Brand new record from these Italian post/avant black metallers, and their first record to get reviewed on the aQ list, which is kind of crazy, considering most of the aQ metalheads have been big fans ever since their debut in 1999. And since that debut, the band has continued to stretch the boundaries of their particular brand of black metal, culminating in this, the single song, ten movement electro black metal concept record that is Psychogrotesque.
Beginning with a bit of creaking industrial ambiance, the record soon launches into a twisted tangled bit of gnarled blackness, blasting beats, chugging riffs, and a swirl of squiggly lead guitars, not to mention little flurries of electronic crunch and glitch, all backed up by choral like voices, and some almost ravey synths, that weirdness is balanced by the croaking lead vocals, and the sinister, minor key melodies, the track swings from churning buzzing blackness, to melodic soaring majesty, to off kilter mathiness and back again. The second movement explodes with some frenzied black metal buzz, but it's swaddled in more synths, the electronic element making it sound alien and futuristic, before shrugging off the synths and delving into some frosty true grim blackness.
And the record just gets weirder and weirder from there on out. The synths competing with the riffs, the arrangements almost orchestral, but instead of woodwinds and brass and strings, it's whirling buzzing keyboards and programmed beats, the vokills are constantly transformed, occasionally becoming a deep dramatic croon, most noticeably in the sixth movement, when those vocals are paired with some Gerry Rafferty style way-out-of-place saxophone, and sure, there's plenty of straight ahead blackness, but there are also jams that sound like black metal Daft Punk, or some bizarre hybrid of the two, and then there's the epic final track that is impossibly epic and twisted, the black metal component furious and frenzied, the over the top electronic bits cranked all the way up, so tense and intense and heavy and twisted and totally bizarre, and be sure to stick around for the hidden final track/coda, strange sampled vocals, over hazy electronic shimmer, the sound gristly and gauzy and darkly mysterious, making us wish they would have kept it going well past its far too brief two minutes.
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Hails to Hells Headbangers, the label is on a roll lately, bringing us long-awaited new releases by two of the most outre of AQ metal faves: Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm by black metal aberrations Inquisition (Record Of The Week last list) and this, the more simply titled Stoned, from psychedelic doomsters Acid Witch! It's their 2nd full-length, after the now out of print debut Witchtanic Hellucinations we cackled over a couple of years back. Once more, Shagrat and Slasher Dave (minus Finnish friend Lasse Pyykko, who wasn't actually the main guy in the band as it turns out) have stirred up a bubbling cauldron of tripped out, horror-loving metal that draws upon their love of old school death metal, doom, fright flicks, and drugs! They say it best themselves: "Metal, punk, comic books, and horror vhs / Nothing else to live for so you might as well obsess / Discovering books of power on the arcane and occult / Eating psilocybin leaves you feeling quite possessed" (lyrics from their song "Stoned To The Grave"). Now, we're not gonna say if we condone that lifestyle or not, but we sure do like the sick, slightly tongue in cheek music that results!! And if you can appreciate a song title like "Metal Movie Marijuana Massacre Meltdown", then you'll probably like this album and band. THAT song features another verse we've just got to quote: "Seen these movies so many times / Turn off the volume cause I know all the lines / So fucking high, just let the stereo play / But only if it's Lizzy Borden or Fastway." Sheer poetry to our ears. However, Acid Witch themselves sound a lot more underground than those '80s metal bands they mention, the Hellhammer poster and Bulldozer t-shirt in the band photo represent more likely '80s inspirations.
So, if you've heard their debut, you what to expect. After an intro of Goblin-y keyboards and looped samples, the album kicks into metallic gear with track two, "Witchfynder Finder", a song about turning the tables on Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General. It's a catchy juggernaut, sounding not unlike Cathedral or Electric Wizard (or Pykko's band Hooded Menace) riding Hawkwind's "Silver Machine". One of the many killer cuts here with skull caving riffery and fuzzed out guitars. Those Goblin-y keys return later on the eerie "Whispers In The Dark" and elsewhere... while in "Live Forever" the keyboards take on more of a Deep Purplish hue! All in all, a heavy, rockin', horror show of guttural vokills, '70s Sabbathry, and spooky-ooky atmospheres.
Their favorite holiday is obviously Halloween. October is a long way off but if you like Halloween too, Acid Witch have a treat for you right now. Buy this along with that Wooden Stake / Blizaro split also highlighted this week, and your inner psych doom freak monster will be well fed.
A long in the works collaboration from two aQ favorites, Aemae and Arastoo. We've listed both Aemae releases, but Arastoo has been a bit more elusive, with tons of super limited vinyl and cd-r releases, of which we've only ever managed to review 3.
Well, the two have come together, to produce this, the first in a new salvo of Bay Area sound art from Aemae, aka Brandon Nickell's Isounderscore label. And a pretty fantastic start. Arastoo plays the piano, and then the two shape and mold the piano into two side long pieces, both quite impressive.
The A side is mostly straight piano all the way through, some gorgeous fluid playing, some stunning arrangements, but the two subtly shape and twist throughout, adding mysterious little music box flourishes, sudden squalls of super high end skree, but those moments are actually quite controlled, the sounds sculpted onto dog whistle melodies, and haunting upper register textures. The subtle production tweaks really only augment, creating complimentary sounds, or add bits of ambience, allowing the piano to drift and sway and unfurl its melody, seemingly oblivious to what's going on around it.
The B side however, finds the sound of the piano obliterated, transformed completely into long shimmering streaks of layered metallic reverberation, a bit industrial sounding, layers of constantly shifting whir and rumble and hiss and roar, like a choppy sonic sea, building to a buzzing crescendo before settling back down into a tranquil sea of black ambience, as the piano returns, unfurling gentle, yet ominous minor key melodies, all very creepy and cinematic, but also quite lovely.
LIMITED TO 320 COPIES. Super striking silkscreened covers, with original artwork by Arastoo.
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...
Ultra limited latest release from the uber prolific Antony Milton and his always genius PseudoArcana label. This time it's an ultra limited lathe cut, created of course by the lathe cut master himself, Kiwi legend Peter King. Limited to 50 copies, the initial pressing of this lp disappeared in no time, but we managed to get a tiny handful of this, the second and final pressing, and it's a doozy. Packaged in a gorgeous hand screened/painted brown paper cover with a brown paper inner sleeve and housed in a resealable plastic jacket, and the record itself clear with printed inner labels, this split teams up label head Milton and his Nether Dawn project with Irish one man band Agitated Radio Pilot. And it's a perfect match up.
Agitated Radio Pilot unfurls slow growing, wheezing melancholy melodies and warm warbly atmospheres, split into 4 tracks, it sounds more like one lengthy extended pastoral drift, a lazy wander beneath leafy trees and a burnt orange late afternoon sky, laid back and blissed out. Melancholy and gauzy. The muted buzz of guitars, warbly melodies, all very hazy and indistinct.
Nether Dawn (this time accompanied by fellow NZ noisemaker James Kirk) counter with their own brand of blurry haziness. Long drawn out drones, hushed whispered vocals, smeared buzz, distant washes of distorted guitar and muted rhythmic clatter. It sounds like pop songs stretched out and pulled apart into spare skeletal stretches of somnambulant sound. Like ARP, it's all very soft focus and dreamlike. And remember, with lathe cuts, the more you play them, the more they degrade, and the sound gets even fuzzier and blurrier and more washed out. So after a bunch of plays this might sound even better! So lovely.
Second and final pressing of 50 copies, once these are gone, we won't bee able to get more.
Now on lp, a killer compilation of jams from abstract doomlord Amort, mostly culled from various cassettes, that we've raved about on past lists, but with an unreleased track included to sweeten the deal...
Amort is one of our favorite purveyors of 'ambient slowcore doom'. Influenced heavily by bands like SUNNO))), as well as groups on the blacker and more metal end of the sonic spectrum, Amort, have their own unique angle, at once mysterious and cinematic, heavy and atmospheric.
This collection begins with the sound of lilting piano, notes hanging suspended in wide open expanses of near silence, but soon that piano is joined by a slow lava like flow of glacial riffing, a downtuned low end throb, a la SUNNO))), Earth, Corrupted, but draped over a delicate slowcore background, then in comes some incredibly low, gurgling vocals, and suddenly all is revealed to us, gloriously hauntingly beautiful slowcore sludge. The massive riffing and monstrous vocals, drift in and out, often leaving just a lilting minor key guitar, to gently pick out the melody, hushed and minimal, like some sort of super abstract post rock, before the guitars pour back in and the vocals croak forth, but even at its heaviest and sludgiest, it's strangely pretty, the melody a minor key lament, the sound more murky and muddy than pummeling and heavy, like Corrupted covering Low maybe... The tempo gets upped a notch or two, sounding like the band might lurch into full on rocking, but instead, the riff just loops over and over, becoming more of a rhythmic drone than an any sort of actual rock riff, eventually fading to black.
The next track creeps along similar ground, beginning with abstract minor key guitar figures, allowed to unfurl and drift through an empty space, joined by simple piano, before launching into a slow motion ambient doom, all burnt out guitar and reverb drenched vocals. Very reminiscent of the Tomb Of... cassette, a strange melding of abstract ambient piano and dirgey doom drenched sludge. The interesting thing about Amort is there are no drums, this is all just huge walls of guitar, harsh demonic vocals, and tinkling piano...
The flipside begins like most Amort songs, with plodding abstract piano, throbbing low end notes, ringing out and reverberating, drifting in vast expanses of near silent hiss. With hushed whispered vocals, and the occasional distant wail of anguish and again, NO DRUMS (although it took us a while to even realize there were no drums, the sound is so thick and dense). Eventually, the guitars roll in like some thick black fog, and the band becomes some sort of black glacial beast, slithering and lurching in slow motion. The piano picks out mournful melodies beneath a thick wash of rumbling crumbling distortion. It's definitely closer to Thergothon or Skepticism that SUNNO))), not so much a static drift as a plodding trudge, the guitars beating against each other, pulsing and throbbing, the piano pounding away, buried way down in the mix. Imagine a Mazzy Star / Khanate mash up and you might be getting close!
The next track begins with gently picked downtuned guitar, the low end cranked, a thick pulsing rumble, another guitar unfurling a plodding chug, another loosing little trills of high end shimmer into the blackness, the vocals again, a gurgling black cloud. But with a little flutter of clean guitar surfacing here and there, drifting through the throbbing black expanse.
Essential listening for the ultra-doom obsessed, and slow core fans looking for something a little darker or heavier should definitely check this out....
And in addition to those previously released grimdoom jams, the record tacks on another slow and low epic, the previously unreleased "Desert Of Ice"!! Sweet packaging, the lp housed in a super thick black and white sleeve, the record pressed on nice thick vinyl and LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
A one sided vinyl monster. Grinding splattery chaos. Super distorted rhythms beneath thick slabs of ultra distorted hiss and waves of crumbling crunch. That is the sound of Australia's Antipan, a fourpiece that traffics in spaced out aggressive free rock ambience. Or Neu! metal minimalism. Either way it's a gloriously unholy racket. Echoey guitars and streaks of feedback, all tangled up into a dense wall of krautrocky chaos, with buried vocals, and dense squalls of acid fried guitar malfunction and jagged melodic fragments. Those harsher moments are balanced by long stretches of distorted drone and glitchy throb, very reminiscent of their equally noisy countrymen Aufgehoben and Shit And Shine.
Pressed on SUPER thick bubblegum pink vinyl, one sided, the other side features an etching by Rizili from the Menstruation Sisters. Includes a dayglo pink insert, packaged in a hand screened, individually numbered pink on black sleeve.
LIMITED TO 275 COPIES. We only got eight, so you do the math...
The amazing Drone Records label, run by Stefan Knappe of Maeror Tri / Troum, has been quietly releasing super limited, hand made slabs of gorgeous drone music for years now. Mostly 7", always vinyl (although there will soon be a 2cd collection of early out of print singles on Andee's tUMULt label), each disc an ultra personal exploration of the drone, sometimes soft and dreamlike, sometimes harsh and noisy, but always beautiful. Recently, Drone has launched a new series, 10"s this time, with a very complicated premise: "A concept that embraces the prospect of infinite possibilities for artists to create music about the intangible such as: the unnameable, the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unidentifiable, etc. Various aspects related to "The Unknown". Sound artists and artwork designers were invited to work on the theme of the "grey matter" / the "dark continent" surrounding us & within us. Transforming this paradoxical idea into acoustic and visual objectifications." Phew. Pretty heady stuff. But these first three installments are up to the task, creating dark and disturbing and truly though provoking dronemusic. We can hardly weight for the rest of the series.
The second in the series is from Asia Nova, who hail from California, and offer up slow shifting instrumental swells, like an orchestra tuning up in outer space, crumbling waves of deconstructed melody slowly stretched into a vast ocean of hiss and static and tiny sonic events that gradually dissipate into the surrounding sounds. In the background hovers ominous gurgling rumbles and far away melodic sparkles. The other side is barely there, an ultra minimal drone, more space than sound, like drifting through some darkened undersea cavern, a barren abstract sonic landscape. Incredibly spare but strangely alluring.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Pressed on pink and white swirled vinyl.
Two of our favorite heavies team up for an epic slab of vinyl dronedirgedoomsludge, and it's just as good as we would have hoped. One man Canadian slow motion doomlord and recent aQ Record Of The Week honoree Aun goes head to head with French ultra doom duo Habsyll, each stretching their sound in new directions, while keeping things appropriately slow and low and heavy.
Aun's first track is a buzz drenched dirge, but with a surprising amount of propulsion, and melody, a sort of psychedelic space rock rendered in mechanical rhythms billowing clouds of buzz, a lumbering glacial groove locked in tight, while all around thick slabs of chordal rumble heave and swell and howl and buzz, swoonsome and swirly and downright catchy, and pretty, almost like a pop song melted down into something slightly more oozing and blackened, at times sounding like some strange sort of metallic trip hop, like a sort of doomy Portishead vibe, dark and smoldery and murky, but still dense and heavy. The shorter follow up, follows a similar trajectory, some blurred effected riffage, laid over another machinelike groove, the mood mysterious and melancholy, the vibe hypnotic and mesmerizing, a sort of stripped down post industrial rhythmscape, with plenty of constantly shifting action in the background, clouds of shifting layers, strange overtones, streaks of crackle and hiss and buzz, very cinematic and atmospheric, and just a little bit krautrocky.
Habsyll counter with a 23+ minute side long sprawl that begins with some spare percussive clatter, before slipping into some strange murky atmospherics, billowing gongs, strange snake charmer melodies, rumbles, downtuned thrum, all very spare and spacious and haunting, until about 4 minutes in, and things lurch into action, albeit some barely mobile glacial tarpit drone action, huge caustic crunches, left to ring out, the decay in the form of crumbling clouds of distortion, swirls of cymbal sizzle, eventually some tortured vocals, a strange cacophonous harmony, one a sick gargle, the other a hysterical shriek, the drums growing more busy, the clouds of rumble and buzz coalescing into riffs, finally exploding into some super manic Lightning Bolt style frenzied freak out, but it's not long before the track settles back down into a creepy crawl, ponderously plodding its way into a drumless haze, dense swells of warped distorted warble, pulsing and throbbing until finally fading out completely.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. 180 gram grey vinyl. Includes a download card, and features super bad ass artwork by Stephen Kasner.
One of our favorite albums of 2009 came from the New Zealand songstress, Bachelorette. Her record My Electric Family was on constant rotation winning us over so big with it's dreamy mix of smart songwriting and a creative mix of electronics and lush instrumentation. It wasn't until we reviewed that record that we learned there was actually more Bachelorette floating around out there. We had missed the boat on her earlier outings, 2005's The End Of Things and 2006's Isolation Loops never made it onto our radar, due in part to the fact that they didn't have much/any US distribution. Luckily Drag City has just reissued both those great records on vinyl so we have two new delicious and dreamy pop records to keep us warm with this winter.
Both albums flow with such a soft, seductive touch with that weightless energy and aura of light psychedelia that reminds us of early outings by Broadcast and Saint Etienne.
We love both of the albums so can't really recommend one over the other, they both are so great!
One of our favorite albums of 2009 came from the New Zealand songstress, Bachelorette. Her record My Electric Family was on constant rotation winning us over so big with it's dreamy mix of smart songwriting and a creative mix of electronics and lush instrumentation. It wasn't until we reviewed that record that we learned there was actually more Bachelorette floating around out there. We had missed the boat on her earlier outings, 2005's The End Of Things and 2006's Isolation Loops never made it onto our radar, due in part to the fact that they didn't have much/any US distribution. Luckily Drag City has just reissued both those great records on vinyl so we have two new delicious and dreamy pop records to keep us warm with this winter.
Both albums flow with such a soft, seductive touch with that weightless energy and aura of light psychedelia that reminds us of early outings by Broadcast and Saint Etienne.
We love both of the albums so can't really recommend one over the other, they both are so great!
It's been a (little) while since we've had some brand new Aidan Baker / Nadja for the store, thankfully this week heralds two new releases. To be reviewed next time, there's long awaited Nadja all-covers disc (which we'll tell you right now is great), and then there's this, a brand new, limited double lp from Baker solo, and as always it's a doozy, sprawling and shimmery and expansive, that sort of blissed out ambient dronemusic he does so well. But it's far from more of the same. The first track we threw on was almost jungle, with skittery beats buried beneath softly undulating layers of warm whir and deep drifts of soft swirling sound. There's also a bit of Spacemen 3 like processed psych guitar, which gives way to some buzzing raga like blur, draped over still more dreamlike dronescapes, although here, it's laced with chunks of processed alien crunch, and weird little bits of scrape and fragmented riffage.
Long stretches of underwater Oval-like wooziness, shot through with streaks of space-y effects and muted bits of glitch and buzz, some of the most washed out and wondrous space (not quite) rock ever! Warped warbly organs are stretched and smeared into warped Philip Jeck like doomy drifts, one of which is apparently a cover of Joy Division's "Twenty Four Hours", although we could only tell by the vocals, and even then, they're so hushed and barely there, that any sense of the original seems to melt into a gorgeously oozing expanse of thrum and shimmer and softly warped rumble.
Another fantastic and gorgeous and of course WAY too limited chunk of droney dreaminess from Mr. Baker. Released on the always amazing Equation Records, who really go all out with the packaging as well. Thick swirled/splattered blue vinyl, thick full color gatefold jacket, and a printed full color postcard, each of which is hand numbered, LIMITED TO 444 COPIES!
Originally released as a cd-r in 2002, so limited we never managed to get ANY. So for lots of Baker fans, this will probably be your first chance to wrap your ears around Letters.
Really hard to know what to say about Baker anymore. He definitely has a sound, unlike his dirgier more metallic blissed out doom duo Nadja, his solo stuff tends toward the super minimal, the dark and droney and drifty, the hushed and shimmery, and Letters is no different. But within that somewhat well defined sound, there is in fact much variation, subtle as it may be.
On Letters, Baker offers up soft billows of sound, which are wrapped around a hushed vocals, more of a murmur actually, but instead of a drone record, it transforms the sound into some super minimal slowcore, the pop element sublimated to almost non existence, the vocal melody being the only thing keeping the track from sprawling out into abstract smears and blurs (not that we mind that either mind you). The instrumentation is simple, just guitars and cymbals, but deftly processed into something deep and sonorous, and surprisingly melodic. Streaks of high end drift in and out (guitar or falsetto vocal, it's hard to say), as the record drifts dreamily. The sound does change dramatically here and there, deep overlapping low end tones, soft squalls of spaced out effects, glimmering streaks of washed out doomic blur, stretches of almost symphonic shimmer, the guitars transformed into hushed string sections, but it all resolves in an extended outro of soft deep swells. As always, absolutely lovely.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!!
We've long been a fan of Bardo Pond, but this new record definitely took a few listens to get into. The response everyone seemed to have was "this sounds really WAY out of tune", and it does, sort of. Right from the outset, the group unfurl some woozy warbly strummy twang flecked psych folk, the strings buzzing and tangling, the melodies, shifting and intertwining, the vocals sounding sort of out of sync with the music, the bassline warped and underwater sounding, the drums an abstract scatter of beats, but as that first song continues, the vocals sink into the mire, harmonica begins to wheeze, the sounds of birds (?) surface, and the guitars, gradually grow more and more intense, first smoldering, before gradually catching fire, and finally exploding, and then the band are KILLING it, a huge squall of swirling, super distorted, wild and loose and chaotic druggy droned out psych guitar freakout, the drums pounding, everything twisted and sprawling and lit from within like some sort of sonic supernova, revealing the group's true purpose, the vocals returning, now sounding perfect, multitracked and nestled within the coruscating sheets of crumbling distortion and pealing blown out leads. The sort of epic dreamlike drugged out jam you never want to end. And that's how the band introduce their latest full length, their self titled their eighth proper full length, nearly two decades into their career, and they still sound as loose and free and psychedelic and heavy as ever. If not more so.
The rest of the record follows suit, "Don't Know About You" launches into a thick crusty chunky bit of riffage, the vocals witchy and snarly, the perfect match for the group's super distorted groove, everything still wreathed in streaks of effects and guitarnoise, and like the track before it, blossoming into some seriously heady psychedelia, surprisingly melodic too, the guitar tone epic, thick and blown out, almost Kyuss-y, that same sort of fuzz and crunch, and the more we listen, the more this sounds like BP at their most songy, sure most of the record is spent unfurling epic space out mega jams, but they're wrapped around dirgey downer pop, some weird hybrid of the Stooges, the Velvets and Crazy Horse, but dosed and doused and let loose, to billow up in great clouds of heaviness, of swirling trippiness. "Sleeping" offers a little respite, all hazy acoustic guitars and warm fluttering flutes, some woozy, acid folk drift, but it's not long before the band launch into the 21 minute "Undone", a warbly slow build, backwards guitars and angelic vox, all over simple folk strum, the track gradually expanding, the drums not even entering the picture until more than halfway through, but when they do, and the guitars finally let loose, it's glorious, the vocals crooning beneath clouds of lightning bolt guitar, and jagged shards of effects drenched melody.
"Cracker Wrist" might be the heaviest of the bunch, but it starts out deceivingly dreamy, all layered drones and gauzy shimmer, but after a few minutes, the riffs come fast and furious, locked tight with the pounding drums, a mesmerizing bit of krauty drone rock heaviness, again the guitars going wild, and wrapping everything in tangles of melody and fragmented drug drenched shred. "The Stars Behind" is another ballady number, but it wouldn't be BP if it too wasn't eventually enveloped by ropy blasts of grinding guitars, and soaring sheets of blown out psych swirl, the record finally finishing off with the comparatively tame "Wayne's Tune", all warbly melodies, angular guitars, shuffling drums, no big build, no explosive catharsis, instead, just hazy and droney and dreamily druggy.
After some initial (and unfounded it seems) trepidation, this is turning out to be one of the best Bardo Pond records in ages. Killer, very metal, cover art too, all black and silver with some strange black shapes and a new spidery drippy BP metal style logo!
With past releases including Acid Mother's Temple and Yahowha 13, we can always count on Prophase to deliver a lysergic dose of psychedelic awesomeness. Gypsy Woman is their latest offering of psych-folk bliss, a free-flowing cosmic epic from Oakland's tarot warrior Janina Angel Bath. With the help of some friends and a wide array of world instruments, including bansari, tamboura and flute, Ms. Bath gently crafts an otherworldly escape into ethno-drone solace. While Gypsy Women is heavily decorated with exotic instrumentation and dizzying effects, the majority of the album revolves around Ms. Bath's vocal work. "Mystic Lady", a favorite track of ours, probably because it features Kazem Zia Ebrahimi on electric sarod, unfolds like a hazy desert dreamscape. Somber gestures from the sarode weave in and out of Bath's vocal croons, swells of reverb fade into the distant horizon as the many layers fall into place like a leaf onto water, so mysterious and elegant.
Awesome soundtrack to some strange low budget film about the failed East German space program. Haven't seen the movie yet, but the soundtrack definitely has us curious. Especially considering the players, Jim Becker of Califone, Jim White from the Dirty Three, and lots of other folks who have backed up indie luminaries like Smog, Bright Eyes and more...
Beginning with some creepy shortwave radio, and some spoken German (Conet Project anyone?) the record quickly switches gear and launches into some awesome (Turkish style?) fuzz psych, blown out and wildly rocking, but with the strange addition of mandolin over the top. Ends up sounding like Calexico meets Erkin Koray!!
But like any soundtrack, the music is dictated by the scenes on the screen, so the sound are all over the place. That said, they gel surprisingly well on their own, it helps that many of the tracks are linked by strange radio broadcasts, mysterious German voices, and other distressed broadcast sounds. The rest of the music is a blast, from soft rock big band jams with horns, albeit imbued with a strange buzzy steel string element, to lonesome strings and wheezing accordion, shuffling percussion, a full on free-jazz drum solo that gives way to a primitive Logan's Run space rock synth drone, laid back blues rock, weird off kilter pop, and near the end, that opening blast of fuzzy psych gets revisited, this time with vocals, and it's even cooler.
Pressed on 180 gram swirled pink cotton candy vinyl, housed in an amazing jacket, an oversized matchbook style sleeve, screen printed and letter pressed, black and metallic silver ink on thick brown paper, liner notes printed on the attached inner sleeve, quite striking.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
Chris Madak is the man behind the Bee Mask, a project with several dozen cassette releases issued over the past couple of years. Madak should also be noted as the principle behind the exceptionally curated Deception Island tape label, which had the foresight to release Oneohtrix Point Never's Betrayed In The Octagon as well as a handful of killer Emeralds related side projects. That said, not much from Bee Mask's own discography has made it through here, with blister popping electrical noise and synth sequencing seeming to be par for the course. Yet through those circuit bent experiments, Bee Mask emerges fully evolved as a master synthesist of all things elekronische and kosmische circa 1975. Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico is a wonderfully varied album whose hallucinatory narratives speak to a purposeful and thoroughly intelligent design in its creation. Throughout you'll hear distinct references to the likes of Roland Kayn, Tangerine Dream (e.g. Electronic Meditations), Jean-Claude Eloy, Francoise Bayle, anything from Sky Records you could think of in the mid to late '70s, and even the more bombastic electronic interludes offered by Pink Floyd for that matter. The album opens in a more studied fashion through a sequence of carillion bell tones backmasked with a series of soft vocal grunts and gradually building set of electronic percolations, but all of this is engulfed in a tidal wave of polydactyl synth sequencing and brainfried electronic percolations only to morph again into a cavernous expanse of elongated tone and drone. The album's numerous detours and labyrinthine structures twist and devolve constantly across both sides of the record, delving into melodic phrasing in the electronic sequences only to shift deftly into plunging electrical vibrations of pulsing synth noise and delirious crescendos popping throughout.
The fact that John Elliott of Emeralds has brought this to vinyl after a release on Gift Tapes a while back should not go unnoticed. Spectrum Spools is his new imprint, released through Editions Mego, and this should be a label not to be missed. Certainly not this release, that's for sure.
There is something about knowing your sound and keeping your focus which is kind of crucial when you are a band playing very primitive ramshackle DIY folk/punk. The Beets know this so well, in fact right on the cover it says this is a collection of thirteen new songs about staying home. And many of the tracks are in fact about why the world can often make staying in your own room the only viable alternative. They keep all the subject matter very simple yet painfully honest. It's about relationships, regret, fear, longing...all delivered in a way stripped down lo-fi left-field garage pop sound. Following in the tradition of folks like Daniel Johnston, The Shaggs, Half Japanese, Beat Happening and Jonathan Richman, The Beets remind us that when done right, less can be so much more!
All right, a new Billy bao, a crazy expensive fancy pants lp, sorry about that, not sure why it's so expensive, it's super limited, imported from overseas, original artwork by HENRY FLYNT!, cool silkscreened plastic sleeves, all that stuff probably contributed to the crazy price, but for the noise obsessed, and specifically BB obsessed among you, it'll take more than $36 to keep you away from another slab of damaged, caustic noise punk weirdness from this demented noisenik.
And demented this stuff is, beginning with a loooooong stretch of barely there hushed crawl, voices, drones, all way down in the mix, played in the store it almost sounds silent, but don't crank the volume, cuz soon from the silence explodes a monstrous chunk of downtuned dirgery, wrapped in swirls of warped buzz and woozy layered crunch, a simple caveman beat pounding away, weirdly hypnotic, like some sort of kraut-noise-rock, which gives way to stuttery staticky stop and start rhythmic hiss, spitting out an almost martial sounding rhythm, underpinned by strange mumbled vox and peppered with shards of feedback and deep tectonic rumbles.
After still more near silence, BB and co. spew some seriously Merzbowian thud rock, all wrapped in jagged squalls of white noise and grinding feedback, stumbling rhythms, that sound like they were made out of distorted voices. Soon after comes maybe the coolest part of the record, a twisted bit of skipping stuttering skittery free jazz, almost like some drunk turntablist spinning dusty old Coltrane records, at the wrong speed, while some nervous footed punter continually kicks the plug out of the wall only to plug it right back in again, dizzying and almost carnivalesque.
After still more whispered drift, another bout of pounding feedback drenched noiserock, culminating in a final stretch of near silence, punctuated by sharp bursts of caustic blown out crunch and fucked up grinding howl, rhythmic and dementedly mesmerizing. Woah. Some serious outsider noiserock damage for sure. Definitely headphone listening, but headphones WITH earplugs!
As mentioned above, super swank packaging, pressed on 140 gram vinyl, housed in a jacket with original artwork by Henry Flynt, in a cool hand screened sleeve, imported and limited, and thus the hefty price tag...
Soft and mystical, Bird By Snow have been making dreamy folk pop with psych-ish elements for the past few years. Featuring former members of Whysp and Residual Echoes, their latest effort, Common Wealth, produced by Tim Green is their strongest to date, perfectly marrying strong songwriting with an elegant ambiance of needlepoint guitar work, spacious drumming and pretty female backing vocals. A perfect record to cozy up to a fire in the dark winter months. Fans of Vetiver, Hush Arbors, and Weird Weeds should check this out.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Ok, dunno much about this one, except that it's "inspired by the 1963 film, Matango! by Inoshiro Honda", and the cover was painted by Bobby Beausoleil, and there's a LOT of synth and Moog on here along with guitars and percussion. Also Cotton Casio of Acid Mothers Temple fame is the guest vocalist on one of the tracks, and Jon Theodore, drummer extraordinare (Mars Volta) plays on another. Take a chance on these 'shrooms...
What the heck's up with Glasgow these days? Until recently, Glasgow was all sunshiney jangle pop and brooding epic post rock. Or so it seemed. Maybe we haven't been paying attention. Maybe it's been a while since we took a good hard look at the seedy underbelly of Glasgow's music scene, but something sinister is definitely going on over there, cuz all sorts of filthy, brutal, heavy, sick sounds are oozing across the sea and into our cowering frightened ears. Next list we'll probably be listing a record by another Glaswegian crew called De Salvo, who are scary as shit, and here we've got the latest from Black Sun.
Black Sun is a bit of a name over there, but they're a new name to us, although it only took a few minutes of this filth for us to realize folks over here, especially the ones into massive dronedirgedeathcrush and slow motion ultra doooooom will likely be freaking out big time.
Three tracks, all 'versions' of the same song, the first, 19+ minutes taking up the whole of side one, is all lurching downtuned lumber, squealing harmonics, all locked into step with the pounding drums, the vocals tortured and anguished and WAY up in the mix, the sound somewhere between Khanate, Eyehategod, and Neurosis. About halfway through the sound simmers down a bit, a low slung softly churning bass rumble, clean minor key guitar lines all spidery and skeletal, warm whirring keyboards, that eventually slip into a groove that sounds uncannily like a slowed down Three Mile Pilot. Clean crooned vocals, laid over the woozy rhythm, before exploding back into stuttering metallic stop start lurch, gradually growing more and more noisy and unhinged.
The flip side takes the same track and jacks up the industrial vibe, way more low end crunch, a bit murkier and muddier, the vocals buried in the mix, little streaks of feedback peeking out from behind thick caustic slabs of rhythmic pound. Very reminiscent of Godflesh or Pitchshifter, relentless and machinelike, but wreathed in swirls of strange keyboards, and mysterious effects and all manner of fucked up guitar filigree. In some ways superior to the A side, at least to these ears. And finally, the second half of the B-side offers up the 'dub' version, which takes the more industrial version of "Paralyser" even further, the rhythm stripped down, the guitars processed and clipped, the vocals twisted and doused in effects, the arrangement all spaced out, the drums pounding one second, careening from speaker to speaker the next, the whole track actually is panned pretty hard, making headphones essential for experiencing the full dizzy drift. Definitely left us wanting more...
Essential listening for the usual suspects. If your favorite sounds are most often described with the adjectives doomy, crumbling, blackened, pummeling, crushing, heavy, crusty, metallic, slow motion, glacial, filthy, then my friends, you should prepare to kneel in supplication, and stare directly into the Black Sun...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, housed in a very Godflesh looking sleeve, with a heavy cardstock insert, liner notes on one side and strange bloody symbols on the other.
Whereas past BtC releases have reminded us of Oval, in their manipulated glitchery and warm underwater shimmer, this latest, a split with Aosuke, is quite different, while managing to incorporate many of the same elements we loved so much about past releases.
A nearly sidelong track that begins with a wavering Goblin-y synth, that buzzes warmly and endlessly, an epic stretch of near static drone, drenched in overtones and subtly flickering variations in texture, and surrounded on all sides by distant barely audible sci fi melodies and field recordings. Eventually this synthdrone is joined by another tone, this one more grinding and distorted, that slowly builds and builds along side the first, the intensity growing and growing as well as the volume, and the various surrounding sonic events seem much more frenzied, until everything levels off in some sort of Niblock style drone, the various layers beating against one another, notes and tones shifting subtly, the sound seemingly alive, flecked with shards of melody and bits of buzz and swirling effects. It's a glorious sound that enraptures and entrances, eventually, fading out and releasing the listener from their glorious trance.
The side finishes off with a brief coda of humid late night soundscaping, the sound of the moors, or the plains, some mysterious dark emptiness, droning and ominous, with creepy reverbed vocals and all sorts of night sounds tangled up in the track's undulating shimmer.
The flip side features a group called Aosuke, who we weren't all that familiar with, but whose sounds are as dark and gorgeous and Black To Comm's. But where BtC focus on sound and drone, Aosuke focus on melody as much as texture, with guitar being the focal point, a blissy soft focus guitar ambience, crystalline notes drifting through clouds of space-y effects and strange processed and blurred vocals, it sounds almost like how you might imagine a Durutti Column record on Morr Music might sound. Organic melodies, natural sounds, all tangled up in strange electronic soundscapes, very meditative, a little krautrocky at times, and so so pretty.
Another batch of gloomy fuzz pop from one man Blank Dog Mike Sniper, and while the sound of Blank Dogs has varied quite a bit over the last handful of releases, from paisley punk pop to gloomy lo-fi garage pop to vintage sounding cold wave, but this latest somehow manages to fuse all those elements into what might be the catchiest poppiest BD record yet.
With woozy low slung basslines, shimmery space-y synths, super lo-fi Casio drum beats, reverby surf guitars wrapped around more angular riffy crunch, and the vocals, so nice, multi tracked and lush, swoonsome and dreamy, the songs peppered with all sorts of super catchy melodies, synth, guitar, vocal, "Goes By" might be our favorite Blank Dogs jam yet, total old school power pop via eighties cold wave via lo-fi 4 track bedroom rock via the current wave of fuzzy lysergic garage pop, fuzzy, effervescent and catchy as all get out!
Much of the rest of the record dials back the pop just a bit, and slips into something a bit more gloomy and new wave-y, the vocals languorous and weary, the synths and guitars buzzy and droney and minor key, wrapped around simple propulsive rhythms, and motorik synth pulses, but peppered throughout are moments of surprisingly poppy poppiness, "Northern Islands" for instance is total skeletal lo-fi dream pop, with super dramatic crooned vocals, and whispery guitar jangle and super stripped down rhythms, but even those bits of poppiness end up segueing into blown out Zombi/Majeure style synthscapes, or total eighties style electro pop, reminding us of the Fixx (who should totally get mentioned more often in reviews of the various new wave of new wave bands, just sayin') or Interpol style gloomwave...
It's all over the map for sure, but then Blank Dogs designed this map, so all the tracks manage to hang together perfectly, and have somehow coalesced into a pretty fantastic collection of twisted lo-fi new wave gloom pop, that we can't seem to stop listening to.
It's definitely weird to call something like this 'pretty', but what can you do? Of all the Blue Sabbath Black Cheer records we've heard, this one is definitely the prettiest. Of course it's all relative, one man's pretty, is another's harsh head caving blacknoise, and perhaps another's ear shredding doombuzz brutality, and weirdly enough, it's sort of all of those things, but in the realms of doombuzz blacknoise, this sidelong sprawl is indeed, a strange shade of tranquil, at least at first.
It's BSBC so the ingredients should no doubt be familiar by now, the sound equal parts blackened crumbling, distorted buzz, and glacial hellish downtuned crawl, but here the crunchy, crumbling surface layer hides a slow shifting sonic interior, a whirling buried shimmer, soft sheets of crackle and whir, everything constantly bombarded by huge heaving industrial booms, like mortar shells, along with strange creaks and distant crashes, like some strange Wolf Eyes / Skinny Puppy hybrid, being broadcast through rusted out Soviet era loudspeakers, as the city literally crumbles all around you. Ambient but abrasive, tranquil but harrowing, a field recording of collapsing tectonic plates, rendered in 'music'. Near the end, the sound takes on a power electronics vibe, due in no small part to the creepy, bellowed guttural processed vocals, but still the sounds behind the demented caterwauling, continue to ooze and crumble and throb and crunch and creep.
BSBC are teamed up with an outfit called Griefer, who use their side of the lp to offer up a strangely cinematic stretch of buzz and glitch, lots of super distorted synth fuzz, peppered with strange machinelike creaks and groans, wrapped around super processed alien vox, all draped over a continuously throbbing synth pulse. Hypnotic and almost soundtracky, Griefer slip from heaving speaker destroying crumble, to whirring spaced out synthscape to blurred electronic crunch, often all three colliding in a thick noise-drenched psychbuzz synthdrone blowout, not so much harsh and brutal as intense and evocative.
Pressed on sick swirled green and brown sewage colored vinyl, housed in hand screened sleeves, with two printed, two sided cardstock inserts. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!
One of two new lps from Northwestern blackdrone heavies Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, one a split, one a collaboration.
The split is almost too perfect, teaming up BSBC with what is essentially the East coast equivalent, Wicked King Wicker, a one man doom combo who definitely traffic in a similar sort of blackened industrial droned out doom, in fact, some folks could very well have trouble telling who was who. Not us!
Blue Sabbath Black Cheer start things off with a sidelong slab of caustic black drone, a heaving slab of brutalist industrial buzz, dense, and black hole heavy, the sounds blown out, the distortion crumbling and decaying before our very ears, it's classic BSBC, that is until the surprise of the second half, where all the heaviness is pulled back, revealing a sprawl of super abstract minimal drift, a muted stretch of creepy ambience, all processed voices, heavy chunks of buzz, the sound of foot steps, distant creaks, orchestral bursts, and lots and lots of space, almost like some strange tape experiment. But somehow it sounds logical coming after that initial black blast.
Wicked King Wicker counter with their own chunk of blackened buzz, super distorted, all rumbling low end, flecked with a weird metronomic pulse, strange heavily effected voices, buried melodies, effects everywhere, almost less like doooooom and more like some sort of metalized and Merzbowized modern minimalist drone music, the sounds layered and constantly shifting, creating overtones, and fragmented bits of melody. A little bit industrial, a little bit metal, a lot drone, HEAVY, and blackened, and finally near the end, the buzzed out drone seems to coalesce into churning sludgy riffage.
Super nice screen printed covers, with a printed insert.
It's pretty phenomenal that this record went from getting the suspicious side-eye when we first took it in on consignment, to becoming one of our favorite "WTF?" records of the year! When it first appeared, no one seemed to know where it came from (it had been brought in by Blunt himself, one day). And we weren't too sold on the cover, a generic photograph that looked like it was shot in the eighties, of this fellow Blunt, standing with a woman (a close friend of his, in a head to toe orange outfit that looks like it could have been prison garb, and who as it turns out, may no longer be alive) in front of a Mercedes parked in front of the mural on the side of the O'Farrell Theater on Polk street in San Francisco. Also, whenever there's a bunch of "ASCAP" logos plastered all over the front and back cover, our internal "uh-oh" meter goes way off.
So it just sat on our new arrivals shelf for a few weeks. But then a couple of folks (one of whom runs the Gloriette label, who have supplied us with some Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel records) started asking about it, because they had heard about this record, so we gave it a listen and were pretty surprised and rather blown away by what we were hearing. A lo-fi but breezy outsider funk, made with repetitive cheap-sounding keyboards loops and tones (the kind being currently exploited by Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink, and James Pants), strange metallic tropical guitar tones that sound more like steel drums and flute sounds than actual guitar, and sly, laid-back vocals and catchy, infectiously naive grooves that work their way into our heads and never let go. Everybody here ended up really really digging it.
We sold one copy immediately to someone in the store when playing it, and then when we tried to contact Blunt to get more copies, we discovered that somehow we'd neglected to get his contact info, d'oh! The cd had no contact information, and searches online only revealed that the title track, a raunchy but coded come-on to a sexy stranger, was included on a James Pants mix. This only piqued our interest further, as Blunt's skewed Caribbean inflected songs would obviously be simpatico with James Pants' more recent tropical themed output. We could also see folks into Ariel Pink and Dam-Funk getting WAY into this. So we thought maybe this record was a rare private press record from the eighties. It does seem to have a strange hard-to-pin-down-time-wise quality.
Thankfully, Blunt eventually came back in and we got more copies and found out that he had pressed vinyl copies too. He also told us that this record was recorded ten years ago in 2000, but that didn't diminish our new found love for this record's questionable mystery, as it still predates all of the artists mentioned above that it reminds us of, though we're pretty sure Blunt probably has never heard of any of them. It also has the left of center oddness of other outsider funk artists like Tonetta, or Wicked Witch, albeit way more toned down than either of those two. Not that it's completely off the wall weird, but it's one of those records that we went into with such hesitation and were pleasantly surprised that we then became totally enamored with its home-brewed charm.
The lp is 5 tracks, with extra shorter versions of the songs "Fly Guy" and "Gentle Persuasion" and comes housed in an old school white cut-out 12" sleeve. The cd version has two extra songs and instrumental versions of four of the tracks. Oh, and the vinyl has a gold star sticker that boldly proclaims "HIT!" We couldn't agree more!
Two stunning new songs from Bonnie Prince Billy and The Cairo Gang. "New Wonder" is a solemn and mournful tear jerker that ranks to the top of any of Will Oldham's most affecting tracks of all time and that's saying a lot! "Island Brothers" will be familiar sounding to anyone who has seen the band in the last year or so as it's become a staple of their live sets. With the profits of this record going to help in the efforts to get clean filtered water into Haiti, still struggling in the aftermath of the recent disaster, it's just further proof that Oldham is not just a class act, but still one of the best songwriters of his generation.
A must have for Oldham fans!
San Francisco boasts a great history of kick ass party bands who have the ability to get a warehouse full of sweaty folks lost in pulsating sounds. From Tussle, Numbers, Dynasty Handbag, The Vanishing, Harold Ray Live In Concert, Jonas Reinhardt (in their live incarnation) - SF bands have proven you can be fun and smart at the same time. Boyz IV Men follow in this great tradition as the torch carriers for sweaty dance floor jams done so totally right. Armed with analog synths and a minimal drumkit, they blast out electro jams that feel like a less precious Ratatat or a more DIY minded Justice or Simian Mobile Disco. We love how they maintain a raw and gritty sound in the midst of their all out body moving bangers. So damn good!
The lp comes with a coupon for a digital download of the album.
There's a whole new generation of indie rockers who missed out on a crucial era in indie rock history in the early nineties, K Records, the International Pop Underground, etc., and thus probably don't remember Tiger Trap, a short lived group that released a single record and a handful of singles before calling it quits after about a year. But TT had a lasting impact, and found a cult following, and made TT frontwoman Rose Melberg a bit of an indie rock icon. Along with Black Tambourine (whose complete discography was recently reissued and is reviewed elsewhere on the aQ site), Beat Happening, Heavenly, Tsunami, Mecca Normal and others, Tiger Trap were a group who represented the DIY indie rock spirit and helped empower women to start bands and labels. Melberg would go on to play in Go Sailor and the Softies, and has returned once again in Brave Irene, whose sound is not that far removed from her other bands, which is just fine with us, stripped down, soft focus jangly indie pop, Melberg's voice is in fine form, lots of dreamy harmonies, warm whirring organs, fuzzy guitars, propulsive rhythms, eight songs in 17 minutes, brief bursts of perfect pop, dreamy and hypnotic, a sound of which we never tire.
Absolutely for fans of any of the above mentioned bands, and the current crop of girl pop: Grass Widow, Dum Dum Girls, White Fence, Vivian Girls, Splinters, Girls At Dawn, Veronica Falls, Yellow Fever...
So many modern bands are looking back to the eighties, and even the seventies for inspiration, which quite frankly to those of us who grew up during those decades, seems a bit surprising, and shocking, all of the stuff that seemed cool then, was quickly deemed "what the fuck were we thinking" not too long after, from MTV synth pop to yacht rock to fringed leather jackets to creepers to rubber bracelets to... well you get the point, the kids today are reclaiming out teenage shame and doing their damndest to make it cool.
But what we're waiting for, and it can't be long off now, is the nineties revival, grunge, post rock, math rock, bands who look to Rodan, Pitchblende, Polvo, Bitch Magnet and all those bands for their inspiration. There are definitely a few bands digging into that era, but maybe it's that it just hasn't been long enough for the younger generation to discover that stuff, lots of those bands are still playing, or playing again, which is totally okay, we can wait, as long as SOMEONE is still making that kind of music. And making it well. Which brings us to Broughton's Rules, made up of members of Pittsburgh's legendary math rockers Don Caballero and not so legendary but still bad ass math rockers Blunderbuss (whose song "Broughton's Rules" is where these guys got their name).
The label's spiel is "recommended if you like: Russian Circles, Sonic Youth, Slint, Shellac, Battles Pelican and The Psychic Paramount", and we certainly can't argue with that, we might also throw in the above mentioned bands Rodan, Polvo, Pitchblende, along with Table, Breadwinner, Bastro, Butterglove, Hose.Got.Cable, Crain, June Of 44, The For Carnation, Shipping News, Turing Machine, Phleg Camp, well, you get the drift. Obviously we love this stuff, and are psyched when some band can totally pull it off, and since these guys have basically been pulling it off since back in the day, it should be no surprise that this RULES.
Dense and lush and intricate, moody and melodic, complex and convoluted, heavy and super rocking, mathy and meandering, brooding and moody, droney and blissed out, the songs are epic and sprawling, but manage to still be catchy, and this isn't all instrumental, there are vocals, which make this eminently more appealing to the rest of the maybe-not-so-instrumental-math-rock-obsessed world, and while there is plenty dense heaviness, and some intense mathiness, there are moments that are sunshiney and melodic and major key, a good balance, and a hell of a good record. One of our new faves for sure.
Now bring on the nineties math rock revival!
A tour only lp from long time faves Burial Hex, aka Clay Ruby who also ran the amazing Skulls Of Heaven label, and who here has joined up with the mysterious Kinit Her for a twisted collection of psychedelic ritualistic acid folk, but laced with bits of industrial crunch and electronic buzz, strange almost black metal vocals, and mysterious field recordings.
Haunting, and ominous, long streaks of feedback and buzzing electronics are blurred into extended drones, peppered with minimal martial percussion, steel string guitar buzz, bits of avant Appalachia, bits of twang, soft swirls of effects, and strange strident vocals, that are definitely reminiscent of Comus (!), a little demented and frenzied and intense. Murky crumbling soundscapes drift beneath clouds of frantic psychedelic leads, simple motorik drumming locked into simple hypnotic grooves, underpinned by flurries of bombinating guitars, then a second set of vocals, even more strange, howled and hellish, almost sampled sounding, struggling to be heard through the mix, only making them sound more hysterical.
The flip side offers up another side of this collaborative ritualistic folk, this time, it's just piano, picking out a mournful melody over a field recording of crickets, the piano occasionally erupting into manic dense bursts of notes, over the whole thing some super freaky, gurgled demonic vox, a strange juxtaposition for sure, made even strange by soaring strings, and mysterious bits of industrial crunch, of twisted electronic percussion, and the vocals, howled and shrieked and even more intense than before, all over that creeping minor key piano.
So disturbing and fantastically bizarre, haunting and in its own twisted way, quite lovely, a warped modern more industrial take on Comus style seventies freak folk, which totally manages to capture the same sort of witchy occultic vibe via these satanically sinister ritualistic sounds...
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!! We have less than 15!
By now, unless you've been living underneath a VERY big rock, you know all about Count Grishnackh aka Burzum, Euronymous, Bard Faust, Mayhem, Emperor and all the killing and church burnings and suicides. If for some reason you don't know about all this stuff, go buy yourself a copy of The Lords Of Chaos, a book that covers all that stuff in great detail. The problem with all this drama, murder, satanism, whatever, you forget that the whole reason these guys knew each other, and the only reason any of us cared, was the music they made. And that music they made was black metal. A black metal that thanks to the decidedly non-musical drama, would soon make black metal a household name.
So when folks ask us to recommend some classic black metal, we always recommend Satyricon's Nemesis Divina, Immortal's Battles In The North, Emperor's Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk, and of course Burzum's Filosefem. Filosefem, originally released in 1996 holds a special place in our outsider music hearts, as the first black metal record to turn the whole black metal formula completely upside down. Count Grishnackh was the only member and played all the instruments, even the drums, which gives the whole thing a weirdly damaged droning swing. A rhythm that would define the rhythmic sound of later black metal legends like Graveland and Woodtemple. The guitars are a thick suffocating buzz, razor sharp and totally blown out. And the vocals are an anguished wail, some sort of primeval demonic incantation. But where Burzum stands out most is the addition of a creepy synthesizers that hover in the background of several of the tracks, a haunting melody buried beneath the swirl of fuzz and ultradistortion. Unlike other BM bands, the keyboard isn't a huge wash of strings to add some sort of epic quality, these tracks are already epic enough, here the keyboards are much more spare, a simple minor key melody is picked out, almost childlike, hovering briefly, before the next note follows. Except for one blazing blast of a track, Filosefem is mostly midtempo, lurching and heaving, stumbling down dirt road into a smeared grey landscape. But as the record nears the last few tracks, the record changes, beginning with the nearly half hour long "Rundgang um die Transzendentale Saule der Singularitat", a track that eschews any hint of metal, stripping away the guitars, the drums, everything, and leaving just the synthesizer, as it unfurls a seemingly endless Aphex Twin like four note melody. Forlorn and strangely compelling. And in the context of the whole record, as emotionally devastating as anything we've heard. The final track "Gebrechlichkeit II", brings back the guitars, but makes them nearly static, an endlessly blurry vacuum cleaner like riff, slowly shifting, as another haunting melody drifts wraith like in the background. Definitely one of the most essential and unique metal records of all time.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
There's no shortage of psychedelic space rock in SF these days: recent Record Of The Weekers Lumerians, the Spyrals (who have a new tape reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Wooden Shjips, Sleepy Sun, and these guys, Carlton Melton, not a person, but a quartet, who conjure up epic stretches of spaced out psychedelia, and who, unlike many of their contemporaries, seem to be less concerned with the pulse, and the rhythm, and the groove, as they are with the SOUND, and the VIBE, weaving lush, expansive sprawls of effects drenched psychedelic ambience, drifting more often than driving, huge clouds of swirling wah guitars, and minimal spare drumming, which seems to exist more as a pulse, than a beat proper, everything murky and muddy and washed out, at once lo-fi, but impossibly dense and heavy, the band seeming to drift weightless though swirling starlit sonic skies, their sound loose and free and abstract and ephemeral, the whole first side here is a single track, the title track, and it's a fantastically entrancing space drone epic, a sound the drifts and buzzes and flutters and swirls, the sound emerging in swells, building into squalls of warm whirling chaos only to slip back into something more druggy and dreamy and meditative, it's not until the final couple minutes that the song finally explodes, and even then it doesn't really get heavier, the rhythm doesn't get any more intense, instead, it just sounds like the whole band crank it up a notch, the swirling clouds of effects and guitars suddenly become more volatile, and more chaotic, the melodies gradually swallowed up by slashes of distorted guitar crunch and crumbling walls of distortion, the sound gets more dense, and more thick, and the whole time the main groove, now buried beneath the roiling surface, continues on unwavering, the only thing keeping the track from drifting into the heavens and toward the heart of the sun.
The flipside is more of the glorious same, barring a brief bit of solo guitar, an interlude that is bookended by two more heaving walls of krautpsych swirl, the band unfurling droned out minimal hypnorock mini epics, that howl and thrum, buzz and shimmer, songs that obviously could have been stretched way out and turned this into a double lp.
As always, fantastic stuff. Fans of the SF psych/space/drone/kraut rock contingent that aren't already into CM, get with it! And obviously, anyone into White Hills, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Cave, The Heads, Heavy Winged, Bardo Pond, White Noise Sound, Spacemen 3 and the like, these guys will definitely hit the spot.
Brand new split of heavy freakiness from one of our favorite local bands Carlton Melton teamed up here with new-to-us bizarre shamanistic cult collective Qumran Orphics.
The Melton side is two 10 minutes slabs, the first, "March Of The Cicadas", sounds exactly like the title implies, a slowmotion dirge over martial rhythms with buzzing electronic hisses and stratospheric guitar leads. The closer, "Murder Ridge" is a noirish Bardo Pond-like spiral of burning sonic embers and sustained decay.
The Qumran Orphics side is a stranger beast altogether. Recorded from a live set at the Blank Club in San Jose, Qumran Orphics is led by KFJC DJ Cy Thoth (host of the show Firebunker, that plays lots of our favorite metal and experimental sounds), backed by an array of simmering guitars and shifting droning electronics. Like a strange and unfurling Crowleian ritual, Cy Thoth croakingly intones bizarre utterances one might hear in an H.P. Lovecraft story. It's a wild and charged performance. Not sure where this project will go next, all info on the group is rather scant or cryptic, but we're definitely curious!
Super limited to 259 copies, pressed on smoked wood and blood colored swirl vinyl. These probably won't last long....
Another collection of total outsider whatthefuck from Ultra Eczema, this one from Cassis Cornuta, aka Daniel De Wereldvermaarde Botanicus (really?), a Dutch noisemaker, who has been brewing up all manner of fractured and fucked up sonics since the early seventies. A confusional mix of loner synth psych, damaged robotic new wave, and melting lysergic sound collage, all blurred and smeared into a head spinning slab of seriously sick soundart.
Warped synths, crumbling effects, woozy keyboard melodies, a stumbling chaotic abstract drift that occasionally coalesces into cool retro analog new wave weirdness, all primitive drum machines and analog synthesizers, but just as often seems to fall apart, or ooze into some other strange sonic shape. As if the sounds here weren't trippy enough, each lp has multiple holes drilled in the center, no less than 3, some as many as 20, so you can play the record off center, sometimes dramatically so, altering the sounds, and making the record sound even more wacked out and demented that it already did. Super rad. Could be a cool secret weapon for the DJ looking for a room clearer, but even (maybe especially) off center, it's surprisingly listenable, if you're in the mood for warped ultra weirdness of course.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, super nice artwork as with all Ultra Eczema releases...
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Another lost seminal punk rock classic, this one from DC's Chalk Circle, an all female punk rock band (supposedly the first to record and perform in DC), who existed for a couple years in the early eighties, and played alongside the usual DC suspects, but were definitely doing their own thing, challenging the prevailing sound and gender scene politics of the day. With a sound that would fit sonically alongside groups like the Slits, Delta 5, Lilliput, Raincoats, X-Ray Spex, Essential Logic and the like, Chalk Circle combined punk rock crunch with teenage energy, raw and urgent, frantic and frenetic, loose and ramshackle, but with some killer hooks, not so much 'punk rock' as indie pop / garage pop, this stuff would have been right at home on K Records or Kill Rock Stars in the early days.
The sound varies quite a bit (as does the recording quality), from bouncy almost danceable jangle punk, to reverby new wave, fuzzy pop-punk pound to primitive off kilter pop, bass heavy almost dubby post punk to spidery skeletal pop minimalism, laced with occasional bits of extra percussion, shouted back up vox, all held together by a super distinctive style and sound, which has us thinking there are a whole bunch of folks out there that would have loved these ladies back in the day, and anyone into the current crop of female punks: Brilliant Colors, Grass Widow, Pens, Yellow Fever, Sandwitches, etc. will probably dig this like crazy!
This lp collection gathers up various tracks from compilations, live shows, demos and unreleased tapes, and includes a big booklet with photos, press clippings and liner notes by Don Fleming (Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L.) whose Velvet Monkeys headlined Chalk Circle's first shows.
Just have two of these in stock. Children are a pretty cool new thrashy metal three piece from NYC, ex-members of Early Man we think, who just have this 12" out on Kemado. We saw 'em play when they opened for The Sword and Slough Feg a few months back. Good stuff, some crazy twin guitar action and raw energy. Note we said twin guitar, and they're a trio... which means, a la The Champs, no bassist! But they're pretty heavy nonetheless, and the shred never stops. Does that (and their long-haired but hipster/skaterish appearance, and label affiliation, membership pedigree, etc.) make 'em not "true" metal? Maybe, but they put on a damn good show and this 12" is worth a spin, headbangers!! Includes download card for free mp3s of these songs, too...
Warehouse find! Here's a great release from a few years back, released as part of Drone Records 10" series. Cisfinitum is the work of the Russian dark ambient practitioner Evgeny Voronovsky, who augments his sound design with a grim intensity with more than a few industrialist illusions. During a concert that Voronovsky presented in Germany for a Drone Records showcase, it's been reported that he managed to empty the room through the cross-contanimation of his deleterious frequencies. We gotta wonder just what the hell he did, as the audience who would go to Drone performance in 2005 would surely know what they're getting themselves into!
Devotio was clearly not the recording that he presented there. While psychologically dark, both of these extended tracks are sourced entirely from church bells. Voronovsky stretches out the incredibly rich resonance and compacts dense layers of these drones whose fundamental frequencies begin to detour away from harmonic purity and into uneasy dissonance. This isn't a dissonance of scraped metal or overblown distortion, but rather a finely tuned cross-hatching of frequencies beating against each other. Voronovsky couples this slow development of aggressively tuned minimalism with additional layerings from alarm bells (or he's processed his church bells to sound like alarms), and growling swells of blackened noise. Certainly for fans of Hazard, Troum / Maeror Tri, any of the more clinical aspects of Cold Meat Industries, and the headspace of Lustmord. Highly recommended!
A few lists back we went apeshit over some mysterious band of musical miscreants called the Violent Students, who made an unholy din like we hadn't heard since the glory days of the Butthole Surfers. Damaged and filthy and freaked out, a druggy chaotic punk sludge mess that just totally blew our minds. We recently discovered that some of those very same Students were doing time in the band Clockcleaner so we figured we oughta check them out as well, and so glad we did! For CC, the all out chaos has been reeled in a bit and while the result is less fractured and less completely unhinged, it's still pretty demented and manic, but way more song oriented with some KILLER riffs. When we first threw this one, the first thing we thought was the Cars meet Flipper. Which pretty much describes our dream band. But the more we listened the more we felt like we were slipping back in time, to that special moment, that only lasted a few years, where the Amphetamine Reptile label could do no wrong. Clockcleaner could easily have existed right there between the God Bullies, Halo Of Flies, Lubricated Goat, King Snake Roost and all the rest. The record starts off with some weirdly eighties metal riffing, like the intro to some Ratt song, before the whiney Jello like vocals kick in, and the whole thing lurches into action with plenty of Buttholes tribal pound, Jesus Lizard groove and a decade's (the nineties) worth of Amphetamine fueled fury. Plus some amazing song titles ("Missing Dick", "Gentle Swastika", "Interview With A Black Man", "Blood Driver") and some problematic poop smeared cover art, but they had us at the Cars meet Flipper!
The quietly menacing, and curiously mesmeric, NYC trio Coconuts (that's plural, not to be confused with SF band Coconut, singular... nor should it be confused with what you probably THINK a band called Coconuts might sound like, either!) offer up what we'll assume to be their debut, on the always interestin' No Quarter label (home to Burning Star Core, Circle, Psychic Paramount, and many other faves). This self-titled disc comprises 5 tracks, mostly all but one of 'em pretty long (but not in the double digits or anything), 34 minutes or so total. When it's on, though, you'll sink pretty deep into their sounds, that it'll seem like it would take much longer to swim back to the surface, helplessly drifting with the wave-action of their heavy plodding rhythms, Coconuts' semi-skronked, but not un-melodic, keening guitars like the plaintive calls of homeless, strung-out whales...
We noticed they thank Blues Control, we can see how they'd fit in with those guys, this has got an abstract, similarly droned-out vibe, darker though, and more spare, maybe like void-travelling Moon Duo, stripped down and spooky, a downer-dosed slo-mo krauty psych groove, spacey and druggy. The vocals are hushed moans, drafty exhalations to go with the droney murk and mope of the music, which slowly throbs and buzzes, the percussion an echoing thud, the electric guitar an avant acid blues wash... The confusional element of all this is perhaps accentuated by the digipak packaging, which is oriented with the spine on the longer side, what's normally the top, or bottom... some of us here (ok, it was Allan) griped that this means when you file it on a standard cd shelf, you won't be able to fit it there with the spine facing out, you'll have to have it facing either up or down, so the name of the cd won't be visible, which is normally one of the functions of the spine, but whatever, not a big deal, at least it fits on a cd shelf at all unlike a lot of other cd packaging options. In any case, it's a cool disc!
West Coast songstress Ms Ora Cogan is back with a pair of new releases... this, a full length titled The Quarry (on cd and lp), and a cassette called The Boggy Mire. So lush yet rustic, The Quarry is perhaps a bit darker in tone and haunting in mood than her previous recordings. Deeply moving, but not despairing, each word is drawn out into almost non-verbal utterances which at times seem as much inspired by old tymey Appalachian folk as by Canadian aboriginal music vocalizations and Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser. Cogan's voice lilts and swoops amid her delicate finger picked and strummed guitar along with some dreamy dulcimer, violin, and fleeting moments of droney dissonance too. The dozen numbers take an unhurried pace, gradually winding their way into your heart. A lovely and deceptively potent aural elixir! Limited pressing of 500!
COH, aka Ivan Pavlov, has been a long time favorite, taking that click and beep and buzz we love so much, that austere clipped electronic minimalism, and somehow infusing it with melody, and emotion, and while we love Pavlov's contemporaries, that might just be what makes the music of COH sound so special to us. And as if we weren't already excited about a new COH record anyway, IIron is Pavlov's 'metal record', a continuation of 2000's Iron, which was ostensibly his rock record (thus the title IIron should be read as Iron with the Roman numeral two replacing the 'I', as in part two), and much like other COH records, his take on minimal electronica bears little resemblance to his peers, especially here, taking acoustic guitars, chugging metal guitars, skittery electro rhythms, synth new wave, droned out low end crush and nineties style electronic industrial, and tangling it all up into some weird electro-avant-metal hybrid, that varies wildly from track to track, but manages to weave them all together into a somewhat cohesive whole.
Besides the usual minimal buzz and click programming and electronic beat crafting, Pavlov incorporates both recent guitar recordings as well as various guitar recordings made back in the eighties during Soviet era Russia, when even listening to metal music, let alone crating it, was expressly forbidden, Which also adds to the tension and emotional resonance of these tracks, which vary from propulsive and electro, to blackened and sludgey, to chuggy and noisy. The opener "Red Square" begins with a bit of delicate fingerpicked steel string guitar, wreathed in record crackle, which is soon overtaken by some pulsing industrial pulse and pound, a little Skinny Puppy, a little Ministry, but a bit more skeletal and cinematic, the crunchy distorted guitar, chopped up and spaced out into a weird sort of rock riff chug, all wrapped around a seriously creepy bit of soundtracky ambience, and a tangle of melodies that sounds almost like a electro-metal version of gypsy folk.
"War End War" is where the record first gets truly metal, after some deep barely audible subsonic rumbles, the low end roils and churns, a Tim Hecker-ish bit of blurred bassy melody, all hazy and indistinct, which builds and builds until a lurching lumbering doom-ic riffscape stumbles from the murk, wreathed in swirls of glitched out electronics and strange spacey FX, the sound crusty, and crunchy, distorted and crumbling, all wound around a big thick metallic riff just chugging away, the sound gradually smoothing out, until the song has returned to the murky muddy thrum that started things off, this time laced with a simple guitar melodies, and distant little curlicues of effects, all beneath a patina of crumbling gauze, before that riff returns, only this time to get all glitched up like a super scratchy skipping record, and then to get fused with some pulsing trancey electronica, the result a buzzy, metallic bit of doomy abstract industrial electronica.
The metal element is not so pronounced on some of the other tracks, or at least not obviously so, "Soii Noir" is a super minimal bit of pulsing electro, spare and spacious, sounding almost like a game of Pong, until another crunchy, lo-fi distorted riff enters the picture, but like before, it's all twisted up and distorted, wreathed in crackle and crumbling buzz, and molded into something distinctly UNmetal, but still heavy and riffy, where as "Slowup (Quadrate Fur Jah)" begins like some old demo tape of garage band riffery, only to become something much more playful and pulsing, like Neu! if they had drafted a metal guitarist to join, the same sort of sun dappled krautrocky drift, albeit with that one extra six stringed element.
"Fist Of Glory" distorts the guitars even further, turning a buzzy lo-fi riff into a layered bit of glitched out textural ambience, cutting out, skittering and skipping, clipped and looped, like some decaying reel to reel of plunderphonic metal, dizzying and abstract, but in its own way strangely rhythmic and hypnotic.
"All Lights Are Fire" is super spare and skeletal, the guitars muted and muddy, the electronics glitchy and squiggly, the sound somewhere between the electro dub of Pole and the krautrock of Can or Neu!, motorik, meditative, hypnotic, but as the track progresses, the guitars grow more buzzy and insistent, the production more noisy and distorted, the arrangement more chaotic.
Finally, IIron finishes off with "Satsugaii", which starts out all minimal murk, spare electronic pulses, and deep low end thrum, before some seriously Shellac-y noise rock guitars come in, which are mirrored by some pulsing synths, creating a weird bit of metallic electro-noise-rock, or something, whatever it is, it's like the perfect middle ground between old school krautrock, modern Carpenter / Goblin style cinematic electro-wave, nineties industrial and noise rock, especially with the addition of wild squalls of psychedelic guitar tangle, all over thick pounding pusling electronics and crunchy clipped riffage, heavy and heady, eventually slipping right back into that opening bit of minimal electronica, and finishing off with some hushed steel string guitar, and one final blast of psychguitar skree.
Awesome stuff for sure. And quite possibly one of our favorite COH records yet, which we should have assumed, considering the record bears the irrefutable legend: "HAIL TO WORLD PEACE AND DEATH TO FALSE METAL!"
Swank gatefold sleeve for the double vinyl, the cd version in a nice digipack, with art and design by Stephen O'Malley.
Yet another new release from the uber prolific Mr. Tim Cohen, who, when he's not fronting aQ faves the Fresh & Onlys, jamming out massive space drug epics with 3 Leafs, or blasting away mysteriously as black metal one man band Amocoma, finds time to make solo records too, like this one, with his OTHER band Magic Trick. And as you might imagine, the sound of TC's Magic Trick doesn't veer to far from the sound of the F+O, if anything, the sounds and songs here are more varied, less overtly garage rocky, and more personal, like experiments, but experiments suggests there's some risk of failure, some chance said experiment will fail, and as we know by now, Cohen's deft hand at popsmithery makes that pretty unlikely. And TCMT does seem to extend his streak, with another collection of perfect(ly off kilter) pop songs, from simple shuffly jangle, to pulsing electronic moody new wave, from brooding dour acoustic folkiness to sixties style sunshiney Spector-ish fuzz, often weaving all of those disparate sounds and styles together. Hazy reverby guitars drift under deep crooned vox, muted electronic pulses drive a warm liquid basslines, synths swirl and soar, female back up vox offer up angelic harmonies, Cohen's vocals getting better and better, rough and ragged one second, warm and smooth the next, and often slipping into a sweet falsetto, the songs too, with every record seeming to become more and more well crafted, a practically perfect assemblage of unlikely parts, surprising melodies, lush textures, quirkly electronics, multiple vocal parts, but none of those distracting from Cohen's vision, just adding to it, woven into a smooth, warm, shimmery, jangly dream poppy whole. Nice!
The work of the woman who was without a doubt one of the most smoking soul sisters to come out of the James Brown camp, this 1974 album finally gets the new vinyl reissue it deserves. With 'The Minister Of New New Super Heavy Funk' Mr. James Brown on board as producer, Check Me Out If You Don't Know Me By Now shows off the fiery hot vocals of Lyn Collins, with the undisputed cream of the crop of funk and soul players backing her up. With burners like "Rock Me Again & Again & Again & Again", poppy nuggets like "Mr. Big Stuff" and emotionally rich tracks like "Put It On The Line", this is an album that displays Collins' amazing range all the while keeping an authentic core that rings so strongly through each of these songs.
An absolute must have for fans of Betty Davis, Betty Harris, Marva Whitney and the rest, and it seems likely that modern day folks who are keeping it real like Sharon Jones & The Dapkings have listened to this album a LOT. So damn good.
There's been quite a few Shirley Collins reissues lately, and they're all pretty great if you've got a soft spot for this British singer's sweet voice and the trad folk she celebrates. We should get 'em all reviewed one of these days, but we thought that we absolutely had to provide a little write-up for this one, originally released on LP in 1964. Amidst the many wonderful Collins discs, this one is just a little bit different and special because it finds her collaborating with pioneering jazz/folk guitarist Davy Graham. It was some record company's notion of getting folk vet Collins and up-and-coming guitarist Graham (a fellow turned on to both Thelonious Monk and Indian raga) to make a "folk-swinging" record, but one that worked out well, even if they were somewhat of an odd couple -- Collins a responsible young mother with two children, the younger Graham a decidely bohemian character with vices that extended beyond merely smoking pot. But despite their differing lifestyles, Collins and Graham's Folk Roots, New Routes is quite a wonderful one-off work, blending old fashioned folk and modern jazz and strains of non-Western music into arrangements both innovative and lovely.
Here's ten more piano-pop gems from Colossal Yes. Both catchy and somehow laid back, this is a record for outdoor barbeques and conversations with old friends. Not overly sappy, the record walks right through sweetness and sentimentality and emerges on the other side without the ickyness of either. The ubiquitous vocal/piano/guitar combination is fleshed out nicely with the occasional flute, organ or horn, especially noticeable in "They Feast on Us / We Feed on Them" and the penultimate jazzy track, "Outskirts of Radiant". Listening to the album on headphones (always recommended) allows the give and take between guitar (panned left) and piano (panned right) to stand out. Although at times the mix feels like the piano and guitar are fighting amongst themselves for sonic hegemony, they usually compliment each other in a way that shows quality musicianship and songwriting.
ATTENTION: LOVESLIESCRUSHING FANS!! We managed to get a handful of these split 12"s direct from the man himself, one side a gorgeous slab of hazy LLC style shimmer, the other an equally lovely bit of abstract guitarscaping from a new to us outfit, it's already out of print, we have a handful of copies, but they will probably not be around for long.
The Cortez side is of course Scott Cortez, the man behind Lovesliescrushing, and the sound is quite similar to much of the LLC stuff, in particular the fantastic Voirshin record, hushed and hazy, ultra minimal, a blurred lovely stretch of softly layered drones, glimmering and glistening and aquatic sounding, very much reminiscent of William Basinski, like if you locked up the tapes that were the source for this record, in 20 years, it'd be all crumbling and decayed and disintegrating.
The flipside is from a group called Language Of Light, who we've never heard until now, a good match for Cortez, similarly washed out and ethereal, but more structured, chiming guitars streaks over processed metallic shimmer, with muted hazy melodies, before the sound shifts to something much darker and ominous, a jagged processed loopscape, weirdly warped and noisy, but that quickly gives way to the final movement, more lovely guitar ambience, blurred and gauzy and otherworldly.
We've carried some strange sounds in our shop. We've listed them in other reviews, but it definitely bears repeating, ice melting, drag racing, life support machines, bats, lots of frogs, insects in stored foodstuffs, EVP voices from beyond the grave, chanting cults, arcade ambience, applause, silence, purring kittens, shortwave broadcasts, the sounds of Symphony intermissions, deer in heat, singing power lines, guitars dragged behind trucks, the aurora borealis, blank tapes, monkeys, crackling fires, the ocean, elephants playing gamelans, vibrating docks and bridges, hollerin' and so much more. The one thing we've yet to carry is the sounds of a gun being fired. Until now.
But this isn't just some random sniper fire, or some yahoos firing their shotguns out in the woods. No these gunshots have a purpose. And that purpose is art. The shooter is a man called Walt Creel, who uses a rifle to perforate big pieces of sheet metal, and in doing so creates huge images from the bullet holes. Cool huh? The works are part of a concept called Deweaponizing The Gun, wherein the gun's destructive power is transformed into the power to create. In conjunction with the visual works, Creel decided to deweaponize the gun in another way, by capturing the sound, one that usually invokes panic and terror and recontextualizing it into something while maybe not musical, something distinctively sonic, and textural, percussive and strange.
And that it is. A one sided 12", featuring recordings of Creel firing his gun into metal, an auditory glimpse into the process of creating his art. Sonically, it's reminiscent of pop guns, or firecrackers, or a screen door slamming, not the huge roar and bang you hear in movies or on TV, instead, the sound is actually slight, tinny, high end, the shots fired create a strange spare soundscape of not quite rhythms, the recording hissy and lo-fi, adding texture and grit, not the easiest listening, but still pretty fascinating, in both concept and execution. Found sound and field recording enthusiasts will definitely dig.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES! Beautiful one sided black and white sleeves, each one hand numbered and signed by the artist, and each with a small cardstock antlered insert.
Most recent full length from these raw cult black metallers from Chicago. We never had the cd version, but the lp is such a gorgeous piece of work, we figured we oughta list it. Sonically, this is super intense, midtempo blackness, with touches of thrash here and there. A huge Darkthrone influence is obvious, and there ain't nothing wrong with that. Each song a buzzing thrashing blur, some super catchy, killer riffing, distorted processed vocals, and drums WAY up in the mix, but doing some cool stuff, and subtly making the songs a little bit weirder than they might be otherwise. In fact, the more we listen to this, the more it's kicking our ass.�
But as much as we love us a black and brutal slab of raw cvlt black metal, it's all about the packaging. Nuclear War Now! always pulls out all the stops, the recent Root box is a perfect example, but this record is just mind blowing. The cover is a gatefold, and is so thick, it's like opening some old unearthed leather bound book. It creaks and groans and you actually have to put some muscle into it. The inner sleeves are thick to, and printed, so even minus the records, the thing must way 3 pounds! Then the vinyl, ultra thick of course. 180 or 200 gram for sure. But the icing on the cake, is the killer original painting used for the cover art, the gatefold and the poster inside, painted by none other than WREST from LEVIATHAN! Immediately recognizable and so striking (even though the� label somehow put someone else's signature on the cover, ugh). Bits of the painting are also reproduced on the record labels, and the gatefold is just thick swirls of paint, the whole thing is just completely stunning.�
