Two lengthy remixes of Lustmord tracks from the 2008 album [Other], one by Justin Broadrick (Jesu, Godflesh, etc.) and the other by Lustmord himself. Neither of the sides on this limited 12" are labeled, so it's anybody's guess as to who's responsible for which side. There are dubby electronic breakbeats lacing the signature Lustmord dark ambience on both sides, and neither really give away much either. Both sides incorporate the doomy guitar riffs that were present on the Lustmord tracks, and actually tend to work pretty well with the rhythms, dub production, and dark dark dark ambience swirling about, pretty much sounding a lot like the classic Scorn sound from the mid '90s. We definitely dig!
Multiple Personality Disorder was the first cd and first major release for the seminal post-industrial ensemble Maeror Tri; and yes, the album's title does allude to one line of psychological research into the delineation of (in this case) four personalities that often correspond with acute cases of multiple personality disorder. On one hand, this thematic application does make a parallel to the pseudo-diagnostic aesthetics promoted by SPK and Lustmord in the early '80s; but on the other, Maeror Tri's Stefan Knappe was studying psychology throughout university, and those ideas clearly impacted the way he approached music, smearing dark drones and ethereal melodies out of heavily processed guitars, bass, synths, and other instruments through Maeror Tri to provide an evocative, enveloping, atmospheric, and occasionally threatening form of dark ambience.
The four suites of the album include "The Administrator," "The Anaesthetizer", "The Revenger", and "The Protector," each seeking to encapsulate the metaphoric sounds of those aforementioned personality traits. Hence, the first seeks something of a balance that's neither too dark nor too warm in the shimmering guitar drones and backwards masked swells of monochromatism. The second piece is a opiating, druggy drone track, that has a serpentine, oozing quality in the densely stacked rumbles of low-end distortion and shadowy murk. "The Revenger" is a suitably menacing track of down-pitched vocal snarls and demonic growls that grate against a noisescaping drone backdrop. The finale is downright beautiful certainly looking forward to the post-Maeror Tri project Troum and their luminous, billowing drones sculpted with lilting melodies buried under tons of smeared reverb. Multiple Personality Disorder was always one of the best Maeror Tri albums, and one that succeeded through this conceptual framework (which would have caused lesser artists considerable trouble). The reissue does do away with the original Korm Plastics artwork, which wasn't anything really to write home about; so, if you don't have the original and are keen on anything dark and droning, pick this up!
What might you expect from a band made up of one part Everlovely Lightningheart and one part These Arms Are Snakes? What if we told you some of the guys in Isis, Helms Alee and a few of the other These Arms Are Snakes fellas helped out? You still probably wouldn't imagine the sound of Mamiffer, which does share some elements with those bands, but is definitely its own unique entity.
Martial snares, grinding drones, melancholy piano, a strange sort of murky chamber ensemble, like a fucked up malevolent Rachels, that slips smoothly into some jazzy almost post rock. Moody and moving and dramatic and pretty dang cool. And that's just the first track. The rest of the tracks are all over the place, but held together by the everpresent piano, from glitchy buzzing dronemusic that swells to an incendiary Jesu / Nadja-like roar, piano laced folky slowcore, all moaning cellos, and cinematic piano, again underpinned by fuzzy buzzing drones, Godspeed style slow burn epics, Necks like slow jazz shimmer wrapped around a glowing black rumble, wrapped in a hazy shimmer, Fahey-esque Appalachian guitar strum that gradually slips into something much more distorted and heavy, laced with ethereal female vocals, and a distant whirring hiss, all woven into one epic and moving cinematic songsuite.
While this might not hit the spot for most Isis / These Arms Are Snakes / Helms Alee fans, it will almost for sure please fans of all things moody dramatic post rock, Rachels, Godspeed, Explosions, Mono, Magyar Posse and the like...
Originally released in 2005 as a cd-r limited to a mere 55 copies, and then later as a tape, limited to 144 copies, this killer split FINALLY gets a proper reissue, with new art, and an extra track, thanks to the always kick ass Tour De Garde label.
Ben a while since we've heard from Hungarian horde Marblebog, although they've been doing tons of split releases over the last few years, this one though is with Brazilian black metallers Draugurz, who long time aQ metalheads will probably remember from their raved about A Yell From The Past record.
Marblebog open the proceedings with some swirling drones and creepy black ambience, before introducing some spidery melancholic guitar, a tangled web of crystalline melody, which gives way to a burst of murky lo-fi buzz, a pounding midtempo depressive dirge, all weepy minor key chords and booming basement drums, with some seriously raspy and hellish vox, reminiscent of Hypothermia for sure, that sort of blackened post rock lope, but the band definitely get grim, exploding into blurred blasts of old school blackness, interspersed with strangely melodic stretches of meandery drift and shades of gloom pop. The other Marblebog track is all solo guitar, a distorted woozy blackened riffscape, creepy and solitary and haunting, a strange tension, as if at any point the drums might kick in, or the song might begin proper, but instead, the riff, twists and transforms, a dense sprawl of mournful buzz and trancelike drone. So cool.
Draugurz counter with some ultra raw, primitive black crunch, punkish guitars, stumbling drums, howled distorted vox, the songs sometimes slowing down into woozy warped doomy plods, with tangled minor key leads, sometimes locking into mesmerizing chunks of hypnodrone black metal, like a grim frosty Circle, building to dense blown out crescendos before slipping into more primitive pound.
This cd version tacks on an extra Draugurz track, a creepy ambient synthscape, all majestic percussion shimmering layered mournful buzz, with a super strange tripped out synth flute interlude, all clipped bleats and alien flutters, before returning to the stately march that started the track.
Killer stuff, from both bands, and probably still limited...
We joked in some past reviews that Dutch experimental world music label Terp must be paying our salaries considering how much love we give their releases, but c'mon, you've heard them! You've bought them! LOTS of them! And like us you've played them all to death. Every single one is amazing, so exciting musically, so emotionally resonant, some of the most unique and moving music we've EVER heard. And as if to drive the point home, we have not one, but TWO new releases from Terp on this week's list, one, a gorgeous final live recording from blind Ethiopian vocalist Mohammed 'Jimmy' Mohammed who passed away recently, and this, a wild live blowout from legendary Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria, jamming with Dutch avant rockers The Ex and other like minded friends...
We've been trying to list this forever, but we kept selling out of them in the store before we could get it reviewed and up on the site. Finally though, we have enough, so it's time to once again get your Ethiopian groove on...
But with a twist. The twist being The Ex, everyone's favorite Dutch avant rockers who have always had a thing for world music, so much so that members of the Ex are directly involved in the running of Terp. So it makes sense that given the opportunity, they would jump at the chance to jam with the legendary�Getatchew Mekuria. So here we have it, what sounds like one of the wildest musical parties ever! Oh how we would have killed to be there. Must have been a stone cold blast, but at least we have this here recording to ease our pain...
The record seems to be split right down the middle, half the songs are Ethiopian classics, given a bit of an angular post punk vibe, due in no small part to the fact that the band playing them is in fact the Ex, and the other half, the ones with vocals, sound like Ethiopian flavored Ex songs... We lean more toward the former, but both are pretty great.�
Imagine your favorite Ethiopiques record, but�way more bass heavy, a fuzzy distorted throb, along with jangly angular guitars, all underneath that oh so recognizable sax, wailing and soaring, practically singing, emotional and gorgeous. A few tracks are�groovy and smokey and sultry, sounding like they could have come straight off of Ethiopiques 4, and�even the all time Ethiopian groove classic "Musicawi Silt" here gets a sort of funkgroove makeover, with percussive guitar clang, blooping bass, the song was already funky, but in a different way, the new version is a little more tightly wound, but in a good way, you could maybe call it Ethiopian postpunkgroove or something. And there's also an�amazing solo jam "Tezeta", with Mekuria just making the sax sing, an extension of his being, going from full on skronk, to melancholy drift, oozing emotion and passion. The crowd reaction afterwards says it all. The rest of the record is packed with the above mentioned Ethiopian Ex style jams, which are awesome and wild and are definitely kinetic and ebullient, but the vocals are definitely an acquired taste...�
As with all Terp stuff, tons of photos and extensive liner notes...
There aren't too many bands you can say sound "unlike anything else". San Francisco's own Mi Ami is one of those rare groups. For the past few years they have been setting SF, and more recently a good deal of the rest of the world, on fire with their spastic blend of skronky rhythmic awesomeness. Things are constantly moving, and the band's secret weapon is no doubt drummer Damon Palermo, who pulls double duty in cosmic explorers Jonas Reinhardt (whose Powers Of Audition record we recently listed). Of course, the other two members, guitarist/shrieker Daniel Martin-McCormick and bassist Jacob Long (both former members of legendary Dischord band Black Eyes), are just as essential in contributing to the sonic maelstrom that makes up Mi Ami's sound. Warmly distorted guitars howl and slash relentlessly, while the grooving basslines hold the foundation as the drums carry the songs all over the place without letting up. And then there are Martin-McCormick's feral screams, practically an instrument on their own. They manage to sound totally fun but with a firebeathing delivery that will also make you stop to think about songs like "Native Americans (Born In The U.S.A.)". The band has been expertly building up its sound over the past few releases, and they possess a keen production sense which makes Steal Your Face their strongest effort yet. The sound is frantic and ridiculously fun most of the time, but they also know how to slow things down, like on the mellow yet tense groove of "Dreamers", which rides slow and steady in a haze of dubbed out, feedback laced atmospheres. There is a constant sense of adventure here, and in never limited themselves Mi Ami have arrived at a seriously unique sound, one where amazing whirlwind rhythms and quirky electronics merge perfectly with a punk aesthetic. Ten years ago, this would have been a pretty difficult combination to imagine, but this is 2010 and Mi Ami own this sound. Highly recommended.
One of the catchiest slabs of vinyl we've heard yet from the crazily prolific and pretty much always awesome Captured Tracks camp. With nice undertones of a warbly and disjointed demeanor along the lines of Blank Dogs, but taken in a more sleek and shoegazey direction. It's got this awesome hint of past C86 glory while infusing darker elements into those swirling and seductive hooks. Kind of like The Cure's mid/late '80s sound trimmed of its fat and recorded on a four track, or Ride at their most focused and infectious. What's so exciting about the Minks is that these two songs prove they know how to write totally infectious and melodic songs that evoke that perfect kind of hazy and blurred emotion. It's not just nailing a style and aesthetic, as these two songs are just so damn good, so good that we've been flipping it over and over playing it more times in a row then is probably healthy. But when a band starts making us obsessive we know that's a pretty great sign. We're super excited to hear more, and this is a fucking awesome introduction!
Always a great read, and lots of it, 146 pages this ish. Peter Gabriel is on the cover, also inside you'll find stuff on everyone from the 13th Floor Elevators to Courtney Love to Serge Gainsbourg to Judy Collins to the Eels... plus all the usual reviews, news, etc. And also you get a free compilation cd devoted to "Dream Pop" featuring tracks by Cocteau Twins, Sigur Ros, Panda Bear, Felt, Mercury Rev, Cluster & Eno, Beach House, Galaxie 500, etc. Nice.
A name that pops up quite a bit in discussions about the '80s noise underground and the global network of cassette culture is Gen Ken Montgomery. He and Al Margolis founded Pogus Productions out of Margolis' Sound Of Pig cassette label; and in 1989, he expanded his Generator record store into the first sound art gallery in NYC of the same name. His own work eludes easy description as it centers upon process-oriented sound construction, exploring the cohabitation of cheap electronic gadgetry with objects from every day life. More of an extension of the eccentricities of Fluxus, Montgomery's work involves the process of adding and negating sound through those aforementioned tools; and as such, his work doesn't really fit into the Controlled Bleeding / Haters axis of ear-splitting noise deconstruction.
Inspired by the demolition of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 (where Montgomery was taking up residence at the time), Drilling Holes In The Wall was originally released as a cassette a year later. Montgomery had recorded the material in Conrad Schnitzler's studio in Berlin, initially conceiving the piece as an 8 channel cassette concert with overlapping lurches of cancerous electronics, mechanical exhortations, uncomfortable abstract groans, and power-tool atonality. That 30 minute piece is reprised here on cd, with four additional lengthy tracks, including two more tracks recorded at Schnitzler's place a couple years earlier. The "New Age Machines" suites are much more spacious than "Drilling Holes" with spooky sound-effects laced around sci-fi paranoid atmospheres and plinkety-plonking electronics, almost recreating the computer music aesthetic of the '60s through cheap consumer-grade electronics. Scattered, convoluted, and highly rewarding.
What do you really need to know here? A NEW MOON DUO 7" (their first?), and the inaugural release for new UK label Agitated Records. We know by now that the Moon Duo of Erik "Ripley" Johnson (um, of Wooden Shjips if you haven't already heard...) and Sanae Yamada are unstoppable, and once again, they deliver. "Catch As Catch Can" is the band's most energetic song to date with a super distorted fuzz organ riff and a guitar that sounds like a shimmering sheet of white noise. It's relentless and catchy as hell, sure to stick in your mind for days. The B-side is a cover of a Scientists tune, and in contrast to the A-side, this represents Moon Duo's slower, more groove oriented persona. The stuttered beat is accompanied by heavily saturated fuzz chords and pleasant little synth blips before rising to a crazy and amazing fuzz solo. Bonus points for the cool as fuck magic eye cover art. Yep, this one kills, and at only 1000 copies worldwide, just know it won't be sticking around for long.
1971 strikes again! Proto-metal freaks, rejoice! Connoisseurs of the "early heavy" have reason to be excited about this, the lone album from this raw n' heavy psychedelic blues rock power trio from Denmark, originally released in '71, finally available as a legit cd reissue complete with liner notes and vintage photos in the cd booklet.
Recalling Vincebus Eruptum era Blue Cheer (big time!!) and early, bluesy Black Sabbath a bit too, Moses deliver blown-out, fuzz-bombed, acid-laced, hairy hippy proto-metal of Biblical proportions. Full of stoned vocals, loping riffs, and lots of wailing, wasted acid rock guitar soloing (worthy of Blue Cheer's Leigh Stephens and/or Randy Holden), Changes is highly recommended to anyone whose interest has been piqued by anything we've just mentioned or referenced. There's six songs here, nothing complex, certainly catchy though, what more to say? Each one provides the good vibes of ye olde primitive proto-metal, starting with the thudding blues brutality of title track "Changes" (which has nothing to do with the Black Sabbath piano ballad of the same name, by the way). Later on, "Beginning" gives the drummer some, ready for some DJ to mine for a crude breakbeat. "Skaev" is the only one here sung in Danish, but the lurching, surging riffage requires no translation. We're glad the final track, 7 minute track "Warning" is in English, though, 'cause we're getting a kick out of the lyrics, a story of a "straight" falling in with a turned-on crowd, which include lines like: "...and suddenly the girl gives him two feeling good pills, eat them if you can, a little after in a big discussion, forgotten everything about his wife, moving with the others in a big procession, he shouts out, this is life!" Awesome.
So, anyone into early Blue Cheer, Randy Holden's Population II, and the recently reissued Speed Glue & Shinki from Japan, stuff like that, will dig Moses for sure. Also, having just reviewed a bunch of '70s garage fuzz monsters from Africa, like Ngozi Family and Witch, we're hearing a lot of similarities here (minus the African thing, of course, but not the fuzz and groove). We bet if we said this was from Zambia or Nigeria, people would be freaking! Denmark is less "exotic", but that's not what's important when banging your head to these 1971 sounds.
It was inevitable really. After a handful of 7"s, and a single mostly overlooked and way under appreciated full length that we raved about way back when, these guys are finally getting their due. This new full length on Important should finally position these guys at the head of the class, in the pantheon of modern spacerockers. White Hills, The Heads, Burnt Hills, Gnod, 3 Leafs, Bardo Pond, Gunslingers, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, Plastic Crimewave, Titan, we love em all, but they're all gonna have to step up their games, cuz Mugstar has definitely thrown down the drug rock heart of the sun gauntlet. Sun, Broken is a colossal slab of speaker shredding, in-the-red, druggy, psychedelic, hypnotic Hawkwind channeling space rock bliss. Heavy, lush, dense, mesmerizing, sprawling and expansive, epic and majestic, incredible drumming, tangled guitars, warm whirring organs, complex mathy almost proggy arrangements, songs that lock into looped stretches of near static throb and pulse, before splintering into convoluted freakouts only to explode moments later into black hole supernova psychspace blowouts.
"Technical Knowledge As A Weapon" pretty much sets the stage, a swirling cloud of effects gives way to a tribal chunk of primal hypnorock pound, which lurches into a killer stop start Hammond organ stutter, before launching right back into the fray, the track growing ever more urgent and explosive, peppered with organ breaks, the whole thing dense and repetitive, and so so epic. "Ouroboros" starts out all tangled and mathy, a churning hypnotic almost looped sounding sprawl of metallic prog, which slowly transforms into a sort of muted pulsing minimal space rock, swirling effects surround a static guitar melody, and dense drum flurries, and tripped out vox, before the inevitable psych-skree outro, all tangled and jagged fucking FIERCE.
"Labrador Hatchet" is the record's first breather, a two and a half minute space-y trip out, all thum and throb, through a billowing cloud of heavily effected scrapes and clicks and glitches, which gives way to "Today Is The Wrong Shape", a dead ringer for Finnish hypnorockers Circle at their leanest and meanest, the main riff and the pounding krautrock rhythm, like a super charged way revved up Circle, with a cool, angular proggy breakdown, before yet another crushing bout of extreme spaced out damaged FX heaviness.
Another brief bit of swirly psychedelic effects weirdness leads into the nearly 14 minute closer, "Furklausundbo", which begins with warm melodic swells, before the bassline slips in, then the simple stripped down rhythm, and from there it's a totally mesmerizing slow build, locked and looped, riff and rhythm in perfect sync, while all around, streaks of sound swirl and swoop, unlike the other tracks, there's no explosive climax, no freaked out space rock free for all, instead the songs twists and transforms, slipping into a doomy plod at one point, getting downright twangy at another, the main groove getting doused in clouds of reverbed high end guitar at another, but all the while, the pulse, the beat, stays solid, and unfailing, total mind trancelike hypnotic dronerock mesmer, that eventually dissipates in a blurred smear of layered organ and washed out drones.
Easily the space rock, kraut drone, buzz drug, psych swirl jam of the year!
Here's the first piece of vinyl from one of our favorite drone artists - Brendan Murray. Here, he's working with his Boston neighbors Perispirit, whose earlier recordings seem to lean much more toward the power-noise end of the soundscraping underworld, but actually ends up being a worthy compliment.
Brendan Murray offers an interesting twist upon his electrical orchestrations of uneasy minimalism for his contribution to this split. Here, Murray is working with the voice of Noell Dorsey as the only source material. Not all that sure of the background of Ms. Dorsey, aside from a few avant-improv performances in various spots in Boston; and Murray repurposes her voice within a churning insectoid drone which elegantly descends into a soft hum whose calm is disrupted through signal ruptures of Dorsey's cackling. These witchy vocalizations have all of the bloodcurdling empathy of Diamanda Galas, but Murray is more interested in dissembling that voice into a swarm of disquieting drone.
The Perispirit half of the record begins with a lurching splatter of air-compressed noise, broken up with tiny jittery silences and heavily gated signal processing, only to snap into a shadowy, lonesome ambient passage of lilting guitar tones, which gradually acquire a leaden sheen of heavy, downtuned distortion before cutting back to a rupture of those aerated noises from the first moments of the record. Another razor edit back to silence, and Perispirit makes another ramp of guitar-sourced dronescaping through atonal loops and layers of sound, whose density has the rapturous quality of those Chatham / Branca guitar armies, but coupled with some low-impact noisemongering below. Limited to 250 copies, pressed on off-white vinyl, and certainly recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
FINALLY! It's here, the first full length from NO BALLS. The new project from TWO of the Brainbombs, and it's just like the 7" (which is sadly now out of print): a noisier, more metal, more stripped down, more mesmerizingly hypnotic, even more fucked up and fractured and RAW, nearly instrumental Brainbombs which means this is fucking AMAZING!!!
If you love the Brainbombs, and how could you NOT, then you'll love this. Looped, motorik rhythms pound away relentlessly, through thick clouds of crumbling distortion, the recording super fucked up and in the red, with a super freaked out spatial thing going on, some of the drums seem to be blasting away right up front, while other drums sound off to the side, while the distorted guitars seem to seep into EVERYTHING, the result is head nodding (banging?) and totally dizzying. It's like these guys took unreleased Brainbombs jams and stripped them down to their bare essentials, then dipped them in a boiling cauldron of blown out distortion, hurling them into the void, picking out just a single riff from each track, and looping it, over and over and over, pounding away at that same riff FOREVER, total maximalist minimalism, like some impossible hybrid of Brainbombs, Gore, Black Flag and Lubricated Goat, hypnotic and mesmerizing, filthy and raw, metal AND punk, post everything noise rock, this shit is so fucked up and fierce.
Angular slashing riffage, buried super distorted vocals, but only here and there, some of that old dented BB trumpet bleat pops up every once in a while too, but those elements are practically swallowed whole by the churning black mass of sound that is No Balls, a gloriously sludgey and psychedelic kraut punk doom, mantra like, but also totally rocking, and simultaneously the best and the worst thing that's ever happened to your stereo. And your ears.
Totally ruling, utter sonic destruction, total musical bliss, filthy and fantastically and utterly recommended. Some of us are thinking... RECORD OF THE YEAR. Oh yeah...
The bad news is these are limited to only 300 copies, and once the batch we have is gone, we probably won't be able to get more. Super simple packaging, black on brown jackets, with that bunny image from the 7", plain white inner sleeve, pressed on nice thick vinyl... grab one before they're gone...
What a kick ass slab of fucked up driving and dark yet totally rocking and catchy post-punk sounds! Nothing People offer up one of the most addictive full lengths in recent memory, chock full of pummeling, paranoid and no-wave tilted garage burners! Taking cues from the likes of The Birthday Party and Chrome, these songs have a hint of danger and dystopia without feeling forced or contrived. We also think a lot of bands like A Frames, Simply Saucer and a more seductive and melodic Mayyors. In fact Nothing People are like this awesome blend of a lot of the fucked up warped garage sounds that have come out on labels like Captured Tracks and Sacred Bones, but with a much heavier and meaty old school Amphetamine Reptile vibe that really fuels the fire of these smoking songs.
After two full lengths on No fun, a split with Aidan Baker from Nadja, as well as a handful of limited releases and comp tracks, comes this latest, short sweet burst of beautiful avant drone, from Sarah Lipstate, who besides making beautiful drone music, also plays (or played?) guitar for the group Parts & Labor, and is an accomplished filmmaker. Over the course of her recordings, we've become quite enamored of Noveller's approach to drone music and minimal ambience, and this 7" just continues to demonstrate that she deserves the same sort of hype afforded to groups like Emeralds, considering the similar sonic terrain they explore.
Warm liquid buzz, hazy and otherworldly wrapped around swirling FX and looped processed guitar, deep rumbling tones, shimmering synths, all floating on a wheezing chordal drift, an amorphous cloud of sound, soothing and tranquil and hypnotic. The A-side builds to a bit of a Sunroof! style climax before drifting off into a muted thrum. The B-side adds a loping guitar figure, a mesmerizing looped melody, bathing the sounds in an ethereal glimmer, creating a gorgeous slab of gauzy dreamlike pop ambience. So nice!
In 1986, Steven Stapleton released Automating Vol. 1, filled with some choice selections he had produced for various compilations during his previous eight years of existence as Nurse With Wound. Given just how much amazing material Stapleton produced in the prolific NWW catalog, it's not surprising that his tracks for compilations were pretty damn good even as some of these pieces were drastic remixes and edits of material already on other albums, or they were tracks that didn't quite 'fit' onto one of his already eccentric takes of industrial-psychedelic-concrete constructions by way of classic Surrealism.
So, jump to 2010, and Stapleton has now released Automating Vol. 3 (yes, there was a Volume 2), with equally astounding results again demonstrating his studio magic.
The compilation moves mostly in chronological order, starting with a track from 1984 and traversing almost to the present with a 2008 piece. The earliest number came from a Japanese compilation called Sound Cosmodel, spliced from metallic slashes and the spoken word of a breathy French woman, providing a typically unsettled Nurse collage. The comedy side of NWW comes by way of "Antacid Cocamotive 93" with a funhouse cover of the early '60s hit "Do The Locomotion" that nearly spins off the rails with Diana Rogerson offering her zombified vocals to accompany the warbling silliness of the tune. Another Rogerson duet appears by way of the track "Beetle Crawls Across My Back" recontextualizing the material that she and Stapleton used on one of the Chrystal Belle Scrodd records. Very creepy, dark atmospheres, with almost ritualist percussion buried way down deep upon which Rogerson snarls her nightmarish tale, you guessed it, about insects crawling on her back."Ubu Noir" is a 2006 redux of "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" - the Appalachian standard that grew notorious via Patty Waters' version in the 60s. Here, Stapleton's cybernetic vocals rasp above blackened loops and leviathan plods. But perhaps the most atypical track is the remix that Stapleton did for the death metal band Cadaverous Condition. Given the uncanny success Stapleton had with the SUNNO))) remix a few years back, this shouldn't be too much of a surprise, as he stretches out the thunderous rhythms, adds haunted chorale loops, and smears the chugging riffs into chunks of mutant noise. Yeah, it's a diverse mix of material; but what Nurse With Wound album isn't? And yeah, it's definitely recommended!
So, Gneiss Things made a small batch of discs for this Oneohtrix Point Never album back at the end of 2008, probably not anticipating that OPN would become something of a big deal via his cyborg meditation music. A Pact Between Strangers was the second recording for OPN, predated only by the Betrayed In The Octagon album, which first came out as a cassette on Deception Island and later got released on LP through No Fun. By now, most everything that Dan Lopatin has released as Oneohtrix Point Never has gone out of print; so Gneiss Things wisely decided to make another run down to Kinkos, run off some more color copies of the artwork, and press up another batch of discs. But it will inevitably be a small window of time in which we'll be offering these discs.
That said, A Pact Between Strangers is not all that dissimilar to the long sprawling sci-fi tracks of Betrayed In The Octagon with shimmering synth patterns gliding along those day-glo lazer tones without much use of the sequenced arpeggiations that Lopatin had featured so prominently on Zones Without People or the KGB Man material.
Limited as fuck, and just as recommended.
Uh, can you say Black Sabbath? 'Cause that's about EXACTLY what this new band from San Francisco sounds like, same vocals, same chugging sludgy riffs, same swinging groove, same apocalyptic hippie vibe, even moreso than other bands also on The Church Within label that admittedly have Black Sabbath as a major influence (Lord Vicar, Lord Of The Grave, Seamount...). Courting confusion with the screamo punk band Orchid, they're naturally named after a Black Sabbath song (amusingly, one of those acoustic-y guitar solo numbers Tony Iommi liked to do now and then amidst all the heaviness, "Orchid" appearing on Master Of Reality). You don't get "Fluff" like that here, though, it's all about the heaviness and rockin' doominess. And it IS super heavy, and super Sabbathy, make no mistake. Maybe TOO Sabbathy... They've got mega riffs that Iommi might come asking for back someday, those unmistakable incantatory Ozzyish vocals, and an authentically Sabbathy sounding production, all of which puts 'em in the same camp as Sabbath worshippers Sleep (circa their Holy Mountain album), sHeavy, Iron Man, etc. We're reminded of Trouble too, though they were never quite such copyists. So, not too many points for originality, none at all really, but plenty for verisimilitude. And, we can't help it, we're sorta suckers for this, being the huge Black Sabbath fans we are, this scratches that itch, y'know?
So, this ep from Orchid comprises four songs you could throw on after listening to Vol. 4 or Sabotage and, if you squint your ears a bit, consider hitherto unreleased Black Sabbath "bonus tracks" (which all Sabbath lovers know are in very short supply). Of course we'd be even more impressed with 'em if they'd somehow managed to write truly 100 percent NEW songs as good as Sabbath's, rather than what's closer to pastiche, but that's easier said than done, and it's still a fun listen if you want to hear a shockingly similar Sabbath sound-alike, fun too trying trying to figure out which specific Sabbath album/song each Orchid song is emulating, which isn't too difficult really... "Into The Sun", despite its "Into The Void" like title, reminds us more of "Symptom Of The Universe". "Eastern Woman" has a Technical Ecstasy feel, we think, while "Son Of Misery" sounds more like the first album Sabbath. And "No One Makes A Sound" is primarily in the style of stuff on the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath LP, with a bit of an "Iron Man" interlude in it too. You won't believe it's NOT Sabbath, that should be their slogan.
We will say, though, that we hope they add a little more of their own flavor in the future, 'cause when we saw 'em live the other day (opening for the Pentagram/Ludicra/Slough Feg show) they seemed a bit... well there's no nice way to put it... like posers. They had the '70s look, the vintage gear (well except the bassist wasn't playing a Rickenbacker for some reason, WTF dude, get with the program, what would Geezer think?), it all seemed a bit too calculated, not really "real" enough, and without anything of their OWN in the mix it they might as well have just played actual Sabbath covers, rather than the cleverly rewritten Sabbath songs it appeared they were playing. That said, listening at home, we can't help but enjoy this ep quite a bit, the worshipful spirit of the thing comes across better here somehow! Like we said a while back in our WhiteBuzz review, sometimes you want more of a certain band's sound, and if another band can channel it too, let 'em! And we ALWAYS want more Sabbath... Orchid obviously feel the same way.
By the way, it's funny that we originally found out about these guys 'cause they're on a cool German label that we order from, even though they're a local band!
If you didn't know already, Emeralds synth-advocate John Elliott is one hell of a busy man. Yeah, there's a ton of Emeralds cd-r's and tapes that disappear before we even know about them, and the same goes for a bunch of Elliott's side projects. Outer Space is one of those projects, which has been hailed at times as a solo venture of Elliott's, but sometimes he's wrangling fellow Cleveland jammers to zone out on the electronics with him. Needless to say, this double cassette from Deception Island is the first time we've heard the sounds of Elliott's Outer Space, but it's certainly a very different animal from his Mist project, whose eponymous LP we've managed to stock from time to time. Where the Mist recordings tend toward the airy, effervescent, brighter end of the kosmische electronic spectrum, Outer Space swings toward the darker, grey smears of industrial din through electronic means. Long filter sweeps push the spectral tones and static laced synthesis towards a leaden oblivion via a turgid application of twin Moogs (with Elliott being joined by Jeff Hatfield).
Smartly packaged in a jumbo double cassette case... but be careful with it, we have no idea where you'd be able to find another, if it were to slip out of your hand and smash upon the floor. Super limited to 200 copies, and destined to be out of print shortly after we type these words.
After a protracted legal battle over the name Gorgoroth, various members went their separate ways, with Infernus keeping the Gorgoroth name, and recently releasing a decent slab of black metal under that moniker. Meanwhile former Gorgoroth guitarist King Ov Hell and vocalist Gaahl went on to form the oddly named God Seed, but before the duo could release a record, that band fell apart, resulting in the formation of this group right here, Ov Hell, which finds King (now sans the Ov Hell) teamed up with Dimmu Borgir vocalist Shagrath, along with a pretty serious supporting cast: Frost from Satyricon, Ice Dale of Enslaved and Teloch of Nidingr and 1349! But initial reports had been grim (and not in a good way), with a pretty much across the board dismissal of the new record. So we were prepared for the worst, which could be why we find ourselves digging this so much.
It's not groundbreaking or revolutionary (then again little black metal is), but it's also not terrible, in fact, it's pretty dang good, and not that far removed from what you might expect from the various contributors. Plenty of the record is blasting blackness, all furious beats and insectoid buzzing, and Shagrath's demonic vokills, but the record is surprisingly varied, with some cool warped dirgier numbers, with strange samples, and tangled spidery guitars, some definite grooves, gnarled riffing, epic melodies, all under a seriously glossy modern production, and every song that seems to be on the surface some sort of a throwaway black metal by the numbers jam, has a lot more going on than meets the ear, and there's plenty of awesomely twisted, blasting and brutal tracks that stand up pretty well to any of the bands in Ov Hell's pedigree. It takes a few listens, definitely, and if you were hoping for some sort of return to classic Gorgoroth, you'll probably be disappointed, but every spin we dig this more and more...
After flipping out over PdP's Black Noise record, a gorgeous collection of lush minimal avant techno, that owed as much to minimal pop music, and avant garde soundscapery as it did to Kompakt or Chain Reaction, we became obsessed with tracking down the two earlier albums, Diamond Daze and This Bliss, but unfortunately, both were out of print, and available only for way too much on eBay.
Then whattaya know, a couple months later and both get reissued, and both are just as fantastic as Black Noise.
The template is the same, spares, spare, skeletal, minimal throb and pulse, click and skitter, house music, techno, the template is classic electronic music, but those tropes get all twisted up and remargined as something lush and otherworldly, sexy and organic, This Bliss couldn't be a more appropriate title for this record, as it is truly blissful. Not so much geared toward the dancefloor, this is like after hours chillout music, but imbued with light and warmth and energy and emotion, propulsive, but also washed out, hazy and shimmery, the sounds are prismatic and crystalline, makes sense that this would get reissued via Kompakt, as it's a pretty perfect fit, but unlike some of the Kompakt stuff, that can tend toward the clubby, the sounds on This Bliss remain rooted in sounds more minimal, and more abstract and avant, besides the muted beats, the swooshing ambience, PdP incorporates soaring strings, epic and cinematic, tracks are given the impression of motion, the soundtrack to speeding along some highway in the middle of the night, notes ring out, chiming bell like loops are layered and allowed to drift into the ether.
On the surface, the sound is definitely minimal techno, but it's so well crafted, it ends up revealing itself as so much more on repeated deeper listens. This is the sort of electronic music that could reasonable convert the skeptical, lure in the non believers with it's lustrous nuanced sounds, and gorgeously moody mystery.
TOTALLY RECOMMENDED. We think it's as good as Black Noise, likewise with Diamond Daze, which we'll review soon, and like This Bliss is destined to join the other two records on non stop heavy rotation around these parts...
Killer two sided single track raga drone epic from these masters, dedicated to legendary musician Angus Maclise, this jam is a magnificent mesmerizing sprawl of harmonium, gong, singing bowls and more, all woven and smeared and blurred into a smoldering slow motion raga, that pulses and throbs, seemingly near static, but so alive, overtones everywhere, constantly shifting layers, deep rumbling tones surfacing now and again, slipping from lush and warm and lustrous to delicate and crystalline, from melodic and dense to atonal and alien, like a Reich or Riley piece smoked out and spread way out into some seriously next level ur-drone bliss. The flipside / part 2 adds still more layers, more shifting tones, as well as wordless vocals, moaning and crooning, another layer of hypnotic sound, veering into frenzied chaos, but remaining utterly dreamy and hypnotic.
In lots of reviews a band does something incredible and we always wish they would take that one track, and stretch it out to fill up a whole record, the result being something like this, although in the case of A Stone For Angus Maclise, we find ourselves wishing this sprawling extended lp length raga drone was stretched out even farther, an endless expanse of looped and layered buzz extending forever and ever, into the unknown.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Cool metallic stickered cover with tiny printed insert.
There are very few contemporary jazz ensembles that get us excited, that remind us of the good ol' days, you know, Jazz Actuel, free jazz, REVOLUTIONARY JAZZ, so it should come as no surprise really, that one of the new bands that does do it for us, is made up of players from the old days, still making music as exciting, powerful and emotionally charged as ever.
Revolutionary Ensemble is Leroy Jenkins on violin, Sirone on bass, and Jerome Cooper on drums and a variety of other sound making devices, and Beyond The Boundary Of Time, captures the trio's 2005 final performance, live in Poland, recorded 2 years before Jenkins' death.
We've long been obsessed with Sirone, ever since the Chicago Art Ensemble days, one of the few players who could mesmerize and entrance us with an hour of solo bass, and he gets to do his thing here too, opening the set with 4 plus minutes of scrapes and drones and rumbles, until the song kicks in proper, and violin is such a strange non traditional jazz instrument, but Jenkins makes it sing, so melodic and haunting and mysterious, soaring over the strange rubbery basslines, and the abstract percussive skitter. The opening track gives us chills every time we hear it. The playing so lyrical and emotional, it's definitely jazz, but with elements of classical music, chamber music, intense, but also raw, and loose, and so free. Utterly beautiful. And that's just the first track.
The whole record is magical and mysterious, and sonically unique, Jenkins' violin and Sirone's bass are perfect foils, tangling and sparring, sometimes in perfect harmony, other times exploding into different directions, but the result is always the same, lush, expressive, otherworldly, some alien strain of jazz, that just seems to unfold and flower and splinter into all sorts of different shapes and sounds as the set progresses, seeing this in person must have been incredible, cuz recorded, it's pretty breathtaking.
The set ends with two lengthy improvisations, and the players go for it, the first, an endless avalanche of strange tones and layered skitter, lots of space, but also strange sonic molecules darting to and fro, the band occasionally locking into some serious droney dreaminess, but just as quickly breaking down into near chaos. The final track, lush and abstract, seriously melodic, until what sounds like some strange drum machine kicks in, and the track is transformed into some almost new wave free jazz freakout, fucking AWESOME.
Definitely one of the best performances from one of our favorite, and sadly now defunct, modern free jazz ensembles. Dedicated, as it should be, to the memory of Leroy Jenkins.
Latest chuck of spaced out doom drone from these long time aQ faves, Burners finds the group getting seriously melodic, sort of. Where on past records, RD trafficked more in abstract drones and ambient doom, and psychedelic soundscapery, the three extended tracks here are more slowcore than doomdrone, more space rock that soundscape, a new direction for sure, but without losing the various drone and doom elements that made past records so compelling.
The record opens with a loooooong stretch of moaning ambience, heaving slabs of muted crumbling distortion, before the drums kick in, a simple, skeletal, almost krautrock beat, and then the rest of the band launch into a droney, fuzzed out space rock dirge, tons of reverb and echo and delay, distant tinkling melodies buried in the mix, the vocals processed to the point that they become just another layer of swirling sound, a plodding, hypnorock workout that builds to a blown out, seriously in-the-red finish. The second track dials it back a bit, all tribal drumming and warm whirring organs, more reverbed vox, washed out and ethereal, murky and muddy, a gorgeously blurred bit of slowcore lumber.
The second side is all one track, which begins with keening soft melodies over buzzing layered low end, and epic slowburning dirge, almost like White Hills or the Heads, at 16 rpm, a blown out space rock, slowed waaaaay down and wrapped in layer after layer of haze and grit and buzz. Majestic, melodic, melancholic, the bass thick and billowing and blackened, the guitars howling above it all, total, with a blurred tribal outro, garbled vox, chiming guitars, tons of effects, all drifting beneath a ever shifting layers of sonic murk, total space kraut doom dirge bliss!
Permalight is the fourth full length from this fine Bay Area band. Rogue Wave don't whip out an album a year, but take their time (usually about 2-3 years) crafting their absolutely wonderful heartfelt gems. Always well worth the wait! With each one the band maintains a remarkable consistency, and yet also continues to grow and evolve. This time we noticed a few more electronic elements blipping and bleeping dreamily around their buoyantly wistful pop/rock core of guitar, keyboards, bass and drums. Also, it could just be our ears, but lead singer Zach Rogue's vocal phrasing and intonation seem a bit different than we remember. We can't quite put our finger on just what it is yet (maybe a shortening of vowel enunciation?), but what we can say though is if you swoon over the lovely pop sensitivities of bands such as Death Cab For Cutie, Postal Service or Nada Surf, or perhaps reaching further back Simon And Garfunkel, you just gotta give Rogue Wave a spin. Really good!
One of two new releases on this week's list from the German doom metal label The Church Within, the other being by extremely Sabbath-styled San Francisco doomsters Orchid, this one is also significantly Sabbathy, although in much more of an original way. Their singer definitely sounds a lot like Ozzy, he's the guy from another (amazing) band with a new record we'll hopefully be reviewing soon, called Hour Of 13. Not sure how he ended up in Seamount, or how they work things regarding live performances, since he's American, living in Connecticut, but the rest of the band is in fact German, based in Bavaria. In any case, we like his vocals, which on opener "Out Of The Dark" gives Seamount not only a Sabbath vibe, but maybe more of a solo '80s Ozzy feel, a la Diary Of A Madman or Bark At The Moon! Meanwhile, as long as we're making comparisons, another band Seamount sometimes remind us of is Monster Magnet. Turns out the singer can do a good Wyndorf drawl too, check out the lumbering "Together Wear The Cross". And heck, Monster Magnet meets Ozzy sounds damn good to us! Stoner metal nirvana really.
But it doesn't stop there, 'cause actually the songs we've mentioned are just the first two on the disc, over the course of this 13 track, 75 minute (!) album, Seamount touch upon plenty of other classic, doomic, metallic sounds, from The Obsessed (big time) to the NWOBHM, synthesizing all the above influences into something into what is indeed, all told, a signature "Seamount" sound, super heavy but also totally rockin', full of thick, catchy riffs, twin guitar power, tight playing, gloomy melody, some quiet moody parts, and other occasional surprises. This isn't their first album either, which now we want to hear! Impressive to say the least, as is the packaging, a nice gatefold miniature LP style sleeve, with lovely 28 page booklet, with evocative artwork to illustrate each and every one of the songs.
Yeah, we're bustin' it out super old school. No joke, the three records in this set were released four decades ago! Each remastered album comes packaged in a cardboard sleeve with its original cover art, and all three are bundled together in a slipcover. We only wish they'd included a booklet of some sort, but alas, 'tis not to be. Oh well, since these Sesame Street treasures have never been previously released on cd, this is still a very welcome reissue! Anyhoo, let us stress that while we're for sure having some warm nostalgic fuzzies, we're definitely not on some irony-laden trip here. Although the show was originally meant for preschoolers, anyone who is young at heart will surely find the music delightful. It's silly and playful and educational, but not vacuously happy nor excessively simple. The television show's musical staff featured some totally exceptional musicians and some totally ace hook-writing composers. Of course, the latter was ideal for the purposes of facilitating the learning of mathematics, language skills, social studies, geography, science, art, and of course music, but it also just makes for a super fun listen! Musical styles run the gamut from straight-laced Welk-ish orchestrations to ragtime follies to banjo jamborees to kicky bass'n'tambourine funkiness and beyond.
The first album from 1970 starts with (what else but) the theme song sung by the original cast of kids, then slips right into a meeting of Gordon (the first "Gordon" Matt Robinson), Susan, Big Bird, and the alphabet (note: this song also appears on the second disc for reasons that become readily apparent). The nineteen songs touch on a well rounded variety of youngster focused subjects, and in true '70s album fashion, The Sesame Street Record works just as well as a single start-to-finish listening experience or broken up into individual tunes. It's definitely the most traditionally educational of the three, but inarguably the standout tracks are Oscar The Grouch's "I Love Trash" and Ernie's "Rubber Duckie".
1974's Big Bird Sings (love the cover!) is next, and despite its title it features fourteen songs not just sung by the giant yellow feathered friend, but also duets with Oscar, Snuffleupagus, Ernie, Bert, Cookie Monster and others friends from the neighborhood (including the second "Gordon" Hal Miller). While this record didn't have any obvious hits, it did have a subplot about Big Bird and his poetic endeavors. Think of this one as the Sesame Street sleeper!
1975's Bert & Ernie Sing-Along follows with yes, a sing along! The cast (including "Gordon" #3 Roscoe Orman) all squeeze into the bathroom for the tuneful festivities while Bert is in the tub because as Ernie states "everyone sounds better singing in the bathroom." The twenty one song selections on this album include a mix of Sesame Street originals like "C Is For Cookie", "What's The Name Of That Song?" and "Bats In My Belfry" (yes, it's sung by The Count!), as well as some old standards such as "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" and "Row Your Boat".
With the recent flurry of fine'n'dandy children's albums by contemporary artists such as They Might Be Giants, Jon Langford and Kelly Hogan's Wee Hairy Beasties or Duplex from Vancouver, it's really great to be able to visit (or revisit) some of the O.G. purveyors of the genre. The upstarts come close, but who can hold a candle to the Sesame Street gang?! We have a sneakin' suspicion that these albums were a prime source of inspiration for them as well as for countless other 40-ish (non-kids-related) music artists back in their own formative years. Recommended for young'uns and older'uns too. We can't wait for Volume 2!
PS: And for those of you wondering why we are singling out the Gordons? Well, somewhat puzzlingly, there was never any explanation given for each casting change. Did they think no one would question it? Little Cup sure did!
Most people probably already have an opinion on She & Him before they even hear a note of music. That's fair enough, after all, it would be easy to automatically hate the musical project of doe eyed actress Zooey Deschanel and her collaborator M. Ward. But if you actually take a few minutes to give this a chance, the less cynical of you might be pleasantly surprised, provided you aren't expecting a drastic redefinition of the sonic landscape. She & Him make easygoing, upbeat pop music with lushly orchestrated production (courtesy of Ward, who clearly knows a thing or two about makin' music) and a sunny vibe that will no doubt bring up thoughts of worry free summers and young love. Deschanel's voice is girlish and innocent, never forceful or attempting to wander beyond her range, instead just keeping things sweet and simple, and she certainly has a knack for crafting songs that are catchy, heartwarming, and fun. While there isn't too much stylistic variety on display here, the songs do flow together as a whole quite well, with plenty of acoustic guitar leads, sweet sounding string accompaniment, and lots of dreamy, layered vocals. This should definitely appeal to fans of Camera Obscura, Velocity Girl, and other similar sounding outfits, and hopefully people can overcome whatever hangups they might have and just enjoy this for what it is, a totally likable sweet and sunshiney pop record.
Finally available again, this essential recording from the legendary Skullflower, notable in that it was the last record before that band shut down operations for 7 years, before returning with the Exquisite Fucking Boredom release on tUMULt, which found Skullflower reborn, channeling Hawkwind and proto-metal and creating their own sort of spaced out hypno riff rock.
This Is, finds the band right in between, having slowly been moving away from the industrial thud of previous discs, toward something much more spaced out and hypnotic, definitely reflecting SF mainman Matthew Bower's raga drone explorations in Sunroof!
Record opener "Lounge", sets the tone for the whole record, sounding less like Skullflower, and more like No Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand or Avarus, a sort of meandering free jazz / free noise freakout, with skittery abstract rhythms, pounded piano, squalls of psychedelic wah guitar, but lots of space too, not a heaving mass of crush, more like a spaced out bit of psych rock abstract drift, underneath it all did definitely lurk a slab of dense drone, but here it stays in the background. Which leads directly into the slightly more ominous "Creaky Rigging", which unfurls as a loose hazy raga, long drawn out tones, spidery guitars, clouds of cymbal shimmer, barely there drums, the sound very Eastern, the sound building and building into something much more intense, but retaining that essential raga-drone-buzz core. Super hypnotic and dense, like a way looser Pelt or something, or Flying Saucer Attack minus the songs.
"Glider" ups the ante a little, adding some more traditional drum pound, to it's billowing sheets of white noise guitar and streaks of squealing feedback, anchored by a pounding piano, a bit like The Dead C, working their way through a lightning storm of layered high end skree and clouds of psychedelic fried amp crunch.
The record closes with a nearly 40 minute live jam "The Pirate Ship Of Reality Is Moving Out", which begins all clean guitar jangle, striped with spidery bits of atonal guitar melody, a slow avant raga, that lurches and sways, threatening to coalesce into a proper rock song, but always veering into much more abstract territory, eventually exploding in a frenzy of sawed strings, and howling psychdrone screech, before slipping into something much more spacious and contemplative, spending the next ten minutes or so navigating a field of blackened shimmer and hushed drift, before in the last few minutes, returning to the fiery salvo of the song's climax.
An incredible record of avant psychedelia and abstract raga, definitely worth revisiting, especially for those who may have found Skullflower's recent releases too intense or harsh, and anyone into the above referenced bands, Pelt, The Dead C, Avarus, No Neck, Sunburned Hand, will for sure dig this, as it charts similar sonic territory, while managing to sound distinctly and uniquely like Skullflower.
Damn, it's getting hard to keep up with Captured Tracks. Every time we blink it seems they have put out a new record of some sort. But keeping up pays off, because they have a pretty amazing record when it comes to fucking great releases. Before we even heard The Soft Moon, we heard so many of our customers in the store asking when we were getting it in. And we can see what all the anticipation and excitement was about as this is for sure one of the finest slabs of wax yet to be released on Captured Tracks. Minimal, driving and sensual post punk. Almost like a sexier Moon Duo, as it shares a similar repetitive and drugged out psychedelic post-Suicide/Spacemen 3 aesthetic, but much more sleek and song based. Makes it even cooler that its all the work of one guy from right here in San Francisco. For sure he fits well in the world of folks like Blank Dogs, Cosmetics, and Pearl Harbor. You can hear that he must have a love for everything from Tones On Tail to Suicide to Slowdive as these two songs melt as much as they slowly burn with such pleasing fire. Fucking great!
We kind of think the Summer Cats have gotten a bit overlooked in the awesome rebirth of Slumberland records. We loved their peppy and additive full length and this new 7" is making us hope that more folks get turned on to their totally upbeat, immediate and yes, totally Summer soaked sounds, in the tradition of the glory days of sugary pop fueled indie rock like Superchunk, Velocity Girl, Rocketship, Tiger Trap, Heavenly, Henry's Dress, and Boyracer. And with all the disjointed and warped lo-fi sounds we've been bombarded with lately it sounds so damn cleansing and beyond refreshing to hear some seriously sunhsiney pop. Summercats understand that to play this kind of music it has to be all killer and no filler, and they totally get that. Both these songs immediately jump into their hooks and pop glory and leave no room for wasted space or lingering moments. It's immediate, way catchy and gloriously sunny.
Anyone who somehow doesn't own any Teenage Fanclub records, should probably buy this, a pretty decent introduction to one of the best pop bands ever, but might as well also find copies of A Catholic Education and Bandwagonesque, their first two proper records. Equal parts Big Star / Byrds jangle, and wild psychedelic Neil Young guitars, Teenage Fanclub were born of the same Glasgow scene that would also give us Mogwai among others, and while they shares a proclivity for extended jams, their sound was way more rooted in classic pop, as was evidenced not only by their sound, but their choice of covers (Beatles, Beat Happening, Alex Chilton, Gerry Love). Their star shone pretty brightly during the nineties alt rock explosion, but a surprising number of folks missed out on these guys completely, which is a shame, especially considering all the pop bands of today, who owe much of their sound to these guys whether they know it or not.
Deep Fried Fanclub gathers up all the songs the band recorded during their brief stay on Paperhouse Records in the early nineties and also tacks on their K records single.
The opener "Everything Flows" is pretty much perfect, in a single song, demonstrating what makes them so great, perfect jangle pop, with big crunchy guitars, sweet vocals, incredible melodies, extended jam outro, so impossibly catchy, in a weird way like a way janglier poppier Swervedriver. "God Knows It's True" is another classic, big guitars, big hooks, heavy and poppy. There's some weird demos and some odd covers, their version of the Beatles "Ballad Of John And Yoko" sounds like Redd Kross / Tater Totz, but the K single finishes thing off pretty perfectly, a killer rendition of Alex Chilton's "Free Again", sounding weirdly like a way more rocking Partridge Family, and Beat Happening's "Bad Seed" reimagined as some sort of dirgey garage rock jam with a verse that almost sounds like the Suicidal Tendencies.
Still one of the best pop bands around, this collection is essential for fans, and anyone into heavy hooky pop, these guys could be your new (old) favorite band!
Out of jail, on the cover: Burzum! "The man behind the myth." Also in this issue of the UK's foremost glossy extreme metal magazine: High On Fire, Borknagar, Negura Bunget, Immolation, Wolf, Skeletonwitch, Kerasphorus, and, among other things, part two of their Metalcore special begun last ish, featuring the likes of Converge and Earth Crisis. Plus the usual bonus sampler cd.
While the origins and history of this Tuareg nomadic group are so interesting and epic, these days what truly stands out is the amazing records they make. Their last outing Aman Iman, was a bigtime AQ favorite and this follow up does not disappoint.
On each release, Tinariwen tend to ease into their sound with more flow and a tranquil intensity that's very hard to achieve, yet it comes to them so naturally. Their guitars, vocals, hand claps, and percussion all come together to create such a hypnotizing intensely moving musical experience. For sure following blueprints laid down by the late great Ali Farka Toure but truly finding their own voice and signature sound that rings with so much soul and such undeniable authenticity. Tinariwen are one of the few African bands who have managed to slightly cross over into a larger following without losing one ounce of their integrity or musical vision. They truly have crafted a sound that's instantaneously recognizable as their own and it's so awesome that we've begun to hear their influence on lots of American indie bands like Brightblack Morning Light, The Drift, OM, and Wooden Shjips. The album closes with "Desert Wind" which really captures the desolate feeling of sand blowing across the desert sky, a track that most drone acts would kill to call their own. Once again Tinariwen has made a record that we're sure will stand the test of time. Oh, and this also comes with a rad documentary film about the group on an all regions dvd.
It's been close to a year since we've heard from Irish one man doomdronedirge guitarrorist To Blacken The Pages, we've been pretty obsessed with every record we've heard so far, this being number FIVE, which is also notable for being a collaboration with Korperschwache, an Austin based Skullflower style guitar noise juggernaut, long time faves of some of us here, who somehow has never made it onto the aQ list, even with a ton of strange and limited releases over the last decade, but we'll solve that problem right... Now.
Regardless of the collaboration, a new To Blacken The Pages is always cause for celebration around here, TBTP continually manages to conjure up all sorts of low end fury, from blown out shoegazey drift, to crushing SUNNO)))-like dirgery, to harrowing black ambience, to spaced out kraut drone, more often than not some dizzying mix of all of those. Korperschwache is similarly versatile, leaning toward the noisy and heavy, dipping into extreme harsh noise, but also gorgeous guitardrone ambience, UK industrial style skree, and rhythmic hypnorock riffery. So what this collaboration would actually sound like was pretty much a total mystery.
What we did know, was that this would be some mysterious, dark and heavy shit, which we're happy to report is indeed the case, but there's much more to the gorgeous blackened soundworld these two sonic soundscapers have conjured up here...
Thick swaths or rumbling low end fog underpin delicate fragmented shards of softly reverbed guitar, almost like some sort of SUNNO))) / Scenic mash up, a little Earth twang, a lush, ominous churning driftscape that builds to a full on doomic crush, all hazey and blown out and in the red, before drifting into more slowcore territory, a simple motorik drum machine laced stretch of hypnotic post rock, with swirling melodies and buried in the mix deep vocal croon. Big billowy sheets of black crush splinter into feedback drenched noise rock, the drum machine cranked way up, the guitars corrosive and caustic, like an ultra heavy Loop track gone haywire. The first disc finishes off with two extended tracks of guitar drone, "A New Seat In Hell", and "Shallow", the first muted and murky and minimal, the second exactly the opposite, like recent Skullflower, a speaker shredding onslaught of full on psychedelic guitargrind freakout.
The second disc begins all dreamy and washed out, the drum machine set to lope and lumber, the guitars warm and gauzy, infused with tendril like melodies, the Jesu comparison is certainly apt here, hazy shoegazey and druggy, the perfect lead in to the "Inside The Mariana Trench", an even more spaced out bit of reverb drenched psychedelia, guitars spitting out blinding gouts of keening high end tones, laid over skeletal programmed drums, and a bleary eared swirl of delay and echo and smeared effects, so nice.
"Absent Friends" is a haunting post industrial bit of minimal dronemusic, again peppered with bits of guitar melody, and streaks of mysterious effects, hushed vocals, simple strums, the root sound a lush layered metallic whir, which leads to the final track, the nearly 40 minute "Stranded In The Hertzsprung Crater", a sprawling spacious, abstract epic, which beings thick and distorted, but soon evolves into something much more spare, effected guitars careening over a bleak landscape of hiss and whir and hum, soft arcs of feedback, a haunting barren world of drift and shimmer, a pretty perfect way to end such an epic sonic journey.
Needless to say, totally and utterly recommended, for fans of minimal guitar music, dirges and drones, dark ambience, doom, outsider metal, shoegaze, whatever, this stuff is dark and blissed out, ominous and abstract, dense and heavy and gorgeous.
Will do our best to get more Korperschwache to list, and we'll of course wait patiently for the next To Blacken The Pages, but in the meantime, we'll just stay gloriously lost in the epic and sprawling soundworld of A Way Dark.
Celtic Frost is dead, long live Triptykon! Yes, this is the debut disc from the new project of Celtic Frost and Hellhammer mainman Tom G. Warrior (aka Thomas Gabriel Fischer), a band he formed after the recent implosion of Celtic Frost. It's billed as an "official" continuation of the CF legacy by other means, and it's even got an H.R. Giger cover painting to prove it. Well, that's not all that proves it, just listen! This album contains several songs originally written for CF's aborted followup to their 2006 highly-regarded comeback album Monotheist, and is much in the tradition of that excellent album: an oppressively heavy juggernaut of black/doom metal mastery with avantgarde elements. Parts are speedier than Monotheist, though others trudge with riffage on the slower side... While a long way from the raw primitive dirge of Hellhammer so many years ago (the subject of a lavish new book by Tom G., also reviewed this list), Triptykon IS plenty dirgey, just not so "garagey", with high tech production. And all Celtic Frost and Hellhammer fans will be relieved to know that Tom's trademark death grunts made the transition to Triptykon intact, along with his more gothic and guttural, spoken/sung/chanted vocal style. Furthermore, just like when we saw him on Frost's final US tour, he's still wearing that knit hat pulled down to just over his raccoon-painted eyes...
The nine, mostly long songs on Eparistera Diamones (which means, uh, what's it mean?) are proof that even 28 years after Hellhammer's formation, and 26 after Celtic Frost's, Tom G. is still relevant to today's "extreme metal" scene, matching anyone out there for relentless density, negative expressivity, anti-religious artistry, and sheer heaviness. If we have to cite his previous band(s) as a reference point, that's no surprise. If CF didn't exist, or all we had ever heard was Triptykon, maybe we'd be comparing 'em to Neurosis or something. Heck, the female vox and classical grand piano that appear on track 7 "Myopic Empire", and the similarly moody experimentation that continues onto the entirely un-heavy, atmospheric track 8 "My Pain", is not only worthy of latter-day, trip-hopped Ulver, but in its Teutonic seriousness could be Tarwater or something, yet is followed by the pounding "You shall perish I shall live" metallic affirmation of "The Prolonging" (which also lives up to its title by being almost 20 minutes long!), ending the album leaving nobody wondering about Triptykon's place in the hierarchy of hell.
Reverently packaged with a thick cd booklet that includes not only more sexy/scifi perverted alien H.R. Giger art, but also portraits of each band member by another equally disturbed artist, as well as lyrics to each song AND personal liner notes from Tom G. about each track too. While in these the sometimes self-important, self-absorbed nature of the whole Celtic Frost thing is evident, so is Tom's artistic torment and sincerity (if you're read his autobiography, Are You Morbid?, which we recommend, you know what we mean). Hail!
Eald-Ge-Streon reveals a much different Troum than we're used to. This German duo, long time favorites of folks around here (ever since their pre-Troum outfit Maeror Tri) has always delivered gorgeous guitar driven drone music, dark and haunting and hypnotic, which makes sense since Troum also operate the quite excellent Drone label, which specializes in, yep, you guessed it, drones.
Eald-Ge-Streon is a strange record in that it's a sort of odds and ends collection, various recordings begun years ago, left unfinished, or reimagined for various live performances, many finally finished here for the first time, and while the sound is still essentially dronemusic, it's much less guitar driven, much more ethereal and shoegazey, reminding us of Jesu and Nadja and Lovesliescrushing more than the usual suspects. Which is not a bad thing at all.
Epic, majestic, fuzzy, dreamy, washed out, the first track sounds almost pop ambient, thick gauzy swaths of sound drifting, layers upon layers, totally mesmerizing, ethereal, ephemeral, quite beautiful. The second track takes a looped machinelike rhythm, and builds a doom bliss dirge around it, a sort of post industrial shoegaze, that ends up sounding like some recently unearthed gem, except they never really made music like this. "Eolet" is deep drones, but infused with lots of melody, the sound cinematic, soundtracky, dreamy and pretty, not at all gritty or underground, which again is not at all a bad thing.
The rest of the record slips from motorik rhythm driven doom bliss, to soft billowing dreamlike ambience, to tangled blown out almost new wave sounding post industrial crush, to the 16+ minute closer "Crescere", an epic bit of muted drift, that slowly builds to a blackened heaving slab of pulsing pop ambience, laced with gorgeous psychedelic backwards guitar flutter, processed percussion, distant almost new age melodies, all building to an epic, super emotional climax of metallic buzz and sweet swirling shimmer. Fantastic. Comes housed in a super deluxe gatefold digipak designed by Stephen O'Malley with photos by Seldon Hunt.
And while they last, the compact disc version of Eald-Ge-Streon comes with a bonus disc, featuring a brand new 33 minute track, another gorgeously epic chunk of dronemusic, the first nearly ten minutes, a hushed barely there whisper, before the sound thickens, and dark wisps become haunting melodies, the soft buzz grows more rough and dense, transformed into an extended stretch of crumbling distorted low end drift, before the surprisingly melodic, washed out dreamy outro.
Latest in the ongoing series of super limited 3" cd-r's, paying musical tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. Past installments have come courtesy of UK avant black metaller Caina, Appalachian heathen metal horde Harvist, black noise occultists LVTHN, Kentucky one man USBM outfit Sapthuran, blackened French metal combo Smohalla, legendary Italian dark metallers Frostmoon Eclipse, aQ faves, Texan black metal Lovecraft worshipper Brown Jenkins, Frostmoon Eclipse side project Stroszek, and now, Italy's The True Endless, whose split with Angmar was a big favorite around here (we still have a few copies, just ask), and whose sound we described as buzzing black Mayhem worship, and very little has changed, the guitars buzz maniacally, the drums pound relentlessly, the songs are epic and majestic, blazing and frenzied, but often slowing down into churning chugging stretches of lumbering doom, before exploding back into another burst of frenetic Norwegian style classic blackness.
The True Endless here sound a bit like some weird hybrid of Khold and newer Funeral Mist, with midtempo almost-grooves, killer stuttery start stop arrangements, some super intense and epically anguished guttural vokills, woozy melodic guitar melodies, all wrapped in a gauzy blurred black buzz production, and surrounded on all sides by furious bouts of blown out blasting blackness. Awesome.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, we got 20, and can't get more, so grab one quick, cuz these always disappear right quick. Packaged in a slim jewel case, with a 4 panel booklet and a thick card insert with a photo of Lovecraft on one side and an essay on the other. And it's always worth mentioning, that TTE bassplayer Soulfucker, is still quite possibly the foxiest babe in black metal...
This longtime AQ favorite is finally available again!
Recorded in 1970 and '71 at his countryside home outside of Hong Kong, the elderly (but spry) Lo Ka Ping will captivate you here with his performances on the qin, a type of ancient Chinese seven-stringed zither with a soft, subdued sound. Confucius' favorite instrument, the sound and style of the qin in the hands of Lo Ka Ping really evokes both Buddhist music and the blues. In his sparse, soulful performance on these ten tracks (four of Ping's own composition and six traditional numbers) you'll hear echoes of the the likes of Son House and Blind Willie Johnson - you could almost imagine this is a lost backporch recording by an unknown gospelish slide guitarist, playing a mysterious, alien blues. Parallels to Indian classical music can be heard as well, to which there is a link to the qin tradition in fact as well as in spirit.
This cd is rounded out with a couple of older, crustier recordings circa 1946-48 by two other "Chinese Masters of the Guqin", Zheng Yingsun and Xu Yuan Bay, who alongside Lo Ka Ping make this a lovely, raw, spiritually resonant document indeed.
First off, anyone who bought the Minimal Wave Tapes compilation, another recent aQ Record Of The Week, is most definitely gonna want this too, another killer collection of, like the title says, Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics, a perfect part two, or companion, and fear not, the only overlap is one single band, who do appear on both comps, but with different tracks, so this is essentially an all new (old) collection of vintage coldwave dark synth sonics, which, if you're anything like us, and we're beginning to think you are, you can't get enough of.
It's pretty strange how cold / dark / new / synth wave have made such a huge comeback, bands like the Cure, Depeche Mode, Human League, Front 242, Soft Cell, are now cited as huge influences on a new breed of dark synth driven combos. Also funny considering something similar happened 8 or 9 years ago, when a rash of bands were exploring similar territory: Adult., The Faint, Fischerspooner, Erase Errata, etc. But music is definitely cyclical, and as a new generation discovers the treasures of the past, they start bands mining that past, and revist that past via reissues. The most recent issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian offers a mini primer on the difference between the various waves: darkwave was early industrial and goth rock, cold wave the French version of darkwave (as we first discovered on the amazing So Young But So Cold comp), Synth wave was like cold wave but more sparse and moody, and new wave, well everyone should know what that is by now.
Lately, it seems most folks make little distinction between the various waves, instead lumping them all together as cold wave, or minimal wave or whatever, since regardless of the variations, they definitely all share a similar sound and vibe, and speaking for ourselves at least, it's a sound we dig big time. But then most of us never really stopped digging that stuff to begin with. Lots of former goths here for sure. And every time we discovered a band exploring the sounds we dug so much back in the day, we went way out of our way to gush about them big time, like one of our 2009 Records Of The Week, from Soror Dolorosa, a black metal side project that sounded like some lost Joy Division jam, or rare cold wave antiquity, and more recently records by groups like Blank Dogs, who may not have grown up listening to this music, but if they didn't then must have had a super hip older brother.
But as was demonstrated on the Minimal Wave collection, there were tons of bands outside of the obvious above mentioned references, who were just as cool, if not cooler, the underground of a scene that for a while was very mainstream, on the Minimal Waves comp, it was Crash Course In Science, Tara Cross, Das Kabinette, Ohama, Das Ding, Martin Dupont, Deux, Bene Gessert, Turquoise Days, and others, a few of the more wave-informed folks here knew many of those bands, but to the rest of us, it was a revelation. So much amazing music, so many new groups. On this Cold Waves collection, it's Absolute Body Control, Ruth, The Neon Judgement, Stereo, The Vyllies, Days Of Sorrow, Land Of Giants, End Of Data, Eleven Pond, Ausgang Verboten, Nine Circles and more more more. And like before, a few groups we're familiar with, but a whole bunch of mysterious new names, all of which contribute killer tracks, and most definitely have us hankering for more from all of them.
The obvious ones, Ruth of course, a long time aQ favorite, whose track here also appeared on the out of print So Young But So Cold, sort of Kraftwerk meets Gary Numan, Linear Movement, who also had a track on the Minimal Wave comp, whose track here is awesome, catchy and swirly, with super hypnotic synth melodies and awesome vocals, groovy bass and that clipped new wave drum machine rhythm, Absolute Body Control, who recently received the deluxe Vinyl On Demand boxset treatment, with some awesomely gothy gloom pop, in fact, this collection sounds WAY poppier than the Minimal Wave collection, so much so, that almost all of these bands sound like they should have been right up there with Depeche Mode and the Human League.
Needless to say, this is another fantastic comp, with some incredible songs, and already has us hankering for volume 2!
Nice thick gatefold sleeve, tons of liner notes, and pix, also comes with a download card. CD coming soon too... ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Finally! Another installment in the incredible Ethiopiques series, and while many of the collections focused on a particular artist, this latest gathers up a whole bunch of classic tracks from, as the title suggests, the golden years of Ethiopian Music.
And the second you push play you'll be transported, and in fact, the sounds you hear may sound strangely familiar, as legendary Ethiopian vocalist Seyfou Yohannes croons over a track we've definitely heard before, on Ethiopiques 2 we think, but it hardly matters, Yohannes' vocals transform the song completely, still smokey and sexy, but reimagined and reinterpreted. And fantastic!
According to the liner notes, which are as always, copious and incredibly well researched, the bulk of Ethiopian records were produced in a single 10 year period, 500 singles, 30 lps, all produced between 1969 and 1978, of those, the tiny Amha label released 103 two song 45's and a dozen lps, between '69 and '75, most of which have been delved into heavily for the Ethiopiques series, and now with volume 24, nearly all of those recordings have been reissued.
But here's one more chance to luxuriate in these magical sounds from the Amha label, before the Ethiopiques series delves into other labels, and digs up more lost gems.
These tracks are all incredible, of course, most of the names are new to us, no Mahmoud Ahmed, no Getatchew Mekurya, a couple tracks from Mulatu Astatke, but more folks like Syfou Yohannes, Ayalew Mesfin, Getatchew Kassa, Tamrat Molla, the sound though is so distinctly Ethiopian, warm languid horns, moody minor key piano, simple shuffling rhythms. and of course the vocals, lush crooning, the perfect compliment to the music's dark sultry mystery. There seem to be two distinct styles represented, the soulful funky slow burning grooves, haunting, late night, sexy, and the more festive and funky, a sort of Ethiopian reinterpretation of American rhythm and blues, with soaring sunshiney melodies, acoustic guitars, and more more horns, both are irresistible, and anyone who has even been dabbling in this series, will dig this big time. Just perfect for the impending warm summer days, and lazy summer nights...
First proper lp release from aQ pal, 78 collector, and curator of the awesome Excavated Shellac blog, Jonathan Ward, appropriately enough on Parlortone, "The Phonographic Arm And Limited Edition Leg" of longtime favorite reissue label Dust-To-Digital. And it's a doozy, before we get into it, anyone who buys everything on Mississippi is gonna want one of these, if you loved the Black Mirror collection, or the Victrola Favorites, for anyone into world music, into lost gems, old sonic obscurities, this is about as good as it gets, the song selection, the curation, the sound, the detailed liner notes, utterly fantastic, and sonically breathtaking. But of course we would have expected nothing less.
For those not familiar with it, Excavated Shellac is a blog dedicated to "78rpm recordings of folkloric and vernacular music from around the world", and besides having an incredible collection, Ward also is a fantastic write, who writes extensively about each record he posts (almost all unavailable anywhere else in any format), detailing the recording, the style of music, the history, a musical lesson in every post, and the music, well needless to say, it's easy to get lost and subsequently obsessed.
So Excavated Shellac: Strings, is an analog extension of the ES blog, with all the things we love about the blog intact. Of course there's the music, impeccably chosen, deftly cleaned up, and perfectly sequenced, the writing, informative and funny, educated and informed, about the record, the project, and each track and artist, and of course the object itself, beautifully laid out, pressed on thick vinyl, lots of amazing archival photos, so great.
This first volume focuses on string instruments from around the world, Armenia, India, Bolivia, Congo, Vietnam, Georgia, Iran, Turkey, Uganda, Lebanon, Japan, Norway, Croatia and Paraguay. Every song a gem, haunting solos on Middle Eastern lutes, tangled frantic, droney sitar like buzz from India, playful festive dance music from Bolivia played on small guitars fashioned from gourds, gorgeous acoustic guitar music, lush and melodic, with soulful call and response vocals, from Congo, home recorded duets on 2 string fiddle and 'moon guitar' from Vietnam, solo violin from Iran, traditional folk music from Georgia, we could go on and on and on and on. But you know already if you need this, and it seems likely you probably do. We had been hearing rumblings about a Jon Ward / Dust-To-Digital project in the works, and had been anxiously awaiting it ever since. Now that we're playing this to death, we find ourselves already looking forward to future volumes. So incredible, and so totally recommended.
Beautifully printed matte finish sleeve, heavy vinyl, with a printed cardstock 4 page insert, with liner notes and photos and more!
You know music is beyond powerful and soulful when it can be all about faith in something you don't personally believe in, yet you can't stop listening to it! The sentiment, passion and energy put into the music transcends any one specific belief and becomes more about the music and its ability to truly tap into raw spirit and deep conviction.
Such is the case for the amazing gospel jams compiled once again by the always dependable Numero Group, in their second volume of gospel burners that we think might even outshine their first installment from a few years back. These are the reeeeal deal, unfiltered sounds that were blasting in black churches in the 1960's. Informed by the soul and deep funk of popular secular music, folks took that inspiration into their churches to create sweaty, impassioned deep grooved fiery and catchy songs that spoke of their deep running spirituality and beliefs. And it's just impossible not to get swept up in the spirit of these songs. Musically it's just some of the most solid, groove filled and exquisitely performed soul music we've ever heard. The equivalent of getting to hear Aretha Franklin or James Brown let it all hang out in the house of the Lord. Most of the tracks here come from Chicago, whose long history of spiritual soul is reaffirmed once again.
While most of us here are everything from Atheists to Buddhists to Jewish to Quaker to Agnostic to worshipers of nature and sometimes even Satan (got to represent out black metal tendencies) we all can't help but testify to the righteous sounds in this collection. For the duration of the eighteen songs on Good God! Born Again Funk, we are all devout believers! Vinyl version coming in a few weeks, by the way...
Here's to persistence! Eric Blevins of Suitcase Records began curating Paper & Plastic, a compilation from the global experimental-noise-collage-drone-n-destroy underground back in 1991, and thought that he was coming to a conclusion by 1998 when he had organized an installation / happening / performance thing in Atlanta with Achim Wollscheid, Yeast Culture, TAC, and Blevins' own a4 project that was to coincide with the release of this 2cd set. Unfortunately, the mastering was done at the wrong speed (remember DATs?) and the project was shelved for well over a decade. Whatever the reason Blevins had for the long delay, it remains unstated. Surely the artwork that Abo of Yeast Culture provided must have caused some of that delay, which is pretty ridiculous / stupid / awesome with its numerous hand-painted, silkscreened, and hand-stamped inserts and envelopes stuffed in the oversized DVD clamshell (which is also screened and painted); but would it be realistic to say this would take a whole decade? Is this why Abo started up the Incubator press once again (remember those Yeast Culture and Small Cruel Party cassette reissues from early in 2010)? Who knows? Ultimately, this is just another long-winded introduction to inform you that the contents within are fucking great.
So, there's Small Cruel Party, Yeast Culture, Sudden Infant, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Emil Beaulieau, Native X (supposedly featuring the Hafler Trio's Andrew McKenzie), Inzekt, TAC, a4, Kapotte Muziek, Chop Shop, Agog, Ios Smolders, and what noise compilation wouldn't be complete without Merzbow.
The material is split between the relatively droned-out, more spatialized Paper disc and the volatile, jump-cut frenzy of the Plastic disc. Los Angeles home-taper Agog offers a NWW-styled collage of cut-ups from found object manipulation that slides nicely into the damp field recording of subterranean drips from Ios Smolders. Blevins' a4 track is a minor-masterpiece with a sustained drone of hazardous environmental rumbling girding a patient scrabbling of various objects. Very simple, but very compelling. Such a strategy had been perfected by Small Cruel Party, who turns in a recording of crunched textures that sounds like a macro-recording of and army of ants crawling over a pile of safety glass, while deep echoing booms within some huge concrete structure resonate underneath. The Yeast Culture meditation on industrial wastelands settles upon crusty flutes occasionally popping above a mechanical grind and accreting dinscapes. Chop Shop's corroded drones of noxious low-end bursting into ferric noise completes the first disc in exemplary fashion.
On the Plastic disc, Achim Wollscheid offers 10 miniature "brakes" most being just a couple seconds long. These shortened bursts of rasping noises, serve to further slice and decentralize the listening experience of the already abraded, punctured, infernal noises that come by way of numerous tape-cut ups, turntable abuse, Dada sound poetry, vocal screaming, electrical ruptures, shortwave static, distortion pedals, and generalized noise-junk from Emil Beaulieu, Merzbow, the Schimpfluch members, Kapotte Muziek, and the like. Blevins should be commended for curating such a fine noise album out of so many different artists, as it's virtually impossible to discern when the tracks begin and end. Seamlessly cut-up noise is definitely a contradiction, but definitely a compliment!
Somehow we slept on reviewing this series when the Yazoo label began issuing them on cd back in the mid-nineties (the cds are still available by the way). It wasn't that we didn't love them, of course we did! But we started carrying them way before our website was in its current form, and they just never made the transition in the usual hectic shuffle of putting together these bi-weekly new arrival lists. Besides, this series really didn't need our help to move them. They always looked very cool and mysterious, promising the discovery of some very far out and lost old world of music that folks here were naturally drawn to while shopping for cult metal, field recordings or obscure psych.
But now that Mississippi, Sublime Frequencies, Honest Jon's, Parlortone, and other like-minded revival labels have spearheded a much renewed interest in obscure early ethnographic recordings on vinyl, it was only a matter of time that this highly influential series would make the transition to wax, here's the first volume, and it's an amazing and beautiful package. Like The Black Mirror, String of Pearls, Mata La Pena, and Sprigs of Time compilations, this is an eclectic but choice collection of music from many different regions and covering many styles and traditions, starting in Nigeria with a church choir and pump organ, and working through Sardinia, Russia, Ceylon, Rajahstan, Cuba, Romania, Vietnam, Macedonia, Tahiti, Morocco, South Africa, Japan, India, the Basque country, Sweden, Poland, Jamaica, Abyssinia, Andalucia, Visayan Islands, and finally leaving us on Fiji with a lonely love song sung by school girls. Sigh.
Whoo-hoo! Awesome to have this on dvd at long last, in a nice, complete "collector's edition" with various bonus features. One of the most exciting rock/R&B audio-visual documents ever, The Teenage Awards Music International Show live concert film was originally screened in theaters in 1964, and has never been on dvd before.
It features James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones, Jan and Dean, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Supremes, Lesley Gore, and more... including, in footage cut from most previous versions of this film, the Beach Boys. Watch Mick Jagger trying to cop James Brown's moves, watch James Brown do stuff that Mick could never do in a million years, watch garage band The Barbarians bash out their mop topped pop backed by a drummer with a hook for a hand, it's all here... an all time classic, now you can take in the whole thing rather than just watching individual clips on YouTube!
Restored and remastered. Bonus features include director's commentary, the original trailer with commentary from John Landis, and radio spots.
When seeing this record, most people will assume it's a killer new comp from Mississippi. In fact, it is a killer new comp, only from the Sutro Park label, which gave us those amazing Sandy Bull lp reissues a while back. Wolf's At The Door features 12 field recordings from the late '60s and early '70s, when a 19 year old Swede named Bengt Olsson decided to travel through the depths of the American South in search of the authentic sounds presented here. All of the artists on this record are unknown to us, and as the liner notes point out, Olsson's odyssey was marked by his introduction to many of Memphis' older, more obscure bluesmen, and many of the performers' stories remain unknown. As far as we can tell these recordings were unreleased before this, and the material offers a stark, powerful glimpse into the lives of these performers. The edges are rough and raw, but the fidelity is surprisingly clear. The songs here are even more interesting when you take into account the time in which they were recorded, as they seem completely oblivious to the innovations that had been rapidly shaping the music industry for better and/or worse. What you have here are some real sounds representative of a culture that managed to avoid all that, and the results are quite powerful. Recommended stuff which will no doubt appeal to fans of labels like the aforementioned Mississippi, Monk, and the like.
Two awesome non album tracks from the always great Vivian Girls. This slab of wax finds them embracing wall of sound girl group glory in full force. Not the more rocking side that shows up in many of their songs, instead this is the wonderful woozy and warm side of the band. The A-side could be some lost Phil Spector treasure and the B-side might even steal the show. It's a cover of "He's Gone" by '50s girl group The Chantels, which they perform with help from their buddy Kyle Thomas (Happy Birthday, Feathers, Witch, King Tuff) playing guitar, and we gotta say they totally kill it, keeping it as warm and intoxicating as the original. One of those 7"s that really makes you wish you could put a quarter in the jukebox as you sit at the counter of a diner sipping on your milkshake and enjoying the simple pleasures in life. So awesome!
Some of you aQ folk-headz out there might remember Rick Tomlinson's first project Voice of the Seven Woods. Well Tomlinson is back with a slightly new band name and a drastically different sound. Voice of the Seven Thunders have plugged into some big amps and expanded into a fiery, heavy rocking trio. A huge shift from the quiet woodland finger-picking of Tomlinson's old outfit, the addition of a bassist and drummer bring the project to a whole new level of pretty straight-shootin' rock. Bluesy baselines plod on and on into a Blue Cheer-type groove, layers of strummed guitar add to the bed of fuzz that shimmer below soaring, neverending solos... Really, the ripping solos never end, not sure if that's a good or bad thing. The trio touch on some more ethnic or Eastern sounding territory, we're hearing a touch of North African flair, think Sublime Frequencies meets Sylvester Anfang.� We love the few, nice quiet moments of acoustic reflection that break up the heavy rockin' momentum of most of the tracks. "Cylinders", one of the quieter pieces, opens with distant flute and slowly rising synth wash, only to slowly crescendo into a strummy, cosmic commune jam. The album comes to a close with "Disappearances", a conventional classic rock sounding jammer, complete with proper lyrics and vocal harmonies.�Though the band have made quite a drastic aesthetic shift, we think fans of VOT7W will be just as enthusiastic about VOT7T, I mean who can really deny some heavy, old fashion blown out psychedelic rock n' roll?
