This has just about everything we love in an electronica record. It's got enough melody and rolling rhythms to allow for serious high rotation listening but its the nuances and unique take on an almost kraut-techno like vibe that has made us fall so hard for Holkham Drones. This is turning out to be one of the most unique electronica records we've heard in a long time. As it's not just an easy fit into a certain specific all the rage sub-genre, but instead it really is the essence of what we thought IDM was supposed to be all about. Music that pulls from minimalism and cosmic kraut sounds yet also is so full of fractured color and a melting Technicolor warmth. Like Gui Boratto being remixed by Arp or Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never paired with Four Tet and given the task of reimagining tracks from Cluster's Zuckerzeit album. This is the kind of record that will draw in both fans of minimal techno and left-field electronica as much as it will fans of hypnogogic pop and washed out psychedelic weirdness. We've been blasting this so much in the store and in our headphones as it really is one of those records that is perfect for the imaginary warped and woozy dancefloor we have in our heads. So great!
More than ten years old now, this cool collaboration finally gets released on vinyl!!
When this was originally recorded, the Powerbook improv ensemble was a relatively new music performance hybridization that was having trouble finding any sort of tangible success in attempting to bring the fluidity of free-jazz improvisation to the digital clickery of live hard disc editing. Recorded results we'd heard had been mostly boring, self-important collages of inconsequential noodling from musicians who seemed more interested in being loud or noisy or simply upstaging their companions rather than in pure creative collaboration. While the cavalier Christian Fennesz and the studious Peter Rehberg have been involved in a few of the more egregious failures of this genre, this, their collaboration with Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, and Paul "Pimmon" Gough perhaps still ranks as one of the best powerbook ensemble recordings. The keys to the success for "Afternoon Tea" are the high degree of restraint from each individual collaborator and the indecipherability betwixt the guitars of Ambarchi & Rowe and the computer trickery of the rest. Slow rhythmic creaks, subtle drones, and hacked musique concrete elements form and dissolve various structures, with a lot of room for each of the sounds to breathe. While this clocks in at almost 50 minutes, you really want it to go on for much longer. Nice.
The New York duo Amman / Josh (aka Josh Varnedore and Amman Abbasi) have composed these five soundscapes from the kind of richly resonant tones you wish would ring on endlessly.
These compositions took shape in New York, Arkansas and... Iceland! There definitely is a distinct sound to music created in the latter locale, and Places most certainly is quite reminiscent to the music of artists such as Sigur Ros and Mum who call that country home. Totally shimmering and mesmerizing. The third track "Leawood" will have you totally drifting off in daydreaminess. So it may come as a brief sad moment when it ends somewhat abruptly instead of gently fading out like the other tracks do. Fortunately the fourth number "Bayshore" will quickly sweep you away once more. This ep's 20 minute running time is all to fleeting, but fortunately Amman / Josh do have a full length in the works as we write this! By the way, you might recognize one fellow in this pair from his other lovely Dynamophone label release - The Abbasi Brothers' Something Like Nostalgia. As with that album, Places is steeped in the teachings of ambient masters Eno and Glass. Very nice, indeed!
Another fantastic bit of electronic dronescaping, this one from the mysteriously monikered Arkhonia, which is apparently one half of a UK collaborative project called even more mysteriously, jz-arkh. We couldn't discover much else about these guys (or this guy) but it hardly matters, this is some gorgeous and heady deep listening, melding pop ambient shimmer, with Eno like drift, long form LaMonte Young style sonic exploration and hushed modern minimalism. Long stretches of muted buzz and smeared abstract melody, all gauzy and hazy and dreamlike, notes are stretched out and laid atop one another, creating, gently undulating expanses of murmured whir and crystalline hum. Soft squalls of hissing white noise are smoothed out into the dreamy white noise of waves on a beach, all blurred into a slowly shifting cloud of pixelated grey wash, tinkling melodies ring out and sunk beneath warm sonic swells, chopped and looped subtly into something approaching a rhythm, but dissipating before achieving any sort of momentum, instead left to drift and float and hover. Some moments definitely remind us of the gorgeous aquatic sounding digital errata of Oval, all warped and woozy overlapping skippings and skitterings, while others are pure warm sound, peppered with bursts of what sound like strings or chords, suspended in some sort of sonic ether.
The closing song suite creates a swirling dramatic cloud of almost sci-fi sounding tension, with deep swells of processed organs wrapped in a hazy psychedelic halo of smeared soft focus gauze, before finishing off with another sculpted white noise soundscape, the hiss and static creating indistinct shapes and textures, obfuscating a creeping low end whir, which eventually overtakes the white noise, unfurling to the finish with a Raster-Noton like field of minimal click and hum. Awesome.
The second full length release from Arp (aka Alexis Georgopolous from Q+A and The Alps), not including the very fine collaboration with Anthony Moore released earlier this year, The Soft Wave expounds and expands upon his stellar debut, In Light. The kosmiche synth textures from that release that harkened back to Cluster and Harmonia are still evident, but the compositions are stronger and more complex. The frame of reference has widened and one can hear touches of the instrumental works of John Cale and David Bowie as well as bits of fourth world Brian Eno and Debussy. But Arp uses these familiar qualities as departure points into his own refined world of space and sound that he builds upon with a dynamic sense of warmth, pattern and texture. There's even one vocal track, "From A Balcony Overlooking The Sea" that alludes to a progression yet to come. We're looking forward to it!
The return of East Coast USBM duo Ash Pool featuring Dominick Fernow of Prurient, which is what usually has people expecting something WAY noisier, along the lines of WOLD or Nekrasov or something, a sort of white noise infused with elements of blackness and buzz, but in fact the sound of Ash Pool is way more "poppy" than you might expect, aligning itself with the raw black energy of groups like Akitsa. Ash Pool definitely used to traffic in ultra raw, primitive BM, but on For Which He Plies The Lash, things seem to have taken a turn, with a more polished sound and some distinctly more accomplished songwriting, that includes some awesomely off kilter riffing, and lots of what the fuck weirdness.
Take the opening track "Holocaust Temple", which begins with a killer start/stop lurch, before exploding into full on manic buzz frenzy, but then there's some crooned clean vocals, that remind us of Borknagar, a weird juxtaposition for sure, but it works, it's just totally changes the vibe, as the music and the harsh vox are relentless and almost looped sounding, pounding away. The song shifts gears, and veers into a seriously poppy stretch, with some awesome guitar playing, and crazy catchy melodies, sounding a bit like In Flames gone black metal, and then suddenly, the song grinds to a halt, and they kick out this crazy folky / polka riff, and the songs becomes almost jaunty, the vocals even more maniacal, the bass bloopy and woozy, the whole song a sort of black waltz, before lurching into the home stretch with a blast of venomous black fury. Holy shit, so awesome, and so fucking weird.
And the rest of the record follows suit. "A Sacrifice Consumed By Fire" begins with a hysterical shriek before slipping into a warped doomy lumber, that eventually becomes more and more jagged, and furiously blastingly obtuse. "Big Bang Black Metal" is downright black 'n' roll, with a super rocking groove, and monstrous grunted vox, as well as a tripped out bridge, all Eastern sounding, with a weird temp change and spidery melody.
The whole record is one awesome musical mindfuck, equal parts troo grim heaviness, warped poppiness, sludge doom driven chug, and out there what the fuck, but all deftly woven into one seriously cohesive chunk of fucked up blackness.
And as if to just seal the deal, the record closes with quite the confusional two-fer, the downtuned shriek laden seasick creep of "Moon Rose Over Sobibor", slipping from doomic lumber, to stuttery chug and back again, before finishing off with the oddly titled "On The Rings Of Saturn Adam And Eve Conceive Cain" which is mostly a filthy slab of midtempo grimness, oh except for that one part where the song cuts out suddenly, leaving a weird, swirly sci-fi organ driven pound, which then underpins the next stretch of soaring majestic riffage, before the band finally leap back into the fray, finishing off with a stretch of frantic frenzied freaked out heaviness.
Fucking awesome stuff. And definitely not where we expected Ash Pool to head next, but these guys just keep getting better and better, and we're pretty sure For Which He Plies The Lash is probably gonna be a contender for black metal record of the year...
Another awesome chunk of retro pop weirdness from Olde English Spelling Bee, this one from the truly baffling Autre Ne Veut. Unlike the rest of the current crop of John Hughes worshipping garage pop new wave revisionists, who mix their retro leanings with modern bits of rocking indie crunch or hypnogogic swirl, the music of ANV is totally removed from any modern musical movement. It definitely has that eighties soundtrack vibe, a weird minimal synth pop, with keening falsetto vox, woozy synth bass, stumbling skeletal rhythms, cheesy electronic drums, super dramatic melodies, reminding us more of Terence Trent D'Arby, Erasure, Prefab Sprout, Scritti Politti, groups like that, and it almost sounds like every track here is from a musical montage from a cheesy eighties straight to video teen movie, the kind you only see at 4am in a hotel in some godforsaken town, where everything closes at 9pm, so you're forced to stay in your room, eating food from the gas station watching whatever is on whatever janky cable channels they have at the Motel 6, and somehow you find yourself riveted. And these are the songs you somehow find stuck in your head. And that's the thing, for all of their cheesiness and retro-ness, these jams are pretty irresistible, like the theme from Beverly Hills Cop, or Breakfast Club, or Pretty In Pink, but once removed, less obviously poppy, but still crazy catchy, more synthy, more cheesy, and sort of more alien and abstract, but at the same time cooler, and weirder, rife with strangely lush vocal harmonies, washed out sci-fi synths, occasional bits of twisted effects, and some of the coolest weirdest (synth) pop songs ever.
Strange and wonderful and definitely a new favorite...
Another slab of blissed out dreaminess from AQ fave Aidan Baker. His umpteenth release this year, every single one of them fantastic. This one, titled like a Damien Hirst piece, I Will Always And Forever Hold You In My Heart And Mind, is one single 50+ minute piece, separated into 12 parts, one for each word of the title, all woven into a single expansive whole.
The opener took us right back to Oval's Diskont 94, a shuffling shimmering underwater swirl, but instead of skipping cds as source material, Baker seems to be using some sort of loping Three Mile Pilot like bass, chopped and looped and smeared over a wash of drawn out synth drones, totally tranquil and dreamlike, but with that bass, lending the track a bit of subtle forward momentum. In fact the whole disc seems to be rooted in the interplay between droning synths and that processed bass. It's a bit krautrocky at times, a little bit Popol Vuh, ambient and abstract but propulsive at the same time. Some of the tracks are more layered, with strange muted bits of percussion, or more distinct melodies (also muted), while others get more and more distorted threatening to crumble to pieces, and still others, remain austere and minimal, throwing a shimmering sonic cloak over the hypnotic circular melodies and slow shifting sonic swells.
What more to say? As always, totally beautiful and completely hypnotic. Another perfect late night soundtrack for spacing out and drifting off...
LIMITED TO ONLY 156 COPIES, so you know what that means, each hand numbered, packaged in a super elaborate die cut sleeve, with a two sided insert, the disc, and the insert all visible around the custom cut outer sleeve. quite striking.
We first got a glimpse of the newly invigorated, and newly METAL-ized Bastard Noise on the recent split with The Endless Blockade, with BN sounding like the second coming of Man Is The Bastard, all heavy and noisy and bassy, but still rife with noise and electronics, incorporating our favorite elements of Bastard Noise offshoot Geronimo into a dizzying hybrid, that hit the spot like crazy. So with this new full length, Bastard Noise have pushed that sound even further. Opening with a brief spoken word monologue, the band explode in an electronic flecked bass heavy crush, the bass and drums locked tight, a lumbering lurching dirge, proggy and intricate, and weirdly melodic, with some of the SICKEST vocals ever, alternating death metal growls and throat shredding shrieks, and all over the place, thick shards of damaged electronics and fractured effects, careening wildly until finally locking into a groove that just won't quit, chaotic drumming, low slung bass buzz, the heaviest, most bad ass thing we've heard in ages. "Me And Hitler" is another blast of Man Is The Bastard style bass driven powerviolence, but with the addition of those shrieked almost black metal vocals, and still more caveman electronics... and when the band again get all proggy and intricate and heavy and groovy, they almost sound like Nomeansno, if NmN were WAY meaner and brutal and caustic, which is in NO way a bad thing.
The whole record is a crushing downtuned post-punk avant prog powerviolence electronic kraut-dirge motherfucker, the songs lurch and swing and grind and blast and pound and pummel, bursts of double kick underpin shards of crackling electronic glitchery and analog skree, there are some really strange stretches of almost jazzy drift, crooned reverbed ambience, operatic abstraction, spaced out dronemusic and moody instrumental skitter, but those brief moments only serve to balance the otherwise insanely and genius-ly brutal heaviness. Fuck, this totally rules!
Believer is the new musical project of Danny Paul Grody and Trevor Montgomery (both from Tarentel and The Drift as well as various other side projects and solo outfits including Lazarus, and Moholy-Nagy). For their debut release put out by Land And Sea, who brought us the Coconut 7" from a couple of lists ago, the duo recorded three expansive synth-based compositions that are beautifully minimal and impressionistic. Using loops, sweeping bell tones and guitar washes, the three tracks encompass a kind of melodic formlessness, beginning with a pattern and then slowly letting it dissolve into something much airier, all the while still maintaining a sense of gravity and musical purpose. A fine debut that makes us look forward to whatever comes next. Super limited to 50 copies in handsewn paper covers (that you have to rip or cut open to get to the disc!). Highly Recommended!
We hadn't heard anything from these New Jersey retro poppers other than a brief 4 song 7", but that's all it took to convince us that these guys were more than capable of pushing all our musical buttons, fuzzed out drum machine driven new wave flecked shoe gaze garage pop of the highest order, a modern take on iconic John Hughes soundtrack indie rock, Simple Minds filtered through M83, jangle pop bliss all ramshackle and fuzz drenched and oozing hooks and melody. The 7" reminded us of Unrest, Guided By Voices, Sebadoh, the Pastels, as well as more modern practitioners of the same sort of sound, Woods, Best Coast, Blank Dogs, but Big Troubles definitely have their own masterful take on the whole C86 pop sound, meshing rudimentary stumble pop, with massive speaker melting squalls of shoegaze shimmer, and crunchy DIY lo-fi pop, into a stunningly varied selection of songs, from dense and driving to skeletal and simple, from hazy and haunting to lush and summery, the thread holding them all together is a weird pop vibe that seems to instantly evoke memories of young love and misspent youth, of wandering aimlessly before the shackles of adulthood and responsibility had truly taken hold, transporting the listener to an age of youth, that vibe and emotion rendered in fuzz guitar, propulsive rhythms, cascading sheets of blurred distorted guitars, buried vocals, perfect melodies, every song major mixtape material, which is about the highest praise we can imagine.
Some bands just have the ability to reach high levels of excellence in everything they do. From their beginnings Blonde Redhead hit the scene as one of the most impressive and charismatic in a long run of Sonic Youth inspired bands, but it didn't take long for them to carve out and create their own totally unique and instantly recognizable take on that sound. Over the years they have released one great record after the other, as well as being one of the most consistently sizzling live bands around. In the last several years there has been a shift in their sound, eventually bringing them to Penny Sparkle, which is by far their most synth-y, steamy and sleek outing yet, all drenched in a certain kind of sweet sadness they've always reached for but never achieved, until now...
It would be so easy for a band who has achieved the levels of success that BR has to just rest on their laurels and make the same record again and again, but instead they continue to challenge themselves as well as being so true to their inner vision. And you can tell listening to Penny Sparkle that this vision for Blonde Redhead is very much about feeling loss, the deep burn of missing someone dear to you, and the realization that things might never be like they used to be. Certain bands have earned the right to gain our trust through any and all twists and turns they take. Blonde Redhead is one of them. Penny Sparkle is not so much about immediately catchy songs but instead it's an album that creates a gloriously sensual, dazed and languid mood that melts with such a sensational slow burn. That's what's really the big deal here, not that they're using a drum machine.
For a limited time, we have the deluxe version of the cd, which comes in a fancy printed canvas sack, inside a fancy printed box...
If we had to pick a single grindcore record, as our all time favorite, it would most likely have to be this one right here, the second record from NY weed fueled grinders Brutal Truth, 1994's Need To Control, but this is no ordinary grind record, instead this is a sprawling, epic, convoluted, complicated, ambitious masterpiece. By the time Need To Control was released, the band were already pretty legendary, masters of gnarled grinding heaviness, but Need To Control was the band's first record with a serious budget behind it, their label Earache had just inked a distribution deal with Columbia, which meant the band had time, and money, which translated into a chance to stretch the boundaries of grindcore, and stretch they did, infusing their chaotic fury with lumbering downtuned doom, super complex arrangements, even didgeridoo(!)...
The record opens with the very UNgrind "Collapse", a lurching, churning slab of doomic crush, laced with the sounds of bubbling bongs, all manner of industrial clatter, laced over the mesmerizing almost looped sounding riffage, and then to top it off, a ridiculously catchy, almost poppy chorus, the soaring melody, and shrieked vokills unable to disguise the crazy hookiness. A bold way to begin a record for sure, but Brutal Truth never really shied away from the unexpected, especially here. Hot on the heels of that sludgey sprawl comes the furious freakout of "Black Door Mine", a blast of super intense, ultra complex avant grind a la Discordance Axis, impossibly tangled riffage, insane drumming, all wound into buzzing blasting impossibly dense and mathy grind metal workouts. "Turn Face" is more of the same, after a low slung gloomy bass buzz intro, the track explodes into another flurry of face melting freakage, but somehow this one manages to be crazy catchy as well, winding in weird little hooks, turning it into one of the rare blasts of grind that you'll find permanently stuck in your head, not to mention more ridiculously frantic drumming.
Then comes "Godplayer", notable for its didgeridoo, which more often than not is a BIG didgeri-DON'T, but for these guys it's the perfect sound, a low buzzing rumble, that not only compliments their already low buzzing sound, but also sounds a little bit like the musical version of a bong (which we can't imagine was lost on these guys). And from there on out, the band continue to craft a seriously twisted bit of avant grind, mixing in long stretches of strange industrial noise, effects drenched drones, bits of doomy plod, often slipping in whole tracks of lurch and lumber, like the opener, and the equally crushing, slow and heavy "Ordinary Madness", which on most grind record would stick out, but here, manage to merge seamlessly with the blaze and buzz that comes before and after, they even do a killer Germs cover, clocking in at less than a minute, but fitting into rest of the record pretty much perfectly, and the whole record is just fucking genius, heavy, complex, catchy, proggy, mathy, metal, we mentioned it might be our favorite grind record ever, well, it's also one of our favorite metal records ever, PERIOD.
When Need To Control was originally released, there was also a 5 record vinyl boxset, that contained the whole record spread out over 5 pieces of wax, a 5", 6", 7", 8" and a 9", besides the cool concept, that vinyl version also included a bunch of bonus tracks, including some killer covers, most of which are included here (sorry completists, there are still a couple tracks on the vinyl box that got left off the reissue, grrr). They do Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" as "Wish You Were Here... Wish You'd Go Away", starting it off almost straight, in fact, covering almost the whole track, complete with clean vocals and everything, before turning it inside out for the second half, a garbled lo-fi grind freakout mess. They also do a pretty bad ass cover of Celtic Frost's "Dethroned Emperor", plus there's a couple jams that sound like they could have been part of the record proper, before finishing off with the twisted deconstructed grind noise freakout of "Head Cheese". Which again, really hammers home what it is that makes these guys, and this record in particular, so special, sure they were grind masters, but they also obviously loved classic metal, and doom, and noise, and punk rock, and avant garde weirdness, all of which found their way into the Brutal Truth sound, not just in the specifically bizarre and UNgrind tracks, but in their blasting grinding heaviness as well, the riffs, and arrangements, and vocals, and everything, infused with some twisted idea of what their music should sound like, which is why it sounds like nothing else. A classic... if you, say, are a fan of avant-heavy faves The Body or other similarly boundary-pushing metal acts today, and you don't already have this, get it!!
There's never a question as to if a Budos Band release will sound good or not, they are one of THEE tightest and most masterful players of Afro-soul-funk around. And while their first two outings were totally great records, they have stepped up their game big time for number three. It's one thing to be talented musicians, it's another to create songs that have a really strong mood and presence, and that's exactly what Budos Band have done on III. It's a bit darker, wider in scope and just straight up ON FIRE! They've figured out how to take their inspiration from the music of Fela Kuti, James Brown, Sun Ra, Funkadelic, as well as hints of psychedelia from Turkey, Latin America and Africa, and bring it all together in such an infectious and surprisingly original sound. If you ever get a chance to see them live, go for it, cuz they always kill, and this new album is our favorite from them yet!
We first discovered this band on our favorite radio show, Radiolab (like a way nerdier, science focused, Negativland produced This American Life), Buke and Gass being a boy/girl duo who made a sort of chaotic ramshackle folk flecked noise pop on homemade instruments, pretty sure Buke was shorthand for a baritone ukulele and Gass is a weird guitar bass hybrid, but regardless, these two make a seriously big noise, crunchy jagged riffage, over simple percussion, usually just a bass drum boom, or a tambourine jangle, a sort of two man (woman) version of a one man band, each handling their stringed instruments, while pounding out the rhythm with their feet, then there's the homemade speakers and amplifiers, it all makes for a curious sight, and an even curiouser sound, a sort of wild and loose folky swampy blues / indie rock hybrid, the vocals powerful, the instruments surprisingly lush, the rhythms simple and hypnotic, the melodies all over the place, some weird Thinking Fellers / PJ Harvey / Sixteen Horsepower / Decemberists hybrid, a bit of a backwoods steampunk vibe too, but all filtered through a killer indie pop sense that makes every song here a dark unforgettable gem.
Finally available, this long in the works compilation of the various collaborations between super 8 filmmaker Paul Clipson and musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, he of Tarentel and the Alps as well as one half of the team that runs the Root Strata label. Many (if not all) of these collaborations were previously available as ultra limited dvd-r's, some so limited (as in 50 copies!) we only got a handful, some so limited we never got ANY. This is the first time they've all been compiled on a proper REAL dvd (not a dvd-r), and we're the only store that has the ultra limited version which comes with a bonus 3" cd-r, but more on that in bit.
First, let's talk about the films and the music included here. First, The Phantom Harp from 2007. The Phantom Harp, was in fact a reworking of the piece of the same name, originally released as a 3" cd-r and long out of print. The reworked version found the music accompanied by Clipson's gorgeous abstract images. The Phantom Harp is a super minimal sun dappled stretch of glimmering shimmering dreaminess, soft notes float like leaves in the summer sun, smears of high end wreath each note in glimmering sonic haloes, the pace is glacial, the melodies stretched out over minutes instead of seconds, a little ambient, a little new age, a little free drone, all deftly blurred into one smoldering sonic dreamscape. The visuals are super striking, and manage to fit perfectly with the sounds, all black and white, images of rain slicked streets, sun shining through the treetops, car headlights at night, images sometimes overexposed, blurred, superimposed, but mostly left to just play out, cityscapes, buildings, people rushing to and fro, light reflecting on water, shapes and textures, walls, grills, neon signs, restaurants, a soft, a dreamy faded super-8 travelogue.
Then there's Corridors, also from 2007, which was the second dvd collaboration between Clipson and Cantu-Ledesma. Another gorgeous and sonically blissed out tag team, Clipson's films, again on Super-8, were shot entirely in NYC, impressionistic shots of cityscapes, rolling hills, the texture of water, sun dappled evening skies, many of the shots textural, extreme close ups, patterns as much as images and shapes, sunspots, shadows, reflections, very active, the world flying past out the window of a train, power lines and bridges slipping out of eyeshot, setting suns and colored clouds, so lovely and dreamy. Cantu-Ledesma offers up the perfect soundtrack, music culled from the same sessions that produced the huge aQ fave Shining Skull Breath, thick and dense, whirring dronescapes, textured and layered, slipping from minimal shimmer to buzzing roar and back again, very much active, the intensity and propulsion of the sounds perfectly matching the motion of the visuals, in some cases, seemingly slowing it down, the drone dragging the landscape flashing by into sudden focus before letting it go again.
Two Suns from 2005: A beautifully abstract and paranoid impression of Southern California, filmed on grainy Super8, with lots of dizzyingly hypnotic footage of telephone wires, helicopters, cityscapes, gorgeously blurred out traffic lights and tail lights and street lights. There's late afternoon silhouettes, fuzzy smears of neon, rain drops on glass, cranes and docks, abstract streaks of passing cars and slick roadways, hillsides covered in windmills, the sun reflected on the sea, highways and green hills. So lovely. And haunting. As are the accompanying sounds created, an ominous, buzzing, vocal drone, affected to the point that it still sounds organic, but not like a voice, more like streaks of sound, greys and blacks and browns, all smeared into blurred soundscapes of purr and whir and thrum, that perfectly compliment the shaky camera work, the grainy film stock, and the gorgeously and ominously mundane subject matter.
Constellations from 2006: A dreamlike drift through a dense visual latticework of plants, chainlink fences, branches, leaves, stoplights, neon signs, a delirious series of slow motion visual tangles and patterns. A bug's eye view of the world mysterious and wonderful, like cutting room floor super-8 plant studies and urban landscapes woven into soft focus home movies. All set to the warm glow of Ledesma's swelling dronescapes.
The other three films here may have been released before, but are new to us, Sphinx On The Seine from 2008, is another collection of gorgeous hazy landscapes, in washed out color and start black and white, the films flitting back and forth, industrial structures, glowing lights, moving textures and solar flares, all set to a dark and haunting melody laced low end thrum, meditative and ominous. There's also Within Mirrors, which is also from 2008, and is much more impressionistic, branches and leaves, constantly shifting in and out of focus, while Cantu-Ledesma's score shifts accordingly, from pulsing looped mesmer to warm washed out dreaminess.
And finally, there's Lights & Perfections from 2006, more patterns, this time a journey through ever shifting foliage, another bug's eye view, flowers and grass, and shifting leaves, blossoms, everything swaying gently in the breeze, the soundtrack equally breezy, soft focus, hushed and dreamy, soothing and tranquil and so lovely. In fact all the sights and sounds here are gorgeous. And as if that weren't enough, we have the super limited version, which comes with a bonus 3" cd-r, featuring an exclusive 17 minute track, a gorgeous hazy dronescape, of pulsing softly psychedelic shimmer, of strange hushed industrial whir, of grinding shoegazey crunch, of barely there whispery drift, of staticky dreamlike shimmer, so gorgeous.
EXTREMELY LIMITED, at least the deluxe version with the bonus disc, so grab one quick if you want the extra disc! The packaging is super swank too, an oversized complex multipocketed origami style cardstock sleeve, printed front and back. Nice!
For nearly twenty years now, Eugene Carchesio and Leighton Craig have been creating wayward recordings in barely-released editions on cassette and cd-r for their exploratory free-folk / semi-improvisational communions with the Australian landscape. Only recently have any of their recordings made their way across the Pacific, mostly by way of their contributions in the group Lost Domain, whose drifting, monochromatic ragas have been released by such shambolic stalwarts as Digitalis Recordings and PseudoArcana. Leaves is another such entry in their humbly spectacular wanderings; this time, it's through the exceptional Australian label Naturestrip. The easiest comparison that anyone could make to Leaves would be to The Blithe Sons, where two dedicated listeners creating droning harmonics alongside the unpredictability of natural events. Carchesio and Craig often are found slumped over their battery powered keyboards, creating shimmering drone vibrations that accompany the cacophony of lorikeets, crows, cicadas, and wind in Leighton's Brisbane backyard, where these recordings were made. When the birds and insects allow it, Carchesio and Craig pick up an acoustic guitar, violin, and recorder (amongst other instruments) for some purposefully primitive arrangements pocked with dreamily psychedelic references and quietly clattered improv. Really, really nice!
Some seriously kick ass true metal from the great white North, a Canadian modern true doom / speed metal hybrid fronted by none other than Annick Giroux, who most definitely knows a thing or two about metal, not only did she edit the awesome Hellbent For Cooking heavy metal cookbook, but she's also responsible for the legendary Canadian metal zine Morbid Tales!
Cauchemar perfectly captures the mood and vibe of classic seventies and eighties metal, equal parts NWOBHM riffery, witchy occult speed metal a la Acid and the epic true doom of groups like Pagan Altar. There's even a little Motorhead in there. The riffs are killer, the guitars loud and thick, the drumming powerful, the bass thick and slithery, but it's Giroux's vocals that really make this, sung all in French, haunting and powerful, reminding us of groups like The Devil's Blood and Jex Thoth, in fact ANYone that digs those groups should check this out for sure. But the thing is, the music here is so much more classic metal sounding. The opener is pitch perfect eighties speed metal, laced with plenty of doominess, epic and majestic and heavy as hell, while the second track slows it down for some seriously doom-ed crush, with a swirling psychedelic bridge, Giroux's vocals bewitching and demonic, the whole record sort of slips back and forth between pounding riffery, and plodding dirge, the vocals and overall seventies foresty vibe makes the whole record sound way more psychedelic than most new metal, definitely tapping into the classic Sabbath sound, and making this the sort of band that should appeal equally to the true metal massive, but also dabblers looking for tripped out psychedelic heaviness...
Whoops, we've had this for quite a while, but forgot to list it! After two discs for I Hate Records, the third album from UK metalcore doomsters CG came out via The Church Within earlier this year (way back in January, right before CG went on tour in Europe with the mighty Saint Vitus). But it's never too late for doom. And if you're looking for a fix of somethin' heavy off of this week's list, of the downtuned sludge variety of heavy that is, this oughta do the trick. With chunky guitars, hoarse HC vocal shouts, and pummelling drums (from the guy who also plays in Lord Vicar), Centurions Ghost sound like they mean business, and it's a mean business indeed! While a tad bit more trad doom than the average Neur-Isis effort, their sludge is far from slo-mo. And though they can scare up some stonery atmospherics, they don't come off as being very "ghostly" despite their name - the rather lovely and arcane cover drawing by Sami Hynninen (aka Albert Witchfinder of Reverend Bizarre) belies the brutality of the music within!
The first time we heard Cephalic Carnage was at a little club in San Francisco, and the band were easily the most insane thing we had ever seen, death metal via stoner rock, the drummer playing what sounded like a continuous drum solo, while the rest of the band spit out churning sped up stoner riffs, transformed into a lurching head spinning what the fuck chunk of outsider metal. They never quite captured that warped, druggy, damaged weirdness on record, but they definitely came close, a twisted death metal grind hybrid, with occasional drum machines, weird processed vokills, creepy samples, streaks of noise and disembodied chug, they were definitely way more outsider grind than death metal, but with every record, they seemed to shed some of that fucked up ness, which in one way was a shame, but in another was maybe unavoidable. They got better and tighter and less weird. Or did they?
On first listen, their latest, Mislead By Certainty, seemed crazily straight ahead, especially on the record opener, which was super melodic sounding Swedish style death metal, it sounded good, but it threw us for a loop, but it only took a few more minutes to realize these guys were just as fucked as ever, that song shifted over and over, eventually locking into one of the most twisted atonal freakout jams EVER, the sort of sounds that make you almost queasy, before slipping right back into some more melodic riffing.
And so it goes, the band leaping from furious blurred grind, to full on classic death metal riffage, to total NWOBHM melody, to awesomely thick and filthy dirgey doom, and the thing is, every song goes through a crazy amount of permutations, a song may go two minutes blasting relentlessly, before suddenly shifting gears and turning into some twisted glob of grinding off kilter whatthefuck only to slip right back into the song again. And let's not forget the awesome 12+ minute "Repangaea", which begins all low slung and creepy, a dirgey doomy bit of drift, there even seems to be some saxophone(!), it builds to a seriously epic blast of melodic power metal / noise rock bombast with clean vocals and a killer hook and everything, before getting all spaced out and blissy, then a little modern metal style chug and churn, before an awesomely dense slowed down death metal outro. Wow. And just so you know it's Cephalic Carnage, they follow that up and finish things off with a super intense one note grind blast, with some seriously ridiculous and sick twisted vokills. Somehow, with just one single all the way through listen, this record went from being a huge disappointment to one of our new favorite metal records. Fuck yeah!
More modern electro funk party jams from these guys. We know lots of folks love em, but we've never been able to really jump on this party train, but who knows, maybe this could be your dance party cup of tea...
Just take a gander at that cover, sleazy, glittery, cross dressing, drugged out sexiness, like a modern Royal Trux, this Aussie duo don't just look the part, they play it as well, the sound equally trashy and glammy, a bluesy bit of swampy dirgery, noise drenched, low slung and slithery, his vocals a wounded croon, hers a feral yowl, the uneasy harmonies set atop stumbling skeletal beats, and simple chug and jangle, and wound all around it, spidery sinewy tendrils of effects-drenched psychedelic guitar filigree, the Stones via Pussy Galore, with plenty of Velvets mixed in, not to mention some Gun Club, a little Birthday Party, the band dipping their crusty toes into sixties girl group style balladry here and there, fuzzy old school scumrock, loose garage grooves, all infused with a wild pounding punk energy and a surprising knack for crafting pop hooks and then wrapping them in filth. A wickedly woozy collection of gutter anthems and hook filled primal garage blues, that with each listen reveals more of its feral, grimy dirge pop heart.
Cloudland Canyon always seemed like some impossible classic krautrock / noise rock hybrid, their records equal parts German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, My Bloody Valentine and the Dead C, a washed out sonic world of gritty hypnotic haze, of lumbering psychedelic grooves, of twisted FX drenched drift and looped druggy ambience, as likely to explode into a super rocking fuzzed out dronejam as they were to emit thick billowing clouds of swirling blurred psychdrone shimmer, but always, at the core of their sound was pop. Little hooks buried in the murk and the mire, catchiness subtly woven into the fabric of every bit of spaced out crush or raga-like skree, the thread that held their sound together was spun from melody and harmony, no matter how much those elemental forces were obscured.
Recently CC shared a split with Citay, both bands paying homage to fuzzy dream poppers Galaxie 500, CC's version was especially fantastic, drugged out and hypnotic, somehow transforming the original into what could have been a proper Cloudland Canyon jam, and in the process, revealing, more explicitly than ever, the warm glowing pop heart, that beat inside the buzzing, lysergic krautrock chest of Cloudland Canyon. Which it seems, lead to this, Fin Eaves, a fully realized exploration of pop music, filtered through CC's gloriously cracked kraut/drone/noise filter, the result, one of the fuzziest, most washed out, dreamiest noise pop / dream pop records in recent memory.
Every track a swirling morass of druggy effects, of muted melodies, of buried reverbed vox, of subverted jangle, muddy grooves, subtle hooks, a soft focus collision between My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Filmstars and Galaxie 500, a three way pileup where the various elements simply sink into one another, blurring and smearing into fantastically new shapes, a little bit of looped hypnotic Spacemen 3 style drug rock here, a little super distorted minimal Jesus and Mary Chain stomp there, slipping seamlessly from gauzy soft pop shuffle, to dense crumbling popnoise damage, to hushed loping slowcore haze, to soaring prismatic space psych bliss, each and every track is dense and spacious and layered, the various sounds constantly shifting, transforming, pealing melodies sloughing off only to reveal even more subtle melodies beneath, streaks of electronic glitch and clouds of warm whirling hiss drift amidst deep thrummed bass, and simple motorik rhythms, gorgeously out of focus vocal harmonies, and all manner of texture and timbre, a rare record as much about song as sound, strip away the sound, and you'd have a surprisingly perfect pop record, take away the songs, and you'd still have some fantastically abstract sonic earcandy, but combine the two, and you have this, an utterly gorgeous disc of otherworldly noise drenched lysergic dream pop. Fans of Teenage Filmstars, Beach House, Jesus & Mary Chain, Flaming Lips, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Candy Claws, Mercury Rev, School Of The Seven Bells, and other psychedelic dream poppers, this is your new favorite record.
It's the middle of summer (although it doesn't feel like it here) and it seems like everyone is still trying to come up with THEE Summer Jam of the year. Wavves, with their recent King Of The Beach record, had been battling it out with Best Coast, and their hazy girl group fuzz drenched Crazy For You, for the top spot, but now here come Crocodiles, with two songs that could definitely give both a run for their money.
Unlike the rest of the current crop of garage poppers, Crocodiles haven't been churning out a 7" a month, instead, laying pretty low since their awesome Summer Of Hate record a while back (minus a recent 4 way split), but "Sleep Forever" immediately reminds us why we dug them so much in the first place, with a big fuzzy slab of sunshiney pop, that owes as much to their current fuzz pop brethren as it does to classic Britpop, a perfect fusion of earnest buzzing jangle, and soaring psychedelic classic pop. "Sleep Forever" could easily be some long lost gem from the golden era of Britpop, maybe some rare unsung B-side, if it weren't for the fact that had this been from back in the day, it would have been anything but a B-side. And as if one blast of perfect psychpop bliss wasn't enough, the flipside finds the band tackling a VERY unlikely cover, Dee-lite's "Groove Is In The Heart", starting with that immediately recognizable bassline, but before you know it, the song is transformed into a total drugged out Spacemen 3 style blowout, complete with squalls of wild tangled psych guitar crunch and fuzzgarage organs, and then before you know it, the song transforms into the Beach Boys' "California Girls", THAT classic melody wrapped around that buzzing Dee-lite bassline, and the swirling blown out organ. AWESOME.
A brand new full length from black ambient soundscaper, Drakh, the last prolific former member of black ambient terrorists MZ412 (his more prolific partner being Nordvargr!), and it's on one of our favorite labels too, Brazil's Essence Music, who in the past have brought us incredible releases from Acid Mothers Temple, Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Boris, Merzbow and Rapoon. But this is not the regular release, we are honored to be the only place in the world, other than the label itself to be selling the super limited, deluxe, handmade boxset version, limited to just 99 copies, completely sold out, except for a handful saved just for us, and for you. These are pricey, but they are incredible, gorgeously and lovingly assembled, with TONS of extra stuff, and there are only about 10 copies left, so get one before they're gone. More on the record proper in a second, but figured we'd best explain what all comes in the box, in fact first there's the box itself, a completely handmade and hand assembled collage-painting-relief book-like boxset housing a long accordion folding insert with 11 attached landscape postcards - based on the album's theme and artwork - displaying stunning abstract watercolor paintings. Just like the box itself, each one of the pieces is uniquely and individually hand painted (no screens) by artist Iremir Oscar. In addition to the custom 6-panel digisleeve packaging, featuring stunning and desolate photography by Seldon Hunt, also included is a mini cd-r with four album remixes by some of Drakh's partners in sonic crime - Nordvargr, K. Meizter, Des Esseintes and Cordell Klier!
WOW. Like we said, there are only about 10 of these left, we are taking PRE-ORDERS for these, they are NOT in stock, once we know how many we need, we'll order them from Brazil and should have them within a week to 10 days. So if you order this with other stuff, your order will ship minus the Drakh box, which will ship by itself, or if you are a regular mailorder customer, probably in your next order, but you will be charged for it NOW, but if you want one, definitely don't dawdle.
The latest blackened drone missive from Drakh, as mentioned above formerly of MZ412, and most notable to aQ-ers, one half of the Nordvargr / Drakh duo, whose last record was released on Andee's tUMULt label. Bethlehem is a sonic travelogue, it's unclear if the sounds themselves are culled from the actual locations, or if these sounds are merely inspired by various places Drakh visited over the last few years, but the theme is reflected in a surprisingly varied sonic palette, which is not at all the grim bleak blackness of his past outings. Bethlehem begins as a dark dreamy swirl, laced with strange industrial rhythms, it's almost like the darkest creepiest dubstep ever, laced with voices, slow creeping swells, the dark skitter gives way to something much more ominous, a crumbling distorted dronescape, laced with strange snippets of spoken word, a creaking mysterious melody, and lots of crumbling hiss and crackle, before drifting into a sort of extra abrasive stretch of pop ambience, the core sound a hushed melodic drift, but wrapped in a sparking staticky gauzy, simultaneously dreamlike and strangely abrasive. Which sort of describes the whole record, deep heaving soft focus swells pulse and throb beneath a patina of buzz and whir, strange electronic percolations skitter atop a sea of electronic glitchery and blackened rumbles, like a malfunctioning Portishead, hushed warm washes of chordal hum slowly splinter into what sounds like Philip Jeck spinning old dusty field recordings, buzzing black noise is muted and smeared into bleary grey blurs, that seem to melt into warbly melodies, and slowly decaying looped crawls, crumbling industrial beatscapes lurch and lumber, a strange mechanized sonic beast, loping through a gorgeously hypnotic rhythmscape, so epic and evocative and mesmerizing, the whole record the perfect hybrid of blackened ambience, blissed out drift, and that sort of gauzy looped Jeckian soundscapery. Fantastic!
We WILL have the standard version, keep your eyes peeled for it on a future list, or ask us to reserve you one, but those of you who want the DOUBLE DISC HANDMADE DELUXE BOXSET, now's the time...
Somehow we never managed to review the debut ep from retro new wave poppers The Drums (not to be confused with local double drums duo also called The Drums, featuring members of Oh Sees and Ezeetiger), which is a shame cuz it was one of our favorite records. And then we managed to track down an import version of the full length, but couldn't get enough to review, and were forced to wait for the domestic version, which is finally here, so now we can gush over this fantastic chunk of moody retro pop.
Probably best to skip right to THEE JAM, "Let's Go Surfing", with its whistled melody, its sped up Joy Division bassline, clipped simple drumming, Smiths guitar jangle, handclaps(!), vocal harmonies, fuzzy synth bits and an absolutely KILLER summery sunshiney chorus. Imagine some mix of Echo And The Bunnymen, the Cure, the Boo Radleys and Surfer Blood, if that makes any sense, totally hook filled jangly new wave pop, with just enough modern weirdness to fit in with the current crop of retro pop futurists, but looking way back to the best of Creation and Factory records. "Best Friend" is all spidery guitars, earnest crooned vox, heartfelt lovelorn lyrics, plenty of ooooh's and aaaah's, all wrapped around an almost funky bassline and another stripped down rhythm. "Skippin' Town" is like "Let's Go Surfing" part 2, jaunty melodies, sweet vocals, more oooh's and aaah's, still more fuzzy synths and handclaps, and another dreamy hook. "It Will All End In Tears" is like a jauntier peppier take on Ultravox, "I'll Never Drop My Sword" adds a cool buzzy synth bassline, and some strange lyrics about Jesus, but all wrapped around that impossibly perfect jangle pop and some total minor key Cure synth shimmer. So good!
Totally catchy, impossibly irresistible, breezy and Britpoppy, perfect summery retro dream pop jams that we can't stop listening to...
Another glorious blast of summery hypnogogic exotica lo-fi garage groove from Ducktails, a session recorded live on WFMU back in 2008, and like the Ducktails records proper, these jams are hazy and washed out and otherworldly, hypnotic and fuzzy, spidery guitars draped over looped exotica rhythms, wheezing organs, plenty of soft wah wah guitars, surfy dream pop and blissed out beach ballads, from hushed almost Galaxie 500 sounding stretches of strum and drift, to killer groovy, sexy jams, that almost sound like weird takes on Ethiopian groove, to fuzzy bedroom folk, all sad boy vox and woozy organ, and more of those phasered/flangered guitars, to smoldering 'space' jams, brooding minimal hypnotic dronerock, that sounds like Ducktails' take on the Velvet Underground or Spacemen 3, obviously much more summery and sunshiney than either of those, finally finishing off the session with two long jams, the first, a 7 minute untitled bit of abstract drone-y bliss pop, strange exotic percussion, long washed out tones, some wild tangles of twisted FX and analog synth, and gorgeously hypnotic bits of tumbling percussive murk, with buried melodies and softly undulating textures.
The final track is "Surf's Up", from their self titled record, here again rendered in spaced out loops and druggy ambient drift, a sea of swirling sonic particles, tangled melodies, constantly shifting textures and layers, blurred and bleary and blissy and totally spaced out and dreamlike. So good.
And of course extremely limited! Some of the copies we got are on yellow vinyl, others black, they come in very old school looking bootleg style stamped covers, most of them have very minor cosmetic damage (dinged corners mostly, like REAL bootlegs!), they're all like that, but for most folks it shouldn't be an issue, comes with a photocopied insert too...
Ready to space out and drift off into a Swedish psychedelic never-never land?? Well if you are, Dungen is back and will take you there. The sixth album from these Scandinavian faves delivers the usual Dungen goodies. 10 new tracks, some proggier, some soft-rockier, some straight-up poppier than others, all quite nice! Oh and let's not forget the searing psych guitar freakouts like the one that erupts in track 5, "Hogdalstoppen". So fans of Dungen will be pleased - and at this point we'd like to assume you all are already familiar with Dungen, and thus most likely fans... which means we can reduce redundancy review-wise by simply saying, yeah, get this, you'd like it! Dungen don't go in any strange new directions here, it's just more of what we dig about 'em, though perhaps compared to their previous album 4 (which was their fifth, oddly enough) they return a bit to "the rock" from where they were on that one. Certainly Dungen can make the loveliest of lovely music when they wanna, or indulge in urgent rhythms and bursts of distorted guitar jangle. And all of it is carefully arranged, everything in its place, even when they're doing the freakout thing. Somehow they have the ability, in the all-instrumental first track for example, to be both blissed out and kick up a garagey ruckus at the same time. Elsewhere, the bliss out is nothin' but, with gentle female vocals, strings, and handclaps keeping the beat.
Listening to this, for the first time we realized that Dungen reminds us a bit of XTC side project The Dukes Of Stratosphear; it's partly mainman Gustav Ejstes' voice (even in Swedish), partly his pop smarts, and of course partly Dungen's fantastical, effortless retroishness... but at this point maybe we can say that Dungen have moved from "retro" category into the one designated "timeless"!
NB. domestic vinyl out 10.5.10, cheaper than the import vinyl on Subliminal Sounds...
Summer in San Francisco is a funny thing. It doesn't really happen, most of July and even August is chilly, grey, and windy. We know we have no room to really complain about the weather here, but it can get you down. Luckily we do usually get this small blast of Indian Summer that hits late in September and we all run to the park, the beach, a lake, anywhere to soak it all up as much as we can, as we know it will be gone before we know it. So in these times of packing in as much summer as we can in just a handful of days we really need and relish when an end of the summer jam shows up just in time to blast as we play in the sunshine.
El Guincho has given us the perfect bright, bouncy and colorful soundtrack that's beyond perfect for tapping into the carefree vibe of running through waves and playing in sand, the fleeting summer state of mind that is already on its way out. Picking up perfectly where his 2008 debut left off, and even upping he quality of songcraft and irresistibility. While El Guincho is from Spain, his music really sounds like someone so in touch with so many great sounds being made across the globe. It's a universal kind of super smart and catchy dance minded pop, filled with so many cascading melodies, catchy rhythms and such impeccable taste.
One of those perfect records that seamlessly mixes synths, samples, and live instruments along with warm and welcoming vocals to create songs that are made for letting down your guard and soaking up some much needed joy and sunshine. So damn good!
Brand new vinyl only, ultra heavy match up between NY's low end doom metal titans Unearthly trance, and Canadian powerviolence grind duo The Endless Blockade. Unearthly Trance go first, and fill up a whole side at 33 rpm, of their roiling doomic dirgery, thick downtuned riffage, bellowed howls, the sound epic and majestic and blackened, like a crustier version of Mastodon or Neurosis, that same sort of mighty bludgeon, but here sprawled into something way more abstract, with the track drifting fro, churning crush to loose doomy drift, with creepy tangled minor key melodies, a gorgeous and haunting, repeating motif, ominously intoned vocals, it sounds like the track will eventually erupt into more heaviness, but instead it goes the opposite direction, or at least explores a different kind of heaviness, breaking down into a long stretch of ambient dronemusic, a shadow of that original riff/motif remains, ghostlike, the track shimmering and slithering and evolving into a sort of ultra doom dirge, spacious and spare, a spaced out plod, that gradually grows more and more abstract before dissipating completely.
On the flip, Endless Blockade temper their usually furious flurries with some lumbering riffage and almost doomy drift, beginning with a dense cloud of glitched out electronics and feedback drenched shrieked vocals, before exploding into a face melting wall of blasting powerviolence crush. Flurries of frenzied drumblast, insane insectoid riffage, dueling grunted/howled vox, a furious grind wrapped in thick swaths of swirling noise, occasionally slipping into something a bit more dirgey or doomy, but eventually erupting back into some seriously aggro pummel. Their side finishes off with a dense and intense abstract noise squall, all grinding and crumbling in-the-red buzz and skree, tangled vocal freakouts, and then finally a strangely pretty field recorded ambient outro.
Most folks probably know Pat Maherr (if they know the name at all) as the man behind Indignant Senility, whose Caretaker like vinyl manipulations and alterations has us smitten, his Plays Wagner found him taking old dusty record of Wagner symphonies and operas and processing them and running them through filters and twisting them all up and layering them into gorgeous washed out ephemeral ambience. But apparently when Maherr is not manipulating old classical records and crafting strangely baroque ambience, he has a bit of a thing for hip hop. And not just ANY hip hop, no the strain of hip hop affectionately referred to as 'chopped & screwed', named for the late great DJ Screw, who would take popular rap records and slow em way down, creating something way more druggy and tripped out, the perfect soundtrack for sipping sizurp, a distinctly Southern concoction which involves mixing cough syrup with soda, and sometimes Jolly Ranchers!
Maherr adopted the bizarre pseudonym Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting for his own experiments with screwed hip hop. And as if you even needed to be told, this shit is WAY more tweaked and warped, not just slowed down, but all twisted up, the beats pulled apart, the voices all messed up, the originals totally unrecognizable, the result of Maherr's manipulations, is some woozy, warbly, warped electronic lurch and lumber, the voices syrupy and moan-some, the beats, crackly and skittery, all the other sounds blurred and smeared into strange shapes, weird textures. It sounds a lot like an Indignant Senility hip hop remix, or a bit like how you might imagine it would feel to down extensive quantities of horse tranquilizers and super potent acid, before floating in a swimming pool in the middle of the night listening to KMEL or WILD 94.9 on a seriously booming system, with your ears just under the surface of the water. Totally wacked and demented and tripped out and awesome. Not necessarily for hip hop heads, but for anyone into druggy beats and fiercely fucked up weirdness.
Failing Lights is the solo project of Mike Connelly, who's better known for the cacophony he produces in the Hair Police and Wolf Eyes. The lo-fi soundsculpting embraced by both of those aforementioned projects is present here as well, but the capacity for ultra-violence and raw explosiveness is replaced by an unsettling atmosphere of dread. The album opens with a somber metallic klang repeating over a building rumble of controlled low-end feedback, and electronic bleeps all set off in various delay patterns. It's a very primitive, but very evocative form of cold industrially-minded musique concrete, coming pretty damn close to what Premature Ejaculation had done in the '80s. This band itself was something of an obtuse performance-art cross-pollination of LAFMS wild-eyed experimentation and Los Angeles goth chic (after all Rozz Williams of Christian Death was in Premature Ejaculation.) Anyway, Connelly is one to leave lots of space between his episodes of grim rumblings, lazer shot electronics, tape machinations, and sporadic bursts of power electronics overdose. By the middle of the record, Connelly uses these empty spaces to push forward an unstable, Jandekishly strummed guitar through a murk of tape decay. This can be hardly qualified as a song; it's more of conscious disintegration of a song, slumping into a stupor right before crumbling out of existence. The finale of the album comes by way of a crusty chord organ, that expands from a reedy whine into a scruffy powerdrone that's equal parts Charlemagne Palestine and Gate. Disquieting to say the least!
Testosterone.
Yep, Grinderman are back with their self-explanatory second album, and it's a motherfucker. Just like the first one. If for some reason you've been living under a rock, Grinderman is a supergroup, if you will, comprised of Nick Cave, and his Bad Seeds cohorts Warren Ellis (also of Dirty Three), Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey. True to that pedigree, this record RULES. The best thing about this is how it bypasses the curse of the side project in ways that few records can (the same could be said of the recent Shrinebuilder and Twilight records). So yeah, the first record was no fluke, and this one is even BETTER. Punked out blues with a dirty mind, muscular riffage, pounding rhythms, and of course, Cave's psycho-sexual vocals delivered with just enough restraint to keep things nice and tense. Every song is totally dirty and sleazed out in the best way imaginable, and the album moves forward with an unstoppable swagger that just reeks of sexxx, sweat, and blasphemy. The production is top notch and perhaps the only thing "tasteful" about this record. It simply SOUNDS amazing, huge swirling psychedelic atmospheres for the band to immerse themselves in. Grinderman 2 is already sounding like a classic after only a few weeks on the shelf.
After a few seconds of pleasantly melodic reverse guitar, the album gets right to the point with opener "Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man", with some burly bass keeping Cave from completely losing his shit as he spits out memorable lines like "And he sucked her and he sucked her and he sucked her dry". Things soon morph into an aggressive stomp that simply rocks. "Heathen Child" sort of continues this theme with its psych blues vibe and more lyrics that involve some literal sucking. The boys know how to switch things up as well, like on "What I Know", the closest thing to a ballad that you get here. Of course, it's still creepy and weird as fuck before leading into the raucous "Evil", one of the album's most aggressive numbers. "Places Of Montezuma" sounds a bit like classic late '60s/early '70s Rolling Stones interpreted by Nick Cave. So in other words, it's pretty rad, setting things up for the perfect closing song "Bellringer Blues", a midtempo dirge with all kinds of psychedelic haziness thrown in with the cool group vocals.
If you dug the first record, this is a no brainer. Not sure if anyone was ever skeptical about Grinderman, but if they were, this should put all fears to rest. Accompanying this kick ass record is some equally kick ass packaging, with shiny blue foil lettering and a super thick booklet overflowing with amazing artwork from Ilinica Hopfner.
It's always exciting to get something new on Sublime Frequencies, and in this case even MORE exciting, the third in the Guitars From Agadez series, and the second from the mighty Group Inerane, leading lights of the Tureg Guitar Revolution, and in this case, revolution might be an apt description. For with the joy of new music from Group Inerane also comes sadness, as the guitarist of the group, has been shot and killed in the ongoing rebellion battles, and Inerane mainman Bibi Ahmed barely escaped with his life from the very same battle.
Hard to imagine a group like this continuing to play music, and tour and perform, in the face of such constant dangers, but for Group Inerane, Group Bombino, and other Tureg Guitar groups, this music is their rebellion, their statement, how they speak out against the senseless loss of life and oppression, and it's that emotion and energy that seeps into every not, every chord, every vocal. Extremely powerful and intense, which is also what imbues the music of Group Inerane with an ineffable magic, that had us utterly entranced at first listen, and this record follows suit.
To replace their fallen comrade, they recruited Koudede, aka Absoulahi Maman, a legendary Tureg Guitarist in his own right, the resulting chemistry is indeed potent, the sound not much changed, but the energy and interactions of course subtly different.
For those new to Group Inerane and Tureg Guitar music in general, just check out the cover, a guitar player in a super fancy satiny robe, holding his guitar up over and behind his head as he presumably SHREDS! Inside, blurred photos of the band rocking out, and that's precisely what Group Inerane traffics in, high energy desert blues, psychedelic and cyclical, hypnotic and in its own way HEAVY.
The sound is warm and sun dappled, celebratory and effusive, plenty of twang and buzz and jangle, simple motorik drumming, intensely emotional and powerful vocals, with lots of whooping and cheering and call and response, emblematic of the hope and joy in the face of the grim realities all around them. The guitar playing is of course incredible, super buzzy and mesmerizing, cool little melodic tangles, locked in tight with vocal counterpoint, or a skittery rhythm, the sound manages to be both loose and free, but also tight and locked in, the recording here is live in a room, so the sound is raw and immediate and intimate, the vocals wreathed in natural reverb, the guitars ringing out, fleck of traditional folks music woven int the groups psychedelic hypnotic desert blues, and while every track is gorgeous, and mesmerizing, like all great guitar bands, it's when they let loose, stretching out the end of a song space rock style, and let the guitars howl and sing and get all tangled up in each other, jams that could, and should go on forever, and these guys definitely have that in them, and when it happens, it's like some glorious Tinariwen / Hawkwind collision.
As always, so so good, and like much of the music we hear from Sublime Frequencies, it's so much more than just the music, we lose sight of that sometimes, but these sounds, and songs, these are people's lives, and hopes, and dreams, and it's their way to be strong and never give in. And listening to this, beyond the sheer joy and exuberance of the music, it's humbling to share in those emotions, and in this music.
Gorgeous deluxe full color gatefold sleeve, with tons of photos and plenty of liner notes. EXTREMELY LIMITED, and vinyl only (for now)...
With a couple of recordings under his belt as Jetone on Force Inc, Tim Hecker has temporarily shelved his Chain Reactive, techno-minimalist pseudonym to experiment with sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" is easily Hecker's best album
This one really doesn't need too much in the way of a description. Vinyl freaks rejoice! Three classic Bernard Herrmann Alfred Hitchcock soundtracks, presented in a luxurious 4lp set, all pressed on 180 gram vinyl, from the same label that brought us that amazing Kurosawa soundtrack set a while back. If you remember that one, you have an idea of how bad ass this looks and sounds. Massive gatefold sleeve with tons of photos and extensive sleeve notes as well as reproductions of the original movie posters, includes the original mono soundtrack to 1956's The Wrong Man, and the original stereo soundtracks to 1958's Vertigo and 1959's North By Northwest. So incredible. A bit pricey, but pretty much worth it. We only have a couple of these in stock, but fear not, if we run out, we can get more in a matter of days. That said, who knows how long these will list, best get one before they're gone for good...
On the same label that brought us the amazing avant grind of PIVIXKI on the last list, comes another stunning find, this one from UK avant/free/math rockers Honey Ride Me A Goat, who apparently have been around for a while now, although this is the first we've heard from them, but we are appropriately blown away.
You think with a name like Honey Ride Me A Goat, we would have been all over these guys, but hell, here we are now making up for lost time. Imagine some dizzying collision between old school SST style free jazz weirdness, stop on a dime NoMeansNo style mathiness, the tangled riffy jangle of nineties college rock, and super spazzy sonic tangles a la everything Mick Barr, and you'd probably be close to capturing the head spinning sonic weirdness these guys traffic in.
After a stretch of swirling abstract free jazz avant noise splatter, the band launch into the first track with something almost surfy, gnarled riffs, skittery rhythms, crunchy distorted guitars, all very looped and hypnotic before finishing off with another squall of chaotic crunch.
But it's the second track where we're totally and irreversibly smitten, a seriously progged out post metal, space metal math jam of epic proportions, think the Ruins and Orthrelm battling it out on stage, only to occasionally slip into some churning hypnotic almost krautrock grooves, with lots of woozy basslines, angular abstract guitar grind, and some of the most perplexing arrangements EVER. And so it goes, the band leaping dexterously from mesmerizing Necks-like avant jazz drone creep, to spastic math grind freakouts, to churning carnivalesque genre leapfrogging grooves, to blown out free jazz / avant grind, to sounds even more abstract and difficult to describe.
Needless to say, this stuff RULES, freaked out and frenetic, frantic and frenzied, fans of Orthrelm, Ocrilim, Ruins, NoMeansNo, Hella, Lightning Bolt, Upsilon Acrux, Flying Luttenbachers and all that sort of post prog / math / grind / avant weirdness will dig BIG TIME.
Interpol aren't groundbreaking or anything, but boy does this NYC quartet sound good. (They probably look good too, got the 'scrod' style DOWN.) The singer's voice has the arch desperation of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. The music is dominated by intertwining guitars that're sometimes angular and choppy, sometimes pensively creating a lush blanket of minor key intensity. Very Factory Records, very Echo & the Bunnymen... but not annoyingly so, for a modern group. I like it! This is a three song, inexpensive teaser single in preparation for the full length to be released August 2002.
- RealAudio clip: PDA
- RealAudio clip: NYC
Of all the sound manipulators, soundscapers and dronologists out there, few can touch Philip Jeck. A master 'turntablist', able to create whole new worlds out of sound, to transport the listener to another place, real or imaginary, with just a clutch of record players, a handful of dusty old vinyl, some cheap Casio keyboards, a couple minidisc recorders, a few mixers, a bass guitar and some effects pedals, the musical equivalent of some mad scientist, creating a time machine, or some temporal shift manipulator, out of odds and ends from the kitchen or the garage. The magic is in the process as much as the result, that result being at least partially beholden to the process, not to discount the sheer creativity and ingenuity of the artist. Because that's exactly what Jeck is, an artist, painting impressionistic landscapes with sound. Instead of colors, he deftly manipulates textures and rhythms, layers and melody, subtly mixing various elements to create something other, the various constituent parts irrelevant to the final piece, like staring at a painting up close, it's not until you step back, that the various elements coalesce into something magical, and beautiful.
An Ark For The Listener is a sonic mediation on a poem about the drowning of five exile nuns in the 1800's, and was performed in various locations throughout 2010, this recorded version incorporates bits of the live performances into the final recorded piece, a gorgeously somber soundscape of deep drones and of mysterious sonic swells, the opener "Pilot/Dark Blue Night", is a hushed drift of stretched out tones and muted sonic garble, a chorus of croaking frogs beneath moaning low end melodies, a slowly unfurling minor key drama wreathed in hiss, truncated rhythms, and clouds of click and chitter, deep bell like tones, and swirling soft focus ambience, culminating in the final few minutes with a super emotional bit of looped strings and epic almost choral swells, strangely skipping, uncharacteristically revealing their vinyl source, but it's precisely what makes it so intense and mysterious.
"Ark" is a tinkling driftscape of chiming tones, and distant melodies which gradually transforms into a weird bit of droney wah wah-ed bass flutter, "Twentyninth" is a perfect slab of Jeckian dreamdrift haze, shot through with moving minor key melodies, and cinematic like tension, a few of the tracks grow dense and turbulent, the sounds thickening, becoming almost caustic and corrosive, while others seems to grow more and more fragile, diaphanous stretches of crystalline shimmer, the record proper finishing off with the surprisingly rhythmic "The Pilot (Among Our Shoals)", with its soft avalanche of looped beats, its tangled flurries of pizzicato strings, a soft focus frenzy of dizzing turntable swirl, which gives way to a lovely outro of hushed barely there drift and breathless low end murmur.
The cd tacks on two bonus tracks, reworked versions from the Suite: Live In Liverpool record, one previously released, the other unreleased, both working surprisingly well with the record proper, "All That's Allowed (Released)" a shimmering expanse of blurred strings and disembodied melody, of softly staticky crackle, and hazy hushed drift, and "Chime, Chime (Rerung)", a crunchy and tactile stretch of tolling bells, reverberating metal, booming gongs and tinkling chimes, all wrapped in a gauze of crackle and pop, buzz and warble, the whole thing lit with some glimmering shimmering otherworldly light. So great.
Brooklyn trio La Otricina have always been about the spaced out heavy jammy psychedelic proggy stoner riffed awesomeness. But now, with their third full-length Holy Mountain monument, they're REALLY starting to fuck shit up. Reality Has Got To Die is their most gonzo album yet, and definitely their most metal! Opener "Hail Fire" sets the scene, with singer/drummer Adam Kriney, tongue perhaps in cheek, rallying La Otracina's jackbooted troops to march forth and pillage some alien landscape, riffs stabbing down from on high like laser blasts from orbiting star destroyers. Melancholic neo-classical guitar melodies lend some pathos to the scene, but pretty soon La Otracina are retro-thrashing it up like Early Man at a kegger. That sort of behavior continues into the next cut, "Raze The Sky", which also manages to up the quota of sci-fi synths, AND throw in a bit of boogie, and visit the set of an Italian suspense movie... Then "Crystal Wizards Of The Cosmic Weird" launches. It's over ten minutes long and thus no surprise even more ridiculously proggy than what's come before, tossing in all that and more, sounding one second like Sleep, another like King Crimson. Clearly this record isn't for those who think bands should be restrained and tasteful in their application of whatever rad '70s stuff in their record collections turns them on. INDULGE! La Otracina aren't holding anything back, but they ARE making damn sure they're tighter and heavier and probably catchier than your band. Unless your band is, like, Pharaoh Overlord or Mammatus or Danava or something, in whose illustrious company La Otracina definitely belong.
But for every metallic part that sounds like it could be off an album by Early Man or The Sword, there's another trippier one that could be by White Hills, Acid Mothers Temple, or even Jonas Reinhardt. In fact, the title track, stretching out over almost 20 minutes, is definitely towards the kosmik krauty spacey psychy side of the La Otracina equation, complete with lengthy distorto-drone maelstroms, and even a drum solo! And when all is said and done, if you can imagine a New Age version of the Saviours you'd be close to a guess at what this record sounds like overall. Enough with the hypothetical comparisons, though, on Reality Has Got To Die these guys have almost moved beyond comparison, whilst making an album seemingly focus-group tested entirely at Aquarius Records. In other words, recommended!
The double lp version comes with mp3 download coupon. The cd version comes with the cd!
Metgumbnerbone is not a reference that pops up all that much, nor is it one that would mean much to anyone who isn't a complete dork about British esoteric experimental musics. But that's where we'll start for this review because that's the reference that one such dork had to make here at Aquarius (it was Jim if you must know). Metgumbnerbone was a shadowy collection of dour Brits (including Richard Rupenus of The New Blockaders) who took up residence in an abandoned factory somewhere in Newcastle and constructed a bleak ritualist music out of the refuse found within. Scraping metal and atonal horns crafted out of plumbing material abound in the Metgumbnerbone vocabulary. Such is the case for Lethe as well, the found-space project of Japanese improviser Kuwayama Kiyoharu. However, as Metgumbernone's post-electrical scrabblings were the result of a collective effort, Lethe's spatializations emerge from an orchestra of one. It seems impossible that he did not overdub many of these sounds, but the production so fully embraces the cavernous space of his choosing that Lethe's pieces sound as if they were constructed in a single take.
For Catastrophe Point #5, Lethe used an abandoned grain warehouse located on the outskirts of Nagoya, Japan. Much more than an ambivalent shuffling or wandering scattering of clunky sounds, Lethe amasses sympathetic scrapings from pieces of metal, large and small, as they are dragged, bowed, and beaten throughout the space. Long form drones emerge throughout the performance as if he's triggering a resonant frequency of the space, echoing against itself. It's true that many of these sounds resemble those found on the impossible to find Metgumberbone records, but other references would be Organum's Vacant Lights album, Z'ev's finer moments, the recent John Grzinich constructions, and even Yoshi Wada's bellowing recordings of his Earth Horns. Excellent!
Another awesome discovery from Chinese black metal label Pest Productions. A few lists back we reviewed the bafflingly brilliant depressive black metal outfit Heartless, with its over the top vocals, and surprisingly twisted blackened sound, as well as the killer outsider blackness of Icelandic horde Dysthymia, and now we have the oddly named Liam, a German post rock / black metal outfit whose washed out shoegazey depressive drift should definitely hit the spot for anyone into Alcest, Ameseours, Les Discrets, Lifelover and other pop minded blackened outfits.
Journey... Two Years and a Fragment collects two long out of print eps, 2007's My Journey To The Sky and 2008's Two Years And A Fragment. My Journey To The Sky is all instrumental, and plays out much more like a metallic post rock record, the blackness mostly implied, the chords ring out, the arrangements are epic and slow building, the crescendos massive, the sound mathy and mesmerizing, the vibe melancholy, washed out and dreamy, definitely super shoegazey, more Mogwai than Mutiilation for sure, the songs are so majestic and melodic, in fact, if these guys didn't simply consider themselves a black metal band, odds are no one would even know.
Two Years And A Fragment is a very slightly blacker beast, kicking off with some harsh vokills, but they quickly fade into the background, leaving just a darkly buzzy gloom pop, the vocals WAY down in the mix, the sound lush, and buzzy, but so melodic and minor key, and with plenty of clean vocals, definitely reminding us of a more depressive Lifelover, or a way less melodic Katatonia. The arrangements are awesome though, the stop start chug, the clean vocal harmonies, and the swoonsome melodic miserablism. Long stretches of buzzy prettiness, three songs clocking in at about 28 minutes, but it sort of sounds like three movements of one single epic track, heavy for sure, and there are harsh vox, but overall this is just some fantastically melodic, hook filled epic shoegazey gloom pop, and we love it. Definitely not heavy enough for the grim throng, but fans of this sort of thing will maybe have a new favorite band, and all you metallic post rock obsessives, here's your chance to dabble in something a bit blacker. But only a bit.
Lots of folks out there are no doubt familiar with Oakland's Lil B, the self proclaimed "Based God", he's got about a million Myspace pages, nearly as many albums, most floating around the web as free downloads, his sound confusional and WAY brilliant, warped beats, lots of twisted synths, and his flow, totally tweaked and twisted, like a less lethargic, less mumbly Sensational, but with rhymes that are equally baffling, but no knowledge of Lil B and his other jams could have prepared us for his Weird Forest debut. Gone are the beats, as in NO beats at all, gone is the twisted buzz, the warped samples, in their place, warm liquid shimmers, sun dappled and meditative, whirring tranquil synthscapes, a sort of Tangerine Dream style drift, all muted whirring blurs and stretched out layered synth drones, all underpinning Lil B's rhythmic next level flow. Strip those rhymes away, and what are you left with? Full on NEW AGE. Yep, this is some tripped out, weirdly psychedelic NEW AGE HIP HOP. It's a seriously polarizing listen, some of us are a little obsessed and can't stop listening to it, plenty of other folks are driven INSANE by this confusional collision of unlikely sonic bedfellows. Think Sensational rapping over Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast, or a beatless WuTang record constructed entirely from Tangerine Dream samples, that should be enough for you to decide if this is your cup of acid laced tea or not. Check out the samples, decide for yourself, but we're pretty psyched on this bizarre chunk of new age spoken word synth hop for sure...
NB. there is a cd of this, but they went fast, hopefully we'll be able to get some more of that format soon...
An ultimate skweee entree here folks!! The head honcho of flagship skweee label Flogsta Danshall, Frans Carlqvist aka Limonious (also aka Pavan), drops his debut, vinyl-only full-length. Eight tracks of dope skweee from a master of the form... and if you're unfamiliar with skweee, Limonious will school you. You can also look up "skweee" on our site for more info in other reviews, like those of the Museum Of Future Sound comps on Carlqvist's label (the blocky b&w cover art of this album is in the style of those comps). Suffice to say that skweee is a (mostly) Scandinavian subgenre of fucked up and funky Electro soundz, computery blip bloop zip zap meets hip hop, done DIY, with distortion and glitch, like what you'd feverishly imagine could be jammin' at an '80s video arcade / dancehall. On House Of Usher, the skweee simply slays, with queasy beats knocking against squelching synth bass, the results being warped, percolating instrumental grooves that are earworm-catchy. And in keeping with the "House Of Usher" theme, there's a suspenseful spooky moodiness to some of this that Poe himself might have appreciated. This album includes a version of the Limonious classic "Swedish Pommak" (as heard on Museum Of Future Sound Vol. 2), here titled "Swizz Pommak", along with 7 brand new cuts of hardcore skweee, though it'd be worth it for the "Pommak" one alone!! Seriously. Anyone into skweee needs this record, and if you're not yet into skweee, maybe this will do the trick, check it out!
Despite a solo discography that tallies well above 30 titles, Mark McGuire has quipped that Living With Yourself is, in his mind, his 'first' album, because it was the first album to emerge as a properly replicated cd and slab of vinyl without originally getting released first as a micro-edition tape or cd-r. Fair enough. McGuire is also the principle guitarist for Emeralds, who also has a discography with a boatload of releases; the man specializes in sustained flares of kosmische guitar arpeggiations recalling Manuel Gottsching and Achim Reichel. In both Emeralds and his solo work, he's at his best when his guitar seems to effortlessly transmit bittersweet, counterpoint melodies within his arching dronerock compositions. It takes Living With Yourself awhile to get to those epiphanous moments, after McGuire churns through a Takoma inspired acoustic guitar workout situated alongside home recordings of some family gathering with a cassette deck recording the affair. By the time, McGuire arrives at "Clouds Rolling In" a distant melancholy settles upon his Durutti Column like guitar lines that skitter in circles to build his impressionist atmosphere. Similarly moody tracks lead up through the album's conclusion, a straight-up, instrumental-rock number with his stratospheric guitar riffs buttressed by a drummer, edging much more into the cinematic Explosions In The Sky territory. Certainly not what we were expecting, but could this be the lead in for McGuire to start scoring movie soundtracks?
A brand new full length from our favorite doom-drone / doom-gaze duo, Nadja, and it's on one of our favorite labels too, Brazil's Essence Music, who in the past have brought us incredible releases from Acid Mothers Temple, Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Boris, Merzbow, and Rapoon. But this is not the regular release. We are honored to be the only place in the world, other than the label itself, to be selling the super limited, deluxe, handmade boxset version, limited to just 149 copies, already completely sold out, except for a handful saved just for us, and for you. These are pricey, but they are incredible, gorgeously and lovingly assembled, with TONS of extra stuff, and there are less than 10 copies left, so get one before they're gone. More on the record proper in a second, but we figured we'd best explain what all comes in the box, in fact first there's the box itself, hand painted and decorated using several techniques, collaged, stitched and an intricate ink layering painting process. The box is gorgeous, but inside, you'll find the standard edition of the album, lavishly assembled in a custom 6-panel digisleeve housing a set of 6 cards set with beautiful watercolor paintings and artwork by Portuguese artist L. Filipe dos Santos. PLUS, as a bonus, an alternative DOUBLE cd-r set comprising the album (same version/mastering) and a DTS 5.1 version of it - this one mastered/mixed by Anders Peterson and including an exclusive remix - housed in a 6-panel package with a striking and utterly different artwork by Iremir Oscar and Essence head honcho Uirajara Resende PLUS an inedit live recording from earlier this year, also on cd-r. That's FOUR discs instead of just the one. PLUS, honoring the album's theme - skin and blood - there's also an individually painted and hand-assembled 16-page book - each page is totally unique - and strange souvenirs, like a pen-like object and a large painted band that holds the whole set together.
WOW. Like we said, there are less than 10 of these left, we are taking PRE-ORDERS for these, they are NOT in stock, once we know how many we need, we'll order them from Brazil and should have them within a week to 10 days. So if you order this with other stuff, your order will ship minus the Nadja box, which will ship by itself, or if you are a regular mailorder customer, probably in your next order, but you will be charged for it NOW, if you want one don't dawdle.
And if you are a Nadja fan, you're definitely gonna want one of these, sure all Nadja records are pretty great, but this one is incredible, an hour long three part epic, the heaviest, most lush and orchestral and intense record we've heard from these two yet. The opening track, clocking in at 25 minutes, begins as a hushed bit of dreamy drift, all gauzy and washed out and shimmery, layered melodies, shifting and swirling and so lovely, very Pop Ambient in fact, until about 12 minutes in, when the drums kick in, the guitars explode, but it doesn't simply get heavier, or louder, it sounds orchestral, huge moaning melodies, what sounds like strings or horns, epic and kaleidoscopic, the sound living and breathing, prismatic and totally warm and glowing, a heaving chunk of blissed out dreamlike heaviness.
The second movement is more traditionally heavy, a chugging churning slab of lumbering doom, the pounding drum machine and buzzing riffs, wreathed in a swirling cloud of hiss and buzz and Technicolor effulgence, a sort of incendiary Godflesh style industrial crunch, with buried howled vocals, and constantly shifting patina of glitched out effects and electronic buzz, which gives away to the 26 minute closer, beginning with super spare acoustic guitars, which drift into a shimmering field of prismatic glimmer, eventually exploding into another slab of blown out orchestral epic dream doom, totally majestic, and almost choral sounding, wrapped in sheets of staticky buzz, the sound getting more and more fierce and intense and threatening to blow your speakers, total chaos and catharsis, blissful but ultra intense, finally, relenting, and leaving gorgeous sonic vapor trails, laced with buried boy girl vox, a dreamy understated coda, to a seriously epic bit of orchestral buzz drenched bliss. So great.
We WILL have the standard version, keep your eyes peeled for it on a future list, or ask us to reserve you one, but those of you who want the QUADRUPLE DISC HANDMADE DELUXE BOXSET, now's the time...
Not one, but two new missives from mysterious blackmetal/blacknoize merchant Nekrasov, an Aussie one man horde who crafts some of the most twisted sickest noise drenched black metal we've ever heard. Elsewhere on this list you'll find an older title, a split/collaboration with Canadian doom-ed black metal peddlers Humiliation, but this right here is the latest bit of filth and fury, transmitted from NKRSV headquarters directly into your rotting blackened earholes. And weirdly enough, while it's still noisy as fuck, it seems Master Nekrasov has dialed back the noise a bit, right out of the gate, the awesomely titled "We Are Just An Indifferent Interpretation Of The Black Plague" explodes in a frenzy of lightning fast programmed beats, of insectoid riffing, of hellish howling vokills, but the whole thing weirdly and impossibly melodic, it's all relative of course, but woven into the fabric of the furious grinding black blast, is a distinctly hooky undercurrent, which not only makes it crazy catchy, also infuses the rest of the track with a distinctly weirdo black vibe. The second track is another blast of pounding grimness, this time the harsh vox are balanced by what sounds like monks chanting and yet still more strangely pleasing melodies, all buried under the relentless pound and churn, the result is a strange bit of almost orchestral sounding brutality.
After a lengthy bit of blackdrone drift, all muted rumbles and buried industrial percussion, a sort of militaristic windstorm ambience, the record slips back into blackened buzz, this time, much punkier, not blasting so much as pounding furiously, the vocals super hot and in-the-red, swallowing up all the other sounds with every shriek, while in the background the new surprisingly melodic side of Nekrasov struggles to shine from behind the black curtain of frantic buzzing and machinelike pound. More ambience follows, some field recorded creepiness, laced with buried bits of melody, culminating in an avalanche of crumbling distortion and harsh blurred black crunch, the final bit of pure buzzing metallic blackness comes in the form of "Chant The Name Of God In A Thousand Languages Until All Is Blood And Feces", a return to the noisy Nekrasov of old, a buzzing old school black metal smothered in thick sheets of hiss, the distortion so blown out, the vocals so processed and inhuman, the whole thing threatens to crumble to pieces, and is constantly blurring into an almost full on blackdrone.
The record finishes off with two lengthy tracks, nearly 22 minutes, of creeping, haunting, abject, miserable black ambience, the first a thick black churning dronescape, heavy glacial guitars smeared into dense streaks, trudging across a sonic wasteland, all industrial filth, whirring church organ (!) and mysterious melodic drift. And finally, the 16 + minute title track, a corrosive blackened noise drone, layered and dense, also industrial, but less rhythmic, heaving crumbling swells, the sound of cities crumbling, of collapse and decay, of death and oblivion. Brutal and intense.
This is not actually brand new, it's from last year, but we've been doing our best to track down enough copies to list for ages now, and were finally able to get some direct from NEKRASOV HQ. And holy shit was it worth the wait. Nekrasov, the one man Aussie blacknoize wrecking crew who have long terrorized aQ with epic blasts of furious blackness, teamed up with Canadian black metal misanthropes Humiliation, for a seriously malformed chunk of audial evil. And while it's a split, it's also a partial collaboration, each band contributing three tracks, one of which has been augmented and fucked with by the other.
The proceedings begin with Nekrasov unfurling drifting clouds of muted murk, which give way to a barrage of blurred riffage, then blown out tumbling blast beats, all gnarled and blurred, weirdly pretty and washed out, Humiliation adding various sounds to the already dense racket. For the next two tracks, Nekrasov goes it alone, first the epic (and epically titled) "From Where I Sit The Sky Was Full Of Wrath And Ill Will", a sprawling 11 minutes of tangled spidery guitar melody, creeping droned out drift, hushed industrial ambience, ominous orchestral swells, harsh howled vokills, a brief blast of black metal crush, and then a tripped out squall of twisted effects drenched blackened noise. Finally, things finish off with a a super abstract final jam, all lumbering machine like lurch, rumbles and creaks, clatter and processed grinds and buzzes, eventually smoothing out into a deep subterranean sounding low end thrum.
The first Humiliation track begins as a haunting whirl of strange processed winds and voices, almost like some sort of EVP style field recording. Soon the voices become more pronounced, wreathed in effects, the ambience peppered with disembodied riffs, bits of chug, soaring bits of minor key melody, all suspended in a field of hiss and whir and buzz, eventually exploding into some seriously filthy and damaged black doom, harsh vokills, lo-fi drum damage, thick black chugs, a strange bit of Khanate-meets-Abruptum-meets-Burzum-meets-Wolf Eyes, a spaced out bit of grimness, eventually fading into a soft swirl of music box like melody and distant rumble, before exploding into the follow up, another chunk of lumbering hateful black stumble, which over the course of the next 8 minutes drifts from abject industrial pound, to tripped out Gnaw Their Tongues style almost orchestral minimal doom, to clattery creepy soundtracky ambience, to Swans like Teutonic pound, to almost dreamy otherworldly drift.
The final track, begins like another slab of industrial flecked doomic plod and crush, wreathed in a corrosive halo of crumbling distortion and malfunctioning effects, before the riffing drops out completely, leaving a roiling expanse of fractured feedback, strange samples, grinding scrape and howl, all wrapped in wildly explosive layers of blown out buzz.
More necessary Nekrasov, and something serious to whet your appetite for more fucked up filth from the mysterious Humiliation...
Long in the works debut full length from these SF heavies, four songs, 54 minutes, a sprawling collection of lurching lumbering, trudging post metal apocalyptic, swampy emo dirgery. And we don't mean emo in the mall punk sense, no we're talking, earnest and intense, epic and EMOTIONAL, the vocals specifically, a wild, nearly unhinged caterwaul, dramatic and occasionally over the top, sounding a bit like a harsher Daniel Higgs (and when it does, the band almost sounds like a metal Lungfish!), or a more metal David Yow, a little like the guy from NoMeansNo oddly enough, or even a more manic Michael Gira, with an intense, snarling delivery, actually sung too, not of that gurgle and shriek, and those real vocals add pathos and intensity to the already swaggery, slithery doomy crush underneath.
Equal parts math metal, post metal and doom metal, these guys unfurl epic sun baked expanses of totally epic doom blues brutality, churning heaviness that slips from gnarled Birthday Party like scumrock to soaring slow building Neurosis style pummel, the guitars drifting from jangle to roar, from shimmer do droned out and blackened, often in the same song. Long stretches of hypnotic cyclical riffing give way to bursts of chaotic metal psych jams, give way to swampy noise rock strut, eventually returning to the lumbering downtuned heaviness that seems to be the band's core, but those vocals soar above it all, tortured and patently UNmetal, helping transform this post metal avant doom into something truly unique.
LIMITED to 100 COPIES!!
San Francisco sound-n-noise technician Brandon Nickell had been recording under the moniker Aemae for a number of years, but he's recently dropped that to go with his given name. It's been a couple years since Nickell / Aemae released a full album (well, there was a pretty awesome cassette on Black Horizon in 2009). But, he's been performing out quite a bit up and down the West Coast and working through his experiential research into auditory hallucinations. If these sounds are any clue as to what kind of hallucinations Nickell was having, they must have been unsettling to say the least. Analog synths, voice, and a hell of a lot of digital synthesis went into pierced electronic tones that Nickell generates, each honed to have a razor sharp edge to sheer your ears straight off. Digitally forged drones stream in every direct at the onset of the album, sharpened for skull scraping results. Even as these dissolve into creepy-as-hell vocal gasps detuned to low-end rumblings, Nickell quickly cuts to an unstable collage of slashing cacophony. Transitioning into a tempered set of recordings of mechanoid grinds, post-Oval digital splutter, and spatialized clank, the pierced rasping tones return to bring the album to a conclusion. There's definitely a connection to the eardrum rattling psychoacoustics that The Hafler Trio could generate, augmented with the aesthetics of Florian Hecker, CM von Hausswolff, and John Wiese.
