
The whole disc is swirly and tripped out, dense and dizzy, relentless and tribal, druggy and dreamy, so totally hypnotic and mesmerizing. And still after repeated listens, we have no idea what the instrumentation is, how it was recorded, if it's live or sampled, all we know is it's super cracked and weirdly beautiful and we love it!
We've ballyhooed Brendan Murray's exceptional, yet perennially overlooked drone & din work in the past; but nothing could have prepared us for Commonwealth. Damn, this guy is good. No, wait; he's fucking great! After a handful of cd-r productions, a Twonicorn cassette, and a fine cd release on Intransitive of processed shimmer, shifting frequencies, and some low-end girth rumblings for our obligatory SUNNO))) reference, Brendan Murray has produced his best work to date with Commonwealth. Compositionally, it's incredibly simple: a drone goes up, and it goes down. It lasts a little under 50 minutes. But buried with this single minded composition, there are thick spun rumbles, reflective vibrations, sympathetic sub-harmonics, and rich tonal frequencies. Out of the constant tectonic whir that introduces Commonwealth, shimmering clusters sound like a battery of reed organs or hurdy-gurdies, slowly modulating into heavier, deeper drones. We've been told that the source material for these sounds is guitar, although you'd be hard pressed to hear anything guitar-shaped anywhere on the disc. It's far more like the hallowed minimalist sound of Charlemangne Palestine and LaMonte Young. Dare we say, it's better? Yes, Murray's drone hums like a perfectly tuned machine, with multiple pistons purring in a steady progress along Commonwealth's compositional arc. When Murray shifts the focus of the album downward, which begins not even halfway through the piece, the descent is noticeable; but it actually becomes Murray's most fertile work within Commonwealth. Here, low rhythmic thrumbs crawl beneath the surface of the slowly collapsing drone, precluding its inevitable terminus. Perfect trance-enducing dronemuzik. Fans of Aidan Baker, Andrew Chalk, and Phill Niblock should definitely take note!
While not new, we only just discovered NID, and our discovery came about in a very random manner, considering various related works were right under our nose. We listed a killer 4 way split 12" a while back called One Man Drone, and our favorite track from the spit was a piece by a group called B(degree)Tong. We later discovered that the man behind B(degree)Tong was previously a member of German experimental sound-collective NID. But what we did not know was that NID was sometimes also known as Feine Trinkers Bei Pinkels Daheim, a group who had various releases on the Drone Records label, one of which is included on the recent tUMULt collection of out of print Drone singles.
So now it's sort of come full circle and we have this, the only proper full length recording (as far as we know) from the group NID, aka Feine Trinkers Bei Pinkels Daheim and it's pretty amazing. Pretty bizarre too, but then with a (sometime) name like Feine Trinkers Bei Pinkels Daheim, what else would you expect?
Three looooooooong tracks. Each an epic, incredibly varied soundworld, blending found sounds and field recordings with drones and intense blasts of layered sound. The opener begins with a muted cacophony of birds and crickets, before disappearing into a roiling black cloud of rumbling low end and distant droning guitar buzz. It almost sounds like sticking your head out of a speeding car, the wind whipping by and causing all sorts of distortions, but blurred into an impressively massive wall of sound. Within all this whipping sonic wind and rumbling whirs, are strange bits of percussion, the clang and bang of metal on metal, shakers and simple rhythms, they drift briefly in the eye of the storm, before the drone drops again, even more furious than before, until it fades out amidst the dreamy shimmer of female vocals and haunting minor key melodic buzz. Really intense and strangely beautiful.
The second track is another deep cavernous roar. A bit smoother than the previous number, but not for long, bit of metallic buzz surface amidst the undulating rumbles, with some serious dynamic spikes, some of which sound like brief bursts of SUNNO 0))), and others are even lower and more aggressive bits of low end exploration. There are bits of static and random buzz here and there, but mostly it's black and dark, a massive growling beast, slowly uncoiling into a monster that blocks out the sun. Near the end of the track, the darkness abates and in its place is a strange skipping stuttering snippet of music, wrapped in hazy distortion and looped into a mesmerizing rhythm, repeated over and over and over, gradually crumbling and becoming more and more distorted before erupting into a final burst of chest rattling low end, finally slowing down and sputtering to a halt.
The final track is over twenty minutes and is the most melodic of the bunch. Beginning with a looped cycle of xylophone melody, over a throbbing low end pulse and streaks of keening distant guitar and bits of operatic female vocals. Very ominous and mysterious sounding. When suddenly everything stops, and there's a guy with a British accent ranting over someone ransacking a kitchen, breaking glass, clanging cutlery, and suddenly it's gone, and we're back in some new dronescape, a mumbled voice looped into a haunting mantra, beneath distant thunder like rumbles, and little blurs of high end melody, indistinct, but gradually building in intensity. The drones drift away leaving birds and voices, and some strange bits of hiss and skree, before transforming into a plodding doomdrone beast. A simple stretched out rhythm over cavernous thrums and the sound of subway cars, everything pulsing and throbbing, a bizarre bit of dark collage, that manages to be strangely musical and completely hypnotic.
An amazingly weird record, and absolutely essential listening for the drone obsessed, which we would assume should be most of you...
UK label Barl Fire has a darn near perfect record with kick ass releases from James Blackshaw, Rameses III, Robert Horton, Lamp Of The Universe, Floating World, United Bible Studies, The North Sea, Uton and more. Their focus seemingly on drone folk and free rock. Their last two releases however, this one, and the James Reid (reviewed elsewhere on this list) have begun to drift more toward straight ahead folk, or at least the sort of modern folk of New Weird America and similar minded hippies. Where as the James Reid channels the spirit of Nick Drake, the Nihil Project is more of a pagan ritual, a sort of Renaissance Wicker Man mystickal magickal folk. Sitars and zithers, tablas, harpischords, violins, along with more traditional acoustic guitars and flutes as well as some little more modern electronic flourishes. Crooning vocals, lilting melodies, occasionally dark and ominous, but just as often playful and festive. Definitely for fans of the Wicker Man, Pentangle, Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Forest, Comus, as well as the new breed of modern folk a la Devendra, Brightblack, Newsom and the like...
Heavy.
Black.
Drone.
That's the shorthand of what happens on Passing Out, the finale to a trilogy proposed by Benny Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa on the virtues and vices of alcohol blurred into a sinister ambience. But of course, we cannot leave well enough alone; and the longhand version is necessary to position this album at the top of the heap of heavy, black, drone albums that we continue to clamor about. Yes, Passing Out is a fucking brilliant album; and if you were blown away by the previous two entries in this trilogy -- Vikinga Brennivin and Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna -- then you're pretty much obligated to pick this album up as well.
Much like Nilsen's old project Hazard and the previous two collaborative records, the album starts in shadow and stealth with an ominous drone backing windswept industrial field recordings. Ten minutes in, this desolate cold snaps with a blinding shimmer of sustained sound. These are ostensibly lighter tones, but given a malevolent twist. Another agitation of activity fires with some sort of tactile crackling that dissolves into a gaping Lustmord meets Popul Vuh passage with a soft rhythm from some slow motion maracas. Benny tells us that these stoned maracca shakes are courtesy of Oren Ambarchi. He also tells us that Leif Elggren also makes a vocal appearance somewhere on the album; but there's nothing that sounds like the sly narration on The Ghost Orchid here. Soon after, a cyclical growl of spectral guitars recall what Robert Hampson used to be able to sculpt through the guitar on his once mighty project Main; and all of this gives way to ring-modulated percolations with disembodied melodies scratched from old 78s that sound like a transistor radio slowly drowning in a giant metal tank filled with water. Deep resonant vibrations abound, with some creepy breathing in your ear whisperings that may be those Leif Elggren vocals that Benny was talking about. Gradually, all of these deep drones and shadowy overtures glide into a slumbering descent. But the Icelandic weirdoes in Stilluppsteypa couldn't just let the album drift away without their absurdism forcing through the door, as they blurt with a clinical repetition of blooping electronics smashed and grabbed from Raymond Scott circa Manhattan Research. It's an unsettling climax to the album, but one that works brilliantly through Stilluppsteypa's expert use of electro-acoustic black humor. But it's drone that dominates the album, as angelic wash and devilish rumble collude to end this magnificent album. Oblivion never sounded so good.
Passing Out is beautifully packaged with letterpressed and silkscreened artwork. Very nice.
It's always a joy to rediscover an album from your youth that's stood the test of time, offering not only a comfy nostalgic feel but also remaining wonderfully listenable decades later. This one's a keeper (particularly if you ask Cup!), and we don't even really need the bonus disc of b-sides and other extras included in this expanded 2008 tour edition. The alternate renditions of "Down In The Park" and "Are 'Friends' Electric?"will surely geek the super duper fans though!
On a passing glance at the synthesized surface of Gary Numan's music it'd be easy to dismissed it along with the hordes of '80s new wave fluff and cheese. Heck, he was the king of British new wave back then! However if you move past your feelings good or bad for his ultra hit single "Cars", you'll be rewarded with near classical compositional elegance, heartbreakingly beautiful melodic interludes, not to mention Numan's remarkably emotive voice expressing his dystopic Philip K. Dick, W.S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard inspired lyrics. All these things stand in stark contrast to the emotionless android chill commonly associated with the genre, and ultimately that's the point that's made crystal clear when hearing Replicas nearly three decades after its original release. While it certainly appeals to the new waver in all of us, it delivers so much more!
Angry Eelectric Finger was a project that Steven Stapleton began back in 2003, having asked irr. app. (ext.), Cyclobe, and Jim O'Rourke to rework some unreleased Nurse With Wound material for three separate takes on three separate albums. The NWW material was known as the Zero Mix and was only made available as a bonus to those who pre-ordered the entire trilogy from Beta-Lactam. Well, near five years later, the Zero Mix resurfaces. This time Beta-Lactam has housed the music with a massive 220 page book filled with images of Stapleton's paintings. As for the music of the Zero Mix, it's classic Nurse With Wound, all dark, unsettling, and obtuse. A crawling loop of what sounds like detuned church bells plods along with some sort of hand-crank grinding, following much of what Stapleton and Colin Potter offered on Salt Marie Celeste. Elsewhere, the weirdo factor is turned up with some varispeed mutations on spring loaded plucked strings, which in turn recalls some of the oddball moments of Homotopy To Marie. Out of these sounds, some saxophone splutter creeps into the mix, marking the final available recordings from Xhol Caravan's Tim Belbe. Car crash white noise and hurdy-gurdy drones complete the media in the pastiche. For some reason, the cd is split into three tracks although there is no discernible difference with the vinyl, which only had two. While there's no text explaining the context of the artwork, each image looks to be painted on a repurposed lp, with Stapleton's psychedelic smears of bright, plastic paints with all sorts of Dali-esque squiggles, amoebas, hands, breasts, penises, and eyes making up a huge inventory of circular mandalas. Some of the last images, show all of these records mounted taxonomically on the wall, part of the installation of paintings that Stapleton did at the Burren School of Art, a few years back. Beautifully done.
Keep in mind that this is one of three variations in presenting Images / Zero Mix, as there's just the book (with no cd) and there's also a massive 14" x 7" box that holds both the book and cd with an entirely different second cd as well.
