Finally, the third full length from these SF crust punk metalheads, another crushing blast of churning downtuned riffage, pounding death-march drumming, and sick demonic vokills. Initially way more punk rock, the band has steadily, with each record seemed to move closer and closer to being a proper metal band, Deathless Master seemingly the culmination of this shift, as we can't imagine these guys getting MORE metal than this. The vibe almost full on death metal here, the sound murky and malevolent, the vocals which were sick as fuck before, now even more of a monstrous DM gurgle, but the groups churning, furious metallic bombast, and punishing D-beat blasts, and seemingly unpayable debt to classic Swedish DM, is still tempered with classic old school melodies, and the occasional killer NWOBHM style guitar harmony, not to mention the occasional blast of galloping old school punkness or brief bursts of full on grind, but then there's a track like the closer, "The Hunger", where the band lock into churning droned out chugs, and take seemingly slow roiling riffage, and anchor them to blasting double kick drumming, making for that unbeatable slow-death-metal sound we can never seem to get enough of, not to mention the wild squalls of lead guitar shred peppered throughout. Fans of the last couple Acephalix records will dig big time, and if you've somehow yet to check these guys out, but dig crusty old school D-beat driven death metal, this will definitely be right up your alley.
Somehow this is the first record we've reviewed from these Belgian heavies, even though this is their fourth full length, but they've definitely found the perfect home for their epic, sprawling riffscapes, as their aesthetic is quite similar to Neurosis', huge heaving riffage, churning slow burn heaviness, pounding tribal percussion, anguished vocals, imagine Neurosis via Godspeed with a serious experimental bent, and you'd be close to approximating Amenra. Four tracks here, the shortest a little over nine minutes, the longest thirteen, the band weaving blackened expanses of doom-prog heaviness, streaks of feedback swirling around Teutonic riffage, lots of space, long stretches of minimal drift, of hypno rock lope, and doomic lumber, spaced out droned out mesmer, and psych-trance drift, all of which is touched on in opener "Dearborn And Buried".
That track pretty much sets the template for Amenra's smoldering slow build bombast, the Godspeed comparison no more apt than on the second track "Boden", the opening few minutes a brooding murky churn, laced with soft focus melodies and strange scraped percussion, slowly ratcheting up the tension, before exploding into a seriously epic avalanche of majestic metallic crush, worshippers of Isis, Neurosis, Pelican and all the rest, who have yet to discover these guys are in for a revelation, their skull crushing riff heavy heave tempered with soaring spidery melodies, before breaking down into a stretch of softly psychedelic drift before another final salvo, all swirling, soaring heaviness.
And so it goes, the band engaged in a constant sonic battle between light and dark, a push and pull between black hole heaviness and heavenly light melody, never more fully laid out than on the 13 minute "A Mon Ame", which displays a surprisingly light touch, the band smearing soft chords into dreamlike swells, adding layer upon layer of washed out riffage, of droning melodies, of lush layered texture, clouds of cymbal shimmer, even when the drums kick in, the sound remains restrained, a tense post rock churn, replete with crooned, almost chant-like clean vocals, building to a brief bit of explosive crush, before quickly settling back into a hushed psychedelic drift, eventually building to a final heaving climax, all shrieked vox, roiling distorted guitars and concussive drum bombast.
Fans of Neur-Isis-y heaviness and epic post rock flecked doom, bow down!
What is it with Brooklyn and cold / new / synth wave? There must be some magical portal between 2012 Brooklyn and early eighties Berlin, or rainy Sheffield circa the early days of the Human League, or something. What else could explain the legions of synth wielding goths that call Brooklyn home. Whatever it is, we're definitely not complaining. The most recent result of this sonic timewarp comes in the form of record number two from Brooklyn duo Black Marble, whose sounds is a warm, lush, washed out electro pop new wave, very raw and DIY sounding, lo-fi but still lush, all driving low slung bass lines, deep, dramatic echo drenched vox, pulsing muted synths, skeletal propulsive rhythms, all of that good stuff. But as we've mentioned before, it's easy to get the 'sound' right, very few bands have the songs to back it up. However, like some of our other gloomy faves, the Soft Moon, Trust, Craft Spells, Minks, etc., Black Marble craft some seriously excellent pop songs. Opener "Cruel Summer" is easily one of our favorite gloom pop / cold wave jams yet, with just a hint of Goblin / Carpenter fused with their eighties style minor key moody electro pop, the vocals especially deep and dramatic, most of the song spent locked into a pulsing motorik loop, cinematic and tranced out, laced with lilting melodies, and subtle hook that is irresistible, the sound a bit like a retro cold wave Magnetic Fields. The follow up "MSQ No-Extra" is just as good, which a churning industrial rhythm, looped beneath ethereal kosmische shimmer, and a serious New Order style bassline, cascading synths, and booming percussion, and another huge hook, the song sounds like it could have been plucked from some classic eighties soundtrack (Breakfast Club?), and that's pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, one eighties style new wave electro pop classic after another, with the occasional bit of abstract cold wave drift, like the awesome closer "Unrelated", which almost sounds more like Zombi or Umberto, that retro synthscapery, definitely informing the group's more electro pop sound. Great stuff, and essential for fans of all things Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks and that whole modern cold / new / synth wave axis.
It took a while for us to be able to list these - first our supplier ran out, then we got copies that were damaged, but now we've got more and we're glad to be able to review it, 'cause few records in recent memory have brought us as much unbridled joy as this one. We've heard inklings here and there about this record over the years and when we heard it was being reissued several months ago, our excitement grew with each new report. Straddling the lines between post-disco and new wave electronica without quite being either, The Ann Steel Album from 1979 is the product of avant-classical composer Roberto Cacciapaglia, a multi-instrumentalist that performed on Franco Battiato's Pollution (a unanimous aQ favorite!) and who is mostly known for composing works of progressive classical minimalism (Wah Wah recently reissued his debut Sonanze from 1975, and Sei Note in Logica from the same year as this, is also worth seeking out). But The Ann Steel Album is an entirely different animal, not only because of its skewed electronic dance-pop leanings, but because it features the beautifully strange and charming vocal presence of American model Ann Steel, who obviously is the real star of this record. She sings like a warm bodied android in clipped chirps and strange phrasings like a machine with english language programming for public interaction. Think Siri with a higher register. In the awesome opening song, "My Time", she's ready to sell you on the artificial wonders of modern society, where consciousness is akin to commodification: "My Life runs smooth like a highway / Billboards show me the way" (Belgian synth trio, Telex covered this in a smoother, more well known version on their debut a year later). Every song on here fully rejoices in the positive joys of the synthetic present, making this an infectiously grooving pop art statement with any trace of irony fully camouflaged under layers of glossy surface. It's easy to tell that retro-futurist bands like Stereolab and Sweden's Komeda were influenced heavily by this record, and it fits right in with the brilliant like-minded eccentric synthesis of Bruce Haack and Giorgio Moroder. Not sold yet? Go here to see an awesome clip from Italian dance show, Tilt, from 1980 and just try and remain unconvinced that this is awesome!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2ESLpe-rE
Thank you Half-Machine for bringing this record back to life! Might just be reissue of the year! And apologies to you non-vinyl folks as this looks like for the present to be vinyl only.
A short two song 45 rpm, 12" blast of kraut-synth blissout from these aQ faves, a variation on the distinctive CC sound we know and love, the A side, glimmering, glistening, pulsating synthscapery, prismatic cascades of dreamlike melodies, woven into a frantic krautscape, that sounds like classic krautrock revved WAY up, the sound still minimal and mesmerizing, but dense and driving, dizzying and swirly, vocals finding their way into CC's sound, like never before, chopped up and recontextualized, adding extra melody, but ultimately blurred into another layer in the already dense soundscape.
The flipside is more of the same, this time with even more vocals, and some serious beat action, more of a pulse, at least in the beginning, giving the song a serious almost house/techno vibe, the vocals way more prominent still blurred and indistinct, but almost like a proper vocal line, albeit sung like a robot speaking in tongues, the whole thing heady and psychedelic, the sound growing ever more chugging and churning, building to a wild percussive, psychedelic freakout finale.
The first sonic onslaught from these UK black/death/doomlords, 2009's Hatred For Mankind, boasted some twisted Justin Bartlett cover art, which perfectly reflected the sort of sick sounds that lurked within, sludgey, downtuned blackened death metal dirges, blasting black ritualistic heaviness, abject anguished vokills, feedback drenched crumbling psychedelia, and samples galore. While all of that stuff is still present on Widowmaker, it's presented in a much different context, a sprawling three part, 40 minute, single song, concept record, the sort of thing that just might frustrate extreme metal fans who reveled in the first record's face melting immediacy and skull crushing pummel, but the sort of thing that most of us dig big time.
The first part is a slow building brood, all layered clean guitar, minimal samples, the mood haunting and harrowing, lots of softly swirling drones in the background, a sort of blackened Godspeed is definitely the vibe, it's not until seven minutes in that the song shifts, the clean guitars growing darker and more minimal, droned out and sinister, underpinned by metallic reverberations (cymbals? gongs?), and what sounds like a piano, a creepy, bleary soundscape, with some definite twang, there's even some fiddle (which we initially mistook for harmonica) adding a bit of a gypsy folk vibe to the proceedings, all very unexpected considering the last Dragged Into Sunlight record, in fact, the whole of the first track is essentially an intro, the metal not kicking in until the second part, a grinding blackened riffscape, loping and roiling, a black downtuned swirl, that quickly transforms into a lurching dynamic stop/start, wreathed in feedback, and laced with samples, finally launching into a strange midtempo death metal churn, all grunted vokills, and droned out riffage, the sound weirdly proggy, and super epic, constantly shifting, laced with melodies here and there, eventually, after nearly ten minutes locking into a surprisingly catchy hypno-rock jam, that could seem out of place, but somehow doesn't, which is even more surprising as it leads directly into the third part, which begins all slo-mo tarpit doom sludge creep, but even then, the arrangement is super dynamic, the riffs fading out, leaving just some muted, distorted bass rumbles, over which more samples surface, and from there on out, we imagine the final part to be especially confounding for some metalheads, as it constantly switches between epic, downtuned riff heavy crush, and weird squiggly psychedelic drift, pounding metallic pummel, and dreamy, hushed melodic shimmer, grinding almost black metal blasts, and mathy post rocky groove, before finally seeming to collapse all of those disparate elements into one final, furious, heavy as fuck, blackened sonic blowout.
We've seen lots of negative reviews of this record, but we're guessing it's mostly from metalheads who wanted Hatred For Mankind part 2, as far as we're concerned, for folks into twisted, avant, experimental heaviness, Widowmaker might be tough to beat.
The third installment, and the first full length recording, in a newly launched series of recordings from Dylan Carlson, he of the mighty Earth, once dirge-y sludgelords, now twangflecked dronefolk drifters, here performing as Drcarlsonalbion. Originally envisioned as a solo project, now expanded to a trio, which finds Carlson and Co. indulging their love/obsession with British music and occultic folklore, in the form of a sound not really that far removed from modern Earth in fact, the tracks here unfurling in hazy swaths of gauzy, dreamlike ambience, spidery guitar melodies, loose shimmery chords, spread out over a lush expanses of long layered tones, and blurred field recordings, sans vocals it sounds like a drumless Earth, it's easy to imagine these tracks tethered to a simple, spare, skeletal beat, but freed from any sort of rhythm, the sounds here billow and buzz, thick blackened clouds of rumbling, crumbling distortion, wash over delicate, crystalline arrangements of measured melancholy, over which vocalist Teresa Colamonaco delivers her haunting recitations, at least on the first track. But those spoken word vocals appear mostly on the first track, she's got a lovely powerful croon as well, and most of the tracks are either instrumental, or strident folk songs featuring Colamonaco's voice prominently, especially on tracks like "Reynardine", which pairs reverby chords with keening distant feedback, and heaving chordal swells, or the brief but swaggery "Wicked Annabella". All the tracks here but one are actually covers, or at least reintepretations of standards and old favorites, all culminating in a killer version of PJ Harvey's "Last Living Rose", which somehow manages to capture the feral energy of the original, while still managing to make it fit into Drcarlsonalbion's more tranquil and darkly psychedelic songsuite.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES (of both the cd and lp versions), both come in the immediately recognizable white on brown Latitudes sleeves, and include a full color printed insert, both with green metallic foil printing, the cd in the usual origami style packaging, the lp sleeve elaborately die cut, the vinyl pressed on green wax.
Self-deprecatingly qualified by Ferrari as a "poor man's concrete music," Presque Rien is a brilliant piece of Spartan tape music that Ferrari began in 1967 with four variations on the Presque Rien theme composed over the next three decades. The first version was originally released in 1970 through Deutsche Grammophon, the next found its way through INA-GRM on vinyl in 1980, the third (composed in 1989) ended up on a cd compendium of the first three Presque Rien suites released through INA-GRM in 1995, and now the fouth chapter (completed in 1998) sees the light of day with the other three version thanks to the Editions Mego subsidized Recollection GRM project. Thus, this complete version makes a hell of lot more sense than the previous INA-GRM version which tacked on a densely claustrophobic and politically charged collage track at the beginning of the disc, setting an entirely different context for how Presque Rein was heard. Each of the four suites operates in a very spacious framework with long passages of placid sounds from nature being ruptured by short aggressive bursts of tape noise, proto-industrial machinations, and psychologically charged fragments of sound. Like Robert Ashley's ultra creepy "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon", Ferrari intertwines fragments of various whispered narratives with the steady buzzings of choral cicadas, as if each narration were that of a voyeur spying upon the intimacy of nature. It's easy to hear the influence that Ferrari's masterpiece had on a young Steven Stapleton and a pre-pop Jim O'Rourke, as well as pretty much every field recordist / phonographer that picked up a digital recorder... but Ferrari started this way back in 1967. The new 2lp was cut to perfection by D&M at 45rpm. Normally, we'd be all over playing this at the wrong speed, but this is an album really does sound way better at the correct speed. There, it's brilliant.
Record number two (?) from these Ohio psychedelic spaced out garage rock knuckle draggers, and another glorious collection of stumbling, blown out, super distorted swagger, big and dumb metallic garage-punk riffs wrapped around drawled vocals and ridiculous lyrics, buried way down in the mix. The drums a Neanderthal pound, everything angular and atonal, noisy and off kilter, the sound slipping easily into crunchy grooves, but just as easily collapsing into seriously bent free-form garage-psych chaos, usually falling awkwardly between the two. It's dirgey, and noisy, and barring one track that sounds like a Residents sea shanty, it's a nonstop barrage of buzzing garage rock heaviness and warped psych jam blissouts. The whole thing sounds a bit like a more garage-sludge version of The Spits, but take The Spits' obsession with the Ramones, and replace the Ramones with the Stooges and Hawkwind, but somehow filtered though Liquorball or Faxed Head. Fuck yeah.
Look out! Lurching, lumbering, mesmerically repetitive & rambling, doomed-out blackened metal comin' at ya here, from Stockholm, Sweden, brought to us by a label that sure knows their hard-to-pigeonhole, psychedelic "occult rock" heaviness (The Ajna Offensive, who most recently brought us both the latest Aluk Todolo and Sabbath Assembly efforts). Head Of The Demon's debut is indeed demonic "head" music, the sort of thing meant for late night listening, with the lights low, when you're in a particularly Luciferian and/or Lovecraftian mood, doing some grim partying all by yourself, working your way through a few cans of beer, cranking tunes that aren't meant for the light of day nor the ears of the innocent.
Under such circumstances, it's easy to embrace the plodding desolate atmospherics of the 9+ minute "They Lie In Wait - Riding The Waste", for instance, and groove to the chantings of "By Titan Hand"...
Head Of The Demon's weird vibe is in part due to the guttural, slightly goofy vokills (that grew on us), channelling Tom G. Warrior deathgruntage at times, Pete Steele gothic crypt-speak at others, all echoed and effected. Even more crucial is the chiming and buzzy but still rather clean guitar, that's wielded by an ex-member of doomlords Saturnalia Temple. The guitarist plays some almost Eastern-inflected riffs, kinda coming across like dismal, doomic snake charmer music, super raw and hypnotic - with eerie organ tones and drones also adding to the effect.
A sickened Sabbath is an obvious reference, also we should cite The Wizar'd, Hellhammer, Negative Plane to explain other aspects of Head Of The Demon's sound. And the cyclic chug of "Phantasmagoria" could be a black metal incarnation of Pharoah Overlord, perhaps! Definitely not a normal "metal" album, but one that for sure fits in with the avant/extreme Ajna aesthetic of darkness and doom.
Longtime aQ favorite Tim Hecker, who might be one of THEE most referenced performers on the aQ list, who for us has set the bar for all things fuzzy and gauzy and dreamily washed out, teams up here with another aQ fave, Daniel Lopatin, the man behind the psychedelic space-synth outfit Oneohtrix Point Never, for a fantastic songsuite of smoldering cinematic ambience, and heavily textured psychedelia, the resulting collaboration one of those rare occurrences where it's nearly impossible to tell who contributed what, where Hecker's sounds end and Lopatin's begin, and vice versa. The resulting sounds seem to land more toward Hecker's side of the sonic spectrum, everything ghostly and spectral, laced with squalls of glitch and squelch, underpinned by warm swirls of chordal thrum and swoonsome stringlike shimmer, the one/two punch of the opening tracks "Uptown Psychedelia" and "Scene From A French Zoo" set the stage for the rest of the record perfectly. Opening with a swirling field of zig zagging melodies, zipping from speaker to speaker, draped over mysterious Eastern melodies, everything wreathed in a fuzzy layered haze, and peppered with constantly shifting blasts of synth buzz and fragments of strange stringed instruments, the whole thing gorgeously bleary, and seeming to slowly ooze into one pulsating and prismatic whole. It's another case, where had that opening track been 60 minutes long and filled up the whole record, we definitely would have been perfectly happy. But there's much more to discover here, as "Scene From A French Zoo" reveals, ditching much of the distorted glitchery of the opener, for something much more lush and serene, a tranquil landscape of long smooth, soft tones, undulating over a bed of crackling static, struggling to break through, but inevitably sinking back below the softly swirling surface. Much of the record plays out like variations of those two tracks, slipping easily from dark brooding moodiness, soaring, swoonsome and melodic, almost choral and symphonic in places, to blurts of gristly static, and sculpted short wave interference, noise deftly transformed into melody, often swaddled in soft focus squalls of blurred buzz, just as often nestled in a bed of dreamlike melodies, and smeared shimmer.
We do hear hints of Oneohtrix on tracks like "GRM Blue II", with Lopatin unfurling a mysterious sprawl of kosmische synth melody, but if that is indeed the work of Lopatin, Hecker seems to be crafting an alien aura in which to place Lopatin's more melodic sensibilities.
Much of the sound here is downright soundtracky. "Racist Drone" sounds like some classic Hollywood score mangled and mutated, while "Grey Geisha", sounds like it was plucked straight off some old VHS tape, and run through Hecker's mysterious bank of alien FX. The record plays out like some perfect hybrid of Lopatin's psychedelic synth melodies and Hecker's master of moody texturalism, the title track sounding almost like a Oneohtrix jam remixed by Hecker, while "Ritual For Consumption" takes some mad scientist exotica, and melds it to some heartbreakingly lovely and lilting melodic drift, and then finally, "Vaccination No. 2" finishes things off with a slow building buzz, a dreamy drift that gradually grows more and more dense and distorted, culminating in a gorgeously blown out sprawl of dreamdrone shimmer.
The cover of this deluxe double lp was a bit misleading, two strange deformed skeletons, placed on stands in some sort of laboratory or museum, the group's name and the record title in a very futuristic fond, in a faded circle over the skeletons, it had us imagining some sort of lost industrial artifact, or some modern noise/powerviolence outfit, when in fact, this is something else entirely. In addition, Holly Hunt is not actually a person, but a duo, from Florida, who traffic in a droned out, super distorted dirge metal mesmer, which makes even more sense when you realize that HH features the original drummer from Florida (and pre-Torche) heavies Floor, and really, in some ways that's precisely what this sounds like, churning, crumbling distorted, downtuned riffage, wedded to simple, muscly beats, the whole thing repetitive, and trance-like, melodic for sure, but looped sounding and darkly psychedelic, each track essentially a single part locked and looped, at times sounding like a slightly more melodic, less overtly metallic Gore, and at others, like Torche / Floor, stripped down and slowed down. It's not hard to imagine, bellowed Harvey Milk style vocals over these tracks, but sans singing, they're much more tranced out and mesmerizing, occasionally lurching into something much more rocking, but just as often slipping into some gnarled sludginess, often careening between the two. And the aforementioned melodies are everywhere, this is not just some exercise in pure riffage, the sounds are alternatingly moody and melancholic, weirdly catchy and almost poppy, and yeah some of the tracks to slip into pure riffery, but even then, the sound is textured and nuanced, and eventually works its way back to something more melodic.
Some seriously epic, mesmerizing, melodic, metallic heaviness, most definitely essential listening for fans of Thrones, old Earth, Harvey Milk, Floor, Torche, Gore, and hell, even early Nirvana!!
We've been trying to get his new Holy Other record for ages, and while the vinyl version remains tantalizingly out of reach, we did manage to get the cd in, and for you cd folks, grab one asap, cuz it was well worth the wait, another gorgeously warped and woozy collection of nocturnal slo-soul post-witch house groovery, but with some bigger beats, the sound still druggy and drowsy, but with some seriously extra heft, that doesn't detract from that nocturnal / somnambulant vibe AT ALL. Shit this record would be worth it for the first track alone, with a garbled, crunchy, distorted intro, a throbbing pulse, swirling disembodied processed vocal fragments, the momentum building quick, to a loping laid back groove, laced with blooping, bleeping melodies, some handclaps, all sorts of buzzing clanging percussion, sort of muted and muffled, and then when the big beat drops, it's epic, somehow totally bangin'/boomin', but still gorgeously murky and lysergic.
The rest of the record takes a sound that could very well be a straight continuation of With U, all Burial style slo-mo soul, with sped up vocal fragments, and muted muddy barely there beats, and twists it all up, making it even more fucked up and experimental in places, while in others going full on commercial, while somehow managing to stay plenty fractured and fucked up. Check out "Inpouring", which sounds like a straight up radio pop soul ballad, but chopped up, jumbled up, and reassembled as some sort of avant dub soul, turning it into precisely the sort of stuff we WISH was all over the radio. In fact, much of this new Holy Other record, sounds like H.O.'s misguided stab at commercial radio, taking just some of those commercial elements, and then weaving them into his way-too-tweaked-for-the-radio sound. And the end result is some of the deepest, darkest 'soul' music we've heard. The sound shifts constantly from swirling Pop Ambience, to stuttering almost dubstep, to murky skittery drift, to -almost- straight up pop, the record super vocal heavy, but in a way that doesn't at all alienate the diva vocal averse around here, in fact, if anything, we're digging this even more that With U, which we LOVED. The tracks much more lush and fully realized, as much about song as sound, it's like these twisted murky witch housey soul jams were written specifically to be pop hits, but then Holy Other just couldn't help himself, and sliced and diced and fucked with the sounds until what once might have had some commercial potential, ended up this twisted slab of dreamy electronic outsider dub-soul weirdness.
We only got a tiny handful of these, about ten, direct from the band, AND it was limited to just 150 copies, AND is basically already sold out, which of course means grab one of these before they're gone!
Stolen Fire is a collection of odds and ends, random demos, electronic experiments, weird warped pop songs, a lot of stuff that has slowly been finding its way on to more and more Horseback records proper, the opening track here is a super minimal, drum machine driven chunk of stripped down skeletal kraut-pop, woozy and laid back, spidery guitar melodies, a weary crooned vocal, darkly dreamy and subtly psychedelic. The follow up is a strange chunk of gristly industrial ambience, all hiss and crackle and high end skree, like an amp feeding back in the rain, with just a bit of those weird garbled vocals that were all over the last Horseback, doused in FX and reverb. The rest of the side unfurls like the opener, looped rhythms, subtle shifting textures, a little bit tribal, wreathed in a softly distorted haze, again kinda krauty and darkly hypnotic, before an even poppier jam emerges from the murk, all Casio drum machine and shimmery eighties chords, it sounds a bit like the love theme from some mysterious B-movie, when the main melody comes in, it's almost like James Ferraro or Ariel Pink, which is not a bad thing at all, just unexpected. Here too, there's weirdly crooned vox, that suit the music to a T. There's a brief bit of super distorted atmospheric heaviness finishing things off, blissed out blackend dreaminess that is WAY too brief.
The B side is split into two lengthy tracks, the first a 'Destroyed Demo Version' which had us envisioning blown out crumble and in-the-red crunch, and while it's not quite that, it is pretty awesomely dirgey and fuzzy, a dark sprawl of tranced out hypno-rock, like Circle on downers, the whole thing wreathed in clouds of cosmic FX and wild sci-fi squiggles, woozy organ melodies, all around that churning kraut-drone groove, and it never lets up, the sound locks in and plays out until the rock begins to fade, leaving just pulsing electronics and a staticky cloud of gristly haze. So great! And the closer is more of the same, a gauze-y, heady drift of psychedelic shimmer, wheezing chords and spidery twang, which is soon joined by a strangely looped rhythm, the sounds all coalescing into a strangely stuttering minimal zoner groove, another track that sounds like warped, zombified Circle, slowed way down, a seriously hypnotic sprawl of hypno kraut mesmer, and even those these aren't proper Horseback songs, they might be some of the coolest stuff we've heard from him/them. Too bad it's so limited.
ONLY 150 COPIES!!! And as we mentioned before it's already sold out, and these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
Here's a perfect fit for the Drone Records imprint Subtantian Innominata. Illusion Of Safety is the long-running post-industrial project revolving around Chicago's Dan Burke. Over the past 30 years, he and his band of malcontents have created an amazing, if under-appreciated catalogue of psychologically grim soundtracks, brutal collages, and sublime dronemuzik, with most of the recordings operating on divergent aesthetic paths. On Sweet Dreams, Illusion Of Safety pushes towards an organic melancholy through some downright beautiful passages for guitar and synth explorations that recalls the Connie Plank haze cast upon Harmonia and Cluster back in the day. Yet, Burke detours from the kosmische ethos by snapping concise samples of earthen crunch along Robert Hampson-esque grids with loosened strumming dissolving the title track into a plaintive call and response of the technological and the roughhewn. "Unresolved" treats the guitar with more of a Tim Hecker sensibility for a digitally savvy blissout, followed up on the flipside with the hypnotic and lovely "Always Somewhere Else" whose motorik underbelly gradually levitates through an oscillating sequence of synths, with brightly toned guitar plucks gradually revolving into focus next to celestial choral synths. Quite a surprise from Illusion Of Safety, but one we're delighted to encounter.
Ingenting is Swedish for 'nothing,' and this American collective (half living in California, the other in North Carolina) pays homage to all of the varied meanings that Ingmar Bergman ascribes to the state of 'nothingness.' This certainly entails all of the dark and heavy aspects of Bergman's nihilism and the long pregnant silences that are sporadically interrupted by dialogue; but they also dig into Bergman's films finding poetry in such banal phrases as "I want nothing to eat." Around this conceptual framework, Ingenting Kollektiva recorded their first album in "direct response to music recorded or released in 1969" from which they announce something akin to the Nurse With Wound list, with entries including Holger Czukay, Amon Duul, Ornette Coleman, Pentangle, King Crimson, Alan Silva, etc. None of those artists mentioned seem to offer the construction of Ingenting Kolletiva's darkly kaleidoscopic abstractions and acoustically driven drones; but the ghosts of those sounds certainly haunt the grooves of this record.
The two long-form pieces of Fragments Of Night allude to more contemporary practitioners of the avant-drone, especially Mirror, Thuja, zoviet*france, and Taj Mahal Travellers (to throw things somewhat near the 1969 year-zero mark). The instruments of the collective's choosing include harmonium, cello, guitar, flute, old 78s, psaltry, etc; and the collective deftly obscure those sources through interwoven harmonics, dense layering, and plenty of delay & reverb. The first side opens with gaping, deep thrums of low frequencies that ripples as if dialed into the reflective black ice from some distant moon around Saturn. The plucked notes from the psaltry gracefully pulls back the gloom of that opening passage and sets off a slow-motion dissolve of foghorn bellows, come across somewhere between Deathprod and Caretaker. The flipside is more acoustically sourced, or at least the guitars and horns can be heard amidst the time-delay effects and tape-decay loops, from which melodies form through rasping Tibetan bowls, guitars amass in dense vibrating chunks of space, and a rather dramatic crescendo of agitated violin scrapes builds to a crashing end of tense noise and drone. Limited pressing in a gatefold sleeve, what else could you want from this fantastic record? Oh yeah, there's a download code, too!
Another incredible jazz artifact rescued from the abyss by the fine folks at Porter, this one comes courtesy of the enigmatic Juma Sultan, and his ever shifting musical collective The Aboriginal Music Society, who over the course of the sixties and seventies recorded literally THOUSANDS of hours of music, the group's sound as constantly in flux as its lineup, the sound a dizzying mix of Afro / spiritual / free jazz, even soul and RnB, all of which is covered here, this handful of tracks handpicked by Sultan, chronicling the groups' expansive body of work, beginning with the near 21 minute "AMS", which manages to capture the free sonic spirit of the group in a single, track, beginning with a dense rhythmic workout, that definitely foreshadows groups like No Neck Blues Band, Avarus and Sunburned Hand Of The Man, before slipping into a woozy, bass and piano driven groove, the bass warped and warbly, the piano lush and melancholic, until in swoop some soulful horns, the vibe very laid back and groovy, before transforming once again into a serious post-bop final movement, the drums growing more chaotic and propulsive, the piano wild and loose, the sound growing more and more free with out losing any of its soul or melody.
"Shake Your Money Maker" is all drums and percussion, fluttering flute and call and response vocals, a total drum and fife style jam, before slipping into the VERY funky "Darn My Socks", with some James Brown style vox, a funky-drummer beat, super raw and lo-fi, wah guitar and extra percussion adding to the songs fierce groove.
The rest of the record is split between two, two-part jams, "Sundance And The Hand Clapping", which is darkly groovy, with whirring organs, dense flurries of piano, and a driving metronomic beat, the second part letting loose with lots of flute, draped over groovy percussion, while "She Made Me Feel Like Glory" unfurls as a seriously heady chunk of spiritual jazz, all droned out and Eastern, hazy and hypnotic, bells and percussion, over slow smoldering grooves, culminating in the second part / final track, which adds vocals, and slowly builds from spare call and response vocal driven soulful jazz, to something much more loose and abstract, a final sprawl of explosive and prismatic ur-drone raga jazz blissout. AWESOME.
So our beloved Finnish singer, Lau Nau (also of Kiila, Paivansade, the Anaksimandros, Avarus, Maailma, and the trio Hertta Lussu Assa - basically most of Finland's underground foresty free folk scene), has moved far away from the drone prevalent on her previous releases, and drifted off into a more spare psych-folk scape. These songs really breathe. Lau's cool and airy vocals fall gently on the mostly piano, jouhikko (a traditional Finnish lyre), and drum arrangements like snow - all the while singing about darkness and death like she's Emily Dickinson. Of particular note is "Run, My Horsey, Run", which has a Gypsy folk influence. Lau's known for her eccentric and vast instrumentation, and this release is no disappointment in that regard. "Conqueror's Song" includes Lau's own beat-boxing (yeah, you read that right), and "Paperthin" credits someone on "seagulls". We're not sure how you play a seagull, but we enjoyed their appearance on this wistful, gloomy, and very pretty release!
Originally released in 1997 on the now defunct Iris Light imprint out of England, Emotion Engramm was the final album from Maeror Tri - the haunting, post-industrial drone trio that was the precursor to the equally haunting, post-industrial drone DUO Troum. This record - more so than any of the other Maeror Tri albums - engaged the complex structures that Troum would later push through their interlocking, shadowy melodies and slow-motion, effects-heavy drone. At the same time, the concepts that went into Emotional Engramm are more closely related to the clinical psychological themes of the Maeror Tri albums Multiple Personality Disorder or Language Of Flames & Sound, as referenced by the titular engram (purposefully misspelled in the title), a Scientology term for a mental image embedded into the brain by any type of trauma - physical, emotional, psychic, or otherwise. Far from prescribing the teachings of Scientology, Maeror Tri uses that concept as a jumping off point in conjuring "resonance of control, impact, fortuity, the randomly instigated yet inedibly etched emotional memory: Kodak ghosts." It's easy to read particular passages within the frozen din of washed-out guitar noise, spectral melodies, tectonic bass rumblings, and metallic slashes of grim electronics as the seizures within the psyche that might get caught in an infinite loop for the inner-mind. Some of those images provide an emotional resonance that's deeply sad and full of despair, while others are enraged with a blackened hostility. As we mentioned, many of the ideas and strategies that went into this album continued to develop through Troum; but even so, this stands as one of the best albums that either Maeror Tri or Troum had produced.
As much as we loved The Men's Leave Home album, which we made our Record Of the Week back in 2011, Immaculada, the 2010 debut from Brooklyn post punks / noise rockers The Men, released on cd for the first time (and vinyl again), might be even better. It's the same mix of experimental noise and twisted pop smarts, but here that hybrid is even more raw and feral, more blown out and urgent, more of a sort of home brewed basement-made mystery. The opener is the perfect teaser, a crumbling distorted layer of guitar buzz draped over a lilting organ melody, the combination reminding us of Tim Hecker, or maybe the Goslings, and then when the band kicks in proper, they simply add another layer, transforming that gauze-y drift into a sort of slow-mo shoegaze bliss-metal doom-drift that we sort of wish would have gone on forever.
Thankfully, the rest of the record is just as great. "Problems/Burning Up" unfurls a woozy sitar like drone, a sort of lo-fi raga, that is rudely interrupted by a squall of feedback and guitarnoise, those too settle into a sort of drone, before the sound splinters, and the song kicks in, all swaggery noise rock riffage and howled distorted vox, early AmRep is the vibe, but all washed out and sort of blissed out, and seriously catchy, and from there on out, the band sort of careen wildly from sound to sound, pretty and drifty one second, noisy and stomp the next, blurry and psychedelic the next, it's a glorious hodgepodge, as is evidenced by the jagged edits, and weird song structures, almost like this was a patchwork put together way after the fact, but that sort of schizophrenic arrangement suits the sound and the songs. "Grave Desecration" is The Men doing their best buzzing black metal, peppering that blackened noise-rock with parts way poppier, not to mention a dreamy acoustic guitar outro. "Madonna, Star Of The Sea" is another gem here, never fully forming into proper song form, but instead, unfurling as a glorious, super distorted, blissed out psychedelic guitar drone, the sound churning and undulating, chugging and drifting in equal measure, a bit of twang here and there, but ultimately, the sounds surface and then seem to ooze and bleed into one another, the result a sort of heady psychedelic drone-drift, that again, like the opener, could have filled up the rest of the record and we would have been just fine with that.
From there on out, the group continue to confound. "Lazarus" delivers a swirling squall of guitar noise and feedback drenched skree, very free form Sonic Youth style, but then when the song kicks in, it's CRAZY poppy, sounding like a stumblier, noise rockier version of the Swirlies, "Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition" sounds like Polvo by way of the Meat Puppets, total classic noise pop, a little bit angular, a little bit twangy, but still plenty murky and lo-fi, "Oh Yoko" is a brief blast of pop flecked noisiness, a chaotic sonic swirl rife with shrieked vox and buried melodies, and finally the title track is a brooding groover, a classic slice of noise pop/rock, with chugging, churning bass heavy verses, soaring super distorted sort-of choruses, some killer psychedelic guitar freakouts, and somehow the whole thing manages to still be insanely catchy. Probably should have made this one Record Of The Week too, which of course means that this is absolutely and utterly recommended!
Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) is a sound artist whose primary tools are field recordings and found objects activated within acoustically interesting spaces. While most of his impressive back catalogue of recordings finds him manipulating and treating those sounds into expressive drones and subtly dynamic collages, this double disc set is far more spacious and open-ended, given a slight shift in methodology. He explains in the liner notes that "the framework compositions are a series of experiments with untreated field recordings, exploring notions of musicality within the structures of found sound. The compositions were created with differing sets of self-imposed rules." Two of the four compositions deal specifically with voice, with "Framework 3" settling into a rather lovely passage of wordless vocal harmonics improvised in an open terrace by noted Estonian folk singers Mari Kalkun and Piibe Kolka. This track begins with a reprise of some of the sounds that McGinley used on his 2012 album What Are The Roots That Clutch, as heard in the dense burbling of water insects, building up through brightly resonant objects that shimmer with the minimalist fervor of an Angus MacLise composition. "Framework 2" is the other piece dealing with voice, with the grunts and wheezes of somebody snoring very loudly at the end of this 30 minute piece, which is mostly comprised of frigid wind-blown recordings and scabrous snippets of activity more on par with G*Park's ice-born recordings. "Framework 4" alternates between interior and exterior sounds emphasizing the psychological impacts of the incessant buzz of late-summer cicadas and the flourescent-tube hum of institutional space. Beautiful wanderings of sound that always have the potential to surprise, frighten, and delight.
We had never heard of Japanese-American percussionist Nakatani before, but from what little we've learned since this record showed up, it seems like he's a seriously formidable drummer / percussionist, and while this record does seem to be a bit removed from his usual sound, it does also seem to chronicle his voracious appetite for both collaboration and experimentation. The Nakatani Gong Orchestra is not so much an orchestra, as it is in fact Nakatani driving around to different cities, his van crammed with gongs and bows and mallets and various other homemade implements, upon arriving in each city, he gets together with 5 or 6 new players, gives a brief workshop, and a little bit of practice, before this impromptu 'orchestra' then performs, most of these performances being recorded - a handful of those presented here.
As you might imagine, the sound of a gong orchestra is dark and rumbling, shimmery and resonant, the gongs bowed and scraped more than struck, the result lush billows of sound, long streaks of bowed metal woven into softly undulating shimmers, rife with constantly shifting overtones, dark metallic swirls, a deep resonant thrum, darkly prismatic, so much going on just below the surface, softly roiling, a whorl of blacks and greys, streaked with shards of high end skree, and shot through with slivers of deep dark ambience and soft cacophonies of blurred haze, the whole of side one is a dark drift, warm and whirling, mesmerizingly mellow. As is much of the B side, although there's a stretch where the gongs build to a serious crescendo, sounding almost symphonic, before once again settling into another slow sprawl of reverberant mesmer.
Gorgeous meditative stuff for sure. Fans of Organum, Phill Niblock and other masters of the drone and the overtone, will find themselves in buzzing metallic low end heaven. As if there was any other kind!
LIMITED TO 800 COPIES!! Housed in super fancy, heavy Stoughton style tip-on jackets, with subtly metallic printing, each one hand numbered!
Long awaited debut from Bay Area hardcore heavies Needles, featuring members of Talk Is Poison and Limp Wrist, whose sound is a killer mix of classic punk rock pummel, old school Bay Area powerviolence and brooding, gloomy new waviness, the opening title track, starts off with a feedback drenched sprawl of new wave, bass heavy, gloom punk dirgery, before launching into a furious blast of pummeling hardcore crush, throat shredding vox, galloping drums and some fierce sinewy riffage. "Not Losing Faith" is a 30 second face melter all chaotic crumble and frenzied shred wrapped around a dense driving bassline, and then "Truth" which mixes the two, slipping easily from grinding hardcore heaviness to near metallic crunch, sounding a bit like a supercharged Rudimentary Peni. And so it goes, six songs in about eight minutes, catchy as fuck, heavy as fuck, and definitely has us hankering for a full length!
Initially we were mostly intrigued by this new ep from Italian punx Thee Oops, cuz the six year old daughter of a friend of ours, has a band called the Oops, where she and her same aged friend, each sit at a drum kit, and try to hit all the drums without hitting the cymbals, and every time they do, they both shout "OOPS!"
This record is by no means as cute as that, but then what really could be? Instead, these guys have tacked on an extra E and delivered 10 short sharp blasts of furious, catchy as fuck punk rock, nothing twisted or weird or experimental, just three chords, pounding drums, yowled vox, and hooks galore. Like all the best punk rock, these songs are essentially pop songs, super charged, revved up and let loose. Opener "1994" has been stuck in our head for weeks, even after only a handful of listens, and the more we listen to this (ten songs in a little over 12 minutes, so it's a lot!), the more it's true of pretty much every song here. Wild little squalls of lead guitar, crazy catchy choruses, some kick ass riffs, the songs flitting from anthemic singalongs to crunchy almost metallic punk to J-Church / Jawbreaker style pop punk to fuzzy midtempo UK punk rock to Toy Dolls style hyper pop. They even do a Beastie Boys cover (as in old punk rock BB!!). So great!
Vinyl folks, fyi, this will be coming out as a double 7" sometime soon.
As soon as we heard this the massive and mesmeric sounds found here on the debut from the Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere, we knew it was Record Of The Week material! And while it's the record of our week (and many weeks to come, we imagine), it was three years in the making, a grandiose accomplishment involving the efforts of around 40 musicians and singers.
The British new music ensemble responsible for this sprawling double cd has an appropriately evocative name, they are in the business of generating clouds of sound from on high, and they are indeed a sort of Orchestra, certainly a lot of musicians on a lot of intruments making a BIG sound, the actual core group of the UOA itself comprising only five folks, but they're augmented by a string quartet (the La Garotte String Quartet), a woodwinds ensemble (The Divine Winds), and a 25 person avant-garde choral group (Juxtavoices).
Together, the UOA and friends create a hybrid akin to 20th century classical chamber music meets propulsive krautrock meets '70s cosmic jazz (some parts, like the ten minute track "Coherent Backscattering" that closes the first disc, remind us of the wonderful Alice Coltrane With Strings album World Galaxy, complete with what sounds like varispeed tape manipulation)� But it's probably most heavily influenced by the work of modern minimalist master Terry Riley in particular - imagine portions of the Riley/Cale album Church Of Anthrax heavied up by a psychedelic stage band, with tons of synth and electronics amidst the strings and horns and percussive skitter. Other comparisons we could cite include the Swedish sixties psych groups Parson Sound/International Harvester (also big Riley fans), some large prog jazz rock ensembles of the '70s, like Keith Tippett's Canterbury based Centipede, and krautrockers Out Of Focus (circa Four Letter Monday Afternoon), as well as various underground free drone ensembles of more recent vintage.
The two part, twenty-plus-minute "Seen From Above" early in the first disc is really worth the price of admission alone, a tour de force that sums up the glories of the OUA without revealing quite all the secrets that you'll encounter elsewhere on these two densely-packed discs (77+ minutes disc 1, 76+ minutes disc 2, no wasted space in other words, you get your money's worth!). The piece is full of droning deep rumbles that resolve into strong bass pulsations, graced with gorgeous organ tones, and dramatic drum rolls and cymbal crashes.
But the next track, the 10 minute plus "The Opposition Effect" is equally impressive, getting even heavier with the krautROCK elements, and brings the Juxtavoices to bear as well, with some intense vocal chant that reminds us of the aforementioned International Harvester.
And so it goes, and goes, the UOA at times bombastic and heavy, at others more hauntingly subtle and murmuring, with squeaks and mumbles, like an orchestra tuning up, in a murky sonic miasma. Much of this is stirring & cinematic, with parts that remind us of Godspeed! You Black Emperor and experimental Norwegian "death-jazzers" Supersilent too. The latter especially on disc two, which opens in an even, ah, moodier mood, the sound ever more abstract and ambient on "An Open Vista Is Revealed", followed by "He Died Before I Could Get My Revenge", which begins with shimmering jittering electronics and stumbling drums. Towards the end of that track, the Juxtavoices ensemble is employed to provide a bed of buried, layered and effected vocal snippets on the subject of the track's disturbing title (giving both a "hearing creepy voices in your head" and "overheard noisy cocktail party conversation" vibe at once). On both discs, the Juxtavoices talents are used judiciously in ways that really put this over the top in the sheer weirdness dep't., really letting it all out in feral, primal form amidst the murk of disc two's closer "Their Dark Presence Stretches Through The Void".
Oh, and eventually of course the krauty drum propulsion kicks in on this disc as well.
Essentially, the UOA take krautrock derived, pounding rhythmic hypnosis a la Circle, and combines it with the symphonic majesty of something like another recent aQ Record Of The Week, the reissue of William Sheller's glorious Lux Aeterna, if you can imagine that, or (if you've ever heard it) Richard Youngs' pseudo prog-rock Ilk project taken to Magma-like orchestral extremes.
At the core of the UOA, is English composer/improviser Martin Archer, also a member of The Divine Winds, and organizer of Juxtavoices. He's a quite prolific musician, who runs the Discus label that put this out, and we should really review more of his releases in future. Previously, Archer's name HAS appeared on the aQ list as a key member of crushing industrial doom/free jazz prog outfit Combat Astronomy, much loved by us; he's also the fellow responsible for the Saint Agnes Fountain album from about ten years ago, a clever hoax that purported to be an early '70s recording from a fictional female Japanese minimalist composer named Masayo Asahara (and if you liked that Martin Archer alter-ego as much as we did, you'll totally dig the UOA, they seem to share a lot of the same sonic inspirations).
Martin, we're impressed. And this couldn't be more up our alley, as you can perhaps judge by the artists we've attempted to compare this to. In a word, wow.
Latest from local label Time Released Sound, comes in the form of this ULTRA limited Peter King lathe cut 10" from Italian soundscaper Fabio Orsi, and it's a gorgeous, drifting dreamy dronescape, spread out over both sides of the record, glistening, and glimmering, laced with field recordings, the chirping of birds and the sounds of natured deftly woven into Orsi's delicate crystalline soundworld, all hushed and hazy, spectral and shimmery, laced with some soaring swoonsome string-like melodies, and patient, painterly piano, all blurred and smeared info gauzy streaks of soft focus sound, lush and so so lovely.
Like all Time Released Sound releases, extravagantly packaged, each 10" housed in a hand altered, spray stenciled, repurposed vintage picture sleeve from an old popular music 78, every one unique and one of a kind. Must have taken hours and hours of work since each one required a different stencil.
LIMITED TO JUST 70 COPIES!! We got only FIVE and will NOT be able to get more!!
Mythical and magical, indeed! Pagan Altar, hopefully you know by now, are an '80s metal band from the UK, who never released anything back in the day, but here in the 21st century have been putting out records, dusting off their old, unrecorded songs to much underground acclaim and amazement. Their style is one that works as well, or even better, when played by gents of advanced age - part epic NWOBHM thespianism, part Black Sabbathy doominess, part hoary Brit-folk tradition. It's misty, mystic full moon music that the ancient headbanging druids of Stonehenge would probably find even more appropriate for their esoteric purposes than house band Hawkwind.
So, here's the final (for now) entry in the Pagan Altar discography for us to list. This 2006 release, originally on the band's own Oracle Records label, has been newly reissued by cult metal label Shadow Kingdom (for whom Pagan Altar are THEE best band ever). This joins Judgement Of The Dead, The Time Lord, and The Lords Of Hypocrisy in the Shadow Kingdom's Pagan Altar catalog, and it's right up there with any and all of 'em, full of emotive, incredible soloing, catchy, doomy riffs, wonderful vocals (again reminding us of a creaky combo of both Ozzy Osbourne and Roky Erickson), and an overall pagan atmosphere delivered with classic rock perfection that's not much known this side of the the '80s. What else can we say, besides, recommended!
This duo of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, aka Raime, have conjured up this strange and mysterious slab of dark brooding black energy, equal parts minimal electronica, bleak black ambience, abstract techno and avant sound design. Right off the bat, we were reminded of last week's Record Of The Week, Roly Porter's Aftertime, as well as the grim, sinister electronic soundscapes of Ben Frost, not to mention recent techno favorites from Shed, Terence Dixon and Stefan Goldmann. In fact, in some ways, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line is like a bizarre hybrid of all of those. Casting doomic plod as stripped down electronic skitter, reminding us of Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore, creating heaving slabs of rumbling crumbling blackened heaviness, that sound like Wolf Eyes score for an orchestra, transforming mutant strains of dub and jungle into creeping expanses of sinister stutter, and stretching dubstep bass warble into droned out layers, and wrapping them around haunting sprawls of cinematic menace.
The record almost plays out like a soundtrack or score, the various pieces blurring into one another, the most disparate, still sonically linked, from the opening rumbles, like some blackened hellish noise-drone, drifting beneath distant keening melodies, laced with shards of grinding glitch, all underpinned by ominous minor key melodies, gradually dissipating, leaving a sprawl of looped skitter, beneath a cloud of ominous chordal thrum the vibe dark and doomy, subtly rhythmic, a little bit dubby, the drumming splintering into near industrial crunch, with the background sounds never ceasing their woozy drift. That drift transforming into the aforementioned Bohren-like creep, minimal and cinematic, which over the course of the next two tracks, begins to slip back into something much more techno, almost jungle sounding, but somehow remains restrained, the rhythmic heft more implied, a muted pulse and stutter behinds warm swirls of melody and dark fragments of caustic crunch.
From there on out, the sound unfurls and expands, slipping from Arvo Part like choral majesty, to harrowing tense rhythm flecked drone, to lush orchestral, industrial shimmer, the various pulses and crashes, groans and clatters, gorgeously rendered, the sound design lush and lovely, while also being harsh and weirdly alien, but all blurred and woven into Raime's haunting moody mesmer.
As much as we love the Beatles (and we do), we don't really find ourselves putting on Rubber Soul or Revolver on a daily basis. No, if we're gonna listen to Lennon/McCartney compositions, we'd rather hear 'em done a bit differently, like for instance rearranged by an obscure psychedelic orchestral jazz-rock ensemble from Norway, as found here. Recorded circa 1969-70, Rain's album features epic covers of Beatles classics "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "A Day In The Life", as well as John Lennon's own "Isolation", amidst a bunch of impressive progged-out originals, all heavy on the sweeping Hammond organ, fuzz guitar, horn arrangements, and grand Nordic vocals. The ambitious musicians in Rain shift from jazzy grooves to delicate '60s psych to electro-acoustic avant-classical experimentation (as on the stark and strange "Norsk Suite"), all except the latter staying nicely melodic as well as quite technically complex. George Martin & the Beatles were an inspiration of course, but also apparently Varese, Stravinsky, and Vanilla Fudge too!
This Shadoks release includes a 20 minute bonus track of free improvisation, as well as extensive liner notes in the form of an interview with Rain's guitarist/violinist, and plenty of vintage photos.
Ways Of Being collects a handful of rare, previously cassette only tracks from this moody minimal electronic cold wave dream pop songstress from Australia, her sound hazy, and druggy, and woozy and washed out, super spare drum machine rhythms dubbed out and doused in reverb, over which RW, aka Stacey Wilson, drapes wheezing synths, multi tracked FX caked vocals and softly pulsing basslines, everything blurred into one heavenly swirling sonic mass.
But the sounds here, while all plenty moody and murky, are still surprisingly varied, from the super spaced out, dub heavy, rumbling drone driven, space-dirge of "Ill Health", to the ominous Casio-core skitter of "Thieves", to the moody drifty melodic murk of "Detached Living", to the haunting minimal gloom pop of "Make Plans". Some of the tracks slip into near Stereolab / Broadcast territory (albeit a much murkier, low fidelity variant), while others pile on the FX until the original song all but disappears beneath a haze of sonic swirl, the vibe is gorgeously melancholic, darkly droney, psychedelic and spectral, equal parts Grouper, Fabulous Diamonds, U.S. Girls, Death And Vanilla, Cough Cool and other purveyors of haunting, otherworldly lo-fi dream-psych ghost-pop.
Any fan of '70s krautrock / electronic legends Cluster - and Cluster's constituent humans Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius - know that both gents remain exceedingly prolific music-makers to this day. Try as we might, we don't always manage to review everything either of them release, though we don't doubt that it's always quite good stuff. This new disc on Sub Rosa did happen to just catch our ears, however, and we felt we should share. It finds Roedelius (sometimes considered to be the more melodic half of the Cluster duo) collaborating with an interesting fellow we haven't encountered before, Christopher Chaplin, who is (true fact) the youngest son of famous actor Charlie Chaplin. The two, Roedelius & Chaplin, first met at an Art Brut themed festival in Vienna in 2010; and when in 2011 the BBC invited Roedelius to record a live session with a musician of his choosing that'd he'd never previously worked with, he selected Chaplin. That recording (some portions of which are heard here) eventually lead to them working together the next year on this album project.
King Of Hearts is centered around the beautiful, romantic piano playing that Roedelius is known for, while Chaplin processes and remixes it, bringing in additional electronics and other unnerving elements. Mysterious hisses and drones and mad scientist laboratory sounds pervade otherwise blissful piano reveries. On one track, there's some heavily effected, indecipherable vocals in the mix, and on a few others, someone (presumably Chaplin) plays distorted electric guitar, raw and lo-fi. One piece is based on a song from the Brian Eno album Before And After Science, in which Roedelius & Moebius participated.
However, the overall mood of this album is lush and lovely, and full of interesting detail. It's perfect music for staring out the window at the landscape on a cold winter's afternoon, while staying warm inside.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Just realized that this '70s metal essential was now available at a bargain price - we've got 'em for only five bucks, while they last! From 1978, long before their MTV fame in the '80s, this was the last studio album by the Scorps to feature the guitar playing of Hendrix-obsessed genius-in-his-own-right Uli Jon Roth, and it features one of Uli's most classic compositions: "The Sails Of Charon", a truly majestic metal milestone. The whole album is a metal milestone, really, 'cause it's one on which you can actually hear "proto-metal" giving way to pure metal metal, the kind that would give rise to the NWOBHM, Metallica, speed metal, thrash, etc., etc., via straight up galloping metal steeds, like "Steamrock Fever" and "He's A Woman - She's A Man". The Scorps, who got their start in the '60s, are still sorta psychedelic on Taken By Force, but so heavy and dark and speedy and gothic. Groovy hippie acoustic strum slams into utter heavy howling headbanging epic riff mania all over the place here. Uli, "The Sails Of Charon" aside, is responsible for most of the hippie stuff, of course, contributing "Foxy Lady" like rocker "I've Got To Be Free" and the beautiful (with bongos!) "Your Light", some majestic jangle there all right. And having mentioned Uli, we should also mention vocalist Klaus Meine, whose performance here also kills, whether screaming his head off, or singing a delicate, tearful ballad (with strings) like album-closer "Born To Touch Your Feelings".
For the longest time, this was a difficult Scorpions disc to come by, we remember searching out expensive import copies, so if you're just picking it up now you're lucky to get it so cheap! And it'd be well worth it at thrice the price, or more, anyway. We can't really do it justice in this brief review. '70s Scorps rules!
Remastered, this edition including two bonus tracks, the cowbell-heavy "Suspender Love" and a live version of "Polar Nights" (but the latter's from Tokyo Tapes, so not such a bonus if you already have that).
Israeli band Churchill's, reviewed a few lists back, aren't the only vintage '60s act from the Middle East to get a reissue recently. We also just got this, from the somewhat more obscure Sea-Ders (aka The Cedars) of Beirut, Lebanon, who sound a bit like a Middle Eastern Monkees or something! There's 8 tracks here, apparently everything they ever recorded, all from singles circa 1966-'68. It's jangling and energetic, exotic East-meets-West psych pop beat action, a la lot of the Turkish stuff of the era we like so much, complete with ripping bouzouki, saz, and/or oud alongside electric guitar, and in fact a couple of their popular songs here were covered by Turkish artists, comped on that Turkish Delights collection we used to have. Any fan of Middle Eastern psych (or psych with Middle Eastern motifs) a la 3 Hur-el or The Devil's Anvil, should enjoy this.
Liner notes provided by both Mike Stax, editor of Ugly Things magazine (which featured an interview with one of the former Sea-ders in issue #26), and also Lenny Helsing of Shingdig! magazine as well.
The debut vinyl release from Smokey Emery aka Daniel Hipolito on Silent Land Time Machine's Indian Queen imprint is a pastoral grey affair, lush with church organ ambience and analog equipment malfunction, a sort of Carnival of Lost Souls meets the Sinking of the Titanic. Split into three movements, the first called "Movement VI (Jumping the Fire)" is an abrupt organ loop shifting in pitch maniacally in a zombie-ish two-step wrenched in the reverbed clacking and whistling of old portable tape machines. "Movement VII: A Craft in Control" sounds at first like an old ballpark anthem slowed way down to a ghostly crawl, but its source may be more sacred or sinister, eventually churning what could be a hymn into a demonic funeral dirge just like the female lead in the aforementioned film. The flip side dedicated to the final movement "Movement V" expands on the previous theme, letting the sound sprawl into a foggy underwater wash of ocean liner doom and the muddled voices of once heralded memories of happier times.
Limited to 300 copies comes in a thick duotone b&w folder-cover of dueling catastrophe-collages by Daniel Hipolito himself.
We've long been fans of dubstep DJ/producer Starkey, in part because even when dubstep was his bag, he was constantly pushing the boundaries of that sound, preferring terms like 'street bass' or 'bass music' to the flavor of the month 'dubstep', and introducing all sort of other flavors into his dubstep. Orbits finds Starkey delivering the latest installment in his 'street bass' series and easily the best, a forward thinking collection of modern electronica, still heavy on the dubstep, but all of those classic dubsteppisms are recontextualized here into a whole new sound. The opener "Renegade Starship" sounds like Starkey trying to mash up DJ Shadow and Daft Punk, which somehow sounds amazing, darkly dramatic, soaring sweeping synths, and stuttering beats, a woozy atmospheric first half, and tangled, beat heavy, second half, with a cool, haunting droned out synth denouement.
But "Command" is the single here, and it's obvious why, moody and atmospheric, with sped up and stuttered soul vox, all wound up into a killer alien hook, and when the drop comes, BAM, an avalanche of synth buzz, that gives way to some skeletal 808 skitter, then big block rocking beat, wound around some seriously slithery synth, this is the sort of shit that some pop star should be singing over on the radio, listening to this now, we're imagining it can't be long before some mainstream big names catch on and start hitting up Starkey to produce their tracks. Orbits plays like the perfect transition records, still fucked up and experimental, and underground, but so close to breakthrough mainstream pop hit material, which is what makes Orbits so good, best of both worlds. And yet for every booming bass hook heavy hit, there's a jam like "Magnet", all murky vocodered celestial electro ballad, creepy and dreamy and haunting, with a surprising final big beat climax, or "Distant Star", which starts out all kosmische and psychedelic, before exploding into full on Deadmau5 / Daft Punk territory. And in-between, more stone cold killers, like the weird stuttery synth crunch of "And Then God Built To Cosmos" or the super minimal old school squelch heavy "Lzr", or even the lush atmospheric synth swirl of "Crashing Sphere".
Easily our favorite Starkey record so far, and the more we listen it it, the more it seems inevitable that some big names will pop up with some crazy new jams with some twisted Starkey productions in the near future. Bieber? Beyonce? Britney? Ke$ha? Nicki Minaj? Taylor Swift? We can only hope...
We missed the vinyl versions of Passed Me By and We Stay Together the first time around, but ended up making the double disc compilation from Andy Stott our Record Of The Week back in December of 2011, now the original lps have been repressed and are available again separately. Here's what we had to say about Stott and Passed Me By:
UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave!
We missed the vinyl versions of Passed Me By and We Stay Together the first time around, but ended up making the double disc compilation from Andy Stott our Record Of The Week back in December of 2011, now the original lps have been repressed and are available again separately. Here's what we had to say about Stott and We Stay Together:
UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter.
We Stay Together dials back the murk that was all over Passed Me By a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave!
The latest record from former Yellow Swan finds Pete Swanson continuing to explore/dissect/reimagine/reinvent his own mutant strain of techno. Like on his recent Man With Potential lp, the sounds here are raw and chaotic, home brewed and noisy, a lot like what you might have imagined a techno Yellow Swans might have sounded like. The framework is classic, a thumping four on the floor, but it's the setting and surroundings that makes Swanson's sound so compelling. Very much like the more beat oriented jams of Our Love Will Destroy The World, or the dancefloor experiments of Astral Social Club, Swanson seems to be coming at techno from a similarly genuine, yet sonically removed, angle, a bit of kitchen sink, mad scientist noisiness, with lots of the sounds obviously culled from an arsenal of synths and drum machines that are not all that dissimilar from what he employed in his noise making floorcore days. But Swanson has definitely proven himself, this is no mere dalliance, these jams are fierce and driving, and in a weird way, seriously funky. The title track here is a mesmerizing blast of super layered, heavily textured techno, that has SO much going on. Total maximalist techno, tangled melodies, chirping fragments of high end, thick shard of rumbling bass thrum, the sort of groove you never want to end. The VIP mix of the same song, just strips back the melody, and piles on the noise, adding even more hiss and glitch, the bassline pushed up in the mix, woozy and hypnotic, the sounds sharp and jagged, and yet the whole thing somehow still so mesmerizing and kinda catchy. The idea that you could get this sort of thing stuck in your heard, seems preposterous, until you find yourself humming these sort of melodies, hours later.
The B side is the real gem here, a sprawling expanse of minimal noisescapery, all washed out shimmer, fluttery fragmented high end melodies, and super spare skeletal skitters, everything beneath a layer of gauzy ethereal hum, the vibe way less electronic, and more sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker style soft noise ambience, the beats not so much beats, as just more texture, buried rhythms and blurred pulsations, even filling up a whole side, you'll find yourself lifting the needle and playing it again and again and again.
Saucy retro Chippendales cover art too.
After a handful of killer releases (Sunchariot, Svetovid, Surt, Lascowiec, Gnieu, Uruk-Hai) comes this long in the works compilation from local black metal tape label Brotherhood Of Light, which gathers up a handful of rare and unreleased tracks from some of those same groups, as well as a bunch of others in BoL's underground orbit.
Up first is local BM duo (trio?) Lascowiec, who unfurl a gorgeous bit of super lo-fi, pastoral psychedelia, that gradually expands into a buzzing black cloud of washed out buzz wrapped around soaring majestic melancholic melodies, stumbling murky drum lope, and some seriously fierce bellowed vokills. Surt deliver a dreamy bit of piano laced drift, haunting and spectral, more of a sonic fragment, but quite lovely, like some lost Caretaker B side all fuzzy and hazy and dreamlike. The oddly named Vinland Special Services layout some strange industrial soundscape, all sampled voices, weird buzz, creaks and clatter, a sprawl of abstract collaged noise, the sound constantly shifting, and eventually splintering into a woozy bout of primitive turntablism, all warbly melodies and warped voices, before slipping back into more strange blackened industrial ambience. Finally, the A side is closed out by Uruk-Hai, and whose sounds is a mournful, depressive black metal drift, that's almost dreamy, with the guitars soaring majestically, the busy bassline providing a woozy melody, the vocals appropriately harsh, but otherwise, it's very Alcest like, all shoegazey and shimmery.
The B side starts off with Sunchariot, whose recent tape was a big hit around here, and is a new unreleased track from a forthcoming full length a blurry, bleary washed out avalanche of crumbling buzz, buried drums, muted melodies, and anguished vokills, super bizarre production, definitely can't wait to hear the full length. Up next is Cosmic Breath 88 who deliver a sort of abstract blackened industrial blowout, all flanged guitars, processed vox, and blacknoise buzz. Then there's a super raw, lo-fi chunk of primitive black buzz from USBM outfit Lord Foul, brittle guitars, the sound woozy and warped, almost looped sounding, tranced out and hypnotic. Aryan Art unfurl some surprisingly melodic black buzz, everything washed out and almost dreamy, a little bit shoegazey and blissed out, the vocals super anguished and WAY up in the mix, jarring at first, but then it sorta makes sense. The music gets very folky and medieval, even at its most furious it's sort of warbly and darkly dreamy. And finally, Svetovid finish things off, with some fuzzed out drum machine driven black buzz, laced with inhuman croaked vox and some super fuzzy dreamy melodies, again a weird mix of harsh and pretty, but it makes for a pretty compelling listen.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered, and housed in full color J-cards.
When we first got this in, we were really just expecting some sort of crappy house music comp flecked with bits of Latin music, we find we're often misled by titles promising 'future sounds' and other similarly enticing hyperbole, but all it took was about a minute of the first track, and we found ourselves inexorably drawn in, and it only got better with every track, this being the rare sort of comp that truly delivers on its promise, a twisted futuristic hybrid of new electronic experimentalism and rural South American musical styles, the opener taking a sort of samba style rhythm, and wreathing it in all sorts of squiggly synths, rough rumbling buzz, sci-fi FX, some sampled loops vocals, a killer beat, some buzzing almost dubsteppy bass, we would have been perfectly happy if the whole record sounded just like that, but in point of fact none of it does, even remotely.
The second track is all clipped skitter, super distorted buzz drenched melody, woozy stuttery beats, loping and hypnotic, eventually wrapped in some swirling guitar melodies, the vibe dark and epic and sort of post rocky, but more post-electronica, the next track switches gears again, taking South American accordion music, and distorting it to hell, adding some crunchy dirty beats, some buried looped vox, and sending it careening through clouds of soft psychedelic noise. And so it goes, a dizzying barrage of super inventive, most definitely psychedelic, South American avant electronica, that manages to be both experimental, but also groovy, abstract and at times WTF?, but crazy catchy, and almost always with a wicked beat. Carnivalesque melodies are wrapped around some tongue twisting vocalizing, Flamenco guitars are wreathed in echo, and draped over shuffling looped grooves, 8 bit video game sounds become vocodered future-style calypsos, brooding guitar strum blossoms into barely electronic South American folk music, before exploding into a wildly inventive skeletal mad scientist Latin dub, which in turn leads directly into some glitch flecked pop vocal electronica, before one last blast of super distorted beat heavy synth squelch and finally a super buzzy, warbly, robotic groove, that sounds like some classic South American jam performed by one of Pierre Bastien's strange machines, and sung by androids. So great!
I remember when the Butthole Surfers' Locust Abortion Technician came out, how blown away I was by the album. On top of all their own material, here was this totally weird song which they irreverantly looped over one word that happened to sound like an English vernacular term for female genitalia. Funny the first time through, I always wanted a copy of the original recording which the Surfers lifted that track from because I thought it just kicked ass in its own right. I know you think I'm gonna say that that song is on this collection. Sorry, it's not. But if you loved that song "Kuntz" for what it was (despite Gibby's juvenile chicanery), you'll definitely be excited by the Molam tracks on this disc. Compiled by Mark Gergis (I Remember Syria, Cambodian Cassette Archives, Neung Phak) from a multitude of sources -- LPs, 45s and cassettes -- this collection of Molam comes from a distinct window in Isan, Thailand history. Molam, which comes from the rural areas of Northeastern Thailand and neighboring Laos, was for many years generally charactarized by male and female vocals backed by the khaen (a free-reed mouth organ). Migrating rural Thai and Laotian people to the cities modernized their Molam with electric guitars, bass, drums and keyboards and the music spread like a fad to the urban population. Inevitably, through the ever changing nature of music, and the economically driven producers, the electronic keyboard surpassed the need for a band and the music was more often than not reduced to the standard pop that is ubiquitous throughout Thailand. This then is a time capsule of the glory days of molam gone electric. Fans of Neung Phak will be familiar with the track which begins this collection, as it's also the opening track of Neung Phak's debut. So those of you who thought Mark couldn't tune his bass can hear his alibi playing the original tune off key as is the style. Certainly fans of the Cambodian Rocks albums should take heed here, but will find a collection of tracks that are much more removed from Western rock. Firstly, there are no covers of rock songs, nor are the melodies here even related -- except by chance -- to Western pop. These are all traditional tunes that have merely been arranged with modern electric instrumentation (which isn't to say that you won't here any khaen on these tunes). It is the vocals though that are what really drive these songs, modernized or no. With melodies that seem utterly independent of what the band is playing, the lilting, almost yodelled, singing is unlike that of any other region in the world. Dare I say it's sultry. Oh so very highly recommended!!
This awesomely titled compilation covers a very specific strain of metal, as in 'heavy metal from Northwest Arkansas'. Aha. Well, we were definitely intrigued. Not that we can think of any metal bands from NW Arkansas off the top of our heads (Rwake?), but we're always down for some obscure metal, and while we're often wary of comps that feature no bands we've heard of, we decided to give this one a go, and were pretty psyched we did.
Up first is Vore, who kick up some serious death metal brutality, equal parts chugging riffage, pounding pummel, churning breakdowns and mathy stop start dynamics, the song laced with some seriously shredding leads, not to mention some surprising melody, the whole thing pretty dang catchy for a DM jam. Deadeye Jack do a sort of grimy, crusty stonery sludge thing, the recording raw and rough, but it suits their sound, muddy and murky, the vocal buried in the mix, but with a pretty serious main riff. Lightbulb Detective Agency have a terrible band name, but their song has a great title ("HP Hovercraft"), the sound sort of mathy and proggy, definitely very modern, dramatic crooned vox over complex mathmetal chug and churn, reminds us of all those Norwegian black metal bands who decided to get all proggy and poppy (Borknagar, Dodheimsgard). Definitely not bad though.
The flipside starts off with Hymns, who are definitely the fiercest of the bunch so far, frenzied and furious metallic grind, mathy and relentless, shredding axe action and insanely frantic drumming, a wild chaotic grindmetal tangle that kills! Ogham offer up a brief blast of instrumental math metal, that might be our favorite of the bunch, a million parts and tempos crammed into two minutes, equal parts the Champs, Scale The Summit, Loincloth, Don Caballero, the song twisting and turning relentlessly before seeming to just stumble to a halt, definitely want to hear more from these guys. And finally some true metal / true doom to finish things off, from the questionably named Dragon Sunday, whose sound is epic and very Pentagram / St. Vitus sounding, soaring majestic guitars, dramatic vocals, classic metal harmonies, chugging riffage, total true metal radness that all you 'true metal'-heads should flip for.
Includes a download code too!
We got a brief taste of USBMers Venowl on the now out of print 4 way split tape with Horseback, Njiqahdda and Cara Neir, release on Handmade Birds earlier this year. Their contribution a particularly sick slab of lo-fi doom/sludge heaviness, replete with weird oinking pig vox and terrifying crusty creep, which is precisely where the A side of this new single lands, the same sort of super low fidelity practice space sound, which perfectly suits their abject lo-fi blacknoise, here rendered into something more approaching black metal, but a mutant slo-mo strain, that seems to lurch and stumble, a blackprog variant, that finds the music slowing down and speeding up, exploding into a frenzied blast, before devolving into another monstrous creep, and those freaky vox make a return too.
The flipside, subtitled the "Iron Forest Reimagining" compacts the 7 minute A side into 3 minutes, and transforms it into a weird pulsing, processed industrial electronic dirge, the sounds crumbling and blown out, the voices weirdly robotic, the song alternately driving by metallic pound and warped electronic skitter, gradually seeming to melt and ooze into one demented black hybrid, gristly, and crusty, skeletal, eventually shedding sounds until it's just a strange spare cold wave-y creep.
LIMITED TO 220 COPIES, already sold out at the label, so these are most likely the last copies we'll be able to get. Pressed on grey vinyl too.
Last year was an incredible year for electronic music, and for techno in general, especially for a new breed/strain of techno that managed to appeal to folks who didn't think they liked techno: Shed, Terrence Dixon, Andy Stott, Stefan Goldmann, all darkly rhythmic, subtly psychedelic, definitely redefining what we thought was techno. You can add this latest record from Cristian Vogel, his FOURTEENTH album if you can believe it. We knew Vogel mostly for his remixes, of folks like Radiohead, Thom Yorke, Maximo Park, but had never really check out any of his records. Not sure what made us throw on The Inertials, but we're super glad we did. As it definitely fits in with the above mentioned faves, the sound, murky and sinister, the beats muted and skittery, the sound palette super cinematic, at times playing like a WAY darker Clubroot, the same sort of lush, luxurious majesty, but here recast as something much more grim. Elsewhere, Vogel tries his hand at minimal dub, and ends up reimagining it as something much more upbeat, but without losing any of the music's inherent sonic malevolence.
While some of The Inertials does drift into more upbeat territory, the majority of the record is spent in the shadows, pulsing, pulsating sprawls of droning ambience, of beat driven drifts, and post Kompakt house music, blurred into hazy streaks of grey, rain slicked rhythmic stutter, the record's finest moments, ditching any sort of techno framework for a way more abstract sound design, tracks like "Deepwater" reminding us of the recent aQ Record Of The Week from Roly Porter, or even long time aQ fave Ben Frost, super minimal beats, that seem to decay before our very ears, leaving just tracks and traces, transforming from a taut, tense stretch of minimal techno skitter, to a dark, ominous landscape of churning black electro ambience, or "Spectral Transgression" that begins life as pure kosmische psychedelia, all pulsing synths and arpeggiated melodies, glistening and prismatic, before transforming into a mysterious strain of house-kraut, finally finishing off with the dark ambient driftworks of closer "Moved By Waves", which suspends all manner of gristle and glitch, in a softly undulating gauze of smeared synths and layered drones, a fantastic slab of blackened Pop Ambience to finish things off.
We were pretty into Vom's Primitive Arts record from a while back, which we described as a "depressive, atmospheric, super distorted sort of gothic cold wave", and who we likened to groups like Soror Dolorosa, Sixx, Factums and Cold Cave, but whose particular version of sound was a much more raw and primitive beast, sort of crusty and filthy, from the production to the actual instrument sounds, even the atmosphere, it was as if a metal band or a noise band or somehow both, decided to make a gloom pop record, and failed spectacularly, and came up with something way meaner, weirder and more amazing.
This brand new split teams Vom up with another group of sonically like minded Scots with the awesome name Gummy Stumps, each group taking a whole lp side. Vom offer up more of the same, their sound driving and darkly post punky, the guitars thick and jagged, the bass fuzzed out and super distorted, the drums almost like some weird strain of motorik krautpunk, the vocals an effects drenched bellow, the group locking into long stretches of buzzing, snarling, minor key hypnorock, that sound like a goth rock Circle, pounding away relentlessly, the guitars unfurling slippery slithery melodies, over churning riffage and gloomy gothic bombast. But it's an epic, so the band sort of cobble together a songsuite, equal parts crash and burn, drift and smolder, shimmer and creep, the sound managing to be surprisingly lush while retaining its raw power. At one point haunting soundtracky synths drift in and transform the sound completely, before the band works its way up into another psychedelic cold wave gloom punk blowout. These guys are so fucking good, it's a crime they're not more well known.
With a name like Gummy Stumps, these guys had our hopes pretty high, and while they're not as grim or gloriously noisy, they're definitely a good match, their sound more of a Messthetics sort of post punk, all jagged angular guitar crunch, frenetic rhythms, and dueling call and response vocals. But again, like Vom's side, there's lots of space to fill, so the band stretch way out, slipping from murky psychedelic shimmer, to something that sounds like way more punk Arab Strap, to blown out drum heavy noise rock crunch, to surprisingly catchy punk pop and right back again to the angular post punkiness that started it all off.
Housed in super swank silk screened covers, with printed insert, cool lyrics booklet, and we're guessing it's pretty dang limited too...
- MPEG stream: B
- MPEG stream: A
Full length number three from this black metal horde (from Canada, via Bangladesh), whose black metal is more of a sort of blackened death/classic metal, and whose sound gets more and more polished with every release, not just production wise, but songwriting too, the opening track here pretty much lays it all out, beginning with a moody atmospheric intro, before some blackened riffing rolls in, midtempo tribal drumming, some almost death metal vokills, a loping tranced out churn, and then some chugging harmonics-laced crunch, before a totally classic metal guitar melody swoops in, a gloomy almost death rocky bassline, then the song splinters into a murky sprawl of pounding furious blackened death metal, slipping from roiling murk to soaring majesty and back again, progged out and intricate, with little Eastern flourishes here and there. As always, we're reminded of Absu, Melechesh, Bathory, old Morbid Angel, the sound simultaneously modern and totally retro, some of the tracks impossibly catchy (like the bridge on "Vanguard Of The Morning Star") sounding almost like some At The Gates part, which leads to a second bridge that's even still more epic and hook heavy, others are weirdly chuggy and churny, like the awesomely titled "Crepuscular Swamp, Unhinged Swine", which unfurls like some weird swaggery slo-mo death metal stomp, and still others, like "Disavowing Each In Aum" and "Shahehshah" are super layered, and ultra melodic, the group's downtuned death metal churn, wreathed in all sorts of near psychedelia, lush textures, and impossibly lovely melodies, which are all somehow deftly fused to Weapon's classic sounding DM, creating a twisted hybrid that manages to reinvigorate the tired tropes while pushing all our classic blackened death metal buttons!
Some of these tracks have been floating around on blogs for ages, it was only a matter of time before someone would gather them all up and release a killer compilation, shouldn't be too surprised it ended up being Omni! This Australian synth pioneer is probably best known for the bubbly synth pop classic "Love By Numbers", with its near literal lyrics, the verses simply AW reciting numbers from 1 to 100 (and then some, but it fades out around there), in a thick weirdly Teutonic accent, his count interrupted here and there by a dreamy girl pop chorus of "It Must Be Love", before it's right back to the counting, all over some terrific minimal wave electro pop. Originally released with the awesomely titled B-side "Boring Instrumental", which is a glorious little chunk of stripped down lilting electronic pop, not boring in the least. And then it gets really weird. Check out "Sex II", which lays down a groovy squelchy minor key electro groove, over which AW, and his female counterpart, recite what sounds like a strange not especially sexy, grocery list, from avocado, to rare beef finely sliced, aspirin, a kumquat, three floral toilet rolls, a pork sausage, a cantaloupe, a jar of Vaseline, chicken giblets, crumpets, mayonnaise (this one delivered in a near orgasmic croon, as is chopped liver, rump steak and Listerine!), the whole thing laced with little electronic squiggles, the boy / girl vocals delivering their various items extremely passionately/seriously, more so as the list continues, the track occasionally also augmented by breathless panting, all over a sort of chorus of thick soaring majestic synth swirl and some crunchy fuzz guitar. Might be the most replayed track here. But that's only the beginning, there's a twisted cover of the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" which is nearly unrecognizable, made all woozy and fuzzy and soft focus, there's the VERY Elvis-y electro-rockabilly of "Boom Boom Baby", which also predicts the sound of eighties big haired synth weirdos Sigue Sigue Sputnik, there's the woozily psychedelic "The Galvanized Garden Of Inner Peace", that also has a little rockabilly swagger to it, there's another version of "Sex II", instrumental this time, the music even more playfully exaggerated and the sounds super dubbed out, there's the dark bloopy, distorted guitar driven, electro slither of "Do-Do" replete with some weird deep vocals intoning "GET OFF THE FLOOR!!", everything reverbed and drenched in echo, there's "The Ballad Of A Metronome", which is classic eighties pop, but with some truly strange sung/spoken vocals, there's also the warped piano ballad "Radiation Injection", which is more goofy and playfully silly than the title might suggest, but with some snarly almost Suicide like vox tethered to the bleepy bloopy music. Pretty much every track here is a twisted gem, covering all of AW's outfits, from his solo single, to his stints fronting the Metronomes, Thealonian Music and Modern Jazz. He would later go on to record with Nina Hagen, he's actually STILL a live member of Einsturzende Neubauten, the liner notes, as with all Omni releases, are extensive, and detail AW's musical life, and of course there are lots of rare photos and reproductions of original record sleeves. But give a listen to the sound samples, we're guessing you'll be immediately hooked!
Avid readers of the aQ list will no doubt remember our obsession with Chicago's Footwork scene, also known as 'jukin', we've reviewed records by DJ Nate, DJ Roc, as well as that kick ass Bangs & Works comp, and we played those records to death in the store, each a brilliantly twisted collection of footwork jams, which for the uninitiated is a mutant strain of hip hop that is weirdly skittery and maddeningly repetitive, the music a nonstop barrage of layered loops and repeated vocal fragments, skeletal 808 rhythms, stuttery handclaps, definitely the sort of thing that has some people nodding along and shaking it, while others are tearing their hair out. It's obviously designed for the dancefloor, so stereo listening is a whole different experience, but like those DJ Nate and DJ Roc records, there's definitely something to this stuff that transcends the dancefloor. Never more so than on Space Zone, the debut from 18 year old Young Smoke aka David Davis, who doesn't rely so much on sampling old spacey funk jams, but instead creates his own spaced out atmosphere using a bunch of self made samples from a battery of synths, and has created a seriously futuristic slab of footwork, channeling old cheesy soundtracks, John Carpenter, Tangerine Dream, all sorts of retro futurism into his twisted spaced out sound. On the surface, there's definitely a similarity to those other footwork jams we've reviewed in the past, but Young Smoke's sound is definitely much more composed and musical, still repetitive, and looped, each song essentially a single melody, and a single beat, looped and layered, but check out the opener, the title track, which is a dreamy chunk of almost bubblegum electro, with vocodered vox crooning "Welcome to the space zone" over lazer beam blurts and sci-fi squiggles, all wrapped around a groovy 8 bit skitter. It's the perfect introduction for sure, but it's not all bubblegummy, the second track "Warning", begins with a cascade of kosmische synths, which gives way to a buzzing klaxon, and a robotic voice repeating the word "Warning", while all around, booming bass and stuttering beats swarm around dense swirls of tangled almost psychedelic synth melodies, which leads right into "Futuristic Musick", which wraps a tinkling ghostly melody and shortwave squelch around a churning muted pulse, soon adding some swoonsome synth swells, the drums tribal and abstract, very cosmic and cinematic, and check out the closer, "Heat Impact" which sounds like some eighties action flick theme sliced and diced and transformed into a wild blast of alien hypno-groove stutter-funk.
By now it should be apparent, that this stuff is not all that far removed from all the retro-futurism and kosmische synthscapery that's all the rave these days, give a listen to the samples and you'll see what we mean, it's just that here, it's funked up a bit, wedded to hip hop skitter and electro-alien-stutter, which makes for some serious future dancefloor destruction, but also some big time headphone bliss out.
