A very strange and very musty artifact from the early '90s cassette culture, right before the appetite for such a medium dwindled to absolute zero by the middle of the decade. The mustiness of the industrial tape murk experimentation found on the disc also translates into the mustiness of the artwork, which was deftly fabricated in overloaded excess by Mark Schoenberg of Yeast Culture, with its 12" x 12" oversized sleeve, manilla folder, and cd holder-thing all encrusted with multiple layers of silkscreen, gesso, and acrylic medium. There were three participants in this project, including Eric Blevins (aka A4 / allfours), Frans De Waard (here recording as Kapotte Muziek, although he's also known for too many projects to list), and Tom Cox (aka TAC, not to be confused with an Italian project with a similar acronym). Over three or four years (dates of 1991-1993 are cited with references to earlier experiments as well), numerous tapes were exchanged, but those cassettes seemed to be just one medium in a larger mail-art project which involved Xerox copies of Xerox copies, mangled postcards, and dot-matrix printed letters choked with unwieldy conceptual strategies for further investigation. This exchange was conceived to be an open source to be plundered, vandalized, crosshatched, and recycled, with the seven pieces here being one possible outcome of the whole project. As such, the various tapes got woven into art installations, live performances, and studio renderings, all of which had been re-recorded, re-recycled, and re-reworked. The results of such overlaid recordings end up as a thick industrial din of grey rumblings, interspersed with found object aktionism which aggregate occasionally toward a smashjob / Z'ev territory but mostly stay on slower nocturnal pacing. Of course, all of these events are cut-up, rearranged, interspersed with varispeed ghosts & dubs, choked in tape hiss, and obliterated through overload. The spirit harkens to musique concrete, but without any of the benefits of an arts council grant to make it into an institutional studio. This is as DIY as it gets when it comes to crusty, collage noise. By the time these three are done with everything, it all comes out as a fantastic, subterranean smear of gnarled noise akin to Chop Shop, Small Cruel Party, the aforementioned Yeast Culture, and other obscurant projects of that era. As an art object, too, this is pretty awesome; and limited to 100 copies to boot!
It's been a little while since we've heard from these Belgian weirdos. Their sound, an ever evolving black buzz sludge, having over the years seemingly drifted away from black buzz, to a more Gnaw Their Tongues style abject doom. But on this latest lp, the band explode from note one into a frenzy of wild, loose, spastic black metal buzzing - however, not sounding so much like a black metal band, but more like some weird noise rock / art rock combo doing their best black metal, which might have some folks crying 'poser', but as far as we're concerned it makes for something much more interesting. Just wait a few minutes for the songs to switch gears, the band grinding to a halt, then launching into an almost Shellac like bit of minimal math rock, albeit a bit more grimy and low fidelity. That opening track is 20+ minutes long, so the song goes through quite a few sonic permutations, adding some woozy droney shimmer, some chugging riffy churn, the sound almost more metallic krautrock at times, depressive black metal at others, eventually exploding into another stretch of stumbling flailing buzzing blackness, only to then add strange samples, squalls of psychedelic noise, and a final movement that's broody and slithery and seriously doomy.
The shorter middle tracks fall into more of a noise rock / dirge rock thing, grimey and downtuned, with the second of the two exploding into an almost D-beat pound, the sounds murky and muddy, flitting from loping crunch to punkish swagger, to noisy tangle, but constantly crusty and corrosive.
The final 13 minute jam, a sonic bookend to the epic opener, unfurls as a haunting hushed shimmer, blossoming into a sprawl of abject slo-mo ultra-doom, all tarpit riffs, and glacial drum damage, long tones and droned out melodies, super trancey and hypnotic and HEAVY, eventually splintering into more black blasts, the final blast getting seriously melodic and epic, making it sound like had the song not ended, it would have become some sort of Godspeed black metal blow out. Killer stuff as always. And yeah, SUPER limited.
Altar of Plagues hail from Ireland, not exactly the first place you think of when it comes to atmospheric black metal. But here they are with their full length debut, White Tomb, which finds the band expertly bringing together the epic sweep of groups like Wolves in the Throne Room and Asunder with that style of Isis-informed metallic post rock we all love. Throw in an awesomely guttural black metal rasp, a couple moments of Khanate styled throat abuse, spaced out ambience with cleanly strummed guitars, and an excellent balance of punishing blasts and more lumbering, slowly moving drums, and you've got one hell of an introduction to this previously unknown (to us, anyway) group.
Consisting of two very long movements, "Earth" and "Through The Collapse", made up of two songs each, Altar of Plagues' lyrical agenda, though not printed here, seems to be similar to that of WITTR's brand of spiritually informed conservation, where humankind will vanish under the indifferent and regenerative hoof of Mother Nature. The two songs in the "Earth" suite, "As A Womb" and "As A Furnace" start with a beautiful piece of slowly building depressive guitar ambience before heading into a super heavy black metal jam that does not sound too far removed from the godly Atlanta based group Withered (who, for some reason, we have never reviewed). Things slow down to a cool, spaced out Mogwai-ian moment that links the two songs, as multiple voices combine before ascending once more to a blissful post metal dirge. As this begins to sink in, we are again introduced to heavy, psychedelically informed black metal that suitably brutalizes you before fading off into the distance as layers of treated guitar ambience combine into a whirlwind of buzzing, which is soon overtaken by a sepia-tinged, slightly disquieting outro that immediately segues into the next song suite. "Watchers Restrained" is where things eventually slow to a glacial pace as disturbing, very Alan Dubin-esque vocals spit out line after line of bile while Altar of Plagues lays a foundation that manages to be both super dense and quite spacious. After being pummeled for a bit, the band pull back and the song fades into walls of crumbling decay that bring to mind the cool Cities Last Broadcast album we reviewed a few lists back. Album closer, "Gentian Truth" takes you on one last journey through a melancholy psych metal hinterland, before ending in an atmospheric soundscape quite similar to the way the album began, giving White Tomb an awesome cyclical feel that will undoubtedly bring out more truths with each listen.
Thank the always right-on Profound Lore label for unleashing this mighty beast upon the world, as White Tomb comes as a nice surprise from a group we certainly hope to hear more from in the future.
It makes sense that French psychedelic space rock heavies Aqua Nebula Oscillator would find their way to Tee Pee, it's a pretty perfect fit, and it's about time too, cuz we've been trying to track down records by these folks for ages with very little success! As you may have surmised, Third is indeed ANO's third full length, but for most folks, quite possibly their first exposure to this group's sound, a sound which will be super familiar to fans of the current crop of psych-space wranglers their sound falling closest to the Heads or White Hills we think, a heady concoction equal parts epic shredding extended Hawkwind freakouts and churning riffy Stooges-y swagger. The sound is raw and a little lo-fi, but at the same time, thick and layered and noisy and HEAVY, just check out the opener "Riot", with its creepy minor key intro, that had us imagining Italian occult metallers Death SS or something, but then the band kick in, and it's all woozy and druggy, with wavery guitars, wild octopoidal drumming, killer shredding leads, trippy deep, effected vocals, more spoken than sung, the track slipping into a feverish freaked out blast of pounding heaviness, that could go on forever but winds up after only 4 minutes.
"Turn On" cranks up the 'Stooges' side of their sound, reminding us a bit of Soggy, the rad obscure eighties French band we're pretty obsessed with, although here sort of cranked and super charged, the track exploding into another frenzy of shredding psychedelic freakout, which again, could have stretched out forever, but instead clocks in at two and a half minutes.
Needless to say, fans of shredding, droned out psychedelic space rock heaviness, we might have just found your new favorite band, just tweaked and warped enough to give the sound a seriously whatthefuck vibe, but never veering too far from totally tranced out hypno-rock heavy psych mesmer, the tracks laced with sitar like buzz, weird samples, even weirder vocals, buried melodies and even some hooks here and there, but for the most part, if you're into Acid Mothers Temple, White Hills, The Heads, Monster Magnet, Hawkwind, Mugstar, Great Society Mind Destroyers, Plastic Crimewave Sound, Lumerians, Telescopes and the like, then you need this NOW.
The final two installments in the ongoing campaign to reissue all four records from aQ beloved noise pop heroes Archers Of Loaf. We've previously reviewed their masterpiece debut, Icky Mettle, a record NO indie rocker should be without, and more recently we covered record number two, Vee Vee, that while perpetually in the shadow of Icky Mettle, is nearly as good, and thus about as essential. And now it's time for the last two Archers records, 1996's All The Nations Airports and 1998's swansong White Trash Heroes. While we would never suggest that either of these is as good or as essential as Icky Mettle, or even Vee Vee, we will say, that they hold up pretty damn well alongside those first two.
Most bands mellow with age, but if anything, Archers kept getting weirder and weirder and more obtuse, the hooks less obvious, the songs more gnarled and complicated, the opening one-two punch on All The Nations of "Strangled By The Stereo Wire" and the title track, offer up two short sharp blasts of atonal jangle and wild mathy drumming, tripped out vox and all sorts of tangled and warped melodies, that the band somehow weave into something rocking AND catchy. All The Nations is definitely a grower, but after a few listens, it's pretty irresistible. For us "Scenic Pastures" is the hook that landed us, sounding like an Icky Mettle B-side, all woozy riffage and wiggly melody, jangly and crunchy in equal measure, and crazy catchy to boot, without losing an ounce of off kilter weirdness. The rest of the record is brimming with more classic Archers jams, every one a perfect example of that tweaked mathy take on Pavement-y noise pop that they absolutely made their own, and continues to sound unlike any other bands past or present.
This reissue takes on a handful of singles and B sides (including the awesome "Density"), as well as a whole mess of 4 track demos of all the tracks from the record, as well as a few that never made it past the demo stage, but sound pretty bad ass nonetheless (those are available as downloads with the lp version).
The final two installments in the ongoing campaign to reissue all four records from aQ beloved noise pop heroes Archers Of Loaf. We've previously reviewed their masterpiece debut, Icky Mettle, a record NO indie rocker should be without, and more recently we covered record number two, Vee Vee, that while perpetually in the shadow of Icky Mettle, is nearly as good, and thus about as essential. And now it's time for the last two Archers records, 1996's All The Nations Airports and 1998's swansong White Trash Heroes. While we would never suggest that either of these is as good or as essential as Icky Mettle, or even Vee Vee, we will say, that they hold up pretty damn well alongside those first two.
Most bands mellow with age, but if anything, Archers kept getting weirder and weirder and more obtuse, the hooks less obvious, the songs more gnarled and complicated, culminating in the bands final record, which was a seriously high note to go out on, opening with the instantly catchy, but weirdly brooding "Fashion Bleeds", with a wiry tension, and cool layered droned out chords, not to mention so weird effected guitar leads, sounding a bit like a way more warped and woozy Afghan Whigs weirdly enough. "Dead Red Eyes" is a gorgeous haunting ballad, Archers style, all swirly shimmer, and thick super distorted bass, and a weirdly stylized vocal, before the band get back to rocking with "I.N.S.", replete with funhouse mirror riffs, dense proggy drumming, and a tangled mathy arrangement, again sounding like not all that much had changed since icky Mettle. And of course the real final statement was the nearly 8 minute closer, the title track, epic and majestic, proggy and droney and hauntingly melodic, the perfect end to a nearly perfect four record streak.
The end of Archers was up there with the end of Polvo, for indie/post/math rock heartbreak, but the music lives on, and seriously sounds as ahead of its time now as it did nearly 15 years ago.
The reissue tacks on some awesome rarities, including a killer 1997 fan club single, which is seriously tripped out, as well as a bunch of 4 track demos, and a few unreleased B sides, including a wild and noisy, weirdly stop/start rambunctious rocker called "Whooh!" which is yet another track that pushes all our Icky Mettle buttons (those are all available as downloads with the vinyl version)!
While the Pesanta Urfolk version of this 2009 demo from Arcata avant black metallers Ash Borer went quickly out of print, it has once again been reissued, on a different label this time, Vendetta, and again features some subtly swank packaging, this version housed in a simple plain brown sleeves, with a color printed / debossed AB logo, as well as printed inner sleeves. Presumably it's limited too. Here's a slightly adjusted version of what we had to say about the last vinyl version...
What is it with bands not naming records? We're all for the 'self-titled' record, but when they're ALL self-titled, it gets a little confusing. By record number two or three at least start numbering 'em, fer chrissakes. Anyway, this is another rad reissue of a tape from this West Coast avant black metal horde, that was so limited on its initial release, we never managed to even see a single copy. Originally put out in a run of 150 copies on Psychic Violence, this is our, and quite possibly your first exposure (or maybe second, counting the Pesanta Urfolk version) to this monumental chunk of progressive blackness, opening with a lumbery dirgey doom, that pounds and creeps, beneath anguished wails, before exploding into some of the most intense and emotional black metal we've heard, due in some part we would imagine to the structure and the melody, unlikely for most black metal, in fact, it almost sounds like post rock sped way up and blackened, soaring and hauntingly melodic, majestic and moody, these blasts are separated by still more emotional sonic stretches, midtempo sprawls of soaring guitar trills, and angular math rock riffs, all wreathed in black beneath grim howled vokills, before closing with a blast of frenzied riffage and a final movement of dirgey weirdly melodic doomic plod.
The B side starts off all shimmery synths and smoldering angular guitar melodies, before launching into another stretch of frantic blasting buzz, here alternating between furious blackness, blissed out reverbed psychedelia and churning mathy doom, the record epic and constantly shifting, but woven together into a single epic movement, the final part of which might be the best bit on the record, a slow build blackened post rock, that eventually explodes into a totally epic blowout of blackened Godspeed-style majesty.
The return of these aQ beloved local psychedelic spacelords (and lady), whose sound has always bucked the prevailing modern psych/space convention of sound over song, rooting their sound in proper songs, catchy hooky SONGS, beholden to classic sixties jams and seventies classic rock, hints of Neil Young, the Allman Brothers, the Outlaws, collide with more modern/heavy influences like Monster Magnet and contemporaries like Wooden Shjips and Earthless (whose Isaiah Mitchell guests here), obviously, if you dig stuff like Carlton Melton and White Hills and Sleepy Sun and Moon Duo and The Heads and the Spyrals, odds are you probably already dig these guys too. But if not, they definitely come at their sound from a drastically different direction. On past records we compared them to Monster Magnet and Dinosaur Jr., and mentioned their penchant for Southern style rocking, but if anything, on Manzanita, Assemble seem to have shifted dramatically, fully embracing that Southern rock side, and combining it with a serious seventies classic rock vibe, and conjured up a killer set of songs that sound like they came from right back in the day. Albeit with a more modern production. Otherwise, this could be the band you saw opening for the Allman Brothers at the Fillmore, the same sort of extended jams, the band locked into heady grooves, the bass thick and fuzzy, the drums tight and propulsive, the guitars running the show, from the crunchy riffs to the extended heart-of-the-sun solos, all accompanied by whirring organs, fluttering flutes, laced with plenty of twang, the vocals laid back and croony, the songs subtly catchy, slow burning and smoldering, sometimes shuffling dreamily, other times pounding away in a psych rock frenzy, usually a mix of the two. And this time around the vocals definitely seem to be a focal point, maybe as much as the guitars, with most of the songs displaying some gorgeous lead vocals and even more incredible harmonies, the result a fantastic slab of retro spaced out psychedelic Southern rock that might just be our favorite Assemble record yet.
While the recently resurrected Beach Boys masterpiece, Smile!, was conceived by Brian Wilson as "a Teenage Symphony to God", we always thought that description better described Wilson's first major master stroke, Pet Sounds, an incomparable combination of heartfelt bittersweet emotion and complex pop orchestration. Classic songs like "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)", "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and of course, "God Only Knows" were the first real deliveries of promise set up by game-changer early hits like "In My Room", and "Warmth of The Sun" that showed the band could forge deeper into complicated emotional territory than its goodtimes-beach-fun persona would suggest. Even the two instrumentals, "Let's Go Away for Awhile" and the title track are some of the best rainy day soundtrack material imaginable. An absolutely perfect record, nice to have it back in stock on vinyl!
Second single (we have a few copies of the first, just ask) from this Finnish apocalyptic post punk combo, which features members of Hexvessel, Code, DHG, and sounds a lot poppier than we expected, reminding us a bit of the Holograms (whose full length is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), or like a punkier Interpol, which is not a bad thing at all, the music is murky and washed out, the guitars a buzzy blur, driving drums and cool crooned clean vox, making this sound like some goth pop new wave artifact, doomy and melodic, propulsive and cold wave-y, at times a bit like a gothier post punkier Katatonia, the same sort of super hooky melody but still plenty heavy hybrid, the track "Void Mother" might be our new favorite jam, a seriously hooky and heavy slab of gloom pop that in a perfect world would be a post punk mixtape staple. Super rad. And very limited!
Nigeria's Blo were one of the very first '70s Afro-funk-rock bands we ever encountered, some years ago when their now out of print Phases 1972-1982 compilation came out. And they're one of the best. Their early stuff, from their first two albums Chapter One (1973) and Phase II (1974), is generally more mellow psychedelic rock, sounding super stoned and fuzzed out. But then gradually the funk took over, their grooves got a lot more uptempo and energetic, and on their next couple records later in the '70s, Blo went disco! Which is really cool too. Step Three was of course their third album, from '75, and the tracks on it are definitely meant for getting sweaty, and up close and personal with the opposite sex, on the dancefloor (er, not to imply that same-sex couples wouldn't enjoy this too!). The little cartoon drawings found on this album's artwork, of a guy and a gal with big Afros and bellbottoms, doing a sexy dance, is basically the pictographic owner's instructions for what you're supposed to do with the music on this record. Also both cute and sexy is how the singer talks to a girl about the first time they made out, in the intro to the second song, "Rhythm Of Love".
And although this is infectiously disco-fied, it also rocks, the chicka-chicka funk guitars with a fuzz edge, and plenty of sizzling fat synth all over the place. The JB's had to be a big influence on 'em. Also, despite what we had assumed, NONE of these tracks appeared on that Phases 1972-1982 comp, which for some crazy reason skipped over this album entirely. So it's great to hear 'em now. It makes for quite the party platter to spin, recommended to fans of other recent Afro-funk-disco reissues by The Funkees, Marijata, Edzayawa, the Lijadu Sisters, etc...
Very cool, slightly expensive but fancy import vinyl reissue of this Carpenter classic (and onetime aQ Record Of The Week), from a mysterious UK label who have just started doing a whole series of uber desirable soundtrack reissues on lp. We're always going on about John Carpenter, citing his music as a big influence on a lot of underground bands today, and this is definitely a good example of what we love about his stuff.
Here's what we said about this when we made the cd reish a ROTW back in '05:
Why are we making a soundtrack for a movie from 1983 starring Kurt Russell (who hams it up in a piratical eye-patch) our Record Of The Week, this week? Well, we've got a few reasons... first off, the music is awesome and we love it (good reason right there). Secondly, this cd has been out of print and hard to find for several years now, going for silly sums on eBay, sought after by soundtrack collectors and electronic music fans.
While director John Carpenter is known for making quite a few classic films in the B-grade horror and sci-fi thriller genres (Halloween, The Thing, Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog, They Live etc.), it's perhaps not as well known that he personally composed the soundtrack music to many of his movies, starting with his first flick Dark Star back in 1974. Working out of a home studio with what was technically advanced equipment at the time (machines which would now be considered awesomely vintage), he composed electronic music soundtracks that some might say are even better than the movies themselves. Certainly they're worthy to stand on their own, anyway (just like Goblin's soundtracks for Argento's films). Carpenter's compositions have influenced other musicians, and not just soundtrack writers. Anyone who loved the Zombi album we recommended last year needs to have some John Carpenter in their collection for sure!
And we recommend Escape From New York as being one of his best. Somehow it combines a lot of stuff that we figure a lot of you like: suspenseful Goblinesque darkness, droning old school synths, kitchy Disco Not Disco style NYC '80s groove... Loaded with claustrophobic nervous tension, these tracks make use of taut, minimalistic, hypnotically repetitive rhythms that make us imagine an Electro version of AQ faves Circle. The atmosphere is further enhanced by the inclusion of sound FX from the film and snippets of dialogue - the tough guy banter of Kurt Russell's wiseass anti-hero "Snake" Plissken is priceless, especially due to Russell's constipated Clint Eastwood delivery.
Set in a dystopian, wartorn then-future of 1997, Escape From New York sends "Snake" into the maximum security prison that the island of Manhattan has become to rescue (at pain of death) the President of the United States, who is being held captive there by the city's "inmates" after Air Force One made a particularly poor choice of a place to crash-land! The film also stars the likes of Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasence, and Isaac Hayes, all of 'em capable of chewing the scenery right along with Russell. You definitely don't need to have seen Escape From New York to get a kick out of this soundtrack, but the movie is an enjoyable '80s action thriller worthy of its cult status and listening to this will probably get you to go rent it.
Carpenter composed and performed the score in association with sound designer Alan Howarth, whose home studio (stocked with an ARP Quadra, an ARP Avatar with 16 step sequencer, a Prophet 5 programmable analog synthesizer, and a Linn LM-1 drum machine) was used for the recording. Howarth was further responsible for remixing and remastering the album for the release of this "expanded edition" which first appeared in 2000. It includes several cues originally meant for scenes deleted from the theatrical release of the film, and runs to over 57 minutes in length. 'Bout time it was back in circulation!
This vinyl version includes a poster of its exclusive over art, by Jay 'Iron Jaiden' Shaw, along with liner notes from both Howarth and Shaw. Limited, we only have a few, and might not be able to get more.
Fantastico! Here's an obscure Spanish psych rock reissue that we're so glad that Shadoks finally got their hands on. Get ready for some of the weirdest, most badass fuzzed out garage psych rockin' you have ever heard. Cerebrum, from Madrid, released just two 7" singles on Barcelona's progressive Dimension label, both in 1970. Soon after, they broke up, and never made a full-length album. So then, what's this? Shadoks, in cooperation with original Cerebrum guitarist Javier Esteve, have unearthed a bunch of previously unreleased early Cerebrum recordings by the band, five live-in-the-studio demos from 1969, presented here along with the four cuts from their 45s (one of 'em, title track "Eagle Death", heard for the first time in its full 6 minute 18 second glory, the original single track having been an edit).
That extended version of "Eagle Death", which opens the disc, is pretty wild, on par with Japanese craziness of the era like Food Brain or Brush!?, a schizophrenic garage rave-up of fuzz guitar explosions, distorted underwater-sounding vocals, manic harp blowin' and sudden tempo changes. Every element seemingly going off in its own direction, then slipping back together to sync up with urgent rhythmic umph. And, before it's over, into the midst of all this mayhem some nice classical piano melody weirdly drifts in from someplace else! With the harmonica, this track makes us think of some warped version of something by the Yardbirds or the Count Five - maybe even a track off of Count Five's totally fictional, totally grungy Carburetor Dung album, as imagined by Lester Bangs. Yep, it's gotta be one of the most wacked out psych singles cuts ever� until you hear the NEXT one on here, its B side, the awesomely titled "Read A Book", which juxtaposes some even gnarlier fuzz guitar soloing, with such gentle heartfelt vocals. The songs from their other 45 are equally killer - the percolating, high energy "Times Door" hits hard, and then its flip, "It's So Hard!" could kinda been Cerebrum's take on the sort of thing Cream was doing back then, yer basic blues rock jamming� but� it's just so SICK. Guitarist Esteve never lets up on the stinging fuzz action, delivering the distortion with demented glee.
Those four singles tracks - which could be aQ faves Los Dug Dugs on a bad, bad trip - are reason enough to get this, essential in and of themselves, but the other, previously unreleased material is woozy cool too. Those earlier tracks add swirling, whirling organ (played by one "Perry") to the mix, and are a bit more murky, and maybe also more good-time rollicking and rollin', than the sharper-edged Cerebrum of the singles. Most of 'em are covers, including versions of songs by Moby Grape, Bo Diddley, and Canned Heat - the endless boogie of "One Kind Favor" by the latter is probably our fave among those.
This reish comes complete with detailed liner notes and vintage photos, its truly a labor of love, and recommended to anyone into garage psych at its most, uh, extreme. aQ customers who bought Blue Phantom last time probably will be the ones who'll want this too.
Bay Area-based jazz sextet, Charles Sharp 6 make their vinyl debut on local San Francisco label Empty Cellar which also released the avant-jazz Sword and Sandals lp Good and Plenty a year or two back. An uncommon combination of reeds (sax and clarinet), cello, accordion, double bass and drums, this group of improvisers seem to be channeling a late fifties /early sixties era jazz, but one that neither sounds classic or retro. In fact, as good as these musicians are, they almost sound like they came to jazz, through some other means, like punk, judging by the near-ramshackle bombast of the opening track. Yet, there is a laid-back angularity to their work that feels like it should be in a beat-era or eighties indie movie, evoking the same sort of vibe as Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, or even the Lounge Lizards with out so much of the eighties art attitude. Sometimes ferocious in their compositional approach, the C#6 are hardly as twee as their instrumentation might suggest, but they can also really intensify a mood with quiet focus, allowing the diversity of instruments to congeal and worry around subtle modal variations, expanding but not releasing the tension. One of the most interesting new jazz albums we've heard in a long while!
Originally released as a super limited quadruple cassette, this fantastic slab of rhythmic gothic industrial weirdness gets reissued on vinyl. Christian Cosmos is Hospital Records / Prurient head honcho and part time Cold Cave-er Dominick Fernow, teamed up with Kris Lapke from Furisubi and something called Alberch, and while we don't know much else about Lapke, we do know these two make a glorious din together here, combining churning industrial rhythms with blown out power electronics, wrapping everything in dense drones and ethereal synth shimmer, a murky washed out miasma driven by looped chunks of machinelike crunch, the sound veering into serious old school eighties industrial, but slowed down and made more caustic and abject, but that bleak rhythmic sprawl perpetually underpinned by haunting melodies, courtesy of Fernow we presume.
The sound slips from rhythmic and industrial to murky lopped mesmer, sounding at times like a Philip Jeck conducted symphony of rusted out old turntables spinning early Ministry 12"s at 16rpm, gauzy and hazy and atmospheric, laced with ornamental skitter, that blossoms into full of crunch and churn. The sound throughout epic and majestic, borderline orchestral at time, the final track a gorgeous bit of vocal driven choral industrial, with looped female vox woven into the black buzz and blurred swirl, tangled up in the roiling rhythms, making for something gorgeously cinematic.
The Flying Nun reissue onslaught continues, this time a vinyl reissue of this collection of odds and sods from legendary NZ pop combo The Clean, who are one of THEE original Flying Nun bands, and whose iconic single "Tally Ho" was even borrowed as the title for a recent double cd collection of Flying Nun's greatest hits. As good as pretty much everything The Clean released, if you haven't already bought their Anthology collection on Merge, that might be the place to start, but if you like your pop a bit more raw and rough around the edges, then this might actually be more up your alley, the same pop smarts, hooks galore, jangle everywhere, vocal harmonies, catchy melodies, killer songs, off kilter and slightly warped, some songs super rocking, others stripped down and acoustic, some cool experimental jams too (just check out the tripped out "Point That Thing Dub"), all recorded in varying levels of fidelity, the performances sometimes more energetic and heartfelt than tight or in key, but this is the sort of pop, that as far as we're concerned, often sounds better warts and all, and the funny thing is, this collection of oddities, B sides, demos, unreleased track and random screwing around studio weirdness, somehow seems WAY better than most of the proper pop records out there. All hail The Clean, whose nearly thirty year old records sound better than ever!
It's been almost 5 years since we last heard from Dead Reptile Shrine black ambient offshoot Cloama, the two records featuring Cloama alongside another mysterious entity called Blutleuchte (or perhaps that was just some sort of affectation, and not actually another person/group?) being big favorites with the drone obsessed aQ-ers, the sound on those records weirdly ritualistic and industrial, expansive blackened soundscapes, minimal yet strangely and hauntingly lush. So what has changed since 2008?
A lot actually. In fact, right out of the gate, Cloama unfurl not some dark lugubrious rumble, but instead, a soaring sort of almost shoegazey swirl, a coruscating crumbling distorted droned out shimmer, over which a vocalist howls abjectly, buried in the mix, while all around, sounds chime and buzz, the whole thing laced with subtle melodic flourishes, and lush textural shifts, it's a heady bit of psychedelic ur-drone soft noise, that leads directly into a sound much more Cloama-like, a grinding crumbling bit of low end, wreathed in thick streaks of feedback, sprawling and oozing in another near static buzz drenched blur, underpinning more bellowed vox, the sound of Cloama seeming to have shifted closer to the power electronics / blackened industrial axis that the black ambience that used to define their sound. Drums surface sporadically, or perhaps it's just bits of percussion, crunch and clatter, a weirdly hypnotic, droned out stretch of crumbling rumbling mesmer, which is how the rest of the record plays out, a series of industrial dronescapes, that sound like Wolf Eyes crossed with Whitehouse, the song shifting occasionally into something much more restrained, the sounds muted and washed out, the various bits of percussion locked into a stumbling abstract rhythm, while elsewhere, the sound blossoms into a sort of late period Skullflower psychedelic noise freakout, Merzbowic in intensity, but more textural and densely layered, rendering even the most caustic sounds weirdly mesmerizing and hypnotic. Another deep listening record that reveals a whole other microscopic sonic world lurking just below the roiling blown out surface.
Fans of the old Cloama discs might find this too abrasive, but anyone into dense psychedelic noise and experimental blackened soundscapery will definitely dig, although it definitely requires an appreciation of noise. And the last song is a creepy surprise, a choir of female voices harmonizing over streaks of low end buzz and pipe fight clang and clatter, peppered with little bursts of grinding distorted guitar crumble, and booming distant percussion, epic and haunting and strangely cinematic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
It seems like maybe it was inevitable, but SF's Cloudland Canyon have finally ditched the last remaining trappings of whatever sort of band they may have been before, and now emerged a fully fledged modern day psychedelic krautrocking combo who are masters of their craft. This new super limited, import 12" finds CC exploring that sound, opening with a serious kosmische kraut / new age trip out, a slow building pulsing shimmering synthscape, before driving synths take over and transform the track into a dizzying swirl of looped and arpeggiated synth cascades, cyclical and repetitive, tranced out and mesmerizing, a churning synth swirl beneath a sky full of tangled melodies.
The B side is much more laid back, a woozy cosmic groove with a pulsing house music throb, all swirly and cinematic, until a seriously crunchy beat kicks in, super dubbed out and almost industrial sounding, like some lost DHR jam or maybe early Techno Animal - whatever it reminds you of, it kicks ass, and turns the record into something else entirely. The record begins to wind down in another dizzying sprawl of throbbing synth swirl, this time over a stuttering New Order like beat, and driven by stuttery ethereal vocal loops. Sweet.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. In fact, we have less than ten, and it's very likely these will be the last ones we can get. Pressed on foggy clear vinyl!
While this is not the first time we listed Bay Area based art-pop group Coconut, this is the first time the band has made a full length release on vinyl and with their new fully-formed incarnation as a four-piece band. Their cd debut was a sprawling 3 cd set of pop experiments between the two main men, Tomo Yasuda (Tussle, Hey Willpower) and artist and publisher Colter Jacobsen, which was originally intended to be one half of a boxed set that was designed to become an actual box when put together, but that second half never materialized. We guess they have been busy playing a lot more live shows and because of that had to enlist two more full time members, the Japanese keyboardist and vocalist, Keiko and bass player Justin Loney. But this development has given the songs more polish and more dynamic focus, while still keeping a loose and fun playfulness to the proceedings.
The sides of the record are split into day and night moods with the day side featuring covers of Leiber and Stoller's "Searchin' " and a slammin' version of Arthur Russell's post-disco classic "Is It All Over My Face". Like a folkier version of Deerhoof, but also channeling groups such as Young Marble Giants and Slapp Happy, the album is not without its experimental explorations, especially on the "night" side. Such a great and beautifully realized record. Released by Oakland-based art-publishing concern, Land And Sea on various colors of vinyl (we have purple and black swirl vinyl in stock). Limited to 300 copies, and highly recommended!
While we wait for the repress of the entire awesome 6lp+3cd When I See The Sun Codeine boxset, and while we're still reveling in their recent visit, and mind blowing Great American Music Hall reunion tour performance, we might as well take a second to focus on this, their breathtaking debut, now re-released individually, separate from the boxset, fleshed out with a handful of bonus tracks, Peel Sessions, demos and rarities, thus totally essential for obsessives like us (or you?) - well, at least those among us who haven't already gone whole hog and bought the boxset. But for all you vinyl freaks who have been waiting to check these guys out, this is the perfect introduction, to one of the most beautiful, intense, moving, and hauntingly lovely chunks of slowcore indie rock EVER, the 1991 debut from Sub Pop slow-core specialists Codeine. Definitely one of those records that Andee, Allan, et. al. here will tell you, if you don't have it already, you oughta get one now...seriously. Emo, indie-rock, post-rock, whatever this is, it's a classic. A classic of majestic melancholia. For the Frigid Stars LP, this NYC-based trio consisted of Stephen Immerwahr on bass and vocals, Chris Brokaw on drums and guitar and John Engle on guitar. They employ the soft-loud dynamic that their former Sub Pop labelmates Nirvana already made famous (or would around that same year). Not that they sound much like Nirvana. They sound a bit more like Low, albeit a lumbering downtuned Low. Codeine's own brand of moody, melodic misery wouldn't, couldn't be an MTV hit. Indie-pop it was, but so sad and slow... The songs here share slowly crawling tempos, and echoey drum hits and big distorted guitar chords crashing down to give extra weight to Immerwahr's weary vocals and love-lost lyrics. We've always wanted to hear a metal band do a cover of some track from this record, maybe "D". But even though this isn't really "heavy" in a metal sense, it still IS heavy. A great record for when you're sad and alone. Strange how something like this will make you feel better, but it will.
As a side note, one aQ-er first heard this album over the phone. Not the whole album, but sound clips much like the ones on our website. That's right, way back when before the internet and the mp3 and all that, somebody got the idea to do a dial-up music service where you'd get to check out new music over the phone, by calling a 900-number, and using a touch-tone phone to choose what you wanted to hear. It had something to do with the old Factsheet Five 'zine as we recall. We have vague memories of looking at the album cover reproduced in the 'zine - a negative photo of black stars floating in white emptiness - and hearing the long-distance sounds of those Frigid Stars like a transmission from that deep space void... even under those circumstances, maybe especially under those circumstances, Codeine were so effective. We might just have selected it to listen to on the basis of the album cover and title alone, and were not disappointed.
Ah-ha! The first D.A.F. record! And boy, was it quite a surprise to hear this one. D.A.F. began in 1978 as a post-krautrock outfit from Dusseldorf, with Robert Gorl, Kurt "Pyrolator" Dahlke, Wolfgang Spelmans, Michael Kemner, and Gabi Delgado originally calling themselves You; but with another German band snatching up the name and releasing the mighty fine album Electric Day in the same year, they decided upon Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft as the new name. A couple of band members were not all too pleased with Gabi Delgado's vocals and lyrics, and he was promptly sacked after their first attempt in the studio. Delgado returned to the band a year later when a few of his detractors left, and he became the iconic frontman for the stripped down D.A.F. with Robert Gorl. That incarnation of D.A.F. spawned an aggressive synth-punk sound that dominated the more abrasive side of new wave throughout the '80s; but this instrumental, motorik album is an entirely different beast. While electronics do make some interesting punctuations to the D.A.F. sound, they were fundamentally a damaged art-rock band with a rhythm section well versed in the classic Can, Neu!, and early Kraftwerk records from earlier in the decade, but they also exploded with slashing guitars, pummelling basslines, and an aggressive angularity that responded to the American contemporaries like DNA and Pere Ubu. Could this influence from American degenerate art-rock be an explanation for the name of the band? In any case, threads of this first D.A.F. record certainly look forward to the likes of Sonic Youth and Circle. The album is a collection of 22 untitled extracts from what seemed to be an exhausting recording session of constantly accelerating rhythmic marches with jagged-toothed guitar riffs that get pretty heavy and churning at times (even reminding us of instru-metallers Gore!), with plenty of interludes of amplifier feedback and spark-plug noise bursts. Part krautrock, part no-wave and new-wave, all rad. Not what we would have expected from their first album, but this is totally an excellent record!
Another new list, another new dream pop offering from Slumberland, this one from a UK outfit called Echo Lake, whose sounds, as befitting the label they call home, hovers somewhere between the gauzy slowcore reverb drenched jangle of Galaxie 500 and something much more abstract and ethereal, a sort of 4AD via My Bloody Valentine by way of Brian Wilson / Phil Spector. The opener is some pitch perfect dream pop drift, all hazy layered vocals, swirling soft focus harmonies, angelic and softly spectral, driven by a barely audible rhythmic pulse, and wound up in a crystalline latticework of spidery guitar melodies, and muted softly distorted buzz, in fact that track's more like an intro, just letting us know what these folks are capable of, but instead of offering up a seriously experimental slab of shoegaze abstraction, they dole out that stuff judiciously (for the most part), instead, weaving it into a more standard Slumberland style pop, simple spare drumming, reverby drifts of soft focus guitar, and those gorgeous ethereal vox. But then right when you think you have a handle on their sound, they unleash something like the title track, which channels Stereolab through the Teenage Filmstars, a warm whirring organ, drifting over a thick distorted drone, peppered with trippy backwards rhythms, the vocals weightless, warm swaths of gauziness laid over the already blurred dreamscape, and so it goes for the rest of the record, all the dream poppy things we love about Slumberland bands, given a sort of psychedelic makeover, slipping easily from dream pop, to surprisingly rocking shoegaze blowouts, and from swirly psychedelic experiments and back again. So nice!!
A gorgeous collection of home recordings from one of Takoma's unsung 'American Primitive' guitar masters, Mark Fosson, whose playing reminds us (and apparently John Fahey too back in the day) of Leo Kotke quite a bit. We reviewed Fosson's collection of lost sessions for Takoma a while back, and while many of the same songs are included here (these are the recordings that led to him signing to Takoma), these versions are a bit more raw and intimate, but still manage to resonate with energy and emotion, and in fact, for home recordings, these sound better than many proper studio recordings. Fosson's playing is lush and lyrical, intricate and emotional, and like those Takoma sessions have an energy and melodic sensibility that also reminds us of James Blackshaw. Of all the tracks here, our favorite here might be the goofily titled "Cosmic Hiccup" with its lush melodic sweeps, and seemingly impossibly intricate melodies, that make Fosson sound like he's playing several guitars at once, but all the tracks here are gorgeous, the sound ranging from classic old timey Appalachian folk to more progressive and intricate compositions that seem to meld classical and folk idioms into a sound that's lush and lovely and melodically complex. Most definitely recommended for fans of Fahey, Kotke, Blackshaw and the like.
We've long been fans of these outsider noise pop weirdos, they even played our very first AQ/WFMU showcase at South By Southwest, but wow has their sound changed since then. Our pal Anthony described this new record WAY more succinctly and accurately than we ever could:
"Expertly performed, extremely difficult clash between pop inclinations and punk ideals sent through a completely synthetic, inhuman aesthetic. If you sent the Wipers early albums through the most intuitive state-of-the-art midi processor you might end up with something like this, simultaneously baroque and sterile, and very catchy at times. When the option is to zig or zag Gary War will always zap!"
And while to our ears, at times Gary War sounds like a whole different band, there are definitely plenty of moments that harken to the GW of old, but right from the outset, Jared's Lot seems to establish a new sonic era with record opener "Thousand Yard Star" unfurling a spaced out psychedelic synthscape that seems to owe more to John Carpenter and Goblin, or more recently Umberto and the like, than Ariel Pink or John Maus, who were so obviously GW's sonic brethren in the past. But this new sound definitely suits them, "Thousand Yard Star" playing out like the soundtrack to some ridiculous, low budget seventies sci-fi epic, all pulsing sequenced synth throb and shuffling Autobahn rhythms, with wild swirling effects and seriously tweaked vox. "Advancements In Disguise" takes that psychedelic synth sound and weds it to some fractured outsider pop, everything doused in space age shimmer, and driven by those percolating synth pulses, the vocals effected and pitch shifted, layered and warped into a dizzying alien chorus, the song driving and propulsive one second, tripped out and almost kosmische the next. It's like some sort of synth heavy outsider garagekraut cold wave, slipping easily from twisted lo-fi pop to prismatic electro bliss out, everything wreathed in swoops of bloops and bleeps and clouds of shimmery outer space psychedelic synth swirl, the best moments are tracks like "Pleading For Annihilation", where the band actually rock, all pounding drums and distorted electric guitars, woven into GW's tripped out galactic synth pop, crunchy buzz butted up against dizzying blasts of arpeggiated synth melodies, those two disparate elements gradually merging into some of the most kick ass kosmische whatthefuck tripped out electronic space pop EVER.
One of two new singles on this week's list from UK label Trensmat, one by outsider abstract noisescapers Whirling Hall Of Knives, and this one, from UK psychedelic spacekraut collective Gnod, and as always, already sold out at the label, and thus the copies we got are most likely the only ones we'll ever see. Gnod offer up two tracks, the A side, a thick, super distorted dirge, all downtuned riffage wreathed in celestial shimmer, pounding death march drumming and soft swirls of ethereal synths, some serious heavy psychedelic space doom for sure, and easily the heaviest darkest thing we've heard from these guys yet, and it had us definitely wishing this was way longer than just a 7".
The flipside is the 'dub' of the A side, and basically douses the whole thing in delay and a murky lo-fi patina, the sounds a bit blurrier and more washed out, the snares dubbed out and sent careening into the ether, the track laced with more weird samples, the overall vibe surprisingly much more heavy, the guitars gristlier, the drums more industrial, and like the A side, we wish there was a 30 minute extended edit, cuz this is the sort of blissed out psychedelic industrial dubbed out heaviness we never want to end.
Pressed on clear orange vinyl, and includes a link to downloads of both tracks.
Weirdly enough, we first heard Guilty Ghosts on some mysterious witch house / drag compilation someone made for us, that track a haunting bit of morose skeletal downer guitar pop, all chiming 4AD guitars over skittery clipped rhythms and soft focus swirls of hushed dreamlike shimmer, not to mention swoonsome strings, listening to that track again now, has us wondering why exactly the rest of the world hasn't caught on to Guilty Ghosts. It's the sort of thing a label like Matador or Fatcat or XL should be flipping out over.
But for now, GG, aka Tristan O'Donnell, is going the DIY route, releasing his own tapes and cd-r's, and we managed to get a handful of the deluxe version of his most recent full length, which does in fact include that mixtape jam we loved so much back in the day, and we're happy to report that the whole record is brimming with more of the same, lush expanses of layered guitars, softly tangled melodies, warm swirling buzz, looped breakbeats, the sound melancholic and wistful, the drum driven jams sounding like a darker, more mysterious underground lo-fi shoegaze pop version of the Happy Mondays, while the more guitarscapey tracks remind us of the Durutti Column, and when the vocals come in, it's total shoegaze dreampop bliss. Just check out "Everlasting Evening", which is the sort of jam we wish would go on forever, a thick swirl of guitar buzz, beneath strummed acoustic guitars, underneath ethereal streaks of tangled psychedelic melodies, buried mysterious samples, and some gorgeous angelic female vox, it's definitely easy to see why GG would be embraced by the witch house camp, but the sound is so much more lush and composed, O'Donnell's sights set somewhere much higher, these tracks expansive and cinematic, with tracks like "Everlasting Evening" reminding us of MBV and Portishead and the like.
The whole record unfurls like a dream, the lush swirling tangle of guitars all on its own would be enough to have us smitten, but the occasional vox, and the various rhythms, the ever shifting drones and textures, all deftly woven into gorgeous sonic dreamscapes, and be sure to check out "Begotten", tucked away near the end of the tape, which just might be our favorite jam here, haunting and lovely, like the brooding slow building soundtrack to some heart wrenching scene in an arty big budget blockbuster, we're surprised someone hasn't snapped this up for some Christopher Nolan trailer or something. So awesome. And obviously totally recommended!!
This limited version includes both a tape, with a printed J-card, a sticker AND a bonus mix cd, which offers up a ton of cool and super varied GG beloved jams, all gathered up in a screen printed canvas drawstring bag.
This new record from High Aura'd is our first exposure to this one man band's gorgeous understated minimal dronescapes, which we discovered via the man himself, who is in fact a long time aQ customer, and who we're proud to say, makes some seriously breathtaking music. Two epic side long sprawls, both born from near silence, a slow building A side that emerges as a deep rumbling and lush layered shimmer, a blurred ambience that drifts in soft focus billows, buried abstract melodies hover over slow shifting textures, all flecked with buzz and whir and distant streaks of sound, a serious slab of deep listening or which active listening is well rewarded, with a sound that is super active below the surface, the keen eared will hear strange voices, and mysterious melodies, and all manner of evidence regarding some secret sound world within High Aura'd's already gorgeously obfuscated music. The A side blossoms into a hiss drenched slo-mo creep, gradually fading out in a cloud of chiming bells and buried rhythms, the sound melancholy and sweetly sorrowful.
The flipside opens with some seriously Koner like low end minimalism, a cavernous drift much like that which opened the record, again building gradually to swath of black buzz crunch, a grinding landscape of hum and thrum and muted howl which quickly collapses into a soft cacophony of what sounds like orchestral samples, burred and smeared into an epic blissed out dreamlike coda before slipping back into the shadows, and a more wistful, hushed final passage.
We were pretty into the debut 7" from Swedish post punks the Holograms, but sadly, we were never able to get enough to list, but the A side from that single is included here on their debut full length, and displays exactly what we dig about these guys, the sound raw and urgent and stripped down, pulsing synths and jagged angular guitars, over powerful drums and a throaty yowl, all driven by thick sinewy basslines, and all woven into a crazy catchy chunk of punky pop that leans way more toward the pop than the punk. But as much as we love(d) that track, there are plenty of other gems here vying for that top spot, just check out opener "Monolith", with its creepy slow build intro, all plucked bass and staticky buzz, which transforms into a doomy dirgey creepy, the vocals WAY up in the mix, an echo drenched croon that sounds a lot like Robert Smith of the Cure, but a bit more punkish and feral, and then finally the track explodes into a driving punkish blowout that sounds a bit like Interpol via Iceage via the Undertones, gloomy and gothy, but driving and punky, the drums surprisingly high in the mix, giving the Holograms some serious heft, and the occasional bit of synth giving it a new wave vibe as well. "Chasing My Mind" is CRAZY catchy and poppy, a 'single' if there ever was one, but then keep digging and there's the herky jerky agit-pop of "Apostate" or the driving bass heavy jangle pop of "Stress", or the stripped down dirgey groove of "Fever", we could go on, but pretty much all the tracks here kill, a seriously sweet collection of hooky poppy post-punk that is gloomy enough for the punks, but jangly enough for the pop kids, and pretty much perfect for everyone else in between.
Once again, the clock strikes 13!! And that means, it's DOOM time. This is the third album of from Hour Of 13, the Sabbatherian side-project of guitarist Chad Davis from psychedelic spacerockers US Christmas (aka USX). As before, he's joined in Hour Of 13's fuzzy, chugging rituals by promiscuous Ozzy-ish vocalist Phil Swanson (also of Seamount, Briton Rites, Nightbitch, and a bunch of others).
All modern-day doom metal bands can of course trace their lineage back to Black Sabbath, but some also have obvious influences from other acts in the doom family tree. The lumbering Gates Of Slumber, for example, owe a lot to Saint Vitus. As did Revered Bizarre - who themselves provided the template more recently for Pilgrim. Other bands take after Candlemass, or Pentagram.
In the case of Hour Of 13, we're hearing a lot of Trouble. But, these guys for sure ain't no Christians. Song titles like "Deny The Cross" and "Rite Of Samhain" are one clue. There's definitely something darker and more disturbing and dismal about Hour Of 13, even as their music riffs and rocks with a lot of obvious '80s metal inspiration. Listen to an hour of Hour Of 13 (or in this case, 47 minutes, totalling 7 tracks) and you're NOT gonna feel uplifted. You'll feel doomed. Which is what you wanted, right? Thus, 333 (hmm, only half of 666, does that mean something? are you supposed to buy two and listen to them together?) is another slab that any Hour Of 13 and/or Phil Swanson fan is gonna want to grab.
King Dude is a tough one to figure out. First there's the name which is evocative of pretty much everything KD is not, and the sound, a constant shifting mix of post industrial neo-folk, dark gothic torch songs, old time balladry, sinister apocalyptic country, and stripped down sixties girl group songsmithery, and on this latest single, a teaser for an upcoming full length, the sound shifts once again, this time, it's all acoustic guitar and vocals, wreathed in a bit of glimmery FX, the voice a deep ravaged croon, that slips occasionally into something more snarly, everything echo drenched, the 7" label bears the legend 'dungeon doo wop' which is not a bad description at all. The A side finishes off with a gorgeous lush harmony vocal-ed coda that leads directly into the even more stripped down non-album B side, a slithery, skeletal blues, nothing but voice and guitar, the voice this time an impossibly deep almost gurgly rumble, which gives the whole sound a darkly demonic vibe.
Comes lavishly packaged in a super thick jacket, and with a big fold out black and white poster. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Uh, c'mon, how could this NOT be awesome? Sublime Frequencies never fails us, first off. AND we're already fans of vintage Turkish psych in general, guitarist/vocalist Erkin Koray in particular. So this release, with its excellent eyeballs-shooting-purple-rays-from-space-or-whatever cover painting, was eagerly anticipated at AQ. And yeah it's awesome. As the subtitle says, this consists of singles and rarities circa 1970-'77 from this Middle Eastern psych rock master, founder of "the first underground group of the Orient", a living legend whose career stretches back to the '50s. Rarities? Well, compiler Mark Gergis notes in the liners: "This collection features tracks not found on the many unauthorized Erkin compilations and LP reissues that have emerged in the west over the years." And indeed these eleven tracks were provided to Sublime Frequencies by Koray himself, sourced from his personal vinyl collection! So, listen up, 'cause this is the stuff Erkin wants us to hear, and well, if you're any sort of Turkish psych fan like us, you NEED to hear it. Tracks like "Kendim Ettim Kendim Buldum" and "Hadi Hadi Ordan" are going to make you very happy. Swirling and shimmering, twanging surfy electric saz (or is that oud?), melodic deep droning vocals, bellydancing folk motifs, stirring orchestration, and YES some wild blasts of psychrockguitar distortion, it's the exotic East (lots of East) meets West sort of thing we just love! While some of this is wonderfully moody, a lot of it rocks, all right, ferinstance just crank up "Krallar" (a '75 single from whence that striking cover image comes) with its especially dramatic vocals to match its uptempo urgency.
Digipack cd release for now, with a vinyl version due out in a couple of weeks as well. Is it too much to hope that Sublime Frequencies will get Erkin to undertake a Western tour like labelmate Omar Souleyman, one of these days...?
Skam Records 001. Lego Feet. In the realm of electronica, this is a recording that few have heard, yet many have dug through crates seeking (and never finding). Back in 1991, Sean Booth and Rob Brown, the duo later to be known as Autechre, released the Lego Feet 12" on their own Skam Records imprint, predating their first Autechre single "Cavity Job" released later that same year. In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of that ridiculously rare single, Booth & Brown have revisited the single, extending what was about 25 minutes of music into four massive suites clocking in at a full 70 minutes, which appear to be conveniently broken into possible side-long passages suitable for vinyl. Where the extra material came from is not really clear, perhaps these are the longer tracks that became so many of the extracted snippets that made their way onto the single, perhaps they are unreleased trax from back in the day. What's very clear is that this is definitely of the era, as a new form of electronica morphing through the nascent rave-culture in England at the time with a keen eye on acid house in Chicago, cybernetic techno on the Detroit / Berlin axis, and the hip hop beats from both American coasts.
For the decade of the '90s, rhythms were crucial to Autechre's sound, becoming all the more slithering, contorted, and algorithmically complex before the two ultimately jettisoned a fundamental rhythm for their more cerebral work in the next decade. Booth & Brown's breakbeats (as they were almost always breakbeats) were always some of the most interesting of the IDM producers, fragmenting alongside weird machine-dreamt ambient melodies and shape-shifting polydactyl sequencing. On Lego Feet, the two laid the rhythmic foundation for much of what would come; and fuck, they were onto something really incredible.
The first cut sports a number of classic breakbeats that would have fit in with the Gescom singles (Gescom being another Autechre side-project focusing more on dismembered hip-hop beats and breaks), with plenty of great percolating electronic blorp, tone-glide ambience, and melody throughout. Track two opens with a frenzied acid-techno number with wildly squiggling sequences jitteringly starting and stopping along a hi-hat riddled 808 techno 4/4 rhythm, but this slides into a breakbeat track with the metallic snares that became a signature for Autechre on their groundbreaking debut Incunabula. Elements of track three take their cues from Juan Atkins' classic Model 500 project with whip-crack snares amidst darkly churning electronics and caustic breakbeats. Track four glides through the acid trax with some sublime melodies upon the ride-cymbal emulating drum machinations. So, damn good.
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 been ages since we've heard from these local psychedelic space rockers, but it seems like a storm of new Lumerians activity is brewing, records, shows, touring, all starting with this, a brand new 12" which displays a side of the band that always seemed to be lurking just below the surface, but is now revealed for all the world to see. The A side of this 12" finds the band exploring a funkier sound, sounding at times like Bitches Brew era Miles Davis, or Sextant era Herbie Hancock, dense percussion, swirls of wah wah guitar, whirring organs, a little bit spacey, and a little dubby, but loose and free and indeed funky, the second track introduces more buzz, and adds some psychedelic freakout to the mix, getting downright proggy before finishing off the side with something much more drone out and soundtracky, swaddled in woozy fuzzy synths.
The flipside is a whole 'nother kind of beast, a dense buzzy churn, layered and thickly psychedelic, it's on the verge of collapsing into full on noise, but the band deftly corral the sounds into a blackened swirling dervish, that manages to sound like a proggier spacier SUNNO))) before blossoming into a tripped out krautfunk blowout, which in turn transforms into a long outro of creepy synths and scattered percussion, a spaced out cinematic sprawl that is at once haunting and harrowing, melodic and lovely. Great stuff as usual, can't wait for more, and to hear this stuff live!
Packaged in a super striking, heavy stock jacket, and pressed on milky, yellowish/off white vinyl. And yeah, totally LIMITED!
The Omni Recording Corporation has been killing it lately in a string of essential vinyl reissue collaborations with the Australian Roundtable label, focusing on rare library, lounge and private press exotica. We recently listed the Orchestra Peter Thomas Orion 2000 lp of tripped out sci-fi grooves, and this week we have two extremely fine examples of Italian library music from composer Egisto Macchi and his more well known group that included Ennio Morricone, Gruppo D'Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
I Futuribili (The Futuristic) was recorded in 1972 for the Gemelli Library and is one of that label's rarest releases. Along with the ritualistic Voix, this is also one of the composer's most essential. Marked by a spacious sound environment and high-relief recording techniques, Macchi takes the listener on a surreal trip of suspenseful strings, big metallic washes, tinkling bells and plaintive electroacoustic atmospherics. Mysterious, and alluring but not necessarily foreboding, these pieces could easily be the soundtrack for a horror or sci-fi film or even a planetary documentary. But what's most interesting about library music composition as opposed to composing a soundtrack is that soundtrack composers compose to the visuals of a director, while in library music, it's the other way around. We're drawn into visualizing the music and creating a larger storyline through the sound design. And while this may sound cold or abstract on paper, Macchi instills a lot of warmth, depth and beauty into these pieces that envelops us in an exquisite sound world, unlike any we've heard in British library music such as DeWolfe or KPM.
Limited to 500 copies, these might be the last we get, so don't snooze!
We went a little crazy for the first Mamaleek record, a way too limited cd-r, packed with blown out blissed out shoegazey black metal, head spinning ultra technical metallic grind, and gorgeous blurred black ambience. That record was so intense, so gloriously fucked up, so complex and confusional, it really seemed like an impossible record to top, but this latest record, the first Mamaleek vinyl release, definitely does its best, and in some cases succeeds big time.
Like the record opener, "I Can't Stay Behind", which begins with some creepy sample, a mysterious voices, the sound of horses, then suddenly, speaker shredding blasts of start stop black grind, a haunting lull between each, before finally launching into full on hyper speed black buzz, but with weird interludes, moaning clean vocals, stuttering drum machines, a strangely almost indie rock arrangement, but shredded and shattered, cool loping arpeggiated breakdowns, the guitars impossibly distorted, the sound WAY in-the-red, the creepy intro sample resurfacing throughout.
That indie rock sensibility runs through the whole record, but is deftly twisted into much blacker shapes. The second track, is an almost looped single part song, very hypnotic, partway through keyboards surface, all sunbaked and swoonsome, and while the track remains buzzy and abrasive, those keyboards help transform the sound into something more akin to a black metal M83.
And that side of the band seems to be the most prevalent this time around, trading in much of the brutal grind and twisted blast of the first record for something a bit more melodic and sort of pretty. Gnarled fragmented and fractured angular crunch is butted up against almost loungey piano, and random Japanese vocal snippets, murky industrial rhythms underpin groovy acoustic guitars, grim buzz gets warped and twisted and draped over swinging jazz, and it almost works, but is all the better for not quite working, the result a seriously twisted mash up. And the jazz element runs through to varying degrees, so much so that there's even a Charlie Parker cover, done pretty straight, only the guitars are a bit distorted and a little off, and there are some harsh black vokills that were most likely not in the original, seriously twisted and tweaked. Elsewhere, Mamaleek unfurls drone drenched near static black metalscapes, weaves loping drum machine grooves beneath coruscating super distorted guitar melodies, incorporates what sounds like seventies FM radio rock into otherwise grim blasting blackness,
The closer is more M83 style washed out woozy drift, skittering drum machines, wheezing accordions, shimmering strings, warm and sun dappled, wreathed in crackle and hiss, until the song shatters into a full bore freakout, a squealing fractured nearly white noise free jazz blurred metal outro, that is as kick ass as it is utterly confounding.
If anything this record is WAY more varied, more experimental, less cohesive, but not in a bad way, the sounds all manage to fit together in one epic, seriously demented whole, but this time it's a much wilder ride, not for the faint of heart, or the unadventurous. But much like the first record, fucking amazing and WAY recommended.
Pressed on super thick vinyl, and housed in ultra deluxe sleeves, with striking and subtle, spot varnish inking.
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!
Long overdue reissue of this legendary and mostly unheard early eighties Flying Nun artifact. Even Flying Nun obsessives would be forgiven for missing out on Max Block's sole 12" release, but odds are you're familiar with the members of Max Block, specifically Maryrose and Brian Cook, who first found themselves in a band together here, having previously done time in Above Ground (recently reissued and reviewed right here) and Scorched Earth Policy respectively, and eventually going on to form long time aQ faves the Renderers.
This lp comp collects both that long lost 12", as well as another, until now unreleased ep, The Max Block's sound a woozy art damaged punk, lots of angular jagged guitars, wild octopoidal drumming, dueling male / female vox, super active melodic basslines, tribal rhythms, swirls of spacey effects, the vibe droned out and propulsive, with whirring organs adding a strange almost circusy vibe at times, but usually reminding us of groups like The Ex and Pere Ubu, even Wire here and there, some tracks frantic and frenetic, others brooding and downcast, sounding like with some extra noise and heft they could've been Dead C jams, in fact the live tracks are downright noisy, but MB's sound is firmly on the pop side of the spectrum, although unlike many of the NZ bands of the time, their's was less concerned with jangle, and more with crunch, less twee and more tangle, slipping from noisy and dirgey to trance-y and minimal to crunchy, angular and chaotic. Awesome stuff, and if you dug the track on the recent Time To Go Flying Nun compilation we reviewed recently, you've probably been wanting more!!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, includes a download coupon as well!
It seems like most of the music coming out of Brooklyn these days has been tending toward fey eighties beholden electro pop or gloomy Cure worshipping synthwave, but it's not all eyeliner and Siouxsie lunch boxes happening over there, at least based on the debut from Meek Is Murder, who might as well be called The Meek SHALL BE Murdered, cuz this is some seriously kick ass poser disposing heaviness, displaying a darker, seriously more fucked up and chaotic sonic side to everyone's favorite borough.
Recorded by Converge's Kurt Ballou, and definitely not that far removed from the Converge / Coalesce sonic axis, Meek Is Murder traffic in a dense, gnarled mathy metalpunk crush, that shifts deftly from dirgey downtuned sludge to crazed hyperdense metalcore fury, with plenty of twists and turns in-between. Nine short sharp blasts of tangled metallic mathpunk, most of the tracks clocking in at 2 minutes or less, 3 or 4 closer to 60 seconds, culminating in a final 6+ minute epic.
The record begins with an intro of sorts, a churning seasick dirge, with rad syncopated drums and rib cage rattling metallic chug, all wreathed in woozy spidery leads, before launching directly into "Return Void", the opening blast the sort of shit that makes pits explode, but then the double kick comes in, and the song blossoms into a weirdly melodic mini-epic, a sort of metalcore Godspeed almost. But it's the title track that might be our favorite, a galloping Speedwolf like classic thrash, laced with a tangled shreddery that at times sounds like a less demented Mick Barr, unfurling woozy harmonized classic metal harmonies over the roiling metalpunk below. From there on out, it's some of THEE best mathed out heaviness, we've heard in ages, we're reminded at time of Kiss It Goodbye or Deadguy, heavy as fuck, with almost proggy arrangements, but shot through with some serious melody, fractured by super dynamic stop/starts and wreathed in thick sheets of feedback. The bulk of the record clocks in at less than 15 minutes, but the songs are so jammed with tripped out parts and intricate arrangements, killer riffing, rad melodies, it feels like way longer, until the record finishes off with "Garbage Collector", which sounds like a more metal Dazzling Killmen, churning noise rock math metal radness, with some amazing, weirdly melodic, droned out breakdowns, as well as a seriously epic, brooding, slow build Godspeed-ish final movement, that pushes MiM's sound way beyond most other typical punk/metal outfits, and is fast making this, and these guys, a new aQ favorite.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! 100 of which are white, and while they last we've got the white ones. Hand numbered.
Now available again on vinyl, the only proper full length from this legendary crew of SF psychedelic punks whose sound was a drunken and drugged out freakout equal part the Stooges, Flipper and Hawkwind, makes sense that some of these guys also play(ed) in the equally noisy and fucked up psych rock garage punk outfit Liquorball!
Needless to say, if you love Liquorball, you'll definitely want to get a load of these guys, who sound like a more fucked up and freaked out Comets On Fire, every track a full bore psych-punk blowout, dirgey and crusty and droned out, the drums and bass locked into endless grooves, the vocals a distorted bark, the guitars though� wild swirls of wah wah everywhere, constant leads, shredding one second, spitting gouts of textural noise the next, slipping easily from hypno-rock crunch to loose almost free form psychedelic space rock, or dirgey swaggery Stooges-y churn. Gloriously loose and ramshackle, lo-fi and noisy, atonal and angular, the sound constantly on the verge of collapse, but for every stretch of fractured damaged psych, the band were capable of conjuring some equally genius blissed out drug rock radness, often impossible to tell which was which. While maybe a bit too lose and fucked up for the current crop of psychedelic space rockers, this stuff is fierce and feral and delivers the kind of true psych few bands were or are able to conjure.
Two conceptually minded pieces of electro-acoustic minimalism found here on the first vinyl release from Winds Measure Recordings, known for some seriously exquisite letter pressed artwork and an aesthetic of austere sound experimentation. That austerity bridges the work of British composer Will Montgomery and the Australian sound artist Robert Curgenven, as does a shared use of controlled feedback (or at least the use of pure tones which flutter eerily in that fine style). Montgomery's piece is sourced entirely from the Heygate Estates, which was a huge public housing project located in London and sported a rather grim facade of neo-brutalist architecture which fell into disrepair by the turn of the millennium. Demolition of the site began in 2011, but has been stalled because of numerous environmental hazards which emerged through the process, notably the high concentration of asbestos. Montgomery wandered the Heygate Estates with a VLF recorder, contact microphones, and a wiretapping mic, collecting the corroded, ephemeral sounds of that space, layering the disembodied hiss, crackling static, and eerie hum into a beguiling collage akin to the work of Tarab, Loren Chasse, and Murmer. Curgenven's piece hails from a very cool sound art project that the Australian began during a European residency, in which he had Dubplates & Mastering (THEE place to get anything weird cut onto wax!) cut a handful of dubplates of a subtle feedback piece, but at an incredibly low level. In playing the dubplate back, one has to really crank the volume thus creating the opportunity for feedback to occur in playback between the stylus and the speaker. The surface noise that one would expect from such a strategy is present, but it's not overwhelming given how good D+M are at cutting their wax. In this composition sourced from that sound making system, Curvengen transmits sinewy feedback tones and deep electrical thrum amidst a dispersion of the cyclical hushed crackle from the vinyl's surface noise. Winds Measures normally releases cds and occasionally some tapes; but the label was very wise to release Curgenven's brilliantly realized concept on vinyl, finding an excellent complement in Will Montgomery. Limited to just 250 copies! Download card? No.
This one's a doozy, one to add to the WHAT THE FUCK section of your collection (you do have one of those don't you?), you know, Fastest, Steven Schultz, Rodd Keith, heck we might even include Ween and the Frogs and other twisted practitioners of their own peculiar sonic songcraft, and now you can add MSG to that group. (Not to be confused with the -other- MSG, the Michael Schenker Group, by the way.) It might be good to listen to the samples first, odds are you'll have one of two reactions, both of which were experienced by listeners at aQ, one was like 'what the fuck is this, for god's sake please take it off', while the other was 'what the fuck is this? This is totally fucking nuts and I love it', which is where most of us ended up.
It's hard to tell from the liner notes if these songs were actually recorded by a child, but we're thinking it was recorded by an adult, channeling his inner child. As the liner notes describe, and the title alludes too, these songs were born of a bored mind, trapped in a gated community, obsessed with MTV, heavy metal, hip hop, BMX bikes, candy, cars with boomin' systems, the man (boy) behind MSG inheriting a shitty keyboard after his grandma died, and creating songs that somehow combined all of his (above mentioned) loves at the time, set to what sounds alternatingly like lo-fi Kraftwerky robotic electro pop and DIY hip hop, imagine dorky sing songy melodies, shitty programmed Casio beats, and vocals delivered in various 'voices', from falsetto croons to faux robot voices, and some amazingly painful rapping.
"Liquid Titanium" is total sci-fi robo-funk, with stiff programmed grooves and sci-fi synths, not to mention some rad robo-vox, while "Boom Boom Boom" is super lo-fi pop electro-pop, with an infuriatingly catchy chorus, "Calculator Machine" might be our favorite though, some fuzzy squelchy synth-wave, with pounding drums, snake charmer synth melodies, more robo-vox and some anguished monstrous bellows, not to mention some hilarious lyrics. And of course there's the sort of cock rock anthem / public service announcement of "You Want To Party / Don't Do Drugs", replete with raspy arena rock star vox, but belted out over some dorky damaged synthesizer, and another cloyingly catchy chorus. Sure it's dumb, and goofy, but it's weird and pretty goddamn hilarious, and we end up finding ourselves listening to this way more than lots of other, less dumb things, which says a lot!
Includes a download coupon.
Subcutaneous Memory is the debut recording for Nephila, the solo project of Shannon Kennedy - better known as the cellist / electronics sorceress from Pedestrian Deposit. Just as she brought a spooky sense of calm to balance the infernal noise manifest of Jon Borges' side of the Pedestrian Deposit equation, this is a super creepy tape made of and for the dark arts. The first side was all crafted on a zither, which she's plucked into haunting, slow-motion cycles of creepy melodies interspersed with atonal slashes and contact mic noises that look back to those apocalyptic collages from Current 93's early days. The second features haunting incantations looped from a "branch fiddle", wood, and voice, creating a hypnotic miasma of arboreal wooziness. Another fantastic tape from Monorail Trespassing, and we certainly hope to hear more from Nephila!
Sometimes the timing of certain 'lost classic' reissues is too perfect, giving us a glimpse of the seeds of sounds to come, a prequel to certain musical trends that are gaining so much momentum in the here and now. Such is the case with this great, lost, lonesome psych classic from the Pacific Northwest, which was originally released in 1970. We're not sure if he's heard it or not, as this has been a really tough one to track down until recently, but man do we hear plenty of Kurt Vile in these old recording! With a fuzzy and faded vibe, The New Dawn crafted breezy yet dirgy pop songs that sound like some awesome combination of Lee Hazlewood, The Sonics, Roy Orbison, George Brigman, The Byrds, and the Velvet Underground. We can't get enough of the warm organ, haunting vocals, hypnotic percussion, just all the right sonic elements that really do evoke some desolate street at night, wet from a recent downpour and the flickering reflection of the moon on the shimmery black of the slick asphalt. So mesmerizing and intoxicating, we're beyond stoked this album is getting its beyond deserved moment!
Besides the obvious influence on Kurt Vile we could see so many other current AQ favorites being super into these sounds...Beach House, Silver Pines, Broadcast, Thee Oh Sees (circa Sucks Blood), The Beets, The Soundcarriers, Gary War, Sic Alps, as well as folks from the '80s and '90s that we love like Rain Parade, The Telescopes, Beachwood Sparks, Dream Syndicate, etc. Forty years after it was originally released There's A New Dawn is still completely captivating!
African garage fuzz fans listen up, we've got another nice "Zam-Rock" reissue here! Guitarist/vocalist Paul Ngozi (1949-1989), according to the adulatory liner notes in the cd booklet, was one of the Zambian music industry's biggest stars, at the forefront of the "Zam-Rock" phenomenon in the '70s. Those same notes explain he took the name 'Ngozi', which means danger, "because each time he took to the stage, people went crazy and it was all disaster"! Apparently he did the whole Hendrix routine of playing the guitar with his teeth, etc. We had heard of Ngozi before 'cause of previous reissues of his band the Ngozi Family's albums 45,000 Volts (1977) and My Ancestors (1974, with Chrissy Zebby Tembo). Both were KILLER, and so is this, a record originally released by a Kenyan label in 1976.
The Ghetto's nine tracks feature both hard-hitting riff rockers and more gently loping, lazy grooves. The singing is lovely & lilting some of the time, urgent & impassioned at others. The relatively lo-fi recording renders Ngozi's amped-up guitar fuzz kind of pleasantly 'soft' but still hella distorted. Lyrically, he tackles some heavy subjects here, like "Suicide", and starving children "In The Ghetto". It's spiritual too, with the song "Jesus Christ" being a most fuzzed out headbanger about Our Savior. Most of the songs are in English, but a few are in Ngozi's native tongue. If you've heard 45,000 Volts, or other Zam-Rock like The Witch and Rikki Ililonga, you pretty much know how rad this is already; it's got the fuzz, the funk, the African vibe� great stuff! Those liner notes also mention the titles of several other albums that Ngozi recorded, among them one called Heavy Metal (!) that we really hope gets reissued sometime too!
No Copper is the duo of Thaniel Ion Lee (Blood Escutcheon) and Douglas Lucas, who lay down a serious sprawl of abstract sonic ritualism, that is equal parts No Neck Blues Band, AMM and Organum, extended soundscapes of groaning industrial shimmer, of pipe fight like clatter, and bowed metal buzz, all drenched in echo and reverb as if it was recorded at the bottom of a cistern, the guitar emitting bleats of strangled buzz and percussive melodic shimmer, the sound slipping from spare and spacious to dense and chaotic, a super lo-fi modern minimalism, peppered with streaks of drone, and shards of crunch and clang.
The sound occasionally slips into a barely there hushed drift, but just as often locks into a sort of stumbling rhythm, or keening high end skree, the final track is the most 'musical' of the bunch, the sounds blurring into extended drones, building to a gloriously mesmerizing climax of thick undulating thrum, before slipping back into a weird spaced out field of plucks and scrapes, a super abstract coda to an already very abstract collection of freeform soundscaping.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Aside from its awesome cover photo (love the red leather gloves!), most folks are probably most excited about this reissue because of its status as a legendary collection of early '80s synthesizer / computer music, which of course we find exciting as well, but truth be told, we were even more intrigued by the fact that Doris Norton was a member of mysterious Italian prog-psych-proto-metal doomlords Jacula, whose In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum record from supposedly the late '60s, we once made a Record Of The Week, a disc that still confounds and fascinates. She also was apparently sponsored by Apple during the '80s!
But regardless of the Jacula connection, or the Apple one too, Norton's 1983 Nortoncomputerforpeace lp is in fact a fantastic chunk of vintage new wavy electronic music, and it's easy to see why folks have been freaking out over it, cuz it's exactly what all the kids are trying to pull off these days, to varying degrees of success. Pulsing synths, cascading melodies, simple robotic programmed drums, vocoder-ed machine like vocals, but even amongst similar sounding records, Norton lets her psychedelic prog flag fly, peppering her compositions with occasional wild squalls of shredding synths solos, especially on the first few tracks, which really gives the sound a serious PROG vibe. Much of the record finds itself in that eighties VHS synthscape sci-fi soundtrack territory, all pulsing and motorik, minor key and hauntingly cinematic, seriously retro soundtracky, but again, Norton laces her compositions with dense melodic squiggles, or almost disco-y breakdowns, check out the end of "Don't Shoot The Animals", crazy funky! The rest of the record slips easily from 8 bit sounding video game music, to synthprog freakouts, to creepy droned out ambience, to full on Carpenter / Goblin style synth workouts, to rad cheesy lo-fi disco synth pop jams. Fans of Umberto, Zombi, Gatekeeper, Majeure, Innercity, Axxess, Roll The Dice, Dylan Ettinger and all the rest, grab one of these before they're gone!!
Around here at aQ we live for the moments of musical discovery that seem to appear out of nowhere. On a rare occasion those moments are created by an artifact dropped off in the store by the creator himself. In our age of internet buzz and blogosphere strip mining, it's exciting and refreshing to be floored by a piece of proper wax passed on in person, without us knowing a damn thing about it beforehand. This record represents one of these moments, and Laws, the brand new lp from LA's William Marshall, aka Octavius, is really blowing our minds right now, so much so that we absolutely had to jump on the chance to make it record of the week! A dizzying assemblage of fucked up outsider post witch house, damaged and deranged avant industrial and whispered, hiss-wreathed melancholic brooding downer experi-techno-pop!
Laws is a multidimensional excursion through the depths of urban isolationism. The dead dreams of metropolis living and lifelong plans falling apart seem to be woven into the sonic fabric. You're all alone in this burned out city, and it's a dark, dark time. The sound is grinding, buzzing, thumping and industrial. The beats are constructed with rusted rebar shards, rattling about the charnel house floor, like some subwoofer-shook bones long forgotten. Octavius' caustic and restrained sound world creates an intensely claustrophobic mood. On tracks like "Apartments" and "Of Mask and Money", the sounds of sharpening knives and blistering white noise blasts commingle with a tense, gasping for breath vocal delivery. As the songs flow onward, layer upon layer of noisy mechanical skree stack up against beautifully stark and forlorn melodies. Haunting, discordant synth stabs add subtle harmonic depth to the tunes, as the vocals, seemingly hacked to bits, syllables left out or cut short, writhe to the beat. The sounds are abrasive and damaged and robotic, but there is never too much going on at one time and everything sits in the mix in such a way that the songs really breathe. It's got that hypnotic sonic subtlety of Berlin era Bowie mixed with the pulsating noisy gnash of Throbbing Gristle. Speaking of Bowie, one of the raddest moments on Laws comes in the form of a "cover" of "Breaking Glass". The low slung, heroin sheen funk of the original is replaced by a fiercely mechanical drum machine stomp, some heavy as fuck JK Flesh-like digitally distorted guitar chugs bashing with the beat, while cascading doppler blips and scraping synths swirl around the stereo field. The only recognizable element are the lyrics, although delivered in the by now signature manner in which Octavius uses his voice, and that is to say fractured and corrosive, hissing hypnosis. Totally bent and completely AMAZING!
There are moments of dark meditation, such as "CCC CCC" and "331 155". Moody, drifting soundscapes of splintered metallic klang, ping-ponging singing bowls, bolstered with aphotic, creepy crawly Carpenter-like synth drones. Beautifully oscillating cinematic ambience laid over what sounds like a far off string section unfurling some somber, elegiac melody. Psychic TV's "Silver and Gold" comes to mind, except with a mechanical bass drum throb twisting beneath the surface. These hazy, murky moments of sonic darkness serve as tension builders. Haunting and anxious and mesmerizing respites from the churning corrosive elements that make up the bulk of Laws.
"Liars & Thieves" is definitely the centerpiece of Laws. Abusive electro-psychosis, uncomfortable and polluted with an industrialized cacophony, and scrap metal pounding rhythms, Octavius allows his reflections on failure and anonymity to unravel in a harrowing, stream of conscious cypher. Imagine Tricky rapping over Coil's "Fire Of The Green Dragon". Paranoid and demented, the noise and words melding to create a bleak miasma of isolation. Moody and tense and wholly original.
Laws pushes all the right buttons for us. It references the WAVES (minimal/NO/cold/synth), without getting mired in any particular sub-genre. It's noisy and abrasive and grim, reminding us of the gnarlier moments of Coil and TG, but produced in such a subtle manner that new layers of sound present themselves with each listen. It's got enough Suicide like swagger as not to get totally bogged down in its mechanized, vitriol pummel. Hypnotic and tensely mesmerizing, the album as a whole is so consistent in its vibe, we find ourselves listening to it over and over and over again, just to get lost, deeper and deeper, in its seedy sonic underbelly.
Packaged lovingly in a minimalist, silver embossed white card stock sleeve, with a beautiful 16 page book of lyrics as well as some killer collage work by Brooklyn based artist Justin Sloane. Do yourself a favor and snatch this twisted gem up quick, really some of the most mind fuckingly special and original music we've heard around here in a long time!
What else needs to be said about these guys that we didn't say first time around? A kick ass punk rock super group, featuring members of some of our favorite bands, doing pitch perfect eighties punk rock / hardcore, that sounds EXACTLY like from back in the day. Dimitri Coats from Burning Brides, Keith Morris from the Circle Jerks and Black Flag, Steven McDonald from current AQ Record Of The Weekers Redd Kross, and Mario Rubalcaba from Earthless, Clikatat Ikatowi, etc. all kicking out the jams, short and sharp, swaggery and snotty, brief blast of serious punk energy, catchy as hell, check out "Wiped Out" which is a dead ringer for Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown", and really you might find yourselves constantly casting back to classic punk jams and/or experiencing a permanent case of sonic deja vu, which in this case is not a bad thing at all.
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!
