Another mysterious releases from the always awesome Ormolycka tape label, this time from a band/person called A Magic Whistle, whose sound is a weird hybrid of early electronic music, bleepy bloopy analog squelch and tripped out psychedelic processed vox, a heady concoction that sounds a bit like Bruce Haack by way of Animal Collective, or some lost sixties psych record performed by an army of automated synths and a bank of rhythm machines, spitting out crunchy motorik robotfunk grooves. Sprinkled throughout are warm swirls of harp like string shimmer, dubbed out operatic croons, thick swaths of rib cage rattling low end buzz, and soft focus clouds of glimmering FX. The flipside, recorded live in SF in 2010, offers up more of the same, but a bit more distorted, the sounds oozing and fuzzy, the low end thick and warm, the tempo dialed way back to something much more meditative and dreamily mesmeric. The perfect soundtrack to laying in the grass in the dead of night, wreathed in a warm breeze, watching the stars dance in the deep blue sky. The sound doesn't remain so sedate, instead, the sounds grow jumbled and chaotic, before once again settling into another stretch of looped, cyclical Reich / Riley style hypnogroove bliss out. Cool stuff. And like all the Ormolycka tapes, SUPER LIMITED (only 100 copies we think!)...
Along with Oren Ambarchi's new Nazoranai trio with Keiji Haino and Stephen O'Malley (in which Ambarchi plays percussion), we thought we'd also list the Aussie experimentalist's recent 'solo' effort on Touch, which features a lot of help from his various talented friends. We were thrown off a bit by the opening track, "Salt", a sad slice of ambient-indie pop, featuring heartfelt singing from someone we at first assumed was Ambarchi (but is in fact Paul Duncan from the band Warm Ghosts) set amidst gentle, atmospheric backing crackle and melodic strings. Quite nice, really, readily reminding us of Ambarchi's Sun duo with Chris Townsend who made a couple records few years back. So we assumed the rest of the disc would play out in a similar song-oriented fashion, Ambarchi as indie troubadour, rather than experimental deep drone axeman, but nope, not exactly - the next cut, "Knots", at over 33 minutes, could be a whole different record all by itself, an abstract expanse with telegraphic tick tick tick percussion and smoothly buzzing electronic drones. Ambarchi contributes several guitar parts, in an (international, edited-together) ensemble that includes Eyvind Kang on viola and igil, along with others on sawing cello and foggy French horn, etc. This is for those into the more extreme end of Ambarchi's oeuvre, as it gets rather frightening before it's over, like the nightmarish, grinding psych rock equivalent of an electro-acoustic ECM improv, though other, milder parts resemble the glitchdrone work of NZ's Dean Roberts.
Following that intense opus, there's two further, somewhat shorter tracks remaining on the disc: the quiet and careful "Passage", with tremulous, wordless vocals from Jessika Kenney; and then, the disc's fourth and final track "Fractured Mirror", which gets into lovely, dual acoustic guitar mode� although somewhat shockingly it's a cover of a song written by Ace Frehley from KISS!!! Hmm, Ambarchi is even cooler than we thought.
A lovely, lovely disc, that touches upon several aspects of Ambarchi's career thus far while opening up other intriguing avenues of exploration (more KISS covers!).
Latest from these LA psychedelic space-prog heavies, whose sounds has definitely gotten more polished and melodic, but thankfully no less heavy and druggy, and in fact, may have gotten even proggier. Which as far as we're concerned is never a bad thing.
The sound on In Dreams And Time is not that far removed from their last, Of Sound Mind: crushing riffs, bombastic drumming, crooned gruff vox, and LOTS of keyboards; swirling walls of sounds, massive production, intricate arrangements, dreamy angelic female vox, and of course looooong songs, with a sound that slips deftly from Neurosis like churn, to Voivod-y math metal, and from blissed out FX heavy Hawkwind style blowouts, to slow build majestic post rock epics a la Godspeed, with stops in between for haunting balladry, and full on planetarium lightshow psychedelia, all tangled up into a dizzying concoction that these guys definitely make all their own. The first thing we thought listening to this recently, was that it bears a bit of a resemblance to the new WAY less metal Baroness, but if anything, these guys might even do that sound better, not sacrificing any heaviness, but managing to push their sounds in all kinds of non-metal directions, the opener an organ heavy bit of mathy psych metal that is as melodic as it is heavy and dense, before slipping into some dark. dolorous piano driven minimalism, which quickly explodes into a weird bit of super heavy, but still melodic dirgery, the song swinging back and forth between the haunting hush and the soaring howl. Later the sound gets downright prog, swirls of organ, long stretches of shimmery space rock lope, clouds of effects, the melodies minor key and melancholic, but rife with blasts of furious riffery and near metallic heft.
The rest of the record seasaws between headbanging psychedelic prog metal and more melodic post metal heaviness, with "Running In Circles" finding the perfect middle ground, the vocal harmonies and soaring majestic melodies wreathed in some serious heaviness, which leads directly into the 19 minute closer, which is a killer psych rock headtrip, stretched way out, droney and druggy, super hypnotic, lush and textured, a little cinematic coda near the end, after nearly seventeen minutes of the kind of space-psych that fans of White Hills, the Heads, Lumerians, Mugstar, Assemble Head, Farflung, and the like should flip over.
Shacklecross is the third installment in an ongoing series of hauntological vinyl explorations from this mysterious musical brotherhood, rumored to in fact be none other than Demdike Stare, along with Finders Keepers head honcho Andy Votel. Rooted in all manner of arcane esoterica, AK engage in an impossibly obtuse and all over the map crazed kitchen sink sonic alchemy, that results in a topographical musical map that leads to some strange other/inner world, where the sky is streaked with Phantasm like synth squelch, wheezing keyboards, strange sound effects swirls, and railroad crossing percussion. Grim horror movie ambience unfurls revealing detuned plucks, creaky old man vox and keening string scrape. The production warped and woozy, bursts of martial snare and blasts of white noise crunch, beneath thumb piano melodies, and Muslimgauze style grooves.
At one point the drums explode into bombastic chaos, cascading over mesmerizing Middle Eastern vocal loops, sounding like some wild Sublime Frequencies remix, before fading into a field recording flecked ambience, all kosmische synth swirl and fluttery birdsong, pocked with bits of skitter and glitch, which seem to melt into a sort of sci-fi sprawl of warped wooze.
The flipside begins with the introduction of tabla like beats over wavery drones and lush layered tones, all wreathed in crackle and buzz. The sound shifting into a creaking Pierre Bastien like robotic clatter, skeletal and oddly propulsive, draped over distant swaths of feedback drenched electronics, all culminating in a droned out doomy drift, driven by industrial clatter and clang, all over a roiling sea of moaning rumbles and bird song like electronic squiggles. Finally the sound returns to the first 'movement', dark squelchy synths beneath bombastic drumming, funky breakbeats and guitar twang mired in murky gurgles, all of which blossoms into an almost Morricone-esque coda, but more blurry and bleary and much more warped and sinister.
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES, spin at 45rpm, or 33 if you dare!
At the top of this week's list, you'll find that one of our Records Of The Week, is a brilliant and beautiful lost DIY soul/funk/pop oddity by a couple kids named Donnie and Joe Emerson who recorded an amazing album in the late seventies, an amazing and obscure collection of soulful fuzz funk and groovy reverby yacht rock balladry, a true crate digger's holy grail, that has eluded any sort of mass popularity for decades, but which found its way into the collections of a handful of music nerd obsessives, who held it in the highest regard. One of those nerds being none other than outsider pop weirdo Ariel Pink, who is partially responsible for the current surge in interest in Dreamin' Wild, and that record's standout single, the smooth and dreamy ballad "Baby", which AP covers on his forthcoming full-length. That cover version had been making the rounds these last few weeks, leading up to Light In The Attic's long overdue reissue of Dreamin' Wild, and now Ariel Pink's interpretation is available as a single sided teaser 12" for his new album.
And while you might expect AP to fuck up the original, douse it druggy FX and freak it the fuck out, nothing could be further from the truth. AP's version is uncannily similar to the original, a reverential homage that on first listen, sound EXACTLY like the original. In fact when we were just playing it in the store, two aQ-ers thought it WAS the original. Sure, it's a little tweaked, some extra reverb here, some tinny lo-fi production there, AP's voice a bit raspier, but otherwise it's a dead ringer. We imagine the likely scenario is that AP considered the original song simply too perfect to mess with, and was perhaps worried about what the Emerson brothers would think hearing a more typically AP'd up reinterpretation, and instead chose simply to revel in the joy of playing one of his favorite songs and paying tribute to a should-have been classic jam.
Housed in a plain black 12"s sleeve with embossed lettering. Probably limited too...
The latest release from local label Time Released Sound comes via the UK duo Ashlar, who traffic in a hazy, dreamy ambience, a field recording flecked sprawl of spidery crystalline guitar melodies, lush chordal swells, and blurred dronedrift shimmer. Softly looped passages seem to gradually decay, revealing all manner of textures beneath, each track here dreamy and ethereal, tending toward the hushed and minimal, but in places blossoming into dense droning buzz or keening high-end skree, but always settling back into something much more serene and tranquil. The fuzzy gauzy sound reminds us of Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker for sure, but the music is more in line with Jasper TX or Machinefabriek, darkly delicate, lushly woven soundscapes that manage to be both haunting and cinematic, melancholy and slightly sinister, the field recordings, giving many of these tracks a slightly paranoid vibe like an alternate modern score for The Conversation. Gorgeous stuff.
As with all the TRS releases, there are two versions. There's the ultra deluxe version, in this case, limited to just 80 copies, and we only have a small handful, each one housed in an original old school 'clock dial' hobby store style package, with the original (slightly modified) clock dial decal, as well as a series of reproduced prints of (slightly altered) drone related projects from the imagined Ashlar Industries. Also included is a sticker, old aerial photographic ephemera, and of course an actual cd (not cd-r) housed in a hand printed and stamped envelope. And of course there's the standard version, which is simply the cd in the hand printed / stamped envelope, that one is quite limited too this time around, just 70 copies!
The latest release from local label Time Released Sound comes via the UK duo Ashlar, who traffic in a hazy, dreamy ambience, a field recording flecked sprawl of spidery crystalline guitar melodies, lush chordal swells, and blurred dronedrift shimmer. Softly looped passages seem to gradually decay, revealing all manner of textures beneath, each track here dreamy and ethereal, tending toward the hushed and minimal, but in places blossoming into dense droning buzz or keening high-end skree, but always settling back into something much more serene and tranquil. The fuzzy gauzy sound reminds us of Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker for sure, but the music is more in line with Jasper TX or Machinefabriek, darkly delicate, lushly woven soundscapes that manage to be both haunting and cinematic, melancholy and slightly sinister, the field recordings, giving many of these tracks a slightly paranoid vibe like an alternate modern score for The Conversation. Gorgeous stuff.
As with all the TRS releases, there are two versions. There's the ultra deluxe version, in this case, limited to just 80 copies, and we only have a small handful, each one housed in an original old school 'clock dial' hobby store style package, with the original (slightly modified) clock dial decal, as well as a series of reproduced prints of (slightly altered) drone related projects from the imagined Ashlar Industries. Also included is a sticker, old aerial photographic ephemera, and of course an actual cd (not cd-r) housed in a hand printed and stamped envelope. And of course there's the standard version, which is simply the cd in the hand printed / stamped envelope, that one is quite limited too this time around, just 70 copies!
'Bout time these guys were back with a follow-up to 2009's great The Weirding. And damn, if San Diego prog rockers Astra don't just blast off from the get-go here, 8-minute instrumental opener "Cocoon" being a galloping space rock hoedown indeed. Hold on to your hats. Then they head right into the album's longest piece, the quarter hour title track. Vintage keyboards are set to stun, Astra channelling some Yes "Heart Of The Sunrise" action here, the epic composition veering from the head noddingly heavy to gently sung and and acoustic-y and back again, or all at the same time, and that's just within the first few minutes.
Next up, "Quake Meat" takes both the rocking out/spacing out to each extreme, while "Drift" is more laid back and aptly named... And so it goes, Astra proving themselves again to be one of the best modern prog bands at doing what sure sounds like ye olde '70s prog, but doing it with just enough heaviosity to fit in on the Metal Blade label. Just check inside the (quite nicely graphically designed) cd booklet to see how authentically '70s these guys look - all the requisite long hair, double necked guitars and other gear... one of the polygon-framed photo montages even features an Old English Sheepdog.
You gotta love prog to get into this, but if you do, this band's chopsy synth laden grooving will take you very happily to your special prog place/space!
Slipcased jewel case packaging, as usual with Metal Blade's Rise Above licensed releases.
We've never carried anything from Winds Measure Recordings before now; but that will certainly be changing, as this is a label with an excellent ear for the finer points of dronesmear sound-art and an equally excellent eye for letterpressed packaging. And we'll start with the stellar manipulated field recording work from the Swiss-born / Berlin-based sound artist Gilles Aubry, who seems to have run a space in Berlin dedicated to experimental music called Stralau 68. The space had unfortunately closed in 2007, but it seemed to have been a nexus of activity for noise, aktionism, avant-rock, live-wire electronics, and whatnot. Perhaps as a final act within the emptied space, Aubry recorded the resonance of the room, capturing all sorts of resonant drones, tones, hums, and buzzes intrinsic to the space outside of its former use as a performance venue. The first of three pieces on this album centers on the rasping frequencies from the industrial air vents matching wind-blown recordings from within what sounds like a huge concrete structure. Here Aubry's work attains the acousmatic aesthetic that the finest Francisco Lopez pieces of minimalism seek. The second piece is far more dynamic, with thrumming rumble grounding an interwoven drone of pierced frequencies and jarring movements from creaking metal doors, bellowing hisses of infernal air, and scrabbling textures. It's unsettled and ominous, something of a hybrid between the end-times collages of Tarab and the late period bleakness of Lustmord. The final piece continues with the scraped abrasions and elongated drones of toxic environmental frequencies. Absolutely brilliant stuff!
As we mentioned, Winds Measure's packaging is a thing of beauty, here with an elegant folio of letterpressed text on thick white paper with a set of abstracted smears printed precisely in a pale pale grey. Some of the finer letterpressed work we've seen! Put it all together in a small edition of just about 300 copies. Highly recommended!
The return of these aQ beloved Byrds worshipping psychedelic country poppers, and it's like nothing has changed. Their sound is still a lush hybrid of slide guitar driven twang, and lush sixties psych pop woven into a confection that's equal parts Elephant Six, Laurel Canyon and No Depression. When we attended the Sub Pop 20th anniversary celebration in Seattle back in 2008, in a weekend full of amazing reunions (Green River, Eric's Trip, The Fluid, Seaweed, Red Red Meat), we were secretly super psyched to see Beachwood Sparks, and they did not disappoint, playing a collection of classics and sounding as good as ever.
So here we are four years later, and the band have whipped up a new record that sounds like it could have come out right after 2002's Make the Cowboy Robots Cry ep. It's a little Grateful Dead, a LOT the Byrds, lush and lovely, with plenty of psychedelic filigree, and lush lovely harmonies, the sound evenly balanced between dark brooders and sun dappled dreampop, the slower darker numbers definitely of interest to fans of Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty and the like who might have missed these guys the first time around. And if you're one of those people who still loves listening to the Radar Brothers, Scud Mountain Boys, Court & Spark, Gram Parsons, etc, this will totally hit the spot. Gorgeous hook filled county pop that manages to push all our retro buttons, but still sound downright timeless.
Record number two from this post-Portishead combo, which finds Portishead mainman Geoff Barrow and crew fashioning a sort of abstract modern krautrock, culled from what we would imagine is the same recording technique used on their debut, which involved recording loops and parts live, and then fashioning them into proper tracks later. Which gives the jams a definite looped / collage vibe, but here on 2 (denoted in the title by two Beak shapes: >>), the sound and feel is much more organic, with what at times sound like proper songs, not just cool parts, with live drums beneath swirls of synths and processed guitars, each track essentially a single groove locked and looped, the group unfurling heady expanses of hypnorock mesmer, that sound somewhere between Faust, This Heat, Circle and even Aussie minimal jazzers the Necks. The vocals more prominent this time around, a plaintive croon, that tends to add color, more than drive the songs, which are already driven by some killer motorik drumming, which pulses and pounds relentlessly through clouds of woozy warped synth shimmer, throbbing reverbed riffage, muted melodies, some of the tracks sound like dead ringers for classic Faust jams, one track had a serious Slint vibe, while another had us imagining some lost German Oak track, with a few moments slipping into weird synth kosmische, and reminding us of Barrow's recent rejected score for the new Judge Dredd movie. Overall, a seriously mesmerizing collection of kraut-flecked hypno rock mesmer and looped rhythmic minimalism that should appeal to ANYone into any of the above mentioned groups, as well as other similarly sonic minded purveyors of math/kraut/psych/hypno rock radness.
Before we'd even HEARD this obscure Italian instrumental library music reissue, it had a lot going for it� Groovy name and title, crude freaky album artwork (really - it's got dinosaurs, and a stonehenge, and a mushroom cloud, and what the heck is that eye in the sky doing exactly?), and also it's from the magic year of 1971! Could it live up to all that? YES. And how.
Recorded by anonymous studio musicians from Milan, intended for use as incidental music for use (presumably suitably hip) film, TV and/or radio productions, this rare collectable is vintage psychsploitation weirdness for all you proto-metal and prog rock heads, full of lumbering heavy psych riffage, often with an eerie overlay of synth. Opening cut "Diodo" immediately suggests the likes of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and Cream's "Sunshine Of Your Love", heavy maaaan! The Distortions title is accurate indeed when it comes to the guitars. But that's mixed with more sinister and/or romantic sounding grooviness elsewhere on the album, like the delicate (but still distorted) dance of "Compression" ferinstance.
The tracks on this disc are suspenseful, exciting, energetic, trippy, with titles like "Microchaos", 'Violence", and "Psycho-Nebulous". Listening to this, you can easily imagine kitschy retro-cool characters in black leather catsuits a la Danger Diabolik interacting with longhaired drugged out hippies in groovy psychedelic discotheques, with this music blaring and colored lights flashing. Spy cinema, spaghetti westerns, biker movies, could (and did?) all make use of these droning fuzz blasters and glammy grooves� we certainly would love to see any movie or TV show that had Blue Phantom on the soundtrack! Hmm, apparently quite a few of these cuts were used in a Jess Franco flick from '72 called Sinner: Diary of a Nymphomaniac...
Definitely one of the best (and by far the heaviest) stand-on-its-own "library music" album we've ever encountered, as good as a lot of 'actual bands' of the era, we've been spinning it quite a bit here at the shop since we got it in� which lead to a funny moment, when aQ overlords Allan and Andee were puzzling over the phenomenon of how there's still such awesome obscure stuff like this out there getting reissued that we'd never heard of of before, when some random girl walked into the store and immediately was like, "Oh, you're playing Blue Phantom! I love that record!", unintentionally showing up us record store nerds, eh?
This reissue includes a non-album bonus track, the only other Blue Phantom recording apparently known.
As more and more folks (foolishly & unfortunately in our view) choose to forgo physical media for immaterial downloads, it seems like it's as important as ever to make records special, as much collectible objects and storage devices for sound, as much cool tangible artifact from a band we care about as simply a conveyance for that band's music. And we're constantly amazed at the sort of incredible and unique packaging we see pass through aQ. Perhaps none more so that Equation Records who are constantly pushing the design envelope, with no regard for profit, hell, no regard for even breaking even, for them it's all about the art, the object, every release something special, that will be treasured, both for the sounds within, and all the amazing craziness that surrounds those sounds.
Which brings us to this. Amazing and crazy just scratches the surface. Three years in the works, an extended production rife with problems and complications, some deftly (and cleverly) incorporated right into the artwork. The record is in fact being sold significantly -below- its actual cost, which was appropriately exorbitant, based on the ridiculous and fantastical packaging. But before we get to that, let's talk music. This extreme packaging couldn't have been paired with a more appropriately extreme band, the Seattle doomdronedirge duo Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, whose infamous live Halloween night set is the focus of this release, presented here on a one sided silkscreened lp, a sidelong expanse of harrowing blackened minimalism, crashing gongs and billowing clouds of cymbal shimmer, buzzing metallic thrum, that reminds us of an Organum record gone haywire. The metal buzz gradually processed into deep rib cage rattling drones and ominous low end tones, eventually melodies creep in, and the sound is transformed into an abject tarpit doom, peppered with blown out blasts of percussive crunch, and bursts of Merzbowian white noise, but always settling back into a deep, ominous thrum. Lion roar rumbles give way to keening moaning black buzz, downtuned and crumbling, all weirdly mournful and melodic, the whole thing laced with tortured vox, seriously harrowing and amazing. And as if that weren't enough, there's also a single sided 7", with an etched B side, the music a crumbling wall of super distorted power electronics style crunch, grinding slabs of corrosive textures and heaving buzz blurred into a weirdly meditative, but still seriously corrosive drone. And as if that STILL weren't enough, there's also a cd (not a cd-r), collecting a handful of rarities from various tape releases and splits, as well as some unreleased jams, the sounds varying from percussive post industrial pipe fight bombast, to droned out feedback drenched ambience, and from militaristic minimalism, to grinding blacknoise blowouts. Phew.
NOW we can talk about the packaging, which we should preface with the word MAGNETS!!! ("Fucking magnets, how do they work?!"), more on that in a second, but if you want a visual accounting of the packaging, check this out: http://youtu.be/ZthdRUqd68w
So yeah, there is a one sided lp, with a silkscreened B side. There was an issue with the silkscreening, so there's an insert affixed to the sleeve, explaining the situation. There's also a red vinyl 7", one sided, etched on the B side, and the aforementioned cd of rarities. The 7" comes in a proper picture sleeve with two 7"x7" pro-printed card inserts, the cd comes in it's own proper sleeve as well. Also includes is a silkscreen turntable slipmat, as well as a 12" by 24 poster. Add in 4 stickers, a 2-sided 12" pro-printed card insert, and two separate silk screened covers, each one affixed with magnets, the two sleeves magnetically adhered! There's also a 2" pin, a numbered certificate, all of this is housed in a thick PVC sleeve, sealed with a circular sticker, and on the front, is a sticker, with a description of the record in Latin, and a translation in English. Wow. Needless to say, this is a beauty, an extravagantly conceived and executed labor of love, that is even more impressive when you hold it in your grubby little paws.
LIMITED TO 235 COPIES!!! Guessing this won't be around for long!
Who doesn't love Peter Brotzmann and/or Han Bennink? If you're into skronky European free jazz craziness that is. Saxophonist Brotzmann is a hard-blowin' legend, and Han Bennink is not only a percussion whiz but also a strong "pro" argument in the whole does-humor-belong-in-music? debate. Teamed up here on this expanded (meaning there's a whole bonus disc with ten previously unreleased tracks!) reissue of what those in the know, know as the 1977 Bro-Ben Black Forest recordings, Brotzmann and Bennink actually did the Jewelled Antler natureboy thing here and took their instruments out into the forest to improvise amid the trees and birds and small curious animals. Along with a supply of bread and wine they toted with them an assortment of clarinets and saxophones, a banjo, a viola, some toys, birdcalls, cymbals, and suchlike sundry instruments -- Han had to make do without his customary drum kit, playing instead on tree trunks and rocks with branches and stones. Their free music got all that much freer for being loosed in the great outdoors, and these Black Forest sessions certainly brought forth all the wildman whimsy you'd expect from this duo. In some ways a precursor to the field recording aesthetic practiced today by the Jewelled Antler gang and all those Finnish free-freak-forest-folk outfits we all love, Schwarzwaldfahrt is replete with the gurgling sounds of water, birds twittering, primal yelps from Han and/or Peter, and other things you wouldn't normally hear in more "civilized" jazz recording. At one point, Han pounds (or splashes) out a stacatto rhythm on the surface of a stream or pond, and you can for sure tell how much fun they were having! So much, that they recorded a lot more music/sound than they could release at the time. They had to edit down their tapes to just one LP's worth of material for the original edition of this on FMP, but now Atavistic's Unheard Music Series has given them two whole compact discs to fill up, and it's a joy.
The return of doom legends Candlemass, with their first full length since 2009's Death Magic Doom, still featuring vocalist Robert Lowe of fellow doomlords Solitude Aeturnus, and doom fans (like us), probably don't need to know more than that. We loved Death Magic Doom, and King Of The Grey Islands before that, and really very little has changed, and hell, we didn't really want anything to change. Our only complaint, which might be unavoidable, is that the sound is super modern, polished and impeccably produced. Which gives the music (which has it been recorded on old tape machines, and dialed in to sound super seventies would have been a stone cold classic), a distinctly modern metal vibe, that might rub some folks the wrong way. While personally we wouldn't have minded to hear this stuff with a murkier Electric Wizard style production, there's really no arguing with the doom these guys wield - crushing downtuned Sabbathy riffage, big pounding drums, soaring true doom vox, plenty of chants, and spidery clean guitar melodies, the tracks slipping from death march creep to more rocking almost stoner grooves, with killer leads, and lots of organ, which definitely helps to give this stuff an old school (and sorta proggy actually!) feel. But c'mon, it's Candlemass, the riffs kill, the doom is devastating, all bow down, and be sure to stick around for closer "Black As Time", which is definitely the doomiest of the bunch, and the goofiest, with a seriously weird opening spoken word part, but a killer main riff, rad flanged drums, and the crushing churning ultra doom coda, the rhythm of which is locked in step with the ominous ticking of a clock. Black as time!
Circulation Of Light is the latest project from Nathaniel Ritter, who also performs in Kinit Her and Burial Hex, offers up a gorgeous collection of dark ritualism for his Black Horizons debut. Haunting and ominous, long low buzzing sitar like tones spread out into woozy undulating layers of metallic shimmer, rife with subtle pulsations, keening barely there melodies, the various tone and overtones, swirling in slow motion above the abyss, glimmering and glistening, a glowing black billow of softly swelling chordal thrum. Meditative and serene, but ominous and darkly mesmerizing, chiming melodies surface from the softly roiling blackness, the sound lush and layered, washing over you, enveloping you, allowing you to get lost in its blackened grandeur.
Music box melodies drift atop a slowly building churn of buzz and rumble, those melodies seeming to lose cohesion, the notes falling to the wayside, disappearing beneath black surface, that surface growing more and more agitated, the sounds buzzier and blacker, high end keening over groaning moaning slabs of crumbling distortion and corrosive low end pulses, locking into a strangely rhythmic dronescape, a washed out darkly psychedelic soft focus blacknoise that manages the perilous balance of grim malevolence and delicate beauty.
Like all Black Horizons releases, gorgeously packaged, housed in a hand screened sparkly gold paper insert, the tape with metallic silver stickers, and of course LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
The oddly monikered Co La is the work of one Matthew Papich, who takes hundreds, if not thousands, of samples, and then snips, loops and recontextualizes those sounds into something surprisingly minimal and skeletal, a modern take on classic IDM rhythms, rife with subtle jazziness, sampled horns, warm swirling chordal swells and loping grooves. We had a lot of trouble figuring out a way to describe this stuff, which is always a good sign. It's jittery and skittery, but also jazzy, stuttering beats beneath sultry sax, bits of upright bass, very cinematic in places, the tracks spare and shuffly for the most part, with unexpected bursts of martial snare, or truncated vox, burst of white noise hiss, mournful horn bleats, the vibe woozy and dreamily warped, a bit like Boards Of Canada via Art Of Noise, using only jazz samples? Or something. One track features smatterings of applause as a beat, elsewhere the sound blurs into a Caretaker like ballroom music, a looped Jeck-like old timey rhythmscape, peppered with doorbell buzzes and jazzy basslines, one second a dizzying collage, the next a sort of woozy alien exotica. Some of the tracks are smooth and laid back, others are gristly and crunchy, although the best moments are both.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, already sold out at the label and thus out of print, which means these are the last copies we'll be able to get!
It's been nearly a year and a half since the venerable British drone composer Jonathan Coleclough has offered us something new; and this collaboration between Coleclough and Murmer (aka Patrick McGinley) is well worth the wait! The two met a couple years back after contributing works to the same compilation. Soon after, Coleclough began making regular contributions to McGinley's weekly radio series Framework for Resonance FM in London; and their continued communication sparked the interest for a collaboration. Much of the music found on Husk originated from semi-improvised sessions whereby the two processed various field recordings, small tactile events, and other electronic devices -- gradually developing beyond the gestural and into a monumental sprawling album which is in the running for best drone album of 2006. The two had cited their source material as refrigerators, thunderstorms, sheep, car horns, ferryboats, windblown sand, and crackling charcoal; and it's a crap shoot to discern which of these electrically blurred drones hails from an overheating kitchen appliance or from farm animals. Not that any of that really matters, as the art of Coleclough and McGinley is in their alchemy, transforming the commonplace into the celestial (albeit, a very dark and very cold heavenly body). Throbbing drones of low end harmonics are joined by secondary sustained timbres which undulate as polyamorous tangles, spreading rhizomes, and slippery knots bristling with tactility and spotted with plenty of hints of the organic. Each of the four tracks proposes a variation on glassine drones counterpointed by rasping textures, at times hedging for the subdued drama of smoldering crescendos and others the sublime stare at glacial immobility. Coleclough's work has always been exceptional, and his collaboration with Murmer is no different! Highly recommended.
Death And Vanilla are a Swedish haunted-pop duo who have found themselves caught in the vortex of retro-futurism circa 1969. On the one hand, they've got a good grip on the baroque psychedelia of the United States Of America, Free Design, and even some of the more woolly tracks that Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg produced; and on the other, they're keen on the whole library music phenomenon augmenting their songs with plenty of sparkling synths, crackling radiophonic samples, EVP recordings (yup, that is Raymond Cass, we hear!), and tripped-out-to-space production tricks that would be right out of the Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire playbooks. There's even a track on this album called "Library Goblin"! If you might think all of this seems like the same strategy that Broadcast employed on their highly acclaimed collaborations with The Focus Group back in 2009-2010, you'd be pretty spot on. Even the unnamed female vocalist for Death And Vanilla sounds an awful lot like Broadcast's Trish Keenan, with her breathy delivery and unexpected melodies which soar above the monochromatic lullaby of many of the songs. As sacrosanct as it may seem, Death And Vanilla may be better songwriters than Broadcast; their cinematic pop gem "Cul-De-Sac" should be in the running for poptune of 2012 for sure with its complex interweave of harpsichord, vibraphone, fuzzed guitar, strutting basslines, and shuffling rhythms all driven by the vocal harmonies, which transitions rather deftly into the far more experimental avant-pop number "Sombambulists" which drifts aptly towards a dreamy headspace of loping basslines and percolating synths all bathed in sound-dissolving reverb. The filmic references also abound on tracks like "The Unseeing Eye" and the aforementioned "Library Goblin" as sublimely revisionist '60s pop numbers with bubbly vibraphones and seductive vocals amidst electronic filigree and charming synth blorp, before disintegrating into an otherworldly interlude of ethereal radio noise and cosmic vibrations. As such, it's a pretty irresistible album for any fan of Broadcast, Ghost Box, and Stereolab. The lp has already gone through a couple of pressings, but hopefully, we'll be able to keep this one in stock for a while. It's totally worth it!
Kill From The Heart is the legendary debut from Texas / SF punks the Dicks, which featured a young Mr. Gary Floyd, who would later go on to form Sister Double Happiness. But back in 1980, in Austin Texas, Floyd was fronting the Dicks, a wild rambunctious band of political punks who terrorized and inspired in equal measure, Floyd was a seriously imposing frontman, the band confrontational and controversial, their first single a tale of a corrupt policeman abusing minorities ("The Dicks Hate The Police"), and songs featuring lyrics about homophobia and sexuality, amongst other charged topics. Their sound raw and feral, but still hooky and heavy, Floyd's voice super distinctive, their influence on other bands was immeasurable, even if some folks don't realize it. Mudhoney's "Hate The Police" is of course a Dicks cover, and Jesus Lizard covered the Dicks' "Wheelchair Epidemic", and the Butthole Surfers even wrote a song about Floyd called, of course "Gary Floyd".
This first incarnation of the band only lasted three years, with Floyd taking off for San Francisco, where he would reform the Dicks with a whole new lineup. Kill From The Heart was originally released in 1983 on SST and has been remastered by Jello Biafra, and for this reissue, the whole of the Dicks Hate The Police single has been tacked on as bonus tracks (they're included in the download with the lp version). We've been listening to this like crazy since it came out, and sort of forgot just how goddamn good this record was, and IS!
These People is record number two legendary debut from Texas / SF punks the Dicks, which featured a young Mr. Gary Floyd (and at this point drummer Lynn Perko), both of whom would later go on to form Sister Double Happiness, but in 1983, the Dicks Mk II had just formed in SF after Floyd's relocation, and the new band reimagined the Dicks sound as something much more melodic and poppy, hinting at what was to come in SDH, and while it was definitely still punk, it was crazy catchy too, Floyd's voice much more controlled, the songs surprisingly polished, a few of the tracks here sounding almost like Sugar at times, hooks galore, but for every blast of pretty poppiness, there's another chunk of swaggery noisy punkiness, often some hybrid of the two, which is what made this record such a killer. And Floyd remained an imposing frontman, the band not shying away at all from the subject matter that made their first record so charged and controversial, in fact, the band found all sort of other injustices to rail against, including murdered Black Panther George Jackson, whose story is told in the album closer "George Jackson". But the sound of the band definitely alienated a segment of the punk rock community, and most likely contributed to the band's eventual breakup, and Floyd and Perko heading for poppy climes, but even now, after all these years, this record sounds better than ever. And the funny thing is back when we first discovered the Dicks, we sort of considered this the wussier record, with Kill From The Heart being THEE Dicks record, but some of these songs are hitting the spot big time, and giving Kill a run for its reissue money!
Originally released in 1985, on Alternative Tentacles, These People has been remastered by Jello Biafra, and for this reissue, the whole of the Peace? 7" single has been tacked on as bonus tracks (on both the vinyl and the cd).
Perhaps you've already come across the cover of this album, it's one of those classic kitschy covers, two innocent looking teens, in cheesy white jumpsuits, unzipped in the front, with huge collars, one of the guys wielding a guitar, both looking pretty earnest and heartfelt. The record's called Dreamin' Wild, which is printed in bubbly red letters. We had seen this pop up on best/worst album covers lists forever, and like most everyone else, we had a chuckle and forgot all about it. But then we started hearing about this song called "Baby", most notably covered by weirdo outsider pop nerd Ariel Pink (the 12" of which we just got in today!), originally recorded by a couple kids named Donnie & Joe Emerson, and holy shit, we suddenly made the connection. We assumed the original version of "Baby" must suck, and Ariel Pink just took a crappy cheesy old song and weirded it up and made it warped and catchy, but instead, it turns out, the original just might be THEE coolest jam we'd heard in ages. Then we learned that Light In The Attic was gonna give this lost gem a proper reissue and we were pretty excited, even before we learned about the record's crazy backstory.
Apparently Donnie and Joe were raised in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Washington state, lived and worked on a farm, when their dad, after making them promise to focus on writing and recording original material, took a second mortgage out on the farm and built his sons a recording studio filled with amazing equipment, spending more than $100K! But that's not all, he also built them a THREE HUNDRED SEAT venue, complete with stage, ticket booth AND snack bar. As you might imagine, those 300 seats were never filled, and while the boys toiled diligently on their original music, even being featured in a local news special, all culminating in their dad paying to release the original version of this record, a selfless act that ended up causing the family to lose a significant amount of their farm when the record failed to sell. And thus, very little was heard from these boys, until now.
And while these days pretty much any old unknown record can be dug up and presented as some sort of lost treasure, very few deserve the accolades bestowed upon them, and even fewer fulfill the promise of crazy album covers and over the top backstories like Dreamin' Wild.
Really, just check out "Baby", somewhere between the sweet soulful shimmer of Shuggie Otis and the dreamy reverby pop of Roy Orbison, it's lush and lovely, the sort of mix tape killer that had we heard it before would definitely have featured prominently in past courtships. And while we're tempted to say, that it's worth the price of admission for that track alone, there's so much more to dig here, the wah guitar disco funk groove of "Feels Like The Sun", the classic rocking bass heavy buzz of "Good Time", the old school soulful smolder of "Give Me The Chance", the psychedelic yacht rock balladry of "My Heart" which manages to sound fantastically droney and druggy and dreamy, and makes it obvious just what had Ariel Pink so smitten. The record is rife with reverbed psychedelic guitars, lush vocal harmonies, ingenious arrangements, and some KILLER tunes, all cooked up by two teens in a basement studio on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So awesome!
Includes a massive booklet with extensive liner notes and tons of pix. And check out this mini-documentary on Donnie and Joe: http://vimeo.com/39424998#at=0
FYI vinyl lovers, this is on lp too, we've got a few but not enough to list, our supplier just happened to be out this week, but we should get some more soon!
Just found a few of these stashed in our closet! A 2010 release by this quite effective Hungarian ambient black metal act. Nominally an ep, but it's over 40 minutes long, containing five tracks of plodding, atmospheric metal, that definitely sounds wintery and ritualistic as per the title. This disc is truly a slow, cold creepy crawl, with so much grim buzz fuzz to it.
The head-noddingly, near-dubby echoing intro to opening track "The Symbol" sets the tone. Other crucial elements here are the eerie keyboard coloration, and rasping almost-an-instrument-itself-in-the-abstract vokills. Also, the rhythmic base of Burzumic, Filosofem style electronic beats, most prominent on the penultimate track "I Feel The Claws Of Darkness". That one's followed by a chill-out, come-down track, fittingly titled "Silence" though it's not in fact, just mellow and quiet and mesmeric, with some whispered vocals and echoing guitar.
Glad we finally located and listened to these! We just have a couple copies we found, not sure if we'll be able to get more...
What else can we say about these local garage pop masters that we haven't already? Every record just gets better and better, and with a release rate that's starting to get Guided By Voices prolific, the quality of songs has not suffered one bit. And not only do the songs sound great, but the records do too, this one recorded in a proper studio and produced by Phil Manley of Trans Am.
The new sound suits the new songs too, hardly garage pop anymore really, just classic kick ass popsmithery, super hooky, the vocals way up front in the mix, all the instruments lush and layered, a classic power pop made modern, with gorgeous vocals from Tarnation's Paula Frazer. Somehow leaves us still wanting more more more!!
We first discovered the oddly monikered Frkse (pronounced 'forks' we think?) via aQ pal Matt, one half of industrial doomdirgedrone duo Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead, who was raving about this lp, and got some from the 'band' to pass on to aQ. It was suggested to us, that anyone who loved the weirdo power electronic abstract industrial weirdness of former Record Of The Week-ers Will Over Matter, would also dig Frkse, which was definitely enough for us, but barely prepared us for what Frkse was really all about. A one man band / mad scientist / audio alchemist, who takes loops and rhythms, weird murky samples, and all manner of noise, hiss and whir and hum, and deftly arranges them into strangely robotic grooves, android symphonies of rhythm and textures, sounding at times like some impossible hybrid of Pierre Bastien, Philip Jeck, Thomas Brinkmann, and Strotter Inst. There's the warped warble of experimental turntablism, the lush hazy washed out textures of that sort of blurred ambience, and the rhythms and grooves all sound very machinelike, as if Frkse simply built an army of machines to do his bidding, that bidding just so happening to be creating these stripped down minimal loopscapes and tripped out abstract constructs.
Each track here seems cobbled together from building block like sonic elements, a loping beat, a strange detuned strum, a disembodied melody, a whirring buzz, all strung together into an ingenious series arrangement that manages to be impossible catchy and mesmerizing, even at its most minimal.
Robotic loops churning through clouds of hiss and buzz, a woozy rhythmic drag, like some strange melted tape 33 rpm jams spinning at 16rpm, the sounds saturated and warm, lush in the way only 4 track tape hiss and old busted analog machinery can be, it's hard not to imagine Frkse's strange underground lair, dusty piles of corroded equipment, nothing grounded or properly shielded, arcs of electricity leaping between various hand built implements, the vast array of buzzes and strains of hiss, carefully cataloged to be used later, and to perhaps be mixed with other separate strains, creating whole new breeds of low fidelity noise. And for all its raw primitivism, each track tends to reveal gorgeous expanses of hissy, buzz drenched minimal mesmer, like a steam punk android Steve Reich, tracks peppered with sudden bursts of almost jungle like drumming, which upon closer examination reveals themselves to be simply endless rhythmic loops piled atop one another, in such a way, that they create glorious cascades of kinetic rhythms.
At times it's like a home brewed, post industrial minimal techno, at others, it's a thick caustic almost shoegazey blacknoise blur, and still others a noise drenched abstract electronica. The sound constantly shifting, a burst of gristled crumbling industrial churn will transform into a stretch of mournful almost Slint like minimalism, gradually expanding into a loping post rock drift, all skitter and stutter, unwinding hypnotically like a super stripped down lo-fi This Heat, everything caked in a dusty patina of chordal hum, a glorious maddeningly mesmerizing collection of robo-rhythms and psych-kraut dirgery, of hazy soft focus loop-grooves and tranced out motorik mesmer. And yeah, fans of Will Over Matter will flip, fans of M Ax Noi Mach too, but even more so, folks into haunting low fidelity experimental loopscapery: Jeck, Strotter, Caretaker, Bastien, Tim Hecker, Belong and the like.
SUPER LIMITED!!! Housed in hand silk screeened / hand stamped covers with a photocopied insert.
Fragments From The Aethyr is the latest blast of caustic cinematic black ambience from this Vancouver based audio alchemist, although it's the first FC record to get reviewed on the aQ list, which is strange, since this is the sort of dense black mesmer that many of you can't get enough of. With a sound that lurks somewhere betwixt Gnaw Their Tongues, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Tenhornedbeast, MZ412 and Wolf Eyes, this band weave gristly sprawls of feedback drenched buzz, and keening high end squalls of swirling black psychedelia, the sound driven by what sounds like a violin, but a violin possessed, wreathed in effects and sent spiraling into the ether, a weird sort of droned out black folk drift, that manages to be lilting and lovely, even while being face meltingly brutal. The sound slips into a long stretch of haunting hushed shimmer, laced with chiming minor key harmonics, and lush rumbling drones, and oozes through clouds of blackened sonic murk, growing quite minimal, and almost modern classical sounding, the violin to the fore, soaring above the abyss, a harrowing bit of minimal modernism that broods ominously, and blossoms blackly into a gorgeous blackdrone cinematic epic, that ends up being far too short, even at nearly twenty minutes, before finishing off with a dense sprawl of echo drenched ritualism, processed vox and heavily layered tones, dubbed out and smeared into hazy blurs and almost liturgical sounding chants, seriously sinister and gorgeously grim.
Fans of abject minimal blackness and any of the above mentioned purveyors of sick sonic miserablism, heed the call.
Once again, hot on the heels of reissues by Edzayawa and Rob, international groove digging label Soundway come up with a winner! And since this Nigerian band is named The Funkees, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect already, right? Of course, if a band from around here, now, called themselves The Funkees, they would probably be terrible if they played funk - and probably still terrible if the name were ironic and they played, like, acoustic indie rock or floorcore dronemusic. But a band from Africa, back in the '70s, called The Funkees, reissued by Soundway? Yep, they're good. Good and funky. Good enough to become East Nigeria's number one band, and their region's closest competitors to Lagos-based big city contemporaries like BLO. And good enough to move to London, and score a record deal.
This "best of" anthology includes the tracks from all of The Funkees' early Nigerian singles, plus crucial selections from the two albums that they recorded in while England. 18 tracks total, packed with irresistibly groovy rhythms, energetic arrangements, jamming organ, and fuzz guitar excess. Heck there's actually even a song here titled "Acid Rock"! They also do an Afrofunk cover version of "Slipping Into Darkness" by War. Hell yeah, it's "Dancing Time" all right...
Packaged with full liner notes that include an interview with original member Sonny Akpan.
Yet another weird and wonderful archival release from cold/synth/new wave reissue label Medical Records, who over the last few months have given us a killer Record Of the Week in the form of the Lou Champagne System, as well as amazing releases from Axxess (another ROTW), Dalek I and Guyer's Connection. This latest blast from the past comes from a pair of Italian teenagers who recorded these tracks when they were between the ages of 14 and 16, one of which, "I'm A Vocoder" became a huge club hit. And that track, which somehow we had never heard before is well worth the price of admission alone. A pulsing synth-kraut groove, primitive drum machine, then some very Kraftwerk like melodies, and when the vocals come in, even MORE Kraftwerk worship, heavily accented English, delivered in a robotic sing-song, totally catchy, super fun and while not exactly 'funky', but definitely groovy, and motorik, and hypnotic. We had to listen to that track 4 or 5 times before we could move on, but then going back to the opener "GCP", it's almost as cool, a brooding synth-drone intro with vocals courtesy of a Speak & Spell, the perfect lead in to "I'm A Vocoder" for sure.
"My Love Is Electronic" cranks up the tempo a bit, with more intricate drum programming, and tangled synth melodies, not to mention more of those robotic vox, which is even more impressive when you realize these guys were using toy-like keyboards modified into makeshift synths, which is what gives this such a cool DIY vibe.
"A Bunch Of Flowers" is a way more melodic take on the electronic pop of groups like Depeche Mode, the sound fuzzy and gorgeous gristly, while "Mr. Do Re Me" is total eighties synth pop a la Yaz, as is "Bit Of Charm", poppy and synthy, with dramatic heartfelt vox and shimmering synths. The title track returns to the Kraftwerk like kraut-homage of the opening tracks, droned out and hypnotic, pulsing and mesmerizingly robotic, and finally, "Television" finishes things off with what sounds like a slowed down version of the "Axel F Theme", but with almost operatic female vox, soaring and dreamy and wonderfully retro-poppy.
Great stuff, as usual from Medical. LIMITED TO 650 COPIES. Each one hand numbered.
We first heard about the awesomely named Grumbling Fur, via the fact that one of the members was none other than Jussi from Finnish hypnorockers Circle, and as with all of Jussi's many projects, we were excited to hear this one, especially since it also included Daniel O'Sullivan of Guapo (and more recently Ulver, Mothlite and Miasma & The Carousel of Headless Horses). Sadly, we so far have not been able to get copies of their debut full-length, so thus, no one here had actually yet heard Grumbling Fur.
Until now, 'cause this just showed up. This three song ep, the latest in the Latitudes series, finds the former quintet stripped down to just a duo, sans Jussi, it's just O'Sullivan and Alxeander Tucker, not sure if this more minimal lineup is permanent or just for the Latitudes sessions, and seeing as we have yet to hear the original lineup, we can't say how it compares, but we can say we dig it quite a bit.
At first blush it's a sort of folky baroque psychedelic pop, a mournful plink plonk bit of piano, over a layer of thick squelchy synth buzz and skeletal drumming, the vocals a dreamily dramatic croon, everything wreathed in streaks of squiggly effects, and some singing strings off in the background, hypnotic, and a little bit tranced out, with a distinctly drone-y element, a dark minimal bit of downer folk pop that also has a sort of Velvets vibe with its single part arrangement and druggy psychedelic mesmer, which gradually grows more manic near the end before disappearing in a cloud of swirling buzz and tripped out FX.
The second track follow suit, with the same general sound palette, but sounding more bombastic, a big lush almost orchestral pop sound, but rendered in greys and blacks, the skittery drumming, the minor key piano melodies, this time in a cloud of what sounds like manufactured field recordings, and the vocals all tangled up into a dizzying round, reminding us a bit of Cardinal in fact, but a much more minimal, druggy Cardinal to be sure.
The final track is an instrumental coda, all effects-drenched piano and shimmery synth swirls, the sunniest of the bunch, with just a slightly sinister streak, playful, melodic, and darkly dreamy.
Packaged as usual in that distinctive Latitudes packaging. the cd in a brown and white origami style sleeve, with a cool black embossed print on the front, and a full color insert inside with liner notes, the lp in a black and white sleeve, with the same insert. BOTH LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
A fantastic compilation of Hazlewood tracks from his late-sixties/early seventies output when the country-pop production genius found himself in Stockholm and recorded some of his most weirdly romantic and beautifully bummed out records. Most of the tracks come from 1969's Cowboy and The Lady (with Ann Margaret), 1970's Cowboy in Sweden (with Nina Lizell and Suzi Jane Hokum) and the most awesomely embittered break-up record ever, Requiem for an Almost Lady from 1971. But fans familiar with those albums might not have everything here, including rare B sides and an unreleased track, "I Just Learned How To Run". The burnt out surrealist western influence came about largely from his collaborations with Swedish filmmaker Torbjorn Axelman who Hazlewood worked with throughout the seventies. Yet these albums were sometimes a bit much on their own, having a flair equally for epic wanderlust as they did for cornball humor. But by taking the best tracks from these albums, it really puts a spotlight on Hazlewood's druggy pop genius, and shows that his best years weren't behind him with Nancy Sinatra and his amazing output for Reprise. Anyone that dug those Water reissues a while back (The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood and Lee Hazlewoodism: It's Cause And Cure) should pick this up too. A compilation that we couldn't heap more praise upon if we tried.
FYI, there was a vinyl version of this that came out on Record Store Day; of course, it's long gone, but we do hear that they plan to repress it sometime...
Latest from this post Unearthly Trance / Thralldom outfit, whose sound has shifted a bit since their last full length Into The Cryosphere, which still seemed more rooted in the blackened sludge of UT, with hints of some blacker force driving the music, a blackness that was more evident on their debut Pestilence & Peril, and a blackness that has again been fully unleashed here, the sound right from the get go, a blasting ice cold onslaught of gnarled black buzz, the opening track, "The Seal Upon The Tomb", the perfect hybrid of classic Unearthly Trance pound, and the furious blackmathbuzz of Deathspell Omega, the sound shifting effortlessly from punkish black pummel to swirling soaring blasts, the churning riffage wreathed in wild squiggles of psychedelic leads, and infused with a surprising amount of melody and mathiness, all over a bed of snake charmer synths, that add a haunting texture to the already dense proceedings. The template is thus laid out for the rest of the record, a collection of frantic, frenetic heaviness, equal parts downtuned crush and dizzying black blasts, the wild squalls of guitar, giving the sound a seriously psychedelic vibe, that transforms Howling Wind into something much more twisted and transcendent. But then, as if to demonstrate their black credentials, they finishing things off with an appropriately grim blast of black crustiness in the form of a Hellhammer cover. Fuck yeah.
Michael Begg's name first came to our attention through those beguiling Fovea Hex albums which smeared and obsfucated the tropes of British Folk with a crushed velvet ambience, although it was hard to discern who might have been responsible for such activities given the heavy hitters that dot the Fovea Hex line-up, including Brian Eno, Clodagh Simonds, Colin Potter, and Andrew McKenzie. Begg was obviously a very good artist to recruit for Fovea Hex as he pursues an aesthetic of extracting a beautiful melancholy from any number of acoustic and electronic instruments. All of this is majestically on display here in his Human Greed project with Deryk Thomas. Fortress Longing is a nocturnal album through and through, with subtle melodic passages coming in and out of focus through a shimmering, gauzy sheen that wouldn't be out of place on the arrangements for any given Current 93 album. Violin, psaltery, piano, bells, and wordless female vocals all enter the Human Greed smears of post-classical ambience and obscurant sound design that cross back and forth between the Caretaker's weepingly nostalgic crackling and emotionally draining yet placid interludes found in Godspeed! You Black Emperor.
Originally released in 1975, this is one serious slab of mind blowing Japanese improvised kosmiche drone music, featuring legendary composer / performer Toshi Ichiyanagi (a student of John Cage who was once married to Yoko Ono!), Takehisa Kosugi, the mastermind behind one of our favorite bands ever, the Taj Mahal Travellers, here teamed up with Stockhausen percussionist Michael Ranta, for two extended free drone workouts.
The trio employ reverbed ring modulators, threaded vocals, melodicas, pianos, violins, gongs and Japanese biwas and shamisens, and weave an elaborate and lush tapestry of sound, one that is really not that far removed from Taj Mahal Travellers. Brooding, shimmering expanses of muted tones, of layered rumbles, dreamlike melodies, peppered with strange electronics, haunting and otherworldly, with a distinctly krautrock vibe, or krautdrone, all of the current practitioners of spaced out kraut inspired dronemusic, as good as they may be, can't even touch this.
The music is alive, a living thing, that the players breathe life into and guide, letting the sounds love and drift and fluctuate, creating something organic and expansive and breathtaking. The percussion adds a unique element, not really adding any propulsion, but instead, contributing texture, and a framework that the players often let collapse, before bringing it right back. The second track begins with a cool skeletal groove, all clank and clatter and thump, the space around the sounds as much a part of the overall sound, eventually slipping back into something more murky and subterranean sounding, the percussion switching to something more tabla-like, draped over an oozing sea of rumbles and growls, scrapes and whirrs.
This is one of those rare pieces of music that manages to be two things at once, a gorgeously dreamlike, relaxing bit of sonic ambience, but also something elaborate and dense, opening up the listener to dual experiences, drifting off on the surface, or strapping on the headphones, letting that extra weight carry you down into the swirling blackness at the heart of this recording.
Incredible. And essential. About the closest we'll ever get to a lost Taj Mahal Travellers record...
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We first heard from Insect Factory on a recent split with NZ droneguitar master RST, the Insect Factory side of the split a gorgeous sprawl of woozy collaged psychedelia, not all that far removed from Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World, with a similar knack for taking multiple layers of sounds, and dizzying rhythms, and somehow fusing them into something more organic and blissed out. We dug those tracks like crazy, and were super excited to discover there was in fact a full length, which essentially takes the sound from the 7" and recasts it as something more longform, which is ideal for this sort of soundscaping, allowing the sounds and textures to gradually change shape and remain in constant motion.
The record opens with a brief bit of warm washed out pulsating shimmer, all overlapping swaths of buzz and hum and smoldering blur, heady and darkly psychedelic, it could have easily been stretched out to fill up the whole side and we would have been please as punch. But instead, the sound shifts to sky full of sine wave tones, drifting in and out, minimal swells, that seem to blossom like some time lapse nature film, glistening and glimmering, the sound laced with little melodic flourishes, little percussive high end blips, it's not until about 8 minutes in, that some low end surfaces, adding some lush heft to the proceedings, letting those glimmers and shimmers, drift atop subtly undulating sprawl of smeared sound. The sound grows gradually rhythmic, before splintering into prismatic distortion drenched ur-drone, a blow out of white noise sculpted into something much more dreamlike and shoegazey.
The near 20 minute "New Incision" begins with a spacious expanse of near silence, and shimmering dreamily dubbed out tones drifting to and fro, swooping backwards guitars drifting in and out, a dreamy melodic tangle, that seems to grow more and more dense, softly noisy, becoming a sort of soft focus shoegaze Reich/Riley style workout, before slipping back into a woozy bit of backwards drift, rife with warm buzz and streaks of high end shimmer.
The record finishes with a strange sort of lo-fi dreamfolk coda, a super lo-fi recording of a guitar, unfurling a lush and lovely bit of spare balladry, wreathed in tape hiss and wrapped in a cloud of crystalline metallic tinkles.
Gorgeous stuff. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Pressed on 140 gram vinyl.
We just got done raving about the brand new record from weirdo garage-pop punks The Intelligence, when what should show up, but ANOTHER new record, well, not actually new, but new to us! Originally released in 2009, on the French label Born Bad, and only showing up here for the first time in the last few days, but we're not complaining, in fact it's like some sort of garage punk Christmas. And like Everybody's Got It Easy But Me, Crepuscule With Pacman is another killer chunk of whatthefuck garage pop that manages to be catchy and jangly and fuzzy, and yet totally bafflingly bizarre. Crepuscule is much more raw and low fidelity, but it definitely suits them, the songs super stripped down, and repetitive, a but minimal, a little murky, but still impossibly catchy. the more we listen to these guys, the more we're surprised so many people dig em, cuz they are definitely difficult. The songs here run the gamut from frenetic angular almost new wave, to Velvets-y dronedirge, from crunchy atonal post punk noise rock to stripped down classic sixties style jangle pop, but really, whatever these guys are doing, they're just a little bit off, a little bit twisted, making the tracks here sound like some sort of alternate universe garage pop band, whose very existence and interruption of the space time continuum, cause their music to warp and warble, but every time we begin to think that (and yes, we think that a lot), they'll slip into some totally perfect pop, or unveil a ridiculously masterful hook. Mixing synths and surf rock, twisted guitars, and warped outsider pop into something that we can't get enough of, and should definitely appeal to fans of groups like Thee Oh Sees, Bare Wires, Ty Segall, White Fence and all the rest, who like their garage pop on the seriously skewed side of the sonic spectrum.
The monicker of Felicia Atkinson's solo project hails from Nico's Desert Shore, that mysteriously bleak 1970 album by the Velvet Underground's troubled chanteuse; and a similarly poetic mysteriousness oozes from Atkinsons' deconstructed songs. Age Of Wonder is the second piece of vinyl for Je Suit Le Petit Chevalier, strengthening her work through a handful of limited cassettes and cd-r out of an amorphous droning psychedelia and into a smoldering intense alchemy of allegorical post-ambience. On this spooky, hypnotic, and harrowing album conjured through ever-shifting, ever-blossoming, ever-defalting soundscapes, she references the psychotropic holiness of Fursaxa, the deep-sleep surrealism of Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, and the expository minimalism of Taj Mahal Travellers. Voice, synths, loops, and electronics are the tools at her disposal, which she uses to build sprawling passages of sodden drones brightened by twinkling synths playing half-melodies and accentuated by her narcoleptic vocals cycling through wordless, but emotively sad lullablies alternating with spectral bellowings swathed in deep, washed-out reverb. The layered accretion of plainsong vocalizations and dank atmopsherics opaquely reimagines that which is natural, mystical, metaphysical, and/or mundane, always positioned as something of a mirror looking back to the human psyche as unknowable and existentially sublime. Brilliantly done.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
If you never really realized just how freaky and experimental San Francisco '60s ballroom psych legends the Jefferson Airpane were, this is a good one to check out. 1968's Crown Of Creation, their 4th album, features approximately none of their classic rock hits, instead it's way dark and psychedelic and weird - even the songs that are mostly acoustic and folky, like the David Crosby penned menage-a-trois ode "Triad", rejected by the Byrds for being too risque. Or opener "Lather", seemingly so lovely, yet with lyrics that are really rather disturbing - and Grace Slick's intense spooky delivery, plus musique concrete sound FX, puts it over the top. Other songs on the album get into a jamming heavy rock bag, with lashings of psych guitar, among 'em the apocalyptic album-closer "The House At Pooneil Corners", its bass-heavy, doomy vibe and trippy anti-war lyrics suitable for the record's mushroom clouded cover art.
Definitely a highly recommended '60s rock fave with some deep cuts for those who might have not given the Jefferson Airplane a good listen lately, or ever.
Just take one look at this record's cover - if you guess these longhaired & bearded hippie boys in their vintage duds are another retro-proto-metal band in the Sabbathy style of Witchcraft, Graveyard, Horisont, and Noctum, you'd be guessing correctly!! Only thing is, time trippers Kadavar aren't from up in Sweden like those bands, they're from Berlin. But damn, just like all those Swedish faves, they are sure good at kicking out the jams with authentic sounding, bellbottomed bombast. The six tracks here are like the March Of The Riffs, unstoppable; from start to finish it's a rollicking ride of fuzzed out retro-riffery frequently adorned with ripping wah wah psych guitar leads, and some even psychier synth (that to be found on the spaced out final track, "Purple Sage", courtesy of guest synth wiz Shazzula, she of Black Mass Rising fame). The tones are fat, the grooves loping, the vibe very much 1972 or so, harking back to the likes of Sir Lord Baltimore and Kadavar's hard (kraut-)rockin' countrymen Night Sun and Tiger B. Smith� funnily enough, the drummer here is named "Tiger". The rest of this classic power trio is rounded out by "Mammut" on bass and "Lindemann" (ok that sounds like a real name) on guitar and vocals, which are in a generally more gentle mode than his dun-dun-dundering heavy riffs, suggestive of folky ritual at times.
Kadavar's debut gets a hell yeah recommendation to all fans of any of the doomy '70s sounding stoner rock, particularly the Swedish bands mentioned above and their counterparts over here like Danava, Witch, and SF's own Dzjenghis Khan.
Digipak cd release or colored (translucent vanilla?) vinyl with digital download.
A totally twisted blast of primitive outsider garage rock from this mysterious sixties French combo, whose sound exists in some what-the-fuck nether region between the Shaggs and Hasil Adkins, a woozy, stumbling, low fidelity workout that begins with a warped cover of Gene Vincent's "Be Bop A-Lula", which pretty much lays it all out, detuned angular guitar strum, shuffling drum stumble, slightly off key vocal croon WAY up in the mix, the whole thing loose and off kilter, weaving drunkenly from verse to chorus and back again, total bad ass swagger wrapped in a utter earnestness, the sort of band who can only pull off stuff this weird and fucking nuts, cuz they're convinced they rule, and rule they do. Every time we play this in the store someone asks what it is an invariably ends up buying it. We were smitten from the very first listen.
Two long lost eps combined into one mind blowing sixteen minute 'long player', a record that our pals at WFMU are nuts for, as we are now too, and like them, we were suspicious that this was not in fact some modern band taking the piss, crafting some fucked up fractured 'lost gem' but by all accounts this is the real deal, which makes sense cuz this sort of warped genius is tough to fake, and genius it is, catchy has heck, even in its damaged sonic stumble, we find ourselves humming along to every misstep, sour note and warbly vocal, and also find ourselves listening this pretty much more than almost anything else, which really says it all.
Killer compilation of unreleased jams, alternate takes and old demos from this garage rock synth punk combo, which was fronted by the late Jay Reatard, and unlike Reatard's solo records, Lost Sounds were a much more intense / aggro proposition, infamous for insane / energetic live shows, Lost Sounds' sound was heavy, and gothy, punky and catchy as fuck, with pounding drums, buzzing synths, chugging guitars, and Reatard's yowled vox. We described Lost Sounds in the past as sounding like Blasted Canyons crossed with Black Bug crossed with the Fuzztones, and that definitely still applies here. Rough and raw, and lo-fi, the sound here is all over the map, and while fans of The Oh Sees, and Ty Segall, and yeah Blasted Canyons, will no doubt dig this stuff, newbies might be better served picking up the recent comp on Fat Possum, Blaq Static, but to be honest, this collection's chaotic all-over-the-place-ness is exactly what makes it such an engaging listen. The opener definitely sounds like the Lost Sounds we know and love, dirgey and dark, synth heavy and hooky, but then there are tracks like "Black Coats / Whitefear", which is essentially acoustic, super stripped down, but somehow seriously fierce, the vocals snarled and swaggery over a minimal backdrop, a sort of Young Pioneers style garage folk punk, then there's the near power pop of "I Cannot Lie", with its fuzzy synth warble, jangly guitar, and whiney keening vox. And that's just the opening salvo, from there on out, the sound flits from raw garage punk, to fuzzy jangle pop, to super melodic drum machine driven crunch, to rad sci-fi synthwave, to blissed out shoegaze, and pretty much every possible combination/permutation, with plenty of short sharp bursts of weird sonic experiments, and sound fragments. And it's weird, the more we listen to this, the better it gets, and while it probably will never be as good as any of the Lost Sounds records proper, it's coming pretty goddamn close!
It's funny, lately it seems like every time we discover some cool new record by some super obscure artist, it turns out that the dude who runs tape label Ormolycka has already put something out by them, way before we even knew who they were. Whether it was the creeped out witch house of Modern Witch, the fucked up aggro hip hop of Death Grips, the twisted electro pop of Pictureplane, the weirdo Southern crunk of Lil Ugly Mane, or what we have right here, the crunchy, ultra distorted industrial beat heavy electro dirgery of the oddly monickered M Ax Noi Mach, aka Philly noisemaker Rob Francisco. Not sure of the exact chronology, but we're guessing Ormolycka were all over this guy when we first laid ears on the In The Shadows lp on White Denim. Regardless, any of you who snagged that lp, are definitely gonna want this too. A dense blast of distortion drenched lumber and crunch, the beats like caustic blasts of grey noise and crusty buzz, all wreathed in thick black clouds of analog synth noise, swirls of hiss and whir and hum and plenty of feedback. Sounding like Techno Animal covered by Amps For Christ, or super obscure noise-hop combo Fever (whose record on DHR is one of our favorite records ever), the sound here lurches from noisy Wolf Eyes-meets-Godflesh stomp, to cool minimal noise drenched mesmer, and from experimental electronic minimalism to spaced out heavily layered dronemusik, primitive and noisy, the sounds manage to fall into patterns that reveal themselves as weirdly melodic and super mesmerizing, the 'songs' constantly devolving into dense tangles of processed electronic noise that while brutal and punishing, somehow remain groovy and tranced out, the sort of rhythmic psychedelic noise that we can't ever seem to get enough of.
Like all Ormolycka tapes, SUPER LIMITED (only 100 copies we think!)...
For years, Swedish black metal panzer division Marduk defined themselves by creating a sound that was unwavering, blurry and buzzy and blasting, their sound a furious blackened onslaught that few could touch, and it seemed the group was perfectly happy making the same record every time, as were we. Then, a few years back, the oddly named Rom 5:12 happened, which found the band pushing way beyond their lightspeed blast, and dipping into sounds and songs that were murky and gnarled, tempering their blackbuzz prowess with a bit of experimentalism, looking no doubt to Deathspell Omega for inspiration, as well as new Marduk blood in the form of Mortuus, vocalist for Funeral Mist. And on Marduk's next album after that, Wormwood, the band continued to expand their sound. And while Serpent Sermon is not necessarily another sonic reinvention, and actually doesn't even move much beyond Wormwood, we're not even sure that matters, instead, Serpent Sermon seems like Marduk honing the sound they seemingly perfected on Wormwood, the sound better than ever, dense and furious, weirdly melodic too, the title track definitely has that all on display, a churning almost doomy intro that gives way to blurred lightning fast blasts, and a super catchy, super melodic refrain, the group deftly flitting from part to part, the result a super progged out mathy blackness that position them alongside DSO in terms of modern black metal mastery. And while there are plenty of moments on Serpent Sermon where the ban shift gears into a punkish pound, or a doomic lumber, even some woozy spaced out psychedelia at times, the band do spend the majority of their time blasting and buzzing frantically, effortlessly spewing furious gouts of grinding black buzz that KILLS. But peppered throughout is plenty of weirdness, whether it's creeping droned out buzz over insanely frenetic double kicks, or shredding leads, or dark strummed apocalyptic folk, all of those elements deftly woven into Serpent Sermon's dense, buzzing sonic black fabric.
Fans of Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist, Katharsis and the like, who have yet to discover the mighty Marduk, now's the time to right that wrong, and fans of Marduk can add this grim sonic gem to an already impressive body of black works.
Here we have a collection of unreleased tracks, lost songs and rarities from weirdo outsider lo-fi pop-smith John Maus, who was originally more of an Ariel Pink sideman, and who thus shared much or AP's sonic worldview, but it quickly became evident that Maus was his own sort of twisted genius, and quickly established himself as quite the iconic "singer/songwriter", one that seemed to eclipse AP for many folks around here, and it's easy to see why, even here. While many of these tracks were left off of records, and some are from super early in Maus' career, they still display his warped mastery of low fidelity cable access VHS late night synth pop balladry, "North Star" sounds like Scott Walker fronting later period Blue Oyster Cult and performing on Stairway To Stardom, while "The Law" sounds like yacht rock via eighties new wave via bedroom 4 track downer pop. And "Castles In The Grave" is like a Bollywood version of John Maus, and might be the best track here. The great thing about Maus is not just his ability to create these weird out of time, worn and faded pop sounds, but to imbue them with impossibly catchy hooks, and the sort of ear worms that continue to burrow brain-ward long after listening. There is some serious goofiness here (like the sub-Sparks "This Is The Beat"), but for every moment like that, there's another that's darkly sinister, or lush and sultry and dramatically brooding, or impossibly catchy and dementedly poppy, and while John Maus is definitely an acquired taste, it's one we acquired long ago!
A long time ago we discovered this little label based out of Upland, California, and became a bit obsessed by all the cool weird bands whose records they released. Via Shrimper we discovered Amps For Christ, Refrigerator, Bugskull, Simon Joyner, Wckr Spgt, Nothing Painted Blue, Diskothi-Q and tons more. But most notably, was a group called The Mountain Goats, which was in fact not a group, just a guy and his acoustic guitar, which sounded pretty unremarkable, until we heard John Darnielle, and his strangely idiosyncratic songsmithery, urgently, almost violently strummed guitar and a high keening voice belting out smart, funny, sad, heartbreaking, hyperliterate lyrics, sometimes almost shouting, the result was pretty fantastic, and the Mountain Goats became one of our favorite Shrimper 'bands'. Back then we never would have imagined that the Mountain Goats would become a real band, record in a real studio, tour for thousands of people, play on the Colbert Report, and be HUGE, back then it was just a guy and his guitar, and it was the age of tape trading and zines, and it sounded like Darnielle's music was being played just for us, and his strange tales of love and loss and traveling TO places (a series of songs which continues today), they spoke to something in all of us, and it seemed remarkable that this nerdy guy with a guitar and a boombox, was responsible for such amazing, moving, emotionally complicated music, that now twenty years on still sounds so good.
Recent converts to the Mountain Goats might be shocked and how raw and primitive these recordings are, recorded live in many cases, songs followed by a smattering of applause, in lots of recordings you can hear a TV in the other room, or the whir of the recording, female background vocals pop up here and there, as do shitty Casio beats, but really, it's all about the voice, and the songs, which are incredible.
This double disc gathers up two of the earliest MG tapes, The Hound Chronicles from 1992, and Hot Garden Stomp from 1993, we presume they've been remastered, but really, it hardly matters, the tape hiss, and weird glitches, and all the other random sonic detritus are as much a part of the sound as the music is. For some us, this is an awesome nostalgic sonic time capsule, for others it will be a discovery, maybe even a revelation, but it's definitely cool to hear where it all began, and an argument could be made, that these are the most pure Mountain Goats recordings there are. Includes new liner notes from John Darnielle as well as some reproduced ephemera from the time.
Once again, the holy grail(s) / canon of 'shoegaze' indie rock, gets yet ANOTHER series of reissues, although these are THE ONES. As in the ones we've all been waiting for, the ones Kevin Shields has been slaving over for years, the ones that by now we can assume are PERFECT. Or at least perfect as Shields sees them, which is really all that matters when it comes to his music.
Of the three 'reissues' this is the only one that is truly an essential purchase, considering that it's not really a proper reissue, but is instead a compilation of all the groups singles, the first time in fact they've ever been gathered up together on one release and holy moly, do they make for what is essentially a head spinning My Bloody Valentine double album. And again, fanatics most likely already have all these singles, but besides collecting them all together, there are also a handful of PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED TRACKS!!! So even you completists, will need this too.
And again, like the other ones, if you're new to MBV, probably Loveless is the one to get first, but an argument could definitely be made for this collection, which gathers up these ep's: You Made Me Realize, Feed Me With Your Kiss, Glider, Tremolo, and tacks on two tracks from the Isn't Anything bonus 7", a 1991 single B side, a track from a French pressing of the "Only Shallow" 7", and three previously unreleased songs!! Pretty exciting.
Fans are probably already sold, but again for folks who are new to MBV, these singles are some of the best tracks MBV ever recorded. "You Made Me Realize" might be one of our favorite songs EVERY, heavy and buzzy and super rocking, fans of Loop will flip their lids. And then "Slow", all woozy and slowcore dreamy, definitely predicting the sound of Medicine, and the Swirlies and loads of others. "Feed Me With Your Kiss" sounds like Sonic Youth via MBV, all dense guitar buzz and intertwined boy/girl vox, and wild chaotic drumming, total shoegaze noiserock. "Glider" is all shimmering swirling psychedelic freakout, barely even a song, more a tripped out sonic experiment, that somehow manages to be crazy catchy, and reminds us a LOT of Teenage Filmstars. "To Here Knows When" is a blurred big of hazy dreampop shimmer, and there's so many more. And then the previously unreleased tracks, are surprisingly good, on the heavier rocking side, hard to believe these are the songs the band chose NOT to release, when most bands would have killed for any of em!!
Needless to say, absolutely essential for fans, new AND old, and of all these reissues, the one that has been getting the most play. Housed in a gatefold mini lp style sleeve.
As we recently listed My Bloody Valentine's hard to find collection "Ecstacy and Wine" as well as their masterpiece "Loveless," it's about time that we got "Isn't Anything" into the Aquarius Records archives.
I seem to remember an odd anecdote about the recording process of this album, that it was recorded somewhere in the outskirts of their native Dublin near a sheep farm and the band ended up crashing at the studio throughout the entire recording session. Yet, their sleep patterns were constantly interrupted by the incessant bleating of those sheep, and the collective insomnia contributed to the lethargy and torpor found within "Isn't Anything." Of course, I've been unable to verify this story with anything factual, but this album sure does sound sleepy, mostly sliding towards the realm of deep slumber, but occasionally hopped-up on punchy sleep-deprived nerves.
In the name of revisionist history, "Isn't Anything" stands as the transition album between the gilded jangle of "Ecstacy and Wine" and the radioluminescence of "Loveless." My Bloody Valentine had begun to bury much of their emulation of '60s psychedelic pop in Sonic Youth mack-truck riffage and intertwining guitar haze that upstages the Velvet Underground strum-as-drone. Tracks like "Feed Me With Your Kiss" and "Sueisfine" thickly blur the sad lullaby vocals from Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher through overblown bass distortion and strangely uptempo rhythms. Yet, My Bloody Valentine will instantly glide out of these into the shoegazing drone-pop of something like "Lose My Breath" with its tone bending extended chords and lack of pronounced rhythms. Only a couple of the songs on "Isn't Anything" are as memorable as those found on "Loveless," but there are plenty of swirling dreamy-pop songs that make this album a treat for shoegazing fans!
We just realised that this record, one of AQ unanimous all time favorites, never got listed on the website OR the AQ list. And while most of you may already have this, a few of you are in for a big surprise and a musical awakening. "Loveless" stands at the
That track along with the equally groovy-yet-dreamy "Glider" ep had been the basis for Simon Reynolds curious thesis that My Bloody Valentine had produced some of the earliest jungle tracks. More plausible was that MBV were one of the first rock bands to actively incorporate sampling into their production techniques. My Bloody Valentine had resampled their guitar feedback digitally to created strangely warbling layers of sound and allow for additional tools to build their bittersweet, melancholic melodies. "Loveless" may remain the final testament to the musical prowess of My Bloody Valentine, as Kevin Shields continues to state the claim that another album is in the works... well it's been in the works for over a decade and has no signs of ever being realized. Nevertheless, this album *still* sounds totally fresh and wholly superior to all of the bands that have attempted to revive the My Bloody Valentine sound (Lilys, Swirlies, Flying Saucer Attack, Third Eye Foundation, Fennesz, Chessie, etc, etc, etc).
Perhaps our opinion best stated by former Aquarian Marc Kate: "If you don't own it, I won't be mad, but you will certainly earn my pity." An earthshattering record. Period.
Yet another release from our pal Jason's amazing and weird as fuck Ormolycka tape label (along with two others on this week's list), this one weird for an entirely different reason. Sort of.
Where most of the Ormolycka tapes hover WAY out on the periphery of popular culture, as in seriously underground, bizarre, challenging, confusional, noisy, chaotic, each with a hefty helping of WTF going on, well, for fans of the label, this might end up being the most WTF of all.
Cooper was maybe best known as the singer for the Passionistas, but since that band hung it up, he has struck out on his own, we reviewed his debut 7" a while back, and the jams here are not that far removed, sunshiney, sugary electro /techno pop, cheesy house music grooves, drum machine driven new wave, synthy, swirly, fey sung / spoken slightly auto-tuned vocals over thumping beats and dreamy melodies, gay club jam meets '80s new wave, fun and funky and a little bit fluffy, like the dance/love scene or montage from an old VHS eighties romantic comedy. Ormolycka definitely has a soft spot for summer grooves, radio/MTV pop, Hot/Wild FM style megajams and the like, and this definitely pushes some of those same buttons.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
All right, if you were excited a few months back when we listed the Imikuzushi album by Keiji Haino, Oren Ambarchi, and Jim O'Rourke (that group's second release), we imagine you'll be equally chuffed about this: the debut from a quite similar trio consisting of Keiji Haino, Oren Ambarchi, and Stephen O'Malley! Yeah, the guy from a little band you may have heard of called SUNNO))). Also KTL and Khanate and a bunch of others. Suddenly, is Keiji Haino still the darkest lord in the room? Well, yeah. But O'Malley has some cred in the blackness-of-soul category, and his presence helps make this even heavier.
And as you should expect, much like with the Haino/Ambarchi/O'Rourke lineup, this grouping is also, again, pretty much Haino's show. Even though he's recently reactivated his seminal outrock power trio Fushitsusha (on the intense Hikari To Nazukeyo album, reviewed here not long ago), Haino seems happy to have other outlets for Fushitsusha-esque stuff, and this is one of 'em, his shamanistic self taking the lead on guitars, vocals and synth. With O'Malley on bass and Ambarchi on battery, he's being ably backed up by guys who, y'know, dig his trip. And since Ambarchi has experience playing with Haino already, and O'Malley for his part has previously collaborated with Ambarchi, they're definitely "on" here, even though Nazorani had only played together a couple times prior to this this particular recording, which documents a live performance in Paris, France November 2011, altogether improvised "real-time" music we assume.
There's 72 minutes of their harrowing music here, four tracks, all obviously titled by Haino, though they almost could be parodies of his typical titles� The set begins with "Feel The Ultimate Joy Towards The Resolve Of Pillar Being Shattered Within You Again And Again And Again", starting off with stretches of near-silence, pregnant with electricity, occasionally single chiming notes ringing out in the vast void from Haino's guitar, accompanied by sparse suspenseful skitter and pendulous plod too, from the percussion, while O'Malley's bass is a eerie, echoing, subtle shivering of low-end in the darkness. Haino's vocals, as always, are anguished, true cries from the heart, torn from the throat. O'Malley and Ambarchi have performed with Mayhem's Attila Csihar before, in Gravetemple, but even the "vokills" of that notorious black metal singer weren't as vokill as these! Let's put it this way, the AQ staffer writing this review is at this very moment suffering from a severe toothache (root canal pending) and Haino, whatever he's saying, seems to be expressing something even deeper and stronger than the merely physical pain that this reviewer is currently suffering�
And then, wow, we won't tell you at exactly what minute of this lengthy track the apocalpyse is unleashed, but eventually it is, Haino's amp suddenly the fount of epic floodwaters of cavern-carving distortodelic guitar volume. And it's sheer manna from above (or below?) for fans of Haino/Fushitsusha and any other out-there heavy duty guitar skree.
The album's other three cuts are constructed from similar sonics, ambient ominous battlefields that provide the gripping backdrop for Haino's moans and wails, via either voice or guitar, but make for good gripping listening in an of themselves, like for instance the many moody minutes of final cut "Not To Leave Everything To The Light Outside Of You But To Be Aware Of The Prayer 'What Do I Want To Do?' That Exists Inside You, And Let That Go Out Of You As A Light, Or Things Might Get Worse, No?" even before Haino's amp really gets warmed up�
Another awesome Haino showcase, featuring great work from all involved, released on an obviously honored O'Malley's Mego sub-label, Ideologic Organ, with (of course) gorgeous packaging & design.
MPEG Stream: "Feel The Ultimate Joy Towards The Resolve Of Pillar Being Shattered Within You Again And Again And Again" [/audio/nazoranaifeel.m3u]
MPEG Stream: "Not A Joy To Come Closer But So-Called A Sacred Insanity Has Finally Appeared" [/audio/nazoranainotajoy.m3u]
We flipped for Ghost Blonde, the last full length from these shoegaze noisepoppers, the opening track of that record one of those rare jams that we found ourselves listening to multiple times a day. And while nothing on this new ep manages to be quite as catchy, pretty much every track here comes close, especially the opener "Junior", which has us thinking No Joy must have some sort of formula for creating the perfect album opener, cuz we've listened to this one 20 times already, and we've only had the record for a few days. And it's not that far removed from Ghost Blonde, crunchy fuzzy guitars, pounding drums, thick swirls of FX drenched riffage, gorgeous hazy female vocals, weird processed sounds and a thick layered production, it's only a little over two minutes but it's dense and dynamic and is pretty goddamn great.
Negaverse does seem to find the band experimenting a bit, it's not all jangly fuzzy noise pop or blissed out shoegaze, the band take weird almost programmed sounding lo-fi rhythms, wrap them in strange stuttering effects, and somehow craft all that into a gauzy bit of psychedelic pop, or they just pound away punkily, and spit out a fierce bit of fuzz drenched jangle, or they unfurl a super drugged out dirge that sounds like Jesus And Mary Chain at 16rpm, driven by drum machines and dense clouds of psychedelic guitar swirl, or they take a psych pop dirge, crank up the tempo, and dial all their effects up to 10 and let a motorik programmed beat drive a swirling heavily panned psych pop freakout, and somehow, they make all of that sound like perfect noise pop bliss.
LIMITED TO 750 COPIES! Each one hand numbered. Comes with a digital download too.
