Ultra obscure, freaky French '70s underground psychedelic proto punk reissued, oui!! Crazy how there's still stuff like this out there ready to be (re)discovered. The Rob Jo Star band originally put this out in 1975, probably under the influence of the Velvets and the Stooges, kinda like cult Canadian contemporaries Simply Saucer. Like SS, the Rob Jo Star Band packs these tracks with all kinds of ridiculous synth blurt, electronics swooshing and bleeping and farting all throughout this album, other key elements of which include jangling distorted guitars and heavily accented vocals... Pretty darn cool if you ask us! There's moments that sound like a French version of The Cramps, inside a spaceship; others where the singer gets kinda Damo, and basically it's a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy) dose of throbbing fuzz, chugging rock n' roll rhythms, handclaps, wild vox, with song titles like "Acid Revolution" and "Blood Flower". File with the likes of Soggy, Angel Face, and Metal Urbain...
Limited edition, import.
UT Publishing being the book arm of Ugly Things magazine, just the folks to publish the story of Dutch sixties beat-psych greats Q65! 205 b&w illustrated pages, full of drama, drugs, and of course the making of some amazing music. Fans know that Q65 were, like, Holland's answer to the Stones, or maybe the Pretty Things, so you can imagine that they have some stories to tell! Definitely lots of rock n' roll craziness, at least as much as the surviving members can remember...
Oh man, is this a match made in heaven or what? Actually, more like a match made in outer space, or in whatever warped sonic reality dub legend Scientist calls home, a dozen killer dubstep jams, worked over by the master, already blissed out and skeletal, dubbed out and droney, bass heavy and skittery, Scientist takes those original jams and sends them careening into the cosmos. Much of the bass is stripped away, but the drums, oh the drums, they get the science like nobody's business, bouncing from speaker to speaker, stuttering, and hiccupping, everything wrapped in clouds of echo and delay, the original melodies pulled apart until they're just barely-there streaks of sound, the dubbiness already in full effect, gets cranked to 11, most of the vocals are buried, but little bits of vocals are doused in effects and spit into the ether, only to have them boomerang right back, dizzying and dazzling, spaced out and psychedelic, even the most minimal stripped down tracks take on new life via Scientist's golden touch, it's hard to explain just what it is he does, but you can hear it, and feel it, the sounds are more out there, or in there, the original tracks just the blueprint for the abstract work of dubbed out sonic art they were meant to become. Totally blissed out and hypnotic, and so so so good. Makes us want to hear EVERYTHING get the Scientist dub treatment, garage rock, black metal, whatever, anything and EVERYthing.
As a bonus, included is a second bonus disc, with all the original tracks, a pretty bad ass dubstep comp all on its own.
The whole thing comes packaged in an eye popping old school reggae/dub cartoon covered 8 panel digipak, depicting Scientist manning multiple spacecrafts, each with a cadre of dubsteppers as his crew. Awesome!
Last year's aQuarius / WFMU South By Southwest showcase was pretty tough to beat, if we do say so ourselves. An entire night of aQ faves, every single one kicking huge amounts of ass, and basically blowing us away over and over again. Just check out the lineup: Speedwolf, Iron Man, Moon Duo, Pierced Arrows, Dengue Fever, Epileptinomicon, Todd, True Widow, Sonny & The Sunsets, Headdress, Home Blitz, Drunkdriver, and Shit And Shine. We'd be hard pressed to pick a favorite set of the night, but lots of folks, ourselves included, might find ourselves leaning toward the rhythmic chaotic cacophony of Shit And Shine, a UK based multi-drummer drone-psych-noise unit who once called Texas home. And who, besides kicking up a glorious drum heavy racket, managed to keep the crowd riveted for their whole set, the members clad in strange costumes, a bunny suit, creepy plastic masks, furry animal heads, all while manning multiple drumkits and constantly switching instruments, and creating a glorious wall of pulsing, pounding, hypnotic sound. Luckily, the whole thing was captured on tape. And while maybe something is lost without the visuals, the music holds up surprisingly well on its own, the group's single song set spread out over two sides, right out of the gate, the band lock into a rhythm and don't let up.
The sound is blown out and in the red, helping make it sound exactly like being there (and like you forgot your earplugs), the legion of drummers, pounding out a rhythm in perfect unison, while the rest of the $+$ crew do their thing, their thing in this case being super distorted fuzzed out bass, processed alien vocals, blasts of screeching feedback, squalls of psychedelic white noise buzz, a sound that is basically krautrock writ NOISY and BLOWN OUT and HEAD CAVINGLY LOUD!
By the time the second half (side) rolls around, the buzz and pound are interrupted by thick shards of almost poppy melody, streaks of almost shogazey looped fragmented noise, until finally the jam switches gears, just a bit, and we get the $+$ version of 'bringing it down', a churning Circle like sludgekraut hypnorock groove that plays out until the record settles into a locked groove, which if you're not paying attention, will have you listening to that single groove for EVER, before realizing something is up. And hell, we actually listened to it for 5 or 6 minutes, and probably would have let it keep on playing... (and the first side ends with a locked groove too, so be prepared to be mesmerized, endlessly there too!)...
Heavy and hypnotic, the perfect sonic souvenir if you were there, an even more perfect slab of crushing corrosive rhythmic noise rock weirdness if you weren't.
Housed in a full color sleeve, an Austin backyard on one side, one of the $+$-ers on the other. Includes a Xeroxed insert, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered. ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Ok, bear with us here... Might anybody remember Steve Trecasse? We're guessing the answer is no. He has been a small-time music producer, who worked at a time for MTV way back in the mid-to-late '80s. He was responsible for all of the music on the shortlived MTV gameshow Remote Control, but he also composed the theme song for the first incarnation of 120 Minutes. The show grew into a rather banal rehash of major label sponsored "alternative" music, but the early years had some genuine underground acts showcasing their videos. Live Skull, Swans, Sonic Youth, and Loop were some of the more atypical groups to get their videos on the air, alongside more conventional college rock favorites like The Sugarcubes, Love & Rockets, and They Might Be Giants. But that theme song hedged toward the darker, grittier sound through a throbbing electronic underbelly girding an air-raid siren guitar swarm which was not too far from a Skullflower (circa Birthdeath & Form Destroyer) / Sigue Sigue Sputnik / Joy Division hybrid as bafflingly awesome as that may seem. Another weird piece of trivia about that theme song was that it was performed by Trecasse with Doug Di Franco (who might just be Double Dee, turntablist Steinski's partner in crime) and Josh Braun (who seems to be the same dude who played keyboards in Circus Mort, which was Michael Gira's band before Swans). Anyway, that theme song proved to be more haunting and menacing than anything else that 120 Minutes dared to broadcast. It is a bit strange that a song that good, that dark, and that bleak would make it as a theme song for anything, much less for MTV. While that track is clearly something for somebody to dig up beyond an odd YouTube clip here or there, the fact remains that The Soft Moon has unintentionally arrived at this exact same psychic, sonic environment, nearly 25 years later, in an act of convoluted convergent evolution.
The Soft Moon is the post-punk / minimal wave project fronted by Oakland's wunderkid Luis Vasquez, whose eagerly awaited debut album is the perfect extension of his two teasing singles which emerged on Captured Tracks earlier in 2010. Guitars, bass, keyboards, drum machines, and a whispered vocal delivery all come together in a series of monochromatic, mechanical, and gloomy propulsions that fit within the current resurgence of Factory inspired alienation through sound. Amongst his death disco vibes and downer post-punk dirges, Vasquez has a knack for an icy noise quotient that glides through the springy basslines and taut rhythms. Layers drift throughout each song, building never as anything so garish as a solo, but more as a scabrous doppleganger of the songs arching mood. These are tonebent squalls of atonal screeches exhumed from a lo-fi murk and rinsed in pools of reverb, very much like those really early Skullflower recordings when Gary Mundy and Stefan Jaworzyn provided the twin guitar attack. Where Skullflower had a drug-fuelled nihilism at their core, The Soft Moon is more of an alchemist of gloom, doubling rhythms with staccato electronics and downtuned Killing Joke-ish basslines to what would have been a standard Goth plod. In many ways, it makes perfect sense that The Soft Moon has landed on Captured Tracks, as he's mining the same aesthetic surfaces of Blank Dogs, but where Blank Dogs holds back with a subtle irony, The Soft Moon fully embraces the gloom of this music; thus making this one of the best records of 2010 that everybody will be hearing in 2011. Awesome.
Originally released back in 1998 on the fabled Misanthropy label, this terminal masterpiece from England's truest champions of epic DOOM, Solstice (R.I.P.?), has now at long last been reissued, with two bonus tracks to boot. Old fans can take pleasure in purchasing this again (because it's an album so good, you'll WANT to buy it twice, so maybe you can fool yourself into that feeling of hearing it for the first time) and those that missed it the first go-round now have a chance to prove themselves as discerning metalheads.
When we first reviewed this, we said it was a grower. A record we came to consider one of the best of that year, of any year. In the near-decade since, this has only gained greater stature. In the realm of true metal, of epic metal, of doom metal, of pagan metal, of just plain pure heavy metal -- we proclaim New Dark Age to be an all-time classic. And believe us, few other albums from the late nineties qualify in that regard.
Such riffs. Such sheer heaviness -- heaviness that actually seems to be signifying something. Such FEELING. This is possibly the apex of epic doom. The guitar leads and harmonies are to die for, the sad Celtic-folk motifs and Lovecraftian lyrics of weird fantasy argue for an ancient intellect at work. The clean, somewhat delicate vocals of Morris Ingram and his abstruse vocabulary ("vermivorous", "tervous", "perpetuum", "axiom abhorrent, protean triumvirate"?) are at first a bit odd, but ultimately utterly fitting with the sombre and arcane, monolithic and melodically grand mood of this album. Certainly his performance on the acoustic "Blackthorne" would make any fan of '70s Brit-folk weep, while the other, fully amped tracks will make headbangers ready to both shed tears and storm the proverbial castle.
FYI, the bonus cuts consist of two NWOBMH covers ("The Prophecy" by Iron Maiden and "Stormchild" by Trespass). Cylcone Empire has also reissued Solstice's two prior discs, Lamentations and Halcyon, just like this one remastered, with bonuses, new liner notes and layout. We've got those as well and will get 'em listed when we can -- they're good too but THIS is definitely Solstice's finest.
Have we really heard the last of Solstice? Rumor has it that guitarist Rich Walker is assembling a new line-up, possibly featuring the singer from Primordial, to do a new album. If it actually happens we'll be eager to hear it, though it's hard to imagine they could ever top this!
Their "Best Of 2010" issue, including their picks for the 40 best albums of the year... so if you're gonna buy just one issue of Spin this year, make it this one. There's multiple covers, featuring their three "Artists Of The Year": LCD Soundsystem, Black Keys, and Florence and the Machine. Also this ish: Gorillaz, Nicki Minaj, viral videos, Patton Oswalt and Amanda Palmer, and plenty more...
Okay, all you Wooden Shjips / Moon Duo obsessives. There's some new kids in town, vying for your psychedelic space rock dronekraut affections, and they're called The Spyrals, and they traffic in the same sort of droned out post Velvets, post Spacemen motorik fuzz drenched psychedelic garage kraut mesmer. Which means, pretty much anyone who digs WS or the slightly less rocking Moon Duo, are probably gonna go nuts for these guys too.
With songs that sound like they should go on forever, and lord knows we certainly wouldn't complain if they did, the Spyrals manage to pack plenty of blissed out hypnotic drug rock droniness into a matter of minutes, so much so that you'll likely find yourself flipping this single over and over and over and over again. The organs are thick and fuzzy, the guitars chime and churn and jangle and ring out, the drums simple and solid, the melodies are mesmerizing, a little bit of twang here and there, it's pretty much everything you could hope for from this sort of thing, cyclical, repetitive, motorik, propulsive, druggy, dreamy, fuzzy, buzzy, psychedelic and still most definitely catchy.
We'd be awfully surprised if these guys didn't blow up big time soon. Which means, you better act fast, these 7"s are CRAZY limited, as in only 30 copies, each one hand numbered, and hand screened. And most likely gone before you know it.
We first got hip to the airy and sensual soulful voice of Sylvia Striplin through the Eighties Ladies group she was a part of, masterminded by Roy Ayers. That great disco album was reissued earlier this year on Universal Sound (an offshoot of Soul Jazz) and now they hit us with her one solo outing, also arranged and produced by Roy Ayers. The album is a slab of rare groove lovers delights, as both Ayers' seamless touch at bringing a lush vibe to disco and boogie grooves and Striplin's free flowing infectious voice, make for songs that transport you into a wind in your hair, arms in the air, sultry and wholly satisfying smooth groove.
"You Can't Turn Me Away" will excite all Erykah Badu fans as Badu lifts/samples/covers the original on her latest album, a track that's also been sampled by hip-hop artists like Notorious B.I.G. And damn it's a song ahead of its time, while still totally being in its own time and magical place. Every time we get to that song we literally repeat it at least three times in a row before we move on, it's that damn good! Luckily that's not the only gem here, tracks like "Look Towards The Sky", "Give Me Your Love", and "Searchin'" will give any soulful disco lover so much to dig. Somewhere between the sassy nature of Gwen Guthrie and the soulful vibrations of Minnie Ripperton, this is an album that deserves this new fresh moment in time. So hot!
A reissue of record number two from Sun Araw, aka Magic Lanterns guitarist Cameron Stallone, and much like the other SA releases, Beach Head is a fuzzy, druggy, washed out, effects heavy psychedelic krautdrone new age blow out. Four extended tracks of smoldering minimal drift, soft cacophonies of bells and chimes wrapped in streaks of feedback and swirls of spaced out FX, undulating tendrils of sitar buzz, warped calliope melodies, and muted almost folky twang, everything sun dappled and Technicolor ear candy.
"Thoughts Are Bells" is indeed a bell heavy intro, a slow building, dronescape of percussive swirl, smoothed out angular guitars, and a slow motion avalanche of effects and buried melodies. "Horse Steppin'" is all laid back tropicalia via Ariel Pink, and broadcast through loud speakers hung from palm trees on some deserted tropical island. Flirting with Ducktails style lo-fi tropical garage pop, but transforming it into a reverb drenched bit of slow dreampop, that almost sounds like Animal Collective being spun manually at about 10rpm, the guitars glisten, the drums are muted and barely there, the vocals are soaked in echo and delay, everything laid back and stretched out and washed out, hazy and lazy and bleary and deliriously dreamlike.
The rest of the record doesn't deviate too much from those first two tracks, "Beams" manages to fuse the two, the sort of raga drift of the first with the slowcore blurpop of the second, into a Spacemen 3 style druggy drone, replete with woozy basslines, ethereal guitar atmospherics, and all the other various elements, vocals, drums, buried in a glorious sonic murk, while "Bridal Filly", takes the same combination, but stretches it WAY out into something even still more indistinct, an almost Tim Hecker-ish landscape of blurred grit, and pixelated melody, softly pulsing melodies, weightless wordless vox, muted percussion, swaths of thick buzz, eventually coalescing around another lumbering bassline, into some total stoner zoner psych drone spacerock drift. Awesome.
Oh man do we love Terror Danjah. We may get more and more dubstep over here, but grime seems harder and harder to come by, not sure why, but thankfully Planet Mu is still on the case, and finally offers up this the latest brand new full length from Terror Danjah, a killer disc equal parts synthy dubstep skitter, and sinister, blackened dubbed out grime, which KILLS. Like the Power Grid ep we reviewed a while back, TD whips up super cinematic landscapes of big stuttery beats, squelchy synths, tangled melodies, orchestral stabs, looped samples, choral-like backdrops, that are situated firmly in dubstep territory, that is until an MC grabs the mic, and then everything shifts and stuff gets gloriously grimy, FAST. And Undeniable shifts frequently back and forth, from brooding ominous low end darkness, to buzzy synth swirl and back again.
The record opens with the very grimey "Grand Opening", with its stripped down beats, choir like textures, synthy strings, booming bass, and fuzzed out low end warble, all beneath Dream McLean's raw rough flow, winding and slithering through the fields of buzz and thrum and skitter. "Acid" is a blast of house-y Daft Punky dubbed out synthy stutter, which leads directly into "This Year (Pro Plus)", another grime jam, fuzzy and washed out, with some seriously dueling MC's both male and female, stuttery and twisted and abstract.
"Minimal Dub" is just that, a super minimal slab of abstract dubstep, peppered with vocal snippets and bits of synth squelch, all laced over a fragile sounding crystalline beat, which leads directly into the pounding almost dubhouse-y "Breaking Bard", with its relentless beat and swirl of buzz and rumble and thrum, not to mention fractured vox and ravey synths.
And on it goes, long stretches get all sci-fi and synthy, sounding like the dubstep version of the current craze of Carpenter/Goblin worship, but heavy on the bass buzz and stuttery beat, while others get super stripped down and minimal, skeletal and spidery, while still others get all soulful and trip hoppy.
A killer collection of dubstep /grime, that is absolutely essential listening for anyone who has been digging the recent spate of dubstep comps or any of the recent jams from Zomby, Clubroot, Vex'd, Ikonika, Guido, Mount Kimbie, etc.
And be sure to stick around until the end for a secret track, a bad ass blast of old school dubstep ragga style jungle, Terror Danjah style. Makes us wish he'd do a whole record of that stuff for sure!
Some of us are shocked that there's a volume two, collecting still more of the cracked electronic soul pop lo-fi disco of mysterious YouTube phenom Tonetta, but then, there are plenty of folks, like most of us here, that have been waiting for another volume. Why you might ask? Why indeed. Not sure we can describe Tonetta better than we did in the review of the first volume, so probably better to just revisit:
"We were trying to find a simple succinct way of describing Tonetta, and decided to turn to the online source for all things freaky, Freakipedia (oddly enough there was no entry for Tonetta on Wikipedia) where Tonetta's entry described him as "an incredibly gay older man on YouTube who dances half naked to songs he pre-recorded. While most of the music sounds the same in his videos, his lyrics largely differ dealing with sexual fetishes such as pissing and pooping, larger women and men, and ass to mouth." Which does pretty much sum it up. Tonetta dresses in strange ripped Flashdance style outfits, g-strings, torn sweatshirts, bustiers, weird masks, sometimes pantyhose over his head, wigs, dresses, whatever, sometimes he's practically nude, he shimmies and shakes, in a diamond shaped frame surrounded by trippy colors, in front of a backdrop that looks like it's probably in his basement, white curtains, a black sheet hung on the wall and/or a bunch of balloons."
Wow huh? It's definitely weird stuff, but it's engendered a bit of a crazy obsession among all sorts of music lovers, ourselves included. And you'll know how you feel the second you hear it. The songs are super simple, usually, just one or two parts, drum machines, looped samples, disco basslines, all lo-fi and distorted, alternatingly groovy, psychedelic, stumbling and damaged, tripped out and funky, sometimes a head spinning collision of all of those. The song titles, like on the first volume, speak, well, volumes: "Hot Little Fuck, "G+B Showers", "Rape Victim", "Doin A Dyke Tonight", "Picking On Lennon", "Ultimate Whore", "Daddys Little Boy", "Big Rig", "Death Sentence", you get the drift.
It's warped, and bizarre, demented, and weird as all get out, but it's also surprisingly catchy, and a bit irresistible, and while you may scoff now, once you get an earful you might find yourself as obsessed as the rest of us. Don't believe us? Check out the sound samples, or better yet, go watch a few Tonetta vids on YouTube, and then come back for this (and volume one!) when you're ready!
Super fancy packaging, thick silkscreeened jacket, each one hand numbered, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, printed full color inner sleeve, pressed on nice heavy vinyl, and includes a cd that features all the tracks on the lp PLUS two bonus tracks.
This head spinning psychedelic collaged freakoutscape is by none other than Total Life, aka Kevin Doria, aka a member of aQ fave dronerockers Growing, but on Ken Bradshaw, Total Life veers well away from the drone and drift of Growing, crafting a totally trippy pulsing sonic barrage assembled entirely from clipped and looped and recontextualized samples of Pet Shop Boys songs. Sounds like it could be a mess, or a play-it-one-time novelty, and it is maybe a little bit of both, but it's also a totally mesmerizing barrage of loops and drones and rhythms, hypnotic and cyclical and repetitive and totally mesmerizing, the sounds swirling and whirling, but always the main beat pounds on and on, some twisted alien dancemusic, the little bits of vocal becomes a strange refrain, the pulsing synths, blur and refocus, wash in and out, the whole sound slowing down and speeding up, blissing out and then snapping right back into a propulsive pound.
It takes a few minutes to let yourself get lost, but once you do, it's pretty fantastic. And the best part, is the sound continues to expand and develop and sprawl and become more noisy and more distorted, until it sometimes sounds like some fucked up noise rock band lock grooving their way through a field of pound and chug, all blown out and freaked out and pretty goddamn great.
Available on both tape and vinyl, the tapes are red and blue polka dot cassettes, and packaged in super thick, silkscreened blue and red J-cards, the lps are housed in eye popping blue and red almost 3D looking jackets. Both are ULTRA LIMITED. And unfortunately, the lps sleeves are all a bit dinged up, mostly bent corners, so be warned, vinyl nerds and condition obsessives steer clear, or just grab the tape!
Just one glance at the cover of this 7" should send most doom obsessives into an involuntary frenzy, the weird black and white washed out image, the twisted barely legible writing, so distinctive and immediately recognizable, but this is not in fact a lost record or weird reissue from New York doom legends Winter, but is in fact, the next best thing, two contemporary outfits, tackling their favorite Winter tunes, an homage / tribute to a criminally under appreciated band, especially considering that their sound predicted pretty much all the slow and low heaviness going on these days, and that the sound, and most of the bands that practice it, would sound a whole lot different if it wasn't for these guys, whether they know it or not.
Up first are long time aQ faves Unearthly Trance, who add their own twist but don't drift too far from the original, lumbering, lurching, plodding crusty doom sludge bliss, a filthy midtempo plod, peppered with bursts of double kick drumming, guttural vox, and of course twisted tarpit guitar buzz. UK sludge beasts Volition also don't mess with Winter's sound all that much, unfurling a blackened and dense bit of sprawling doom, that more than classic ultra doom, sounds more like a grindcore record played at 16rpm. Both sides rule, essential modern megadoom, and if you've yet to discover the dismal joy of Winter, maybe these two tracks will convince you to track some of that shit down. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
If no one told us this music was from Angola, we would have guessed it came from somewhere around Central or South America. A lot of this music reminds us of those great Panama compilations on Soundway, and as it turns out, Angola had the same cross-pollination of Latin-based musical influences from neighboring regions that Panama experienced with African-influenced music during the same time period. This compilation focuses on the electric bands, vanguard singers and the two significant recording companies that led to an explosive scene of musical forces in Angola during the late sixties and early seventies. Traditional African music from the Luanda Islands, psychedelic guitar-based music from neighboring Congo, Latin rhythms, the relentless beats of Carnival music and old school Caribbean Merengue, combine for some uplifting and uproariously joyous music. If you need some movement and heat to cure you of the winter blues, this set is for you!
Avid readers of the aQ list have no doubt noticed out new found obsession with 'jukin' and 'footwork', and the music that is the soundtrack to this new style of dance battling. We reviewed collections by DJ Nate and DJ Roc, both big names in a scene that most folks had never even heard of until recently, and masters of a sound that is equal parts twisted genius, and maddeningly repetitive insanity. It's easy to imagine this being the perfect music to get out there and dance your ass off, the manic music matching the speed of the frantically moving bodies, or vice versa, but removed from the dancefloor or street corner, the sound takes on a life of its own and has proven to very divisive. Most of us can't get enough, the looped repetition, the ridiculously relentless skitter and stutter, but some folks are driven totally batty after a matter of minute. But frankly, we just don't know what the heck is wrong with those folks. This stuff is totally brilliant, baffling, confusional, and weirdly funky and freaky and WAY far out.
This collection gathers up jams from the better known names in Footwork music, DJ Roc and Nate are both represented, but so are a whole legion of others, who take the sound of dance music and twist it all up, the formula being super intricate 808 beats, chopped and spliced and layered, into intricate mathy patterns, while snippets of soul songs are sped up and repeated over and over and over, bits of rapping, or fragments of a vocal line are also lifted, chopped and then looped, a variant of ghetto tech, the sound is so intense, and groovy, and funky, and in its own way psychedelic too.
From the weird low end synth stutter of DJ Rashad's "Teknitian", with its warbly sci-fi melodies and skeletal skitter, to Tha Pope's "Jungle Juke", which takes "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and speeds it up, loops it, and transforms it into a hiccupping avant soul groove, to DJ Spinn's "2020", which does sound strangely futuristic, and to these ears approximates Majeure or Zombi making Footwork music, to DJ Yung Tellum's creepy soundtracky "Freddy Vs. Jason", all the songs here rule, and are totally mesmerizing, and hypnotic, and weirdly impossibly addictive, and odds are you won't be able to resist either.
Another fantastically curated collection of magical and mysterious and mostly unheard songs from Honest Jon's, these vintage recordings from East Africa, recorded between the years 1938 and 1957, and categorized as 'native records', in that this was music that was intended for sale to native Africans, not the white colonialists or various traders or laborers, and these recordings helped capture and preserve popular music, the various styles popular before the influence of imported sounds from abroad and various immigrants. These sounds were specific to various villages and represented many different languages and styles. The other cool thing about these performances, is that they were specifically by non professionals, since earning a living making music was nearly impossible, instead these were regular folks, who were often called upon to entertain, at weddings or parties, at markets or for various rituals. The liner notes, like all Honest Jon's liner notes, go into incredible detail, about the various styles of music, the difficulties in translating the languages, the musicians, the performances, the recording processes, it reads like a primer on East African music, and like it should be part of a college course, in fact, we often think smart schools would be snapping these guys up to teach courses in world music, but beyond the background, it's the sounds that count, and the sounds here are incredible, so strange and lovely and mysterious and at once warm and intimate and emotional and totally alien and fantastical.
The first track is the perfect example, a super hypnotic stretch of relentless vocalizing over a barely audible string melody, the sound distorted, the vocals more like testifying, it's not until the very end of the track where the vocals drop out that you can hear how strangely frantic the string playing really is. And from there on out, there's never a moment that's less that totally wonderfully lovely, whether the sound is super melodic and folky, or minimal and rhythmic, buzzy and droney, moody and emotional, we lack the vocabulary to truly describe these sounds, other to say that they move us, and that they're so absolutely beautiful, sometimes haunting and mournful, other times effusive and celebratory, always breathtaking.
The cd comes in a beautiful hardcover style book, with a massive booklet inside, filled with extensive liner notes and vintage photos. The vinyl version is spread out over two double lps, the first with the same title as the double cd contains all the music from the first disc, while the second, containing the music from the second disc, is titled Bellyachers, Listen!
Another fantastically curated collection of magical and mysterious and mostly unheard songs from Honest Jon's, these vintage recordings from East Africa, recorded between the years 1938 and 1957, and categorized as 'native records', in that this was music that was intended for sale to native Africans, not the white colonialists or various traders or laborers, and these recordings helped capture and preserve popular music, the various styles popular before the influence of imported sounds from abroad and various immigrants. These sounds were specific to various villages and represented many different languages and styles. The other cool thing about these performances, is that they were specifically by non professionals, since earning a living making music was nearly impossible, instead these were regular folks, who were often called upon to entertain, at weddings or parties, at markets or for various rituals. The liner notes, like all Honest Jon's liner notes, go into incredible detail, about the various styles of music, the difficulties in translating the languages, the musicians, the performances, the recording processes, it reads like a primer on East African music, and like it should be part of a college course, in fact, we often think smart schools would be snapping these guys up to teach courses in world music, but beyond the background, it's the sounds that count, and the sounds here are incredible, so strange and lovely and mysterious and at once warm and intimate and emotional and totally alien and fantastical.
The first track is the perfect example, a super hypnotic stretch of relentless vocalizing over a barely audible string melody, the sound distorted, the vocals more like testifying, it's not until the very end of the track where the vocals drop out that you can hear how strangely frantic the string playing really is. And from there on out, there's never a moment that's less that totally wonderfully lovely, whether the sound is super melodic and folky, or minimal and rhythmic, buzzy and droney, moody and emotional, we lack the vocabulary to truly describe these sounds, other to say that they move us, and that they're so absolutely beautiful, sometimes haunting and mournful, other times effusive and celebratory, always breathtaking.
The cd comes in a beautiful hardcover style book, with a massive booklet inside, filled with extensive liner notes and vintage photos. The vinyl version is spread out over two double lps, the first with the same title as the double cd contains all the music from the first disc, while the second, containing the music from the second disc, is titled Bellyachers, Listen!
Debut ep from this Brooklyn based boy girl duo who traffic in gloriously blissed out, slo-mo, witch house-y synth-wave nu-gaze dream pop, the sound super minimal and stripped down, like Portishead crossed with oOoOO, a bass and synth heavy electro brood, that creeps and drifts, smoldering and sexy, swirly and darkly abstract. A series of glacial electro ballads, that pulse and throb, washed out dark wave slither slipping sinisterly from cold wave, to new wave, to trip hop and back again.
The basslines thrum, the synths whir and wheeze and shimmer, all beneath deep, smokey chanteuse like vox, each track, a thick undulating synthscape, minimal and moody, skeletal and spidery. Here and there arise bits of psychedelic squall, of metallic buzz, and effects drenched swirl, but for the most part the record drifts moodily and dreamily, the perfect late night, last drink, dark bar, drift off, lights low, bliss out, come down jam.
The first track on the B side mixes things up a bit with a blast of feral post punk energy, sounding a bit like a more fiery Strokes, lots of guitar crunch and real drum pound, distorted weary boyvox, the whole thing sweaty and fuzzy and intense, and then as if to make up for that sonic transgression, the rest of the record is dialed even further down, mostly just synths and vocals, various keyboards, wheezing organs, a droney minimal dreampop drift, softly buzzy and druggy, like a disembodied, even more stoned Velvets or Spacemen 3, perhaps a bit more modern and electronic, but just as lysergic and laid back.
Super thick vinyl, nice heavy full color gatefold and printed full color inner sleeve.
Twisted eighties style new wave electro industrial electronic pop from this duo, a dizzying mix of old school synth pop and industrial crunch, with a teeny bit of Chicago house swirled in. And some straight up eighties MTV style pop. But it's not the parts, it's what they do with them, and what these guys do is pretty bizarre and fantastic.
Imagine Oingo Boingo but way more minimal and druggy and psychedelic, or a way more industrial version of The Fixx, think old Ministry, Foetus, Coil, Severed Heads, even Portion Control, it's poppy, but dark, warped and electronic, new wavey but also a little witch housey here and there.
Woozy melodies are wrapped around stuttery beats, deep super dramatic vox drift over angular off kilter synths, strange sound effects swirl in the background, while the beats skitter and pound, keyboards buzz and pulse, all somehow molded into some retro dancefloor destroying electronic industrial pop weirdness, that manages to totally hit the spot, referencing all of those bands we grew up with, but also twisting that sounds into something fresh and new and gloriously tweaked and tripped out.
Pressed on super thick white vinyl, and probably pretty limited too...
It's been way over twenty years since Wild Style came out. No doubt, one of the freshest, most fun and stylish hip-hop films ever made. A few years ago it played at the Red Vic, a great co-op run theater in the city, and those of us who had never seen it before totally fell in love with with the charm of the movie and the great early hip-hop soundtrack (not to mention to jaw dropping fashion that still looks so damn hot!). While there was a cd reissue of Wild Style a few years back, these really are the kind of tracks you want to have on wax. Brings us back to that so missed fun filled, groove rich sound of early hip-hop that was really the soundtrack to breakdancing, graffiting, and ultimate endless block parties. Turntable wizardry, flawless raw MC skills, all under the musical production of Fab 5 Freddy. Still sounds so damn good all these years later. And any of you who love stuff like Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Doug E Fresh, Kurtis Blow, and the like, Wild Style is definitely the ultimate document of hip-hop's glory days. So fresh!
As a teaser for their upcoming Jennifer Herrema (Royal Trux, RTX) produced full length, psychedelic metallic noise poppers Wildildlife team up with their sludge pop doom noise pals in Flood for a killer two song onslaught.
Wildildlife just keep getting better, their sound getting poppier and poppier, but somehow managing to not get less heavy or any less weird or psychedelic. Their track here explodes right out of the gate with some mathy drum pound and some tangled guitar harmonies, sounding almost like some sort of Iron Maiden / Butthole Surfers hybrid, the sound woozy and distorted and druggy, the vocals processed and all tripped out, hooks galore, but all buried under Wildildlife's blown out glammy noise pop chaos. Swaths of crumbling sound and swirls of spacey effects get wrapped around looped samples, and wild streaks of pop flecked psychedelia, churning, and rhythmic and heavy, and noisy and crazy catchy to boot.
Flood counter with some low slung slithery post rock lope, which gains momentum and finally explodes into a seriously stonery doomy sludge, the brooding minimalism giving way to some epic, majestic hypno doom crush, but with plenty of groove, the sound at one point locking into a long stretch of repetitive and hypnotic chug and churn, sounding like a downtuned doom metal Circle, pounding away beneath bellowed vox and majestic melodies. So good.
Limited to 500 copies, we managed to get a bunch of the colored vinyl. Each one is hand numbered, and comes with a download coupon.
Collectors should be excited about this "warehouse find"! Our pal JW who runs the Holy Mountain label just discovered a stash of these long out of print Wooden Shjips Sub Pop singles, and sold 'em to us... the tracks latter appeared on WS's Volume 2 collection, but we figure there's folks who are obsessive WS collectors - or who just like 7"s - who would want these. We just a have a handful, and when they're gone, they're quite gone. And they're cheap, too!
Here's some of what we said about this single when we originally listed it in 2007:
We shouldn't have to say very much at all about this brand new 7" from beloved local dronerockers Wooden Shjips, considering how many of their recent full length we sold, same with the self released 7" and 10". It seems like we could just whisper the words "Wooden Shjips" into the internet and all of these records would suddenly just disappear, only to re-appear moments later on turntables around the world. Which, when you think about it, is basically what is about to happen right now.
"Woooooooodennnnnnnnssssshhhhhhhhjjjiiiiiipsssssssssss..."
The A side is classic Wooden Shjips, taking all of their influences and whipping them into a droney druggy blur. Whooshing distorted riffing, heavy on the phaser (so heavy at times, it sounds like maybe it's not just the guitar, like they ran the whole record through a phaser), some warped Stereolab style organs, simple krautrocky drumming, and those hypnotic Jim Morrison / Nick Drake deep crooning vocals. Think a super psychedelic Sabbath, or a heady mix of Flying Saucer Attack, Spacemen 3 and Loop. Cyclical and hypnotic, with a strange almost new wavey chord change / breakdown smack dab in the middle. It's a song that would shoot off way beyond the clouds if the rhythm section didn't keep things perfectly grounded like it does.
The flipside is way more poppy and less droney, a slow psychpop drift, with serpentine guitars, and a gradually increasing tempo, the guitar getting all tangled up with the whirring organ, the whole thing fuzzy and softly propulsive, but with a surprisingly garage-y vibe, reminding us of a more drugged out Sonics, or a more spaced out Fuzztones, especially in the main melody and the higher than usual vocals. It's by far one of the band's most beautiful songs, proving once again that a Wooden Shjips B side is nothing to be taken lightly. Both new tracks are pretty kick ass and fans will most definitely not be disappointed.
Reissue of the reissue. Previously an actual black box, with 2 cds, now everything fitted onto one disc. When these two Naked City records originally came out, it was before aQuarius had started doing our "list". But then Tzadik reissued 'em in The Black Box back in 1996, and we had a chance to review them... but all we said was: "Stars John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Fred Frith, Joey Baron & Yamantaka Eye. For their re-issue, Zorn has packaged these two albums in a black box, presenting all of the original, controversial artwork in the liner notes. Zorn gives a bit of history behind the graphics for Naked City releases. The albums, one fast and furious, the other slow and brutal, are without equal. They demonstrate the most aggressive sides of these incredible musicians."
True that, but there's more that could be said! Perhaps we figured, at the time, that everyone must already know all about Zorn and Naked City and there was no point in any extensive description. But, nowadays, there's gotta be people reading this who haven't yet experienced the mindboggling, genre-jumping musical mastery of Naked City, especially as intensely expressed on Torture Garden, originally released as a 45rpm 12" on the Shimmy Disc label in 1989, and if you're one of those folks, you're in for a treat - as long as you dig the idea of a "jazz" band playing almost every style of music imaginable, from lounge to country to surf to grindcore, in jarringly short, sharp stop on dime bursts, with Eye from the Boredoms vocalizing over top like a gibbering demon, screaming along with Zorn's saxophone, performing songs with titles like "Thrash Jazz Assassin", "Speedball", "Jazz Snob Eat Shit", "New Jersey Scum Swamp", and "S&M Sniper"! It's like the cartoon music of Carl Stalling meets Napalm Death meets, well just about everything else in the realm of music. Utterly insane and influential (though it must be said, Napalm Death was a HUGE influence on this). It's how we first heard about the Boredoms, too!
Blew us all away the first time we heard it. 12, 17, 28, 43 second songs that had more and better riffs in 'em than some ten minute Metallica epics. Well maybe that's exaggerating. But you get the idea. Amazing. And definitely Naked City's most "metal", grindcore-iest moment. Utter mayhem, with Zorn and Co. cramming a crazy number of changes into each track. Videos of them performing reveal a reliance on sheet music, but we don't blame 'em. That almost makes it more insane.
On this disc, the 42 tracks of Torture Garden (the longest of which clocks in at 1'19", but most don't come anywhere near the minute-mark) are followed by the single, 31'38" track that comprised the entirety of the 1992 Naked City album Leng Tch'e, long out of print, the yin to Torture Garden's yang for sure. Leng Tch'e is like the Naked City version of Earth or the Melvins, one long sludge trudge, super heavy and doomic and nightmarish. Again, Eye's vocals vie with Zorn's saxophone in emulating the screams of the damned.
If we had to choose our favorite Zorn album from amid his VAST discography (The Big Gundown? Spy Vs. Spy? Spillane? Bar Kokhba? Absinthe? Execution Ground?) Torture Garden would get a lot of our votes... it's certainly one of the most "extreme", though an argument could be made for Leng Tch'e too. No wonder they both belong together here (which also has something to do with the original, controversial cover art, necessitating the "black box" treatment). Nice to have 'em back in print, for the uninitiated, and also for old fans like us who had almost forgotten how incredible this shit is.
FYI some of the Torture Garden tracks also appeared on cd on the self-titled Naked City disc on Nonesuch (1989) and the Avant-label release Grand Guignol (1992).
