We last heard from Agents Del Futuro, aka Bay Area composer/soundmaker/electronic alchemist Jesse Clark way back in 2006, when he released a killer cd-r on the Dielectric label (we have 1 or 2 copies left, just ask if you want one!), a head spinning array of beats and glitched out electronics, sampled sounds and acoustic instruments, all woven into a noisy, fractured, skittery, stuttery sonic stew.
This latest album, finds Clark working from the same template, but with a much more nuanced and subtle approach, less noisy and ramshackle than the last record, this one sounds more composed, more arranged, more lush and layered, more organic, and ultimately more fully realized. The sound a sprawling swirl of pizzicato melodies, of warm whirling ambience, Autechre like shards of clipped electronic beats and fractured melodies, fuzzy, twangy guitars, deep shimmering drones, delicate piano, muted rhythmic pulses, hazy super distorted Tim Hecker like blurscapes, delicate crystalline expanses of ethereal drift, soaring strings, simple propulsive rhythms, all wound up into a distinctly post rock sound, that sort of moody, brooding meandering minimal instrumental drift that we love so much, the slow build, a bit of twang, a little Godspeed, a little Scenic, but instead of the usual guitar bass drums, the songs here are cobbled together mad scientist style from the above mentioned elements, fused together gracefully and seamlessly, creating a sound at once lush and organic, mysterious and softly cacophonous. And if that wasn't enough, it's also a concept record, based on the 1783 eruption of Iceland's Laki fissure,�which resulted in a massive ash storm that lasted almost a year, killing crops, cattle, and thousands of people...
Cool stuff for sure. And most definitely recommended for anyone into abstract electronics and avant minimal post rock, preferably some kick ass mix of the two...
Not sure how we managed to not review/list this amazing record, we just stumbled onto a little cache of these beauties, each disc housed in a gorgeous wood box, with a slide out top panel revealing the disc inside, and the name of the band burnt/embossed into the wood of the box. So nice! In fact, so nice, you might want to buy one regardless of the music inside, lucky for us (and you), the sounds of Alvars Orkester are most definitely worthy of the over the top packaging.
The AO duo were a staple of the late eighties cassette underground, and it wasn't until much later, that one half of the Orkester would re-emerge as half of another duo we dig, The Skull Defekts. And similar to how the Defekts sculpt rhythms, Alvars Orkester sculpted textures and atmospheres, creating gorgeously lush abstract soft noise dronescapes and slow shifting heavily textured ambience.
The bulk of the record is drawn from long out of print cassettes, and is made up of long sprawling, smoldering, slow developing drones, layered and looped, the sounds are tangled into long streaks of pulsing sound, that often blur into gorgeously indistinct crystalline shimmers, but just as often blossom into corrosive squalls of distorted crunch. The tracks drift from abrasive electronic squelch, to hazy sun dappled drift, keening FX-warped skree to stumbling blown out krauty chaos, finally culminating in the 3 part final suite of short form electronic workouts, all squiggly and glitchy and spacey, sounding like some Radiophonic Workshop psych jam, lots of buzz and distortion wrapped around the swooping bloops and bleeps.
LIMITED TO JUST 200 COPIES, long out of print we'd imagine, we have just 3 copies, so act fast if you want one.
First record from Swedish depressive black metal trio, Apati (Apathy we assume), who travel a well worn path, one most recently and fantastically tread by their countrymen Lifelover, but who manage to take that sound and do their own thing with it. To be fair, that 'thing' is most definitely not that far removed from Lifelover, although we do hear plenty of other sonically similar groups like Hypothermia and Happy Days, and other outfits who are melding melodic blackened pop with harsh shrieking vocals and black atmospherics. Also worth mentioning is Katatonia, who seem to have inadvertently created the template for the modern wave of depressive black metal, strip the hellish shrieks away, introduce some deep crooning vocals, and you'd have some seriously dark and catchy blackened doom pop. Which should give you an idea of what's going on with Apati, the music is mournful and melodic, epic and grandiose, the drums sound programmed, but they're simple and there more as a framework, allowing the guitars to loop into mesmerizing riffscapes, most of the tracks only have one or two parts, more about repetition and mood than songsmithery. The vocals are really the only thing that keep Apati at all tethered to black metal, they shriek maniacally, frenzied, hysterical, anguished, wailed dramatically, easily the most metal element besides the buzzy guitars, but the guitar buzz is less harsh and hellish and more melodic and poppy.
Apati also offer up plenty of haunting instrumental interludes (which is probably another reason they get slagged off for being Lifelover copies), dark chamber music, looping piano figures, the sound of storms, disembodied voices, sampled dialogue, all draped over hazy, gauzy stretches of dreamy shimmer, or murky ambience. Where Lifelover are seriously demented and fucked up and damaged, Apati don't concern themselves more with creating beautiful music, the juxtaposition is certainly odd, and is what make them what they are, but it's not willfully far out, it seems more like an aesthetic choice, the harsh vocals, adding to the dread and drama of the melancholy music underneath.
We're pretty partial to this new breed of depressive black metal, most of our favorite BM has elements of pop anyway, this more like a dark rock band infusing their sound with elements of black metal, whatever you call it, gloom pop, dark metal, depressive dirge pop, black pop, it hardly matters, this stuff is awesome, moody, melodic, hypnotic and heavy, and heck, it will definitely tide us over until the next Lifelover record, or even the next Apati record. RECOMMENDED!
All the way from Green Bay, Wisconsin, comes this blackened doom metal horde, and we just discovered a small clutch (3 actually), of this, their self released 2001 ep, 4 tracks of moody, atmospheric midtempo doomy blackness, programmed beats, swirling keyboards, bellowed gruff vokills that switch to occasional crooned clean vox, all laid over tangled buzzing riffage, and blurred into hazy surprisingly beautiful buzz and blast and pound and crunch, the tracks slipping from frenzied blast, to lumbering dirge to woozy moody waltz and back again, the pretty parts reminding us a bit of older Katatonia, which is not at all a bad thing.
ONLY 3 COPIES!!
We often get mysterious packages in the mail. Sometimes a tape, or a handful of 7"s, often surprisingly, with no info whatsoever, no note, no nothing. Which in some ways is cool, nothing to go on but the music itself, and the packaging. But unfortunately, sometimes it takes us a while to listen to everything, which means once in a while, we hear something we dig, and realize we have no way of tracking the band or the label down.
So a while back, we got a little package of 7"s in the mail, and they looked amazing. Transparent vellum sleeves, clear vinyl, the word 'Tickles' printed on the front in a cool font, a weird painting/picture of a stoplight pasted on the front, and a manga style drawing of a diner on the back, with a sad lonely girl sitting by herself underneath a sign for vegetable burgers and beans. Very strange.
It wasn't until a few days ago, months and months after the 7"s showed up at the store, that someone from the band finally contacted us and gave is the lowdown. We never noticed, but printed in tiny letters on the back is the name of the band, The Banana Crew, which is apparently the name of the group, but it's not just a group, it's also a sort of arts collective, and this, "Tickles" is their first musical document. If you're anything like us, a band called Banana Crew with a record called Tickles might not have sounded all that promising, but we were pleasantly surprised to discover, the music of BC was a sort of Gary Numan / Kraftwerk style krautwave machinemusic electro pop, all fuzzy synths, shuffling snares, tinkling melodies and moody dramatic new wave vocals. A definite eighties vibe, one that positions BC amongst many other contemporary acts mining that much maligned decade, taking a sort of Daft Punk thing, stripping it way down, and slowing it down, a sci-fi retro electronic future pop that's hazy, and dreamy, and softly propulsive, definitely with a little of that Carpenter soundtrack feel, but the vocals turn it into the sort of futuristic electro pop that groups like Soft Metals, White Car, Blank Dogs, Gary War, Greatest Hits and Autre Ne Veut and the like have been exploring lately as well...
Barn Owl are no stranger to the drone. In fact, this Bay Area duo's sound is all about the drone, a deep, brooding, moody, twangy Earth-ish cinematic devotional doomdriftDRONE that we can't get enough of. But on this recent collaboration, the band explore another side of the drone, one less dark, and one more in keeping with the traditions of modern minimal dronemusic, teaming up with The Infinite String Ensemble (consisting of a fellow named The Norman Conquest on acoustic guitar, vocals, and Moog; Theresa Wong on cello; and Ellen Fullman, on the long string instrument), Barn Owl ditching their smokey twang flecked shimmer, and instead laying down lush layers of complimentary long form drones and extended tones.
For those who are unfamiliar with Ellen Fullman, she created the 'Long Stringed Instrument', which is exactly what it sounds like, although the name does not and all prepare you for the power of actually seeing it and hearing it. Essentially, she stretches long strings across large resonant spaces, the strings sometimes 50 feet or longer, and the players proceed to scrape, and bow and vibrate the strings, creating incredible sounds. And how perfect for Barn Owl to join in and add their own drone two cents.
The result is pretty fantastic, but again, well removed from the Barn Owl most folks are used to. In fact it almost would have made more sense to bill this as an Infinite String Ensemble, with special guests Barn Owl. Either way, the players here create four loooooong tracks of shimmery sun dappled dronemusic, long streaks of metallic buzz, lush and layered, lots of shifting textures and subtle overtones, all wrapped in softly burnished reverb, space-y and kosmische and hypnotic and heady, like Taj Mahal Travelers jamming with Organum, the tracks slipping from hushed and minimal, glimmering and crystalline, to smoldering and softly cacophonous, from dreamy hazy drift, to ritualistic ur-drone. Gorgeous.
And obviously absolutely recommended for all the drone fanatics out there, which we're guessing is a whole lot of you.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Cover art by Root Strata's Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
The first in the series comes from the very strangely named Behemothaur, and their even more strangely named record Necroglacial Enema. With a name like Necroglacial Enema, you might expect this to be a joke, some sort of goofy pisstake on black metal, but there's nothing finny about these three songs. All three are dense and heavy and noisy and chaotic. The opener, the shortest of the three, clocking in at 8+ minutes, is the noisiest of the bunch, the drums blown out and in the red like a rehearsal recording, the guitars moaning and keening, lots of crumbling low end and squealing feedback, there might be riffs but if so, they're hard to follow, instead it sounds more like some noise rock blow out. Dead C, Harry Pussy, locking into stumbling jams, hurling cymbals, blowing speakers, all maybe wreathed in just a bit of murky blackness.
The second track, clocking in at a whopping 21 minutes, is a strange looped guitarscape, coruscating angular chiming crunch, looped into grinding arcs of moaning guitar howl, like jagged shards of Keiji Haino blow outs hurled into an expense of noise rock sprawl, a furious roiling concoction of psychedelic skree and smoldering deconstructed riffage, that eventually gives way to a surprisingly serene stretch of murky whir.
The closer is another downtuned noise rock murk fest. This one WAY heavier on the low end sprawl, lots of crashing percussion, splattery snare, cymbal sizzle, all draped over a slow lava-like crawl of doomy riffage, and all of THAT, wrapped in thick swirls of crumbling distortion.
While this is definitely heavy, it seems like this stuff might be a bit abstract for most metalheads, but fans of stuff like Heavy Winged, White Heaven, Fushitsusha, Dead C and the like will most likely dig big time!
SUPER LIMITED. ONLY 73 COPIES!!!! Packaged in a full color, oversized jacket, with a full color insert, housed in a plastic sleeve, with two crossed twigs like nature's crossbones!
After the amazing reissue of the 1969 Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg album, Light In The Attic gives us this reissue of Jane Birkin's proper solo debut from 1973, Di Doo Dah. Of course, Serge and his producer in crime, Jean-Claude Vannier make their presence felt, the latter especially in the arrangements that begin soft and low-key, but build with orchestral nuance and grace. Di Doo Dah has less of the mod-pop feel of the earlier record with Serge and is more lush and intimate, Birkin's non-native French singing is amazingly natural and fluid. Like Francoise Hardy's great La Question album we reviewed awhile back, Di Doo Dah is that perfect transitional record from youthful hipness to something more true and deeper lasting.
Boy, were we looking forward to this: A strange 1974 French sci-fi based concept album that claims comparisons to both Alain Goraguer (La Planete Sauvage) and Jean-Claude Vannier (L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, Melody Nelson), by some composer we had never heard of, Jacky Chalard, perhaps originally made under the assumed identity Gilbert Deflez (the booklet has the puzzling backstory). We were blown away by the opening number, "L'Agonie", almost fulfilling the promise of the B-Music folks' claims. But then almost all the following tracks are either spoken word, or strange radio plays in French (sort of in the same wacky spirit as Les Maledictus Sound), which we wouldn't mind normally, except the spoken stuff is on almost every track on the record, and after awhile, we want to just hear the backing music alone, because it IS so good! Occasionally, there is a French woman singing which is nice and there's a couple of Massiera-ish disco pop numbers, but overall, the narrative aspects becomes just a bit tedious. At least it's in French, though, that helps. We're sure this is a must have for some folks who dig the stranger realms of french prog-pop, but we can't recommend it as highly as La Planete Sauvage, Jean-Paul Massiera, or Jean-Claude Vannier.
If only all dubstep sounded this mean and mysterious! A seriously dark, low slung slab of bass heavy skitter from some unknown electronic alchemist, a stripped down skeletal beat, some skull cavingly caustic electronic crunch, heavily panned, swinging from speaker to speaker, disembodied female vox, swirls of minor key synths, so tense and dense and claustrophobic, the beats wreathed in clouds of thick swirling bass buzz... Over the course of the track's 11 minutes, the mood and tension just get ratcheted further and further up, the sound more and more layered, like the soundtrack to some foreign thriller, maybe a chase scene through dark alleys, or a couple's decent into drug induced madness, the sound brooding and THICK, about as -heavy- as electronic music gets, easily our favorite dubstep/electronic jam of the year, it kills us it's only one song, but we've been playing this on repeat pretty much nonstop.
One sided, super limited, packaged in a super swank hand screened jacket.
When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators.
As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression.
This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge.
And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again.
"Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz.
Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience.
And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!
We've yet to list anything from these Bay Area emo/screamo killers, which is a shame cuz these guys SLAY. Every thing we've heard from them, has been practically perfect. Heavy, mathy, complex, melodic, epic and brutal and emotional and LOUD. The songs are short and super intricate, with tons of parts, lots of stop/starts, the sound somehow chaotic but still ultra tight, the drums wild, all over the place, the vocals very raw and raspy and Rites Of Spring-ish, in fact in some ways, Comadre sound like a revved up super charged RoS or Fugazi, which is most definitely not a bad thing. And besides the -sound-, they whip up incredibly catchy songs too, hooks galore, totally unforgettable melodies, jamming more into 90 seconds than most band can pull off in 10 minutes, the sort of sound that hints at insane, sweat soaked, stage collapsing live shows, that energy captured surprisingly well on wax!
If you dig stuff like Pianos Become The Teeth, Orchid, Mohinder, The Locust, and classic emo/punk like Fugazi and Rites Of Spring and Embrace and all that stuff, you should definitely check these guys out!
Killer split from Bay Area screamo punks Comadre, here teamed up with European punk rockers Glasses. Both bands offer up some of their best material yet.
Comadre (whose equally badass 10" is reviewed elsewhere on this list) dial down the frenetic vibe of their 10" and go for some seriously tuneful pop songsmithery, still heavy and distorted and intense, but this time it's all about the hooks, and the hooks are huge, listening to this, it's hard to see how these guys aren't HUGE, can't imagine these guys can stay underground for much longer.
Glasses kick right back with some super aggro, ultradense, mathy metallic punk rock heaviness, wild tangled riffage, furious frenzied drumming, vitriolic vocals, all wound into 3 blasts of proggy punk metal fury, definitely need to hear more from Glasses...
Super fancy packaging, two 7"s with a 12 page booklet fixed to the inner spine of the gatefold sleeve.
We've long championed the beautiful bliss of Lovesliescrushing, which was born in the early '90s as a deconstructed shoegaze project producing billowing masses of blown-out drift-drone on oversaturated 4-track recordings with bits of song smeared amidst the ethereal guitar and voice. It seems as though Lovesliescrushing's guitarist / principle sound sculptor Scott Cortez has been digging through the archives. First there was the Girl Echo Suns Veils boxset which issued some of the demos and alternate mixes from way back in the early '90s, and now he's gathered this collection of unreleased guitar drones recorded outside the context of LLC from 1997-1999. Robin Guthrie and Kevin Shields certainly loom large as the icons for Lovesliescrushing's guitarist Scott Cortez; but this work also looks forward to the guitar driven driftscaping produced by Fennesz and Tim Hecker (on Black Sea and Radio Amor especially).
Cortez opens the album with lovely ambient passages of smooth surfaces that whisper hints of an impressionist romantic underbelly. For those familiar with the most recent work from Cortez on Lovesliescrushing's restrained Crwth (Chorus Redux) or the split lp he did with Language Of Light, these amorphic tones will be instantly recognizable. But as the album progresses (and this becomes apparent by the 5th movement of Twin Radiant Flux), the smooth surfaces at first become disturbed in a series of darkened shimmers, slightly distorted passages, oceanic swells, and harmonic rumblings. Slipstreams of blurred noise which extend into the aforementioned Hecker / Fennesz territory act as a suitable crescendo, however subtle that might be, to this exceptional album!
It's kind of hard to review this objectively. As of right now, we're exactly 17 hours away from seeing a movie we've been waiting more than 20 years for, and we can barely write reviews, except for the fact that if we don't get the list done early, we won't get to go see TRON, and we know it's gonna be amazing. Some of us already have plans to see it 3 times, once in 3D, once in a normal theater, and once on the IMAX, the previews look incredible, and the music we'd heard sounded incredible. What a great idea, who better to do the music for the new Tron than a couple of guys who look like they just stepped straight out of the movie anyway. Helmeted and futuristic, makes sense that they play DJs in the movie as well. But we digress.
We'd heard nothing but complaints and gripes about Daft Punk's score for Tron Legacy, most directed at the fact that it sounded more like a soundtrack than a Daft Punk record. Which makes sense, but that's just us.
To be fair, much of the soundtrack, doesn't sound like Daft Punk at all, so for sure, folks after a Daft Punk record, you may just be disappointed. But Tron obsessives, well, shit, you either already bought this, or didn't even get this far cuz you already tossed it in your cart. For everyone else, Daft Punk have crafted a pretty excellent score, instead of Daft Punking all the music, they actually worked with a real orchestra, and tried to create a classic score, a la John Williams, or Hans Zimmer, and to these ears, it sounds pretty great, soaring and epic and lush and evocative, and there's plenty of electronics, sometimes melded to tense strings, othertimes wrapped around orchestral swells, and occasionally left alone to create John Carpenter like synthscapes. It's not until about halfway through that it gets remotely Daft Punky, "End Of Line" is a brooding, moody, bit of propulsive sci-fi synthery, "Derezzed" is THEE jam, the one that you've no doubt heard by now, and the only REAL Daft Punk sounding track, but it's killer. Can hardly wait to see what's going on in the movie during this song, and finally, the end titles, which sound like Daft Punk doing their best eighties straight to video sci-fi VHS video jam and it rules, but beyond that, it's way more soundtracky, than Daft Punky.
We've been listening to this like crazy, and digging it big time, even removed from the movie, it sounds great, but more than anything, it has us DYING a little bit more every minute to finally see the movie!
Comes in super futuristic reflective Tron style packaging!
One of two new releases on Flingco Sound, the other being the new one from outsider black metal horde Wrnlrd, reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this one, a brand new 7" from a group called Dead Meat, who apparently call the Bay Area home, even though this 7" is the first time we'd heard of 'em. But we want to hear more, cuz these guys are SO right up our alley, and yours we'd imagine.
A twisted blend of old school noise rock, hypnotic spaced out psychedelia, gloomy post punk, and old school Midwest Touch & Go style pigfuck heaviness, the guitars crush and churn, the drums pound, the vocals lazy and laid back, drenched in reverb, the songs stretched way out, brooding and hypnotic, sinister and swaggery, exploding into squalls of full on crunch. Imagine maybe Killdozer crossed with Interpol, or Joy Division recording for AmRep, or Drunkdriver jamming with King Snake Roost, or Clockcleaner doing Wipers covers, however you slice it, this stuff RULES. We need more, NOW.
Awesome Oderus Urungus of Gwar as Santa cover on this month's issue of Decibel, one of our two go-to glossy metal magazines (the other being the UK's Terrorizer). Also this issue: Justin Broadrick, Weapon, Holy Grail, Encoffination, Exhumed, October Falls, Hail Of Bullets, Impaled Nazerene, Quest For Fire, and more, including an interview with Bobby Liebling's Mom!! Of particular note this ish are Decibel's selections for the Top 40 Metal Albums Of 2010 (#1: Agalloch!). Also Satyricon's best album, Nemesis Divina, gets the Hall Of Fame treatment. And there's tons of reviews and news and the usual funny columns (the South Pole Dispatch on the back page, the regular column by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, is particularly amusing this issue, as he makes fun of a bunch of Decibel's Albums Of The Year picks...).
After leaving their longtime home at Kill Rock Stars, and ending up on Polyvinyl, this new split finds Deerhoof trying out some new ideas as they team up with the rapper Busdriver, for what could be a whole new project they are calling Hoofdriver. Interesting concept: inviting guest vocalist to add lyrics to some of their instrumental songs, which is what they do here with Reagan Farquhar aka Busdriver. The flipside is a new jam from a new band featuring members of the Mai Shi, called Physical Forms, and whose track is a very '90s indie rock/post punk throwback, while the Deerhoof (Hoofdriver) side doesn't sound much like anything we've heard from them before. Busdriver definitely brought in his own aesthetic and vision, which in its own weird way was a pretty good match for the twisted minimal art rock of Deerhoof... Curious to see where this project and future collaborations go!
We won't go into too much detail on this one as it was limited to 72 copies of which we got about a third of the pressing. Egghatcher is the work of Bay Area free folk avant noisemaker Robert Horton, and features some of the most sublime drones we've heard created from some of the least likely sources. A helicopter flying overhead, crystal glasses, old 78's, all smeared and smoothed into soft slippery slivers of sound. So lovely. A few tracks are not as dronelike, one features vocals, chopped and reassembled into a skittery soundscapes, with occasional blasts of corrosive squeal, while another is constructed from and played on a homemade 4 string guitar constructed from wood found on the street. All quite gorgeous as we've come to expect from Horton.
Again, LIMITED TO 72 COPIES, we have the last 20 or so. Comes packaged in a plastic sleeve with an insert, held together by a twig, and with a VERY strong smelling leaf inside, so each disc smells like flowers or potpourri!
What is it about this new Electric Wizard record? Don't get us wrong, we are longtime worshippers at the altar of the 'Wiz, but for some reason, this new one, has everyone around here freaking out, even the more non-metal folks, ESPECIALLY the non-metal folks. People who normally don't spend much time listening to witchy druggy demon conjuring sonic rituals, like those practiced by EW, suddenly can't get enough and play it EVERY day. We've tried to get to the bottom of it, cuz Black Masses doesn't seem that far removed from any of the other EW's, but it must be. Cuz it's cast some serious bongsmoke spell (smell?) over pretty much everyone here, which if anything is a good argument for the power of this slab of post Sabbathy psychedelic spaced out drugdoom heaviness.
Everything we love about Electric Wizard is in full effect here: the epic slabs of downtuned doomy crunch, the swirled clouds of lysergic effects, the crushing riffage, the thick pulsing bass, and of course EW high priest Just Oborn's wailing vox, all wound into druggy doomy trancelike jams, the vocals repeated mantralike, the guitars churning and roiling, totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, spaced out and impossibly catchy.
One difference this time around is the production. It's way less obviously heavy, less downtuned and sludgey, the low end is dialed way back, the sound much more raw and trebly and high end, which maybe makes it sound less metal and more psychedelic and garagey, although it definitely sounds like plenty of both to us. But perhaps that's the mysterious component that suddenly has everyone in its thrall.
The record is rife with the (un)usual sonic filigree, swirling winds, loads of effects, long drawn out dirgey drones, bizarre samples, voices, laughter, loops, film clips, all laced within long drawn out psychedelic space jams, the sort of freakouts that would sound just as at home on a Monster Magnet or Hawkwind record, but they always eventually find their way back to whatever satanic drug doom groove they had been exploring before they drifted off.
Heavy and doomy and druggy and psychedelic and seriously tripped out and apparently not just for metalheads anymore. A unanimous aQ fave for sure...
Housed in a fancy embossed slipcover! (Vinyl version sadly has not yet materialized here, we're hoping someday but dunno what's up...)
Mountain Goats alert!! Mountain Goats alert!! Fans, you don't want to miss this wonderful new full length starring MG main man John Darnielle and his tuneful comrade Nothing Painted Blue's Franklin Bruno. They have decided to shed a couple of letters in the moniker of their collaborative project. They are no longer Extra Glenns, they are now Extra Lens. Not sure why, maybe they visited an optometrist recently?! But at any rate, their recording approach hasn't changed and the musical output of their combined forces still sounds terrific. Darnielle first writes and records his trademark speak-sing vocals and folksy guitar. Then, Bruno steps in to arrange and embellish his heart out - and he does it ever so tastily and tastefully, never obscuring the trademark wistful ache of Darnielle's voice which is always the focal point. In the ensuing years since their fine 2002 debut Martial Arts Weekend, Darnielle's own music has become much more fleshed out and considerably more elaborate than his barebones early works. So these days it actually more closely resembles that of Extra Lens. Definitely check out the hushed sock-you-in-the-heart "Cruiserweights" and "Programmed Cell Death". Sure to delight his legions of admirers!
For those not savvy with sports terminology, "undercard" refers to the preliminary rounds in series of matches leading up to the final main event. On the cover, there is a vacant boxing ring. We aren't certain if it is pre-match or post-match... or who was the victor. However, we think it's safe to say though that no punches were likely thrown between Bruno and Darnielle in the making of this album. Ha ha! Together they shine in each of its dozen flourishing folk pop numbers... and it is the listener who is ultimately the winner. Recommended!
Newly and nicely reissued on vinyl!! The debut John Fahey record, Blind Joe Death from 1964, with its beautifully minimal and mysterious original cover, is such a perfect record in so many ways. Everything we have ever praised Fahey for musically is present at the start (okay, maybe not his experiments with found recordings and tape manipulations, but everything else!). This is the true beginning of the Guitar Soli genre, with Fahey using open-tuned solo guitar improvisation to mine classical, folk, blues, pre-war popular and gospel idioms in a metaphysical hybrid of esoteric sound and spirit. Songs like "Transcendental Waterfall" and "In Christ There is No East and West" are deliriously mystical and beguiling, paving the long road of musical influence that still continues to inspire to this day. Fahey made many amazing records, but no collection is truly complete without this one.
Highest recommendation!
We sometimes think lysergic free noise floorcore duo the Skaters might as well have never broken up. Sure both James Ferraro and Spencer Clark (aka Monopoly Child Star Searchers) have carved their own sonic path, but they seem perpetually linked. On the same label, releasing records at the same time, often playing on each other's records (which makes it the Skaters sort of anyway, right?), sounds that while different, definitely share many similarities, and most notably, both possess a visual aesthetic so appalling and seemingly purposefully eye gouging, it's almost as if they're trying to get people not to listen to their records. Which is a shame, cuz another thing these guys have in common, is almost without exception, their records are fantastic. Tripped out and woozy and warped and psychedelic, each in his own twisted way.
Ferraro has mixed up his sound quite a bit, trading the confusional murky loopscapes for what sounds like a lo-fi eighties after school special soundtrack version of Ariel Pink. Which is not a bad thing, just fucking awesomely bizarre. Like eighties FM radio rock mixed with seventies glam rock run through the warped lysergic lo-fi warped retro pop of NOW. Hard to tell if the music is actually played, it sounds so genuinely old, it seems like it must be sampled, but either way, Ferraro straps on his best falsetto and lets loose, sounding one second like Russell Mael from Sparks, the next like Prince, and the next like some hair metal howler, the music similarly flits from sound to sound, one minute sounding like eighties MTV cheese, the next spandex-ed glam metal, the next dizzying warped collages, and the next like some Saturday morning commercial for some gloopy messy toy.
It takes a lot these days to confuse and confound, but this stuff is wacked, and weird, and pretty twistedly wonderful. Not sure exactly who the audience for this stuff is, us it seems, cuz for all of its what-the-fuck-ness, we can't seem to stop listening to this, which either says something about the record, about us, or most likely both.
By now most folks have probably heard of the Buddha Machine. A little device, about the size of a deck of cards, with a speaker, and a switch, a volume control, and inside, recordings of various ambient loops recorded by the group FM3. Since 2005, when the first Buddha Machine came out, we've sold hundreds and hundreds. In fact we're guessing most people reading this right now already owns at least one. The group must have sold tens of thousands. Which makes perfect sense, it's absolutely the perfect music geek gift, a strange little sonic object, that you can just listen to, or like lots of folks have done, use the sounds inside to make your own music, layering multiple Buddha Machines, jamming along, the options are endless. There have been two generations of Buddha Machines, the second introducing more loops and pitch control. Well, now, just in the nick of time, a week before Christmas, your music nerd stocking stuffer quandaries have been solved! A brand new Buddha Machine. Generation 3, now called Chan Fang ("Zen Room"), and with new sounds AND a new look.
First up, the new sounds, 4 extended loops, no more drones and tones, but instead, unadorned classical loops, all the loops performed on the Qin, a seven string Chinese zither, the sounds rich and deep and sonorous, lots of overtones and subtle sonic shadings, timeless and classic, yet mysterious as well, beautiful and haunting. In fact, it almost sounds like some sort of minimal avant guitar piece, Loren Mazzacane Connors, David Daniell, Roy Montgomery, Steven R. Smith, super spare, the melodies, lazy and measured, spidery tendrils of sound that seem to fade into the ether, notes drifting, and then fading, soft little melodic flurries, dreamily dark and contemplative, equal parts tradition Eastern and experimental Western, quite soothing and hypnotic. And, as with the Buddha Machine II, it features a pitch-shift wheel, so you can make those loops sound stranger if you want.
And of course there's a new look, all of the Buddha Machines are now see-thru, so you can see all the electronics and speakers and little doodads inside, while you're blissing out to the tranquil sounds. They come in 5 different colors, all of 'em see-thru, tinted black, red, green, blue, or clear. The box also comes housed in a printed/textured see-thru slipcase, with the credits on the back, and cool super subtle filigree over the whole thing. This close to the holidays, it might be good when ordering, to let us know if you have an alternate color, cuz we're bound to run out, and if we are able to restock, it won't be until a day or two before Christmas, which will definitely be too late for mailorder customers, and might be too late for locals too.
Needless to say, like all the Buddha Machines that came before, this little thing is amazing, looking, and sounding, and odds are you'll find it hard to keep from buying more than one, and buying one for everyone you know!!!
By now most folks have probably heard of the Buddha Machine. A little device, about the size of a deck of cards, with a speaker, and a switch, a volume control, and inside, recordings of various ambient loops recorded by the group FM3. Since 2005, when the first Buddha Machine came out, we've sold hundreds and hundreds. In fact we're guessing most people reading this right now already owns at least one. The group must have sold tens of thousands. Which makes perfect sense, it's absolutely the perfect music geek gift, a strange little sonic object, that you can just listen to, or like lots of folks have done, use the sounds inside to make your own music, layering multiple Buddha Machines, jamming along, the options are endless. There have been two generations of Buddha Machines, the second introducing more loops and pitch control. Well, now, just in the nick of time, a week before Christmas, your music nerd stocking stuffer quandaries have been solved! A brand new Buddha Machine. Generation 3, now called Chan Fang ("Zen Room"), and with new sounds AND a new look.
First up, the new sounds, 4 extended loops, no more drones and tones, but instead, unadorned classical loops, all the loops performed on the Qin, a seven string Chinese zither, the sounds rich and deep and sonorous, lots of overtones and subtle sonic shadings, timeless and classic, yet mysterious as well, beautiful and haunting. In fact, it almost sounds like some sort of minimal avant guitar piece, Loren Mazzacane Connors, David Daniell, Roy Montgomery, Steven R. Smith, super spare, the melodies, lazy and measured, spidery tendrils of sound that seem to fade into the ether, notes drifting, and then fading, soft little melodic flurries, dreamily dark and contemplative, equal parts tradition Eastern and experimental Western, quite soothing and hypnotic. And, as with the Buddha Machine II, it features a pitch-shift wheel, so you can make those loops sound stranger if you want.
And of course there's a new look, all of the Buddha Machines are now see-thru, so you can see all the electronics and speakers and little doodads inside, while you're blissing out to the tranquil sounds. They come in 5 different colors, all of 'em see-thru, tinted black, red, green, blue, or clear. The box also comes housed in a printed/textured see-thru slipcase, with the credits on the back, and cool super subtle filigree over the whole thing. This close to the holidays, it might be good when ordering, to let us know if you have an alternate color, cuz we're bound to run out, and if we are able to restock, it won't be until a day or two before Christmas, which will definitely be too late for mailorder customers, and might be too late for locals too.
Needless to say, like all the Buddha Machines that came before, this little thing is amazing, looking, and sounding, and odds are you'll find it hard to keep from buying more than one, and buying one for everyone you know!!!
By now most folks have probably heard of the Buddha Machine. A little device, about the size of a deck of cards, with a speaker, and a switch, a volume control, and inside, recordings of various ambient loops recorded by the group FM3. Since 2005, when the first Buddha Machine came out, we've sold hundreds and hundreds. In fact we're guessing most people reading this right now already owns at least one. The group must have sold tens of thousands. Which makes perfect sense, it's absolutely the perfect music geek gift, a strange little sonic object, that you can just listen to, or like lots of folks have done, use the sounds inside to make your own music, layering multiple Buddha Machines, jamming along, the options are endless. There have been two generations of Buddha Machines, the second introducing more loops and pitch control. Well, now, just in the nick of time, a week before Christmas, your music nerd stocking stuffer quandaries have been solved! A brand new Buddha Machine. Generation 3, now called Chan Fang ("Zen Room"), and with new sounds AND a new look.
First up, the new sounds, 4 extended loops, no more drones and tones, but instead, unadorned classical loops, all the loops performed on the Qin, a seven string Chinese zither, the sounds rich and deep and sonorous, lots of overtones and subtle sonic shadings, timeless and classic, yet mysterious as well, beautiful and haunting. In fact, it almost sounds like some sort of minimal avant guitar piece, Loren Mazzacane Connors, David Daniell, Roy Montgomery, Steven R. Smith, super spare, the melodies, lazy and measured, spidery tendrils of sound that seem to fade into the ether, notes drifting, and then fading, soft little melodic flurries, dreamily dark and contemplative, equal parts tradition Eastern and experimental Western, quite soothing and hypnotic. And, as with the Buddha Machine II, it features a pitch-shift wheel, so you can make those loops sound stranger if you want.
And of course there's a new look, all of the Buddha Machines are now see-thru, so you can see all the electronics and speakers and little doodads inside, while you're blissing out to the tranquil sounds. They come in 5 different colors, all of 'em see-thru, tinted black, red, green, blue, or clear. The box also comes housed in a printed/textured see-thru slipcase, with the credits on the back, and cool super subtle filigree over the whole thing. This close to the holidays, it might be good when ordering, to let us know if you have an alternate color, cuz we're bound to run out, and if we are able to restock, it won't be until a day or two before Christmas, which will definitely be too late for mailorder customers, and might be too late for locals too.
Needless to say, like all the Buddha Machines that came before, this little thing is amazing, looking, and sounding, and odds are you'll find it hard to keep from buying more than one, and buying one for everyone you know!!!
By now most folks have probably heard of the Buddha Machine. A little device, about the size of a deck of cards, with a speaker, and a switch, a volume control, and inside, recordings of various ambient loops recorded by the group FM3. Since 2005, when the first Buddha Machine came out, we've sold hundreds and hundreds. In fact we're guessing most people reading this right now already owns at least one. The group must have sold tens of thousands. Which makes perfect sense, it's absolutely the perfect music geek gift, a strange little sonic object, that you can just listen to, or like lots of folks have done, use the sounds inside to make your own music, layering multiple Buddha Machines, jamming along, the options are endless. There have been two generations of Buddha Machines, the second introducing more loops and pitch control. Well, now, just in the nick of time, a week before Christmas, your music nerd stocking stuffer quandaries have been solved! A brand new Buddha Machine. Generation 3, now called Chan Fang ("Zen Room"), and with new sounds AND a new look.
First up, the new sounds, 4 extended loops, no more drones and tones, but instead, unadorned classical loops, all the loops performed on the Qin, a seven string Chinese zither, the sounds rich and deep and sonorous, lots of overtones and subtle sonic shadings, timeless and classic, yet mysterious as well, beautiful and haunting. In fact, it almost sounds like some sort of minimal avant guitar piece, Loren Mazzacane Connors, David Daniell, Roy Montgomery, Steven R. Smith, super spare, the melodies, lazy and measured, spidery tendrils of sound that seem to fade into the ether, notes drifting, and then fading, soft little melodic flurries, dreamily dark and contemplative, equal parts tradition Eastern and experimental Western, quite soothing and hypnotic. And, as with the Buddha Machine II, it features a pitch-shift wheel, so you can make those loops sound stranger if you want.
And of course there's a new look, all of the Buddha Machines are now see-thru, so you can see all the electronics and speakers and little doodads inside, while you're blissing out to the tranquil sounds. They come in 5 different colors, all of 'em see-thru, tinted black, red, green, blue, or clear. The box also comes housed in a printed/textured see-thru slipcase, with the credits on the back, and cool super subtle filigree over the whole thing. This close to the holidays, it might be good when ordering, to let us know if you have an alternate color, cuz we're bound to run out, and if we are able to restock, it won't be until a day or two before Christmas, which will definitely be too late for mailorder customers, and might be too late for locals too.
Needless to say, like all the Buddha Machines that came before, this little thing is amazing, looking, and sounding, and odds are you'll find it hard to keep from buying more than one, and buying one for everyone you know!!!
By now most folks have probably heard of the Buddha Machine. A little device, about the size of a deck of cards, with a speaker, and a switch, a volume control, and inside, recordings of various ambient loops recorded by the group FM3. Since 2005, when the first Buddha Machine came out, we've sold hundreds and hundreds. In fact we're guessing most people reading this right now already owns at least one. The group must have sold tens of thousands. Which makes perfect sense, it's absolutely the perfect music geek gift, a strange little sonic object, that you can just listen to, or like lots of folks have done, use the sounds inside to make your own music, layering multiple Buddha Machines, jamming along, the options are endless. There have been two generations of Buddha Machines, the second introducing more loops and pitch control. Well, now, just in the nick of time, a week before Christmas, your music nerd stocking stuffer quandaries have been solved! A brand new Buddha Machine. Generation 3, now called Chan Fang ("Zen Room"), and with new sounds AND a new look.
First up, the new sounds, 4 extended loops, no more drones and tones, but instead, unadorned classical loops, all the loops performed on the Qin, a seven string Chinese zither, the sounds rich and deep and sonorous, lots of overtones and subtle sonic shadings, timeless and classic, yet mysterious as well, beautiful and haunting. In fact, it almost sounds like some sort of minimal avant guitar piece, Loren Mazzacane Connors, David Daniell, Roy Montgomery, Steven R. Smith, super spare, the melodies, lazy and measured, spidery tendrils of sound that seem to fade into the ether, notes drifting, and then fading, soft little melodic flurries, dreamily dark and contemplative, equal parts tradition Eastern and experimental Western, quite soothing and hypnotic. And, as with the Buddha Machine II, it features a pitch-shift wheel, so you can make those loops sound stranger if you want.
And of course there's a new look, all of the Buddha Machines are now see-thru, so you can see all the electronics and speakers and little doodads inside, while you're blissing out to the tranquil sounds. They come in 5 different colors, all of 'em see-thru, tinted black, red, green, blue, or clear. The box also comes housed in a printed/textured see-thru slipcase, with the credits on the back, and cool super subtle filigree over the whole thing. This close to the holidays, it might be good when ordering, to let us know if you have an alternate color, cuz we're bound to run out, and if we are able to restock, it won't be until a day or two before Christmas, which will definitely be too late for mailorder customers, and might be too late for locals too.
Needless to say, like all the Buddha Machines that came before, this little thing is amazing, looking, and sounding, and odds are you'll find it hard to keep from buying more than one, and buying one for everyone you know!!! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
It was only a matter of time. If Forest Swords hadn't done it, someone definitely would have, but hard to imagine it could have sounded as good as this. DRONESTEP. That's what they call it. A fusion of dark post-rock ambient drone music and skittery spaced out dubstep. Warm languid guitars, brooding atmospheres, and laid back downtempo grooves. In the wrong hands it definitely could have been lame, but Forest Swords nailed it, the result so organic and warm and mesmerizing, odds are the last thing you'll be thinking about is what to call it. Instead you can just sit back, and let these lush droned out grooves carry you off.
Had this not been on Olde English Spelling Bee, it certainly wouldn't have been out of place on some upstart dubstep 12" label, it definitely has the same sort of lugubrious soporific feel as Burial or Kode9, murky, washed out, muted, muddy and bass heavy, but instead of being sample based, guitars unwind, spidery melodies all tangled up in clouds of hazy reverb, vocals drift in and out all spectral and ethereal, in fact if anything, it's like some awesome, nineties slowcore jam, Codeine, or Seam, or someone like that, remixed by Portishead, transformed into a different kind of slowcore, a bleak, moonlit, forest dancefloor slowcore, everything bathed in dark blues and soft blacks, smokey and gauzy, the beats skeletal and minimal, the guitars chiming, glistening and glimmering, the bass, rumbling and throbbing, a rib cage rattling hum, samples woven into the mix, but doused in effects, so vocals becomes little swirling clouds of truncated melody, and melodies drift heavenward like wisps of grey smoke. Every track here is a smoldering late night blur, a bleary ear-ed slither and skitter through some soft focus soundscape, dreamlike and hypnotic.
Gorgeously dark, otherworldly, warmly mysterious, and darn close to being our favorite new record this year...
Comes with a download coupon as well...
We've long loved Norwegian weirdo one man black metal horde Furze, aka Woe J. Reaper. In fact, in our love of and obsession with the most twisted, warped, fractured and fucked up black metal, we would rank Furze pretty damn close to the top. Three records in (Trident Autocrat, Necromanzee Cogent, and UTD) and few can reach the heights (depths?) of Furze's sonic dementia. Just have a look at past Furze reviews on the aQ site, to see just what sort of confusional brilliance this guy is capable of.
So when we discovered that the new, fourth Furze was meant to be an homage to seventies era Black Sabbath, a sonic tribute to the band that is, according to Woe J. Reaper himself, the reason Furze exists at all. The question really was, would the new record simply sound like a Furze record, and be dedicated to the spirit of Sabbath, or would it sound like Sabbath, with Reaper doing his best to evoke the same mood and might and majesty? Howabout a little of both?
Right off the bat, Reaper Subconscious Guide finds Furze doing his best Sabbath, but unlike the legions of Sabbath worshipping wannabes, Reaper is capable of capturing that seventies sound, the vibe, and the first track, while not sounding like Sabbath per se, it definitely sounds like it could be some demented lost seventies private press metal artifact. The riffing old school and Sabbathy, but everything else pure Furze, the drumming is super strange, mathy and stuttery and busy, the vocals, even weirder, a crooned mewl, no screeching or voKILLS, but proper (sort of proper) singing. The track is all over the map too, gongs, clean guitar strum, and finally, some black metal, but only sort of, instead, it sounds more like galloping classic metal, pounding and relentless, before the track shifts back to that Sabbath styled chug and croon, but this time lacing the sound with glockenspiel. Yep, glockenspiel. We can't think of a Furze record that would appeal to classic metal purists, and while this one might not either, it's about as close as Reaper will ever get.
The rest of the record follows a similar path, old school seventies hard rock guitar parts, wild chaotic drumming, the strange doomy croon vocals, some seriously killer riffs, twisted squiggly leads here and there, and it's Furze, so there's lots of random weird shit going on, not the least of which is the chiming bell like glockenspiel which surfaces at the oddest times.
The thing is, without the black metal baggage, if this was some recently unearthed lost doom artifact, people might be freaking out, the perfect balance of classic metal, damaged naivety, and freaked out psychedelic weirdness, makes this a twisted classic. Definitely the least black metal of all the Furze records, but just as awesomely weird and brilliantly baffling!
Lots of strange liner notes, and super swank sparkly reflective cover art/logo that ought to appeal to little girls everywhere.
We kinda forgot how much we love NZ noise rockers The Futurians, but within seconds of throwing this on, their latest, and first for Last Visible Dog (also LVD's first vinyl, and vinyl-only, release), we most definitely remembered. The band clobbering us with their buzzing lo-fi psychedelic minimal garage noiserock dronedirge crush, the guitars crusty and fuzzy and drenched in distortion and buzz, the vocals a buried yelp, the drums so distorted that they sometimes sound electronic, and the production, totally fried and in the red, with the sound seeming to continually shift from brittle and tinny, to murky and muddy, to fully blown out. So weirdly produced in fact, that much of this ends up sounding more avant and experimental than noisy and rocky. The sound is motorik and repetitive, tripped out and mesmeric, NZ style, like a krautrock Dead C or a noiserock Faust, tribal and trancelike, a few tracks are just wild tangles of psychedelic guitar noise, but others, like the final nearly sidelong track, are just total low fidelity outsider spacerock krautgarage bliss. Noisy, heavy, in the red, fucked up and so kick ass.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Pressed on 80 gram vinyl, with super heavy jackets.
Another weird and wonderful release from the mysterious Tapeworm label. "What's so weird and wonderful and mysterious about someone remixing Fennesz?" you might be wondering? Well on Remiksz, Stefan Goldmann makes use of Fennesz' previous Tapeworm release, the collection of samples appropriately titled Szampler, which gathered up various source material used to create some of our favorite Fennesz records and then wove those raw samples into a surprisingly cohesive whole. With Remiksz, things get pretty meta, with Goldmann removing Fennesz' original samples, one by one, replacing them with samples of his own, recorded and created over the last decade, in the same sequence, eventually resulting in this, Remiksz, a sort-of remix record, which contains absolutely NO music by Fennesz. Instead, Goldmann has composed a record using Fennesz' Szampler as a template, or a framework: the track durations are all the same, all the arrangements, it's just the sounds that are utterly and completely different. We guess one could argue that it therefore does incorporate MUSIC (in the sense of organization/structure) "written" by Fennesz, but just not his SOUNDS.
So Fennesz fans at first might be a bit puzzled, or disappointed, which definitely seems fair, but give it a chance, Goldmann has a fantastic arsenal of sounds and samples, many of them quite reminiscent of Fennesz himself, and like Szampler, Remiksz ends up being a deliriously varied barrage of tripped out psychedelic soundscapery, tendrils of buzzing guitar, dense staticky rumbles, orchestral bursts, little bits of melody, long shimmery drones, swirls of crackly haze, and blown out gauze, delicately drifting harmonics, dark ominous piano, cinematic strings, fields of celestial glitch and burnt black squelch, skittery fragmented rhythms, buried samples, cricket-like clicks, lots of reverb and washed out echo, warped and warbly tape experiments, primitive synths, a blurred and ever shifting short attention span sprawl of fractured lush loveliness and glitched out sampledelic sputter. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
The THIRD repress of this exquisite album on vinyl. If you missed it the last two times, don't expect this one to last any longer! The only difference is the black & white artwork, but the musical content is the same. Here's what we said way back when...
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with an entirely characteristic yet coy swell of effected elemental smear, crumbling delicately yet forcefully, until giving way to what is, to date, and here is the coy part, Liz Harris' most songwriterly and structured album. As opposed to the rich swaths of drone that up until now defined her sound, Harris has shifted from the abstract towards a more distinct and figurative sound. True to the title, the record unfolds like a sort of mysterious and morbid fairytale, innocent in its clear and elegant melodies, yet creepy and highly abstract in its more droney and sublime interludes. For the most part, her guitar playing is laid bare, removed from the dense fog of effects that typically occlude them. And what we discover is actually a pretty strummy record, with plenty of clean guitar articulation though certainly the aroma of her previous tech heavy approach remains in what is relatively speaking still pretty effected. At times she even reverts back to the gorgeous icey crunchy string attack of some previous efforts. With so much space liberated in the absence of drones, we also get to hear her stunning voice. Furthermore, the occasional audible lyric creeps to the surface, one standout fragment being "Love Is Enormous," a somewhat shockingly affirmative sentiment from an otherwise darkly mysterious and abstract persona. From start to finish Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill lulls you into its graceful murmurings and hypnotic thrumming. An exquisite addition to an already compelling discography. Recommended.
Any band described as 'the Melvins playing King Crimson', well, how could you not want to hear that, assuming that were it true, you might have a new favorite band!! But, those sorts of descriptions are usually hyperbole, and while we love us some hyperbole, claims like that definitely bear some deeper digging.
That said, this stuff is pretty close to that Melvins meets KC claim, a sort of avant sludge, or prog-doom, or avant-prog-sludge. In addition to the Melvins and King Crimson, we're also thinking Harvey Milk, Dot [.], Moss, Swans, Black Shape Of Nexus, Blutch, Slomatics, and tUMULt's Like A Kind Of Matador, in fact, pretty sure that Gruel features the guitarist from LAKOM, and thus it has a similarly epic sludge prog feel. Four loooong songs, all clocking in at about 15 minutes, sprawling and epic and intricate, loads of parts, riffs, bombastic drumming, the sound slipping from classic sounding rock, to glacial sludge, to slo-mo ambient drift, to math metal churn, midtempo caveman pounds to frantic thrashing crush to super spare abstract ultra-mega-doom, to almost pretty shoegazey buzz to hushed barely there shimmer, the various parts laced with wild leads, mysterious percussion, children's voices, harsh hellish vox, bellowed yowls, weird field recordings, thick rib cage rattling low end, and a massive milk curdling guitar sound. So while it might not exactly be Melvins meets King Crimson, it's close enough, and most definitely plenty proggy and doomy and sludgey, and will no doubt hit the spot for fans of all the above mentioned bands, and all things slow and low, heavy and heady.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, packaged in a PVC sleeve, and wrapped in a full color sleeve that folds out into a big two sided full color poster!
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A brand new record from Finnish psychedelic noise alchemists Haare, and it's a doozy, two tracks, nearly 32 minutes of thick, swirling, blackened, corrosive crunch, and crumbling blackdrone shimmer.
Ritualistic and caustic, this is the sort of noise music we can get behind. Not white noise, but more like dense clouds of grey and brown noise, gristly, and crunchy, and abrasive, but simultaneously textured and layered, an epic and expansive sprawl of industrial thrum and buzzdrenched ambience. And there's organ. Lots of it. Creepy and haunting and mysterious, turning the noisiness into something way more chilling, it's like a blacknoise haunted house, or the sort of soundtrack you wish real scary movies would have, where the music elicits and evokes the same sort of horror and the visuals. And here, the organ also manages to settle and smooth out the sound, turning it into a more tranquil, almost soft noise, a blurred, blasted, coruscating ambience that is also moody and mournful and melancholy. Imagine Merzbow or Ramleh reinterpreting the soundtrack to Carnival Of Souls. Fuck yeah.
The second track is like a super charged, extra filthy and crusty version of the first, the organ still present, but way lower in the mix, the other sounds more fierce and frantic, streaks of feedback and squalls of blackpsych swirl, a furious sonic storm that again deftly straddles the line between speaker melting pummel, and blown out atmospheric softnoise drone.
So killer. And definitely a possible entree into the noise world for those who have yet to take that first terrifying step. And for sure just psychedelic enough to appeal to folks into all that blissed out, heavy dronepsych weirdness.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! In a eye popping full color A5 sized sleeve, featuring cover art by Andrew Labanaris, who has done art for Electric Wizard, Moss and others...
It's kind of a no brainer around here, a new Harvey Milk is cause for much rejoicing, and often means shoo-in for Record Of The Week. What can we say? We LOVE these guys. Perhaps one of our favorite heavy weirdo sludge bands ever. Andee even released their legendary Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men on his tUMULt label, before Relapse swooped in and snatched it up. NO ONE sounds like Harvey Milk, NO ONE, and it's ironic that pretty much every band these days wants to, cuz they've sounded the same for years and years and remained patently unpopular almost the whole time.
As if to drive that fact home (not the unpopular fact, the 'always sounded like this' fact), here's the Harvey Milk holy grail, the original debut record, recorded by Bob Weston in the early nineties, after which the band took it home and promptly lost it. And lost it remained, barring a few dubious and crap sounding bootlegs, and more recently some posted downloads of the same crappy recordings. Since folks were gonna listen to it anyway, the band figured what the fuck, they oughta take the best sounding tape they had, and get it all remastered and gussied up and released properly. And voila, the long lost self titled Harvey Milk record, featuring on its cover, perhaps THE tape where it all started.
Fair warning to the uninitiated, lots of these songs were reworked and re-recorded for other albums, this record was lost after all, so a bunch of these, in altered forms, made it onto My Love, Courtesy, the Kelly Sessions, but it's a gas to hear them here, rough and raw, in some cases dramatically different than their later versions, but that probably only matters to HM newbies, the cult of HM (ourselves included) are a dedicated and obsessed bunch, and even though we have most of these songs, we HAD to have it, and odds are a lot of you will feel the same. Plus, we have to say, the rough and raw recording definitely suits these jams. And the sound, so heavy and punishing, it's hard to imagine what folks thought of these guys back in the day, not very much we'd imagine. This crushing difficult heaviness, exactly what made them our immediate favorite band from first listen is precisely what turns off most other folks.
But if you've made it this far, we'll assume you, like us, have a think for Harvey Milk. And thus, you NEED this, everything about HM that you love is already fully formed even nearly 20 years ago, the crushing glacial pummel, the killer drum pound, the impossibly slow and yet ultra complex arrangements, the insanely emotive howled vocals, it's like these guys emerged fully formed from the band womb.
But a quick whip through the tracks should sway any nonbeliever, "Merlin Is Magic" is an epic melodic sludge prog masterpiece, with weirdly melodic vocals, and lurching hypnotic arrangement, "Dating Pressures" is total classic noiserock, laced with downtuned chug, pounding drum damage, but all Milked up with a howling vocal, and some lurching convoluted progginess, "Plastic Eggs" is the quintessential Milk slow motion doomjam, so slow, so anguished, so heavy, "Anthem" is downright jangly, but still a crushing bruiser, fuck it, you should know by now that this is essential, if you already dig the band, you're gonna go nuts for this, if you've never heard HM before, we might recommend Courtesy or My Love first, but at the same time, we can't imagine anyone listening to this, and not losing their shit and becoming immediately obsessed, and if for some reason, a person did hear this and was not utterly blown away, well, then we think the problem must be you!
Cool mini, lp style sleeve, with a simple photo of a (THE?) Harvey Milk cassette on the cover, the inside sleeve with liner notes on one side and a picture of the Milk van on the other, and last but not least, a mini reproduction of what looks like a promotional HM photo, complete with 'For booking call:' info, which is hilarious whether it's a joke or not.
Latest from this French psychedelic loopscaper, hot on the heels of his Ascension lp, which we loved (and still have a few copies of, just ask!). Like Ascension, Incapulco finds Mr. Wolf, assembling sprawling landscapes of layered loops, of swirling psychedelic atmospheres, mesmerizing, hypnotic, repetitive, cyclical, total tranced out zoner bliss. Wah guitars are wreathed in effects and wrapped around stuttering percussions and whorls of tinkling melody, wild tangles of African rhythms wound tight over soft moody swells and shoegazey shimmer, hushed hazy atmospheric drift shot through with tendrils of glitched out electronics, a sort of industrial flecked new age dronescape, fracture eighties pop, lopped and looped into a Ferraro-esque bit of lysergic Tropicalia, soft swirls of prismatic analog synth give way to woozy Casiocore lounge drift, pulsing motorik churn underpinning flecks of psychedelic wah and heaving crumbling thrum.
Another fantastic collection of consciousness altering sonic shimmer and bongsmoke fueled ur-drone dream loop mesmer, for anyone into Skaters, James Ferraro, Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Avarus, Natural Snow Buildings, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Starving Weirdos, etc...
Over the last few weeks, we've reviewed a bunch of 7"s, previously only available to subscribers to Not Not Fun's long running Bored Fortress Club 7" Subscription series. For whatever reason, the singles have finally been made available to non-subscribers, and feature a pretty killer line up of bands: Wet Hair, Peaking Lights, High Wolf, Gnod, Robedoor, Ducktails, Rangers, Sex Worker, Psychic Reality, and The Savage Young Taterbug. The only one we weren't able to list, UNTIL NOW, is this one, a split between two longtime aQ faves, noise poppers No Age, and psychedelic post noise dronescapers Infinite Body.
No Age unleash a squall of gnarled distorto guitar, muted drums, and buried vox, a swirling cloud of sound that finds the various elements blurred into a single heaving washed out noisepop mass, here and there shimmering guitars ring out through the murk, while near the track's end, the rhythmic pulse transforms into a metallic industrial pound, and the guitars grow hazier and more ghostlike, until the song blinks out with a short blast of grinding crunch.
Infinite Body counter with a woozy loopscape, all burnt guitar thrum, and circusy melody, a pulsing hypnotic landscape of gristly distorted smears, reminding us of Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck, a gloriously lysergic, gently blown out bit of dronefuzz ambient dreaminess.
As with the other installments in the series, killer eye popping packaging, and of course VERY LIMITED!!
We're not sure if the Numero Group's small subsidiary label, *(asterisk) is still continuing or not. Dedicated to obscure full album releases of private press records (namely in the soul, folk, and R&B vein), it's been over a year since their last release. Quite frankly, with the exception of the great Boscoe album, we just weren't as excited by this sub-label's releases as we have been with most all of the Numero Group output. But we recently discovered we still had a few copies of this Johnny Lunchbreak release that we never reviewed before, and after the Boscoe, it was our second favorite release on the label, mainly because it was so different from the others.
While Johnny Lunchbreak, an early-seventies post-Velvet's rock band from Connecticut, never recorded a full album, an acetate of nine demo recordings made between 1974-75 had turned up mysteriously and been released as a limited lp on Zero Street Records a few years ago, and *(asterisk) made it into a full cd release. Like the Modern Lovers and other East Coast rock bands of the era, Johnny Lunchbreak have a softer New York sound, clean but Velvety riffs with sort of a surfy twist and vocal melodies that are less insistent then either Jonathan Richman's or Lou Reed's. Apparently the band was trying for an early Bee Gees sound, but didn't quite reach that potential. Still the songs are pretty catchy, and for a band that spent its two years of existence focusing more on merchandising than playing live, the songs are surprisingly well-written and recorded. Worth checking out!
Both K-Group and Omit have been longtime Aquarius favorites from the New Zealand experimental noise scene; but unfortunately, they've been pretty quiet in their respective outputs during the past couple of years. K-Group is the solo project for Paul Toohey, who has also worked in the (defunct?) Surface Of The Earth, both of which centered around low-frequency tectonic drones coaxed from abused amplifiers. Clinton Williams has taken up the Omit moniker for his creepy, tape loop compositions loaded with bleak sci-fi / psychotic imagery. This collaboration between Williams and Toohey is actually their second, if you count a 7" which came out ages ago. In running Williams' battery of analogue synths through Toohey's cabinets, they've constructed an eerie album of deep rumblings that are on par with anything that Coleclough, Koner, or Troum have managed to release. As the K-Group / Omit drones ripple with a gritty amplifier buzz often lacking in the driftwork of those aforementioned artists, "Storage" pulses with a subterrenean heaviness, pushing this closer towards the Earth / Sunn 0))) terrain. A really wonderful album!!!
Killing Joke's self-titled tour de force in 2003 left us breathless, electrified, floored. The intent and precision of that musical attack was mighty, and the impact was pronounced on mind, body and spirit. Their last album Hosannas From The Basement Of Hell as well as this one are similar in their unwavering address of universal crises, but they have more of a live performance feel. Absolute Dissent is definitely more raw and punk a la early Killing Joke... not surprising though since it features the band's original line-up - Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker, Paul Ferguson and Youth! A sludgey bassy roar rumbles through each song while Walker's trademark eviscerating guitar and Coleman's raging vocals slash their way to your ears. Pretty much anything this 32 year old band does can easily lay to waste most of the current hard rock, metal, punk, hardcore, you name it. The band's sound remains unmistakable and imposing, still vital and volatile all these years later, due largely to Coleman and Walker. Check out the propulsion of "Fresh Fever From The Sky" or the metallic firepower of "This World Hell". The second to last song "Here Comes The Singularity" hits the punk-pop nail on the head. Ultra catchy, but unlike the hooky yet inert anthems of current young bands of that genre, theirs actually present potent ideas with thought-provoking lyrics. That said, the album's seemingly most anomalous song, the slower, haunting "The Raven King" is also its highlight, calling to mind the atmospheric modern rock of Muse, Radiohead or newer Cave-In even. A grand lament! All hail Killing Joke!
Two more blasts of musical mystery from the Utech camp. Last list it was blackdrone alchemists Locrian, blissed out black metallers Gog, and the freeform psychedelic drone and drift of Japanese outfit Tetragrammaton. This time it's the sculpted noise of Daniel Menche (reviewed elsewhere on this list), and this, a split between husband and wife, Aaron Turner, he of Isis, Hydra Head, and of course his solo project House Of Low Culture, and Faith Collocia, and her Mamiffer project.
Mamiffer is up first, and is a single 12+ minute track, constructed from piano, synthesizer, organ, tapes, field recordings, percussion, bass and effects, and it's a beauty. Stately piano drifts atop a bed of smoldering shimmer and minimal low end thrum, haunting and hazy and a little ominous, soundtracky and cinematic, the piano eventually fading out, leaving a gauzy bit of layered drift, laced with muffled explosive booms, the organ gradually swelling up from the murk and mire, building into a squall of soft psychedelic noise, before fading out once again, leaving that strange reverbed boom, to ring out into empty black space.
House Of Low Culture is mostly Turner, but here he's joined by his wife on guitar, and legendary percussionist Z'EV on, well, percussion. A hushed black ambient creep, drifting beneath dramatic multitracked vocals, everything wreathed in thick undulating black buzz, the sound switching from ambient soft noise to the vocal parts, that sound downright new wave/post punky, but those two elements bleed into each other, creating something more than its constituent parts, the track smoothes out, and becomes more and more ethereal, leaving just piano, to float in a field of hushed near silence, stately and mysterious and quite lovely, it's not until the last couple minutes that the tranquility fractures, and the fissure unleashes a cloud of noxious, crumbling distortion, and heaving blacknoise, which too fractures and peels back leaving a brief bit of clean guitar riffing and then nothing at all.
Like all Utech releases, gorgeously packaged, in a oversized full color sleeve, with super striking artwork.
A while ago we reviewed an incredible, and incredibly far out collection of strange electronic music from South Africa, the comp was called Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music from South Africa, and boy did the music live up to the promise of that title. We described the sound as being part Congotronics, part Nintendo, part Omar Souleyman, part karaoke, sounds pretty weird and amazing, and it was, a huge favorite around here. Some of the coolest, weirdest most damaged and deliriously fucked up 'dance' music we had maybe ever heard.
So now comes another missive from that same scene, this one a gospel record, Shangaan electro-gospel to be precise, which already sounds amazing. Plaintive, moody emotional heartfelt vocals draped over simple skeletal Casio keyboard rhythms, looped whirring accordion like textures, goofy lo-fi 8 bit video game music and a weird wheezy whistle (which is a hallmark of Shangaan, and tweets throughout all the tracks here), and a much more traditional sounding chorus of female vocalists, providing gorgeous harmonies to accompany the main vocal, and the strange tweeting, wheezing, skittering music underneath.
It sounds really strange, and definitely a little goofy, but the music is hauntingly beautiful and quite mesmerizing, and the more you listen, the more you become utterly mesmerized, the sounds lulling and soothing and transporting, transcending the limitations of the instrumentation (if those are truly limitations, we're not so sure!), and creating something moving, emotional and truly spiritual.
It's hard to know what to expect from a band with a name like Megaton Leviathan. You might guess heavy. Probably loud. And you'd be right on both counts, but you probably wouldn't guess that these guys play some sort of super melodic, poppy, and very pretty doom. Or sort of doom. Soft doom? We sure as heck didn't.
But that's pretty much what ML are all about. Even categorizing them as doom doesn't do them justice. The tempos are slow, the mood is doomy, but unlike the typical downtuned sludgery and lumbering slo-mo pummel of most doom combos, these guys infuse their dirges with soaring shimmering clean guitars, the vocals are clean, not howled or grunted, but crooned, bathed in reverb, and draped over the almost ethereal sounding heaviness.
The drums are strange, big and boomy, but they perfectly suit the Nadja-like doom-gaze, the washed out blissy reverbed doom pop, the hazy, gauze-y, space-y doom flecked psychedelia these guys so effortlessly conjure up.
The 19 minute opener is split into two parts, the first half, is a gorgeous dirgey creep, with a melancholy main melody, swirling synth textures, and those moody crooned vox, all stretched out into a glorious bit of space doom dream pop haze, the effects swallowing the instruments up and sending them spinning into the cosmos, woozy, and dreamy and mesmerizing and strangely emotional with some of the best most beautiful hooks you'll ever hear in a 'doom' band.
The second half almost sounds like a dub version of the first, the riffs are stripped away, leaving a glistening filed of layered vocal mantras and electronic effects, the drums spare and abstract, the sound thick and lush and distorted, but blurred and free and swirly and psychedelic, some sort of alien spacedoom ur-drone, the perfect balance for the more riffy bliss of the first half.
After another short track (and by short we mean almost 6 minutes), which is another dirgey crawl, through fields of cloudy effects and smeared electronics, sounding like a modern space doom Codeine, all pretty and melancholy but still dark and heavy, comes the 33+ minute closer, "A Slow Death In D Minor", the whole first half of which sounds like SUNNO))) covering Tangerine Dream, thick downtuned glacial thrum, underpinning, swirling kosmische synths and jangly shimmering clean guitar chords. This could go on forever, and practically does, until about 18 minutes later, the drums come in, and pound out a strange skeletal beat, atop the still drifting buzz and shimmer, buried vocals and muted melodies churn just below the surface, until finally, the sound grows more and more melodic, and what sound like strings surface, and the track is transformed into some sort of chamber doom, until eventually, just the strings are left, to soar dramatically over a barely there layer of crackle and hum, before slipping into silence.
This could definitely be our new favorite doom record, if it didn't feel so wrong to and reductive to call Megaton Leviathan doom. But it's definitely a new favorite, for fans of all things dark and heavy and dreamy and melodic, droney and drifty and pretty and poppy and trance inducing.
Much of Daniel Menche's recordings have mustered primal forces (the self, the voice, the natural world, etc.) channeled into a potent sound design of powerdrones, concussive rhythmic assaults, and sustained explosions; yet Terre Paroxysm, on Utech, is something of a detour into more subtle constructions. Following a similar modus operandi as on his Kataract album on Editions Mego, this Portland noise merchant constructs everything from recordings of ice, wind, and rain, with considerable amount of electro-acoustic treatments. The album begins with a slow crackling of what sounds like crushed gravel slowly being pulverized into smaller and smaller components, until Menche reduces his earthen composite to their molecular and atomic base elements. Here, Menche's natural sounds become electrical, buzzing and vibrating as if the whole desert were wired with miles of hissing fluorescent bulbs. Abruptly, Menche cuts the power and ends the first track. A haunted watery drone introduces the second track with a soft percussive underbelly that punctuates a frigid trickling of water and swelling high-frequency tones. Here, Menche's texture and drone configurations resemble those of Small Cruel Party, G*Park, or Coelacanth. Quite nice! The third track continues along that vein with a series of repeating patterns of slushed texture orbiting around sharply sparkling electronic tones and deep subharmonic rumblings, all of which slide into an insectoid chorus at the end of the track. The finale is the most psychoacoustically tense piece found on Terre Paroxysm with a sinewy set of pierced sinewave tones that undulate above a blustery howl of crunched noise. While this fourth track is typical of Menche's catalogue, the more restrained elements of Terre Paroxysm are where Menche is at his best.
Never reviewed anything by these guys (this guy?) which is a shame, cuz the folks here into dark, industrial heaviness and black drone crunch are way into Methadrone, and also unfortunately, we only have TWO of these, they've been tucked away for years now, but figured a couple folks out there might just love to get their hands on this, especially considering that listening to this now, it bears a striking resemblance to everyone's fave post industrial shoegazers, JESU! Same sort of lumbering crush, but wreathed in hazy washed of buzzing crumbling melody, plenty of downtuned thrum, and keening feedback, but all woven into a thick undulating blissed out dirge. Blackened and beautiful, distorted and dark, this is some gorgeously heavy stuff. Includes a killer Swans cover, and two videos. Comes packaged in a slim dvd style case, with full color cover. Way out of print, got two copies and that is IT.
More exceptional recordings broadcast from the house of Emeralds! Mist is the collaboration between Emeralds' John Elliott and Sam Goldberg, both employing a bunch of synthesizers for this sci-fi extravaganza. Like Emeralds (and all of the other John Elliott productions for that matter), Glowing Net locates itself at the tail end of the post-krautrock explorations of progressive electronics from the early '80s that quickly devolved into new age drivel and tepid incidental music. Much of that devolution of kosmische music into garbage came at the hands of too many portentous concepts and over-reaching metaphysical agendas, and while Elliott and Goldberg are tapping into a poetry of galactic expansiveness through their electronics, they never lose sight of the simple elegance of an arpeggiated melody, open-ended allusions, or a bittersweet reflectiveness that comes from the benefit of hindsight. The album opens with a plaintive aquatic percolation that slides into a tighter, focused lazerbeam of sequences on "Sky High" that at once speaks to fellow hypnotist Oneohtrix Point Never and the soaring work of J.D. Emmanuel. "Mist Stream" acquires something similar to Wolfgang Voigt's highly innovative ambient swoosh on the Gas album Pop, soaring above a low-ratcheted arpeggiation. Very impressive stuff, that could easily be extended into a 20 minute zoner jam, but Mist has condensed this down to an economic four minute track. While this album is cut at 45 rpm, we've resisted our normal urge to spin these at 33, since Mist got everything just right at this speed. No need to fuck with genius!
We sometimes think lysergic free noise floorcore duo the Skaters might as well have never broken up. Sure both James Ferraro and Spencer Clark (aka Monopoly Child Star Searchers) have carved their own sonic path, but they seem perpetually linked. On the same label, releasing records at the same time, often playing on each other's records (which makes it the Skaters sort of anyway, right?), sounds that while different, definitely share many similarities, and most notably, both possess a visual aesthetic so appalling and seemingly purposefully eye gouging, it's almost as if they're trying to get people not to listen to their records. Which is a shame, cuz another thing these guys have in common, is almost without exception, their records are fantastic. Tripped out and woozy and warped and psychedelic, each in his own twisted way.
Bamboo For Two is apparently some sort of poetic loveletter to Clark's beloved parrot, unless it's all a put on, but the cover, does feature Clark in a button down shirt, with a parrot perched on his shoulder, with lots of cheesy fonts and palm trees, and yeah, we know it's that weird eighties retro tropical look the kids are digging so much, but ugh. And yeah, the music inside is a little tropical, but it's also a little alien, a little looped and twisted and tangled and freaky and fucked up and weird as fuck. Ferraro joins his former partner in sound, as does Lieven Martens of Dolphins Into The Future and Eva Van Deuren of Orphan Fairytale, the four of them crafting a sound that evokes a visit of the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, while tripping balls. Warbly retro Casio-scapes, peppered with strange percussion, squiggly melodies, bizarre vocalizations, wheezing organs, fluttery flutes, often sounding like a new age Avarus record, all clatter and shuffle and skitter and looped lysergic mesmer.
As always fantastically far out, a murky mesmerizing chunk of retro-looped lo-fi tropical psychpop, as long as you can get past the garish cover, but do, cuz it's definitely worth it...
We had a vinyl version of this split between ethereal bliss-scaper Liz Harris aka Grouper, and legendary NZ guitarist Roy Montgomery, a while back, but we got so few copies, and had such a rush on the ones we did get, that we never had a chance to review it, and thus it never even made it up onto the site. But now it's finally been reissued on cd, and with a bonus Roy Montgomery track to boot!
Roy's original track/side was a gorgeously epic bit of dreamy strum and steel string drift, titled "Fantasia On A Theme By Sandy Bull (Slight Return)", just that instantly recognizable guitar, a cloud of buzzing steel strings, a sort of blissed out Appalachia spread out over nearly 20 minutes, the sound slipping smoothly from that urgent strum, to something much more hushed and minimal, abstract and softly space-y, and over the course of the track, drifting between the two. Hypnotic and haunting and quite lovely.
His bonus track is a billowy cloud of chiming shimmering guitar, sweet melancholy melodies, piled atop a jangly strum, notes wreathed in delay and reverb and echo, the sound somehow both ethereal and propulsive, ghostly and insistent, the sounds hazy and gauzy and washed out, but subtly tense, with a sense of mystery and loss and longing, the aural equivalent of watching the world through rain slicked windows, in fact, Montgomery seems impossibly deft at creating the perfect rainy day soundtrack.
Grouper's half of the split begins with "Hollow Press", and the sound of whispering wind, for nearly two minutes, before ethereal effected vocals drift in, floating atop the swirling soft white noise, which leads directly into "Vessel", a haunting elegy of weirdly distorted guitar, unfurled in spidery tendrils, the vocals nearly free of effects, and sounding as angelic as ever, a gorgeous hushed lullaby. "Hold The Way" is another gentle bit of crystalline drift, a looped muted guitar figure, undulating softly beneath sweetly crooned vox, a dream pop slowed down and blurred into something much more ethereal and ephemeral. Finally, "Pulse" sends reverbed guitars drifting from speaker to speaker, the stereo field dizzyingly panned, softly psychedelic, slowly the wind returns, and guitar fading out leaving just the sound of wind, and a barking dog, a hazy outro of found sound, wiping away all the traces of the sounds that came before, like the surf smoothing out sand on the beach. So Lovely.
The new cd version is housed in a swank digipak, and is still most likely WAY too limited...
Dug up a just a couple of these (as in only TWO copies) mysterious discs, a two track cd-r from Aussie experimental ambientists Moonmilk, who released a killer 3" a while back on the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis...Don't label. For those who remember that one, The World Creaks offers up more of the same, a fantastically tripped out and hazy blur of layered soft keyboard noise, lush roiling textures, swirling fractured FX, stuttering loops, wheezing melodies, all stretched and blurred into long expanses of hypnotic lysergic free noise drift, that slips from hazy upper register ur-drone to murky muddied low-end creep. The sort of stuff that should definitely appeal to folks into Skaters, Monopoly Child Star Searchers, James Ferraro, Yellow Swans, and all that sorta pretty noisiness.
Beautiful oversized screen printed covers, two printed, inserts on heavy textured paper, and again this is WAY out of print, and these are the last two copies EVER.
