Wow, we've gotten quite a bunch of terrific pop releases for you his week... such as Dead Science, and this one! Xs On Your Eyes is album #4 for +/-, and what a fine one it is! Songs like "Snowblind" and the title track make this a near-perfect autumnal indie pop treasure and a great follow-up to 2007's Let's Build A Fire. With their warm reverbed male vocals, jangle-pop guitars and smart songwriting, +/- possesses the comforting fuzzy security blanket nature of bands like Death Cab For Cutie, Postal Service, Nada Surf and Yo La Tengo, but with more propulsive drums and horn embellishments. Also, as with past +/- recordings, you can still hear fond familiar echoes of guitarist James Balayut's other band Versus, so if you were/are a fan you sure don't want to miss! College radio cuddle-ready!
*Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert*
Whew, glad that still works. It's been XXX since the last AMT cd, Journey Into The Cosmic Inferno, after all. We were getting worried. (Though, we did have a dvd from them on the last list...). But never fear, AMT is here, again. Actually, AMT is probably out on tour somewhere in the world, and this new cd is more product for their groaning merch table. Ensconced inside a package boasting swank Seldon Hunt cover artwork, you get three new, long, studio recorded tracks, with (as usual) fairly absurd titles. Try these on for size: "Phantom Utopia Or Suicidal Star Warriors", "Cosmic Soul Death Disco", and "Stargate Of The Hell"!!
When the 22 minute track one starts off, you'll be like, woah, heavy. It's a ploddingly paced, lumbering grey grinding dirge, claustrophobically encumbered with swirling, spaced out FX. Definitely in the AMT tradition, and not far from the SUNNO)))-like heaviness of their Recurring Dream & Apocalypse Of Darkness album earlier this year. The second track, however, while equally awash in FX, and just as amped in the guitar dep't, is more of a rocker, throbbing (and babbling, there's vox on this one) a bit like Circle, on their way down the rabbit hole. Kawabata's acid rock guitar dances (or does battle) for the duration with the synthy zips and zaps swooping about, it's another long (29 minute), loud trip indeed.
After all this glorious sprawling psychedelic mayhem, what do we get for a coda? A concentrated dose of the same! The third and final track is a mere 5 minutes but crams in even more frantic FX and acidic guitar squiggle, before the final 30 seconds or so reminds us what bliss a simple vibrating hiss can be, as it fades out and leaves the listener waiting for their next transmission. This one, though, is good for many more spins as well, in fact it's practically spinning by itself even when not in the cd player due to all the cosmic chaos contained within it.
Where to even start... HAWKWIND. The mighty lords of drugged out space rock, without whom, most of the bands we love might not even exist. These four Hawkwind records: Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall Of The Mountain Grill, In Search Of Space, and Space Ritual, are pretty much all anyone needs to know about space rock. Or whatever it is that Hawkwind do, long sprawling jams, extended psychedelic workouts, heavy and trippy, totally drugged out and divine, while at the same time, surprisingly catchy. But yeah, aQ folks probably already know how much we love Hawkwind.
So if we were to pick six bands to cover classic Hawkwind tunes, we might not have picked these six, but then again, we very well might have: Mudhoney, Mugstar, Acid Mothers Tempo And The Cosmic Inferno, White Hills, Kinski, Bardo Pond. Holy hell! If this were just a comp with those bands, we'd be all over it, but the fact that they're covering Hawkwind seems like it was made just for the aQ faithful, and who knows, maybe it was. Spread out over three 7"s, we almost didn't list these separately, but as a set, 'cause to our minds, who the heck would only want one or two of these? But you never know, so for those of you who didn't already freak out and toss all three into your cart, here's a brief bit about each specific 7":
Volume 2, "Psychedelic Warlords", features Acid Mothers Temple, who are an obvious choice to pay homage to a band who was doing the AMT thing 30 years ago, and in true AMT fashion, Kawabata and company go for it, covering "Brainstorm" although it's difficult to tell, as it's buried under sheets of wild freaked out psych guitar and blown out space rock effects EVERYWHERE. It really doesn't sound all that different from any number of other AMT jams, but that's basically because every AMT jam is a tribute to Hawkwind, isn't it?
AMT are matched up with NYC's White Hills, who ditch much of their usual spaceiness for something a bit harder, tackling "Be Yourself" with crunchy chugging guitars, pounding drums, wild tangles of distortion drenched leads over the top, the band not so much covering the original, as transforming it into an endless psychedelic hard rock loop, the band churning and grinding out a steady stream of psychedelia over that endless main riff, before drifting off into a cloud of glittering soft psych shimmer.
The packaging is brilliant, perfectly tripped out psychedelic acid flashback, naked lady, geometric design, cribbed from the original Hawkwind artwork (or at the very least, an incredible simulation), the sleeves are printed complete with shelf wear and corner creases (so don't complain, they're meant to look like they've been on your shelf for decades), each one SUPER LIMITED, and already sold out at the label, we have a bunch, but these will be the only copies we'll ever have!!
Why mess with a good thing, right? Well, Ryan Adams' not known to be one to follow that advice, but it seems like he has with his latest full length. He's kept on track with his great backing band The Cardinals. Sounding totally at ease, they really seem to ground him with their exceptionally sound foundation. Although throughout his contrivance-riddled past we've been forced to be somewhat suspicious of the sincerity when he dons his 'sensitive guy' persona. Here, the haunting melancholia and sweet sentiments of some of the quieter songs such as "Cobwebs" and "Evergreen" ring true. Also, unlike his former tendencies to churn out album after album with nary a breath in between, he and the band took their time with Cardinology (*gasp* almost a year!). The album itself take its time too, unwinding at a laidback reflective pace. A hushed fine follow-up to the Americana goodness that was his Follow The Light cdep.
Whew! The first time we got something in from AFCGT, it was a painfully limited cd-r that exploded like a supernova and then disappeared just as quickly from the site. So, it's a damn good thing that this awesome collaboration between A Frames and the Climax Golden Twins has resulted in another batch of unbelievably good recordings. This time, it's a bit less limited, as Dirty Knobby has pressed these 8 tracks onto a 10", which should mean this thing will be around a little bit longer than the debut. The sound of AFCGT here is pretty much the same. Instrumental tunes with Mack truck rhythms, spring-loaded basslines, and giddy explosion of jagged guitar riffs that come together in what AFCGT blurts out as "New Punk." These swamp mutations of detuned Cambodian garage pop songs with an excess of stereoscopic distortion certainly have a Sun City Girls meets the Birthday vibe going on, with occasional excursions into a free noise mess of devolved noise and out of control drum fills, sort of like some of the Laddio Bollocko breakdowns. Who can complain about a Laddio Bollocko reference? Not us!
Moon Safari is pretty much an undeniable classic by now. One of those records that sits in the collection of both casual music listeners and the more musically obsessed (i.e. folks like us!). At this point it's really easy to take this record for granted but it really still does hold it's weight. A seductive record that perfectly blends electronics with a smart and sexy pop sensibility. Channeling the rich history of French pop and infusing it with a very contemporary electronica sound this is one of those records of which we all have so many great memories. Celebrating the 10th (!) anniversary of its release, this deluxe package includes a disc of bonus tracks (remixes, live, etc.) as well as the dvd of their Mike Mills directed documentary "Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing."
In the wake of The Alps recent full length, III, comes not one, but two lengthy cd-r eps culled from the same recording sessions that produced III. Mostly improvised, those sessions for III found the trio expanding their sprawling abstract free folk into a sound much more spacious and druggy, New Age-y and blissed out, and in the process they ended up with more music than would fit on a single record. The good news is, that since the music was all improvised, and was all recorded during the same sessions, these two eps play like sides 3 and 4 of III, had it been expanded to a double album. Which is most definitely a good thing. Both of these discs, A Path Through The Sun, and A Path Through The Moon, are limited to 100 copies, of which we have 30, and those will most likely disappear in a flash. So act fast if you don't want to miss out on these. And needless to say (although we will anyway), everybody who dug III will absolutely need these.
As we mentioned in our review of III, The Alps have retained much of their free folk sound, yet have managed to incorporate more krautrock, more new age, even more space rock into that sound, creating a hybrid that manages straddle the underground cd-r scene, and something much more expansive and epic.
A Path Through The Moon, is cut from the same cloth as the sunnier Path, but offers up some krautrocky folk drift right out of the gate, reverbed guitar floats on clouds of cymbal sizzle, while a super spare rhythm holds it together, the whole track swaying woozily, the guitars laid back and softly psychedelic, the drums more of a subtle pulse than a driving force. The second track is all glistening sun baked guitar drone, the strums and picking allowed to melt into each other, creating a hazy web over the constant shimmer below, a distant rhythmic throb barely audible, very washed out an bleary eyes and lovely. The track after that sticks out a bit, a brooding low end rumble, riff with buzz and random room noise, a slow burner for sure, that at one point incorporates wailing female vocals (sampled we assume), some hip hop (!) and what sounds like random dialog buried beneath the churning buzz and rumble.
The band quickly shift back to folkier climes, offering up two chunks of glimmering steel string Appalachia, the first gorgeously sun dappled and lush, albeit peppered with bits of buzz and feedback near the end, the second much moodier and murkier, the guitar drifting through a field of soft hiss and washed out shimmer, before dropping out completely and leaving those background sounds to fade out until the end. And finally, the band finish up with a 9+ minute epic that is all over the place, starting out as a warm whirring drone, shifting to a sax flecked free jazz drift, then veering into a piano driven krautgroove, then a Reichian looped piano jam flecked with reverbed steel strings and zither like percussion, finally finishing off with a spacious stretch of free folk, minor key chords drifting through long stretches of near silence.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in a plain chipboard sleeve, the liner notes pasted on one side, a printed insert showing through a diecut on the other side.
In the wake of The Alps recent full length, III, comes not one, but two lengthy eps culled from the same recording sessions that produced III. Mostly improvised, those sessions for III found the trio expanding their sprawling abstract free folk into a sound much more spacious and druggy, New Age-y and blissed out, and in the process they ended up with more music than would fit on a single record. The good news is, that since the music was all improvised, and was all recorded during the same sessions, these two eps play like sides 3 and 4 of III, had it been expanded to a double album. Which is most definitely a good thing. Both of these discs, A Path Through The Sun, and A Path Through The Moon, are limited to 100 copies, of which we have 30, and those will most likely disappear in a flash. So act fast if you don't want to miss out on these. And needless to say (although we will anyway), everybody who dug III will absolutely need these.
As we mentioned in our review of III, The Alps have retained much of their free folk sound, yet have managed to incorporate more krautrock, more new age, even more space rock into that sound, creating a hybrid that manages straddle the underground cd-r scene, and something much more expansive and epic.
A Path Through The Sun begins with a lush layer of distant shimmer, over which steel strings shimmer and layers of background buzz swoon and swell, sounding not unlike James Blackshaw or Jack Rose, but soon the background builds unto a churning wall of distorted guitars, and the song is transformed into something wholly other. The following track is a longform near static drone, but densely layered and subtly colored with all manner of details, streaks of overlapping high end laid over a sea of rumbling overtones, laced with delicate spidery guitar melodies. Track three is the first hint of the bands more kraut side. Buzzing metallic guitars swirl over a stripped down Can like bass and drums groove, that stays solid, as those guitars twist ands turn, creating psychedelic clouds of sound over that motorik groove. The last two tracks find the band returning to a more dronefolk sound, a brief stretch of moaning bowed steel strings, glistening high end harmonics, and tinkling chimes gives way to a warm wheezing outro, guitars unfurl fragmented melodies over a slow swaying harmonium drone, lilting, and sun dappled and so dreamy.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in a plain chipboard sleeve, the liner notes pasted on one side, a printed insert showing through a diecut on the other side.
Holy shit! All we can say is look out Bone Awl. You'd never know it from the strange cover art, an abstract photo of pens and books and a family photo, or the name, or the indie like scrawled liner notes, but this is some of the fiercest, heaviest, most damaged off kilter and ultra raw black metal we've heard in forever. Well, since Bone Awl actually, or maybe Ildjarn. But music this raw and punky and fucked up, is only barely black metal anyway, they sound a bit like a supercharged Brainbombs, or maybe the Violent Students playing black metal. This is in-the-red, overblown, crusty blackened garage stomp. Filthy and pounding. The drums are so hot, they make the tape distort. The vocals are an inhuman snarl, the guitars are just a dizzyingly dense tangle of white noise and black buzz. The tempos are relentless and occasionally, the guitars and drums lock into a weird four on the floor techno style pound, albeit dripping with amp buzz and blown out guitar, before launching back into a full on black crust speaker smash assault. Fans of all things raw and distorted beyond recognition will go apeshit. And all you Bone Awl obsessives might have just found a new band to love...
I (Allan) have been trying to regularly review some classic old hard rock and metal albums, reissues of stuff that we as a responsible record store -should- have on our website. Some have gotten better customer responses than others. I did a whole bunch of KISS reviews and those were sorta hit or miss. And then a few lists ago I reviewed Def Leppard's debut, On Through The Night, to small avail. New Wave Of British Heavy Metal gem Loose N' Lethal by Savage did far better, perhaps 'cause its more obscure. But here's something, well let's put it this way: I know for sure that not everybody out there already has this album. So we should expect to sell quite a few of these, ok?
Like the two albums named above, this is a bona fide NWOBHM classic. And one perhaps more aligned with the Sabbathy doom/occult vibe that we so adore here at AQ, from bands both old and new. And this, their 1980 debut, is Angel Witch's finest platter. Believe me, we don't have room here to discuss the ups and (mostly) downs of Angel Witch's ill-fated on-and-off career after this album. Better to imagine that this disc (including all the bonus tracks of equal vintage) was all they ever did, and allow it to shine from its pedestal of NWOBHM perfection, just a brilliant concoction of heavy riffs, ripping solos, melodic vocals (with some badass shriekin' upon occasion), and dark, mystic atmospheres. It's catchy, too. They had a way with memorable, stick-in-your-head choruses - once you've heard the song "Angel Witch" itself, it's always gonna seem familiar, ferinstance.
Angel Witch, as an exemplar of the NWOBHM, are indeed very British, with quite the Hammer Horror vibe. We'd think so even if one of the bonus tracks wasn't an instrumental called "Dr. Phibes". Speaking of bonus tracks, this reissue, the "25th anniversary edition", not only sports a "nice price" but also features even more extras than earlier Castle pressings, bringing the total of tracks on the disc to 20. There's six tracks from 7" and 12" singles and the Metal For Muthas comp, several of which are gems equal to the best of those on the album proper, plus an additional four live BBC radio broadcast recordings!
Highly recommended to any headbanger worthy of the name, being a macabre NWOBHM essential in league with Diamond Head, early Iron Maiden, and Witchfinder General - indeed, we must say that any fan of WG should be aware of this 'witch as well!
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Just wanted to get the attention of the growing legion of Mississippi Records obsessives, as this week we have not one, not two, but THREE new releases from this PDX based all vinyl, mostly reissue label.
The first we heard from Animals & Men was on one of the long out of print Messthetics compilations, and then again on the Hyped To Death disc Revel In The Static which collected almost everything the band recorded. A bunch of those tracks are included here, available on vinyl again, for a super limited time.
Animals & Men were a female-fronted DIY art/blues/punk from rural England, totally charming and catchy and homemade, comparable to Kleenex/LiLiPUT, Delta 5 and the Vaselines with a wide array of influences including black American blues...and the novels of J.G. Ballard!
Many touted them at the time as New Wave coulda-woulda beens, especially with patrons like John Peel and their long-time pal Adam Ant. Yet, obscure they remained, but that obscurity allowed wonderful idiosyncrasies to flourish in their songwriting.
The sound is irresistible, with sing songy vocals, simple tribal drumming, fragmented blues riffs wrapped in reverby jangle, and rubbery almost dubby basslines (and don't forget the harmonica). Groovy, hypnotic, punky, even a little bit funky, their sound, while pretty darn unique, wouldn't have sounded at all out of place in the early days of K Records or Kill Rock Stars.
Nice thick black and white sleeves, and a super detailed cardstock insert, with a song by song guide and lots of cool photos.
The product of Jerry Cole, veteran Los Angeles session guitar player who worked with everyone from the Beach Boys and The Byrds to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, The Animated Egg was a fictitious band capitalizing on the "Now Sound" of sixties psychedelic pop. Like Hal Blaine's Psychedelic Percussion, Guitar Freakout was basically a corporately-funded psych exploitation record, but one that actually delivers the fuzzy and funky sonic goods! Of course, references to acid trips abound, but while a few songs are merely fuzzy and groovy takes on standard blues forms, songs like the hallucinatory heavy "Sock It My Way" and "I Said, She Said, Ah Cid" really show why this is a holy-grail for crate-diggers. This reissue features the entire album plus eleven bonus tracks from Cole's other psych-sploitation outfits, such as The Generation Gap, T. Swift and The Electric Bag and The Projection Company. If some of these tracks feel vaguely familiar, the producers of this record appropriated a lot of these same tracks for the 101 String's Astro-Sounds From Beyond 2000 adding even more and spacier string effects over the top of the originals. DJ's should definitely pick this up, and anyone else who loves wild psych-pop.
Two years ago, we discovered a one man band from Israel called Animus, who crafted a depressive buzz unlike any we had heard before. An incredible dirgey depressive landscape of blown out buzz, of layered whir, a sound that in other hands would sound downright blissful, but there was nothing blissful about that sound, it was miserable, melancholy, suicidal, dejected and despondent, the darkest of emotions rendered it varying shades of black, painted in varying degrees of buzz.
Two years later, Animus returns with another bleak sonic missive, another exercise in blackened buzz, but right from the start something is different. The record begins with hushed minor key steel string acoustic guitar, softly strummed, shimmery, until the buzz swoops in, and immediately locks into a static blast, the drum machine rigid and unswerving, pounding out a relentless beat, while the guitar is locked into a buzzy loop. Impossibly mesmerizing and hypnotic, exactly the sort of subtle transcendence we are always looking for in black metal. And so it goes, slipping back and forth from soft fluttery folk, to frenetic black flurry, until halfway through, after another brief soft interlude, the sound shifts to an impossibly dense doomy crawl, the guitar continuing to buzz furiously, but the drums slowed down to a tarpit crawl, and the vocals spewed out like some noxious black fog, gurgling and growling, a thick layered wall of droning sound. The deeper you sink, the further it moves from black metal, and the closer it gets to some experimental dronemusick. But even that only lasts briefly, before the song shifts back to the opening riff, and resumes its back and forth, only this time introducing extended pauses and haunting church bells. And that's just the opening track.
The next few tracks offer up some cinematic black ambience, soft piano, moaning strings, deep shimmering drones, muttered otherworldy invokations, folky steel string strum, hushed harsh vocals drenched in effects until it becomes crumbling streaks of distortion, before the vocals how and wail over the lilting minor key melody.
That tranquility is disrupted by a flurry of chaotic drumming and buzz drenched riffage, which gives way to a speeded up black krautrock, muted layered fuzzed out guitars, and impossibly fast blast beats, all over a pretty swoonsome guitar melody, and peppered with super random cymbal crash crescendos. Along stretch of incredibly deep rumbling blackened ambience, all subterranean drones and distant whirs, gives way to a haunting washed out final track, the guitars so blurred and smeared it's hard to even hear the riff, instead the guitars sway back and forth like black swells, the drumming spare and a bit off kilter, the vocals a raspy croak, the tone of the track not heavy or grim or brutal, as much as weary and worn, the sound of spirits slipping into the darkness, of the world slowly falling to pieces, the sound of stars blinking out, leaving a vast expanse of utter blackness, rendered in sound, it becomes a woozy whirling almost seasick dirge, with muted militaristic drumming, and a gorgeously thick and viscous soft focus roiling sea of warm languid buzz. So gorgeous and abject, so dreamily depressive, and so fucking amazing.
Grab a brew, it's Annihilation Time! This is their third album (duh) but their first for Tee Pee (and thus the first we've heard, even though they're from right over in the East Bay... must mean we're more stoner rock than punk). The standard issue spiel about AT is that, as you might have guessed from their name, they're big time Black Flag and Bl'ast! fans, crossing over into the retro-thrash movement, with some classic '70s cock rock moves a la KISS or Thin Lizzy thrown in. Think fellow retro rockin' Oaklanders Drunkhorse, but more punk and skater-ly.
So, do such blurbs tell the truth? And if so, does this supposed hybrid of Deep Purple and D.R.I. sound better on paper than on your stereo? Well check out the twin guitar leads towards the end of track 2, "About To Snap", there's shades of Iron Maiden's Smith/Murray right there, and you'll find plenty more in the way of tasty '70s/'80s metallic guitar action elsewhere on the disc, usually smack in the midst of some much more basic, punk styled riffage... while their music ain't rocket science, it is definitely some good times rock n' roll. Not the second coming of anybody, but still a neat mix of elements, glorious guitar harmonies coexisting with hoarse punk rock vox... even if it's hard to know if we're supposed to be pogoing or headbanging. It can't quite approach the shreddingness of their live shows, but it's fun nonetheless.
Weirdo black metal obsessives no doubt remember Italian band Leaden, whose awesomely titled album, Monotonous Foghorns of Molesting Department, we raved about a while back. Not only were the songs called things like "Black Apartment Of Depression" and "When Out Seems To Vanish", but the music was a stumbling confusional mix of blackened doomy slowcore and lurching murky black fuzz, that managed to be more droney and hypnotic than blasting and buzzing, but so weird and unique that we just couldn't get enough of it.
So when we discovered the guy from Leaden had another band, we knew we had to track it down. This isn't that new, but it's the firs time we've managed to get enough to list. And while it doesn't really sound much like Leaden, it is just as weird, but in a whole different, maybe even more brilliantly fucked up way.
My Frozen Dream Slept Too Eternally is only 4 songs, but they're all long, and there's so much packed into each. It would be worth it even if it was just one song, the opener, "Strongest Nocturnal Silence" is the black metal gloom pop what-the-fuck jam of the year. Of any year. Beginning with a simple doomy, almost Sabbathy riff, the drums join in, simple and stripped down, and then the vocals, holy shit. Somewhere between the Ethel Merman like warble of Urfaust and a doped up Axl Rose. A raspy harsh falsetto croon, draped over a warm thick doomy black groove that is equal parts black metal, slowcore and slooowed way down punk rock. The end result is something haunting and creepy and off kilter and amazingly moody and evocative. When the track shifts to the 'chorus', it's a hook that will stick in your head forever, the lurching riff, the anguished vocals. And we're only 5 minutes in. The track shifts gears and suddenly it's just a guitar, unfurling a mournful melody, the notes dripping in effects, drifting over space-y Tangerine Dream style synths, until a distorted guitar comes back in adding a layer of woozy swirling riffage, then the track builds and builds, the guitars getting more psychedelic and frenzied, the synths more dramatic and tense, and suddenly it's some sort of spaced out epic, Godspeed versus Hawkwind by way of Abruptum and Urfaust, the vocals come back in, and finally, the track explodes into a blast of about as black as it gets here, minor key doom-ed black metal, rife with super movie melodies, that minus the vocals and some of the buzz, could be some sort of dark post rock record.
Wow. Like we said, that song alone would be worth the price of admission, but there are three more long ones to go, and they hardly tread the same ground.
The next track starts off all churning downtuned chug underpinned by stumbling double kick, an almost Khold style groove, with some strange murky synthesizers than transform the track into something much more moody and unhinged, the vocals adding their own bit of anguished mystery, the track veering all over the place, the synths shifting the mood from punkish pound to swirling dizzying doom psych and back again. The next track is another punkish jam, with those disembodied keyboards that make this sound like Burzum covering Khold covering Nuit Noire. Shifting repeatedly from loping melancholy dirge to blurred buzz to lumbering moody dirge.
The final track is total blackened post rock. The guitars tangled and minor key, a swirling layer of ghostly keyboard over the whole thing, the vocals, a raspy mournful howl, the melodies constantly shifting and swirling, the song slipping into post punk groove, then dirgey doom metal pound, then black metal blast, but always twisted up by those vocals, and the off kilter keyboards, and the thing is, it may be damaged and demented, but beyond simply being 'bizarre', the sound is intense and emotional, epic and melancholic, dark and weirdly beautiful, while still managing to be heavy, buzzy, totally freaked out, fucked up and so fantastic.
If you've already guessed from the band name and album title that this is old school DOOM METAL, you'd be correct. What could be more doom than the idea of "Sincere Misery"?? Doom, depression, misery, of course. Sincerity, that's also a hallmark of the truest doom, from Ozzy's earliest croakings with Black Sabbath... he always sounded so sincere, that was a big part of his charisma. Later on, the prayerful likes of Trouble held the same sort of feeling...
So, with this debut, these guys are part of the grand tradition, that's for sure. Cleanly-sung vocal lamentations, soaring o'er CRUNCHY, crawling riffs, sheer epick heaviness in copious quantities, basically. With a variety of interestin' twists here and there to give Apostle Of Solitude their own identity, such as the sampled spoken narrative of some Depression-era old timer over the wide-open-spaces jamming of "This Dustbowl Earth", like a psychedelic Americana. And when comes solo time, they really shine. As achingly gorgeous as doom'd metallic guitarwork can be, yet sharp and fierce too. Perfectly complimenting the glacial gloominess of the band's pained plodding, which reaches its peak on the massive "Warbird", stretched out to over 14 minutes. File alongside the slow and low likes of Solitude Aeturnus, Reverend Bizarre, and home-staters Gates Of Slumber (for whom their guitarist/vocalist played drums, once upon a time).
Oh and we've gotta mention the hidden bonus track, a cover of Sabbath's "Electric Funeral". We think doom bands should resist the urge to cover Sabbath songs, but we're sure for obvious reasons it's an overpowering urge, so we don't blame 'em. At least AoS had the sense to make it an unlisted track at the end of the album. Why do we think doom bands shouldn't cover Sabbath? Well, we ALREADY know you like Sabbath, right? And you're not gonna improve upon the original, nor sound different enough to be interesting from the novelty angle. And now you've gone and ensured that the best song on your album is a cover. Whoops. However, hardly a serious complaint, and true doom fans will enjoy not only AoS's reverent cover of "Electric Funeral" but the whole album for sure. So, TDFs, get this, and also don't miss the new one from Finland's The Wandering Midget, from the same label, reviewed this list too!
Another gorgeously subdued missive from one of our favorite cd-r labels, Mystery Sea. Each release somehow fits into the label's focus on "night-ocean drones" whether literally, sonically, conceptually or spiritually. And every disc impeccably designed and packaged, the artwork as much a part of the art as the music inside.�
This installment (one of two on this week's list) comes from the East Coast, Massachusetts to be exact, from a one man band�known only as Asher. One of the better-known artists to release a record on Mystery Sea, Asher, focuses on field recordings, processed and manipulated into fantastic minimal microlandscapes of sound, creating textures and melodies, spreading found sounds and bits of generated music into long-form, slow-moving near static drones. But closer examination reveals all sorts of subtle rhythms, and constantly changing tonal colors, deep swells and distant shimmers, keening slivers of amp skree, but smeared into glistens rather than glares, the sounds of people and things, barely visible through the glorious blurry fuzz. Really quite lovely. Very close listening is definitely required, but the listener will be suitably rewarded by a beautiful and haunting otherworld of sound.�
The second in the Astral Social Club mp3 reissue program. One disc, 9 cd-r's and close to 8 hours worth of blissed out shimmer, soft dreamy noisescapes and mutant alien discodrone, all jammed onto one little disc. So for those of you who missed out on any of the numbers 8 through 16 (heck we did too, we only reviewed 3 of those!), then this is a good way to get it ALL!
First, an Astral Social club primer would probably be useful:
For those who don't already know, Astral Social Club just so happens to be Mr. Neil Campbell, the mastermind behind the genius Vibracathedral Orchestra, who for years, has been spending his days off from VCO, recording disc after amazing disc of deliriously spaced out drone, blown out extended ragas, and seemingly endless slabs of hypnotic pulse and drift, and more recently a sort of fractured otherworldy dancemusic.
Okay then, odds are, most of you are probably gonna want this, but in case you need a quick description of some of the sonic joys to be found within, here goes:
Strange and murky, looped percussion, with bits of electronic glitch, sounding almost a little like some sort of twentieth century classical filtered through some primitive krautrock, glorious sparkling epic shimmering drones, Technicolor cascades of rich reverberant sounds and all manner of glimmering glittering ear candy, super minimal dark ambience, with drifting whale call melodies and deep rumbling swells, Sunroof!-y bit of high end raga sparkle, complete with the sounds of crickets and running water, sun dappled, dreamy looped guitar sheen, all wrapped up into one big glorious space drone whole, dense synthscapes, lots of hiss and whir, with buried rhythmic pulses, weird underwater bloops and burbles... all sounding very much like some white label Pop Ambient 12", thick corrosive washes of overblown distortion and buzzing droning ragas, thick slabs of feedback, grinding chunks of guitarbuzz, processed vocals, all wound up into a snarled dronepsych blowouts, tranquil smears of soft sound, high end streaks and tangled slivers of feedback all wound up into gorgeously shimmering upper register skreescapes, circular looped hypnotic longform dronemusic, blissy and droney and spaced out and druggy, transcendental slabs of glistening high, super minimal percussive flutter, swirling abstract FX-scapes, pounding almost house sounding bangers all uniquely cracked, effects-soaked, drug-infused and blissed out and more more more more.
Essential listening for fans of all things drone-y and blissed out, fans of Vibracathedral, Skullflower, Yellow Swans, the Skaters and folks looking for some truly twisted outsider dance trax to go with their ambient dronemusic.
packaged in a thick PVC plastic sleeve, in a plain white jacket with a paste on front cover image.
- MPEG stream: 1
- MPEG stream: 2
- MPEG stream: 2
- MPEG stream: 3
- MPEG stream: One
- MPEG stream: Two
- MPEG stream: Four
As a follow-up to getting the NEW Asva we recently listed (on both formats), they've just now made their debut available on vinyl too... Here's what we said when this first came out on cd back in 2005:
It's funny how suddenly every one has a doom drone dirge project happening. The popularity of SUNNO)) and Earth and Corrupted and Boris not only has record collectors scrambling for their wallets, but seems to have other musicians scrambling as well, buying bigger amps, more distortion boxes, trying to tune lower and play slower, all of this evidenced by the sudden glut of bands whose influences don't extend much beyond Earth and SUNNO))). We're not complaining mind you 'cuz you know we can't get enough of that sludgy downtuned dirge! And, you can't give Asva too much grief as bass player Stuart Dahlquist (brother of Silkworm's Michael Dahlquist) was there in the early days, having played in doom dirge metal outfit Burning Witch, and Asva actually feels like a logical extension of his old band. Dahlquist is joined in Asva by guitarist John Schuller and ex-Mr. Bungle guitarist / current Web Of Mimicry head honcho Trey Spruance, as well as an organist (!) and a female vocalist (!). It's these last two elements, as well as a flair for incorporating melody into a sound usually light on the melodic end of things, that makes Asva a much more interesting prospect. Of the four extended tracks here, it's the first and the last that hue closest to the SUNNO))) / Earth template. Huge slabs of ultra distorted guitars, working their way through slow motion riffs, a ponderous plodding metallic crush. On the final track, vocalist Jessika Kenney belts out a one woman chorale, adding a strangely angelic vibe to the proceedings, minor key, but soaring over the slow motion Sabbath beneath, beautiful and haunting in a way few bands like this have managed. The two tracks in between are much more abstract and spare, not in the least but heavy, but still creepy and droney. Track two is all minimal whir and shimmer, slowly shifting and subtly moving through a minimal almost melody. Track three again features Kenney's vocalizations, this time though, it's ALL about the vocals, the musical bed is a hushed doomy organ driven drone, endlessly sustaining with occasional super reverbed bass and sizzling barely-there percussion, while Kenney wails and trills, swooping through strange alien melodies, her multi tracked vocals harmonizing with themselves, creating a very bizarre, but thrillingly creepy soundworld. Fans of the genre (sludgedoomdirgedeathdrone) probably already know about this record and know they need it, but folks who have yet to get into this stuff, might find Asva just melodic enough and weird enough to merit further investigation.
Doom devotees, could we have your attention? We've got a handful of these remaining in stock, a 2-song 10" ep from English sludgelords (and frequent Nadja collaborators) Atavist, released earlier this year on vinyl only, limited to 333 copies. Actually it's really only one song, the downtuned dirge "Alchemic Resurrection", parts a and b, spread over both sides of this 10", nearly 15 minutes of misery.
It's so punishingly slow and heavy that it's pretty hard to tell if it's supposed to play on 33 or 45... they both sound good, and even at the faster speed it's pure sludge.
This comes on black wax speckled with sparkly flecks, like a star field or goldschlager or metallic dandruff.
Not one, not two, but THREE Nadja releases this week! Two of them are collaborations, but still, how's a Nadja fan supposed to keep up? But as we've learned, it's well worth the effort, as each disc has been a bonafide killer, and this one is no different.
Teamed up with UK sludge doom quartet Atavist, this seems like the ultimate doom drone matchup, and thus you might expect that these two bands would bring out the heaviest and sludgiest in each other, when in fact, the exact opposite is the case.
Two nearly half hour tracks, each one meandering and blissful, darkly tranquil and really really pretty. The first is a slowcore / postrock drift, delicate guitar figures, looped over a slow shimmery dronescape, the backdrop constantly shifting, the guitar line spidery and minor key, repeating hypnotically above a constantly intensifying backdrop of drones and rumblings. Eventually the background noise overtakes the lonely guitar, but not in a sludgy bombastic way, more like a muted churning swirl, lots of billowy low end guitar, and drifting smoky ambience. Near the end, the guitars do thicken, and suddenly the dreaminess is mired in some serious sludge, shot though with distant keening psychguitar, but it doesn't last, and the sludge softens quickly into more whispery whir.
The second track is a wide open expanse of billowy dark ambience, lots of strange muted FX and pulsing krautrocky swirl. More in line with Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh than SUNNO)) or Earth. Eventually building into a moaning majestic wall of sound, like Sunroof! or Vibracathedral, but less skree and more rumble, huge slabs of crumbling guitar, beneath glistening melodic fragments and soft whirls of sound.
Droney and dreamy, divine and doomy and obviously essential.
The German label that brought us the first two albums from ambient doom-jazzers Bohren & Der Club Of Gore is much better known for crusty punk/metal/hc stuff. One of their top acts is Audio Kollaps, who tear it up on their latest, the aptly-titled juggernaut of blurring brutality that is Panzer. It's full of fast, fierce grinding metal with chugging breakdowns and gruff, German-language vocals growling lyrics that we're pretty sure must be politically progressive, anti-war diatribes. Though, just from listening to this aggro music, you wouldn't necessarily take 'em for peaceniks!
Is it us, or is UK noise rock outfit Aufgehoben continually getting noisier and noisier? Is that even possible? We're beginning to think it is, even after the recent Messidor full length seemed to have reached a noise ceiling.
But here we are, two splattery, speaker frying blasts of no wave, free jazz noise rock. Or something. Not sure what to call it, but we like it. A lot. It does require a strong stomach and some iron clad earholes, but if you think you've got the stuff, that hop right in.
Two drummers, electronics, and very little else, are all these guys need to DESTROY. Side A begins with some rhythmic free jazz splatter before being swallowed alive by white hot bursts of crumbling distortion and swells of Merzbowian fury. The sheets of noise stuttering and almost 'skipping' into strange speaker shredding almost-rhythms, some otherworldly white noise pulse that bathes the rest of the song in a blinding and painfully loud glow.
Side B is cut from the same cloth, beginning with some Derek Bailey-ish guitar scrabble before the band launch into a full-on free jazz noise rock assault, loads of buzzing feedback, charged sheets of skree, all blown out and super distorted and in the red, interrupted by brief bits of tranquility, peppered with moments of grinding guitar scrape and spastic drum sputter, always quickly obliterated by a massive super nova of pure noise. Fucking brutal and massively intense!
Packaged in a plain black sleeve with some simple paste on art. Pressed on super thick vinyl, a gorgeous picture disc adorned with strange branch like patterns, like a fossil or some blurred winterscape. Nice!!
LIMITED TO 524 COPIES!!!
More grim buzzing black metal from Finland! For some of us, that's all we need to know, but then, go ahead and check inside and discover that the lyrics were "written and stolen from various sources", by someone called Ancient Fisherman, who just so happens to be Albert Witchfinder of the mighty Reverend Bizarre!! Fuck yeah!
So in addition to digging through the RB archives and releasing almost as many records posthumously as when they were actually a band, Mr. Witchfinder indulges his glacial ultra doom side as The Puritan, and offers up musical black masses in both Armanenschaft, and now Azrael Rising.
Relentless and furious, buzzing and black, the Ancient Fisherman's partner Vitutor lays down some serious grimness, channeling the Nordic elite, but also countrymen like Horna, Ajattara, Beherit, Sargeist, the Finnish elite, and Azrael sounds right at home. Long epic stretches of sweeping keyboards, give way to loping sprawls of midtempo Burzumic buzz, before slipping into lightning fast blasts of blown out blackness. One track stands out, as it harkens back to Reverend Bizarre, a seriously doomy trudge, the vocals slipping from harsh and screechy to bellowy and demonic, while the riffs churn and the tempos lurch, before the last song crashes in, a blown out hiss drenched burst of midtempo drumming, washed out blurred buzzing guitars, and vocals that are wild and gloriously unhinged.
So there you go... Black metal. Finnish. Albert Witchfinder. Buzz. Blast. Grim. What else do you need?
- MPEG stream: I
- MPEG stream: II
Sure, "You don't mess with Texas" is a cliche as old as the hills, one that has lost much of its import, but those are definitely words to live by if "messing with Texas" means messing with these guys. Houston's Bahimiron return with the aptly titled Southern Nihilizm, a furious slab of blasting grim blackness, that owes no small debt to the mighty Gorgoroth, giving that classic Norwegian sound through their own cracked Texan twist, the guitars are crunchy and buzzy, the drums are buried in the mix, but are wild and frenetic, and the vocals are seriously demented, going from processed guttural growls, to monstrous roar to almost Cradle Of Filth shriek, often in the same song.
The other weird thing about Bahimiron's sound is the production, tons of effects and what sounds like reverb, so everything is dense and noisy, and the riffs sort of blend into one another, turning a black buzz into a droned out buzzing blacknoize. There are some strange moments scattered throughout the record as well, the end of "The Cauldron Born" features a bizarre, awesomely out of place chromatic sort-of-guitar solo, "Agonist The Filth" has killer squiggly leads draped all over the place, "Chambers Empty" features deep bellowing clean vocals doused in effects that transform them into confusional speaking in tongues garbled mumbles then moments later into hysterical howls. The title track has a cool melancholy breakdown in the middle with a distorted guitar playing out a mournful minor key melody, before the band explodes into another blown out black frenzy. And "War Whiskey Sodomy" closes the record with a brief lumbering sludge soaked doom outro. But all that weirdness is deftly tangled up and tucked away in and within the band's furious noisy black metal buzz, making it just weird enough for us, but just grim and true enough for everyone else.
Cool cover art, the band's logo and evil goat image rendered in super subtle gloss black ink on a flat matte black booklet.
At first we were a little put off by the idea of a double disc Aidan Baker 'greatest hits' collection. As avid readers of the list no doubt have realized, we average close to a new Baker record every two weeks. One a list! So collecting random tracks to create yet -another- release seems a bit like overkill. But as we dug deeper, we discovered that these two discs were culled from super rare and long out of print releases, spanning the years 2000 to 2007. So rare in fact that even the avid Baker / Nadja obsessives around here didn't recognize 90 percent of the releases these tracks came from. Which ultimately means that I Wish Too is essentially a whole new record, which is perfectly fine with us. The tracks are quite varied, seeing as they span almost a decade, and include vastly different instrumentation, and varying lineups, but it's all pretty great, from the delicate drift of "Element #1", not all that far removed from the Aidan Baker dreamdronedrift we know and love, to the lilting post rock chamber music of "K", with real drums, cello and violin, a dramatic Godspeed / Rachel's sort of meander, that is quite lovely, to the rumbling subterranean low end sprawl of "Merge", a deep shimmery drift that is draped with ethereal falsetto vocals, to the tribal ambience of "Calibrate" which sound a bit like a murkier Muslimgauze or a super stripped down, much dronier African Head Charge. And there's more, lots more. A glimpse at every sonic side of Baker: huge slow moving industrial whirs and glimmering abstract shimmer, stuttering looped soundscapes that sound like alien filed recordings mixed with minimal Raster-Noton jams, warm, washed out slow jam trip hop, with skittery beats over deep low end swells, and stretched out jazzy dirgescapes, shuffling drums, and muted trumpet, soft focus piano, all locked into ever expanding loops like a more abstract Necks. And that's just disc one. Just one disc! The second disc collects a whole 'nother hour+ of drones and drifts and loping meander and whirring shimmer, a pretty serious retrospective for sure.
Needless to say, Baker fanatics, even the most obsessive, will probably not have all this stuff, and newbies will definitely have lots to dig in to and discover. So once again, if your already overloaded Baker / Nadja shelf can handle the additional strain, RECOMMENDED!
Originally released as a cd-r in 2002, so limited we never managed to get ANY. So for lots of Baker fans, this will probably be your first chance to wrap your ears around Letters.
Really hard to know what to say about Baker anymore. He definitely has a sound, unlike his dirgier more metallic blissed out doom duo Nadja, his solo stuff tends toward the super minimal, the dark and droney and drifty, the hushed and shimmery, and Letters is no different. But within that somewhat well defined sound, there is in fact much variation, subtle as it may be.
On Letters, Baker offers up soft billows of sound, which are wrapped around a hushed vocals, more of a murmur actually, but instead of a drone record, it transforms the sound into some super minimal slowcore, the pop element sublimated to almost non existence, the vocal melody being the only thing keeping the track from sprawling out into abstract smears and blurs (not that we mind that either mind you). The instrumentation is simple, just guitars and cymbals, but deftly processed into something deep and sonorous, and surprisingly melodic. Streaks of high end drift in and out (guitar or falsetto vocal, it's hard to say), as the record drifts dreamily. The sound does change dramatically here and there, deep overlapping low end tones, soft squalls of spaced out effects, glimmering streaks of washed out doomic blur, stretches of almost symphonic shimmer, the guitars transformed into hushed string sections, but it all resolves in an extended outro of soft deep swells. As always, absolutely lovely.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!!
Much like the Trinity cd we listed a while back, Trinitarian, finds the Canadian doomdronebliss duo Nadja offering up a whole lp of new material, including a solo piece by each member as well as a brand new massive sidelong dreamdirge.
Baker's contribution is a gorgeous expanse of breathless shimmer, all billowy and dreamlike, soft swirls of muted chimes and bell-like tones, woven into almost choral sounding passages, warm and hushed and reverent, but with a slightly ominous tinge that only grows more pronounced as the track progresses.
Buckareff balances Baker's more tranquil contribution, with a piece much more sinister, a deep, dark and creepy soundscape of crumbling distorted buzz and shimmering metallic whir, lots and lots of space creating a bottomless black ambience rife with minor key melodic fragments and undulating layers of textured drone. Intense and intensely haunting.
The Nadja track takes up all of side 2, and begins with blissed out harmonized guitars, super spare drums, a digitally treated, slightly glitchy soft minimalism that drifts delicately until the inevitable crush, but this time the crush is not only massive, it's weirdly warped and warm and soft, processed and distorted making it sound a bit alien and otherworldly, almost more warm and washed out than heavy, a bit like a doom metal Galaxie 500, sun dappled and multihued, dreamy and ethereal, while somehow managing to remain incredibly heavy. The song grows slightly less blissy and more intense and ominous by the end of the side, but even then, the sound is still mysteriously transcendent.
LIMITED TO ONLY 200 COPIES!!! These are probably the only copies we'll ever get!
Latest release from Bay Area doomfolkdrone duo Barn Owl (featuring our very own Jon Porras) who team up on this limited lp only release with long time fave Tom Carter of Charalambides who for now, seems to have shed his psych folks sound for something far more, well more on that in a second...
Up first, Barn Owl with three new tracks of bleak blackened dark ambience, invoking wide open spaces, moonlight glimmering on frosted fallow fields, of slow moving brackish water, and of ruined buildings and lonely dirt roads. It makes sense that these guys opened for Earth when they were here, as their sound carries the same spiritual weight. But where Earth employ twang and elements of Gospel, Barn Owl go somewhere much deeper, and more dangerous, a swirling slow motion world of blacks and greys, of blurred landscapes slipping by through smudged windows, shafts of sunlight, moving glacially across the bare wooden floor, causing the dust motes to drift in little flickering flurries. Once the band build momentum, they create long flowing streams of warm whirring buzz, held together by simple percussive pulses, buried rhythmic throbs, all the while the guitars arc above like solar flares.
Dark swells rise and fall, wreathed in halos of soft focus FX and smeared streaks of subtle distortion, slipping from hushed shimmery whisper, to groaning wheezing metallic buzz, drifting forever slowly around a warm glowing core, and continuously emitting an aura of mournful dark mystery.
Carter approaches his side from a whole different angle, his single 16 minute track takes a slow meandering chunk of dark downtuned blues and transforms it into a coruscating wall of blown out psych buzz, rumbling chug and crunch, wailing noiseguitar freakout, heavy and buzzy and chaotic, but still warm and layered and melodic, like a rural Keiji Haino raised on avant folk and old time blues. A gorgeous ever expanding chunk of blown out heaviness and warm, slowly crumbling deconstructed blues, culminating in a beautiful almost symphonic arrangement of high end skree and warbly buzz, before slipping into a long stretch of languorous unravelling guitar shimmer. So nice.
LIMITED TO 380 COPIES. Plain black jackets with a paste on front cover, printed insert, thick black inner sleeves. We got a bunch direct from the bands, and we might be able to get more from the label when we run out, but you never know. Better to grab one while you can...
Finally! The first two kick ass eps from these Georgia heavies combined into one killer full length (we always thought they sounded like they belonged together on the same record). So for all you metalheads who missed out the first time around (these eps have been out of print for a while), you got yourself another chance, don't blow it.
Man, Baroness just totally destroys. Three massive tracks of Electric Wizard meets the Fucking Champs metal stoner sludge crush. Some of the catchiest riffs we've heard in a while, from strange melodic finger tapping, to soaring Iron Maiden-esque melodies, to groovy southern stoner rock to pummeling detuned sludge to thrashing punk rock with howling throat shredding vocals -- typically all in the same song! The first track on First has an awesome stomping stop start riff with an insidiously catchy little melody, which ends up sounding like Carcass meets the Jesus Lizard. The second track is all Sabbathy sludge / doom with occasional bursts of rapid fire blasting punk rock. But it's all about the third track. A super epic, proggy complex metallic post rock workout, tons of parts, all of them worthy of their own song, super dynamic and totally catchy with Champs-ish breakdowns and weird bursts of abstract ambience. So fucking great!
Baroness' Second, while still heavy and stonery and crushing, seems to be tempering their heaviness with some serious post / math rock, which is just fine with us, think maybe Isis / Pelican majestic sludge metal meets Rodan / June Of 44 style moody post rock. However Baroness' sound still leans way toward the metal side of that equation. Plus, their songs continue to be really weird, rife with strange meters, complex arrangements, lots of slippery guitar harmonies, weird psychedelic wah guitar, spacey electronic burbling, some stretched out slow motion sludge, some intricate riffing and some of the most insane drumming we've ever heard.
The reissue features the original eps' killer artwork, kinda like Pushead doing '60s Fillmore poster art, courtesy of Baroness guitarist, John Baizley, and comes in a digipak with cool embossed metallic lettering housed in a slip cover.
This double disc set from Steve Wilson's Bass Communion project reissues the second and third albums, both unavailable for some time now. II was originally released on Hidden Art back in 1998, and III had been an on-demand cd-r which Wilson offered through his website back in 2001.
On II, an elegiac violin spirals into a chorale loop with itself and sympathetic melodies, as a soft crackle of what could be icy rain or maybe even downtuned surface noise on a piece of vinyl. In many ways, this fits neatly next to the orchestrations that Godspeed! You Black Emperor were creating at the time, with a slow building crescendo hitting a dark majesty before the bittersweet comedown into subterranean drones and dappled ambience. There's a lot more going on here in terms of melodic interludes and discreet flourishes of sampled horns, strings, and post-IDM electronic rhythms, especially when compared to the bleak arctic environments of such Bass Communion masterpieces as Ghosts On Magnetic Tape or Loss. But it's still gorgeous and arresting ambience.
III is a collection of ephemera, most of which had predated II, including some pieces of television that Wilson had been commissioned to compose. Given the disparate sources, III doesn't flow as nicely as the other disc; but the opening track "Amphead" is clearly one of Wilson's best pieces. It's just filtered white noise transformed into a desolate piece of sweeping dronemusik on par with anything that Thomas Koner or Keith Berry has released. Some of the other tracks hit on the Biosphere tip with synthetic strings pocked with simple electronic underpinnings; but there's also some head-rattling digi-dub harkening back to the illbient aesthetic of Scorn or DJ Spooky many moons ago.
Oooh. We're always excited about any new releases from French automated-instrument builder and trumpeter Pierre Bastien. How often do we get records featuring music made (in part) by robots? Not often enough. And such lovely music too. All these tracks were originally composed as soundtracks to projects by a Dutch experimental filmmaker by the name of Karel Doing (hence the title). But Bastien's music so readily stokes the imagination than Doing's cinematic visions are not necessary accompaniment.
We said 'automated-instrument builder', those instruments being what Bastien calls his 'Meccano', simple sound-making robots or kinetic sound sculptures, that make looping music box melodies and provide a backing of slow, steady mechanical clank for Bastien's own wheezing, muted trumpet. Bastien plays in a smokey jazz mode, breathy, beautiful, oh so melancholic, that in the this context reminds us of Chet Baker in some sort of Tom Waits-ish instrumental junkyard. The gamelan or thumb piano like plinkings of Bastien's Meccano - exotica for scrappy homebuilt robots - are rendered somehow more human by the sweet sighs of Bastien's trumpet. He also makes use of field recordings, unidentified underwater warblings, and other mysterious textures in constructing these tracks. Wonderful stuff, so languid and relaxed and full of life, animated indeed by Bastien's Visions Of Doing. Bastien's previous discs for Rephlex, and others, have all been 'late night faves' here at AQ, and this latest gentle gem from Bastien joins them for sure.
For many of us the classic era of Belle & Sebastian is when Isobel Campbell was still in the band and they made truly classic and timeless albums like Tigermilk, If You're Feeling Sinister, The Boy With The Arab Strap, and so many great ep's too.
Dedicated to the memory of John Peel, this collection of BBC recordings originally recorded between the years 1996-2001 is packed with tons of their instantly recognizable heart melting classics, as well as four previously unreleased tracks, that fit perfectly amongst all of the super smart and heartfelt songs Belle & Sebastian have crafted over the years. Stuart Murdoch's voice sounds so amazingly effortless and seductive throughout and we still get tingles when Isobel Campbell makes her way to the mic. The first batch of these come with a bonus disc featuring a live show recorded in Belfast in 2001 and include endearing covers of "I'm Waiting For The Man" and "The Boys Are Back In Town." B&S have inspired way too many wannabe lisp-having over-sensitive pop peddlers but that's not their fault, and no matter how many bands try, none of them will be able to match the true ease, breeze and nostalgia that Belle & Sebastian are able to evoke with their beautiful sounds.
We apologize to tape music buffs near and far, but we shamefully snoozed on reviewing this awesome book about this music movement's seminal Bay Area based hub back in June of this year when it was first published. We thought that now would be a good time (what with the holiday gift-giving season just around the corner as well as the chillier stay-inside-with-a-good-book autumn and winter months) to give it a good ol' shout out! Better late than never, right?
Those already well acquainted will need no further explanation, but for those unfamiliar, in a nutshell, the San Francisco Tape Music Center was a vital cultural and educational meeting ground of adventurous pioneers in audio arts and science. The sonic explorations of composers Morton Subotnick (who performed an in-store presentation here a few years back), Steve Reich, Ramon Sender, Don Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley among others produced some of the most stunning and influential avant-garde sounds of the period in an utterly unassuming locale right here in SF. This creatively tangled web of tape-loop and tape-delay, analog synthesizers and various other electronic tentacles came into fruition back in the early '60s. These days, having been schooled by the wonderful reissued works of numerous seemingly like-minded audio renegade technicians of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, John Baker to name a few), we still can't help but conjure images of the electronic music artists of that decade donning lab coats with pocket protectors and bespectacled consternated gazes, but this 344-page book reveals just as much the kaleidoscopic opening of minds induced by sound (and in some cases substances). In fact, for those of you who were captivated by the revelatory glimpse of the LA counterculture in the '60s courtesy of the recent Source Family book (The Source: The Untold Story Of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa And The Source Family), this serves to some degree as a Bay Area counterpart (albeit perhaps somewhat less Hollywood tabloid scandalous). It's the first ever first-person retrospective of the SFTMC. Many a fond memory and occasionally a hair-raising tale were unearthed for this tome. Our current favorites include one involving wild escapades to keep the center afloat on a less than shoestring budget as well as a desperate search across a floor/sea of tape edit detritus to find an errant single note snippet using a dismantled reel-to-reel playback head!
An inspiring, fascinating and often entertaining document of interviews with and essays by all the key figures and more. This 322-page softcover tome is also packed with color and black & white photos, diagrams, drawings, and a comprehensive chronology. But wait, there's still more! A dvd is tucked away in the back which features video documentation from the 2004 Wow & Flutter: The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1961-Now festival / reunion of sorts that took place in Troy, NY.
Highly recommended!
This is pretty much exactly what you'd hope for from a band who has a Flying V guitar as part of their logo! Chicago's Bible Of The Devil are back, all hairy and bearded, with another ripping record of '80s, NWOBHM inspired heavy metal rockin'. It's their fifth album, so along with the guitar, they've got a (Roman numeral) V in the logo on the cover of this, too. V can also stand for victory, and "triumphant" is a word we've used to describe these guys' metallic gallop in the past, a gallop graced with gruff Lemmy-ish vocal gargle and (of course) tons of twin Flying V fret burnin' leads and dual harmonies.
Catchy stoner riffage, soaring melodies, singalong choruses, total shred, these guys bring it on Freedom Metal, recorded by their hometown heaviness production guru, Sanford Parker. No wonder they're such good buddies with those epic eccentrics known as Slough Feg. Their rollicking riffs even seemingly share some of the same Celtic/folk influences at times... or Thin Lizzy influence anyway, as on the likes of "Greek Fire", "500 More", and especially the super Lizzyish, upbeat "Ol' Girl" (which we could also describe as sounding like Southern rock with extra Champs-y guitars). Furthermore, while the whole album hews to BOTD's usual raw rock vibe, one foot still in the garage, they mix it up from track-to-track, some more blazingly metallic, and a few more melodically mellow, as with the moody "Heat Feeler" which has moments that make us think of Elvis Costello or something!
Basically, Bible Of The Devil just keep gettin' better n' better, and Freedom Metal is a blast. And like a blast from the past that ain't actually from the past. Our only question: why no song called "Turn It Up, Man"?
NB. we also have a new BOTD split 7" with Pennsylvania doom metal act Valkyrie, we'll try to list that next time if we still have copies.
We listed the latest album of dual Flying V action (Flying VV?) from Chicago's metal masters Bible Of The Devil last list. Here's another, new n' exclusive, kick ass track from them, "The Auld Dirt Road", on one side of this split 7" single they share with Virginia doomsters Valkyrie, who do a song called "False Dreams". Between 'em, BOTD and Valkyrie manage to turn this 7" inch into a shrine to all that's retro, rad, & rockin', with Bible leaning towards Thin Lizzy, and Valkyrie tilting towards Pentagram...
It's a limited edition release, naturally, on either red or blue colored vinyl (luck of the draw). We have but a handful.
We've picked up another title from the Ohio based field recordists / audio collagists Jeremy Bible and Jason Henry, after being suitably impressed by their earlier album Vectors. The title alone to Shpwrck offers unsettled maritime references, and the lulling pace of lugubrious half melodies and creaking metal does little to alter the course down to the bottom of the ocean. The opening track is effectively simple repetition of a haunted melody, with all of the tape oxidization and murk that makes for a successful Disintegration Loop for William Basinski. Bible and Henry introduce quiet cracklings which sporadically make themselves known, sort of like embers popping in the aftermath of a fire. This combination is so effective, immediately other sublime works with seaworthy themes come to mind: Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste, Elegi's Sistereis, or the Philip Jeck / Gavin Bryars / Alter Ego redux of The Sinking Of The Titanic. More recognizable instrumentation comes to the forefront throughout the rest of the album, with twinkling bells and flutes contrasting next to a dystopian blurt of a post-Cosey Fanny Tutti trumpet with matching bellows from huge metallic objects being struck and then twisted into a deep, dark ambient smear. There's even some piano which alternates between maudlin impressionist gestures and angry minor key strikes. For all of the baroque objects which litter the descent way way down, Bible and Henry coax an even surface of atmospheric shadow and tactile grit into the mix. A very fine collection of work that is also quite limited. 150 copies, we believe.
Jeremy Bible and Jason Henry are two Ohio based sound artists, who draw heavily from field recordings from the rust belt and obfuscate them into seductive, occasionally dark pieces of fizzing ambience. The details of decaying leaves from the artwork of Vectors immediately translates into the opening passages of Vectors, as a tactile crackling nestles into a womblike drone. The soft crunch could easily come from Loren Chasse's meditations on broken earth and crumbled leaves, but they could be confused for the vintage turntable collages of Philip Jeck. But as the passages for layered tones and variable loops begin to articulate themselves against the tactile grit of those aforementioned sounds, Bible and Henry showcase themselves more as digital sculptors closer to Aidan Baker and Tim Hecker. Their looping repetitions progressively appear as a slowly generative kaleidoscope with cross-hatched smears, refracted distortions, and slightly eerie abstracted noises, all set against a static electrical hum. Flickered haunted melodies appear and disappear amidst
thobbing metallic drones, 8-bit distortion and post-Fennesz fizzing ring modulation before seamlessly shifting into an obfuscated field recording. On one occasion, a blustery chorus of blackbirds breaks through the shimmer and pixelation; on another, the two include the modulated Doppler effect of cars roaring past along a freeway, recalling the Hafler Trio's revelation that God told him to record the sound of cars passing by. Limited edition to 150 copies, or thereabouts.
Lotsa 'zines, in the old days, tended to peter out after just a couple issues or three. But Bixobal, which debuted about a year ago, is going strong, and on schedule, up to issue #5 now. If you missed the first few issues, you just need to know that Bixobal, published/edited by Eric Lanzillotta of Anomalous Records fame, is a 'zine dedicated to all sorts of interesting, obscure culture (experimental music, psychedelic stuff, weird film, ethnographic research, etc.). And it's well worth your $2, this issue consisting of 56 digest-sized pages packed with good readin'. On the cover, a happy Djinn Aquarian of Ya Ho Wa 13, heralding an article by David Nuss of the No Neck Blues Band about his trip to Hawaii to visit with the Source Family. Also in this issue: Rob Millis further adventures in the world of shellac 78 rpm record collecting, an interview with Belgian noisemakers Onde, a remembrance of late Noggin violinist Michael Griffen, an interview with Canadian '80s art-punks Tunnel Canary, a feature about the output of new "jazz" label Assophon Records, and several pages of record reviews... Again, $2 well spent!
Black Moth Super Rainbow have made quite an impact in the last couple years with their crunchy and poppy take on analog electronic pop, a sound that falls so near the more playful side of Boards Of Canada, and has us imagining what it might sound like if Air covered Daft Punk, using busted up old equipment, the result would have to be oh so charming and satisfying.
Drippers is essentially a collection of outtakes and unreleased tracks, but this is no throwaway ep. In fact we've been playing this nonstop, loving how thick and distorted the sounds here are and marvelling at BMSR's ability to conjure up such catchy and washed out electronic pop delights. The fact that they got Mike Watt to play on one of our favorite tracks ("Black Yogurt") has us even more smitten. Complete with a scratch n' sniff cover, this is music that engages all the sensations and keeps us coming back for more and more.
(FYI, 10" vinyl version forthcoming...)
What the heck's up with Glasgow these days? Until recently, Glasgow was all sunshiney jangle pop and brooding epic post rock. Or so it seemed. Maybe we haven't been paying attention. Maybe it's been a while since we took a good hard look at the seedy underbelly of Glasgow's music scene, but something sinister is definitely going on over there, cuz all sorts of filthy, brutal, heavy, sick sounds are oozing across the sea and into our cowering frightened ears. Next list we'll probably be listing a record by another Glaswegian crew called De Salvo, who are scary as shit, and here we've got the latest from Black Sun.
Black Sun is a bit of a name over there, but they're a new name to us, although it only took a few minutes of this filth for us to realize folks over here, especially the ones into massive dronedirgedeathcrush and slow motion ultra doooooom will likely be freaking out big time.
Three tracks, all 'versions' of the same song, the first, 19+ minutes taking up the whole of side one, is all lurching downtuned lumber, squealing harmonics, all locked into step with the pounding drums, the vocals tortured and anguished and WAY up in the mix, the sound somewhere between Khanate, Eyehategod, and Neurosis. About halfway through the sound simmers down a bit, a low slung softly churning bass rumble, clean minor key guitar lines all spidery and skeletal, warm whirring keyboards, that eventually slip into a groove that sounds uncannily like a slowed down Three Mile Pilot. Clean crooned vocals, laid over the woozy rhythm, before exploding back into stuttering metallic stop start lurch, gradually growing more and more noisy and unhinged.
The flip side takes the same track and jacks up the industrial vibe, way more low end crunch, a bit murkier and muddier, the vocals buried in the mix, little streaks of feedback peeking out from behind thick caustic slabs of rhythmic pound. Very reminiscent of Godflesh or Pitchshifter, relentless and machinelike, but wreathed in swirls of strange keyboards, and mysterious effects and all manner of fucked up guitar filigree. In some ways superior to the A side, at least to these ears. And finally, the second half of the B-side offers up the 'dub' version, which takes the more industrial version of "Paralyser" even further, the rhythm stripped down, the guitars processed and clipped, the vocals twisted and doused in effects, the arrangement all spaced out, the drums pounding one second, careening from speaker to speaker the next, the whole track actually is panned pretty hard, making headphones essential for experiencing the full dizzy drift. Definitely left us wanting more...
Essential listening for the usual suspects. If your favorite sounds are most often described with the adjectives doomy, crumbling, blackened, pummeling, crushing, heavy, crusty, metallic, slow motion, glacial, filthy, then my friends, you should prepare to kneel in supplication, and stare directly into the Black Sun...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, housed in a very Godflesh looking sleeve, with a heavy cardstock insert, liner notes on one side and strange bloody symbols on the other.
Lo, the Great Orthochromatic Wheel (?) dost turn! And with it, comes a happenstance that shall bring happiness to Jewelled Antler fanciers the world over: yes, a new album from the very special Blithe Sons duo, our friends Loren Chasse (Of, Ov, Thuja, Child Readers, etc. etc. ETC.) and Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, Thuja, The Ivytree, Jex Thoth, etc., etc., ETC.). They'd been on a bit of an unofficial hiatus for far too long, taking a little 'time out' as it were, and we were both surprised and pleased to hear tell of not only this album's impending release but also to attend the 'reunion' show they did a couple months back, opening for Van Der Graaf's Peter Hammill at The Great American Music Hall here in SF. At that show they previewed some of what you'll hear here, and it's the usual Blithe Sons naturalistic improv-folk magick conjured from stones and branches well as actual instruments like acoustic guitar, harmonium and recorder. Field recordings suggest the hum of twilight grasses, a pleasant place to find Glenn's gentle Richard Youngish vocals whispering elegiacally o'er the drones and chimes of the Blithe Sons' abstract, organic, mutedly melodic soundworld.
And, they've woven some cover material into their own compositions/improvisations here, doing Jewelled Antlerized interpretations of ye olde progge songs by, we believe Genesis, and perhaps others... prog fans, listen close. Makes sense they'd play with P. Hammill!
There's no cd version of this LP, but it does come with a coupon to allow you to download mp3s of these tracks to your computer.
Been looking forward to this one! The debut album from this seemingly time-lost Toronto band, the latest in the current spate of retro-proto-doom-metal bubbling up from the underground. All the heavy '70s Sabbath/Pentagram riffs -and- occult vibe of a band like Witchcraft, with soaring female vox and a thick coating of vintage Hammond organ, spooky and bombastic. It's an equation along the lines of Atomic Rooster + Jacula + Jex Thoth, maybe. Yeah, we're down with this. And that's just after hearing the first song. Then track two kicks in with some proggy flute! With LOTS more flute to follow on the rest of this album. So now they've added some Jethro Tull to the mix... Black Widow, Uriah Heep, Rainbow, and a mess of other more obscure '70s acts could also be cited as references too, along with the much more recent likes of the aforementioned Witchcraft and Jex Thoth.
Now, if you hate Jex Thoth's singing, you might have a similarly tough time with Blood Ceremony, but we found that the lady here isn't quite as polarizing a proposition. And it's her dramatic vocals that gives Blood Ceremony their special sound, along with her flute playing. She's also the organist. But let's not forget the guitars... it's tough not to grow your hair long and sprout bellbottoms when exposed to these lumbering, loping riffs, all of 'em seemingly from the school of Sleep's Sabbathier-than-thou classic "Dragonaut"! Or imagine Electric Wizard given a medieval, madrigal makeover.
And the lyrics... "I see witches in the sky, flying toward the quaalude eye"?? Ok. These guys and gal are definitely "smoking black drugs from Satan's bong" (I think that's what they said). Speaking of witchcraft, the dark arts of pagan ritual are of course Blood Ceremony's main subject matter, on tracks like "Into The Coven". The grooviest black mass we've attended in a while, right here. After spinning this for a while, if you find toads hopping about near your stereo, we wouldn't be surprised...
It's been a while since we heard from Ukrainian black metallers Drudkh (and all of their albums seem to be currently out of print sad to say) or ambient side project Dark Ages (and of course Hate Forest, another band featuring the same members has been split up since 2005). So what has Drudkh mainman Roman Saenko been up to for the last little while? Why crafting an epic black metal album based around Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian mythology and histry of course! And this is it. Blood Of Kingu, a swirling blackened blast of buzzing guitars, blasting drums, buried vocals, soaring melodies, and the occasional traditional folk interlude. The root sound is not that far removed from older Drudkh or Hate Forest, but imagine that sound a bit more lo-fi, a little more drenched in buzz, the riffing more looped and cyclical, the mood more majestic and epic, and you'll get an idea of the Blood Of Kingu sound.
Each track is a drone drenched slab of relentless riffery, furious and lightning fast, the drums careening chaotically beneath a thick layered wall of frenzied buzz, the vocals chanted and almost like throat singing, super low in the mix, giving the proceedings a sort of ritualistic vibe, with each song made up of only really one or two parts, creating a super tense, ultra hypnotic black metal mesmer, with the guitars swirling occasionally into gorgeous surprisingly melodic harmonies, while below, the track continues to churn and thrash violently.
Fans of Drudkh and Hate Forest and other Ukrainian black hordes absolutely need this, as do folks who love their black metal drone-y and hypnotic and trancelike.
Not to be confused, as we sometimes (almost) do, with brutal black metallers Book Of The Black Earth, who also have a new album out, soon to be reviewed here as well. This band is the one whom we last heard sharing a dirgey split 12" with Celestiial. Here's there new full-length and, as we expected, it's some serious doom metal/post rock/black metal/ambient hybrid wyrdness from the same guy responsible for the shamanic, organic drones of Ruhr Hunter.
Ok, the first track, "Spell Of The Elk", mostly (gruffly) spoken and atmospheric, is cool enough but mainly serves as a 9-minute intro to track 2, "Crippling Of Age", when things really get intense, the guitar kicks into gear, the hammer drops, the fuzz explodes, the totemic blood of this black owl flows thick and dark. This is musick full of creepy guttural croakings, seasick shoegazing droned-out riffery, and some seriously doooooomic plod, along with sudden yet graceful dynamic shifts from apocalyptic destructiveness to introspective dreaminess, yeah!!!
Many of these nine fairly lengthy tracks seem like ceremonial mini-epics, with gentle keyboard melodies wandering in from some obscure '70s Italian horror flick soundtrack, haunted by heavy doses of fuzzed out riff-sludge, providing a terror-struck background to the disturbing internal monologue (prayer?) played out by the anguished, echoed vokills. So much of this is surprisingly beautiful, so much of it fantastically fuzzed. The mystic moodiness is enhanced by foresty flutes and bone rattles from Native American / New Age ritual amidst all the industrial-strength dirge. This is part Neurosis, part Godspeed, part Burzum. Maybe part Bohren, and even part Thuja too! Well, possibly an aboriginal Thuja, when it really quiets down and spaces out and enters the Dreamtime. One of those "metal" records we recommend to a wider audience of adventurous listeners for sure.
If you like Death Metal, we probably don't have to tell you to buy this. By the same token, if you don't happen to like Death Metal, you sure aren't gonna be interested in Bloodbath! Not for you would be all the chunky riffage littered with high pitched guitar squeals. Jud-jud-jud-jud-jud....skwee! skwee!... ZzrrrooOOOowww... Grunty-grunt-grunt. Well, that's what this might sound like to the non-DM fans. But those attuned to this sort of thing will appreciate the fully pro, old school DM heaviness on offer from this Swedish supergroup, featuring (this time) two guys from Katatonia, two from Opeth (including frontman Mikael Akerfeldt, back after a one-album absence), and someone else from a band we hadn't heard of, 21 Lucifers. But dude's nickname is "Sodomizer" so we assume he's cool. He'd better be since he's replacing Dan Swano.
Seriously, if you dig yerself some Death Metal then you can't go too wrong with Bloodbath's The Fathomless Mastery. No, it's not the best death metal album ever, or even Bloodbath's best, but it should get your hair a-twirling, and bring back nostalgic memories of the early '90s likes of Entombed, Dismember, Morbid Angel and so forth, which is the very blunt point of all this, moreso than the blasphemy and brutality of the lyrics, that keeps these guys getting together and doing the Bloodbath thing. Again, if you're not into DM, then you'll see this Bloodbath as half empty, while we see it as (more than) half full.
The packaging Peaceville put this in is kinda fancy for this music, one of those digipacks that looks a little bit like a hardcover book.
Early '70s American power pop we'd never heard of before, but are glad got reissued! We love the Raspberries and Big Star, but the less successful Blue Ash, from Youngstown, Ohio, had slipped under our radar. As always, praise the Lord for cd reissues of obscure treats. Mercury signings Blue Ash originally unleashed this album back in 1973, and it was to be their only major label release... despite its obvious charms, critical plaudits, and the band's hard work touring it (opening for the likes of Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Nazareth, among others) it didn't sell, and they were dropped about a year after it came out. Their A&R guy (who also had signed the New York Dolls) was fired too, for good measure. The band broke up in '79 after making a second and final album for a smaller label.
Don't know nothin' about that one, but this here, No More, No Less, is definitely worth a spin if you like ye olde power pop. At odds with the nascent heavy metal and progressive rock excesses of the age (not to mention soft rock wimp outs and disco sell outs), Blue Ash's music, with three-minute pop songs and three-part harmonies, harked back to the British Invasion years of the '60s, bands like the Who, the Hollies, the Kinks, the Monkees, and of course the Beatles (this album includes their fine, fervent cover of "Anytime At All", delivered with gusto). Speaking of covers, they also do a song called "Dusty Old Fairgrounds", that they learned from a Bob Dylan bootleg. But all the rest of the tracks here are originals, in the same tuneful and head-bobbin' tradition as their '60s forebears, updated with extra, edgy energy. Much of this is uptempo and energetic, full of cranked up jangly guitars, thumping drums, handclaps, and nostalgically yearning vox. There's some laidback, mellow moments, as well, making their West Coast country-psych a la The Byrds influences also evident. All in all, a class act, definitely deserving of reissue. There's no bonus tracks, but we do get liner notes from bassist Frank Secich, who may have preferred rock n' roll stardom but seems content with at least cult status for his old band. Oh, and we'd certainly recommend this to those of you who dug local power popsters The Makes Nice (R.I.P.), this is right up that alley.
Plus you gotta love an album with a song called "Smash My Guitar" which does indeed feature the sound of an actual guitar-smashing, as well as much wild guitar soloing -and- sweet, sweet singing.
Another missive from some grim otherworld, the latest in a hellish black flow from the brackish depths, a never ending glacial eruption of blackened sonic filth and blown out white noise brutality from this despicable duo, this latest, a three song 12", is currently, due to the insanely limited nature of their releases, the only thing these guys have available, but not for long we predict, as this too was limited to a mere 525 copies, we got about a tenth of those, but as with past releases, we can't promise they'll be around for long.
More of the BSBC caustic black ambience, a cacophony of junkyard clatter, the clang of pipes, all sorts of crunch and grind, under a thick wash of high end buzz, and shifting clouds of blurred hiss, monstrous vocals buried in the murk, some riffage too (we think), but those riffs mostly exist as simply another layer of blacknoise, a never ending wash of grinding static heaviness. The second track ups the heaviness, the vocals more bellowing, more surges of black tar low end, still cloaked in sheets of white noise, but churning violently beneath the surface, a rumbling, rib cage rattling drone, that seems to be splintering and crumbling to pieces before our ears.
The flip side is much more tranquil (it's all relative though), a minimal driftscape of distant whir, twisted fragmented melodies buried way down in the mix, the grinding of alien machinery, peppered with squalls of speaker shredding buzz, the track quickly escalates, the noise getting noisier, the buzz getting buzzier, the vocals more howled and anguished, the whole thing pushing toward a Merzbowian white noise blowout. Imagine sitting in a concrete bunker with a thousand transistor radios tuned between stations, with the volume all the way up, an ear shredding symphony of static, while in another concrete bunker Wolf Eyes and Khanate play at full volume, barely audible through the suffocating cloud of hiss all around you.
Brutal, punishing, abject, harrowing, hateful, heavy, and pretty fucking awesome. As if we even needed to tell you.
LIMITED TO 525 COPIES. Amazing woodcut paste on front cover, with a printed insert and postcard inside.
So when you were a kid, what do you think your Mom got up to while you were at school, or out playing with your pals? Doing laundry? Cleaning the house? Doing the dishes? A little gardening? Or maybe playing bridge? Canasta? Going to the grocery store? How about collecting and building analog synthesizers? Building a soundproof recording studio in the extra room? Recording strange space-y minimal electronic music on reel to reel tapes? Or building an 'orgon accumulator' in the backyard? Such were the activities of a mild mannered housewife named Ursula Bogner, who in addition to being a pharmacist, as well as a loving wife and mother, just so happened to also be obsessed with electronic music and analog synthesizers, but unlike others with similar interests (were there other 30 something housewives so obsessed?), Bogner didn't just read about electronic music, she attended seminars, followed the activities of various groups and musicians (even apparently sharing her children's enthusiasm for new wave pop!) eventually deciding to create music herself.
She never released any recordings, didn't even really make public her hobby, instead, she simply spent her free time, creating, composing, recording, experimenting, for over 20 years, amassing an incredible body of work. All of that wouldn't merit anything but a cursory glance and maybe a chuckle, if the music weren't amazing, but it is, fantastical and inspired, primitive and raw, playful and childlike, but also, haunting and mysterious, otherworldly, and so incredibly varied, from spare academic sounding minimalism, to Perrey & Kingsley style playfulness, to super stark click and skitter that would be right at home on Raster-Noton, to swirling fantastical spaced out soundscapes that could have been sixties sci-fi soundtracks. The sounds are so evocative, so mysterious, it almost seems impossible that they were recorded by a Mom in a spare room in a house in the suburbs.
The collection opens with "Begleitung Fur Tuba", which indeed features tuba-like tones, locked into a playful grove with a bleepy bloopy rhythm, which is eventually joined by streaks of static, and a warbly main melody. From there, highlights include "Proto" which is kaleidoscopic and groovy with a super minimal click-track rhythm. "2 Ton" is almost like space age lounge music, with it's reverbed guitar like shimmer, and slithery tempo. "Speichen" is another playful number, the burbles and bloops, and definitely predicts groups like James Bong, Luke Vibert, Boards Of Canada and the like. "Punkte" is another minimal groover, with a hissy static rhythm, a bloopy bassline, and all manner of descending and ascending electronic tones, as well as pizzicato bleeps that almost sound like an alien thumb piano. The longest track is "Soloresonanzen" and is maybe the dreamiest, taking the minimal click of Raster-Noton, and draping it over slowly shifting layers of electronic whir and buzz, peppered with bits of click and glitch, textural hiss, woozy melodic fragments, very dreamlike and meditative. And finally the record finishes with a brief burst of tangly scribbly electronic whir and skree, all mad scientist machines gone haywire, but deftly arranged into a pretty alien lullaby, weird and wonderful.
Bogner's music was discovered via some pretty incredible happenstance, Jan Jelinek, who runs the Faitiche label, met Bogner's son on a plane and the two got to talking, Jelinek was an electronic musician, so was Bogner's deceased Mother Weirdly enough, and well, the rest is history. Or is it? There has been much talk that this is all a massive hoax, or more correctly, the ultimate concept album. Carefully crafted down to the tiniest details, photos, back story, Bogner's artwork, everything. In some ways it doesn't really matter, in fact, it's almost more impressive if the whole thing was in fact fabricated, but you know what, fuck it, it's so much more fun to just go along with it...
The cd is gorgeously packaged in a thick book-like digipak, with extensive liner notes from Jan Jelinek, notes on each song, lots of photos, as well as various reproductions of Bogner's various outer space linocuts.
Imagine a blackened, funereal dooooooom band like Skepticism or Nortt morphed into the jazz idiom (after having kissed a frog, or some fairytale scenario like that), playing their slow, sad music in a smoky Berlin jazz club. The sound is jazz (electric piano, organ, vibes, sax, double bass, trap kit...) but the feeling is doom. That's our usual shorthand for describing the unique music made by longtime AQ fave, Germany's Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. Here at last is their eagerly anticipated 5th album, Dolores (not named after the San Francisco street near us, presumably). If you're fans like we are, you know what to expect, it's just as ponderously "heavy" as a "jazz" band can be. No, not loud, not harsh, not noisy. The opposite of all that. Rather, whisper-quiet, glacially slow, and spacious, with sparse snare hits keeping time like a wound-down clock ticking off the eternity between 2 minutes to midnight and the witching hour itself. Doomsday so slowly arrives on a velvety bed of somnolent deep bass notes, and the cool slinky tones of vintage Fender Rhodes. Cymbals shiver in a dark haze of ambient drones near to silence. Several of the songs are infused with the warmth of tenor or baritone sax breathes gorgeous expiring breaths. It's all so sad and woeful and achingly beautiful, Bohren nodding off, their fragile melodies trickling like tears, and by the end you may find you have shed a few too.
This newest Bohren differs mainly from their previous Ipecac outing Geisterfaust by being composed of somewhat shorter, sweeter tracks, ten in all, in about an hour. But it is, again, an-ever-more-perfected example of why Bohren is one of our all time favorite bands, especially at twilight and late at night...
