You can tell a lot about a band by how they creatively they describe each member's role, what they play, and what they do, this is mostly applicable to metal bands, but avant Japanese grinders AKBK (featuring members of recent aQ faves, progressive space psychedelic death rockers King Goblin!) put most metalheads to shame with their liner notes, no 'drums' or 'vocals' here. Instead it's: 'Judas Preacher', 'Hard Puncher', 'Dirkschnoise', 'Anal Backfire' and 'Noise Gigolo'. And those aren't their 'rock names', those are the instruments they play, or at least the roles they fulfill in the band. And heck before we even get to the music, we might as well mention the amazing song titles: "Bug In Your God's Ear", "Have A Jail Lunch", "Let Me Eat Whales", "Sexual Response Of The Intact Male", "Give Back My Horse", and the super cool colorful abstract collaged artwork, and before we make our spiel about how amazing these guys are, and how twisted and gloriously fucked up and heavy this record is, have a look at the obi which features testimonies from a few metal, noise and grind luminaries: Rich Hoak of Brutal Truth, Tabata Mitsuru of Zeni Geva, Lasse Marhaug of Jazkamer, and Analtoshit of Butcher ABC, who describe AKBK as "a non-stop terrorist attack in the brain" and "like being crushed by a mountain" and as "a prog rock grind metal excursion", and Marhaug even wants AKBK to be played at his funeral!
But don't just trust those guys, take our word for it, this stuff is incredible, the core sound is definitely grind, with shrieked vocals, blasting chaotic drums, wild flailing gnarled guitars, and there's probably some bass in there too, buried under an avalanche of blown out crunch and howling ultra distorted chaos. But like Agoraphobic Nosebleed, AKBK twist everything up into super intense, ultra complex, and skull crushingly heavy prog-grind-metal weirdness, time signatures shifting constantly, riffs turned inside out, lurching start stop arrangements, super intricate tangles of melody wound around lumbering almost doomy dirges, which lead right into freaked out psychedelic math rock grind, and then back into some primitive D-beat pound, a furious stumbling confusional outsider grind juggernaut spitting swirls of atonal melody, insane blasts of woofer shredding double bass and pealing streaks of feedback drenched powerviolence. Yet the thing is, for all of this record's weirdness, it's not goofy at all, maybe the guys making this are funny guys with great senses of humor (the song titles and various non-musicial stuff seem to indicate that might be the case) but AKBK's music is anything but, this is some serious, and seriously devastating heaviness, furious and frantic, experimental and avant for sure, but essentially just a beautifully brutal chunk of twisted metallic grindcore. We imported these direct from the band in Japan, and only have a few on hand...
If you were one of the lucky few to snag a copy of Ariel Pink's self released 2002 cd Scared Famous, when it came with an extra disc, well, this was it, Fast Forward, a collection of AP's earliest recorded songs from '00-'01, and if you DID manage to get one of these, well, then you know how damn great and bizarre this is. Sadly that pressing went out of print in a flash so chances are most of you and most of us don't actually have these songs. So it's cool that Gloriette is giving them their well deserved, first ever vinyl pressing.
It's a little crazy to think that just a little while ago, Ariel Pink was in town opening for The Flaming Lips and then took off on a co-headlining tour with Os Mutantes, cuz when we first heard these songs almost a decade ago we were pretty sure he would remain this really amazing secret of the damaged left-field pop underground. Luckily sometimes the world catches up and catches on, and Ariel has leaped out of the fringe and into the limelight as one of the most original musicians of the last decade, influencing a whole wave of bands and labels along the way, all of whom have tapped into his primitive style of recording and creating damaged pop.
Fast Forward shows just how out there and fucked up his recordings were from the get go yet still always filled with layered pop prettiness that if lifted from the layers of lo-fi hiss would be any slick pop band's dream songs.
So stoked that this is finally available and on vinyl to boot. Best grab one quick as the world of Ariel Pink vinyl tends to be quite fleeting.
Ancestral Star is the latest batch of brooding, epic, twang flecked darkness from this local duo (now trio with the seemingly permanent addition of a drummer), their first for Thrill Jockey, and easily their most fully realized record yet, and while we were expecting it to maybe be their heaviest, based on the last few releases and the duo's individual solo recordings, it seems the band have dialed back the crunch, opting more for moodiness and atmosphere. The group's development from hushed psychedelic droners to brooding epic soundscapers has been a gradual and natural one, which is most likely what accounts for the seamless melding of whispery psychedelic ambience and lumbering doom-ed country drift.
The record opens up with a wild squall of superdistorted guitar buzz and howling feedback, a slowly unfurling melody, the notes crumbling and blown out, it had us expecting some serious crush right off the bat, but instead, the thick peals of smoldering psychdrone give way to some smokey Morricone-ish drift, haunting and abstract, the drums giving the sound a definite slowcore vibe, vocals hovering way off in the distance, more about adding texture than delivering lyrics.
After a brief twangscape, another spare skeletal bit of haunting countrydoomdrift, the band launch into the 10+ minute title track, a gauzy bit of slow building dronemusic, lushly layered, gradually expanding like a timelapse film of a supernova, a slowly blossoming burst of white hot buzz, expanding in every direction, a massive cloud of roiling distorted sound, that begins to fade almost immediately eventually becoming another stretch of hushed haunting ambience.
The rest of the record is rich with short sonic vignettes, a brief bit of echo drenched Appalachia, a heavily reverbed stretch of lush droney piano, a gorgeous bit of desert-y drift, all brooding twang and sitar like buzz, even some wheezing harmonium and choral like chants, these short form soundscapes separating the record's other two lengthy soundscapes, the first "Flatlands" begins all singing strings, and droned out vocals, lots of layers, and incredible overtones, the sounds constantly shifting, so dark and dramatic rife with some sort of melodic inner glow that infuses the rest of the sounds, the drone eventually fading out, leaving a bit of distorted twang, to gradually unravel to song's end. and then there's the closer, the nearly 7 minute "Light From The Mesa" another sprawling bit of dark dronemusic, washed out and whirring, the band's murky twang buried beneath the muted drift, everything wreathed in an ethereal haze, the drone finally dissipating leaving more spidery western twang, this time with percussion that sound like the clink of spurs on the wooden floor of the saloon, until those spidery guitars blossom into thick warm waves of chordal hum, backed up by soaring falsetto vocals, a gorgeous dirge to lead Barn Owl out of the valley, the record winding down as they disappear into the distance.
Yet another gorgeous collection of darkly epic doomfolk dronedrift dreaminess.
The cd version comes in a 4 panel mini lp style gatefold sleeve, the lp comes in a full color gatefold jacket and includes a download coupon as well.
For some of us, Belle And Sebastian are one of the only bands that have been a constant in our lives for the last fifteen years. So listening to them always takes on extra weight as we immediately are flooded with so many memories when we hear their delicate and exquisitely constructed bittersweet pop songs. Seeing them live just a couple weeks ago we were reminded just how many life defining and moment-capturing songs they've created over the years with an ease and breeze that so many have tried to emulate but always seem to come up short. During that live set we got to hear several of the songs that are on Write About Love for the first time and it made us very excited for the album.
Like all Belle And Sebastian albums, it's hard to write about this new one without spending tons of time with it as they really are a band who make records for the long haul. As all their records have left a mark on us even if at first we didn't think we were as in love with it as the one before.
Write About Love is a nice mixture of the slower side of the band as well as a few totally sugary and catchy songs that we have been humming non stop since we got this in. The record does make us miss Isobel Campbell, as a couple of the female led tracks just aren't as special as when they were being sung by her. But we know that so many of these songs will become totally ingrained in helping cue so many future memories of romance, friendships, lazy rainy days, and sun soaked adventures. (FYI, vinyl being repressed, probably back in stock next week.)
Soft and mystical, Bird By Snow have been making dreamy folk pop with psych-ish elements for the past few years. Featuring former members of Whysp and Residual Echoes, their latest effort, Common Wealth, produced by Tim Green is their strongest to date, perfectly marrying strong songwriting with an elegant ambiance of needlepoint guitar work, spacious drumming and pretty female backing vocals. A perfect record to cozy up to a fire in the dark winter months. Fans of Vetiver, Hush Arbors, and Weird Weeds should check this out.
Last list we had the Sabbathy Japanese proto-metal reissue from Blues Creation, circa '71. Now, moving a few years further into the Seventies, we present: Bow Wow! Ok, the name might not sound that heavy. But they are.
Much to Andee and Allan's excitement, the UK label Rock Candy has recently reissued the first four albums by '70s Japanese metal band Bow Wow (not to be confused with '80s new wavers Bow Wow Wow, or Bow Wow the rapper). We'd like to review 'em all eventually, but thought we'd start with this one, their 2nd, originally released in 1977. After all, it's got a song on it called "Rainbow Of Sabbath", so you know its gonna be good! Better be! And indeed, they are definitely influenced by Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Scorpions, and other classic contemporaries from the West.
The ten tracks here are packed with uptempo, flashy hard rockers. There's lumbering riffs ("Silver Lightning"), one affecting power ballad ("Still"), and plenty of ripping guitar pyrotechnics from axe hero Kyoji Yamamoto, particularly on the instrumental title track. Some of his solo six string freakouts are positively psychedelic (he was a big Hendrix fan), as are the effects that they use on the drums here! Bow Wow aren't from early enough in the '70s to be proto-metal, of course, but we could call 'em proto-NWOBHM, maybe. Though it's some young American bands of the day that they most remind us of, like Riot, Starz, and Van Halen (both Yamamoto and Eddie Van H. are known for their hammer-on technique).
This album is just bursting with electric energy, and it's not hard to believe what the liner notes here say about it being a big fave of Metallica in their formative days. Those liner notes, by the way, based on a recent interview with Yamamoto himself, are interesting and in depth, typical of Rock Candy's deluxe reissue treatment. Highly recommended rock from the land of the Rising Sun!
Get this, and if there's enough interest then we'd be stoked to also import and review their self-titled debut ('76), Charge ('77), and Super Live ('78), all also awesome.
Along with the new batch of Our Love Will Destroy The World cd-r's (4 in total, the first listed elsewhere on this week's list) came this mysterious little disc, the work of some group called Brilliant Swords, seven songs in thirteen minutes, and not at all what you might expect from Campbell Kneale's Don't Fuck With Magic Label. Instead of thick clouds of abstract free noise, or twisted dronescapes of blown out loops and buried rhythms, Brilliant Swords are a pop band. Yep, a pop band. Fuzzy and noisy for sure, but this is totally buzz drenched noise pop, and it's pretty goddamn great. A little bit Husker Du, a little bit nineties indie rock, the guitars are super distorted, the vocals super melodic, the songs are short sharp and hooky as hell, the longest clocking in at 2:53, the shortest at :58, but pop music like this doesn't need any more than that.
We couldn't find out anything about these guys, or this guy, the liner notes simply state that each song was written, recorded and mixed in less than two hours, and heck it sounds like it, which is not a bad thing, the songs are super intense, passionate, catchy bursts of fuzzy lo-fi power pop, we hear some My Dad Is Dead, Hard Ons, Buffalo Tom, a little Nova Scotia jangle (Eric's Trip et al), all wound into some seriously kick ass pop. The sort of pop that if it found its way from a super limited release on an obscure micro cd-r label to the right ears, these guys could definitely be huge, or could have 15 years ago. Either way, we're loving this a LOT. It's short, but that just means we've been listening to it over and over.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES! We're the only source for these in the US and we only got 20 copies, so once those are gone, that's it.
Before we blather on like we so often do, it seemed like it might be good to just toss out a first impression of Love Is A Stream, the fantastic new record from Root Strata label Head Honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, his first for the type label. And heck, that first impression might be all you need:
Lovesliescrushing meets Flying Saucer Attack.
There. Hard to argue with that. Warped warbly, blurred shoegazey drift, long stretches of incendiary psychedelic guitar drone, streaks of soft noise, buried melodies, ethereal vocals, lush layered textures, dense and explosive, expansive and dreamily hazy, and in its own way, gorgeously heavy.
A new side of Cantu-Ledesma for sure, whose past records seemed to hover in a much more tranquil serene otherworld, unfurling hushed landscapes of whispery minimalism, of delicate crystalline shimmer, and of barely there soft focus ambient drift. Love Is A Stream is anything but, a fiery, fierce, yet ultimately lush and washed out series of bold shoegaze dreamnoise experiments, not so much pop songs swathed in distortion and effects, as carefully crafted sonic impressions, a series of gorgeous miniature epics, each a brief expanse of prismatic hypnogogic psychedelia, every one a unique a roiling concoction of fuzzpopbliss and murky melodic churn. On the surface, the record plays out like a series of textures, from warm whirling hum, to crumbling blown out white noise blur, to grinding muted pulse and throb, to gauzy bleary haze, to thick billowy low end rumble, to superdistorted effects-drenched synthnoise, and yeah, you're reading right, this is in fact a noisy record, but it's an artfully crafted, carefully sculpted noise. A thick, billowing, warm and gloriously enveloping melodic noise, like sinking into a swirling sea of burnished muted crush, a nearly overwhelming avalanche of whirling swirling crumbling throb and thrum, beneath it all lurk delicate melodies, tendrils of minor key guitar, ghostly voices, whirring synths, they rise to the surface here and there, but for the most part exist as shadowy impressions, infusing the noisy textures with a melodic core, a warm glowing sonic heart, which is what transforms these heaving slabs of shoegazey heaviness into something divine, and divinely dreamy.
There are brief moments, where the surface noise, and the distortion, and the walls of effects peel back, and we get to peek behind the curtain, which reveals the lush minimal underpinnings of the songs, a brief melodic smear here, a hushed little fragment of guitar there, but a glimpse is all we get, and really all we want, because it's how those bits of minimal songcraft interact with the intense sonic effulgence that is truly the magic that Cantu-Ledesma wields in conjuring up the sounds here. And like all magic, the joy is not in how it was done, but it how it makes us feel.
The lp version comes with a bonus cd, a collaboration with Type label mainman Xela, who took source material provided by Cantu-Ledesma, and fashioned his own bit of ambient dronemusic. Nearly 50 minutes of haunting drift, after a short burst of caustic super distorted crunch, Xela settles into a slow burning sprawl of washed out chordal shimmer, deep rumbling thrum and lush streaks of shoegazey buzz, a few moments as dense and psychedelic as the record proper, but for the most part, more of a chill out wind down coda, the perfect addendum to an already practically perfect record. Really quite lovely.
No Reserve is a limited run release of a radio broadcast care of KALX in Berkeley from the eccentric Thomas Carnacki, whose ooze-riddled sound collages are buttressed by the likes of Gregory Hagan (Common Eider King Eider), Jim Kaiser (NFOrchest, etc.), and Jesse Burson (Big City Orchestra). Carnacki's live performances are notoriously last-minute affairs with the ringmaster collecting his resourceful motley crew of sullen noise makers a few days before any given performance, almost always resulting in spontaneous madness of illogical sounds and colliding electro-acoustics. Strangely, the gigs almost always work wonderfully, and such is the case for this KALX transmission.
At the onset, the quartet finds themselves in a claustrophobic space, with metallic exhalations and looping scrapes reflecting all of the optimism of a bombed-out bunker. Gritty pulsations of electronics build out of residual drones, oscillating two and fro, with a thick clatter of that bunker-powered reverb settling at the bottom of the layering of sounds. Hagan's violin, which adds to those sadder-than-sad moods to Common Eider King Eider, creeps to the foreground at various intervals, amidst the cooing electronics, the crumblings of sand, rock, and debris, and the funereal tolls from a resonant bell. Think early HNAS, Cranioclast, and Nurse With Wound, and you'll be close to the unsettled atmospherics of Mr. Carnacki and his so-called Anti-Memorial Orchestra and Choir.
Record number two from these Virginia doomlords, a crushing collection of druggy, dirgey ultradoom, a lumbering sludge juggernaut, filthy distorted guitars, crushing drum pound, hellish shrieks, but something's changed this time around, cuz in addition to those harsh vokills, there's some serious vocalizing going on, that manages to nudge Cough's sound a little bit away from filthy crusty doomsludge toward something more classically doom, we're feeling a little Electric Wizard perhaps? The band dabbled a bit on their last record, but here those vocals are way up in the mix, still wreathed in reverb and delay, but the subtle groove of Cough's stonery sludge becomes much more pronounced with those vocals, which is not a bad thing at all, the band stumbling from pure grim downtuned plodding filth to swinging Sabbathy groove, even adding some surprisingly melodic guitar leads and lush swirls of spaced out effects which produces a sort of weirdly melodic sludgey space rock, which RULES.
But fear not, the band inevitably slip back into something sludgier, but not TOO sludgey, as those clean vocals seem to outnumber the harsh vocals pretty significantly. So if you're in the market for some total Eyehategod worship, you might be better served with the first Cough record, but if you're up for some slightly more melodic heaviness, this record should definitely do the trick.
Especially if you stick around for "Crooked Spine", which is ridiculously poppy, sounding a bit like a stoner sludge version of a Codeine track, a sort of druggier, sludgier slowcore, the vocals super poppy, maybe hinting at a more melodic Cough to come.
But again, all you have to do is hold on for a few more minutes, and the title track swoops in, and flattens you with its sheer malevolent crush, a lurching lumbering sludge EPIC, complete with a killer spaced out effects laden doomdirgedrone breakdown, and a final burst of skull crushing riffage.
Unlike many of their lo-fi garage peers, Crystal Stilts are quite restrained when it comes to releasing records. They still have not released a full length since their amazing debut, Alight Of Night from way back in 2008, and we think it's wise they're taking this approach. The only thing we've heard from them since was the incredibly addictive single "Love Is A Wave" which they released as a 7" last year and now finally we get two more brand new songs to whet our hungry appetites for a new album by one of the bands we imagine will outlast so many in the crowded lo-fi crowd they share a scene with. The A side "Shake The Shackles" could be confused with one of our favorite Jeremy Jay songs as it finds the Stilts at their most melodic and inviting yet. The B side "Magnetic Moon" has that perfect dark pop gloom that they do better then almost anyone around. A no brainier for fans of the band, and if you're not a fan or missed the boat the first time around,we urge you to check out their records as they really are something special!
Found a few of these tucked away in the closet, just four copies of 2007's self titled full length from this now defunct Belgian black metal horde, which features members of Gotmoor, Paragon Impure, Verloren, and a bunch of others.
While this is definitely black metal, it's more on the 'black 'n' roll' side of the grim black spectrum, meaning that blasting beats and buzzing riffs are wound into more rock arrangments, the band sounding like a filhty crusty D-beat juggernaut, serving up crushing slabs of double bass driven downtuned chug alongside Entombed style melodic black metal, lumbering deathmarch style midtempo plod, twisted chaotic noise rock and full on muddy and murky blackend buzz-drenched heaviness. Killer.
Pretty sure these will be gone in a flash, so we'll keep this review short and sweet! Likewise, if you want one, please don't dilly dally. A limited edition 12" by a super Canadian team-up of aQ faves - Destroyer, Loscil, and Tim Hecker. Dan Bejar wrote and sang the lyrics, while the other two gents of ambient artistry composed and performed the atmospheric backdrop. Zoweee! Includes a digital download coupon.
Latest from these Ukrainian black metal masters, and by now faithful readers of the aQ list most likely know how much we love Ukrainian black metal: Hate Forest, Nokturnal Mortum, Lucifugum, Astrofaes, and of course Drudkh, and while there is much of the old Drudkh present, there have been some seriously dramatic sonic and stylistic shifts which somehow manage to change the sound completely without losing the essence of what makes Drudkh so great.
After a dark brooding piano intro, the first proper song kicks in and the first thing you notice is the almost jangly guitar tone, and the busy almost mathy drumming, and suddenly, the sound is more Katatonia / Alcest than anything we might have expected from Drudkh, there are still harsh vocals, and blasting double kick drumming, but combined with the almost clean guitars, it sounds more like Lifelover. It's a little jarring for sure, but the new sound definitely suits them, and over the course of that first track, there are cool stop / start arrangements, midtempo drifts of post rock that build to super tangled complex mathy blowouts, verging on black blasts, but more blissed out and shoegazey almost.
The second track begins similarly, with lightly flanged clean guitar, a strummed minor key melody, with a second guitar adding Smiths-y shimmer, and then again, the song kicks in and it's super melodic, the only true element of blackness the vox. It's at this point that something else becomes noticeable for its absence, no synths, and no folky interludes, for years an integral part of Drudkh's sound, but seemingly ditched in favor of melody, and harmony, and a definite pop element.
All that said, the songs are still pretty fantastic, the drumming, super original and complex, often adding strange rhythmic filigree to a part that is seemingly simple on the surface, the guitars too are lush and layered and offer all sorts of melodic shadings, the final track offers up the final word on this sonic shift with a long stretch of bass driven lope, spidery guitars, thick low end pulses and simple solid drumming which gives way, peppered with bursts of Godspeedy crescendos, and a super melodic classic rock sounding lead, only to finish off in a tangle of howled vokills, intricate drumming, and lush layered guitars.
We were definitely thrown for a loop at first, but after a few listens, it's easy to hear Drudkh in these seemingly UN-Drudkh like songs, and we love the soaring heavy black pop sound, and hell, this might be the gateway record for the black metal shy to give this Ukrainian thing a try, it only gets blacker and grimmer from here...
Latest chunk of gloriously murky reverbed dark pop jangle from this LA trio, this one produced by Bobb Bruno of Best Coast, who knows a thing or two about reverb and echo, and helps Dunes swath their sound in as much as possible. A somewhat misleadingly dark and brooding intro gives way to something much more sunshiney and jangly, although that initial vibe runs throughout, with low slung Joy Division-y basslines, and washed out minor key guitars, that drift hauntingly but always eventually blossom into lush reverbed swirls of jangle pop.
The second track offers up more of that new wave-y bass, underpinning spidery echo drenched guitars and angelic vocal harmonies, like a more slowed down broody version of the opening track. The flipside, "Dream House" is in fact dreamy, but also dirgey and murky, the guitars muted, the rhythm softly propulsive, a little tribal, the bass fuzzy and distorted. The second half of the track shifts gears, and the sound transforms into something that sounds almost like African high life, with syncopated percussion and rhythmic vocal counterpoint, really cool.
Definitely for fans of Grass Widow, Best Coast, Brilliant Colors, Pens, Dum Dum Girls, and similarly reveby pop outfits...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Eccentric outsider doom metal from the '80s, from waaaaaay down underground. Now hold up, if the words "doom" or "metal" make you think, not for me, think again (maybe). This isn't like any metal you've ever heard, really. More like spaced out '60s heavy psychedelic guitar rock (one song's called "Heavy Vibrations", man), overloaded also with shrill synth symphonics and trippy effects... That's where the "outsider" tag comes in, Dwarr being a one-man band, all the work of South Carolina multi-instrumentalist (but especially guitar!) Duane Warr (hence the name Dwarr), whom we get the impression is quite a character. It's so DIY that the cds have his phone number on 'em, in case you want to get in touch. His privately pressed music comes off like a cough-syrup dosed mixture of Black Sabbath and Todd Tamanend Clark (whom you should know from the double cd anthology we raved about a few years ago). Or, The Happy Dragon Band playing Pink Floyd, from beyond the grave. Maybe a lo-fi Captain Beyond, on even more drugs than Captain Beyond were ever on. Or imagine if Bobb Trimble was an '80s metaller, perhaps (and worked out in the gym a lot more?). Sorry to use so many almost equally obscure references, but it's hard to compare this confusional beast to anything else.
Look at that insane cover painting, a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape (that's a malevolent-looking Statue of Liberty sunken in polluted looking water next to a cave populated by long-haired, skull-faced cannibalistic mutants, with an avatar of Dwarr himself, we're guessing, striking a heroic he-man pose in the upper right hand corner). The music itself is as surreal and apocalyptic and ridiculous as that image, matching up to it much more than most other "metal" albums ever match up to their cover art, both in subject matter and, ah, execution.
Just from the cover painting, let alone the music, this Dwarr album is SO perfectly Aquarius, you'd almost think we made it up. But no, Dwarr's for real, something we'd vaguely heard tell of and been curious about for years, and finally went to the trouble of tracking down (not so hard, thanks to the Internet, now that everybody and their grandmother's bands are on MySpace). And lo and behold, it turned out Dwarr had issued ALL four of his albums (two from the '80s, two from the '00s, believe it or not!) on compact disc. So we had to get a bunch of this one, his second, from 1986, probably his best and "heaviest". A Record Of The Week, easy.
There's 13 tracks, each one incredible (or incredibly strange). There's nothing that's NOT freaked out about this. Even the poppiest songs (like the title track "Animals") are full of sluggish grooves, druggy lyrics, buzzing electronics, melodic stoned vocals, acid rock guitar (and acid WTF synth). Elsewhere it gets away from rock/metal song structure entirely, with interludes of eerie atmospherics, spacey soundscapes overlaid with ominous whispered declamations, and weirdass instrumentals, like the squirrelly, proggy bombast of "Chocolate Mescalyne", a track that if you sped it up a lot would almost fit in on a Orthrelm album.
And then there's the DOOM. Oh yeah, while it's not "normal" doom it IS doom. Sludgy, Sabbath-riffed doom indeed, despite the trebly production. "Ghost Lover", for instance, gives us the feel of both the Sabs' "Iron Man" and "Electric Funeral", and Duane's vocals are particularly Ozzy-ish on the uber-heavy "Evil Lures" too... Great stuff if you really really appreciate the stranger, more psychedelic aspects of true doom artistry, the spirit is HERE.
Three cheers for avant garde new wave downer rock hippie heavy metal weirdness! That gives special thanks "to the Columbia High School Band for the use of their percussion instruments". We are so pleased to play a role in sharing this culter than cult classic with you, which by the way comes in fairly no-frills packaging, the cd in a thin cardboard sleeve with full-color album art front and back but no lyrics, liner notes, nothin' like that. It's pretty cheap though. Not that you should need any further incentive to pick this up, after reading our ravings above...
Another awesome reissue from those Universal Sound experts. Elektronische Musik Aus: Koeln was a project born in the midst of the Neue Deutsche Welle, but really came about a decade too late, as this was a band that embraced a pre-Midi electronic songsmithery that neatly fits next to Kraftwerk's technocratic vibe or even Chris Carter's percolating contributions to Throbbing Gristle. The gentlemen of E.M.A.K. hailed from Cologne and holed up in a basement right down the road from Holger Czukay's studio, constructing a sublime array of simple electronic instrumentals for synth-bleep melodicism, chiming arpeggiations, and strolling drum machine pulses. They self-released three albums on their own Originalton West imprint, and this collection on Soul Jazz culls from said albums. E.M.A.K. were very much aware of what was going on at the time, taking the best from the likes of Brian Eno (esp. Another Green World), Human League (esp. Reproduction), and even some Vangelis, to build a rather unique sound that paralleled the minimal wave producers but infusing it with a far more baroque flair in their whimsical squiggle that looks back to the exotica types of Jean-Jacques Perrey as well as some of the more adventurous disco producers out there. Connoisseurs of library music should certainly take note!
We made this a Record Of The Week on our special Halloween in-between list last week, here it is again in case you were out trick-or-treating and missed it:
Man, were we ever bummed when Sub Pop told us that Earth's first album (or ep?), their seminal doom-drone debut Extra-Capsular Extraction, had gone out of print (again). WTF? How could that be? That's so wrong. Well, thankfully, it hasn't stayed OOP for long. Southern Lord has just repackaged, remastered, and reissued it, incorporating a whole bunch MORE music recorded at the original Extra-Capsular sessions back in 1990, material that previously appeared only on bootleg 7"s long ago (and/or showed up as bonus tracks on the also-quite-out-of-print Sunn Amps And Smashed Guitars Live disc). So what you get here is the COMPLETE Extra-Capsular album as Earth mainman Dylan Carlson originally intended it. So if you don't have the Sunn Amps disc, this is totally worth getting again even if you already have the Sub Pop version! Plus, the packaging is aces, with gorgeous new art by Simon Fowler, designed by Stephen O'Malley, and there's new 2010 liner notes from Carlson. He talks about how they got signed by Sub Pop after opening for L7 at a show in Seattle, fortuitously 'cause they had been having no luck up 'til then finding a label interested in putting out the record they'd recorded, this one. Apparently it cost just $300 to make at Smegma studios, and the "guest musicians worked for Pabst and Percodan"... Earth back then consisted of Dylan Carlson (guitar/vocals), plus Dave Harwell (bass) and Joe Preston (bass/percussion). Joe of course later went on to fame and fortune in the Melvins, and later, his one man band Thrones (and High On Fire, and Harvey Milk, etc.). Oh, and this is the Earth record that one Kurt Cobain (spelt "Kobain" here), sings on as well, which we know confused and dismayed a lot of frat/jock guys back in the day, who bought this hoping for something that smelled like teen spirit and instead got what turned out to be the inspiration for SUNNO)))!
So, here's what we said about this when we reviewed the prior version, back on list #135 in 2002, when Sub Pop repressed it (at our urging, we like to think):
Kind of a holy grail for those who didn't pick up the long-out-of-print original version of this when it was first released, the 1991 debut cd by the Pacific Northwest's late great drone/doom masters Earth. Originals sell for big $$$ on eBay. And those who DO have one consider it an old friend. Now Sub Pop has finally got their act together (prodded by the pleas of many an Earth fan, including Allan here at AQ, who takes full credit, so you can thank him) and have reissued it at last - this time in a jewel case instead of the mere cardboard sleeve of the original version (another triumph for Allan). The artwork is the same, though: the medical-text inspired 'Postgraduate Seminars: Eye Surgery - Concepts and Problems' graphics. There's no extra tracks or anything, but the original three tracks ("A Bureaucratic Desire For Revenge Parts 1 & 2", "Ouroboros Is Broken") are more than enough: 32 minutes of downtuned dirge, metallic slow-motion sludge riffery that goes to extremes of low, slow heaviness that even the mighty Melvins never achieved. The lengthier, airier follow-up "Earth 2" might be Earth's masterpiece, but "Extra-Capsular" was their devastating opening act, sounding like the grand, ominous martial music meant to accompany an invasion by malevolent Underearth Dwellers. We remember when I first got this, most of our friends thought it was the most retarded record ever. Now they know better. Well, actually, they probably don't, but WE know. So recommended. Also "Geometry Of Murder" seems to sneak in a Saint Vitus riff!
So NOW thanks to Southern Lord, this album by the still great (and no longer late!) Earth is back in print, as God and/or Satan intended, in its complete version for the first time, extended to seven tracks over 55 minutes. The extra stuff fits right in, more-Melvinsy-than-thou slow-mo sludge riffery that outshines almost anything that came after.
An obvious Record Of The Week, and perfect for our special Halloween list, as it's super heavy and menacing, as well as such a long-time fave - and also the eye-surgery theme of the cover art always gave us the chills.
And FYI, Southern Lord will also being doing this on double vinyl, due out November the 22nd!
Record number two (but the first one we've listed) from East Coast avant black/doom terrorists Ehnahre, featuring members of Kayo Dot and Biolich, whose sound is definitely on the confusional side of heavy, sounding more like a mash up of doom metal and free jazz than anything more traditionally metal.
Six, mostly looooong songs, that flit from skittery churning crunch to blurred black blast and back again, mixing in strings and horns, a swirling, dizzyingly complex exploration of abstract heaviness, that will probably be frustrating for those after something 'brootal', but for the adventurous listeners out there, who like their metal to confound and confuse, then Ehnahre should definitely hit the spot.
Just take opener "The Clatterbones", beginning with a splatter of manic free jazz drum splutter, underneath some atonal sprawling downtuned riffage, and some sick demonik vokills, lots of space, seriously 'free' and loose and abstract, horns belch and bleat way down in the mix, it's not until about 2 minutes in that everything seems to coalesce, and suddenly, it's a murky muddy blurred bit of avant death metal, churning and roiling, the drums wildly manic, the riffing gnarled and twisted, the arrangements super convoluted, horns skronking in the distance, the sound blurring into black metal buzz, before splintering back into abstract black noise free metal chaos.
And so it goes, a sound that is seemingly impossible to pin down from one minute to the next, slipping from chugging ultra doom, to mathy noise rock, to blissed out field recording laced psychedelic ambience, to glitched out dronescape, to haunting abstract drone metal, to freaked out art metal weirdness, to deconstructed death metal chug, to harrowing black ambient dirge metal, those various descriptors constantly shifting and bleeding into one another, the whole record a massively confusional, geniusly complex, fucked up epic chunk of avant heaviness. Wow.
Like Clubroot, Eleven Tigers is another artist pushing the boundaries of the dubstep sound. And as much as we love the stripped down dubstep big beat heaviness that's all stuttery thump and big bass warble, we're also pretty into these new dubstep variants that concern themselves with atmosphere, texture, mood and vibe, as much, if not more than beats, taking those beats, and setting them in some verdant otherworld of sound, lush and expansive, or submerging them in some swirling murky subterranean sonic sea, infusing the core dubstep sound with bits of techno, house, even soul, to create, in this case, a single linked set of songs, each one flowing into the next, slipping seamlessly from washed out hazy shimmer, to sweetly soulful dubpop, to bass heavy dubstep crunch, to playful almost ska flecked electronic skitter, to warped woozy downtempo drift, to Portishead-y trip hop and back again.
The record begins super atmospheric, with psychedelic streaks of sound, fragments of melody, all floating in a softly swirling haze, the beat a buried pulse, warm lush swells, when the beat does finally surface, it manages to be fierce, but still subdued and subtle, eventually the beat slips back under the surface again, leaving a whirling bit of muted murk, which slips directly into a short stretch of cool twisted processed sound, clipped and looped guitars, twisted into atmospheric smears, glitchy and hypnotic, like some Jeckian loop, which leads into the first proper song, a woozy bit of folk flecked electronica, the vocals wistful and sweet, balanced by some serious bass buzz, a little distant guitar strum, vocal harmonies looped over a tangle of skeletal rhythm and buzzing synth, so nice.
From there on out, the record is a continues flow of constantly evolving dubstep, dipping into the above mentioned sounds, but twisting each on up over the course of the track, darkly aggressive one minute, tranquil and dreamy the next, the beats varied and expressive, the surrounding sounds lush and layered and in constant motion, a long slow build that finally settles back down near the record's end, into some divinely dark and stripped down dubbed out electronic bliss.
Another new favorite electronic record, to add to the stack recent discoveries from Clubroot, Gold Panda, Actress, Glitterbug, Pantha Du Prince, Walls, Vex'd T++, Klimek...
More epic and dense heart-of-the-sun blissed out heavy space drones from Expo 70. And the thing is, we're running out of superlatives, we can only gush so much before we run out of new things to say, which is especially difficult when every record is as good as if not better than the last. So do forgive us if we're repeating ourselves, but hell, any one into spaced out heaviness, and droneprogbliss, who hasn't heard Expo 70 is missing out on one might just be their favorite band EVER.
Like past records, Expo 70 suck the essence out of every Hawkwind record, the soul of every Tangerine Dream record, and filter it through filter of SUNNO))) black hole heaviness, and come up with their own unique psychedelic space rock krautdrone, a sound we just can't get enough of. Expansive and sprawling, dark and meditative, washed out and dreamy, heavy and layered, the opening track on Sonic Messenger is a crushing chunk of low end rumble and pulse, which immediately gives way to some ultra hushed bliss, which smolders and flickers and expands in slow motion like a time lapse film of a planet being birthed. And so it goes, rhythms surface and blink out, guitars groan and whir and weep, synths wheeze and unfurl glimmering sheets of sound, the guitars sometimes coalesce into psychedelic almost-leads, but more often than not fade into clouds of hazy reverb and ethereal delay, the record closes with a 21 minute slow burn that is subtly fierce, a muted ominous swell of sound, wrapped in airy tendrils of fragmented melody, and swaths of gritty texture, a brooding and intense stretch of dreamy darkness.
Once again Expo 70 deliver the divine drugged out sonic space drone bliss.
And while they last (only 150 copies!!), included is a whole extra disc, an actual cd, not a cd-r, 50 more minutes of blissed out krautdrone space psych ambience. Three long long long songs, much more hushed and almost new age sounding that the record proper, except for the first 22 minute jam, that builds to a frenzied psychedelic freak out coda.
Deluxe packaging too, a glossy full color mini hardcover book-like sleeve, while the bonus disc comes in a cardboard sleeve, but there are instructions how to get some bonus stuff for the limited cd via the label's website. Cool!
Latest (vinyl-only) chunk of kosmische spacekraut exploration from long time aQ faves Expo 70, for this recording expanded to a duo, consisting of Expo 70 main man Justin Wright, along with his occasional collaborator Matt Hill, aka recent Record Of The Week honoree Umberto. Together they conjure four sprawling smoldering tracks of galaxian space drone mesmer spread out over four vinyl sides. While it seemed like on other recent Expo 70 records, that Wright and Co. were slowly moving toward a heavier sound, dipping into occasional SUNNO))) territory, the sounds here are seem more tranquil and blissed out, although the addition of Hill gives some of these songs a distinctly haunting soundtrack vibe...
The opening track offers up some subtle minimal drum machines, more textural than rhythmic, drifting on a warm whirling sea of shimmering sonic swells and hazy soft focus drones, everything gauzy and washed out, the soundtrack to a sky full of solar flares, blurred and indistinct, bleary eyed and blissful The guitars do gain some momentum, wrapped in reverb and sent spinning into the ether, but everything stays grounded, a dreamlike abstract soft sonic drift.
The second track definitely seems to reflect the presence of Umberto mainman Hill, immediately unfurling a thick swatch of buzzing drone, a haunting ominous tense bit of ambience, streaks of minor key melody, all underpinned by squelchy low end synths and warm washes of synthesized strings, the whole thing sounding like Umberto or Zombi filtered through Expo 70. There are some brief stretches where the low end becomes a bit more corrosive, but it dissipates quickly, leaving synth shadows and melodic traces, to gradually fade into the cosmos.
The second record begins again with some thick droning synths, layered into softly pulsing streaks, wheezing and whirring elegantly, and ominously, building a mysterious background, over which the duo lay swoonsome strings and maudlin piano, it's all very cinematic and soundtracky and classical, like the score to some lost Italian giallo, again like some hybrid of Umberto and Expo 70 (which it essentially is), one can almost picture the strange psychedelic colors, and constantly flitting shadows, some crumbling old villa set atop a hill, beneath a burnt black sky, tense and moody and gloriously creepy.
The final track/side begins with a cloud of processed guitars, wreathed in delay and reverb, a warm swirl of buzz and pulse, that gradually grows more lush and full, hazy and druggy, the drum machine from the first track returns, again adding texture (but this time a little propulsion as well), the swirl of guitars smooth out into something much more hypnotic, before everything seems to meltdown in a soft psychedelic squall, streaks of spaced out effects, fragmented melodies, shuffling rhythms buried beneath clouds of hiss and whir and static buzz, a warm whirling stretch of soft chaos, that soon morphs into a muted murky bit of outer space shimmer, that gradually disappears into the vast endless blackness, like a dying star. Epic and fantastic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on super thick virgin vinyl, and housed in a fancy old style tip-on gatefold jackets. Includes a download code as well...
Newly reissued on vinyl, here's what we said about the cd:
While the Flying Lizards are best remembered for their new wave / post punk antics in the '70s - avantgarde electronic novelty covers of pop tunes, most famously the dub influenced tinkering of their jaunty version of "Money (That's What I Want)" from '79, they had a more serious interest in dub and experimentation as well. "The Secret Dub Life..." is an example of such that should not go unnoticed, and here we have a reissue to check out. The somewhat murky story is that back in 1978, Flying Lizards main man David Cunningham was given the chance to remix some tracks laid down by Jah Lloyd and some unidentified Jamaican musicians. Confronted with a mono master only (and with no fancy studio or samplers at his disposal) he had to be rather inventive with the mixes, doing them in his free time so that this album was only fully completed and released in 1995! (Although, his original experience with these mixes informed much of his subsequent work through the eighties, we're told in his liner notes.) Real nice, authentic sounding low-tech ambient dub stuff, loaded with weird sound effects, and really not at all like the Flying Lizards "hits" you may have heard.
***Jawbreaker alert!!!****
Man we haven't been able to utter those words in a long while, and as you might know by now all things Jawbreaker related strike our interest right away as they were really one of our favorite bands from the '90s. After they called it quits lead man Blake Schwarzenbach emerged with a new band called Jets To Brazil whose debut still holds as one of the best moments of that whole emo sound, a sound that would become big business for so many others in years to follow. With his new band Forgetters, he's joined by former Against Me! drummer Kevin Mahon as well as unknown to us bassist Caroline Paquita. The sound of Forgetters is much more urgent and punkish then Jets To Brazil, in fact it recalls early Jawbreaker in such pleasing ways. Scharzenbach's vocals are as impassioned and honest sounding as ever and his lyrics continue to be so poignant and poetic. Four great songs sure to please fans of Jawbreaker, as it's totally hitting the spot for us!
Comes with a coupon for a digital download of all the tracks.
Latest from these damaged art pop deconstructionists, a brief blast of retro new wave garage pop weirdness, beginning with the very Ariel Pink-ish "Born Of Light" , which begins with a smear of ambient whirs and random clatter before the pulsing synths and swirling sci-fi effects swoop in, supporting some weirdly processed vox and an old school eighties electro drum machine beat. Which definitely sets the scene for Police Water, the whole thing sounding like an experimental eighties science fiction straight to video soundtrack, composed by Joe Meek, but performed by some forgotten new wave band, recorded on an old boombox, and played back through a busted Leslie speaker, long stretches of swirling effects give way to trippy synthscapes and woozy electro pop, the sound muted and hazy and washed out, as if it was dubbed straight off the VHS tape, groovy and a little dance-y, like a fractured lo-fi pop version of that recent Majeure record, where that record was sleek and polished, evoking futuristic landscapes, Police Water evokes an alternate future, one much more bizarre and broken down, via this crumbling ramshackle off kilter future-retro pop score. As always, so awesome, and so confusionally genius. Definitely on the weirder side of the current crop of Carpenter style synthscapery, and just a twisted weirdo popwave record in its own right.
The cd includes two bonus mixes!!
All it took was about 30 seconds, and we knew this was probably gonna become out favorite new electronica record, heck, maybe just our favorite new record period. The best way we can think to describe Gold Panda is like a more lo-fi DIY version of The Field, if that makes any sense. Where The Field take samples, and loops and layers them, rendering them almost unrecognizable, and creating lush house-y soundscapes, Gold Panda does something quite similar, but without the goal of disguising the source or the samples, a vocal loop is chopped up and processed and woven into a stuttering melody, over a simple looped beat, and warm whirling melodies, that looped sample makes the whole thing sound so playful, and at least on the opener, "You", whose sample is the word 'you' chopped and looped, that melody ends up sounding strangely Indian, like some electro raga, although over the course of the track, the tone and timbre and pitch changes, so it slips from Oval like shimmer, to skittery faux Indian raga, to loping super melodic playful trip hop.
And the whole record is like that, the construction of the tracks is obvious, the glitch and static and crackle and pop of the source records, are all part of the sound, the samples assembled to create rhythms, to fashion melodies, draped over whirring skeletal beats, woven into Philip Jeck like cracklescapes, gamelan like melodies are layered into a lush tangle of melodies and placed atop a sea of hiss and a spare stripped down beat, soft melodic swells are truncated and left to rise and fall, creating a woozy rhythm, the whole thing wrapped in playful chimes and clipped minimal beats, every track is playful and lovely and dreamy in its own way, not so dependent on the beat, as much as the arrangement of samples, which is inevitably perfect, and conjures up the perfect mood and atmosphere.
There are some definitely oddballs, the two minutes of folky acoustic guitar on "Parents", that manages to be quite pretty and sweet on its own, and fit with the rest of the more sample heavy tracks pretty perfectly, there's also the buzzy sitar laced "India Lately", which does chop up Indian ragas, sitars and tablas, and weaves those parts into a gorgeously shoegazy stretch of pop ambience, and finally, the record finishes off by revisiting "You", this time with strings and chimes, and a less manic arrangement, instead opting for something much more subdued and dreamlike.
So great! All this amazing electronica coming out lately, we can't get enough, but this one just might take the cake!
Ethiopiques meets Torch Of The Mystics? Cambodian pop meets Turkish psych rock? Freaked out surf rock meets Saharan guitar music? Howabout all of the above...?
The very first release on the Sun City Girls' Sublime Frequency label from Istanbul-based instrumental psychedelic surf / space rock band Hayvanlar Alemi, their first vinyl lp, and their first record readily available outside of Turkey.
The thing that makes this Hayvanlar Alemi record work in the context of Sublime Frequencies, is that it borrows from a super varied set of sounds, from all sorts of musics, each track here sounding like it could possibly be from some other SF release, twanged out desert psych, moody Eastern garage pop, fuzzy druggy almost krautrock style drift, a few of the tracks even sound like they could be some Sun City Girls Torch Of The Mystics B side! But somehow these guys make all those different sounds work, this whole record holds together perfectly and flows like a proper album, a super expansive and sonically rich collection of modern psychedelia, beholden to all the various musics that came before.
The sound on Guarana Superpower is definitely exotic, lush, with Eastern melodies, simple hypnotic percussion, long droning tones, looped motorik grooves, plenty of buzz, and jangle, and crunch, rhythms that veer from spare and skeletal to wild and splattery, songs drift from tranquil shimmer to meditative buzz to occasional blasts of full on chaotic freaked out in-the-red psychedelia, but even in the midst of those noisy squalls, the instrumentation is distinctly Eastern, the result some fantastical Eastern psychedelic noise rock. It's during those moments that the Torch Of The Mystics comparisons become even more apt. The record is of course rife with references to traditional Turkish folk music, Turkish classical music, sixties and seventies Turkish psych rock, as well as all the above mentioned NON Turkish sounds and influences, all filtered through a modern avant rock sensibility. There are a few tracks of surfy, bluesy garage rock stomp as well, but again, even those jams are infused with a vibe and energy that is way more Eastern than Western. So good. And such a perfect fit for Sublime Frequencies...
As always, this is a super limited one time vinyl pressing, nice thick vinyl, housed in a heavy old school style tip-on jacket.
An offshoot of Teenage Panzerkorps / Der TPK, Horrid Red is described by the band's Glenn "Edmund Xavier" Donaldson as a militant new wave project somewhere near the likes of Death In June circa Nada. A beloved album of Death In June fans for sure, but Nada was a very clumsy attempt at bringing an occult obliqueness and right-wing imagery to the more romantic strains of new wave - Donanldson's recapitulation of '80s stark post-punk is WAY better.
The name Horrid Red might also be a play on the peculiar, forgotten new wave iconoclast Snowy Red, who sort of fell between Suicide and Fad Gadget; this was a band that Donaldson once professed considerable admiration for. That said, Horrid Red doesn't fall that far from the TPK sound, especially since Bunker Wolf is very present in delivering his booming Teutonic vocals with megaphone volume and clarity. Donaldson's arrangements are more stripped down than in TPK, but no-less spiky with their propulsive basslines, and also feature these sad, melodic leads that certainly look back to his earlier work in the Knit Separates and early Blithe Sons. But then there are the minor-key, haunted synths that take a page out of the Blessure Grave / Zola Jesus playbook and the minimal wave rhythms that gird almost every song. Released on Holiday Records, who seem to be the Sacred Bones of Italy. A necessary album for all fans of the recent wave of new goth. Limited to 300 copies!
Another fantastic collection of murky, sci-fi, new ageish, synth-wave, soft-noise dronescapes from this Belgian audio alchemist. Low fidelity mad scientist concoctions of muted mechanical crunch, woozy myopic shimmer, hazy soft focus whir, buried hypnogogic melodies, sonically similar to countrymen Dolphins Into The Future, as well as folks like High Wolf, Skaters, etc. Innercity, aka Hans Dens, takes all those elements and blends them into retro-futuristic miniature soundtracks, each track evoking some strange alternate universe, some long lost and buried civilization, decaying tape loops unwind crookedly, bunching up into warped soft squalls of blurred melody, cacophonous collisions of metallic crunch and layered thrum, bleed into each other, and are seemingly viewed through broken panes of frosted glass, everything gorgeously shadowy and indistinct, fractured rhythms stutter and stumble beneath clouds of Eastern melodies and effects drenched squiggles, occasionally locking into total Goblin/Carpenter sinister synthscaped ambience, or lurching machinelike robo-funk, the motorik pulses skittering over buried slowed down vocals all wreathed in a fuzzy haze, sometimes overtaken by heaving walls of crumbling shoegazey crunch, other times gradually blissing out into barely there swirls.
The lp comes with a cassette, featuring nearly an extra hour of music, parts 3 and 4 of Innercity's Future Life songsuite, one part washed out gauzy minimal drift, a darkly meditative sprawl of hushed shimmer, the other a futuristic bit of ultra lo-fi loopage, murky and blurred, which eventually gives a way to a fantastically lysergic bit of hypnotic electronic minimalism.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
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Now back in print on vinyl, Chair Beside A Window was album number four in the massive Jandek discography, recorded and originally released back in 1982. Jandek's recordings are always self-contained, self-referential, and willfully difficult excursions into anti-folk aesthetic that deconstructs every blues-based archetype through freely tuned 'songs.' It was never clear at all if Jandek was the work of one mystery man who lived in Texas, or if he employed help from anonymous musicians. The early records allude to a nearly hermetic form of creativity, but given the model for Jandek's live performances in the 21st Century (with only a couple of a notes handed to the backing musicians and no introductions whatsoever), it's entirely possible that Jandek brought in a couple of musicians under similar instructions back in the day. That said, Chair Beside A Window is an exceptional record for Jandek, not just because of its cracked genius, but also because of the appearance of two outside vocalists, a woman presumably named Nancy and another woman who might be Nancy's sister named Pat. There had been speculation that Nancy was Jandek's girlfriend, although there's nothing to prove (or disprove) that notion. In any case, Jandek's "Nancy Sings" is something of a freak-folk classic with Nancy adopting more of a classic Patsy Cline delivery of fragile beauty, as a counter to the lithium warble and growl from the man himself. Jandek also reprises his track "European Jewel" which is as close to a Jandek standard as you can get, given the recurrence of this song on a handful of albums. This song appeared on Ready For The House but here gets an electric guitar arrangement instead of the treble happy acoustic found on the debut. There's still no end to the mystery of Jandek, even after he's been touring the globe as a very unlikely troubadour. Pretty much all of Jandek's records from the '80s are awe-inspiring / confounding documents, Chair Beside A Window included!
Had this in stock for little while, should definitely list it, it's pretty great... It's released on Numero, but instead of the deep funk and soul they usually dig up, this dvd release is about the visuals - it's a collection of clever, brief, animated films from public television. You might have seen a few of 'em if you were a kid, watching Sesame Street in the '70s! Taking an avant garde approach that prefigured many techniques now familiar from MTV videos and advertising, filmmaker Jarnow made educational animations that were quite artistic as well. Beautiful, fascinating stuff. And even adults might learn (or re-learn) something about science and math from this. Plus, anyone with kids, this is perfect.
There's a total of 45 short 16mm films in this collection, nicely presented in a slipcased package that comes with a large, 60 page book filled, as they say, with "essays and ephemera". The dvd extras include a documentary about Jarnow's creative process, as well as index and playlists. Super duper nice. You can look up Jarnow on YouTube to get a taste of this, but if you like what you see, you definitely would want the complete package.
Er, we've never been sure that Lesbian was such a good name for this all-dude band from up north Seattle way. Unfortunately not an easily Googleable choice either, if you're just trying to find the band. But in its seeming inappropriateness, it does at least represent the "not quite what you expected" nature of their sound. And we HAVE always liked 'em; their debut for Holy Mountain, Power Hor, was a bit of a heavy fave here when it came out in 2007, we compared it to both Pelican and Wolves In The Throne Room! Now moved over to the Important imprint (they have good taste in labels, and vice versa), Lesbian present a solid follow-up in the form of Stratospheria Cubensis. Giving off a serious, melancholic vibe, this new opus, resplendent in Seldon Hunt artwork, should meet all your epic prog-doom-stoner-psych-metal needs quite handily.
The disc starts off with a great song, with a great title: "Poisonous Witchball", full of proggy angular riffs, and very metal ones too. It's the shortest song on the album, but still manages to fit in a great number of shifts and surprises, foreshadowing what's in store on the rest of the disc, which consists of looooong songs, five of 'em, that shortest one a relatively brief 8'28", the others in the double digits, up to 22'31", which gives them plenty of space to stretch out and psychedelicize... rather than go track by track, let's just say you get a smorgasbord of avant-metal mayhem and majesty, with repetitive sludge-bludgeon, speedy attacks, postrock soft-loud dynamics, sharp shredding guitar shards of quirky math metal, mammoth doom riffage, shoegazing melodic pretty parts, and more. It flows, though, how it flows. From ripping it up like Darkthrone one minute to crushing like Conifer or Samothrace another, there's no false steps, and no boring (but many beautiful) moments. We note that the "Lesbros" thanks list does not omit drugs, and likewise *your* thanks list should not omit Lesbian!
Now available on vinyl for the very first time! Here's what we said about this Christmas-time perennial when it first came out:
Although the first song on this Xmas ep will surprise fans as it is Low at their most upbeat(!), the rest of this ep is vintage Low - languid songs heavy with atmosphere and tension.
Brief, but what else needs to be said? Christmas classics, done in Low's lovely and lugubrious, darkly romantic, dreamlike slowcore style,
The vinyl is likely to be limited, so despite the fact that it's got "Little Drummer Boy" on it, we don't really expect this to be around by the time Christmas rolls around...
First of all, love that cover! Rainbow-hued multiples of bespectacled Indian flute player T.R. "Mali" Mahalingham, two of whom's crucial albums, from 1969 and 1970, respectively, are collected here on this double cd (or double vinyl) release, brought to us by, it's no surprise, the always interesting and unusual Japanese reissue label EM, who were most recently responsible for Bharat Karki & Party's International Music, another amazing, obscure '70s Indian artifact. While that record was a wild explosion of exotic, psychedelic funk, this one is on a whole different level - spiritual, calm, acoustic, lovely, but yes also exotic, from an innovative virtuoso of the humble bamboo flute. Across these two discs, "Mali", steeped in Carnatic music tradition, utilizing his own special "parrot clutch" fingering, weaves mesmerizing, fluttering ragas and folk melodies, accompanied by gentle hand percussion and happily droning strings. It's very "Indian-sounding", perhaps not like most flute you've heard, and also as we said, very spiritual. He would sometimes (he claimed) see GOD when he played... and if that happened, he'd stop, concert over, 'cause why go on at that point? We're also told that he could communicate with birds via his flute playing. Seems possible. Although we'll confess we'd never heard of Mahalingham before (have you?), and that's why we love labels like EM, apparently he was legendary in India, and influenced important Western fans like composers Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Oliver Messiaen.
We're becoming addicted to this, it gets played in the store several times a day by different staffers, and makes us all feel good.
As with all EM releases, the packaging is lovely, though the deluxe crazy limited vinyl version IS quite expensive.
Die-hard Man Or Astro-man? devotees, it's finally time to dust off and fire up your rawkets! Pacific Northwest garage rock kingpins Estrus Records has kindly released a limited edition vinyl reissue of the 1993 debut album by these intergalactic surf brainiacs from the South!
For those unfamiliar... While the heart of their sound was driven by a deep reverence for the raw buzzing guitar licks of the legendary Link Wray, The Ventures, The Sonics among others, the journey into the MOAM? cosmos was equally injected with sci-fi kitsch spectacles and science geekery, and genuine smarts. Live shows were wildly fun and rockin', featuring full costumes and a giant working Tesla coil! Over the years, the beloved four piece evolved quite a bit. In later years, their sound drew closer to Sonic Youth than the abovementioned Wray. As well, they eventually added vocals to their instrumental sound, and formulated clone bands to tour in place of the official band members! Hearing this album again will surely bring back some awesome fan memories of this super entertaining and endearing band, and trigger some newbies to search YouTube for live footage to see what they missed. Hurrah!
Recorded before the tragic death of drummer Jerry Fuchs, this 12" is a sort of teaser for the very very soon upcoming new record from post/math rockers Maserati, hence the similar title, but both tracks here are exclusive, and both make this well worth picking up.
The A side is another dose of that Maserati style post rock we can't ever seem to get enough of, sounding like some sort of impossible Circle / Zombi / Tortoise hybrid, krautrock rhythms, fuzzy Carpenter-y synths, KILLER drumming, all very hypnotic and mesmerizing, the main riff, a crunchy downtuned chug, wrapped around an almost danceable beat, those sci-fi Carpenter synths swirling in the background and occasionally wrapping themselves around the chugging guitars, the sound positions Maserati as a sort of heavier counterpoint to recent Record Of The Week-ers Majeure.
And if a brand new, exclusive sidelong track wasn't enough to convince you, that same track gets the remix treatment of the flipside from The Field, sampling the original, and transforming it into something much more woozy and washed out and hypnotic. The synths are cranked way up, the rhythm more machinelike, the chugging guitars reimagined as a blurred almost electronic sounding pulse. So great. We only have a handful of these, and it was super limited, so not sure how long we'll have these around...
Brian McBride, for those who don't know, is one half of beloved slowcore drone drift soundscapers Stars Of The Lid, and based on the reviews on the aQuarius website, you might assume they were one of our all time favorite bands, and well, you would most definitely be correct. If there was indeed an official aQ pantheon, Stars Of The Lid would absolutely be included, their records, spanning the last two decades now, have without fail been absolutely breathtaking works of sublime ambient brilliance, from raw blurred 4 track shimmer, to the more orchestral and composed later releases, we can't think of a SOTL record that we didn't love.
The Effective Disorder is a score McBride recorded for a documentary film called Vanishing Of The Bees, and in the liner notes, McBride explains that he tried his best to compose music that was hopeful, striving to capture in music the "gloriousness of the bees", but that the result was more in keeping with his past works, pieces that tended toward the melancholy and lamentable, that dark and haunting and sweetly sorrowful. And we're not complaining one bit!
The Effective Disorder plays out like it could very well have been a new Stars Of The Lid records, lush and orchestrated, but still intimate and emotional. Separated into suites, the opening two parter mixes the muted sitar-like buzz of old SOTL soundscapes, with soaring strings, swirling streaks of minor key melody, and lots of space, the sounds unfurled in glacial swells, gorgeous harmonies left to gradually fade and drift into nothingness.
"Girl Nap" is about as close as The Effective Disorder comes to sunshiney, but even then it's just barely, sun dappled shimmer dissipates in a haze of hushed soft focus blur, peppered with far away reverbed piano, "Several Tries (In An Unelevated Style)" is another assemblage of longform tones, lushly layered, the overtones adding color and movement, "Supposed Essay On The Piano (B Major Piano Adagietto)" adds horns, the mournful brass moans giving the already sorrowful sound a funereal cast, but shot though with warm hints of hope.
The three part "Toil Theme" is brooding and ominous, haunting and delicate, another dreamscape of minor key swells, while "Beekeepers Vs Warfare Chemicals" drapes tinkling chimes over streaks of stings, and warm sun dappled melodies, the track gradually transforming into something much darker and depressive.
The brief closer, "Chamber Minuet" is the perfect coda, a brief recapitulation of the rest of the score, and of the two sides of McBride's composing style, beginning with a rough bit of low fidelity drift, gauzy and hushed, before it blossoms into a more traditional sounding string quartet, dramatic and majestic, only to slip right back into the opening ominous minimal drift. So lovely and captivating.
The music perhaps darker than the film makers intended, but for the purposes of pure listening, removed from the visuals, Stars Of The Lid fans will not be disappointed, nor will fans of dark brooding ambience.
We're gonna just come out and say it. Monster Magnet have NEVER made a bad record. Ever. They've come close for sure. And there have definitely been some bad songs, but every record has had at least a handful of MM classics. Sure maybe once they made the shift to a more pop oriented sound, there was no hope of them ever making another Spine Of God. But that was just fine with us, we love Dopes To Infinity or Powertrip as much as we love Spine Of God. To be fair, being superfans, we're probably not the most objective when it comes to MM, but we will say, the last couple of records, Monolithic Baby and 4-Way Diablo, were probably the weakest of all the MM records. That said, there was plenty on both to dig, just in comparison to some of the other stone cold classics, those two maybe paled. So we were maybe expecting more of the same, another Monster Magnet record, that maybe didn't rule, but that was pretty great, and had at least a few killer jams, but then BLAM. First song in, and we're digging the heaviest, fiercest MM record in ages. "Hallucination Bomb" is low slung and sinister, swaggering epic stoner space rock bliss, fat fuzzy bass, a killer main riff, wild loose leads, and ridiculous over the top lyrics, what more could we ask for? How about a whole record that good! That's right, you got it, solid top to bottom, with another clutch of ridiculously genius song titles too: "Bored With Sorcery", "The Titan Who Cried Like A Baby", insanely inspired lyrics like "I'm a pumped out freak on a big wheel..." and some of the sickest riffs since God Says No.
We could go song by song, but why bother, if you're like us, you'd buy a new Monster Magnet no matter what, and the fact that it totally rules, only makes it that much better. And if you've somehow made it this far without hearing MM, holy shit man, what's wrong with you, total epic over the top stoner space rock genius of the highest order, buy this one, then go get Spine Of God, Superjudge, Dopes To Infinity, hell, you're gonna want them all. And odds are you'll have a new favorite band. It's a Satanic drug thing, you wouldn't understand. Trust us.
Absolutely recommended.
Every time there's a new Nadja or Aidan Baker release, which is EVERY TIME we do a list, we constantly vow to finally just say fuck it. New Nadja. Buy it. That's it. But every record is a little bit different, and there is a chance that this will be someone's first exposure to a band we actually really do dig quite a bit, so seems unfair to penalize them for catching on later than some other folks. However, we will be a bit less wordy as our drone metal thesaurus has been just about exhausted. But for those of you who might be reading your very first Nadja review: blissed out, blown out, crushing, shoegazey, pummeling, shimmering, sludgey. All words that perfectly describe Nadja's slow motion doomdronedirge.�
This two track release begins with the 30 minute title track, a slow burning, jazzy meander, thick warbly bass, washed out drums, simple strummed guitar, almost Slint-y, and fluttery flute. Like the last Baker disc we reviewed, this one too has some Necks style jazzy drift, but all wrapped around a loping post rock, some gorgeous gauzy slowcore, that builds and builds until it blossoms into a churning blurred downtuned dirge. The cool thing about this track, is the flute remains, floating just above the roiling heaviness beneath it, giving it a strange otherworldly prog vibe. The heavy breakdown goes on and on but as with most Nadja tracks, you sort of never want it to end, but eventually it must, and here the distortion fades leaving a barely there whispered hum to finish off.�
The second track, another half hour long epic, explodes right out of the gate, a burst of crushing feedback drenched heaviness, a super spare abstract doom, one hit, that then slowly decays over the course of minutes, the original crash ringing out into infinity, a sea of swirling streaks of high end, of rumbling distorted low end, an unbelievable amount of sustain, sounding like it could, and maybe should ring out forever. When in fact it's only really 10 minutes! The track then shifts gears, and becomes a piano driven minimal doomfolk, stuttery drums, swooping backwards effects, a dark lugubrious, almost jazzy crawl, that slowly builds its way back to another supernova blowout of blissed out blinding heaviness.�
So there you go. Another Nadja record. It's awesome. You should buy it.�
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Already nearly sold out at the label. We have a bunch, but they won't last long (and we did get a tiny handful of the special edition, which comes with a bonus cd-r. They are identical in every other way, they're mixed in randomly with the regular copies, so a very few of you just might get lucky).
Something of a musical chameleon, Andrew Lagowski has popped up in a bunch unlikely places since the mid-'80s. He worked with Brian Lustmord on a couple of his seminal records (including the dark ambient classic Heresy and the brutalist industrial project Terror Against Terror), and shortly thereafter produced some thumping techno singles for the Warp-lookalike label GPR, only to produce an incredible series of paranoiac electro-acoustic work on Touch under his moniker SETI in the late '90s. Nagamatzu represents Lagowski's earliest recordings, dating back to 1986, and these sound nothing like anything that he's done since. This was his minimal wave / post-punk project, working with bassist Stephen Jarvis. Drum machines, claustrophobic electronics, horror-movie / newsreel samples, and a few droning licks on the guitar all work through these instrumental pieces, with most every track driven by Jarvis' low-slung melodies that come directly out of the Peter Hook and Simon Gallup schools of goth-inflected basslines. Not surprising, "Sacred Islands Of The Mad" comes across as an incredible collection of what could have been lost Joy Division or Cure demos minus the vocals. Every track is met with dour moods and melodies grafted onto comparatively uptempo rhythm tracks. There was an mp3 rip of the cassette posted by Mutantsounds a couple years back, and the remastering job that George Horn did on the recordings is a huge improvement on those pretty crappy sounding files. Yup, Dark Entries has delivered another kick-ass album from the farthest regions of '80s dark/minimal/cold wave.
A record this short should probably get an equally short review, just don't want to sell Nails short, cuz for what their record lacks in length, it makes up for in sheer crushing ferocity. 10 tracks in 14 minutes, a relentless onslaught of classic Earache Records style grind from these SoCal crushers, downtuned guitars blasting beats, guttural vocals, screeching feedback, gnarled tangly leads, the occasional bit of lumbering doom, a frantic whirlwind of powerviolent brutality, a nearly non-stop blast of face melting Napalm Death style classic old school grind. Heavy as hell and definitely recommended for folks who like it fast and furious and filthy as fuck.
When we first heard this we had no idea what the heck it was, all we knew was that it RULED. Lots of short tracks, constructed from looped, sped up soul samples, stuttery 808 drum machines, and short snippets of vocals, chopped up and looped into rapid fire weirdly hypnotic mantras. Like the backing tracks to some lost Kanye West record, looped and then rapped over, but the rapping is just the same phrase repeated ad infinitum. Seems weird, and it is, but it's also totally cool and bizarre.
Only later did we discover that this collection of tracks, created by 20 year old DJ Nate, gathers up all of Nate's Footwork tracks, tracks specifically created for 'Footwurking', maybe better known as Jukin', a Chicago dance style that's frantic and frenzied and is a big part of local dance battles. These tracks are gathered up from various tapes and cd-r's and YouTube videos, and are so good, warped and mysterious, the drum programming super complex, little bursts of rhythmic complexity laced over the main beat, and those sampled vocals, so intense, often laid over each other to create strange melodic passages that eventually stop sounding like words at all, and those repeated phrases are meant to hype up the dancers during battles. It's not just the vocals either, the samples, those soul loops, are sped up and slowed down, distorted, layered, often shifting back and forth repeatedly in the same song, making everything sound woozy and warped and weirdly druggy and psychedelic.
Total ADD hip hop trip out. Listen to the samples. We can't stop listening to this, but it seems to drive some folks crazy, although most of our favorite records do!
Local label Flenser is quickly becoming the Bay Area's primary bastion of blackened buzz, with a seriously stellar first batch of releases, Bosse De Nage, Ghast, Palace Of Worms, Panopticon, Skagos and now the first proper full length from West coast USBM-ers Necrite, whose sound is really only loosely black metal, instead, these guys traffic in creeping, crawling, atmospheric dirgery, as much about atmosphere and texture as blasting riffs.
The sixteen minute opener sets the stage with a haunting skeletal guitar party, all spidery and minor key, a chilling sonic refrain that sort of drifts over spaced out mathy drums and inhuman hellish shrieks, that sometimes slip into belching death metal grunts, or even now and again almost Tuvan sounding humming vocal buzz. But fear not, these guys definitely offer up some ferocious blackness, bursting into face melting stretches of woozy blurred blast beating and frenetic insectoid riffing. In the case of the first track, the blasting subsides leaving some strange abstract post rocky ambience, crumbling abject atmospheres rife with creepy vocal mewls, and all manner of buzz drenched noise, only to explode again into some seriously intricate noisy blackness, infusing it with all manner of twisted melody and gnarled rhythmic weirdness.
The next three tracks follow a similar pattern, the band deftly slipping from super abstract ultra doom creep, to soaring Norwegian style raw and primitive black buzz, to tangled mathy post rock blacknoise psychedelia, plenty of ambience, lots of intricate melodies, even some sort of guitar leads weaving lush harmonies over and within the proceedings. All of this is wound into some super twisted arrangements, and the weirdly cavernous production only adds to the fucked up feel.
Then there's the nearly half hour title track, the majority of which is hushed blackened ambience, reverbed streaks of blackened shimmer, rumbling vocal murmurs, shards of guitar melody, building to a huge almost static wall of glacial crumbling black buzz, spare doomy drumming, it's not even until more than halfway through that the band offer up some buzzing blasting blackness, and even then, it soon splinters into weirdly tangled heaviness, before fading into some gorgeous minimal droney drift.
Which leads directly into the final track, "Worship The Sunn ((O))", which as you could probably tell from the title, is a sprawling chunk of SUNNO))) worship, but Necrite make it their own, adding mysterious chant like vocals, roughing up the guitars a bit, adding church bells and other ambience, the superdistorted riffing is not as static as it would seem, constantly undulating and squirming, making for a gorgeously bleak and ultra heavy bit of blackened and tangled ambient guitardrone.
We've gone on and on in the past about how much we love French black metal, a list of our French faves should definitely speak volumes: Deathspell Omega, Spektr, Peste Noire, Mutiilation, Alcest, Aurvandil, Arrival Of Satan, Blut Aus Nord, Hell Militia, Diamatregon, S.V.E.S.T., Wolok, you get the picture, so how the hell did we miss out on these guys? With a seriously killer sound that falls somewhere right between classic Norwegian style blackness, and modern French Industrial black a la Spektr and Blut Aus Nord, as well as creepy album covers, bad ass song titles ("Hoax-Virus-God", "Cloning The Divine", "The Hulk Of Conviction And Faith") not to mention their awesomely and blasphemously titled debut Fuck God-Disease Process, anyway, better late than never, thanks to the suggestion of an aQ customer, we can now revel in the glorious black filth of these agents of Satan (although lyrically, they are equally concerned with quantum physics!) and glorious it is.
After a creeped out, seriously grim almost industrial intro, all black noise, and looped riffs beneath harsh hateful vox, the band launch into the record proper, a brief bit of mechanical blast, and then into a strangely psychedelic stop start thing, before exploding into frenzied furious blackness, that never lets up, until the sound shifts into a doomy lumber complete with classic metal sounding leads, and some surprising melodies. The follow up is a black industrial blow out, with some of the fiercest vokills ever, and woozy detuned guitars, a lurching warped midtempo lead in, to yet another stretch of blurred black buzz.
The record is a relentless onslaught of gnarled Deathspell like riffage, tangled almost psychedelic leads, mysterious samples, buzzing black drones, martial percussion, strange field recordings, some seriously awesome angular warped guitar crunch, super dense flurries of frenzied blastbeats, spaced out atmospheric droning doom, grinding industrial black fury, and lots of abstract black sonic weirdness woven in.
Needless to say, we're doing our best to make up for missing out on these guys the first time around, by listening to this pretty much nonstop. A contender for black metal record of the year quite possibly, and thus obviously recommended to anyone who likes their black metal grim and mechanical, fucked up and furious, frantic and FRENCH!
Alos includes a short film / music video!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of four new super limited releases from Campbell Kneale's post Birchville Cat Motel Combo, Our Love Will Destroy The World, released on his own Don't Fuck With Magic label, and limited to a mere 50 copies. We're the only source for these in the US, and we got 20 of those 50, which means that most likely these will disappear pretty dang quick. You know what that means if you want one.
Ships Cloud Mascara is a half hour psychedelic loopscape, lush and layered, gorgeously textured and subtly melodic, the opening salvo here is a swirling cloud of insectoid buzz, chiming shimmer, fragmented industrial crunch, all manner of mechanical whir and buzz, woven into a softly undulating organic swirl, the sort of thing that we could definitely listen to forever, but the various layers begin to fade away, leaving just a couple, a spare sparkling stretch of glimmery drift, which is quickly swallowed up by thick black buzz, and spread out over a simple plonked piano, and some strange deep voiced mumblings, the black buzz remains super active, constantly shifting and morphing and transforming, changing tone and timbre, drenched in feedback, it swirls around that sonorous voice and that spare piano, before eventually changing shape again, becoming more glitchy, the piano/voice now accompanied by a strange shuffling rhythm, and that squelchy black buzz, haunting and darkly mysterious, mesmerizing and hypnotic, before shifting once more into a lush shimmering dronescape of soft focus layered tones, muted percussion and buried tinkling chimes, all blurred and smeared into a washed out whorl of dreamlike sound. So great.
And again, LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, we have 20, and once those are gone, that's really it...
Oh, and we do have the other three titles in stock (to be reviewed on upcoming lists): Greychant Glitter Seven, Dogstar White Ka-pow!, and Blanket Universe Duo, so if you want to purchase any of those too, just let us know, they're in the "instock, not yet reviewed" section of this week's list...
And, the title should also say, lots and lots of stuffed animals! 'Cause these three discs of "strumming music" are by eccentric, minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine, known for his love of stuffed animals, large numbers of which often adorn his grand piano in performance, as you can see in some of the photos that illustrate this release. He's even better known, though, precisely for this incredible "strumming music" of his. Lengthy, continuous, repetitious, dense note clouds, resonant with overtones, totally trance-inducing, apparently inspired by the sounds of carillon church bells. Disc one of this set, recorded in 1974, is the only one previously issued, simply as "Strumming Music". A typically hypnotic, very physical solo performance by Palestine, it's one 52 minute, 14 second track of utter Bosendorfer bliss (Bosendorfer being Palestine's preferred make of grand piano). Palestine varies the intensity over the course of the piece, subtly shifting in volume and speed throughout, rising and falling and rolling on and on; fans of such artists Steve Reich, Tony Conrad, Terry Riley, Lubomyr Melnyk and The Necks all ought to check this out, especially if you haven't already become aurally acquainted with Palestine's work. The other two discs here consist of previously unissued material, one being a 1977 recording of Palestine's Strumming Music for harpsichord, performed by Betsy Freeman (which replaces the warmer tones of the Bosendorfer with the tinnier, more brittle ones of that baroque instrument); the other being a special string arrangement of Strumming Music, also from '77, organized by John Adams at the San Francisco Conservatory, performed by a group of twelve student musicians, uncredited here.
It was rare for Palestine to allow others to perform his Strumming. He (with a little help from his stuffed animal friends) was The One to really do it, most ecstatically, at least judging from the length of the disc he plays on, which is quite a bit longer than the other two, which clock in at 35'24" and 24'26" respectively, but both of those are quite compelling as well. We like the "ringing" nature of the harpsichord one, it begins to sound almost electronic. Meanwhile, the string ensemble version features relaxing, shimmering drones, and also builds up to truly dramatic heights.
Packaged in a triple-digi, with a booklet of liner notes by Palestine's colleague Ingram Marshall.
Latest single from this master of lush fuzzy minimal abstract techno, who along with Actress, Glitterbug, Walls, and a handful of other recent electronic alchemists, has had us flipping out over modern electronica again.
This 4 song 12" features the track "Lay In A Shimmer" from PdP's most recent Black Noise record, a hazy bit of skitter and chime, laced with handclaps and low end rumble, it almost sounds Christmasy, with its chiming melodies, but it's anchored by some sitar like buzz and dubsteppy bass warble, not to mention a production that sounds like it's nestled in a bed of Oval Diskont94's.
That track gets a gorgeous reworking, which on the surface doesn't sound all that different, but somehow the new version is more lush, the beats more propulsive, there's more swirling buzz in the background, streaks of glitch and hazy whirs drift beneath the skeletal beats and woozy basslines, the first half is a bit more blissy, and dreamy, while the second half is more dense and layered and a bit darker, really quite fantastic.
The two tracks in between sound like they could have come straight off Black Noise, "Sonnesturm" is a thick sprawl of gristly glitchy low end drift, big bassy rumbles underpinning long shimmery tones and tinkling windchime like melodies, before gradually blossoming into some Kompakt worthy, pulsing and loop-ed, minimal almost shoegazey housemusic, while "Ursonate 3" also begins in a cloud of glitch and static, before setting into a gorgeously washed out, muted and minimal late night bit of low slung post-house throb and skitter, chill out bliss.
Available again on vinyl, this all-time AQ fave, now via Mexican Summer, limited to 1000 copies in a deluxe gatefold with new liner notes and artwork by Perhacs herself!
The psychedelic folk fans here at Aquarius (all of us!) are overjoyed that this brilliant obscurity is back in print again with bonus tracks included. We got to see her play here recently and it was indeed a dream come true. She also let on that this was her favorite reissue of her sole record. Here is what we said about it the last time it was reissued:
Originally released in 1970, Linda Perhacs' Parallelograms is a now-not-so-lost gem of lovely, delicate folk-psych songs in line with Joni Mitchell or Heart's folkier moments, gone waaay underground and mystic. For a long long time, although collectors held the record in great esteem, no-one knew anything about Ms. Perhacs at all. When the Wild Places label first reissued the album on cd some years ago they had to do it from a mint vinyl copy of the record. Later, they miraculously managed to track down Linda and got their hands on reel to reels dubbed from the original masters, along with a passel of bonus tracks - half a dozen of 'em, demos and alternate takes, which they included on their second cd edition and are included here as well. Along with that good stuff, some mysteries were answered. It turns out that, for instance, the popularly held belief that Perhacs was from Hawaii was incorrect. But she lived in the Pacific Northwest and California, so that's not too far off, really... They also confirmed that this was indeed her only recording. But if you're only going to make one record, having it be as good as Parallelograms is a neat trick. Her gossamer vocals encounter tripped-out electronic effects and gentle folk-rock backing, transporting the listener to a place not usually or easily reached in this day and age. There's a track or two that get strangely coffeehouse beatnik on us, and sound a bit dated, but most of this is truly ethereal hippie folk-psych beauty unparalleled. Really nice, and recommended.
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Pesteg Dred was a very short-lived project, as the trio that revolved around Hall got together in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects. We've never heard of any of Hall's other projects; but if any were half as good as Pesteg Dred, they'd be worth the price of admission.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune); but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet. Death disco? You bet!
Dark Entries scores yet again with a really great re-discovery on Pested Dred.
Brand new blast of pissed off noise rock from these aQ faves, a modern take on the gnarled punk of Black Flag, a sort of supercharged art rock, damaged and demented and distorted, abrasive and chaotic but also plenty melodic, with pounding tribal drumming, squealing feeding back guitars and bellowed vox, all wrapped around a fucked up sense of humor, just take the song titles this time around, "Sam Kinison Woman" and "The L Word".
The A side is droney and hypnotic, the vocals howled and yowled and yeah, sounding a little bit Kinison-y actually, and the Oxbow vibe we mentioned in past reviews in full effect, as well as a definite nod to Fucked up, that sort of single riff over and over and over, the song subtly shifting from 'verse' to 'chorus' but really just churning out an awesomely heavy and hypnotic almost looped sounding riff/part, laced with some awesome leads and harmony guitars, giving it a distinctly pop vibe.
The B side is more dirgey and bluesy, the guitars super distorted, the tempo lumbering and lurching, sounding like Nick Cave singing for a slowed down Brainbombs, with a little Killdozer mixed in, the guitars churning and chugging, but occasionally splintering into strange little scraping feedback drenched tangles, the vocals slipping at one point into a super demented almost falsetto mewl, over that insistent, relentless thud and plod.
Awesomely twisted, heavy and dirgey, and yet still sorta hooky and catchy. Totally ruling, definitely has us hankering for MORE!
