We first discovered mysterious multiple w'd dronedrift outfit Owwl via a cd-r that showed up one day in the mail, and we were pretty much totally smitten on first listen. This German duo specializes in that sort of ultra minimal dronemusic we can't ever get enough of, blackened sprawls of obsidian thrum and softly pulsating rumbles, long tones spread way out and layered into lush landscapes of dark overtones and perceived rhythms. The thing that really made Owwl stand out was that they augmented their drones with a 19th century reed organ, giving the sound a haunting organic feel, and transforming it into something much more emotional and evocative than most the guitardrone records we hear.
So it makes perfect sense that they would end up on Utech, who seem to specialize in the sort of blackened minimalism and psychdrone mesmer that Owwl traffic in, and it is indeed a perfect match. This latest missive from Owwl is even darker and denser than the cd-r, the sounds impossibly lush, at times reminding us of some Phill Niblock piece slowed down to a crawl, but with the same sort of overtones, the sound deceivingly static, but alive with all manner of sonic subtleties. But it's not all pure dronemusic, the band do explore a more psychedelic sound, creating shimmery ragas, the harmonium unfurling a gorgeously warm thrum, that the group stretch waaaaay out, wreathing it in guitar buzz and pulsating swells of crumbling distortion, or wrapping it in sheets of muted feedback. The sound veers into an almost industrial black ambience, abject and corrosive, but still washed out and dreamlike, before settling into a long stretch of whirring chordal shimmer, a dense softnoise cloud that seems to ooze and expand, the sound growing more and more lush, the blackness revealing colors hidden within, a smoldering soundworld of blunted tones, blurred chords, and beautiful black drift.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Housed in a super striking oversized sleeve.
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With countless miles of tireless touring under their belts, guitarist/vocalist Becky Black and drummer Maya Miller have honed their chops which has allowed them some freedom to explore other musical possibilities in and around their snarling rawk core. Claims of this album venturing radically from the pair's core sound have been bandied about plenty by both the band and their label, however we think it's a bit of an overstatement 'cause Unpersons actually doesn't sound like such a huge departure from their previous three albums. It definitely shows them stretching their lanky creative limbs - a bit more slick, a bit more bombastic, a broader range of tempos and temperaments - but Black's throaty soulful yowl and low slung guitar playing and Miller's primal pound are still in full effect. And wisely so, because the power of The Pack A.D.'s music lies in bluesy garage rock's sock-you-in-the-gut immediacy. Having garage rock producer kingpin Jim Diamond (White Stripes, Detroit Cobras, Dirtbombs, etc.) at the helm only strengthens those tethers. It's understandable that four albums down the line you'd get itchy to try something new, and we're sure they're tired of all of the comparisons to the White Stripes. Mind you, those same comparisons are also what likely drove plenty of new fans their way, right? And besides, it ain't like the White Stripe have released any new tunes lately! So, maybe this album does sound and feel different to them, maybe they did do things differently in the studio during the recording sessions, but the final results sound like the tried and true Pack A.D. If it ain't broken.... Just get yer bluesy garage rawk fix right here.
We've dug pretty much everything we've heard from this Wisconsin husband and wife duo, the lp on Night People, the split with Wet Hair, those records found the group unfurling thick slabs of murky dronepop, twisted psychedelic dub, blurred hypnotic riff heavy space drone, psychedelic space boogie, all wound into a roiling sonic stew, seriously warped and druggy and occasionally blown out and noisy, but on this new record, they've ditched much of the heaviness, a lot of the noisiness, and toned down much of the murky psychedelia and instead crafted something much poppier and dreamier. The first track is a bit misleading with this in mind, as it's a lysergic bit of distorted dubbed out riffage, with some programmed beats, buried under chiming melodies and a heaving bass buzz, kaleidoscopic and hazy and with the potential to explode into something much heavier and noisier, but instead it gives way to "All The Sun That Shines" which sort of lives up to its title, a dubby reggae flecked bit of woozy skitter, programmed beats, swirling effects, loads of reverb and delay, and hazy ethereal female vox, some spidery Morricone-esque guitar twang, and an almost calypso groove are woven into the proceedings too, the result though is indeed hazy and sunshiney and gloriously washed out.
"Amazing And Wonderful" is up next, and while featuring a similarly murky Skaters-esque rhythm, it ditches the dubbiness, and sets a sort of abstract post punk into a much more dreampoppy realm, all tinkling chimes, descending melodies, multi tracked vox, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of swirling reverby whir. "Bird Of Paradise Dub Version" is another abstract swirl of druggy space pop, the 'dub version' aspect embodied by the delayed drums and the softly swirling clouds of blurred effects and heavy heavy echo. And so it goes, the rest of the record unwinds similarly, an ever shifting collection of murky, lo-fi programmed-beat driven dub pop, muddy, and murky and warbly, plenty of buzzing low end, shimmery effects, hushed dreamlike vox, a little bit of synthy new wave here and there, some stripped down low slung trip hop every once in a while, and even some fragmented off kilter synth pop strangeness, but overall, way less damaged then their past outings, and more akin to a group like Pigeons, that same sort of downtempo electronic pop, albeit with a much more murky, warped and experimental bent. Which as far as we're concerned translates into really really cool!
While we're eagerly looking forward to the upcoming documentary movie, Last Days Here, about the last ditch whowouldathunkit rebound of doom legend, Bobby Liebling's drug-damaged life and career, there's also now this new live dvd of footage from his band Pentagram's recent tour to demonstrate that, yes indeed, the seemingly ancient frontman Bobby L and the 'Ram gang are BACK, miraculously in fine form, a bug-eyed Bobby strutting like the glammed-up, gramped-out Ozzy/Iggy hybid he (somewhat grotesquely, but amazingly) is. Featuring classic Pentagram trax like "Day Of Reckoning", "20 Buck Spin", "Sign Of The Wolf", "Relentless", "Forever My Queen", and the title track, amongst others. This was shot at the 2010 Maryland Deathfest, and crucially, features the return of guitarist Victor Griffin, the riffmaster on Pentagram's first 3 official albums, from which these songs are drawn. Also, on bass, Greg Turley (Place Of Skulls) and on drums, Gary Isom (Spirit Caravan). Nothing here by the way from the subsequently recorded Last Rites album that Metal Blade released in 2011, an excellent effort also featuring Griffin.
Finland's Pharaoh Overlord return with this devastating double lp on Aaron Turner and Faith Coloccia's vinyl-only Sige label. Whilst we have many favorite Finns, these guys (and their mothership Circle) are among our very favoritest. Yours too probably, so we imagine these are gonna fly out of here fast.
This Circle sideproject is certainly VERY "circular" here, full of repetitive minimalist vibrations to the max, utter stoner neo-kraut hypnosis for sure, with a heavy metallic undercurrent and some freaky cosmic jazziness to it too. Of the couple most recent previous PO efforts, Lunar Jetman aligns more closely with the space/noise rock of live lp Horn, rather than the "song-ier" classic metal of Out Of Darkness, harking back also to the dark stoner soundscapes of some of their earlier albums as well; but as always, it is its own entity.
Lunar Jetman features six tracks, mostly quite long, sprawling over four album sides, for far more than an hour of slow burning, steady building, all-instrumental Overlord action. The album begins with the insistent gallop of the nearly 11 minute long "Rodent", which almost sounds like Maiden gone motorik! With extra spaceage shoegazey shwooshing and wooshing thrown in. It'll have you totally transfixed before it's even half over. The distortodelic kraut-iness continues amidst the metronymic percussive percolations of the even-lengthier track two, "Palmyra Cali"; then "Cardinal" is a much shorter, blissed out improv-sounding interlude.
That's followed by the 16+ minutes of "Black Horse", at long last a studio version of a composition earlier documented in briefer versions on both PO's 2004 live album The Battle Of The Axehammer, and then again on 2007's Live In Suomi. Here, it begins with much skitter and skree, before hammering into the happy heavy churning riffage we recognize. This one's definitely bound to be a fave of all the Wooden Shjips' fans out there.
Finally, Lunar Jetman delves deep into the dirge, with the two-part, nearly half-hour, massively moody "Cave Of Hair", a detailed, obsessively repetitive soundscape of ominous chuggery, building from quietly brooding near ambient creepy-crawl to metallic majesty...
Another awesome Overlord recording, in other words. And fyi, Lunar Jetman features Faust's Hans Joachim Irmler on keyboards, who has performed with PO previously, appearing on Live In Suomi - and who produced Circle's 2002 Klangbad release, Alotus. Not that PO nor Circle need Irmler to make 'em any krautrockier, they already had that covered!! But this IS plenty krautrocky.
Double lp fancy limited (530 copies) vinyl for now via Aaron Turner's Sige imprint; cd version expected also from Ektro, someday soon we hope...
1972, Argentina: hard rockin', heavy bloozin', proto-metal political protest band Piel de Pueblo ("Village Skin") record and release their one and only album, which we recently discovered via this reissue, being intrigued by its cover painting featuring a blood-dripping Earth whirling through space, orbiting a bummed-out Sun that's crying a single tear...
Piel de Pueblo make some prog moves here - there's electric violin on a couple of the tracks (reminding us of early UK heavies High Tide) - but mostly it's all about the wailing wah-wah guitar solos, and distorted fuzzed-out riffage (also reminding us of High Tide, for that matter).
"La Tierra En 998 Pedazos" is the psychedelic epic here, at 9 minutes plus (thus finding time for some gentle melodiousness amidst the riff-rock), but most of the other songs are right around 3 minutes or so, rockin' out for the duration. Fans of Mexico's Los Dug Dugs at their most "Loco" should investigate, likewise if you're into Piel de Pueblo's fellow countrymen Pappo's Blues...
Booklet includes Spanish-language lyrics, band photo, and a brief note about the history of the band in both Spanish and English.
Techno is a genre of self-quotation and unrepentant appropriation, always looking in the rearview mirror at what just happened to predict what will be the hot-shit trend on the dancefloor tomorrow. So to be able to trace an entire strain within techno's taxonomy to a specific record is quite rare. The 1996 album Biokinetics by Porter Ricks is one such record, setting the stage for pretty much every electronic artist who would flock to the banner of Chain Reaction through a stylized hypnotic, narcotizing techno haunted with deep atmospherics, dub murkiness, and subaquatic allusions. Porter Ricks was the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Koner, who pursued "techno as a nautical sound experience." By the time the first Porter Ricks single emerged in '96, Koner had already developed his signature isolationist approach to slow-motion sound-design blustering with arctic metaphors through the dronemuzik classics of Nunatak Gongamur (1990) and Permafrost (1993). So when Koner began exploring techno with Mellwig, the approach to techno was less about 64-bar measures and more about constructing an evolving atmosphere girded to quintessentially German techno engineering that could be taken for a sonic portrait of tidal flows, map coordinates, sonar blips, and the vastness of the deep blue sea.
Biokinetics opens with the magnificent "Port Gentil" whose steady techno pulse coalesces through overlapping patterns from muffled pulsations of white noise and distant locomotive rhythms, later topped by a radiant metallic drone. The somatic oscillations of "Biokinetics 1" hardly makes for a techno track at all despite the insistent rhythms, but the eerie heartpulse dub of "Biokinetics 2" takes an isolationist reproach to everything adding its own desolate pulse and some subterranean reverb. Granulated hiss and slippery drone shimmer blossom through the final tracks "Nautical Nuba" and "Nautical Zone" that look forward to what Wolfgang Voigt would produce on his seminal Gas albums Zauberberg and Konigsforst. It sounded awesome in 1996, and it sounds awesome today.
The vinyl is limited to 700 copies!
Deeeeeeep spiritually-charged drones from this supergroup of Bay Area heavy experimentalists. You are going to want to just hammer the "Add To Cart" button when we list all the members involved: folks from Barn Owl, Date Palms, Tarentel, En, Higuma and The Alps! The Root Strata All-Stars, basically, though this is on Important. Three tracks, the first, "D" is a side long affair, delving into the most harmonically aligned keys of the western scale utilizing both electric and acoustic instruments including violin, harmonium, tamboura, koto, sine wave oscillator, bass clarinet, tapes, shruti box and electric guitar in rich layered tones and frequencies. Side 2 begins with the all vocal meditation, "Sa" reminding us of David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir's cathedral amplified minimalist hymns before unleashing the deepest and heaviest track here, "Gong", which focuses on the shifting and shimmering metallic reverberations of the titular instrument. A beautifully honed study of harmony and frequency within a wonderfully attuned collective and collaborative spirit.
Housed in a hand screened heavy stock foldover jacket. LIMITED TO 500 copies, so act fast!
As much as we love that Hydra Head sound, huge churning riffage, pummeling drums, crushing metallic dirges and all things heavy heavy heavy, we're becoming more and more obsessed with the releases that don't fit so comfortably on HH, don't necessarily embody that classic Hydra Head sound. Although that's not necessarily fair, as the more bands HH sign that sound different, the more diffuse and varied that HH 'sound' becomes, which renders this whole theory moot. But whatever, stick with us for a second, there is a point. It's sort of how we were with Sub Pop, sure we loved Green River and Soundgarden and Mudhoney, THAT sound, but we got crazy obsessed with stuff like Rein Sanction and Hardship Post, the stuff that stuck out, that sounded WEIRD, maybe almost more than the regular Sub Pop stuff.
It might be just that for a band to kick someone's ass SO much, that they're willing to release a record by them, even though sonically it's a whole different ball of wax, means that the record in question is that good, that fucked up, that unique, or could be that we just like to be contrary. Either way�
Whatever. We love Isis and Cavity and Pelican, but lately, we, like a lot of you, have been obsessing over Jesu, Hayaino Diasuke, Austerity Program, Torche, Pet Genius and now Pyramids, who hail from Denton Texas, and who sound like nothing on Hydra Head. If we had to pick one band, it might be Jesu, but even then, the similarities are minimal. Pyramids are blissy and fuzzy and gauzy and pretty, almost ambient at times, drifting dreamily, their sounds shimmering and glistening, everything blurred and washed out and totally fucking gorgeous, BUT, they do have some surprises up their sleeves. And it's those surprises that make this record such a mind blower.
But let's start at the beginning. The first three tracks here are totally lovely, guitars are wisps, vocals are fluttery shadows, melodies are delicate and fragile, the production is warm and sun dappled, rhythms are muted shuffles, effects swirl and sway, here and there, the sound thickens into something almost heavy, but never quite gets there, remains on the pretty drifty side of heavy. It's like a more avant freaky version of Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500, that same sort of windblown washed out blissy vibe. Until the fourth track.
Beginning with some minimal guitar buzz, amidst a whirl of chiming harmonics, shortwave interference, and blown out buzz, the drums kick in, and the riff locks into an insectoid buzz, and suddenly the Pyramids are some sort of black metal band, still bleary and blissy, but with pounding drums and buzzing guitars, eventually vocals come in and it's like a metalgaze Sigur Ros, which is most definitely awesome.
The next track too offers more of the same, a sort of swirling chaotic shoe gaze-y black metal, and in fact the rest of the record continues on in that vein, each track a twisted convoluted take on blissed out black metal, sometimes grinding and furious, but even then swathed in a warm sonic glow, sometimes more poppy and swirly, like a more abstract Swervedriver. As you can tell, it's pretty hard to describe. Not sure it's really black enough to appeal to black metallers, it's more like some shoegaze ambient metal pop band just borrowed some black metal tropes and wove them into their gorgeous blown out soundworld.
There's a second disc too, of remixes, by the likes of Jesu, James Plotkin, Loveliescrushing, Birchville Cat Motel, Blut Aus Nord and more, and we would have assumed that remixes by those folks, of this sort of music, would just render them more blissed out, but instead, at least the first two, transform the songs into furious blown out black jams. The first, remixed by Toby Driver of Kay Dot, Ted Parsons of Prong and Swans and Colin Marston of Behold the Arctopus, begins all soft and swirly, but by the end has added super distorted drums, and all manner of fried buzz. The Plotkin remix up next, strips away most of the bliss, and leaves a seriously fucked sounding lo-fi in-the-red black metal blast. The Jesu remix sounds just like you might imagine, a gauzy slowcore drift, with the vocals jacked way up, soaring through the ether, a fluttery falsetto. The two Loveliescrushing mixes bring out the soft blurred ambience of the originals, making them even more tranquil and serene. Birchville turns his mix into a virtual BCM track, using bits and pieces of the original, creating a thick slow growing drone, that builds to a buzzing crescendo before fading back into a dark moody drift. Blut Aus Nord is the most fucked up remix. Not sure if they added tons of stuff, or just did some crazy mix, but the guitars groan all dizzy and woozy and angular, the drums, pounding and machinelike, the vocals a hissy evil howl, the whole track a lurching black lope. All the mixes here are amazing, utterly transforming the originals, but in doing so hewing to the spirit of the original record, which was already pretty schizophrenic and all over the amp as it was.
Way way way recommended. A new aQ favorite for sure...
AQ faves the Bee Gees (psychedelic '60s Bee Gees) grace the cover of this issue of Shindig!, the UK magazine of rad old music and likeminded modern day retro sounds. Also this ish: Jason Falkner of Jellyfish, Mighty Baby, The M-80s, The Action, The Move, drummer John Shirley, The Modern Folk Quartet, and plenty more. Plus all the usual features - news, reviews, and the comic strip Bob Dylan Supervillain.
Thought Noises spans the brief career of the Belgian post-punk outfit Sic, whose short run from 1979-1981 amassed three singles and some demos, which are all collected here, thanks to the wonderful archivist post-punk / minimal-wave label Dark Entries. Sic grounded their sound on an axis balanced between Micheline Dufert's vocals and the expressive bass of Francis Pourcel. Drums, synths, sax, and an occasional guitar would accompany Sic's sound, as additional members gravitating to the group to bolster the live sound. Dufert broadcasts an innate sneer through her scabrous vocals, which sharply and gutturally articulate the lyrics with plenty of venom. At times, she comes across like a disco-punk diva akin to Lesley Woods from Au Pairs or Eve Libertine from Crass; and at others, she looks to the Neue Deutsche Welle sound with its dark cabaret croon and caterwaul. Pourcel takes his cues on the bass from Peter Hook (Joy Division / New Order) and Jeremy Kerr (A Certain Ratio) with plenty of disco funk overtures. Sic weren't terribly compatible with their Belgian contemporaries, instead looking toward other parts of Europe for their mutant strain of strident, minimalist post-punk.
One of two new releases on the Utech label these week, the other from mysterious dronelords Owwl, and this one from Sky Burial, aka Mike Page, who once fronted power electronics / harsh noise outfit Fire In The Head, but since that 'group's demise, his focus has been on the much more cosmic post industrial black ambience, one that owes much to the kosmische drift of groups like Tangerine Dream Popul Vuh, but filters that kraut-psych sound through something much grimier and abjectly industrial. The results are pretty fantastic, sprawling slowburn blackened space-drift epics that creep and slither, drift and hover, oozing in ominous chordal clouds over glistening barely there melodies, and lush layered thrum, sounding almost orchestral at times, grimly majestic, the noise element still present, but muted and blurred into woozy washes of ashen grey and obsidian black. Long stretches of whirring ambience peppered with industrial clatter, and the crunch and creak of mysterious machinery, there's definitely a Wolf Eyes vibe here too, not to mention some SAXOPHONE, which was a bit unexpected, coming right at the end of the 40+ first movement, but that's not just any sax, its played by the godfather of psychedelic spaciness Nik Turner of Hawkwind, that last stretch wreathing Turner's sax in swirling tendrils of spaced out glimmer, and thick swells of chordal hum.
The comparatively brief (16 minutes) second movement is a much more minimal affair, at least initially, with a sea of insectoid buzz, draped over roiling low end rumbles, both of which are soon joined by a soft cacophony of strange pulses and buzzes, as well as a dreamy wash of ethereal shimmer, soon a skeletal rhythm surfaces, before disappearing in a cloud of cosmic sci-fi FX, only to emerge a super distorted churn, the track shifting constantly, most notably when it blisses out into a hissy swirling ambience, peppered with strange processed vox, before finally finishing off in a haze of industrial rumble and psychedelic space synth drift. Sounding almost like a more industrial, more blackened Expo 70, which is not a bad thing at all.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! And like all Utech releases, gorgeously packaged, the cd in a black inner sleeve, along with a fold out full color poster, all housed in a super striking, black and white patterned oversized outer sleeve.
Sometimes we long for the pre-internet era, when bands took months, or more often years to get popular, instead of just days. Where it took tour after tour and show after show for the world at large to discover a new favorite group, instead of it taking just the posting of a single video that ends up being seen by a million people in a matter of minutes. Sure that stuff is amazing, and has made for some amazing discoveries, and the ability for bands to get their music heard is unprecedented. But the hype machine can be a cruel mistress. Take witch housers Salem, whose debut full length was incredible, but who had no live experience, and were thrust into playing their first shows in front of thousands of people, instead of a handful of drunk friends. Or take Lana Del Rey, who became the talk of the town (and by town, we mean THE WORLD), with one song, and one video, and before you know it, she was performing on Saturday Night Live in front of MILLIONS of people. Which brings us to Sleigh Bells, whose first record Treats was a big hit around here, but even then, we had to talk about the hype and the extreme blog love, and how all that made us want to hate them, but in spite of all that, we still dug it like crazy. The weird thing is, we recently saw Sleigh Bells on Saturday Night Live, and they were AWFUL, so much worse than Lana Del Rey, but for whatever reason, people didn't seem to notice. Part of the problem, which becomes obvious listening to the new Sleigh Bells record, is that SB are essentially a studio concoction, and a pretty fantastic one at that, but live, it just didn't translate, watching a sexy mallgoth singer dancing in front of two short haired metalheads riffing it up, all over a big bombastic pre-recorded beat. Maybe for some big dumb dance party, but it definitely left much to be desired. But on record, the listener can just revel in SB's big dumb dance metal pop fun, and the thing is it IS fun. Check out "True Shred Guitar", with it's faux crowd sounds, big hair metal riffage, pounding drum beats, and howled distorted vox, squiggly shredding and wild dive bombing feedback, goofy for sure, but again, totally fun. The rest of the record takes that same sort of cock rock / hair metal sound and weds it to fuzzy poppy synth sing alongs and old school M83 style eighties retro pop, with hints of Weezer power pop crunch, fuzzy new wave, beat heavy Digital Hardcore style blasts and that sort of "Hey Mickey" kind of cheerleader chant, all woven into a sweet sugary metal pop confection, that despite all the haters, we find ourselves sort of digging once again.
Gotta say, the redesigned, oversized, matte-paper Spin is lookin' good. This ish features Lana Del Rey, M83, the Shins, Best Coast, Frank Ocean, Sleigh Bells, Korean pop, and plenty more.
For all the deserved attention and press the whole Los Angeles musical underground has been receiving in the last couple years, we still think that Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, is perhaps the most unique musical visionary to come out of that scene. Beyond being so prolific, the quality of his proper records just gets increasingly better and better. On Patrol was one of our favorite albums of 2010, and with Ancient Romans, Sun Araw continues to move forward from that dubbed out blueprint and expand on what has become one of the most singular sounds of any new band of the last decade.
The moment the album starts, you immediately understand that you are at the beginning of a ceremony, some sort of stange sonic ritual, which requires the listener to open up to completely, wholly trusting in these sounds to carry you away. With dirty, hypnotic organs for the opening tones, setting the stage for the textured and layered dubbed out trip that will unfold over the next 80 minutes. More then almost any band we can think of, Sun Araw is a master of creating a unified vibe. The tracks on Ancient Romans just melt in and out of each other, you lose track of what song is playing, and instead just get lost deep in the fuzzed out grooves, and tripped out meditations. It's hard to explain when music feels this spiritual, it's just something you feel and trust. And with Sun Araw we get that feeling so intensely. It places you in some dusty, archaic temple that we could imagine was transported directly from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Once inside the temple, you forget about the trivial details of the everyday, and instead leave your body and find yourself somewhere mystical, magical and totally transcendent. This is going to be a contender for record of the year!
It's been more than 2 years since we last heard from this Flemish free-noise post-kraut avant-psych collective, and strangely, this Latitudes session was recorded back in 2010, so while it's technically a new releases, the actual status of this drone-psych outfit is definitely in limbo. But regardless of their present state, circa 2010, Sylvester Anfang II (an homage to Amon Dull II we assume) were in fine form, culling these 35 minutes from nearly 3 hours of continuous jamming, during which the band zoned out and unfurled some gorgeous sprawling psychedelic krautrock flecked jams, jams that seemed to gradually evolve into hazy drugged out ragas, all woozy bass lines, simple motorik drumming, wheezing organs, spidery guitars, and soft hazy clouds of effects, everything blurred and smeared into gauzy expanses of minimal ritualistic drift. But the magic of SAII is that for all of their abstract drug rock exploration, they're also masters of freaked out psychedelic space rock blissout, and the tracks here are the perfect blend of both.
The opener is a loping drug-psych dirge, all tangled up in tendrils of sitar like guitar buzz and anchored by a mesmerizingly hypnotic bass groove, while the second track slows things down to a murky woozy crawl, haunting and abstract, the drumming lose and almost jazzy, the various instruments floating weightless in wide open stretches of bass thrum and echoey shimmer. the third track (all the tracks are titled "Jam 1", "Jam 2", etc.), is minimal but darkly propulsive, the tightest we've heard these guys sound, still jammy, a little bit dubby too, but dense and driving and totally hypnotic. The fourth jam, cranks up the buzz and the murk, channeling Hawkwind through some swirling King Tubby like percussion, and wrapping everything in some strange space-y synths, underneath which a buzzy garage riff churns away, the drums again loose and free, the whole song seeming to drift heavenward, and finally, the closing jam is a total space-garage stomp, sounding like some lost sixties Nuggets artifact dipped in LSD and sent spiraling into the ether, super rocking and mesmerizing, this track especially has us thinking that everyone into Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, White Hills, Gnod, Burnt Hills, 3 Leafs, and the like, who somehow missed out on these guys until now, will definitely find themselves adding Sylvester Anfang II to their space / kraut / psych rock pantheon.
As with all Latitudes releases, the packaging is exquisite, the cd in that immediately recognizable white on brown origami style sleeve, each one hand number, with a full color insert, the vinyl featuring the same design with an intricate die cut letterpressed jacket, both formats LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
As a medium, the drone is liminal at best. Strip away too much and without making the very best of decisions, the drone gets boring very quickly. The success of any given composition grounded in the drone is often found at the sites of transition between ambient passages, atmospheric disturbances, and / or meditative properties. Whatever "truth" the Chicago-based dronemusician Nicolas Szczepanik may be seeking through the transience of the drone is dictated from one warm immersive drone into another. Szczepanik's tonal quality has brightened considerably in the past few years, his billowing, gaseous drones sounding radiant and hymn-like. Even when he dials up the distortion, as he does on the mesmerizing second-side of this album, the slow-burning intensity of smoldering noise refracts the fundamental drone with a jagged yet shimmering quality akin to a piece of pyrite reflecting sunlight. Szczepanik steers the track through a steady build, cutting the power at the end of the track. A nice trick for sure. The first-side of the album is more of a convoluted composition, with gong-tones and rasping digitalia dispersions jutting from Szczepanik's gilded hypnosis, almost sounding like Oren Ambarchi remixing Eliane Radigue, or vice versa. Really beautiful stuff.
Housed in a fluorescent lime-green sleeve with foil stamping, marking this another excellent album from Brandon Nickell's Isounderscore label. Limited to 300 copies.
This month in the UK's biggest/best metal mag: Alcest, Darkthrone, Woods Of Ypres, Candlemass, Earth, Orange Goblin, Iwrestledabearonce, Dying Fetus, and more. Including a "wicked women" feature, with Landmine Marathon, Huntress, and cover star Lacuna Coil among others. As always, there's lots of reviews (we know you love reviews!), and it comes with a free cd sampler too.
These New Order and Philip K. Dick worshipping new wavers return with yet another collection of cool Euro wave electro pop, opening their new record with a haunting pulsing intro that wouldn't be out of place on a Zombi record, that Carpenter / Goblin worship tempered with lush swells of the groups more melodic Euro pop leanings which blossom into the record's first proper track, "Fur Judith", that most definitely has a serious Neu! / Stereolab vibe going on, that sort of hazy motorik mesmer, anchored by a simple propulsive rhythm. As the record progresses, it reveals itself as a whole different beast compared to past TLU records, the group seem to have a way more experimental trajectory this time around, instrumental, minimal, rhythmic, the krautrock vibe is huge, but krautrock via new wave, which is definitely a potent combo. But the sound here also seems to be way more experimental, with brief interludes, what sound like primitive tape experiments, and kosmische synthscape, spread out between more conventional eighties new wave beholden jams. It's pretty heady stuff, definitely elevating them above the current crop of retro-wave revivalists. This is the sort of thing that folks into weirdo electronica, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and the synthier side of modern krautrock, might really dig. The perfect balance of retro pop wave and avant electronic experimentalism, and by far our favorite TLU record yet!
Dive may be the latest release from the man known as Tycho, aka Scott Hansen, but it's the first thing of his most of us here have heard, and we have to say we're pretty swept away by Hansen's sonic vision, a musical accompaniment to some sort of abstract futuristic utopia, rendered in shades of glistening, sun dappled shimmer, abstract IDM skitter, and warm, lush, organic atmospheres. The sound is definitely shoegazey, and a little bit house-y, flecked with glimmers of new age ambience, wreathed in wisps of celestial ethereal drift, and smears of late night chill out electronica, all filtered through what to our ears sounds like a decidedly indie rock filter, with the occasional acoustic guitar and wistful melancholy melody woven deftly into glistening expanses of crystalline electronica, or minimal dreampop space-prog, all floating lazily beneath swells of swooshing synths and wreathed in woozy moodiness, and all driven by skeletal shuffles and warm liquid pulses, those pulses occasionally coalescing into a sort of eighties retro Knight Rider style groove, and briefly positioning Tycho's sounds alongside folks like Zombi and Umberto, but not only are the sounds here more prismatic and dreamy, they're also decidedly more rhythmic, and more IDM style electronic, definitely a retro-futuristic sort of dancefloor vibe, but only if you can imagine said dancefloor in the middle of a sun dappled meadow, beneath a blue sky and surrounded by rolling hills as far as the eye can see. It seems like those two elements wouldn't really work, but they kind of do, creating something minimal and groovy, but also tranquil and meditative, a sort of new age / soft focus electronic kosmische indie pop, that would be the perfect soundtrack to the romantic montage in some low budget experimental underground art film (or heck, these days, even some big budget car commercial)!
The latest release from the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation, an organization whose goal it is to preserve Jewish culture, musical and otherwise, comes in the form of this deluxe cd/book compilation that focuses on the Tivka label, according to the Idelsohn Society, "The greatest Independent Jewish record label of the 20th century", and who are we to argue?
The book goes into great detail about the history of the label, one that is surprisingly rife with drama and mystery, which makes a great read, but it's definitely too involved to get into here, but in a nutshell, the label was started in the '40s, and was a seriously DIY operation, one that included label owner Allen B. Jacobs stamping every single copy of every release by hand, spliced the master tapes himself using a rusty pair of scissors, an approached album cover design in a similar manner, cutting and pasting by hand in his basement. And in keeping with that entrepreneurial spirit, Jacobs set out to release the most accessible music possible, records and groups, no matter how disparate, that most appealed to the constantly shifting tastes of post World War II Jewish-American listeners, and since that audience was so varied, the releases on Tivka, while distinctly Jewish could be ANYTHING, children's music, opera, garage rock klezmer, wedding songs, Israeli folk tunes or even Yiddish language lessons. So with so many releases, in so many styles, and of varying quality, it seems it would take some digging to discover the gems, but gems there were, plenty of them, with 20 of the best gathered up here. A bevy of names, most unknown to us, but the music, so fantastic and varied, some tracks dark and dramatic, others playful and silly, still others haunting and mysterious, some of our favorites, the fuzzed out Yiddish garage rock of The Sabras, the gorgeous cantorial crooning of Jo Amar, that sounds surprisingly Bollywood-like, the kick ass Klezmer of Sam Musiker, the psychedelic dueling flute and doumbek groove of Sara Aviani And Her Yemenite Trio (which as the liner notes point out, is the sort of break, DJs would flip for), the surprisingly orchestral and almost operatic cantorial bombast of Moishe Oysher, and it goes on and on. Even if you don't fancy yourself a fan of Jewish music, this is a fantastic and fascinating listen (and might just turn you into one!), and like all great comps, it's had us trying to track down more by a bunch of the artists represented.
Fantastically packaged, in an oversized hardcover book style cover, with a smaller soft cover booklet inside, featuring extensive liner notes, on the label, as well as on each artist and their track(s), with tons of amazing photos as well!
Yet another awesome archival compilation from the recently reactivated Flying Nun label, this one curated by The Dead C's Bruce Russell, who takes great pains in the liner notes to explain that this is in no way a greatest hits, or a collection of obscurities, but instead paint a picture of the New Zealand scene at a time when much was changing, socially and politically, and of course musically, with the NZ pop sound being twisted and tweaked with groups looking to bring back the psychedelia of the sixties, if not specifically in sound, most definitely in spirit. The results sonically point more to the post punk groups of the time, Joy Division, Wire, the Velvet Underground, etc, with many of the tracks here darker and gloomier and noisier, which of course we dig big time. Lots of familiar names here, the Pin Group, The Clean, The Gordons, Tall Dwarfs, The Chills, Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos (one of our favorite NZ groups EVER!), but again some lesser know, but equally kick ass outfits: The Puddle, The Rip, 25 Cents, The Shallows, and loads more.
For all its darkness and psychedelia though, fans of the NZ sound won't be disappointed, but unlike the predominantly jangle pop sound of the other recent Flying Nun comp, the also ruling Tally-Ho double cd, Time To Go definitely focuses on a darker energy, just check out The Clean's "In The Back", the band ditching their penchant for perfect pop for a gloriously abstract psych guitar swirl, there's still jangle in there for sure, but it's wreathed in buzz and spidery tendrils of melody, obscured by clouds of fuzzed out shimmer and smeared soft noise. Then there's the Pin Group's darky dolorous "Jim", a brooding chunk of gloom pop dirgery, that the current crop of Brooklyn punks would kill to have recorded. Deep moody vox, minimal minor guitar thrum, murky rhythms, all hauntingly sinister and dreamily depressive. Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos offer up "Rain", which is also dark and murky, a sort of low fidelity slab of bedroom strum and croon, intimate and hushed, melancholic and moody, which then splinters into some bizarre psychedelia with the addition of haunting female vox and some squiggly synths. The Gordons get all Sonic Youth-y with some downcast atonal guitar heavy noise rock, that's still weirdly melodic and propulsive, and sounds fresh enough that it could be some Captured Tracks / Sacred Bones band from today. We could go on and on, track by track, but all you need to know is this stuff kills. Even fans who have many of these records will find this a kick ass NZ/Flying Nun mixtape, and for those who may have missed this stuff first time around, odds are you're gonna find it shockingly revelatory. And anyone who bought that Tally-Ho compilation, you're definitely gonna want this one too!
Includes a big booklet, with cool pix and extensive liner notes from Bruce Russell, detailing the scene, the bands, the label, and what was going on in NZ at the time, and how all that stuff (social, economic, political) affected the music.
Vinyl version forthcoming, btw.
We always knew that famed indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch had good taste in music, judging by the soundtracks to his movies, but we were only vaguely aware of his extracurricular musical activities. In fact it was with some surprise that we recently encountered him on record, as a guest guitarist in a cameo appearance on the latest 12" by avant-punks Fucked Up! Meanwhile, AQ fave experimental Renaissance lutist, Jozef Van Wissem (who, yes, is also the ONLY experimental lutist we know, though if there were others he'd probably still be our favorite, after his rocked out performance at a memorable aQ instore awhile back) has collaborated in the past with a variety of interesting personages - Gary Lucas, Smegma, James Blackshaw. And now, Jim Jarmusch! Who actually played on a track on Van Wissem's previous album, The Joy That Never Ends, one we stocked and listed on our website but somehow never managed to get around to reviewing, which we should have 'cause really everything we've heard by Van Wissem has been excellent and that one is no exception... Anyway, we'll try to make up for that lapse by reviewing this new one, his full-on duo disc with Jarmusch. And it's a beaut.
Slowly and steadily, Van Wissem plucks prettily at the strings of his instrument, while Jarmusch's electric guitar hovers gently in the background, an ambient wash. As the disc goes on, though, Jarmusch becomes more assertive, accompanying Van Wissem like a ghostly, twanging echo, until eventually the cyclical note patterns chiming from Van Wissem's lute are almost fully enveloped by Jarmusch's doleful dense guitar distortion, approaching Ulaan Khol or Urthona levels of softly droning bliss. His past association with Neil Young (Dead Man) definitely makes sense...
The disc as a whole, at all points in the Van Wissem/Jarmusch duet, is meandering, melancholic, mesmeric... The final track, "He Is Hanging By His Shiny Arms, His Heart An Open Wound With Love", is perhaps the loveliest, and happiest, all-acoustic, brought to a close with a brief spoken supplication from Jarmusch, reciting words by St. John of the Cross.
So, another Van Wissem winner - and we'd definitely be happy to hear more electric guitar emanations from Jarmusch, how 'bout a solo album?
By the way... is it possible that Jarmusch and Van Wissem got together because both men are members of a secret society called The Sons Of Lee Marvin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sons_of_Lee_Marvin)? Jarmusch is known to be a founding member, and Van Wissem looks like he might qualify...
This is the first we've heard from this duo, one half of which is the singer for Danish post punkers Iceage, and fans of that band will find much to like here. If anything the sound is even murkier and dirgier, recorded in a basement on a four track with minimal instrumentation, the biggest surprise being a sort of house music / electronic vibe, which is not so evident on the A side, which opens up with a blast of murky, sludgey post punk pound, laced with synths but still mostly a gloriously gloomy blown out lo-fi dirge, although the second track definitely gets more rhythmic and tripped out, a looped and soaring epic, abstract and warmly noisy, a droned out melodic drift, that while muddy and murky, manages to soar majestically, creating a strange sort of blissed out shoegaze psych-drone. The flipside though is the jam, still wreathed in the same murk as the A side, but here applied to a stripped down skeletal house music, pulsing and pulsating, minimal and washed out, still super lo-fi, but rhythmic and hypnotic, with plenty of ravey synth, crusty 4-track thrum, all driven by a muted 4 on the floor throb. Crazy cool. Definitely can't wait to hear more!
If nothing else, Keith Fullerton Whitman is a connoisseur of adventurous electronic music from the cryptic and the academic to the low-brow and the demonic. It should come as no surprise that his compositional work has long been revered around these parts, as it hinges upon the expansions, investigations, and meditations of the huge history of electronic music that Whitman has at his disposal. Way back when, Whitman revved up the BPMs on his headfucking drill-n-bass cover of Pink Floyd's "Cirrus Minor" recording as Hrvatski; and we were hooked. Since then, citations of Terry Riley's tape delay machinations or Alvin Lucier's electro-acoustic strategies might emerge within Whitman's repertoire, but as with that hyper-kinetic version or Pink Floyd, he always takes those references somewhere totally different and unexpected.
This album features one such citation, as Whitman pays homage to the awe-inspiring minimalism of Eliane Radigue on one of these two tracks released by another stalwart of adventurous electronic music, Editions Mego. Both are variations on his mutable "Generator" series, which is based on a generative system of digital and analogue modular synths. The general principles of the system seem to deal with the errata and unpredictability from the overlapping routing systems Whitman has set up through his electronics. On "Issue Generator, For Eliane Radigue," Whitman opens with a harmonic drone worthy of Radigue's long-form compositions for her beloved Arp synth; but gradually, the drone fractures into spiralling sequences and incrementally shifting patterns. A few of those patterns resurface on "High Zero Generator" - or at least elements which cycle through similar routing systems - but these are bookended by claustrophobic crunches of electricity into stress-fracturing noises, blorps, and tactile gurgles. The sound has the feel of a high-modernist piece of classic computer music, although Whitman renders this piece (and the first) in real-time. Nicely done!
South Of Salem is just the second record from this long running (14 years!) Portland doom outfit, but it's their first with vocalist Uta Plotkin, and she really makes all the difference, transforming the groups dirgey bluesy Sabbathy groove into something much more unique, soulful and slithery, and weirdly poppy too. In fact Plotkin is not possessed of a raspy howl, or a guttural growl, but an actual voice, a serious set of pipes that almost sound out of place in a metal band, which is exactly what makes this record sound so special. Plotkin belting these tunes out like some metallized Janis Joplin or doom-ed Heart, like the lost Wilson sister who chose the darker path. The music is a doom lovers dream, thick churning downtuned guitars, dense busy drumming, the sound thick and heavy and epic, and then Plotkin just seals the doomed deal, her voice slipping from a sultry croon, to a powerful yowl, occasionally launching into some seriously wild wails, with some cool multitracked vocal harmonies only adding to the doom-Heart-ed vibe.
Rad stuff for sure, and most definitely recommended for the other witchy doom combos we've dug in the past like Loon, Blood Ceremony, Jex Thoth, The Devil's Blood, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Witch Mountain tour-mates Christian Mistress, etc.
As we've said before, regular aQuarius shoppers should know what to expect from Wooden Stake: female fronted, horror fixated, riff rituals of slomo sludge, that are part Black Sabbath, part Jex Thoth, part Obituary. The first thing we ever listed by 'em, a limited cd-r entitled Vampire Plague Exorcism, proved quite popular, and is now totally out of print. But, now you'll find those tracks again here, on this new compact disc which collects that 2010 debut together with a bunch of other rare, out-of-print recordings (an unlucky 13 cuts in all) from this cult doom/death duo (one boy, one girl, all ghoulish).
Here's what we said about Vampire Plague Exorcism (tracks 9-13 here), which pretty much sums up the entire Wooden Stake ouvre:
So it's beginning to seem like it's a happening new quasi genre of sorts, this "doomy, black magic metal band with witchy sounding female frontperson" thing. There's Jex Thoth, and The Devil's Blood, and Blood Ceremony... and now Wooden Stake, an extremely doomy duo who've seen more horror movies than you have, featuring Vanessa Nocera on vocals and bass, with Wayne "Elektrokutioner" Sarantopoulos handling the guitars, keyboards, and drums. Like the other abovementioned bands, Wooden Stake is Sabbathy and '70s, with lumbering riffs and an occult vibe, though the difference is that they come from more of a death metal background, and are thus a lot darker and creepier. Electrokutioner is in a bunch of other doomed-out death metal bands we like, among 'em Decrepitaph, Scaremaker, and Encoffination; Vanessa is also in Scaremaker, and just joined Skeletal Spectre. So the guitars are not just thick but EVIL, the plodding drumming has a caveman wallop, and Vanessa's spooky siren song singing style sometimes switches to guttural growls. Imagine Jex Thoth wearing an Incantation t-shirt. Very underground sounding for sure, underground as in "from the grave".
But, say you've got V.P.E. already. Besides the upgrade to an actual cd, what else do you get here? Plenty. In fact, everything, almost, apart from last year's full-length Dungeon Prayers And Tombyard Serenades. There's the 2 cuts from the Black Caped Carnivore 7" (about which we said, that the title track was perhaps the best we'd yet heard from 'em), 2 more from an earlier 7" we never got (Invoke The Ageless Witch), their song from a split 7" with Druid Lord, and for completeness' sake (since it's actually still available), the 2 tracks from their great split cd with Blizaro. You might have some of this stuff, but we didn't even have it all... And also there's one previously unreleased song, "Night Of The Banshee"! So, definitely an essential collection for Wooden Stake fans who might have missed out on any of those limited edition releases, or alternately a fine place to start becoming a Wooden Stake fan if you're into the idea of checking out their brand of heavy & haunting metal, bewitched and brutal... The cd's booklet includes full lyrics, thumbnail cover graphics from all the featured releases, and a pair of b&w pictures of the two bandmembers (in which you'll see Wayne proudly brandishing a truly horrific, eldritch looking guitar, something like a Lovecraftian flying-V, all melted and monstrous).
Dust In Our Mouths from Scottish black ambient dronelords Wraiths, is the final installment in the group's extended blackdrone trilogy/triptych which started with Oriflamme released on Aurora Borealis, continued with The Grey Emperor, released on At War With False Noise and finally finds its resolution here, in a nearly hour long track the label describes as "a crushing noise ritual from the dark realms of plague and grim death", which perhaps paints to noisy a picture, as anyone whose been following Wraiths over the last two records, have watched the band transform into something much more abstract and ambient, shedding much of the harsh noise that defined their early sound in favor of gorgeous grim atmospherics. Dust In Our Mouths, in fact, opens with some haunting blackened drift, lush chordal swells, all anchored by a hypnotic, looped, almost dubbed out rhythm, just a simple softly stuttery snare, and gently tinkling chimes. In the background, there lurks all manner of sonic misery, heaving slabs of corrosive low end, disembodied spectral howls, sheets of jagged feedback, but those are relegated to background ambience, the first few minutes gorgeously hypnotic, spare and skeletal, almost like some black metal band doing their best minimal abstract dub, a hushed sort of industrial ambience, it's not really until about 20 minutes in, that the song shifts dramatically, not necessarily noisier, but that dubby rhythm is replaced by lush dreamily distorted shimmers, and blurred melodic drift, it's almost Caretaker-ish in fact, woozy and washed out, but here that wistfulness is underpinned by an ominous grimness that manifests itself as a dense spectral hum, roiling with shadows of black noise, but that noise is definitely obscured by the woozy wash of smeared surf-like shimmer.
The drums return, more of an ominous sort of death march, still buried in the murk, that murk growing ever more intense, blossoming into a blown out black buzz, and eventually splintering into squalls of muted feedback, only achieving full on noise about 40 minutes in, where things become chaotic and dense and intense, but even here, the sound is infused with all manner of hidden melody and swirling textures, the sharp edges smoothed out, resulting in a heaving crumbling wall of blurred blackness, churning its way through clouds of hiss and hum and howl, until finally disappearing in a cloud of swirling FX heavy white noise, emerging on the other side, to play out its last few seconds as a skeletal sprawl of loping reverbed drift. Awesome.
