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.
A sprawling collection of previously released, (mostly) vinyl-only tracks from this aQ beloved doomdronedirge duo, many of which were extremely limited, most of which are now out of print, all culled from a three year period from 2007 to 2009.
First up is a track from a three way split between the band, and its two members Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff, which was originally released on Die Stadt. The song begins all dark and serene, but quickly builds to an incendiary blown out doom trudge, quite possibly the heaviest and most distorted we've heard the duo, the guitar thick and crumbling and so distorted it almost obscures any melody, the drum machine a chaotic splatter, the last few minutes so intense and heavy and freaked out, the squall of swirling black psych and drum machine sputter almost completely obscures the churning riffage below. The second track is another sidelong jam, from a second three way Nadja / Baker / Buckareff split, released on Important back in 2008, this one begins with blissed out harmonized guitars, super spare drums, a digitally treated, slightly glitchy soft minimalism that drifts delicately until the inevitable crush, but this time the crush is not only massive, it's weirdly warped and warm and soft, processed and distorted making it sound a bit alien and otherworldly, almost more warm and washed out than heavy, a bit like a doom metal Galaxie 500, sun dappled and multihued, dreamy and ethereal, while somehow managing to remain incredibly heavy. The song grows slightly less blissy and more intense and ominous by the end of the side, but even then, the sound is still mysteriously transcendent.
Track three comes from Nadja's split with 5/5/2000 (featuring members of Cattle Decapitation and Creation Is Crucifixion) called Tumpisa, released on Accident Prone, and is all action, no slow builds, no pretty simmering, it's straight into a big ol' lurching doom, the drums big and reverbed, the guitar offered up in swells, and allowed to drift off, leaving just the drums to pound away between bursts of crumbling distortion. Very industrial sounding, dark ambient, the drums locked into a loop, a distant keening high end hovering just above the rumbling whir, there is a build up, but the duo begin the build already in the thick of it. The guitars grow more and more fuzzed out, the sound becomes thicker and more distorted, the background becomes more chaotic, riffs seem to coalesce out of those abstract swells, strange harmonics drift into the picture, the recording sounds decayed and damaged, as if it was some unearthed archival slab of ancient doom bliss, until the last 4 or 5 minutes, when yet more buzz and distortion enter the fray, and while the drums remain constant, they seem to sink deeper and deeper beneath the blossoming swirl of blown out noise and warm dense fuzz, all the while the sound threatening to crumble or collapse, a gloriously fractured post industrial doom bliss crawl for sure. The final track on disc one comes from 2008's Magma To Ice, released on Fario, a split with Netherworld, Nadja's track a 19 minute crusher, but as heavy as it is, and as doomy, it manages to be more effulgent and incandescent, the guitars grinding and shooting off rainbow colored sparks, thick radiant swells of sound, that seem to stand still yet manage to convey inexorable forward momentum, in fact this track finds Nadja giving Sunroof! a run for their money. This is a seriously transcendent ur-drone, keening high end, sine waves, crumbling distortion, soaring, whirring, static buzz and fuzz and skree, all over a whirling undercurrent of throb and pulse. Truly one of the most intense and unique tracks we've heard from Nadja.
Two of the tracks on disc two are drawn from Nadja's Bodycage record, originally released as a cd-r on NOTHingness, then as a cd on Profound Lore, reissued on vinyl by Equation, and then cd again via Broken Spine, the two alternate versions presented here were bonus tracks on the lp release, and while these versions are different enough from the original mix to be interesting/essential for folks who have the record proper, they're still similar enough that our original review still applies, which was almost more of a description of the duo's sound, than these songs in particular anyway: Call it doom. Or drone. Or dirge. Or better yet deathdoomdronedirge. It's a sound we can't get enough of, the logical extension of our obsession with the drone. And while we still love to drift off to the soft shimmer of a distant rumble, when you imbue a drone with more power, and more volume, and more wattage it becomes something new, a fearsome sonic beast, whether it's a subtly snarling growl of grit and grime, or a massive undulating wave of black hole fury, a drone possessed of power becomes a glorious thing to behold. And no one has as deft a hand with the drone than Baker, and Nadja is the ultimate drone via rock band. Beyond the ultra minimalism of SUNNO))), way prettier than the filthy dirges of Moss or Monarch, Nadja are almost like some indie slowcore band but lit from within by some otherworldy source. Every track is suffused with a warm rich glow that is almost blinding, but at the same time warm and inviting. It's heavy, sure, but it's more just plain beautiful. Like staring into the sun until your eyes start playing tricks on you. Imagine listening to a sound so loud, so bright, that the synapses in your brain misfire, and your ear scrambles to make sense of this sound, and in doing so, forges all kinds of unlikely connections, subtle melodic threads, paints a lush sonic portrait. Now imagine a music that was played to already sound like that, before it even got to you. Just imagine what your mind and your ears would do with a sound like that. Some sort of unreachable aural nirvana suddenly within reach. That's the music of Nadja. It's like watching a sunset slowed down so each subtle shimmer stretches out forever, each ray of sunlight is tangled up with another, writhing in sparkling glistening knots, slowly unraveling, stretching, into endless streaks of gorgeous muted color. Imagine Jesu, but dosed to the gills on Prozac, a shiny happy Godfleshian dirge, or a My Bloody Valentine riff looped and repeated forever, underpinned by some Can drum loop at 16 rpm, or a Teenage Filmstars 45 played at 33. This is epic ultradoom metal, but with the metal replaced by soft billowy clouds of fuzzy distortion, the howling fury twisted into dreamlike tranquility, the blasting beats pulled apart and sprinkled here and there like percussive raindrops. This is as soft and pretty as a dirge-y drone can get while still retaining its inherent doomic mass. Utter and absolute loveliness drenched in a thick patina of crushing heaviness.
Also included on disc two is Nadja's track from a split with Kodiak, originally released on Denovali in 2009, a record we were never able to get the first time around, another churning slo-mo drift through gauze-y ethereal swells, shot through with jagged shards of feedback, and heaving melting melodies, which while already dense and heavy, somehow explode part way through and become exponentially moreso, a churning sprawl of soft focus white noise crumblingly distorted dronedrift bliss, a rapidly expanding cloud of bleary supernova buzz, that like all of the tracks here manage to be both crushingly heavy, and dreamily washed out. And finally, the collection finishes off with a track from a one sided etched 12" originally released on Vendetta in 2009, and is most definitely one of the duo's most subdued and contemplative tracks, a creeping somnolent slowcore, rumbling blurred bassline, skeletal smears of guitar, the programmed drums a barely there framework, the whole thing delicate and crystalline, brooding and melancholy, shot through with ominous drones and a dense rib cage rattling thrum, all blurred into a warm wispy background for the hushed melody, and ethereal dreamlike drift.
Definitely essential for Nadja obsessives, and we know there are a lot of you out there, and a pretty fantastic introduction for folks who are just discovering this duo's blissed out heaviness, and doomdrone beauty.
Another new lp from this avant rock free-psych collective, hot on the heels of their already out of print YTIU, which we reviewed a couple lists back. This is a continuation of sorts, culled from the same sessions, and while not quite as limited, definitely limited enough that once we run out we won't be able to get more. So won't go into too much detail about this one, needless to say, folks who bought YTIU are definitely gonna want this one too, and anyone who missed out on the first one still has a chance to nab one of these. Two sidelong tracks, the first one playing out more like a multipart songsuite, the sound swinging wildly, beginning with wheezing organs and buzzing guitars, loose, super abstract drumming, dirgey and atonal, flecked with sci-fi FX, tripped out and weirdly dubby, blossoming into a sort of looped mesmer, drifting through fields of glitch and static, the sound shifts and becomes a droned out Eastern style raga, buzzy and trance-y, before shifting once again, stripped way down, just gnarled melodies, and skeletal rhythms, mostly hi-hats over a dense smoldering cinematic drone, laced with murky percussion and a thick woozy low end.
The flipside feels more like a single track, starting out super spare, again very abstract, in the distance moaning strings, reverbed percussion, psychedelic guitar buzz, unfurling snake charmer melodies, about halfway through the sound seems to grow more detuned and deconstructed, beginning a slow build, the an explosive last few minutes, a surprisingly heavy space-psych freakout, that quickly becomes glitched out, as if the tape player was malfunctioning, that sort of Faxed Head, old worn tape, busted tape deck sort of weirdness, the sounds seeming to ooze and melt and gradually grind to a halt. Cool!
Super limited, these are the last copies we'll be able to get, the covers are hand painted with paste on artwork. The covers are all bent, due partially to them being handpainted we think, and thus, a few of the records are VERY slightly warped, it's barely noticeable, and doesn't effect playback at all as far as we can tell (then again, it's NNCK, so it always -sounds- warped), but these are the only copies we'll ever get, so if you're super anal, or the record collector nerd type, you might wanna pass...
Another amazing cosmic sonic artifact from Japanese reissue label EM, this one a legendary album of galactic analog synth wizardry, originally released in 1978, created by composer / sound designer Matsuo Ohno. He's most famous for his sound design on the animated television show Astro Boy, on which he was assisted by none other than Takehisa Kosugi from seventies fluxus dronelords Taj Mahal Travellers. With the help of Kosugi, Ohno recorded this his first non soundtrack release, a sprawling collection of super abstract cosmic drift, often classified as new age, but really so much darker and mysterious. Separated into 8 parts, beginning with zero and ending with infinity, the record unfurls slowly, almost as if it were in fact the sounds of the universe, as pictured on the record's cover, with some strange all seeing eye hovering amidst the stars. The sounds rumble and whir, smeared into long stretches of deep thrum, and spaced out shimmer, there's plenty of gurgling buzz and dense rumbles, crumbling distortion, and strange little squiggles of sci-fi effects, if anything the sounds here are way more academic, and sonically seem to hew closer to experimental tape music. The swoosh and whoosh of most analog synthscapery is relegated to the background here, with Ohno coaxing all manner of strange sounds from his synths. His experience in sound design is evident throughout, as much of this plays out like some lost soundtrack, the score to some strange experimental film, or how we imagine some seventies planetarium light show would sound on LSD, streaks of melody, shards of chordal thrum, lots of reverb and echo, the vibe is definitely futuristic, but not kitschy, instead, it's ominous and haunting and fantastically otherworldly. Essential listening for analog synth obsessives, but the sort of thing that should appeal to fans of dronemusic and spaced out abstract psychedelia as well.
And as if the record proper wasn't enough, also included is a bonus 3" cd that features a rare recording originally released as a super limited flexi-disc, which was created in honor of the 1970 World Expo (as in Expo '70!), and features 6 popular songs of the time, from all over the world, America's contribution being "My Darling, Clementine", recreated using nothing but animal sounds, which had been captured on tape. A trippy bit of outsider tape music for sure, one that in some strange way foreshadows the dogs-singing-Christmas-carols and Jingle-Bell-cats kitsch that would prove to be so weirdly popular decades later. But this is not nearly so goofy, instead, it's strange and wonderful, the animal sounds wreathed in echo and delay, bizarre and beautiful, and again, recorded with the assistance of Taj Mahal Traveller's Kosugi.
Gorgeous packaging as always, a full color gatefold sleeve, with reproductions of the original artwork, a big booklet too with liner notes in Japanese and English, the 3" bonus disc, house in a miniature replica of the original World Expo flexi-disc sleeve. Wow!
Previously a quadruple lp, now on double cd in a deluxe oversized package!!
Perhaps the only bright side to the passing of one of the most ambitious but relatively unsung figures in early electronic music, is that the archives of hundreds of reels of unreleased recordings of sound experiments, tape compositions, field recordings, cinematic sound effects and�Musique Concrete are just starting to be released to a wider audience. Young Americans did a stellar job with the first Daphne Oram vinyl overview, Oramics, which was a retrospective of her long and varied career from her time as a wartime radio technician to becoming an electronic instrument pioneer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Now that her invention, The "Oramics" machine (the first electronic musical instrument designed and built by a woman), has gone on display at the Science Museum in London, Daphne Oram's legacy is finally moving into its rightful place. This deluxe compilation is the first in a planned series of releases that dig deep into Oram's vast recording archive. Painstakingly compiled and restored from over 400 tapes and mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, The Oram Tapes Volume One features 37 previously unheard recordings (a bit less than what was on the vinyl version). While most of the pieces are short, they show a darker and more layered compositional style than what one may be used to from the bigger names of The Radiophonic Workshop. While the typical Workshop compositional bloops and bleeps were often steeped in a science fiction futurity, Oram was more often concerned with the mystery and science of sound composition, and the place where the sounds of machines and nature overlapped. That is probably why her effects reel for the film 2001 sounds more like haunted insects and cathedral-like atmospherics rather than say, robotic whirrs and laser-like phasing. There is a thoughtful and cerebral consideration in her compositions that allows us to imagine and nearly inhabit the world she is building in sound. Quite stunning!
From the golden era of hip-hop, The Pharcyde's 1992 debut Bizarre Ride II is available on vinyl once again. West Coast equivalents to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, Bizarre Ride II completes a trifecta of essential hip-hop records that includes 3 Feet High and Rising and Quest's The Low End Theory, though it's probably not as well known outside of hip-hop circles as either of those two. Based in South Central LA and comprised of choreographers and street dancers who did stints on "In Living Color", the Pharcyde drew on early funk samples, skits and interludes and an "everyone on the mic" approach to rap that was more present in East Coast rap at the time. Though they released three records over 14 years (a Record Store Day box vinyl set is in the works!), it was their debut that gave them the most acclaim after going gold. Their most well-known track, "Passin' Me By" with its stony Quincy Jones sample of "Summer In The City" making it an infectious groove, is the perfect song for cruising in your car on a hot summer day. Did we say essential?
Self described as 'industrial doom', the French outfit known as P.H.O.B.O.S. take the industrial pummel and clattery chaos of classic Godflesh, the serpentine song structures of Voivod and the grim grating brutality of the most bizarre black metal, and wind it all into a dense, hateful, slow motion black hole beast, plodding and pounding mercilessly, like some sort of unstoppable behemoth, crushing everything in its path, sucking life, spitting fire, spewing jagged shards of metallic blackness. The sound of a million monstrous jackboots, marching endlessly toward some unspeakably bleak final destination. The stretched out feedback soaked abstract doom of Khanate, given an industrial makeover, throbbing Teutonic rhythms, never even coming close to midtempo, instead pounding out impossibly slow rhythms, the whole thing wrapped in white hot sheets of feedback, and churning tarpit riffage, with the occasional melody tossed in, surviving only briefly, like a cow thrown into a river full of pirahnna, the whole thing exploding in a churning, bloody froth before settling back into the relentless machine like crush. And despite all that brutality, it's also amazingly hypnotic and listenable, with some of the beauty of the post-Godflesh outfit Jesu wethinks.
Originally released on the Appease Me label, run by Phobos' French metal brethren Blut Aus Nord.
We often wonder why members of bands strike out on their own, and then end up making solo records that sound pretty much exactly like the band said member is taking a break from, but it happens all the time, and in most cases, nobody minds, cuz the whole reason we're interested in the solo record by that artist, is cuz we love the band they're from. In some cases, we imagine it's cuz they don't get as much input as they'd like, which makes it even more ironic when their solo record sounds so much like their actual band. Anyway, what we're getting at, is that this new ep from Poor Moon, which features two members of Sub Pop folkies Fleet Foxes, sounds quite a bit like Fleet Foxes. The biggest difference to these ears is the vocals, as obviously FF is defined by the dulcet tones of mainman Robin Pecknold, and a sound that is a bit more washed out and reverby. But otherwise, we might have even believed that this was in fact a new Fleet Foxes record, as it delivers the same sort of softly psychedelic folkiness, acoustic guitars, lush vocal harmonies, lilting and dreamy, opener "Illusion" is a serious gem, with some cool background noise delivered in soft swells behind the strum and croon, and a gorgeous vocal melody, sounds like a song, that could easily have been a FF jam. The rest of the record plays out similarly, woozy, washed out, dreamy and druggy, lots of shimmer and sun dappled reverby drift, with a serious sixties hippy vibe, but the band does occasionally get their rock on, like the classic jangle pop of "People In Her Mind", which sounds like some lost classic sixties garage jam, and there's the lilting twang flecked dream pop of "Once Before", but the record returns to the classic country folk sound for the dreamy loveliness of closer "Widow", which really IS a dead ringer for Fleet Foxes. Needless to say, fans of FF will want this for sure, but anyone into that sort of washed out sixties sun dappled country folk should definitely lend an ear...
Slumberland are killing it lately. Band after band, release after release, it's beginning to feel like they've got the market cornered on fuzzy garage rock and buzzy jangle pop. And this new single from roommates only drives it home. Roommates is in fact Ben Cook from Fucked Up, and his partner in the Fucked Up side project Marvelous Darlings, Mark Fosco, and the two have cooked up some gorgeously hooky fuzzed out garagey power pop that totally kills. Big distorted guitars, pounding reverbed drums, the sound hazy and dreamy and shoegazey, with washed out vox and big big hooks. The two tracks on the A side came out as a crazy limited tape back in the day, and apparently were never intended to be heard outside of a few friends. Lucky for us, cuz these are fast becoming new favorites around here. The B sides dials back some of the buzz and fuzz and channels some totally classic old school power pop, with fantastic vocals, harmonies and hooks galore. It's weird to think of this as a tossed off side project, cuz most bands would kill for these songs. Here's hoping there's more where these came from...
From our friends at the mighty fine Utech label comes this heady blast of spaced out Japanese psychedelic ritualistic minimalism, part of the same batch of releases which also included the dark droning minimalism of Owwl and the blackened spacedrift of Sky Burial. Sachiko is in fact a member of amazing Japanese psych rock combo Overhang Party, as well as Kousokuya, but here veers quite far from the psych rock path, and instead forges a droned out drift worthy of late great Japanese Fluxus psychdronelords Taj Majal Travellers, a 37 minute sprawl of primitive percussion, layered thrum, garbled vocalizations, woozy buzz and swirling shimmer, whistles and bells, electronics and fluttering flutes, bowed strings and spidery melodies, all blurred and woven into an epic stretch of raga like swirl. The track surprisingly dynamic, shifting from dense and chaotic, to hushed and hypnotic, but all woven together by warm whirring drones and strange almost Yoko Ono like mewling vox, the sound organic and alive, pulsing, and pulsating, a throbbing rhythmic core driving the track subtly from within, the surface a frenzy of microtonal shifts and constantly transforming overtones, headphones definitely required, allowing the listener to sink deep into Sachiko's lush mysterious soundworld. So gorgeous. And fantastically and psychedelically mesmerizing. Essential for Japanese psych freeks, but folks into more modern raga-psych a la Sunroof! or Our Love Will Destroy The World and the rest, might find this to their liking as well�
Houses in a super striking minimal oversized sleeve. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Album number 4 from these home recorded synth rock improvisers, each one has been a beautifully hand assembled package rife with bizarre xerox collages that riff on retro-futurist themes, as does the music though in a more roundabout way. This is modular synth music that doesn't winkingly nod to the vast past of synth heavy music, but takes a more DIY off the cuff attitude towards shaping its sounds and song. Though we can hear strains of groups like Chrome, Add N To X and Stereolab, Scantily Clad don't seem to try and emulate either of those bands instead focusing on a hodgepodge of moods and tropes: Noisy interludes, distorted shoegaze psych, vibrant pop, kosmiche bliss, and avant experimentation. All with strange titles like "Vacant Stare World Exciter" and "Exotic Fabrics And Materials". This is library music for the new modern age!
There's a certain strain of black metal, that concerns itself more with black than metal, more with texture than heaviness, more with mood than any sort of musical rules. Those are precisely the sorts of black metal bands that send us spinning. Bands that transcend their genre, or are seemingly oblivious to the fact that they might belong to any genre at all. Such is the case with mysterious black metal outift Spektr. We discovered their debut a couple years back and proudly proclaimed it THE WEIRDEST BLACK METAL RECORD EVER. Since then it's been practically raining bizarre black metal, Furze, Rehtaf Ruo, Dead Reptile Shrine, Hidden, Urfaust, Circle Of Ouroborus, all most definitely black, but each with their own take on what black metal means. And sounds like.
This new Spektr record, however, takes up right where the last one left off, and effortlessly outweirds them all. But their mission is not to be weird. This is not calculated, purposeful, ironic, or in any way untrue to their vision. And it's not that sort of damaged inept weirdness. The music is too dense, and complex and varied and lush and just too impossibly and truly weird to be anything but the musical expression of someone's twisted vision. It's like how truly insane people are the ones who don't realize they're insane. And Spektr are most definitely insane.
The cool thing about Spektr, is that they seem to be some sort of experimental ambient project, with occasional bursts of black metal, as opposed to the other way around. More than half the record seems to be made up of drones, and static and white noise and intercepted transmissions, short wave radio, found sounds, soft subtle rumbles and strange rhythmic interference. When the metal does kick in, it tends towards a seasick lurching midtempo buzz, a lumbering blackened beast, that sort of stumbles and careens wildly out of control, occasionally slipping into a galloping blast, but quickly settling back into a slow sort of lope. Their metal is just off kilter enough to balance their experimental tendencies, and Spektr don't shy away from busting out with a black blast for only a few second before getting back to the drone at hand. And oh the drones! The gloriously twisted ambience. So dense and multilayered. Creaking and crackling, swelling and slithering, often punctuated by industrial pounding, strange rhythms, glitchy hiccups and stutters, but just as often a smoldering warble, a low end dirge of glacial hum and creepy crawly gurgle and whir, voices drift up from the murk, as do strange song fragments and bits of malfunctioning electronics, it's like walking through some black skied wasteland, the ground strewn with all manner of debris, the air thick with smoke and ash, The view fuzzy and indistinct, distant tolling bells, cymbal sizzle that sounds like sprinklers in a moonlit field, all these bits of sound, these ambient fragments, woven together into a truly ominous world of dark sound, the background to a truly bleak and buzzy black metal framework. The more we listen to this, the less -weird- it seems, scary maybe, haunting, harrowing, dark, dreary, creepy, ominous, ghostly, unnerving, and mysterious most certainly, oh okay, and quite a little bit weird too.
A definite contender for our favorite new black metal record!
The disc also includes a video, playable on your computer, for a track not on the cd. And it's a strange one as you might expect. The music is all dark drones, with weirdly jazzy drums way up in the mix, shuffling over a fuzzed out Burzumic riff that sort of ebbs and flows, a fuzzy distorted wave. It never fully kicks in, but it never completely blisses out. It sort of teeters back and forth between dark jazz and glacial black fuzz. It's a little like a black metal post-bop Bohren, sort of. The track shifts partway through and becomes a strange sonic kaleidoscope of creepy orchestra music, garbled ambience and a haunting martial rhythm played on tympani's. The accompanying video is gorgeously grainy, all darkness and shadows, like some rare damaged print of a lost silent horror film, the film stock so degraded that various chunks of light and dark take on ominous shapes, the end result, the visual equivalent of an old crackly record. Totally mesmerizing.
A few weeks ago we listed the debut, limited edition 7" single from Finnish/American hardcore hypno-punk supergroup Split Cranium. That was the teaser for this here Hydra Head full length, which includes that single's A side (the B side was a Daniel Menche remix) "Scepters To Rust", along with seven other (mostly) short sharp shocks of this band's noisy, gnarly, D-beat driven loud/fast attack. Featuring our pals Aaron Turner (Mamiffer, Isis, House Of Low Culture, etc.) and Jussi Lehtisalo (Circle, Pharoah Overlord, Steel Mammoth, etc. etc.) along with another of the guys who plays with Jussi in Steel Mammoth. Here's what we said about that track on the single: "Cranium splitting heaviness for sure. Pounding drums, kick ass riffs, massive HEAVY production, some seriously crusty punk blowouts woven into more metallic chug and crunch, peppered with wild squiggly metal shred freakouts, and bizarre echo drenched vocals, that make this sound very Circle-like indeed." Well, a Circle-like version of aggro crusty HC punk anyway (if you've got Circle's Panic cd from a while back, you've had a taste of this). And that pretty much goes for this whole album, starting from the 1:47 blast of "Little Brother", Split Cranium cranking out the raw distorted punkrock in race-to-the-finish, fist-in-your-face fashion. None of the first three tracks break the 2 minute mark, in fact, they get shorter and shorter. But then, with "Blossoms From Boils", the band starts to groove a little more, that's where the Turbonegro-doing-NWOFHM comparison we made in our 7" review comes in. They stretch that one out to almost 5 minutes, and as cranium-splitting headaches go, it's a darn catchy one. A couple tracks further along, we come to "Black Blinding Plague", a track that's about 50 percent just feedback, before the crush and churn and sore throat vokills come in and the party really starts. No wonder they got noisician/droneologist Daniel Menche to do that remix! (Though we wonder, was Merzbow not available?). And then a song called "Yellow Mountain" gets to gallopin', upping the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" quotient while also bringing in some soaring, clean, chant-like vocals (mixed under/above the gruff shouty ones). Beginning to hear some early Circle here, circa Meronia, but more punked out for sure. That awesome headbanger is followed by the album's grand finale, the 8+ minute "Retrace The Circle". It takes the sound of "Yellow Mountain" and gets more epic and Isis-y with it, building into grand spaced out drone heaviness and ending with a totally distorted noise flourish. Wow. We're sold.
For a project such as this, with key members living many time zones apart, who probably spend more time emailing each other than they ever get to spend jamming together in the same practice space, it's damn convincing. But then, we'd expect nothing less from Jussi and Aaron, et. al. And while Circle and Isis fans should of course be interested in this, we feel Split Cranium is good enough to garner fans on their own merits. If we'd never heard of Circle or Isis or Steel Mammoth, we'd still be digging Split Cranium's freaked out HC.
Cd version comes in a nice oversized digipack sleeve, & there's also vinyl but we weren't able to get enough to list this week, hopefully more will show up soon...
We sold a ton of the recent reissue of Diasporas, a record by French ethno-experimentalist composer Ghedalia Tazartes, a record that was probably most well known for being on the infamous Nurse With Wound List, but one that most definitely lived up to that hype, a dizzying concoction of manufactured vocal folk music and imagined sonic rituals, all woven from processed vocals, looped samples and all manner of strange found and manufactured sounds. Mesmerizing, hypnotic and so mysterious.
And first we were under the impression that this was in fact new recordings from Tazartes, but in fact, it's even more exciting than that, it's the first release of Repas Froid, in its complete form, a collection of unreleased recordings from the seventies and eighties woven into two sidelong compositions, and previously released on cd only as fragments, partial tracks and random source material. And on listening, it's easy to hear much of what we loved about Diasporas, although if anything, this is a bit more chaotic. A confusional collage of drums and field recordings, random loops and found sounds, keyboards and vocal drones (sung by Tazartes himself), the result is a fantastically mesmerizing, but seriously unhinged bit of vocal and rhythm driven sonic experimentation.
Symphonic snippets collide with children's voices, various loops hiccup and stutter creating gorgeous, rhythmic Philip Jeck like soundscapes, percussion is looped and woven into all manner of random rhythms, sometimes abstract, other times motorik and hypnotic, the sound is often overwhelming, dizzying, the songs laced with street sounds and birdsong, often a seemingly jumbled passage will suddenly coalesce into something impossibly lovely, and often some perfect arrangements of loops and voices will crumble and fall apart and become something else entirely. The best part of the record is the end of both tracks/sides, which each seem to culminate in something more akin to an actual (if imagined) folksong, with Tazartes singing over buzzing strings and all manner of layered sonics, resulting in some alien gypsy folk, a droned out vocal raga that is so haunting and mesmerizing and gorgeous, especially the A side, which is the sort of tripped our psychedelic raga folk that few could even imagine, let alone execute, while the culmination of the B side offers up something similar, but more like old time folk singing over weirdly sped up loops. The results in both cases are truly divine!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, housed in a gorgeous matte finish full color jacket, that housed in a gold printed PVC plastic sleeve.
Jason Kahn has come a long way, now a respected sound artists and minimalist composer, it's still a little hard to believe he played in bands like the Leaving Trains, Trotsky Icepick and the Universal Congress Of, and normally, this is where we would say, but actually you can hear much of those past groups in his new sound, but actually you can't. Not at all. Kahn's new work is world's removed, and we've come to love that stuff nearly as much as we love(d) the late great Leaving Trains.
Which brings us to Tetras, a trio featuring Kahn, whose sound is a sprawling rhythmic abstraction that touches on everything from This Heat (especially This Heat!) to Aussie minimalist jazz combo the Necks, exploring the same sort of stretched out propulsive mesmer and textured dronescaping, each of the four side long tracks here a totally mesmerizing sprawl of layered buzz and deftly arranged melody, but with the rhythmic element really holding it all together. The songs, for as minimal and abstract as they are, not at all static, alive and full of energy, with a barely contained momentum, that makes the tracks seethe and thrum. The Necks vibe is huge, especially on the opener, which takes the cyclical slow build of that group and gives it a sort of avant / post industrial makeover, the drums a skittery shuffle, the bass loping and looping, all beneath layers of blurred organ chords, static wreathed melodies, and all manner of constantly shifting textures.
The other three tracks follow suit, subtly altering the equation, part two is much more droned out and noisy, the clouds of hiss and static ebbing and flowing, over a buried jazzy shuffle, the bass bowed unfurling long moaning tones, everything wreathed in an insectoid buzz, the result hazy and hypnotic. Part three opens up with a wall of crumbling chaotic white noise, a squall of warped blown out psychedelia, which gives way to some hushed shimmer, which is soon overtaken by some weirdly gorgeous feedback drenched melodies and distorted dynamics which soon explode into some awesomely blown out jazziness that reminds us of Laddio Bolocko or the Psychic Paramount, but so in-the-red, the tones blossom and expand transforming the sound into some strange heavy psychedelia. And finally, part four finishes things off with something a bit more dialed back, a scattering of tribal drum splutter, more bowed strings, and moaning melodies, this time under weird digitally processed guitar skree and crumbling distorted drones, eventually slipping into something slightly more straight forwardly jazzy, which also eventually morphs into a weirdly abstract but druggily dreamy electronic noise drenched jazziness.
Housed in a super thick, ultra deluxe, hand screened heavy cardboard jacket, and includes a download coupon as well.
We've long been pretty into Thieves Like Us, whose M.O. had been a sort of eighties style electro pop, a vintage sounding new wave that fused the sounds of classic New Order to an icy futureworld beholden to sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, but then something strange happened on their last record, the band ditching vocals completely and transforming into something totally (okay, well, maybe not totally) different, conjuring up a sound much more cinematic and krautrocky, definitely shifting toward the current crop of Goblin worshipping John Carpenter wannabes, experimental, psychedelic, kosmische, so that's pretty much what we were expecting from this, their brand new full length, but it seems that brief bit of sonic dabbling, was indeed just that, and with Bleed Bleed Bleed, regardless of the very evocative album title, the band returns to that shimmery eighties synth pop sound, the opening title track, slow burning and sultry, with a percolating bassline underneath swirling synths, and icy dueling boy / girl vocals. "Stay Blue" sounds opens up with a brief bout of serious Kraftwerk worship, before blissing out into something much more swoonsome and ballady, sounding like some lost jam straight off eighties FM radio or classic era MTV, reminding us more of ABC or Thompson Twins or any of those bands, more than the krautrock forebears who the band also obviously count as influences. And so it goes, a hazy time machine trip back into vintage new wave electro pop, and while more modern moments reminds us of M83 at times, folks who flipped over the anomaly that was the band's krautrocky last record, Berlin Alex, might be a bit confused, and perhaps even disappointed, but for the rest of us, who were already digging their fuzzy retro sound, this definitely hits that same sweet spot.
Robert Turman may be more well known in early industrial noise circles as a part of Boyd Rice's NON project (contributing to the seminal conceptual noise single "Knife Ladder" with its additional holes drilled into the vinyl) as well as other obscure noise groups such as Z.O. Voider and Comfort Control, but this recording shows a completely different side of this multi-instrumentalist composer's sound.
Flux, recorded in 1981 and originally released on cassette, is a series of long form compositions of lo-fi meditative minimalist grandeur, a home-brewed study of new-age avant-classical aspirations made through a distinct DIY sensibility. Reminding us a lot of the spacious dreaminess of Anton Batagov, Turman uses piano, kalimba, a rudimentary drum machine and tape loops to make slow-paced tones and textural phrases that eventually repeat, and form drifting mesmerizing patterns. Eventually the looping aspects of the various compositional components begin to gently overlap, causing the sounds to shift subtly and collapse on each other. A mysterious vibrational resonance flows throughout, created both through the hypnotic longevities of the pieces but also through the low fidelity manipulation of overtones. Rough button clicks and other sonic debris of the recording process occasionally cause crackles and distortions, emphasizing their home recorded origins. The choice of instrumentation and their processional pacing give off an Eastern influenced quality, but it also shows a deliberate effort to push the boundaries of minimalism within a challenging limitation of sonic palette and available technology. It's this restraint that makes this incredibly beautiful. Hats off to Spectrum Spools for allowing this to see the light of day again!
And for all of you non-vinyl folks, a cd version will be available soon!
Here we have a fantastically frenetic compilation from the always SO SO killer Honest Jons Label. Shangaan Shake compiles all of the releases from the "MEETS" 12" series in which current electronic heavy hitters and aQ faves like Actress and Demdike Stare took on the "Shangaan" dance music sound of South Africa (a genre celebrated by Honest Jon's great Shangaan Electro compilation 2 years ago, as you hopefully are aware). We didn't ever list any of the 12"s, they flew out of here too fast, but we were looking forward to listing this collection, which ends up being a high powered, schizophrenic double disc set of ass shaking dance floor BLISS! But this ain't yer typical floor fodder...oh no. True to form, Honest Jons only asked the best of the truly far out electro experimentalists to contribute to the series...fucked up foot work, abstract drifty dream techno, stripped down long form minimal workouts, spacey ghost vibez DUB, and super-future slo-mo ELECTRO!
The Oni Ayhun (alias of Olof Dreijer of aQ faves, The Knife) Meets Shangaan Electro is the first tune to really set it off for us, a super frantic and hypnotic electro shuffle, the original vox from the Shangaan source being endlessly pitch bent into some truly bizarre yet catchy as hell melodies, while the hi-hats and claps stutter and fall out of phase, resulting in an hallucinatory funky freak out! Peverelist follows suit, but somehow ups the WTF quotient with his take on Tshetsha Boys. Starting with some industrial sized hi-hats, drifting in a syncopated haze, before a simple mid tempo electro drum pattern enters on an unexpected beat. It chugs along like this for a minute before yet ANOTHER hi-hat pattern enters bringing the track into a subtle yet transcendent groove, the sound design of which is seldom heard on this planet. Excitingly NEW sounds for sure. Actress, of course you know by now, will not bring something to light unless it is of the utmost quality, and here he does not disappoint. His take on Shangaan is truly mesmerizing, a jam that starts out as a sort of blissy dubby techno groove, albeit with some seriously deranged synth squelches and disassociated Shangaan vox atop, is all of a sudden transformed into something entirely different with the introduction of some discordant, Liquid Sky meets Rinse Dream meets Badalamenti sounding cyber-skronk keys! These chords are the twist yr ears up element, ultimately subverting your expectations and leaving you with something that feels entirely FRESH! Old Apparatus (whose Tapeworm cassette was a big highlight last list), turns the tempo down a bit, and treats us to some spooky ass Shangaan rub-a-dub! Pristine synths and that killer xylophone sound stretched and reverberated through a vast cave of FAR-I DELAY. We COULD go on and on...the rest of this double disc comp maintains this top shelf quality, with highlights ranging from the legendary Theo Parrish's ruff neck cut-up Mancingelani remix, to Demdike Stare's haunted house dubwise fraidy-pants minimal Soweto soundscape...not to mention forward thinking contributions from aQ faves Villalobos/Loderbauer and Hype Williams, as well as a funky ass Detroit style electro BBC mix from the venerable Afro-Futurist, Anthony "Shake" Shakir!!!
Ahhhh!!! Too much good stuff! Honest Jon's have outdone themselves, by first of all sharing this Shangaan goodness with the world, and then following it up with a perfectly concise and meaningfully curated remix series, by some of the best, brightest, and down right weirdo-futurist producers of the now! Essential!
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.
The always awesome Sutro Park label strikes again with another impeccable reissue, this one focusing on a type of music that, sadly, too often slips through the cracks of history when discussing blues or early modern styles. Not because it isn't awesome - oh, it is - but because the stuff on this platter resists easy categorization. As indicated by the title, the focus here is on "Negro Fife And Drum Music From The Deep South". This unique hybrid style brought together African polyrhythms and syncopation with fife and drum routines from the American and British militaries, resulting in a sound that wasn't quite modern OR antiquated. Rather, it was both... or maybe neither. The liner notes bring up the fact that most of the songs "conform roughly to the 'Bo Diddley' beat", which is apt for music that seems both primal and ready to stomp through the twentieth century. One thing is certain, the heavy rhythms presented here can be seen as a spiritual and literal precursor not only to blues and eventually rock n roll, but also jazz, disco, and hip hop just to name a few. And we certainly couldn't neglect to mention the priceless reaction of one customer who came in and wondered if we were listening to Einsturzende Neubauten! Which, actually does make sense if you were just wandering into a record store with incessant militaristic marching rhythms blasting out of the speakers.
The fifes (and some Sonny Terry-styled vocal whoops) are generally the only accompaniment to the rhythms, adding a vocal quality that carries the majority of the melodies, though the drumming itself is also strangely melodic and enveloping. Some of the earliest songs here were recorded in 1942 while the majority are from 1970, and it's interesting to note a strict adherence to the form with very little, maybe even nothing changing in those years. A few of the names here are familiar to us - Otha Turner, R.L. Boyce, and the legendary Sid Hemphill - and the recording sessions took place locally in Mississippi and Georgia, though some of the musicians made their home in Tennessee, making this a uniquely regional phenomenon. The music represents a distinct fusion of African and African-American cultures, with the emphasis obviously on rhythm, even when handling traditional folk songs. As many of the musicians were old enough to remember life in the late 1800s, they were basically the lone adherents of what might have been perceived as a lost or dying art which had never been recorded commercially, having been performed mostly at picnics, dances, and parties. The notes make mention of how the younger drummers preferred playing instrumental pieces as they allowed for greater improvisation than the older minstrel pieces with their fairly rigid patterns, which in a way sounds like the beginnings of modern music as we know it, where tradition and style are used as a springboard to something else entirely. The results are not only interesting from a historical standpoint, but also a pleasure to listen to and an excellent tutorial on the progression of rhythmic music in the twentieth century.
Wierd Records have brought us some amazing records over the last few years, from Led Er Est, Martial Canterel, Xeno & Oaklander, Staccato Du Mal and others, but this one might just be the coolest, and the weirdest (wierdest?) of the bunch. From the above mentioned bands, it's obvious that Wierd traffics in darkwave / coldwave / newwave music primarily, and this debut from Canadian outfit Vaura, definitely does fit in there, somewhere, sort of...
But unlike those bands, Vaura is HEAVY, the sound dense and epic, and times intense and downright crushing, while at others, droned out and dour. At their gloomiest, we're reminded of French retrowavers Soror Dolorosa, the sound a sort of death rock, beholden to groups like Joy Division and the Cure, but there's no denying the metal element, hinting at the likes of both Liturgy and Katatonia, which makes more sense when you know Vaura's pedigree. A group you might not expect to include members of Dysrhythmia, Kayo Dot, Secret Chiefs 3, and maybe most surprising of all Gorguts, who are responsible for what might be one of aQ's favorite death metal records of all time, Obscura. So the real question is maybe what is a death metal guy doing in a band like this, and how the heck did these weirdos and metalheads end up with a dark, gloomy, heavy record on Wierd? And really the answer is who cares. We're just happy to have this strange slab of moody heaviness, and it's quickly become the only thing we want to listen to.
The sound is a bit confusional, but only when you're trying to describe it, cuz on paper, it seems like a mess, like a weird whatthefuck that would never work, but in action, it's awesome. Hooky and heavy, brooding and moody and metallic, thick guitars, chiming and shimmering one second, churning and chugging the next, sinewy basslines, the vocals deep and dramatic, subtly processed, the songs proggy and intricate, some incredible drumming, the songs super melodic, even poppy in places, but occasionally peppered with bursts of gloom infused black metal, complete with blast beats, and deep ominous vox, atonal chords, often splintering into a grinding almost death metal, but more muddy and gothic and less distinctly metal, everything wreathed in cool textured psychedelic guitars, dense squalls of dark sonic energy, layered chordal thrum and swirls of FX and streaks of feedback. And while the sound seems to always return to a sort of dark, and heavy, gloom rock, it's what the group do to and with that sound that makes this so transcendent.
And while the record definitely works as an album, the individual songs and sound are super varied, from the washed out black metal flecked gloominess of "Obsidian Damascene Sun", with its furious double kick drumming, and swirling psychedelic guitar filigree, to the churning bombastic almost doom-ed heaviness of "Uncreated Light (Transfiguration)", to the strangely ritualistic sounding "The Column's Vein", all rumbling low end, and chanted monklike vox, to the acoustic gloom-folk of the title track, a gorgeously moving softly psychedelic steel string ballad, the record culminating in our favorite track, "The Zahir" which begins as a barely there rumbling drone, underpinning steel string guitar strum, some softly crooned vox and chiming harmonics, which disappear in a squall of massive distorted riffage and swirling feedback, the whole song transformed into a whirling propulsive sprawl of melodic drone-psych, a brooding slow build that becomes a heavy gloom pop, driving and intense, in comes some metal vokills and some tangled super catchy guitar melodies, all over tribal drumming, and thick buzzing guitars, the sound gradually falling apart, and transforming into a woozy detuned dirge, only to explode into a crushingly heavy, gloriously blown out Godspeed style epic outro, wild streaks of psych guitar, pounding chaotic drumming, clouds of swirling effects, definitely the sort of thing that should have been stretched out for another 20 minutes or so, but instead, collapses in a field of glitch and static, buzz and crumble. So fucking awesome. A practically perfect slab of heavy gloominess / gloomy heaviness. And a new aQ favorite for sure.
The latest full length from these East Coast psychedelic space rockers and long time aQ faves find the band at their most rocking, trading in some of their soaring heart-of-the-sun blissed out psych jams for something a bit more Stooges-y, launching right into it with "Pads Of Light" which is definitely their most overtly hard rocking, channeling Loop and Spacemen 3 as much as Hawkwind, the pounding riff heavy churn still wreathed in swaths of celestial effects and underpinned by multiple layers of guitars, the song a seemingly simple three chord pound, but the production is massive, and the song offers up super melodic refrains, some gorgeously melodic basslines, and a second half that's all wild cosmic shred, soaring melodies, soft squalls of psych guitar tangle and more swooshing effects, on past records it might have stretched out for 10 more minutes, but here the band wind it down after just four. But fear not, the follow up "Robot Stomp" is a sprawling 12 minutes, a slow burn smoldering chug through clouds of shimmer and buried voices, some serious mesmerizing hypno-psych krautdrone mesmer, we kept expecting he song to explode into another part, but the band stay locked tight, letting the groove unwind slowly and druggily, the surrounding sounds getting more and more active, swirls of effects, warped woozy melodies, bombarded by squelches and glitches and lazer like bleeps and bloops, not to mention soaring string like synths, super dramatic and tense and intense, which leads directly into another rocker, the relatively brief "You Dream You See", which swaggers and slithers, the guitars thick and warm, the drums dense and tribal, laced with blasts of psych guitar freakout, finally, slipping into some abstract spaced out psychedelic drift for the last half of the song, another part that could easily have stretched out for two or three times as long.
"Song Of Everything" manages to merge the two sides of the band perfectly, the droned out psychedelic hypnorock, and the urgent riff heavy hard rock, the band slipping seamlessly between the two, before collapsing into a weird sort of abstract outer space drift, laced with spidery tendrils of melody, shards of wah wah, processed vox, spoken, and slowed down, super trippy and far out, before finally exploding into a final minute of chugging, churning psychedelic hard rock riffing.
And finally, the record closes with the awesomely titled "I Write A Thousand Letters Pulp On Bone", a hazy, woozy, dreamily druggy single part, repeated over and over, the listener sucked in and sent spinning into the ether, a cool super dynamic drum part, soaring swells of shimmery synth, while all around guitar and effects whirl and swirl and drift, definitely the sort of thing we could listen to forever, and the perfect finish, a sort of chill out, come down droned out psychedelic coda, that does get heavier and heavier, but also seems to get further and further out, and takes us willingly with it. Needless to say, absolutely recommended. And while we're tempted to say this might be the best White Hills yet, let's just say it's another fantastic record from a band whose given us pretty much nothing but fantastic records.
And, needless to say with a White Hills release, the vinyl is on the limited side of things, and going fast...
Sun Araw (aka Cameron Stallones) is this month's cover star, discussing his recent experience collaborating with The Congos, among other things. And also inside this issue of this most indispensable new music magazine, you'll find features on composer Conlon Nancarrow (he of player piano fame), saxophonist Charles Gayle, droning trumpeter Nate Wooley, and more. Remix master Tom Moulton does the Invisible Jukebox. And Simon Reynolds contributes an essay entitled "We Are All David Toop Now". Hmm. Plus all the usual worldwide news, tons of reviews, and a free cover mounted cd sampler, The Wire Tapper 28.
