Up until now, we'd managed to hear very little from electronic soundscaper / audio experimentalist Lee Noble, but we definitely liked everything we heard, but this will be the first LN release to make it on the aQ list, which in some ways is perfect, as it's not a split, but instead a collaboration with aQ faves Ensemble Economique, aka Brian Pyle, from another aQ fave The Starving Weirdos. It's a perfect collaboration, in that it's impossible to tell exactly who is contributing what, and while the lush, organic, near cinematic sounds here do display shades of EE, Motion Forever expands on those sounds with Noble and Pyle crafting swoonsome swirls of Caretaker-esque shimmer, and Jeck like turntable ministrations, everything woozy and warbly, a nocturnal drift that gives way to some creepy skeletal lo-fi pop, laced with plaintive vox and detuned strum, all atop a layer of electronic buzz. A mysterious strain of slowcore that gradually disappears in a cloud of warm thrum, draped in tinkling chime like melodies, before returning to the Jeck / Caretaker like skeletal balladry of the opening few minutes.
The flipside introduces muted rhythms, beneath softly swirling synths, and over distant soft focus drones, all laid back and dreamily druggy. Strange samples surface throughout, the sound shifting into something much more dirgey and almost new wave sounding, haunting and otherworldly, with processed vox and distorted piano pound, a ghostly, spectral electronic dirgepop finale that is as good as anything we've heard from either participants!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Holy shit does this rule: hip hop producer Oh No crafts a whole record using nothing but samples from DOLEMITE, one of the most legendary blaxploitation films (and soundtracks) ever. Rudy Ray Moore is the mother fuckin' OG. Oh No samples wah guitars, slithery seventies grooves, killer symphonic snippets, movie samples, female vox, harpsichords, guitar funk, smooth soul, wheezing organs, funky horns, all sorts of rad, weird shit deftly looped and layered to the point that unless you were super familiar with the film you probably wouldn't know it was Dolemite at all, but odds are, plenty of rap jams before this borrowed bits from Dolemite anyway, cuz all of these sounds are super well suited for repurposed looping, and Oh No kills it, funky as fuck, catchy as hell, big booming beats, fuzzy synth buzz, woozy rib cage rattling basslines, and a wicked array of underground hip hop royalty doing their thing over these killer jams: MF Doom, Chino Xl, Erick Sermon, Phife Dawg, Sticky Fingaz, Prozack and loads more.
If you've seen the documentary Blood, Sweat + Vinyl, about the Hydra Head, Neurot and Constellation labels, and all the various bands that call those labels home, you'll see our very own Andee publicly profess his undying love for mysterious simian drone metal combo Old Man Gloom. And he's most definitely not alone. For a band that started off as a joke (or at least not as a serious or 'proper' band), OMG quickly became an obsession for lots of metalheads, heck even (and maybe especially) for non metalheads. Their sound a killer concoction of grinding downtuned dirge metal and all manner of experimental drone music, equal parts rocking out and spacing out, even the heaviest jams constantly disrupted by the bands experimental streak, or even more often their twisted sense of humor. And no this is not some joke band, although they can sometimes be funny, and their obsession with monkeys borders on the pathological (but then so does ours, thus another reason we love them), but it's that weirdness and funniness, when wedded to some killer songwriting and some seriously bad ass musicianship (courtesy of members of Isis, Converge, Cave In, Zozobra, etc.) that makes these guys so utterly ruling. And to a degree, the freedom of not taking your band all that seriously definitely makes it more likely that you'll have fun, do whatever the fuck you want, and in the process come up with some mind melting, ear drum shredding shit.
But it's been more than 8 years since the last OMG record, so the question is, getting these guys back together again, after all that time, everyone older and wiser, and maybe, heaven forbid, returning to OMG as a proper band, do these musical representatives of the Simian Alien Defense League still got it in them? Thankfully the answer seems to be yes. The sound maybe a bit more modern, but not that far removed from the last OMG missive, starting off with a long stretch of rumbling drones, before some brittle blackened riffage ushers in some crushing downtuned bombast, howled vox, pounding drums, the whole thing wreathed in what sounds like a guitar that keeps shorting out, glitchy and constantly dropping out, which only gives the proceedings a bit of a Faxed Head vibe, which is NEVER a bad thing. The sound shifts to some churning chug, before splintering into a starfield of prismatic effects, processed vox and all manner of blurred sonic shimmer. And we're only about ten minutes in!
And so it goes, the heavy parts utterly crushing, the melodic parts crazy catchy, sounding a bit like Torche, that sort of hook heavy sludge pop, and the sounds and songs constantly seeming to malfunction, or implode, or buckle, or crumble, guitars become sheets of static, drums stumble and invert, guitars slip into backwards swoops, low end rumbles thrum and shimmer beneath twangy clean guitars, only to be buried beneath an avalanche of almost symphonic heaviness, only to constantly slip into a grind metal stutter, there's even a gothy steel string acoustic apocalyptic folk jam, that is actually pretty great, and it too rife with all sort of fucked and fractured sounds and production. And finally the record finishes off with the 14 minute "Shuddering Earth", which opens with a blast of super melodic math metal, before slipping into some dark dolorous drift, tons of space, streaked with static, and anguished vox, gradually building to a Harvey Milk like sludgedoom ballad, all about to crack vocals, churning chug, and woozy melodies, but even then, we're only halfway through. A field of minimal crackle/static turns into a sheet of near Merzbow electronic noise, the sounds gradually intensifying, before unexpectedly transforming into a bit of hazy, shoegazy, noise drenched prettiness, that ends in a gorgeous squall of psychedelic high end skree. Fuck yeah! Here's hoping this is not just a one off reunion, cuz even after all these years, we still sorta find ourselves digging OMG more than any of the members' other bands. WAY recommended for sure, and essential listening by order of the Simian Alien Defense League!
The impressive Spectrum Spools imprint has been churning out a fantastic array of progressive electronics both modern and vintage, tracing a similar aesthetic thread regardless of time-period. We have John Elliott to thank for all of this expert sound selection. In years past, he might have been best known for his membership in the brilliant kosmische trio Emeralds, but that project has inexplicably been dormant since their 2010 masterpiece Does It Look Like I'm Here. For the previous 18 releases on Spectrum Spools, Elliott himself has been conspicuously absent from his own curatorial vision for the label. That is, until now. Outer Space was once a solo moniker for Elliott to work out various synthmusik permutations that might have detoured from the Emeralds general vibe. Sometimes that detour has been pretty radical (the glorping velocity of an eponymous album on Arbor), others less so (the sprawling zoner trax of Lightyear Demonstrations); and here, Elliott is proudly bellowing "EMERALDS!" in the synth arpeggiation and nebula extrapolation of Akashic Record. Elliott has also roped in a few like-minded types under the Outer Space banner, including Drew McDowell (a former satellite member of Coil!), Philip Whiteside, and Jeff Hatfield. While much of the album tends towards the kirlian glow of the Schulze / Schnitzler axis, the dark-minded chords and arpeggiations found on "October 27, 1989: Bay Village, Ohio" is much more indebted to the Carpenter / Goblin models of '80s horror soundtrack design. This date and place refers to the kidnapping and subsequent murder of a 10-year old girl in Elliott's hometown, warranting the much more bleak vibe of the Outer Space sound. The album's finale "February 8th, 1990: Ashland, Ohio" refers to the time and place that girl's body was later found. Throughout the album, Elliott and crew are in fine form, making this pretty much required listening, especially for those of you who who were smitten by that aforementioned Emeralds record Does It Look Like I'm Here.
Latest chunk of murky sonic misery from this Oklahoma one man ultradoom outfit, and while many of the releases on Black Horizons would most definitely qualify as doomy, calling PoM a 'doom metal' band might not seem like a good fit, as this is not any doom metal band, PoM's weirdly distinctive sounds is more murky creepy crawl that churning crush, the guitars are blurred muddied thrums, the drums a weirdly programmed beat that sounds like it might be more at home on a Scorn record. The vocals slipping from distant demonic howl, to haunting croon. The sound rife with strange buried samples, streaks of feedback, spidery minor key melodies, the sound, a lurching tarpit creep, a little bit skittery, an electro-doom ballad, abject and miserable, but strangely motorik and mesmerizing, and just blurred and droney enough to be tranced out and near meditative.
The B side even moreso, a strange landscape of glitchy processed low end, all murky throb and smeared crumbling bass, melting and oozing, the drums a barely audible pulse way down in the mix. It's like a weird home brewed take on Skepticism, as if you were listening to them play in the house next door, the sounds leaking through the walls, losing all definition, and instead, transformed into a strange series of impressionistic pulsations, and rib cage rattling throbs, beneath some harsh vokills, and a shimmery patina of high end skree, but again, all melted down into one oozing viscous blackdronedirge mass.
Like all Black Horizons releases, the packaging is incredible. The tape features a silver metallic label and along with a printed insert on green metallic paper, is housed in a thick obi-style sleeve, which in turn is wrapped in a black cloth patch, everything them wrapped in a silkscreened silver on green metallic O-card. And of course, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
A deep thrumming drone announces the beginning of William Hutson aka Rale's obliquely titled album I Sit By The Window And Watch Walls And Ceilings. Maybe a reference to Alvin Lucier? Maybe a reference to "I Was No Longer His Dominant" by Nurse With Wound during particularly choice NWW period in the early '80s? There is a conceptual and composition rigor to this album that is considerably stronger than on Hutson's previous recordings, as he's incorporating far more acousmatic and electro-acoustic strategies to accompany the sinister post-noise synthdrone which he mastered earlier on. While the album sports seven tracks, they all blend together into a seamless 51 minute piece marked by passages of distended minimalism, magnetic crackle, spluttering tape noise, and more than a few moments of buried melody dialed into the haunted melodicism of Tim Hecker at his most ephemeral. "Golden Hydra Chokers" snatches transient radiowaves through an ill-advised chain of effects pedals whose crumbling drones lead into the aeronautical soaring of the aptly named "Swimming Beside The Plane" with its unstable tone-float ambience. "Abnatural Burnings" accelerates through a series of tape decks and microcassette recorders spinning wildly to the point of collapse, pocked with bursts of erratic tape noise that terminate in a smoldering, ominous hum which opens up into a dour powerdrone from Hutson's flanging synths that undulates deeper and deeper toward the album's conclusion. Excellent work!
The proto-metal lovin' legions who read the AQ list should be quite pleased with this reissue - take a trip down this particular Road and it's heavy riffing all the way, early '70s style! A power trio put together by former Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding in 1972, Road only made this one record for a rock-oriented Motown sub-label (the eco-friendly Natural Resources) before they broke up, and it quickly became lost to the mists of time, though we'd have thought Hendrix fans, if they'd heard it, would have been chuffed... anyone who likes stoned hard psych, with loads of wah wah wailing will dig this, it's total hippie heaviness (well, "I'm Going Down The Country" isn't so heavy, it's an acoustic jam, natch). There's some sixties sike-pop to it as well. But tracks like "Mushroom Man" and "Spaceship Earth" are spaced out and heavy all right, these three long hairs dishing out quite the din, with the 9+ minute album closer, title track "Road" gettin' almost DOOMY riff-wise.
Certainly deserving of recognition in the proto-metal realm, Road goes with Toad, Cactus, Moses, Tiger B. Smith, etc., and is probably the best thing that Redding did post-Hendrix, though we haven't heard his whole discography, to be sure. But it beats Fat Mattress, in volume and heft for sure, despite that earlier outfit's name (the drummer here was also in Fat Mattress, by the way, while the guitarist hailed from Rare Earth).
This is one of several new reissues from the new Relics label (Churchills, Aguaturbia are some other, more internationally-oriented titles that just came out, we'll be listing soon too). Nice to have, though the booklet's a bit skimpy, the cover reproduction looks kinda washed out and blurry. It does include something in the way of liner notes, though, from which we learn that Redding fell down some stairs at Frank Zappa's place prior to the formation of Road. Hmm, that almost sounds like the description of a band, but not this one! Thankfully he recovered from the accident and added Road to the list of awesome proto-metal obscurities.
Sort of seemed inevitable that these guys would get together, two local lo-fi garage pop masters, both of whom have gotten much love from aQ, and both of whom have surprisingly similar styles, collaborating on a set of songs, that ultimately manage to sound like they could have been proper records from either. No distinct separation between tracks, no huge stylistic shifts, instead, a meeting of the minds that manages to be both impossibly hooky and fuzzy and catchy, but also as weird and twisted as anything either of them have done on their own. Lots of kick ass axework, wild psychedelic leads and dense squalls of tangled freakout, over all manner of jangle and crunch, the vocals doused in reverb and appropriately washed out and yelpy, the drums simple and spare, the songs slipping easily from druggy psychedelic jangle pop to crunchy noisy garage punk raveups, to full on skiffle-y sixties psych-pop to twisted echo drenched garage rock dirges and some head spinningly experimental garage rock space jams, like "Scissor People", which might be THEE jam here, beginning with a little bit of birdsong, before launching into some jangly crunch, another blast of garage-y poppiness, until things go totally crazy about halfway through, the song suddenly a patchwork of alternate takes and different productions, as if multiple versions of the song were playing simultaneously, and someone began to flip between the various channels, the sounds dramatically different, even the tempos, and then coming out of it into a sort of motorik psych-kraut groove, wreathed in killer leads, and thick swaths of guitarnoise, it's the sort of jam most bands would have stretched out for ages, but these guys cram into a succinct 3:31.
We have to admit, that on first listen, mostly heard in the shop in little chunks, didn't fully sell us, but once we strapped on some headphones, this collab definitely revealed itself as being something sort of next level, and blossomed into a pretty fantastic(al) psychedelic garage pop trip out that we've had on pretty heavy rotation ever since.
Listen on: Deezer
It's been awhile since we heard from Austin based one man band Silent Land Time Machine, not that Jon Roberts hasn't been busy. He runs his own Indian Queen imprint as well as co-running the fantastic tape label, Holodeck (from which we've reviewed releases by Thousand Foot Whale Claw, Smokey Emery and the other band Roberts does times with, the awesome kraut-psych drone outfit, Lumens). His debut, & Hope Still on Time-Lag, felt like a host of musicians in a full-on psychedelic Henry Flynt whirlwind, but all instruments were deftly played by Roberts himself. Here on this six song vinyl ep, he gives his compositions more space. With treated violin as his primary instrument, he carefully crafts beautifully layered psych-folk dirges that sound as if they were transmitted from some far-off place and time. Billows of static over looping and cascading filigrees of melody, murky percussive rhythms, and field recordings add to the songs' haunting remote quality. With harmonium and parlor piano on a song like "An Own To One's Room", it feels like some old west paean to days gone by. The long title, I Am No Longer Alone With Myself and Can Only Artificially Recall the Scary and Beautiful Feeling of Solitude, is a quote from Carl Jung, and it aptly describes not only the overall feel of the recording, but also the mysteriously romantic notion of how experience is shaped by continuous yet selective entanglements with the memories of our past. On 180g clear vinyl. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Highly Recommended!
Another beautifully austere letterpress design housing another beautifully austere set of recordings of found sounds by way of Winds Measures Recordings. This album was the result of a performance at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn a few years back in which these five artists consecutively mixed unprocessed environmental recordings. The whole set is pocked with silences and quiet moments of sonic inactivity, working compositionally in sync with the latter day / lowercase acolytes of Morton Feldman (e.g. Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden, etc.), but also speaks to the growing lack of quietude in the 21st century society. Scott Smallwood is a sound artist who worked with Pauline Oliveros in the past and had a fantastic, if under appreciated disc of desert wind recordings released on Deep Listening about a decade ago. His field recordings here focus on aquatic details and rippling textures, that deftly cut to the resonance from wind chimes and back to those watery sounds. In a terse piece of text that accompanies the disc, Smallwood speaks of the unwanted / unexpected / hidden sounds that blur the lines between the natural and man-made sound ecologies. One has to wonder if those bells would qualify as an "unwanted" intrusion for Smallwood as he tried to situate his microphones near an alpine stream, and as such, would those seemingly innocuous sounds bemoan an urban interlocution with the natural soundscape. Sawako's bizarrely reflective echoings of disembodied human speech seem completely unnatural, but we'll assume that her contribution held true to the modus operandi of unprocessed sources. Church bells introduce the field recordings of Seth Cluett, who transitions towards a series of small tactile cracks and thunderous scrunches from contact microphone recordings, feeling like a hyper-amplified listen into the crevices of a teeming colony of ants. Ben Owen's wooden clunking events transition perfectly out of Cluett's sounds, again focusing on the amplification of the minuscule through the contact microphone. Civyiu Kkliu completes the album with a humming drone from an unknown electrostatic source, crafting a sustained minimalist howl akin to his sporadic collaborator Toshiya Tsunoda, rounding out a wonderfully introspective record of pure sound. Limited to a mere 300 copies!
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
We recently relisted the first three classic Blue Oyster Cult albums, as part of a special $5 cd sale one of the majors currently has going. Well here's another great $5 bargain, from one of BOC's occasional outside lyricists, a lady by the name of Patti Smith� Radio Ethiopia was her second album, from 1976, following the previous year's Horses, and is simply a great, keen edged rock record from this pioneering poetic female rock n' roll hall of famer (and her Group). The CBGB's brewed art-punk here is both experimental and hard rocking, replete with wild, weird layering of Patti's dynamic vocals, some downer reggae-inflected grooves, and freaky jamming noiserock invocations (the ten minute title track). You can detect a VU influence, and speaking of influences (going the other way), we were surprised to realize moments here were reminding us of Oxbow! Sonic Youth too, but that's less of a shock.
Remastered, includes previously unreleased bonus track "Chicklets".
Contains six tracks of the 30 from the 2cd anthology The Lizard Years. Gatefold, limited to 500 copies for the world.
Contains eleven tracks of the 30 from the 2cd anthology The Lizard Years. Gatefold, limited to 500 copies for the world.
The story goes that The Sound *should* have been huge - as big as any number of successful post-punk outfits like The Cure or The Fall or Echo & The Bunnymen - but for reasons seem to baffle most everybody, they didn't find that success. Frontman Adrian Borland cut his teeth in the 1976 punk frenzy in a project called the Outsiders; but grew dissatisfied with the amphetamine trad-rock that punk was becoming. The Sound formed around Borland's increasingly complicated songwriting, following a similar art-punk route that Howard DeVoto took after leaving The Buzzcocks to start the equally adventurous Magazine.
From The Lions Mouth was The Sound's second album, released originally in 1981; and it displays a big leap toward a more theatrical atmosphere and away from the jittery two-step punk-pop of their debut. By this record, frontman Adrian Borland developed a voice that falls somewhere between a couple of Ians - Ian McCulloch's Scott Walker croon in Echo & The Bunnymen and Ian Astbury's snakebit yelp then of Southern Death Cult. From The Lions Mouth also benefits from the lush, layered production of Hugh Jones. The Sound maps out much longer, tracks that soar, billow, and collapse with more aplomb than The Chameleons, Comsat Angels, or Cripsy Ambulance, exemplified by the album's final number "New Dark Age." It makes for an epic, sprawling album that does raise a lot of questions as to why The Sound didn't propel themselves onto MTV and beyond like so many of their contemporaries.
The story goes that The Sound *should* have been huge - as big as any number of successful post-punk outfits like The Cure or The Fall or Echo & The Bunnymen - but for reasons seem to baffle most everybody, they didn't find that success. Frontman Adrian Borland cut his teeth in the 1976 punk frenzy in a project called the Outsiders; but grew dissatisfied with the amphetamine trad-rock that punk was becoming. The Sound formed around Borland's increasingly complicated songwriting, following a similar art-punk route that Howard DeVoto took after leaving The Buzzcocks to start the equally adventurous Magazine. Jeopardy was the first album for The Sound, whose complex pop-punk was built around Borland's nervously chiming guitars and engaging hooks that paralleled those from The Cure's mod-pop debut Three Imaginary Boys, the theatrical bellowings of Juilan Cope's The Teardrop Explodes, and of course Magazine. This album was recorded roughly, supposedly for less than 800 British pounds; and the urgency (or panic) of getting everything to tape quickly works well with these songs. The Sound embellish a number of their new wave / punk tunes with glammy synthesizer melodies that harken back to Roxy Music and an occasional sax blurt for good measure; but it's Borland who passionately drives this band, one that should have been heard back then... and right now.
Latest blast of garage punk filth from these Detroit weirdos, and at first blush, unlike the noise-rock-space-garage what-the-fuck chaos of their last record, Rise Of The Green Gorilla, this new one, album title Raw Sewage Roq notwithstanding, seems to be a bit more reeled in. It's classic Stooges-y swagger and fuzzed out garage blooze crunch, the opening one-two punch of "Cats On The Moon" and "Bouncing Boobies" sounding more like something you'd hear from some SF garage rock combo, a sound not that far removed from Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin and all the rest, but then once we get to "Monster Walk", things start to go wonderfully wrong, and slip back into something much more warped and tripped out, thick swaths of wah guitar, weird almost Beefheartian vox, not to mention strange bellowed background vox, but somehow, it still manages to be catchy as fuck. Which is pretty much TO's M.O., a wild swirling cacophonous mess, piled atop crazy catchy hooks and indie pop jangle, everything wreathed in super distorted lead guitar shred, and thick buzzing low end bass thrum, often driven by some weirdo vox, just check out the weird punk rock gang vox sing along of "Unhook My Leash", or the almost death metal growls of "Take The Castle", which by the way, might be one of our favorite jams here, a sort of epic near-metal dirge jam, all tribal drumming, and woozy wah wah guitars, the aforementioned vox, all murky and muddy and freaky and psychedelic. And thankfully, the record never lets up, slipping easily from dark almost ballady creeps, to churning garage punk snarl, and from classic fuzz drenched pop to the full bore noise rock garage pound of the title track that finishes things off. So good!
Ulaan Markhor is the latest sonic incarnation of longtime aQ fave Steven R. Smith, who over the years has given us some amazing records, from projects and groups as varied as Thuja, Hala Strana and Ulaan Khol. Ulaan Markhor seems to be a continuation of Ulaan Khol, focusing on the same sort of heady psychedelic kosmiche musik, but where in the past, those sounds would drift and shimmer, smolder and sprawl, here they are given some propulsion, rhythm playing a bigger part than ever, whether it be simple campfire percussion, shakers and hand drums, or full on motorik drumming, the sound of UM is easily the fiercest we've heard from Smith, the opener, "Pharoahs" immediately launches into a sprawling stretch of pulsing propulsive mesmer, the guitars smoldering, the rhythm insistent, the sound super hypnotic, which leads directly into "White Markhor", which lays down loose abstract jazzy drumming, and wraps it in dense clouds of distorted buzz and swirling psychedelic shimmer, the track gradually building to an almost Sunroof!-like ur-drone, before launching into "100 Birds" which is full on psychedelic rock, a loping stripped down groove, slithery sinewy bassline, and chugging hypnorock riffage.
And so it goes, the whole record a killer collection of dark drone-flecked psych-kraut, which Smith deftly fashions into all manner of variants, from the majestic "Half Ricochet", with what sounds like a horn section, but could just be processed guitars, and whirring organs, to tripped out lo fi hippy jam of "Kites", and from the dense almost shoegazy laid back psych rock bliss out of "Hand In Circles" to the 6 + minute closer "Dancing", a sprawling, slow building, almost post rock sounding psychedelic coda, all lush chordal whir and simple spare drumming beneath thick swirling clouds of psych guitar shimmer and smoldering buzz. Awesome.
Those genre-defying former black metallers (a long long time ago, now!) Ulver return, with an unusual even for them detour into all-covers territory! Specifically, a collection of (mostly) obscure sixties psych faves, as it says on the cover, "lost & found from the Age of Aquarius".
They do 16 such nuggets, all moody, kaleidoscopic treats originally recorded by the following artists: The Pretty Things, The Byrds, Bonniwell's Music Machine, Chocolate Watchband, Jefferson Airplane, Gandalf, The Electric Prunes, 13th Floor Elevators, Troggs, Left Banke, Beau Brummels, Common People, Music Emporium, Curt Boettcher, Les Fleur De Lys, and The United States Of America.
And they do them well. Not totally straight, but not black metal versions either (which, really, might have been even more interesting!). No, this is a respectful tribute, Ulver emulating the originals fairly accurately, but boosted with some modern prog rock power & polish, presumably with the mission of introducing 'em to a new audience, though we'd venture to guess that folks who listen to Ulver these days already have pretty wide ranging musical tastes...
Comes in nice hardback digibook packaging, though we don't know if the use of the iconic napalmed naked Vietnamese children running in the street photo is in such great taste, though it makes sense with the title of course... Ulver definitely demonstrates good taste in their musical selections here, however! We were especially stoked to see the Gandalf pick. It's all great stuff, Ulver's versions reminding us a little bit of another Norwegian fave of ours (also with some black metal connections), Lars Pedersen's When, who also digs the '60s sikepop.
It seems like in every Uton review, we inevitably mention both that they are mysterious, and that we don't get nearly enough music from them. And once again, it's been a while since we've heard from these mysterious Finnish forest freaks, who definitely rank way up their in our Finnish music pantheon, and the fact that their record seem to be rare occasions only makes us treasure them more.
This latest was in fact recorded two years ago, on a 4 track using only headphones as speakers ("no other speakers were used during recordings and mixing of this record", the liner notes proudly explain). It's also suggested that we "listen near midnight in a dark room (or with minimal light)" which is always good advice when it comes to Uton, whose music is haunting and ritualistic, and most definitely evokes some sort of nocturnal gathering, especially here, where processed voices chant over fluttering flutes and minimal percussion. Swirling squelchy effects drift in fields of deep sonorous rumbles and whirs, manufactured field recordings surround layers of malfunctioning synths, and dreamy melodic cacophonies, and lush swirling swaths of deep low end, this new record darkly restrained, meditative and hypnotic, heavy on the vocal driven drones and subterranean shimmer, with some almost throat singing woven into the woozy whirling thrum, everything driven by murky pulses and buried rhythms, might be the darkest, dreamiest Uton yet, and as always, WAY recommended. LIMITED TO 275 COPIES!!
New from Sublime Frequencies comes this lp reissue of an out of print cd called Eat The Dream: Moroccan Reveries, chronicling a trip to Morocco undertaken by Tucker Martine, who, as people tend to do, spent much of his time there recording local musicians, the trip culminating in a meeting with legendary Gnawa music master Maallem Boubker Ghania, who arranged for a series of recording sessions in his home! This compilation gathers up some of those recordings, as well as a handful of other recording including various street performers, a wedding reception, snake charmers and more!
Gnawa is a mystical brotherhood whose ancestors who migrated to North Africa centuries ago, and whose music is a blend of Islamic and African influences, that music tranced out and spiritual, traditionally played on a three string lute called a guimbri, and metal clappers called krakebs for percussion. It's a very distinctive sound, and can be both wild and celebratory, and haunting and stirring, it's a music that is in fact fairly varied, from dark, dolorous melodies played just on just the guimbri, a sort of melancholic African folk, to full on chaotic percussion heavy freakouts, augmented by a saz like horn, handclaps, call and response vocals, the recordings here especially pleasing to our ears as the surrounding sounds are often as present as the music itself, cars whizzing by, children playing, people shouting and talking, the music perfectly at home in the bustling sounds around it, mesmerizing and fantastic, as most Sublime Frequencies tend to be.
Packaged in an old school heavy tip-on style sleeve, with a printed insert featuring photos and liner notes by Martine.
Patrick McGinley's Framework radio show has been on the air for well over a decade now, sporting the tag line of "Phonography, field recordings, the art of sound hunting. Open your ears and listen." He began Framework through the seminal London-based Resonance FM, gradually expanding his scope with stations licensing the series around the globe. In support of these productions, McGinley (who also records under the moniker Murmer, fyi...) started a small cd-r imprint whose releases would only be available to the donors supporting Framework; but he's made one very kind exception to this, appointing aQuarius as his sole retail outlet.
This is the second in the ongoing series of the semi-regular Framework Seasonal publications, featuring a fantastic array of sound artists using field recordings in composition. Most of the artists featured are making their aQ debuts, although we are well acquainted with the work of the aktionist performance artist Dave Phillips of the Schimpfluch Gruppe and the industrial clamor of Australian engineer Camilla Hannan. Phillips's piece, being a field recording, is not the overt aggression one would find in his bloodcurdling performances or his diabolical sound designs; but certainly holds true to his abject agenda. He managed to capture the sound of a very drugged out transvestite shrieking into the night sky, punctuated by metallic clanks presumably from Phillips banging on the rails of a stairwell. Whether the transvestite was responding to Phillips sporadic percussive klank or not is unknown, but it does make for a very strange, and very unsettling duet. The Lithuanian sound artist Sala constructs an equally creepy track called "Arboreal Burial" that draws inspiration from a dream he had about a group of trees which bid farewell to their fallen brothers and sisters by sending them down to the river. The field recordings of creaking trees and deep resonant windscapes amass into churning thickets of acoustic noise. Very unsettling. Situated next to Sala's mobile tree rituals, a sense of dread rubs off on James Wyness' "6 Listening Environments," a collection of rustic scrapes and springtime weather events from the English countryside. Both Camilla Hannan and Aymeric De Tapol draw from the ultrasound and thrumming resonance of ship engines, with vastly different results. The former focuses on the wheezing repetition of the chugging pistons; where the latter collects the massive drones diffused through large bodies of water. There's all of this plus tracks from JD Zazie, Anton Mobin, Pali Meursault, and Lass-Marc Reik. Another brilliant collection from Framework!
The second volume in local label Secret Seven's SF underground rock primer lp series, and like the first, it's jam packed with tons of aQ faves, including the Ty Segall Band (whose recent Slaughterhouse album we made our Record Of the Week), Tim Cohen of the Fresh & Only's and Magic Trick, Wymond Miles also from the Fresh & Only's, Paula Frazier of the late great Tarnation, Sonny & The Sunsets, Hannah from Grass Widow, Kelly Stoltz, the Papercuts, Vetiver, as well as a few new to us names including Bad Backs and Lucky Eyes. And while there are no huge sonic surprises here, that's not what this series is all about, it's either an introduction to a thriving scene for the uninitiated, or a killer mixtape of exclusive tracks from a who's who of SF indie rock combos.
And again, like the first volume, plenty of gems to be found, Vetiver's "Any And All" might be one of our favorites from them yet, sounding like some lost Kinks B side, all lilting jangle and twang pop chorus, Ty Segall offers up a bruising guitar heavy chunk of garage pop crunch. Papercuts deliver some hazy washed out slowcore blissiness, Hannah from Grass Widow offers up one of the best tracks here, a heady, home brewed bit of reverby slo-mo dream pop balladry, all multi-tracked vocals, and lush layered lo-fi loveliness. Bad Backs combine organ drive garage rock fuzz pop with classic power pop songsmithery that definitely has us wanting to hear more (which is not surprising once we'd discovered BB features Andrew from SF pop punk heroes Ovens!), and Lucky Eyes too are a nice surprise, their track a strange harmony vocal-ed dirge pop creep.
And there's more more more more, and like all good comps, will have you scrambling to pick up anything and everything you don't have already by all of these artists! Packaged in a swank full color sleeve with a printed insert.
Second archival release (the first one sold out before we could get enough to list) from this legendary underground New Zealand rock combo, whose name is most likely familiar to only the most NZ obsessed, but a list of the bands whose members got their start in Vacuum, should definitely get your attention: Pin Group, Terminals, Scorched Earth Policy, Bilders, etc. This was WAY pre-Flying Nun, these tracks culled from late seventies cassettes, but it's easy to hear the sound that would eventually help define a sound that we (and much of the rest of the world) would grow to love. The Christchurch sound started here, and it sounds as good now as it ever did, especially considering how many current bands, whether knowingly or not, continue to borrow and steal from the early NZ days.
The first track "Walking Slow" is a scorcher, murky and lo-fi but somehow still jangly and lush, a droned out jangle pop that manages to take the sounds of the Velvets and make it their own, super catchy, but also sort of cyclical and mesmerizingly repetitive, an early instance of the 'hypnorock' we love so much. "Born & Bled" is even murkier, with drums that sound more like a janky drum machined, the riffage definitely looped sounding, the vox here anguished, the sound more damaged, and way more lo-fi, bordering on experimental, a darkly gloomy pop that definitely foreshadows much of the current crop of gloom poppers.
The flipside is all organ driven drone rock bliss, mumbled vox buried beneath crashing waves of jangle and buzz, churning chords and sixties style drum thump, finishing off with a hooky slab of slithery garage pop stomp rife with crooned vox, the sound blown out, and gloriously distorted.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Pedestrian Deposit and Emaciator are two projects that the Los Angeles noise artist Jon Borges steered toward the electro-acoustic, the drone, and even the beautiful. This was especially true for the last two Pedestrian Deposit albums Kithless and East Fork North Fork, which found Borges' emphathic electronics dialed into the chilling violin from Borges' partner Shannon Kennedy. But with Vasculae's Cultural Primitivism, Borges is all violence, all punishment, all noise. Fifty minutes of glass-gargling distortion, headrinsing overload, and downright sonic obliteration that harkens to the pre-digital era of Merzbow and the feral noise of Matthew Bower's Total. While Borges posits this album as "full circle" to his beginnings, he doesn't slump back into wall-of-noise ethos of his teen years, as he's clearly learned a thing or two about the dynamics of noise and is very much attuned to the textures that bristle and crackle through his torrents of sound. It's great to hear Borges return to the noise, somewhat like hearing those blistering noise records that Kevin Drumm cranked out after his isolationist albums Imperial Distortion and Imperial Horizon. That said, certainly not for the faint of heart, or sensitive of ear!
These Iowa psychpop-kraudrone-WTFwave weirdos return with their second full length for De Stijl, the group now expanded from a duo to a trio, with a sound that while still weird, continues to move further away from the twisted noiseness of the early releases, toward something distinctly more melodic and much more accessible. Mixing their psych-kraut tendencies with something that sounds much more like some lost new wave /cold wave artifact, due in no small part to the deep dramatic crooned vox of frontman Shawn Reed, he of the late great Raccoo-oo-oon, but the band get all wave-y too, weaving a lush twisted backdrop of synth buzz, and driving drums, the bass thick and fuzzy and sinewy, the sound rife with playful almost carnivalesque melodies, the sound often blossoming into sun dappled prismatic clouds of swirling synth shimmer, but just as often locking into a tranced out hypnorock mesmer, if these guys were an instrumental band, they'd definitely be a whole different beast, some sort of heady, druggy psych-kraut-prog combo that would fall more in line with groups like Cave, Lumerians, Gnod and the like, cuz the instrumental stretches here get downright blissy and trancey and dreamily psychedelic, the vocals though give it a distinctly goth-pop cast, adding some Suicide and Spacemen 3 and Interpol to Wet Hair's sonic equation, and transforming this into something much weirder, and in its own twisted way, much cooler.
NOW AVAILABLE AS A DOUBLE LP!!
Latest release from Tim Presley, aka one man lo-fi garage rock / noise pop band White Fence, a sprawling two volume collection of jams, culled from supposedly over 80 tracks, and this collection is a doozy, like past WF records, a collection of super varied pop weirdness, from super catchy indie jangle, to super fuzzy Kinks worship, from damaged zoner psych, to in the red garage punk swagger, and pretty much every stop in between. We're tempted to compare this to the Sopors, whose 7" we reviewed last list, another rad blast of weird pop from a twisted loner genius, and while the Sopors record is seriously damaged and on the verge of collapse, the sounds here are significantly more polished, but only some of the time.
The first volume is the poppier of the two, just check out the opening one-two punch, "Swagger Vets And Double Moon", with its programmed drums, psychedelic leads, reverbed vocals, fuzzed out guitar, shuffly rhythm, and then "Long White Curtain", which is total British Invasion worship, with a seriously strange lo-fi mix, the leads practically bursting from the speaker, while the rest of the sounds are dialed way back. And so it goes, wherever Presley's twisted sensibilities take him, there's the lilting dreamy fuzzy twee pop of "Do You Know Ida Know", which sounds almost like Ween, with its weird processed vox, or the fuzzy organ driven shuffle pop of "It Will Never Be", that locks into a hazy krautpsych loop and warbled and warps, while spidery guitars coil themselves around that main groove, or "Hey! Roman Nose", which is total lo-fi bedroom pop, with a little bit of that Purling Hiss style seventies power pop mixed in, and the first volume finishes off with "Daily Pique" a fuzzy psychedelic groove with weird vocals, and an even weirder production.
The second volume seems decidedly weirder, although it starts off with a dreamy bit of synth driven balladry, that sounds weirdly like the Frogs, which is most definitely not a bad thing, "She Relief" wraps some garage pop in squiggly leads and all sorts of piano pound and psychedelic freakout, before "I'd Sing" brings things back down, unfurling as a little stretch of psych guitar laced bedroom pop murk.
Things do definitely become more and more unhinged, lots of weird synths, and strange experimental song structures, noise guitar freakouts, even the poppiest jams are all twisted up, doused in effects, tangled up into weird arrangements, but somehow it suits them, and we find ourselves digging the second volume as much as the first, if not more.
Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin and John Dwyer might be getting most of the love (rightfully so), but folks who like their garage rock and indie pop a bit more fucked up and fractured, twisted and confusional, White Fence might just be your cup of spiked tea.
Holland's Roadburn festival has become THEE ultimate heavy rock music festival, be it doom, sludge, psychedelia, space rock, whatever, the fest consistently offering the sorts of lineups most of us could only dream about, super hyped new bands, legendary older bands, total unknowns, next big things, nobody curates festivals like these guys, and it definitely shows, every year, selling out sooner, and luring folks from all over the world to fly over to take it all in (heck, our own Allan even went a couple years ago!). Roadburn also decided a while back to chronicle some of these performances and release them, so the rest of us sorry suckers unable to make the journey could get a little taste of what it is we've been missing.
Which brings us to this, a document of last year's Roadburn, in particular, a performance by aQ faves, Brooklyn heavy psych rockers White Hills, who definitely KILL it, with one of the heaviest sets we've heard from them. In fact, the disc opens with the band in full on heavy riff mode, almost like someone just pushed record mid-set, our imaginations have us picturing opening 8+ minute blast "Three Quarters" just the last chunk of an hours-long mega blown out super psych jam. Regardless, the band churn and roil, the riffs distorted and in-the-red, the drums wild and chaotic, of course everything wreathed in thick swirls of effects, the vox gruff and bellowed, definitely giving the sound some serious rock heft. "Under Skin Or By Name", sees the band slipping back into some more meditative drifty krautpsych territory, but within a few minutes the band have exploded again, with wild endless leads, lumbering motorik grooves, total drugged out heavy psych bliss of the highest order.
And so it goes, the band never letting up, the songs sprawling, slipping from Stooges-y stomp, to Hawkwind like druggy drift, to hazy psychedelic shimmer, to near Monster Magnet like metallic chug, the bass groovy and melodic, those drums pounding fiercely, courtesy of occasional WH skinsman Lee Hinshaw, bassist Ego Sensation even offers up some vocals on one track which gives it a cool sort of True Widow vibe, the band unfurling epic expanses of druggy FX heavy drift woven into more crushing space-metal riffery, finally finishing off with a killer version of the title track from their most recent full length "Hp-1", which if anything takes the original and makes it even more epic and heavy and gloriously spaced out.
Sweet packaging too, full color six panel digipak with some killer psychedelic live shots of the band in action at Roadburn.
Killer split 7" from Aussie heavies Whitehorse, and Floridian thrashers Hot Graves. Whitehorse offer up another skull caving slab of extreme heaviness, churning, lumbering, groovy and sludgey, with some cool harmonized melodies offsetting the otherwise downtuned crush. The vocals are a demonic gurgle buried in the mix, occasionally exploding into banshee like howls, the sound creeping one second, swinging and Sabbathy the next, a killer jam, and surprisingly melodic/catchy.
Hot Graves are new to us, and a quick glance online seemed to have them pegged as sounding like Swedish styled death metal, but to these ears, at least on this split, they sound way more old school thrashy metal, reminding us quite a bit of aQ faves Speedwolf. Loping, galloping metallic punk (or punky metal?), all classic metal chug, shredding leads, raspy throat shredding bellows, raw and fucking fierce, with wicked classic harmony guitar leads, and a cool second half, that slips into a mosh worthy breakdown with still MORE classic metal riffing. Definitely want to hear more...
Probably limited, super swank silkscreened covers, and a printed heavy cardstock insert.
As promised last list, here's the second of the two volumes of collected wah-wah overload and heavy fuzz freakout from this legendary underground UK hard psych power trio, circa 1969-1972, who were doomy and proto-metallic, but also fairly melodic and bluesy and sixties-sounding (they do a version of Jimi's "Voodoo Chile" here, which fits right in).
There's seven more archival Wicked Lady selections here to delight deaf bikers everywhere, ranging from excellently titled opener "I'm A Freak" to the album-ending 22 minute epic "Ship Of Ghosts", each full of heavy fuzzed out chugging guitar to the max.
Imagine a rather darker, more evil sounding Blue Cheer and you'd be close. The nearly 10 minute "Passion" sounds a heck of a lot like something by early Pentagram (or Bedemon), you could almost imagine it's Bobby Liebling singing it. Also there are some lines in the lyrics that go: "Tell me you love me / And I won't throw your grandma on the fire", how nice!
The cd booklet includes lyrics, and liner notes (the same notes as found in vol. 1, The Axeman Cometh, though). And for your information, Guerssen has released this on vinyl as well, though we're still waiting for our copies to arrive.
A holy proto-metal relic here, folks. This is the first of two volumes (vol. 2, modestly titled Psychotic Overkill, we'll review next time) collecting the recorded output circa 1969-1972 of this heavy riffing underground UK unit, well known in the annals of hard psych fuzzarama. A classic power trio, featuring Martin Weaver (later of the Dark) on guitar, along with Bob Jefferies on bass and "Mad" Dick Smith on drums, Wicked Lady had a rep for being LOUD and causing violence. No surprise that Wicked Lady's axeman stateth in the liner notes that their fans were either partially deaf people or bikers! Or both!
Their sound was based on the basic British blues rock of the day, a la Cream, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, and so forth, with melodic vocals and a generally sad vibe, their songs sometimes relatively tame hippie popsike seeming - at first - before Weaver would unleash the hellish wah wah fuzz freakouts that whipped those poor deafened bikers into such a state.
Groovy, lumbering, loping, amped up and drugged out, Wicked Lady is the real deal, dated to us now, perhaps, but quite charming. You can't argue, ferinstance, with how after a gentle, folky beginning, the track "War Cloud" morphs from melodic to martial, a jackbooted march with wild soloing o'er top, kinda as if Trad Gras Och Stenar went (proto-)metal� such fuzz guitar jamming excess is to be found throughout, like Wicked Lady were the Earthless of their day.
The eight tracks found here (DIY recorded in the band's dingy rehearsal space, 'cuz they were about playing live, not making records, but wanted to remember how the songs went!) are all gonna be of interest to those into the likes of Randy Holden's Population II, High Tide, Stray, '70s Pentagram, Iron Claw, T2, Negative Space, and other obscure late sixties / early seventies purveyors of heavy psychedelic riff rock. This is the first time Wicked Lady's music has been legitimately released on cd (and Guerssen has pressed vinyl too, which hopefully we'll have soon), with the participation of Martin Weaver himself, who contributes liner notes, telling the whole Wicked Lady story - and he's got some stories. Though he does dispel the rumor that he broke a window and stole his first guitar - instead, apparently, he built it himself. Full lyrics are also included in the booklet.
As an earlier, bootleg edition of this on the cult Kissing Spell label put it in a back cover blurb: "60 Minutes Of Wah Wah Hell"!
"Beta male" Ariel Pink stares intently at us from this cover of this month's issue of indispensable new music magazine The Wire. Inside, there's also stuff on Estonian disco experimentalist Maria Minerva, Ghanian drummer Buddy Pipp, field recordist Peter Cusak (doing the Invisible Jukebox... what, are they going to play him cracking ice and ask him to identify the lake? We wish!), Austrian composer Peter Ablinger, and more, including a novelist's "epiphany" about the Wu-Tang's vocal collage... Plus the usual news, reviews, charts, etc.!
