We've long been champions of Mr. David Eugene Edwards, in both of his swampy apocalyptic folk ensembles, first the late great 16 Horsepower, and then later, his more personal, and seemingly more spiritual Woven Hand. As long time readers of the aQ list know, Edwards is like a modern day revivalist, conjuring up demons and darkness, death and pestilence, but simultaneously light and hope and sometimes even redemption. With a sound that shifts from stripped down and intimate, to dense and heavy and ominously rocking, the music of Edwards is easily some of the most powerful and passionate we've heard. Woven Hand played the aQuarius SXSW showcase, and our first impression was holy shit, these guys are HEAVY. And loud. And so intense. In fact, considering how many actual metal bands and super heavy rock bands played that showcase, it's pretty remarkable that WH might still have been the heaviest band in the lineup.
Secret South is one of our favorite 16HP records, originally released way back in 2000, and out of print for AGES, this was their first record after leaving their major label, and thus seems to be infused with an extraordinary amount of anger and darkness. This record is FIERCE, the classic 16HP lineup is on fire, the vocals incredible and impassioned, the guitars raw and rough, the drumming powerful, the bass thick and enveloping, strings moaning and singing, but the magic of 16HP is how all those elements are woven together, it's difficult to imagine a mere band could evoke this sort of ominous atmosphere, this sort of dread and darkness, this is so much more than music, it's energy in sound, it's sweat and blood rendered in notes and melodies. A swampy mysterious gothic folk, but infused with elements of classic bluegrass, dramatic cabaret, plenty of doom and gloom... You can check the aQ site for other reviews where we rave on and on and on about both 16HP and Woven Hand, needless to say, both bands are all time favorites around here, and Secret South ranks right up there as one of the best by either.
Both the cd version and the lp comes with a bonus dvd featuring the whole record in 5.1 surround sound DVD audio.
An amazing kind of soft-psychedelic breeze must be blowing over whatever strange and mysterious land Numero Group call home as their two most recent recent deep vault discoveries have both sizzled in a soft psychedelic glow of vibrant color. Last time we heard from this always amazing reissue/rediscovery label it was the late 60's psych-pop delights offered by Pisces. This time out it's the early '70s soft psychedelic soul of 24 Carat Black. Conceived, produced and orchestrated by the amazingly talented Dale Warren whose delicate touch can be heard on various records released on Motown and Stax including choice cuts from Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Eddie Floyd and Albert King. As seductive and rich in his orchestration and production as fellow soul magic makers like Charles Stepney and Norman Whitfield, Warren also had a kind of vivid imagination and singular vision much like aQ fave David Axelrod. He took a little known Cincinnati group called The Ditalians under his wing and had them change their name to 24 Carat Black and released their 1973 album Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth on Stax. A record that has become big time fodder for rare groove lovers and was sampled by hip-hop artists like Digable Planets and Young Disciples.
While that record has enjoyed cult-status by a new generation, it was, sadly, a commercial flop, so the follow up record was never released. Luckily Numero Group has given this deeply satisfying record the day in the sun it so rightly deserves. This is a record filled not only with a soft psych-soul vibe but also such intense emotional weight and an overall feeling which should speak loudly to fans of What's Going On era Marvin Gaye, Rotary Connection and Ramp. We also get the feeling that if she hasn't already, Erykah Badu would find so much inspiration here, and these guys would for sure be kindred soul spirits. Truly a lost classic. Thank you once again Numero Group!
We first heard about 39 Clocks (or "The" 39 Clocks according to the cover here) a few months back
with the release of their career spanning collection Zoned, and we were surprised to come across a group that managed to embody so many elements of what we love about various styles music while still managing to sound unique and delightfully out of time. The German duo's most notable characteristic was their pre-1966 take on hard driving beat music, delivered through a punkish art school filter on a couple tabs of acid. They managed to be catchy but nihilistic, familiar yet obscure, and we still stand by our assertion of them sounding like "Modern Lovers on Quaaludes with the guy from Faust singing," the liner notes here accurately describe them as "the natural successors to the Velvet Underground (minus Nico), ? And The Mysterions, and Suicide." Can't argue there.
Pain It Dark is the group's debut album, released back in 1981. From a historical perspective, it makes sense for this to have been reissued, but to those who purchased Zoned, be warned that eight of Pain It Dark's 12 songs were featured on that collection. For those of you hesitated for some reason or other, however, Pain It Dark might be the way to go, as the general flow and overall feel of the album help to paint a stronger picture than some of the more rambling songs featured on Zoned.
The album begins with "Shake The Hippie," an upbeat number with the band's trademark lazy German guy vocals. The next song, "DNS," is where things really take off, featuring a sleazy sax lead and a super rhythmic combination of real drums and drum machines. It's druggy in its own way, and its aggressive attack definitely makes this one of the stand out songs on the album. The Velvet Underground influence is also made pretty clear on "78 Soldier Dead," which alternates between a self-penned riff and the one from "Sweet Jane". "Stupid Art" sounds a bit like the Fun House-era Stooges, especially with its use of saxophone, while the band's warped pop sense is further illustrated on the awesomely titled "Radical Student Mob In Satin Boots" with a slashing little keyboard melody and percussion that could very easily not work in less skilled hands.
While we are slightly confused by the timing of this reissue with Zoned, Pain It Dark is a good place to start for the uninitiated, and hopefully marks the beginning of an extensive reissue campaign for this mysterious German duo.
It's always been an easy criticism to make of people like Christian Marclay, Michael Gendreau, Otomo Yoshihide, or any artists whose main instrument is the abused turntable, that they should be only releasing their work on vinyl. The Bay Area's tactical noisenik Brandon Nickell (aka Aemae and the mastermind of the stalwart Isounderscore label) has taken to addressing this criticism through a different medium, with this recording, loaded with tape warble, presented on, yep, you guessed it, tape. Given the fate of all cassettes to eventually fail through tape breaks or jammed wheels, the sound of a warble always causes the listener to pause: is the tape gonna break? Is there something wrong with the tape deck? It is that sound with its lurching gate which opens And Tongueless, I Can Conjure You At Will. Applied to an uneasy drone splayed with harmonic undercurrents, this seasick swelling of tape warble abruptly stops upon a mangled collage stitched together from the results of some vocal exorcism. These guttural utterances and demonic utterances are intensely fucked-up expressions of digital manipulation. The closest thing we could think as a comparison would be Stalaggh reworking their infernal screams through the Hafler Trio's early collage techniques. After this nightmarish assault, Nickell is more restrained through a series of crumbling drones that again work well with the medium's noise, hiss, and static. Supposedly, this is going to be the final recording that Nickell will produce as Aemae, instead recording from here on out under his own name. Only 111 copies of this cassette-only release are in existence.
This is the second release for the amazing new Soul Jazz subsidiary label World Audio Foundation, devoted to new recordings of far-flung sounds from around the globe. The first was the Carnival Music of Eastern Cuba, an amazing recording, we'll hopefully list next time, if we can keep it in stock! But this beautiful recording of Sacred Polyphonic Vocal Chants out of the Republic of Georgia by the all male Anchiskhati Choir is equally amazing! Polyphonic singing dates back to pre-Christian times, but was readily adopted for Georgian Orthodox liturgical services, the second oldest Orthodox Christian Church in the world dating all the way back to the first century. Polyphonic singing involves two styles, one where two alternating male singers sing over a drone sung by a male chorus, and the other where three independent vocal lines are sung simultaneously to produce an array of consonant and dissonant chords. Probably the most well-known example of Georgian Polyphonic singing is the traditional folk song "Tsintskaro", featured in Werner Herzog's film version of Nosferatu, as well as Kate Bush's "Hello Earth" from her album Hounds of Love. Maintained over centuries as an oral tradition, The Anchiskhati Choir are the world's leading exponents of this incredible musical form, and after listening to it, it's not difficult to understand why it was proclaimed by UNESCO to be "one of the Oral and Intangible Masterpieces of Humanity".
We somehow missed the boat on the first two Bachelorette albums but now that the band has landed on Drag City, all the folks who slept on Bachelorette will finally get a chance to experience the utterly charming musical magic of this multitalented New Zealand songstress.
Bachelorette employ a keen pop sensibility as well as a fresh use of electronics, all the while finding inspiration in distinctly left-field musics, creating songs that are so totally engaging and memorable. You can definitely here bits of Broadcast, Bjork, and Goldfrapp, but Bachelorette rises is so much more than her inspiration, easily soaring over the mostly underwhelming hordes aiming for the same sound. The strength of Bachelorette is how she absorbs all sorts of disparate sounds and ideas ('60s psych-pop, Delia Derbshyre-esque electronics, girl groups, and we can't help but think that her song "Mindwarp" might be a tip of a hat to Patrick Cowley's classic hi-nrgy classic of the same name) and deftly weaving them together into so many different musical landscapes, which makes the whole album totally coherent, songs that flow with an ease and assured seduction that has us under her spell. Highly recommended!
A killer cd compilation from Spain-via-New-York noise rocker and audio experimentalist Billy Bao, whose May 08 lp we made Record Of The Week, and whose Dialectics Of Shit we reviewed recently as well. This cd collects that Dialectics lp, as well as a handful of earlier releases. The whole thing is packaged in a jewel case, then wrapped in sandpaper and sealed shut with duct tape. Here's a review of the Dialectics lp, now cd, and after that we'll give a quick rundown of the other stuff compiled here.
So first up is the wonderfully titled Dialectics Of Shit, and we're happy to report, that while the horns that were all ovr May 08 seem to be M.I.A here, everything else is present and accounted for, BIG TIME. A gloriously filthy, in-the-red, sludge fueled noise drenched monster. Weirdly produced, super chaotic, rife with sharp angular skree, pounding Neanderthal drums and a growled phlegmy vocal that seethes maniacally. All that stuff is locked around single, KILLER riffs, each track, a looped hypnotic crush, that riff pounded out over and over and over and over, while the various other elements swirl and careen all around it.
Insane bursts of grinding crunch, thick sheets of Merzbowian hiss, long stretches of brittle jangle and thump that will suddenly get swallowed up by a blown out wave of sub sonic low end, or a cloud of white noise will well up obliterating everything in its path, all the while the bass and drums 'groove' churns away, often emerging from one of those disruptions a whole different beats, a sort of muted murky bit of surf guitar, some weird twang, everything off kilter and woozy and noisy and INTENSE. The guitars are sharp and jagged and rough edged, slippery and warped, the riffs seem to be melting, or crumbling to pieces before your ears, the whole record a stumbling, lurching, blackened dirge noise behemoth. All the while, little hooks, and insanely catchy flourishes surface here and there, keeping the record weirdly catchy, and almost poppy occasionally, the sound is schizophrenic, about faces all over the place, sudden edits, overlapping sounds that don't seem to fit (but somehow do), voices all tangled up in guitar melodies tripping over struggling drum pound, everything on the very edge of total collapse, somehow held together in one massive speaker destroying chunk of tweaked and twisted heaviness.
The weird thing when you finally see these tracks in your cd player, is that all the songs are of an exact length, almost all the songs on Dialectics are 3:00 long, the two songs from the ep are exactly 10:00 each, and all ten of the tracks from the 7" are exactly 1:00 long. Weird.
ANyway, the Fuck Separation ep from 2007 is two ten minute long jams, the whole thing, all twenty minutes made up of the same riff, a killer for sure, looped and locked and pounded out over and over and over, while the vocals howl, the sound shifts from sharp and jagged to murky and muddy, only near the end, does it begin to unravel and fall apart in a glorious pile of broken beats shrieking feedback, the riff never letting up until the very very end.
The Accumulation 7", also from 2007, follows a similar pattern, locking into a single sludgey garage-y Brainbombs style groove, while the vocals howl and mewl, and the sound gets more and more brittle and noise and fucked up until it devolves into a blonw out nearly white noise damaged psych free-for-all.
Incredible stuff. Heavy and heady, fucked up and freaked out and damaged and demented, and some of the best shit we've heard in forEVER.
We all love our dub deep and heavy, all rolling bass and echoing drums. But we also love it when it sounds like deep space transmissions, all tinny and faraway sounding, like the sweetest Lovers Rock emitting from a tiny transistor radio floating around the stratosphere. Echoing in a Doppler effect as the voice pings off the planets, intensifying then receding. And what a voice! Cornell Campbell is not as well known here but his soulful falsetto has graced countless dub records. He's best known for a series of "Gorgon Rock" albums he cut with producer Bunny Lee in the early to mid-'70s, that mixed heavy Rasta Roots with Lovers Rock and various covers often with biblical themes. This release covers various sessions in 1974 during which he worked out dub versions of his best songs with key rhythm players like Robbie Shakespeare and Ansel Collins. A great dub obscurity truly worth your time!
It seems like most of the recent reissues on Omni have had a distinctly kitsch element to them: Lorne Green, Dee Mullins, Gil Trythall's Country Moog, but there are plenty of lost country classics that Omni have given new life to, records by Hoyt Axton, Porter Wagoner and others, and now this, a cd collecting two classic lps from Tommy Cash, younger brother of the man in black. And one listen is all it takes, there's no mistaking that voice, it definitely ran in the family.
These songs are fantastic, classic country for sure, but unlike the dark desperado gunslinger jailbird jams of his big brother, the songs of Tommy were much more working class, often extolling the virtues of the working man, more traditional, and thus always overshadowed by his older brother. So much so that until recently, we didn't even know there was a Tommy Cash, and had never heard either of these records, although we had heard "Six White Horses" we just somehow never realized it was Tommy Cash. A brooding bit of storytelling country, a tribute to the fallen greats, JFK, MLK, a dark and gorgeous timeless country classic for sure. Then there's "Rise And Shine", another total classic, with a strange horn fanfare peppering the otherwise traditional twang, with a chorus that will stick in your head forever. And there's 28 more songs, a fantastic collection, once you get into it, the similarity vocal-wise to Johnny begin to fade, but every once in a while some turn of phrase, or some specific pronunciation, will remind you that this is indeed the little brother of the man in black.
Deluxe Omni packaging, tons of full color vintage photos, original album art reproduced, new liner notes, reprinted original liner notes and more!
This killer slab of blown out noise rock ferocity, NOW ON CD!!
These guys must destroy live. Check out the picture on the sleeve, wild frenzied sweaty kids mid-mosh, a bloodied microphone, and then of course there's the music, a fucking skull crushing unholy post punk noise rock racket that manages to take all the stuff we loved about Sub Pop and AmRep and nineties noise rock and amp it all up two thousands style. A little bit of screamo, a bit of post hardcore, but really, these guys could have come straight out of 1995, cuz they just don't make shit like this anymore. Only, they do. Catalyst does, and it sounds as good as it ever did.
Heavy as fuck, catchy as fuck, wild tribal drumming, buzz drenched super distorted riffage, howled vocals, soaring choruses, plenty of mathy breakdowns, a little bit off groove, hooks galore, warped woozy guitar harmonies all tangled and melodic reminding us big time of Drive Like Jehu, and heck, they even have a song called "Lars Ulrich's 1986 Funeral (It Should Have Been You)".
We raved about their previous record Marianas Trench, which we still have a few copies of, but this one is even better, heavier, catchier... We often lament the lack of actual BANDS, y'know, bands that write songs, there's so much dronemusic, and experimental ambience, and free folk improv, and blackend buzz, and we do love all that, but sometimes nothing hits the spot like an actual rock band, pounding away on actual instruments, sweating, bleeding, leaping off the stage, rolling around on the floor, and spitting out actual songs. Of course it helps when the band is this bad ass and the songs rule this hard, so if you've been hankering for some seriously heavy post punk noise rock in your life, and who amongst us HASN'T? Well, then these guys should definitely hit the spot.
Holy shit is this awesome. Some sort of super dense, ultra distorted, noise drenched electronic grind, not at all what we expected from RRR, well, maybe the noise part, but this is just so awesomely heavy and intense and face meltingly brutal.
Long swaths of grinding glitchy electronic drones give way to buzzing frenzied gabber-like hyperspeed grind, which in turn gives way to lurching noisecapes of sculpted distorted crunch and maniacal almost black metal shrieks, all wreathed in sheets of feedback, buried beneath layers of grit and grime, everything laced with malfunctioning electronics, fractured effects, and shrieking sine wave like tones. There do seem to be songs, but the various tracks and parts just ooze and sprawl into each other, a heaving massive expanse of constantly shifting heaviness, gnarled and twisted, and fractured and freaked out. Spaced out ambience wraps itself around long slow creepy drones, laced with more sine waves and haunting chantlike voices, full on digital hardcore blow outs pepper stretches of completely fried blasts of melting metallic damage, everything laced with weird samples, children's voices, folky percussion, mysterious vocals, all quickly swallowed up by glitched out slabs of corrosive heavily effected buzz, and shot through with garbled underwater alien vox and buried machinelike blast beat pound. Fucking awesome. Probably the heaviest, most freaked out slab of electronic hypergrind-blacknoize we've ever heard.
We got a very very very few of these. It is after all limited to a mere 50 copies. Chasse completists and Jewelled Antler obsessives, as well as fans of gorgeous abstract field recordings, it's a race to see who can grab one of these before they're gone.
Chasse's piece is 10 minutes long and begins with a burst of static, but as you might imagine, that's not static at all, it's more likely a field recording of wind in branches, or water traveling over a rocky stream bed. The sound soon fades, and then rest of the track is a constantly shifting soundscape of textures and timbres, many recognizable, many not, but all of them strangely musical. Such is the magic touch Chasse has with field recordings, an alchemist who with a handful of sticks and some pebbles can conjure up a beautiful world of earthy sound.
Sonderberg is a member of the Chicago based sound-project Haptic with Steven Hess; and his half with Katherine Young is not quite as serene as Chasse's, a sound field rife with squeaks and creaks and thumps and Geiger counter like clicks, the sound shifting from spare and skeletal to thick and hissy and almost distorted, all underpinned by a weird low end almost electronic sounding thrum.
Really nice, but as mentioned above, we have VERY FEW of these, it's almost out of print, and once they are gone, we will not be able to get more.
Cool packaging too. A 3" cd-r affixed to a small block of wood, wrapped in s sheet of clear plastic, attached on one side with little nails, and velcro on the other, the liner notes a sticker beneath the plastic, each one hand numbered, LIMITED TO 50 COPIES.
A killer live DVD from our favorite Japanese, serial killer obsessed, stoner groove doom lords, Church Of Misery. We've gone on and on in the past (and elsewhere on this list, their debut was just reissued) about how much we love these guys. Some impossible mix of Sabbath, Electric Wizard, Eyehategod, Antiseen and Boris. Heavy as fuck, groovy and spacey, blown out and super psychedelic. Live it's everything we would have hoped for. A band of crazy Japanese hippies in ripped concert shirts, bell bottoms, berets, dreadlocks, furry coats, big ol' silver rings on every finger, flying V's, on a tiny stage, heads banging, hair swirling, in a closet sized dark club, packed to the gills with a heaving, sweaty, head banging crowd. The sound is amazing. A truly MASSIVE guitar sound, huge blown out crumbling riffs, the band a whirlwind of lurching groove, and a bass player who wears his bass lower than anyone we've ever seen (even the Ramones!). SO low in fact, that the body of the bass is at shin level and he ends up sort of playing way up on the neck. Awesome! Three live shows filmed over the last two years, a handful of CoM classics as well as some free form freaked out space jams. Also included are videos for "Filth Bitch Boogie" and "I, Motherfucker" (best song title ever maybe), both look quite similar, filmed in creepy black and white, on fuzzy degraded film stock, haunting shots of two emotionless girls making out, dead bodies in forests, plenty of violence and gore (mostly perpetrated on the band themselves) and of course the band trudging through mysterious woods all very Sabbath-like. So cool.
Packaged in a blood red Japanese style DVD case. NTSC and ALL REGION!
Now on Vinyl! Here's what we said about the cd version when it came out in '07:
One of our most unexpected surprises last year came from Cloudland Canyon who totally blew us away with Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004, a shimmering sonic concoction, that sounded a bit like Ash Ra Tempel being channeled through the more melodic side of The Dead C.
They've followed that remarkable outing with a record that contains only two songs, but what it lacks in length it more then makes up for in cosmic-kraut brilliance. Listening to the two long tracks on this record is like being transported away on some otherworldly helicopter co-piloted by LaMonte Young and a very spaced out Hawkwind. We keep listening to these two epic tracks over and over and every time we do a customer is inevitably convinced that we're playing some obscure vintage kraut gem that they somehow have never heard before. Folks are always stunned to find out that this is brand new, but what makes Cloudland Canyon so great is that they manage to tap into that magical moment of cosmic kraut bliss, but do so without merely sounding like a tribute band, as there is something very immediate and timeless to the sounds they create. With another brand new full length coming soon on Kranky [Lie In Light] we predict that everyone blasting their Wooden Shjips records right now will be blissing out and taking off with Cloudland Canyon very soon. We sure are! You can start now.
This is one of those records that was nearly impossible to track down for years, so we are beyond happy for this vinyl only reissue to finally surface. Recorded in 1969 right after her great debut, A Monastic Trio, Huntington Ashram Monastery is an album that ranks right near the top of the amazing legacy of music that Alice Coltrane left us. Playing piano and wielding her majestical harp in a magnificent trio that featured Ron Carter on Bass and the wonderful and sadly recently passed away Rashied Ali on drums and percussion. So much thought, love and devotion was put into every single note that Alice Coltrane recorded, and Huntington Ashram Monastery is such utter proof of that. No wasted notes, or throwaway moments. You can't lay the needle down on these grooves and not be moved and transported to another plane of consciousness. This is truly sacred, essential and transcendent music. Beyond recommended!
First proper cd release from either of these bands. Culver you may know by name, and years of limited cd-r and hard to find vinyl releases, but maybe you don't realize that Culver is in fact Lee Stokoe, who also plays in long time faves Marzuraan, as well as being a member of the most recent version of the mighty Skullflower! Holy shit, that is one serioius noise rock underground cred resume if we've ever seen one.
We listed a Culver cd-r years ago, on the now defunct Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label (we actually have 3 or 4 left, if you're interested, just ask!), but haven't really managed to get anything else in since, at least until now. For his half of the split, Stokoe offers up a 31 minute, crushing, ultra heavy, super dense DRONE, corrosive and crunchy, crumbling and bristling with energy, thick slabs of teutonic low end suspended in a field of sonic tar, it almost sounds like black metal riffs blurred into thick streaks of sound, a near static crush, that seems to heave as if at any minute the whole thing could just crumble to pieces. About halfway through the sharp edges beging to wear away, the sound growing smoother, cleaner, yet somehow ever more harrowing and ominous. The track finishing off with a long stretch of near black shimmer, all smeared and woven into ropy tendrils of rumble and hum.
Seppuku counter with something much heavier, and way more metallic, their first joint, begins with a squall of electronics, some looped industrial thrum, soon gives way to a thick cloud of swirling glitch and buzz and hum, eventually dissipating leaving some seriously glacial ultradoom, left to lumber and lurch and pound its way through nearly ten minutes of amp shredding ear drum destroying glacial crawl, monstrous vocals, caveman drums, and all sorts of strange effects and electronics swirling and whirling... So slooooow and so so heavy.
The second Seppuku jam is much more of a power electronics sort of thing, tons of crumbling distortion, heavily processed vocals, all of staitc guitar buzz, loads of feedback, the sound growing ever blacker and more frantic, a grim industrial noisescape that seems to occasionally explode into flurries of murky blown out grind, before splintering back into caustic free noise. Phew.
Some serious heaviness, and some equally serious noise. In some very saucy packaging. Very little in the way of liner notes, but page after page after page, of scantily clad and mostly bare breasted euro babes!
Of all the dark, drone-y, druggy synthiness that's been popping up lately (and believe us, it's a LOT), this lp from mysterious Los Angeles duo D.A. is most definitely our favorite. A heady collection of dark and dreary, lush and spaced out sci-fi synth creep that tapes into classic Goblin soundtrack music, the best John Carpenter scores, and mixes in plenty of modern lysergic lo-fi experimentation, conjuring up some of the most tense and dramatic and hypnotic sounds we've heard in ages.
Like some strange mix of Zombi and Expo '70, but with a hint of new age-y drift that makes these songs sound like they could only be the music from some lost eighties film, only the visuals could never hope to match this haunting otherworldly music.
Looped synths are looped into slow shifting swells, pulsing over a bed of softly swirling minor key tension, alien tones, blurred buzz and dense shimmery drones, shot through with moody melodies, laced with super spare abstract percussion and everything wrapped in a gauzy warmth, total kraut drone new age soundtrack bliss.
The second side changes gear toward the end, evolving into a sound akin to Godspeed meets Zombi meets SUNNO))), a thick thick buzz wrapped around twisted looped melodies and all sorts of simulated haunted forest sound effects, growing ever more harrowing, ominous and dramatic, and surprisingly, yet subtly heavy.
The flipside is much more minimal and abstract than the A side, but no less intense and mysterious. Reverbed piano is sent drifting into blackness, tons and tons of space, softly wheezing organs, deep muted tones, that distinctly eighties sounding bass pulse, long thick swirls of softly distorted synth buzz, tinkling high end tones, all of that gives way to another thick, and surprisingly heavy space synth drone, a starlit slow motion swirl, abstract, super space-y, dark and emotional, tense and INtense, it still boggles the mind that filmmakers aren't constantly on the lookout for groups like this, whose cinematic soundtrack ambience is way more compelling and original and ruling than 90 percent of the music that actually ends up in movies. But who needs the movies, best to just throw this on, close your eyes, and let these sounds ooze into your consciousness, creating a fantastical and unreal world all for you, populated with far out sights, worthy of these far out sounds.
Incredible hand silk screened, ultra thick card stock sleeves, LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Hailing from Olympia, Washington, Desolation Wilderness create hazy dreampop that's the perfect twilight of summer soundtrack. With shimmering guitars, breezy vocals, infectious melodies swirled amongst the fog and haze, this record has been reminding us of so many bands we love, like Chapterhouse, Spiritualized, The Chills, 764 Hero, Galaxie 500, Sparklehorse, Ride, etc. While there is a definite shoegaze element to their sound, the songs also have a spark and punch to them. We also can't help but think of a very awesome and underrated '90s band from Los Angeles called Strictly Ballroom who similarly found enticing ways to evoke this kind of daydream nation. New Universe is one of those records that's perfect for so many occasions - the long ride home, the blissed out late night walk through the city, the lazy Sunday afternoon... Desolation Wilderness pleases on so many levels!
Here's a question that gets tossed around here more and more in recent months: Is this new or old? Given how many bands who make druggy, atmospheric ritualism could have produced those sounds in 1972 or 2009 with equal aplomb. The Amen Dunes record Dia (2009) and Warlus' Songs album (1975) make for an interesting case study. Over the past twelve months, there's been another resurgence of black clad, post-punk thanks to some of the dour Goth reissues from Sacred Bones, which fit neatly next to the spunky Joy Divisionisms of Blank Dogs and the moping, black eyeliner tunes of this weeks ROTW Soror Dolorosa. Those could also be addressed with that same question: is this old or new? In the case of the dark, moody sounds of Dial M For Murder, the answer is, as hard as it might be to believe, "new."
Citing Joy Division and the Chameleons as their references, Dial M For Murder end up in a place remarkably close to Interpol. The vocalist David Ortenlof really does come across like Interpol's Paul Banks on a good chunk of the tracks, and almost like Mark Edwards from My Dad Is Dead on the others. Musically, the dark jangliness of the guitar and the punchy basslines situates around tight drum machine programming coming across like Ratatat reworking Joy Division singles. Gothic and haunting, but propulsive and poppy, really really cool stuff for sure.
Ducktails is another one of those bands that went to zero to sixty in no time, in terms of releases. Before, it was a tape here, maybe a 7" there, now every week brings a new slab of Ducktails' twisted tropical pop, but hell, we're not complaining one bit.
Especially this time, as Landscapes might just be one of the strangest Ducktails record yet, The first track is what we've come to expect, and dig big time, swirling lo-fi, tropical soft fuzz pop, antiquated drum machine, warbly synths, playful woozy sun dappled melodies, plenty of tape hiss and amp buzz, definitely raw and muddy but also weirdly lush.
That, however, is just the first song, from there on out, Ducktails bounces wildly from sound to sound, all held together by a strange hard to describe thread that runs through all the songs here, keeping this from being just a mish mash of sounds and songs, and instead smearing it into a crazy yet cohesive dizzying drift through some seriously tweaked eighties retro future fuzz Ducktails dream pop. Weird buzzing Eastern sounding new age gives way to some groovy hard pop, with warped guitars, lots of flange, rad leads, like an alternative dimension instrumental lo-fi Loverboy (?), before switching gears and unfurling some looped almost African sounding warble, which then transforms into fuzzy jangly blissed out garage pop, then falsetto crooned jangle and swoon, then a bit of bluesy bedroom slow jam and finally a wicked, twisted late night infomercial soundtrack, all of the sights and sounds in Ducktails' soundworld hazy and shimmery and otherworldly and gloriously washed out.
Yep, another Ducktails joint, and it's a goodie. Maybe our favorite mode of sonic Ducktalia, the sort of faux eighties outer space new age drift. These days nobody does it better. Bleary eyed, sparkly, glimmery, glistening, crystalline, otherworldly new-age-wave, bloops and bleeps and softly effected melodies, all woozy and warbly and oh so dreamy.
Julian Lynch is the garage bliss pop new kid on the block, but what we've heard so far has been pretty awesome, and these two jams demonstrate just why folks are suddenly all aflutter about this guy. The first track is a warped minimal soundscape, breathless vocal drones draped over detuned twang, which eventually builds to a sort of stumbly wah wah garage pop dirge. The second track sounds like a warped Beach Boys 45 spinning at 16 rpm, fuzzy and washed out, more of that twisted and looped wah guitar, some almost-funky bass, and some surprisingly lush harmonies that brighten up the murk just a bit.
Comes with a dvd-r, featuring a bunch of videos too...
What hath the Skaters wrought? In the wake of that group's ever expanding body of work, both as a duo and each member solo, has risen a whole movement of musicians channeling similar sounds and melding many of the same influences into that ethereal collaged anti-pop that the Skaters if not invented, popularized. A symptom of today's MySpace world, where the minute one group, or one sound, gets hyped, a million bedroom 4-trackers take it upon themselves to do something similar. See the recent lo-fi garage pop explosion for example. But heck, stealing from the bands you love is a tried and true rock and roll tradition, the key being stealing from bands YOU LOVE, not from bands that are suddenly popular and you want to be popular too. That shit is transparent. That's why in an avalanche of wannabe's there are always a few who shine, whose creativity had seemingly lain dormant just waiting for a trigger. Sometimes hearing a sound, makes you realize that someone else hears the same sort of sounds you've been hearing in your head.
This could all be bullshit, but the second we first threw on this Explorers records, we couldn't help but think of the Skaters. But like any good band, taking influence from another, it's not the sounds you steal or the ideas you borrow, it's what you do with them that counts, and the Explorers definitely do their own sort of fractured soundscapery as good as, if not even better than their forebears. Layered tangles of tones and squiggly melodies, wheezing textures and buried stumbling drumloops, a swirling soft chaos of blurred sounds smeared into streaked landscapes of broken tape deck new age, deep dense outer space buzz and washed out dream drone, the sift from sound to sound is sudden and sharp, like flipping the channel or changing the station. Imagine the sound of sound remote research station, all the machines left running, whirring in the darkness, pointed heavenward, as they sample and intercept transmissions and broadcasts from alien worlds and alternate dimensions. Gloriously tripped out and deliriously druggy. For fans of the Skaters for sure, but also anyone into weird and wonderful, freaked out and far flung sonic explorations (they don't call them Explorers for nothing apparently).
LIMITED TO 330 COPIES.
A brand new record from Mr. Justin Broadrick, formerly of Godflesh, presently of Jesu, as well the sole member of this, his long running project Final. Originally an experimental solo guitar project, and actually maybe STILL an experimental solo guitar project, Final has definitely changed over the years, lately sharing more in common with Jesu than anything, the same sort of blissy drift, washed out drone drenched shimmer, but in Final, those elements are blurred into something more ambient and less propulsive, more soundscape-y and less post metal.
Four long tracks, each slow building and slow burning, the first all soft ethereal melodies over a grinding crunching minimal drone, those two elements all tangled up, with the melodies eventually blossoming into epic atonal harmonies, sheets of sound like a symphony of car horns, smoothed into something much more listenable but no less clamorous and chaotic, definitely reminds us of Sunroof! near the end.
The second track starts out all SUNN-y, a crumbling distorted downtuned dirge, although within that dirge lurks some surprising melody, and this track too builds to a blissed out high end shimmer, overlapping tones, washes of synthy warmth, bits of buzz and glitch, lovely, but still softly abrasive.
The flipside begins with some sort of abstract doom, thick, jagged chords, ringing out, and allowed to nearly fade out completely, before the next one comes crashing down, lots and lots of space, in the background a strangely active swirl of skree, streaks of feedback, shards of feedback, sine waves and upper register whir, roiling and churning beneath the lumbering riffage.
And finally, the record finishes off with something altogether different. Something pretty and strummy and yes, shoegaze-y, but weirdly looped and hypnotic sounding, as if they took a chunk from a Jesu track, a pretty undistorted bit, then doused it in effects and set it on repeat, allowing it to slowly shift, but to lock into a mantra like loop, so gorgeous, could have used a whole 'nother side of this stuff for sure.
VINYL ONLY (At least for now, cd coming someday)! LIMITED TO 1500 COPIES!!!
Finally one of the legendary lost This Heat related recordings gets its first proper release! Originally released as a tape in 1985, recorded by This Heat's Gareth Williams and Mary Currie and friends, shortly after Williams left This Heat, Flaming Tunes is a gorgeous, quirky collection of lo-fi experimental moody textural avant pop, originally conceived as something totally removed from the much more abrasive and rhythmic music he made in This Heat. Unavailable ever since its original cassette release, minus a bootleg which included the tape in its entirety but described it as This Heat's final demo recordings, Flaming Tunes in some ways reminds us of Charles Hayward's Camberwell Now project, in that some of the sounds are familiar and still somewhat This Heat sounding, but the record is much more vocal based, and song oriented, resulting in a sound, that while appealing to This Heat obsessives, offered a whole new window into Williams' approach to sound and songwriting, and in that, a once removed glimpse of some of the elements that helped make This Heat what it was.
The record opens with a looped piano wrapped in sizzling electronic buzz, peppered with strange bursts of sonic crunch, stuttery fragmented rhythms, not hard to see why folks believed this could be a blueprint for new This Heat material. But the second song is more of what Flaming Tunes is all about. Tunes. Sing songy weary vocals over plonked piano, squeaking horns, skittery percussion, lots of drones, plenty of tape hiss and amp buzz, definitely lo-fi, some cool synth melodies, the sound definitely reminiscent of the first two Brian Eno records or that classic Flying Nun sound, bands like the Tall Dwarfs or the Pin Group or This Kind Of Punishment or The Children's Hour or even the Dead C at their most poppy. And that's the sound that makes up most of Flaming Tunes, a hazy, gauzy, low fidelity (but strangely lush) bedroom pop, lots of piano, wreathed in reverb, warm warbly bass, occasional strings, programmed rhythms, detuned tangles of minor key guitar, plenty of jangle and chime, with intermittent forays into cool abstract experimentation, but even then, those tracks still sound a little song-y and don't at all disrupt the flow of the record. "Raindrops From Heaven", with a field recording of rainfall, insects, beneath some clattery, muted parlor skitter, or the brooding muddy piano drone of "It's Madness" with its disembodied vox and haunting creepy creaking Victorian vibe, with sampled strings and mysterious textures, before the record closes with a surprisingly Beatles-esque ballad called "Generous Moon", that sort of classic pop, rendered a little bit warped and woozy, the guitars twangy, and the background melodies a sea of whirring keyboards, locking into a looped dreamlike dirge before finally fading out.
So nice. This Heat fanatics will flip for sure, and no doubt some have tapes or bootlegs of this already, but it sounds so much better now, and comes in a super deluxe digipak, with tons of photos, artwork and liner notes. And even if you've never heard This Heat (what the hell is wrong with you?), this will still appeal to folks into twisted dark lo-fi pop.
Philip Glass's first commercial success and enduring classic soundtrack is available once again and in its original completed form (76 minutes) for the first time on cd. Glass's score to Godfrey Reggio's sublime 1983 film, Koyaanisqatsi (the Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance") is a perfect marriage to the film's altered time sequences of fast-moving clouds and sped-up machine-like urban scenes of traffic and city-life. The repetitive arpeggios and slowly undulating shifts of patterned movements give off the sensation of static motion enhancing the film's captivating majestic qualities. But even without the visuals, the score by itself stands the test of time, and its longer unabbreviated format renews the film's pointed silent protest against the out-of-control pace and shortened attention spans of our so-called civilization. Recommended!
Even though he resides right here in the Bay Area we knew very little about this Brian Glaze character when we first got in this new release of his, but oh damn is that about to change, as this is becoming one of those records that we can't seem to stop listening to. Channeling so many eras of warped pop delight, Brian Glaze has made a record that's as fun as it is smart, and as catchy as it is fulfilling. There is for sure a similar aesthetic and delivery to some of our favorite warped popsmiths like John Maus and Ariel Pink, but Green Living totally has its own thing going on. '50s pop colliding with psychedelic rock that's soaked in new wave electronics. We hear a bit of what The Gris Gris might sound like if they began to pull from more varied influences. Psychedelic disco pop? Deconstructed multigenerational pop genius? We're not sure exactly what to call it but we know that we LOVE IT!
We're running out of superlatives, not to mention overly poetic descriptions of filth and blackness and depravity, to describe this one man cinematic black doom noise outfit, but with every record, Mories, the man behind the beast, offers still more glimpses into what lurks below, or within, the sound an ever evolving cloud of black energy, rendered audible in shades of pummeling drum plod, of downtuned melting riffs, of howled and shrieked vocalizations, of Bernard Hermann like strings, all stretched and blurred and smeared and tangled into a veritable symphony of black bleak heaviness.
It's difficult to classify, as every song tends to slip seamlessly from Wolf Eyes like industrial soundscapery, to Godflesh like metal machine crunch, to lurching Abruptum like black ritual, to almost classic sounding black metal buzz, to haunting cinematic dark ambience, each of those elements fully realized, but then hurled into a black sonic vortex, where along with all the various other sounds and shapes and colors it gets mangled and tangles and spewed out on the other side as some almost living thing, a music that is at once threatening and caustic, harrowing and hateful, but also weirdly melodic and almost classical sounding, a definite case of black(ened) beauty.
For those new to the filth encrusted soundworld that is Gnaw Their Tongues, a brief survey of song titles: "My Orifices Await Ravaging", "The Stench Of Dead Horses On My Breath And The Vile Of Existence In My Hands", "The Gnostic Ritual Consumption Of Semen As Embodiment Of Wounds Teared In The Soul", the album title: All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity, the crown of thorns / blood splattered / bondage cover art, should all give hints as to what sort of sinister sound lurks inside, but again, all of that could point to something much more puerile and simplistic, the sound of Gnaw Their Tongues is something altogether more refined, if a word like that could be applied to something this hellish, but it does sound refined, and composed, epic and majestic, for every bit of sluggish heaviness, there's another part that is hauntingly beautiful, or strangely serene, it boggles the mind how someone creates music like this, it must come from some deep, dark, black part of the soul, and while we ourselves might fear such a place in ourselves, we can't help but be enthralled and obsessed with the sort of sonic darkness that lurks in others.
WAY recommended, as with past GGT releases...
We've only heard just a couple of recordings from Jonas Asher; but those we have heard - the UW Owl LP done with Jochen Hartmann and the split release under Asher's Grasslung moniker - have been outstanding pieces of analogue electronics that run the gamut from the glumly sublime to the dourly ominous. This super limited edition cassette from the local imprint Black Horizons slants more to the blackened electronic side of Asher's aesthetic. A turgid, low-end pulse marches through the first side of In Bad Fields, much like an even slower version of Wolf Eyes' cancerous rhythms. Sinewaves and speckles of electro-magentic static flicker through the lurching pulse. The second side fashions those bass rhythms into an unsettling roar whose surfaces get abraded through a similar undercurrent of static found on the first. Very dark stuff.
Given that Asher's Phaserprone label produced some of the finest letterpressed editions of artwork well suited in its iron hued colors and post-industrial iconography, Black Horizons had to come up with something special for Asher's first release outside of Phaserprone. The artwork is a nice silver-offset print job on a darkened metal-colored paper, and the whole cassette is encased in a hand-cut plastic slipcase. Watch out for the blackened nail hiding in the packaging, too. Really cool!
The tape is a C20 and is limited to 100 copies, or thereabouts!
We were totally gaga for Grouper's Way Their Crept cd from last year. So much so we made it Record of the Week. A more aQ record we couldn't have imagined, a gloriously thick and fuzzy swirl, equal parts Arvo Part, Morton Feldman, Skullfower and all manner of drift and drone. Dense smears of processed vocals and mubled guitars, all so heavily affected they became indistinct blurs, drifting fuzzy drones. We've been anxiously awaiting more, and were thrilled to discover this new 3" cd-r on the Yellow Swans' Jyrk label. The good news is that it takes everything we loved about Way Their Crept and made it more, daker, denser, thicker, prettier. The bad news is it was limited to 130 copies of which we only managed to get 20. And the rest are sold out, so after these are gone we won't be getting any more.
He Knows is very short, three songs, ten minutes. But what it lacks in lenght, it makes up for in depth. The first track could of come straight off of Way Their Crept. Disembodied vocals hover and drift, guitars (are they guitars?) rumble and murmur and shimmer and hover, not so much an instrument as some sort of musical spirit. The vocals, the guitars, the sounds Grouper produce are like wraiths, floating like whisps of smoke, drifting in and around and through each other, a thick cloudy soundscape, warm and enveloping, pusling and reverberating, an indistnict blur, lovely but ineffable.
The second track is like chamber music recorded at the bottom of the sea, listening to it after it has bubblrd up to the surface, warm and warbly and murky and so lovely. Melodies are nothing but streaks of barely there sound, like sunbeams filtered through the prism of swirling seawater. The final track sounds like a hymn, but muffled and indistinct. Imagine laying in a field outside a smalll stone chapel, blankets wrapped tight around your head to stave off the cold, the warm sounds of the church drift across the icy ground, the sounds barely making it through your wool shroud and into your ears, but what does make it, sounds warm and safe and beautiful. So good.
Limited to 130 copies and already OUT OF PRINT! We have the last 20, once these are gone they are GONE!
Hildur Gudnadottir has such a way with the cello, able to create such utterly moving music that is filled with nuance and texture but that is also so deeply emotional. Hailing from Iceland, Gudnadottir's resume includes collaborations and partnerships with the likes of Pan Sonic, Mum, Sigur Ros, Angel, BJ Nilsen, etc. It's so nice to get to hear her take center stage, carefully crafting a sound that is about as moody and beautiful as music really gets. Perfect for those eternal gray days we are faced with so often in San Francisco, this is a record we put on when we just want to get lost in the fog and haze. There is very nice and subtle processing throughout the album as well, and here and there Gudnadottir tries her hand at the zither with stunning results. Johann Johansson adds organ on a few tracks as well, and fans of HIS best work as well as music by folks like Sylvain Chauveau, Philip Glass, Michael Cashmore, Joan Jeanrenaud and Colleen should for sure check this out. Truly elegant and intensely resonant. And thus highly recommended!
Just a few copies are available of this vinyl only release from Kyle Parker's Infinite Body project, from which we got a nice introduction into his soft-noise / heavy-ambient sounds on the split LP with Emaciator. He picks up where he left off there with a blissed-out distortion billowing out of a glistening cyclical drone from what sounds like a overdriven pump organ. The heavy waves of distortion gradually fade away, and a pastoral, Cluster like melody is left behind to effortlessly glide through a warm set of ambient melodies. This gives way to a crunchier version of what Oneohtrix Point Never has been offering through luminous arpeggiations that trick themselves out of anything remotely new age sounding; and here, it's the heavy patina of distortion which saves Infinite Body's mantra. Parker furthers the shimmer with some floating-in-outer-space driftscaping bristling with bleary noises just beneath the surface, only to find these collapsing into a throbbing drone that reconstitutes itself through a kaleidoscope of that same pump organ sound. At first this emerges as a eerie fog horn only to overtake the sound field in a growing mass of crunched noise. Limited to 300 copies and pressed on clear vinyl.
Calling all skweee-jays! Or would-be skweee-jays. We've got four new 7" singles of fresh skweee straight from the source, imported from Flogsta Danshall in Finland. They're in plain white sleeves, the only art to be found here on the labels. If you've followed our other skweee recommendations (both Museum Of Future Sound comps, the more recent Skweee Tooth collection) then you know all about this Scandinavian DIY electro b-boy instrumental 8-bit phenomenon, and you'll also already be familiar with the strange names of the artists on these four singles.
Flogsta boss Limonious' slinky "Swedish Pommak" already wormed its way into our ears via the Museum Of Future Sound Vol. 2, though the jittery yet spacey b-side "Hurri Up!" we hadn't heard before. And all the tracks by Mangrove, Mrs. Queda, and Joxaren (all three artists hailing from Sweden) are new to us as well. Suffice to say, if you like skweee, you'll like these cuts, presented here in skweee's ideal format.
Joxaren's "Ritam Bluz" is a chiming, exotic, slightly sinister groove. Mrs Queda's laidback "Post-Pubertal" bleeps and bloops nicely along aided by robotic handclaps and digital hisses (oddly, her MySpace page lists Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum as her only influence). Maybe our fave of the batch, Mangrove's "Angry Animals", is a bit of a fractured funky banger, bringing down some rigid buzzin' beats. The flip is pretty solidly crunchy / catchy too. The various other A- and B- sides on these 7"s are all pretty darn skweelicious as well! Seriously, if you're a DJ, just throw one of these on in your set for instant skweee cred. Listening at home is fun too.
Go here: http://skweee.com/ for a lot more interesting skweee info, including interviews with some of the folks we just mentioned.
Recording in Paris in 1976, legendary Brazilian songstress Joyce teamed up with percussionist Nana Vasconcelos (he has worked with everyone from Milton Nascimento to Don Cherry) and multi-instrumentalist/producer Mauricio Maestro to create this truly stunning record of textured psychedelia, laced with the colorful flourishes of samba and Tropicalia, the immediacy of acid folk and a wonderful mystical haze that seems to permeate the entire album.
For some reason, Visions Of Dawn was never actually released, at least until now, which is shocking as this really is one of the best, if not THE BEST Joyce records we have ever heard. You can hear here the sounds that would influence generations of performers, even decades later, like Juana Molina and Samara Lubelski, both of whom would largely base their sound and style on the magical music of Joyce. From start to finish this is an unbelievable album, it starts with more of a samba-pop vibe, but as the record progresses the rich mood and atmosphere of the instrumentation along with the breathtaking vocals begin to swirl in the air, floating through the clouds and refracting the sunlight. This record really belongs in the pantheon of the best discs by folks like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Milton Nascimento. Visions of Dawn is truly a lost classic!
We've always loved Keelhaul. How could we not? We love noise rock, and math rock, and KH are pretty much straddling the line between the two, spitting out dense, mathy bursts of grinding crunchy proggy metallic heaviness.
The cool thing about KH is that while they are super technical, and their songs are complex and convoluted and confusional, it never sounds wanky, these are just killer songs that happen to have a million parts crammed into each one, and the band aren't into singing, so they only do it once in a while, and they mostly just want to rock, it just so happens that their rocking involves strange time signatures and super tight instrumental workouts. In a lot of way, these guys sound a bit like a way more metal Polvo, which needless to say is awesome. The same sort of post rock vibe, sounds to these ears they the melodies sometimes get all Eastern and not typically rock sounding too.
Past records reminded us of groups like Neurosis or Coalesce, even Mastodon or Coalesce, but now with this, their first record in 6 years, we're hearing way more of a noise rock vibe, AmRep, Helmet, Tar, that sort of thing, but unlike those bands, this is way more complicated and heady, maybe like if the Champs teamed up with Lightning Bolt, went back in time and released a record on AmRep in 1992, but even that doesn't do this justice, there's a weird power metal vibe too, soaring melodies and catchy not-quite-choruses balancing the twisting serpentine compositions and the lurching pound and downtuned chug. However you slice it, these guys STILL RULE.
Calling all skweee-jays! Or would-be skweee-jays. We've got four new 7" singles of fresh skweee straight from the source, imported from Flogsta Danshall in Finland. They're in plain white sleeves, the only art to be found here on the labels. If you've followed our other skweee recommendations (both Museum Of Future Sound comps, the more recent Skweee Tooth collection) then you know all about this Scandinavian DIY electro b-boy instrumental 8-bit phenomenon, and you'll also already be familiar with the strange names of the artists on these four singles.
Flogsta boss Limonious' slinky "Swedish Pommak" already wormed its way into our ears via the Museum Of Future Sound Vol. 2, though the jittery yet spacey b-side "Hurri Up!" we hadn't heard before. And all the tracks by Mangrove, Mrs. Queda, and Joxaren (all three artists hailing from Sweden) are new to us as well. Suffice to say, if you like skweee, you'll like these cuts, presented here in skweee's ideal format.
Joxaren's "Ritam Bluz" is a chiming, exotic, slightly sinister groove. Mrs Queda's laidback "Post-Pubertal" bleeps and bloops nicely along aided by robotic handclaps and digital hisses (oddly, her MySpace page lists Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum as her only influence). Maybe our fave of the batch, Mangrove's "Angry Animals", is a bit of a fractured funky banger, bringing down some rigid buzzin' beats. The flip is pretty solidly crunchy / catchy too. The various other A- and B- sides on these 7"s are all pretty darn skweelicious as well! Seriously, if you're a DJ, just throw one of these on in your set for instant skweee cred. Listening at home is fun too.
Go here: http://skweee.com/ for a lot more interesting skweee info, including interviews with some of the folks we just mentioned.
These guys sent us an lp a long while back, and somehow we totally slept on it. Not sure why, a 12" x 12" image of a cloudy sky, the sun glinting in the background, and the words "PURE TRANSCENDENTAL BLACK METAL" writ large in big black records across the front, and inside, just what the cover promised some seriously buzzing blazing blackness. It's not surprising these guys found there way to 20 Buck Spin, a pretty good fit for sure for this NY horde.
Unlike the blissed out blackened ethereal transcendentalism of the lp, back when Liturgy was a one man bedroom black metal band, Renihilation finds Liturgy expanded to a 4 piece, and the sound is much more raw and organic, still blown out and pretty blissy, goddamn soaring and epic in fact, but it sounds more like a proper rock band, although the drumming is still inhumanly fast, and the band lock into these cool, weird, and very un-black metal sounding high end trills, that only make the sound that much more mysterious and mystical. The band claim some unlikely non-metal influences, but as you get into Renihilation, it's easy to hear that there's way more going on here than Ulver or Darkthrone worship, the band slipping into lurching, almost mathy breakdowns, incredible dynamics, that almost sounds like Harvey Milk at 78rpm, the sort of stop start, sway and lumber, that only works if the band is tight as fuck.
These songs are not super long either, but they feel majestic, and sprawling, and never ending, in a good way, the guitars are frantic, the drumming relentless, the guitars seem to exist only in the upper registers, like wild psychedelic leads transformed into some sort of blackened tremolo picking, so instead of black metal, these jams almost sound like modern classical compositions, like Arvo Part composing for black metal band, when a song ends, you feel exhausted, and drained, like at the end of a long journey, but before you can even catch your breath, the band explode into action once again. And before you know it, they're locked into another high end blast of extreme tension, no let up, no slipping into acoustic interludes, it's almost like the musical version holding your breath, soaring as high and for as long as (in)humanly possible, so when the band does pause briefly, it knocks you on your ass, of when they switch gears and get all spacious and dynamic, it nearly blows your mind.
When we first got this, we only listened to it a couple times, and thought it was pretty cool, but on repeated listens it is proving itself to be truly transcendental, and unlike almost all of the other black metal out there, and is quickly becoming a contender for black metal record of the year.
Strange that we haven't posted anything about Dale Lloyd in previous lists, but this is a man whose influence should be well known throughout the experimental and sound-art communities. Lloyd runs the And/OAR label, which specializes in environmental soundscaping with a few subsidies that push toward an electronic-pop context. Even so, the last full album from Mr. Lloyd emerged well over five years ago. This album continues in Elevator Bath's very impressive series of picture discs, which began in 2008 with releases of corroded drones from our own Jim Haynes and kosmiche brainmelting from Rick Reed. Lloyd's work is an excellent companion to these two releases. One of the two sides opens with a modulating hiss that harmonizes with a sinewy drone and gets punctured by a series bone-numbing electrical charges for something that could have some unsavory context had it been generated by John Duncan, but then again it could be a field recording of a grain-slew with minor post-production techniques. In fact, each of the pieces on Akasha For Record have this sense that they could be the results of well-situated field recordings like those of Tarab or Eric La Casa, as the smudges and grittiness of these recordings allude to such strategies. Another track shimmers like the vibration of a loose piece of metal on an industrial HVAC, with the timbres generating a surprisingly fluid and beautiful resonance like something Andrew Chalk would actively seek out. There's greater evidence of field recordings on the tracks that do feature the roar of surf and a cold wind intermingled with the softened white noise of sand getting pushed around. Lloyd had devised this album to complement the crackles that get magnified through the picture disc - a medium which notoriously wears heavier than most pressings of vinyl. The album certainly works well with its medium. Beautiful stuff, and super limited to 216 copies.
Maeror Tri was a legendary German post-industrial band that forged a mighty sound of corrosive, post-Industrial dronescaping throughout the '90s before moving onto the equally impressive drone-based project Troum. Myein was one of the first CDs for Maeror Tri, originally released by ND Records and housed in an unusual, oversized triangular sleeve. Now that this has been reissued through Waystyx, Myein enjoys a slightly less cumbersome, but no less appealing matte black, die-cut sleeve with a gold envelope housing the disc. Myein opens with a black cauldron of swarming guitar drones that steadily increases the atmospheric pressures over the course of the opening track before cracking in a burst of seething noise. Maeror Tri follows this with one of their more melodic interluded, extending a melancholic descending chord progression into a haunted mantra. The final entry on Myein finds Maeror Tri at their most sprawling, amorphous, and shadowy with an undulating ocean of dark dark drones littered with flanging sounds. We can only hope that Myein is the first of many reissues from Maeror Tri's hard to find back catalogue. Excellent!
What can be said that hasn't been said already about the mighty Americana troubadour Jason Molina? He continues to weave his wonderful rustic folk pop tapestry in various deep dark shades of sorrow. On Josephine, he once again absolutely nails the heartbreak and the despair in classic country rock fashion. Of the generous list of fourteen tunes, standouts include the title track as well as "Little Sad Eyes", but the best might be "Knoxville Girl". Check 'em out!
The Long Hair label digs up another kool krautrock obscurity for reissue here, one that Andee and Allan both happened to have heard already via a previous cd edition. It's an album that we're now glad to be able to get to list (with a bonus track!). Originally released on LP in 1971 (natch) on a tiny label with the wonderful name of Mouse Trick Track Music, this one-off rarity is a bit of a trippy gem, groovy and flutey and fuzzy. And plenty weird too, as is evidenced by the album's odd song titles, each with the word "Mammut" in them:
"Bird Mammut" (indeed featuring birds twittering, and birdsong like flute flutter, amidst propulsively grooving drumming), "Classical Mammut" (a brief interlude of whooshing wind, crying baby, placid piano), "Mammut Ecstasy" (hippy chant, fuzzed out guitar heaviness), "Footmachine Mammut" (laidback groove, what sounds like a lively dinner party in the background, with clinking percussion/wine glasses, more guitar soloing), "Short Mammut" (kinda like "Mammut Ecstacy", but shorter), "Shizoyd Mammut" (shrieking vocals, organ jamming)... and that's just side 1. Side 2 actually consists of just two songs, longer, more lyrical ones, including the 13+ minute psychedelic tour de force "Mammut Opera", that's both dramatic and rather lovely.
The whole thing, the way it combines the acid rock guitar action with Hammond organ, flute, and even field recordings (both outdoor and indoor it would seem), sorta sounds like a demented Deep Purple dosed on drugs, jazzily jamming away at some hippy party place in the Black Forest (where the were, recording in the studios of jazz label MPS). It's more groovy than heavy, but they let loose with some wild guitar riffery now and then, as well as dabbling in some (Beatles inspired?) songiness, particularly on the second half of the record. Krautrock aficionados should definitely investigate! And, especially as we know they overlap, Acid Mothers Temple fans too! There's definitely a precursor to AMT's funny freeform freakout vibe going on here. Specific krautrock comparisons could be to some of the previous Long Hair reissues like Et Cetera, Kollektiv and Wolfgang Dauner's The Oimels.
This official reissue has been digitally remastered, and comes with a thick, textually informative cd booklet, and the aforementioned 5 minute bonus track ("Da Du Da", recorded by these musicians in '69 for a compilation album, leading to the formation of the Mammut band/album project).
Calling all skweee-jays! Or would-be skweee-jays. We've got four new 7" singles of fresh skweee straight from the source, imported from Flogsta Danshall in Finland. They're in plain white sleeves, the only art to be found here on the labels. If you've followed our other skweee recommendations (both Museum Of Future Sound comps, the more recent Skweee Tooth collection) then you know all about this Scandinavian DIY electro b-boy instrumental 8-bit phenomenon, and you'll also already be familiar with the strange names of the artists on these four singles.
Flogsta boss Limonious' slinky "Swedish Pommak" already wormed its way into our ears via the Museum Of Future Sound Vol. 2, though the jittery yet spacey b-side "Hurri Up!" we hadn't heard before. And all the tracks by Mangrove, Mrs. Queda, and Joxaren (all three artists hailing from Sweden) are new to us as well. Suffice to say, if you like skweee, you'll like these cuts, presented here in skweee's ideal format.
Joxaren's "Ritam Bluz" is a chiming, exotic, slightly sinister groove. Mrs Queda's laidback "Post-Pubertal" bleeps and bloops nicely along aided by robotic handclaps and digital hisses (oddly, her MySpace page lists Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum as her only influence). Maybe our fave of the batch, Mangrove's "Angry Animals", is a bit of a fractured funky banger, bringing down some rigid buzzin' beats. The flip is pretty solidly crunchy / catchy too. The various other A- and B- sides on these 7"s are all pretty darn skweelicious as well! Seriously, if you're a DJ, just throw one of these on in your set for instant skweee cred. Listening at home is fun too.
Go here: http://skweee.com/ for a lot more interesting skweee info, including interviews with some of the folks we just mentioned.
Second 7" from local San Francisco power pop group The Mantles, who will soon have their debut full length released on Siltbreeze. Not sure why this is called Trust, as that title is not mentioned anywhere, and the songs are "Don't Lie" on the A-side and "Secret Heart" on the B-side. But this is a band that likes to play with a bit of mystery, often sounding like they're from the seventies or eighties. Garnering comparisons to The Clean, or Big Star, they have also been called San Francisco's answer to The Crystal Stilts, which is apt as they seem to be mining similar retro sounds, although with the singing less mournful than you find on the Stilts releases. Engineered by Jason Quever from The Papercuts, this 7" is sure to please folks into the current wave of garage-pop bands on Woodsist, Slumberland, In The Red and of course Siltbreeze.
Finally available on vinyl!
Damn. Not only was this here disc cooked up by a badass, totally STONED sounding R&B infused greasy garage rock n' roll band from Deeeetroit, featuring members of heavy hitters like the Black Keys (guitarist Dan Auerbach), Dirtbombs (bassist Troy Gregory), Outrageous Cherry (guitarist Matthew Smith), and the Sights (drummer Dave Shettler) but check the top billing - there's a bona fide, veteran black soul singer fronting this combo, maybe you've heard of him, maybe you haven't, but he was the real deal, Nathaniel Mayer. He had his first hit single, "Village Of Love", in the Top 40 back in 1962. We've had (but haven't yet reviewed) a pretty cool anthology of his '60s stuff, I Want Love And Affection, Not The House Of Correction. But that certainly didn't prepare us for this. Don't call it a comeback, this is something else altogether. Ol' Mayer didn't sound like this back in the sixties. We mean, yeah, this IS retro, but also totally something that could only be made now, the unlikely meeting of a versatile, veteran voice and young 'uns who grew up worshipping the Stoogesy rock action, who bring a fresh dose of fuzz and loose, laidback druggy psych to the proceedings that's pretty special.
Even more special though, is Mayer's marvelously ragged, hoarse voice. Weary and burnished with time - you can hear every one of his 64 years. Yet he's also totally in command of it, butter smooth one moment, croakingly gruff the next, belting out the James Brown style "owwwws!" like he coined the phrase. Yeah, the man can sing. And lyrically, he's all about sex and desire. Beggin' his girl. "Why Don't You Give It To Me?" Sometimes, "Doin' It" (which is a nearly 9-minute, wasted wild wahwah'd jam). In keeping with Mayer's phlegmy voice, the whole album is wrapped in a lo-fi murk, adding to the battered, bluesy, psychedelic mood. One that we might compare to some of the more soulful obscurities on that ol' Chains And Black Exhaust comp. The 1995 solo album by LSD casualty and former Funkadelic, Tawl Ross comes to mind as well.
And we'll remind you ('cause you DO read his site, right?) that this was Julian Cope's Head Heritage Record of the Month back in May.
Sadly, Mayer has passed away since this album first came out (it's a 2007 release, now here on vinyl), but there's a pretty cool posthumous album called Why Won't You Let Me Be Black that's just been released as well that we'll be reviewing soon on an upcoming list.
People have been freaking out about the Mayyors for ages now. Before we had even heard them, we knew we HAD to hear them, cuz that's what everyone we knew was telling us. Then we were lucky enough to get them to play our South By Southwest showcase, and whattayaknow? Everyone was right. They destroyed, wild and punk rock, and a little new wave, and s upper distorted and weirdly poppy, pretty much exactly what we could have hoped for. One person we knew even flew from another state JUST to see the Mayyors, and managed to see them play 8 or 9 times. And loved every single minute of it.
We got a bunch of these 12"s a while back, and they sold out in a heartbeat, before we could even get it reviewed. We got a few more, but then those too were gone in a flash. So the band finally repressed another batch, so now here's your chance, however fleeting to snag one of these 4 song 45 rpm 12"s, same as the first pressing, but now in plain white stamped sleeves, instead of the first pressing's gross dirt covered jackets, but it's the sound that matters, and the sound here is ferocious. Snotty, snarly, fuzzy, punky, noisy, catchy, druggy, crumbling ultra distorted guitars, wild pounding drums, yowled effected vox, tons of feedback, FX all over the place and THICK corrosive buzzing bass that drives EVERYTHING. Imagine maybe a poppier, less fucked up more new wave Rusted Shut, that same sort of chaotic noise rock, that while druggy, manages to be a bit tighter and a whole lot less on the verge of total collapse, while remaining awesomely chaotic.
The final track might be our favorite, the same sort of revved up Brainbombs style dirge, supercharged, and eventually growing more and more and more distorted and in-the-red, culminating in what might just be the raddest post-Buttholes drug rock noise guitar freakout EVER.
We did get a ton of these, but they'll probably go quick, and the band did say they would press more if this pressing sold out, but it could mean a bit of a wait if you don't grab one now.
The L.A. sound art duo Mem1 gathered together a great line-up of collaborators for this, their second album released earlier in 2009. Steve Roden, Jan Jelinek, Frank Bretschneider, and Area C are the heavy-hitters from our perspective, although those contributions from the those we've not heard of - Jen Boyd, Ido Govrin, RS-232 - seem to more than pull their weight. Mem1 works from an electro-acoustic context reworking cello through an interconnected series of electronics, most of which are probably driven through Max/MSP patches. The results typically settle into a slumbering drone sensibility, as noted in the Jan Jelinek collaboration which interweaves dark plucks from the cello with fizzing Tim Hecker-esque digital washes. The RS-232 pairing is a creepy, nocturnal track of sci-fi sound design for deep industrial hummings scorched with slow burning arcs. Frank Bretschneider offers an exception to this rule through his pulsing post-techno rhythms which gyrate in pools of reverb beneath looping sustained patterns of resampled cello. Beautiful stuff!
With artwork by the man behind Svarte Greiner and a conceptual framework dealing with "plant and animal poisons and their antidotes," Alexipharmaca is an album that wouldn't be out of place on Type. The Los Angeles based Mem1 is a duo comprised of Mark & Laura Cetilia, employing plenty of high-tech gadgets to abstract, obfuscate, and accompany the languid sounds from Laura's cello. Softened drones and delicate atmospheres are the dominant structures for Alexipharmaca, certainly casting a long gaze back to Erik Satie's idea of wallpaper music through the lens of Brian Eno's ambient and Akira Rabelais' esoteric digital abstractions. The movements of the bow across the strings of the cello are sometimes all that remains, as the rest of the sounds have been rarified, pitch-shifted, softly mulched, and recast as a ghostly undulation of sound crosshatched with digital ephemera and microsonic pin-pricks of glitchiness. While many of the quietly rendered sounds enjoy a jewel-like preciousness, Mem1 infuse these passages with a ghostly bleakness that occasionally grows ominous.
As the first few songs from Malcolm Middleton's latest album burst forth, you sorta get the feeling that he's thrown off the sadsack shackles of past dour hopelessness. The feverish tempo of many of these songs suggests that he might've come to the realization that too much time has been wasted mopin' around, and he's pulled up his socks and gotten a move on. The fantastic opening tune (and clear choice for the first single off the album) "Red Travellin' Socks" had us imagining what the world would be like if the New Pornographers had blossomed out of Scotland instead of Canada. 'Tis buoyant, beautifully produced pop with soaring female backing vocals that's as infectious as can be. Sure there's still the occasional song during which Middleton's spirits droop and his shoulders slump under the weight of the woes of his heart and soul as well as that of the rest of the world. Need proof? Give "Ballad Of Fuck All" a spin! Yeah, the title sez it all. He's never been one to mince words. As well there are a few endearingly dorky moments when the parts don't quite seem to fit - such as the introduction of programmed beats and/or a bleep-bloop synth line (as on "Zero") into the predominantly folksy acoustic setting. On the other hand, the same additions to songs such as "Box And Knife" work beautifully! Day in and day out, Middleton seldom disappoints! Recommended.
We usually don't pay too much attention to mainstream music mags, especially when they're pushing something as the next big thing, so we're not sure how exactly we ended up hearing this record from Miike Snow, a Swedish trio, not a person, but apologies to whoever wrote the recommendation, and whatever magazine printed it, cuz this really is fantastic. Totally quirky, super lush pop, that if we had to summarize these guys in a nutshell, we'd probably describe them as Animal Collective meets Phoenix, maybe with a little TV On The Radio mixed in (especially in the almost Peter Gabriel sounding vox), although we have seen them described as Animal Collective meets A-Ha, which might be not that far off either.
But however you describe them, the sound is amazing. Super lush, glimmering almost orchestral pop, with gorgeous vocal harmonies, buzzy synths, minimal programmed rhythms, little flurries of electronics, swirling ambience, tinkling pianos, a glistening production, and incredible hooks, the first three tracks have this record so frontloaded the rest of the songs barely stand a chance, but somehow they do manage to hold their own, which is saying a lot, just give the three sound samples a listen and you'll know exactly what we mean.
We probably haven't dug a major label mainstream pop record this much since Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, and you know how much we love(d) that one, so needless to say, for the pop kids this one comes highly recommended.
A killer vinyl sort-of best of from these legendary Cleveland punk rock new wave misfits. The Mirrors were only active for about three years in the mid seventies, in the about-to-be-obscenely-fertile Cleveland punk rock scene, breaking up just as Cleveland was poised to unleash a barrage of snotty punky new wave mayhem on an unsuspecting public in the form of the Dead Boys, Rocket From The Tombs, The Electric Eels, the Pagans, Pere Ubu and more!
Think early punk rock mixed with a little Velvet Underground. Awesome stuff. LIMITED TO 800 COPIES. Maybe sold out already, we have a small handful...
If there's one thing musicians, and heck, even fans of music hate, it's a dabbler. Someone well established in one arena who decides to dabble in some other sound or scene, often 'slumming', experimenting with a sound or style that they would never integrate into their actual sound. And no one hates dabblers more than metalheads, who came up with a new name for those dabblers, POSERS.
But without a little dabbling, music would remain stagnant, genres would go on forever unchanged, or more likely would die out because everything would have been done. The key is two fold, to dabble, or experiment respectfully, and to then incorporate those borrowed sounds into something new, and original, that while heavily indebted to the new sounds, is also firmly rooted in the original sound. It would make no sense for some punk band to just switch gears and come out with a country record (although it has happened), one would question that band's integrity for sure, how serious could they have been about punk if they could just chuck it for something else without a thought? It makes more sense for that band to infuse their punk with some twang, or add some slide guitar to the thrashing howl, and already, even just describing, it sounds way more interesting.
Needless to say, we were WAY skeptical when we heard that there was a Mount Eerie 'black metal' record in the works. We were never that into Mount Eerie, or the Microphones, it took the recent collaboration with Julie Dorion to win us over, and that record remains one of our favorites. But we had been reading about Mount Eerie mainman Phil Elverum discovering Xasthur and getting the black metal bug. Which is fine, that's sort of what this store is all about after all, but there's a difference between just digging black metal, and suddenly adding black metal to your dark bedroom folk. In theory it sounds like an intriguing combination, but we remained skeptical...
Which proved to be unnecessary, cuz wow, this is a strange and beautiful beast of a record. Right from the start, the title track explodes in a squall of thick corrosive buzz, where does a folky learn to kick up a sound like that? And since BM is not his first musical language, the result is truly unique and strange, there are some lurching strange arrangements, and then of course the black metal is peeled back to reveal some soulful crooning, and the hybrid is just as cool as we hoped it might be, a mournful sad boy Sebadoh like croon, buried amidst heaving walls of crumbling buzz, that explode into furious clouds of caustic crunch, only to recede once again, revealing those sad boy vocals again, and some strange plodding drums alongside a moaning minor key main melody, and the cool thing is, Elverum's distinct melodic style, immediately recognizable since we listened to Lost Wisdom so much, is perfectly fused with the buzzy blasts and blackened atmosphere. Really really cool. And that's only the first track.
As mentioned above, the key to successful dabbling is not abandoning your original sound, since theoretically, the music you make, you make because that's the sound you hear in your head, and your heart, and Elverum continues to craft gorgeous brooding dark folk, the second track, is a wheezing organ driven drone, with hushed angelic vocals, and a haunting deeeeep drone outro, which leads right into a gorgeous reverb drenched bit of mist shrouded drift, all spidery guitars, and warm whirring distant keyboards, and more crooned vocals, all subtly sinister and harrowing, but quite beautiful.
Fear not, that opener was not just a one shot. "The Hidden Stone" is another super distorted blast of blackened heaviness, and again, the magic here is that the buzz and fuzz is wrapped around distinctly UN-black metal melodies and song structures, the result sounds like a blackened Mount Eerie, lilting and sorrowful, but simultaneously distorted and blown out. And the record continues to strike the perfect balance between drifting, droney melodiousness and blackened buzzy crush, the best moments being when the two are fused, which thankfully is most of the time.
"The Mouth Of Sky" unleashes some incredibly cool, over saturated hyper distorted guitars and what sounds like processed cymbals, weaving them into a loping dark melody, the result is a super heavy, noise drenched, metallic shoegaze-y psychedelic blow out, the sort of track we wish was about 10 times longer. "(Something)" clocks in at a little over two minutes, and is obviously an experiment, but is one of our favorite tracks, a super strange, heavily panned, crunchy, distorted rhythmic, looped dronescape which gives way to a soft, shimmery, glistening dreamscape. "Lost Wisdom Pt. 2" is another killer blast of black folk buzz, about as frenzied as any of the blackness here gets, but divided into a strange lumbering tempo, which gives the whole song a sort of seasick vibe, lurching and lumbering and so EPIC, before all the distortion is stripped away, leaving just hushed vocals, a warm distant buzz, and some muted distortion, and the immediately recognizable melody from the original "Lost Wisdom", and finally the record finishes off with a long sprawling slow motion drone-folk drift, the bed of which is all warm organ and softly strummed acoustic guitar, interrupted only briefly before a slow motion explosion of super processed cymbal shimmer, leads into a gorgeous, outro of dark dreamy Neil Young-ness, finishing off like a Mount Eerie record should, haunting, resonant, mournful and melancholy.
Not sure what else to say. It should speak volumes that we were so skeptical and so cynical, and were actually not even all that interested in hearing this, and now here we are proclaiming it our Record Of The Week. We stand before you humbled, but happy, with ears full of this strange confusional sound. Which makes sense really, as lots of our favorite metal these days is some sort of hybrid, some strange mix, or twisted take, and while we will always love the primitive blasting raw buzz of true black metal, we'll never get tired of people pushing that sound, one of our FAVORITE sounds, in new, exciting and unlikely directions. And we definitely can't think of anything less likely than indie folk and black metal...
Incredible packaging, the cd a fold out full color oversized accordion style matte finish booklet, with frosty forest images on one side, lyrics and liner notes on the other, the band name and album title in reflective gold metallic ink. The lp similarly deluxe but a fancy gatfold jacket instead.
