Mix number two from mysterious local turntablist and DJ, the brilliantly monickered DJ Female Convict Scorpion, whose mixes are less DJ mash-ups and more haunting artistic assemblages, incorporating free jazz, fuzzy funk, found sounds, bits of dialogue, sampled instruments, stripped down beats, pretty much no genre is off limits, but those genres are basically meaningless once everything is mixed together.
From the opening track, with its ominous chiming bells beneath Tom Waits' gravelly voice spinning a yarn, the mix slips smoothly, into a deep laid back minimal grooves, surrounded by swirling sheets of soft focus effects, before the mix shifts, and wailing female vox are draped over a thumping beat, a sea of record crackle, bits of hum and distant whir, Shadow wouldn't be all that far off as a reference, but imagine if Shadow was raised on prog and punk rock and art films and free jazz, then how would a mix of his sound? A bit like this perhaps.
The tracks veer wildly from super rhythmic workouts, to drifting minimal soundscapes, strange electronics drift in and out, mournful horns, spidery guitars, strings are bowed and plucked, deep rumbles surface from below, tribal drumming is laid beneath tangled world music voices, creating gorgeous and unintended harmonies, dense clouds of blooping bleeping effects over skittery free jazz skronk, dark reverbed noir-ish guitars shimmering beneath subtle percussion, breathless vocalizing and steel string scrape, deep ritualistic chanting drifting over the sound of sirens, funky drumming and subtle barely there dronemusic in the distance, Really good stuff. Made even better by the fact that we weren't able to identify a single source for any of the sounds within!!
Beautiful packaging. Full color printing on thick matte paper, super haunting and tripped out imagery, pressed on black cd-r's each with an actual postage from some other country affixed to the face.
Which came first Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz? If one is to merely look at the discographies of the twin kings of digitally tricked out guitar sculpting, the chronological answer is obvious: Christian Fennesz. But in the four years that have transpired between his brilliant album Venice and the 2008 opus Black Sea, Fennesz must have seen a younger protege in Tim Hecker coming up in the rear view mirror with his own dramatic sound for smeared guitar whose beauty is similarly rendered through error. Not only does Black Sea feel like a response to Tim Hecker's work, it also stands as Fennesz' most fully realized album, perhaps even more so than the sunburst explosion of meta-pop on Endless Summer.
Fennesz works best in the cold, with ice, snow, and frost dusting the strings of his guitar and seeping into the circuitry of his computer; and the cold landscape is exactly where he situates himself on Black Sea. Not surprisingly, Touch's Jon Wozencroft perfectly matches a photograph of an abandoned train track set onto a barren wintry landscape, looking a hell of lot like the photographs that Anselm Keifer uses as a background over which he dumps tar, paint, cement, lead, ash, and whatnot into his alchemical paintings.
Black Sea opens with the fizzling crunch of digital errata getting mangled even further by digital means, with Fennesz sculpting a sea swell of a half melody in the distance. Considering the contemplative and cold nature of the rest of the album, this track is a bit discordant; but Fennesz isn't going for the Menche / Merzbow attack, just something of a wake-up call. But gradually, even this first burst of noise quells in a plaintive round of finger picking on the guitar, out of which a beautiful cloud of vaporized drone begins to amass and a subharmonic throb of distortion settles in. These sounds become the template for the rest of the album, all wrapped in gray, muted timbres. When noise bursts through Fennesz' circuits, the attack almost immediately blurs into clustered loops, drones, and sympathetic noises to smooth the edges into a shimmered glisten of remarkable beauty that exhibits a cold, overcast, and gray soundsmear, certainly on par with the sleepytime shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine. After an exceptional collaborative track with Rosy Parlane of lunar landscape ambience riddled with dust before opening into a hymnal melody, Black Sea comes to an end with one of Fennesz' best tracks ever in "Saffron Revolution," with its soaring vapor trail of tone-bent guitar drone and a majestic crescendo of sustained, soft focus distortion. A truly marvellous piece of work.
Five Or Six were a shortlived UK post-punk band from the early '80s with a revolving door of members, the most well known of which included Ashley Wells who later went to form Spring Hill Jack and David Knight who continues to work with Karl Blake in Shockheaded Peters. While Five Or Six never got into the avant-jazz electronica of Spring Hill Jack or the monstrous art-pop of Shockheaded Peters, the band was intent on pushing beyond the three chord punk attack. Given a dour demeanor and a penchant for moody atmospherics, their small catalogue of albums and singles rightly earned favorable comparisons to Joy Division and 154-era Wire. Tracks such as "Another Reason" and "The Trial" are grounded upon low-slung basslines grooved against percussive dirges, bleak electronic drones, and spindly guitar leads. This compilation is certainly the best place to start with the Five Or Six catalogue, as their albums could be hit and miss. David Knight admitted that the group somewhat cancelled out many of the strengths of the many members, leaving only a handful of great tracks. Fortunately, all of that great material is found here. So if the early 4AD / Factory Records post-punk dirge is your thing, this will certainly float your boat.
We managed to get, like, 5 copies of this mysterious cd reissue someplace. So act fast if you want one, as we won't be getting any more. Wish we could though, 'cause this is thee best doomy DIY black metal album recorded in 1987 in the basement of a YMCA building in Iceland we've EVER heard!!
So lo-fi and raw and fucked up it's amazing, with tons of cult '80s atmosphere (a la Hellhammer) and truly bizarre vocal stylings, as on the chugging, erupting "Evil". What strange wretched howlings and absurd rasping shrieks! Like, Tim Baker of Cirith Ungol with more than one frog in his throat. Musically this both shreds and sludges, in both cases clogged with lo-fi production (not helped by this reissue's dodgy mastering from what sounds like a crackly vinyl original) and off kilter outsider aesthetics. But that's all part of the charm. It has to be heard to be believed.
If you liked, say, some of the other eccentric '80s metal artifacts like Black Hole or Dark Quarterer that we've reviewed, and want to hear the "Venom" version of a band like that, this is for you.
It's take a couple years and about a million cd-r's, but here it is, the first proper actual cd (not cd-r) release from both of these groups, two of our favorite UN-black metal bands. And for those out of the loop, un-black is another name for white metal, which is another name for Christian black metal, which does indeed seem like an oxymoron, but avid readers of the list by now are well familiar with the sound, and the groups, Glaciial, Agathothodion, Drommer, Elgibbor, Offerblod, Njiqahdda, and of course Flaskavsae and Light Shall Prevail.
LSP is the work of EEE records head honcho W.S. and prolificacy is so extreme, he fronts or is a member of at least 5 different outfits. LSP seems to be his main one and is definitely one of our favorites. Like on past releases, the sound here is a mix of classic grim black metal, and all sorts of fucked up lo-fi production, the core being a relentless buzzing riff, and furious blasting beats, but the sound is wrapped in strange sheets of hiss, and layers of murk and mire, the drum machine is strangely processed, the cymbals unleashing sprawling clouds of hiss, the guitars always buried in varying degrees of fucked up buzz or fuzz, turning riffs into streaks of blurred sound. The first LSP track here offers up a super strange, arpeggiated melody, very sing songy and major key, right in the middle of a roiling sea of blast and buzz. Ends up sounding quite mysterious and haunting. The big change this time around are the vocals, that are a dead ringer for Wrest from Leviathan's hellish corrosive howl, but within LSP, those vokills are simply another layer in the droning hypnotic buzzscapes, and that weird sing songy melodic element resurfaces throughout the other three tracks as well, culminating in the 15 minute closer, a sprawling, woozy and warped black metal, the guitars super blown out and washed out, the sound more of a blurred drone than black metal, even the drums are so static and relentless that they evoke a sense of mesmer as well.
Flaskavsae (a one man band, whose one man plays in Glaciial with Mr. LSP) are a perfect match, a similarly twisted take on (un-)black metal, but instead of speed and aggression, offer up something more depressive and midtempo, the guitars warbly and the distortion crumbling, the drums buried in the mix, except for the cymbals, that like LSP offer up sizzling streaks of hissy sibilance. Even when the songs launch into more furious tempos, something about the sound still manages to remain lugubrious and druggy, the riffs, less insectoid, and more blackened melting psychedelic. The final Flaskavsae track, begins with a creepy almost classical sounding circusy melody, over a lurching almost industrial sounding rhythm, before the blackness and buzz seeps up from below, transforming the track into a weird droned out black buzzscape.
Packaged in a super glossy full color digipak.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Their debut album, Generic, is classic - a crushing, pounding, drug-addled nightmare of existential angst and torment. Lyrically hateful - yet hopeful - Flipper seems like a band at war with the audience and themselves. Their music is an utter trainwreck - it's often out of time and out of tune. You get the feeling that the band could really give a damn about playing well or recording quality. It's cynical, blase and yet utterly hypnotizing. It's also occasionally hilarious. From the opener "Ever," with its caustic lyrics (complemented by hand clapping!) to the seriously dark and murky "(I Saw You) Shine," to its ultimate peak with the optimistic "Life" ("Life is the only thing worth living for"), it's a glorious, fucked up listening experience.
Ending with the 8 minute long epic "Sex Bomb" - a punk "Louie Louie" if there ever was one - Flipper managed to create an album that epitomizes alienation and discomfort. It's pure poetry.
Reissue contains additional photos and obligatory liner notes by Nirvana's Krist Novoselic, who joined the band a few years ago.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Flipper's second album finds them better recorded, although it almost doesn't sound right - like an ill-fitting suit. And no suit can make this band sound any less dirty - Gone Fishin' is still full of lurching, menacing bass lines and repetitive, drug-fried riffs. And occasional piano. And horns. And xylophone. It almost sounds like a UK post-punk band at times, until the vocals kick in and it degenerates into a sloppy, group sing-a-long. It's a mess.
Best songs include the triumphant opener "The Light, The Sound," the chilling "Sacrifice" (since covered by the Melvins, yes, on Lysol), and the disorienting "Talk is Cheap."
The cover reproduces a scaled-down version of the original LP art, which is an interactive cut-out model of their tour van and band members. You could cut this one out, but it's not recommended.
Reissue contains additional photos and highly entertaining liner notes by Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, who rightfully gives thanks.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Live albums are often throw-aways, but this one is so NOT. On this masterful double CD compilation, Flipper demonstrates more than a casual flirtation with Public Image Ltd, at whom the band enacts revenge for allegedly stealing the "Generic" concept years prior. It's a sprawling, chaotic selection of some of Flipper's best songs, and many that don't appear on any other readily available release. Gloriously muddy, deranged swampfests of feedback, documenting the oft-touted rowdy live experience that their studio-recorded output may not have conveyed. This release definitely captures the best elements of Flipper - humor, depravity and a sloppy yet confident self-critique of what it means to be a band playing rock music.
Did we mention on-stage banter?
"Don't dance, I don't give a shit!"
"Is everybody on speed? I'm getting a contact high like a motherfucker!"
"Are you satisfied yet? Can we leave?"
The cover reproduces a scaled-down version of the original LP art, which was an interactive board game based on Flipper's touring life on the road. You could cut it out and construct it, but it's not really recommended.
Reissue contains additional photos and liner notes by writer Steven Blush, who still needs to explain why the movie made from his American Hardcore book chose Flipper as San Francisco's contribution to said 'American Hardcore', and not Crucifix, the Fuck Ups, Code of Honor, or even Fang.
At long last, reissues of the four best works by San Francisco's own Flipper!
Founded in 1979, Flipper was an anomaly. Though featured in the 2006 documentary "American Hardcore," alongside bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, they seemed totally miscategorized. They were far easier understood in the context of SF artpunk, but their shitty production values, menacing lyrics and nihilistic attitude ingratiated them with the hardcore crowd.
Often credited with inspiring a thousand sludge rock bands, there's no doubt that their influence runs far and wide. From '80s contemporaries like No Trend and Drunks with Guns, to Rick Rubin's copycat band Hose, to bands with later, greater success like the Melvins and Nirvana, the impact of Flipper is formidable. In fact, the Melvins in particular owe so much to Flipper; having recorded SO MANY covers of their songs - and obviously influenced by Flipper's hollow, sparse, plodding drum style - they may be Flipper's number one fans. But unlike their disciples, Flipper's music remains far less polished, less categorizable and more enigmatic, in our humble opinion.
Sex Bomb Baby! is a compilation of the band's singles, several of which were released before their seminal debut album Generic. Recorded in a trash can, their dirgey, feedbacky songs somehow transcend. Add cheap studio effects, the occasional arty sample or spoken monologue, and Flipper's trademark angst/sneer/fucked up genius definitely shows through. This album is a good companion to Generic but the uninitiated should start there first, not here. Aside from different versions of "Sex Bomb" and "Ever" from Generic, there's the insanely creepy "Ha Ha Ha," a live version of their most overtly political song "Sacrifice," and the bludgeoning "Earthworm." There are other nuggets here, but also quite a few jokey songs that were probably funnier to a teenaged-bong-smoking Flipper freek than the Flipper freek of today.
Reissue contains additional photos and decently entertaining liner notes by Henry Rollins, who was responsible for the last reissue of this oft-reissued disc.
The well of Henry Flynt music never seems to dry up. Here, billed as Dharma Warriors, Flynt collaborates with C.C. Hennix on drums on two long guitar pieces recorded to boombox in Woodstock in 1983. Like a stripped down minimalist boogie version of Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca, Flynt brings a lo-fi backwoods zen vibe to his raw and earthy modal jamming of repetitive riffs and fuzzy chords, while Hennix ties it together with his clattering scattershot drumming. Celestial indeed!
That's right Buddha Machine II!!! As in a whole new machine. New design. New features. And all new sounds. Most aQ customers are probably quite familiar with the Buddha Machine by now, most of you probably own one, or more, and a bunch of you probably bought one or more as gifts for your music nerd friends or significant others. We freaked out over the Buddha Machine just like everyone else when we discovered it. Rumor was that the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop bought 24, and Brian Eno bought 8! Just here at aQ we've sold HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS!!!
For those of you who missed out, the Buddha Machine is a little handheld soundbox, with a tiny speaker, a volume control and a line out so you can plug it into your stereo. Inside is a chip, which stores nine dreamy, drone-y, drifty, meditative loops, which can be switched using a little toggle on the side. It was designed by the group FM3, aka Christian Virant and Zhang Jian, who recorded nine loops specifically for the tiny handheld soundboxes. These boxes are ubiquitous in China ands all over Asia, where they are used in worship, with the boxes featuring recordings of chants and prayers. FM3 took that concept and expanded it, offering musical loops, to be used in meditation or relaxation, or perhaps even prayer, if one was so inclined. The boxes are very simple, the sound lo-fi, but as an object, especially a sound producing object, it was, and is fantastic, and totally mesmerizing. The original Buddha Machine is still available, and comes in multiple colors: purple, white, black, blue, red, yellow, but mover over old Buddha Machine....
There's a new Buddha Machine and it's a doozy, improving on various elements of the original, adding an awesome new control, and most importantly featuring nine new loops. So even if you have one of the old ones, you're probably gonna want one of these too. The sounds this time around, are much less meditative, a bit more active, ranging from deep swells laced with feedback and strange processed electronics, to pulsing minimal melodies, to what sounds like a distorted music box / piano duet, to a stripped down strummed metallic dirge wreathed in buzz, to single sustained notes draped over random bits of room sound, to dubbed out thumb piano, a few with an almost post rock vibe, albeit way more stripped down and spare, and some of the loops are really long, sounding much more like song fragments that loops, and even more than the first Buddha Machine, the new sounds definitely lend themselves to playing multiple boxes at once, creating your own Buddha Machine symphony. The big change besides the sounds, is the addition of a pitch control, which allows you to dramatically change the pitch of any or all of the loops, for us, everything sounds better slow, but you can speed it all up, or you can continuously adjust the pitch while the loops are playing, adding all manner of warble and pitch shift, creating your own woozy dizzy loops.
Definitely the perfect stocking stuffer for the music freak in your life, and totally worth getting, even if you have the old Buddha Machine. The new machine comes in three colors, brown, burgundy, or grey, and all of them come in a nice printed cardstock boxes. No batteries included this time, though, you'll have to provide your own (2xAA).
That's right Buddha Machine II!!! As in a whole new machine. New design. New features. And all new sounds. Most aQ customers are probably quite familiar with the Buddha Machine by now, most of you probably own one, or more, and a bunch of you probably bought one or more as gifts for your music nerd friends or significant others. We freaked out over the Buddha Machine just like everyone else when we discovered it. Rumor was that the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop bought 24, and Brian Eno bought 8! Just here at aQ we've sold HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS!!!
For those of you who missed out, the Buddha Machine is a little handheld soundbox, with a tiny speaker, a volume control and a line out so you can plug it into your stereo. Inside is a chip, which stores nine dreamy, drone-y, drifty, meditative loops, which can be switched using a little toggle on the side. It was designed by the group FM3, aka Christian Virant and Zhang Jian, who recorded nine loops specifically for the tiny handheld soundboxes. These boxes are ubiquitous in China ands all over Asia, where they are used in worship, with the boxes featuring recordings of chants and prayers. FM3 took that concept and expanded it, offering musical loops, to be used in meditation or relaxation, or perhaps even prayer, if one was so inclined. The boxes are very simple, the sound lo-fi, but as an object, especially a sound producing object, it was, and is fantastic, and totally mesmerizing. The original Buddha Machine is still available, and comes in multiple colors: purple, white, black, blue, red, yellow, but mover over old Buddha Machine....
There's a new Buddha Machine and it's a doozy, improving on various elements of the original, adding an awesome new control, and most importantly featuring nine new loops. So even if you have one of the old ones, you're probably gonna want one of these too. The sounds this time around, are much less meditative, a bit more active, ranging from deep swells laced with feedback and strange processed electronics, to pulsing minimal melodies, to what sounds like a distorted music box / piano duet, to a stripped down strummed metallic dirge wreathed in buzz, to single sustained notes draped over random bits of room sound, to dubbed out thumb piano, a few with an almost post rock vibe, albeit way more stripped down and spare, and some of the loops are really long, sounding much more like song fragments that loops, and even more than the first Buddha Machine, the new sounds definitely lend themselves to playing multiple boxes at once, creating your own Buddha Machine symphony. The big change besides the sounds, is the addition of a pitch control, which allows you to dramatically change the pitch of any or all of the loops, for us, everything sounds better slow, but you can speed it all up, or you can continuously adjust the pitch while the loops are playing, adding all manner of warble and pitch shift, creating your own woozy dizzy loops.
Definitely the perfect stocking stuffer for the music freak in your life, and totally worth getting, even if you have the old Buddha Machine. The new machine comes in three colors, brown, burgundy, or grey, and all of them come in a nice printed cardstock boxes. No batteries included this time, though, you'll have to provide your own (2xAA).
That's right Buddha Machine II!!! As in a whole new machine. New design. New features. And all new sounds. Most aQ customers are probably quite familiar with the Buddha Machine by now, most of you probably own one, or more, and a bunch of you probably bought one or more as gifts for your music nerd friends or significant others. We freaked out over the Buddha Machine just like everyone else when we discovered it. Rumor was that the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop bought 24, and Brian Eno bought 8! Just here at aQ we've sold HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS!!!
For those of you who missed out, the Buddha Machine is a little handheld soundbox, with a tiny speaker, a volume control and a line out so you can plug it into your stereo. Inside is a chip, which stores nine dreamy, drone-y, drifty, meditative loops, which can be switched using a little toggle on the side. It was designed by the group FM3, aka Christian Virant and Zhang Jian, who recorded nine loops specifically for the tiny handheld soundboxes. These boxes are ubiquitous in China ands all over Asia, where they are used in worship, with the boxes featuring recordings of chants and prayers. FM3 took that concept and expanded it, offering musical loops, to be used in meditation or relaxation, or perhaps even prayer, if one was so inclined. The boxes are very simple, the sound lo-fi, but as an object, especially a sound producing object, it was, and is fantastic, and totally mesmerizing. The original Buddha Machine is still available, and comes in multiple colors: purple, white, black, blue, red, yellow, but mover over old Buddha Machine....
There's a new Buddha Machine and it's a doozy, improving on various elements of the original, adding an awesome new control, and most importantly featuring nine new loops. So even if you have one of the old ones, you're probably gonna want one of these too. The sounds this time around, are much less meditative, a bit more active, ranging from deep swells laced with feedback and strange processed electronics, to pulsing minimal melodies, to what sounds like a distorted music box / piano duet, to a stripped down strummed metallic dirge wreathed in buzz, to single sustained notes draped over random bits of room sound, to dubbed out thumb piano, a few with an almost post rock vibe, albeit way more stripped down and spare, and some of the loops are really long, sounding much more like song fragments that loops, and even more than the first Buddha Machine, the new sounds definitely lend themselves to playing multiple boxes at once, creating your own Buddha Machine symphony. The big change besides the sounds, is the addition of a pitch control, which allows you to dramatically change the pitch of any or all of the loops, for us, everything sounds better slow, but you can speed it all up, or you can continuously adjust the pitch while the loops are playing, adding all manner of warble and pitch shift, creating your own woozy dizzy loops.
Definitely the perfect stocking stuffer for the music freak in your life, and totally worth getting, even if you have the old Buddha Machine. The new machine comes in three colors, brown, burgundy, or grey, and all of them come in a nice printed cardstock boxes. No batteries included this time, though, you'll have to provide your own (2xAA).
A second release from the mysterious Formatt, aka Belgian sound sculptor Peter Smeekins, we relisted a back-room find elsewhere on this list, a cd-r originally reviewed 2 years ago, that we dug big time, and in discovering extra copies of that release, we also found a little stash of these 3"cd-rs, released on Antony Milton's Pseudo Arcana label, a single 17 minute track featuring another brief glimpse into Smeekins' dreamy mad scientist sound world.
Much like the other disc, the root of Smeekins' sound is soft hushed shimmers and ethereal drones, a sky full of glimmering sonic stars, all smoothed out into gorgeously languid long-form slow motion drifts, which on their won would be plenty pretty, and would definitely hit the spot for deep ambient late night drift off music, but the sounds here are not so tranquil, over the top of these glacial low end murmurs, Smeekins drapes all sorts of other sounds, that manage to add all sorts of depth and color and activity, somehow without taking away from the track's soporific stasis. Showers of crystalline sparkle, swirling soft focus clouds of grit and static, bis of hiss and pop, more layers of thrum and rumble...
At low volume, Minor Curations exists simply as a gorgeous slice of minimal electronic ambience, but strap on some headphones and it's like that ride at Disneyland where you go through the microscope into a world of atoms and molecules, Formatt takes us on a similar ride, moving slowly through layer after layer after layer emerging finally in a strange microscopic world of inner sound.
SUPER LIMITED, ALREADY OUT OF PRINT, these are the last copies ever...
Newest release from Belgian sound manipulator Peter Smeekins aka Formatt. A dense mix of soft droney shimmer and all manner of glitch and crunch. Imagine hearing Low or some other slow motion band through a concrete wall so thick that just the bare essence makes it through, a sort of ghostly outline, a dreamy, barely audible hum, then stretch it into a gauzy soft sound blanket and spread it out over the whole record. This soft, shimmery bed is the foundation for all of Re:Take_Repeat. Over the top of this Formatt fiddles and fidgets, like some tinkering mad scientist, glitches and crackle, bursts of shortwave interference, white noise, industrial machinery, haunting EVP like transmissions, pops and creaks, amp buzz and distant feedback, it's like some giant mysterious soundmaker upended his rusty old tool box full of sounds and dumped all of those strange sharp metallic shapes, all over the thick velvety background, like stars sparkling chaotically in the black night sky.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. We managed to get the last 20 so once these are gone they are gone for good!
Heavy psychedelic vibes from these '70s South African proggers, getting all, um, astral and spacey and downright spooky at times on this, their second album dating from 1971 (or maybe 1970?). A lost classic, this is, if you're a fan of Pink Floyd and/or cosmic Krautrock stuff of similar vintage. It's super trippy, with echoey vox singing weird conceptual lyrix over majestic acid rock meets church organ jams.
This was reissued on cd before, in '97, but what we've got here is a 2005 reish that adds a bunch of bonus tracks, yay. Recommended.
Newly reissued, here's a superb slice of acid rock psych from South Africa, circa 1971. Shadoks have also reissued one from Freedom's Children we already loved, Astra (also on this list), and another one yet to be reviewed here, their debut Battle Hymn Of The Broken-Hearted Horde.
This was their third album, following Astra which had made them the #1 pop band in South Africa. Hmm, things were different back when! But if you were a hippy hearing this then, Galactic Vibes was definitely everything its title promised. Lots of spaced out guitars echoing over polyrhythmic percussion, certainly a multi-layered cosmic experience, peaking perhaps with a 16 minute extended live version of "The Homecoming" from the Astra album, complete with an epic drum solo. Elsewhere, there's the freaky blips and bloops of an experimental "electronic concerto", lovely Middle Eastern inflected, orchestrated balladry, moody pop bombast, and, maybe best of all, fuzzed out heavy stoner riffery!! Opener "Sea Horse" is one of album's bad ass proto-metal moments, in a Frijid Pink style, and on "That Did It" they rock out again, much like Led Zeppelin or Leaf Hound. Other parts of this album make 'em seem closer to a homegrown South African Pink Floyd. All in all, pretty damn cool for those of you for whom a druggy album title like Galactic Vibes has already piqued some interest.
No bonus tracks, but this does feature lengthy liner notes in tiny, tiny type, full of info.
A gorgeous and mysterious one sided lp from GazHeart, a duo made up of artist Rita Ackerman, and No Neck Blues Band's Dave Nuss. The two played together in Angelblood as well, but these recordings were made after the breakup of that band, on the duo's annual trip to visit Ackerman's family in Budapest. During late nights in the backyard, with Nuss beating on coffee cans and broken bottles, Ackerman sang lyrics she had created using automatic, unmeditated writing. The results are beautiful, innocent, playful, haunting and very mysterious.
This consists of a series of short tracks, each with a slightly different tribal rhythmic component beneath Ackerman's vocals, which range from ghostly chantlike recitations, to sweet cooing, to wild wailing. The record drifts from tripped out FX drenched clang and clank beneath childlike gurgling, to campfire handdrums and sweetly almost whispered vocals, to hypnotic almost looped sounding tribal drums tangled up with breathy ethereal hum, to Casio style drum machine pitted against manic vocalizing and buzzy synth melodies, to the final track, the percussion super abstract, with chimes and bells, the vocals sung by a little girl, very cute and innocent, but also quite haunting.
Fans of Deerhoof, OOIOO, Tenniscoats and obviously No Neck and Angelblood will definitely dig.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Housed in a thick sleeve, with Ackerman drawings on both sides, each the opposite/negative of the other, printed on nice thick paper, the lp is one sides, the flipside has an original Ackerman etching. Cool.
We know nothing about this release except that it's not German. And that it's an awesome slab of tripped out tribal psychedelia. Apparently there's a thumb piano being played but it's doused in FX so it sounds more like strange buzzing insectoid melodies, all wrapped around a propulsive tribal drum jam. No Neck and Sun Burned Hand are the obvious references, and anyone who likes either of those groups will no doubt dig this. Lots of buzz, and shimmering ambience, the drums are a continuous presence, a never ending, far out, outer space drum jam, not over the top, just steady, and subtly intricate, a solid framework for the various strange sonic goings on draped over the top. Thick swaths of flanged buzz drift over soft streaks of high end feedback, vocals are garbled and looped, all surrounding a core of trance-y disembodied skeletal krautrock. Killer stuff for sure. Too bad this is another one of those discs that has been sitting on our shelves for months. It -was- LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Now it's obviously out of print and gone gone gone. We have about 10 copies, and they won't last long, so act fast...
We were all prepared to write this review thinking that this Ghast, from Wales, was in fact, the same as the Ghast whose last two split albums we had reviewed recently. The sound was quite different, but hey, bands do that all the time. Thankfully, we dug a little deeper and discovered that indeed there are two different Ghasts, one French Canadian, one Welsh!
This Ghast is the one from Wales, and since they are in fact not the Ghast we already knew and loved, they are totally new to us, but there's plenty of room in our shrivelled black hearts for two different Ghasts, which is a good thing as we're starting to think we love these guys too. Where the -other- Ghast traffic in a crumbling lo-fi slow motion blackened doom, the Welsh Ghast, on So May The Curse Bind, their first proper full length, up the black quotient quite a bit. Right out of the gate, opening track "Crawl, Blighted And Afraid" explodes in a flurry of punkish blast beats, harsh vokills and buzzing frenzied riffage, raw and primal and a bit lo-fi, this is definitely frosty and grim sounding, but before too long the band can no longer resist the black hole pull of doom, and the tempo slows to a lurch, the blast beat transforms into a pound, the riff churns and chugs, occasionally, spinning out into little squalls of furious buzz, the melodies minor key and epic, a relentless black doom dirge, that shifts back to blasting buzz to finish off in a blaze of blackened fury.
The rest of the tracks follow a similar path, veering back and forth between stumbling chaotic frenzy and lumbering doomic crush, buried within the murk and the mire though are haunting hook filled melodies and surprising guitar harmonies, which add a bit of texture and color to the blurred blackness. A few of the tracks slip into a D-beat pound, others stretch out into woozy seasick almost-waltzes, while "Pale Robe" slows everything waaaaay down for a weary depressive crawl through clouds of Burzumic buzz and spidery minor key guitar melodies, a sort of black doom ballad, melancholy, miserable, and weirdly beautiful.
We first heard from Ghast on their split with Yoga, we were pretty obsessed with both bands and have been on the hunt for more from both ever since.
So Ghast have returned, on yet another split, offering up two more loooong tracks of their unique not-quite-doom, a dirgey crawl, that spends as much time shimmering and buzzing as it does pounding and lumbering. The opener here is 21 minutes of grinding corrosive soft buzz, think Tunnels, Wolf Eyes, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, that sort of thing, deep whirring low end, drifting beneath clouds of metallic buzz, plenty of fuzz and hiss, beneath it all, there does seem to be some sort of thick tarpit like riffing, but it's WAY down, more like a distant drone than anything overtly metal, but it does lend the track a serious sense of dread and foreboding, as if any second the track might splinter into pieces and explode into crushing doom, but it never does, instead ratcheting up the tension, like the soundtrack to some super abstract foreign horror film. An actual rhythm dose seem to develop, but it's cobbled together using hissy white noise, ominous whirring synths, buried and blurred vocals, and a super drawn out low end melody, creeping and creeping before the low end drops out leaving just a sea of high end electrical buzz, and weirdly enough the sound of sheep (!). The second track clocks in at nearly 12 minutes, and again, is more ambient than anything, bits of crackle, melted tape loops, field recordings, processed electronics, all blurred into a strange undulating drone, peppered with fragments of melody, some buried riffing, which finally crawls up from the murk, and the band, for the first time in nearly half an hour, launch into some lurching lumbering doom. But the sound is not massive or crushing, instead, it remains murky and muted, more bass heavy than anything, if there is guitar it's tuned WAY down and is locked in with the rumbling bass, the rhythm mechanical and machinelike, with a definite industrial vibe, the track slipping into brief stretches of ambient drone-like shimmer, before the band lurches back into action, pounding away, stripped down, but still heavy and doomy and mysteriously grim.
Rape-X existed until now, as an MP3 file someone sent us a looong time ago, a half hour slab of blown out metalnoise, industrial drone weirdness. We'd notice it on the computer every once in a while and fire it up, and always think, "wow, this is pretty great, I wonder when they'll have a record". Well here it is. And Rape-X is a pretty good match for Ghast, seeing as they traffic in a similarly abstract doomy ambience, falling closer to Wolf Eyes or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer than any classic sort of doom. The vocals are huge part of the sound, and are harsh and super processed, demonic and maniacal sounding, giving the track a bit of a Whitehouse feel, ranting and proselytizing over a constantly shifting backdrop of blackened noise and droning harsh ambience. A glorious metallic cacophony, wreathed in hiss and skree, a bit like a way more static Sunroof!, the sound roiling and churning below the surface like some rough black sea, while that hellish voice continues to testify, the unholy scripture from some lost black gospel.
Caveat Emptor, though: these have a pressing defect, it's minor, but it's definitely noticeable. The band was contacted about it, but apparently there's some bad blood with the label, so there will never be a new, corrected version, so we figured we would list it anyway, since otherwise it's pretty amazing, and the defect is so slight. Basically, the problem is, there's a digitial click at the beginning of each track. Annoying, distracting, yes, but it doesn't affect the songs themselves, so if you can handle that (you can also edit out the clicks yourself on your computer when you import it into your iTunes or whatever), then by all means pick this up, some seriously abject and harrowing doom-ed blacknoize.
Whether you are into the idea of mash-ups or not, it's really hard not to like Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk. He brings the energy and he definitely brings the party. Sure mash-ups are nothing new, but Gillis's ADD approach to the method is what keeps us listening as one sample or combination of samples never stays long enough to wear out its welcome; recycling familiar sounds into unfamiliar forms that are still�irresistibly�danceable. Sometimes there are up to 20 different samples weaving throughout just one track. But unlike Belgian duo, 2 Many DJs, who take a more hip-insider approach to the mash-up on masterful mixes that are way too expensive over here, Gillis takes a more rough-and-ready bargain basement approach picking key parts from familiarly terrible songs into constantly shifting pieces that are surprisingly kaleidoscopic. The man knows how to entertain!
The return of our favorite one man blackened noise drenched cinematic doomscape wrecking crew, with a super limited single, only 300 copies, of which we got about 40. Already sold out and out of print, so act fast if you want one of these filthy little black slabs.
And filthy they are, and heavy, and noisy, and most definitely the most metal thing we've heard from GTT to date. Two tracks, both sound cut from the same blood soaked cloth, relentless blast beats and drum machine splatter buried beneath thick oozing layers of churning downtuned black buzz, underpinned by tripped out keyboards, and some super harsh processed vokills. Occasionally moaning slabs of woozy drone surface, or the vocals become even more garbled, but the pace remains frenetic. Both sides feature a breakdown of sorts, the A side finds the sound slipping into some weird sort of soundtracky Goblin territory, all queasy synths and creepy minor key melodies, epic and cinematic, but still filthy and grimy and lo-fi, while the B-side introduces some haunting spoken word, over a dense swirl of drones and hums and buzzing, before exploding again into a guitar drenched blacknoise outro.
Awesome as always, and again, already OUT OF PRINT. These are the last copies, we, you or anyone else will ever see.
Miss Golightly continues on along the dusty country road she set off on her last album, 2007's You Can't Buy A Gun When You're Crying. No signs of the garage anywhere, but fear not she nails the country roots just as well and with as much grit and guts as she does the garage rawk. Her unmistakable he-done-me-wrong voice is perfect for the genre. A perfect balance of girlish sass and world weary womanly know-how, she can really belt out the blues, and The Brokeoffs are right there with her! Also for fans of The Sadies when they've got Ms Neko in tow (or vice versa)!
Endless Bummer is such a good name for a record. Usually we're not all that into puns as titles (or band names), but Endless Bummer manages to be a pun, while sort of flipping the spirit of the original inside out. We always wanted to call a record Endless Bummer, but we've now been beat to the punch TWICE. At least. Once in the nineties by Further, whose Endless Bummer was an effervescent chunk of in the red post-Pavement slacker Beach Boys worship, and now this record right here, by the mysteriously named Good Stuff House, whose own particular Endless Bummer is much darker and more sedate, a sprawling drift of minimal shimmer and fluttery folk enveloped by dense clouds of natural reverb and billows of soft buzz.
We didn't know too much about Good Stuff House, we had another cd-r that we dug quite a bit, but which went out of print before we could get enough to review, but now we know just why we liked GSH so much, it's the two guys from dronedrift duo Zelienople, and none other than long time aQ fave, guitarist Scott Tuma, he of the legendary Souled American as well as a clutch of amazing solo records (including a recent record of the week). Pretty much hard to go wrong. And Endless Bummer is further proof of just how far from wrong these guys can get....
Apparently Endless Bummer was recorded in unorthodox spaces, warehouses, churches, basements, and it's not just the band performing live, but much like Taj Mahal Travellers 30 years earlier, who would record various performances, then broadcast them into the space, playing along live, often more than once, every step adding more and more murk and buzz and reverb and echo, the sound getting less and less distinct, until it became the sound of drifting along some murky body of water, through a sonic fog so thick it clings to the surface of the water, every note sounding like it had travelled up from the bottom of the sea, or echoing off of the distant shore. Tuma offers up bits of his gorgeous distinctive guitar, and while they do manage to hover briefly, they seem to absorb the sounds around them, soft spidery tendrils transformed into thick swells, the trio introducing bits of voice, various other sounds, all rendered almost immediately unrecognizable, becoming more another part of this sprawling organic whole, cymbal sizzle becomes shimmering clouds, drifting over the drifting murkscape below.
The sound is simultaneously muddy, murky and lo-fi, yet warm, glistening, and subtly melodic, everything is muted, the softened edges barely hiding the glowing sonic glimmers within. Gorgeous.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Packaged in super subtle silver ink on pale blue fold over origami style sleeve.
First proper cd (not cd-r) release from Scott Goodwin, whose day job is in the group Bonus, but who spends his spare time, making even MORE drone music. Unlike the thick and rumbling, almost doomlike drone of Bonus, on his own, Goodwin tends toward the minimal, more Niblock than SUNNO))), less distortion, more timbre and tone. Goodwin's most recent cd-r Impeccable Surface demonstrated a dramatic shift in that direction, but with Off Light, Goodwin full realizes his vision, crafting too extended drones from pure tones, sine waves, the result is a subtle dronescape of shimmering overtones, and of sound in flux. Niblock is definitely the closest reference, as Goodwin seems to approach his drones in a similar fashion, lining up the layers, the tones, and then shifting them microscopically to create various rhythms and colors. For what seems fairly static, the sounds are incredibly active. Changing shape, their textures constantly shifting, the overtones creating rhythms, those rhythms interacting with the tones and creating counter rhythms and more overtones. With headphones it's easy to get sucked in, it almost makes the listener dizzy, the way the sound seem to move and breathe, but take a step back, and the sound seems more static and manageable, but ever beckoning, with its own impossible gravity. The two tracks, one low, one high, both offer up glimpses into sound, both entrance and enthrall, each soothing in its own way, but far too complex to be ambient music. The sound is academic as well as primal (what's more primal than the drone?), ethereal and ineffable, yet measured and composed, the sounds here are complex enough that they can be appreciated on either level, as a world of sound to explore, and attempt to understand and unravel, or as pure sound, simple and subtly lovely. Or better yet, a mix of the two.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
We're not entirely sure, but we think Shawn Greenlee was a member of Six Finger Satellite, if he wasn't this disc sure makes us think he would have been a perfect fit.
Cobbled together from various live performances, run through all sorts of filters and hand made electronics, Greenlee takes all manner of glitch and bleep, buzz and crackle, squeak and hiss, and renders it totally alien, creating shimmery squiggles, sheets of caustic high end skree, long streaks of textural whir and rumble, harsh white noise draped over creaking malfunctioning machinery, processed voices, fractured melodies, all sorts of grinding skitter and strangled buzz, essentially a field recording of a laboratory full of robots and machines, becoming sentient, and deciding to destroy their former masters.
This isn't harsh noise, but it's definitely noisy, and chaotic and freaked out and pretty dizzyingly over the top. Strictly for folks who find even the most damaged of electronic music too pedestrian.
We only have a few of these, it came out last year, and is packaged in a super gorgeous metallic gold die cut fold over paper sleeve. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES...
So it seems like you can't be a singer/songwriter these days without having a bio involving, either Eastern gurus, nomadic quests or shamanic encounters. Larkin Grimm is definitely no exception, with her lengthy bio reading more like a fairy tale then a back-story. Between growing up in rural Appalachia and hitchhiking through Alaska, the elegant songwriter's magical lifestyle has inspired her vibrant career and her latest and most promising release, Parplar. Ms. Grimm has succeeded in conjuring a sound that is solely her own, haunting finger-picked, acoustic sorcery that cuts to the bone. But don't think this album is so easy to wrap your head around, it's dense with all kinds of instrumentation and fantastical production. With some songs that are stripped down, sparse and folk oriented, and others that are rather twisted in a child-like, whimsical way. Kind of like a fucked up Disneyland nightmare, or a malfunctioning carnival ride. Really bizarre and twisted, but unique and intriguing, Parplar is finely crafted and is the perfect addition to the Young God records catalogue.
What it is exactly that constitutes "Krautrock" is definitely up for debate. It seems often largely construed to be the insistent, motorik pulses of Neu! and Can. But to limit the genre to just that would be a mistake. Bands like Guru Guru and Ash Ra Tempel were also present, bringing some of the heaviest psychedlia ever recorded. Hinten is the former band's second album, and a classic. Free range guitars grazing on open, organic jams. It is more evidently structured than their debut, UFO, while still retaining an improvisational feel that is as playful as it is crushingly acidic. This is one of both Allan and Cameron's favorites within the genre. Halfway between killer rock riffs and complete psychedelic blow-out. Essential, though an expensive Japanese import in its current incarnation.
Alright!! For this latest batch of awesome (sorry couldn't help ourselves) Awesome Vista releases, one we've been looking forward to maybe a teensy bit more than the others is this solo debut from Linda Hagood. Probably best known for her unique vocal contributions to the nineties bands Smackdab and The Double U, Hagood revels in a childlike spookiness that channels the creepier parts of Comus, the angular shuffle and carnival weirdness of bands like Thinking Fellers, Monitor and Caroliner, and the cuddlecore pop of Cub, Puffy Ami Yumi and The Shaggs. Sometimes it reminds us of a female Daniel Johnson, but the music is much stranger and cartoony like Carl Stalling lost in an animated forest full of pet zombies moonlit ravens, giant bunnys, baby hyenas, and dancing marsupials. Freakish Moog whooshes and skittering violins punctuate spindley Eastern European guitar riffs and off-kilter rhythms as she sings these eleven strange but charming dreamlike songs. Her cartoony voice may be a dealbreaker for some, but no other voice would quite fit songs like this, songs that we've seen performed live for years and are finally glad to see laid to wax. Featuring gorgeous hand printed cover artwork by Christine Shields. Super cute and super weird, and like all the Awesome Vista releases, Super Limited!!!!!!!!!!
We've had these for a while now, but are only getting around to listing it now. And unfortunately it's been so long we can't remember any of the details about who these guys are. Web searches have revealed very little as well, but as usual, it hardly matters once we get down to the sounds, which are awesome. A stumbling noiserock, light on the noise, a sort of loping, meandering postrock, the drums simple and spare, while all over the place electronics swoop and buzz, guitars clang and chime, a sort of slowcore crossed with some abstract electronic noise... Imagine a more post rock less machinelike Geronimo, or a prettier, WAY less chaotic Dead C, woozy and weary, and washed out, slow motion math rock dipped in glitch and skree and left to wander aimlessly. Really weird and atonal but pretty and subtly tripped out. There's definitely some Godspeed moments, and some distinctly Dead C sounds (or at least NZ noise rock sounds), but the way that they're arranged, it almost sounds like a normal everyday post rock band gradually and gloriously going haywire. Hard to explain, but this dusty little back room find is suddenly a new fave!
SUPER LIMITED and now discontinued and out of print. We only have a handful, so grab 'em while you can...
First, there was The Bastard. The ultimate over the top power metal/black metal rock opera, as far as we're concerned. Ok, so Andee here at AQ put it out on his tUMULt label... but that simply proves that he/we really like it (not that that's WHY we like it). Still Hammers' best, wethink. But their follow up The August Engine was pretty killer too. And the same with their third album Locust Years, which we hailed as the first ever fantasy metal album that was also a contemporary political allegory (about Bush and the Iraq War). With that record, Hammers settled with regal grace into a new phase, with the significant addition of '70s styled Hammond organ, taking their prog leanings to ever proggier heights, the raspy black metal aspects of their sound discarded long ago. And this new release from the acclaimed San Francisco metallers is definitely a continuation of that, despite some major lineup changes in the Hammers camp since Locust Years came out in 2006.
Of course, mainman guitarist John Cobbett (Ludicra, ex-Slough Feg) is still the with the band. Also drummer Chewy Marzolo, and keyboardist Sigrid Sheie. But now there's a new set of singers. Hammers, as you may know, have always flaunted operatic/theatrical, male and female vocals, intertwining in their compositions. There's been a few different female singers (who also played bass) over the years, but the clean male vocals until now had been handled solely by Mike Scalzi of Slough Feg, who has a distinctive voice to say the least. Taking over the female role is Jesse Quattro, a trained singer who definitely holds her own in the tradition of Hammers' female vocalists. You won't notice much difference there, though she may well be the best they've had. She doesn't play bass, however, so they've got Ron Nichols in to handle that task. More difficult, perhaps, for Hammers, was replacing Scalzi, who left to concentrate entirely on Slough Feg. Patrick Goodwin (of Dirty Power and Pansy Division) stepped up into Scalzi's shoes and while his voice is definitely different, not having the weird presence or booming depth Scalzi's, he's a capable melodic singer, yearning and emotive, and maybe his less idiosyncratic style fits better with Hammers' current direction. Long time fans will definitely notice a difference, though, and some will roll with it, some won't. Certainly the Hammers of The Bastard aren't the Hammers here.
So, now Hammers Of Misfortune obviously have a lot to prove on this new album - or, actually, albums. That's right, as if to really rise to the occasion and make a statement, they've released a double album, or what they'd have us believe is two separate albums, Fields and Church Of Broken Glass, packaged together. Each one gets its own cover art, you flip the gatefold digipack over to see each one, in the style of an old Ace Double paperback (the cover shown here is that of Fields). Though we were a bit bemused to discover that since the seven cuts on Fields clock in at just over 37 minutes, and the five songs on CoBG total about 35, it actually would have been possible to fit 'em both on a single disc! At least Profound Lore isn't making you pay any extra for this two-cd concept. And, since HoM's music can be so exhaustively epic, full of complex arrangements and keyboard busy-ness and cryptic lyrics, it's actually easier on the listener to have two shorter cds to digest than one exceedingly lengthy one, really!
As well, each disc has its own theme, a rural/urban dichotomy between Fields and Church Of Broken Glass. The best example of the latter being the moody 10 minute epic "Butchertown", painting this very city's streets in sinister fairytale shades. (Urban decay, blight and fright being territory previously explored by Cobbett's black metal outfit Ludicra, as well.) If we know Cobbett, there's probably a clever narrative or allegory at play here, encompassing both discs, leading from song to song and one disc to the next, but Hammers lyrics are poetically vague enough that we haven't puzzled it all out yet exactly. You could look at their recent interview on the Pitchfork website for more insight if you wish. We again get a political vibe from some of this, and do have the idea that Fields starts off about the plight of peasant farmers in Afghanistan, beginning with the three-part, 16-minute suite of "Agriculture", "Fields", and "Motorcade". See what you make of these lines, from the latter: "Escorting friendlies, a walk in the park/Unlock the cages as soon as it's dark/Motorcade motorcade easy to mark/Send in the snipers to swim with the sharks/Breadline is burning, the headcount's a joke/Soon they'll be feasting on mirrors and smoke/Motorcade motorcade horses to show/Fish in a barrel and ducks in a row". Hmm. And Hammers manages to turn that into singalong catchiness!
Fortunately, even with the ambitious scale of this latest project, and all the new members in the band, fans will find that Hammers hasn't changed too much, still full of blazing guitar solos and stop on a dime dynamics, memorable riffs and melodies and exquisite harmonies, musical theater moments and multilayered vocals - all the over the top-ness we love about 'em. Perhaps though the progginess has gotten even proggier, more flowery... We're reminded of Kansas, actually! Well, Kansas mixed with Megadeth, maybe. With a healthy helping of that rollicking, Deep Purplish Hammond organ first introduced on previous opus the Locust Years, as we said. And if you're into 'em for the female vocals, you won't be disappointed at all.
So, what should be Hammers' sales slogan for this album - New and Improved? Well, no, we can't quite go there, what with our feelings about the The Bastard. Well, how about Two For The Price Of One! Sure. And how about Thinking Man's (and Woman's) Metal? Definitely. But we get the idea that slogans and soundbites and all those mass media manipulative aspects of modern commercial culture are exactly what Hammers Of Misfortune stands against, so we'll just leave it with, well worth checking out.
Oh, and Hammers fans of the vinyl-buying persuasion, please note that this is also going to be coming out on lp (several of them of course), via the 20 Buck Spin label...
We love Harry Pussy, and we take every opportunity to tell the world. Unfortunately we don't get that many chances as the noise rock trio known as Harry Pussy has been broken up for years now, only the occasional live bootleg or video surfacing now and again. And as much as we love Harry Pussy, and their amazing studio albums, live is where they really shined, and by shined we mean fell totally apart, erupted into utter chaos, started fights with audience members, punished all within earshot, caused every indie rock noiserocker in the world to fall in love with drummer / vocalist Adris and generally annoyed and brutalized every club owner, promoter or opening band they ever crossed paths with.
But holy shit, did HP pack a wallop. The recent live cd-r we listed, for what it lacked in fidelity, it made up for in spunk, and sheer speaker shredding brutality. So here we have yet another live document. Well, pretty much live. Half the record was recorded in a rehearsal space, the rest live at various locations. And needless to say it all rules. Heavy and noisy and off kilter and unhinged and spastic and wild and chaotic and freaked out and funny and fun and fucked up and GENIUS. HP were like the scarier, more lo-fidelity, less technical, noise obsessed Melt-Banana. Short sharp bursts of frenzied fury, all shrieking and thrashing and pounding, it's a little surprised the grindcore crowd didn't go nuts for HP as they share much sonically, but the sound of HP is so much weirder and unhinged. Some songs fly by in a matter of seconds, others pound away hypnotically for a few minutes. The guitars are gnarled and tangled and atonal, the drums a what-the-fuck splatter, and Adris' vocals a wild banshee wail that switches from hysterical shriek to guttural growl in the blink of an eye.
This collection is awesome, the sound is excellent, the songs destroy, they even do some covers, a Nip Drivers tune, a Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, and they even tackle Kraftwerk's "Showroom Dummies", and it sounds pretty bad ass. Also included is a single 18 minute live recording, we originally thought it was a live show, but it sounds like ONE LONG TRACK, lots of chiming high end guitars and clouds of cymbal sizzle, moaning vocals, a bit like a stumbling off kilter Sunroof! The disc finishes off with 10 more live tracks, the sound super hot and in the red, the band totally on fire, sounding like quite possibly the raddest live band ever, which for that 14 minutes they almost definitely were. and we get a good dose of Adris' goofy cute stage banter to boot!
The current retro thrash renaissance of course has its practitioners here in the Bay Area. Of course, 'cause the Bay Area in the '80s was thrash ground zero what with Metallica and Exodus and Heathen and all, and, well, history repeats itself. The North Bay young 'uns known as Hatchet are up for riding the retro thrash rocket as high as they can go (so far, getting signed to iconic label Metal Blade on the strength of the tracks they'd posted to their MySpace page!).
With mile-a-minute neck wrecking riffage, blasting battery, and snarling, sometimes screeching vox (spitting lyrics about angels of death and marching dead and stuff like that), Hatchet sure sound like the real deal, no (pardon the pun) hack job. Dunno how they would have fared vs. the Big Four back in the day, but amidst the legions of retro thrashers popping up left and right in the metal underground right now they more than hold their own. A rapid fire mix of technicality, melody, attitude, and horror-flick fun.
Nostalgic good times all right, nothing more, nothing less, but cooler in our book than boring death metal band number 71,523 that until recently was standard issue in the American underground metal scene. If you want originality, well grab the Slayer and Megadeth and Testament albums that Hatchet so obviously grew up on...
What a difference a name makes, oh ok, and an extra member. The UK's Abandon, formerly a tortured suicidal black metal one man outfit, has changed their name to Hateful Abandon, added a fella called Swine to the lineup, and the result is really strange and unexpected.
Abandon, before the name change, trafficked in a super harsh and hateful black metal along the lines of Xasthur or Leviathan, buzzing riffs, deep depressive blackness, laced with hysterical shrieking vocals. But on Famine, gone is ALL of the buzz, and much of the vocal hysteria, in its place, something equally depressive, but sonically completely removed from the black metal of its former incarnation. The sound here is all clean guitars and simple loping drums, deep moody basslines, more gloom and goth than blast and buzz. Joy Division is the obvious reference. The occasional blackened shriek being the only reminder that this band was once grim and harsh. But hell, c'mon, the sound doesn't need to be grim and harsh for the vibe to be. and the vibe here is definitely grim and bleak, and sorrowful and depressive. Much like the recently reviewed Frail cassette, that matched up black metal vox with Cure-ish eighties new wave, Hateful Abandon subtly infuse a bit of blackness into what would otherwise be just a slab of gloomy miserablist gothic slowcore. Which would be fine with us of course, but the mix is pretty bizarre, and the result is pretty excellent. Guitars chime and ring out, melodies unfurl lugubriously, the bass is serpentine and soporific, the drums more keeping time than driving the songs, the vocals, lazily drawled, from soft sad boy croon, to deep gothy bellow, to demonic shriek, often in the same song, but the shrieking is in fact kept to a minimum, relying much more on the gloomier less harsh vocals, which definitely makes this something dark and brooding and moody and melancholic, not even remotely heavy, which means this is only for truly adventurous and open minded metalheads, or for the rest of you, who like it dark and creepy and haunting and hypnotic, and might not mind the occasional hellish howl with your doomy dreary dirges...
It's a bold move to offer a debut recording as a DVD; but that's what the East Bay improv / drone / noise HBK Trio has issued forth. Well it's DVD-R; but still! This trio features such stalwarts of the Bay Area sound community as Jim Kaiser (Petit Mal, NF Orchest, French Radio) on his trusted bowed bicycle wheel and other slabs of metal, Angela Hsu (NF Orchest) on violin and electronics, and Adrian Bayless on horns and electronics. As an ensemble, the three capture the spirit of AMM or even some of the Fonal adventurousness (minus the freak folk attributes) with all of the intertwining gestures and expressive bouts of sustained tones and softened noise generated acoustically and tempered with effects. The film comes in two distinct variations; but both of which document the biodiversity of the many creatures living in the East Bay: wasps, beetles, ravens, blackbirds, ants, and bees seen amongst the hurricane fencing, train tracks, and telephone wires. Shot digitally in video, the film enjoys some very nice static shots of insects scurrying about, then with rapid cuts of ravens marauding in the sky. You might ask yourself, is this limited? Hell, yes!
We've been big fans of the previous collaborative efforts between Kieren Hebden (Four Tet) and legendary free jazz drummer Steve Reid, but NYC demonstrates the two truly finding their own pulsating and exciting outer groove. This isn't fusion or jazz, instead it really sounds like two musical innovators reaching out into each other's orbits and succeeding in making something wholly new.
NYC was recorded right in the heart of New York City over just a couple days and both the city and the urgency shines through as these tracks play like some amazing version of Liquid Liquid performing live at the Village Vanguard. We almost want to send copies of this to some of our favorite rhythmic and percussion fueled bands like Tussle, Mi Ami, !!!, Lemonade and Trans Am, for a shot of fresh inspiration. Hot off the heels of Hebden's recent collaboration with Sunburned Hand Of The Man and a dazzling stripped down and drugged out Four Tet ep he's really sounding like he's on top of his game lately and Reid keeps proving that getting older has hardly dimmed his soul and passion as his percussive skills have never sounded more alive and full of fire. Highly recommended!
Mitch Hedberg is the kind of comic you either get or you don't. He's not immediately "ha-ha" funny on the surface, but like a junkie version of Jerry Seinfeld, he's truly one of the few comics we could listen to over and over again and still laugh at the�inane�brilliance of his stoner observations. It's not so much what he says but how he says it; focusing on the small mundane details of�colloquialisms�and popular culture and mining them for�epiphanies�of absurd logic. It's hard to say had he lived longer (he died in 2005) if he would have had a bigger following, as attempts to groom him into a sit-com starring comedian didn't quite pan out. His strength was stand-up, and even then his best shows were the ones where they teetered on the brink of all-out failure (see his HBO special!). Thankfully, this killer set was recently salvaged from material that wasn't on the first two Hedberg discs. Arguably, the best recording from this sadly missed comic genius.
You can't always judge a record by its cover. But after one look at the cover of Caesura, disc number four from Boston's Helios, we could pretty much tell this would be a wondrous escape into some heavenly realm of ambient goodness. Between the latest Grouper release and the cosmic psychedelia of the recent Alps disc, Type seems to have tapped into some infinite well of dream pop specialists. And Helios is one of the most outstanding members of this cast of dream weavers. Boston's Keith Kenniff, the man behind Helios, has crafted an album of delicate, gorgeous compositions shrouded in winter's haze. Light and somber guitar passages stepping along side sparse electronic beats and percussion to create a lush wreath of pop ambiance. Unlike some pop ambient records that too easily meander into the dreary corners of space, Caesura remains anchored to earth. Invoking images of quiet pines and blissful isolation, there's a captivating relationship between the more industrial, electronic backbone of the record and the droning, organic melodies that hover above. Caesura is the perfect soundtrack for gazing out at the morning fog on lonely winter mornings. Need we say much else?
Like Robert Fripp and Manuel Gottsching, the UK's Steve Hillage is a stellar guitarist who came out of the prog era (Arzachel, Khan, Gong) to mine his own unique cosmic territory that could be the blueprint for latter day ambient techno. His amazing guitar work on Gong's Radio Invisible trilogy, especially the epically spacious "You", was just the first stepping stone toward this 1979 avant-new age masterpiece, Rainbow Dome Musick, originally recorded for an on-site installation at an actual Rainbow Dome in London.
While it must have been -really- an experience inside the Dome, it's even now a fantastic listen at home on headphones. Two 20-minute, side-long tracks built from the sequenced filtering of guitars, piano, synths and bells, that organically glide from phased rhythmic passages to expansive cloud-like washes of sound.�It's definitely much more ambient than Hillage's other albums up to that point, but as blissed out and new agey as it is, with the sounds of gurgling water (starting side one) and shimmering drones, you won't forget he's a killer electric guitarist either. Obviously,�a heavy influence on The Orb, who later collaborated with Hillage, after they met in an club where to Hillage's surprise, Alex Patterson of the Orb was spinning Rainbow Dome Musick in the chill-out lounge, so the story goes! Another essential entry of cosmic proto-new age sounds for fans of Fripp and Eno, Cluster, Ariel Kalma, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Eberhard Schoener and Ashra. We recently got into this album, ordered it for the store on cd, and heartily recommend it - though it seems to sell itself anyway when people see the cover, something about that hypnotic vibrating rainbow dome image...
It's hard to say exactly why, but Horna might just be our favorite black metal band EVER. No matter what we're listening to, no matter how heavy or dark or grim or fucked up or mind blowing that whatever is, the minute we throw some Horna on it's like all that listening never happened. We're suddenly in thrall to Horna's timeless black buzz. Ensorcelled, enraptured, smitten even. Horna are heavier than anything else, buzzier and more black. There's just something magical and mysterious about Horna, they're Finnish, that could be part of it. But their sound is totally unique, even though that sound is assembled from all the bits that make up all black metal. It's a sound simultaneously frenzied and furious and heavy as fuck, but also simple and punky, even a little groovy here and there, the songs swing wildly from impossibly blazing black blasts to lurching chug and back again. The guitars are massive and thick, and while Shatraug's vocals were always amazing, there's now a new second vocalist Corvus, the two mix it up big time, hellish shrieks, punk rock barks, death metal growls, all adding a weirdly emotional element to their grim blackness. And like most of our favorite bands, there's a definite pop element buried beneath, hooks all tangled up with the lurching, thrashing, head banging buzz, drifting just below the surface, making these songs not only brutal and black, but crazy fucking catchy as well. It's almost as if someone took Iron Maiden, dragged them into the forest, where they were forced fight and then mate with Darkthrone, then the offspring were fed human flesh and blast beats, slathered in corpsepaint and doused in black buzz, until they emerged feral and fucked up, demented and delirious, but ghostlike vestiges of their more traditional lineage continue to linger on. Fuck it. We could make up cool little stories and spend the next several paragraphs exhausting our black metal thesaurus, but basically, none of that really matters. This review could have been two words long. HORNA RULE. If you're into black metal, and you don't love Horna, then you're not. Not really. And if you're new to the genre and want to hear traditional black metal done about as well as humanly, or inhumanly possible, then Horna is the band to start with, and this double disc is as good a place as any to dive in...
In the past Keith Wood has released all kinds of material under the Hush Arbors moniker, so we had no idea what to expect from this new record on Ecstatic Peace. Turns out it's a seriously awesome album of psych folk psychosis! It really grew on us, the perfect album to play in the store. With a simple charm that totally hinges on catchy, rootsy guitar licks and soft, falsetto vocals that are ever-so effective in completely captivating. Slipping between quietly sung finger picked ballads and rowdy full-band jammers, these are the kind of songs that stay in your head longer than you'd like, but you don't mind because they're awesome. Wood and his partner, Leon Dufficy, have conjured a magical release that falls somewhere between a forested acoustic ritual and a boozed up, barn burning hoedown. Wood's somber songwriting is clever and touching, combining the tenderness of Neil Young with the atmospheric obscurity of Six Organs (Ben Chasny even makes an appearance on the second track!). Very cool! Complete with a beautifully collaged cover featuring a picture of the man himself. Needless to say, don't miss out, this is highly recommended!
The name Huzun might not ring a bell, but for folks tuned into the experimental music scene in New Zealand or who are avid collectors of micro edition cd-r releases, you might know the names behind Huzun: Andrew Scott and Tim Coster. Andrew Scott is one half of the duo Nest, along with Nigel Wright, whose Flotter record has been a HUGE hit around here, and who shared a collaborative release last year with Mr. Coster.
So for Huzun, Scott teams up with Coster once again, this time minus Wright, for a disc of super minimal metallic melodic dronemusic. A 35 minute slow crawl through murky expanses of subterranean low end, dense clouds of slowed down whale call-like melodies buried beneath grinding swells of soft whirring blur, like exploring some lost underground city by torchlight, what sounds like bats fluttering overhead, strange sounds off in the distance like the buzz of insects, all over a deep dark rumbling like some sort of machine buried beneath the city. Haunting and harrowing, minimal and mysterious, at the same time subtly melodic and darkly mesmerizing.
More essential listening for all you dronelords and ladies...
The cover of I Am The Fire depicts a lone figure crouched amidst a strange assemblage of equipment, several amps, a synthesizer, an old fashioned tape recorder, some sort of oscillator and a large square lamp illuminating the scene, while surrounding the figure and all the equipment is a light dusting of what appears to be leaves, quite evocative, and we'd like to think it's an actual photo of the creation of this disc, as the sounds here are definitely dimly lit, suffused with a mysterious glow, dark and intimate, haunting and abstract. A slow burning drone music, less minimal and more melodic, the opener sounds like Godspeed or Explosions In The Sky, stripped of drums, melted down and poured out into a slowly spreading pool of blackened sonic shimmer, the sound muted and softly distorted, smoldering with a strange urgency, more thick and warm than heavy, reminding us quite a bit of a less heavy Fear Falls Burning. The other tracks here definitely slip into more minimal territory, but even then, the sound is dense and organic sounding, tones and notes stretched way out and laid atop one another, alongside other sympathetic tones, unleashing clouds of rhythmic overtones and all manner of subtle colorations, drifting slow and low, glimmering dreamily, a prismatic soundfield of blacks and greys, beautifully blurred into soft focus suite of deep listening dronemusic.
Inside is Kiwi soundmaker Sandy Schaare and Celestial Telepathy is his debut. Twenty minutes of gorgeous psychedelic solo guitar. But don't be expecting any sort of wailing shredding freakouts, Schaare takes the guitar and manages to make some of the most beautiful un-guitarlike sounds you've ever heard. Soft billowy drifts, gentle shimmering clouds of sound, and what sounds like Tibetan bowls or distant chiming bells, a resonant ringing that spreads delicately like tiny ripples in a still pond. So gorgeous and tranquil.
Limited to 100 copies, packaged in a full color mini sleeve with original psychedelic artwork by Schaare himself, in a mini PVC plastic pouch with a printed insert. Already sold out at the label, so once these are gone, they are gone for good.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A gorgeous disc of drifting, moody, softly psychedelic dronefolk from this mysterious duo called Invisible Bees. Fans of all things darkly twangy, drone drenched, shimmery and haunting, will definitely want this, the sounds inside are gorgeous, the packaging is over the top luxurious, the bad news is, it's limited to only 50 copies, and we only got a handful. So we'll be brief, but needless to say, do your best to grab one of these, you won't be sorry.
Loping bass, over fragments of folky steel string guitar, plenty of swirling wheezing ambience, more folk than drone in fact, the steel strings guiding the Invisible Bees' sound. The twang and pick and strum, pulled apart, and set amidst deep soft swells of warm washed out whir, the melodies minor key and mournful, in the distance shimmering streaks of high end sway to and fro, the percussion is minimal, the ambience is thick, super moody and cinematic, creepy, and beautifully ominous, a disembodied skeletal folk music for the drone set. Really fantastic, and practically criminal that only 50 people will get to hear it.
Incredible packaging, full color, hand water colored covers with cloth binding with a full color printed inner sleeve as well!
Another super limited release from Portland (formerly SF) based artist Chris Johansen's Awesome Vistas label. We flew through the last two, the Oh Sees' Peanut Butter Oven EP and Linda Hagood's Pink Love Red Love (the Oh Sees is WAY gone, but we might have a few of the Hagood left), so we expect the new ones to fly out of here just as fast.
The Cryin' Sea is the latest from folk drone free noise collective Jackie-O Motherfucker, whose last disc Freedom Land was a bit of a flop around these parts. But thankfully The Cryin' Sea has not only righted that wrong, it also finds the band returning to more of a folk sound, at least on the opener. A loping meandering shuffle, with mumbled vocals, simple propulsive drumming, and spidery reverby guitar lines. A bit like a super stripped down No Neck, Jackie-O let the song unfurl lazily, allowing the track to morph into some super blissed out krautrock, which could easily have filled out the whole side but ends up ending way too soon. That's followed up by something a bit more abstract, an angular assemblage of buzzing metallic melodic fragments, bits of guitar twang spread out over sizzling tinkling percussion, muted voices, and distant shimmering drones, before the vocals return and the song gets a bit folky again. The side closer is a caustic slab of bedroom buzz, the guitars crunchy and buzzing, the vocals distorted and garbled, the drums a buried plod, a lilting, darkly pretty dirge.
As if that weren't enough, the B-side is a single side long song, the title track captured live in Finland, and sounding much more like 'classic' JoM: sputtery percussion, moaned abstract vocals, bits of turntable whir and mutated samples, eventually giving way to strummed guitar, simple motorik drum beat, and some gorgeous super stripped down krautrockiness, that over the course of the rest of the disc becomes looser and looser, more and more free, finishing off with a burst of soft cacophony. Really nice. And JoM now counts among its membership Nick Bindeman, the man behind bigtime aQ drone faves Tunnels (he may have been in JoM for a while, but we only just noticed).
As with all Awesome Vistas, cool cover art too. Hand screened black green and purple images on SUPER thick old style lp sleeves, with a photocopied insert.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!
The name James Din A4 is a new one to us, but most likely not for longtime fans of minimal techno and leftfield electronic music. This disc collects a whole mess of previously released tracks, all culled from super limited self released vinyl lps, on cd for the very first time, and is really pretty difficult to describe. Opener "The Seaside" is quite possible our electronic jam of the year, and pretty much displays the best of what James Din A4 has to offer, crammed into a single track. From the opening fuzzed out loop, which could have been yanked wholesale from a Field B-side, to the skittery super minimal click track, to the spaced out electro groove that follows, various strange chopped samples and vocal bits, over the course of the first few minutes, the track gets less and less minimal and more and more playful, all sorts of beep and buzz, the melodies all sunshiney and bubbly, but still all wrapped around that warm whirring intro, finishing off with a snippet of the sea shanty that gives the track its name.
This is definitely lo-fi minimal techno, but there's some electro going on, some definite nod to the 8-bit side of electronica, that opening track is so warm and whirry, especially the main loop, that we can't help but think of The Field, but the rest of the record not so much, more sort of playful and goofy, definitely plenty of dancefloor silliness here and there, the sort of sounds that could easily spawn their own ill-advised dance, but for the dancefloor averse (like some of us) this is total headphone ear candy, that slips from wild and wooly and weird to muted moody and minimal, some tracks sound like fractured exotica, others like skittery Oval mashups, still others are just gorgeously minimal and dark, while still others are groovy and playful. Maybe our favorite track is "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me", a way too brief song constructed from chopped and looped fragments of sixties jangle pop, reminding us a bit of Terry Riley's "You're No Good", and similarly would have sounded amazing expanded to fill up a whole disc.
This year has been crammed with amazing electronic music, and with less than two months to go, Fistel Rose has surfaced just in time to join our list of 2008 favorites...
Packaged in a 6 panel black and white digipak, with a huge booklet filled with all sorts of crazy artwork, from back and white line drawings to eye popping full color collages, all done by Mr. James Din A4 himself!
It's been a little while since we've heard from UK duo Jazzfinger, we've got a split lp that will be reviewed on the next list, and we found a few of these hiding out on the shelves, another cd-r from last year that we're only getting around to reviewing now. It was limited to 100 copies, we have less than ten, but sure there are way more then 10 of you out there who never got your hands on this.
Jazzfinger are always all over the map and it's no different here, from wheezing melodica, slathered in distortion and feedback, to strange percussive junkyard lope, swirling tendrils of high pitched shimmer, to haunting laughter draped over ominous church organ whir and metallic creaks, abstract detuned folk strum over more wheezing warble, and then there's the 24 minute "Caves", a noisy workout that slips between corrosive crunch, dreamy drone, fucked up confusional soft noise and ever possible combination of the three.
Bizarre, and unpredictable and sort of pretty and definitely cracked, exactly what every Jazzfinger fan expects and desires.
Once again, this was LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, we've got 8 or 9 left, it's out of print so that is definitely it, packaged in cool water colored covers...
Dunno what happened here, but Johann Johannsson totally blows it on Fordlandia. His previous records had tip-toed around the ideas of big Hollywood filmscores, exaggerating the emotional rigor to describe the banal, or composing quietly sad scores to counterpoint a hyperviolent play. But here, the Icelander goes for a full-on melodramatic orchestration, something that would make for the big crescendo on a Jerry Bruckheimer film. Amidst the massive string symphony, some Guitar Hero wannabe rockstar dons the role of The Edge with some tricked out delay appreggiation on his politely 'artful' riffs. Is this supposed to be ironic? Ugh.
