Swung is New Zealand musician Zoe Drayton, and as the title would suggest, these five tracks are pieces for voice and piano recorded over the last twn years. Super sweet and incredibly intimate. The first track is solo piano, dark and dreamy, the chords ringing out, a sweetly melancholy lullaby. Track two is just the between song utterances, breaths, lip smacks, all woven into a strange soundscape, that leads into a simple piano piece recorded in a big empty room. The third track is super lo-fi, a dreamy vocal line and a barely audible pump organ, a fragmented lowercase pop song. Track 4 is a warm rich organ drone over some sort of creaking machinery, really haunting and lovely. The final track is soundscape created from chopped and manipulated song parts, mostly backwards vocals, recontextualized into a beautiful but alien little ditty.
We'd never heard of Drayton or Swung, but this lil' disc definitely has us hankering for more!
Packaged in a cool little full color 3" sleeve with a printed insert.
Three new sonic missives from the ether, from whatever mysterious alternate sonic universe the NOTHingness label exists in. A world of bleak emptiness, massive expanses of barren rumbling tundras, of glassy black surface sonic pools... Every disc dark and lovely, creepy and ominous, haunting and super intense. And of course outrageously limited...
This shadowy shimmer is the work of Taphephobia, a side project of the more well known dark ambient outfit Nothaunt, and actually treads somewhat similar sonic ground, but maybe even more abstract. The true audial essence of nothingness for sure, not so much dark ambience, as a mysterious series of soundscapes, of imagined field recordings, the sounds of strange goings on beneath the surface of the earth, massive slow moving machinery, a series of nearly abandoned mines populated by strange shuffling creatures and the occasional ghostly spirit. The clang and shudder of huge pieces of metal being moved across rock strewn plains, the hiss of steam and the grinding of gears, steeped in the shimmering reverb of bottomless pits and mile high caverns overhead, clank and clatter, spread out over strangely rhythmic backdrops, reverberating shimmers, huge pulsing thumps, a gorgeous hellish underworld industrial symphony of minimal lowercase crawl.�
LIMITED TO ONLY 111 COPIES!! Packaged in a slimline dvd style case with full color cover.
Last time we were in New York, we managed to grab a single by this band, Taylor Bow, named for an infamous online porn site featuring videos posted by a disgruntled and spurned ex boyfriend, we heard it playing in a store, and had to buy it. An insanely furious and frenzied, blown out chunk of metallic punkness, or maybe punked out metal, either way, the speakers seemed to be melting and malfunctioning, spewing red hot daggers of sound, the vocals ultra distorted and in the red, the drums, total practice space boom and crunch, chaotic and unhinged, the guitars slipping from wild feedback soaked squalls, to churning Brainbombs-y sludge. So we of course tried to order a bunch, but it was the LAST copy.
So we waited and waited, and our patience was finally rewarded with this, the first full length from NYC hardcore noise metal weirdos Taylor Bow, fronted, you might not be surprised to discover by Dom Fernow, of Prurient, Vegas Martyrs and Ash Pool among others. Taylor Bow features the same sort of lo-fi metal-punk noise drenched crush, but instead of blasting blackly, or exploding into sheets of white noise, TB slip back and forth between freaked out on-the-verge-of-collapse hardcore and looped sounding sinister dirges, that totally push all our Brainbombs buttons. The sound is red hot, blown out, brittle and brutal, but still thick and heavy, the vocals are super intense, which sometimes makes Taylor Bow sound like a way more rocking Whitehouse, but there are definite nods to the current crop of stripped down raw black metal, Fernow's Ash Pool for sure, but also stuff like Akitsa and Bone Awl. But even with that metal edge, this stuff is way more filthy and punky, and we're loving it. Released on the same label that brought us Ancestors and that Hallow record, which makes perfect sense, just more fucked up freaked out heaviness that we can't seem to get enough of.
SUPER LIMITED of course, we may have the last 20 or so copies, so grab one while you can...
The return of Irish one man guitar dronedoomdirge noisemaker, Paul McAree aka To Blacken The Pages, with his first vinyl release, and to commemorate, McAree mixes it up a bit, offering up at least one side dramatically different from what we're used to hearing on TBTP records up until now.
Originally recorded for a sound exhibition in Dublin, "Crow's Nest" strips away most of the thick rumbling distorted guitars we might have been expecting, leaving a strange haunting bit of effects drenched shadowy sound in their place, the result though is quite pleasing, much more mysterious and otherworldly, lots of delay and reverb, bits of clang and crunch sent spinning into the ether, here and there long notes ring out, the overall sound is super spare and abstract, soft tangled melodies, the guitars smolder instead of roar, plenty of scrabble and scrape but smeared and blurred into solar flares of Sunroof!-ed sound, but unlike the raga-like ur-drone of Sunroof!, the sound and sounds here are way more spaced out, both figuratively AND literally. Warm washes of feedback bathe the whole track in a rich glow, and strange little flutters surface here and there, like some alien birdsong.
The track on the B-side is more similar to past TBTP outings, but McAree manages to meld the old sounds, with the new sounds found on the flip, the same strange assemblage of high end crunch and scrape and squiggle, but set in a landscape much more black and buzzy, thickly layered, undulating sea of sound, blown out an streaked with feedback, the weird effected shards of melody, drifting on that thick, rumbling undercurrent. Dense and drone-y looped and hypnotic sounding here and there, but for the most part a massive organic sprawl of minimal psychedelic guitar drone dreaminess.
Housed in a simple black 12" style sleeve with the middle holes cut out, a printed obi with all the artwork and liner notes, and comes with a black cd-r, packaged in its own sleeve with a proper insert, containing, both the tracks, but a WAY extended and remixed version of the B-side!
Sometimes a pedigree can tell you a lot about a band. For instance, take Transitional. Here's a list of bands the various members have been a part of: Novatron, Head Of David, Jesu, Grey Machine, God, Fear Falls Burning, and if you include the guy who mastered the record, add to the list: Jesu, Godflesh, Final, Ice, Techno Animal, Sidewinder and Napalm Death. Phew! You probably nailed that last one as Justin Broadrick, who does indeed master this second disc from Transitional, and the group does not stray too far from this sonic lineage, as Stomach Of The Sun is indeed intense, drone-y, grim, ominous, noisy, distorted, rhythmic, blackened, atmospheric, hypnotic and HEAVY. Fans of any or all of the above mentioned bands will most likely find this much to their liking.
The record begins with a 13+ minute slow burn guitardrone, that builds and builds, growing ever more intense and caustic, but somehow remaining warm and lush, before stumbling into a lurching industrial Godflesh-ed pound, dirgey and dense, but with a bit of a melodic element, a feedbacky melody draped over Transitional's tarpit plod, totally brings us back to the early Earache / Pathological days, but with a slightly more modern sheen. "In My Collapse" follows up with more rhythmic metallic crunch, this time a bit more dubbed out, a little space-y, like a Godflesh ballad if there could ever be such a thing, which leads directly into "Drowning", a gorgeously washed out doomic drift, spare drums, swirling effects, and lots of streaked longform tones, hypnotic and dreamy. The rest of the record pretty much shifts between those sounds, the more Jesu-y metalgaze drift, the post industrial metallic plod and the dreamlike ambient shimmer, the three sounds rarely remaining totally distinct, instead, constantly blending and mixing, creating gorgeous hybrids, sometimes dense and ominous, othertimes soft focus and otherworldly. "Hideaway" is the best song Jesu never recorded, the title track begins all spaced out and dubby, before introducing one of the most crushing (and weirdly processed) riffs ever, and the record closes with an epic swath of noise drenched free form ambient soft noise drift, that manages to be soothing and serene, as well as intense and haunting at the same time.
Seriously awesome stuff, not sure how we missed out on their debut, but this one is so good we're definitely gonna have to track that one down as well... On limited (naturally) vinyl and cd.
Another new release brought to us by Finland's Ektro, the label run by our pal Jussi of Circle. Ektro's releases are always graphically quite nice and musically quite adventurous and unpredictable, although Jussi's interest in prog and psych usually is evident. In this case, we have a percussion extravaganza from one Janne Tuomi (currently, a member of Circle and various underground Finnish improv ensembles). It's mostly percussion, anyway -- the list of instruments in the cd booklet reads thusly: "drumset, cymbals, percussion, tam-tams, opera gongs, changgo, pandiero, raagini-pro, pocket trumpet, voice". With these implements, and "no overdubs, no editing", Tuomi has created five instrumental pieces (not conventional songs, we mean), bridging free jazz and Finnish free-folk. Carefully constructed, rising and falling, with hazy drone and dramatic clatter, soothing bells and rattling sticks...not a noisy racket at all, but a personal sound-world quite listenable for something that falls into the 'solo percussion' category.
Sur-Terre.Net is an interactive project by the Parisian multi-disciplinarian Gregory Chatonsky, involving film, sound, and a generative web interface. With only a cursory glance at the website (go figure, it's www.sur-terre.net), it appears that the work deals with layers of observation and being observed within social spaces, all with a vaguely psycho-sexual overtone. The project also happens to incorporate a very impressive soundtrack from a who's who in the world of abstract electronica and fractured sound-art: Fennesz, Scanner, Francisco Lopez, Steve Roden, Tim Hecker, Hazard, Pita, General Magic, and many others! We'll leave discussion of the sociological insights of the entire Sur-Terre.net project to the experts (or if you want to tell us what you think about it, be our guest!); but we most definitely can say that the soundtrack is exemplary almost from start to finish. The one minor hiccup is the clumsy rhythms of the Vladislav Delay track, but beyond that, richly textured electronic ambience and static vibrations dominate the compilation, laced with historical allegories, memory, disillusionment, and dislocation. Standouts include Fennesz' impeccable blurring of pixel-points, Atau Tanaka's eerie field recording manipulations, Francisco Lopez' grinding swells of gritty hiss, and even the sometimes lackluster Scanner contributes a brilliant piece of crepuscular electronics more in keeping with Biosphere's work. Unlike a lot of compilations which merely collect interesting tracks to be unceremoniously dumped onto the iPod, the soundtrack to Sur-Terre.net is totally engaging from start to finish. Recommended.
As we've mentioned in the past, we're a little wary of the noise. We love us some Merzbow now and again, some Hijokaidan of course, maybe some Masonna, New Blockaders sure� but pure noise, harsh noise, is an acquired taste we just haven't acquired yet.
But while Technicolor Hell is by definition a 'noise comp', it's a lot more than that. The sounds are varied and rife with fucked up rhythms, bizarre textures and a world of grinding grating roaring whirring sounds that are somehow both hard AND easy on the ears.
It makes sense that this wouldn't be your run of the mill noise record, as it comes by way of a Mr. Dave Smolen, whose last record we reviewed and dug heavily a while back (still got a few in stock), and who was also responsible for the mind blowing genius that was Flittermice Of Eld, a single track, abstract not-quite-black-metal-not-quite-noise tribute / homage to the Darkthrone song ""As Flittermice as Satan's Spys", drawn from just a handful of notes from said song. What the fuck?!? But so awesome.
So Mr. Smolen's on here, and it's his label, and it's one of those comps where we pretty much don't recognize a single artist, but the names have us convinced before we even hear them that we'd have to love 'em: Cars Will Burn, Drums Like Machine Guns, Tweeter, Mincemeat Or Tenspeed, Sharks With Wings�
Yeah okay already, but what the hell does it sound like, you're thinking, well, obviously the simplest description would be, well, NOISY. But like we mentioned before, that's just the tip of the ruptured eardrum.
Mincemeat Or Tenspeed offer up their own sort of metal, but it's pulled apart and shattered into a million jagged pieces, the resulting skree sounds more like a crumbling wall of blown out distortion, wrapped in sheets of brittle feedback, but part way through, the track morphs into some creepy buzzing Goblin-esque synthscape. Smolen's track has Flittermice in the title, but if there's any Darkthrone in there we sure can't hear it. Instead it's a black sonic sky filled with streaks of ear piercing feedback and fireworks of grinding high end. Sharks With Wings is more traditional noise, channeling Masonna, a garbled vocal transmission caked in filthy FX and blown to bloody bits. Cars Will Burn weave a gorgeous little soundscape of downtuned grind, sine wave glitch, skittery static, all assembled into a strangely rhythmic jam. We had high hopes for Drums Like Machine Guns, c'mon, with a name like that? They don't disappoint, but they do surprise with a kind of lo-fi Atari Teenage Riot thing, pounding techno beats in a field of distortion and buzz, vocals hyper distorted and buried in the mix, almost like a synth squealing and shrieking above the din. Pretty dang cool. In fact this whole comp is pretty bad ass. Surprisingly (or not) we seem to be getting more and more noise in our diet lately, and quite frankly we're digging it big time. I guess it's about time we reconsidered our general position on noise music�
Packaged in an oversized, eye popping color booklet, packed with liner notes, track info, color photos, diagrams and designs, a printed insert with the cd affixed to the last page. And probably pretty dang limited�
Some of you must remember the Simon Wickham-Smith disc Twofordancin', a sort of out of left field blast of house-y trip hop electronica. Which threw us for a loop at first, but ended up getting crazy play in the store.
So when we heard about this new collection, a triple disc spanning 8 years, because of the title we were maybe expecting more of the same. And we got it. The opening track here, from way back in 1999, is a nearly half hour jam, all simple percussion, and house music whistle, looped and hypnotic, again it takes a second, but once you get into it, you're hooked. In the background is a thick distorted whir, there are occasional bits of strange effects and processed vocals, but for the most part it's a killer stripped down groove.
But surprisingly, that's it for the groove, the rest of disc one jumps to the 2000s, and we're back on more familiar ground. "Sealight", from 2000, is a barely moving shimmering whisper of a song, high end streaks smoothed into oceanic swells, everything glimmering and glistening, muted and minimal. Quite lovely. "The Horizontality Of Saskatchewan" (2202) is a strange gnarled guiatarscape, the riffs distorted and crumbling, sounding a bit like damaged bagpipes, or some lost Daniel Higgs jam, melodies lurching and threatening to fall apart, lots of whir and buzz, on closer listening maybe that's not a guitar but a pump organ, minimal percussion, very haunting and hypnotic. Track 4 is brand new, recorded this year, and is another super minimal dronescape, lots of glitch and click and whir, but all muted into a subtly pulsing melody, eventually building into a distorted blown out swirl of processed vocals, Eastern melodies, and thick grinding buzz.
The second disc begins with the warped warble of "Cool Memories" from 2004. a seasick backwards dreamworld of subtle buzz, mumbled voices, and a gorgeously woozy main melody. "Angels And Birds And The Coming Of Night" is the centerpiece of the second disc, recorded in 2004 as well, and clocking in at 45 minutes, an epic expanse of soft focus fuzz and billowing metallic drones, dense and lustrous, dark and dreamlike. The disc closes with 2005's "Cool Memories II", a sonic addendum to part one, the mumbled backwards swoon, now peppered with bits of glitch and smears of static.
The final disc in the set is a live set recorded earlier this year in Paris, a 48 minute stretch of high end minimalism, a flickering fluttering upper register electronic trill, oscillating endlessly, is spread out over almost the entire length of the entire performance, with subtle sonar like overtones and subtle low end throbs, until the flutter begins to fluctuate, and suddenly the track is a twisting and tangled squall of warped synth, blurred effects and processed vocals.
As always, packaged in that instantly recognizable Celebrate Psi Phenomenon wallpaper packaging. Inserts and liner notes for each disc, and as always, EXTREMELY LIMITED.
Now this was a bit of a surprise. Especially coming from Simon Wickham-Smith, although by now we should maybe expect the unexpected from W-S. One single seventy five minute track, an endlessly looped tripped out hip hop beat, with stuttery vocal samples in the background, chanting and tribal, but low enough in the mix that they just sounds like random warbling and rumbling. Had trouble getting our heads around this at first, but after a few minutes, it sort of grabs hold of you, with its strangely hypnotic repetition, and you sort of drift away on a slowly shifting current of tribal percussion and strange ambient sounds. Very reminiscent of Muslimgauze. As always, limited too!
We begin so many reviews of noise records, with disclaimers like "we don't typically like noise music" that we're beginning to think we actually DO like noise music. Although to be fair, the noise music that mostly appeals to us, is not the speaker shredding white noise, but rather the carefully crafted, dynamic soundscape sort of noise. With rhythms, however subtle, melody, mood and definitely dynamics. So it might be more fair to say we enjoy noiserock. Or noisy music. (all of this said, knowing full well, that many of us DO in fact like NOISE music, Masonna, Incapacitants, etc�)
Semantics aside, we do love our music noisy, and we love plenty of noise in whatever rock it is we're rocking, kraut, space, post, garage, a little noise goes a long way, especially when wielded deftly and applied sparingly.
We got this disc in the mail a few months ago. Self professed noise music, so it took us a while to hunker down and throw it on, and what do you know? It was awesome. A strange soundscape of fragmented rhythms and electronic whir, of crumbling drones and spaced out ambience. A more minimal take on a sort of krautrocky noise rock, not all that far removed from recent AQ records of the week by Geronimo and Aluk Todolo. In fact, anyone who bought either of those would do well to check out Orchids by Winters In Osaka.
Orchids would be worth it alone for the opening track, a ten plus minute jam that could go on forever as far as we're concerned. A spacious rhythmic noise jam, reminiscent of This Heat's Repeat. A strange electronic trill, the heart of the track, repeating throughout, sometimes panned to the right, sometimes to the left, right up front, then buried in the mix, while underneath, a rhythm skitters and shuffles, locking into a groove, and then fragmenting into strange stuttering hiccups, before settling back in again. Swirling all around are sheets of feedback, minor key synthesized basslines, crumbling static, other bits of percussive clatter, but the main rhythm keeps resurfacing, and that strangely soothing little electronic trill, the whole thing impossibly soothing and hypnotic.
And like we said above, that track would be enough, but the rest of the disc echoes that first track, as if the various songs were just movements of a bigger expansive piece, and it works. In fact the second track, is like a more percussive version of the first, the drums more pronounced, that trill still present, but the rhythm distorted and thick, with extra bits of disembodied guitar drifting in here and there. The third too is a part of that first suite, the drums growing even more distorted and insistent, the layers of noise growing more and more corrosive as well.
But from that point on the record, while still referencing the opening suite, seems much more varied, little bursts of staccato percussion, thick swaths of downtuned drone, melodies scrawled in squiggles of feedback, moody murky melodic thrums drifting nearly static and almost out of earshot, sprays of hiss, like one of those sprinklers, hooked up to an amplifier, fields of distorted chimes and resonant shimmer. But the magic being that the various songs keep revisiting themes from the song right before it, or hinting at some sonic element no yet introduced. Creating a sprawling rhythmic soundscape of buzz and hiss and skitter, of fuzz and skree and thud, that unfolds and unfurls and fills your ears with glorious glorious noise.
There's weird black metal, and then there's WEIRD black metal. Generally the weird stuff tends toward either the stumbling and inept, or the super avant and ridiculously proficient, but the strangeness of Wrnlrd seems so much more organic, as if the sound of Wrnlrd was not in fact strange, but more that all the other sounds around it were way too normal. Nothing sounds forced, or ridiculous, but it all sounds twisted and freaky, and most definitely unlike any other black metal you've ever heard. Could be because the man behind Wrnlrd grew up playing bluegrass, could be these are just the sounds he hears in his head, whatever it is, we're grateful, cuz every Wrnlrd record seems to blow our mind more than the last.
Just check out the opener here, the guitars -almost- out of tune, the melody strangely atonal, the drums buried in the mix, the bass warbly and warped, and what sounds like some sort of bleating tuba supplying the low end, chugging riffage over strange snippets of found sound, tangled saxophones (?), bellowed vocals, all the sounds relentless and all tangled up in a swirling blackened mass, harmonized guitars, weird jagged shards of metallic crunch, and then the song suddenly shifts, the key changes to something slightly more melodic and major, and female vocals, soulful and almost operatic wail over the top. What? Really? How does it work? And why does it sound so goddamn amazing? You'll probably be asking yourself that over and over as you dig into Myrmidon, that is if you can stop yourself from headbanging or pry the headphones off your ears. That first track is a sort-of-template for the whole record, the soaring female vocals, the gnarled crunchy riffage, the lurching start stop arrangements, everything murky and downtuned, a bit noisy, blurred and buzzy, dense and so chaotic, but somehow it all works, and the result is some seriously transcendent black art.
Super thick vinyl, 180 gram, comes with a digital download too!!
