Obscure but awesome, ugly yet catchy, crusty underground noiserock here! We gotta thank our pals in Megaton Leviathan for hepping us to this now defunct band (2000-2006). In fact, one of Megaton dudes put this disc out on his own label a while back, and we just got a handful direct from them at a bargain price. Not sure if there was ever any membership connection between the two bands or not, could be, but we do know the Billy Dirt Cult started off in Anchorage, Alaska, eking out a DIY punkrock existence up there in the frozen north for several years before migrating down to the relatively milder climes of Portland, Oregon, and then subsequently morphing into another band called Theda Bara whom we're also now curious to hear, after getting into this document of BDC's particular brooding darkness.
With the Megaton Leviathan endorsement, you'd expect Billy Dirt Cult to be heavy, and they are. But while Megaton Leviathan traffic in what might be called "soft doom" or "doomgaze", Billy Dirt Cult is a much nastier beast, though like we said, quite catchy, and in their way quite artful, and political.
This disc collects a 2001 demo, their half of a split lp with some fellow Alaskans called Eu Vusahm, and unreleased tracks, 12 cuts in all. Rife with caustic vocals, rumbling guitars, pounding drums, feedback, all that good stuff. Gets more and more distorted and crusty as it goes along, it seems, culminating though in the disc's surprising grand finale, an instrumental epic called "February", kind of a post-rock apocalypse, all shades of light and dark in one gripping, gnarled, blown-out fuzzfest whose only flaw is that it eventually fades out instead of going on forever. Worth the price of admission right there for that one, but we are diggin' on the whole thing, whether BDC be in driving scuzzpunk mode or doing the plodding crashing doomic stuff, or both.
We had never heard of this eighties art punk / weirdo industrial SF outfit, but HOLY SHIT, this is some seriously fucked up psychedelic noise drenched punk weirdness/radness. Initially released in a run of 1000 lps, each one hand painted with thick gobs of paint and whatever the band members could find around the house (feathers, dirt, trash, flyers, etc.), it's now been reissued by a new local label Superior Viaduct, and what a record to announce your arrival, a creeping, dirgey, occasionally drum machine driven collection of noisy chaotic stumbling ferocity, with loping low slung basslines, jagged, crumbling guitars, a vocalist whose caterwaul is a dead ringer for Kurt Kobain at his most ravaged, his feral yowl tortured and anguished, everything tangled up into a head spinning barrage of post punk stomps, gloomy industrial lumbers, moody murky creeps, dizzying spoken word freakouts and tripped out collaged whatthefuck weirdness.
Just check out the opener, "Undancing In The Dirt", a lumbering creep, gloomy and harrowing, the guitars in a constant state of chaos, the drum machine and woozy bass locked tight beneath a death march pound, not to mention the weird break in the middle with the sound of tolling bells and what sounds like some sort of machinery, the rest of the record careens wildly between similarly woozy outsider industrial creeps and more frenetic artpunk mouth breathing thudrock, most definitely beholden to other local groups of the time like Flipper and Factrix, but also displaying hints of what was going on in Cleveland at the time (Electric Eels, the Pagans, etc.). And on top of that, peppered throughout are some seriously unhinged experiments, weird tape manipulation, free noise fuckery, chaotic clatter and dark droned out minimalism, culminating in "KILL THEM!!!" an almost Negativland worthy mash up of spoken word sloganeering, a serious message presented as some conservative / poseur button pushing, super intense and bizarre, funny and fucked up.
Love God - Love One Another is a seriously twisted slab of SF punk rock history, and easily one of our favorite reissues in recent memory!
Packaged with the original unused cover art, a super striking image of Ronald Reagan holding a cross in front of an American flag with swastikas where the stars normally are, the inside also adorned with a swastika made out of crutches. Comes with two inserts, including new liner notes, the original lp liner notes (explaining the charge imagery and the inspiration for each song), and the Maximum Rock N Roll review that first got them noticed, as well as offending some of the more sensitive punks, one of which has their angry letter reprinted here, along with the response from the original reviewer, in defense of said review.
Now on lp!!! With a cd version included!
Doesn't feel like we need to say too much about this one as everyone's been freaking out about this record, and it seems to be the album that is going to push The Black Keys to the next level of fame (they are on the cover of Rolling Stone this month). We're totally down with bands who get famous and actually get to make a good living on making music, and the Black Keys are cool, and have worked their asses off, but at this point we can think of so many other bands that deserve this sort of success just as much. We actually dug their last outing quite a bit, but this new one seems to be pushing them in a new direction, one that seems potentially less exciting for long time fans, and more geared for new fans, festivals, and big stadiums...
We haven't listed too much Marion Brown before, save for an early ESP label release, though his name is often spoken of in the same revered tones as Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and John Coltrane. We loved his playing on Harold Budd's Pavilion of Dreams, and he had famously played on Coltrane's Ascension (two very opposite sides of the alto saxophone spectrum and really the only extremes of that instrument we dig) so we were very excited to get this latest entry in Impulse's "two-fer" cd reissue series to see what Marin Brown as a bandleader is all about, and this doesn't disappoint.
Brown, who died in 2010, was a more understated (and underrated!) player than his better known contemporaries, often marking his playing with noted hesitations and tentativeness that most jazz giants readily avoided. The influence of poetry, ethnomusicology and southern folk tropes also took him into stranger and less popular directions than most jazz at the time. Geechee Recollections and Sweet Earth Flying from 1973 and 1974 respectively, are the second and third installments in what is considered the "Georgia Trilogy" (the first installment, Afternoon of a Georgian Fawn, from 1970, was recorded for ECM), based on the tone poems of Georgia poet Jean Toomer and Brown's Georgian upbringing. Both records are largely built around suites of songs, with Geechee Recollections more horn based and Sweet Earth Flying largely based around piano and fender Rhodes compositions.
Geechee recollections starts with the loping bass groove of "Once Upon a Time (A Children's Tale)" propelled by ethnic percussive rhythms and energized alto sax playing. Toomer's poem "Karintha" is recited by Bill Hasson over an avant backdrop of intersecting violin, sax, kalimba chimes and other percussion. Passages of martial New Orleans style jazz open up into soft abstract spaces in the Tokalokaloka suite, that have a slow languid heat full of humid tropical associations. Mostly sheets of metallic percussion and tinkling bamboo surround Brown's intuitive and often introverted horn improvisations in fertile bursts of sound.
Sweet Earth Flying may be more satisfying for those looking for a deeper, more inviting, immersion. Focused on two suites, the title one, along with one called "Eleven Light City", "Sweet Earth Flying" begins with a soft and graceful solo on fender Rhodes before jumping full flight into a percussive free jazz excursion. Part 4 of that suite features a swirling recitation by Bill Hasson of an invented hybrid language drawn from a variety of Latin, Afro-Caribbean and regional American vocabularies. "Eleven Light City" has a more late-night low-key feel, slightly noirish, but not foreboding. It has a spacious genteel quality that belies its more muscular undertones. But the chief beauty of this record is the genius pairing of Muhal Richard Abrams and Paul Bley on acoustic and electric piano that make this a truly exciting listen.
This is the first time both records have been released on cd, and it's about time! So good!
Jean-Christophe Van Thienen formed the French new wave project Buzz in 1983, after several formative years spent in the UK soaking up the divergent post-punk scene which spawned the artful pop of Adam & The Ants, the majestic gloom of Anne Clark and The Cure, and the DIY energy of countless bedroom / shed / garage acts tinkering with drum machines, electronics, and tape. Upon returning to Lille, France, he found a local radio station who would let him use the studio during off hours; and as such he recruited a couple of friends and neighbors to come into that studio to flesh out the sketches he had made on a couple of synths and drum machine. See You Sioux was the result of those sessions, self-released in 1985 as a cassette with hand-assembled artwork and press-type lettering in an edition of 250 copies. Van Thienen takes up the elliptical, somber atmospheres of the Belgian post-punk outfit Trisome 21 as well as the eccentric theatrics of Fad Gadget. The songs work through urgent synth melodies, jittery sparkplug guitar scratches, and propulsive rhythms from a nice combination of live drums and drum machines, with Van Thienen conjuring more of a French rock persona, perhaps striving towards the stylings of a Jacques Dutronc. Another great find from Dark Entries.
Woah. Only previously available in the form of expensive Japanese imports, this is the first time we've been able to stock and list this amazing album, and we've wanted to for a long time. It's one that anyone into weird heavy '70s psych / prog, particularly of the Japanese variety, should add to their collections posthaste. Seriously. You perhaps have heard of J.A. Caesar (variously, J.A. Seazer, J.A. Ceaser), a Tokyo based playwright and composer, responsible for many wild, psychedelic theatrical productions that we can only imagine were utterly mindblowing to witness, judging by their soundtracks. This disc, reissuing a 1973 record, contains the highlights of his dramatic score for a 5-hour play called Kokkyou Junreika, here about 54 minutes of music. And it's an intense 54 minutes, this album being the best, and heaviest, J.A. Caesar release we've heard, with ceremonial-sounding Buddhist chant and fuzzed out guitars and doomy organ and heavy riffs and moody female vocals out the wazoo. Wow. Magical Power Mako meets Magma would be one good (if potentially puzzling) description. Or perhaps imagine Flower Travellin' Band participating in a freaked out rock opera / ritual, with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance. For krautrockier comparisons, Amon Duul II and Necronomicon are obvious ones, and should suffice as an excellent recommendation. Another would be that this album was highly rated by Julian Cope in his Japrocksampler book (ranking at number 5 of his top 50). This reissue says it's remastered, and is limited and numbered to boot, packaged in a gatefold sleeve.
By the way, one of the tracks here was later covered by druggy doomsters Solar Anus, you can hear it on their tUMULt double disc, Skull Alcoholic...
Always so many reviews to write, and we've pretty much saved the best for last, it's the night before the list, and we've got a date with the Christian Mistress!! So stoked on this, the second strike of instantly memorable, uniquely atmospheric, old school galloping trad metal greatness from these Olympia, WA gods - and, ahem, goddess!
We at Aquarius - and many of you, we know - can be considered Christian Mistress early adopters. We boldly made their debut album Agony & Opium a Record Of The Week back when it came out in August, 2010, after all. Joining the chorus of such fans as Fenriz of Darkthrone, and the guys in Slough Feg, we sang their praises to the skies. Needless to say, this new full-length, a year and a half later, is eagerly anticipated. And being released on Relapse, is bound to get a wider audience, which is quite deserved. Having seen 'em slaying live, every time they've come to town, we've heard a few of these songs already and that further whetted our appetite for this album...we didn't know if they could top their debut, but we think they maybe just did!
Analog-recorded at Louder Studios by Tim Green of The Fucking Champs, Possession offers up nine new tracks of Christian Mistress' classic sounding riffing and rippage, inspired by '70s Priest, the toughest NWOBHM (Diamond Head, Angel Witch), and early '80s speedmetal. Songs full of exquisite shred, catchy choruses, doomed-out power, acoustic adornment, and most significantly, such compelling melodic singing. While the dual guitarists are whizzes for sure, throwing out licks in passing that lesser bands might base whole songs around, the band's main attraction remains singer Christine Davis, who as we have said before, possesses a serious VOICE. Charismatic, commanding, husky, raw, melancholic. It's the X-factor that makes CM's music sound so special, so timeless, even transcendent. A crucial component to these carefully crafted songs, which range from rapidfire off-the-rails rockin' to utterly emotive & epic. CM are so totally metal - rooted in the genre's finest traditions - yet their songwriting is pop enough underneath it all for anyone to enjoy, who likes good, real rock music.
So the deal obviously is, those of you already into CM are getting this for sure; but folks who haven't checked 'em out, please do, even if you're not a metal "regular", particularly of the old school variety. When we made their first album Record Of The Week we said something like, if you were gonna buy just one metal album this year, make it this one, and while of course we think you should be buying MORE than one metal album a year (that's ridiculous!!!), put this new CM at the top of your list. It's definitely a contender for best heavy metal album of 2012; at least, there's so many songs here, like "Hunted Haunted" and "Black To Gold" and their cover of obscure '80s Swedish doomsters Faith's "Possession", for instance, that we just can't stop spinning over and over and over. Good thing this is the last review we've got to finish before the list...
Originally released in 2004, this long out of print (at least on cd), classic slab of serial killer obsessed, stoner sludge, downtuned heaviness from these Japanese doomlords finally gets a spiffy new cd reissue via Metal Blade!
Seven massive slabs of pounding, pummelling ultra heavy stoner groove. Crunchy and throbbing, pummelling and MASSIVELY HEAVY rock and roll. Fuzzed out, drugged out, super distorted and punishingly heavy. Quite possibly, you will have your stoner / doom metal credentials REVOKED if you don't go nuts for this, although odds are most of you already have a little thing for these freeks. As always, each song is based on an infamous serial killer, this time around, the subjects of CoM's worshipful sludge are Ted Bundy, Mark Essex, Andrei Chikatilo, Aileen Wuornos and more! And it's just as sonically depraved as that sort of subject matter demands. Churning riffage, knuckle dragging drum pound, howled vox, thick sinewy bass grooves, all peppered with plenty of ultra creepy samples and snippets from various newscasts, detailing the killers' grim transgressions, all set to some fantastically punishing, ribcage rattling, slo-mo lumbering Sabbathy swing.
Fans of Boris, Green Machine, Eternal Elysium, Bongzilla, Eyehategod, Sleep, High On Fire and other heavy groovies should already have a shelf full of CoM records, but if some reason they (you?!) don't this is as good a place to start as any...
Perhaps most widely known as one of the bigger stars of New Age music's MOR commercial peak in the mid-eighties (think Mannheim Steamroller's Fresh Aire series and Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast), most folks don't necessarily consider the Private Music label's pop new age princess Suzanne Ciani as being a second generation electronic music pioneer or a highly inventive classically trained synthesist. But this fantastic new anthology of early works from Ciani's archive on B-Music/Finders Keepers is aimed at changing that perception.
Fact is, Ciani has had a hand in many of the innovations in electronic music from the late sixties to the early eighties, in what has been a largely male-dominated field. A classically trained pianist, she met Don Buchla through a mutual artist friend and mastered the Buchla Synthesizer (pictured on the cover) and soon began seeking out projects for art galleries, experimental films and pop music (Meco's Star Wars theme for example), before moving to New York and becoming a valuable asset in the experimental underground and commercial advertising fields. She supplied the sounds for Xenon's pinball machines as well as doing sound effects work for films The Stepford Wives and The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Her company Ciani Musica became a testing ground for many of electronic and computerized music's new developments where she built up an incredible portfolio of recording experiments that make up the bulk of this collection.
Alongside advertising spots for Atari, ITT, Almay, and Coca-Cola, are longer compositions of electronic grandeur that point to her later new age music career, but are also steeped in electronic music's recent past. Percolating oscillations, robotic breathing, percussive mechancial rhythms, and long-form and layered computerized tones are assembled into warm and engaging pieces that aptly put Ciani in the same league as Laurie Spiegel, David Behrman and even the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This is an exciting anthology that sheds light on an overlooked period of electronic music innovation and one of its most vital players. Recommended!
Breaking Day is record number two from Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess (Locrian, Haptic) and Michael Vallera, and much like their self titled debut (reviewed elsewhere on the aQ site), this record finds the duo weaving longform landscapes of rhythm and sound, texture and noise, drawing influence from abstract ambient electronica as much as lo-fi floor-core noise. In fact, in many ways, Breaking Day feels like a continuation of that first record, touching on many of the same elements, but here having honed those elements into something spectacular.
Born of live performances in the studio, employing both live drums and sampled percussion, as well as atmospheric guitar work and all manner of droned out soundscaping, Cleared create gorgeous expanses of minimal krautdrone noise-dub, that weds rhythmic mesmer to lush layered minimalism, churning hypnorock throb to gauzy softly caustic ambience.
Opening track "Rogues" is pretty much all we've been listening to lately, a slow building sprawl of chiming soft focus shimmer, peppered with squalls of white noise, and wreathed in washed out sine wave tones, the bursts of static building a barely there rhythm, that gradually solidifies into a Necks style jazzy skitter, the sounds growing more and more dense and intense, and when the rhythm proper comes in, it's epic, a simple stuttery pulse, but it changes the whole tone of the piece, giving it some serious heft and momentum, mix in some dubbed out snares, add layer after layer of hiss and hum, and it's total psych-jazz-kraut-noise bliss. Ten minutes is way too short. This could have been the whole record, had they stretched it out to 40 minutes and it STILL would have been Record Of The Week.
The group explore similar territory on the rest of the record, but in smaller chunks, "Sighted" is a churning expanse of tinkling melodies, wavery low end thrum, and buzzing static, blurred into some seriously mesmerizing (and subtly propulsive) ambience, the title track veers into a sort of This Heat beholden post rock / post punk, all big chiming brittle guitars, woozy rhythmic churn and gloomy atmosphere. "No Path To Claim" revisits the vibe of the opener, creating a sort of soft noise raga, laced with chimes and bells, the churning low end miasma lush and textured, the track's propulsion more implied than explicit, finishing off with a haunting swirl of psychedelic guitar drift and woozy low end pulsations. "Quartz" lays down a gorgeously dense stretch of grinding minimal dronemusic, thick and viscous, but weirdly warm and hypnotic, underpinned by soft shimmery chordal swells, and the record finally finishes off with "The Harvest", the most abstract of the bunch, and one which sounds strangely like another one of this week's Records Of The Week, the bowed reindeer antler music of Hornorkesteret, with its creaking and rumbling, dark swirls of rumble and drone, distant keening melodies, what sounds like field recordings of clatter and shuffle, hints of some creaking ship abound, it's haunting, atmospheric and very evocative of some ancient mysterious ritual. Fantastic stuff!
We've yet to list anything from these Bay Area emo/screamo killers, which is a shame cuz these guys SLAY. Every thing we've heard from them, has been practically perfect. Heavy, mathy, complex, melodic, epic and brutal and emotional and LOUD. The songs are short and super intricate, with tons of parts, lots of stop/starts, the sound somehow chaotic but still ultra tight, the drums wild, all over the place, the vocals very raw and raspy and Rites Of Spring-ish, in fact in some ways, Comadre sound like a revved up super charged RoS or Fugazi, which is most definitely not a bad thing. And besides the -sound-, they whip up incredibly catchy songs too, hooks galore, totally unforgettable melodies, jamming more into 90 seconds than most band can pull off in 10 minutes, the sort of sound that hints at insane, sweat soaked, stage collapsing live shows, that energy captured surprisingly well on wax!
If you dig stuff like Pianos Become The Teeth, Orchid, Mohinder, The Locust, and classic emo/punk like Fugazi and Rites Of Spring and Embrace and all that stuff, you should definitely check these guys out!
Kick ass doom / sludge split from these two UK outfits, and in the spirit of the split, we figured we oughta do a split review as well, so Allan will tackle Conan's half, and Andee's got the Slomatics half. Allan's up first...
I just know Andee's gonna write, like, a novel about Slomatics, and to do the mighty Conan justice, I should give them an equally lengthy writeup too. Or, on the other hand, maybe I should just keep my bit short. After all, there's really not much more to say about the barbaric doom-drone metal that Conan offers up here, than we already said in our review of their 2010 cd on Aurora Borealis, Horseback Battle Hammer. To wit, "Their music is not by, nor for, wimps. Slow, low, and loud = HEAVY. Even Arnold might have had trouble bench pressing these riffs! The plodding, shuddering distortion on display here is kinda like ultradoom in the vein of Moss or Bunkur, but not quite so slow, speeding up as necessary when the crushing riffs are really ready to go in for the kill." We went on to compare 'em to Yob, the Melvins, and Corrupted, among others, as well. These 3 new tracks are in the same vein what we'd heard before from Conan, meaning bass-heavy blown-out bludgeon, though there's a subtlety here we should note as well. Their first cut, "Older Than Earth", is a six+ minute miasmic trudge. That's followed by the brief, unexpected electronic interlude of "Obsidian Sword", and then the epic "Retaliator" rounds out Conan's contribution to this disc, being an eleven and a half minute creepy-crawl that melds Conan's brawniest rumble and howl with more atmospheric synth-sizzle, kinda reminding us of Thrones. Very cool.
Now for the Slomatics half, take it away Andee...
It's been two years since we last heard from UK slo-mo heavies Slomatics, who we discovered initially via an impending split with late great prog-sludge combo Like A Kind Of Matador (whose great full length on tUMULt is still available btw), and whose full length debut was a huge hit with the doomlords (and ladies) around these parts, their sound a heaving, churning morass of murky tarpit sludge, heavily beholden to Harvey Milk, Eyehategod, Bongzilla, the Melvins of course, even Electric Wizard, thick crumblingly distorted riffage, massive tectonic drum pound, laced with little bits of melody, short stretches of mellow drift, but for the most part all about the pound and pummel. We got another taste of the Slomatics' heaviosity on a split with Seelah, their sound slightly more rocking, and a wee bit poppier, but ultimately more of the glorious dirgey same. Which brings us to this brand new split, with another band of heavy aQ faves, Conan, and while much of that Slomatics sound is intact, something has definitely changed. There's definitely a slight pop edge, which did seem to be present on past outings, but here is much more openly on display, especially on the first track "Lose The Five", which peppers the thick Sabbathy riffage, with cool harmonized melodies, and buried hooks, with the song dangerously close to sludge-pop territory at times, definitely like a murkier, less poppier Torche (which weirdly is how we described one of the tracks on the Seelah split). There's also some seriously majestic Harvey Milk like moments too, that sort of creep anthemic epicness. "Black Blizzard" find the group ditching all of the above poppiness, for some pure grimey, filthy dirgery, reverbed vocals over death march downtuned trudge, but wait, strap those headphones on, and you'll hear all manner of melody buried in the murk and the mire, not to mention some super cool dynamic stop/starts, and a crazily blown out production that gives the sound a trippy washed out vibe. Finally, Slomatics finish off the split with "Mont Ventoux", which begins all abstract and psychedelic, cards-in-spokes skitter, over off-in-the-distance drumming, then some howled reverbed vox give way to another stretch of doomic churn, this time sounding weirdly dubbed out and a little bit industrial, a bit of a Godflesh vibe all tangled up with the bands more gnarled and grinding chug. So ruling! Still hard to fathom why these guys aren't in everyone's doom/sludge pantheon...
This split sure makes sense, these two bands belong together, and well deserve the super bad ass sci-fi, mysterious warrior, snail steed, dual mooned, skull mountain cover art!
These last few months have finally seen the arrival of the most recent batch of Latitudes releases, some that had been in the pipeline for months, maybe even years, first Gang Gang Dance and Gowns, then Nadja and Mount Eerie, and most recently the Master Musician of Bukkake, and now finally, this sprawling avant hip hop doomscape from Dalek, who already pushes the boundaries with his proper releases, but this one takes it even further, a massive 44 minute untitled sonic sprawl, epic and abstract, dark and ominous, lush and majestic, a slow burning dubbed out bass heavy intro lays the groundwork. Warped and warbly, a shimmery downtempo creep, laced with distant melodies, buried vox, folky guitars, there's some rapping, more like spoken word, but it fades out quickly as the surrounding sounds blossom and expand into a dark swirling dronescape, bits of twang and garbled voices drift on a sea of hiss and hum, of muted melody and crumbling textures, and then things get serious, the sounds is cranked up, the low end thick, the rhythms industrial and grinding, almost like some sort of hip-hopped SUNNO))) / Godspeed hybrid, the vocals buried in the mix, before it all winds down again, and then in come the tablas (!), wrapped in weird backwards swoops and heaving slabs of low end rumble, building again, this time into a lumbering string laden machine like trudge, doomy and dark, almost like a more blissed out Gnaw Their Tongues, orchestral and epic, and after about 27 minutes, a proper hip hop beats swoops in, still wreathed in caustic buzz, and surrounded by all manner of fractures sounds and effects, and suddenly it's like the hardest heaviest hip hop you've never heard, super distorted and blown out, a crushing chunk of post apocalyptic robo funk lope, which eventually fades out, leaving just a long stretch of hushed shimmer, and tangled steel string melody, all blurred and smeared into a hazy expanse of ominous minimal drift, and one final verse, delivered ominously over the tense droning whir beneath. Fucking KILLER.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, the covers the immediately recognizable brown and white origami style Latitudes sleeves, this one with a black and silver cover image glued to the front, and a full color insert inside.
One of our monthly metal must reads. This issue's the special ZOMBIE ISSUE! With the top 25 zombie metal songs of all time, tips of surviving a zombie apocalpyse by people who think about stuff like that a lot (i.e. members of death metal bands), and for this month's Hall Of Fame album induction, Deceased's Fearless Undead Machines, of course! (With some great stories about the weird producer dude Relapse hired for them.)
Folks featured this issue include Impetigo, Terrorizer, Hooded Menace, Coffins, Wooden Stake, and illustrator Matt Putrid, among many others. Great issue, guys!
We would have made Demdike Stare's sprawling quadruple vinyl 12"s epic Elemental our Record Of The Week had it not been for a few things. One, the four records were released over the course of several months, two, the combined cost of all those records ended up being nearly $100, and three, we knew it was eventually gonna come out on cd. So now that the cd version is here, we can finally make this twisted hauntological epic our Record Of The Week, which is great news for everybody, EXCEPT maybe crazy completists, who will be dismayed (or perhaps perversely thrilled) to discover, that not only does the double cd version tack on a bunch of extra tracks (nearly 33 minutes worth!!), but it also features alternate versions of some of the tracks from the 12"s. So it's really up to the folks who already shelled out for all four 12" if they want to buy it all over again, but for everybody else, we can't recommend this highly enough. More on the bonus tracks at the end, but let's talk about Elemental proper first...
Elemental was probably one of the most anticipated records around here recently, the sprawling epic from hauntological duo Demdike Stare, a four part songsuite, Chrysanthe, Violetta, Rose and Iris, the duo's new sound seriously dark, much more industrial sounding, the vibe blackened, the sounds layered and way more dense.
Chrysanthe opens with "Mephisto's Lament", which is all foghorn buzz, deep whirring drones, keening high end melodic fragments, murky buried rhythms, peppered with creepy synth squelches, and when the song gets rolling, it's almost like a hauntological SUNNO))), the same sort of roiling downtuned heaviness, but here stretched into something a bit more sinister and abstract, almost like the soundtrack for some subterranean factory, all rumble and clang, all shadows and very little light. "Kommunion" is up next, a lush looped slow build, all repeated piano motifs wreathed in chanted vocals, and all blurred into fuzzy soft focus swells, the sound suddenly expanding into a blisteringly blown out in-the-red buzz, a swoonsome melody hidden in there somewhere, the sound slipping from caustic and crunchy to blurred and murky, before switching gears completely, lacing a sprawl of staticky hiss to a skeletal trip hop pulse, extra percussion provided by found sounds, clatter and crunch, atonal piano, all woven into a strange almost Art Of Noise sounding beat. Then comes "Unction", a super creepy stretch of undulating lowend, demarcated by a strange sonar ping rhythm, one that is quickly augmented by a twisted effected croaking frog skitter, and another beat seemingly assembled from the sounds of workman scraping and dragging, a crunchy noisy lurching groove, that is soon overtaken by another cloud of reverberating pianos, which finishes off the side with a coda of swirling minimal washed out thrum.
The second part, Violetta, begins with "Mnemosyne", a blissed out sun dappled bit of witch house-y skitter, all hazy and gauzy and dreamlike, until a sudden burst of clattery noisy rhythmic crunch changes everything, and then assembles itself into a strange lumbering cacophonous beat, the sound eventually underpinned by some Eastern style folk music, which drifts briefly, before that clattery beat crashes back in, now accompanied by that Eastern melody, sounding like a weirdly stuttery bit of gypsy electro. Which leads directly into "In The Wake Of Chronos", which opens with some distant mysterious melodies, some sprinkler like textures, some super minimal skeletal skitter, and some seriously deep bass thrum, the minimal drift soon peppered with short sharp bursts of metallic crunch, clipped bits of hiss and skree sculpted into a sort-of-beat, also soon joined by tinkling melodies, wreathed in echo, the sound gradually expanding, and becoming more and more lush, that beat drifting off, leaving the various other sounds to shimmer and hover ethereally over a blackened backdrop of blurred hum. And finally, Violetta finishes off with the title track, a soft cacophony of pounded piano, the chords allowed to ring out and slowly fade, all subtly warped, an ominous sort of avant classical doom, laced with little sonic squiggles, and wreathed in clouds of hiss and static, soon those little squiggles transform into beats, a wild chaotic looped rhythm, which is strangely at odds with that funereal piano, still pounding away in the background, a twisted bit of hauntological IDM, the piano subtly replaced by a hazy sprawl of synth simmer, which is left to fade out once the beat drops off, a thick swirling final movement, washed out and woozy.
Part three is Rose, and begins with a churning industrial chug, grinding through a woozy washed out haze, wreathed in a distant ethereal vocal drift, looped and mesmerizing, the sound is most definitely epic and cinematic, the sound laced with bits of clatter and crunch, and than BAM, the track is transformed into a gorgeous stretch of Middle Eastern string laden groove, all wrapped around that opening industrial rhythm, sounding like a more dense, more psychedelic Muslimgauze! The second track is more murky and dubbed out and spacey, anchored by a muted slo-mo house beat, buried in the murk, the beats wreathed in soft metallic billows, the surrounding sounds swirling dreamily, hazy melodic streaks and blurred background shimmers, clouds of tripped out drift, through which that industrial flecked rhythm soldiers druggily on.
The third track begins as a gauzy, ethereal thrum, that seems to hover wraithlike, before suddenly in drops an impossibly dense and heavy ribcage rattling bass pulse, accompanied by cool spare tabla like rhythms, that Muslimgauze vibe is definitely huge here too, a keening high end sine wave tone flutters over fragmented chunks of dubstep bass wobble, all drifting in the sonic ether.
Finally comes part four, Iris, which 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 creepy and cinematic, but also a bit blackened and industrial. The second track 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. Next up some surfacing 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.
Obviously, that should be more than enough to sell you on it, but folks who are after the bonus tracks will not be dissappointed, more than a half hour's worth minutes of extra music, six tracks, the first of which, "New Use For Old Circuits", opens up the set with a blast of psychedelic noise, before oozing into something much more liquid and murky, a sort of subaquatic space dub, a little bit like Chain Reaction style 'heroin house', but instead of hearing the music through a wall, we're hearing it through the thin steel walls of a submarine, stranded in the inky blackness of the deepest sea. "Shade" is a short stretch of gauzey high end shimmer, a haze of blurred melody and buried plink plonk piano, while "10th Floor Stairwell" is a fantastic chunk of thrumming low end pulsations, a minimal blackened drone that slwoly blossoms into something more tonally colorful, eventually becoming a sort of blackbuzz raga. "Metamorphosis" takes a field recording of voices and wraps it in soft swirls of static and tape hiss, soon introducing more of that impossible low end, the voices locked in a chant-like loop, while that skull rattling bass tone, pulses ominously, eventually introducing some throbbing 4 on the floor house music, but all murky and muddy, as if blasting in an upstairs apartment, just the rhythm oozing though the walls, a darkly propuslive slab of late night housemusic murk. "All This Is Ours (Sunrise)", unfurls soft swells of new age synth shimmer, a crystalline drift that soon sinks into a thick layed morass of crumbling bass-synth squelch and gradually intensifying distorted crackle, before finishing off in a squall of soft noise and sc-fi FX swirl, and finally, "We Have Already Died", strings some tribal skeletal skitter into a looped almost Muslimgauze sounding groove, all draped over an ominous sprawl of post industrial hum and layered swirls of blurred ghost-grey ambience.
Packaged much like the last Demdike Stare, in an oversized six panel digi-sleeve, with original Andy Votel artwork, mirroring the artwork from the original quadruple gatefold sleeve that housed all four 12"s...
Imagine the soundtrack to some strange, and apocalyptic planetarium show, all celestial and cosmic, but exploding in a supernova of looped mesmer and cyclical psychedelia, or picture Steve Reich or Terry Riley composing for minimal electronic trance music, or even the music of doomdronelords SUNNO))), transcribed for processed guitars and synths, and reduced to their rhythmic essence. Record number three from composer / guitarist Mario Diaz De Leon, is a little bit all of those, a dizzying collection of processed synths, and looped abstract guitars, all woven into sheets of blurred crystalline power electronics, smoldering slow build looped minimal majesty, and abstract epic heaviness.
Not metal precisely, but still quite metallic in places, and most definitely HEAVY. Too dense and noisy and chaotic to be strictly minimal, but in composition and arrangement, it has more in common with modern minimalism than anything else really. It's as much about texture and tone, as it is about melody and rhythm, the sound is at once atmospheric and cinematic, cosmic and abstract, pieces drifting through space only to explode into churning thrum, and alternately grinding away like some blurred tarpit spacedoom only to blossom into a kaleidoscopic series of dizzying synth swells.
Opener "Oneirogen" starts off with a flurry of layered synths, a dizzying big of melodic swirl, that immediately begins to gain momentum, blossoming in slow motion like some sort of sonic supernova, before exploding in a soft cacophony of prismatic melody, the synth sounds more distorted and frenetic, managing to strike a fine balance between hypnotic and intense, the sound pulsing and throbbing and buzzing before blurring into a soft focus cloud of gloriously blissed out dreamdrone shimmer, only to build right back up again to something much more caustic and corrosive, yet still somehow ethereal and spacey. "Consumed" displays Diaz De Leon's other more metal side. unfurling thick grinding downtuned gouts of guitar rumble and keening high end melody, all over streaks of pulsating synth, the result sounding a bit like Jesu as performed by Steve Reich, that sort of thick, blissed out, warm whirling guitar heaviness, but arranged in layers and loops, a heaving heaviness that blossoms into some sort of blackened minimal shoegaze drone-psych doom, that will have Nadja fans losing their minds.
The rest of the record finds Diaz De Leon flitting from churning downtuned crush to flurries of celestial synth, in most cases combining them to great affect, "Hypnocaust" fills the sky with wild tangles of sci-fi synth melodies and stuttering chips and chitters, while beneath, a strangely processed guitar rumbles and thrums, unfurling a crunchy bit of oozing disembodied riff-borne dronedoom, while "Cinerum" is something else all together, a hushed bit of hiss and hum wreathed drift, the shards of synth left to float weightless, over a warm woozy swath of lush chordal thrum. "Kukulkan" begins life as a noisier take on the current crop of psychedelic space synth retro futurism, but quickly (d)evolves into almost like an abstract black metal, with fast picked riffage blurred into clouds of droned out drift, before exploding into a kaleidoscopic squall of thick low end swells and pulsing synth swirls, and "Dissolution" revisits the sound of the opening track, again sounding like that planetarium show gone haywire, perhaps signaling the end of Diaz De Leon's dizzying sonic journey. But our favorite track might just be the 8 minute "Faithless", with its hazy, washed out intro, all lush blurred shimmer, and more stuttering synth throb, but here it's much more dreamlike and serene, laced with ghostly voices, definitely reminding us of Zombi, Majeure and the like, super cinematic, but then gradually, those sounds begin to transform, the sound intensifying, and then at about three minutes in, in a squall of high end skree, a thick ribcage rattling slab of low end surfaces, heaving and softly roiling, while the synths continue to churn over the top, it's the abstract minimalism equivalent to THE DROP in electronic music, it raises the hairs on the back of our neck, a sudden burst of energy and emotion and sonic power, which dissipates as quickly as it began, disappearing in a swirl of hushed shimmer, before splintering into a blast of caustic chaotic noise, processed vokills, low end synth buzz, all tangled up into a blackened squall, before finally fading out in a static wreathed drift of soft focus synth and almost Caretaker like melancholia.
Utterly fantastic.
If there's any artists that really deserves some sort of epic retrospective that digs deeeeep into the archives, it's Bo Diddley. All too often he's celebrated for his unique charisma, but it's sometimes forgotten how many great records he actually made. Originally released in 1970, The Black Gladiator shows a much more psychedelic rock/blues side to Diddley's sound. The songs pack such a punch, and there's so much energy and conviction that you can almost feel Diddley's sweat oozing from every note. The lyrics cut to the core, perfect for the music, so raw, dirty, and full of attitude. Like a way more fucked up Booker T. & The MG's or Meters, or maybe Hendrix and Black Merda doing a tutorial for Lux from the Cramps. We're even reminded of that amazing weird blip in Chubby Checker's career that was documented on the mind blowing Chubby Checker Goes Psychedelic album.
There's no doubt that many future garage psych/blues masterminds were influenced by these sounds. You can pretty much hear the origins of folks like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Make Up, Dub Narcotic Sound System, The Gories, White Stripes and we even clocked a moment that The Beastie Boys sampled. And we're pretty sure that our favorite current garage rock artists like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees either already treasure this album or would freak out if they were finally hearing it for the first time.
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.
Single number two from these Brooklyn retro-poppers (who count among their membership, some folks from aQ faves the Smith Westerns) who continue to hone their eighties beholden new wave chops, to great effect we might add, another chunk of blissed out jangle and warm sonic shimmer, lots of chiming guitars and woozy wistful melodies. Lilting and melancholic, both tracks here are perfectly dreamy stretches of blissed out dreamy shimmer-pop, rife with reverbed vocals, crystalline production, all softly smeared into a wonderfully washed out sound that channels all the best parts about eighties pop. We mistakenly listened to this at 33 the first time, and it was transformed into a collection of awesomely dreary post punk gloom pop dirgery, which sounded just as good (if not better!) as it did at the correct speed...
Armed with a seriously bad ass band name, these Dutch avant black metal merchants throw their hats into the gnarled dissonant experimental blackness ring alongside groups like Deathspell Omega and Katharsis, and do their best to up the ante, taking that sound we already dig so much and making it more twisted, more chaotic, more dense, more progged out, and to a degree pull it off.
The first track is all it should take, the opening a pounding wash of atonal riffage, and moody atmospheres, which soon explode into a furious white hot blast of buzz and howl, the opening atonal melody continuing on, drifting amides the dense swirl of sound, a sound so dense, that minus headphones it might be difficult to suss out exactly what's going on, which is a LOT. At one point the group add a layer of high end industrial skree, which sounds totally bizarre, but transforms the sound into something fucked up and geniusly far out. But that's only the first two minutes, the song splinters into a woozy psychedelic doomy breakdown, a swirling morass of intricate drumming, spidery minor key melodies, and some seriously bust, super melodic bass lines, not to mention some super dramatic crooned vocals, and then when the song explodes back into the black fray, it's like an anvil to the skull, and if anything, the sound emerges even more densely layered and complex. If you ever wondered what would happen if DSO were faster and more fucked up, well, this is most likely your answer. The second track is more of the same, a dizzying barely controlled chaos, ultra mathy and impossible intricate, some of the drumming utterly mind boggling, and the guitar playing not just fast and furious, but also super abstract, a torrent of twisted unlikely melodies and seriously warped chordal crush, all interspersed with some blown out black drones, industrial soundscapes, mysterious glitched out ambience, and other aural oddities.
Then there are tracks like "Vanitas" which finds the band slowing way down, and spitting out some seriously harsh abject doom, with processed alien sci-fi vox, swirling cinematic atmospheres, the vibe gloomy and depressive, but still the sound fantastically lush and blackly beautiful. The record finishes with a 22 minute three part epic, that fuses some classic metal riffing, with more of the groups impossibly gnarled blackness, managing to make much of it surprisingly catchy, or at least as catchy as stuff this fucked up and heavy can be. In fact the main riff of the first movement might be the catchiest chunk of black metal we've heard in ages. But over the next two parts, the sound slips easily from psychedelic slo-mo drift, to woozy black-prog, and from churning grim doom to epic, majestic and surprisingly catchy heaviness, the whole thing rife with insane bizarre and brilliantly fucked up guitar parts, and fractured calculus arrangements, the band fusing some serious (but still subtle) hooks with some absolutely crushing blackness. Definitely a new favorite, and absolutely recommended for fans of DSO, Katharsis, Antaeus, Ascension and all the rest, which is a whole lot of you!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
First of all, be warned, these took nearly six months to show up from Sweden; and we will most likely not be restocking these when we sell out of this batch, or if we do, it could very well take ANOTHER six months. But back in the late summer of 2011, we caught wind of what seemed like a really fascinating piece of damaged, witchy pop narcotic from the Swedish sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne (aka Ectoplasm Girls). Shortly, there after, The Wire raved about the album; and then we simply waited for the box to show... Fortunately for a lucky few of you, that box did indeed finally arrive!
The Byrne sisters could very well be ghosts from the mid-80s cassette culture of DIY electronics, industrial antipathy, and corrosive psychedelia. As half-formed / half-forgotten songs of deconstructed piano, looped abstractions, and bad vibes, the Ectoplasm Girls arrangements aren't too dissimilar from those that Zola Jesus primitively sketched on her earliest recordings. Like Zola Jesus, voice is also key to the hauntological pop that the Ectoplasm Girls create, although they take it in an entirely different direction. At times, they adopt a baby-faced atonal lunacy with shrill lullabies above their murky tunes, abstracted rhythms, and macabre electronics; and at others, they utter mantras in dull monotone as if these strangely seductive passages were culled from their own exorcisms. "Sexodrome" takes all the right cues from Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, with vocal fragments orbiting a skeletal rhythmic plod that's all gotta reference Cronenberg in some way shape or form. It's too creepy not to! A blast of hurricane noise launches "If Your Mother Asks" which surges forward through driving techno stomp akin to TG's ceaseless march "Discipline" and complementary slashes of noise and vocal gaspings.
If we thought we could get more, we might expound more on the subject of the Ectoplasm Girls; but as it stands, we've got less than a dozen. So, delay now and perhaps delay forever.
As much as we love the later, lush psychedelic experimental pop of the Flaming Lips, and the grungy, drug addled noise rock whatthefuck weirdness of those early records, we have to say our hearts truly belong to the three records that fall right in between, a fantastic trilogy of noisy psychedelic pop and twisted noise rock experimentalism, that chronicled the group's shift from the underground to the mainstream, and capturing them when they had a foot firmly in both. That shift started with this, 1992's Hit To Death In The Future Head, and continued on through 1993's Transmissions From The Satellite Heart and 1995's The Clouds Taste Metallic. All of these have been reissued on vinyl, and hopefully we'll list them all, but it makes sense to start here. Cuz before Hit To Death, while the band were definitely pop savvy, they were also still punks, and antagonistic and naturally sonically subversive, they tossed off bits of pop like it was nothing, often tossing that pop into the midst of a 10 minute drugged out psych jam, or some warped garbled noisiness, Hit To Death, while not devoid of that stuff, was the first time where the band seeming went for it, happy to play a pop song without dousing it in noise or pulling it a part after the first chorus. That said, for a pop record, even one as tangentially 'pop' as this one, it's weird as fuck. The awesomely titled opener "Talkin' 'Bout The Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants To Live Forever)" is a super rocking noise pop classic, hooky as hell, but still rife with weird processed vox and wild psychedelic guitars, no amount of which could disguise just how good these guys were at whipping up some crazy catchiness. "Hit Me Like You Did The First Time" explodes out of the gate with a killer superdistorted processed psych guitar melody, draped over acoustic guitar strum, swoonsome strings, and weird rubbery bass, and then when the song kicks in proper, it's another chunk of sunshiney acid drenched psych pop. It is the Flaming Lips though, so there is plenty of weirdness, fucked up sounds, bizarre production, it's only really slightly removed from their previous record In A Priest Driven Ambulance, but for every blast of psychedelic noisiness there's a strummy jangly chunk of indie pop like "Gingerale Afternoon (The Astrology Of A Saturday)" or a gorgeous plaintive psych pop classic like "Halloween On The Barbary Coast", which still ranks as one of the band's best. And that's really only scratching the surface, every track on Hit To Death is so great, hooky, heavy, tripped out, dreamy, super rocking, hypnotic and mesmerizing, anyone paying attention when Hit To Death came out, knew these guys were destined for bigger things, and even now, nearly 20 years later, it sounds as fresh and creative as ever, and still pretty much like nothing else out there.
Before we launch into what's gonna be relatively long-winded review, let's just state up front that this has the best album cover EVER: the band themselves cruising down a rural highway on choppers wearing nothing but their birthday suits!! And this version sees the orginal gatefold recreated for the cd-era, mini-LP sleeve style. But if that's not enough to get you to buy this, read on...
Not long ago we gave a big thumbs up to the album "Satori", the masterpiece from Japanese '70s psych rockers the Flower Travellin' Band (note: we're still waiting to get more of those in stock, they're backordered at our distributor!). Now, however, we've got a brand new reissue of the Flower Travellin' Band's debut album, "Anywhere". It certainly doesn't scale the heights of "Satori" but it'll help you to understand how they got there. Along with a great take on "House Of The Rising Sun" (a nod to Frijid Pink?), this album also explicitly demonstrates, via covers, these Japanese freaks' radical recognition of the genius of two of their Western contemporaries, Black Sabbath and King Crimson. Like many other great artists, with humble beginnings Japan's Flower Travellin' Band cut their teeth on the material of their mentors. Though "Anywhere" -- released in 1970 -- is primarily a covers album, it's also quite a testament to both the band's veracity in their reproductions and their creativity in realigning the building blocks of rock & roll. Their cover of Black Sabbath's self-titled track was actually recorded in the same year as the original and their version of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" only a year after its release. And they aren't merely content to play only the "Schizoid Man" opening riff, like so many other bands that have attempted to cover it, but take on the entire piece in all its schizophrenic freaked out glory, getting waaay into the improv element of the mid-section. The same is true for "Black Sabbath" and you have to appreciate singer Joe's take on the unique Ozzy voice. The most interesting track on the record though has to be their attempt at straight-up blues rock -- while their "Louisiana Blues" starts and finishes almost pedestrianly enough on the "Minglewood Blues" riff by Gus Cannon (of Cannon's Jug Stompers) that was popularized in the rock scene by the likes of The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart, the interior of the song is a complete departure of sorts. Not only devoid of the original progression, it's not even "bluesy" at all. Here in the extended jam that makes up the meat of this musical sandwich, the Flower Travellin' Band's Eastern roots surface a bit. It's a precursor to the sound of their later albums "Satori" and "Made In Japan" (another great one which we'll be reviewing in the future if we can ever get any stock of it in quantity).
The return of this mysterious high concept project from electronic produced and soundscaper Jan Jelinek, which we initially took to be some sort of elaborate hoax (a la Ursula Bogner), a foundation called Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples, or Society For The Emancipation Of Samples, a recording project, and ostensibly and organization, based on the idea that samples, such as music played on a ride at a carnival, should be exempt from royalties, and by extension, we assume it would make sample based artists less worried about lawsuits. That idea is further fleshed out here, with extensive notes on the sleeve, about the idea for this body, as an entity dedicated to helping out artists when their sample based work incites a lawsuit and that artist incurs financial damages. So once again, Jelinek assembles a handful of tracks, all sampled in public spaces, some processed and layered and transformed, others nearly straight recordings, all of them quite lovely, whether it's woozy mysterious melodies, rhythmic minimal beeping, kitschy exotica, ice skating rink organs, all laced with backwards swoops and whirling effects and various degrees of processing, and all replete with the ambient sounds around them, footsteps, voices, cars driving by, various machines, and best of all the hiss and crackle of the public playback devices.
We loved what we heard on Grimes' split 12" with D'eon that we were finally able to review a few lists ago, but our love for Grimes really blossomed when some of us got to catch her/them live several months ago, in town opening for Austra. We could tell then that they were on the verge of creating something pretty awesome. Visions totally delivers on that promise, Grimes' glorious soft gaze synth driven sound creating not just a hazy atmosphere but producing memorable and mesmerizing pop songs as well.
Like the sounds of Gang Gang Dance and Glasser softly drifting through a smoke filled room, the sounds here manage to be both tender and sexy. While Grimes may too often be pigeonholed as a witch house band, there is something much more bright, melodic and sonically rounded about their sound and approach. Each song has its own distinct vibe and tonal color. Sometimes it sounds like Little Dragon doing the most seductive Blondie song ever and other times it's like Chromatics letting their hair down at an after hours '90s RnB dance party. Airy without being too light, addictive without being too saccharine. Visions definitely transports us to some fantastical sonic otherworld that we're digging big time...
Yet another record from this incredible Saharan outfit, number four if you're keeping track, their first was an aQ Record Of The Week, and the other two might as well have been, wild guitar driven African folk, rhythmic and percussive, all very hypnotic and mesmerizing, trancelike for sure, with some incredible vocalizing, soulful and emotional, all wound into some of the most jubilant, energetic, emotional and original music we've ever heard.
Our first impulse this time around was to say that this was simply more of the same, but in fact, the sound has definitely changed, due in no small part to what seems to be an expanded lineup, as the elder Doueh has enlisted his next oldest sons, on synth and drum kit, and it's really the drums that are the big difference. The first track is immediately more propulsive, the production better than ever, the low end thick, the vocals way up in the mix, the drums so hypnotic, and of course the guitars, impossible tangles of super intricate melody, gnarled riffs, all woven into a sound that's surprisingly super rocking.
And actually 'super rocking' might just be the best way to describe the whole record. The aforementioned drums are powerful and ever present, and the guitars remain impossibly wild, wooly and wonderful, drenched in effects, wah and flanger, or some approximation, making the notes and riffs twist into fantastic new shapes, the keyboards adding all sorts of texture, and the newly added trio of female backup singers adds even more oomph, the choruses and call and response vocal harmonies so rich and lush.
There are a couple tracks that stand out, where the band set aside their new rocking-ness, and instead unfurl gorgeous hazily psychedelic expanses of guitar buzz, sounding more like a sitar, the melodies all tangled and interwoven, while the drums offer a deep resonant pulse, and the vocals wail passionately way down in the mix, cuz here it's about the crazy intricate dense guitar playing, which is incredible, so hypnotic and utterly mesmerizing.
The record finishes off with a lengthy jam that is definitely another of our favorites, sounding a bit more laid back than the rest of the record, less buzzy, and more warm and washed out, the guitars unfurling gorgeous little flurries of notes, the rhythms and main riff locked tight so that it almost sounds looped, and at times like the record must be skipping, those moments eventually blossoming into synth laden, softly droney stretches of strummy folk and sun dappled Afro-pop bliss, dreamy and so divine. Like all the records before, utterly fantastic, and totally recommended. We can only imagine how great it must be to see Group Doueh live, but thankfully, we won't need to imagine much longer, as this record coincides with their first US tour!!
How To Reform Mankind marks yet another entry in the reissue campaign of The Hafler Trio's early research into sound and its effect upon the human psyche. It was the third in what now stands as the first of many untitled "triologies of three," standing as the final chapter to the series featuring Kill The King and Mastery of Money. Within the entire catalogue of the Hafler Trio, How To Reform Mankind (1994) represents one of the last records that Andrew McKenzie produced before drastically slowing down his activities in the middle and late '90s. In many ways, this album is also an exceptional culmination of the ideas that McKenzie propagated throughout the '80s, which reflect a considerably different perspective upon his work, his life, and the world in general. The early Hafler Trio albums revelled in the miscommunication, the recycling of information within new contexts, and a disorientation caused by the play between what is real and what might be real. In recent years, The Hafler Trio's idioms have suggested a revelation / obfuscation of truth in the grand traditions of ancient Gnosticism.
Psychoacoustics and the psychological impact of sound have both figured heavily into all of the Hafler Trio's work, and these areas of research are profoundly present on How To Reform Mankind. Subtle flutterings of shortwave data have been processed into rarified air; low volume, resonant frequencies colliding with the body for a chest-cavity massage; the clunky piano from McKenzie's Negentropy album returns as a post-serialist leitmotif; and desolate sonar plinks slam against metal walls to astounding effect. McKenzie's uncompromising drive for his art has made the Hafler Trio one of the greatest artistic endeavors of the last two decades; and How To Reform Mankind stands close to the top of his best recordings.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we cannot offer sound samples of the Hafler Trio's work. Oh well.
For some folks (you know who you are), this has got to be the most exciting entry on this week's New Arrivals list. The second recorded collaboration by this heavy duty international trio, each with their own dedicated following. But let's not kid ourselves. Only one is truly a cult, he of the dark shades and bangs. And, not to discount the impassioned contributions of Mssrs. O'Rourke and Ambarchi, both talented musicians and noisemakers in their own right, this is, as all such collaborations ultimately are, Keiji Haino's album, he's the star of the show (cf. Keiji Haino & Boris, Keiji Haino & Pan Sonic, Keiji Haino with Bill Laswell & Rashied Ali...). This is how it should be, how it must be, how it always shall be. So, if, say you were interested in an Ambarchi or O'Rourke record that just happens to have the Dark Lord of Japanese psych playing a little guitar on it, this isn't it. This is a new Haino album, with O'Rourke and Ambarchi in the roles of very capable sidemen, essentially manifesting a 2011 version of Haino's classic power trio, Fushitsusha! And O'Rourke and Ambarchi are here for a reason (for the 2nd time). That reason, being to bask in the darkly-shining psychedelic magnificence channelled uniquely by Haino, to be a part of that, to experience and share in it, and probably be changed by it. For the same reason we listen, but more so. O'Rourke, whose usual instrument is guitar, plays bass (as he did in Sonic Youth). Ambarchi, best known for his guitar-based dronemongering, plays drums. The implication is obvious. Both do their utmost to help Haino achieve, well, Haino-ness. And he does. On these four loooong tracks, recorded live in Tokyo, January 2011, washes of distortion and feedback are sculpted with eerie otherworldly angles only possible in some non-Euclidean musical geometry... shrill, sparking tendrils of guitar cascade over steady percussive plod and skitter. Haino's emotive vocal shriek is wrenched forth poetically o'er some select passages, but mostly this is about the ominous glorious grinding interplay of the three instruments. There's quiet stretches, and rocked-out bass-heavy ones; rhythmic moments of softly pulsating distorted shuffle, others where all players meld in one slomo explosion of dense churning muzz. Fans of Haino, fans of Fushitsusha, you want this. Those more familiar with the *other* two guys, well, they're introducing you to something special... And if your soul has ever cried out in the void, you'll like it. (PS if it's not obvious, a huge Haino fanboy here wrote this review!)
Nice graphics/design by Stephen O'Malley. Cd in digipack; vinyl in nice gatefold, cut at Dub Plates and Mastering, Berlin.
The second tape in as many weeks from our favorite modern day punk rock shaman, the venerable Daniel Higgs, former frontman for post punk hypnorockers Lungfish, Higgs has forged a truly idiosyncratic sonic path, and this latest missive is another gorgeous collection of abstract minimal ragas and strange spoken word mystery.
All three tracks here were recorded in a redwood room perched above a waterfall in Big Sur, captured on a handheld cassette recorder, so the sound is lo-fi, but raw and intimate, the opener, the 10+ minute "The Elemental Conflux at Big Sur", an extended banjo improvisation, one that flits from cyclical and mesmeric, to dense and percussive, to spaced out and droney, the banjo augmented here and there by wordless vocals, a gorgeously hypnotic epic that blossoms directly into "Return", which sounds like some classic folk song, Higgs' powerful vocals soaring over a skeletal melodic framework, equal parts abstract raga, and strange old timey shanty, the vibe intense and darkly personal, and like the track before it, hypnotic, and subtly cyclical.
The whole B side is taken up by an extended version of Higgs' haunting sermon "Say God", stretched out to over 100 VERSES, a truly fascinating and perplexing spiritual poem, that even sans music, manages to be utterly mesmerizing, and listening to Higgs verbalize his visions, and lay out his cosmic ideology, his tribute to his version of a God almighty, one seemingly of nature, and humanity and the universe (and most likely not -that- God), it's easy to imagine him as some Yahowha style cult leader, or the head of his own mysterious church, which really, in a way, he sort of already is!
As always, absolutely recommended. And gorgeously packaged in an origami style fold out cardboard cassette case, printed in reflective gold, and hand numbered, with a textured paper obi, a full color insert, with another insert with the liner notes AND a download coupon.
As much as we've been flipping out over the recent spate of retrospective compilations coming from the newly re-activated Flying Nun label, it's not all just 'the good ol' days', as the label continues to push newer bands, although to be fair, High Dependency Unit are hardly a new band, having been kicking up a glorious noise rock racket for close to two decades now, and having recently reformed to perform as part of Flying Nun's 30th anniversary (!!), but this record is in fact, fairly new, or at least new-ish, released back in 2003, and now getting re-released on FN where it belongs, as it carries on the tradition of big gloomy psychedelic noise rock, as practiced most notably by the mighty Bailter Space, who might be the closest reference for HDU. Just give a listen to the first track, a barreling juggernaut of blown out, crunchy, heavy guitars, Sonic Youth-like soft noise, pummeling drums, buried vox, churning indie rock that explodes in dense surges of psych noise bliss. It's all we could do to make it past the first track. But these guys definitely have a soft side too. Check out the woozy bliss-pop of "Grace", that again looks to SY with its warped outsider avant pop, boy/girl vox, soaring synths and twisted guitar figures, it's sort of a slow jam, or a ballad maybe, but still it manages to be dense and layered and noisy, and actually now that we think of it reminds us a bit of the Swirlies too!
From there on out, it's a dizzying drift through pounding shoegaze noisepop blissouts, gorgeous sprawls of feedback drenched dreamdrone dirgery, stripped down gloom pop crush, dense guitar heavy churn, and finally, the record closes with a delicately atonal stretch of piano and acoustic guitar driven slowcore, still wreathed in swaths of soft noise and blurred effects, the result darkly lovely and subtly psychedelic.
Latest blast of downtuned, crusty, sludge-soaked ultra doom from these Kentucky killers, released on the always kick ass Israeli label Total Rust. Somehow we missed out listing the first Highgate record, which we're kicking ourselves for now, cuz this new one is a pretty brutal and twisted slab slow and low heaviness.
Three tracks (and one brief sampled intro), a little over 40 minutes of extreme, hateful, filthy slow motion, grim, grinding ultramegadoom. A lumbering, lurching, stumbling slo-mo sludgefest, creeping and crawling and slithering sickly, the guitars thick and tarpit black, the drums a Neanderthal pound, and the vocals, howled, growled and bellowy, but weirdly metallic and effected, as if they were sung through a length of pipe, making them sound sick and alien and awesomely fucked up.
This is about as doomy and dismal as it gets, no swing, no Sabbathy groove, a little bit of clean guitar shimmer, a sort of minimal outro in the second song, but other than that, Shrines To The Warhead is all death march trudgery, lead foot dirgery and blackened and filthy hellish crush and pummel. The sort of sick shit that should be sonic sweetness for folks into Eyehategod, Khanate, Bunker, Moss, Corrupted, Otesanek, Habsyll, Moloch, Monarch, Salome, Trees, Whitehorse and the like.
We have a long history of obsession with strange sounds from Scandinavia, whether it's all the hypnorock weirdness from Finland, grim blackness from Norway and Sweden or music performed on instruments made from ice, there's something about that stuff that we find irresistible. Not just sonically, but also conceptually. Which makes the provenance of this disc's arrival at aQ all the more wonderful. One day in the mail, a cd with a moose, standing in front of an open refrigerator, set amidst a sunset lit landscape of snow. On the back, drawings of men all wearing white hooded body suits, and all seemingly holding deer skulls and antlers. We were already sold, but the deal was sealed with the legend: "Originals and traditionals performed on stringed reindeer antlers." Which is exactly what this is, a series of haunting soundscapes, performed primarily on stringed and contact mic'd reindeer antlers, the strings and antlers bowed and plucked and scraped, those mysterious sounds accompanied by all manner of sticks, logs, rocks, bones and various field recordings, those field recordings giving the proceedings the air of some surreptitiously captured ancient ritual. There are more traditional instruments as well, drums, flutes, fiddles, guitars, but those are employed judiciously, and most often merely to color the background over which the antler skulls hum and thrum, shimmer and moan.
It's no surprise that David Tibet of Current 93 is a fan, and maybe even less of a surprise that so is�Fenriz of Darkthrone (who even did a '90s acid techno remix of 'em which works surprisingly well! Not included here, sadly...), the sound of Hornorkesteret definitely plays into C93's ritualistic ambient folk, and Darkthrone's Norwegian pride, but beyond that, the sounds here are unlike anything you've heard. If we had to compare it to anything, we might mention Avarus, No Neck Blues Band, the aforementioned ice instruments of Terje Isungset, there's definitely a murky, primitive, tribal krautrock vibe, not to mention a certain hauntological bent, especially on the first track (more on that in a second), but ultimately, this is some fantastic raw sonic exploration, a mysterious songsuite, atmospheric, haunting and strangely psychedelic in its own way.
This disc collects the group's best recordings from the last ten years, and begins with what might be the weirdest one, "Elegi For Roald Amundsen", which begins with a staticky shortwave broadcast, a lost radio transmission of a voices speaking in Norwegian, beneath which, the stringed antlers rumble and hum, weaving a dark shimmery drift, driven by a low pulsing thrum, all the while wreathed in a warm crackle, totally mesmerizing and strangely evocative of some impossible melding of ancient tribal ritual and 'modern' technology. It had us imaging some ancient Norwegian tribe, who discovered an old transistor radio, which they assumed must have come from the gods, and every mysterious broadcast was a message from beyond, which they paid tribute by accompanying on their bowed skulls and stringed antlers. Elsewhere, the group weave darkly meditative and ominously rhythmic soundscapes of thrum and rumble, over beds of rushing water and birdsong, or pounding stretches of almost Dead C worthy abstract atmospheric psychedelia, or groaning surreal ambience that reminds us quite a bit of an even more abstract take on Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. The tracks vary greatly, from spare and minimal, to dense and rhythmic, at one point detouring into pure Norwegian folk, and at another into something almost funky, a sort of super rhythmic kraut-groove, but for the most part, spends the majority of its time in some haunting sonic otherworld, a transmission from a lost time, delivered in a lost language of sound, the stories and lives and memories conveyed via this strange music, performed on skulls and bones, captured here for eternity.
Here's another band for all those folks freaking over the blissed out post black metal jangle pop of groups like Alcest, Amesoeurs, Les Discrets, Sleeping Peonies and all the rest. This Dutch one man band began life as something much more black and grim, but gradually shed all of that as the sound drifted toward something way more shoegazey and poppy.
And that's essentially what this is, a shoegaze record, a fuzzed out dream pop record, albeit one with buzzing brittle guitars, occasional squalls of frenzied fast picking, and once-in-a-while blast beats, and any of the elements that would normally go toward creating a grim black buzz, are transformed into a prismatic psychedelic shimmer, a fuzzy, a blissed out shoegaze buzz equal parts super sunny jangle pop and slow building instrumental crystalline post rock, soaring and epic and emotional, oozing with glistening melodic shimmer, wreathed in warm sonic swirls. If we had to pick one band to compare Hypomanie to, it would probably be Slowdive, a sort of blackened post rock Slowdive, but that same sort of wistful melancholia, and epic shoegazey swells, not to mention the occasional sweeping string like synths. There's also a huge Jesu vibe in the guitar tone and the epic crescendos (which also remind us of M83), and there's a strange looped vibe to many of the tracks, as if the songs were constructed and assembled, which gives the whole thing a dizzying, alien feel, which certainly suits the strange dreamlike sounds. And throughout the record, there are definitely some subtle hints of Hypomanie's black metal roots, in the buzzing guitars, the tremelo picking, the strange production, and here and there, the sound does actually explode into some serious black metal, like the closing bit of the opening track, which bursts into some furious soaring frenzied buzzing, anchored to some double kick driven blast beats, but even then it's all kaleidoscopic and dreamy, the blasting drums buried in the lush sonic swirl, a sound so epic and cinematic and fantastically grandiose. Gorgeous stuff for sure, and ANYone into the post black metal jangle pop usual suspects (mentioned above), will definitely dig this big time.
Lots of folks got their introduction to German outsider sci-fi electro pop visionary Felix Kubin via the Bruder Luzifer compilation we reviewed last year, a career spanning retrospective that offered up a handful of tracks that touched on nearly every aspect of Kubin's schizophrenic and ever-morphing soundworld, leaning heavily toward his twisted electro-pop / new wave popsmithery, but also giving us glimpses of warped lo-fi minimal electro-buzz, lush twang flecked soundscapes, freaked out chaotic noise and pretty much every stop in between. TXRF is something else entirely, a seriously high concept record, apparently based on a method of X-raying microchips to detect microscopic defects, these tracks, ostensibly some sort of sonic test for the X-ray system, and this record in effect, the sonic printout as it were, a document of the processes and their musical byproducts. Which is definitely believable, since on the one hand much of TXRF sounds weirdly clinical and academic, machinelike and robotic, the sort of thing you might hear on Raster Noton or some other label that traffics in such things, but Kubin, as we've discovered is a kind of a nut, and that definitely shows here, the sounds surprisingly playful, occasionally groovy, dizzyingly tripped out and most definitely psychedelic, shifting from a sort of stuttering 8-bit IDM to a woozy glitched out rhythmic abstract house music, to full on sci-fi mad scientist weirdness, all of those various sounds and elements somehow woven into a surprisingly cohesive whole, the record constantly transforming and morphing, the tracks impossibly varied, whether it's pulsing, pounding squelch and stutter, or skittery laser-beam, alien staticscape, playful Perrey And Kingsley style analog experimentation or haunting soundtracky psychedelic synthscapery (the closing track is a KILLER), it's all great, and yet another bafflingly brilliant piece of Kubin's unsolvable sonic puzzle, which of course, if you couldn't tell by now, means absolutely WAY recommended.
Wow. We can't get over this incredibly cosmic, tripped-out debut cassette from KWJAZ. SF mastermind Peter Berends decides that space is the place and sets his sights for uncharted musical territory. Falling somewhere between outsider instrumental pop and dubbed-out psychedelic ethno-jazz, Berends leads a colorful excursion into the astral unknown. The two, side-long tracks unfold like some otherworldly mix-tape, deep basslines giving way to sizzling warbling drones, cut-up bits of rhythmic clatter ooze and materialize into slow grooving monuments to the stars. Chopped up samples and distorted swells melt into a lo-fi woozy web. Hazy, primitive beats (picture a slowed down Ethiopiques loop) rock and sway as horns, electric piano and weirdo samples add to the celestial crunk. And keep in mind, though KWJAZ is weird, far-out and strange, this humble cassette is overflowing with musicianship and close attention to layering and detail.
What makes all the tripped-out, genre defying weirdness so satisfying is Berends's ability to form these diverse elements into a propulsive, evocative musical journey through time and genre. Moments of cool jazz tranquility unexpectedly morph into trip-hop fantasy ballads, long-tone new age bliss suddenly shifts into West African romps, and somehow all these tangents seem impossibly and seamlessly linked. We can't recommend this one enough!
Limited to an edition of 121, fans of Hype Williams, Rangers or Ducktails will not want to miss out on this lysergic masterpiece!
Solo record number two from aQ pal Jussi Lehtisalo, frontman of Finnish hypnorockers Circle, Ektro / Full Contact label head honcho, and member of too many outfits to count, a few of which would include Ektroverde, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo, Doktor Kettu, Pharaoh Overlord, Rakhim, Grumbling Fur, Krypt Axeripper, Motorspandex, Split Cranium, Steel Mammoth...
Sadly, we haven't yet managed to get Jussi's first solo lp, by all accounts a surprisingly beautiful and subdued album, but we did manage to get a bunch of these, the tape version at least (there's a vinyl version as well, which we hope to have soon too), which is also beautiful, but about as far from subdued as you can get. Both side long tracks are dense and layered, and constantly shifting. In some ways taking all the disparate sounds of Jussi's other bands, and somehow mashing them all together, into something surprisingly cohesive.
The A side, "Caterpillars", starts off sounding like some sort of abstract deserty ambient experimental doom, with churning guitars, spurts of metallic crunch, clattery bicycle spoke like percussion, woozy Morricone-esque twang and spidery minor key melodies, peppered with occasional twisted little synth trills, all beneath some monstrous growled vokills, before the song transforms into something more woozy and jazzy, a little late night bluesy, with crooned distorted vox, and thick low end rib cage rattling thrum, only to then launch into some seriously twisted buzz drenched rock pound, which initially sounds like it might explode into full on black metal, but instead, the pounding and buzzing is joined by more twisted xylophone like synth melodies, booming sub bass throbs and cool blasts of rad classic metal style harmonized leads, before once again slipping back into a spacey sort of moody, woozy slowcore, driven by frenetic high hat cymbal stutter, and trippy dubbed out snare drums, still more crooned vox, the sound dreamy and washed out, laced with strange swoonsome faux horns and glistening spaced out FX before finally returning to that strange xylophone driven metallic stomp.
The flipside is equally schizophrenic, "Here March The Cranes" begins all grinding gnarled guitars in a cloud of cymbal sizzle, which is then joined by some Circle like hypnorock bass, the guitars coalescing into little soaring squalls of majestic fast picking, multiple guitars interwoven, those guitars growing more intense, unfurling wild psychedelic leads, everything getting noisier and noisier, until finally switching gears and mellowing out, into a twisted post rock sprawl, all ethereal guitar shimmer, wild jazzy drummy, and spaced out bass blurts. Soon those growled vox come back in, and the sound turns into some strange sinister epic prog rock, swirling synthy strings, a slow build, more and more intense and tense, before splintering into a stretch of cool droned out noise rock churn, that sound gradually growing more and more spacey and serene, dreamy melodies, more of those faux horns, all manner of strange percussion and swirling FX, as the noise recedes, the sound becomes a hazy, lilting bit of psychedelic dreamdrone raga like drift. Fantastic! Easily one of the coolest weirdest things we've heard from Jussi, which is saying a lot considering his whole career has basically been nothing BUT a series of cool weird releases!! WAY recommended. And limited, limited TO JUST 100 COPIES!!! The cassette comes sealed in a stickered little bag, inside a cool cd sized box, artwork affixed to the inside and outside, and sealed shut with another sticker.
If you were to touch a piece of metal to dry ice, an incredible squeal bursts forth at a caustic frequency and high volume. This phenomenon of sonic alchemy is the result of the temperature change between the metal and the dry ice. When the dry ice jumps in temperature from 60 degrees below zero, the molecules rapidly sublimate from solid to gas. Since the metal is quite rigid, the carbon dioxide gas bursts outward and the two surfaces of the solid dry ice and the metal act akin to a reed on a sax played by a six year old. We first saw this trick employed by Matmos at their Yerba Buena Center for the Arts residency many years ago; and Lethe - the Japanese acoustic experimentalist Kuwayama Kiyoharu - took this up on a much large scale with large steel tables heated by candles and situated in a massive industrial warehouse. The protracted squeals, sonorous buzzing, and shrill drones aren't too dissimilar to how Kuwayama would bow metal, wood, and other found objects within abandoned warehouses, especially with the cavernous reverb that spills around every sound. As with pretty much all of his other recordings, Kuwayama takes great care in the amount space he uses between each of the highly variable shrieks and bellows produced by such incredibly simple means. It's a fantastic post-Fluxus performative gesture presented on a grand scale.
Killer collaboration from these two aQ faves, both trafficking in a similarly ominous abstract minimalism, and who together have conjured up something pretty epic. The opening track begins as if to creep abjectly through some expanse of blackened thrum, but instead blossoms into something almost more Godspeed like, minimal propulsive drum pound, spare haunting piano melodies, distant vocals drifting ethereally over clouds of distorted buzz, and peppered with little bits of backwards effects. Haunting and heavy, epic and brooding, a cinematic sprawl that has one more surprise up its sleeve, the surprisingly heavy and metallic last couple minutes, buzzing guitars over monstrous drum pummel, transforming the sound into something even more epic and heavy.
Most of the rest of the record, seems to meld Locrian's penchant for distorted blackened dirgescapes and droned out psychedelia, to Mamiffer's stately haunting abstract chamber music, the tracks unfurling dark swirls of shimmering thrum and roiling, crumbling crunch, often smoothed into blissed out ambience, but just as often blurred and blackened into something much more corrosive and caustic, over which drift various tendrils of bleak melancholic piano melody, moaning whorls of bowed-string low end, sheets of gristly electronics and industrial clatter, as well as slow shifting clouds of smeared grey shimmer.
The record closes with a nearly 19 minute three part epic, which perfectly encapsulates the two groups' symbiotic collaboration, dark dolorous piano, ghostly angelic vox, over lush swells of chordal thrum, monk-like chants, spare acoustic guitar strum, which all disappears in a cloud of feedback drenched psychedelic guitar skree, before transforming into a stretch of FX heavy power electronics black-noise crunch, and then transforms again, into some sort of black doom trudge, gnarled super distorted guitar wrapped around booming almost jazzy drum damage, and a throat shredding metallic bellow, the result a glorious sprawl of minimal blackened industrial doom that eventually fades out to just a low level hum, and a slow, funereal, martial drum plod.
Gorgeous packaging too, both the vinyl and the cd in swank sleeves, with super striking artwork, the cassette version in a cd sized box, with a hand sewn booklet, and two stickers. The tape version limited to 200 copies...
The art of field recording is deceptively tricky. With tiny digital recorders and a pair of decent binaural microphones, anybody can wander through a city center, capturing the sounds of an urban environment with incredible detail. Such audio tourism might be instructive on personal level, but as a statement beyond "Listen up everybody! I went to Thailand!" such recordings can be really dull. We approached Machinefabriek's Veldwerk with some trepidation, as these recordings are framed as "audio snapshots" based around travels to Slovakia, Russia, and Germany (plus some more close to home recordings from Rotterdam). Fortunately, Rutger Zuydervelt (the man behind Machinefabriek) uses those recordings as a jumping off point for his compositional abstractions, akin more to the psychogeographical work of Tarab or John Grzinich, but further augmented with his deft extended guitar techniques. While he never achieves the massive, Tim Hecker-ish swarms of melodic drone density Zuydervelt mastered on his epochal Marijn cd from Type many years ago, he uses those guitar drones still coated in blur and antiquated grit as radiant coronas of sound that echo through the decontextualized field recordings of various locations. The dramatic noise crunch of "Slovensko I" which opens the album is quite a jarring passage amidst a slow drifting loopscape of warm melodic whirs. "Rusland" (which was actually one of the micro-edition cd-r releases we got back in 2008), is a beautiful organic soundscape with lots of space, distant shimmer, simple reverbed guitars, deep Jeck-like swells of soft focus fuzz, and dark low end rumbles that slip into smoothed out record cackle and deep drones, brief moments of found sound, coughs, footsteps, eventually transforming into hushed whispery blurs, peppered with thick resonant thuds, muffled effected guitars, more mysterious voices, all very funereal and mysterious drifting off to near silence. "Apollo" - another microedition release which never passed through these doors - bristles with a quiet electro-static energy, with some of the field recordings coming to the foreground through watery churns, cargo-ship reverberation, industrial clank, and ventilator drones but always rendered as organic abstractions. We should have never doubted Zuydervelt, as he's once again presented us with an incredible album.
BACK IN PRINT! This exceedingly weird '80s fantasy metal band has another of their many obscure albums reissued on cd! We first listed this way back in 2000, and it's a reissue of a 1983 album in the first place. But these days, Manilla Road is probably much better known than they ever were, whether nine or 26 years ago, now being cited as an influence by everyone from The Gates Of Slumber to Wormsblood, so it's about the time this cd was available again, particularly 'cause it's also pretty much our favorite of their whole weird ouvre (though they're still going strong even today).
When you talk about a cult metal band, they don't get much more "cult" than this one... Hailing from the state of Kansas, but more at home in some sub-Robert E. Howardian prehistoric epoch of swords and sorcery, this band is beloved by the same folks who worship Cirith Ungol and The Lord Weird Slough Feg, and should appeal to bizarre-minded fans of Iron Maiden, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, Manowar... "Crystal Logic" is a perfect illustration of what's great (and ridiculous) about Manilla Road: eccentric (to say the least) vocals, a totally wrong (tinny, thin, poverty-stricken) guitar sound that paradoxically sounds fantastic & punk, doomy bass, mythological/intellectual lyrics, and lets not forget the so-bad-it's-good cover art... But most importantly, Manilla Road had the talent and imagination to write some great songs, and truly rule their own unique sub-genre of progressive, remarkably catchy garage-metal. This reissue includes the crazed guitar instrumental "Flaming Metal System" as a bonus track. On the album proper, you'll find true Manilla classics like the oft-covered "Necropolis", the doomy "The Veils Of Negative Existence", and the especially epic "Dreams Of Eschaton".
Super limited debut release from these Quebecois funeral doomlords, whose sounds definitely hews closer to the sort of washed out dronedreamdrone doom we've been digging so much lately, that strange liturgical murk of Skepticism, mixed with the doom-ed psychedelia of Megaton Leviathan, the sound shimmery and almost shoegazey, the guitars warm and soft focus, the vocals airy and ethereal, in fact the A side is downright blissed out, and when the more metal VOKILLS finally come in, a rumbly demonic growl, even then it manages to sound sort of blurred and bleary, especially with the other more clean and chantlike vocals, a seriously dreamy chunk of downtuned dirgery that almost sounds like a doom metal Low.
The B side slows it down even further, adding some keening mournful melodies, the guitars massive and warm, lush and layered, the vocals another layer of low end, gorgeously viscous and beautifully blackened, a haunting melancholic creep, that is more tranquil and mesmerizing that pummeling or pulverizing. The second half of the song adds some extra clean guitar melodies, and what sounds like swirling synths, and in a surprising twist gets a little bit mathy, but a slow woozy mathiness, that only manages to make it sound even more strange and psychedelic.
LIMITED TO 550 COPIES!!! Pressed on green vinyl, with a printed full color cardstock insert.
When we first listened to Meltdown, we found ourselves crazy obsessed with the title track, a killer slab of synth heavy drum machine driven cold wave electro, with cool squiggly Perrey And Kingsley like analog melodies over the top, the sound raw and urgent, a bit frenetic, dizzying and psychedelic and a little bit noisy too, but also atmospheric and cinematic, definitely reminding us a little of the current crop of retro-futurist synthscapers. The rest of the record, at first blush, could hardly compare, sounding more like a straight ahead garage rock. But a strange thing happened - the more we listened, it was like all the sci-fi synthy weirdness and electro-noisiness of that title track seeped into all of the others, revealing the record as something so much more, an awesomely psychedelic melange of crunchy garage punk, seventies new wave power pop, and brooding cold wave gloom pop, with some of the songs all jangly and fuzzy and garage-y, while others are more weirdly robotic and futuristic, although even the poppier jams are peppered with rad theremin like squiggly melodies and thick buzzing synths, all tangled up with super hooky classic fuzzy punky garage pop, giving them a cool retro-future-pop vibe, and making them a bit more dark and tense than your typical garage rock. Elsewhere the band craft some seriously perfect power pop, sounding like some lost Yellow Pills style B-side from the seventies, all kinetic and crunchy, big chiming jangly chords, super melodic basslines and kick ass propulsive drumming, but the strangely new wave-y vocals once again change the feel just enough to make it sound totally original (or at least as original as something so beholden to sounds past can be).
Imagine Thee Oh Sees via Gary Numan, or the Ramones if they were on Captured Tracks, or maybe even Bare Wires covering Snowy Red... this is fast becoming a new favorite.
One of two new cassettes on this week's list from UK cassette label The Tapeworm, the other a weird bit of haunting minimal living room ambient electronica slowcore from Old Apparatus, and this collection of tape experiments from multimedia artist/musician Achim Mohne, whose sounds sources are almost as interesting and baffling as what he does with those sources, a 1982 instructional tape for a Blaupunkt tape player, that overlaps various instructions in different languages, as well as adding blasts of white noise, overlapping the various different styles of music offered as samples, and messing with the tape speed. A serious blast of Plunderphonia for sure.
Then there's a track that uses as its source a 1999 performance for disassembled VCR's, video monitors, glue, medical gloves and rubbing alcohol, with Mohne cutting up the tapes, taping them back together, and manipulating them over the VCR's playback heads, the result is a dark, woozy assemblage of hiss and warble, whirs and disembodied voices, snippets of music and dialogue, deep rumbling tones and plenty of glitch and thrum and buzz, it sounds a bit like something you'd hear on Raster-Noton, albeit a bit more collaged, homebrewed and lo-fi. Another track is a live performance for multiple turntables and cassette recorders, and finds Mohne mixing a dizzying onslaught of different musics and sounds, from pop to noise, from metal to classical, all chopped up and looped and layered, almost like a skipping Negativland cd, or some sort of John Oswald / Philip Jeck DJ set.
There are a couple tracks that employ handheld recorders, one that uses recordings of fairy tales, another that's a sort of twisted Jeck style tape player / turntable mash up, those all murky and muted and droned out and atmospheric, and then prepare yourself for the final jam, a super short ultra dense blast of tape noise, that's actually the beginnings and ends of the first 34 releases on The Tapeworm label! Cool twisted stuff, that ends up being surprisingly haunting and beautiful much of the time. And features an awesome (and awesomely creepy) cover drawing of some character called Pooman, in a drawing called "The Tapewyrm Will Drive Out Any Stuck Up Turd With Fragrant Sound!" Indeed!
Latest from this long running minimal techno outfit, aka sonic alchemist Robert Henke, and another fantastic excursion into a murky world of mysterious sound, minimal skeletal beats and crunchy, staticky ambience, dubby and this time around, surprisingly big-beat heavy. Long gone are the days of Monolake's 'heroin house' murk, the later releases by Henke displaying a lush sound palette, even at their darkest and moodiest, the sounds themselves are still glistening and prismatic, but Henke never shies away from employing sonic detritus as well, whether that means bursts of static, or sheets of crumbling distortion or clouds of white noise hiss. The title track gives us a glimpse of Monolake's new sound, which is seriously propulsive and downright funky, almost a little jungly, with a distinctive techstep vibe, but wreathed in crackle and crunch, making it sound a little Digital Hardcore as well, but Henke keeps things tight and controlled, so it never veers totally into any of those other realms, it remains mostly tightly coiled and minimal, but Henke also adds some creepy whispered vocodered vocals which add a whole other element.
The rest of the record is not nearly so block rocking (although a few tracks do come close), definitely hewing closer to Henke's more minimal roots, but within that sound, Henke definitely mixes it up, creating some serious headphone ear candy, a lush minimal liquid skitter one second, the beats seemingly made from the sound of marbles or various items rolling on a hard surface, some severe ultra pristine Raster Noton style click and crunch the next, although in both cases Henke definitely adds his own unique twist. There's one track where things get downright housey, complete with buried female vocals and weirdly reverbed handclaps, while elsewhere the sound does occasionally shift into strange buzz drenched metal percussed skitter grooves, or blisses out into gauzey, hazy almost Caretaker sounding ambience, or blossoms into warm whirling almost proggy synthscapes, or oozes into a hushed almost static black ambient rumble. Pretty fantastic stuff, but then, we've sort of come to expect that from Henke's Monolake.
Latest blast of psychedelic proto metal blues rock heaviness from these retro rockers, their second for Siltbreeze (which still seems like a weird home for these guys), which finds the band continuing to hone a sound that is disturbingly (and we mean that in a good way) indistinguishable from the real deal. We'd be hard pressed to pick these guys out of a name-that-tune style lineup with a batch of genuine seventies hard rock outfits. The sound, the songs, the vocals, the production, this is total hard/blues/southern rock nirvana for folks who dig shit like Humble Pie, Zeppelin, Cream, ZZ Top, Skynrd, Ten Years After and the like. And Jerusalem - as we mentioned in our review of the first MC, the singer sounds a whole lot like the guy from Jersualem.
And while you might imagine this Ohio combo must be tongue-in-cheeking it, nothing could be further from the truth, this is the real deal, or as real as it gets circa 2012. And while the usual Siltbreeze fanbase might find this a bit too, well, classic rock, for everybody else, this stuff is pretty tough to resist, slithery riffage, hard rocking grooves, hooks galore, killer leads, stoney jams and some serious psychedelic heaviness.
We've been digging so much electronic music that's been coming out in the last few years, but we'd be lying if we didn't say that we still miss that golden era of the early/mid '90s when our love of electronica first really blossomed. A time when electronica albums were challenging and unpredictable. When you didn't know what sound/style Aphex Twin would explore next, or what twists and turns Squarepusher would take, or which frequencies Mouse On Mars would glide in and around. Well it seems like Mouse On Mars are really one of the last bands standing from that heyday of IDM. Over the years they've stayed true to their vision of always evolving, exploring and redefining. They could take you to the most sun soaked blissed out space on one record, and then drill & thrill you on the next, and then turn all abstract and fractured on another.�
We weren't sure what to expect with this new outing, and that's probably how they like it. What they've come up with though is one of their most expansive and eclectic albums yet, one that doesn't stick to one simple motif, yet somehow feels succinct in its schizophrenic tendencies. It's a prime example of their ability to take the wildest twist and turns in each and every direction while introducing elements of their trademark squeaks, squelches, and knack for sophisticated and strange melodies. We've been blasting and digging this so much.
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 latest mysterious musical missive from these aQ faves, NYC's psychedelic improv free rock explorationists No Neck Blues Band, who remain one of the most reference groups on the aQ site, referenced whenever we need to describe some sort of tribal freeform psychedelia or jazzy abstract drift, or dirgey home-brewed free form minimalism, or pretty much any stop in between, these guys are the modern masters, and this record is another fantastic glimpse into their utterly unique soundworld. Recorded in 2009 in the Faust Studios in Germany, YTIU offers up two sidelong epics, the first starts out all psychedelic and raga-like, with spidery guitar melodies, rumbling low end, and occasiona synth squelches, dreamy and drifty for sure, gradually becoming more electronic and skittery, a little bit jazzy for sure too, slipping into some hushed near ambient shimmer before bursting into some abstract free noise atonality, laced with sawed strings, tinkling chimes, stuttery horn bleats and propulsive tribal krautrock drumming.
The flipside is the band at their most meditative and dreamily psychedelic, dedicated to Pink Floyd, it's a long drift of thick whirring organs, abstract melodic figures, slowly unfurling psych guitars, shuffly and jangly, a sound that perhaps envisions them, however briefly, as an underground avant Grateful Dead (or Pink Floyd perhaps), which is not at all a bad thing, druggy, dreamy, endless psychedelic jamming, that drift and hovers and shimmers and soars weightlessly heavenward.
LIMITED TO JUST 300 COPIES!! Sadly we have less than 10, and it's already sold out and out of print. So these are the last copies we'll ever get. The covers are each individually hand painted and hand stickered too!
Secret Of Secrets is the latest record from San Francisco clarinetist and composer (and long time aQ customer), Aaron Novik, and we were all ready to review it for the list, when we discovered that another friend of aQ, our pal Monte, had already picked up his copy from us, and LOVED it, and on top of that, Monte might just be the biggest fan of the Tzadik label that we know, so we figured he'd probably be able to review this way better than we ever could. So take it away Monte...
San Francisco clarinetist / composer Aaron Novik, assembles an all star cast of local Bay area musicians, among others, for his first Tzadik release. Featuring Fred Frith, William Winant, Ben Goldberg, Carla Kihlstedt, and Adam Theis, "Secrets of Secrets" is a brilliant new work exploring the Kabbalah, over the course of five long compositions that incorporate traditional klezmer song structures with contemporary classical music, as well as rock and metal, accented with brilliant improvisations, churning percussion, and passionately engaging string and brass arrangements.
"Secrets of Creation" starts things off with a soft pulsing bass line that is soon joined by violin. Slowly and methodically the song builds adding more strings and subtle brass accents. Then, a short tympani build leads to clarinets and violins playing a vibrant melody while roiling staccato processed bass hits pulsate underneath. The song then drifts into the 'experimental' world briefly before returning to that percussion heavy groove supporting the electric clarinet madness. And then, seemly out of nowhere, enters a crackling sample of old style klezmer, before returning to the preceding percussive, dense interplay of instruments.
Building on the intensity of the first song, "Secrets of the Divine World" starts off with all cylinders firing. Clarinet, bass, and percussion flirt with the rock world while firmly rooted in the Jewish tradition. When the gears shift the listener is transported to a mysterious sonic world where exotic strings and dumbek take center stage. Returning to the main theme, the players take turns participating in a series of abstract and psychedelic solos woven deftly into the piece as a whole.
Lush Jewish themed strings and clarinet in "Secrets of the Divine Chariot" remind the listener that this is on the 'Radical Jewish Culture' series and not the 'New Japan' series, respectively. Again, the balance between strings and brass is nothing short of brilliant. Leading again to dominating percussion, both acoustic and processed.
"Secrets of the Holy Name" focuses on a series of player solos. Fred Frith... shit, how do we even begin to describe this playing? Well, anyway, he starts things off with one of his most empathic and sensitive solos we can ever recall hearing (and we've been listening to him for years) over a low clarinet drone. From there violin and clarinet solos bleed together creating an improvised psychedelic world of Jewish beauty. Despite the abstract, drifty nature of this song, it's still clearly referencing the music's roots, the song is based on a 'Donia', which is a formless improvisational lament in the Jewish tradition that references Jewish prayer and other Eastern melodic modes.
Like the best Tzadik releases (and there are a lot of them), "Secrets of Secrets" is original and genre defying while respecting the past. It builds on traditions, while simultaneously tearing them down, creating a new sound world of complexity and beauty, mystery and passion.
Yet another batch of aural oddities from the esteemed and mysterious UK tape label, The Tapeworm, this one the result of an improvised home recorded bit of abstract electronic experimentation, from this audio/visual collective
who in real life tend to specialize in a much more dancefloor driven sort of electronica, but here, the group are loose and free, conjuring up spaced out clouds of blurred psychedelic drift, laced with bits of glitch, sonar like pings, haunting pianos, bowed violins, strummed guitars, everything wreathed in tape hiss, the sound almost Caretaker-y at times, melancholic and mysterious, slow burn shimmers that wrap themselves around glistening guitar harmonics drifting weightless in fields of electronic crackle, Morricone-ish twang, wreathed in reverb and draped over long wavery tones, a sort of tentative unearthly dronemusic, a super abstract deserty slowcore, the vibe dark and ominous, soundtracky and mesmerizingly atmospheric. There's a deep throbbing low end running throughout, occasionally pulsing minimally, but also occasionally blossoming into something thick and viscous. The hushed drifts of smeared sound adorned with swoonsome strings, darkly delicate piano, all manner of field recordings, tangled melodies, murky swirls, all woven into a hazy soft focus landscape of dreamlike ambience, and ethereal slo-mo dreamdrift dirgery. So gorgeous. And like all Tapeworm releases, SO LIMITED. Grab one before they're gone.
