Another new 7" on Negative Guest List, this one some early nineties thud rock from this Aussie outfit, who sound like they should have ended up on Siltbreeze, thick distorto bass, big caveman drums, two covers, the A side a Gary Glitter jam transformed from glam anthem into a knuckledragging dirge, gloomy and sludgey, with a sort of Sonic Youth-y vibe in some of the weird chords. The B side is a killer version of Pere Ubu's "Non Alignment Pact", with some loose drumming wound around some killer slippery guitar work, swaggery and slithery, crunchy and fuzzy and heavy, almost digging it more than the original.
Housed in fancy hand glittered covers!
Debut release from this duo, featuring Adam Wiltzie of aQ-beloved dronescapers Stars Of The Lid. He's teamed up with composer Dustin O'Halloran, for a suite of songs that doesn't veer to far from recent Stars Of The Lid releases, but focus on the piano as the main instrument, with the duo seeking out large spaces and grand pianos, with which to fully realize their sonic vision.
The opening track, far too humbly titled "We Played Some Open Chords", lets chords on the piano ring out, the natural reverb carrying the notes off and letting them gradually fade. The piano underpinned by some sweetly sorrowful strings, and some mournful horns, a strangely melancholy bit of modern chamber music, all laid atop Wiltzie's masterful and subtle guitar drone shimmer. The two part "Requiem For The Static King" is lush and lovely and sounds like a soundtrack, all soaring strings, dramatic melodies, the second half veering into slightly darker territory, the piano resurfacing, the strings dialed back, the guitar drones allowed to swell and shimmer, while "Minuet For A Cheap Piano" sounds to be just that, the sound slightly muted, subtly distorted, and again, wreathed in what sounds like strings but could very well be the swirl of droned out guitars, hushed and delicate and dreamlike. "Steep Hills Of Vicodin Tears" is another bit of chamber music, the strings softly swelling, the arrangement strangely rhythmic, as of the instruments were breathing, the song laced with a delicate piano melody, the mood swoonsome and melancholy.
"A Symphony Pathetique" the longest track at nearly 13 minutes, seems to be the record's centerpiece, that piano suspended in a field of gauzy dronemusic, the track is epic and gorgeous, a sprawling stretch of hushed minimal beauty, the background sounds in constant motion, shimmering and undulating, overtones loosed to drift dreamily, all the while the piano plucks out painterly melodies, and like all the best songs, we would have been happy to have this stretch out and fill up the entire rest of the disc. Instead, the song fades gradually into the ether, from which drifts "All Farewells Are Sudden", a very UN-sudden sonic farewell, all slow swirling swells, hazy ambience, and most surprising, female vocals, creating a lush lovely droney harmony with the strings, and what in lesser hands could sound maudlin, ends up sounding simply beautiful, especially with the strange addition of what seems to be field recordings, only to have the whole song gradually unfurl into a darkly moody soft focus piano coda. So gorgeous. Fans of recent Stars Of The Lid will be in heaven, and anyone into dreamy mysterious ambience, minimal melodic drones and avant chamber music will definitely find much to love here.
This long out of print slab of heavy Japanese psych from aQ faves Acid Mothers Temple (or more accurately, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.), originally released on vinyl, via the Detector label, WAY back in 2000, is one of a handful of new reissues from Brazilian label Essence (along with two Circle cds, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and is presented in a super swank mini-lp style gatefold sleeve, with the original sound of the lp, totally remastered, and revved up, heard for the first time the way it was meant to be heard. 'Cause according to the band, the guy who originally mastered the vinyl said the sound was "too heavy" to be mastered for vinyl, hence the sub par sound. And while the cd version definitely does sound better, it's still plenty murky and muddy and lo-fi, raw and in the red, with the band a wild chaotic squall of psychedelic sound, with lots of buzz and feedback, you can hear people in the audience talking here and there, the band offers up some funny between song banter, all of that non musical stuff woven into some of the band's fiercest rocking ever.
The record starts off all drifty and shimmery, the band unfurling lush layers of whirling sound, wreathed in clouds of sci-fi swoops and bleeps, it doesn't take long for them to launch into it, and they never let up. Channeling High Rise and White Heaven and all the Japanese psych greats that came before, Kawabata Makoto and company tear it up, the guitars a constant barrage of wild Hendrixian blow outs, and tangled sprays of furious shred, the drums pound desperately in the background, the bass is nothing more than a low end thrum, and EVERYTHING is doused in effects, rendering all the sounds washed out and woozy and druggy. Occasionally the band do lock into some more krautrock like grooves, and its then that the bass comes to the fore and definitely drives the group, but most of Live In Occident is spent in full of freaked out psych-noise blow out mode, sounding like a modern version of the avant Japanese jazz noise of folks like Takayanagi, albeit run through a million fuzz pedals and transmitted from the furthest reaches of the galaxy.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Second full length full length from East Bay sound technician (and AQ customer) Brandon Nickell, who spent the last year painstakingly assembling the sounds that would eventually become this here disc.
His previous full length, a big AQ fave was a blissed out collage of deep drones and thick soundscapes of high end skree, soft focus whispery minimalism and dense squalls of swirling noise. Even some shuffling skittering rhythms found there way into the mix.
On Maw, Nickell's approach is similar, although the first track threw us for a loop. A strange spacious slab of music concrete, the focal point being a strange grunting gasping reverb drenched animal sound. Like some mysterious electronic beast, confined to a tiny pen and registering his displeasure as it ruts and calls out to others of its kind. Creepy but pretty dang cool. The second track returns to more familiar waters, a super tranquil drift of burbling barely there rumble and subtle electronic pulses. A slow lugubrious crawl beneath and within the tiny sounds that make up a mysteriously indistinct low end world. After that it's another visit to the strange electronic zoo, to observe the insect enclosure, where some seriously angry winged creatures buzz wildly as they careen back and forth in front of the glass.
We move on into another long form stretch of abstract ambience, sparkling and glimmering like the glassy surface of a pond in the late afternoon, and then it's one more quick glimpse into the final enclosure, the beasts within are much more calm, lazing in the fading sunlight, their cooing and snorting, like some sort of shortwave radio static, interrupted by electronic birdcalls and the manufactured whoosh of a warm electronic breeze. So weird but strangely compelling and beautiful.
There's some definite Nurse With Wound worship here, as well as nods to Coleclough, Hafler Trio, and the like, but Nickell knows enough than to just ape his heroes, instead he takes what he needs and does some serious exploring on his own... and we like it.
Packaged in a super simple and striking white on white sleeve.
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
The latest from aQ beloved Mississippi Records is in fact sort of a three way label split, with Mississippi sublabel, Change, as well as Sahel Sounds, who recently released that amazing Music From Saharan Cellphones compilation. This fantastic album features live 'stream of consciousness' recordings of Agali Ag Amoumine, a griot (a West African storyteller/singer who is a repository for oral tradition) from Timbouctou, who plays in a distinctive style called Takamba, which is essentially a droning electrified guitar, or in this casea more lo-fi electric 3 string lute called a terhardent, accompanying himself with a simple haunting rhythm on a calabash, which is a sort of hollowed out gourd used as percussion.
Fans of the Sublime Frequencies series, especially Group Inerane, Group Bombino, and the other sort of African desert blues groups will find much to love here, as will folks into hypnotic droned out ragas, as Amoumine unfurls glorious gouts of fuzzed out steel string buzz, all anchored by that simpler percussion, all accompanied by Amoumine's emotive vocals, the result is a droned out desert blues, mesmerizing and trancelike, the 'guitar' playing incredible, wild squalls, flurries of notes, warm shimmering buzz, the sound almost looped sounding at times as Amoumine locks into a groove, and while the sides are separated into songs, the whole record plays like one epic continuous psychedelic desert trance jam. The lp also comes with a bonus 7", the A side featuring a much more mellow, acoustic version of the sound found on the album proper, accompanied by a handful of female vocalists, some of them perhaps children, changing the vibe of the sound completely, while the B side is still acoustic, but is just as frenzied and frantic, droney, tranced out and psychedelic as the electric version.
So completely amazing! And so totally recommended. A new unanimous store favorite. And absolutely required listening for Sublime Frequencies fans for sure!
One of two new releases from the Frequency Thirteen label, home of TRUE SHEFFIELD BLACK PSYCHEDELIA, as in aQ faves like Black Vomit, Ice Bound Majesty, Skulltrol, Dukkha, Rape Rack and others. Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find the new record from Torture Gnosis, a tripped out disc of celestial lo-fi psychedelic synthscapery and blackened cosmic dronemusic, but this here, the debut from Astral Womb, is exactly the opposite, although from the band name we were maybe expecting something 'astral', but instead these guys kick out some serious noiserock grindprog jams, churning downtuned heaviness, wild octopoidal drumming, buzzing guitar crunch, the songs wildly intricate, the band slipping from churning chug to furious grind to mathy metallic pound to lumbering dirgey doom to dense stop/start dynamics. Like some twisted lo-fi hybrid of the Fucking Champs, the Ruins and Loincloth, with some Lightning Bolt thrown in for good measure. It's like math rock, noise rock, grindcore and maybe a little death metal all tangled up into a lurching chunk of wildly rocking avant heaviness. The recording super lo-fi, giving the sound a seriously raw vibe, and be sure and stick around for the last track, an sprawling 8+ minute math heavy progged out epic, that pretty much pushes all of our heavy rock buttons, furious and frenzied, mathy and heavy, loads of stop/starts, even some weird clean guitar jangle, but for the most part, lurching and lumbering, pounding and blasting, the sort of jam that's a total set ender and leaves the crowd a sweaty bloodied exhausted mess. So killer.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!
The two most recent records put out by ultra hip experimental electronic label Triangle, finds that label continuing to push well past the 'witch house' genre ghetto that birthed them. To be fair, the first few proper releases on Triangle, Holy Other, Clams Casino, and Balam Acab, were already a sort of POST witch house strain anyway, with some of the WH tropes retained, but with those groups upping the production big time, and ditching much of the lo-fi drag that defined the best witch house, and in the process, inventing a new electronica. Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find the new record from SF electro weirdos Water Borders, a dizzying slab of Coil worshipping electronic what the fuck genius, and then there's this, the debut from Ayshay, which also incorporates a bit of Coil into the proceedings, but there seem to be no beats at all, at least initially, channeling some sort of Cocteau Twins ethereal drift, with some processed throat singing style vocals as a bass, the only beat a buried pulse, it's pretty compelling, and darkly haunting, and beautiful for sure. The second track offers up more of the same, channeling Grouper and stripping away all that low fidelity murk and instead creating a lush layered symphony of voices, subtly twisted and tweaked, another spectral vocal bliss out, and in fact, the third track is more of the same, it's like a three part vocal song suite that acts as a sort of introduction to the final 12 minute "Nguzunguzu Megamix", which is in fact the first track with beats, and while we may have been expecting some sort of skittery drag, or murky muted low end throb, it actually plays more like some lost Muslimgauze remix, all skittery Eastern percussion, multiple drums and rhythms all tangled up, some hand claps, some serious low end, all over those ethereal vox from the first few tracks, the sound constantly shifting, the beat growing more and more block rockin as the track progresses until it finally blossoms into some almost jungle near the end, the stutter and skitter (and some BIG bass booms), perfectly woven into that strange shimmery swirl of ghostly vox. And it's those last few minutes that are the sort of warped and weird, beat heavy mystery secret weapon that some cool DJ will unleash from his sonic arsenal at just the right time and just destroy the dancefloor. So good, getting tons of play here at AQ and appropriately just in time for the Halloween season...
Latest blast of kick ass hook heavy garage pop from Mr. Matthew Melton and company, and it's another doozy, ditching the reverb and low fidelity that so many of their sonic brethren rely on, in favor of some KILLER songs, as well as a sound and production that sounds like it was transported here direct from the sixties. Opener "Don't Ever Change" was the A side of a single we were never able to get, and it's an impossible (and impossibly kick ass!) blend of glammy T.Rex stomp, fuzzy sixties pop and Beach Boys surf rock, all crunchy jangly guitars, lots of oooh's and aaah's, a hook to die for, and some super strange production with the second guitar swooping in from one channel, way louder than the rest of the mix, adding a strange bit of psychedelia to the proceedings. Once we got past that first track (after listening to it about a million times), the rest of the record unfolded similarly, Melton's knack for conjuring up classic pop unmatched these days, and the sound, we can't help but think we're listening to some lost collection of sixties Nuggets or something. As always, regardless of the sound, or the production, it's all about the songs, and BW are tough to beat when it comes to classic hooks, just check out the title track, fuzzy, jangly, a little bit surfy, a little bit rockabilly, bur pure pop at its core, and that coupled with the weird mix, the vocals panned hard right, the drums panned hard left, only makes it that much cooler and weirder. As the record progresses the sound gets a bit heavier, and the Who vibe that was all over past records resurfaces here big time (check out "Sweet Little Stranger), as does some Stoogesy swagger.
As always, killer stuff, and like with past records, we find ourselves not really wanting to listen to anything else!
Any record bearing the legend: "All the music on this cd has been created using a very old record player, second hand microphones, discarded tape recorders and various bits of wire" pretty much has to be good. Well okay, maybe HAS TO is exaggerating, but at the very least that sort of description is enough to get us very intrigued.
And in this case, it is good, but at the same time nothing at all like we were expecting.
We had imagined some sort of washed out Philip Jeck style drones, or pixelated Tim Hecker-ish soundscapes, or even the sort of crackling slow decay of William Basinski's tape pieces, but instead, Grant Beran has taken old records and some junky beat up equipment and used them to create surprisingly rhythmic tracks, utilizing various cracks and pops, and skips to fashion almost-grooves, like a lo-fi DJ Shadow sort of. The opener is all fuzzy and buzzy, but with a super driving beat, a skipping record looped into a hypnotic groove, a little bit techno, a little bit hip hop, a little creepy Goblin soundtrack, and a lot fuzzed out turntable buzz. It's not hard to imagine some clever DJ adding huge beats to this and you'd have the most fucked up lo-fi dancefloor jam ever. But we don't want to exaggerate the 'dance' aspect, it's more like the soundtrack to some lost John Carpenter movie, dubbed from VHS to VHS to home stereo to microcassette recorder until it ended up sounding like this, groove and fuzzy and murky and awesome!
The second track is much more moody and atmospheric, the rhythms an afterthought, that seem to surface randomly, while the meat of the track is deep sonorous tones, throbbing and distorted, woven into some low end melody. The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between hushed whispery ambient drone, and weirdly distorted lo-fi grooves, standout's include the buzzy electro jam of "The Man In The High Castle", the cinematic krautrocky murk of "Double Star", the almost Chain Reaction dub of "Star Collector" and the droney buzz and grind of "Gleanings".
Falling somewhere between experimental turntable soundscapery and a moody cinematic DJ record, Beran has skillfully woven sonic straw into fuzzy, stuttery, groovy gold, taking turntables and dreamdrone ambience into rhythmic places until now, as far as we know completely unexplored! WAY recommended.
Two lovely tracks of nocturnal electronica from the perennially exceptional Biosphere (aka Geir Jenssen). While he recently produced the N-Plants album, a disc rippling with taut rhythms amidst his signature warm ambience, the tracks here date back to 2006 when he was working on the Dropsonde album. Both of these tracks represent some of the darkest work we've heard from Biosphere, marking a considerable detour away from his typical work; and we're certainly not complaining at all. Glacial and arctic references abound in this Norwegian's work, but on the A side "Fluvialmorfologi," they take on the ominous pall of what BJ Nilsen mustered under his older Hazard moniker, through sodden drones and rasping sinewave tones. The B side "Feber" is more in keeping with the somber nature of the aforementioned Dropsonde album, built upon a languid loop of minor-key strings topped with subtle effects and melodic interludes, not too far from the work of Leyland Kirby or the Konigsforst period of Gas. Great stuff, but we would expect no less from Biosphere!
Remember when the Black Heart Procession used to be good? Well, it's not hard because that time is NOW! After the universally acknowledged disappointment that was The Spell, TBHP has returned to form beautifully with Six. There's lots of piano and strings and organs and maracas and moodiness and drama and WAY less guitar.
After the slow opening number "When You Finish Me", comprised mainly of the abovementioned piano and strings, there's "Wasteland", a catchy bass-and-vocals driven dirge. And although in their live shows it's obvious frontman Pall Jenkins' voice has not held up as well as one might have hoped, on record it still sounds great, especially in the slower, more spoken / less sung pieces. When the third song, "Witching Stone", opens with a catchy guitar riff and you think to yourself, "Oh no, not more guitar!" fear not, noble listeners, for once the guitar has served its purpose, it soon fades in the mix and is replaced by organs and extra percussion.
On the whole, the tone of the record seems somewhere between Three and Amore del Tropico. Six is occasionally moody and sparse like Three, but usually full and flushed out like Amore. Flashes of Latin rhythms pop up like skeletons of old friends. Also, bass guitar is an essential element to almost every song, whereas TBHP used to rely more on the low end of the piano.
Further on in the record we find "Suicide", probably the noisiest and most varied track on the record, one that definitely should be listened to on headphones. Building up in layers, a maraca here, an organ there, after a minute and a half, it explodes into a (gasp!) booty-shaking chorus filled with screaming synths and guitars that abruptly cuts off, only to be built back up again. Excellent.
Where TBHP really shine, though, is in their slow songs; they master a certain space that few bands can even enter. One of the best songs on the record, "Drugs", is also the shortest: a concise yet mind-expanding piano-and-strings ballad about, you guessed it, drugs.
The album comes on three formats, each slightly different from the others. The double lp comes on three-sided vinyl (the fourth side is etched artwork) and features different (and better) cover art than the cd. For you collectors, there is also a limited edition heart-shaped flash drive necklace that comes in a heart-shaped etched metal box. It contains the full album, a digital copy of the booklet & artwork and also a music video for the song "Witching Stone".
This Italian band's sole album from 1985 is a tough one to figure out. An oddity all right. They're definitely a metal band at heart -- the fast-paced, pre-album demo track "Midnight Madman" included here as one of four bonus cuts is proof of that -- but on their album itself, they somehow created a much more unexpectedly PSYCHEDELIC and spacey, synthy sound. Totally dark and gothic in a metal way, yeah, but lost in space at the back of a black hole (of course), a slowed-down, doomed-out, dosed-with-cough-syrup vibe, splicing bits of Voivod with the likes of Jacula... in fact, the lurching music on this crackly disc (mastered directly from a none-too-pristine vinyl copy, the original reels having been lost to time, and sounding to us all the better for it!) could be AQ-faves Jacula given an '80s metal makeover... the church organ strains that open "Demoniac City" surely set that tone. Meanwhile, the title track cops a riff from Sabbath's "Electric Funeral", as if to give the nod to their biggest influence we're pretty sure. But the doomy compositions of vocalist/bassist/organist Robert Measles (great name!!) also derive from phantasms far beyond our plane, we're pretty sure of that as well.
Those in the know about Italian '80s metal acts like Death SS, Paul Chain, Bulldozer and Dark Quarterer are aware that a bizarre, poverty-stricken sort of prog weirdness often infects the proceedings, and Black Hole are no exception. In their case, on this album, it makes for something really strange and special, creating a cultish legacy that led to this cd reissue. We're glad to get to hear it! Now it's time to burn the black candles and visit Black Hole's "Spectral World" ruled by "Blind Men And Occult Forces"...
The killer, groovy music from around the world, out of the past, just keeps on coming... and more often than not we have the fantastic Soundway label to thank for such vintage international reissue discoveries. Here's their latest, a rescuing of the sole release, circa 1976, from a group with the promising name of the Black Truth Rhythm Band. It's an album rife with soulful call-and-response chants, polyrhythmic percussion, some spacey synth, funky horns, whistling flute, and sprightly kalimba melodies... We'd have thought the BTRB were an Afrobeat band from West Africa, but it turns out they're from Trinidad, so this is Afro-centric funk with a bit of mellow Caribbean, calypso flavor as well. Though, Africa is their main thing, and and we're not just talking the jungle noises heard on the track "Kilimanjaro".
The BTRB has both a gentle touch, and deep, DEEP groove. So good, why the heck has it been out of print for so long? And why did they only make the one album?
The occasional synth squiggles remind us of the JB's, like James Brown getting down on "Blow Your Head", but the real big influence here was probably Fela Kuti - and BTRB leader Oluko Imo (bass, kalimba, conga, flute, percussion, lead vocals, whew!) indeed did get to record with Fela later on in the '80s.
This first-time reissue includes a bonus track on the cd version, while the 180 gram vinyl comes with a bonus 7" single, and includes a download code for the entire album as well. Damn fine stuff, highly recommended. Using those terms "killer" and "groovy" with regard to this album is NOT in any way hyperbole.
This is the seventh installment in the ongoing Frkwys series of recorded collaborations, a series that focuses on teaming up contemporary artists with artists that perhaps influenced them, or as we described it in another review the old guard and the new wave. Past installments have included Julianna Barwick and Ikue Mori, Excepter and Carter Tutti (ex Throbbing Gristle) and Foetus, and more recently Blues Control and Laraaji. This one actually came out earlier this year, BEFORE the Blues Control and Laraaji, but is most definitely another winner in the series. We were kinda cautious at first, though, as we were worried about the risk of too many cooks, all comfortable in very different kitchens, cuz really, what could you get when you cross James Ferraro (ex Skaters), David Borden (Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co.), Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), Laurel Halo and Samuel Godin? Seems like it would probably be a crazy chaotic mess, but instead, they came up with something stunning, a gorgeous bit of soft focus new agey synth drift, long form dronemusic that manages to be both ethereal and dense, lushly layered and surprisingly ephemeral, kosmische for sure, but rooted is musics more terrestrial. The two part "People Of The Wind" is definitely the anchor of the record, the 12 minute opener a gorgeous hazy expanse of fluttering sun dappled drift, smoldering and softly shimmery, managing the impossible task of being serene and tranquil and hypnotic, but still in its own way, heavy, with a slightly dark edge. We would have been perfectly happy had they stretched that track out to be the whole album.
They do revisit the track via part two, a much more brief exploration, with a slightly darker cast, melodically at least, it's also much less buzzy and dense, and more infused with gentle melodies, the vibe much more pastoral and dreamlike. The other tracks drift in similar directions, with a slightly altered palette, still evoking the same sort of sonic wonder, a hushed sonic haze, but with "Internet Gospel Pt. 1" flecked with fluttery almost Native American sounding melodies, and muted dubbed out super minimal percussion, while "Internet Gospel Pt. 2", stretches part one out into a swirly sprawl of sci-fi glimmer, with swooping bleeps and bloops, draped over a woozy carnivalesque organ, and a warm shower of swirling effects, the whole track a slow build, eventually attaining a nearly Sunroof! like raga style buzz/blur. "Twilight Pacific" is more cinematic, a lush story in sound, darkly futuristic, rife with thick warm swells, and softly soaring string like shimmer, as well as muted softened steaks of upper register skree, the sound like laying on your back on a hill and watching the night sky, and finally, the record finishes with "Just A Little Pollution", which starts off hushed and serene, but soon blossoms into an effects wreathed pulsating and propulsive synthscape, with vocals for the first time, super effected and draped in synth buzz and melodic swirl, the whole thing sounding like the soundtrack credit sequence from some eighties VHS tape, definitely hinting at the musics of some of the individual players.
The vinyl version includes a full album download.
It doesn't happen very often, but occasionally, TWO aQ staffers accidentally review the same record, and usually, we try to just cram them together into one (sort of) cohesive single review, but this time we figured, screw it, here's two different aQ-er's takes on the latest from Byetone, a record we liked so much we reviewed it twice! See if you can guess who wrote which!!
Review one:
It's weird to say, but it seems like the most compellingly funky electronic music is coming from a camp that pretty much perfected the ultimate cold clinical electronic sound. Raster-Noton for years has been home to icy cold collections of bleep and click, him and hiss, taking music and seemingly reducing it to it's most elemental form, and arranging it into machine like rhythms. Don't get us wrong, we LOVE that stuff, and hearing pristine arrangements of ultra low, rib cage rattling lows, and dog whistle highs, rhythms created from clipped static and 1 bit bursts, total mad scientist genius. But all along, it seemed like something lurked just below the surface. A funkiness that the artists seemed to be combating, as if the whole thing was an elaborate sonic ploy to keep the funk at bay. And then suddenly, one of the brave ones, decided to let a little of the funk seep into his audio experiments, and it was good. Too good. Too good to not let more in. And soon, it was too late, and then against all odds, and in an ironic twist of sonic fate, people like Alva Noto were crafting some of THEE funkiest sounds we'd ever heard, all assembled from the same elements, beeps and clicks, 1 bit bursts and sine waves, culminating in the recently reviewed Univrs record.
But then along comes Byetone, not to be outdone, takes those same elements, and decides to not just let the funk seep into his sounds, but to go all out, and craft lush expansive soundscapes, epic and cinematic, proving that those same ingredients could be twisted up into all new shapes, which brings us to Symeta, a gorgeously lush collection of electronica, that slips easily from super clinical click and buzz, to warm lush chordal swells, often in the same song, the various elements arranged into killer grooves and funky beats, with some of the tracks sounding almost Pop Ambient, that lush and lovely, while others stayed more clinical, and still others found a middle ground, which strangely enough sounds like a weird take on the whole Goblin/Carpenter sci-fi future-retro synthscape thing, but somehow cooler, and more -actually- sci-fi sounding, and more hauntingly futuristic, with Byetone coaxing some seriously gristly buzz and tripped out psychedelia from his strange sonic laboratory.
Awesome!
Review two:
Olaf Bender's Byetone project is hardly prolific, but he has proven to be strongly consistent in his clinical electronica, which nudges the signature Raster-Noton sound of glitch 'n' tone on a trajectory that might not be all that averse to the dancefloor. Symeta comes three years after the much acclaimed Death Of A Typographer; and like that earlier record, this one also owes quite a bit to the formative work of Pan Sonic and Mika Vainio's solo album Metri. The hypnotic, adrenaline-pulsed piece of minimalist techno on "Opal" is right out of the Vainio playbook, slowly ramping a militant drum-roll from Bender's drum machine out of a throbbing basspulse radiating ominous hisses and x-ray frequencies. "Helix" and "Black Peace" nod toward the latter Pan Sonic works of gnarled, distorted electronica through an excellent track of grimy blocks of electronic riffage, caustic blasts of noise, and dubstepping electro backbeats, in the construction of some exceptional, high-pressure chamber electronica. Lest you think that it's all Vainio all the time, the first three blips from the album opening "Topas" are devilishly close to the robotic sequencing that Kraftwerk used to build their onomatopoeic "Boing Boom Tschak." Another great record from Raster-Noton.
One of the more recent Circle records finally released on vinyl by our pals at Static Caravan. Good thing too since the cd is out of print. Double lp, colored vinyl in a nice gatefold sleeve with some of the most tripped out artwork we've seen in a while, different from the cd version. Here's what we had to say about the cd when it first came out.
Is there such a thing as Circle overload? We don't think so. In their case, you can't have too much of a good thing. A brand new disc of their hypnotic avant-rock compositions. Newer than their recent "Andexelt" album, and just as good. Not as sparse and dubby as that disc, "Prospekt" is rather heavier and denser, mesmerizingly repetitive as always, and kinda startling, with some incredible vocal acrobatics / operatics in the opening track "Dedofiktion". Really great!
Circle are getting to be like a Finnish hypnorock version of the Grateful Dead, a comparison which would no doubt thrill Circle mainman Jussi Lehtisalo, who is very upfront about his obsession with the Dead. In so much as between albums, Circle, like the Dead, crank out killer live record after killer liver record, often with some of the same songs, always including a few live staples, familiar enough to hit the spot, but different enough that a Circle fan could be forgiven for needing them ALL!
This vinyl-only latest from these fantastic Finns, is indeed yet another live set, and not only features a super striking crystal skull cover, but also finds the band bolstered by some extra axe power in the form of members of fellow NWOFHM combo Pharaoh Overlord. Recorded last year, in Finland, Soundcheck, as the label puts it, "offers the most contemporary document possible of a Circle soundcheck / concert experience". Indeed!
The Aside offers two new tracks, beginning with the brief "Kukkakaalia Kapteenit!", a wispy swirl of shimmery synths, laid back tribal drumming and some dramatic, emotional crooning, very cinematic sounding, almost like it could be some lost 4AD single, dreamy and ethereal, giving way to the way more rocking and intense "Tuhatsata", which takes up most of the side, a slow burning, blackened bit of Finnish krautrock, super epic, with dueling vocals, crooning versus grunted and growled, fusiony keys, still more tribal drumming, spidery guitars, the track pulsing and pounding, building to multiple crescendos, frenzied freakouts that always lip right back into more looped mesmer.
The flipside features two instantly recognizable live set staples, first up, "Virsi", dramatically progtastic, with that super soaring epic intro, all dynamic shifts and huge bursts of instrumental crunch, with vocals howling and wailing almost operatically, before lurching into some rad atonal krauty, fusiony, jazzy, hypno groove skitter. The second track, another Circle classic, and live staple, "Nopeuskuningas", explodes right out of the gate, with its chugging almost surfy, ZZ Top-ish boogie riff, locked in groove, the whole thing stretched out over the remainder of the side, the band solid, and hypnotic, and intense, and rocking and tight as fuck. Their showstopper for sure, and it clearly did the job at this show as well.
Heavy vinyl, super swank skull jacket, and most definitely LIMITED.
A long lost Circle album??! Sort of. One of Circle's best albums?! Definitely. The deal with Taantumus is that it came out on the Finnish label Bad Vugum back in 2001, falling betwixt Prospekt and Sunrise (approximately, it's hard to keep track) in the ever-expanding Circle discography. At the time, there was talk of Taantumus getting a domestic release in the US, so we never imported any copies from overseas. Well, that domestic release never ever happened, but thankfully, years and years later, this amazing "lost" (to most folks outside of Finland, anyway) Circle album has been reissued by the band's own Ektro label, now crowned with the 9:21 bonus track "Veitsi"!
Now, you should already be aware we LOVE this hypnotic Finnish space/prog/psych/metal/kraut band. If we could marry them, we would! So of course we're excited by any release of theirs. However, this one is definitely extra-deserving of Record Of The Week honors, as it's really one of their best efforts (though we'd be hard pressed to agree upon a definitive Circle top ten, let's not get sidetracked).
One listen should convince. To one track, even. The first track, "Kultaa", that's IT. Right there. Damn. Hit Circle song, in the universe where Circle could have hit songs, which is our universe, as far as we're concerned. Boom boom on the floor tom, the guitars hitting the same chord over and over again. Repetition, repetition, repetition. But utterly energizing and maddeningly catchy. And then, the vocals - Meronian monks whooping it up.
Track two, "Kekkone", tick tock drums and electronic flutter, with melodic guitar lines tiptoeing across the stereo field... utterly exquisite! Track three, "Valtaisa Hahmo", another monster motorik HIT. With whistling FLUTE, well maybe it's a recorder, and droning synths. Track four... well heck we're not gonna go through 'em all. What's the point, you already know you want this, right?? So get it and listen for yourself, at home, cranked up LOUD. (Not that this is loud music, per se, some of it sure is, but lots of it is subtle, stuff that if listened to at volume will simply allow one to more easily bask in its glory). That way you can find out about the kick ass harmonica jam of track 9, "Morn", all on your own. (Shades of Itavayla there.)
Rest assured, Taantumus is stocked with plenty of Circle's trademark mantric riffs, throbbing bass, precision timekeeping, cosmic shimmer, and curious noise. OK, we'll mention a few more of the many treats to be found on this 66 minute disc... Track 5, "Suopea", brings in extra distortion and heaviness, contrasted with a haunting vocal choir that floats over, of course, a tight percolating rhythm. Track 7, "Lyhytaallosta", is a slab of bass heavy angular postpunk, Circle style, with chiming no-wavey guitars and deepvoiced Viking vox - plus weird glitch and gurgle. Into the more "metal" side of Circle? Try track 10, "Siivet", a killer "speedkraut" cut foreshadowing their later Panic disc, albeit with piano. And Mika's operatic vocals, something first unleashed on the preceding Prospekt disc. Heavier still is "Pelqton", which sounds like Circle doing abstract Isis... but, again, with piano. Oh, and yeah the bonus track is awesome too. Droning density that skitters into deep grooves with some near spoken singing. Actually, elsewhere on the album there's mysterious vocal bits in the background that somehow sound like they could be a song from The Mighty Boosh, if you are familiar with that British TV comedy you'll be scratching your head too.
So, wow. This is the sort of album that leaves us puzzled - why isn't Circle the biggest band in the world? (Maybe they really HAVE hypnotized us.) But really, aside from being really WEIRD, and not widely released, you'd have thought that an album like this would have made Circle megasuperduper stars. I mean really, what do they gotta do, besides being one of the best bands ever? You think that'd be enough. You'd think Taantumus would be enough. Well whatever, in our universe it is.
Originally a cd released on Last Visible Dog back in 2006, Tower has now gotten a super swank vinyl reissue on Full Contact, a label run by Jussi from Circle (the vinyl-only offshoot of his Ektro label). And in typical Circle fashion, the sleeve of this new version has been updated with the self deprecatingly boastful legend: *Slightly disappointing jams from 2006 by "The Best Band In The World 2010"*
Haha!
So here's what WE had to say about Tower when first listed it way back in 2007...
What? Another disc ALREADY from our favorite Finnish psych/space/prog/metal/drone/wtf? rockers, the one and only Circle? Good grief, we're still reeling from their amazing Miljard two cd set on Ektro, and their even more recent, mindblowing Tyrant disc in the limited edition Latitudes series! Who do they think they are, Acid Mothers Temple?
But we can't complain, who wants to wait when a new Circle is concerned?? Especially when we're all trying to keep up with (as it says on the face of this cd) the "NWONWOFHM", in other words, the "New Wave Of" the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal"... which, as it turns out, isn't in any way metal at all! Nope, the all-instrumental Tower follows Miljard in exploring the really really pretty side of the Circle sound. But unlike Miljard, which was slowly unfolding, almost stately, Tower has much more of an uptempo, rapid pulse.
The album seems to divide into two parts. The first four tracks flow together in sort of suite, burbling beautifully and hypnotically...just so so pleasant. No heavy riffs, nothing edgy at all. Then there's a pause, and the remaining two tracks reveal something of a darker, more mysterious sound. Just a bit though, like a bright sunny day edging towards twilight, the knowledge of the coming night starting to seep into one's consciousness, some clouds drifting in as well, but the sun still shining...
Also, you'll note that this album is billed to Circle "featuring Verde" - referring to special guest Mika Rintala, who has played with Circle and their jazzier cousin Ektroverde as well, and whose solo albums, recorded under the Verde monicker, we've raved about here before. We're not sure how to judge the "Verde-factor" here, but we do note that in addition to playing on this album he also recorded and mixed it. Maybe this does remind us a bit of some of Ektroverde's output, come to think of it... there's definitely a spaced-out, jazzy fusion groove here, of shuffling drums and chiming synths, that makes for a relaxing soundtrack we wouldn't feel foolish recommending to fans of The Necks and Miles Davis as well as Ektroverde, Verde and Circle too of course...
Now we wonder, what will the NWONWONWOFMHM be like? At this rate, chances are we'll find out sometime soon...
Yeah, we know, Christmas is over, but you can keep that Christmas spirit alive with this super limited collaborative one sided, single song 7" from the Crocodiles and Dum Dum Girls, a gorgeous, darkly dreamy, fuzzed out, echo drenched Christmas classic if there ever was one. The guitars are blown out, the drums massive, LOTS of feedback, the production total sixties wall of sound, noisy and fuzzy but warm and woozy, with dueling boy / girl vocals, some wild squalls of psychedelic guitars, and a dreamy crazy catchy chorus. Maybe a stocking stuffer for NEXT Christmas?
Either way, you better act fast, we have just SIX copies left. It was LIMITED TO 300 COPIES (each one hand numbered of course), and is already sold out and out of print. Which means you better grab one of these before they're gone, or at least try...
When we travel, record shopping plays a huge part in our planning. We're guessing the same is true of many (most?) of you. Not only do we typically have various stores we want to check out, we also have a list, with all the stuff we've been looking for forever, and while we may have scoured our local stores looking for stuff on that list, in the hopes that something might pop up, it's when we go someplace new, when we really expect to get lucky. When Andee went to Finland a few years back, he was lucky enough to have Jussi from Circle as his host, who is legendarily obsessed with record shopping (and who on his last visit to San Francisco, went record shopping EVERY SINGLE DAY!), and Jussi was tasked with helping Andee find two things at the top of his Finland-specific list, a single from Finnish dirge rockers Worms, and any or all of the three singles from legendary Finnish punks Death Trip.
Thus, this is pretty exciting - here we have the COMPLETE recorded works of Death Trip, released on Jussi's Ektro Records, and barring a trip to Finland and much crate digging, this is the only way you're gonna get to hear this stuff, and even then, besides the six songs from those three singles, there are EIGHT bonus tracks, available only here: six rare live recordings and two unreleased demos! And while Death Trip were punk, they weren't necessarily 'punk rock', their sound was almost more Stooges-y, all sludgey and dirgey, with a crazy lead vocalist, Laja Aijala from Finnish punk legends Terveet Kadet, and who slips from guttural yowl to hysterical shriek, it's easy to see why Jussi would be obsessed with these guys, heck, why anyone would be. Their namesake song "Death Trip" is total swaggery glam blues slither, with some wild shredding guitars and those twisted vox, it's from 1988, but the sound is total nineties noise rock. Albeit a weirdly minimal punky proto-noise rock. "We're Gonna Die Tonight" begins with weird synth buzz and twisted weirdo vocals, which goes on for a whole minute before the band kicks in, sounding a bit like Hanoi Rocks, but still with those bizarre vocals. Here's where we pause, and say, if we didn't know better, and didn't know for a fact that Death Trip were a real band, we'd be tempted to think it as another Jussi / Circle project, like Steel Mammoth or Mercedes Hell or something. At the very least, it's easy to see where Circle and Co. got much of their inspiration.
"Chainsaw Goddess" is all Loop / Spacemen 3 guitars wedded to punk rock beats, swirling synths and more feral vox, while, "Deep Red" is total tripped out punk doom, with even MORE unhinged vox, dirgey and noisy and super heavy. "Please Skin Me Alive" is total noisy post punk / noise rock crush, with wah wah guitars, a seriously Stoogesy main riff, and finally "Something" is all low slung bass, another dirgey groove that reminds us of Green River or Skin Yard more than proper punk rock, which is probably why we love this stuff so much. Those of you who remember the band Smack, who were sort of a glammy, trashy rock band from Finland, there's actually a surprising amount of sonic overlap, with much of Death Trip's sound verring into the almost grungy/glammy. It's only six songs, but most bands would kill for a body of work half this ruling.
Then there are the live tracks, which are super blown out and lo-fi, noisy and chaotic, one of 'em an altered Stooges cover in fact, with some of the tracks getting stretched way out into sprawling dirges, and the two demos are great too, for tracks which were never properly recorded, and while super raw and lo-fi, still sound just as kick ass as the singles tracks proper.
Gorgeously packaged too, with a huge booklet, filled with loads of rare photos, track notes and old reviews (all in Finnish).
Probably one of the most anticipated records around here recently, the sprawling QUADRUPLE 12" epic from hauntological duo Demdike Stare. These, the first two 12"s are available now, released in a massive quadruple gatefold book-style jacket, which could be what accounts for the price. Sorta steep for sure, but the idea is that parts 3 & 4 will be released soon too, and can be housed in this very same jacket, so theoretically, those will be significantly cheaper (we hope). And while there WILL be a double cd version available in the next year as well, according to the label, apparently the music will be (somehow?) different, with altered version of the songs. Sheesh. It's almost like something Boris would do!
Anyway, Elemental is a four part songsuite, Chrysanthe, Violetta, Rose and Iris, each one pressed on a different color vinyl, and if these first two parts are anything to go on, the new sound is seriously dark, much more industrial sounding, the vibe blackened, the sounds layered and way more dense.
Part one opens with "Mephisto's Lament", which is all foghorn buzz, deep whirring drones, keening high end melodic fragments, murky buried rhythms, peppered with creepy synth squelches, and when the song gets rolling, it's almost like a hauntological SUNNO))), the same sort of roiling downtuned heaviness, but here stretched into something a bit more sinister and abstract, almost like the soundtrack for some subterranean factory, all rumble and clang, all shadows and very little light. The flipside starts with "Kommunion", a lush looped slow build, all repeated piano motifs wreathed in chanted vocals, all blurred into fuzzy soft focus swells, the sound suddenly expanding into a blisteringly blown out in-the-red buzz, a swoonsome melody hidden in there somewhere, the sound slipping from caustic and crunchy to blurred and murky, before switching gears completely, lacing a sprawl of staticky hiss to a skeletal trip hop pulse, extra percussion provided by found sounds, clatter and crunch, atonal piano, all woven into a strange almost Art Of Noise sounding beat. The B side finishes off with "Unction", a super creepy stretch of undulating lowend, demarcated with a strange sonar ping rhythm, one that is quickly augmented by a twisted effected croaking frog skitter, and another beat seemingly assembled from the sounds of workman scraping and dragging, a crunchy noisy lurching groove, that is soon overtaken by another cloud of reverberating pianos, which finishes off the side with a coda of swirling minimal washed out thrum.
The second part, Violetta, begins with "Mnemosyne", a blissed out sun dappled bit of witch house-y skitter, all hazy and gauzy and dreamlike, until a sudden burst of clattery noisy rhythmic crunch changes everything, and then assembles itself into a strange lumbering cacophonous beat, the sound eventually underpinned by some Eastern style folk music, which drifts briefly, before that clattery beat crashes back in, now accompanied by that Eastern melody, sounding like a weirdly stuttery bit of gypsy electro. The flipside starts off with "In The Wake Of Chronos", which opens with some distant mysterious melodies, some sprinkler like textures, some super minimal skeletal skitter, and some seriously deep bass thrum, the minimal drift soon peppered with short sharp bursts of metallic crunch, clipped bits of hiss and skree sculpted into a sort-of-beat, also soon joined by tinkling melodies, wreathed in echo, the sound gradually expanding, and becoming more and more lush, that beat drifting off, leaving the various other sounds to shimmer and hover ethereally over a blackened backdrop of blurred hum. And finally, Violetta finishes off with the title track, a soft cacophony of pounded piano, the chords allowed to ring out and slowly fade, all subtly warped, an ominous sort of avant classical doom, laced with little sonic squiggles, and wreathed in clouds of hiss and static, soon those little squiggles transform into beats, a wild chaotic looped rhythm, which is strangely at odds with that funereal piano, still pounding away in the background, a twisted bit of hauntological IDM, the piano subtly replaced by a hazy sprawl of synth simmer, which is left to fade out once the beat drops off, a thick swirling final movement, washed out and woozy. Look out for some hidden locked grooves too.
Definitely a lot different than past Demdike records, but we're digging it, a lot. If you want it on vinyl, you're definitely gonna want to get these first two parts before they run out, and as far as we know, this is the only way to get the jacket that houses all four parts. Asking us to put your name down to preorder parts 3 & 4 would also probably be a good idea...
Yet another band from Brooklyn, who seem to have mastered that eighties shoegaze / new wave sound, and these guys might be the best yet. Featuring members of aQ faves the Smith Westerns Dive offer up a gorgeous A side, all warm and jangly, lush chiming melodies, super washed out and blissy, driving and minimal, the sort of song that could go on for a whole lp side and we'd never get tired of it. The flipside is a bit more downtempo, a little moodier, with some gorgeous darkly driving basslines, and some hazy ethereal vocals, gorgeously fuzzy and woozy, still shot through with those chiming melodies from the A side. Definitely dying for a full length, as it is, been playing these two songs to death!
Of Dust's two albums, this 1972 LP is considered the harder of the two, the more metal, the somewhat more Sabbathian. "Downer rock" they called it back then (we're told). Their song "Suicide" (track 9) -- whooah, that could be Pentagram! This track alone makes this an essential purchase for any true doom/psych fan. It's an all time classic. Between that and the awesome Frank Frazetta cover painting, what more could you want?
But it's not all doom n' gloom n' barbarians -- "Hard Attack" has its lighter side, but unlike a lot of their peers, the poppier and/or less rockin' stuff Dust do is actually really great. Sure, a song like "Thusly Spoken" features strings and a Beatlesy melody, but the lyrics still name-check Satan and speak of dancing demons. Lush, gorgeous downer-pop that sets you up to be crushed by the following, urgently hard-rockin' track "Learning To Die". They do that throughout the album, alternating gentle -- even acoustic -- numbers with the proto-metal workouts that the headbangers of 1972 must have loved.
It's hard to understand why Dust didn't "make" it, as this stuff is certainly the equal of big sellers from their era by Deep Purple or Uriah Heep. Great singing, riffs, melodies, and that "feel" -- it's all here.
We mentioned Pentagram above -- if you bought that awesome Relapse label anthology of Pentagram's original seventies recordings that we recommended a few lists back, you should definitely check out the work of Dust, who were both contemporaries of and an influence on the Ram's Head boys. Dust are an important name on the list of forgotten but godlike '70s hard rock bands that make today's so-called stoner rockers sound like punk wanna-bes (bands like Lucifer's Friend, Highway Robbery, Orang-utan, Toad, Budgie, Sir Lord Baltimore, Captain Beyond, Leafhound, etc.). In a word (again): classic. Too bad you'll never hear 'em on your local "classic rock" radio station...
Not a new release, but listed for the first time 'cause we love it: The American hard rock trio known as Dust are another of those legendary early '70s bands that get mentioned in the same breath with heavies like Captain Beyond, Sir Lord Baltimore, The James Gang, Bang, and the like. They cut two excellent LPs of late-psychedelic-era proto-metal back in '71 and '72. This the first, self-titled one, and of their two albums, this one's swampier, with a lot of slide and country/southern rock moves on tracks like "Stone Woman" and "Chasin' Ladies". But then there's the lugubrious and weighty 10-minute epic "From A Dry Camel" and the gentle acoustic dreaminess of "Often Shadows Felt". Mostly, though, the album kicks ass with uptempo hard rockers. Maybe they could be considered the American version of Nazareth (with vocals somewhat less soaked in whiskey). What we're saying is: pretty great!
Dust features the future Marky Ramone on drums, by the way, before he decided punk was the way to go.
Seems like no matter what, there's always some obscure gem left out there to be dug up and reissued, you've never heard it all. Here's the latest example, a reissue of a 1976 album with a promising title and equally alluring cover art. Electronic Mind Waves by Italy's mysterious Elektrikus (aka one Andrea Centazzo) is indeed pretty awesome, as a lone offering naturally touching on both the traditions of Italian prog and Germanic "kosmische" electronics, especially heavily influenced it would seem by the latter.
While over the years Centazzo has apparently made other albums, of improvised avant-garde jazz, collaborating with the likes of Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and ROVA, under his one-off Elektrikus guise (as might be expected) he concentrated on synthesizer-based keyboard music, creating hypnotic (and sometimes haunting) electro-acoustic soundscapes of abstract droning synths and sequencer patterns, also employing tinkling bells, tape effects, and on one track, upright bass.
There's eight tracks here, 38 minutes of his shimmering, ringing, burbling sounds that wouldn't sound out of place on the score to some strange sci-fi flick. Fans of Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze should definitely check this out... For an Italian comparison, maybe some Franco Battiato? It also reminds us of a variety of more current underground acts, at moments like Vibracathedra Orchestra, or Kemialliset Ystavat, or something on Spectrum Spools, perhaps!
Kinda disappointed that this turned out to be a cd-r, though. We thought it was a real cd at first, it's in a jewel case and totally pro-printed with color artwork and all. Not sure why they didn't make it a real cd (and it's NOT a bootleg, Ictus is Centazzo's own label, started in the '70s and reactivated recently). Oh well, still neat to have!
2nd mortuary slab from this doom/death duo whose 2010 debut, Ritual Ascension Beyond Flesh, proved deservedly popular 'round these parts, with the underground abuzz about it like flies on a corpse. If you liked that, you know what to expect from this sequel, which is equally up to snuff in terms of old school slowed-down, doomed-out death metal sickness.
If you haven't encountered Encoffination before, you know the old adage? "Only death is real." That's what death metal is always all about, right? A lot of death metal is specifically about the moment and manner of death; unnatural death, the gory act of killing in war and crimes of violence, bloodthirsty horrors. But some bands take other approaches - Carcass ferinstance infamous for their clinical, medical lyrics. And Encoffination, as you might surmise from their name, are about death itself, and what happens afterwards... no, not so much regarding the soul's journey into the afterlife (if any), but what happens to the physical form of the body after death, the ceremonial rites and rituals of our culture, about embalming and burial and so forth, and the meaning of such... Dust to dust, flesh to filth, that sort of thing. Although all that is part of sending the soul where it is supposed to "go" as well.
Therefore, song titles include "Rites of Ceremonial Embalm'ment", "Elegant in Their Funebrial Cloaks, Arisen", and "Washed and Buried". Encoffination's obsession here is part metaphysical, part aesthetic, and part professional - as one of the band members is studying to become a mortician!
So unlike most death metal, this is so much aggressive, then, than rather almost literally funereal. Fuzzed out, full of painful feedback and tolling bells, the hoarse, fetid crypt-breath vokills but another layer of many beneath which the listener is sonically, symbolically buried.
So very serious and gloomy, and gorgeous, if you dig it. It's all about atmosphere for sure, Encoffination's songs and riffs subservient to the sounds, towards the totality of effect of the entirely of the record. It's all one ritual, from first track to last (the 10+ minute "Annunciation of the Viscera"). Imagine "typical" death metal, but at 16rpm... on downers... with production by Leland Kirby, 'cause there's often ambient crackle like you're listening to a scratchy old lp... though in comparison to the debut, the production here is perhaps thicker and fuller and even more miasmal, heavy-ing 'em up a few notches in that dep't. Quite an experience.
And once again, the cd booklet is beautifully designed, also the work of band member Ghoat (the mortician-in-training).
So, enough. If you're still reading, you probably already love this band as much as they love the dead...
The latest release from Mr. Bryan Pyle, one half of the Starving Weirdos, as well as one half of RV paintings, both groups who we've raved about in the past, as is the case with Pyle's solo project, Ensemble Economique, whose sound is even more difficult to pin down than either of his other two groups. Both the Starving Weirdos and RV paintings seem to be cut from the same sonic cloth, the difference seemingly being that the SW stuff is roughly torn, while the RV Paintings is delicately cut, the former trafficking in a sort of ramshackle experimental droned out abstract ambience, while the latter, dials back the ramshackle, and deftly weaves in field recordings and produces something much warmer and pastoral. Needless to say, we're huge fans of both. Pyle on his own, is all over the place, incorporating obviously elements of both SW and RV, but definitely doing his own idiosyncratic thing, whether it be progged out krautpsych electronics, dark synth-croon songsmithery, filmic melancholia or dense layered dronemusic, so we were definitely prepared for Pyle to throw us a curve ball with this new one, his first for Dekorder. And we were not disappointed. Not one bit. Opener "Heat Waves" sounds remarkably like Salem, straight up witch house, all fuzzy sun dappled synths, those skeletal crunked out handclap rhythms, some very John Carpenter like melodies, but Pyle definitely makes it his own, adding strange flurries of percussion, stretches those synths out into something a bit dronier, but regardless, Salem fans might find themselves flipping out. "Vanishing Point" dials back the witchiness a bit, but it's still all synthy and drum machiney, very retro eighties, a little bit of that synthdrag we dig so much, but with lush string laden swells, and darkly delicate melodies. And so goes the rest of the records, a songsuite of witchy cinematic eighties retro-futurism, but Pyle definitely is a master, transforming what in lesser hands could be bandwagon jumping, into something all his own, mixing in some downtempo Portishead style grooviness, loads of texture, subtle percussion, the vibe haunting and ominous, even hearing a little Barry Adamson here and there, that same sort of faux soundtrack Adamson did so well. But here it's a bit more twisted, the sound seeming to revisit that Salem-y witch housiness throughout, but on tracks like "Everything I Have, I Give To You", making something new and exciting and sonically compelling, out of a sound that's been done to death, and in doing so, creating his own genre, which is basically what he seems to do with every record. Borrowing a little, but then basically tangling and twisting it all up until it's totally unrecognizable.
This might just be our favorite EE record yet, but pretty sure we say that about every one.
Absolutely RIYL Salem, Umberto, Dylan Ettinger, Xander Harris, Roll The Dice and various other purveyors of witchy / synthy / retro sounds...
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
This sixties electronic kids' classic reissued on vinyl!! Here's our review from when we listed the (now out of print) import cd version way back in 2004:
There was a time not too long ago when Bruce Haack was simply an anomalous footnote in the history of electronic music. But thanks to the rise of (for the lack of a more specific term) experimental music and the good folks making it, the gospel was spread and steps were taken to lift Haack's dedicated life's work out of the doomed classification of 'incredibly strange music'. In the late '90s, a vinyl reissue of Haack's legendary Electric Lucifer album appeared. Then in 1999, the QDK and Emperor Norton labels issued separate compilations of tracks selected from Haack's massive oeuvre: Hush Little Robot and Listen Compute Rock Home, respectively. These compilations featured a huge chunk of material originally released on Haack's own Dimension 5 imprint (with Listen Compute Rock Home being tagged as a D5 'best-of'), and set off a new generation of record geeks and purveyors of oddly adventurous sounds on the lookout for the original small press lps.
Introduced in 1963, Dimension 5 was a project created by Haack to reach children, as he believed that music could be a powerfully communicative, and ultimately educational, tool. Along with a host of guest musicians and educators (most notably Miss Esther Nelson), D5 set out to create inspiring and imaginative recordings - both sonically and narratively - for children of all ages. Having issued eleven lps over a span of thirteen years, Dimension 5 is certainly a musical phenomenon worth investigating itself, in addition to the other works of Bruce Haack. So here's 1969's The Electronic Record For Children, which just might be the best of the bunch.
This album is credited to Bruce Haack, but also prominently features Miss Nelson. Like the title implies, there is an emphasis on the use of electronics, but the narrative certainly doesn't take a back seat here. There are songs that are indirectly of an educational nature: "First Lady" is a skit in the style of a television game show in which a young girl lists off the names of the US presidents in chronological order, set to a robotic rhythm. Simple enough, but when the host asks the girl to recite the names in reverse order, Haack flips the tape backward, splices and cranks it - a total mindfuck for kids! Other 'lessons' teach us about rhythmics ("Clapping With Katy"), the compositional use of call and response ("Echo") and the life and daily routines of arachnids ("Spiders"). Inspired by the classes that Miss Nelson and Bruce once taught is the activity song "Dance", a Raymond Scott-fueled rollercoaster ride with wacked out helium vocals. But what stands out most for me on this recording are the songs of an abstract nature. "Mara's Mood" tells the story of 'a boy who tried to grasp the moon' over a loop of fuzzed out psychedelic guitar and synth. "Upside Down" could easily be mistaken for late sixties era British psychedelia a la Twink or Floyd. Quintron fans just might toss out their Quintron records when they hear the completely insane organ and rhythm box track credited, incredibly, to the Planet Of Singing Mice's Greek Cathedral Childrens' Mouse Choir, "Saint Basil". Definitely one of the better of the Dimension 5 releases, though there's something for everyone throughout all of their wondrous recordings!
Most folks probably know of this Chicago trio by way of Steven Hess, who besides playing in Haptic, also plays in black metal / drone combo Locrian. And the sound of Haptic is occasionally not that far removed from the dronier side of Locrian. We reviewed Haptic's The Medium lp a while back, and were pretty taken by its dark minimalism, and rhythmic dronescapes. And while the sound on Scilens is definitely similar, the list of instruments takes up almost the whole inside of the J-card, and while it would take up way too much space here to list ALL the instruments used, a list of highlights might just prove enlightening: sparklers, strobe light, tuning forks, wine glass, wire brush, wooden clothespin, sand, sewing machine, electric fan, fabric, hurdy gurdy, leaf, marbles, metronome, paper, and then there's all manner of pianos and drums and effects and tape recorders and record players, found sounds, field recordings, harmonicas, guitars, basses, well you get the drift, that's a whole lot of stuff to make a record so hushed and minimal. The A side opens with a killer bit of dense drumming, but after that, the sound slips back down to a near whisper, distant drones, hushed minimal shimmer, all manner of random sounds, running water, scraped strings, chordal whir, sine wave like tones, rumbling SUNNO))) like buzz, hazy soft focus whirs, brief bursts of industrial clatter, lush lovely swirls and lots and lots of near silence. Not so much about music making, or song composition, instead, the three guys in Haptic are creating miniature soundworlds, imaginary installations, evoking all manner of images via deftly arranged objects, and the seemingly incidental sounds they produce, the fact that this is all surprisingly listenable speaks volumes about their skills as soundmakers. A gorgeous, abstract, challenging listen for sure. But one that fans of ultra minimalism, abstract dronemusic and lowercase sound will no doubt find quite satisfying.
Horrid Red can hardly be qualified as a side-project anymore, but pretty much everything born from the twisted vision of Glenn Donaldson is in a constant transformation from one aesthetic strain and/or band to another. Horrid Red emerged out of the creative overload of Teenage Panzerkorps through the talents of Donaldson (here cloaked in the guise of Edmund Xavier) and the Teutonic punk vocalist Bunker Wolf. Where Der TPK blasted outward as a furiously darkened drone-punk, Horrid Red sought more of an elegant take on the post-punk agenda with Factory inspired synths and Death In June's urgent acoustic guitars; but those megaphone vocals from Bunker Wolf on all of the Horrid Red and Der TPK recordings make the projects somewhat interchangable and just goddamn great! Celestial Joy is the second record in about twelve months for Horrid Red, following Der TPK's impressive German Reggae and a 'singles' collection; and this album finds Burial Hex's Clay Ruby joining the fray. Some of the songs on Celestial Joy seek a minimal-wave brightness such as on the skittering groove of "Marble Staircase, III" complete with electric piano lines and Bunker Wolf crooning the vocals instead of barking them through a megaphone. "Nothing In My Heart" cops a few choice guitar licks from The Cure's "In Between Days." But other tracks sport the bass-driven punk propulsive favored by Der TPK, such as "Men And Sand" and the death-disco vibes on the title track.
The Holiday Records vinyl version of Celestial Joy is limited to 400 copies and comes with a much nicer print-job on the artwork than the domestic version, hence the higher price.
Horrid Red can hardly be qualified as a side-project anymore, but pretty much everything born from the twisted vision of Glenn Donaldson is in a constant transformation from one aesthetic strain and/or band to another. Horrid Red emerged out of the creative overload of Teenage Panzerkorps through the talents of Donaldson (here cloaked in the guise of Edmund Xavier) and the Teutonic punk vocalist Bunker Wolf. Where Der TPK blasted outward as a furiously darkened drone-punk, Horrid Red sought more of an elegant take on the post-punk agenda with Factory inspired synths and Death In June's urgent acoustic guitars; but those megaphone vocals from Bunker Wolf on all of the Horrid Red and Der TPK recordings make the projects somewhat interchangable and just goddamn great! Celestial Joy is the second record in about twelve months for Horrid Red, following Der TPK's impressive German Reggae and a 'singles' collection; and this album finds Burial Hex's Clay Ruby joining the fray. Some of the songs on Celestial Joy seek a minimal-wave brightness such as on the skittering groove of "Marble Staircase, III" complete with electric piano lines and Bunker Wolf crooning the vocals instead of barking them through a megaphone. "Nothing In My Heart" cops a few choice guitar licks from The Cure's "In Between Days." But other tracks sport the bass-driven punk propulsive favored by Der TPK, such as "Men And Sand" and the death-disco vibes on the title track.
The Holiday Records vinyl version of Celestial Joy is limited to 400 copies and comes with a much nicer print-job on the artwork than the domestic version, hence the higher price.
Horrid Red can hardly be qualified as a side-project anymore, but pretty much everything born from the twisted vision of Glenn Donaldson is in a constant transformation from one aesthetic strain and/or band to another. Horrid Red emerged out of the creative overload of Teenage Panzerkorps through the talents of Donaldson (here cloaked in the guise of Edmund Xavier) and the Teutonic punk vocalist Bunker Wolf. Where Der TPK blasted outward as a furiously darkened drone-punk, Horrid Red sought more of an elegant take on the post-punk agenda with Factory inspired synths and Death In June's urgent acoustic guitars; but those megaphone vocals from Bunker Wolf on all of the Horrid Red and Der TPK recordings make the projects somewhat interchangable and just goddamn great! Celestial Joy is the second record in about twelve months for Horrid Red, following Der TPK's impressive German Reggae and a 'singles' collection; and this album finds Burial Hex's Clay Ruby joining the fray. Some of the songs on Celestial Joy seek a minimal-wave brightness such as on the skittering groove of "Marble Staircase, III" complete with electric piano lines and Bunker Wolf crooning the vocals instead of barking them through a megaphone. "Nothing In My Heart" cops a few choice guitar licks from The Cure's "In Between Days." But other tracks sport the bass-driven punk propulsive favored by Der TPK, such as "Men And Sand" and the death-disco vibes on the title track.
The Holiday Records vinyl version of Celestial Joy is limited to 400 copies and comes with a much nicer print-job on the artwork than the domestic version, hence the higher price.
It's been a while since we've heard from House Of Low Culture, the one man experimental / drone / soundscaping project of Aaron Turner, he of Hydra Head Records, Sige Records, Mammifer, Isis, Twilight, etc. This one man band, now augmented by Turner's wife Faith Coloccia, has definitely blossomed into something much more abstract and minimal, at least in the opening few minutes. After some haunting monk-like vocal chants, the sounds unfurls as a super minimal expanse of barely audible sine waves, distant rumbling thrum, streaks of shortwave static, seemingly gone are the creeping low end dronedrifts of early HOLC records, the sound here is way more academic, think John Duncan or Francisco Lopez, there are some fragmented melodic moments, but sans headphones, this might be an impossible listen in a world full of ambient sounds. But the tracks here are long, so there is lots of ground to cover, and after about 6 minutes, some guitar drifts into the picture, but just barely, it's not for another few minutes, until the song proper begins, and weirdly it's a strange sort of slowcore doom, all minimal drumming, super distorted crooned vox, somber melodies, it's like a super abstract experimental Codeine, which is definitely a good thing. The rest of the record flits from hushed shimmer, to squalls of caustic noise and back again, before leading into the second track, which again begins life as a hushed glitch laced drift, before thick droned out guitars and more crooned vox surface, and then the song explodes into some strange sort of abstract pop, but very briefly, and rendered in shades of grey and black and skree, before slipping back into long stretches of deep thrum and staticky buzz, all underpinned by a muted percussive rhythm and some softly swirling disembodied vocals and gristly minimal effects.
The record finishes off with the 21+ minute "Inappropriate Body", which begins with some almost playful sounding percussion, still wreathed in crackle and static, only to give way to more drift and blur, more near silence, and pizzicato melodies, strange bursts of garbled voices, bits of skree, and more chantlike vocals, blasts of whitenoise, lush choral drifts, and finally some creeping slo-mo metallich churn, the track more like some music concrete meander, an expansive abstract sonic exploration, loosely woven into some sort of avant sonic narrative that may have Isis fans and Hydra Head obsessives scratching their chins, but has the rest of us laying in the dark, headphones strapped on tight.
Gorgeous super minimal packaging too.
Norwegian label Miasmah has long been home to a stable of artists creating the sorts of sounds we can't ever seem to get enough of: dark, brooding, electronic flecked hauntological cinematic soundscapes, and late night mysterious classical infused dronemusic, artists like Elegi, Macus Fjellstrom, Gultskra Artikler, FNS, Kreng, Jasper TX, and of course Jacaszek, aka Polish electro-acoustic composer and soundscaper Michal Jacaszek, and while Jacaszek only made one record for Miasmah, it was such a perfect fit, that it was easy to imagine Jacaszek as emblematic of the label's sound. But here we are a few years later, and Jacaszek has already moved on to a new label, but thankfully taken that 'Miasmah' sound with him. And if anything, this new one is even more fully realized than Treny, which was already a unanimous aQ fave. And really how could it not be? Like Treny before it, Glimmer unfurls a ghostly world of blur and shadow, of hum and thrum and glitch and crackle. Operating in a darkened world not that far removed from the Caretaker or Philip Jeck or Demdike Stare, albeit with a bit more of a classical bent, Jacaszek conjures up haunting brooding soundworlds of lush shimmering strings, of echo drenched harpsichord, of woozy loops and hazy staticky record crackle, soft slow swells, that grow so distorted and intense, they slip easily into the red, transforming into something much more harrowing than the music of many of his sonic brethren. The sound threatening to collapse or explode, an urgent pulsing, nearly grinding buzz, that as quickly as it blossomed, seems to slip right back into languid expanses of soft focus drift. Horns and strings, acoustic guitars, all layered delicately into creaking faded stretched of hushed mesmer, an old timey chamber music, transmitted from the other side, much of the sound damaged and decayed as it crossed over, resulting in some darkly alien dronescaping, that slips easily from warped, looped murky moody ooze, to lush, almost pop flecked cinematic post classical drift, the sound at either end of that sonic spectrum flecked with bits of glitch, and audio detritus, the sound seeming to gradually fade and flake as the record spins, almost as if on the next play, it would sound even more washed out and hazy.
There are moments where the sound coalesce into something much more polished, and more traditionally musical, but even then, the music is underpinned by an ominous foreboding, wreathed in strange muted loops, and mysterious sonic fragments, as if being listened to through some sort of dusty old sonic veil, loveliness gradually darkening, shadows lengthening, melodies unwinding and growing subtly more menacing, the recording revealing more and more crackle, swirls of hiss like little dustdevils, all woven into some sort of otherworldly funereal threnody, dreamlike and lovely, but always on the verge of drawing the listener into the mysterious dark place from which these haunting sounds emanate...
Sparks fans: Alert! You should hear Jet.
No, not the contemporary Aussie rockers. This Jet, an English band, blasts in from the wonderful, glam rock '70s, and was a short-lived semi-super-group of sorts featuring ex-members of The Nice, John's Children, Sparks, Jook, and Roxy Music. (And after Jet's brief career, some of the band later went on to form new wavers Radio Stars.)
This deluxe double cd reissue consists of Jet's self-titled, sole album, originally released on CBS in 1975, on disc one; while disc two, entitled More Light Than Shade, collects various demos, live cuts (including a few from a recent reunion), and other rare odds n' sods. You're getting the complete Jet package here, and then some, in other words.
And for another word, how 'bout: WHOO! 'Cause this is certainly an over the top, energetic display of power pop / glam rock capabilities of the highest order. Quite catchy, quirky, clever, and theatrically Queen-like (none other than Roy Thomas Baker produced their lp), Jet thus also come across as more than a lot like Sparks, no surprise there really, as two of the gents in Jet were part of the Mael brothers' band's UK lineup at one point, including bassist Martin Gordon, the main songwriter in the Jet crew. Then there's the precious high vox of Andy Ellison (who sang in John's Children alongside a pre-T.Rex Marc Bolan), sounding a heckuva lot like Russell Mael from Sparks. Mix that up with the loud shining guitar licks, and fancy studio tricks, some ritzy-glitzy piano and infectious melodiousness, and, ta-dah!, this reish is an awesome find for anyone into early Sparks, The Sweet, 10cc, The Quick, and other fave glam jams of the era. So glad for the reissue, Jet shouldn't be so obscure. Nicely packaged with full liner notes, etc. And dig that awesome retro sci-fi cover art. Ah, the '70s!
Though we sadly haven't been able to get copies of the first Kaleidoscope album on cd of late (the one entitled Tangerine Dream, not to be confused with the krautrock band of that name), we are very happy to now have copies of this perfectly twee UK psych pop combo's recently reissued second album, 1969's Faintly Blowing! And it comes in a nice digipack with six bonus tracks! Now if only we had some tea and crumpets we'd be all supercalifragilistic. Ahem.
Kaleidoscope were one of the best unsung post-Peppers British psych-pop acts. This one carries on from their first (a solid AQ fave) with more of the same delightful dreamy oh-so-melodic and lysergically lyricized pop psyke, some of the best ever in our humble opinion. Orchestrated, emotive, shoulda-been-hits abound, along with some way-out psychedelic experimentation. The Kaleidoscope story continued into the proggy '70s with a name change to Fairfield Parlour but Faintly Blowing was really their last colourful hurrah of dainty dandy '60s poppiness.
Not a new release -- nor even a new reissue -- but we just manage to get some and wanted to list it 'cause it's something that several of us here have been listening to a lot lately! This Kaleidoscope were a sixties British pop psych band (not to be confused with the various other Kaleidoscopes of the era from the US and Mexico) and we believe these guys might in fact have been THE ULTIMATE psychedelic pop band ever. This album (also not to be confused with the famous Krautrock/soundtrack outfit with the same name as the album's title) is just incredible. Gorgeous vocals, killer melodies, lush orchestrations, and, especially, beautifully baroque psych-speak lyrics that put "Strawberry Fields Forever" to shame -- with lines like "Battalions in baby blue are bursting beige balloons / the water pistols are all filled with lemonade / the jester and the goldfish have joined minds above the moon / oh please kiss the flowers and you too will be safe / oh swing and sway..."
It's very British, twee and dreamy, being that perfect blend of sunshine and melancholy so many psych pop bands of the era were striving for. The Kaleidoscope did it best right here. I mean, if you like the Zombies and the Hollies and heck the Olivia Tremor Control you should know about these gents too. Indee, the original 1967 album's final track (followed here by six bonus tracks), "The Sky Children", might be THE ULTIMATE pop-psych track on this ultimate pop-psych record. (Hey a little hyperbole never hurt anybody.) It's an eight-minute epic, with a thrilling vocal hook on endless repeat, and amazing lyrics continually pouring forth the whole time. Truly awe-some, if you're attuned to the vibe.
As we mentioned in our review of the last King Dude record, you really couldn't come up with a less appropriate name for a group like this, a group whose sound is some sort of brooding, moody, post industrial neofolk, all haunting and apocalyptic, deep crooned vox and lush layered strum, but like all weird band names, they eventually become so familiar and so inexorably linked to the sounds, it's hard to separate the two. This latest King Dude record finds T.J. Cowgill, the one man behind this one man band, adding some classic country to his sound, a sound which already touched on classic seventies psychedelic folk, as well as the martial industrial of groups like Death In June, Blood Axis, Sol Invictus and the rest, but this hint of classic country definitely transforms the sound into something else entirely.
Opener "Don't Want Me Still" sounds like a classic country ballad, mixed with a sixties girl group production, and some Mazzy Star like shoegaze, everything slathered in effects, thick whorls of delay and echo, all hazy and druggy and so divinely dreamy, weird too, when the vox pitch down and become a strange sort of gurgling rumble. Elsewhere KD touches on the swampy apocalyptic folk of groups Like Woven Hand and Sixteen Horsepower, but with creepy deep vocals that sound more like Pete Steele, and gives the sound a distinctly gloomy gothic vibe.
A couple of the tracks here are spare and skeletal and sound distinctly slowcore, reminding us a bit of Low, with woozy guitars, and sweetly angelic female back up vox, while others seem to touch on the sort of fractured lo-fi rockabilly of Dirty Beaches, that crumbling low fidelity crooned creep, with still others sounding like classic torch songs reimagined as dark strummed dronefolk. The sound drifting drowsily from urgent and strident, to hushed and ominously menacing, to dreamy and droney and darkly warped and woozy. So great.
Some of the SWEETEST packaging we've seen, stark black and white jackets, diecut with the shapes of sigils cut out, revealing the strange full color imagery beneath. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one hand numbered.
Another single from Australia's Negative Guest List label. We had reviewed some records by The Lost Domain over the years, mostly way way back, but this is the first we've heard from them in a while, and actually we're not even sure if they're still an active concern, considering the material here is from way back in 1999. The A side here seems like a bit of a goof. A cover of that standard "Drunken Sailor", which actually sounds like it was played by drunken sailors, stumbling and skronky and free form, lots of feedback and buzz, the whole thing on the verge of collapse. But like the Blank Realm 7" reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, the real gem is on the flipside, where the Lost Domain get their Dead C on, unfurling a sprawling miasma of clang and clatter, buzz and skree, that classic nineties NZ noise rock sound (even though they're from Australia), echo drenched, full on free rock abstraction, wild loose drumming, loads of space, buzz and rumble everywhere, the sound lo-fi and cloaked in tape hiss and amp buzz, a glorious chunk of dreamy noisiness that's over way too soon!
A while back we reviewed two cds from the LA based duo of Mark And Laura Cetilla, one a collaboration with bigger avant music names (Steve Roden, Jan Jelinek, Frank Bretschneider), the other the duo's own dark sonic concoction, and while the guests on the collaborative record definitely made for interesting listening, we much preferred the Cetilla's work unadorned, a hushed minimal darkness, brooding, and softly caustic, ominous and strangely menacing. The sounds here on their first proper full length lp, seem to be a continuation from the music presented on that cd.
Three longform compositions, of smoldering lowercase sound, what sounds like bowed strings, and reverberating metal, blurred into a murky concoction of shimmering grey thrum and dense softly undulating swells, the vibe is definitely cinematic, conjuring up all manner of bleak and abject imagery, evoking decay, and distance, the drones alive with overtones and constantly shifting layers, noisy in places, but the noise blunted and smoothed out into rough expanses of warm buzz and softly prickly hum. There are moments of pure unfettered speaker shredding noise, but even within these blown out squalls, lurk all manner of rich texture and subtle shading. That said, most of the record is spent in hushed drift mode, the final track the most fully fleshed out, with the original instruments still recognizable, the tones organic and only lightly effected, drifting on a sea of distant blackened shimmer, and softly roiling whir and hiss, before finally smoothing out, into a final coda of warm, dreamy (and still slightly ominous tranquility). Dark abstract loveliness for sure, the sort of thing that folks into Jasper TX, Machinefabriek and Type Records might dig quite a bit.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered, packaged in super swank matte finish jackets, and includes a download coupon as well.
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
This sixties electronic kids' classic reissued on vinyl!! Here's our review from when we listed the (now out of print) import cd reissue way back in 2004:
This is the fourth Dimension 5 record in which Bruce and Esther ask children to, rather than drop out, drop into the way out sounds within! While the artists' statement on the back of the original record expresses a philosophy of "love and reverse-psychedelics", vaguely implying an anti-drug stance, there is a very slim chance that if your child was listening to this in the late sixties they wouldn't be carrying the keys to the kingdom soon after. The Way-Out Record For Children is conceptually exemplary of its 1968 inception. Likewise, it is very much ahead of its time. Heads will dig the vibrantly colored tales of sun travels, rainbows and butterflies set to a sitar and synthesized drum mantra surfing the cosmos ("Mudra") as well as the close encounters with shape changing creatures from outer space ("The Saucer's Apprentice"). Prog fans, check out the lesson in odd time signatures ("Accents"). What we perceive as our sense of taste is miraculously transformed into sound ("Four Seasons"), as is our perception of physical motion ("Rubberbands"). If you're not ready to come home by the end of this record, maybe the looping, echoey refrain of "nothing to do" in the closing track will prompt you to take another trip far out!
This is yet another one of those records that seems like it was cooked up in a lab specifically for aQ, one of our favorite tracks from Lime, the most recent record from UK psychedelic space rockers Mugstar, remixed and stretched out (from 13 minutes to 37+ minutes), by Robert Hampson, member of the late great aQ beloved combo Loop, and who later went on to perform as Main, another longtime aQ fave. So while we may have been imagining Mugstar reimagined as soft swirls of abstract drift, maybe the drums stripped away, the guitars blurred and smeared into hushed rumbles and warm whirs, and on first listen, it seemed we were right, a strange bit of muted distant buzz, some twisted glitches, super abstract, until about 2 minutes in, when the original song seems to surface, a pulsing krautrock style groove, now wreathed in that opening buzz, which has grown more intense, and has been joined by all manner of mysterious electronics, the sound drifting lazily from speaker to speaker, dreamily dizzying, the vibe closer to Loop, already a huge influence on Mugstar we'd imagine, and for the first 15 minutes, it seems that Hampson may have just looped a bit of the original, that motorik groove allowed to just unwind, while all around it he applies thick dollops of buzz and swirl, of shifting textural streaks, and stuttering shards of feedback, subtle enough that it could be just some super tripped out space rock jam, but different enough from the original to keep it totally mesmerizing, but then eventually that loop drops out, the rhythm is discarded, and Hampson is left to drift freely though space, the song becomes a gorgeous abstract bit of kosmische bliss, impossible to tell what exactly he's reused from the original, but it hardly matters, as he conjures up dark crumbling swells of bristling buzz, distant swirling spaced out shimmers, a dreamlike soundscape of cosmic thrum and hushed blurred thrum, glistening and glimmering, a sonic night sky of shooting stars, hazy and hypnotic and totally fantastic.
A brand new full length from our favorite doom-drone / doom-gaze duo, Nadja, and it's on one of our favorite labels too, Brazil's Essence Music, who in the past have brought us incredible releases from Acid Mothers Temple, Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Boris, Merzbow, and Rapoon. But this is not the regular release. We are honored to be the only place in the world, other than the label itself, to be selling the super limited, deluxe, handmade boxset version, limited to just 149 copies, already completely sold out, except for a handful saved just for us, and for you. These are pricey, but they are incredible, gorgeously and lovingly assembled, with TONS of extra stuff, and there are less than 10 copies left, so get one before they're gone. More on the record proper in a second, but we figured we'd best explain what all comes in the box, in fact first there's the box itself, hand painted and decorated using several techniques, collaged, stitched and an intricate ink layering painting process. The box is gorgeous, but inside, you'll find the standard edition of the album, lavishly assembled in a custom 6-panel digisleeve housing a set of 6 cards set with beautiful watercolor paintings and artwork by Portuguese artist L. Filipe dos Santos. PLUS, as a bonus, an alternative DOUBLE cd-r set comprising the album (same version/mastering) and a DTS 5.1 version of it - this one mastered/mixed by Anders Peterson and including an exclusive remix - housed in a 6-panel package with a striking and utterly different artwork by Iremir Oscar and Essence head honcho Uirajara Resende PLUS an inedit live recording from earlier this year, also on cd-r. That's FOUR discs instead of just the one. PLUS, honoring the album's theme - skin and blood - there's also an individually painted and hand-assembled 16-page book - each page is totally unique - and strange souvenirs, like a pen-like object and a large painted band that holds the whole set together.
WOW. Like we said, there are less than 10 of these left, we are taking PRE-ORDERS for these, they are NOT in stock, once we know how many we need, we'll order them from Brazil and should have them within a week to 10 days. So if you order this with other stuff, your order will ship minus the Nadja box, which will ship by itself, or if you are a regular mailorder customer, probably in your next order, but you will be charged for it NOW, if you want one don't dawdle.
And if you are a Nadja fan, you're definitely gonna want one of these, sure all Nadja records are pretty great, but this one is incredible, an hour long three part epic, the heaviest, most lush and orchestral and intense record we've heard from these two yet. The opening track, clocking in at 25 minutes, begins as a hushed bit of dreamy drift, all gauzy and washed out and shimmery, layered melodies, shifting and swirling and so lovely, very Pop Ambient in fact, until about 12 minutes in, when the drums kick in, the guitars explode, but it doesn't simply get heavier, or louder, it sounds orchestral, huge moaning melodies, what sounds like strings or horns, epic and kaleidoscopic, the sound living and breathing, prismatic and totally warm and glowing, a heaving chunk of blissed out dreamlike heaviness.
The second movement is more traditionally heavy, a chugging churning slab of lumbering doom, the pounding drum machine and buzzing riffs, wreathed in a swirling cloud of hiss and buzz and Technicolor effulgence, a sort of incendiary Godflesh style industrial crunch, with buried howled vocals, and constantly shifting patina of glitched out effects and electronic buzz, which gives away to the 26 minute closer, beginning with super spare acoustic guitars, which drift into a shimmering field of prismatic glimmer, eventually exploding into another slab of blown out orchestral epic dream doom, totally majestic, and almost choral sounding, wrapped in sheets of staticky buzz, the sound getting more and more fierce and intense and threatening to blow your speakers, total chaos and catharsis, blissful but ultra intense, finally, relenting, and leaving gorgeous sonic vapor trails, laced with buried boy girl vox, a dreamy understated coda, to a seriously epic bit of orchestral buzz drenched bliss. So great.
We WILL have the standard version, keep your eyes peeled for it on a future list, or ask us to reserve you one, but those of you who want the QUADRUPLE DISC HANDMADE DELUXE BOXSET, now's the time...
Looking back on reviews of other Necks records, we find ourselves either struggling to describe the Necks' unique sound, or gushing uncontrollably about how goddamn great they are. More often than not, some mix of the two. And we realized that wasn't likely to change here, with the latest record from these Australian modern jazz minimalists, who do indeed have a sound that's difficult to describe, but that is precisely why they are one of our favorite bands EVER. Jazz or otherwise. And they are most definitely jazz, drums, upright bass and piano, and many jazz music tropes are present in their music, it's just that their music takes the idea of jazz, and stretches it way out, and turns it into something much more about tension (and no release), about timbre and mood... Their songs are generally 20-60 minutes long, most of their records are in fact a single track, and they slowly build a gorgeous lush jazzscape that on the surface appears jazzy, a quick glancing listen and an unsuspecting listener might think, "oh, nice, jazzy", but had they bothered to keep listening, that wasn't just a part in a song they were hearing, it WAS the song, and the Necks masterfully take that part and nurture it, from a hushed whispery skitter, occasionally to an all out roar, but just as often, just a much more dense and intense hushed whispery skitter. The three players impossibly and organically linked, sounding less like a band, and more like pure sound. Like we said, it's hard to explain. In some ways, their music sounds like it could be the result of some sort of audio manipulation, as if some audio alchemist took jazz samples and stretched and layered them into these droned out hypnotic jazz ragas, which in itself is a testament to these guys' skill.
On Mindset, the Necks offer up two 21+ minute tracks, the first might be their darkest yet, starting out immediately with some deep low end thrum, some minimal drum skitter, the band immediately locked into a dark almost dirgey groove, and when the piano comes in, it's noisy and surprisingly atonal, the pedals depressed, the tones all bleeding into each other in a thick swirling angular sonic cloud, while the bass and drums remain locked tight. The bass gradually grows more active, and more melodic, as does the piano, the sound impossibly lush and dense, sounding like a way heavier Lubomyr Melnyk, swirling flurries of notes over layered drones, the drums subtly propulsive, it almost sounds like a jazz Godspeed You Black Emperor, so epic and majestic, and darkly moving. Eventually the drums too begin to be more active, and deviate from the groove, the sound building to a cathartic climax, before jettisoning much of the jazz, and turning into a dark droned out abstract psychedelic dirge, with what sounds like effects everywhere, although we're pretty sure they don't use much in the way of effects, there even seems to be what sounds like a guitar, offering up fuzzy squalls of high end buzz, the second half doesn't sound like jazz at all, more like some heavy droney psychedelic post rock outfit. So good. One of our favorite Necks jams for sure. And definitely a good gateway for those aQ-ers who tend toward the jazz-phobic.
The second track is a lot more subdued, starting out super abstract and spacious, tinkling melodies, mysterious sound effects, minimal percussion, spacey little glitches, streaks of high end skree, it's not until 5 or 6 minutes in when the song really starts to coalesce, the bass bowed, unfurling lush slow-mo melodies, and then finally, the drums drift in, another motorik shuffle, the sound remaining ethereal and washed out, glimmery and shimmery, very cinematic too, the drums crazy busy, but still holding things down, the track growing more and more frantic, and frenzied, while on the surface, the piano remains languid and tranquil, while beneath it, the rest of the band grows more and more agitated, the sound so dark and tense, and growing ever darker, hints of funkiness are blurred into something more abstract, the groove nearly swallowed up by the bands swirling sonic churn. Maybe THIS one is one of our favorite Necks jams ever. Hell, who needs to pick? Another Necks record that will no doubt rank as one of our forever faves, and again, Mindset definitely seems like the kind of record that could very well convince some folks out there of what we already know, that the Necks are one of thee best bands out there!
We had never heard of Nick Nicely before, but thanks to Captured Tracks we have a new psychedelic electro-pop obsession (did we have an old one?). Hard to explain exactly what NN sounds like, but there's definitely a sort of Gary Numan vibe, but wedded to a sort of classic pop, a la the Zombies or early Bee Gees, a sort of baroque classical pop futurism? The sound are lush, drum machine driven, with soaring strings, subtly processed vox, and gorgeous hooks, just check out the sound samples and you'll be hooked. Hard to imagine folks like Ariel Pink and John Maus wouldn't be totally obsessed with NN (in fact, we're tempted to think they were both heavily influenced).. It makes sense that this would end up on Captured Tracks, cuz it actually sounds like it could be some weird new retro popwave combo from Brooklyn, except for the fact, that this stuff is so genuine, and so genuinely quirky, whereas most modern bands can get the sound right, they can rarely back it up with songs. But NN is a master of both, total crazy catchy electro-pop / post-punk / minimal disco / psychedelic synth rock that sounds more and more like the bastard pop child of Gary Numan every time we listen to it. We even hear a little XTC, but NN manages to take all these disparate influences and sounds and creates his own perfect electro-psych-pop. Fuzzy, groovy, synthy, quirky, druggy, tripped out, hooky as hell and totally twisted, and just about the coolest thing we've heard in ages. A new (old) favorite!
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Perhaps the only bright side to the passing of one of the most ambitious but relatively unsung figures in early electronic music, is that the archives of hundreds of reels of unreleased recordings of sound experiments, tape compositions, field recordings, cinematic sound effects and�Musique Concrete are just starting to be released to a wider audience. Young Americans did a stellar job with the first Daphne Oram vinyl overview, Oramics, which was a retrospective of her long and varied career from her time as a wartime radio technician to becoming an electronic instrument pioneer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Now that her invention, The "Oramics" machine (the first electronic musical instrument designed and built by a woman), has gone on display at the Science Museum in London, Daphne Oram's legacy is finally moving into its rightful place. This deluxe 4lp compilation is the first in a planned series of releases that dig deep into Oram's vast recording archive. Painstakingly compiled and restored from over 400 tapes and mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, The Oram Tapes Volume One features 46 previously unheard recordings cut at 45 rpm for deeper sound quality. While most of the pieces are short, they show a darker and more layered compositional style than what one may be used to from the bigger names of The Radiophonic Workshop. While the typical Workshop compositional bloops and bleeps were often steeped in a science fiction futurity, Oram was more often concerned with the mystery and science of sound composition, and the place where the sounds of machines and nature overlapped. That is probably why her effects reel for the film 2001 sounds more like haunted insects and cathedral-like atmospherics rather than say, robotic whirrs and laser-like phasing. There is a thoughtful and cerebral consideration in her compositions that allows us to imagine and nearly inhabit the world she is building in sound. Quite stunning!
Last Rites? Well yeah, most folks, if they had to bet, probably woulda predicted that wizened Pentagram frontman Bobby Liebling would have been dead by now, of drug abuse if not old age. Certainly not living out a long overdue rock star dream of critical adulation, sold out shows, flashy clothes, and marriage to a shockingly young, stylish wife (with whom he just had a baby)! So the title is ironic, since the dude seems to have an unexpected new lease on life. Seriously, who woulda thunk it, that in the year 2011 (which still sounds like a futuristic date to us in it now, right?), ol' Bobby Liebling and his band Pentagram, who began way back in 1971, would still be going strong, stronger than ever in some ways? Bobby's even become a hipster fashion icon of sorts, too, thanks to his wife's blogging...
Not only is there a new Pentagram album (this one) but Bobby's also been touring, something some of us never thought we'd see happen (and now that we have, will never forget). Pentagram made two appearances in SF in the past year or two, the first what we thought was once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this seminal doom metal band, which surpassed all expectations and RULED, and the second a bit of trainwreck, featuring a woefully unprepared lead guitarist and some godawful blues jams. Both times, though, Bobby was all showman, surprising everybody with his Mick Jagger moves, strutting his stuff in expensive boots and skinny designer jeans. The crotch-grabbing and pelvic thrusting was a bit disconcerting, though, considering that from the neck up, the man looks to be about 90 years old, an ancient, frizzy haired, goggle-eyed Muppet. But considering that so much of Pentagram's lyrics/imagery is horror-related, that kinda works for him (and for the groupies??). We don't even think he acted like that back in the day, we've seen live Pentagram footage from the '80s where he's just hanging on the microphone stand, not shimmying across the stage like it's the T.A.M.I. show, or rolling around on the ground a la Iggy Pop.
So, what about this new album? Does it fulfill the promise of the first "comeback" show we saw, or fall down like the second? Well, glad to report it's indeed a worthy addition to the Pentagram discography! Bobby sounds pretty darn good here, belting it out with ghoulish gusto. And he's teamed up for the first time in years with guitarist Victor Griffin, who was Pentagram's riff master general on such classic albums as Relentless (1985), Day Of Reckoning (1987), and Be Forewarned (1994). Griffin wasn't yet back on board for the shows we saw here in SF, so that makes Last Rites even more of an exciting event.
As usual with Pentagram's albums, this one's a mix of new material and old songs from the '70s that they never recorded for a proper album before. Thus true Penta-fans will, for instance, recognize "Walk In The Blue Light" from the First Daze Here demos compilation, and they even do a couple songs by Stone Bunny (Bobby's pre-Pentagram band circa 1970). All very cool to hear in these new versions. But newly written tracks form the bulk of the album, and (also as usual) they perfectly continue the vintage Pentagram sound, heavy, Sabbathy, psychedelic... how could they not with Liebling singing and Griffin on guitar? They also mix in some slightly more modern sounding dirgery on tracks like "8". The only song that we really feel a bit 'meh' about is "American Dream", on which, for some reason, Liebling relinquishes the mic to Griffin, who sorta sounds like his ex-Palace Of Skulls bandmate Wino. So it sticks out as a Place Of Skulls-ish number, especially considering that the rhythm section here is also from Place Of Skulls. And that song's overtly political lyrics are not very Pentagram-y as far as we're concerned. But otherwise, this is all pure Pentagram magic, better than 2004's Show 'Em How and almost up there with the last two Liebling did with ex-bandmate Joe Hasselvander, 1999's Review Your Choices and 2001's Sub-Basement. Penta-fans, and all classic doom lovers, rejoice!
The good news: at last, we finally got some copies of this recent vinyl-only PO album! The not-so-good-news: we only were able to get a few, not nearly as many as we'd wanted. And that's it, when they're gone they're gone. So, if you're a fan of Finland's Pharaoh Overlord (and/or their mothership act Circle, which this could just as easily be, sonically), act fast if you want one.
Some further info: the four (long!) tracks on Horn were recorded live at something called "Space Force 1, 2nd Flight" in Lahti, Finland in late 2010. Three out of the four are exclusive-to-this-record PO compositions: "Lalibela", "Solar Stomp", and "Sky". And then other one's a cover of "Revolution" by Spacemen 3. All are riffy, raucous, rhythmic noiserock, with some stray pretty piano plinking and enthusiastic crowd response whenever the band takes a between-song break. And the packaging is sumptuous, the thick gatefold sleeve bearing colorful artwork, band name stamped in golden foil... Limited to only 500 copies and as we said, we got all we're gonna be able to get, ever.
Well, we probably don't need to say a whole lot more, but absolutely have to quote the blurb on the sticker on the cover. Pretty much sums it up: "Horn documents 'The Lord' in their rawest, nastiest live mood. Like an early Mudhoney jamming with Crazy Cavan and The Rhythm Rockers, or Sonic Youth tearing it up with Elakelaiset." Yeah, we totally agree! Even though we've never heard of ('70s teddy boy rockabilly act from Wales, it turns out) Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers before, nor novelty Finnish "humppa" band Elakelaiset, neither. But the Mudhoney and Sonic Youth, we hear, yeah.
'Tis wild stuff, not exactly in PO's "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" style like their recent Out Of Darkness album, but definitely ROCK, channelling Spacemen 3 (obviously, since they do the cover) and Funhouse-era Stooges. But noisier! It's blasting, throbbing, distortodelic overload, that WE might compare to a rabid combination of The Heads and Circle. Awww yeah!
Perhaps you're familiar with that kick ass Prog Is Not A Four Letter Word compilation on Delay 68? It's sure been a big seller hereabouts. One of the bands that compiler Andy Votel introduced us to via that collection was an Italian group by the name of Picchio Dal Pozzo. Their track "La Merta", in all its gently gorgeous glory of tinkling, buzzing, and wordless vocal "aaaah-aaaahhing", made us curious to hear more by them! Turns out "La Merta" was taken from this, their self-titled debut originally released in 1976 on the Grog label. And indeed it was indicative of the mellow and mysterious delights of this album, a work of cosmically spacey, jazz-inflected, psychedelic chamber-prog inspired by the Canterbury sounds of Robert Wyatt era Soft Machine (indeed, it bears a dedication to "Roberto Viatti" aka Robert Wyatt). They were probably into Terry Riley too. Yet nothing prepared us for track three, this record's ten-minute masterpiece, the suite entitled "Seppia" that freakin' blew our minds with its droning, throbbing, Magmoid, synth-sizzling heaviness. Wow! Have the Boredoms heard this?? So, a very nice record indeed, with at least one track that just takes things to another level entirely. Seriously, if you're like us you'll being playing that one over and over again. Instantly a new Italian prog fave here -- half the AQ staff bought copies for themselves!
