THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We always say we're not going to write very much about something for whatever reason, we couldn't get enough, it sold out already, but then we always seem to go on and on and write a bunch anyway. Not this time. Short and to the point, since we only have 7 copies of this, and for months now, maybe years, we've been trying to get more, lots more. If we could track more of these down, it would definitely be a highlight, probably even a record of the week. Andee finally made contact with the band, indirectly though another band, so maybe he can convince them to let him re-issue it, or maybe release their next album or both. But for now, we have 7, and once they are gone, for the foreseeable future they will be gone for good.
So yeah, Manierisme, a mysterious black metal horde from Japan, this record easily one of our all time favorite BM records EVER. Fucked up for sure, warped and warbly, twisted and off kilter, buzzy and beautiful, so completely and utterly unique, one of those records that when some one is in the store and is looking for something strange and black and mindblowing, this is the disc we always pull out, and simply tell the person, "buy this". And so there you go. No ROTW, no highlight, just tucked away within the body of the list to be discovered by the aQ faithful who read the whole list. Maybe one day we'll be able to get more, until then though, seven lucky folks will enjoy the beautiful black grim mystery of Manierisme...
It's been a pretty great several months for San Francisco's Mi Ami. They went from being a living room party band secret to getting signed to Quarterstick and touring the nation, with Europe coming up on their horizon this spring. With a few now-hard-to-get 12"s under their belt we were anxious to hear what shape their debut full length would take. Watersports (such a dirty album name, and we love the cover photo!) definitely brings the full voltage, power and energy of their live shows. While much is made about their incorporation of dub, disco and cosmic influences, listening to an entire Mi Ami full length we're very much reminded of their punk and post-hardcore roots, with ex-members of Dischord's Black Eyes making up 2/3 of the band and a spazzy and high pitched squealed vocal delivery that reminds us a lot of some of those great '90s post-hardcore bands like Native Nod, Nation Of Ulysses, Rye Coalition, Antioch Arrow, etc.
Sonically however there is much more at play in Mi Ami's bag of tricks and while the vocals may be a make it or break it scenario for some folks, you can't deny the energy, enthusiasm and visceral fury bursting out of their creative and lively songs.
A new issue of Mojo is always a time to rejoice, especially when we're about finished with the list, so we can dedicate some serious time to one of the best reads in magazine land. On the cover Nick Cave, as well as a jewel cased cd featuring some of Mr/ Cave's favorite records and biggest influences, inside: Johnny Marr, Ry Cooder, Jane Birkin, Dave Clarke Five, Springsteen, Thin Lizzy, Deerhoof, Buddy Holly, Soft Machine, Neil Young, Taj Mahal, R.E.M., as well as tons of reviews and all sort of other good stuff!
We might normally scoff at a release limited to only 37 copies, but when you see the handmade miniature collage covers and hand painted tapes, you'll understand. Each one is hand made, a surreal landscape of humans with animal heads, fragments of buildings, mysterious shapes and figures, all done, tiny, to fit in a cassette. Folks who picked up the other releases on Custodian, Color Zoo Containers, will know what we're talking about. One had a cover, that was an intricate cut out insect, the other hand painted, each on folded transparencies. But it's not just the packaging that gets a lot of attention, the music inside is appropriately skewed and mysterious. This one is by a duo called The ( ) Moppers (space and parentheses required), half of which is the man responsible for C,CZC and the incredible packaging.
This is the document of a live show recorded back in 2004, and while it's difficult to pick out exactly what instruments are used, the result is a gloriously buzzy, crackly rhythmic soundscape, lots of glitchy crunch, throbbing distorted low end, soft chordal drones, some simple drumming, all super lo-fi and blown out, parts of this almost sound like a lo-fi noise rock Aluk Todolo, the same sort of abstract rhythmic mystery, but here, it's much more intimate, lots of little sonic events going on, what sound like music boxes, simple strummed guitar melodies, even some piano, but the various elements are distorted and woven into a loping field of thump and thud, of crunch and clunk, that seems to sprawl and drift, sometimes billowing into thick buzzing swells or harsh grinding distortion, but more often, meandering minimally.
Fans of Avarus and Uton and other Finnish sonic experimentalists will dig, as folks into minimal lowercase soundwork. Cool stuff. And remember. Limited to 37 copies, each one individually hand mad and numbered, we got more than half, but those won't last long...
While so many of his big name '80s peers have either vanished or started churning out sub-par sounds in recent years (The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, etc.) Morrissey has kept great quality control and has been aging so so gracefully. Years of Refusal might be his most punchy, rocking and self assured solo outing to date. With his golden voice still so warm and rich and powerful and his brutish band offering some muscular back up, this is a set of songs that rely not only on Morrissey's always clever and dramatic word play but the rockin' music backing it up as well!
His last album Ringleaders Of The Tormentors, though filled with some great songs, tripped up a bit on its over-ambition and pretension. Years Of Refusal gets it all right, with a sound palette very similar to one of his great recent outings You Are The Quarry. These songs bristle with such natural force and those magical melodies that Morrissey has been creating for over twenty-five years now are in full effect. Even folks here at AQ who are far from being devoted Morrissey fanatics have been digging this big time! And those of us who do have that special place in our hearts for Morrissey are finding this to be such an infectious album that only reaffirms that despite what one might think of his persona or mystique, this is truly one of the greatest songwriters and singers of our generation!
Oooohhh! Live Free Or Die is a re-configuration of Brendan Murray's acclaimed Commonwealth cd, also released by San Francisco's premier sound arts organization 23five. This limited edition redux was conceived as a "tour disc" in support of Murray's 2009 performance at the San Francisco Art Institute, opening for Tony Conrad. The title happens to be the motto for New Hampshire, and has more to do with his personal history in living in New England than anything else. As a teenager, Murray was living in New Hampshire when he and a friend ventured to Boston for a Table Of The Elements showcase that featured a performance from Mr. Conrad. In so many words, the concert blew his mind, and lead him to begin tinkering with sound, a process which lead him to become a mighty finer minimalist and phonographer in his own right.
In making Live Free Or Die, Murray drove Commonwealth (a stately single minded composition of subtly shifting harmonics and drones) through a handful of distortion pedals and effects boxes, changing the overall color of that golden recording with an ashen grit. Using these sounds as the source material, Murray presents two slowly building crescendos whose dynamic range of near silent valleys and speaker rattling peaks as the crux to Live Free Or Die. More Francisco Lopez than Eliane Radigue, Live Free Or Die makes for a very nice companion to his near perfect Commonwealth. There were only 50 copies of these things produced, and the bulk have already disappeared! Ack!
Another new one from tape label Twonicorn, a label specializing in "basement new age crawl", finally new music from the highly underrated Brendan Murray, who as we mentioned before we would most definitely rank up there with Coleclough and Chalk as one of our favorite masters of the drone. Former missives from Murray have been of the harsher and heavier variety, gritty and buzz bottomless dronescapes, still ultra minimal but with some heft, bordering occasionally on the heaviness of SUNNO))) or other like minded sonic explorers. But on Scared In My Heart, Murray softens his sound, and offers up two utterly mesmerizing chunks of slow moving soft shimmer. The first, is all hushed ambience, tones that pulse and flutter, but are ultimately smeared into endless drones, allowed to shift and drift, seemingly simple and nearly static, but rife with strange tonal color, subtle dissonance, and all sorts of tangled melody. The second, is like a louder, more active version of the first, the tones sounding more like bells and organs, stretched out and smeared, wavering and warbling, notes beating against one another, all manner of implied motion and abstract melody, minimal but strangely active, intense and emotional, slow burning and quite beautiful.
As with all Twonicorn, gorgeously packaged, pro printed tapes, textured paper sleeves, and of course super limited, ONLY 100 COPIES!! Each tape hand numbered.
We most definitely have a thing for Russian black metal, Old Wainds, Stielhas Storhett, Forest, Branikald, Raven Dark, Nav, Ithdabquth Qliphoth, we could go on and on. So we're always psyched to discover some new band we had never heard, or heard of before, such was the case with Native In Black, whose 2008 disc At The Gates Of Eternal Winter we just managed to get in, and it's a killer, but the cool thing is it's a whole different take on black metal than we're used to, especially from Russian bands.
Their sound is cold and grim and frosty and buzzy, but it's not really furious or fast, it's also not stripped down or raw, instead it's almost like some weird variant of classic eighties metal, mixed with a little blackness, and a lot of thrash. It's hard to describe, but much like the Ruins cd reviewed elsewhere on this list, the more we listen to this the better it sounds. Most black metal is droney or blurry, barely headbangable, but this shit is epic, and totally rocking, midtempo most of the time, and when it is fast, it's not blast beats, but more furious and sort of punk rock. Lurching and lumbering, pounding fists in the air. The vocals are awesome too, definitely a black metal shriek, but also frenzied and super dramatic, a bit like Mr. Doctor or something, giving the black metal a distinctly over the top Devil Doll vibe. In fact the more we dig into this record, the less distinctly black metal it sounds, and the more it sounds like some fucked up noise rock band, who just so happen to have some metal roots, a tangled mathy buzz, wrapped around those crazy vox, and shot through with a bit of stumbly punk rock, and streaks of blackened grimnity. Live these guys could easily either be corpsepainted and bespiked, or a bunch of bearded dudes in jeans and tshirts, leaping all over the stage, flailing wildly and stage diving, hardly matters, either way this shit rules!
Yet another limited edition release from Mike Donovan's Folding cassette-only label. This one's considerably longer in running time than any of the recent batch, and it features early improvised recordings by John Dwyer (guitar) and Brian Gibson (drums) aka The Netmen. Noisy and rhythmic and weird and pretty wonderful. Just what you'd expect from the mad musical minds of Gibson and Dwyer.
Super limited!
You know a record is good, when you have no idea what the hell to say about it. Or if "what the fuck" is the first words that come to mind. Such is the case with this tour only cd-r ep from local twisted psych goth weirdos New Thrill Parade. Part of a burgeoning local scene that includes the Ovens (new record on tUMULt soon), Prizehog, Robocop 3 and a bunch of other dubiously named local noisemakers.
But New Thrill Parade definitely stand out, their dizzyingly druggy cabaret workouts, chiming high end guitars, chaotic drumming, long stretches of doomy Nick Cave like crooning, buzzing bass drones and wild operatic freakouts, like a soundtrack to some super fucked up Tim Burton student film. It's impossible to not imagine some strange stone creatures or gross, tentacled beasts singing the deep vocal parts, and some crazed multi headed ring master type balancing on some equally deformed beast belting out the wailing high parts.
Moody and dramatic and cinematic and over the top. Plenty psychedelic and tripped out and druggy, and really fucking catchy, hooks popping up all over the place, while the band unfurls their peculiar brand of funhouse doom and abandoned amusement park goth, horns bleat and moan sparring with the multiple voices, the vibe is definitely eighties, these guys would have KILLED at L.A.'s Scream club, maybe opening for Jane's Addiction or Tex & The Horseheads, but they take that sound and doll it all up with some more modern lo-fi noise rock heaviness, some warped off kilter over the top psych-glam freakouts, and plenty of textures and layers and effects and ambience.
Still need to see these guys live, might be a disappointment since we're envisioning strange beasts and scary monsters, but that's why the cd is perfect, close your eyes, and let these guys drag you screaming into their cracked and crazed world of sound.
TOUR ONLY, LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, we got a dozen or so, might very well be the only copies we get.
Man From Deep River is another fantastic album in the ongoing Viking drone collaboration between BJ Nilsen, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, and Helgi Thorsson. Where their trilogy for Helen Scarsdale spoke the trials and tribulations of alcoholism through heavy minimalism, this one has a Mondo feel. The album is based upon a found tape from 1975, which served as the guide to their excursions; but even beyond this piece of audio verite, they frame the album as if it were the harrowing sound design for some fucked-up Italian pseudo documentary on any number of unsavory topics. The opening field recording of African mbira players and wood percussionists is tame enough, setting the stage for a narrative beyond their Scandinavian tundra. As these recordings degrade through incrementally increasing reverb, the signature Nilsen / Sigmarsson drone sound oozes forward amidst the chattering of European finches. Things quickly blacken with a Dracula haunting of carnivalesque organ chords played with heavy hands and minor keys. As all of this happens within the first 10 minutes, the album instantly has a very different feel than the alcohol trilogy's isolationism.
Deadly serious, flatlined tones emanate beyond this point, coupled with those same bird recordings which have now been deformed into mutating coos and slow-motion clucks as if refracted through a fun house mirror. Bits of spoken dialogue also creep forward presumably from that aforementioned found cassette, but swimming in deeper than deep reverberation and intermingling with warbling carnivalesque overtures spawned from the almighty drone. After a rasping collage of electrified field recordings, Man From Deep River concludes through a series of spectral arcs of modulating sound radiate the night sky like the northern lights filtered through auditory hallucinogenics. Only during these brief concluding moments do Nilsen & Stilluppstyepa allow for a sense of beauty to emerge from an otherwise terminally unsettling, if blackly psychedelic album.
Hermann Nitsch might just rank as one of our favorite modern composers, his pieces being huge atonal drone works for orchestras, accompanied by bloody 'aktions', with performers dressed all in white, or nude, faux crucifixions and gallons and gallons of bovine blood. It's precisely the disturbing dramatic elements of Nitsch's aktions that have kept him from ever performing in the US.
A few of his here have gotten pretty obsessed with Nitsch, his recordings always super limited and notoriously difficult to track down, one aQuarian (we're looking at you Andee!) even owns several of boxsets containing complete aktions, which result in upwards of 50 cds.
Like his live aktions, every release is a spectacle, Die Geburt Des Dionysos Christos is no different. Released by the always amazing Vinyl On Demand label, which means outrageous and over the top packaging, this time, it's a gorgeous silk screened and hand stained wooden box, with a hinged top, inside, three lps, each in a deluxe printed sleeve, also a massive gorgeously printed booklet, thick textured paper, metallic inks, the whole nine yards. It would be worth it even if the lps were blank and it was just the object. But thankfully, there is music, but unlike the grand scale aktions, the recordings here are much more intimate. Minimal drone organ recordings, some captured live in a cathedral, others recorded on the organ at his private castle (!) in Austria.
We only got two, probably can't get more. Fans of extreme and mysterious sounds will be blown away, it looks amazing, sounds fantastic, it even smells great, the box and the ink and the printed sleeves, so recommended. And so worth the hefty price tag.
Man we wanted to rave on and on about Nodzzz's amazing single "I Don't Wanna Smoke (Marijuana)" possibly the catchiest song of 2008 but sadly the 7" went out of print before we could ever get our hands on it. But luckily these San Francisco garage popsters have this great new 12" out to fulfill our Nodzzz fix. Refreshingly energetic and punk in spirit, Nodzzz craft super catchy rudimentary garage pop that's equal parts sassy and bratty. With hints of Jonathan Richman's bravado and charisma along with shots of inspiration from the smarter side of garage rock as well as obscure new wave bands who we imagine the band collects tons of rare vinyl from. We're excited to see what the future holds for Nodzzz.
First we've heard from the appropriately named Noise Nomad, a mysterious horde who traffic in primitive electronics and avant noise rock. Like an even more Neanderthal Man Is The Bastard but without the basses, or like some�sort of damaged tribal Silver Apples, but way more lo-fi and fucked up.
Wild squalls of Lost In Space electronics and FX, stumbling pounding unhinged chaotic drumming, creating some sort of crumbling framework for the pulsing alien high end skree happening in the foreground. Within this stumbling static soundscape of caveman thud and abstract electronics, lurk lots of other little sonic mysteries, that flit and flutter just below the surface, but it's all about the dueling drums and FX that will either melt your brain or send you drifting off into some gloriously damaged trancelike state.�
Super limited of course, and packaged in cool two color silk screened covers.
Labradford had long been the American precursor to the lugubrious noir that Bohren & Der Club Of Gore had masterfully grafted with doom. But now that Labradford has quietly ceased activities, guitarist Mark Nelson has fully embraced his solo project Pan American, which had been running concurrently with Labradford for the past seven or eight years. Without Bobby Donne's lonesome bass as a foundation to work with, Nelson's Pan American has relied heavily upon glitchy electronic rhythms and dub-injected studio tricks with varying degrees of success. Perhaps now that Labradford is no more, the Pan American project has taken on a greater sense of purpose as White Bird Release is easily the most accomplished Pan American record to date. There's much less of that dubby electronica to be found on this album; but when employed, Nelson's skeletal pulses enjoy a rich noir ethos resembling those scarce moments of darkened prog-rock dirge for organ and drums offered up on that Deathprod boxset a few years back. But for the most part, Nelson seems comfortable with the Fripp & Eno style streams of pastoral guitar ambience dotted with softened static, smokey vibes, and gracefully arcing drones.
The album is based on a letter from Dr. Robert Goddard to H.G. Wells written in 1932 and concerned with the possibility of space flight. While many of the obvious references to White Bird Release harken to the deep space cosmology from the '70s (e.g. Fripp & Eno, Cluster, Schulze, etc.), Nelson's work is not a departure from this rock travelling around the sun, but rather a glance upward to the heavens, while remaining firmly grounded below.
The cd has one extra track not to be found on the vinyl.
We're actually surprised it's taken this long for Jello and Pansy Division to join forces, as they both have been some of the loudest, proudest and most subversive voices in rock n roll's underground for the last several decades. While of course Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys fame and head honcho of Alternative Tentacles has been around forever it made us feel a bit old to find out this release is in celebration of Pansy Division's 20th year of being a band. "Average Men" is the track with Biafra on vocals and it's a perfect match as the lyrics have the same kind of sarcastic and smart ass bite as so many of his classics. The song takes aim at those average dudes sitting at the counter of a bar or restaurant whose lives revolve around the junk food they eat, the bad beer they drink and the high class Hooters restaurant they salivate over. The 'b' side is without Jello and it finds Pansy Division covering an early track by their friends and former touring mates Green Day. Here's hoping Jello & Pansy Division crank out some more subversive pop together and continue to agitate those who need it for several more decades to come!
In recent weeks, Bay Area experimentalist Jim Kaiser offered us a couple of collaborative discs with violinist Angela Hsu; and now's he gotten around to releasing his own work under the moniker Petit Mal. As with his collaboration with Hsu, Kaiser's principle instruments for Petit Mal are the reel-to-reel tape machine and a collection of found metal. There had been a handful of obscurely published albums of mysterious drones and growling electronics that Kaiser issued as Petit Mal, but this is the first we've seen in quite a long time. Sensory Deprivation begins with a crawling rhythm of tape machine noise that seems to share a similar technique as Terry Riley's time lag accumulation devices, although Kaiser's roughly handled noises have the same brutalism as found in Wolf Eyes or Esplendor Geometrico. The next two tracks contain murky depressive drownings of sound, as if Kaiser's tape loops were pulled from the bottom of tar pit and forced through his machines, muck and all. Snippets of conversation pull away from the general torpor, with interjections of varispeed warbling and iron-clad screeches of bowed metal downcast in billowing clouds of sonic decay. Limited edition, of course!
Pocahaunted have become quite the household name these days, and rightly so. After releasing somewhere close to five LPs in a single year, the Olsen twins of drone, as they are so aptly nicknamed, show no signs of slowing down. And we can thank Troubleman for getting hip to these lady droners just in time to release their most promising effort yet. The duo teem up with the famed Bobb Bruno, as well as Cameron Stallones, a member of Magic Lantern and the man behind Sun Araw, to summon up a darkened slab of ceremonial drone that proves to be our favorite material from the band to date.
Imagine Popol Vuh getting tribal with Brast Burn, throw in a touch of the mysterious voodoo vibes of Valet's Blood is Clean, and you pretty much have this album. Less dubbed out and much more focused then their last lp Chains, Passage is ghostly and unsettling. We can't help but notice how much this outfit has matured over the last few records. Seems like they really laid down some solid ideas on this record. Voices calling from the deserted plains as the sky grows heavy with menacing clouds, the distant clanging of gongs and bells growing louder and louder as the dry earth begins to crack. The pair's signature vocals are deep and melancholic, trance inducing and hypnotic as they sulk in apocalyptic lament. But there is a kind of astral freak out vibe hidden in the dark grain woodwork here, with flaring organ licks and fuzzed/reverbed out electric guitar that fades in and disappears. At times it kinda sounds like some New Agers channeling a Native American ceremony, only to realize they've conjured up some angry force that swallows them whole. Slow building, contemplative and, dare was say, dooooomy, we're definitely into it. And this time around, the band takes a break from their usual collagey album art aesthetic and opted for the more refined look. With a simple, vintagey cover complete with stark pictures of the female droners looking quite dashing, we have to say we're really impressed with the whole package. Don't miss out on this incredibly impressive release! Completely and sincerely recommended!!
We would be the last ones to deny the fact that we are easily swayed. Or at the very least, easily intrigued. Band names get us every time. A killer band name and we're halfway there. Album title, artwork, it all lures us in, has us already loving bands before we've ever heard them. Sure, once in a while we're disappointed, but for the most part, sometimes you can judge a band by their cover. Needless to say, we were pretty intrigued by a band called Prehistoric Fuckin' Moron(s), the optional plural added an extra bit of mystery to the whole thing as well, even more so when we realized it was indeed a single moron. And as if that weren't enough, all it took was a quick gander at the description of the music and we were well beyond sold: "Take one moron, feed him copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, throw him a bunch of old turntables with some effects and watch him smash the shit out of them. Totally weird, absolutely insane." Almost sounds like we wrote it. And heck, we would have, if they didn't already, cuz this is in fact totally weird and absolutely insane.
Imagine Christian Marclay and Philip Jeck, both dosed with LSD, having some sort of lo-fi DJ battle, the entire thing run through a bank of effects pedals and recorded on a busted 4-track. The weird thing is, this isn't as noisy as you might imagine, at least not all of it. The opener is dark and muddy, a super dubbed out spacey drift, reverb and delay wrapping everything in a thick coat of fuzzy blur, the sounds allowed to drift into oblivion. Very dreamlike and tranquil. But the second track is anything but. A cacophony of industrial clatter, and murky vocal snippets, huge ch-chunks from the needle skipping, but emerging from the cacophony are some strangely dreamy loops as well as some jagged shards of distorted noise. The rest of the tape is schizophrenic in that way, flitting from speaker shredding chaos, to strangely serene loopscapes, often times both simultaneously. It's all very chaotic and fucked up and freaked out and messy, but it's such a glorious mess. Fans of Jeck and Tetreault and Marclay and Strotter Inst and Bastien with an ultra lo-fi bent will be in skipping scratching scraping stuttering turntable heaven.
In recent weeks, we've ballyhooed the career of Rick Reed, the Austin based composer of grimly psychedelic electronics; and now we've gotten a hold of a few copies of the picture disc he produced for Elevator Bath. Both of these track appeared on Reed's Celestial Mudpie anthology, just so you don't end up buying the same two great pieces of lazer-tone emissions... unless of course, you want to. As we've mentioned before, primary instruments are Moog, sine-wave generator, and shortwave radio which must go through innumerable analogue treatments and filters before entering the domain of the digital workstation. Rarified atmospherics and spectral transmissions dominate his compositions which can start as hypnotizing electronic meditations on the music of the spheres before accelerating to a dramatic crescendo of blistered vibration and gasping drones. Both "Dreamz" and "Blue Polz" find Reed at his best, somewhere between Emeralds steamrollered into a tectonic rumble, that Omit / K-Group collaboration of rasping analogue synths achieving LaMonte Young mantra status, and the classic ambient psyche-drone smear of Conrad Schnitzler and Cluster. Nice!
Latest analog blast of abstract hypno skree from this French one man band and it's a beaut. Looped high end shimmer, distant industrial grind and creak and a creepy whispered mantra are smeared into a gorgeously woozy blur, eventually joined by some random woodpecker percussion. Strange but really quite beautiful and mesmerizing. The flipside is another mantra-like loop based drone, lots of tape hiss, and lo fi rumble, tape warble and stuttering fragments of hiss all drifting on a swirling sea of crumbling low end, and peppered with bits of crackle and crunch. Weird and wonderful.
Amazingly packaged, a green and yellow hand painted tape, in a full color sleeve, inside a full color insert and a folded up short story printed on super nice textured paper. LIMITED TO 68 COPIES!!!
Perhaps best known for the seventies R&B hit and wedding song mainstay, "Loving You" (as well as being the mother of former SNL comedienne, Maya Rudolph), the late great Minnie Riperton was also the angelic voice behind one of Chicago's most underrated psych-soul groups, The Rotary Connection. Come To My Garden was Riperton's first solo outing after the break-up of that group, yet plays like the band's final effort. Released on Cadet records, a subsidiary of Chess, and arranged by the mighty Charles Stepney with The Ramsey Lewis Trio and Maurice White from Earth Wind and Fire as the back-up group, Come To My Garden is one of the most beautifully majestic chamber-soul records we've ever heard. Sampled heavily by the likes of Jurassic 5, Tribe Called Quest, The Orb, and 4hero amongst many others, there are plenty of amazing orchestral breaks of harps and strings and kettle drums plus of course, Riperton's jaw-dropping five octave vocal range. While the vibe is definitely vernal and heavenly, this is not the syrupy Minnie Riperton you find in most thrift store record bins. This is a solid classic from beginning to end. So tragic that this is so little known. Perhaps the finest hour from someone who was cut down before she got the chance to really flourish. Highly Recommended!!!!
Yes, that does in fact say "Shorewed" in the title, a mistake that escaped all of the parties involved in proofing the artwork for this delicate and beautiful composition by LA's sound artist Steve Roden. Alas, these things they happen. For a few years now, the French label has been commissioning shortened compositions for what has turned out to be an exceptional series of 3" singles. There's an immediate parallel one could make to Metamkine's long out of print Cinema Pour L'Oreille series from many years back, although Ferns has less of a theoretical strain coming from musique concrete and more of a haunted impressionism relying on the smoke and mirror strategies of the drone. Roden's work is an excellent compliment to those contributions from Giancarlo Toniutti, Joe Colley, and Matt Shoemaker. Ecstasy Shorewed Its Petals uses only a small hand bell as the source material, which is more than enough for Roden to cull a wide range of sounds. With ample uses of pitch shifting and his excellent use of two delay pedals (anyone with a Loop Station should take note of Roden's work to learn a thing or twelve), Roden lays down a hypnotic and slightly eerie set of phasing loops with golden hued tones. On top of this foundation, he gradually builds up softly rasping textures, the gentle tinkling of the bell unprocessed, reversed tape gasps of drone snippets, and a distant tapping which sounds more like water tumbling out of a pipe rather than a bell. Roden keeps the composition simple, revealing the wealth of his sounds and then quietly retreating to a silent conclusion. Very lovely stuff!
Not to be confused with Japanese prog duo Ruins, these guys are from Germany, and traffic in classic old school thrashing blackness, channeling the greats like Bathory and Sodom and even Darkthrone. On first listen, we just took Ruins for another bunch of retro thrashers, which technically they are, but we left the record playing, and the more it played, the deeper we got into it, the more obsessed we became. We're not always that into old school thrash, our tastes run more to the black and droney, or the fucked up and frenzied, but there's something about these guys that has all the metalheads around here in a bit of a froth.
The riffs of course destroy, buzzy and crushing, the production massive and in-the-red, the vocals are insane, a glass gargling bile spewing demonic rasp that pretty much seals the deal. Tons of distortion and reverb, the songs simple and stripped down, raw and relentless, it takes all our self control to reign in fits of spontaneous head banging when this disc is playing.
The crazy thing is Ruins is a one man band. We're used to one man bedroom black metal, but listening to this we envision three long haired guys all holding up chains and upside down crosses, scowling at the camera, bullet belts massive spikes, leather jackets, in a graveyard or some forest or something, pretty insane that something this furious and blown out and thrashy is just one guy, but hell, kudos to him.
Not sure what else to say, this rules, total punked up greasy, filthy thrashy blackened metal genius, give the sound samples a few listens, once you're hooked, you'll be hard pressed to pry this thing out of your cd player.
Includes Ruins' first two demos, from 2006 and 2007, as well as a bunch of previously unreleased bonus tracks.
METAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It might be a bit obvious, but it'll get our point across: take a look at this album's cover, an evocative image of a Neolithic stone circle out on a mystic moor somewhere, the stones jutting up into a darkened, dusky red sky. Now imagine the amid the stones also a circle of Orange amps/cabinets, cranking twin guitar jams in a '70s psych/metal style... add a bassist and a drummer who makes a point of also being credited with "cowbell", and you're perhaps getting close to an idea of what Serpent Throne's The Battle Of Old Crow sounds like.
Released by Vessel (best known as the label who previously brought us that fantastic archival release by '70s Pentagram alter ego Bedemon, a few years back), this is the 2nd full-length from these Philadelphia instru-metallists (featuring one of the guitarists from sludge-doom act Otesanek), following 2007's Ride Satan Ride. The concept for -that- album was that it was a reissue of a long-lost soundtrack to an obscure '70s biker film. And it almost could have been, but we think Serpent Throne could have gone further with the idea, like having a repeating "theme" motif throughout the album, interspersing the tracks with made up fake movie dialogue and sound effects, or including a mellow acoustic ballad "hit single" that would have played during the imaginary film's love scene... stuff like that would have made it more like the soundtracks to actual films like Psychomania and Stone. But it was a cool debut anyway, that we should have reviewed but didn't, so we're making sure not to sleep on this one too. The Battle Of Old Crow scraps the movie soundtrack concept and just provides the riffy instrumental rockin', without pretense. Which we could describe as sounding like a stoner rock Fucking Champs, maybe. Or a shut-up-n-play-yer-guitar version of The Sword. In other words, heavy and badass in the guitar dep't. Of which there's two here, guitars that is, bringing the stirring harmonies, trippy leads, and fat riffs. Heck, it's got "guitariness" on par with AQ faves Slough Feg and Hammers of Misfortune. Fans of Earthless ought to dig this too, though the songs here are just that, songs, more concise and less jammy than Earthless's extended improvs. Another fitting comparison would be to fellow Philly instrumental act Stinking Lizaveta, if they were just a bit more overtly on the retro/stoner tip. The '70s heaviness of bands like Sabbath, Scorpions (both cited on the cover sticker blurb), Wishbone Ash, Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple and the like is the obvious inspiration here, and Serpent Throne have definitely learned their lessons well.
While not having a singer can sometimes be a good thing (since any given vocalist's voice, not to mention lyrics, can be so subjective a pleasure, or not), the question that usually gets asked about something like this is, well, is it boring? We'd say, no, definitely not. Not if you like tasty guitar and authentically '70s sounding bellbottomed riffage! In that case, having no singer is a plus, since there's no vocals to get in the way of the guitarists doing their thing. Which they do quite well indeed! The rhythm section is pretty tight too.
While often, the solution (or purpose) of some bands doing the instrumental thing is to get ultra-techy and complex, to grab attention that way, Serpent Throne take a different tack, writing songs that are just that, memorable songs, vocals or no. Sure, there's moments where you wouldn't mind your favorite '70s metal vocalist stepping up to the mic. But Serpent Throne's catchy riffs and purely instrumental interplay is plenty enough most of the time - powerful, mesmerizing and melodic. Recommended.
Some of you who were living in San Francisco a while back, might just remember these guys. Sharkbait. It's been a long time since we'd heard, or even really thought about these guys. The way we remember it, was they were a sort of industrial post punk rock band, maybe like a West Coast version of Cop Shoot Cop, all junkyard percussion, howled vocals, crunchy guitars, skeletal, noisy and slightly funky. And the truth is pretty close to that.
So a customer of ours discovered a box of Sharkbait tapes, still sealed, stashed and covered in dust, and thought that since folks were digging cassettes so much lately around here, and that Sharkbait were a seminal eighties SF outfit, that he would bequeath them to us, so we could disseminate them to hungry ears that might want a little taste of what the SF scene was like back in 1988. For some of us, it was all about funk metal, bands like Mordred tearing it up, or thrash, but there was a whole 'nother thing going on in the underground. Bands like Bomb, Tragic Mulatto, the Skatenigs, and of course Sharkbait. And Sharkbait were indeed a sort of proto industrial punk rock band. Lots of samples. Lots of tribal percussion, some Cash Worship going on here and there, throbbing basslines, crunchy guitars, and howled sloganeering vocals, sort of political, definitely punk rock. It sounds dated sure, but it still sounds pretty cool. There's some art of Noise percussion, some weird spoken word, slabs of feedback, droning ambience, but all wrapped up in a pounding churning post punk caterwaul.
Every Silentist review always requires a quick recap of the band's back story. Or at least the story of how we were introduced to the band. We were told they were a duo, a classical piano player, and a grindcore drummer (when in fact the same guy handles both drums and piano!!), and thus it was some sort of classical grind hybrid, and while perhaps there are elements of both in the music of Silentist, it's way weirder and harder to describe.
The sound here is similar to the last record, the A side begins with pounding low end piano, forceful and almost violent sounding, beneath it, super mathy and complex drumming, lots of rumbling bass buzz, the result is a sort of classical metal cabaret if that makes any sense, the howled vocals adding a strange punkish element to the weirdly complicated sort-of-groove.
The B side opens with swirly clouds of piano a la Lubomyr Melnyk, over rubbery rumbling bass and muted crunchy percussion, the vocals this time are heavily effected and crooned, and again, the cabaret vibe is heavy, albeit more evil and demonic. The rums explode and get super heavy, the piano becomes more frenzied, the bass thick and distorted almost like a metal guitar, all the elements tangled up and clashing wildly.
Plus at the end of the A side, there's a super brief track, a 26 second long burst of super lo-fi power violence, just insane drumming and shouted vocals, like Drop Dead or Man Is The Bastard but stripped WAY down.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
With Boss mania in full swing once again and a rare appearance on AQ's list a few weeks ago with his split 10" with Suicide, we thought why not offer up a few words on his latest album, Working On A Dream? Truth be told Springsteen has made some really fine music in the last several years. His 2005 album Dust & Devils was his most bleak and dark affair since Nebraska, and his Seeger Sessions, We Shall Overcome which came out a year later displayed Bruce at his stripped down best. This record finds the boss being his biggest, most arena ready and triumphant self. It almost sounds like the 2nd disc of a greatest hits collection, which is to say it's so familiarly Springsteen for better and for worse. Lots of midtempo songs ready for high rotation on commercial radio and then there are some full on fist in the air anthems as well. Big time Springsteen fans will find lots to like on here but for sure it's not his greatest or most adventurous outing.
A lot has changed since we first hear Striborg, and his truly idiosyncratic Tasmanian rain forest black metal. Since then he's released about a million records, some on Southern Lord, and frontman Sin Nanna has performed and recorded with SUNNO))), so it would seem he's not nearly as kult as he once was (but much better known). But the weird thing about Striborg, is no matter how popular he gets, or how many records he puts out, NO ONE will be more kult. Hell, he lives in Tasmania, in a shack, and records record after record of some of the bleakest, depressive and totally fucked black metal we've ever heard.
A big part of Striborg's sound is the production, which fluctuates wildly from record to record, and sometimes even song to song, and while we love EVERYTHING he's done, we're particularly partial to the older stuff, as if is so completely wacked and so impossibly lo-fi, someone here once described it like listening to a boombox in the shower, but that's exactly how a black metal record should sound, or at least THIS kind of black metal record.
We got a bunch of these double lps, figuring that we had reviewed the cd at some point, when in fact, this was one of the many that slipped through the cracks. We do have this on cd, both the original version and the recently reissued Displeased version, if you want either, or both, but this is about the vinyl version of these two bleak black grim classics.
Seems weird to take two records and lump them together on a single disc, but Striborg has been doing it since the beginning, usually a new-ISH record, with an older demo tacked on, and since his sound remains pretty consistent, typically the two record work well together, but what's different here is that Black Desolate Winter and Depressive Hibernation were both recorded in 2005 and released together, and thus feel like two parts of a single whole. Each record is all about the title track, "Black Desolate Winter", the song, is 30 minutes long! Surrounded by shorted blasts and bits of drone and black ambience, "Depressive Hibernation" is nearly 15 minutes, it too, surrounded by shorter tracks, the whole disc finishing off with the nearly 11 minute "In The Gloom Of The Foreboding Night."
Striborg initiates already know what to expect, stumbling off kilter drumming, brittle buzzing guitars that sounds like swarms of insects, mournful melodies, the production very much like a boom box in the shower, the drums more of a pt pt pt pt than a blast or a pound, the vocals a wail buried in the mix, the guitars, sometimes all spidery and arpeggiated, but more often than not lost in clouds of furious buzz and crumbling distortion. "Black Desolate Winter" is a depressive buzzing black epic, that slips from lurching blast to woozy midtempo plod and back again over the course of its half hour, with ambient outros, appropriately creepy and warped sounding before and after.
Depressive Hibernation is more of a proper record, "Entangled In The Black Roots Of The Forest" is another chunk of frenetic buzz, doused in sheets of white noise distortion, but with some of the most tweaked vocals ever, raspy and demonic, but super effected so they seem to go spinning off into distance. "Depressive Hibernation" the track, begins all pretty and melancholy, but when the guitars kick in, they're barely riffs at all, it's like someone turned on a white noise generator. A shriek and then some simple drumming turn the track into a creepy Burzumic plod, the super processed shrieks continue on, making for another of the weirdest BM tracks ever. The rest of the disc plays out equal parts deep black drones, and fucked up and freaked out buzz drenched blurs, peppered with bizarre vocals, buried drums and maybe even a riff or two.
Needless to say, there is a reason, Striborg was always the barometer by which we measured all other 'fucked up' or 'damaged' black metal, and listening to these records again, it seems to us that Striborg might still reign supreme!
Striborg on vinyl is rare, so we were super psyched to get these, heavy vinyl, deluxe heavy weight gatefold sleeves, and of course limited limited limited!!!
Take the blown-out pop psych euphoria of Les Rallizes Denudes, throw in a dash of Parson Sound's hypnotic kraut feel, and you're getting close to honing in on the futuristic yet tribal psych jams effortlessly conjured up by Cameron Stallones, a member of Long Beach's Magic Lantern who goes it alone as Sun Araw. From the prolific folks at Not Not Fun, Phynx resounds with a heavy California daze, a drugged out, bluesy blend of face melting drones, fuzzed out guitar riffs, and repetitive clangy rhythms. Ritualistic and somehow modern, Sun Araw walks the line between pop and drone. Moments of the album are dense with catastrophic buzzing thickness, and other parts are more rockin' with a pretty defined heavy groovin' psych feel. All very guitar based, we're reminded of dudes like Ignatz, but less lo-fi and intimate, definitely more rhythmic and percussive. We're even sort of reminded of Brightblack's older stuff, heavy lethargic blues on Robitussin.
But Phynx is much more dense and perplexing. Layers of fuzz on top of layers of vocals on top of layers of drones...you get the idea. A seriously engaging album, there's tons of variety and small details to get all wrapped up in. And not to mention the sweet picture on the cover of some mysterious blindfolded figure in the dim hall of a library! Don't miss out on this California tribal psych gem!
Already out print, this is the fifth in the Cloaven Cassette reissues from the Sun City Girls on vinyl. There were 23 of said cassettes which the Girls released themselves from 1987 to 1990, although some of the material dates back to their beginning in the early '80s. These two sets of recordings were recorded in 1986, most of which features live recordings of the 'Girls free improv / middle-eastern skronk dotted with some choice songs of their mangled psyche-punk including a live version of their single "Sev Asher." Like all of the previous Eclipse 2LP sets, not all of the original cassette has been rescued and preserved on vinyl, BUT there are some unreleased extras which do make their way onto these very nicely packaged sets. We only were able to get a handful, and when they're gone, they're gone...
Another super limited vinyl only missive, broadcast as always from some dark sonic underworld, courtesy of the man known as Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin to his mother), following the equally haunting and mysterious Man Beard Dress lp from the end of last year.
As we've mentioned before, this is doom. But not doom as you know it. Not heavy and crushing and downtuned and distorted, instead, spectral and ghostlike, abstract and ambient, doom in vibe, intention, spirit, as much as in sound. It's not about riffs or beats, it's about mood and space and soul, and taking a cold hard look through the cracks into the crumbling wasteland that lies inside all of us.
The opening track deviates from SG's usual M.O., taking the soft blackened shimmers and distant foghorn like drones, and adding a layer of grit, a swirling skree reminiscent of Skullflower or Sunroof! Like rattling chains, or bits of rusty metal falling from decaying structures, this extra element turns acoustic doom into something far more harrowing, a soundtrack to the descent, of slick stone walls and flickering grey lights, of black clouds obscuring burning skies, everything fading to nothing as the music lowers us deeper and deeper into the abyss.
The second track is a bit less harsh, more spacious and sprawling, skeletal, soft swells of moaning minimalism drift through a wide open expanse of far away throbs, and muted pulses, ghostly voices lurk beneath the surface, the slow motion sound of decay and despair, pretty, but ominous, and sinister, and beautifully bleak.
The flipside begins with another soundscape of space and soft sound, like a super abstract ambient Wolf Eyes, bits of feedback are streaked through hushed black whispers, creaking industrial whir wraps itself around desiccated barely there melodies, the sound of wandering through an empty and dead city, smashed windows like black eyes looking down from above, splintered doors like gaping mouths, the sky unleashing a cleansing rain of soft hiss, doing very little to combat the emptiness and loneliness evoked by Svarte Greiner's delicate doomic drift.
And finally, the record fades to black with the doomiest (and weirdly enough, prettiest) track of the bunch, a soft focus smear of effected black guitar shimmer, blurred into a throbbing dronescape, rife with fragmented melody and soft edged buzz, a strange and warm, almost ebullient sonic center, glowing faintly beneath the roiling lowend, a smoldering, crumbling, shadowy,and quite lovely doomdrone coda...
Beautiful full color covers, pressed on thick vinyl, and once again, WAY LIMITED!!!
It's strange what a huge influence Bay Area black metallers Von ended up being on pretty much everybody. Not really all that surprising really, they did after all totally destroy. Filthy and grimy and so heavy and primal and raw. It seems like every black metal band has at one time or another covered Von, there was even a full length tribute, and of course, there have been about a million bands who did everything in their power to channel the spirit and ferocity of Von, one of the most successful being Swine, the Von worshipping side project of a guy called Swine appropriately enough, frontman for Hateful Abandon, whose most recent record, Famine (Or Into The Bellies Of Worms), a collection of blackened gothic gloom, we highlighted a while back.
On Marked By The Baron, it's Satanic Blood Angel time, ALL the time, blasting drums supplied by a furious frenzied drum machine, the guitars thick and gritty, buzzy and intense, the vocals drenched in reverb and effects, grunting and growling, as much as howling and shrieking. The sound manages to be weirdly moody and dramatic too, with moaning guitar melodies drifting over the churning black filth below, giving most of the tracks a weirdly wistful vibe, considering how fast and furious the rest of the music is. Rapid fire, frenzied and relentless, pounding and punky, but so atmospheric and with such a vile vibe, and that aforementioned moody melancholy, culminating in the final track, that dips into some super emotional classic sounding doom, even slipping into some mournful clean guitar, and after a few minutes of silence, returning with a bit of washed out dreamy drone, weird.
But beyond those little bits of strangeness, this is some gloriously heavy, harsh, beautifully depressive, raw blasting blackness.
Many of the records we love best are the ones that are the most difficult to figure out where we would file them in the store. Such is the case with the engaging and genre transcending aural delights of Polish sound artist Dawid Szczesny. His sounds are filled with suspense and restraint. You can tell he is someone whose love of music and sound spans a wide distance yet he has the skill and foresight to keep his creations fluid and filled with a brimming mood that never resorts to melodrama and never goes over the top, crafting soundscapes that remind us of everything from Moondog to Pierre Bastien to Philip Jeck to J.P. Shilo to a more elegant and restrained take on what many in the Chicago jazz/post-rock scene aimed to create (Tortoise, Chicago Underground Duo, Isotope 217 etc.).
We've been loving so much of what Porter has been putting out but this release is really getting tons of play and might be our favorite of their non-reissue releases yet!
The third part in an ongoing series of blackened drone guitar missives from Irish one man slow and low wrecking crew To Blacken The Pages. Fans of the first two TBTP records (None and A Semblance Of Something Appertaining To Destruction) are already well versed in the bleak abstract soundworld this guy can conjure, fusing the low end explorations of groups like SUNNO))), Expo '70, Bohren, Slomo and the like, with something a bit more psychedelic and space-y. Sure, TBTP is capable of unfurling some planet crushing black hole heaviness, but also of tossing handfulls of notes into crystalline expanses of murky reverb, letting the various notes flutter and fall, before tossing out another handful. The first two tracks on North are perfect examples, "Crossing" and "I Am Screes On Her Escarpments", the first begins as a swirling almost static field of slow shifting reverb and delay, peppered with percussive thumps and creaks, sent careening into the ether, while shards of clean guitar, sounding a bit like super mellow Keiji Haino, unfurl like clouds of grey smoke, while underneath, a guitar rumbles and whirs, gradually becoming more and more rifflike, ringing out a bit chaotic and noisy, before slipping into the second which begins with the same sort of reverbed stretch of echoey thumps and creaks, before the guitar thickens into a crumbling corrosive wall of swirling chordal hum and keening feedback, a roiling blackened bit of guitar ambience, infused with melody and moodiness and shot through with strange high end streaks and swoops that are probably effected guitars, but almost sound like children's voices here and there. Quite haunting.
The next few tracks take TBTP's sound in a different direction, the root again being shimmering guitars, but this time the focus is on the voice, a lazy drawled croon nestled down in the mix, that drifts along side the increasingly caustic guitar buzz resulting in a sound not unlike some strange Dead C / Roy Montgomery hybrid, a sort of sun baked noise drenched dronedirge slowcore. Dark and woozy and melancholy and way druggy and drowsy sounding. Later, "To Be Dead" introduces actual drums, and gets all propulsive, a lurching noise rock take on spaced out krautrock, but with the guitars in full on overdrive, a constantly swirling squall of feedback and psychrock freakout. And then the last two tracks are massive billowing clouds of coruscating buzz and skree, blurred into gorgeous multi hued smears of blown out guitar and a gorgeous hazy shoegazey drift, in fact the nearly 15 minute "Night Drive" might be one of the prettiest heavy guitar tracks we've heard in ages, anyone into Nadja or Jesu, will love it, it's like the slow motion metalgaze of those two outfits but stripped of drums and allowed to just sort of hover. So nice.
Needless to say, the drone and dirge and doom obsessed out there probably already added this to their shopping cart (or if they didn't yet, probably should now), anyone who bought the other two records definitely NEED this too, and folks not necessarily into metal, but who still dig on dark drifty hazy heaviness might be pretty into To Blacken The Pages, North in particular...
Longtime readers of the aQ list should need no introduction to Torche, our favorite sludge pop geniuses, who by our reckoning should be HUGE. They may be heavy and loud and distorted, and feature members of Cavity and Floor and Dove, but the music they make as Torche is something else entirely. The guitars massive chugging and crunchy, the drums pounding and brutal, the bass thick and buzzy, the vocals a totally unique wail / croon, they sound a bit like the Foo Fighters, if the Foo Fighters were heavier and catchier and more punk rock. To really get into Torche, check elsewhere on the aQ website and read the reviews of Meanderthal, s/t and In Return, we go into way more detail and gush like crazy, cuz these guys absolutely rule. But this one might be for fans only, although we can guarantee, all it would take is these three songs and you will freak out, become obsessed, and need to buy everything these guys have ever done, so maybe give it a try.
Two tracks from Meanderthal, the two 'hits' on a record that was pretty much all hits, both epic and hooky and heavy and genius. But the reason we're here are the two bonus tracks, both unreleased, and both as good as anything on the record proper.
Big guitars, a killer hook of a chorus, amazing harmonies, kick ass drumming, even some shredding leads, this band just keeps getting better and better, but also tighter and more polished, without ever sounding wussier or like sellouts. C'mon, if a bands b-side toss offs are this good, then holy shit they are MONSTERS. The second unreleased song here is total commercial radio alt rock heaven. If more FM radio programmers had balls, Torche would get played as much as the Offspring!
But it's not just two more killer Torche songs, you also get a dvd, with videos for the two Meanderthal tracks, one is a straight up performance clip, totally rocking and awesome, but it's the video for "Across The Shields" that's the mind blower, the whole band in furry costumes, but not just bears and rabbits, no one is a fanged teddy bear monster, one is a big headed baby with another fanged jaw at waist level, one is a creepy demon faced rabbit eared furry, and the other looks like a furry piece of French toast, with long fingers and claw like toes, and 4 heads on the front of the toast, all the band members heads, but one is the actual head stuck through a hole. Wow. The video is of them cavorting in the forest. And of course stills from that video are used for the cover of the lp and the dvd. And as always insanely deluxe packaging, outrageously thick colored vinyl, equally thick and deluxe sleeve, and a black and gold metallic sticker on the plastic. Not sure how limited these are, but we only got a handful.
Very few record labels attain the sort of iconic status usually reserved for artists, and those that do, often spend YEARS cultivating a roster, and developing a fanbase, made up of the sort of fans that will buy ANYTHING and everything on the label. In the past, Sub Pop, Touch And Go, Homestead, tUMULt (sez Andee!), but lately a couple labels have managed to make that leap in a matter of months rather than years. Mississippi of course. Reissuing all manner or blues, gospel and punk rock rarities on vinyl, and now Plus Tapes, who are doing the same, albeit with international sounds instead, and focusing on the cassette tape as the format of choice. Always limited, and always guaranteed to sell out in a heartbeat.
And this latest reissue from Plus Tapes will most likely be no different, aside from those folks who will buy ANYTHING, regardless of what it is, before they hear it or even know anything about it, this collection from Travellers, will be of great interest to fans of all the Sublime Frequencies releases for sure. From Singapore, Travellers, traffic in a sort of groovy jazzy surf pop, rife with Morricone-isms, plenty of twang, groovy Mariachi horns, fluttering flutes, simple shuffling drums, spidery guitar melodies, cheesy synthesizers and lots of reverby surf rock , occasional wild rock saxophone, all with a distinctly Eastern vibe.
Lots of this sounds like the soundtrack from some long lost Western or kung fu epic, surfy, jazzy, funky, folky, playful, slipping from minor key moodiness to fun sunshine-y poppiness, always dramatic and evocative and most definitely always groovy.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! Already sold out at the label, we have the last copies, more than a third of the pressing came to aQ, but these still probably won't last long. Full color covers, hand numbered, green tapes, correspondingly numbered!
Attention FINNISH music FREEKS!!! Maybe most Finnish bands are crazy prolific, but one of our favorites keeps a much lower profile, the mighty Uton. It's been a little while since we heard from these guys, but as always, well worth the wait. Expansive and abstract, Uton create baffling alien universes of sound, minimal, but somehow dense and alive. Here's it's distant skree and mysterious scrapes, hissy clouds of static, reverb drenched melodies sent careening into the black void, rhythmic crunch and deep cavernous swells, subtle rumblings and washed out ambience. Gorgeous and haunting, creepy and amazing, of all the Finnish groups, we're still a little surprised that more folks aren't freaking out more about these guys.�
As if that weren't enough, the flipside is just the A side in reverse, a glorious gorgeous dizzying warbly backwards world of sound, and you know how much we love backwards sound!! Way recommended.�
Gorgeously packaged, gold metallic ink on platinum vellum paper. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
Pretty awesome that Matador got involved with the Red Hot Organization, a great international charity that works to raise funds and awareness about HIV and AIDS around the globe. Red Hot has aligned itself with the music world many times before for benefit comps you might remember like No Alternative, Red Hot & Blue, Red Hot & Rio, etc. This time out the Red Hot compilers got loads of heavyweights from the indie underground to contribute exclusive tracks and some cool collaborations for this double cd.
The track listing pretty much reads as a who's who of indie star power from the last several years and beyond: Yo La Tengo, Blonde Redhead, Cat Power, Spoon, The New Pornographers, Antony, Sufjan Stevens, Beirut, The Decemberists, the list goes on and on. There are also some really cool collaborations like Jose Gonzalez and The Books joining forces for a cover of the Nick Drake classic "Cello Song", Grizzly Bear and Feist team up to cover Vashti Bunyan's "Train Song", Kronos Quartet do an inspired version of Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was The Night", Sharon Jones & The Dapkings do a smoking version of the Shuggie Otis classic "Inspiration Information". Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian fame goes at it solo and Conor Oberst brings Gillian Welch into his world with a duet of a newly penned Oberst track. Like all comps there may be a few tracks that don't totally hit the mark, but the winners far outweigh the losers on this comp. The collection was produced by Bryce Desner of The National, and with over two hours of music and all proceeds going to this awesome charity this is pretty much a no brainer.
The Numero Group has helped spawn a much needed revival and rediscovery of lost soul from the 60's and 70's, showing the world that there was much more amazing music beyond the Motown monopoly. Amazing soul records were being released everywhere by all sorts of small independent labels. We'll never ever tire of really good soul done juuuuust right and once again the Numero Group has hit the bulls eye. This collection focuses on the Chicago label Twinight. The label began with the name Twilight but soon found out another label with the same name existed so they changed one letter and thus became Twinight which would prove to be an appropriate moniker for the label, as most of the records they released were only played during the wee hours of broadcasting day often referred to as the twinight hours. The label was known primarily for its one star Syl Johnson but this collection digs even deeper and exposes the music and the artists who never had big hits but who produced some classic soul burners.
This collection isn't as flashy or outright catchy as some of the past Eccentric Soul collections but it's that great kind of tasty soul that heats up nice and slow and keeps you coming back for more.
Another fantastic collection of lost soul treasures!
Aside from the eye-popping cover art, the first thing you might notice about this record is its intriguing title - G Spots: The Spacey Folk Electro-Horror Sounds Of The Studio G Library. But what does it all mean, and how could the music live up to such a ridiculously awesome yet difficult to parse description? Well, since we don't have sound samples, you'll just have to trust your buddies here at aQ and get this vinyl-only collection on your turntable to discover for yourself.
Some of you may remember the equally great, SUPER limited (not to mention uber-pricey) Electrosonic record from a few lists back, featuring library music from esteemed BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer and titan of early electronic experimentation, Delia Derbyshire. Much in the vein of that long gone gem, G Spots contains selections from the somewhat mysterious Studio G, a production company started by one John Gale, whose work in advertising inspired him to up the ante on the music we either take for granted or generally find annoying as shit. Rather than approaching this work as mere background music, Gale wrangled in a number of composers to bring his vision to life. Things kicked off with a series of 7" records before moving on to lps. Gale claimed to release the first collection of library music to feature actual artwork, and you are advised to go to Trunk's website to view some stellar examples of Studio G's visual aesthetic.
The music, of course, is pretty dang great as well. The songs basically set out to mimic the popular trends of the time, resulting in a sound that is at once familiar, yet strangely distant, as they were produced in a laboratory-like setting with studio musicians. Of course, that kind of thing happened all the time, but it's much more intriguing to imagine this as some sort of parallel reality interpretation of pop music in the '60s and '70s, made by chain smoking guys in their thirties with thick horn-rimmed glasses and neckties. Aside from song titles, the 20 spacey folk electro-horror tunes collected here are identified only by their catalogue numbers and composers, most (all?) of whom you will not recognize. This lack of information only adds to the mystery, in the best way.
It is possible, based on the 4 digit catalogue numbers, to piece together some sort of loose history, not only of Studio G's evolution, but of musical trends in general. Opening with the moody synth piece "Icicles," many of the other songs on the first side are fun, lightly psychedelic pop that would have fit perfectly in any number of party scenes in any number of 1960s movies. Airy acoustic guitars mesh with the occasional spacey weirdness, the songs are at times accompanied by live drums, but sometimes feature early, primitive rhythm machines. The final song on side 1, however, the perfectly named "Deformed Theme," is an anti-melody that ventures into darker territory, a creepy synthscape setting the mood for much of side 2, where ominous, surprisingly heavy Goblin-esque songs like "Cosmic Dust" and "Cosmic Blues" rub elbows with "Freak Blues," which would not sound too out of place on Bruce Haack's The Electric Lucifer. Then there's the hilarious "Dangerous Voyage," a funky, tropical-tinged piece that would sit well in your favorite '70s porn film, with its lead harmonica, fretless bass, and hi hats galore. Other songs feature flutes, more synths, weird tape effects, and random elements of percussion. Throughout it all, things flow perfectly, all part of the style that John Gale created with Studio G.
While this record comes with the highest possible recommendation, like many things of this nature, it is quite limited. We just hope that of Studio G's 48 release 4 volume output, Trunk will keep the G Spots... coming. Get it? HAHAHAHAA!!!!!!!!!
Busy guy, that M. Ward! Every precious second that he saves not writing out his full first name is surely put to good music-making use! All kidding aside, although his She & Him collaboration last year with actress Zooey Deschanel didn't really charm the pants off of many of us here, his solo offerings sure have. This time it sounds like he decided to try a little (or a lot) of something different. On songs such as his cover of "Rave On", it sure does sounds like he dusted off his Zeppelin and T-Rex albums for a bit more inspiration. And perhaps coming full circle, you can hear some similarities between M. Ward's music on Hold Time and that of one of his earliest boosters/benefactors Howe Gelb. Much more so than ever before. This unexpected eclecticism and eccentricities might toss a few of his devotees from the fan wagon, particularly those hankering for more of his familiar warm rustic Americana - as is found on his last two awesome, immediately captivating albums Post-War and Transistor Radio. Don't be too hasty though. We suspect this might be a 'grow on you' kind of album. Guests include the abovementioned Deschanel as well as Lucinda Williams, Grandaddy's Jason Lytle, and Devotchka's Tom Hagerman.
The return of White Medal. And that's MEDAL not METAL. There's nothing god fearing or white or light or positive or hopeful about the sound this grim horde spew forth. We had their 7" a while back, and it was a primo slab of blown out almost industrial sounding blackness. Like a black metal Godflesh, crossed with maybe some of the more raw stuff like Bone Awl or Ash Pool, but with a bit of post rock epic-ness mixed in. Not sure how all that stuff worked together but it did. We dug it big time.
So now here's release number two, this time a super limited cassette / patch combo, limited to 100 copies, and finds the band going in a bit more of a raw, old school black metal direction. Beginning with an awesome washed out creepy ambient intro, all clean guitar shimmer and dark moody creep, the band soon launch into a full on buzzy pound, the guitars murky and muddy, the drums a buried in the mix plod, the vocals weirdly effected, the whole thing gloriously gurgly and lo-fi, almost d-beat sounding at times, with some cool languid and woozy folky interludes.
The flip side is much more frenzied and furious and somehow even more-lo-fi, total washed out black buzz murk, everything wreathed in hiss and distortion and buried in an all mids and lows and no highs mix, making the sound almost sludgey and doomy even though the band is blasting frantically. So blurred and smeared, that the buzz and blast gets smudged into droning epic blackness, that occasionally slips back into crunch and chug, but more often swirls and shimmers, if the sound was even a tiny bit more washed out or even a little bit more lo-fi this could have ended up an awesome blackdrone record. Killer stuff. We definitely need to hear a full length from these guys one of these days.
Comes with a cool cassette sized embroidered black and white patch, featuring the band name, the legend: Tread The Earth, and a cool image of a strange skeletal figure wielding a scythe over a garden of what appears to be body parts.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!!!! We got about 20, and after that we will not be able to get more.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
NEW ON MISSISSIPPI!!!!
They may specialize in reissues, funk and soul and blues and gospel, but the fine folks at Mississippi also dabble in more contemprorary sounds, The Spooky Dance Band (members of the late great Reeks And The Wrecks) and Sad Horse (members of the late great Fuck!) being the most recent, until now, and until Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship, which sounds exactly like it could be the title of a Mississippi compilation, but is in fact the name of a group, a BIG group, nine members, handling instruments like accordion, upright bass, banjo, bass drum, trumpet, French horn, sax, piano and euphonium. That should give you a rough idea of the sort of sounds these cats conjure up, and consider that this is a co-release with a label in New Orleans, so we're talking a sort of woozy, New Orleans style funeral jazz, or more modern references might be the Decemberists, or even a less rambunctious, darker more contemplative Pogues, that sort of jazzy, drunken, wandering minstrel sort of cabaret sound, the instrumentation makes the sound old timey, Dickensian even, the horns moan and bleat, the accordions wheeze, very playful, yet ominous and haunting, the arrangements are gorgeous, evoking cobblestone streets, and cloudy skied rain soaked afternoons, shuttered buildings, and rolling hills of brown grass and tumbledown structures. It's the music's very old timey-ness that somehow makes it a perfect fit on Mississippi, and while it may not appeal to the blues / gospel / archival vinyl reissue purists, it is pretty cool, and should definitely please fans into the Decemberists, Beirut, Neutral Milk Hotel, Slim Cessna and other outfits not necessarily at home in this time...
SUPER LIMITED of course. Super swank, silkscreened chipboard jackets, white, black, red and metallic silver on brown, includes a printed insert as well.
Ol' Bonnie Prince Billy aka Will Oldham peers from the cover of this issue. Inside, there's also dubstepper Zomby, black metallers Menace Ruine (about time some more black metal made it into The Wire!), free jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille, and avant vocalist Joan La Barbara... and much more of course. Reviews, columns, the "Invisible Jukebox" feature (this month's contestant, jazz guitarist Joe Morris), and a Cambodian 'scene report... As always, you need it.
Now this great archival release is also available on limited vinyl... not cheap, but super swank, boasting 200 gram wax, and fancy gatefold packaging. Here's what we said about the original cd version (which also included a dvd, not found here):
There is a magical moment about three songs in on this amazing live acoustic document from 1971 when we get to hear the reaction of an audience upon hearing "Old Man" for the very first time. Recorded between After the Gold Rush and Harvest, this set covers Young's most classic material including "Helpless", "Journey Through the Past", a medley of "A Man Needs A Maid / Heart Of Gold", and the first official release of "Bad Fog of Loneliness". With just acoustic guitar and piano, it's no wonder that this intimate set has existed in bootleg form for so long. It's so good!
Sometimes you know a record is gonna blow your mind before you even throw it on. Such is most definitely the case with Isophonic Boogie Woogie by Roland P. Young. Heck, it's called Isophonic Boogie Woogie after all! And it's on the seemingly infallible (and impossible to pin down) EM records from Japan who have quickly become our new favorite label, having released Jim Fassett's Symphony Of The Birds, Moolah's Woe Ye Demons Possessed and Sam Moore's MOOOHIEEE! and those are just the ones we've reviewed so far. Plus it's got super tripped out black and white hand drawn cover art, three heads, presumably all Mr. Young, one with a well groomed afro, one with headphones, one with crazy hair that drifts skyward like tentacles, and a third eye right in the center of his forehead, while surrounding the heads are leaves and electronic equipment, and ankhs, and black suns, scorpions, saxophones, sailing ships and cars and pyramids, and a bunch of little Roland P. Young's walking up hillsides, jamming on guitars, getting into cars... you get the idea. This is some seriously far out stuff, and we haven't even heard a note of music, and that's a heck of a lot of trippiness to live up to.
Thankfully, Isophonic Boogie Woogie is as weird and as wacked as all the above business would lead you to believe. Originally released in 1980, Isophonic Boogie Woogie was the first realization of Young's unique version of free jazz music, which he referred to as "Afro spiritual minimal electronic space music" which on closer listening is WAY more spot on. Young employs an unlikely arsenal: Kalimba, saxophone, voice, clarinet, electronic bass clarinet, bells, chimes, electronic drones, electronic pulse and electronic accoutrements (!), to craft his spaced out free jazz minimalism. The first track is a warm melodic fugue, woven from the reverberating steel of the kalimba (sounding like a muted mellow version of Konono No.1 actually) with soaring falsetto vocals, before eventually a saxophone joins in, playing soft moody melodies over the rich bed of the kalimba. So nice. Wouldn't mind a whole record of this. But Young has different ideas. The second track is a brief but aggressive blast of solo clarinet, emitting gritty rumbles, a series of droney duck calls, very textural and oblique, and really mysterious sounding. As is the next track, an ominous low end groove, warm distorted and muted melodies, the electronic bass clarinet strangely alien sounding, a groovy jazzy thrum, pulsing and throbbing each note with a strange texture and a bizarre electronic after image that makes the whole thing sound that much more dark and droney. The record's centerpiece (and longest track) is "Loveliness", a 15 minute drift of dense ambient whirs, subtle drones, tinkling chimes, softly struck bells, sizzling cymbals and all sorts of percussive clatter, all beneath a wild free jazz workout, skronks and squeaks and trills, impossible melodies, a tangled free form melodic freakout. Afro spiritual minimal electronic space music indeed! The last track is another long one, with more of that alien sounding electronic bass clarinet, the notes and tones low and rough, with lots of reverbed echoes, the track starts as a thick corrosive drone of rumbling warbling horns, mumbled vocals and all sorts of spacey effects, swooping and swooning, before the clarinet begins to explore its freedom and offers up a litany of strange sounds, from free jazz skronk to percussive patter to playful melodic figures, before drifting back into a droning murky swirl.
Some of the coolest, weirdest, most far out free jazz we've heard for sure, and another check in the 'right fucking on!' column for EM!
This reissue includes two bonus tracks, one a shuffling funky rhythm, with primitive drum machine over a warm distant sonic glow. swooning sax, like mood music from some long forgotten eighties soundtrack, the other a soft stretch of dreamy mediation music, subtle electronic pulses beneath a swirling wash of moaning horns and shifting subtle tones. Both more melodic and less tripped out than the original tracks but cool nonetheless.
Like all the EM reissues, this includes extensive liner notes (all in Japanese, sorry), tons of photos, original album artwork and more.
We knew nothing about this Zenlo fellow when this arrived in the mail, but just the sight of his somewhat sleazy, sexy and mysterious photo on the cover and the fact that Porter records has been releasing so much interesting stuff, definitely piqued our interest.
What we discovered was in fact a total outsider classic! An Italian who has lived in London and elsewhere, the sounds Zenlo creates are truly the work of someone in their own unique and singular world. It's not quite clear but apparently his was all recorded in the early '80s, and all the songs here are supposedly completely improvised affairs with only first takes laid to tape. Using an array of instruments and wonderfully clunky electronics, Skelethal Antics roams worlds that are both bizarre and beautiful. The record begins with several tracks that feature some seriously damaged saxophone along with spaced out drum machines and an overall sound that feels as if its about to collapse and self destruct, but somehow manages to prevail in such intriguing ways. While the first several tracks do feature some serious horn time that does test our sax-phobia, luckily as the record goes on it becomes much more about slow and melting sounds created with organs, Casio, harmonica, guitar, electronics and and an untuned upright piano. Sounds buzzing with tension and awkward emotions. The perfect soundtrack to some lost avant-horror film.
There are moments on the record that remind us of the early dark sounds of Cabaret Voltaire and it could even be the musical bed for some of today's equally eccentric outsiders like John Maus and Ariel Pink. It also has a nice '70s exploratory kraut/space/prog rock feel and an overall schizophrenic disposition that allows for moments that veer from Ariel Kalma to Ariel Pink. We could imagine everyone from Acid Mothers Temple to Goblin fans finding something to love here. Most of all we love how totally DIY the whole thing was. And it sounds like it. In a good way! This was truly the work of someone locked up in their basement with little care for popular trends but instead voyaging into their wild imagination to create something totally new and weird. It will always be the true eccentrics that manage to move us the most with their music, and Skelethal Antics leaves us shaking our head in disbelief, finding it hard to accept that something weird and wonderful could have escaped us and almost everyone for so long...
