Latest from these local tranced out psychedelic space rock aQ faves, and don't let the awesome title fool you, there's no metal to be found here, technical or otherwise, just the usual sprawling abstract psych-scapes, two side long blowouts, brooding, and rhythmic, atmospheric and darkly melodic. And more than any of the other releases, this one sounds the most like an alaborate studio concoction, a 3 Leafs plunderphonic collage, mutliple sessions (including some of the aQ instore, which also just so happened to feature guest keyboards from our friend Pam's 1 year old son, Brix!), different recording qualities, multiple musicians, new jams AND old, all deftly woven into one single, and singular 3 Leafs epic, which weirdly is fast bacoming our favorite yet.
The A side, "Technical Death", starts out like some strange Eastern raga, all swirling and muted, laced with mysterious melodies and fluttering woodwinds, exotic instrumentation and gorgeous lush ambience, when the drums kick in, the sound is transformed to something distinctively more groovy, but without shedding that mysterious Eastern vibe. Space-y effects swoop in, and soon the track begins flitting sonically from sound to sound, as if some strange space rock overseer is flipping channels, weird falsetto vox, wheezing chordal shimmer, tangled analog squiggles, streaks of fuzzy hazy almost-pop, gurgling bass, clouds of cymbal shimmer, woozy acoustic guitar strum, a bit folky, but still droney and hypnotic, the sound melting into a weird collage of blurred sonic smears, electronic percussion, sine wave melodies, before blossoming into some Bitches Brew style groovery, and then finishing off with a wild tangle of skittery drums, bloopy electronics, and almost orchestral sounding strum. Wow.
The flipside is equally all over the map, beginning with a barely audible low end gurgle, before building into a Necks like churn, all dense percussion, and throbbing bass, wrapped in swirls of wah guitar, strange spacey chords, and a thick druggy haze, not to mention some washed out vox, the song seriously dense and driving, dark and churning, might be our favorite 3L jam yet, and then BAM, about 16 minutes in, the sound collapses into a weird swirl of drones and bleeps, before drifting back together in a new shape, this time sounding like some African street jam, like it could have come right off some tripped out Sublime Frequencies comp, albeit a little more tripped out and psychedelic. So good.
AND LIMITED TO JUST 100 COPIES!!!! Includes a download code as well.
The return of lo-fi synthscaper / beatmaker / weirdo electro pop alchemist Oxkykitten, hear teamed up with the awesomely monikered Adderall Canyonly, who proves to be the perfect match for OK, so much so, it's difficult to tell who does what, and whether Adderall Canyonly is even a real person, or just some sort of made up split personality. But it hardly matters, cuz like Oxykitten tapes, The Cutting Room is another batch of weirdly homebrewed cinematic electronic pop weirdness, playful, a bit dark in places, the sound palette, equal parts lo-fi electro and 8 bit video game music, but imagine that stuff woven into darkly minor key sweeping arrangements that tap into the same sort of soundtrack sound as Zombi and Umberto and Majeure, but imagine those groups, were they forced to make their music on Casio keyboards and Fischer-Price toy guitars. Sound silly, but the results are pretty fantastic, with much of these jams playing out like the weirdo soundtrack to some sci-fi art film, thick synths buzz ominously, beats skitter and percolate, lush swaths of chordal shimmer ebb and flow, everything wound up in woozy melodies and dizzying futuristic bloops and bleeps, a little bit Kraftwerk, a little bit Goblin, a little bit toy symphony (made that one up, but there must be one, right?).
While much of this is fun and playful, some of this stuff gets pretty dark, hauntingly sinister, the soundtrackiest stuff here is also the best, weaving lush landscapes of sound that evoke some Logan's Run like future, where all of the vehicles and buildings look a bit like big blocky toys anyway, with the Cutting Room the perfect soundtrack for whatever darkness lurks beneath the pristine exterior of this imaginary futureworld.
Fans of all the modern retro synth stuff should check this out for sure, as should anyone who dug the last few Oxykitten tapes. Includes a download code as well!
Here's two long time AQ Krautrock favorites - the first and second albums by Berlin band Agitation Free - that have been previously available as cds on the Spalax, and then on Garden Of Delights labels. But now krautrock reissuers Revisited have done even newer reissues, which is great 'cause we LOVE these records and we're glad of an excuse to list 'em again, especially since the previous edition has been unavailable for some time now. Also, Revisited has found some bonus tracks to include on each!!
The ethnic influence that so defined Agitation Free's debut is not as much a factor on 1973's Second - but both the West Coast style guitar jamming AND the way-out-there electronics experimentation really come to the fore. Again, mostly instrumental (one exception being the ominous, electronically treated reading of an Edgar Allen Poe poem that forms the last track, backed by gloomy Mellotron-led prog rock), psychedelic, trippy stuff, utterly gorgeous. Electronically created environmental sounds, wild and spacey synths, and relaxed, melodic guitar are all to be found here in abundance. Second was the second great album from this brilliant, often overlooked, Krautrock band. After Second they departed the scene with their excellent swansong live album, Last (not yet reissued by Revisited), though some other posthumous live/archival documents have subsequently been released as well.
The bonus track included here is "Laila '74", a nearly 8 minute live version of the album track(s).
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Missisippi Records continue their welcome run of Ethiopiques vinyl releases with another blast of hot desert soul from the one and only Mahmoud Ahmed. Also released on cd as Ethiopiques Vol. 19: Aleyme, here's what we said when we first reviewed it in 2005:
Recorded in 1974, smack dab between the lps reissued as Ethiopiques 6 (1973) and Ethiopiques 7 (1975) Alemye is the third entry in this series given over to documenting Ahmed's complete recorded output, a totally unique, gorgeously smooth funk / soul / jazz groove accompanied by Ahmed's unmistakable crooning. There are plenty of resources to read more about Ahmed and the history of Ethiopian music, on the net, even elsewhere on our website, but this review is all about the music. This is sexy sultry stuff, lively horns and fluttering flutes sway hypnotically above a muted rhythm section of bass drum and organ, in fact the rhythm section is so subdued that it almost sounds like it's bleeding through the wall from a room next door. But that gives it a super warm, warbly droning feel, all dreamy and mesmerizing and totally otherworldly. But it's all about that croon. Ahmed is known as the James Brown of Ethiopia, which makes sense in that he is definitely a funk / soul superstar there, but sonically, he is way less hyper and energetic, less wild and teetering on the edge of collapse, and way more broodingly sexual and sensual, lights low, the room cloaked in smoke, tense and mysteriously intense, his voice slipping smoothly up and down impossible scales, a rich warm velvet purr, capable of soaring into passionate wails and back down again, slithering and shimmering with that perfect vibrato.
We'll pretty much get anything on the Roundtable label right now, as they in collaboration with The Omni Recording Corporation, have been on a winning streak of reissuing on vinyl the most farflung and obscure library records, documentary soundtracks and other psycho-cinematic sonic ephemera from far off corners of the globe. Trouble is, they have been especially hard to get, and even more difficult to get enough of for us to list. We've literally been waiting for these latest two releases for nearly a year and our hopes of ever getting them were diminishing by the week. And all of the sudden, we got the news they were on the way and we were so seriously psyched! Two Italian library gems, one of haunted choir compositions from Egisto Macchi, founding member of the mighty Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova con Sonanza and the other from the wonderfully named Alessandro Alessandroni who is perhaps more well known as Ennio Morricone's guitarist and whistler! (Yes, whistler, of course he had to have one!) Both are pretty essential for lovers of seventies dreamy, otherworldly, acousmatic psychedelia!
Alessandro Alessandroni was a key player in shaping much of the classic Italian soundtrack sound as we know it today from such comps as Delirium Of The Senses: Psychedelia In Italian Cinema. As guitarist for Ennio Morricone, his famous whistle pretty much defined the whole Spaghetti Western sound. He was a session player for nearly all the well known film composers, Piero Umilani, Bruno Nicolai and Francesco De Masi, yet his own solo work often was overshadowed. It's hard to figure out why with such a beautifully brilliant album as this mythical library album for the Sermi label. Like the most sublime Italian soundtracks from Ennio Morricone, Prisma Sonoro is phantasmagoric exotica of strangely compelling and lush melancholic moods. A lysergically-minded sound design creates druggy cinematic compositions of harpsichords, mournful strings, psychedelic guitars and haunting female vocals. Seriously beautiful and limited to 500 copies, get one while you can!
Last Rites is the debut full length from this moody instrumental post rock combo from San Jose, and it's awesome. The band dropped off copies ages ago, and we're kicking ourselves for taking so long to listen, cuz it's pretty much everything we love about this kind of stuff, soaring and majestic, epic and moody and emotional. Definitely beholden to another time, their sound reminiscent of the nineties, and the whole instrumental math/post rock scene that flourished then, it was an era of music we love and miss, and we wish there were more bands today doing something similar.
Amonie take that nineties post rock, and give it a modern makeover, fusing it to a more brooding slow build Godspeed style, and definitely adding their own twist, the opener here "King Of Prussia" is a near pitch perfect 8+ minutes of brooding, smoldering, epic post rock heaviness, slipping easily from intricate loping melodic mesmer, to churning, stormy noisy heaviness, rife with explosive climaxes, soaring tangled guitar melodies, powerful drumming, super intense and cinematic, peppered with hushed expanses of muted minimal thrum, and string laced melancholic shimmer, all leading up to an explosive finale.
That first track definitely lays out the template for the rest of the record, a classic sort of epic post rock arrangement, but Amonie mix things up, especially on the shorter tracks, some dense and mathy and proggy, others, glistening and almost cosmic sounding, foregoing the blown out coda, at least until the very last minute or two, still others, chiming and minimal, bookended by fierce heaviness.
The record closed with two longform epics, the first, maybe the most hushed and delicate of the bunch, a woozy, dreamy drift of glistening guitar shimmer, and lush layered tones, with a near metallic final movement, and the closer, 13+ minutes, the first 5 of which sound almost like some sort of modern minimal chamber music, until the drums kick in, and the band lurch into a woozy washed out lope, before a brief bit of distorted crunch, only to unfurl in a dreamily palindromic drift for the remainder of the song.
Awesome stuff. Fans of Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky and other epic post rockers will flip for these guys. Includes a download coupon as well!
Three new tapes from local label Black Horizons this week, all of the artists new to us, EXCEPT Astro, whose Japanoise power electronics crush has always been a favorite around these parts. However here, he offers up his own take on 'New Age', laying down some soft noise komsiche bliss out, a gloriously celestial sprawl of deep rumbles, pulsing synths, and swirling space aged FX, all blurred into a heaving expanse of deep space drift and dizzying starfield synth shimmer, on the verge of total noise collapse, but remaining firmly entrenched on the dreamy side of the divide.
Fear Konstruktor, from Russia, counters with his own brand of cosmic soundscapery, a similarly warped take on new age, it sounds a bit like the Astro side dipped in some sort of viscous fluid, all murky and underwater, burbling and muted, but peppered with wild electronic squiggles, and skittery sonic shards, building eventually to some full on crumbling, corrosive NOISE, which somehow manages to infuse its caustic crunch with the spacey drift that came before. Cool.
Swank packaging, a marbled art mini booklet J-card, printed on glossy plastic stock, housed in a purple case, the tape purple too with metallic stickers on both sides.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Record number two from this Portland black/doom horde, which finds their sound moving in a surprising new direction. The first record was classic blackened doom, loooooong songs, depressive and mournful, sonically similar to outfits like Yob, Atavist, Cough, and other masters of the slo-mo doom-ed creep, but on Ritual Of Passing they seem to have an almost death rock thing going on, the sound way more punk, the songs shorter, choppy and churning, the vocals the biggest change of all, a snarly yowl, a good match for the music certainly bit well removed from the vocals on the first record, harsh AND clean. And we have to say we're digging it a lot.
It's kind of exciting to hear these guys attempt such a weird hybrid: black metal, doom, noise rock, goth, deathrock, it's all sorta tangled up into something pretty original sounding.
The opening track "Parasite" kind covers all the bases, starting out all classic doom, creepy and funereal, but then instead of erupting into full on doooooom, the sound instead explodes into a chugging, swaggery, gloomy noise/death rock dirge, with cool minor key guitar melodies, pounding double kick drumming, a shouted, super catchy chorus, which the more we listen to, the more removed from metal it seems. Then there's the wild psychedelic black noise progged out chaotic outro. Pretty badass we have to say. And while the other tracks do tend more toward proper doom, those elements from the first track definitely find their way into the rest of the record, the vocals especially, which sound even cooler, when paired with woozy, dirgey doom, and soaring almost black metal guitars, and in places, the vocals get all croony and dramatic, the music following suit, slipping into a sort of churning post punk minimalism, and on one track, where the sound slooooows waaay doooooown, more of a weird goth-doom ballad, before exploding back into another stretch of weirdly mathy, metallic post punk, noise rock crush.
Fans of the first record might be a bit thrown off, but we're digging this one WAY more than we ever did the first one, precisely cuz it's so different, and so far removed from the doom / death sound that's been done to, well, death!
Another gorgeous collection of Buddhist based modern minimalist compositions from one of our favorite contemporary 'classical' composers/performers. We recently made another Batagov release our Record Of The Week (Music For The 35 Buddhas), and we sold tons of Batagov's sprawling three disc minimalist masterpiece The Wheel Of The Law, which had we been able to get more, would also have been a Record Of The Week. And for some of us, ranks as one of our all time favorites, classical or otherwise!
Bodhicharyavatara is breathtakingly beautiful, and once again demonstrates Batagov's ability to fuse his Buddhist practice, with his unique compositional style, informed by so much of what came before (Glass, Feldman, etc.) but definitely something wholly original, especially here, where the sound takes on something more akin to post rock, incorporating warm smoldering guitars, even some actual drumming, into his already achingly lush palette of piano, bells and percussion.
All of the tracks here are tranced out and hypnotic, delicate slow building swirls of sound, constructed from lush resonant piano, warm wistful woodwinds, chiming bells, the guitars more like swirls of smokey shimmer, the tones stretched out into warm, chordal streaks, with Telo Tulka Rinpoche, the Supreme Lama of Kalmykia, reciting ancient Buddhist texts over the top. It's very reminiscent Of Godspeed! You Black Emperor, especially in the way Godspeed used to employ samples of spoken word, but here, that same effect becomes something much more spiritual, haunting and heady. While it's definitely more droney and dirgey than other Batagov recordings we've listed, it's still quite meditative, the lush backdrop of sound, broods and pulses, tones moan and soar, the piano alternates between low end flurries and pointillist crystalline melodies, and then part way through the second track, in come the drums, and the song blossoms into full on post rock, pounding drums, wailing guitars, all over that darkly swirling bed of bells and piano. Super intense, and the sort of thing Godspeed freaks will flip over.
The third and fourth 'movements' return to a sound much more restrained, but like the first few tracks, continue to explore a brooding, post rock flecked modern minimalism, the sung/spoken texts truly mesmerizing, woodwinds drifting in, bleating horns, blurred into softly churning backdrop, all of this adding a haunting melancholy to the already moody minor key sound, and while the drums are still present, their presence is much more abstract, their rhythmic colorations more spare, skittery for the most part, but with brief moments of bombast. Batagov has always professed a love of collaborating with rock musicians, and many of his records display the fruit of these collaborations (there's even been talk of a drum / piano record, with our very own Andee!), but few reveal his mysterious musical mastery, better than this one. Stunning.
Seattle doom duo Bell Witch have been lauded for being one of the heaviest doom outfits around, their sound achingly crushingly despondent, made all the more remarkable for the fact that they're just a duo of bass and drums. On the one hand, that makes sense, all low end, the perfect ingredients for dismal dirgery for sure, but the weird thing is, the most appealing part of this new record, and easily the most special, is the parts that are most definitely NOT metal at all. Not even not doom, we mean not METAL. On this, their debut full-length, the band have crafted an incredible hybrid of plodding miserablist ultra doom, and classic, minor key, slowcore, it's like Codeine crossed with Esoteric, or something.
Admittedly, the band do conjure up a pretty devastating sound, the bass super distorted and downright guitar like, churning and blown out, the drums a monstrous plod, the tracks laced with aching minor key melodies (also played on the bass we presume), the vocals an inhuman demonic rasp, perfectly suited to the group's death march trudge, but then, suddenly, the buzz and distortion peels away, leaving just a spare minimal rhythm, and soft warm chords, drifting in long expanses of soft focus shimmer, softly loping, a minor key slo-mo lament, made even more perfect by the clean crooned vox, emotional and heartfelt, hell, we probably would have dug this record just as much sans the crushing doom, but the two parts together, make this pretty spectacular.
"Rows (Of Endless Waves)" explodes right out of the gate, as a churning slab of downtuned extreme heaviness, bellowed howls, pounding drums, laced with demonic shrieks, the bass buzzing and blackened, but then suddenly, the sound begins to grow more melodic, even still in the heavy part, and then like the opener, the heaviness is gradually shed, and the song is reborn as a super spare stretch of haunting, softly strummed slow motion sad pop, sounding quite a bit like Low in fact, slightly heavier perhaps, but not much, and here, the heaviness creeps back in gradually, but without the track following, instead it seems to wrap its shadowy sonics around the dark dolorous sadcore, making it just that much darker and dolorous.
Almost the entirety of "Longing (The River Of Ash)", is spent in slowcore mode, the heaviness relegated to lazily crashing chords, but it's the sort of dark doom pop gem that could easily find its way on to some indie kids breakup mixtape. In fact in many ways, this is the kind of record that could very well open the doors to darker and heavier sounds.
For a heavy doom record, it's remarkable how much of the record is spent sounding not that heavy, or perhaps more 'emotionally' heavy, than sonically heavy. We'd almost classify this as some sort of slowcore/sadcore record with elements of doom, than the other way around. However you approach it, it's definitely one of the darkest, saddest, and most beautiful doom records we've heard in ages. Or if you'd rather, one of the doomiest, heaviest slowcore records. WAY recommended.
Latest from these long time aQ faves, another blast of prismatic woozy electronic psychedelia, this one moving even more in a sort of warped electro-soul direction, but starting off like some futuristic take on Gary Glitter, all booming glam rock beats, and distorto buzz guitar, but instead of getting big and bombastic it blisses out, and become a weirdly propulsive kosmische style synth groove, with autotuned vocals and swirly shimmery melodies, all sort of washed out and trippy... and from that point on, the record drifts druggily into a full on mutant, home brewed alien strain of garbled DNA, groovy, cosmic disco, built from lazy, woozy crooned vocodered sexy boy vox, slithery melodies, whirling synths, all driven by stuttering robo-funk beats.
But this is BMSR, so even this glossy soulful side is laced with strange stretches of stripped down lysergic sonic shimmer, slo-mo jangle pop that almost sounds like cough syrup Smashing Pumpkins spinning at 16 rpm (check out "Psychic Love Damage"), but then it's right back into it, a sort of drowsy dancefloor fractured pop, slippery grooves, crazy catchy melodies, and twinkling harmonics, drifting in a soft focus chordal haze, peppered with slippery slide guitar, sounding like some sort of blissed out bluegrass laced electronica, while beneath the surface, collaged voices swirl above a softly roiling backdrop of gauzy ethereal dreampop, the sound building to a hazy soaring shoegazey M83 style electro-swirl!
All right! Unlike Blues Control, who might mislead just a bit with their name, this band Blues Addicts ARE indeed just what you think they might be from the moniker. Yep, reissue label Shadoks brings us the real deal heavy hippy blues rock here. And that is the sort of blues we like! Acid-rock blues circa 1970 from a Danish outfit definitely influenced by Cream and Hendrix. It's badass stuff, full of crunching chords and wailin' solos, approaching Blue Cheer levels of distortion n' heaviness, though with a jazzy side too, and some mellow moments. Blues Addicts' big thing was improvisation, as on the ten minutes plus of "Hailow". There's a singer, but really these songs are about instrumental musical expression, as you can tell from track titles referencing modes and methods like "Jazzer", "Bottleneck", "Electric", and perhaps even "(4/4+6/4)/�4"...
We mentioned these guys in our review of Shadoks' earlier reissue of another acid-blues item from Denmark, the Terje, Jesper & Joachim album. They were originally on the same label, Spectator, along with another, even fuzzier, band called Moses, which we hope will show up on Shadoks' reissue schedule someday soon too! Anyway, this is in that vein, and also fits in with other obscure bluesy proto-metal acts of the era like The Human Beast, Human Instinct, Speed Glue & Shinki, Skid Row, N.S.U., and many other fave raves of the same ilk.
Speaking of proto-metal, there's a high-contrast black and white picture in the cd booklet of hot shot guitarist Ivan Horn, whose evil facial grimace, long hair and shadowy brow makes him appear very black metal indeed. A man ahead of his time. Though, for looking so tough, he's also credited with playing the kazoo. The cd booklet also includes other photos and two pages of liner notes talking about the history of the band. Unlike the previous cd reissue we've seen of this (a few years back on the Karma label) there's no bonus tracks of alternate takes and the like, oh well.
Cosmosophy is the final installment in the 777 trilogy from French industrial black metal weirdos Blut Aus Nord, which began with Sect(s), a record that was sonically well in line with past BaN records, dense and heavy, ultra complex and darkly twisted. The second installment was where things got really weird, The Desanctification found their sound veering dramatically more toward the electronic, and the poppy, with one track sounding almost like nineties industrial electro pop, and a bunch of the tracks driven by programed beats. It definitely seemed like the least black metal, and the most challenging, at least for the grim true metallic hordes.
This final volume apparently is meant to bridge the gap between the two, fusing the gnarled blackness of the first record, with the experimental electronics of second, but in fact forges ahead into completely new territory, eschewing blast beats entirely, as well as traditional BM buzz, and instead weaves a lush, emotional landscape of dark metallic moodiness, sweeping and epic, minor key and majestic. The opener is a dark slab of gloom pop, the guitars heavy, the sound vaguely metallic, but sounding more like Alcest or Katatonia, crooned dramatic vocals over gothic heaviness, while the second unfurls a programmed rhythm, under a haze of crackly static, the vocals a weird spoken word, the background a blur of gauzy shimmer and angelic voices, super stripped down and minimal, when all of a sudden, the song erupts into a super dramatic, soaring, almost operatic sounding epic, chugging riffs underpinning crooned vocals all over wild drumming, the vibe equal parts brooding heavy rock and stripped down power metal. The song's joined by mysterious stretches of droned out static, and weird urgently whispered voices.
The Katatonia / Alcest vibe is huge on the third track, brooding, minor key, starting off hushed and shimmery, but building to something more bombastic, although the second half is the first hint of black metal, harsh vokills, droned out insectoid guitar buzz, it never fully blossoms into blackness, in fact, the guitar splinter, and the sound is transformed into a cool mathy stop/start groove, the chugging growing more and more dense, before the sound is wreathed in soaring melodic leads, the sound managing to be both melodic and melancholy, but also darkly malevolent.
The sound continues to evolve, moving even further into a more melodic direction, downtuned guitars wreathed in hazy washed out synth swirls, all draped over a skeletal mechanical beat, clean crooned vocals belted out, total blackened gloom pop, that briefly splinters into something blacker and dirgier, but still rife with melody and dark emotional energy, before finishing off with the sprawling 11 minute closer, all industrial programmed rhythms, epic muted riffery, and deep chant-like vox, it's almost like an outro (which it sort of is really), looped and cyclical, subtle variations in the sound, but overall, repetitive and tranced out, before fading out, and leaving just a creepy expanse of deep synth drone, that sounds remarkably like some lost Carpenter soundtrack, a weird, but cool way to finish off the trilogy.
And while more metal folks were most likely hoping for something much blacker, we have to say the sonic arc of all three records played out pretty much perfectly.
This could be the funkiest five dollars you ever spent. Payback came out in 1973 as a double album, making the most of those four sides of wax, its eight tracks for the most part consisting of sprawling, seemingly endless grooves that run for like 7, 8, 10, even 12+ minutes. There's a couple gorgeous soulful slow jams ("Doing The Best I Can", "Forever Suffering"); the rest are hard-hitting, extended, mesmeric funk workouts. All crammed full of oohs and unghs and squeals from James Brown, as he preaches it, rasping and rapping about real-world subjects like jobs, poverty, hunger, and inequality. And, of course, "Payback"! Also "Mind Power". What it is, and what it is. He gets immediate support, whenever he asks for it, from the funky horns of Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker and the rest. He's got a call-and-response thing going too with a bevy of sweet soul sister backup singers. Not to mention the always crucial drumbeats of John "Jabo" Starks. It's a groovy tour de force, 73 minutes of pure funk with the Godfather in charge. Payback was originally conceived as the soundtrack to the Blaxploitation film Hell Up In Harlem, but was rejected (!) believe it or not. Released on its own, it was a big success, and it's now a classic in the JB canon.
Finally! A new Burmese record. We've said it before, but it definitely bears repeating. Burmese might just be the best band in San Francisco, and one that not nearly enough folks have heard, or heck even heard OF. And Colony Collapse Disorder might just be their heaviest, tightest, grindiest, most expansive, and weirdly enough catchiest record yet. It's also the first to feature the new lineup, which still includes the two Mikes on bass and vocals, and one of the original Marks on drums, but now adds Weasel Walter and a guy called Tissue to the mix, and HOLEE SHIT. This is pummeling heaviness, grinding chaos, dense crushing metallic brutality, free form noise rock chaos. Hard to know what to call it really, all we know is it rules.
The sound seems to be less Whitehouse and more Crossed Out these days. The long stretches of high end drone and shrieking feedback have now seemingly been all tangled up with blasts of wild octopoidal (literally this time, not literally as in octopus, but literally as in 8 limbed!) drum damage, super distorted bass riffage, layer after layer of grit and grime and crust and filth and buzz, definitely harkening back to their first two tUMULt records, but just WAY, MORE.
Epic abstract sludge grind, blown out blasts of lightning fast crush, lurching stop start arrangements, insane throat shredding vocals that go from shriek to growl to gurgle even stopping briefly at weird croon. Burmese are just the thing for folks into stuff like Discordance Axis, Drop Dead, Melt Banana, the Locust and that sort of sound, who are up for something way more harsh and heavy and fucked up frightening. Baffling and brilliant and noisy and heavy as fuck. WAY recommended as always.
And as always, incredible packaging, released on Rock Is Hell, this is a beautiful full color picture disc, bees and flowers and honeycomb, housed in a spare printed thick sleeve, with a small envelope containing two very mysterious and obtuse inserts. And of course LIMITED TO ONLY 300 COPIES!!!!
More music needs to be like this! Open and unfettered yet baroquely mysterious and cryptic; taking strange careening detours that cast endlessly distorting sonic reflections. Minimal but complex, driving and repetitive, yet sloppily unraveling with a ponderous noisy pop undercurrent that is both reverent and perverse. Is this a rock record led by a chamber ensemble? Or an avant-garde composition ambushed by lurching bass and drums? Or both? Makes sense that this album is called Church of Anthrax and both of its high priests are one time Velvet Underground and Dream Syndicate members John Cale and the guru of minimalism Terry Riley.
This one time collaboration from 1971 has just been re-issued and it's never sounded better! Touching on experimental jazz, minimalist composition, free rock and baroque pop yet remaining elusive and restless, never settling neatly into any one genre. It was recorded at a time when such cross-pollination of sounds was not only new but very necessary. John Cale plays all sides of his musical personae returning to his avant-garde roots with LaMonte Young in the Theater of Eternal Music but infusing it with the noisy economy of The Velvet Underground and the poetic pop of his subsequent output. While Terry Riley allows his more purist minimal aesthetic to become looser and emotive, paving the way towards his soundtrack works a few years later. Add to it the shambling drums of Bobby Columby from Blood Sweat and Tears (uncredited here) and the strange guest appearance of little known singer, Adam Miller (probably best known for the sesame street song, "We all Live in the Capital I") and what we have is this truly odd and hypnotically amazing document. Something that sounds more Germany than New York, like a collaboration between Can and Ralf and Florian of Kraftwerk or between Faust and Cluster. Or more contemporarily and unlikely, say between Wooden Shjips and Shogun Kunitoki with a guest vocal appearance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead!
The title track opens with a deep low multi-horned drone before the bass and drums kick into what begins to sound like a more driving version of The Kinks'"Powerman". But instead of going into a formal song structure, the riff repeats with Riley's pipe organ laying circular filigree riffs over the top, maintaining a constant lurch forward, and glassy saxophone stabs and atonal guitar rising from underneath creating an uneasy rhythm that slowly unravels into a propulsively droney stew. The air clears for the beautiful "Hall of Mirrors in The Palace of Versailles" with Cale on piano and Riley on solo saxophone trading off building and lilting riffs that rise and coalesce into shimmering tones. It's the moment that feels unique to each of them: the melodic minimalism of Cale's Dream syndicate days, and the all night time-delayed sax pieces of Riley's "Poppy Nogood and The Phantom Band". But with its mirror imagery and gorgeous repetitions, it feels wonderfully cinematic like a lost score for Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad". The next track, "The Soul of Patrick Lee" is perhaps the strangest because it's the only one with vocals, which wouldn't be unusual for John Cale as he wrote it and it sounds like him, but oddly he relegates the singing duties to his friend Adam Miller, an obscure singer-songwriter who wrote a Partridge Family tune and sang the above mentioned Sesame Street song. This track provides a breather of sorts, a short baroque folk ballad interlude between the other longform pieces, but it's like a haunting theme that adds to the mysterious soundtrack feel of the whole record. "Ides of March", the longest piece, features chugging piano riffs and skittering drums over a looped but drunkenly lopsided groove that wavers in and out of sync, building in a weird way where all the notes that seem off finally becoming locked in and right. Closing the record is the short "Protege" which ups the vampy piano riffs and Moe Tucker like drums before careening into a swift blast of noisy distortion. A sudden ending to this curious record that leaves us wanting more. Thankfully there's the repeat button!
Latest from these long time aQ faves, a heady blast of kosmische kraut-synth bliss, released on the always ruling Trensmat label, and like the last few records, this new 12" finds them continuing on in their deep space-ward trajectory, the sound minimal, but simultaneously dense and driving, a relentless cascade of pulsating synths, swirling sequenced melodies, like the best bit of the Logan's Run soundtrack, looped and layered, and distorted and sent swirling into the ether. It's like the soundtrack to some tripped out sci-fi art film, totally hypnotic and WAY psychedelic, new age cranked to 11, at least until about 6 minutes into the first track, where programmed drums come crashing in, bringing with them, a thick pulsing bassline, and dreamy ethereal female vox, the resulting hybrid a rad mix of dubbed out electro pop and swirling kraut-drone synth-wave.
The flipside is more rhythmic and industrial, a sort of looped and lumbering robo-kraut, crunchy beats, jagged melodies, super distorted buzz drenched bass rhythms, swirling sci-fi shimmer over the top, dense and driving, and relentless, less dancefloor groove, and more fever dream freakout. These guys just keep getting better.
The lp includes a download of the two tracks on the record proper, as well as two extra bonus tracks, nearly fourteen minutes, the first some seriously dreamy celestial new age, all swirling synths, and woozy rhythmic pulsations, the second a dense tangle soft chaos, a roiling cloud of intertwined melodies, swooping effects and processed synth squelch, dreamily hypnotic and cosmically psychedelic.
Already out of print and sold out at the label, we got a bunch, but once we sell out, we may not be able to get more, so best grab one before they're gone. Packaged in super striking, hand screened pink on white jackets.
Debut full length from this LA outfit who fuse shimmering shoegaze blissouts to churning, taut, cold/new wave rhythms, everything murky and synthy, taut and sinewy, tribal drums and crooned heavily effected vox, a little bit gloomy, a lot gothy, all driven by some punkish pound, and crazy catchy, a rad retro sound that's equal parts classic Factory Records, 4AD gloom pop and urgent low slung post-punk crunch. We can't help but be reminded of some other bands mining similar territory recently, most notably the Holograms and Iceage, and of course we hear plenty of Interpol here as well, but Cold Showers traffic in something much more murky and dramatic, brooding and intense, less wiry and punky, more hypnotic and tranced out, with the songs locking into super mesmerizing cyclical grooves, which stretch way out, before blossoming into some impossibly hook melody, or swirling psychedelic squall. The vocals especially add a different dimension, way more croony and moody, which along with the soaring spidery melodies, and the driving Joy Division-y basslines give Love And Regret a serious classic new wave vibe, and when the female vocals swoop in sparring with the male, we can't help but think of a cold wave X, which is most definitely a good thing. Cold Showers could easily have ended up on Captured Tracks or Sacred Bones, and fans of either/both will very likely dig, as will anyone into dour gloomy new wave pop, and obviously fans of all the above mentioned outfits. Definitely a new favorite around here...
You wouldn't expect an ensemble of 14 year old school girls playing all manner of vibraphones, marimbas, glockenspiels, xylophones and timpani drums to have a name like Cults Percussion Ensemble, but it's highly appropriate as this is not only a totally obscure record from 1979 sold only on European festival tours, but Cults also happens to be the name of the Scottish suburb of Aberdeen that the group and their bandleader, Rob Forbes, hailed from. And it makes perfect sense that it would end up getting reissued on the uber eclectic Trunk label. This is a beautifully charming new releases of hypnotically cascading mallet music that is shimmering and strange, dreamlike and diaphanous, so pretty but also at times a little cartoony, reminding us of Carl Orff's wonderful children's music, Sea World's Sparklett's Dancing Water Show (a fave attraction from our childhood, now sadly dismantled) or the incidental music on the Addam's Family. The girls' deft performances and light airy touch are delightfully enchanting, and though not as sinister or as ominous as the title would suggest, the music is nonetheless spellbinding and mysterious and comes highly recommended!!
When the first Cut Hands disc came out in 2011, we raved, saying "It's kind of insane, kind of incredible", and a year later we're still pretty obsessed with it. In hindsight we feel we should definitely have made it a Record Of The Week, just like this one. Not sure why we didn't, but maybe at the time we were taken so much by surprise, since it was the work of William Bennett, the Englishman best known for the misanthropic harsh noise of underground '80s outfit Whitehouse. But even those of us who don't care at all about Whitehouse, absolutely loved Cut Hands. It has a noise element, but also an "Afro" one. "Afro-Noise" instead of Industrial Noise. Meaning, intense rhythmic workouts utilizing authentic ethnic African hand drums, mixed with electronics and distortion, in the tradition of a (possibly fake) compilation he released some years before, called Extreme Music From Africa. Pretty original (excepting perhaps the "cultural appropriation" factor, which can be debated) and compelling and so incredibly well done. Really remarkable that the person famous (or infamous) being a seminal artist in the noise genre would, later in life, come up with something if not completely different, at least pretty darn different, and do it so well that we suspect Bennett could have a career with Cut Hands to rival the success of anything he did with noise terrorists Whitehouse. Bravo.
So, here at last is Cut Hands' follow-up full-length, named for an especially venomous snake, and we're excited, our appetite for this whetted also by having seen Cut Hands in person down the street at San Francisco's Elbo Room a couple months ago, on his US tour. When we went to that show, at first we were a bit disappointed that the stage wasn't covered with exhibits from Bennett's extensive collection of Congolese and Ghanaian hand percussion instruments to be played live, and instead it was evident that he was going to be performing like a techno DJ, mixing pre-recorded sounds from multiple laptop computers, all the while dancing spasmodically and ecstatically with his shirt open. But pretty soon we, and everybody else in the club, were completely enraptured and entranced, the frenzied rhythms invading our nervous systems. Sure, some of the people in the place were probably on drugs, but they didn't need 'em. When his set at a certain point devolved into a rhythm-less Whitehouse-like pure noise barrage, that broke the spell, but up 'til then were were, in a word, possessed. We were wondering if this new Cut Hands would go to that level, and have that same raw, quasi-techno sound to it, some of it does, but there's also lovely stretches of much mellower, if eerily sinister, ambient/drone drift here too. But for us, yes, it's about the beats, stunning, stuttering polyrhythmic tick-tockery, in and out of which Bennett weaves elements of distortion and noise to great effect. So it's a lot like the debut, only with the "almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion" perhaps pushed to further extremes, but the harsh noise factor in fact toned down somewhat. Bennett's carefully constructed attacks of primal boom bap and metallic click-track chaos are powerfully "possessive", a pleasant sensation in combination with the more ambient, moody elements of this disc, of which there are plenty. Easy to understand why several tracks from this have already been utilized for cinematic soundtrack purposes (even for a documentary set in Siberia, oddly enough, didn't know they had voodoo cults up there). Very impressive and immersive, and highly recommended! (By the way, if you're a fan who has been desperately looking for the expensive, hard to find, Japan-only Cut Hands cd ep release that came out sometime last year: among the twelve tracks here you'll find all 3 songs from that ep, yay.)
We had sort of forgotten that we made Permission To Land by The Darkness our Record Of The Week back in 2003, it seemed like a bold choice at the time, but listening to it again now, holy shit, so goddamn good. About the best modern slab of super catchy, super heavy cock rock radness we've heard, and that voice, crazy. Even the second record, which we never reviewed, was darn near as good. Now after years and years, these guys are back with a new record, and goddamn if it isn't pretty fucking great. On first listen, there's nothing quite as immediately hit-worthy as "Get Your Hands Off My Woman", or "Love On The Rocks With No Ice", but from the first track, it really couldn't be anybody else. Especially when the music stops, and the vocalist belts out "SUCK MY COCK" in that unmistakable falsetto. The Darkness probably get filed under guilty pleasure by most folks, but we're here to say, there's nothing to feel guilty about AT ALL. Crazy catchy, equal parts eighties hair metal, NWOBHM and classic Queen (check out "Nothin's Gonna Stop Us"), killer guitar harmonies, shredding leads, hooks galore, that voice, the more we listen to this, the more we dig it.
The real reason to pick this up, and worth the price of admission alone, is there insanely rad cover of Radiohead's "Street Spirit (Fade Out)", which sounds less like Radiohead and more like Iron Maiden, super heavy, minor key, majestic, epic, guitar harmonies, bombastic drumming, wailing vocals, another one of those rare covers, that's so good, it makes you wish that there were bands that actually sounded like THAT, Iron Maiden meets Radiohead, it's so good! So good in fact that we've found it difficult to stop paying JUST THAT TRACK, and listen to the rest of the record. Most definitely recommended, and easily our favorite cover in forever!
The latest from weirdo electro black metal warped pop weirdo Disunicorps, whose music we've described in the past as "post-post-digital black/death metal, and like the last 'new' record, not so much a new album, as a reinterpretation of a record we've already reviewed. Re-Try found the man behind Disunicorps taking his record Try, and slowing it down via crappy cassette deck, and somehow, the results were even better (and definitely weirder) that the original.
So when he recently contacted us to let us know, that his first record, Synonymy, had been redone, and the new version was "fucked up slowed down n fazed", we knew we had to get some. And guess what? As you might imagine, it's like the original, but more! More warped. More weird. More demented. More woozy. The opening track is a garbled FX heavy creep, everything slowed down and warbly, and then when the first song proper kicks in, the blasting digital metal of Synonymy becomes a murky blurred electro black doom, everything melty and oozy, the guitars muted and muddy, some definite 'creep' added to the mix, not to mention tons of echo, and reverb, and probably a phalanx of other misused and abused effects. What it ultimately does is remove the sheen of the original, which was super well recorded, and had a distinctly classic power metal feel, but here, those moments become something else entirely, there's still the weirdo progged out Champs-y tech metal thing going on, but it's been given a caveman makeover, and dipped in a vat of whatthefuck. To be fair, it's not all THAT far removed from the original, at least as much as we remember, but it's definitely weirder, and a weirder version of already pretty goddamn weird is never a bad thing.
You can check out our review of the original and listen to some sound samples, and see what you think, we're pretty sure most folks who dig that one, will feel the same about Sobotomy. But if you do, act fast, limited to FIFTEEN COPIES, of which we got all fifteen, each hand numbered, and housed in a spray painted, hand decorated paper sleeve.
Mark McGuire, John Elliott, and Steve Hauschildt - the talented trio of synthesizerists and guitarscapers collectively known as Emeralds - have taken a break from their own personal, prolific release schedules and other music-related activities like running labels and such, to enter Tangerine Sound Studios in Akron, Ohio and come up with this, their umpteenth (we have no idea really, what with all the limited cassettes and cd-r's as well as cds and lps!) album together, following 2010's Does It Look Like I'm Here?
The instrumental shimmer of Just To Feel Anything carries on from that prior release, Emeralds' mix of motorik beats, majestic ambience, and "glowing guitar workouts" again being expressed in shorter form, more "song-like" compositions. After an opening track, "Before Your Eyes", which begins as a barely audible bliss-scape of subdued synth before building up into militant beats and soaring melodies, this new Emeralds opus keeps the old school drum machine beats going on the bright and energetic "Adrenochrome", which goes from kinda dancey to guitar-oriented by the end of its own epic trajectory. Emeralds are annexing some Zombi/Moore/Majeure territory there, or sounding like something by Trans Am. A sudden shift of mood brings us to "Through & Through", a pensive & romantic sounding piece for guitar� But the very next track, "Everything Is Inverted", gets us back to the late-night-driving, early '80s krautronica soundz that make us think Zombi (and Michael Rother). Gorgeous future-retro grooves. Then, "The Loser Keeps America Down" (which would be the start of side two, on the vinyl version of this that we expect will be out in the next few weeks) sees Emeralds embrace their not forgotten, more experimental side, its textural distorted crackle not unlike a burning fire of electronic origin. Following that, eerie Goblin-like tones open up the album's title track, which blossoms into probably our favorite cut here, encompassing all the attractive features of the current Emeralds program. 'Tis shimmering, burbling, propulsive, and ultimately emotionally stirring. The album then comes to a close, bookended by another beautiful bliss-out piece. Nice!
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Upon their release, Paid In Full (1987) and Follow The Leader (1988) were instant classics. Pioneering the recipe of simple beats, perfect samples (including a first use of James Brown) and powerful bad-ass rhyming with super smooth flow, EB&R led hip-hop into new territory and have since not quite been matched in their effortless style and effectiveness. If you've lost your cassette tape versions of these classic albums and didn't go for any earlier overly expensive reissues, here's your chance to get 'em pretty true to the original album with only a few new remixes.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Upon their release, Paid In Full (1987) and Follow The Leader (1988) were instant classics. Pioneering the recipe of simple beats, perfect samples (including a first use of James Brown) and powerful bad-ass rhyming with super smooth flow, EB&R led hip-hop into new territory and have since not quite been matched in their effortless style and effectiveness. If you've lost your cassette tape versions of these classic albums and didn't go for any earlier overly expensive reissues, here's your chance to get 'em pretty true to the original album with only a few new remixes.
We may have mentioned it before, but it seems like Thrill Jockey is quickly establishing itself as an indie powerhouse. Not that they weren't already, but recently, they've been taking on band after amazing band, loads of aQ faves (heck, this week's Record Of The Week from Golden Void is also on TJ!), and broadening their scope to include, well, anything really, from the twisted experimental plunderphonic electronica of Matmos, to the brooding mesmer of Barn Owl, not to mention all the various strains of modern psychedelia, including a particularly virulent version practiced by long time aQ faves Eternal Tapestry, who in the past have been know to create records from hours of tapes, multiple jams melted down into one single slab of head heaviness, but apparently, A World Out Of Time finds the band going old school, and recording essentially live, single takes, the band locking into endless grooves, and blissed out kosmische freakouts. And all of the usual E-Tap radness is present, but there are definitely some surprises, like the 12+ minute opener, which is of course rife with thick whirls of drone and bleary shimmer, but is also laced with sax, and is driven primarily by some groovy classic rock guitar, it's like the Grateful Dead or the Allmann Brothers, but WAY more tripped out, imagine some obscure psych rock festival in the late sixties, early seventies, everyone, wasted and weary, and this is the band that goes on last, playing for HOURS, continuing to rock out as the sun begins to rise. It has that sort of wasted, endless psych vibe, and it definitely suits em, and of course it gets even more tripped out and drowsily squiggly near the end, although the end here feels pretty arbitrary, as if the track could have played on forever.
And weirdly, that retro vibe continues over the rest of the record, the sound slipping from dizzying mini-ragas, laced with bloopy electronics and loads of sitar like buzz, to full on fuzz rock proto metal, heart of the sun space rock, to loping tribal minimalism that sounds like No Neck Blues Band or Avarus, to straight up druggy psychedelic folk, replete with Donovan like vox, low end horn blurt, and swirling backwards fuzz guitar, and check out the purloined opening riff on "Apocalypse Troll"! There are some moments, where the band go for it, and deliver some blistering blown out heavy psych, and for the most part, the sound manages to not be that far removed from the Eternal Tapestry we know and love, but simply recasts it, the various influences brazenly displayed, old school Fillmore psychedelic classic rock transformed into modern space psych bliss!
While they last, the record is accompanied by a super limited cd-r, called Prometheus Rising, a killer collection of previously unheard/unreleased material handpicked by the band, ranging from droned out hypno-kraut grooves to full on wild psychedelic squall blowouts to hazy loping, brooding FX drenched drifts, to super spare kosmische ambience, even a couple blast of surprisingly rocking melodic fuzz-rock freakouts! We're the only store in the States to have this bonus cd-r, but they won't last long.
Hee's an absolutely stunning recording of Feldman's most often played durational chamber piece, Crippled Symmetry. Recorded in 2000 for the 25th anniversary of "June in Buffalo", an annual series of concerts at the University of Buffalo begun by Feldman after he took over the post of Edgar Varese Professor there. Crippled Symmetry was written in 1983, four years before the composer's death, for a trio consisting of flute/alto flute/bass flute; glockenspiel/vibraphone; and piano/celesta. Commissioned by the remaining members of a collective ensemble called The Feldman Soloists that the composer worked with over the years as a writer and pianist, this new recording is performed by all three of the original players, and is hailed by them to be the definitive performance of the piece.
Spanning ninety minutes over two disks, this interlocking minimalist composition was not scored so much as it was instructed. Taking its influence from the handmade process of weaving oriental rugs where slight imperfections are regarded with high importance to the overall effect of the piece, hence the title, Crippled Symmetry. The musicians operate in their own tiny clusters of sound creating dappled circular patterns against the other players causing an undulating and slowly twisting tapestry of sound forms. Not quite melodic, but not at all dissonant, the sonic field of the trio becomes a singular vibrational unit and the effect of attempting to stay wholly aware as a listener is akin to attempting deep meditative contemplation. A great place to start for those unsure where to begin in the Morton Feldman catalog!
We first discovered Fescal, via his Alchemical Wanderings release on Time Released Sound, and not soon after we reviewed it, Fescal got in touch and offered us the remaining copies of his super limited Moods & Views cd-r on Twice Removed, so of course we got all the copies we could, and besides some INSANELY deluxe packaging (more on that in a bit), the music is just as lovely and haunting as Alchemical Wanderings.
Separated into two nearly half hour 'movements', Fescal weaves a gorgeous sprawl of minimal electronic dronemusic, that right off the bat had us in the mind of Oval, but where Oval was all liquid swirl and skipped cds blurred into lush lustrous dreaminess, Fescal is a bit more home brewed, the sounds a little more raw and less polished, the first piece here, a deep sonorous thrum, pulsing gently, as if it was caught in a slow moving current, or drifting in a gentle breeze, the sound itself though is dark and ominous, a distorted drone, that seems to shift subtly with each pulsation, and is wreathed in a gauze-y haze, everything wrapped in a cloud of crackle, that sounds a bit like either a sputtering campfire, or an old scratchy record spinning lazily on an antique turntable. There's little variation, or what variation there is, is subtle enough that it's almost imperceptible, instead, the piece sucks you in, and holds you in thrall for its full 28 minutes. Super gorgeous dreamy dark minimalism for sure.
The second piece is a whole 'nother beast entirely. Gone is the woozy washed out shimmer, and in its place a heaving sprawl of distorted low end, but muted and blurred into hazy ghostlike shapes, buried in the mix, moaning tones, and mysterious low end melodies, the sound thick, and softly caustic, a bit more industrial, and a bit more sinister. Soft noise sprawls into blackened ethereal thrum, shot through with keening streaks of high end, and what sounds like strange industrial field recordings, everything still wreathed in that warm comfortable crackle.
The packaging is just as stunning as the music, a textured paper outersleeve, wrapped in twine, with a fabric flower affixed to the front, the whole thing wrapped in rough twine. Inside, a printed insert, with liner notes and credits, as well as a beautiful fold out poster, printed on gold metallic paper, bundled with another insert, also on textured paper. Each cd-r also includes a tiny personalized note from Fescal, and these are LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Already sold out and long out of print. These are the last copies we'll be able to get.
Probably better known as the guitar player in weirdo / outsider avant-jazz free-rock outfit Peeesseye, Forsyth ventures out on his own here, and while we were originally expecting something more like his previous PSI mothership, Kenzo Deluxe is something else entirely, more like a modern warped take on classic Appalachia, the label refers to it as cosmic Americana, which isn't that far off, long form compositions, simple and spare, softly doused with effects, but relying more on the melodic structure, and the subtle rhythms of the pieces.
"First 10 Minutes Of Cocksucker Blues", is a mesmerizing bit of slo-mo abstract blues, a woozy loop gives way to some awesomely emotive melodies draped over the top, a tranced out sprawl of psych-blues minimalism, that finds some slippery slide guitar sneaking into the woozy, hazy drift. "Downs & Ups" is more contemplative, the sounds muted and lovely, sounding almost liturgical, or like some lost piece of arcane holiday music, the melodies lilting, the overlapping guitar lines creating beautiful subtle harmonies, a gentle bit of pastoral guitarmusic.
From there on out, the sound drifts into different directions, lush billows of guitar strum are drenched in distorted crumble, soaring melodies become almost raga like buzz, the sound gloriously distorted, while elsewhere super spare folk builds into dense stretches of lush guitar soundscapery, and still elsewhere, the sound is totally delicate and crystalline, notes ringing out, the melody heart wrenching and dreamily minor key, the melodies unfurling lazily, and drifting into the grey sky above.
Another blast of Sic Alps, and another good one, apparently an outtake from their recent full length, it sounds like it too, a fantastic slab of crunchy fuzz guitar glam rock stomp, which starts off all folky and acousticky, fluttering falsetto vox and lilting melodies, before blowing up into some serious glam folk garage pop radness.
The flipside comes courtesy of a duo called Freakapuss, who we had never heard of, but apparently is a new group born of underground UK pop outfit the Tronics, who Sic Alps covered on a previous 7", and it's a good match, a more sort of electric era Dylan vibe, fuzzy electric guitar jangle, loose free percussion, and the vocals delivered in a stream of consciousness drawl, heck, had we not known, we might have just assumed it was a Sic Alps song too...
Not sure where the idea came from for this match up: Billy Gibbons of legendary boogie rock gods ZZ Top, and Bonnie Prince Billy, formerly of Palace Brothers. Was it the two Billy's thing? Could be. But then there's also the fact that both are covering Fleetwood Mac! Seemed kind of silly, and like a total novelty, but goddamn if both tracks here aren't pretty great.
Gibbons tackles an older Peter Green 'Mac track, back from when they were a proper blues band, and thus it suits him perfectly, a dirge-y swampy blues, driven by a simple rhythmic stomp, Gibbons' badass raspy vox, all slithery blooze stomp, and it sorta kills! BPB takes on a Stevie Nicks track, and it ends up sounding like it could have been a BPB original, all stripped down and mostly acoustic, gorgeous vocal harmonies, all building to a lush final few minutes, helps that it was already a beautiful song to begin with.
We first heard Golden Void, via their debut single on local label Valley King, and were immediately blown away, so much so that we could pretty much only muster up a bunch of wild gushing to explain how much we loved it. It went like this:
"Golden Void's sound is SO kick ass and SO hits the spot, totally heavy, hooky, groovy stoner rock, big riffs, lots of organ, soaring vocals, and yeah, of course some seriously shredding leads, totally catchy, a modern take on some mix of all your teenage faves, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Skynrd, just totally rocking, laced with plenty of psychedelic swirl, and a distinctly laid back classic rock vibe. Also reminds us a LOT of aQ stoner rock faces Freedom Hawk, the A side of this here single, might be THEE rocking jam of the summer. And we're thinking that when these guys come out with a full length, we might just have us a new favorite record..."
Well, we pretty much called it, cuz these guys DO have a new record, and it most absolutely IS our new favorite, in fact, we got a copy a while back, even though it only just came out, and it has to be one of THEE most played records in the store, by pretty much everyone here, and almost every time we played it, customers in the store had to find out what it was, and more often than not, ordered themselves a copy.
So yeah, Golden Void is the new band from Earthless' Isaiah Mitchell, along with Camilla Saufley-Mitchell (his wife?) from Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, as well as few other locals, and they have come up with easily the best retro rock, heavy psych record of the year. In addition to the above mentioned outfits, we hear plenty of Captain Beyond, Ozzy era Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, even Witchcraft, the sound is heavy and hooky, the songs good enough to actually BE classic rock tunes, not just sounding like them, had this record come out in 1976, we'd be hearing this shit on classic rock radio non stop. Sun baked and blown out, more mellow than metallic, very California-esque in its vibe, a totally classic, vintage seventies sound, right down to the recording, and again, the songs. We can't tell you how many bands have the sound nailed but not the songs, but every track here is perfect, and impossibly catchy, the sort of songs you'll have stuck in your head forEVER.
"Art Of Invading" starts things off, organ driven proto metal psychedelic radness, wild drumming, the vocals bathed in reverb, the sound stone-y and heavy, super dynamic, and it is Mitchell's band after all, so plenty of super melodic, wildly shredding leads. "Virtue" cranks things up a notch, and weirdly reminds us of the sort of sound that aQ faves Malachai were conjuring up in the studio, super heavy, riffy, laid back vox, and hooks galore, and the drumming, holy shit, crazy busy, but perfect for the song, which leads directly into "Jetsun Dolma", the slow groover of the record, the psychedelic ballad, that has a bit of an Allman Brothers vibe, laced with woozy swirls of washed out organ, and killer wah guitar.
It's at this point that the record gets REALLY good. Even better than the first half. "Badlands" might be our most played song on the record, with its churning organ heavy groove, crazy catchy chorus, and killer proggy breakdown midsong. Then come the two tracks from the Valley King single, which along with "Badlands", are absolutely the perfect retro psych heavy rock one-two-three punch. "Shady Grove" is the band at their poppiest, and sort of Southern rockiest, such a goddamn great song, and the main melody, especially when Mitchell solos off of it, untouchable. And then there's "The Curve", which might be even poppier, but is also heavier, some of us hear Kiss like crazy, but a smarter, heavier, more psychedelic version of Kiss, more killer guitar harmonies, and probably the catchiest leads on the whole record. There's also the bluesy breakdown midsong, which is so seventies, Mitchell lacing it with all sorts of subtle guitar shreddery, and then the slow build back to the main riff, pretty much impossible to resist headbanging or air guitaring or BOTH.
Finally, the record finishes off with "Atlantis", which might be the most psychedelic of the bunch, with its slithery main melody, and washed out vocals, the whole thing hazy and tripped out, but still heavy and groovy, slipping from the dense drum heavy verses, to the soaring swoonsome chorus, the two separated by a super cool angular guitar break. The second half of the track adds extra guitar shred, and a bit of sonic heft, before the music drops out, leaving just the vocals to fade out in a druggy haze.
Holy shit. Even after maybe a hundred listens, we're still not tired of this. Anyone into any of the above mentioned outfits, as well as obviously Earthless, Assemble Head, Comets On Fire, etc. will definitely lose their shit over these guys, as will most folks into heavy, hooky retro rock heavy psych radness, which we're guessing is probably a whole lot of YOU.
It's tough to argue with this one. Two recent aQ Record Of The Week-ers, Chicago blackened doom-drone-metal trio Locrian, teamed up with one man psychedelic-black-drone outfit Horseback, for two tracks of brooding, smoldering, blackened psychedelia, the perfect fusion of the two sounds into something darkly mysterious and hauntingly beautiful.
The shorter opening track, "The Gift", definitely sounds like it could be either band, and most definitely sounds like a hybrid of the two, hazy blurred ambience, haunting melodies, deep rumbling shimmer, a sort of gauzy post industrial black ambient drift, streaks of high end hovering over soft slow whirls and strange bits of clatter, laced with what sounds like someone playing the inside of a piano, buzzing metallic strums way down in the mix, beneath heaving groaning slabs of low end, billowing clouds of washed out thrum, distant drums, some harsh vokills, a slow build, with everything fading out EXCEPT the drums, which just get louder and more powerful, leading directly into the nearly 14 minute "Our Epitaph" which sounds fantastically like neither. At least on the surface. After a brief flurry of tolling bells, the song unwinds like a gloomy pop song, all fuzzy low end synth buzz, shuffling minimal drumming, all wreathed in swirling streaks of dreamlike haze, and wrapped around a darkly hypnotic main melody, and then there are the vocals, a softly distorted croon, wreathed in reverb, the result is pretty fantastic, sounding almost like an Interpol B-side or some lost live Joy Division track, spinning at 16rpm, but way more abstract and washed out and blackly psychedelic. Over the course of the track, the surrounding sounds grow more and more intense, an ever expanding squall of swirling high end and blurred and smeared melodic tangles, but that rhythm, and that relentless dirge stay locked solid, totally mesmerizing, a gorgeously trancelike chunk of noise-drenched blackened krautpsych that while obviously essential for Utech obsessives, and lovers of all things dark and droney, heavy and haunting, it's also just melodic enough to maybe lure some dabblers over to the dark sonic side for good�
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Features super striking artwork from longtime collaborator artist Denis Forkas Kostromitin, who also did the etching on the B-side, and on the printed insert.
Faux-Finnish, droning freak-folk from a Japanese sound artist and a Swiss chanteuse!
Juppala Kaapio is comprised of Hitoshi & Carole Kojo, whose lysergically bright-eyed concoctions draw from plenty of arcane and archaic folkloric traditions, and emerge as a beguiling, playful form of abstracted psychedelia. We've mentioned before that the name of the project is in fact Finnish, translating as Juppala Dwarf. What, who, or where Juppala is, we don't really know; but the aesthetic which the couple evoke is definitely akin to those adventurous Finns responsible for Kemialliset Ystavat, Avarus, Islaja, and Kuupuu. Bells, flutes, hand percussion, cheap synths, violins, melodicas, vocal chants, and whatnot all go into the buzzing, wheezing thickets of sound that make up Juppala Kaapio's Animalia Corolla. With all of these instruments, the two create dense layerings of glistening textures and radiant drones that slip and slide around quite a bit, but always seem grounded in a fundamental harmonic tone that the two have plucked from the celestial spheres above. It's easy to situate these not only near those Finns, but also Taj Mahal Travellers at their most celebratory, LaMonte Young at his trippiest, and Fursaxa at her most narcotized. Really beautiful transcendent, modern-day ritualism!
We have here the art edition of Animalia Corolla, packaged in a neatly stitched felt sleeve and a screen-printed o-card to house the cd itself. This version is in an edition of ONLY 88 copies. We'll probably not be able to restock this, but we should have the regular version shortly.
A swarmingly beautiful, miasmic piece of psychedelic drone folk! Juppala Kaaplo is the husband & wife duo of Carole and Hitoshi Kojo, the latter of whom had released a number of spectacular drone-smear constructions under the moniker Spiracle. Minimalism is certainly a key component to the Juppala Kaaplo sound, but it's the kaleidoscopic trills that you'll get from Terry Riley rather than the steely suspension from Organum or Phill Niblock. Certainly, Spiracle's last affair - the daydreaming ambient record Ananta - was a much friendlier form of minimalism, but we were still not entirely expecting the shimmering, prism-shot psychedelia of this album. A hypnotizing mass immediately emerges from the lp with lengthy repetitions of Carole's vocal that is equal parts Liz Harris and Tara Burke, haunting the forest-dwelling drones from various bowed instruments that Hitoshi stacks into sinewy passages. Throughout, long breathy gasps of aerated noises push to the foreground alongside a revolving set of church organ trills and arpeggiations that faithfully play homage to Terry Riley's classic Rainbow In Curved Air. The second side is a slightly more somber affair with violin and piano gliding out of an aggregate drone from those two instruments. Like the A-side, it's a wonderful bliss-out number albeit sodden from a rainy night out in the Finnish wilderness. Limited to 450 copies and highly recommended!
We went pretty crazy for The Kenya Sessions, a record on which producer/percussionist Sven Kacirek took field recordings from Africa, of local musicians as well as various street sounds, and wove them into his darkly hypnotic percussion driven soundscapes. Lush and rhythmic, and quite melodic, Kacirek laid down gorgeous expanses of xylophone/marimba/kalimba/glockenspiel, the resulting collages sounding not like collages at all, the studio elements and field recordings perfectly fused into a seemingly organic collaboration. And while much studio magic was employed in that instance, exactly the opposite is true here, a record on which not only does Kacirek play all the instruments, but employs virtually no studio tweaking, no sampling, no loops, everything here is meticulously composed, and then played and recorded straight through, the sounds not manipulated, but left whole, which seems impossible listening to this, all manner of strange buzz, thrum, glitch and hiss, lovely and layered, and sounding weirdly like a techno record. Much like the 'live techno' of another recent aQ fave Elektro Guzzi, much of this record sounds like it must be the work of some DJ or studio mad scientist, but instead it is simply an incredible work of modern minimalism, by an amazing percussionist, who seems to have a ridiculous mastery of recording and production.
The vibe throughout is melancholy and brooding, the sound impossibly full and lush, multiple melodies overlapped, creating dreamy harmonies, constantly shifting overtones, moody and mesmerizing, all of these sonic elements anchored by Kacirek's minimal rhythms, intricate and skittery one second, bombastic and free jazzy the next. Like some strange fusion of modern classical, minimal electronica, and brooding electro pop (the vocals on "It Is Not About Love" remind us of the late great Lamb), there's also some Kompakt style Pop Ambience going on, not to mention Necks style drone-jazz, and a little bit of washed out house music propulsion, field recordings also surface throughout, the whole record has the feel of something that might end up on Type, or Miasmah, with its murky mesmer and strange dubbed out 'clicks and cuts', but it's too playful, too much like a real band, and a real recording, not a studio concoction, which imbues the sounds with some ineffable warmth that transforms it into something very very special.
Second release from the Teranga Beat world music reissue label, who are fats positioning them as a new label to watch, the first, Halleli N'dakarou, by Guelewar, we reviewed on the last list and everybody flipped for it, a primo slice of vintage African psychedelic soulfunk, notable in part for the fact that their classic African sound was augmented by very modern Moog synthesizers. Karantamba is actually related to Guelewar, in that it was the last band of Bai Janha, who founded the group Alligators, which would in fact become Guelewar. And like that Guelewar record, it was the cover that first grabbed us, the band performing love, Janha (we assume) in front of the organ, with a synth on top, guitar strapped on, playing the flute! Fuck yeah. The music here, while not featuring the Moog, is definitely very much in keeping with the sound of Guelewar, which makes sense as Janha is credited with inventing this sound, a sort of African psychedelic soul.
And we find ourselves about as obsessed with this record as we were/are with the Guelewar. The sound lush and drivingly rhythmic, laced with some incredible, intricate guitar playing, and AMAZING drumming, there are either multiple drummers, or one insane superhuman drummer - just check out the closing minute of the opening track, spidery guitar melodies draped over wild chaotic drumming, and what is essentially a full on drum solo, one we didn't want to end. So great.
The whole record is fantastic, soulful, fuzzy, groovy, the guitar playing is unique and inventive, beholden to classic African music for sure, but taking all sorts of influence from the West, not to mention some serious sonic invention/innovation beholden to NO ONE. There are horns, and organs, call and response vocals, it's jubilant and energetic, but also a bit dark, and minor key, but for us, it's really the relentless guitar/percussion interplay, that makes this so incredible. All it should take is listening to the first sound sample below, and we're guessing you'll be hooked too...
Latest single from this Aussie post punk downer pop outfit, but unlike their Siltbreeze lp, which we likened to vintage Guided By Voices or Strapping Fieldhands, the A side here is way more subdued, and definitely fits the song title, a gorgeous woozy lament, all detuned guitars, and lazy sad boy vox, over a skeletal shuffling beat, the sound fuzzy, and gauzey, when the record first started we though it was spinning at the wrong speed, it had that sort of warped warble. It's all drowsy, and darkly psychedelic, slo-mo garage pop, like some classic indie pop jangle jam slowed way down, softly noisy and really quite lovely.
The flipside is more of the same, a minor key, Velvets style chunk of minimal dirge pop, shimmery and reverby and sweetly melancholy, washed out and woozy, this time the sound laced with what sounds like a harmonica or some sort of organ, adding a druggy bit of wheezing whir, softening the edges, and making the already soporific pop seem just that much more wasted and dreamlike. Nice!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
First record we've reviewed from these Portland crushers (who count a member of aQ faves L'Acephale among their ranks), whose sound has changed dramatically over the last 4 years and 3 full lengths, having started life as something much more noisy and chaotic, initially some sort of twisted power electronic / grindcore combo, their sound blackened considerably, their music growing more and more dense and darkly metallic, arriving here, at Tresspass, where they have essentially made the transition to full on black metal band, but what makes these guys so good, and this record so compelling, is that it's informed by that transformation, for all the black buzz, and gnarled riffing, there are gouts of grinding fury, or weird stretches of processed vocals sounding like a symphony of gurgles. In some ways they're like a more punk rock Deathspell Omega, they have a similarly dense sound, and a similar knack for creating lush blackened crush from multiple layers of droned out guitars, tangled riffage, and impossibly chaotic drumming.
Even at their blackest, their punk roots show through, whether it's a barrage of squealing pick slides, or some serious punked out D-beat pound, the guttural vocals more death metal, but again, it just adds another cool element to their already wildly hybridized sound. Relentless and furious, the production MASSIVE, the sound epic and crushingly brutal, downtuned and HEAVY, the tracks occasionally splintering into droned out doom, or blurry stretches of rumble and thrum, or crumbling industrial blurscapes, but just as often exploding into wild gouts of metalpunk chaos, before slipping right back into another blast of grinding blackbuzz churn.
Super swank gatefold sleeves, with printed cardstock insert.
Gorgeously packaged, gorgeous dronemusik!
Hitoshi Kojo is a Japanese sound artist and drone-centric expressionist who has recorded in the past under the moniker Spiracle and performs in the jubilantly psychedelic but still quite droned-out project Juupala Kaapio. Omnimoment is a collection of edits from Kojo's sound installations and site-specific work dating from 2006 - 2009, all of which extract and manipulate elemental forces of wind, fire, water, metal, wood, sand, etc. into blossoming thrums of sublime minimalism which run parallel to the works of Andrew Chalk, Loren Chasse, and John Grzinich. "Shiranui" was originally conceived at the MoKS residency program in Estonia, sourced mostly from the blades of an abandoned Soviet turbine left inexplicably out in the countryside. Kojo extracts pensive, metallic overtones from those blades that sound more like an ancient gong than some hulking industrial machine; and he amasses those sounds into semi-melodic phrases and ritualized acoustic dronings that Organum mastered in the mid-'80s. "Sea Migration" is an excerpt from an installation involving a feedback system and a bunch PVC pipes that hung from the top window of Germanic castle, looking sort of like a weird plastic octopus playing the part of Rapunzel. Those pipes captured the sound of the wind and the various frequencies of that feedback system creating a tactile, generative composition of pure tones and haptic events not too far from those far more composed works from Andrew Chalk's once prolific project Ora. The last three tracks demonstrate Kojo's ongoing strategies involving found objects through a process which he calls 'molecular communication' where extended vibrations and dense beds of accreted drone broadcast outward from Kojo's scraped metals, clinked glass, and rubbed sand. There's definitely some type of alchemy at work in Kojo's sound design, with mysterious energies transforming the commonplace into something sublime, otherworldly, or divine.
This is the limited art-edition of Omnimoment, which comes in a thick cardstock folio with a 24-page book and die-cut artwork. Certainly on par with what Faraway Press has done in their packaging department! Limited to just 88 copies! We most likely won't be able to restock the limited version, but will have the standard version soon.
Three new tapes from Black Horizons, all of them mysterious, and mysteriously wonderful, this one from a German married couple who call themselves Kommissar Hjuler Und Mama Baer, and the label drops a Fluxus comparison, and we'd be hard pressed to disagree, a strange assemblage of lilting melodies, abstract lo-fi collages, field recordings, the opening track, sounds a bit like someone humming to themselves as they do things around the apartment, but somehow the sounds are blurred and abstract, and are transformed into some strange otherworldly mantra, the label description goes on at great length about the roots of this project/recording, much of which we won't even pretend to understand, but these were dropped off around Halloween, and we were told by label head honcho James that these were all very Halloween worthy, this one especially, in that it's sort of bizarre and subtly terrifying, like the soundtrack to some nightmarish dream sequence, warped and warbly, woozy melodies, fragmented pop songs, industrial creak and whir, hushed whispering, panicked vocalizations, lots of distortion, tape hiss, feedback, screaming, speaking in German, the mind conjures up some seriously chilling imagery to accompany these strange and alien sounds. Woah.
Gorgeous packaging too, purple and gold offset printing on green vellum, held together by a riveted obi strip, all housed in a green case. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
When we reviewed the recent career retrospective compilation on Omni from weirdo German outsider sci-fi electro pop alchemist Felix Kubin, we got a little taste of his very early material, and in a weird way, found some of that stuff the most twistedly and disturbingly appealing, so in the spirit of digging deeper into the warped youthful sonic dabblings of a burgeoning musical madman comes this lp collection of, as the title suggests, Teenage Tapes, which in fact is precisely that, a collection of early EARLY recordings, from a teenage Kubin, aged 11-15 (he began playing at age 8!). And like the tracks we heard on the Omni comp, maybe even more so, these tapes do not disappoint.
Consisting of nearly half entirely previously unreleased material, Teenage Tapes is a wild melange of tripped out electro pop, primitive cold wave, and some weird strain of home brewed krautrock, just check out opener "Paris Paris", with it's driving drum machine beat, twisted electronics, goofily playful melodies, sinister super distorted vocals, it may have been a teenage experiment, but it's way more fierce and bad ass than half of the grown up bands trying to pull this stuff off now. And more of Teenage Tapes is made up of the same sort of churning, rhythmic minimal kraut-pop weirdness. Stripped of the vocals, these jams could easily be early electronic krautrock experiments, but add in the vocals, and it becomes some sort of warped avant electro pop, with some tracks drifting into almost kosmische synth territory, others sounding a bit like Perrey & Kingsley doing Tangerine Dream, others like wild 8-bit freakouts, and still others sounding like some rad new band on Wierd or Captured Tracks. And while usually, a collection of early teenage works would end up being more of a novelty, and sure, some of this stuff is a little goofy, many of the tracks here are incredible, lush and textured and atmospheric and near cinematic. Hard to believe Kubin was making music like this in grade school, just grateful that someone is finally digging through Kubin's teenage archives. Here's hoping there's more to come.
Nicely packaged in a heavy jacket adorned with a teenage Kubin's gothy made up face, with an inner sleeve featuring lyrics, and some hand drawn diagrams and schematics.
One of our main complaints about garage rock, (and hell, most music in general) is that to a certain degree, it's easy to get the sound right, but the sound is really nothing without actual songs. Plenty of bands can bash it out Oh Sees style, or get all Stoogesy, but no amount of vintage amps, old mics, beat up guitars, blown out vocals, pounding drums, and swaggery snarly attitude can make up for a dearth of hooks or melodies. Sure a band like that can be a blast live, if all you want to do is sweat and bleed and fuck shit up, but bands like that tend to not translate so well on record. Cuz once the visceral live experience, of careening wildly against the stage in a heaving sweaty throng, ear drums blasted, body battered and bruised, is stripped away, you're often left with something that pales in comparison to the live experience.
And that was actually our first impression of Lamps, the first track here especially, a speaker shredding blast of garage-noise that rivals the full blown intensity of Japanese garage noiseniks Acid Eater, a pounding jangle and stomp peppered with bursts of grinding full on in-the-red NOISE, but the weird thing is, we found ourselves playing that track over and over, and eventually even those noisy bits, became somehow catchy. And as the rest of the record unfolded, it all somehow made more sense. The hookiness, the melodies, the catchiness that we look for in bands like this, was still present, just way more subtle, utterly buried or obscured in places, but then in the midst of some droned out riff heavy pound, a hook will surface, and drag you in, and suddenly, the record, and the sweaty, bloody live show don't sound all that far apart.
Nothing else on the record is as totally blown out as the opener, but the sound does tend way more toward the noise rock side of the sonic spectrum, than the garage rock, jagged shards of super distorted guitar, thick rumbling bass, yowled vocals, huge clouds of psychedelic noiseguitar freakouts, tranced out hypnorock crush wreathed in swirls of crumbling distortion, squalls of feedback, the sound frequently coalescing into parts that are surprisingly poppy, but only briefly, seeming to always devolve into something way more messy, noisy, heavy, and gloriously chaotic.
Fans of the current crop of garage rockers (Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, etc.) probably already dig these guys, but really, anyone who's into all the kick ass noise rock we've been listing lately: Metz, the Men, etc. should check these guys out for sure!
We'll pretty much get anything on the Roundtable label right now, as they in collaboration with The Omni Recording Corporation, have been on a winning streak of reissuing on vinyl the most farflung and obscure library records, documentary soundtracks and other psycho-cinematic sonic ephemera from far off corners of the globe. Trouble is, they have been especially hard to get, and even more difficult to get enough of for us to list. We've literally been waiting for these latest two releases for nearly a year and our hopes of ever getting them were diminishing by the week. And all of the sudden, we got the news they were on the way and we were so seriously psyched! Two Italian library gems, one of haunted choir compositions from Egisto Macchi, founding member of the mighty Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova con Sonanza and the other from the wonderfully named Alessandro Alessandroni who is perhaps more well known as Ennio Morricone's guitarist and whistler! (Yes, whistler, of course he had to have one!) Both are pretty essential for lovers of seventies dreamy, otherworldly, acousmatic psychedelia!
Roundtable/Omni previously reissued Macchi's I Futuribili last year, and that missive of exotic outer space soundscapes was deeply mysterious and alluring, but not nearly as this one. As the title suggests, the compositions here all centered on voice, but not as you may think. This is the voice detached from the body expressed in haunting electronic choral effects and spectral concrete ambience that ranges from the percussive and urgent to the pastoral and ritualistic, always with a keen ear towards a brilliantly dynamic sound design. Pretty much the defining blueprint for Demdike Stare's entire sound, this has been considered a holy grail among collectors and comes with the highest recommendation. Limited to 500 copies. Don't Miss Out!
Just as it first appeared in the Boston Area around 1977, there are no song titles, contact info or any other identifying information accompanying this mysterious release, a reissue of a private press recording of serene but outsider-inflected new age classical composition. Like another similarly minded aQ fave, Moolah, the music presented on Mad Music Inc. is an oceanic mixture of echoed piano, harp and gong, in short sketches with one track adding percussion, some subtle bass groove and female spiritual cosmic jazz vocals (not quite the "cosmic disco" stated on Drag City's cover sticker, but still pretty cool!).
The primitive cover painting of two diametrically opposed naked women looks like it was inspired by Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man, with the women jumping out of their constrained environs. This seems like it would be an easy candidate for the Nurse With Wound list, especially with the back cover graphic of a chuckling Ming The Merciless type character with a tape machine implanted on the side of his head. Whatever it means, it must have been too elusive for even Stephen Stapleton, an obsessive authority on such obscurities. Regardless, for fans of weirdo new age, library records, and private press mysteries, this should be a nice sounding addition to your collection!
Oud Vibrations is a killer compilation collecting two rare records from the late fifties, which found two different groups incorporating the oud into their more standard instrumentation, in a quest for new, strange and exotic sounds. Most folks have seen an oud, even if they weren't sure what it was called - the body is pear shaped, with a short neck, and a strange bent head stock, the liner notes describe it as looking like a 'sawn off psychedelic guitar', which is pretty spot on. The instrument was prominent in lots of Middle Eastern music, as well as some Greek, Armenian and African music, it has a very distinctive sound, one that like the sitar, many Western musicians found super appealing, as much for its sound, as its exotic and spiritual connotations.
Both the records included here are pretty great, but Ahmed Abdul Malik's East Meets West is the main reason to pick this up, the sound a fantastic spiritual/modal jazz, hypnotic and pulsing, the playing incredible, the arrangements lush, and the sound truly exotic and original, with a serious band backing him up, including Lee Morgan on trumpet, among others. There are a few more standard jazz numbers, but the majority of the record is heavily Eastern influenced, driven by dense percussion, and another equally exotic instrument, the Darabeka. Fans of the Spiritual Jazz series, as well as reissues from Lloyd McNeill, Lloyd Miller, P.E. Hewitt and the rest will find Malik's record absolutely essential.
Charles 'Chick' Ganimian's Come With Me To The Casbah, has a bit more of a novelty vibe to it, but still has much to offer, the opener "Oriental Jam" lives up to its title, groovy, and soulful, exotic and spiritual, but then the cover of "Over The Rainbow", played on the oud of course, is a little bit kitschy. As is much of the record, but delightfully so. "Daddy Lolo" was the big hit, and is a vocal driven groover, with the cringeworthy line "This is Oriental rock and roll" delivered in a weird, heavily accented croon. Novelty hit for sure. But then there's the title track, which is a killer East/West hybrid, groovy and soulful, and very exotic sounding, so much so that it was apparently used as background music for an episode of the sixties TV show The Man From UNCLE. There's also the closer "Nine Eight" which is another fantastic blast of Eastern jazz that is as wild and wonderful on Malik's East Meets West.
Both albums are pretty fantastic, each in its own way, there's extensive liner notes included as well, that give a brief overview of the history of the oud in jazz, as well as some info on both of the records.
This latest full length from garage rock iconoclast/legend Dan Melchior is a definite departure from recent releases, in that not only is it the first solo record on which he doesn't play everything, and collaborates with a revolving cast / sort-of back up band, but also, it's much more song based, and somber, due in no doubt to the fact that his wife Letha (who played in the late great Ruby Falls, and is an amazing musician and artist in her own right, not to mention a super rad person!) was diagnosed with cancer several years ago, and the two have been struggling to deal with all the ramifications, from struggling to pay medical bills, to facing the mortality of a loved one. And it call comes through on the Backward Path, with Melchior as the brooding troubadour, the songs darkly melancholic, sweetly melodic, his distinctive croon wrapped in acoustic strum, and wreathed in a lush tapestry of atmospheric ambience, whirring drones, woozy lysergic shimmer, some of the tracks downright psychedelic, others spare and lovely, a stripped down garage pop psych folk that feels timeless, sonically, and emotionally, and of course, the whole record is musical love letter to his wife, which only makes it that much more beautiful and powerful.
The other cool thing, is that the record's proper (love) songs are separated by short interludes, sonic experiments, reminiscent of Melchior's record on Kye, brief abstract tone poems, each a chunk of experimental psychedelic ambience, drifting guitar strums suspended in hazy blurred shimmers, soft swirls of FX, skeletal spirals of muted melody, all of which perfectly balance the songs proper. Way recommended. And of course, you can (and should!) donate to the Letha Rodman Melchior cancer fund: http://melchiorfund.blogspot.com/
NOW ON DOUBLE VINYL!
While we've definitely dug the last few records from Canadian blackened neo-folk duo Menace Ruine, we were initially a bit confused by their shift from grim, psychedelic, experimental black metal, to their newly minted neo-folk incarnation, and while much of the mood and musical ambience remained, some of us still longed for the group's previous incarnation. But over the course of the next two records, we grew to dig their witchy, mystical sound, one that shared seemingly everything but sound with the black metal that birthed them, sinister and haunting, abject and ritualistic, it's no surprise that they continue to be embraced by the BM scene, even though they had essentially ceased playing black metal long ago. But on Alight In Ashes, their blackened strain of neo-folk has definitely drifted even closer to the great black abyss, the sound already grim, but here even more cloaked in shadow, the soaring dramatic vocal incantations, the perfect foil for the roiling blurred riffage and muted power electronics that churn underneath. In fact, the music sounds like slow motion black metal, blurred into sinister swells of smeared riffage and buried rhythms, it makes for a fantastic combo, when coupled with the vocals, which we've seen compared to Nico, but we still hear Jex Thoth or Blood Ceremony or Christian Mistress, and in places, the vocals sound remarkably like a female Mike Scalzi from Slough Feg. The vibe throughout, much like the record before it, continues to be haunting and harrowing, very much like these are in fact mysterious rituals, and arcane incantations, the music often building to dense, near psychedelic crescendos, or slipping into hushed mesmer, the opening track might be the most black metal thing we've heard from Menace Ruine since they shed their black buzz, a sprawling, dynamic expanse of murky metallic churn and smeared shadowy psychedelic shimmer. Elsewhere, the sound shifts to something much more medieval, that ancient music simulated by electronic buzz and minimal percussion, or the music groans and heaves, like a symphony of moaning strings, even sans vocals, the music here would be some fascinating collection of blackened electronic ragas, but with the vocals, the sound is transformed into some sort of divine doom-ed blackened medieval folk, and we find ourselves no longer missing the black buzz one bit.
Last list, we had Solar Maximum, the new one from Majeure, aka Zombi drummer A.E. Paterra. It was all kinds of cosmic synth new age disco-tinged bliss, naturally. And, as we mentioned then, there's also a new solo album from the OTHER half of the Zombi duo, Mr. Steve Moore. Here 'tis, Light Echoes, released on the venerable prog rock/new music label Cuneiform, which is kind of like when a modern '80s styled heavy metal band like In Solitude or Slough Feg gets signed to Metal Blade.
Moore is not to be outdone by Majeure, delivering the spacey, synthy, shimmering hypno-minimalism over six tracks, the last one ("Ancient Shorelines II") stretching out for nearly a half-hour...
Any fan of the more melodic and atmospheric side of Zombi (or Majeure), should find Moore's glowing and glimmering electronic pulsations here quite enjoyable.
This might be called Light Echoes, and it has its blissful moments for sure, but it's not all light and fluffy, not at all. "Aldebran Exchange" is super moody gloomy piece, leaning heavily on pitched-down drones. So, throughout, there's some shades of somber darkness to these echoes of light.
Yet another amazing discovery in the realms of unheralded heaviness from the '70s. Krautrockers Night Sun released this, their only album, back in 1972, and probably the only heavier sounds produced on earth that year were produced by Black Sabbath (and,
