WARNING: You -should- play this loud. But still, be careful! Make sure any of your easily-aggravated housemates aren't asleep. Move breakable objects out of the way. Take your heart medication. All reasonable precautions before subjecting yourself to the might of 16-17's newly reissued Gyatso.
The music of Switzerland's 16-17 has been called industrial free jazz. And it's certainly got the swarming, squealing saxophones of the most freaked out free jazz we've heard. But with its industrial/metallic elements, the BRUTAL trance-inducing grind of martial drumming and guitar chuggery, maybe "free" jazz isn't the word. How 'bout "totalitarian jazz"? When we previously highlighted the two-cd Early Recordings collection of 16-17's '80s output, we described the band as the "Gods of ultra extreme hardcore free jazz post punk whatthefuck". Ok, that's about right.
Well, Gyatso, originally released in 1994 on Kevin Martin's long gone Pathological imprint (home to Martin's projects like Techno Animal, God, and Ice, as well as crucial discs by Oxbow, Peter & Caspar Brotzmann, Terminal Cheesecake, Zeni Geva, etc.) was even more insane than the stuff on Early Recordings, being to us the pinnacle of 16-17's recorded existence. The thing is, this album takes their earlier excesses into a whole new realm, finally getting their music the heavy duty production treatment it deserved. It's about the heaviest "jazz" ever! Basically, imagine Godflesh teamed up with Peter Brotzmann and this is about what you'd get. The aggressive, constantly-escalating tension of machine-gunning opener "Attack-Impulse" pretty much wipes the floor with all other contenders, going beyond the likes of Zorn's Painkiller or fellow Swiss maniacs Alboth! It simply kills. Having done so, for the rest of the disc 16-17 make sure you stay good and dead with an expansive onslaught of repetitive, rigid rhythms and psychedelic skree-scapes, with brassy bass drone and high-end sax skronk swimming in an ominous electronic miasma. A couple extra-noisy remixes are included at the end to wrap things up in the most extreme manner possible. (These appeared on the original version too.)
The trio responsible for making this masterwork consisted of Alex Buess (screaming saxophones and bass clarinet), Markus Kneubuhler (guitar, electronics and tapes), and the relentless Knut Remond on drums. Also, this disc features a couple very special guests: on utterly sick, thuddering bass, there's Ben "G.C." Green of (indeed) Godflesh fame. And providing electronic samples, Pathological head honcho Kevin Martin.
This essential reissue has been digitally remastered by Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers), and comes with a thick booklet of extensive new liner notes based on interviews with Buess and Martin, discussing the history of the band. We were fascinated to learn that Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine was such a big fan of 16-17 that back in 1995, he actually invited Alex Buess to work with him on the (still unrealized) follow up to Loveless! Who would have guessed? Apparently Alex spent a month in the studio with MBV, without much to show for it unfortunately... though we'd be still interested to hear what they were up to..
But, it surely couldn't be anything like this, there's nothing better as far as "ultra extreme hardcore free jazz industrial" or whatever is concerned!!
We couldn't be happier about the disco revival that has swept through the music scene over the last year or two. It's exciting that a whole new generation is discovering the high energy and sexually charged dance floor burners that were such important anthems for so many underrepresented communities in popular culture (queer, African-American, Latino, etc.). While producers like Giorgio Moroder and Patrick Cowley have finally been rediscovered by a whole new generation of kids who dig stuff like Justice, Glass Candy and the Chromatics, we're hoping it will happen for Patrick Adams too.
Born in Harlem in 1950, Adams is an amazingly rare breed of producer, having managed to stay fresh and vital for more then three decades. He has worked with everyone from Astrud Gilberto to Eric B. & Rakim, Sister Sledge to Salt 'n Pepa, Eddie Kendricks to The Salsoul Orchestra. Maybe best known for the irresistible disco jam by Musique "In The Bush", Adams was one of the few producers of the disco-era who continued to make cool and innovative records throughout the '80s and well into the '90s.
Master Of The Masterpiece 2 digs really deep into Adams' vaults, as none of these tracks have been available on cd before, and finding original vinyl versions is damn near impossible. From the playful disco of Bumble Bee Unlimited, the strong and soulful stylings of Debbie Taylor, the electro robotic sounds of The "P" Crew and the breezy funk of the Universal Robot Band, all 12 tracks here show how carefree sounds can be made with backbone and conviction. So when you wanna dance in style or ride around town with the top down, we can't think of a better of a soundtrack than these Patrick Adams gems!
Tetuzi Akiyama has always been one of the weirdest of the whole "Wooden Guitar" bunch, doing the lovely steel-string, neo-Appalachian folk thing a la Jack Rose and James Blackshaw in the John Fahey tradition sometimes, yeah, but often bringing to it the fractured logic and significant silences of the experimental "onkyo" improv scene he's a part of in Japan. Then there's his whole, under-documented uber-repetitive, electrified avant-garde "boogie" side. And, when he was here earlier this year and did an instore at Aquarius, he held us spellbound with slow-motion string pluckings that we could barely hear.
So it's something of a surprise to find that this new seven-song, 15 and a half minute ep from Akiyama is entirely song-based, and not only that, he SINGS. There's lyrics printed on the cd sleeve, cryptic poetry suggestive of Biblical commands. Vocally, he sounds something like Devendra Banhart, believe it or not! But his nasal vocals are stereo-effected (double tracked), and maybe a bit off-key... so imagine The Shaggs doing a Devendra impression. The music fits with that to, as of course being Akiyama his compositions aren't gonna be easily grokked by your typical folk-fan. There's a definite Jandek-ishness to this, but by way of Takoma, an alienated, atonal quality that (for us) feeds perfectly into the strange dismal blues mood he's trying to conjure. With wheezing harmonica drones, rattling maracas, Akiyama's delta-delic acoustic guitar, and some dabbling in electronics, he has us spellbound again with these atypical Akiyama-ized death chants.
Brand new 7" of delicate beauty and haunting songsmithery from Mr. Oren Ambarchi, who hasn't had much time lately for his own music making, as he seems to be a constant part of the Southern Lord / SUNNO))) axis, being a part of at least three groups we know of. But we've pretty much loved every one of Ambarchi's releases and this new single is no different.
Using electric guitars, organ, bells, samples, percussion and motorized cymbal (!), Ambarchi has created to dramatically different pieces. The A side is a woozy, washed out underwater sounding loopscape, peppered with record crackle (unless that's coming from the record player, either way, it sounds great!), like a slightly jauntier, less melancholy Oval, major key melody, all softly sunshine-y, a dreamily hypnotic stretch of soft swirl that could go on forever.
The B side is much darker, long streaks of shimmery low end beneath haunting slowed down vocals, mournful and mysterious, the vocals and the guitar drift and shift, all wound up in and around each other, throughout, bits of electronic glitchery, smears of muted buzz, snippets of conversation and dialogue, but all that stuff seems to be woven into an undulating backdrop for Ambarchi's ghostlike disembodied blues.
As always, packaged in super striking thick matte sleeve with gorgeous photos and layout from Touch head honcho Jon Wozencroft.
Another strange (but then again, maybe not so strange) collaboration. Karl from Axolotl and Elisa from Magic Markers get together to make some beautiful and slightly noisy music together.
Elisa's guitar seems to be taking center stage on the A side, scrabbly and angular, chaotic and scarping and grinding, dense tangles of high end squiggle and scrape laid over a distant hum of tape hiss and other abstract ambience.
The flipside is more bluesy, kind of. A sort of ghostlike disembodied folk, a bit of twang, lots of clunk and clatter, stumbly and spacious, the notes and melodies gnarled and twisted into strange atonal shapes, deep rumbling swells here and there, clouds of high end shimmer, soft washed out buzz, a dreamy creaky blissed out noiseflecked abstract guitarscape. Haunting and strangely pretty.
Extremely limited. We have a handful but they probably won't last long...
Initially, it's difficult to appreciate Water Curses on its own merits, and not as the follow up to staggering records like Feels, Sung Tongs, and Panda Bear's Person Pitch, whose influence on contemporary indie music will be felt for a long time to come. In this context, it falls flat, but if you can find the patience to discover it on its own terms, it's not really a bad little ep, and quite possibly even a good one. Fans of Panda Bear's distinctive croon will be disappointed however, as Avey Tare is at the vocal helm of every track, though PB's influence is certainly felt through the nobs and dials of his Dr. Sample. Truly, the title track is as perfect a piece of out-there pop as Animal Collective have ever made, barring perhaps the classic "Who Could Win A Rabbit." It's intoxicatingly catchy, and sends you through a captivating gauntlet of shifts in momentum leaving you delightfully exhausted. The remaining three tracks are all spare in comparison, but each with its own specific charm. "Street Flash" is spacious with sudden screaming accents, and some fantastically wacked vocal processing. Also memorable perhaps for its pathos-enriched lyrics including the standout: "Does anyone in here get hit with inside fevers?"
"Cobwebs" has its roots in sampling, with only a little bit of guitar work, but some fantastic vocal hooks, and exalted whoops and hollers. The final track, "Seal Eyeing", the only track that wasn't tracked in the Strawberry Jam sessions, is a gentle tour of aquatic tableaus and marine communiques, perhaps most noteworthy for its mournfully placid tone, a place Animal Collective hasn't really taken us since the latter half of Sung Tongs. Each song on this ep has its own distinct allure, but in comparison to the revelations embedded in the band's previous work, it's a bit limp. What's difficult to determine, is whether unseasoned ears would find this work as mesmerizing as earlier Animal Collective, or whether there really is something missing. We're not sure. But needless to say, Water Curses will get its far share of spins, if only because it is so damn pleasant.
What to say about Avarus that we haven't already said? Have a look at the aQ website for review after review extolling the virtues of these freaky foresty folky Finns. Heck, Andee even liked them enough to out out a double cd of theirs on tUMULt.
Longtime readers of the aQ list are no doubt by now familiar with Avarus and the sonic orbit they exist in. Kemialliset, Anaksimandros, Fonal Records, but of all the multitude of soundmakers and amazing records, there's just something special about Avarus that makes them maybe our favorite of the bunch.
This lp-only release captures the group on tour in the US in 2006 and 2007, and live Avarus can be a much heavier and riffier beast. Two sidelong jams, the first recorded in Washington D.C., finds the band channeling German Oak, offering up a murky buzzy groove, that sounds like it was recorded in some bunker, the guitars muddy and thick, the percussion simple and propulsive, a gorgeous and druggy blow out that takes up most of the side, but eventually the riffs drift off, leaving a scattered abstract soundscape of bird calls and weird vocalizations, of detuned guitar and stumbling skronk, swirling effects and mumbled chanting, angular and obtuse, building to a cacophonous finale.
The B side, recorded in Providence, is like the second half of the first side expanded to nearly half an hour, total abstract minimalism, dada-ist sound making of the highest order, reeds creak and shriek, percussion stumbles and skitters, vocals are spoken, hummed, broadcast through a megaphone, deep resonant swells surface and quickly fade away, the track growing gradually more and more chaotic, the vocals transformed into moans, the drumming growing more frenzied, the air seeming to thicken with murky buzz and fuzzed out whir, as if the fidelity in the room is slowly decreasing. A pretty neat trick, and one that surely suits Avarus' absurdist sensibilities.
Packaged in a full color fold over sleeve, with a printed full color insert. Pressed on beautiful greenish clear vinyl. And pretty limited of course, just can't remember HOW limited. VERY we're guessing...
Beans returns with his latest post-Antipop Consortium solo outing, and it offers up an infectious and tweaked out mix of primitive electro crunch and swaggering old school b-boy flow that further cements Beans as an outsider stuck between hip hop and something else. Beans' lyrical skills have never been sharper than they are here, as he spits and bites through topics ranging from the personal (fatherhood, his own childhood) to the polemic (the state of hip hop, race, politics) to the playful (fantastical sexcapades, taunts, boasts).
Likewise, the production (mostly by Beans himself, but with a few contributions from Dabrye and Holy Fuck) is more focused and consistent than it has been on previous outings - it's a dense, future primitive sound that manage to push boundaries and look forward without losing sight of its roots.
To anyone who has followed Beans' solo work, Thorns won't throw any curve balls; rather, it offers a more concise and focused approach to the music he's been making over the past half decade. The record is both brainy and brawny, and is recommended for anyone with a penchant for fractured electro beatsmithery, lyrical acrobatics, and hip hop that harkens back to the old school.
Any record bearing the legend: "All the music on this cd has been created using a very old record player, second hand microphones, discarded tape recorders and various bits of wire" pretty much has to be good. Well okay, maybe HAS TO is exaggerating, but at the very least that sort of description is enough to get us very intrigued.
And in this case, it is good, but at the same time nothing at all like we were expecting.
We had imagined some sort of washed out Philip Jeck style drones, or pixelated Tim Hecker-ish soundscapes, or even the sort of crackling slow decay of William Basinski's tape pieces, but instead, Grant Beran has taken old records and some junky beat up equipment and used them to create surprisingly rhythmic tracks, utilizing various cracks and pops, and skips to fashion almost-grooves, like a lo-fi DJ Shadow sort of. The opener is all fuzzy and buzzy, but with a super driving beat, a skipping record looped into a hypnotic groove, a little bit techno, a little bit hip hop, a little creepy Goblin soundtrack, and a lot fuzzed out turntable buzz. It's not hard to imagine some clever DJ adding huge beats to this and you'd have the most fucked up lo-fi dancefloor jam ever. But we don't want to exaggerate the 'dance' aspect, it's more like the soundtrack to some lost John Carpenter movie, dubbed from VHS to VHS to home stereo to microcassette recorder until it ended up sounding like this, groove and fuzzy and murky and awesome!
The second track is much more moody and atmospheric, the rhythms an afterthought, that seem to surface randomly, while the meat of the track is deep sonorous tones, throbbing and distorted, woven into some low end melody. The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between hushed whispery ambient drone, and weirdly distorted lo-fi grooves, standout's include the buzzy electro jam of "The Man In The High Castle", the cinematic krautrocky murk of "Double Star", the almost Chain Reaction dub of "Star Collector" and the droney buzz and grind of "Gleanings".
Falling somewhere between experimental turntable soundscapery and a moody cinematic DJ record, Beran has skillfully woven sonic straw into fuzzy, stuttery, groovy gold, taking turntables and dreamdrone ambience into rhythmic places until now, as far as we know completely unexplored! WAY recommended.
Another new record from AQ's patron saint of buzz and drone and epic soundscapery, New Zealand's Mr. Campbell Kneale, aka Birchville Cat Motel. Every new BCM record is full of new sonic directions, new discoveries, Kneale deftly managing to forge ahead musically, while somehow infusing whatever it is he's doing with a distinct Birchville sound, that while difficult to describe, is not at all difficult to hear.
This lp only release comes from Belgium's Conspiracy records, hence the hefty price tag, but like all BCM records it's well worth it.
This one starts out with a bang. Or rather a grinding dirgey rrrrooooar. Sounding more and more like a full band, right out of the gate Kneale is spewing an avalanche of super chaotic and noisy doooooom, squalls of distortion, sheets of feedback, pounding drums, a seriously brutal chunk of heaviness, but that eventually gives way to a drones out bagpipe jam (an electric bagpipe, part of Kneale's unique sonic arsenal), sounding almost like a heavier more epic Amps For Christ. Drone-y and raga-like, the long drawn out upper register tones eventually bliss out into a whirring tranquil outro laced with deep soft swells and dreamlike whirs.
The flipside begins with tangle of thick buzz and streaks of rumbling low end, underpinning a garbled downtuned angular melody, strangely and sort of impossibly noisy and pretty simultaneously. The track lurches into full forward motion, as if we were in for another doomic dirge, but instead, the track transforms into a glistening bliss out, all sputtery percussion and twinkling high end, eventually finishing off in the same manner as side A, but here the outro is a bit more intense, the tranquility disrupted by muted shards of atonal chaos, finally drifting off to silence.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!! With super intense four panel, fold out, full color cover, with artwork by Seldon Hunt.
Already up to issue number 3! Issues #1 and #2 are already sold out, but it looks like we can look forward to the regular appearance of many future issues. Editor Eric "Anomalous" Lanzillotta (with the able assistance of Patrick Marley, Rob Millis, Allan MacInnis and others) has really got a 'zine on his hands.
He explains that the main purpose of Bixobal is to be "delving deeper into the worlds of the musicians behind the music" in the form of articles and interviews. The music, in Bixobal's case, being that of the more experimental, psychedelic, folky, obscure international, or otherwise usual variety. Thus, this ish we find an extensive interview with Peter Stampfel of legendary NYC hippie folk outfit the Holy Modal Rounders (his ex-wife, Antonia Stampfel, is also interviewed separately). Whether discussing his theory of the importance of 1957 in the history of rock n' roll, or the effect of recorded sound on musicians' use of vibrato, or the unfortunate inter-band personality conflicts that apparently plagued the Rounders, it's pretty interesting even for those not already Rounders fans. There's another, briefer interview this issue as well, with Gerd Kraus of '70s cosmic krautrockers Limbus 3 (and 4). It's interesting as well.
And then there's the usual 'zine things like reviews and ads. Oh, and Rob Millis has another "Talking Machine" column wherein he tells of searching for rare shellac (78rpm records) over in India... yet he doesn't find exactly what you'd think he'd find, his "Victrola favorite" this issue is by the Beatles... or is it?
Ahhhh, how we love Black Mayonnaise. Not the foodstuff. Although to be fair, we've never really tried it. No we're talking about the weird blackened musical one man band who years ago graced us with the mindblowing and soul melting Ttssattsr album, and who has now returned with a brand new disc of self described "Warped Lunar Sludge-core", and if anything it's even noisier, heavier and more freaked out and fucked up.
Ttssattsr, as best as we could describe it, sounded like some fractured blend of Godflesh and SUNNO))), and while that element is still present, things seem to have gotten a lot more abstract, with many tracks eschewing rhythms altogether, or burying them under an avalanche of grinding throbbing churning blackened buzz.
The first track is one long static drone, thick and tangled layers of blurred out buzz all tangled up into one huge ropy mass, above it float monstrous froglike croaks, impossible low end gurgles, while beneath a skittery rhythm lurks, barely audible, more like a thready pulse, all dubbed out, a rickety rhythmic skeleton supporting the blackened hide of the Black Mayonnaise beast. While heavy and intense, it's also weirdly dreamy and blissed out, a sort of soft doom-drone.
But the next track takes care of that, the drums finally kick in, the croaking frog still belching out noxious clouds of vocals, the guitars and drums locked into a doom plod, everything wreathed in space-y FX, like a slow motion doom metal Hawkwind.
Track three is super reminiscent of the first BM record, a very Godflesh sounding dirge, the industrial drumming, the thick riffing, but all melty and murky with those awesome croaked grunted rumbles over the top.
Probably the biggest surprise is the Flaming Lips cover, that sounds nothing like the Lips AT ALL, instead, it's a caustic slab of furious fuzzed out distorted in-the-red buzz and relentless blast beats, as close to blacknoise as BM gets, there are all sorts of groaning creaking sounds, as well as squiggly streaks of hiss, but they are practically swallowed whole. There's also a Flipper cover, which seems and sounds much more Black Mayonnaise appropriate, a murky lurching trudge through a world of sonic black tar. Everything black and dripping, but shot through with lazer blast FX, and those creepy vocals again.
The thirteen minute closer is totally out of left field, a garbled synthscape, very abstract and freaky, plenty of whirring buzz, and bleeps and bloops, slippery squiggles, like intercepted alien radio broadcasts, a sputtering, squelchy glitchy not-quite ambience that does manage to actually get pretty hypnotic.
Gorgeously packaged in a silkscreened black-on-black cardstock sleeve, while inside there's a black-on-metallic-silver printed insert, BUT be warned, it is in fact a cd-r, not an actual cd, but really it hardly matters, you'll forget about everything but what the hell is happening to your ears, and our brain, and your soul the second you press play.
Amongst AQ customers, another Boris/Merzbow collaboration is most certainly a rock dream. But folks who don't enjoy 'noise' in their 'rock', or don't necessarily want to hear Boris classics transformed, might just find this to be a rock nightmare. That said, Rock Dream is really pretty cool. With a surprisingly subtle Merzbow adding his own world of sound FX to Boris' blown out dronegroove heaviness.
On their first matchup, the brilliant Megatone, these two outfits meshed perfectly, offering up a dense and thick drone record, not so much heavy as intense, Merzbow adding a gritty grind to Boris low end rumble circa Flood. A record that was pretty and mysterious as well as being massive and crushing.
The lp only live document 04092001 was a less successful pairing. A live show with Boris playing their Stooges-y rock jams behind an impenetrable wall of Japanoise, cool and weird, heavy and fucked up, but definitely on the harsh side, at times sounding amazing, but at times, more like a super lo-fi damaged noise band.
Rock Dream sounds like the 04092001 refined, with Merzbow's Masami Akita taking a much more active role in these songs, instead of just spraying dense gouts of buzzing screeching sonic gore all over the place, or smearing drones and riffs with walls of crumbling sound, here his touch is deft, offering up delicate glimmering sparkles as often as skull crushing streaks of white hot noise. It's like a Boris greatest hits record, an epic live show, but with Merzbow's Masami Akita rounding out the trio to a quartet, and we have to say, they almost sound better than the originals. Beginning with the 35 minute "Feedbacker". A long slow build, with Akita adding texture, and strange little sonic events to the proceedings, waterfall like hiss, clouds of tinkling chiming high end, smears of fuzzed out whir, never interfering, always complimenting the song, and when the band explode into full on planet caving heaviness, Akita somehow manages to make it sound even heavier, taking Boris's extended space jams and adding a million more layers, the outro to every Hawkwind song and a roiling swirl of malfunctioning Acid Mothers Temple effects, the track culminating in a kick ass drum splatter, alien FX, amp destroying feedback freejam. In fact, most of the songs sound like some strange mix of Boris groove, and Acid Mothers Temple freakout. Which is most definitely good thing. "Rainbow" here sounds like a female fronted Wooden Shjips jamming with Wolf Eyes, "Evil Stack" (a previously unreleased track as far as we can tell!) is a blinding supernova of freaked out effects and damaged drum chaos, and "Black Out" is a dirgey doom trudge, through thick clouds of crumbling, grinding buzz and keening psychnoise guitars. And that's just disc one.
Disc two starts off with the furious garagepsychbuzz blast of "Pink", Akita just adding an extra layer of buzzy hiss. The hiss just gets louder on "Woman On The Screen", at points threatening to take over completely. Disc two is definitely the more ROCK of the two, at least the first half, furious and freaked out rollicking and totally rocking, just sounding slightly noisier. But once we get to "The Evilone Which Sobs", it's back to ultra heaviness, a loping grooving dirge, the guitars wailing, the drums pounding, this time the Merzbow component taking the driver's seat, a gorgeous chaotic swirl of corrosive noise, swirling and whirling, never quite obscuring the jam behind it, but making the background rock sound that much more mysterious. There's a bit more RAWK, with "Just Abandoned Myself", a super rocking, hyper distorted, garage psych blowout, again with Akita's wall of sound adding all sorts of new texture and extra heaviness. Finally, Rock Dreams finishes up with the almost arena rock sounding "Farewell", epic power chords, majestic vocals, triumphant melody, all wound up in a glimmering field of brilliant buzz and crumbling shimmer.
This version, released on Southern Lord is limited to 5000 copies, each disc numbered. Awesome miniature gatefold lp style packaging, with cool die cut front cover so you can see the printed full color inner sleeve inside, designed by none other than Stephen O'Malley...
There is a Japanese version, much more expensive, with super deluxe packaging, very much like the artwork for the Japanese version of Jesu's Conqueror record, the multi paneled digipak with the clear plastic printed slipcover. BUT, the music is exactly the same, so unless you need the fancy Japanese packaging (which some of us do), you won't miss out on any of the music if you pick up this domestic version. If you do want the Japanese version, just email us and we'll order you one...
Saxophonist and composer (and professor) Anthony Braxton always blows our minds. Sometimes with his out-there jazz music. Sometimes just with his rather weird conceptual ideas. Of course, the two are closely related.
This album got us right from the cover picture. What the fuck is that thing he's playing? We've never seen a saxophone that big. It's gotta be like five feet long. And then there's an even bigger one (the mother?) sitting behind him. Wow.
On top of that, this disc, with Braxton's Diamond Curtain Wall Trio (sounds vaguely like some acid folk or "floorcore" band we'd be selling cd-rs or cassette tapes by), features Braxton not only playing oversized saxes but also doing live electronics via a laptop computer! Intriguing at the very least. So, of two recent Victo discs to come out of Braxton's performances at the 2007 Victoriaville new music festival (the other with a "12+1tet"), we've chosen to review this one. It's a single hour-long piece (""Composition 323c", the title being a drawing of a spiral intersected with a dashed line, joining a pink circle and a orange half-circle, with another dashed line branching off diagonally terminating in a blue circle, accompanied by the equation (40-B) with a vertical line and a Q under the 40... yeah that's way we love Braxton so much!).
Despite the size of the saxes, this starts off all quiet-like. Braxton's bleats and blurbles respectfully leaving space for the electric guitar of Mary Halvorson and the various horns (cornet, bugle, trombone, trumpets, etc.) played by Taylor Ho Bynum. Together they weave a tangled web of sound, sometimes calm, sometimes frantic, full of bumble-bee flights of horn blurt balanced between melody and out-and-out skree. The guitar and electronics add further cross-currents of texture, a vibrating sheen of drone sometimes surfacing as the band tiptoes around melodies. And when Braxton wants to blow in the bass frequencies, those bigass horns allow him to belch out a bowel-shaking rumble all right! You'd probably have to take a music theory and/or mystic philosophy class to figure out what's going on here and why, compositionally speaking, but even for casual fans of Braxton's eccentric jazz it's a varied hour to enjoy.
Second release from this mysterious one man black metal band from Texas. The debut Brown Jenkins record, Dagonite, was a bit of a sleeper hit around here. It took people a while to warm up the very unmetal name (although as we mentioned it is from a Lovecraft story) and the strange murky blurred sound. Not everybody though, the weirdo black metal obsessives here were all over Angel Eyes in a heartbeat. How could we not be, a black metal band that trafficked in a strange woozy ethereal murk, whose songs didn't buzz so much as ooze, the riffs slippery and slithery, the bliss out factor pretty high for something this grim and heavy.
We were a bit surprised to see a new record show up so hot on the heels of the first, but we're psyched. We had just about played that first one down to a little plastic nub. So here's record number two, and damn if the murk of the original doesn't sound a little bit buzzier this time around. But somehow even still, it manages to merge the murk of Dagonite with a more Burzumy buzz, and the result is another record that manages to sound both true, grim and black, but unlike almost any other black metal record you've heard.
The tempos are slow, midtempo bordering on doom. The sound is depressive and dark, minor key and miserable, the guitar parts are languorous and arpeggiated, the chords pulled apart into cascades of notes, each one wreathed in that strange murky buzz, the drums pound away, but they almost don't enter into the equation as they're so buried in the mix. The vocals a haunting howled wooly mammoth bellow bordering on death metal gurgle. When the tracks do speed up, they transform into some drone-y hypnotic post rock, the guitar parts blurred into near static streaks of fuzz, but they quickly slip back into some sort of plodding doomic trudge or mesmerizing slow motion lurch.
The sticker on the front of the cd compares Angel Eyes to a cross between Jesu and Bathory, while someone else says Hellhammer/Burzum crossed with Swans/Earth. And there are definitely elements of those matchups, we also hear some twisted blackened post rock a la Deathspell's Kenose, but none of that accounts for the twisted Ginn-ish riffs, the off kilter atonal melodies, that totally unique buzzy murk, to us it sounds more like Morbid Angel, played at 16 rpm, broadcast through busted 1000 watt speakers, heard through a pair of earmuffs, but that's just the sonic element, the songs too are pretty unique, and those DO sound pretty Swans-y, from seasick sway to relentless pound, to lugubrious crawl, stopping, starting, speeding up, slowing down, each track some sort of blown out, extended riffdrone post punk, black metal doom jam, and once again we can't get enough.
Feeling Strange is a fluid mixed set from Parisian minimalist proponent Jennifer Cardini. Yes, the minimalist techno gestures abound, with plenty of bleeps, bloops, and acid squiggles grafted onto that insistent technotic pulse; but Ms. Cardini doesn't just adhere to the Detroit / Berlin axis of electronica with some very nice transitions into some Moroder-esque arpeggiating disco and leftfield electro-pop. Static, Maurizio, The Hacker, Reinhard Voigt, Apparat, and Luisine are but a few of the selections. Adorned with the Kompakt seal of approval.
ATTENTION FINNISH ROCK OBSESSIVES!!! It's time for another strange missive from the Finnish combo known as Chainsmoker, a band created from the bits and pieces of Finnish legends Sweetheart. But where Sweetheart were a corrosive guitar based rock band, Chainsmoker are more of a dramatic, sort of gothic new wave band. If these guys were living in NY and going to all the right parties, getting remixed by DFA, partying with Fischerspooner, they'd be huge. Touring with the Scissor Sisters and screwing Lindsay Lohan and Ashley Simpson. But alas, they are marooned far away from the glitzy nightclubs and drugged out dancefloor kids who would be dancing and fucking and fighting the nights away to their spacey new wave techno groove rock. But there's more to it than that, these guys are Finnish after all, so it goes without saying that they have a bit of a twisted take. They incorporate morose vocals, saxophone, swirling outer space FX, Nick Cave like dramatic crooning, strummy acoustic guitars, cinematic synths, fuzz guitar, full on casiocore freakouts and pretty much anything else they can think of into their jet set, cocaine party, private jet, Studio 54, faux fur, dead of winter, NYC via Paris via Finland, Fischerspooner and Pet shop Boys in a back alley knife fight dance party!
It wasn't long ago that Cherry Red Records rescued Reading's shoegazing Chapterhouse from near obscurity by reissuing their first album. Now, they've gone and done it again with the band's markedly different sophomore effort Blood Music. Where as Whirlpool was a hybrid decidedly indebted to Spacemen 3 and bands like the Seeds, this album sees them learning and progressing, updating their sound, and moving into their own distinct sound. If the Cardigans had a male singer and made a record in the wake of the Stone Roses, this might be it. Basically, the first record was proto-shoegaze, and this, the second record, adopted some more distinctly pop leanings. If you missed out on them in the past, or you lost your original copy, you need this beautiful slab of '90s British catchiness in your life! Recommended.
Oh Canada! On their latest full-length (their first since leaving Sub Pop for Arts & Crafts), Toronto's Constantines present a further refinement to the sound they've been developing over the past four records. Kensington Heights manages to balance a brooding sort of intensity with an unwavering sense of optimism and translate the two into a solid, anthemic record filled with songs of rebellion, growing older, disappointment, and hope.
While the tempos might be slowed a bit from their previous outings, there's no shortage of growl - right out of the gate, the first two tracks ("Hard Feelings" and "Million Star Hotel") are thoroughly sweat-drenched, and mid-tracklist pick-me-up, "Brother Run Them Down" shows that the band is still more than capable of writing a solid scorcher.
That said, there are a number of slow burners on the album ("Time Can Be Overcome" is a standout) that reveal a Constantines who are weary but not jaded. Where the album strikes some of its highest notes, however, are those moments in songs like "Trans Canada" and "I Will Not Sing A Hateful Song," where the band displays a particularly deft ability to be at once both delicate and pummeling.
What the Constantines provide, moreso than anything else, is a reminder that bands *can* be successful, current and relevant without a swarm of blog-fueled hype, or a post-modern mashed-up genre descriptor attached to them. This is an irony-free rock band making an irony-free rock album that manages to connect itself to a firmly entrenched tradition of earnest, blue collar arena-ready anthems (think Springsteen, Thin Lizzy, and Tom Petty, with touches of Fugazi, Wilco and Archers of Loaf). This is by no means a perfect record, but it's one that feels raw and real in its mix of bravado and yearning. Highly recommended for all of you who wear your bruised hearts on the sleeves of your tattered jean jackets.
Justice, Digitalism, Crystal Castles. The list of contemporary indie-electro goes on on and on. And it's all at least slightly retro: disco, French house, video games, or whatever. But what we have to high five Australia's Cut Copy for is attempting to revive the orchestrated power-pop sounds of bands like Electric Light Orchestra! Take that, throw in a drum machine, maybe a few heavy post-production filters, and that's where they're at. Above and beyond anything else, and unlike some of their contemporaries, these guys seem to understand that they're essentially making pop music. Whereas projects like Justice sometimes rely too heavily on form rather than content, Cut Copy has their eyes on the songwriting prize. Much like British producer Richard X, they have a healthy and addictive affection for the '80s. Severed Heads, Tears for Fears, even maybe a little Roxette. Yeah! Don't come expecting a challenging musical experiment, or something as conceptual and cohesive. But if you can handle great pop tracks, just give in and let your feet do the dancing. Recommended.
We're huge fans of NZ guitarist Craig Williamson and his space raga rock outfit Lamp Of The Universe, whose sound is actually light on the rock, and heavy on the space and the raga, with buzzing sitars, and loping krautrock grooves, blissed out ambience and wispy clouds of spaced out FX. But way back in 1999, before the birth of LOTU, Williamson was doing time in a little band called Datura, who shared some sonic sensibilities with his later outfit, spacey, groovy, buzzy, but Datura rocked, we mean ROCKED, some serious stoner rock�Hawkwind / Monster Magnet worship for sure. Big�ol' wah wah guitar riffs, pounding drums, downtuned fuzz guitars, BIG BIG amps unleashing thick walls of sun baked drug drenched sound. The kind of sound we could gladly listen to forever. But...
...It's the vocals that will make it or break it for you. Super throaty rock croon, very reminiscent of Kyuss, some folks here thought it sounded a little too bar rock, or like the one rock guy on every season of American Idol, channelling some Eddie Vedder with that "yyyyuuuuuaaaayy" sort of classic rock yowl. But if you were into Kyuss, or any of the first wave of stoner rock bands (Beaver, Dozer, tons of other Man's Ruin bands) or any bands on the Small Stone label, this will definitely push those space rock, desert rock, stoner rock, slow groove, blown out guitar, beer and pot laced laid back groove buttons for sure.
This is not really new, but we've never been able to get enough of these to list until now. From the label that brought us Benighted Leams, Contra Ignem Fatuum, Dark Ages and Meads Of Asphodel comes another confounding blast of black metal, this time from a mysterious group called Dawnfall. The first three tracks are 11+ minutes each, every one a convoluted, twisted swirl of stumbling midtempo black metal weirdness and swooshing keyboardy ambience, with some of the most tortured vocals we've ever heard. Somewhere between the anguished shriek of Weakling and the inhuman howl of Rehtaf Ruo. Each prickly spikey tangle of blackness is peppered with squirrelly Greg Ginn like guitar freakouts, random tinkling chimes and warm wooshes of synthesizer. Dizzying and totally brilliantly confusional. Warm fuzzed out guitars wrapped loosely over a framework of thudding pounding drums, while maddeningly slippery guitar squiggles slip and slide in and around the blackness colliding with the harsh vocal wails. Amazing. But that's just three tracks in. Track four is some sort of faux harpsichord driven electronic ambient soundscape, like Benighted Leams playing Dead Can Dance covering Autchre or something? Skittery beats and a dense wash of thick metallic string strum. As if it couldn't get weirder, the next track is mostly sped up and slowed down vocals, mixed with strange spacey effects, swooshes, and beeps and a hiccupping dsrum machine. Weird! But it's not over yet, the second to last track is a ten minute soundscape of skittery synthesizers, warbly keyboard squiggles, all smothered in reverb and other space-y ambience. A creepy, splattery minimal crawl through some outer space fun house. Finally, the record finishes with a weird one minute blast of synthesized circus music, maybe like a lite Killing Joke, with wooshy synth stabs and casio style drum beats. Woah, not sure what to make of this. We love it. For sure. Just not sure why. Definitely too weird for most metalheads, you all can quit after the first three tracks, that is if -those- aren't already too weird for you. But folks who have been digging all the crazy shit Supernal puts out, and anyone up to trying to wrap their brains around something amazingly weird and wonderfully obtuse, definitely check this out!
We kinda think that when we're reviewing a band's eagerly awaited new album, for instance their follow up to a debut we really liked, that it's not entirely unreasonable for us just to say, hey, please go read our review of that first record (or provide a brief summary, like in this case: awesome Swedish time trippin', '70s sounding stoner psych prog a la Dungen, Elope, Witchcraft) and then for us to go on to say, this one is ALSO awesome, so if you liked that one get this, and if you haven't heard either, get both! If you like this retro-'70s sort of thing, that is. Reasonable, right?
Dead Man's Euphoria is maybe a bit mellower than their self-titled debut, certainly much closer to the sun-dappled poppiness of Elope than to the Sabbathy proto-metal heaviness of Witchcraft. But it could definitely appeal to those into the moody folkiness -and- progginess of the latter.
They're still big time '70s throwbacks, they look and sound like bunch of long haired ol' hippies. Back to the land types, doing their thing out on some farm / commune someplace. Definitely a lazy, hazy, rustic vibe here, quite a bit Grateful Dead-y in point of fact. Some tracks are long (8, 9 proggy minutes for "The Wheel" and "Rest In Piece") while others breeze by in under two or three minutes. There's acoustic guitars and backporch bluesy bits (the singer asking someone for some lemon-squeezin' in "A Pinch Of Salt" ferinstance), and an overall placid, summery feel. Real pleasant, but ofttimes melancholic too. The vocals, particularly when handled by the guy with the wavery, breathy, close-to-tears voice, are quite emotive. (Those could be tears of joy though, the album's called Euphoria after all.)
And that's not to say that Dead Man don't heavy it up with the guitars now and then, they do, some swinging hard rock riffage certainly is heard, but this is mostly much lighter and gentler than you might be used to from the more doomy likes of Witchcraft, Burning Saviours, Graveyard... out of that Swedish '70s lovin' scene, Dead Man do the least to live up to the more evil implications of their name! But for melodiousness and progginess and flutey folkiness they're holding their own. We like!!
FYI, this will supposedly be getting a domestic cd release in June, we've just learned. Also they should be coming over to the US for a tour this fall, cool!
Ok, we don't know what sort of time warp technology they've developed over there in Sweden, but it does the job. I mean, if the US Navy ever wants to find out just what happened with that aircraft carrier or whatever from the 1940s (y'know, they made a movie about it, The Final Countdown or The Philadelphia Experiment wasn't it?), we'd say don't bother asking Michael J. Fox, get somebody over in Sweden to explain. They obviously have the time travel thing figured out. And best of all, they use it to make more rock and roll bands like in the good ol' days of acid rock and psychedelia!! Bands like Witchcraft and Elope and Dungen, who sound more 1970 than 2006. We've mentioned them all before, and if you know 'em and love 'em, well here's *another* group of Swedes that we think fans of those bands should check out. Dead Man! Long hair, bright harmonies, folky melodies, acoustic strum, heavy riffs, trippy vibes... even a 14-minute long experimental prog finale. Yep, definite time warp. Like Witchcraft and those others, they never betray their modernity. No anachronistic hints of '90s stoner rock or alternative rock or metal or anything. Really, though it -says- this debut full-length was recorded in 2005, it's like no rock music past, say, 1974 seems to have ever entered their ears.
Despite being called Dead Man this isn't particularly a dark album... just heavy psych in the old style. Some tracks are hard rockers, others spaced out and Floydian, even a little bit on the rustic Grateful Dead side of things... A couple of the guys in the band sing (in English), one of 'em with a wavering trill in his voice that reminds us a bit of Roger Chapman from Family, whereas the other singer has a stronger Swedish accent giving more of that Dungen flavor. The Norwegian '70s heavy psych act November could be one definite influence on these guys.
Again, although we do suspect the use of time-travel technology, we're also aware that Dead Man's guitarist used to play drums in Norrsken, Magnus Pellander's band before he formed Witchcraft. I guess he stole a page from Magnus' spellbook, temporal magic chapter. Meanwhile, two of the other members were in Swedish bands called The Strollers and The Roadrunners -- never heard them but boy those names are EXACTLY what the sort of '60s garage/beat bands that would have evolved into a band like Dead Man would have been called -- had this all really transpired 35 years ago like it sounds. Sure, not a lot of points for originality, but plenty for verisimilitude. We say, right on, Dead Man!
We can't think of a band who we've put on more mix tapes or listened to on more roadtrips than Death Cab For Cutie. When we need a break from obscure music obsession, it's really nice to have bands you can turn to when you just want songs that speak to your heart and those ever so simple yet universal emotions that all of us are filled with. Narrow Stairs finds DCFC in fine form. Sounding as crisp and charged as ever, the band has made the transition into their new major-label life quite effortlessly. We're pretty confident that this is the same kind of record they would have made at this point in their career even if they were still on Barsuk. "I Will Possess Your Heart" has become our new favorite DCFC song of the moment, we love how no vocals enter the song until about 5 minutes in, reeling you into their driving grasp and then of course Ben Gibbard's irresistible sincere and sensitive voice comes in to score the winning touchdown. Yikes, we just used a sports metaphor, but it's sort of fitting as there is something so wholesome and everyday about Death Cab's music. They have sort of become the Hall & Oates for folks with an indie sensibility. And it's kind of perfect that their new record comes out as we approach summer as their songs suit the season so well. The soundtrack to a summer fling, the aftertaste as that fling comes to an end, warm nights, the yearning, barbeques with friends you haven't seen in ages. Their topics and methods aren't weird or controversial at all, but their solid and honest delivery always hits the spot so dead on with hearts on sleeves and conviction intact.
Hard to believe that before the blown out, guitar hero, indie psych jangle of Dinosaur Jr, J Mascis was actually a drummer, who spent most of his time drumming in Satanic punk metal combo Upsidedown Cross, and legendary punk rockers Deep Wound!
But it wasn't just Mascis, Sebadoh mainman Lou Barlow was there too, both kicking up a shitstorm in this short lived, but kick ass outfit.
This is furious old skool punk rock, but with those two you know things would still be, well, a bit melodic. And it is, Catchy and heavy, fast and furious, the seeds of things to come...
Killer songs, tight musicianship, and yeah, we're still talking about punk rock here. While Deep Wound obviously have a bit of that classic Boston HC sound, falling somewhere between fellow Beantown brethren Siege & DC stalwarts Void, their sound wasn't quite as chaotic or over the top, but definitely just as full of conviction.
Sure, Deep Wound featured some soon-to-be indie superstars, but it wouldn't matter anyway, cuz Deep Wound stand completely on their own -- underrated though they may be -- in the first-wave-of-American-Hardcore. An essential release for sure. Better than the old cd version with new artwork and a bunch of extra songs!
Now somebody sort out a super deluxe Upsidedown Cross reissue and we'll be happy!
And also, we should note that Mascis HAS been back behind the drumkit recently, in AQ fave doomsters Witch!
For this review, we recruited AQ pal Cliff Hengst, artist and co-editor of "Good Times: Bad Trips":
I love me some good prank phone calls. A great prank call can be the most devastatingly funny thing ever - it's just you and the caller, and of course, the poor sap at the other end (who never seems to get the clue to just hang up). Of the many prank-call cds we've listened to, this one stands out as among the most brilliant and repeatedly played. It's perfect for those long road trips to stave off the urges to cause injury to your traveling companions. Reissued as a double cd with 25 extra pranks (the original, released in 2002 was fine enough), it's packed with some of the most memorable and pathetic characters you've ever heard. The middle-aged and recently divorced Barbara, who loves the "stanky blues" of Bonnie Raitt, trying to join a band to spite her ex-husband; Barbara's ex-husband in turn calling the same poor dude warning him about his ex-wife and her "buffet of psycho-tropic drugs"; Bedroom ETA , a "quiet storm" band that involves a hilariously sung Jermaine Stewart song; and of course, Bleachy, a fat black sad-sack who harangues army recruiting offices, worker's comp centers and fast food chains with his miserably petty requests and complaints - so awesome! It's really no use reading a review of something like this; you miss the timing, the phrasing, all those embarrassing awkward pauses, and out of left-field cultural references. So listen to the clips. An original and hilarious collection that you will listen to again and again and will make you "shit your pants". Comes with a prank-by-prank analysis booklet by Andrew Earles and Jeffrey Jensen. Shattering.
The grindy political punk metal brigades have a new iron gang of northernmost killers in their ranks now! Toronto's The Endless Blockade brings 13 brutal tracks to the attack on their 20 Buck Spin debut (and 2nd full-length overall). If you liked the Iron Lung album we raved about earlier this year and want more of that brand of modern power violence brutality, a pissed off blend of hardcore, noise and sludge, look no further (in fact, the two bands recently shared a split 12").
Jello Biafra puts in a cameo vocal appearance on the title track, which is funnier than most Jello guest spots 'cause that song is all of 4 seconds long, Napalm Death style, and the lyrics in their entirety consist of: "The Endess Blockade!" (which Jello puts his unmistakable stamp upon).
Expo '70 just keep getting heavier and heavier. Beginning as a spaced out drone-heavy krautrock-worshipping band, with swirling synths and drifting FX laden guitars, the band has gradually been altering their sound, guitars getting heavier and more distorted, the spaciness swallowed up by huge slow moving black walls of rumble and buzz, the low end slowly but surely taking over, their music drifting ever closer to some sort of SUNNO)))-baked crawl. This new record, a split with SF based Rahdunes, finds the band moving still further into their own dark sonic galaxy of black heaviness.
Cursory listens will reveal just that, a grinding roiling whirl of distorted guitars and throbbing bass rumble, but this is Expo '70, so even when they're channeling their inner doomsludge demons, they can't seem to help infusing their lugubrious crawl with streaks of outer space shimmer, buried melodies, subtly shifting textures, sure this is intense and heavy and loooooooow, but it's also blissed out, and fuzzy and dreamy and in its own weird way still sort of space-y and krautrocky.
Rahdunes take the high road, literally. It's almost like the two bands decided to split the frequency range right down the middle, with Expo '70 taking the low, and Rahdunes taking the high. Their tracks counter Expo's Earth-y throb, with some glistening druggy folky space drift. A swirling expanse of druggy ambience, guitars wreathed in effects drift by. vocals moan and wail, through thick curtains of fuzz and buzz and delay and reverb, percussion shuffles way off in the background. Imagine the Manson Family, and the Beach Boys, high as fuck, sitting in the grass, by the ocean, their faces lit by flickering firelight, as they chant and jam and conjure up some primal space drone energy, and you'd basically be tapped into whatever lifeforce feeds Rahdunes. The rest of the disc gets a little more rhythmic, reminding us of No Neck and Sunburned Hand, but never losing that bleary eyed druggy wonder, looped guitar, stumbling rhythms, more ethereal chanting, finishing off with a fuzzed out murky dreamscape of muted melodies, soft focus tones, buzzing synths, sputtering percussion, mumbled vocalizing and shimmery feedback, somehow perfectly complimenting Expo '70's doomic crawl on the flipside.
Gorgeous silver and black matte covers. And first time on vinyl for anything Expo '70!!!
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.
Another UNblack gem, this from one of the mainstays of the scene, Flaskavsae. Celestial, originally recorded in 2005, and finally released in 2007, then out of print, only now getting reissued (albeit in another way too limited run).
But holy crap, another disc of totally wacked, bizarrely produced unblack madness. Grim and buzzing and primitive, the drumming super straight ahead, not blasting as much as a sort of relentless Dbeat pound, but the guitars, they sound ghostly and alien, and whatever effect they're running through, renders them all blurred and pixilated and makes them sort of stutter in this super hypnotic blissed out way. This predates the whole new-gaze craze by years, but somehow, however it happened, this record is total dreamlike noise drenched UNblack metalgaze. At first the sound was so blown out and buzzy that it has us thinking of Canadian black metal weirdos WOLD, but as the record progressed, the sounds seemed to soften and blur, the guitar parts crazy catchy and weirdly melodic, the vocals a strange rumbling gurgle, that really do sound like just another layer of buzz.
That effect infuses every bit of the record, the whole thing seems to shimmer and shuffle and vibrate, almost like the sonic version of a strobe light, sending strange vibrations from the speaker into your bones. A few tracks are doomy crawls, with that impossible fucked up guitar beautifully damaged, unfurling in gorgeously stuttery loops, the bass thick and even more melodic than the guitar, pulsing beneath the swirls and whirls of FX and guitar fuzz.
But the final track is the ultimate, a furious black blast, so densely effected that the whole track seems to pulse in time with the drumming, it has some crazy effect on your ears as you listen, and your body as you feel the vibrations, like a black metal dream machine, the vocals a hissing insectoid whisper, the drums chaotic and stumbling, but it's that effect, we can't explain it, but it just freaks us out, in a really good way, it turns Flaskavsae's grim buzz into something totally and inexplicably transcendent.
Not sure what exactly required the name to change from Spectre Folk, to the Folk Spectre, but fear not fans of all things folky and droney, fuzzy and drifty, this is still indeed the work of Mr. Pete Nolan, of the Double Leopards, GHQ, Wooden Wand and we're sure a handful more. At first we were tempted to think the name change had to do with a slight shift in sonics, as the first few tracks are totally stripped down lo-fi folk. No noise or drone or buzz to be found. At all. Just skeletal guitar, plaintive vocals, wrapped around sad sad melodies, and allowed to drift in wide open expanses of record crackle and tape hiss. But then the closer on side A finds some squealing feedback entering the fray, and simple Velvets like drumming, distant chanting, the main riff sort of wobbly and warbly, a gorgeous laid back stoned and droned drug jam, that while slightly noisier than the tracks preceding it, still falls well within the groovy hippy bliss we've come to expect from Nolan and his folky Spectre-d outfit.
The B side offers up more of the same, but varied a bit, a few tracks of hushed folkiness, but then a long stretch of high end hissiness draped over the lilting guitar beneath, a track of Middle Eastern style melody, with a distinct raga-like vibe, and the record finishes off with a gorgeous muted muddy slo-mo drone-jam, that sounds a bit like a much more mellow Wooden Shjips played at 16rpm, and a little bit like a folkier Spacemen 3. As usual, killer stuff.
Packaged in hand screened black and white sleeves with photocopied inserts, covered in drawings, lyrics and liner notes.
One of our favorite local artists returns with volume two of her Read This To Get Your Enjoys zine. The first one was a huge hit around here (we still have a few left, just ask), killer art, funny stories, even a piece of gum! Local folks might know Maria Forde from her drawings of movie stars and directors that have graced walls, shirts and buttons, across the street at video shop Lost Weekend, her art an impossible blend of playful childlike wonder, super technical focus, and poignant whimsy for sure.
This time around, for number two, everything is a little bit bigger and better. Full color covers, inside and out, lots of contributors, an extra full color mini-zine insert, and even a cd-r mix tape.
And just like mixtapes, we never get tired of zines, super personal and intimate, cleverly laid out, creatively designed, sometimes super sleek and smooth, other times more scribbly and lo-fi, found letters, photos, doodles, elaborate illustrations, it's easy to tell from looking at Read This... that Maria and her crew love the form and are helping it to thrive and flourish. We could describe each piece and part, but it's sort of pointless, if you're into zines, and cool art, and like us don't get nearly enough small press bliss, pick this up. Funny, weird, sad, melancholy, goofy, playful, earnest, heartfelt, beautifully drawn, and lovingly assembled. Plus a bad ass disc, in a little pocket inside the back cover, filled with killer hip hop from one of the zine's contributors, part of his answer to the question posed to him as to why he makes hip hop. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a song must be worth a million.
Just like the first issue, WAY recommended.
This is the most minimal and repetitive sound we've heard from Four Tet and we are loving it! Taking inspiration from 20th Century composers as well as minimal techno, Ringer finds Kieren Hebden back in the saddle as one of the premier forces in all of electronic music. The ep seems to be the perfect format for Hebden to really dive in and explore a new direction as he does so perfectly on Ringer. The songs are long enough to really reel you in, yet once the record is over you want to press play again right away and get swept away into the melodic trance that Four Tet so effortlessly creates in these four songs. Imagine if someone gave glow sticks and ketamine to Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Hmmm? We've always been fans of Four Tet in the past and while we haven't been as absorbed by the last couple records, this one is making us jump right back on board as big time fans once again!
A glorious spaced out druggy FX drenched sonic trip to the outer reaches of the galaxy from the aRCHIVE label (Nadja, Goslings, Astral Traveling Unity, Alasehir, Jack Rose, Khanate, Keiji Haino, LSD-March, Growing, Bardo Pond). The perpetrator of said sonic space trip is Hiroshi Hasagawa, who spends most of his time doing similarly druggy business in C.C.C.C. and Astral Traveling Unity, on synth and ring modulator, and Keichi Miyashita (from Mandog) on guitar and tape echo. Needless to say, everyone who bought that ATU on aRCHIVE is definitely gonna want this....�
Three extended improvised freaked out ultra mega blown out drifting space jams. Swirling clouds of whoosh and bleep and bloop and shimmer and schhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwooooooooooooooooossssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh. Peppered with glistening sonic sparkles, a sky full of blinking twinkling melodic shards. Very laid back and meditative at times, a pulsing throbbing hypnotic krautrock like Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh, but occasionally exploding into full on blistering acid fried psychedelic chaos. If you loved that Astral Traveling Unity, or Space Machine, or the above mentioned krautrockers or Acid Mothers Temple at their most unhinged and free (one�track even features AMT's Hiroshi Higashi on extra synth) then this will surely hit the spot.�
Like�all aRCHIVE releases, beautifully packaged, this time a glossy psychedelic 6 panel fold out sleeve with the cd affixed to the inside.�
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES and probably already almost out of print...
Ooh La La! Foolish Season is one of those rare pop-psych treasures that actually exceeds the expectations stirred by its delicious and mystical cover art. So often we have been burned after seeing some lost record from the '60s or '70s that looks like it's going to be the best record ever, complete with cryptic and captivating artwork, filled with unicorns, sunshine, and band members dressed in nothing but white robes. But then when we listen to the record it turns out to be nothing more than ho-hum middle of road faux-psychedelic rock often with less than desirable vocals.
But every once in a while we actually find a record that lives up to the expectation of its amazing artwork, and Foolish Seasons is one of them! Gillespie adorns the cover in a beautifully embroidered robe, standing beside a white horse, on a bleached out sun-soaked afternoon. Inside we find more great photos of Dana in all her voluptuous and curvy beauty. But most importantly from the first time we pressed play on Foolish Season we were hooked big time! This is truly one of the best lite-psych records we've ever come across. Infectious orchestrated pop with Dana's warm and inviting vocals. We started thinking of Nancy Sinatra collaborating with The Free Design or if somehow Scott Walker as arranger for Dusty Springfield in the late '60s. With songs written by Donovan, Billy Nichols, Michel Polnareff as well as herself, Gillespie perfectly tapped into the magic of bright, bold and breezy orchestral pop done so right. Highly recommended!
Anyone who has seen the Gossip live knows what a special and sweat inducing and spirit invigorating experience it is. When Beth Ditto takes center stage it feels like being at the most inspiring punk show, cathartic soul show, and gut wrenching blues show all wrapped into one intense night. So while we aren't always the biggest fan of live records, we knew that if any current band could get away with releasing a live album (and as a major label debut!) it would be the Gossip.
Recorded live in Liverpool, this will show those who have never experienced the Gossip in person what the magic is all about and remind those of us who have, why we try to see them every single time we get the chance. There's no doubt that when they hit the stage they pour every single ounce of blood and guts into making their songs ring as loud and true as possible. They are one of those bands whose music has changed lives, so many people, including a few of us at AQ have had moments when it was a Gossip song or a live show that really reminded us of our core strength, or gave us the perseverance to fight on and be proud of who we are regardless of sexuality, gender, weight, race, etc. Beth has become this amazing combination of the spirit of Mama Cass and Nina Simone with a riot girl disposition. As well as performing songs from their great albums, this live recording also captures a heartfelt cover of Aalyiah as well as a Wham cover not to be missed. Live In Liverpool also comes with a live dvd directed by Lance Bangs. One of the few new live recordings we can totally stand behind!
Wow! The first vinyl-only (that's right, no plans for a cd we're told) Sublime Frequencies release focuses on a single group rather than an anthology of regional folk and pop or collaged radio broadcasts. Struck by an ecstatically squealing lo-fi blast of electric guitar from a song heard on Moroccan radio, the Sub Freq's main man, Alan Bishop went on a quest for the regional origins of that particular electric sound. Canvassing numerous cassette dealers, he was only able to identify the music as Sahwari and to pinpoint the region as the Western Sahara, a disputed territory nestled on the Atlantic Coast of North Africa between Morocco and Mauritania where frequent political struggles have caused the massive displacement of the region's indigenous people. A few months later, Bishop's colleague, Hisham Mayet, armed with Bishop's recording travelled back to Morocco to continue the search, ending up in the last outpost of the Western Sahara, Daklha, where through the help of the Sahwari shopkeepers was finally led to the creator of the strange music himself, Baamar Salmou, or as he is known in Sahwari, Doueh. Born in 1964. Doueh learned guitar on a homemade instrument fashioned from pieces of wood and steel strings. In 1981, influenced by Mauritanian music as well as Spanish cassettes imported from Europe and America of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown, he formed Group Doueh, fast becoming one of the definitive groups in the region, playing in festivals all over Northern Africa and even in France and Portugal. His wife Halima later joined as a vocalist and percussionist and in later incarnations, Doueh's son Jamal joined on keyboards. The tracks on this release are all taken from Doueh's personal archive except for two recordings made by Mayet, early last year. This is definitely some of the strangest and twisted ethnic music we've heard in awhile with its buzzing lo-fi circular guitar hooks and exhuberant vocalising and infectious rhythms, reminding us of aspects of Konono No1's DIY tinkering, Tartit's desert trance-jams and a bit of the Shaggs self-taught charm (not so much in sound, but how a lot of the guitar parts follow the vocals). Limited to 1000 copies, this is so awesome and highly recommended!!
Wow. This is a real "believe it or not" release. We thought we knew all about eccentric electropop pioneer Bruce Haack (1931-1988). Omni's reissue of Haack's 1969 psychedelic synth classic The Electric Lucifer was an automatic Record Of The Week for us. But we'd never heard of Haackula before. However, it lives up to its billing as a "lost classic of outsider electronica" for sure. At first, we weren't sure what to expect, putting it on with some excitement and trepidation... rest assured, we now have big smiles on our faces. Haackula is playful and perverse, and perhaps more than a little bit paranoid. Imagine Perrey and Kingsley on some bad acid. Haack's electronically effected vocals here continue the wordplay that he delighted in on The Electric Lucifer but now, shockingly, some swear words have crept in, for instance he drops the f-bomb in the first song "Lie Back", wherein he also rhymes "schizoid" with "shitzoid"!
Bruce Haack unleashed his Moogs (and warped imagination) in his bedroom studio to create Haackula back in 1978, but it remained officially unreleased until now. Possibly 'cause a large portion of Haack's discography consists of records for children, we were really surprised by the R-rated content of Haackula. And the R isn't just for robotic. There's a song called "Blow Job" fer chrissakes. Perhaps this is why it never saw the light of day in Haack's lifetime...
Haack's homebuilt synths and rhythm machines bleep and bloop, shuffle and shudder, conjuring an alternate universe of electronic computer funk wackier and weirder and way more off-kilter than anything Kraftwerk was up to at the time. The musical sense of childlike innocence with which Haack was so adept is still happening here, these tracks are as tuneful and catchy as ever, but his mystical ideas are joined by sexual themes... where The Electric Lucifer was astrological, Haackula is scatological. Adult realities are confronting the outsider, making Haackula's haunted house electronics all the more eerie, while the bizzaro-factor (plus Haack's aforementioned songwriting skills) insure that it's all very entertaining, gleefully so.
And if Haackula itself wasn't cool enuff, there two equally mindblowing bonus tracks. First there's Bruce Haack's 1982 proto-hiphop collaboration with Def Jam's Russell Simmons, an 8 minute track entitled "Party Machine" that features funky Herbie Hancock "rockit" style grooves and deep distorted vocals laying down such science as "Haack attack is back... Bruce Haack... Anti-wack." Damn!
The other bonus track included is an epic 32:15 piece called "Icarus" that would have made a fine release all by itself. Commissioned in 1979 to accompany an avant-garde art exhibition in Guadalajara, it's a sensational soundscape of everything from mad scientist laboratory burbling to faux-classical fantasias, frightening noise and groovy beats...
Omni has done their usual nice job with this. It's remastered from the original master tapes, and includes a thick booklet. Extensive, informative liner notes tell the story of Haack's "lost years", about his psychological ups and downs, how his passion for music and technology (and the two together!) never flagged despite his lack of major label success after The Electric Lucifer failed to take the world by storm... we also learn how he hooked up with hiphop producer Simmons, though we're left wondering if any DJs back in the day ever got their hands on it. As well, the cd booklet includes vintage photos and lyrics to all the Haackula songs.
Like we said, believe it or not, it's true. Haackula lives!!
Before Hatewave became a grinding mathy metal juggernaut (with a killer record on tUMULt), they were, well, THIS. Something much more fucked up and damaged. Retarded and demented. Still sort of metal, but way more lo-fi and noisy, splattery confusional and bizarre.
Before Weasel Walter was in the band, they were fronted by the mysterious and brilliantly demented Nondor Nevai. As the liner notes to this archival release so eloquently state: "Fuck metal." And indeed, most metalheads, even ones who dug the twisted blackmathgrind of the tUMULt recording, will find this stuff too tweaked and twisted.
The guitars are muddy smears, not so much riffing as spewing gouts of buzz and fuzz, gnarled melodies and sheets of lo-fi crumbling distortion, the drums, if they are real drums, are an avalanche of thuds, of splattery skittery chaos, the vocals howled and moaned and shrieked, this is some seriously fucked up stuff.
Probably the closest comparison would be Faxed Head. In fact, twice when we were listening to this, people came up and asked us if it was Faxed Head. But even compared to Faxed Head this stuff is grimier, more mental, a sick onslaught of furious relentless pound and grind and grunt and stumble and what-the-fuck.
Definitely might be too much for all but the strangest and most adventurous metalheads, but noiseniks and grind freaks and anyone into utter aural insanity should just go ahead and dig in.
Also be warned: super gnarly, somewhat problematic cover art, inside and out, nudity, blood, violation, and some awesomely shitty layout!
Recommended, but only for the sick, chosen few.
Let's just get it right out in the open, first thing. This should have been record of the week. It's beautiful, weird as fuck, mysterious, it's two whole discs of far out sounds, it comes with a massive photocopied book, filled with lyrics and text from some mysterious professor, and they're called Have A Nice Life...
BUT, the band decided to not make any more copies, and let us have their last 40. It will probably be available as a download or something in the future, but for now, these are the last 40 physical copies available EVER. And the only way, as far as we know, to get the book as well.
So what's the deal with Have A Nice Life? People are always emailing us about the new wave of shoegaze bands, nu-gaze as some folks like to call it (the same ones who now have us using the term metalgaze), and someone recommended Have A Nice Life, telling us the band was some sort of doom, metal, black metal, gothic, new wave, shoe gaze outfit, so obviously we were pretty curious. So we emailed the band. No response. Emailed the label. No response. Then we just happened to be going through piles of records, and found this one just sitting on the desk, where it must have been for weeks, a cool creepy cover, a color painting of a man's arm, bleeding, the words "the plow that broke the plains" on a black field above it. And it was bundled with a book. Hmmm. With the word Deathconsciousness printed on the front. And wham. It clicked. Those guys had already sent us a copy, which had somehow slipped through the cracks. So we quickly threw it on, and it was everything we had expected, everything we had hoped for, and more. We finally got in touch with the band, who told us they were not going to make any more, but would make one final batch for us.
So here they are.
Two discs, jam packed with dark blissed out shoegazey, new wave-y, slightly metallic nearly perfect pop. The songs insanely varied, but impossible cohesive. Some sort of sprawling bliss rock opera. Each track, perfect on its own, but even more perfect as part of the bigger whole.
The first disc is the prettier and poppier of the two. The opening track is a creepy stretch of Goblin like synth ambience, peppered with simple minor key acoustic guitar, haunting and lovely, which quickly gives way to thick ropy basslines, and reverbed electronic drums, a definitely Joy Division vibe, swirls of thick guitar, gorgeous melodies and heartfelt vocals, it's dirgey and doomy and depressive, but so catchy and poppy. The next track is a big blown out pop epic, all effected vocal harmonies and washed out watercolor guitars, reminding us quite a bit of M83. The rest of the first disc slips easily from gloomy goth pop, to minimal drone, to shimmery shoegaze, often all at once. The disc finishes off with a gloomy dirge, all downtuned grindguitar and pointillist piano. Softly crooned vocals, and a surprisingly catchy melody.
Which perfect leads into the second, darker and heavier disc, which begins with a track the boasts probably the greatest song title EVER: "Waiting For Black Metal Records In The Mail". But don't be expecting any black metal, instead it's a killer slab of eighties style indie doom pop, jangly guitar, propulsive drumming, and killer vocals, all wound into an awesome blast of hooky retro gloom, very reminiscent of the Comsat Angels. Hot on the heels comes another awesomely named song: "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000", but again the title gives no clue that the song is a lilting mostly acoustic jam, with more piano, sad vocals, minor key melodies, a super reverby eighties production, all set to that Casio keyboard preset metronome rhythm. But about half way through, the track shifts and becomes a pounding rocker, the guitars thick and distorted, the drums pounding, but then all around synths buzz, vocals croon, the heaviness transformed into something much more dreamy and blissy. "The Future" is an aggro, almost no wave workout, all jagged guitars and shouted vocals, and more of that thick throbbing bass, but just like the rest of the tracks, it gets totally twisted around, his time by the addition of fake strings, and yet another killer and totally irresistible hook.
"Earthmover" finishes things off, but instead of being some dirgey doom epic, it's another blissed out popscape, lots and lots of fuzz and buzz, glistening melodies, minimal rhythms, all buried beneath layers of woozy whir and sun dappled sparkle. Almost like a much prettier and poppier Nadja.
And the thing about this record and these songs, is that, they all manage to be outrageously catchy, but not obviously so, and while they straddle about a million different genres, they manage to weave them all seamlessly into each other, making Deathconsciousness feel less like a rock band's collection of songs, and more like one massive organic mass of blackened dronepop jangle-goth bliss. Which as far as we're concerned it actually is.
The packaging is amazing. A slimline dvd case, two cd-r's each hand spray painted, full color cover, super spare and striking, and then there's the book. A dvd sized 80 page book, filled with lyrics, liner notes, woodcuts, engravings, illustrations, and a massive amount of text on the soul, spirituality, death, sorcery, Medieval heresy and more, all supposedly penned by an East Coast professor and scholar.
So awesome!
This band is definitely tough to pin down sonically. Their sound is equal parts black metal, industrial, free jazz and electronica, but the resulting sound resembles none of those. Or perhaps all of them simultaneously. Hard to tell.
Which is sort of what makes this band so magical. A duo from Minnesota, whose first release is on a Belgian label, continues to confound from the sound to the dearth of information on the sleeve. But as confounding as this record is, it's also fantastic. Totally vibrant and alive and freaked out and joyous, while somehow managing to be grim and brutal and weird as fuck.
But how to accurately describe them... They are a duo, so of course one is tempted to throw some reference to Lightning Bolt in there, and there is some LB to Heatdeath's sound, a relentless churning, maniacal energy, it's impossible to imagine the drummer can play like that nonstop for whole sides of an lp, but he does, and the axeman keeps up just fine thank you. A closer and slightly more accurate comparison, might be a black metal, or black industrial Necks. There is a definite element of slow shifting stasis, no distinct riffs, and no real distinct rhythms, but more a roiling black hole of chaotic drumming and denatured riffing, like the Necks covering Abruptum. Wow. Indeed. The two tracks constantly shift, moving from slightly more tranquil drift, to fullbore crash and buzz, and it sounds improvised for sure, but at the same time, it almost seems composed, the two players shifting seamlessly from part to part, mood to mood, creating gorgeously expansive soundscapes of intense instrumental interplay, and churning abstract ambience, often the two colliding and getting gloriously tangled up.
Packaged in thick plastic sleeves, black on black fold over jackets, and each lp includes a coupon so you can download the whole record for your iPod.
LIMITED TO ONLY 250 COPIES!!!!
Record number two from this mysterious drone-kraut styled duo. Their last disc was a huge hit around here, so we were pretty thrilled to get our hands on this one, a logical sonic extension of the first, delving deeper into some murky tripped out twilit soundworld.
The disc opens with shimmering clouds of gongs and cymbals, whirring and sizzling, suspended over a deep distant rumble, a delicate intro to a record at once hypnotic and lovely, dark and dense.
The record is arranged into three epic tracks, interspersed with short sonic interludes, ranging from field recordings of crickets, looped chants (Elizabeth Clare Prophet if we're not mistaken), spirituals and mysterious liturgical songs, whirring drones, and backwards percussion, but it's the long tracks where the duo get to spread out, let their dense soundscapes sprawl.
The three long tracks sounds like movements of a greater whole, clocking in at 15 minutes, 11 minutes and nearly 17 minutes respectively, each rife with creepy delayed vocals, churning guitars and smeared chords, roiling muddy whirls, which often dissipate leaving streaks of fragmented melody and haunting slowed down voices. Buried amidst the drones and whirs, are lullaby-like melodies, skittery percussion, streaks of grinding distortion, hidden voices, more field recordings, thick swaths of cavernous rumbles, little bits of electronic glitch and lots and lots of low end buzz.
Packaged in a fancy navy blue fold over sleeve, screenprinted in white ink, with a photocopied insert with liner notes and song credits.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES! Each one hand numbered.
There seems to be a bit of a noise renaissance going on these days. Not only are there more and more outfits whose specialty seems to be kicking up serious squalls of sonic chaos, but groups who dabbled in noise, or originators of noise music who had perhaps moved on, and often pushed the boundaries of what noise music was or could be, seem to be reverting to sounds much more primal and cathartic. Witness the most recent Skullflower. A blast of coruscating blown out skree. And here we have the latest from the duo Hototogisu, which just so happens to feature Mr. Bower. Hmmm. Maybe it's just Bower then. Skullflower briefly returned to THE RIFF recently, most notably with Exquisite Fucking Boredom, a series of looped seventies drug rock riffs, rendered increasingly disjointed and disembodied. And back in the day, Skullflower were a serious riff heavy thudrock combo. But over the last few records, the sound of Skullflower has gotten increasingly noisier. The cool thing though is that the noise is infused with a melodic sensibility Bower just can't seem to kick. Or maybe doesn't want to.
Now, Hototogisu, Bower's group with Marcia Bassett from GHQ and Double Leopards was always a noisy proposition, and that hasn't really changed much. here and there, the group would slip into something more drone-y or raga like, but noise was their reason for being. So it should com as no surprise that this latest lp is very very noisy. Two side long tracks, the first of which is seriously caustic, as always close listening reveals much going on, texture and rhythm and timbre, but it is very much a serious slab of noisemusic.
The B side however, is much more nuanced. And while still noisy, is much more melodic, drones and layers of buzz shifting and transforming, streaks of feedback, bits of rumble and whir, all wound around accidental melodies, and stretches of almost blissful noise. But noise it remains.
Thus, this is another one for the iron eared. Fans of Hototogisu and Bower and Bassett's various projects will most definitely dig, but those with sensitive ears or a low tolerance for sonic skree, tread very carefully...
It should be frighteningly obvious by now, to everyone, that we love the sound of record crackle. Pops and clicks, buzz and fuzz. Just have a look at the last 8 or 9 years of reviews, and you'll see that we are grade-A suckers when it comes to that unmistakable sound. In fact, more than once, we posited that if we had a way, some simple system or an effects pedal even, that would render EVERY record we had, more fuzzy, turn every super clear crystal clean recording into something that sounded like it had been sitting in the garage for 50 years and was being played back on a rusty Victrola, well, you know we'd do it in a second.
And if there was one single artist, responsible for cementing that love of crackle and pop, of twisting our tastes all around, of taking a love, and turning it into an obsession, it would very likely be Mr. Philip Jeck. Ever since his Surf record, we have been smitten, no, obsessed is more like it. Desperately waiting for another missive of dreamlike murk, of looped chunks of vinyl, of pastoral bliss rendered in disembodied melodies and all manner of distortion and grit. We would later becomes similarly obsessed with soundmakers exploring similar territory, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Eric Cordier, but our fuzzy crackly little hearts will always belong to Philip Jeck.
Which is all the more ironic considering Sand, his brand new record, is perhaps the least fuzzy, the least murky, the most crystalline and clear recording we've heard from him yet. Recorded live over the last couple years and later edited into a series of slow developing soundscapes, Sand finds Jeck moving beyond the crackle and static of turntables, allowing his deft hand at arranging, at collaging various sounds, heck COMPOSING, take the center stage. That element was always present, but was often overshadowed by the sound, by the ambience, whereas here, in these SONGS, the fuzz and crackles is just one more compositional element. Fear not, there are still plenty of old fuzzy recordings, re-envisioned sonic snippets, haunting blurred loops, but here, it seems as if Jeck has chosen the parts and pieces more for their melodic content than their texture, and the results are quite surprising.
The opener is a mysterious creep, muted crackle woven into a warm whir, in the background, deep melodic swells drift in and out, soon to fade out completely, leaving just crackle like the sound of gentle rainfall. Over the track's 9+ minutes, sound shifts and changes, timbre and tone are altered dramatically, often unexpectedly, but it manages to work, finishing off with a gentle fade out peppered with intense squelchy squalls of white noise.
From then on out, the sound is surprisingly epic and majestic, the loops and snippets stretched out and tangled up into long form pulsing fanfares, some sort of sun dappled ur-drone, underpinned by strange subtle rhythms, and a constantly churning melodic undercurrent.
The end of "Residue" almost sounds like Nadja at points, with short sharp bursts of heavily delayed and effected samples, but spends much more time whispering along, delicately traversing seas of soft static. "Shining" is all low end rumble and whir, shimmer and sway, pulsing and throbbing, a churning blackened sea of sound, this time peppered with strange almost-rhythms crafted from sonic snippets, giving it an almost Chain Reaction minimal techno vibe.
The disc finished off with the 11 minute "Fanfares Over", the third and final part of Jeck's Fanfare song trilogy on sand, and begins with a splatter of crackly percussion, a woozy warbly loop, all slowly overtaken by a soft skipping record, slowly becoming a sort of ghostlike lullaby, that strange persistent percussion, making the track sound like, at times, like it could be from some forest folk or free drone cd-r. Jeck sets up a calliope like loop, wraps it in flanger, occasionally spreads a little distortion and record buzz over the top, and lets it weave and say and sprawl until it explodes near the end into a flurry of bleary eared distortion, the melody blown out, the sound jagged and intense, a subtly chaotic, in-the-red climax, that doesn't fade out, instead just blinks out, leaving the strange vacuum of silence.
At first we were a little disappointed that Sand wasn't more fuzzy, more murky and washed out, more distorted and damaged sounding, but the more we listened, the more we realized, that all of those elements WERE still present, just in ways that might not be so obvious, Sand is still fuzzy and murky and dreamlike and distorted, and it's a testament to Jeck's skill as a composer and a turntablist, that he's able to make it seem otherwise. And judging from how often this gets played in the store, we're all just as smitten as ever.
Glorious fuzzed out howl, rather dark and desolate despite the warm and fuzzy sounding name. Well maybe fuzzy is right, the guitars certainly are... This is the first cd release (after some obscure limited edition vinyl and cd-r action) from this Dutch improvisational "free rock" power trio. It's no surprise that they've found a home on the Holy Mountain label, alongside the likes of Suishou No Fune, Zodiacs, Lichens, La Otracina, and the Davis Redford Triad, amongst others. It's definitely some Holy Mountain sounding shit! Mega-massive distorted whale call guitar explorations, displaying density and intensity on par with Japanese units like Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha. There's four lengthy tracks here, 66 minutes total time, studio-recorded but presumably live without overdubs, each one of them deserving of a serious "whew!" when finished. The wind-tunnel of feedback from the amplifier abusing guitarist is ably supported by the bassist's clouds of low-end tones and the percussionist's jazz-worthy, freely fractured drum kit hits, in a moody, never too busy interplay of paradoxically controlled chaos. It's channelled volume and energy, boring a hole in your skull through your ears to the part of your brain where you imagine John Coltrane's sheets of sound, stretched out and slowed down and ground up, electrified for guitar strings instead of sax... Whew! We like.
Latest issue of this kick ass metal mag from long time aQ favorites, black metal geniuses (maniacs?) Circle Of Ouroborus, who, when not crafting twisted damaged folk flecked stumbling blackened buzz, put together a seriously excellent 'zine, covering a super varied selection of very AQ worthy outfits.
Number 5 features NY based primitive black metallers Ash Pool, Japanese doomsters Coffins, Danish doom combo Sol, legendary Norwegian black metallers Trelldom, German blackened death metallers Drowned, death metal legends Incantation, stoner doom trio Ramesses. And even some new-to-us stuff: Australian black thrashers Denouncement Pyre, and four super obscure black death doom bands with only demos to their names: Arvet from Finland, Ignivomous from Australia, Exorcism (we're not sure where they're from) and another Finnish band Profetus.
In addition to all that stuff, there's a bunch of reviews, as well as a killer primer on Finnish black metal, and each page has a cool hand drawn border with demons and flames and upside down crosses, skeletons, and in addition to all the various band photos, there are tons of creepy hand drawn illustrations.
A while back, someone made us a really excellent mix tape of jazz. And there were a couple songs by a cat called Byard Lancaster that just knocked us for a loop! He was playing flute and just destroying. A total wildman, singing and shouting, and humming, almost scatting through the flute, spitting out multiple melody lines, sputtering maniacally, but somehow making it sound as natural as whipping out a staid version of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things". So we were a bit obsessed, and it proved pretty dang difficult to track down any proper releases from Lancaster, outside of crazy pricey imports.
Then word came down from Porter Records, a new label started by aQ pal Luke Mosling, who in the first few months of existence, have released more records than most labels put out in a year, about a deal brewing between Porter and Mr. Byard Lancaster that since has been solidified. Which means that over the next little while, Porter will start re-releasing essential Lancaster discs, as well as digging up rarities and lost sets and making them available for the first time.
Such is the case with this here gem, a set recorded at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1971 (a magical year for music, as we've noted in about a million other reviews!). Those three tracks clock in at nearly 21 minutes, at start out all dreamy and moody, piano and flute, ominous and haunting, but that soon gives way to an amazing drum solo, nearly two minutes, skittery and in its own way weirdly catchy, until the band joins in and they're off, that track is super abstract and skronky, very free, but with a definite dark melody running through it, while the 10+ minute track that makes up the bulk of the Macalester set is bouncy and energetic, wild and while less free, still free enough. Each player shines, some serious bop that gives way to some more dark moodiness. Gorgeous gorgeous stuff.
And if that weren't enough there are three loooong bonus tracks. The opener "1324", is 16 minutes of gorgeous free jazz bliss, Lancaster wailing away, the bass and drums slippery and serpentine, Lancaster's horn slipping from classic jazz to Eastern melodies and back again, and fear not, there's a drum solo here too!
The two bonus tracks tacked on the end were recorded in 1973 by the J.R. Mitchel Experimental Unit featuring Lancaster on sax, and features some seriously psychedelic jazz, skronky and free, but with lots of drones and exotic percussion, some tripped out effects and some seriously dense compositions. Awesome and expansive far out freedom for sure! Can't wait for the rest of those lost and impossible to find Lancaster discs to materialize, but this one will hold us over just fine.
Like the rest of the Porter releases so far, nicely packaged with a huge booklet, extensive liner notes, extra notes from Lancaster himself, band and musician histories and a bunch of cool photos.
When we got the Supernaturals Vol.1 cd that teamed up Italy's UFOmammut and Lento (or Lent0?) we knew who UFOmammut were. The snailkings of psychedelic heavy sludge stoner metal awesomeness, a perfect hybrid of Electric Wizard's drugged-out doom and Hawkwind's even spacier, uh, spaciness. Big fans of UFOmammut we already were. But who were this Lento?? Now we have that band's out-on-their-own debut, and now we know. Lento are Italy's all-instrumental answer to Isis. They're Italy's masters of sinister, atmospheric, super-heavy post rock chugga chugga. The seven tracks of Earthen are divided between full-on, blown-out, heavy-riffing clobber and more restrained, near-ambient dronology, usually dynamically within the same song, though there's several tracks given over entirely to the latter, as on "Emersion Of The Islands" a drone-piece with crackling sferic-like sounds... It's a majestic, metallic post-rock soundtrack to a trudging trip across the cratered surface of some airless planetoid, an epic slog under unknown stars, bathed in space radiation, amidst the ruined remains of ancient alien technology... Or at least that's what we're getting from all their drone and grit and feedback, crashing cymbals, and monolithic riffage. Though Earthen's theme, as expressed in the song titles and artwork, appears actually to be more "Subterrestrial" than extra-terrestrial.
First off & obviously we'd recommend this to fans of their pals UFOmammut... the rigid, mechanical Godflesh-like elements that we've detected in UFOmammut's music are more prominent here, with some isolationist Lustmord ambience thrown in as well. Certainly check out Lento if you're into Godflesh (and Justin Broadrick's Jesu too), Isis, Nadja, Dumb & The Ugly, Hyatari... and of course if you liked that Supernaturals Vol.1 disc. This, and UFOmammut's new one Idolum also reviewed this list, are both fine follow-ups to that.
Similar to that new UFOmammut, this "regular" edition of Earthen is packaged in one of those newfangled rounded-corner jewel cases. There is (or was) a special limited edition of Earthen, too, with arty inserts and all, but we got precisely one of those 'cause they cost so damn much. If you're interested, ask, we might still have it... $49! Otherwise, this $19.98 edition is recommended!
Another chunk of classic old school style doom from Sweden's I Hate Records. This time from a band called Lord Vicar, whose name should give you a clue as to what they're all about. From Reverend to Vicar? That's right, Reverend Bizarre's axeman Peter Vicar has joined up with vocalist Christian Lindersson of Count Raven, Terra Firma and St. Vitus to craft some total Sabbath worshipping heavy doom. And it is pretty excellent. Killer loping tempo, druggy doomy guitar, wailed almost Ozzy-ish vocals, think Pentagram, Pagan Altar and the like� fans of that sort of classic doom will dig this big time. There is some surprising folkiness to be found here and there, but it never takes long for the band to lurch back into full on doom groove destruction. Lord Vicar also include in their ranks members of Centurions Ghost, While Heaven Wept and Revelation for extra doom cred, if any more were needed!
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES! Packaged in a thick matte sleeve, pressed on heavy vinyl, with a color insert with lyrics and liner notes.
