Latest from these San Francisco psychedelic space rockers, and yet another record that has us wondering what it is exactly that keeps these guys from being huge. Sure here at aQ, we sell TONS of 3 Leafs records, but they've yet to start getting the sort of broader attention bestowed on many of their spacey / psychedelic brethren. Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, White Hills, Burnt Hills, etc. If you're into ANY of those bands, or just into space rock and psych rock and have somehow managed to miss out on these guys, now's the time to remedy that. And Canal Smarts is as good a place to start as any. With the band expanded to a sextet, including Anthony from Ezeetiger, Tim Cohen of the Fresh & Onlys, and Chris Cones, Canal Smarts starts things off with a sidelong slowburn sprawl, that might be the best thing we've heard from these guys yet. A thick crunchy bassline is looped and sent drifting into the ether, the drums are super minimal, a skittery shuffle, the guitars aren't riffing or chugging, instead they're emitting clouds of vaporous drift, of crystalline shimmer, and blurred chordal whir, the whole thing laced with intercepted cell phone calls, of what sounds like whirring organs, the mix heavily panned so sounds seems to be drifting from speaker to speaker, there are vocals too, some ethereal and angelic, others reverbed and croony, and throughout, there seems to be a miasma of random sounds, voices, percussion, strange production, random FX, a heady blurred swirl of droned out psychedelia, that seems to us like one of those long form Miles Davis space-jazz mega jams reimagined via modern psychedelic drug rock. There also seems to be a bit of Necks going on, that same sort of super minimal looped jazziness, mesmerizing and hypnotic, repetitive and circular, the sidelong epic unfurling as a slowly building sonic smoldering, that spends its second half winding down, becoming more spare and sparse, the rhythms fragmenting, much of the effects heavy atmospheres dissipating, leaving something almost poppy, with some proper vocals, a sort of slow motion psych pop drift, that disappears into a cloud of tangled melody and gradually fading shimmer. And that's just the A side!
The flipside starts off with the oddly titled "Guacamole Window" (the band seem to have a thing for goofy titles), a surprisingly propulsive jam, urgent busy bassline over a skittery rhythmic shuffle forming the framework, while the rest of the band fill the rest of the space, with wildly looped samples, dense swirls of FX, clipped vox, plenty of industrial whir, more vocals, which give the song an almost old school post punk vibe, there are tangles of psyche guitar in there too, but so doused in effects they barely sound like guitars, spidery melodies underpin the proceedings, and near the song's end, the guitars grow more distorted and angular, the bass even buzzier and busier, the vocals sent careening back and forth, distorted and dubbed out, the song finishing off in a blaze of wild sonic chaos. And then finally, the comparatively low key title track finishes things off, with a slithery funky bassline, plenty of heavily effected percussion, and more vocals, another chunk of abstract psych pop, that seems to slowly coming apart, a dubbed out bit of psychedelic minimalism, that mixes classic melodies with fluttery dubbed out effects, guitars drift in and out, the whole thing delightfully druggy and dreamy, and the perfect spacey wind-down.
Yet another kick ass record from 3 Leafs, with apparently another one on the way any day now! We can't recommend these guys, or this record, highly enough, especially for all of you into spacey psych (and we know that's a LOT of you), and who knows, maybe this will be the record that finally pushes them to the next level. But heck, if not this one, maybe the next one, or the next one, or the next one...
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, each one hand numbered!
Latest record from psych folk troubadour Ilyas Ahmed, his first since 2009's Goner, and much like Goner, his sound continues to move away from the super delicate folky drift of his past records. In fact, we remarked in our review of Goner, that there was a marked shift toward a sound more distorted and blown out, and while that record seemed to simply bury all of the delicate sounds under buzzing guitars and pounding drums, on With Endless Fire there seems to be a more of an organic hybridization of the two. The sound here is less prettiness-wreathed-in-heaviness, and more prettiness recorded in a way that it actually BECOMES heavy, the sound super hot, and in-the-red, so much so that lots of the music sounds super saturated, but it only makes it sound that much more urgent and intense. Even the moodiest broodiest bits, seethe with energy, a smoldering emotional intensity that oozes from every note.
The record opens with "Now Sleeps", a lush layered raga, all buzzing tones, that build and build to an almost Sunroof! ur-drone level, softened by Ahmed's ethereal vox, the raga sloughing off high end until it becomes a dense drone, which is soon joined by acoustic guitar, and simple shuffling drums, strangely recorded, the result a sort of blackened sun baked psych folk dirge, again with Ahmed's voice changing the tenor, all wistful and weary, but distorted and thus intense and emotional, and when the leads come in, super blown out and fiercely psychedelic, convulsing over that warm brooding rhythm beneath. "Skin In Circles" is more folk pop, softly rhythmic and propulsive, the seemingly minimal guitars, imbued with an energy and intensity that transforms a delicate bit of folkiness into something darker and more brooding. That same vibe oozes into "Stained Sky", which almost has a classic rock vibe, but again, the sounds are so blown out and druggy, that it becomes a sort of blackened psych ballad, gorgeous and harrowing.
After a brief bit of steel string balladry, a lovely mid record bit of hushed dreamfolk, the sound shifts right back into that smoldering drone, with another expanse of layered twang flecked heaviness, laced with spidery tendrils of dense buzzing melody, wrapped around a more delicate bit of psychedelic drift, which leads right into the sprawling "My Mirage", another deserty folky drift fused to some thick super distorted psychedelic guitar, the perfect balance for Ahmed's vox and the shimmery steel string strum, the second half of the song blossoming into a gorgeous dreamily blown out psychedelic dream dirge, that eventually fades onto record closer, "By The Light", which ditches all the distortion for something much more hushed and lovely, a hazy, reverby stretch of warm washed out dream folk, a darkly sweet lullaby and perfect way to wind down, and drift off.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Pressed on high quality virgin vinyl and housed in a super heavy Stoughton tip-on style jacket. Also includes a download coupon. Cassette version coming soon, btw.
Really, what can we say at this point about French shoegaze / post black metallers Alcest, that hasn't already been said, by us, and pretty much everybody else? Alcest are pretty much the gold standard when it comes to soaring emotional melodic shoegaze black metal (along with Amesoeurs, but they're both fronted by the same guy anyway), and with every record they move further and further away from actual buzzing blackness, but at the same time, they keep getting better and better (production, arrangement, songwriting) and in the process, their ability to blend their dreamy jangle and black buzz far surpasses any of the other groups out there trying for the same effect. There's no jarring shift from crystalline shimmer, and hazy dreamy drift to blasting buzz, it's totally organic, and sure, in the process, perhaps the black and the buzz becomes muted and less, well, buzzy and black, but the strange thing is, no one is complaining. Even the grimmest of metalheads seems to love Alcest (and Amesoeurs). It's the Depeche Mode principle again, like Depeche Mode, all metalheads love Alcest. Not that we can blame them, what's not to love? Especially here, on what is arguably the group's masterpiece, so epic, and melodic, and sweeping and soaring, lush and textured, alternatingly heavy and majestic, dreamy and drifty, heavy on the post rock and the jangle, with the black metallisims making up a relatively small part of the sound, and when the band do get into some buzzy blackness, the infuse it with an impossible melodic sense, and the fact that the sound is so lush and the record is so well produced, it makes it sound heavier than most proper black metal bands, not brittle and buzzy, or chaotic and furious, but epic and crushing and MASSIVE. It can only really be a matter of time before non metalheads catch on. There's plenty here that would not sound at all out of place alongside Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed You Black Emperor and M83 and Mogwai and all the rest, and we wouldn't be at all surprised if this had come out on Temporary Residence, or even Matador. Maybe that's in the cards, but for now, we can all continue to bathe in Alcest's glorious sonic glow, while they still remain, at least tenuously, in the underground. At this point, this can't really be a contender for black metal record of the year, cuz it's finally just too far removed, but it's still so goddamn good, we're having a hard time imagining very many records this year, metal or otherwise, will top it.
We've long been fans of both of these artists, James Woodhead, aka At The Head Of The Woods, and Glass Throat Records head honcho Chet Scott, aka Blood Of The Black Owl, as well as their collaborative project, The Elemental Chrysalis, a quick search on the aQ site will find much we've written about all three projects over the last several years. This super limited cd on Handmade Birds (run by R. Loren from Pyramids) finds both groups offering up a bit of a teaser for their prospective full lengths. Up first is ATHOTW, with another sprawling bit of ritualistic ambience, all haunting and otherworldly, ethereal vox over whirring organs, and simple percussion, blurred buzz, even some psychedelic wah guitar, the sound slipping from an almost improvised sounding slow build, to an FX drenched psychedelic space dirge, the transition seamless, the final few minutes of the track, space and heavy and fantastically psychedelic and transcendent. Easily the most epic ATHOTW track yet!
Blood Of The Black Owl counters with his own bit of sonic ritualism, all shakers and fluttery flutes, deep drones and distant shimmer, channeling the spirit if Native American musics, the sound drifts and hovers, until the vocals come in, a strangely out of place demonic croak, that adds some serious menace to the proceedings, that voice soon joined by more voices, all over spidery guitar melodies, and a creeping slowcore rhythm, the song slowly building and brooding, laced with what sounds like spacey theremin and deep distant rumbles, culminating in a distorted coda, all crumbling distortion, dirge like drum pound, swirling FX and soaring vox.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Housed in a cool oversized sleeve, with striking skull/antler artwork.
We were blown away by this, the most recent issue of this totally DIY travel / music / metal magazine. It's their 8th issue, and it's overflowing with amazing stories and killer interviews and reviews, with plenty of aQ faves. Metalheads will probably want to check this out for the interview with Erik from Watain, or John Gossard from Dispirit / Weakling / The Gault / Asunder, and there's also a bunch of killer in depth reviews of records by Necrite, Dispirit, Barn Owl, Walknut, Horna and others. Which on it's own would probably be enough. But the bulk of the magazine is about travel, specifically of the DIY type, even more specifically, with a focus on train hopping. From Traveling on freight trains in Mexico, to various expeditions throughout China, Mongolia, Finland, Norway and Nepal, there's a history of railroads and railroad operations in Maine, where the author is from, and there's tons of crazy stories, encounters with other travellers, loads of photos, it's pretty incredible, and besides getting a vicarious thrill from reading about all of these amazing places, and the amazing journeys to and through and back, it definitely gives us the bug, to tour, travel, explore, get lost, the sort of thing that the best travel writing does. We've been reading this like crazy, but it's HUGE, so are only partway through, but you'll find yourself riveted, and probably will have trouble putting it down. Also has us hankering to check out past issues as well! Total photocopied, cut and paste old school zine radness, and obviously WAY WAY recommended
Lots of radiophonic blorp, orbital bleep, and weird science are to be found on Matt Carlson's solo lp Particle Language. Carlson ranks amongst the more prolific members of the Portland experimental scene, starting out in the heavy-drone trio Bonus and moving onto the Vangelis-esque progressive electronic outfit Golden Retriever and the spasmodic DIY electronics of the Oregon Painting Society. Particle Language follows the retro-clad affairs of Golden Retriever, but his modular synths are dialed into a more cerebral, more academic approach to electronic music, with swarms of spiralling oscillations firing at every conceivable trajectory. Carlson gives the impression that he's set all of his careening, spiralling sounds in motion and allows them to crash into each other with regularity, as if they were all toy robots and remote control cars banging together. The violence of this atonal, electronic cacophony is all comedy, recalling the most playful explorations of Conrad Schnitzler in the '80s and the most angular / obtuse productions of Oneohtrix Point Never.
After being blown away by their awesome self released cd-r a few months back we were stoked to get the first slab of wax from this young, energetic post punk band out of the UK who are blasting our ears with such immediate and intensely satisfying sounds. These two new songs find the band getting tighter and their sound even punchier, without losing one bit of the infectious intensity that won us over on their cd-r.
Both songs display a wonderful ability to strip away all the fat and make sure that every single moment of the song packs a bright colorful punch. These jams make us bob our heads, and even jump up and down when no one is looking. It's also so refreshing to see C24 develop their chops the old fashion way, not relying on blog-hype, but actually touring non-stop, and you can get a feel for how invigorating it would be to see them live from these two killer tracks. Awesome!
Fourth installment from these mysterious NYC producers, and another chunk of abstract dancefloor radness, this one another one sided 12", and of the bunch maybe the most overtly dubsteppy, still on the minimal techno side, but with some seriously thick bass buzz. That and some looped and chopped female vox, not to mention some cool glitchy static, all gets woven into a woozy, fuzzy chunk of housey/dubsteppy groove, definitely one of more overtly dancey of the bunch, but still sorta dark hued and low slung with a bit of a creepy ominous vibe. Killer stuff, and like past Chasing Voices 12"s, crazy limited, and odds are they'll blow out of here and be tough to restock, you have been warned...
Housed in a cool, super simple hand silkscreened jacket, with no info at all, no title, no band name, no nothing!
We won't get into too much detail with this one, as we managed to get just TEN of these from a supplier who had a stash tucked away, so these are probably the last copies we'll ever be able to get. The aQ faithful are no doubt by now familiar with weirdo outsider post black metal weirdos Circle Of Ouroborus, and their tracks here do not disappoint, twisted and mournful and melancholy, detuned blackened folks melded to chaotic murky black metal buzz, with plenty of indie rock jangle and stumbling lo-fi drumming, crooned dramatic vox, and a twisted eighties new wave vibe, the sounds muddy and muted and washed out, dreamy and darkly hypnotic, all three tracks are mesmerizing and awesome.
Australia's Drowning The Light counter with their somewhat more traditional black metal, raw and depressive, with soaring frenzied guitar buzz, blasting lo-fi drumming, harsh vokills, shimmering keyboard atmospheres, moody melodies, and some super strange deep crooned vox as well, the perfect blend of harsh, blackened primitivism, and epic minor key melodic black buzz. Great stuff from both bands...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
True '80s metal doesn't get much more cult than the late great Cirith Ungol, they're up there with Manilla Road and Brocas Helm in the realm of eccentric, epic-er-than-thou Swords n' Sorcery style metal mastery. With ripping guitars and rasping banshee wails, Cirith Ungol tore it up on four albums from 1980-1991, to little commercial avail. They weren't the mainstream of '80s metal that's for sure. If you're into traditional metal that is both hot rockin' (they were from LA after all) and also gloriously doomy, with a definite '70s vibe, and you haven't yet delved into the works of Cirith Ungol, then we'd recommend finding copies of their debut album Frost And Fire, and its 1984 follow-up, King Of The Dead... But, those are both sadly out of print at the moment. Which brings us to this, their rarities collection, an archival anthology entitled Servants Of Chaos. Originally released only in Europe, ten years ago, it's just been reissued domestically, in a digipack, now with an extra dvd disc of live video footage in addition to the two cds of unreleased demos, live tracks and other early ephemera dating back to 1978 that already comprised this set.
Obviously it's for fans. And if you're not (yet), well, maybe it's not the place to start - but then again, maybe it is! 'Cause we know there's a certain type of absurdity-loving AQ customer who will probably dig this MORE than Cirith Ungol's proper albums. Such as, those of you into the wackiness of the NWOFHM (Steel Mammoth, Pharaoh Overlord, Krypt Axeripper, etc.). And anyone who digs the somewhat trippy, outsider metallic stylings of such private-press gems as White Boy And The Average Rat Band or Dwarr, too... This will be right up your alley, 'cause a bunch of the tracks here, some of 'em songs that later did appear on later CU albums, are, in these demo versions, outrageously overloaded with psychedelic sci-fi synthesizer insanity! As the amusingly self-deprecating liner notes by original guitarist Greg Lindstrom put it, these date from "before [he] grew out of the 'I think this could use some more synthesizer' phase". Raw and ridiculous, these are. We played some of this stuff on Brian Turner's WFMU radio show a few years back, and we know that turned Brian, whose metal tastes run to the "weird" exclusively, into a rabid Cirith Ungol fan. Or at least, a fan of this collection!
Elsewhere, you'll find plenty of long lost tracks that were never again recorded, including several even synthier instrumentals, along with (on disc 2) lots of killer live cuts from the band in their heyday. Oh, and a couple quirky covers, including a version of "Secret Agent Man"! Though maybe the oddest track on this anthology is "Ferrari 308QV On Dyno At 8000 RPM", which is nothing but a 23 second recording of a revving Ferrari sports car engine. These guys loved Ferraris.
So, though some of this is a mite more bizarre than "real" Cirith Ungol, it'll give even the uninitiated a good idea of how and why these fantasy metal madmen ruled. Definitely check out their actual albums if you can, wherein they eliminated the silly synthesizer excess, but the songs themselves are rad either way, and always, in any case, pretty darn over the top. (As is the dvd footage, mostly from a show in '84, when metal was METAL!).
We've all fallen in love with this one! It's a minimal-wave fantasy come true, imagine your sultry French girlfriend whispering in your ear over mesmeric machine beats... Obscure origins, limited edition, and (most importantly) utterly captivating atmosphere = Record Of The Week!!
In 1981, Belgian minimal-synth experimentalist Alain Neffe began his Insane Music cassette imprint, with the first of many Insane Music For Insane People compilations. We're pretty sure that all of the material on that first compilation was penned by Neffe with the help of a few other people, including Pseudo Code, Human Flesh, and Bene Gesserit. Some of those projects (especially Bene Gesserit) moved towards a disjointed, minimal-wave agenda, while others moved towards a cacophonous industrial sound with Pseudo Code in particular paralleling the information overload of SPK or Nocturnal Emissions.
Cortex might have been the most elegant of Neffe's projects, with baroque / sci-fi ambience setting the stage for monotone recitations of French lyrics from a rotating cast of female vocalists. Neffe's surrealistically charged drones, suspenseful passages of pregnant silence, and baroque synth fragments figure somewhere between Edward Artemiev's frigid soundtrack for Tarkovsky's film Solaris, the bleaker moments of Richard Pinhas (especially on Iceland), and with those breathy female vocals, the radiophonic works of Luc Ferrari.
Everything on the first disc of The Whole Story came from various cassette and lp compilations from the early '80s, but Neffe managed to keep the Cortex sound very consistent almost as if he were anticipating some archival collection some 30 years later. The second disc is almost all unreleased material, except for the 24 minute "Cortex O" which was the b-side of a cassette released back in 1984. The longer tracks of the second disc favor the spaciousness of Cortex's aesthetic, augmented by skittering drum machines and prog-tastic meanderings on the intertwining synths influenced by Schniztler and Pinhas for sure. Very nice to have this reissued, although probably not for long as it's unfortunately SUPER LIMITED, Korm Plastics only printed up a mere 300 copies of this 2cd set.
We were pretty crazy for the Cough Cool cd-r on Debacle we reviewed a while back, heavy on all 3 of the aQ D's: Droney, Druggy and Dreamy, a sort of warped slo-mo bedroom pop that blurred shoegaze shimmer into lo-fi jangle dirge drift, within which lurked all sorts of warm liquid poppy goodness. If anything this latest lp just finds the band doing what they do even better. All of the above mentioned elements are still present, and heck it's one of those records where we could probably have just used the same review over again, but it's definitely worth mentioning that while this might on the surface sound just like that cd-r part two, it's way more, the sounds are more lush and dense, without really getting that much more high fidelity, and the songs too, manage to be even catchier, but again, without losing any of their sonic nonchalance. The rhythms are rudimentary, dirgey and almost stumbly, to the point that they almost sound like real drums (heck, maybe they are), and the definitely goes a long way to giving CC a lush organic feel, and on songs like "Got A Show", it's like they're channeling nineties indie pop, big fuzzy guitars, swirls of reverb and effects, the vocals are the main thing that keep it mired in a glorious tarpit murk, all slowed down and mumbly, deep and woozy, and when the vocals do slip into something more properly croonsome, they're invariably swept up and thick dustdevils of echoey blur and prismatic shimmer. We're definitely reminded of faves from our past like the Swirlies, and of course the Jesus And Mary Chain, and plenty of other purveyors of shoegaze jangle, but there's just something about these guys that push all our buttons, and not just the droney, druggy, dreamy ones, CC obviously have a knock for the perfect pop hook, and have classic jangle pop sensibilities, it's just that somehow the sounds get all twisted and tangled, warped and mangled on the way, which is exactly how we like 'em!
We're huge fans of guitarist Matt Baldwin, we are so smitten by his psychedelic kraut-guitar drift, beholden to Fripp and Riley and Reich and Rother but also the Appalachia of Fahey and Kottke. So when he brought in this new disc on Psychic Arts, that's pretty much what we were expecting, although we did think Cryptic Cross was an odd name for some dreamy droney minimal guitar music, so we threw it on and pretty much knew we were in for something completely different. The opening intro is a super lo-fi dirge, all crumbling guitar buzz, sped up voices, tape malfunction, and then suddenly "Don't Chew Worry" kicks in, and we're in full on lo-fi new wave dirge metal territory. At least that's the best way we can describe it. Super murky and lo-fi, buzzy metallic riffage, but strange almost outsider cold wave vocals, crooned, sort of spoken, insane lyrics, the guitar and vocal melodies locked tight, making everything sound sing songy, and then when the vocalist slips into a falsetto, and the guitar shreddery begins, we're in total whathefuck heaven. We say this once in a while, but again, this totally sounds like something you might discover via Brian Turner's show on WFMU, psychedelic, metallic, but with a twisted knuckledragging post punk / lo-fi sludge vibe. Fucking weird, but totally bafflingly genius. Not sure where they're from, or what their deal is, but what we do know is that we have been jamming this nonstop! Fucked up and heavy, warped and drug addled, this is some crazy, kick ass shit!
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES! Each one hand numbered, and housed in a silkscreened origami style cd sleeve.
If anything, the Estonian countryside is quiet. The clockwork schedule of the network of rural buses and the cackle of a black swan racing high above the trees is about all that you'll hear. I (Jim) had the pleasure of experiencing this Estonian quietude a few years back, and I have to say that Yannick Dauby's collection of field recordings is way more active than any i actually encountered. Estonia is known for its avian diversity, although when I was there during the brief transition from summer into winter (literally, three weeks!), the birds had all flown south... so Dauby must have been there in later spring or summertime as he does capture a number of chittering sounds from those birds passing through from Russia and Finland to Southern Europe and North Africa (or vice versa). Between these avian recordings, Dauby documents another common denizen of the Estonian countryside - the giant chunks of metal dumped unceremoniously by the Soviet agricultural industry. Even without much wind, these abandoned grain silos and oil tanks resonate with thick rumblings and subtle overtones, which Dauby dutifully records with contact microphones. These thrumming drones recall the Alan Lamb wire recordings as much as they do Thomas Koner's deep gong recordings.
Disc one of this two disc set features Dauby's "songs for birds and metal" while the second features reworkings of Dauby's source material by John Grzinich and Murmer (aka Patrick McGingley), both of whom have exceptional catalogues of electro-organic compositions based often on phonography. Grzinich's two lengthy pieces are quieter and more subtle, focusing on the patter of dripping water and melting ice with flickering drones and harmonics forming arctic halos around those aquatic textures. The two Murmer tracks intensify things comparatively against Grzinich's lowercase work, with thick drones amassed around what sounds like somebody trekking through the deep snow. Those Coleclough / Koner drones manifest ominous black clouds and unsettled vibes, not heard elsewhere on the album and turning that Estonian quiet into something haunting. All in all, a magnificent piece of manipulated field recording and sound ecology.
For whatever reason, we had never really listed anything by this local singer/songwriter before now, but this new 7" definitely has us kicking ourselves, although we're led to believe it's a bit of a departure. But holy crap, is this great, total old school seventies/eighties Yellow Pills style classic power pop. The A side is such a stunner, sounding like it was from some old power pop comp alongside Dwight Twilley Band, Cheap Trick, the Knack and heck even Rick Springfield. Crunchy guitars, reverby vox, hand claps (of course!), kinetic and energetic and a little bit new wave-y with hooks galore and a killer chorus. We've listened to this about 20 times in the last week.
And the flipside ain't so shabby either, more mellow, a dirgey slow jam, total eighties prom slowdance, with a heavy John Hughes vibe, new wave-y bassline, reverbed, dramatically crooned vocals, awesome melodies, and classic sounding hook, very much like M83's take on eighties teenage soundtracks, but way more genuine.
Great stuff for sure! Comes with a download code too!
Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Back in 2004, we were totally blown away by the mysterious looking matte black four cd box by Deathprod. If the black box was evocative enough to pique our interest, the music contained within surely did not disappoint. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delays and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound - such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence - into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. Here, we have one of those discs from the boxset reprinted individually.
Imaginary Songs From Tristan da Cunha was Sten's graduation project from art school, inspired by the remotest inhabitated island in the world - Tristan da Cunha, located nearly 2000 miles away from the mainland. Here, Sten went so far as to record tracks on a Nagra deck, transfer them to wax cylinders and then transfer them once more to digital media. The resulting sounds are authentically old and decaying tracks which are hauntingly beautiful as well. But the bulk of this disc is comprised of the live recording of "The Contraceptive Briefcase II" with a large ensemble of vocalists who are also apparently playing glass. Sten's composition of dramatically minimalist dark loops whose phrasing is damn close to what you'd hear on Morals & Dogma, progressively decaying into grinding metal; throbbing drones and eerie female chorus - a la Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna" from 2001. Stunning.
Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Back in 2004, we were totally blown away by the mysterious looking matte black four CD box by Deathprod. If the black box was evocative enough to pique our interest, the music contained within surely did not disappoint. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delays and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound -- such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence -- into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. Here, we have one of those discs from the boxset re-printed individually.
Treetop Drive was the earliest of Deathprod's albums, originally released in 1994. Structurally, Deathprod's brooding scores are starkly minimal, with a solitary loop of a mournful note from a string quartet comprising the base for the first track of Treetop Drive. Around this base, Deathprod sweeps pallid noise and harsh acoustic scrapings, cycling around the track's central theme. It would fit a David Lynch film perfectly, with its distorted sentimentality and violent darkness. The twin note electronic bellows of the second track take the dark ambient mode of Cold Meat Industries to a reductionist strategy of a turgidly slow Terry Riley. The third track reprises those sweeping blasts of white noise from the first track around an incredibly sad melodic drone that sways in the distance. The final track revolves upon quite deep-space beacon of electronics whose darkened frequencies refract into a bleak soundscape.
More metal reading material here. Retro thrashers Municipal Waste yukk it up on the cover. Inside, also: Christian Mistress, Cattle Decapitation, Cathedral, Esoteric, Orange Goblin, Pallbearer, Paradise Lost, Alcest, Asphyx, and more! Including the usual "South Pole Dispatch" from Mountain Goat John Darnielle, loads of reviews, and a "Hall Of Fame" induction of Overkill's The Years Of Decay. Oh, and for Valentine's Day, a special feature on "Extreme Metal Couples"... as always, informative and/or amusing reading.
Guess we couldn't help but weigh in on the most discussed album so far this year. Now, we are not normally swayed by massive hype, but we admit to be quite taken early on by the sudden appearance of her two big singles, "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans", songs that seemed to marry dead end Hollywood glamor, with a jaded detachment and torchsong doom, the music either swathed in descending minor key hip hop beats, or orchestral string sections, sometimes both. Lynchian affinities naturally spread, as well as comparisons to both Amy Winehouse and Scott Walker. In the mainstream pop sphere, there was nothing quite like this.
Now the album is finally here, and while it doesn't completely live up to the promise of the singles, it -nearly- does. But we don't feel the problem with the record relates to any of the bafflingly contentious debate that has plagued the singer in recent months (we won't go into that here, as it's been well gone over in the mainstream music press). But rather it's the unexpected RnB Diva side to Del Rey that we have yet to encounter in her videos, that has thrown us off. Sung in a higher register with a blunted hip-hop swagger, songs like "Day at The Races", "National Anthem" and "Diet Mountain Dew", though not really that bad on their own (they're catchy as hell, but not sure if that's a good thing), don't quite jive with the persona the singer has so carefully crafted with "Video Games", creating a jarring schism within the flow of the record.
But still, this is a better record than most mainstream pop, and we'd rather hear this (or have the kids listen to it) more than the new Madonna record or anything by Lady Gaga. Say what you will about fake personas, Del Rey at least doesn't come across as some corporate schill, Diet Mountain Dew notwithstanding.
Here it is, the final installment in Demdike Stare's sprawling new hauntological epic, Elemental, split into 4 separate 12"s, the first three already sold out and out of print, as this one will be too shortly. Obviously, if you bought the first one, which came in the super deluxe Andy Votel designed quadruple gatefold sleeve, designed to hold all 4 records, you're gonna want/need this one too, but like we said with the last volume, the record do work pretty well on their own.
This fourth one, titled Iris (they're all titled after different flowers), might be the grimmest and darkest of the bunch. Opening with buzzing cellos, and swirling blackened drones, which are soon joined by a plodding doomy rhythm, laced with streaks of prismatic feedback and hauntingly melodic harmonies, all the whole in the background, textures and layers softly swirl and undulate, the result is definitely creep and cinematic, but also a bit blackened and industrial. The second track on the A side dials it down even further, unfurling a hushed, blurred thrum, a wash of hazy shimmer, a dubbed out murk laced with mysterious industrial percolations, reverbed clatter, and strange squelches, like a field recording of an old abandoned office building with all the air conditioners and printers and computers whirring away, a creepy disembodied hum which is soon enveloped by crunchy caustic high end, keening shards of buzz and skree, growing ever more dense and noisy...
The flipside introduces sonar pings, over a skittery, skeletal beat, shuffling through clouds of effects swirl, droned out bass warble, and more of that unidentified background shimmer, the sound is cavernous and hypnotic, the background sounds gradually solidifying into sheets of chordal whir, all wreathed in a cowl of soft buzzy sonic gauze, all the while that rhythm churns relentlessly, and that bass thrum stretches out into a strangely undulating low end drone.
CRAZY LIMITED of course, already sold out, so these are the last copies we'll be able to get. Comes in another Andy Votel designed sleeve, pressed on blue vinyl, and something weird this time (we didn't notice with the other records), the run out groove is on the OUTside, with the music toward the center, as if it was a 10" with extra empty groves wrapped around the circumference, etched of course with a mysterious message as well...
Back in print/stock, these came in the mail slightly damaged, so anal record nerds steer clear, but for everyone else, these are seriously discounted, so if slightly bumped corners and less than perfect sleeves don't bug you, snap one of these up before they're gone...
We've pretty much dug everything we've heard from Mark Deutrom, one time bassist for the mighty Melvins, which is saying a lot, considering his recorded output has been all over the map, from Queens Of The Stone Age like metal-pop, to full on experimental soundscapery, so we weren't super sure what to expect from this new double lp, but we figured it was Deutrom, and it was on the always kick ass Rock Is Hell label, so we figured that however it panned out, we'd be psyched. And right off the bat, Deutrom unfurls some Earth-like dusty twang, not at all what we were expecting, but super cool, acoustic guitars, simple dramatic percussion, we were definitely into it, and then the second song kicked in and BAM, total epic sludge heaviness, huge churning riffage, wild chaotic drumming, angular slo-mo melodies, murky textural drones, the sort of shit that should send fans of the Melvins and Harvey Milk into paroxysms of doom/sludge pleasure. And so it goes, over the course of three sides (the fourth one features a cool etching), the sound pretty much all over the place, but with a focus on riffs and heaviness, which is right where the focus should be. Deutrom has a handful of guest vocalists, who compliment his own gruff croon, with the music slipping from lurching noise rock, to Harvey Milk-ish sludgey groove, churning riffage, howled bellowed vox, at some points that Earth-y twang returns, but in the heavier bits, making for some awesome twangy sludgey noise rock epic-ness. There are some bits with drum machine, and some strange interludes, but the record is rife with epic doomy heaviness, sometimes laced with angular noisiness, but also sometimes slipping into something more dirgey and even almost ballady at one point, but it all works, the production is massive, the riffs kill, there are plenty of hooks too, seriously Melvins/Harvey Milk fans, grab one of these before they are gone!
LIMITED TO 466 COPIES!!! Packaged in a super swank full color gatefold jacket, with two full color cardstock inserts, pressed on heavy vinyl, and again, side 4 features a cool mysterious etching!
We've written a lot about super hyped YouTube phenoms, South African rave rappers Die Antwoord, do a quick search on the aQ site and check out the other DA reviews, we were pretty much obsessed with them from day one, as were most of our friends. It was hard not to be, especially after seeing the group's over the top videos, the tall gangly goofy tattooed redneck mainman, the impossibly cute elfin hype-girl, the over the top imagery, the ridiculous art design, the larger than life characters, the ridiculous rapping, the synth driven goofball anthems that actually KILLED, and were catchy as all get out. The band seemed to wear out their welcome, already dropped from their label, and with a sizable backlash, with people either proclaiming them stupid, or fakes, but as we mention in the other reviews, it doesn't matter. When we thought they were real South African ghetto rappers, we loved it, when we discovered it was a super well crafted musical art prank, we liked it even more. And you know what, the music STILL kills, the videos are still totally nuts, Yo-Landi, the elfin pixie with the coat made out of dead rats and the super severe (but impossibly hot) bleached white mullet, just gets more and more crush worthy, especially now what she's handling much of the vocal duties, before we go any further, take a second and watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uee_mcxvrw
How can you not be totally obsessed?! Still? Or AGAIN?! That's some total mindfuck / whatthefuck genius right there. And yeah, there is something to be said for Die Antwoord relying heavily on the visuals, and that removed from the videos, and without the larger than life characters, it's maybe not as immediate, but we defy folks who say the music sucks. Sure it's goofy and silly and dumb, puerile and ridiculous, but that's what makes it so goddamn fun. If you were in club, what would get your blood pumping more, a Rhianna song, some Lady Gaga hit, or "I Fink U Freeky", with that pulsing euro-rave synth, that inane but hypnotic chorus, that crazy rap, that speeds up weirdly midway through? No contest. And the record's pretty much overflowing with jams like that, huge buzzing synths, big dumb funky as fuck beats, bizarre vocals, over the top raps, if this was a record by some unknown producer, people would be flipping their shit, and rightfully so. Fuck the haters, and fuck the backlash, we love this shit, and it's pretty much all we want to listen to. And if we actually danced, you can bet this would be our JAM.
What a total gem! An amazing unearthed, ultra obscure album from way back in 1986. Hailing from Rochester, NY, Eleven Pond crafted super infectious dark pop with wonderful synth moments and song writing that has really held up over the years. Some of the production, and much of the overall sound reminds us a bit of Seventeen Seconds era Cure, where basslines lead the tracks and the guitars and synths add such a nice mood and texture. We're also reminded a lot of another obscure mid '80s band, For Against, who had the same ability to take Factory/4AD elements and influences and meld them so nicely with classic eighties American college rock, they kind of sounded like this amazing hybrid of Joy Division and R.E.M.
With new romantic vocals that totally tap into vintage Depeche Mode and New Order territory, we also hear echoes of other lesser known yet great bands of this era like Soul Merchants and Jet Black Factory. With so many new bands lately referencing that era and looking to similarly vintage sounds for inspiration, it's so refreshing to hear an actual relic from that period, too bad it sadly somehow slipped through the cracks, but now we can finally enjoy this set of songs, so worthy of much wider appreciation.
Limited to a pressing of 500, each copy has been silk screened and contains two Eleven Pond postcards as well as a sticker from Dark Entries, the label who mark this as their first release and who we have a pretty good feeling we're going to be hearing a lot more from in the future. Grab one while you can, as this is highly recommended!
La Lumiere Parfumee marks the second collaboration between longtime aQ favorite Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Lujik as Elodie. Chalk's vocabulary of the evocative, arcane, and hypnotic drone has seduced many over the years; but recently Chalk has been pulling back the shroud of mystery that envelops much of his long-form pieces of impeccable minimalism (e.g. Sumac, East Of The Sun, Vega, etc.), revealing the instrumental backbone to his drone-supreme. While not a drone album in the slightest, La Lumiere Parfumee is covered with Chalk's fingerprints, as noted through the album's refined sense of reductionism and that achingly poetic melancholy which drips from every sustained note and hushed passage. Van Lujik and Chalk work with a wide assortment of instruments, although on any given track, there's only three or four quietly orbiting each other. Through the sparse, non-linear interplay of guitar, bass, gongs, flutes, clarinet, percussion, and electronics, Van Lujik and Chalk utter amorphous structures that occasionally flicker with the ghost of a muffled Movietone number or something from Circle's Miljard, both of which would have already been sun bleached and stoned to the point of radical abstraction. We're probably more smitten by the piano and electronic excursions, which lean towards a Satie-inspired ambience over the loping impressionism through bass and guitar, but all of this is played with a spellbinding sadness, accompanied by small tactile events that sound like hapless shuffling through fallen leaves or the rustling of century old newspapers. Very handsomely packaged in/with Andrew Chalk's always impressive, hand-fabricated artwork.
It's been harder and harder to know what to write about Expo 70 records lately. Besides being uber prolific, we've pretty much exhausted out psychedelic stoner space rock thesaurus. Thankfully, this new one changes things up enough to give us something new to work with. Mostly the addition of rhythm, which the band have employed in the past, but never to such an extent. Sure they remain spacey, and psychedelic, and new age-y, and drifty and dreamy, and druggy, and washed out, hazy and gauzy and cosmic and kosmiche, and we could go on, but here, they open up their latest record with what might be their most chaotic and sonically dense jam yet. Starting off all stumbly and abstract, with skittery programmed beats, and loosely strummed guitars, some amp buzz and bits of glitch and random crunch, but then those sounds gradually begin to coalesce, the guitars super reverbed, the rhythms looped and mesmeric, the guitars getting more intense, and more driving, multiple loops and melodies layered, eventually some proper riffs entering the equation, churning beneath clouds of those looped melodies, all the while, that rhythm skitters away, the song getting louder and louder, more intense, easily on of the heaviest things we've heard from these guys in a while, bordering on White Hills / Heads territory there for a minute, before fading back into something much more tranced out and meditative.
And while the rest of the record isn't quite so dense or heavy, the songs definitely display both a cool sort of jammy looseness, as well a penchant for something darker and more dense than usual. "Seven Serpents" minus some spidery guitars is a lush undulating expanse of layered synths, and warm whirling dronemusic, definitely cosmic, and spaced out, minimal, and super mesmerizing. "Growing Mushrooms Of Potency" starts off with a sky full of BBC Radiophonic Workshop / sci-fi bleeps and bloops, before another lo-fi skittery rhythm comes in, and then finally some low slung bass, and some shimmery organ, and we're in full on intergalactic drift mode, dodging stray FX and clouds of celestial glimmer, and then at the very end, the sound shifts, and becomes intensely dark and ominous, like some sort of soundtracky Umberto style creepdrone, which fades out WAY to soon. And then finally, "Heartfelt Moon Tripper" finishes things off with what begins as a hazy big of new age-y shimmer, all glistening crystalline clouds and warm whirring chordal drifts, until about half way through, a dark heartbeat like pulse surfaces, and dense little guitar tangles begin to loop and layer, until the hazy opening layers are shed completely, and replaced with a deep ominous thrum, wound around that sinister pulse, all surrounded by streaks of jagged melody and howling echo drenched sheets of guitar swirl, until a brief bit of Zombi / Goblin like cinematic synthscapery ushers the song to its more ethereal conclusion.
Cassette version coming soon too, btw.
Latest (vinyl-only) chunk of kosmische spacekraut exploration from long time aQ faves Expo 70, for this recording expanded to a duo, consisting of Expo 70 main man Justin Wright, along with his occasional collaborator Matt Hill, aka recent Record Of The Week honoree Umberto. Together they conjure four sprawling smoldering tracks of galaxian space drone mesmer spread out over four vinyl sides. While it seemed like on other recent Expo 70 records, that Wright and Co. were slowly moving toward a heavier sound, dipping into occasional SUNNO))) territory, the sounds here are seem more tranquil and blissed out, although the addition of Hill gives some of these songs a distinctly haunting soundtrack vibe...
The opening track offers up some subtle minimal drum machines, more textural than rhythmic, drifting on a warm whirling sea of shimmering sonic swells and hazy soft focus drones, everything gauzy and washed out, the soundtrack to a sky full of solar flares, blurred and indistinct, bleary eyed and blissful The guitars do gain some momentum, wrapped in reverb and sent spinning into the ether, but everything stays grounded, a dreamlike abstract soft sonic drift.
The second track definitely seems to reflect the presence of Umberto mainman Hill, immediately unfurling a thick swatch of buzzing drone, a haunting ominous tense bit of ambience, streaks of minor key melody, all underpinned by squelchy low end synths and warm washes of synthesized strings, the whole thing sounding like Umberto or Zombi filtered through Expo 70. There are some brief stretches where the low end becomes a bit more corrosive, but it dissipates quickly, leaving synth shadows and melodic traces, to gradually fade into the cosmos.
The second record begins again with some thick droning synths, layered into softly pulsing streaks, wheezing and whirring elegantly, and ominously, building a mysterious background, over which the duo lay swoonsome strings and maudlin piano, it's all very cinematic and soundtracky and classical, like the score to some lost Italian giallo, again like some hybrid of Umberto and Expo 70 (which it essentially is), one can almost picture the strange psychedelic colors, and constantly flitting shadows, some crumbling old villa set atop a hill, beneath a burnt black sky, tense and moody and gloriously creepy.
The final track/side begins with a cloud of processed guitars, wreathed in delay and reverb, a warm swirl of buzz and pulse, that gradually grows more lush and full, hazy and druggy, the drum machine from the first track returns, again adding texture (but this time a little propulsion as well), the swirl of guitars smooth out into something much more hypnotic, before everything seems to meltdown in a soft psychedelic squall, streaks of spaced out effects, fragmented melodies, shuffling rhythms buried beneath clouds of hiss and whir and static buzz, a warm whirling stretch of soft chaos, that soon morphs into a muted murky bit of outer space shimmer, that gradually disappears into the vast endless blackness, like a dying star. Epic and fantastic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on super thick virgin vinyl, and housed in a fancy old style tip-on gatefold jackets. Includes a download code as well...
Mu.Zz.Le is a 10 song mini-album that acts as a sort of a temporary fix until the next Gonjasufi full length. While these are songs that easily could have been left-over from the A Killer and A Sufi sessions (an album we loved!), the flow here has a more tight-knit focus than the kitchen sink approach of the first album. Blurry spectral keyboards and pitched-shifted vocals, not to mention the odd typographical layout of the title, display a witch-house production influence, but the sounds are scuffed and blunted with enough of the stoned grime of his debut that it feels like a natural progression. The tone rides heavily on the melancholy with echoing vocals far-off in the mix and slow doomy beats, but with everything sounding at arm's distance, it may take awhile for the emotional and melodic heft of the songs to really sink in. But it's definitely worth the wait.
A few years ago (2006) we reviewed the debut album from unpretentious modern day prog rockers Gosta Berlings Saga, of Sweden. Checking in with them again, they're up to album number 3, released Stateside by the venerable progressive rock / new music label Cuneiform. This actually came out last year, so we're a little late to it, but this sort of prog rock is timeless anyway (it might as well be from 1975!). They're still pushing our "traditional" prog rock lovin' buttons, so we thought we ought to list it for those of you likely to feel the same way, who dig other 21st century efforts at updating this '70s genre from the likes of Astra, Diagonal, and Crime In Choir, for instance.
Glue Works, like GBS's preceding albums, is mostly instrumental, and not overindulgent (for prog) - and thus could just as easily be seen as a moderately mathy "post-rock" album (but with mellotron!) instead of anything self-consciously retro. Most of the songs are even quite short and succinct, with only two of the 7 tracks breaking into double-digit lengths, those would be the powerful symphonic epic "Island" (12:58), and the album's multifaceted grand finale, "Sorteragatan 1" (12:51).
Filled with the varied drama & delight of grimy distortion, pleasant keys, eerie synth, sweeping strings, some angular new wavy guitar, and even musical saw, the entirety of Glue Works is a melodic and moody opus that nods to the proggy '70s without growing a ponytail or anything. Quite nice!
A while back we reviewed a record by Scottish depressive doom laden black metal outfit Vostok, which ended up being a favorite among the aQ black metalheads, so we were psyched to discover that there was a Vostok offshoot called Haar, who take a similar approach to black metal, imbuing it with plenty of gloomy creep and midtempo lumber, even opening up the proceeding with a almost Sabbathy sounding stoner metal dirge, before launching into some proper black buzz. But even over the course of that first track the band constantly slip into a sound much more lurching and dynamic, mathy and a bit proggy, with some dirgey guitar chug, cool double kick drumming, and soaring guitars, all wedded to the weirdly lumbering tempos that only occasionally erupt into full on blast. "To Forgive An Enemy" offers up some darkly melancholy riffage, gnarled and blackened, wreathed in strange spidery melodies, the drums pounding away underneath, which gives way to closer "Without Form Or Void", which is the weirdest of the bunch, all woozy, warped start/stop chug and churn, super mathy and complex, the song's arrangement dizzying, flitting from grinding blast, to classic metal majesty, to murky dirgery and back again, weirdly dissonant, with bellowed clean vocals and hints of classic true doom infused into the band's otherwise twisted black doom crush.
One that nearly slipped through the cracks, here we have The Hafler Trio's impressive Dislocation. Originally recorded to tape back in 1986 on Staalplaat, who later released it on disc in 1990, Dislocation was certainly one of their more obscure albums both in terms of distribution and in terms of content. It has been speculated that these recordings represent the final material that Chris Watson contributed to The Hafler Trio before embarking on his own impressive field recordist career; but there's no discernible 'proof' to back up that claim. Such is the way for the man behind the curtain of The Hafler Trio - that man, of course, being Andrew McKenzie. The title here couldn't be more apt in describing this very decentered collage, which leaps, cuts, and jumps from one tape-spliced collage of oblique, industrial-stained musique concrete to electronic decompositions of found sound, marked by short snippets of near silence and ambient room noise. In this collage, you might find yourself confronted with electrified voltage arcs bursting out of field recordings of fighter jets racing above and waterlogged ships creaking below. Elsewhere, h3o presents an unsettling sonic clamor prescient of the Schimpfluch aktions that may or may not be part of some unknowable gnostic ritual, or the sonic detritus from a display of guttural abjection. Blurting alarm calls and scraped metals disrupt streams of disembodied voices and heavily collaged media samples, and electrical drones are plucked from the ether of the shortwave radio band. There are elements from Dislocation that reappear throughout the Hafler Trio's early catalogue, say from 1984 - 1992; but with Andrew McKenzie, the act of recontextualization is a critical component to the process of splintering mediated and social metaphor. McKenzie states that he's reprocessed and even replaced some of the original material with this reissued disc on Korm Plastics. The material all has a gritty tape-grafted feel, so whatever is replacing the old material has the spirit and feel of the original. As with all of the Hafler Trio releases, sound samples are verboten by decree of the man behind the curtain.
Found just TWO of these tucked away in the closet, we got em way back in 2005, and for whatever reason, we never got around to reviewing it, which is a shame cuz this is some crazed kick ass stuff. A sort of manic twisted post punk, thrash pop, or something, from back in the nineties, angular, crusty, chaotic, noisy, atonal crunchy buzzy guitars, wild octopoidal drumming, super melodic basslines, unhinged vocals that flit from keening croon, to punk rock yelp to banshee wail, it's really hard to describe these UK weirdos, we'd say if you dig Crass and Rudimentary Peni and that sort of crusty punk rock, but mixed with some over the top, almost proggy aspirations, with the songs devolving into mathy freakouts, or soaring punkprog epics, then these guys are right up your alley. Hard to believe more people haven't freaked out over these guys, cuz this stuff is baffling and brilliant, noisy, dense, loose, epic, twisted and heavy. And way recommended. Sadly we only have 2 copies.
Killer packaging too, a cool cd sized softcover book, with full color covers, and inside pages and pages of lyrics, drawing, photos and collages. The cd contains the group's only LP, their only 7", a demo tape and a bunch of comp and unreleased tracks!
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.
We've been meaning to review this for a while now, record number two from the East Coast post-hardcore sludge pop combo Hull, whose first record positioned them alongside aQ faves Torche, with that sort of extreme heaviness fused to extreme poppiness thing, but on the new record the band have had a serious sonic makeover. The opening track alone, after a brief bit of sludginess, explodes into a furious blasting metalpunk blowout, with shrieked vox, buzzing guitars, slipping into chugging almost-breakdowns, before exploding into a roiling bit of lumbering doom, the guitars super distorted, the band lurching through some cool stop/starts, peppered with wild double kick drumming, and some psychedelic guitar shred, before shifting gears and locking into a super blown out mathy churn, before slipping right back into a strange sort of sing along punk dirge, and heck, the song is 11+ minutes so the band go all out, jamming wildly and flitting from sound to sound, managing to string it all together into something cohesive, and pretty massively crushing.
The rest of the record is just as varied, with the second track getting all spacey and droney, never really metal more a sort of acoustic guitar driven dirge, big drums wedded to some almost Appalachian style buzz, swampy and bluesy, but still dark and heavy, before the title track finds the band launching right back into some bellowed, downtuned heaviness, all angular guitars, and pounding drums, the poppiness of their first record still finding its way into their sound, but more subtly, with this new sound being much more about texture and mood, riffing and metallic pound, but it definitely suits them, in fact in some ways, while this new sound is still beholden to many that came before, it's a much more original sound, and one they've definitely made their own, and one we're still exploring after repeated listens. Epic and varied, sludgey and thrashy, melodic and mysterious, and most definitely psychedelic, this is the kind of record that should hit the spot for heavy music obsessives of all stripes. WAY recommended.
The strangely named duo Imbogodom, made up of UK based Alexander Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Ginnungagap) and New Zealander Daniel Beban, once again return to the BBC studios, sneaking in after everyone has gone home, where they again proceeded to work some audio alchemy on the old equipment, using not much more than a mixing desk and tape machines, as well as some field recordings and found sounds to create their own sort of BBC Radiophonic Workshop style analog tape musique concrete. And like their last record, The Metallic Year, it's pretty fantastic. A dizzying assemblage of sounds and textures, atmospheric, ambient, rhythmic, moody and haunting, mysterious and otherworldly, clouds of static whirl around the whir of machinery, glistening tinkling chimes are blurred into smears of hazy shimmer, melodies and voices are chopped and looped and layered into weirdly majestic alien prog folk, deep tones and slowed down voices are transformed into foghorn like gurgles and deep monstrous rumbles, wild drums are wedded to woozy psychedelic guitars, fuzzy folk is wreathed in black clouds of whir and thrum, and doused in strange effects, shortwave buzz gives way to creepy music box melodies, keening high end tones melt down into murky muddy creep, pocked with sci-fi glitchery, and disembodied voices, stately pianos are smeared into something a bit hazy and warbly, before blossoming into a strange fuzzy psychedelic ballad.
It's a pretty fantastically trippy songsuite, one that masterfully avoids the pitfalls of much experimental music, where the idea and the execution, the story behind the sounds and the joy of creating far surpass the joy of actually listening. But here, it's just the opposite, it's so easy to be immediately transported, the sounds so evocative, so warm and layered and full of small discoveries that surface with each repeated listen, they become essentially a series of miniature soundtracks, music to accompany whatever wild visions the listener can conjure up. So good!
The latest release from Pacific City Sound Visions, the label run by Spencer Clark, one half of the late great floorcore noise duo The Skaters. He's in Inner Tube, joined by none other than Mark McGuire of Emeralds, and the results are pretty baffling, but brilliant in their own way. The sounds of Inner Tube seems to hew much closer to those of the OTHER Skater, James Ferraro, with a wildly fractured recapitulation of the cheesiest music of the eighties, in this case, what sounds like the theme music from BayWatch or Miami Vice, but with more shredding guitar. What? Yep, imagine Joe Satriani via Ariel Pink, and you'll be getting warmer, fuzzy guitars, propulsive beats, synthy swirls, some seriously retro eighties pop, but with endlessly shredding psychedelic leads, total shredfest, but wedded to old school sort of electro pop synth rock. There are a few tracks, where things get a bit murkier and moodier, and a little bit soundtracky, but the majority of the record sets itself firmly in shredding eighties retro pop, but suitably warped and weird. Might shed some light on the proceedings to have Clark himself explain the impetus / genesis of Inner Tube:
"The bliss and ecstatic power of Australian beach music has kept me in this positive mental attitude that I wanted to communicate to everyone around me. Mark and I began to be in touch, and started to really connect in our exotic fascination with Australia and its surf culture. We decided to record an album together with impressions from these private movies and their tunes. Mark travelled numerous times to Pacific City Studios so that we could make this album together (and eventually moved here). At one point, a woman visiting Hotel California who I hadn't met before, mentioned she thought it was strange that I played so much Australian music. I told her about my fascination with Storm Riders, the sickest Australian movie of all time. She immediately told me that her Uncle had a big part in the movie.�The guy's name is Rabbit Bartholomew. He is a magical person in this Storm Riders movie and has been an inspirational to surfers everywhere. He wrote this letter to Mark and I: 'Hey Spencer, Great to get ya letter. Christel gave me a bit of insight. Really cool how you guys were talking about Storm Riders and our family connection, that's meant to be bra. For sure, send me a demo, I'll give ya some feedback. That's really cool about Inner Tube and the beloved zone, that's it mate, right on the money.' We then realized that we were to travel to the Gold Coast in Australia to record Inner Tube Part Deux, and play a Surf Festival put on by Rabbit Bartholomew's sister. The story just keeps on going, so Mark and I are really stoked to have you guys check this out with us..."
Ummm, yep. Doesn't make a whole lot more sense now does it. Or does it? Regardless, we dig it!
Comes in suitably garish dayglo surfer style jacket, and includes a huge equally garish / dayglo poster of Clark and McGuire.
We had never heard of Nicolas Jaar before, a well renowned techno producer apparently, but we were immediately blown away by Space Is Only Noise, which seems to be only tangentially 'techno', to our ears it's more a collection of brooding electronic ballads, exploring the world of slo-mo soul already being mined by folks like Burial and How To Dress Well, but In Jaar's hands, that sound becomes something else entirely, just have a listen to the opener "Etre", after a minute or two of lapping waves, and some strange samples, Jaar creates a gorgeous landscape of mournful melody, and strangely clipped and stuttered vocals, the remove most of the sound and render those voices more as rhythm, the combination of the two is so mysterious, and so otherwordly, and when he then introduces the sound of children playing, it ends up being gorgeous and creepy, as the piano grows more dissonant and chaotic. Heck, we would have been happy with a whole record of just that. But there's so much more going on. "Colomb" takes some Pop Ambient swirl and adds a strangely stuttery handclap beat, and some strange autotuned vocals, the resulting croon, both warm and sensual, and strangely alien. Elsewhere, like on "Too Many Kids Finding Rain In The Dust", Jaar channels Gainsbourg, and creates a dark rainy day ballad, that is techno only by merit of the programmed rhythms, "Keep Me There" is another sultry soundscape of skittery beats, liquid samples, dramatic melodies, handclap rhythms, and strange processed vox.
We could go on, track by track, but you should have a measure of what's going on here, and how much we're digging it. A mix of French pop, minimal techno, slo-mo soul, downtempo electronica, with a heaping helping of strange samples, moody warped vocals, lush textures, subtly twisted percussion, and smoldering moodiness to burn, is making this a new favorite for sure. Fans of Blue Daisy, Burial, How To Dress Well, Holy Other, Kode 9, Swarms, Balam Acab, Shlohmo, as well as dark brooding electronic pop music, would do well to check this out!
Latest missive from this Weakling-worshipping one man black metal band, whose sounds has changed quite a bit since his very Dead As Dreams beholden debut Dead As Duck, with the music growing more and more varied, and the playing getting more and more polished, the recording too constantly improving or at the very least changing, even at its lowest fidelity now, it sound intentional, an integral part of the sound. What began as a rehearsal space recorded DIY project, now sound downright professional, at times, and while in many cases we'd lament that sort of 'progress', in the case of Jabladav, it really does seem to suit the sound.
Ayr begins with a gorgeous bit of acoustic guitar, before the record kicks in proper, and while it may be more polished, that doesn't mean it's not still a bit twisted and weird, clean guitars jangle over clipped drums, howled vox, it's a weird sort of blackened pop, until the buzz comes in, and then, well, it still sounds like blackened pop, reminding us of Hypothermia, that same sort of loping jangly blackness, the distortion more crumbly and blown out than the traditional black buzz. The next track too starts out all clean guitar, and crooned clean vocals, moody and swoonsome, until suddenly lurching into a chaotic black buzz, and it's definitely chaotic, a wild maelstrom of furious riffing, drums-down-the-stairs blastbeats, and of course harsh demonic vokills. The song slips right back into the clean guitar lope, the buzz swooping in again, but this time remaining a midtempo lope, this time just wreathed in a black buzz, the whole thing driven by a prominent bassline, which gives the track a distinctly gloomy gothicky feel.
But it's not all clean and croon, "Oktober" is a frenzied blast of gnarled blackness right out of the gate, raw and feral, with some awesome stop/start arrangements, the sound filthy and crusty, blown out and in the red, which helps to balance the comparatively melodic opening salvo.
The next track, even after starting out with classic black metal intro, launches into a strange hybrid, that melds black buzz to burbling basslines, strummed acoustic guitars, more of those demonic vox, the result is a strangely washed out almost shoegazey sounding blackened metal, with definite pop elements lurking beneath the surface, the vocals getting particularly creepy and unhinged. It's a cool sound, and definitely unlike any other black 'metal' we've heard. And so it goes, the record continuing to confound, as Jabladav seems to loved doing, the next track a woozy slo-mo dirge, some killer riffing wrapped around a minimal beat, mesmerizing and hypnotic, might be one of our favorite tracks on the record, the guitars thick and buzzy but still melodic, the sound harsh and heavy, but atmospheric and a bit doomy.
The title track begins with the sound of thunderstorms, beneath weirdly processed guitars, a warped shimmery guitarscape, ambient and strangely psychedelic, the song does briefly explode into some black buzz about halfway through, but the buzz is muted, and the song is driven by a lilting melody, and everything is blissed out and becomes more so as the song morphs back into that opening pulsing guitarscape. Finally the record finishes off with another bit of impossibly melodic black buzz, the first half all chiming and shimmering, the second half more of the same, but wedded to a buried blast beat, and with slightly more buzz, but still ultimately melodic and more pretty really than grim or black.
This may in fact be the least overtly black metal Jabladav record yet (barring the ambient discs), and is most definitely the strangest, but because of all that, it might just be our favorite so far�
Packaged in a purplish-pink digipak, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, each one signed and hand numbered ON THE SHRINKWRAP, which means if you open it, that number will be gone, unless you save the plastic wrap.
A self-taught musician with a keen understanding of electronic circuits, F.C. Judd published the first of 11 books on the nascent field of electronic music in 1954. This was a few years before the BBC founded its Radiophonic Workshop, and documentation exists that Judd and the Workshop's Daphne Oram were in communication with each other. That said, Judd might have counted amongst the hundreds of amateur enthusiasts who tinkered in garages, basements, attics, and sheds throughout the UK (and beyond for that matter!); but his anonymity was not for a lack of trying, as he did publish those 11 books, founded the Amateur Tape Recording magazine (with a run from 1959-1967), and funded a couple of record labels, all in the pursuit of disseminating experimental tape music to a wider audience. Many of those singles did get bundled by Studio G for library use (and subsequently, one of those tracks made it onto the G-Spots compilation from the Studio G archives, curated by Trunk Records), and Judd did create the electronic sound design for the children's sci-fi puppet show Space Patrol in 1963.
Judd's late '50s / early '60s studio featured various oscillators, tape decks, and filters alongside a primitive drum machine and an experimental synthesizer, both of his own design; and he rendered an eerie array of vibrations and electronic plonk, coupled with a rough-cut / hand-spun approach to tape edits and loops. Judd varied from the spookily abstract paralleling (and predating) the sound design from the Forbidden Planet and Dr. Who soundtracks; and some delightfully playful electronic poptunes looking forward to Joe Meek's gleeful electronics as The Blue Men. Interspersed throughout the electronics and tape experiments, Judd offers up his own thoughts on the tracks themselves with a dry sense of humor tossing about explanatory definitions of basic musique concrete techniques and various electronic circuits. A fantastic and compelling document of the earliest and nearly forgotten pioneers of British electronic music, to which Judd himself said it best: "Musique Concrete is fascinating!"
Latest from violinist / composer Eyvind Kang, released on the Ideologic Organ label, run by Stephen O'Malley of SUNNO))), three lengthy pieces performed by a strangely eclectic ensemble featuring a mix of young upstarts and minimal music legends. The instrumentation is equally eclectic: trombone, trumpet, violin, oboe, viola, voice, glass (!), piano, electric piano, modified cello and pedal steel guitar. The players include Kang of course, along with Stewart Dempster, vocalist, Jessika Kenney, Steve Moore from Zombi and a handful of others.
The pieces here while distinct and separate, seem to form one single epic piece, austere and mesmerizing, minimal and droney, a series of haunting high end drones drift and undulate over minimal percussion, layered and lush, the moaning low end blurred into the keening high end, the result thick swells of sound that ebb and flow, leaving plenty of space, hushed and nearly static one second dense and intense the next, the vibe definitely cinematic, with the second 'movement' introducing more traditional melody, acting as a sort of closing coda for the side, pulling the drones apart into distinctive melodies before finally fading out.
The sidelong third 'movement' might be our favorite bit, more of a buzzing raga, laced with glistening guitar harmonics, all the scrapes and screeches of the strings smoothed into long layered tones, all driven by a subtly pulsing rhythmic component, that fades gradually as the piece continues, the whole thing becoming more and more abstract until the parts seem to dissipate leaving just emptiness. So nice.
And as with all Ideologic Organ releases, beautifully packaged in an O'Malley designed jacket, printed in super subtle, yet striking reflective ink.
This classic album from 1971 has been lovingly reissued by Tompkins Square. Released originally on the LA-based Black Jazz label, Shawn-Neeq was soul-jazz guitarist Calvin Keys debut release after years being a member and session player in several famous jazz combos with the likes of Jimmy Smith, Richard "Groove" Holmes, and Jack McDuff.
Shawn-Neeq begins with the cosmic opening herald of "B.E." before launching into an understated groove backed by Fender Rhodes, bass, and flutes, some low-key horns, but the main space is left open for Key's travelling guitar lines that explore wildly while still keeping it all glued together. The title track delves into a softer focus of pretty balladry with lyrical flute and Rhodes keeping the momentum. The eight minute "Gee-Gee" brings a funkier vibe back into play and is probably our favorite track. Though it's hard to beat the closer, "B.K." which has a harder funk vibe and distorted Rhodes again that give the song a more acid-y psychedelic feel. This is an excellent slice of empowered soul jazz and we're psyched to see it available on vinyl once again! Recommended!
Calvin Keys lives in Oakland these days and we've heard he's playing out again in support of this reissue, unfortunately we missed his show at Yoshi's but hope to see him soon.
Recently released on vinyl by Mississippi Records, and made a Record Of The Week by us, this fantastic collection of 78s from legendary Indian classical vocalist Ustad Abdul Karim Khan is now available on cd (with different cover art for some reason). Compiled by Ian Nagoski (who also put together some of our favorite old timey 78's collections, including Brass Pins & Match Heads, Unheard Ofs & Forgotten Abouts and Black Mirror: Reflections In Global Musics, among others!), the sounds here are unlike anything you've ever heard, so haunting and mysterious, timeless and powerful, a collection of lush, spiritual ragas, which manage to be both simple and Spartan, yet simultaneously sonically dense and melodically complex, a soundworld both moving and mystical, emotional and utterly gorgeous. Khan was a huge influence on legendary minimalist composer La Monte Young, in fact the Mississippi lp liner notes offer up a quote from Young that basically sums it up better than we ever could: "When I first heard the recordings of Abdul Karim Khan I thought that perhaps it would be best if I gave up singing, got a cabin up in the mountains, stocked it with a record player and recordings of Abdul Karim Khan, and just listened for the rest of my life."
We can definitely understand his feelings, this is the sort of music, so powerful and so passionate, that it definitely puts most 'singers' to shame. The instrumentation is very traditional classical Indian, but it's the vocals that drive these songs, the instruments way down in the mix, Khan's intense and ecstatic vocals soaring and dramatic, so commanding yet still impossibly warm and mellifluous. We've seen descriptions of these recordings as being "not easy listening, but ultimately very rewarding", and while we definitely agree with the second half of the statement, these sounds, while complex and totally unlike most 'Western' music you've heard, are not at all difficult to listen to, just the opposite, after just a few seconds, you'll be whisked away, totally transported, as the sounds surround you, and seep into your spirit and soul, soft swirls of soothing sonorous, sonic spiritual bliss. The music here so utterly transcendent, so lush, warm and welcoming, yet at the same time, so strange and wondrous, Khan's voice sounding like it's bathed in divine light.
Ustad Abdul Karim Khan truly was a sonic shaman for the ages, delivering these divine musical messages to us, his willing supplicants. Incredible.
We first heard LA black metal horde Lake Of Blood on a split with aQ black metal faves Panopticon, but sadly, that split was so limited we were never able to get enough copies to list/review. So here it is two years later, and Lake Of Blood return with their first proper full length, in the form of a two song, 32 minute lp on local label The Flenser, where LoB prove to be a good fit, their epic slowburn doom flecked post black metal sounding right at home amidst other Flenser outfits like Panopticon, Bosse-De-Nage, Ghast, Necrite, Palace Of Worms, and Seidr.
The A side begins with the sound of surf, the soft white noise of crashing waves, which leads directly into a very wavelike progression of crashing lurching doom, plenty of lumbering stop/starts, angular riffage, crashing staccato heaviness, that almost sounds more like noise rock than black metal (we're hearing Dazzling Killmen for sure), it's not until about 4 minutes in that the band launch into some serious blackness, but even then, it's not the typical buzz and blast we were expecting, instead, the guitars are super bright sounding, and there's loads of melody, and even some acoustic guitars strumming away below the surface, and they pepper their blackened blasting with returns to the opening lurch and lumber. The song gets dense and mathy and pretty complex and proggy, with some seriously kick ass drumming, and over the course of the 17 minutes, the band slip easily from mathy blasting blackness, to stuttery abstract doom, to super melodic drift, to noise rocky crunch and to classic metal churn. All the while the strange production, and those mysterious buried acoustic guitars transforming the song into something all its own.
The flipside offers up more of the same, if a bit more straight ahead, less mathiness, and less of that doomy vibe, and more blasting and thrashing, with the first 5 or 6 minutes veering into almost classic black metal territory, until the band change gears again, and unfurl a droned out bit of almost psychedelic sounding post rockiness, laced with spoken word, and long stretches of droned out buzz, and when the band slip back into some more black buzz, the sound seems to shift dramatically, that mysterious acoustic guitar returns, and the sound is suddenly way more progressive, the sound flitting from dirgey and doomy, to buzzy and mathy, to noisy and chaotic, to super melodic and almost poppy, finally slipping into another bout of classic metal riffing before finally fading out into the surf sounds that opened the record.
One of two new releases on local label The Flenser, the other being the latest full length lp from LA black metallers Lake Of Blood (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and this one, the first demo from Oakland funeral doom band Lycus, who existed briefly years ago in Sacramento, but reshuffled their lineup and relocated to the East Bay, and finally released their first record, and it's a doozy. A gorgeous sonically lugubrious crawl, glacial and downtuned, the sort of sludgey ultra-doom bliss that should hit the spot for folks into Skepticism, dISEMBOWELMENT and the like. And like those bands, there's a huge melodic component, this is not the sort of slow motion tuneless ultrasludge (which we also dig!), this is like classic doom, slowed waaaaaay down, there's even some groove, a little Sabbathy swing, but it's subtle, the band creeping and lumbering for the most part, but with a surprising amount of complexity, in the arrangement, the melodies, the drumming quite busy for music this slow, and the riffing active, with all manner of intertwined melodies and churning riffage. The sound slipping from classic metal to funereal dirge and back again, often letting the two bleed into each other, the resulting hybrid, impossibly catchy, heavy, and doomy all at the same time. In fact, when we were playing this in the store, it got Allan to come investigate, he being notoriously finicky about his doom, but it's that sort of sound, grim and slow and murky and dirgey enough to appeal to the doomlords, but melodic and subtly poppy enough to immediately stick in your head, rare is the sort of doom that is actually catchy, and catchy without losing any of its dark energy and blackened heft. The band also mix the typical doom vocal gurgle with clean vocals, monklike chants in places, but that dramatic croon just adds another element, not just melodic but also textural. There are even some strange melodies that sound almost like horns in one track, and the band also don't hesitate to explode into blast of furious black metal crush, but when they do, it's only briefly, then it's right back to that loping, lumbering impossibly catchy, melodic downtuned churn.
We had never heard of the oddly monikered M Ax Noi Mach, aka Philly noisemaker Rob Francisco, but it was brought to our attention that if we were digging Finnish power electronic hypnodirge weirdos Will Over Matter, we really oughta check out this guy, and holy cow, while it's definitely not the same thing, it definitely pushes a lot of the same buttons, total lo-fi beat heavy post industrial noiserock club music for sure, the sort of shit noiseheads would be blasting if they had any sort of booming system. Just check out opener "Creeper", with its brittle crunked out beats, super distorted tweeter punishing clipped hiss, the howled feral vox, a total gristly groove that kills. Think Will Over Matter collaborating with Wolf Eyes on some sort of alternative universe club banger, and you wouldn't even be close.
The second track sounds like some sort of cold wave DHR mash up, stuttering trashcan beats, the warbly bass groove, peppered with a killer skipping skittering high end break that DESTROYS.
There's definitely some serious Throbbing Gristle worship going on, but via Philly club music, and there's some glitchy post Whitehouse chaotic crunch, like "Devil City" which definitely sounds a lot like Will Over Matter, a thick grinding murk pulsing away, and peppered with caustic blasts of white noise drenched feedback/vocal freakouts, a thick ugly groover that would be a guaranteed dancefloor clearer. Then there are tracks like "Fetico", which finds much of the high end peeled back, the skree blunted, the rhythms muted and murky, multiple vocals laid atop one another, whispers, spoken, slooooowed doooooown gurgle, a dizzying tangle over that loping stuttersludge loop, the follow up, "Hallowed Eyes" is equally stripped down, a fuzzy pulsating low end throbs beneath some clipped house-y skitter, about as groovy and anything on the record gets, the melodic element supplied by what sounds like amp buzz, and a switch being flipped on and off again, it's like some sort of Dead C electro, which is fine by us, we could listen to shit like this endlessly, and at 6 minutes it ends WAY too soon.
The rest of the record cranks it back up again, a barrage of lo-fi DHR pound, gouts of growled angry bellowed vox, sheets of Metal Machine Music chopped and screwed into hiccuping expanses of grind and gristle, clouds of angry crunch and dense swirling hiss wrapped around robotic drum pound and muddy mechanical grooves, everything filthy and crusty and blown the fuck out, a glorious chunk of rhythmic electronic punishment that we can't seem to stop listening to.
LIMITED TO 406 COPIES. Housed in swank printed cardstock jackets.
At last, for those of you whose turntables are built sturdily enough to withstand the massive heaviness, here's some VINYL from former AQ Record Of The Weekers, Megaton Leviathan, those droning Portland doomsters who, while as heavy as their name so inadequately attempts to indicate, are surprisingly somnolently mesmeric too!
Released on their own label, it's a limited lp pressing of their original 2009 demo tape, five tracks, around 34 minutes of doooOOOOOooooom. The first two tracks, "Water Wealth Hell On Earth" and "Guns And LSD" both were later rerecorded for their cd debut that we made ROTW, while the other 3, "Repeating Patterns Of Love", "Time Fades", and "Turlock", all appeared redone on their 2011 demo cassette as well. So, no new songs, but if you don't have the original demo, you haven't heard these versions before, and in any case this is the only way to weigh your turntable down with their doom, as we said... though as we also have said, ML's doom is a special sort of "soft doom", as much spacey slowcore shoegaze as it is anything else, uniquely so even on these, their debut recordings.
Got just a handful of these tapes, from a batch of 120, from this new-ish group featuring members of several aQ faves including Pussygutt / Wolvserpent and A Story Of Rats, recorded a few years back, and sold mostly on the recent Wolvserpent / ASOR tour. And for folks who are familiar with either or both of those bands, the sound of Mezektet isn't that far removed, shimmering strings, melancholic steel string guitar, ominous percussion, all hazy and woozy and otherwordly, sounding at times like some sort of gypsy folks spinning at 16rpm, definitely a dark doomfolk vibe, but like the players' other projects it leans toward the black and the metal, and in this case, actually does spend much of it's time in metal mode, pounding drums and frenzied riffage, howled vokills, but here, those sounds are smoothed out and blurred, wreathed in high glistening crystalline tones, the sound a murky loopscape more than a proper black blast, almost as if Tim Hecker was trying his hand at black metal, needless to say, it sounds incredible, tripped out and heavy, atmospheric and darkly moody, definitely need to hear more from these guys (and gal). Hope this wasn't just a one off, cuz it's definitely as good as anything the various members have done in their other projects.
Sadly, we only have about 10 copies left, and pretty sure it's already sold out and out of print. So grab one quick before it's too late.
LIMITED TO 120, each one hand numbered, recorded on cool metallic green tapes.
Earth Has Doors is the first solo record from Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles, and while in many respects it's sonically similar to the F&O's mothership, Miles paints a much darker musical picture, twangy and dirgey, heavily reverbed, a little bit swampy and gothic sounding, Miles' vocals are haunting, deep and dramatic, and while these songs are heavily rooted in Miles' study of eschatology, anthroposophy, and Gnostic and Hermetic symbolism, one might not necessarily hear that, even on close listening, although the sounds here are most definitely dark and mysterious, reminding us at times of Scott Walker, Woven Hand, Mark Lanegan, and other similarly dark spirited songsmiths. Miles' vocals do definitely also remind us of Fresh & Onlys frontman Tim Cohen, which makes sense, and sonically, Miles's first foray is again not that far removed from his main band, which of course means F&O's fans will definitely dig, as long as they're prepared for a bit more darkness than they're used to. But that said, Earth Has Doors is its own dark beast, with some strange production, sweeping strings, buzzing synths, proggy arrangements, tribal percussion, lots of buzz and drone, some thick spaced out effects, as well as some surprisingly catchy songs, all wreathed in a darkness that somehow only makes these songs that much more appealing. Great stuff!!
Total "Arctic Hysteria" here people! We liked this a lot when we first listened to it, before we even knew what it was. Well, we knew it was Finnish (always a plus), and released on Circle's Ektro label (also a reliable indicator of quality). It's not another "NWOFHM" band though, or even any sort of Circle side project, or even really a band at all. As it turns out, the quasi-Industrial DIY soundscapes of noise and drone created by Musiikkivyory ("Music Avalanche") are the work of one person, Mika Taanila, who was all of 15 years old when this was first released as a homemade cassette - back in 1981! That's right, a Finnish teenager in the early '80s making monstrous noise/drone tapes, contemporaneous with the likes of Maurizio Bianchi. How cool is that? Pretty cool we think.
The 12 tracks here (resurrected from a couple of super rare tapes, circa '80-'81) are a wonderful witches' cauldron of throbbing rhythmic chaos, fractured grinding drones, strange voices, field recordings, and DISTORTION, lots of distortion... it's a playful sort of isolationist music, if that makes sense. And as an evidently artistically inclined kid he had every reason to want to express himself in such a fashion. Imagine being a teen with fears of nuclear war, living up near the Arctic Circle. The dark postpunk music (Cabaret Voltaire, This Heat, The Normal, Dome...) you were able to tune in to on the BBC's John Peel show might make a lot more sense than the "normal" happy Christian adults who surround you!
So Mika began messing around with tape recorders, cast-off band instruments, radio static, toys, primitive percussion, etc., and pretty soon had generated enough material to fuel his own bedroom cassette label (of which it's hoped that Ektro will eventually reissue more releases), which issued limited runs of tapes not just by his own Musiikkivyory project but also by other likeminded Finnish friends... and, in fact, one by Italy's M.B. himself! (A reminder that international networking was possible before MySpace came around.)
Ektro has colorfully packaged this in a fashion up to their usual spiffy graphic standards, the cd cover insert folding out into a large sheet with photos and liner notes (in both English and Finnish) on one side, the other a poster depicting one of the original cassette releases at larger-than-life size.
Crude, creative, and compelling, this is quite an interesting surprise, thanks Ektro!! We'd definitely like to hear more from this corner of '80s cassette culture, hint hint.
One evening earlier this week, for a couple hours, we hosted an instore DJ performance by this nice fellow Brian Shimkovitz who runs the celebrated Awesome Tape From Africa blog. He brought in several cases full of rare cassettes from his collection, and they were indeed awesome! Groovy stuff from all over the continent.
His blogging and DJing activities have also now spawned a reissue label, and when he was here we grabbed a few copies of his debut release, on cassette of course - though it's also out on cd and vinyl, and we should get some of those eventually too. But the limited edition cassettes are what he had with him. It is Awesome TAPES From Africa after all!!
For this first Awesome Tape From Africa, he's selected an obscure recording from the Ivory Coast, circa 1982, by female Malinese singer Na Hawa Doumbia. It says Vol. 3 in the title, presumably it was Brian's favorite of Na Hawa Doumbia's La Grande Cantatrice Malienne tapes. If you were here for his DJing, or have ever checked out the stuff on his blog, you know it's gonna be good! Full of tumbling drum-heavy rhythms, pierced by Doumbia's higher register vocals, sometimes impressively soaring, singing these "diadai" dances. Joyful in sound, but also full of cautionary warnings about betrayal and other misfortune.
Comes with download code!
The best part about one of our old favorite records getting reissued, especially one that predates the New Arrivals list, is that we finally get the chance to try and put into words exactly what it is that made the record so special to us. Neurosis' Enemy Of The Sun is particularly overdue for some gushing praise, to this day it remains one of our favorite records ever, and definitely our favorite Neurosis record. Although it should be noted, that Allan and Andee have spent much of today arguing about which is the better Neurosis record, this, 1993's Enemy Of The Sun or 1992's Souls At Zero, and while arguments could be made for plenty of other Neurosis records as well, we were at least able to agree that it most definitely boiled down to one of these two, but since Andee's the one writing this review, guess which one wins here!
Living in the Bay Area, Oakland's Neurosis were our heavy music heroes, crusty punks who embraced metal, transforming their early punk sound into something much more stately and epic and heavy, without losing touch with their punk ethics, their new sound as most folks by now know would go on to influence an insane number of the heavy bands of today. With no Neurosis there would be no Isis, no Pelican, and by extension of that, no metallic post rock bands at all, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. While Allan posits that Souls At Zero was the record where Neurosis made the shift from punk to metal (and chamber prog), Andee further posits that Enemy Of The Sun was the record where that new sound was perfected, the brooding slow builds, the mysterious samples, the Ozzy-like vox, the crushing doomy dirge-y pummel, the squalls of crushing heaviness, the sound so moody and atmospheric, yet so heavy and intense. Record opener "Lost" has to be one of the most perfect songs EVER, beginning with a haunting sample, simple high-hat rhythm, low-slung slow motion Joy Divisiony bassline, big bass kick and those Ozzy-ish vox, when the band kicks in, they sound almost industrial, like a Ministry track slowed down to a crawl, super dynamic, stop/start, big blasts of guitar crunch, and wailing harmonics, all underpinned by more samples, lurching and hypnotic, until finally the band explode into a churning downtuned blowout, only to slip right back into that start/stop harmonic driven drift, the song shifts a few more times, changing it up completely for the more punkish pounding outro, that also slips right back into chugging epic Neurosis style bombast.
As if that track weren't devastating enough, "Raze The Stray" is just as good, with its strange Middle Eastern sung intro, minor key piano, soaring strings, acoustic guitar, the haunting revery shattered by a dense grinding tribal blowout, roiling and fierce as fuck, howled and heavy, only to again slip right back into that tranquil ambient drift, now laced with bells, and woozy bass. This track too changes gears and directions, weirdly proggy, but somehow still cohesive, the second movement featuring a loping mathy midtempo groove, with a killer scraped guitar part and more chuggy chunky guitar crush.
We could go through the whole record, track by track, but you can probably figure out by now that they all rule, although it is worth mentioning the nearly half hour long closing track "Cleanse", a sprawling drum jam that definitely hints at future Neurosis side project Tribes Of Neurot, a hypnotic pounding Crash Worship style epic, laced with didgeridoo, and strange strangled vocalizations, those vocals wreathed in effects, and looped and sent spinning from speaker to speaker, the whole second half of the track a druggy damaged soundscape of hard panned, effects drenched, vocal trip-out. Woah. So fucking great, and even nearly two decades later, this still sounds better, and heavier, and more original than most of the stuff out there...
The new reissue features the same bonus tracks as the 1999 version, a demo and a live track, but this new one comes housed in a swank slipcover...
