Finally! The long out of print nineties releases from legendary industrial / power electronics / UK noise / black drone one man band AX once again see the light of day. Longtime fans of the mighty Skullflower, will no doubt be familiar with AX, the project of one time SF member Anthony Di Franco, who also did time in a number of other bands you might also be familiar with: Ramleh, Novatron, Ethnic Acid, JFK. But we always had a soft spot for AX, whose first two vinyl lps (collected here), Nova Feedback and II, originally released in 1994 and 1995 respectively, were for some of us our first taste of power electronics, and unlike much of the more harsh, ear shredding power electronics, AX trafficked in something much more droned out, a sound that whether intentionally or not, seemed to foreshadow the sort of slowburn sludge, and crumbling slo-mo ultra-doom that would follow. It's hard not to hear hints of Earth and SUNNO))) and Bunkur and Khanate or even groups like Troum and Maeror Tri, for all of its noise, and it IS noisy, that noise is sculpted in such a way as to render it impossibly listenable, totally hypnotic, and utterly mesmerizing. You can almost imagine a primitive hybrid of Troum and SUNNO))), the dark trancelike dronescape of the former, fused to the impossible black hole heaviness of the latter, but then the whole thing doused in a haze of caustic industrial crunch, and liberal swaths of grinding howling feedback.
This collection opens up strangely enough with one track that is NOT from either of those two 12"s, but is instead plucked off AX's only proper full length cd, 1997's Astronomy, but that track, "Kortex", is definitely the perfect opener, and in some ways the perfect introduction to AX. The doomiest of the bunch by far, due in no small part to its plodding slow motion 'beat', a gristly metronomic crunch, that sounds like a snare hit slowed down a hundred times and run through a bank of dead distortion pedals, over which Di Franco lays down a churning layer of crumbling blackened distortion, wreathing those plodding squashed bug beats in squalls of overloaded powergrid buzz, it's a sort of primitive electron-level ultra doom, snakelike tendrils of hiss wrapped around sheets of grinding metallic buzz, all driven by that sinister blacknoise pulse. Which leads directly into "Nova Feedback 1", a swirling psychedelic wash of rumbling black buzz, and phased out thrum, evoking the whole guitar-against-the-amp style near-static minimalist doomdirge. Fans of the late great Vulture Club and other practitioners of that sort of doomdronedrift will be in heaven.
"Heavy Fluid" is near symphonic, a sprawling 11 minute soundscape of layered guitar buzz, gristly electronics, shards of static, clouds of hiss, some serious proto-SUNN extreme slo-mo heaviness, which had us thinking a bit of another recent aQ fave, Blackwolfgoat, unfurling an endless cascade of woozy guitar buzz and melting blackened psychedelic riffage, the tones shifting constantly, as if someone was continually fiddling with the pitch knob, or more likely, an endless fiddling with the tuners, letting notes morph into other notes, to dip down into an even murkier thrum, before slowing drifting into a near howl. The sort of track, that we could listen to ENDLESSLY, only really exploding about 8 minutes in, when the original detuned creep is barraged by scrapes and squiggles and an avalanche of still more roiling guitarnoise. There are moments of pure noise, "Theme One", is in fact pretty much a four minute blast of face melting, ultra corrosive, blacknoise blur, but it almost acts like a palette cleanser, as it leads directly into the title track, which might be the most tranquil jam here, again foreshadowing the sort of bleak black soundscapery of groups like Wolf Eyes or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer or Gnaw Their Tongues, a gorgeously abject stretch of haunting post industrial buzz and hum, super cinematic, laced with all manner of grinding guitar noise, and strange moans and creaks, slipping easily from hushed drift, to cavernous bellow, and back again.
We then move into the two tracks from AX's II 12", the first a 10+ minute of grinding power electronics bliss out, which after an opening blast of speaker destroying crunch, seems to gradually settle into something more spaced out and atmospheric, but really no less noisy, buried voices, shards of feedback, and all manner of metallic crunch, are blurred and smeared into a softly heaving sprawl of dense, droned out, psychedelic free-noise drift. The second part begins as a low level hum, distant heaving moans buried beneath layers of static and hum, super dense and tense, the perfect cue for the final shot in some long lost seventies horror movie, but soon the haunting elements are all but subsumed by the swirling noise, the result a roiling sea of hiss and howl, grinding metals and churning buzz.
Finally, the collection finishes off with the last two tracks from Nova Feedback, the first, a dreamily psychedelic swirl of prismatic deconstructed guitar shimmer, and process chordal whirl, pulsing and pulsating, easily the prettiest track here, those strange melodies a recurring theme throughout the track, but gradually pulled apart and recontextualized, drifting dreamily one second, chopped up, looped and layered the next, wreathed in delay and reverb, and sent swirling into the ether, keening melodies over soft focus background guitarnoise, here rendered a dreamlike haze, totally hypnotic, and strangely tranquil. And finally, "Cluster" finishes things off, with what sounds like a classic chunk of black metal buzz, but here looped and layered and stretched out into an endless stretch of guitarbuzz mesmer, again reminding us of Blackwolfgoat, or perhaps Mick Barr, if he was restrained to just using the lowest strings, but that sort of near symphonic buzz, a churning tangle of blackened riffage, but blurred into something much more amorphous, a dreamlike cloud of psychedelic black shimmer, that is the perfect finish, to a near perfect collection.
Needless to say EXTREMELY recommended, and not just for nineties industrial obsessives (although obviously, for those folks, this is a no brainer), but if you dig minimal guitar mesmer, psychedelic doom, abstract heaviness, post industrial soundscaping, all strains of drone, especially heavy guitardrone, this collection will blow your mind.
Pete Swanson's post Yellow Swans trajectory into the uncharted realms (at least uncharted by most other noise making weirdos originally from the "floorcore" scene) of twisted, noise drenched avant techno, takes a not entirely drastic detour here. On the oddly named Hobo On The Face Of Music, Swanson joins up in a duo with his pal Brian Sullivan, adopting the moniker Beer Damage, and proceeds to lay out a slab of churning rhythmic noise, warped industrial ambience and dense textured experimentation, a sound that most definitely harkens back to the days of his old duo, but pushes the sound way further, into the furthest reaches of garbled, rhythmic, free-noise psychedelia. Sonically somewhat aligned with an outfit like, say, Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World, Swanson and Sullivan take a similar tack, of burying rhythms and distorted melodies, beneath thick, roiling, chopped up layers of sound, stuttering and dizzying, some serious WTF? sonic carnage, that occasionally coalesces into dark beauty, or driving rhythmic churn. The A side launches directly into a jumbled Jeckian soundscape of warbling loops and woozy tangled melodies, splintering into squalls of haywire machinery, spewing, bleeps and bloops and sheets of crunchy gristle. All eventually buried beneath a cascade of glitched out whir and swirling collaged plunderphonia. There are still lots of rhythms going on, what sounds like primitive beat-boxing at one point, accompanied by detuned drones, a barrage of twisted babel-like vox, a crumbling soundfield pelted by squelches from all sides. Amidst all this chaos lurks some loveliness too. Blurred sprawls of smoldering jazz-noise drift, wistful and melancholic, but doused in grime and grit, but even the pretty parts, eventually transform into stuttering grooves, dementedly chopped and looped into haphazard blurts of murk and twisted melting sound effects.
The flipside seems a bit more tranquil and serene, but really only a bit, starting out super pretty, but still plenty warped and warbly, detuned varispeed plucks hurled from on high and landing with a series of sonic splats over looped swirls of cosmic garble. The side begins to drift into rhythmic territory again, with some clipped and glitched out weirdo grooviness, before crumbling into a blackened decaying noisiness, wreathed in muted guitar freakout, all blurred into prismatic psychedelic smears. Finally the record ends not with a bang, or a whimper, more like a strangled, demented sprawl of stumbling, collaged lysergia, a sample-delic robot-noise, that sounds almost carnivalesque, with truncated voices, and even some harmonica (?), a twisted finale, that sounds like it was filtered through a malfunctioning transistor radio in the hands of a restless toddler with ADD. Phew! Warped, and weird, and really kind of dementedly wonderful.
Here's a vinyl reissue of this Nigerian band's second album, as you may have guessed from the title, originally released in 1974. As we've said before, the first two albums from this Afro-funk outfit are on the "bong-ier" side of their discography, with more stoned '60s psych fuzz stuff going on - though we also like their later, more discofied direction too, as displayed on the also recently reissued & reviewed Step Three lp from just a year later. Phase II is maybe just beginning to cross over into that dance-boogie roller-rink worthy territory, but their idea of a groovy love song here is called "Whole Lot Of Shit"!
Afro-beat funk is melded with with trippy Western garage psych choogle. Wah wah fuzz guitars, sunny melodies, spaced out vocals, and rhythms from hand percussion all coexist here in blissful grooviness.
One of two new lps from Northwestern blackdrone heavies Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, one a split, one a collaboration.
Unlike the split (with Wicked King Wicker), Skeletal Coupla Remains finds BSBC teaming up and collaborating, and what makes that idea even more interesting is that it's with none other than dadaist soundscaper and long time Nurse With Wound collaborator Matt Waldron, aka Irr. App. (Ext.). Seems like a strange pairing, but only until you actual hear what these guys can pull off together.
Unclear if they actually jammed together, or worked in the studio, or if BSBC just sent Waldron sounds to fuck with, but however they did it, the results are pretty fantastic.
Waldron has transformed BSBC's black noise into something way more tripped out and surreal, there's still plenty of buzz and rumble, grinding low end and roiling black ambience, but there are also swooping sound effects, warped production, tinkling melodies, sounds flipped backwards, layered and then pulled apart, huge chunks of heaviness, gradually transforming into weird bits of rhythmic churn, epic swaths of pulsating synths, all spaced out and almost krauty, looped voices, twisted samples, cinematic and creepy, it's almost like some black drone Nurse With Wound, and shit, if that doesn't sound good to you, then we have no idea what would.
The B side is a single sidelong dronedoomjam, that slips from hushed minimal drift to chugging SUNN-like riffage, all tangled up with spacey synth squiggles, bleating horns, warped FX, interrupted briefly by a stretch of near silence, laced with a series of field recordings, crunches and creaks, footsteps, and some monstrous gurgling growls underneath it all.
Super cool black and white jackets, with a massive fold out poster of the same artwork, as well as a printed insert with original artwork by Waldron.
We only got about ten of these, and that's all we'll ever be able to get. Criminally limited to just 250 copies and already out of print, this review is essentially just a sort of sonic starting pistol for all the aQ shopping Bong obsessives to ready-set-go and push add to cart before these are gone for good. Two lengthy live tracks, recorded, as the title helpfully explains, live at an old church AND burial ground, the perfect setting for Bong's sprawling, undulating wash of droned out doom-ed psychedelia. And live is definitely where these guys shine, building up thick clouds of swirling mesmer, all blurred chords and woozy buzz, the sound of voices and the buzz of the unplayed snare drum, adding a strange sort of rattling buzz to the proceedings. The vox here are much more dramatic, and way higher in the mix, delivered like some demonic preacher in a crumbling old cathedral, the guitars build and build, roaring instead of growling, and then finally, the drums kick in, and the band lurches to life, some massive lumbering behemoth, filling the church to the eaves with a noxious sonic black fog, which seems to pour out of the shattered stained glass windows, and drifts along the muddied ground, cloaking the old weather worn tombstones in a grey haze, warped and washed out spectral doom, spaced out and darkly druggy, the sound super lo-fi, but in a way that definitely suits the sound, lots of echo and reverb, and random noise, woven into the bands buzzed out psych doom trance.
Again, EXTREMELY LIMITED, just 250 copies, which are essentially sold out already minus this batch. Like all MIE releases (Gate, Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides, Pelt, Chord, etc.), gorgeously packaged, pressed in heavy vinyl, and this one includes a 12"x12" poster of the cover art as well.
NB. we also have another new Bong vinyl release as well this list, the lp version of Mana-Yood-Sushai.
By now, we're pretty sure most regular AQ customers are familiar with Bong. The name rings a bell, right? (Hahaha.) While there's plenty of stoner/sludge type bands with "bong" in their name, and a lot of 'em are pretty good (Bongzilla, Bongripper, and the recent Belzebong, for instance), this Bong, the one true Bong, have deservedly earned the appellation of Bong by itself without any cute suffixes or prefixes. This UK band's sweet sonic smoke does indeed send the listener into an altered state. On this, their latest, recorded by Esoteric's Greg Chandler, they've come from beyond ancient space (the title of their previous album, also released on the aptly named Ritual Productions) to bring us another two looooonnng tracks of their trademark slomo, spaced out, dronedirge dooooom. Dunno though if we should even be calling Bong doom, or dooooom, actually, though we do. What's heralded here is perhaps something more transcendentally wondrous, psychedelically blissful. Tune in, turn on... the first, 27+ minute track is "Dreams Of Mana-Yood-Shushai", its title referencing the poetic, pre-Lovecraft mythology of early 20th century fantasist Lord Dunsany. Mana-Yood-Shushai is the sleeping god, creator of all, the god of "having done", to whom none may pray, for when he wakes the world will end... Bong do a good job of conjuring the gentle, yet ominous mood of such a god's dreams here, as near as we mere mortals can tell. Heaving waves of down-tuned guitar riffage and rolling, rumbling softly thunderous percussion accompany droning monkish vox doing some sort of seemingly ceremonial chant. The deep, Earth-like bass frequencies emanating mountainously from Bong's amps provide a solid foundation also for the exotic East Indian zing of Bong's secret weapon, the Shahi Baaja (an electrified zither / drone harp with typewriter keys) to play its part in the unfolding phantasmagoria of the endless innerspace odyssey that is Bong's gift to you... Massive, meditative. Sinister, somewhat, and sensuous, the Shahi Baaja contributing to the sense of snake-charmer sway.
Next, track two, "Trees Grass And Stones", we must assume is a nod to legendary Swedish psychsters Trad Gras Och Stenar! Certainly not just the name, but the somewhat more pastoral feel of the mesmeric music, supports such an interpretation. If not, then it's a case of great minds... some sort of psychic psychedelic communion between two of our faves. In any event, it's a thick, 19 minute slab of sturdy, stately krautdrone hypnorock, that stirs up a mite more rhythmic umph than what came before.
Once again, highly recommended by all of us here at aQ, especially of course to fans of Bong (or the use of bongs), Megaton Leviathan, OM, Earth, SUNNO))), Hawkwind, and all other bands that could have used the name Bong but didn't, leaving it to this groop to take up the challenge, and succeed. All bow down and pray to Mana-Yood-Shushai! (Whoops!)
Listen on: Deezer
It's been two long years since Broadcast singer Trish Keegan's tragic untimely passing, and we're finally getting to hear some of the material the band was working on before she died. There have long been rumors of a posthumous Broadcast record proper to someday be released, but until that album is ready, we have this soundtrack to a British psychological thriller called Berberian Sound Studio to keep us company. Unlike Broadcast's previous album with the Focus Group, Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, which played like an imaginary soundtrack for the most incredible horror movie never made, Berberian Sound Studio comes across like a proper soundtrack that follows a visual plot, with repeating themes in various moods that are lilting, atmospheric and tense, but also including creepy foley sound effects of bloodcurdling screams, sinister prayers, as well as short haunting library music cues. The film, about a British sound engineer's devolving mental state while working on a giallo-like exploitation film in the mid '70s at Italy's famed Berberian Sound Studio, harkens back to the days of heralded Italian movie composers Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai working on films by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Originally conceived as the soundtrack for the film within the film, called The Equestrian Vortex, director Peter Strickland soon decided to use Broadcast's music cues to underscore what was happening outside of the interior film as well, so that there is a lovely blurring of reality and fantasy, intensified by the various sonic cues included from the film that overall make this soundtrack stand up on its own. Of course adding to the haunting quality of the music is the ghostly but minimal presence of the late Keegan's voice, that appears mostly in near background like famed Morricone singer, Edda Dell'Orso, in lilting sing-song and wordless choruses. The question remains unanswered if that is her voice heard praying or screaming.
Coincidentally, we've recently become obsessed with a similar sounding soundtrack by Polish composer Andrzej Korzynski for the eighties cult horror film, Possession (something, we are hopefully going to be able to list one of these days!) and the two have been interweaving a strange musically cinematic and terrifying spell throughout the store. Highly Recommended!
There are so many amazing records, longtime aQ faves that sadly predate the aQ list, so thus never got reviewed, or often got a cursory one or two sentence write-up when we put it on the site some years later. We could probably do a hundred lists, just reviewing all the records we loved and raved about and sold in the store, before the aQ list got started. But, we often do try to go back pick some of our favorites, when we can get them, to revisit and relist, to hopefully expose them to a whole new audience. One old fave in particular that we just managed to get some copies of back in, after YEARS, is this, the debut from The Bug, one of the many projects of Kevin Martin (God, Techno Animal, etc.). But before it was strictly a Kevin Martin solo thing (eventually becoming his sort of modern hard ragga dancehall project), The Bug was in fact, at least on this disc, a quintet that featured Martin, along with most notably, DJ Vadim - and also Swiss reedsman Alex Buess from late great noise-jazz outfit 16-17!
This first Bug record was inspired by the '70s Gene Hackman thriller The Conversation, and according to the liner notes does NOT feature any samples, sonic or visual, from the movie. Is a dense, claustrophobic, paranoiac dub jam, that still sounds so good, and so vital all these years later. Longtime fans of WordSound, are already familiar with this sort of low slung illbient dub, all creepy crawly beats, buzzing burnt out blunted bass, the vibe dark and shadowy, sinister and ominous, but here, the minimal palette of later WordSound jams is greatly expanded, Buess' bass clarinet is the real star, adding melody and texture, a dark jazziness, often without really sounding like a horn at all. The tracks here are all dark, malevolent grooves, DJ Vadim adding weird crackle, as well as more texture, weaving mutated loops, constantly shifting layers, sheets of noise and murky sound effects, there's guitar too, but it seems to be mostly utilized to add texture, Martin overseeing the whole thing.
When this first came out, back in 1999 or thereabouts, we often fantasized about someone doing a modern remake of the Conversation, with this as the soundtrack, which on the one hand would have been kind of amazing, but on the other, a total travesty. As far as we're concerned (and we're guessing Martin would agree), the original movie is perfect, as was the original soundtrack by David Shire, and really Tapping The Conversation works just as well even without knowing its inspiration. So as an homage to one of the greatest movies of the seventies, it too is pretty much perfect.
Holy cow, this is a weird one. Rock fans may recognize the name Tony Carey, knowing that he was of course the keyboard player in Rainbow (playing alongside Ronnie James Dio and Richie Blackmore!), but then those same folks might find themselves wondering what the heck he's doing on Medical Records, who specializes in new wave / electro pop reissues. Well it seems that after Rainbow, Carey did indeed have a bunch of solo records that did quite well, but in the late seventies, he took up a residence in Germany, and began to work on mastering all sorts of instruments and studio gear, and writing a ton of songs, some of which would eventually end up on these records. Influenced by what he called "Euro-electronica", Carey's version of that sound is equal parts swirling kosmische synthscapes, Italo-disco, proto-techno, and yeah, a little eighties style electro pop.
This two lp collection gathers up two essential and long sought after Carey rarities, Explorer and Yellow Power, Explorer might be the more essential of the two, if just for the opening track "Enjaw J", which is such an amazing song, from its pulsing synth swirl open, a cascade of dizzying melodies, leads into a darkly dramatic groove, with a killer hook, surprisingly melancholic, the song stretching out, and letting the drum machine, and pulsating synths drive this electro-kraut workout, peppered part way through with a strange noisy swell and a splatter of abstract percussion. You'll find this one stuck in your head after one listen guaranteed. The rest of the record is pretty great too, but definitely leans more toward an eighties electro-pop. "Transit To Nowhere" almost sounds like an alternate version of the Sparks' "Cool Places", while "No.8" is a strange abstract slab of minimal electro-dub, and "Queen Of Scots" sounds a bit like A-Ha, a moody and dramatic, with a cool cascading main melody that again, like the opener is crazy catchy. There's definitely a cheesy element to these songs and sounds, but it's kind of what makes them so cool, that and realizing this guy once rocked out in Rainbow!
The other record, Yellow Power, is a sort of companion to Explorer, and shares much of the same sonic palette, but seems a it more thematically linked, to the somewhat problematic title, when you realize some of the song titles are "Peking Duck", "Radio Tokyo" and "Hai Samurai", that one complete with some weird processed vox singing "HAI!"
There are some of the same tracks on both records, it has been theorized that one was demos for the other, but the version are different enough the make it worth it. Yellow Power definitely features more vocals overall, whispers here and there, wailing operatic female vox in the background, and it's interesting to hear some of the instrumental tracks on Explorer with vocals. There seems to be more guitar too, and more studio fuckery, they're both weird, each one weird in a slightly different way. We're digging this a LOT, and we should say, that of all the Medical releases we've reviewed, this is the one our distributor excitedly insisted we get a bunch of cuz it's so weird, and so good, and we most definitely agree.
Super swank packaging, the records pressed on thick 160 gram colored vinyl, one record green, the other blue, housed in a super thick full color gatefold sleeve, limited to 100 copies, each one hand numbered. Includes a bonus insert with a retrospective and interview.
This is a special musical valentine from aQ pal Dan Valor, aka Clarinette, to all the aQ customers out there (actually it's to his wife, but he decided to share it with us, and you!). This Valentine's Day release is only available from us, and only as long as this single batch lasts (a single batch of just 18 COPIES!), which we're guessing won't be long. And you should definitely not sleep on this, cuz it's a doozy. Not necessarily romantic in the traditional sense, but we're guessing this heaving slab of lush layered drones would be a lot more exciting than a bunch of chalky candy hearts, the first track here, mixed live on WFMU, finds Vallor taking what has to be his thickest and darkest piece yet, originally on his cd-r Nul, and recontextualizing this swirling psychedelic tangle, near metallic in places, but shot through with multiple melodies, a murky expanse of blackened shimmer that should have all you aQ dronelords in heaven. Nearly sixteen minutes of undulating low end, and constantly shifting longform tones, the overlapping sounds producing all manner of pulses and pulsations, giving the sound a sort of spectral momentum, that is utterly entrancing. Then about nine minutes in, the voice of Gertrude Stein surfaces, drifting atop the churning drones, delivering her spoken valentine to her friend, the writer Sherwood Anderson, the perfect valentine, celebrating a strange and unlikely friendship, as all the best friendships are. The voice soon fades, leaving the drone to play out to the end, augmented for the last few minutes by the sounds of machinery, a gorgeous mechanized dreamdrone collage.
The second track seems to harken back to Vallor's recent piano tribute to DNA, delivering a sonic valentine to his true love in the form of "Crepuscule With Shannon", a gorgeous stretch of abstract piano, wreathed in reverb, flurries of notes, billowing above more subtle melodic constructs, haunting, and elegiac, minor key, wistful and yeah, kinda romantic.
Comes housed in a die cut, two part, hand made paper sleeve, the inside part printed with liner notes, credit and minimal artwork, viewed through the outside sleeve, in red and pink of course, and again, EXTREMELY LIMITED! ONLY EIGHTEEN COPIES and THAT'S IT!! And only available here...
Chris Cohen might not be a household name for most folks, but if you live in SF you might remember him from when he played in the mighty Deerhoof, as well as Curtains, and the Natural Dreamers. He's also played with, White Magic, Cass McCombs, Danielson, Haunted Graffiti and a bunch of others. Overgrown Path is his first solo record under his own name, and is a gorgeous collection of psychedelic pop, not nearly as weird as we were maybe expecting, but really all the better for it. The instrumentation is lush and lovely, produced like a classic orchestral pop record, with some cool sonic twists, and Cohen's voices is warm and honeyed, deep and soulful, but slipping easily into a near falsetto, and the songs here, classic sounding and catchy, obviously indebted to classic pop outfits like the Zombies, Big Star, Beach Boys, Bee Gees, etc, but here given a little modern / avant tweak. Opener "Monad" is impossibly lovely, rich, piano chords, over softly swirling guitars, Beach Boys like drumming, blooping bass, then Cohen's dreamy vox, sunshiney guitar melodies, and the chorus/bridge, which finds the sound fracturing into something much more psychedelic, all swirling and woozy and subtly spacey, not to mention the warped droney outro. "Optimist High" is another chunk of near perfect pop, the sound warm and washed out, and dreamily prismatic, definitely reminding us of modern retro poppers like the New Lines and Zumpano, and here, on a track like this, the only thing giving this away as a modern recording, is the recording itself, otherwise it could be some lost Emitt Rhodes B side or something.
The whole record has a definite sixties/seventies singer/songwriter vibe, some tracks darkly groovy, others chiming and jangly, and still others brooding and melancholy, all of them lush and lovely and so absolutely dreamy. A new soft pop fave for sure!
God Takes L.S.D. is the provocatively titled follow up to 2011's Meanwhile... In The Midwest lp from Midwestern zoner folk / psych drone one man band Dead Luke, who is backed up by a whole mess of guests here, mostly a selection of drummers, which is odd, cuz the drumming on these jams seems to mostly exist to provide a steady pulse, a sort of primal throb, buried beneath the squalls of burnt out guitar fuzz, and languorous layers of fuzz and thrum. Like that lp, this tape is a dark, washed out collection of minimal psych throb, primitive druggy blues, beholden no doubt to Spacemen 3, the same sort of lysergic creep, woozy, weary, wide eyed grooves, that start out slow, and build momentum, multiple guitars, pulsing organs, swirling vox, heady and in their own bad-trip style, pretty goddang heavy. There are moments of pure poppiness, female vox here and there, bouncy basslines and the occasional bit of jangle, even some hooks, but the bulk of God Takes L.S.D. is a glorious sprawl of laid back bummer psych, bongsmoke wreathed mesmer, and driving motorik space-kraut garage punk minimalism, fans of the usual space/drone/drug/zoner/space suspects will flip for this.
Anybody remember the excellent Australian indie punk band Venom P. Stinger, circa the late '80s / early '90s? That Melbourne based outfit was guitarist Mick Turner's band before the Dirty Three. Well, turns out that two of Turner's former Venom P. Stinger bandmates, Nick Palmer and Alan Secher-Jensen, are still doing the underground Aussie noise rock thing, in a criminally under-publicized power trio that goes by the ominous name of Deep Where All Drown. They've recorded two albums worth of their powerful music thus far, 2004's The Marianas and 2008's Movement, and you'll find 'em both together here in this gatefold digipack double cd set, released in 2009 (of which we only just managed to track down some copies, as it's barely available at all outside of Australia). Being Venom P. Stinger fans from way back, we were curious, and when we finally heard these Deep Where All Drown discs, we were extremely pleased! Mostly instrumental (there's singing/shouting on only about half the songs on disc one, that's it), both discs add up to 22 tracks total of some seriously intense, ultimately hypnotic post-punk math-rock music chock full of chiming, noisy guitar wrangling, muscular bass, and insistent drumming. DWAD are tight and complex, and conjure atmospheres both grim and beautiful. Great stuff from Down Under! (And by Down Under we mean both Australia and also metaphorically, in keeping with one of DWAD's main themes, the lightless depths of the bottom of the ocean, viz. the Pacific's Marianas trench.)
Another obscure legend of the NWOBHM gets the fancy reissue treatment (on cd AND vinyl) from the Buried By Time And Dust label. This self-titled album was Desolation Angels' full-length debut from 1986, predating the band's ill-fated and short-lived relocation to Los Angeles the very next year. Dunno why they thought they'd be able to make a go of it on the Sunset Strip at the time, 'cause this album is much more gloomy than glammy. A rough-hewn, riff-strewn headbang, galloping headlong from deep underground in the NWOBHM bog, full of doomy sub-Sabbath bashing and some epick Viking vox (wailing about "Valhalla" and so forth, & some Satanic subjects too). It chugs along with a lot of charm, and should appeal to fans of Witchfinder General, Bleak House, Mythra, and other such BBTAD excavations of NWOBHM rarities. Packaged with that label's usual care, including a bonus 7" (on the vinyl, bonus tracks on the cd) of a single of theirs from '84.
All the NWOBHM fanatics here at aQ are pretty excited about this one, we've been awaiting a reissue for ages!
The return of Ducktails finds this formerly 'hypnogogic pop' outfit, who previously trafficked in a warped, murky tropical surf pop, delivering their most polished and poppy record yet, one that sounds less removed than ever from Ducktails mainman Matthew Mondanile's other band, Real Estate. The opener is a sweet slab of warm, shimmery, classic sounding jangle pop, the guitars lightly flanged, the vocals soft and breezy, the drums simple and propulsive, the whole sound wreathed in a soft haze of echo and reverb, chiming, and dreamy, and pretty darn near perfect. The second track offers up more of the same, but with more of a seventies soft rock slant, right down to the electric piano, that definitely gives it a bit of a yacht rock vibe, but Mondanile, manages to overcome any sort of cheesiness and craft a warm slab of classic pop, that really does sound like some lost seventies B side. And that seventies vibe is all over The Flower Lane, from the disco drums and horns (!) on "Under Cover", to the string laden echo drenched piano driven shuffle of "Timothy Shy". Some of the tracks slip back into the modern day, "Planet Phrom" is all chiming, psychedelic jangle pop, replete with weird lyrics about other planets and alien wives, but then it's right back into some lost alternative universe seventies, with a track like "Assistant Director" that adds some new wave to the occasion, that track a twisted bridge between both sides of Ducktails divergent musical personality here. Oh did we mention the bongos? Those bongos though are wreathed in spacey effects and wah wah guitar. It's a weird sound, and a weird record, for sure, and would definitely not work if Mondanile weren't such a good songwriter, and such a master in the studio, managing to somehow merge the sound of Squeeze and Steely Dan with something more fuzzy and psychedelic, the result at once retro and weirdly psychedelic.
One of three new Mississippi titles reviewed on our list this week, this one another vinyl full length extracted from the Ethiopiques cd series (Ethiopiques 22, to be exact), following Mississippi's Tsegue-Maryamthis Guebrou and two Mahmoud Ahmed records. For this one, Mississippi take a big dip into the vaults of Alemayehu Eshete, one of the biggest stars from the golden age of Ethiopian music in the '70s, who alongside Mahmoud Ahmed, Tlahoun Gessesse and Mulatu Astatke helped define that sound. In fact, Eshete was the star of both the 9th and 22nd volumes of the Ethiopiques series, and judging from those releases, the man left a very sizable legacy. This lp features songs he worked out with three different bands: The All Star Band, The Alem Girma Band and Shebele's Band, and is filled with absolute treasures without a throwaway track in sight.
With instrumentation that's so tight, and breaks that would make any psych/kraut/rare groove lover's jaw drop, this is a collection that we've already been spinning over and over ever since it showed up at aQ. Eshete's voice and presence feels so sure and confident, with a unique vocal style that's been compared to an Ethiopian James Brown crossed with Elvis Presley. There are moments in these songs that catch such deep grooves and moments that sound like they could be pulled straight from a Can song. You just can't beat the warmth of these stripped down analog recordings. You want to be in a room filled with smoke and candles when you listen to this. Eshete made such amazing songs that just drip with sweat, while oozing elegance too. Highly recommended!
Another warped export from the weird and wonderful wilds of Finland, this one in the form of psychedelic sludgelords EXO, who are a three piece, two bass players and a drummer, and thus deliver a punishing wall of sound, all dense low end dirgey, this churning dual-bassed low end onslaught held together by some dense drum pound. And as you might imagine, with two basses, and being mostly instrumental, EXO, traffic in a sort of tranced out riff repetition minimalism that's hypnotic, cyclical, and churning. When the vocals do surface, they're some sort of garbled underwater demonic burblings, which adds a sort of blackened, demonic vibe to the proceedings. Otherwise, the music itself is equal parts OM, Godheadsilo, the Melvins, that sort of murky, super distorted sludge, but more econo, minimal not maximal. Think Dutch instru-metal outfit Gore, and you're definitely in the ballpark. It's psychedelic and spacey at times, but for the most part, EXO are masters of the downtuned, low end doom-dirge trance, the coolest moments being when the two basses deviate, one going high, the other low, sometimes obviously, as if one was playing some sort of lead, but more often, just creating strange harmonies, octaves, thirds, whatever, but the result is a gorgeous headfucking dissonance, that suits EXO's lumbering, monolithic pummel. Fans of all thing slow and low, check this out for sure.
We went absolutely nuts for Feeling Of Love's Dissolve Me record, a twisted collection of droned out, post punk, garage rock dirgery, not really sure we didn't make it Record Of The Week at the time, cuz for some of us, it was pretty much all we listened to for a while. And cuz we're the way we are (and we're guessing you are too), we immediately wanted more more more. So here's the latest blast of garage punk shenanigans from these French weirdos, not a new record, but instead a collection of singles, and comp tracks and rarities. Here's a quick run through the song titles, just at least give you a flavor of that they're all about, and why we dig em so much: "I'm Nothing But A Drunk Pussy", "The Right Bitch At The Right Place", and of course "You Rock You're Seventeen You Should Kill A Ten Years Old Kid". The sound pretty much fits perfectly with those titles - raw buzzed out garage guitar, primitive drumming, yelped echo drenched vocals, swaggery and snarly. Opener "Hand Clap Girl" sounds like a bluesier, more wasted Thee Oh Sees, the song driven by a programmed beat, that features a very loud simulated handclap, and when the kick drum kicks in, it's the sort of moment, that you can imagine inspires a crowd of sweaty, bloody kids to lose their shit. The aforementioned "I'm Nothing But A Drunk Pussy", is nothing but that line, or variations of, delivered in a drunken, garbled, heavily accented mush mouthed croon, over caveman blues, and THEE most damaged drumming EVER. And so it goes, this is Feeling Of Love at their most raw, blown out, and utterly primitive, all of the sounds are doused in crumbling distortion, totally in-the-red, this is sweat soaked, drum machine driven garage punk weirdness that like the proper record has us hooked. If you wished Thee Oh Sees was way more damaged and demented, and sounded super shitty and lo-fi, like some drug addled Neanderthal psychedelic garage rock monster mash, then this is yer shit! So goddamn great!
Once again, these two Chilean psych bands, Follakazoid and The Holydrug Couple, each sharing a member with the other, release their records at the same time, giving us a glimpse of two sides of a similar sonic personality. Elsewhere on the list you'll find the latest from The Holydrug Couple, but here, we revisit the psychedelic modern space-kraut sprawl of Follakzoid, whose sound is equal parts classic psych/space rock, and more modern garage psych mesmer. The opening track here definitely had us thinking of Wooden Shjips, the looped and loping low slung bassline, the sonic swirls and laconic vocals, everything drenched in echo and reverb, a hazy, druggy, droned out psychedelic space dirge laced with weird little synth squiggles, and dense clouds of crumbling distortion. Like a darker, more rocking Spacemen 3, which is most definitely not a bad thing. A lot of the rest of the record drifts way more into old school jam band territory, think Hawkwind, Santana, Pink Floyd, just hazy, washed out stretches of hypnotic, rhythmic mesmer, the core sound a bass and drum groove, very propulsive and motorik, the krautrock vibe is huge, then all around that groove, synths, and guitars, and voices, swirl and swoop and drift. It's heady hypnotic stuff, in fact, some tracks, like "99" sound a lot like Circle at time, that same sort of kick ass hypnorock churn, but Follakzoid definitely make that sound their druggy, laid back, tripped out own. And be sure and stick around for 15 minute closer "Pulsar", which is the sort of heart-of-the-sun psych groove bliss out we could listen to forever.
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We were first turned on to this Seattle collective by our pals in psychedelic kosmische krautdrone combo Magdalena Solis. As much as we love MS, we figured a band THEY found worthy of recommending, would in fact be well worth checking out, and we (and they) were right. Geist & The Sacred Ensemble are from Seattle, and traffic in a sort of Eastern tinged psychedelic folk ritualism, spidery guitar melodies, minimal percussion, tinkling chimes, chanted vocals. But unlike many of their sonic brethren, who stop just shy of actual songwriting, instead subsisting on creating sprawling soundscapes, Geist often transform whatever abstract drift they've just conjured up into what sounds like some twisted strain of swampy apocalyptic folk, or some twisted psychedelic sea shanty. Just check out the opener "Awaken / The Gut", which begins like some abstract forest folk ritual, all blurred melodies, hushed percussion, chanted vox, only to blossom into a proper song, all woozy strum, druggy atmosphere, echo drenched melody, hauntingly crooned vox, the song sounded strangely familiar, until we realized it sorta sounded like a super slowed down, ultra psychedelic, dirgey and druggy reworking of the Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood". Weird. More often than not, it's songs proper that these guys offer up, sometimes slipping into a bit of ambience, or some psychedelic drift, but otherwise weaving lush expanses of drug folk shimmer, or woozy, swampy psychedelic blues, check out "Grave Coins", with it's drunken swagger, and sonic snarl, we're guessing fans of King Dude, Woven Hand, Kiss The Anus, Nick Cave and the like will flip for these guys. The whole record bursts with mysterious psychedelia, gypsy folk, brooding campfire dirges, tracks like "In Search Of Fabled Lands" wraps snake charmer guitar melodies, around shuffling percussion, with swooping backwards chordal wheezes, all building to a more percussive, tribal psych dirge freakout, or there's "Fertilize", which is all stripped down blues, or "Circles", which is a lo-fi sprawl of tribal, junkyard swagger, crooned vox, over murky shimmer, and pounding percussion, or even "These Embers Need A Blowin", which sounds like New Model Army by way of Cop Shoot Cop if that makes any sense.
A fantastic collection of dark, brooding, bluesy, psychedelia, that's haunting and hypnotic and harrowing in equal measure.
Comes with a full color printed J-card and includes a download coupon as well.
Music For Sick Queers is very strange album from the bowels of the San Francisco synth-punk scene during the early '80s. The band was founded by Stephen Scheatzle and Sandy Stark in 1981, who concocted lumbering, atonal synth blorping and stumbling drum machines that served a very loose backdrop to the flat, cynically delivered lyrics that mocked the paradigms of control - politics, morality, and religion, complete with the requisite Jim Jones appropriation that was commonplace for the proponents of Industrial Culture. Their first single from 1981 featured a song entitled "Booty Jones" which told the true crime story of child molester who kidnapped a young boy and then raised him as his son for many years. The infamy of that song devolved into the suicide of Sandy Stark who in 1984 was awaiting trial on trumped up charges of child molestation. The band continued on with Mark Hutchinson replacing Stark, well sort of... as Stark and Hutchinson were in fact the same person, and the Sandy Stark suicide was all just a publicity stunt to support the 1984 album Music For Sick Queers. Woah!
The album is an exercise in deliberate confusion, with the songs being loose, visceral collages of sicktone electronics lurching around broken rhythms and megaphone vocal distortions that at their best take on the guttural aspects of Factrix or what Debbie Jaffe would later manifest as Master/Slave Relationship (might any of her stuff get reissued?). On more than a few tracks, German Shepherds push the vocals forward in the mix and their lunatic ranting embraces an unrefined, performance art ethos with an affected, flat intonation of sarcastic mockery.
This was one of those records that you would see around San Francisco pretty much everywhere back in the '90s; but obviously they slowly got snatched up, making this a pretty intriguing reissue for those outside of the Bay Area interested in the more out there proponents of DIY post-punk electronics. The Superior Viaduct reish comes wth a bonus 7" of unreleased material, and the LP has a single-only cut not found on the original vinyl. Yup, there is a download code.
This metal band from the mean streets of San Francisco (featuring members of Walken, Orb Of Confusion, Owl and others) claim to play "epic blackened stoner thrash" and it's hard to argue with that self-assessment. They do play such a thing, if you can imagine that, and it's definitely cool. Gruff guttural vokills roughly rasp desperate battlecries, singing of smoke and mountains, o'er top heaving lumbering grooves and punked out grind. It's sick, and it's sludgy, but it also rocks, way more than we were expecting (was that a cowbell?), with chugging riffery and spirals of old school shreddtastic soloing in spades - the dual axework influenced by classic '80s thrash all right, even as the band's raging sonics range overall into crustier territories redolent of burnt churches, smoldering bongs, and other black and doom metal signifiers. Hazzard's Cure are in and out in about 38 minutes, seven slayin' songs, including amidst 'em an acoustic-y interlude or two, even. They remind us a LOT of another band that's a favorite 'round these parts, the shredding heshers in Saviours. And, in their dynamics and diversity, also the likes of (early) Baroness, High On Fire, Behold The Monolith, and local duo Black Cobra.
Once again, these two Chilean psych bands, Follakazoid and The Holydrug Couple, each sharing a member with the other, release their records at the same time, giving us a glimpse of two sides of a similar sonic personality. Elsewhere on the list you'll find the latest from psychedelic space-kraut combo Follakzoid, but here, we're reunited with cosmic, sun dappled dream psych duo The Holydrug Couple. Unlike the stretched out psych jams of Follakzoid, The Holydrug Couple traffic in a sound more overtly poppy, while still constructed from the same psychedelic building blocks, fuzzy guitars, propulsive motorik drumming, echo drenched vox, the song structures looped and hypnotic, THDC locking to endless grooves, and then playing those endless grooves at pop song length, the longest track here close to eight minutes, but most clocking in around 3 or 4. Fans of the Wooden Shjips, Spyrals, and other local SF psych combos will once again find much to love here, a sort of revved up Spacemen 3 vibe, but with plenty of jangle.
A quick listen to opener "Counting Sailboats" will tell you whether this is your sort of jam or not. Hazy, hypnotic, darkly groovy, infused with plenty of melody, and subtle hooks, psych pop minimalism that's hard to resist. And the rest of the record plays out similarly, mixing in swoonsome strings, acoustic guitars, organs, loads of FX, and weaving them into all sorts of different sonic shapes, from the fuzzy drift of "Sailor", a psych pop trifle, to the seventies sounding dreampsych soft rock groover "Follow Your Way" (which sounds a bit like a more psychedelic Bread), to the woozy, murky, druggy, longform drift of "Out Of Sight", that really could have been twice as long, even at eight minutes, to the echo drenched garage pop of "Red Moon", to the super warped, lysergic jangle of "Willoweed", to the seriously heavy garage psych of "Paisley", and on and on.
Definitely a sweet slab of psychedelic pop, for folks who dig the Shjips, Assemble Head, Sleepy Sun, Moon Duo and the like.
Here's our '70s proto-metal pick for this week's list. It's an archival release compiling the never-released album this Houston hard rock quartet put to tape in 1978, along with a bunch of bonus tracks from the same era, and holy heck it smokes!! It's aptly titled for sure.
If you're reading this on our website, you can see the thumbnail image of the front cover, with the band's name and album in the form of a young lady's 'tramp stamp' tattoo, but we wish we could show you this disc's back cover photo too. It pretty much says it all, four long haired musician dudes, in a cloud of fog-machine mist, striking an assortment of classic, exuberant rock n' roll poses. And one of the guitarists is brandishing a particularly cool, cruel & unusual instrument - the body of his guitar looks more like some strange four-bladed axe. Very metal. And Hooker definitely incorporate some metallic moves into their badass blend of high energy rippage and heavy Southern blues rock. It's practically like NWOBHM done Texas-style! Although, they have their melodic, sensitive side too, even throwing in a little balladry and Jesus-lovin' honky-tonk (though we don't know how that comports with the sexy and/or sexist nature of some of their other material). Also, we gotta mention one of the mellower tunes, "Beatle", is indeed about imagining being a Beatle, as in, one of the Beatles - a "what if?" scenario any rock n' roller must have considered at one point or another, right? We like the weirdness of that one quite a bit, but the main draw here are Hooker's guitars, the riffs and dueling leads and so forth, to which "Turn it up!!" can be the only proper reaction. Definitely for anyone who digs other obscure American '70s hard rock/early metal action, like previous Rockadrome/Vintage reissues we've recommended by Poobah, Cain, Hillary Blaze, etc.
There's 8 songs here originally recorded for Hooker's unreleased ('til now that is) album, plus 5 more bonus cuts circa '75-'79 or so, including their cover of "I Want Your Body", originally recorded by early '70s proto-metal outfit Tin House.
HSDOM is the sporadically active project of Jochen Hartmann, who runs the equally sporadic Phaserprone label with Jonas Asher, releasing grim, obscurant electronica with plenty of blank, macabre overtures. His own work doesn't fall too far from this axis with his grids of moody step-sequencing that modulate above skeletal rhythms and alien dronescapes. The tape begins almost innocently reclaiming a pleasant synth sequence that could have come by way of Suzanne Ciani, but things take a dive down the rabbit hole from there with some aggressive synth percolations dotting a plodding rhythm, ending with a very creepy horror-film swarm of tinkling bells and disembodied voices. It's akin to the early '80s Skinny Puppy demos and the early manglings of Severed Heads from around the same time. Great stuff, in other words! The B side begins with an eerie, ghost broadcast tone that gasps with haunted melodies slowly augmented by cybernetic skitterings caught in a dub-echo miasma. As the tone collapses into a tesla-coil oscillation, HSDOM slowly pours over a boiling concoction of caustic distortion and white-hot static. The tape concludes with a darkening obfuscation of Oneohtrix Point Never's sci-fi angularity through disjointed rhythms and tone clusters. Recommended. C40. Limited to 100 copies.
We'd been meaning to review this record for a while, but before managed to get it listed, we noticed it popping up on some customers' 2012 top ten lists, and then we just discovered Inter Arma apparently features members of another recent aQ fave, Bastard Sapling. So here it is, finally, the debut 12" from these Richmond heavies,
who traffic in a sort of dark, mathy noise rock, rife with psychedelic flourishes, bursts of furious black metal buzz, and swaths of sludgey downtuned crush. Sounds like a wild concoction, and it is, but somehow these guys make it work. Check out opener "Wailing Moon", which starts out all woozy angular guitars, and dense driving, super busy drumming, making us think of a more metallic Polvo, but then BAM, the song turns metal, churning and chugging, only to splinter into full on buzzing blackness, only to shift again into epic, riff heavy, doom flecked metallic bombast. The vocals flitting from demonic shriek, to warrior like below and back again, the sound too, slipping easily right back into a bout of furious blasting, and soaring fast picked riffage, only to collapse right back into that opening mathy tangle. They pack a lot into those nine minutes, even some soaring classic metal leads at one point, which transform the last few minutes into a sort of blackened epic heaviness, that sounds a bit like some weird hybrid of Opeth and Ash Borer, with a little classic noise rock mixed in. Which is some seriously good band math as far as we're concerned. The second track starts off with some acoustic guitar, wrapped in wild squalls of feedback, even some slide(!), a weird bit of twang flecked psych, that leads directly into "The Long Road Home", which for longtime readers of the list, we'll say reminds us of country stoner rock combo Antler, but for those not familiar, it's a sort of brooding twangy, countrified rock, but HEAVY, and when the lead comes in, it's like a metalized version of the Outlaws, all minor key, melancholic country jam, not at all what we were expecting for sure, but holy shit it sounds amazing, and when the song freaks out, the drums getting wild and chaotic, the guitars shredding wildly, the bass super busy, the result is super dramatic and tense and intense, until with about 2 minutes to go, the sound shifts, and the band explodes into another stretch of black buzz, which somehow retains the melodic component of the preceding country part, giving it a weird sort of melancholic emotional heft. Epic and dramatic. Finally, things finish off with the title track, a killer main riff, that instead of launching into another blast, is droned out, and becomes a cool trance-y dirge, bellowed vox over the stretched out riff, and churning low end beneath, still warped and blackened, punctuated by some creepy, raspy, dynamics, but slipping right back into that churning raga-like heaviness.
Awesome! Full length coming soon on Relapse, we can't wait.
Another list, another batch of tapes from UK label The Tapeworm! This one comes from a guy named Phil Julian, who despite apparently being quite active in the experimental music underground since the nineties, we had not previously heard of. But all it took was a few seconds of his Live Flux to convince us that that was definitely an egregious oversight on our part. Huge billowing clouds of low end rumble and buzzing metallic shimmer, all constructed from experiments with "unstable/chaotic systems", aka modular synths, contact mics, feedback etc. It's impossible to tell what the source is for these sounds, but it hardly matters, just sit back and let these thick sonic swells wash over you. Undulating, and softly pulsing swirls seem to coalesce into heaving walls of sound only to immediately dissipate into drifting clouds of sonic particles, before beginning to gather once again. The sound eventually settles into something much more serene, a sort of Niblockian stretch of layered tones, backed with all manner of incidental sound, voices, shuffling feet, pieces of wood on concrete, hard to say if these were purposeful or not, but they do add mysterious texture, to Julian's dronemusic, which even in its more serene state, begins again to build to something dense and intense. The flipside is more of the same, but the recording is more raw, wreathed in hiss, the sounds pulsing madly as well, as if tones were chosen that were just off enough that their overtones would collide and disagree, the results though are a wild chaotic cloud of hissing, throbbing soft noise, that for all of its noisiness and abrasion, still manages to be weirdly hypnotic.
Killer split/collaboration between German retro heavy rockers Kadavar and French psychedelic spacerock heavies Aqua Nebula Oscillator, three new tracks from each band, and then two side long epics, where both bands team up and play together. Kadavar kick down a sort of proto metal style heavy blues rock, with bellbottom riffs, fat fuzzed out bass, and a wailing vocalist, total seventies hard rocking riff-o-mania, with some serious psych overtones, and one track that has some killer start/stop dynamics, and one that's a slithery southern stoner jam, all swaggery and snarly, with a second half that cranks the tempo into a frenzied bas heavy freakout. Aqua Nebula Oscillator counter with a sound that's much more noisy and abstract, space rocking and heavy, spaced out and hypnotic, they do indulge in some retro riffing action, the bass driven breakdown on the very seventies titled "Purple Sage", replete with wild tangles of psych guitar shreddery, or the weird percussion and deep dramatic vox on "Jungle Man", which totally sounds like it could be a cover of some old sixties groover, by the Animals maybe? There's even some fake animal sounds, tiger roars and everything! And then finally there's their organ driven blooz ballad, that sounds like a heavy psych version of the Moody Blues, all drowsy and moody and dreamily dramatic, a little Pink Floyd in the mix too.
Those tracks are all well and good, but it's the collaborations that are the real reason to pick this up. The first, epically titled "From The Flying Dutchman", weaves a spaced out sprawl of wild drum splatter, and heavily effected guitar swirl, a dreamy droned out psychscape, that gradually builds to dizzying squall, all flanged and phasered, but still loose and free, never quite locking into a song proper, at least until about 5 minutes in, when the song finally coalesces into a serious guitar heavy chunk of kraut-psych heaviness, the drums (dual drumming), dense and driving, the drums too doused in flanger, the song sprawling out endlessly, constantly morphing from riff heavy crunch, to ethereal psychedelic shimmer, to brooding murky drift, to chiming almost jangly shimmer, and finally, to bass driven dirgey, that finishes things off in a cloud of murky FX and slow decaying chords. Awesome. As is the title track, a similarly structured epic, but one that launches immediately into a drum heavy stretch of fuzz guitar psych, occasionally settling down into something droney and tranced out, but for the most part never letting up, the guitars swirling and howling, grinding and crunching, multiple leads spiraling into wild tangles, the bass throbbing, the drums pounding, total heavy psych bliss out for sure.
Super swank, embossed, heavy stock gatefold jacket, includes a download code as well.
One of three neat new Mississippi titles in this week, and by far our favorite (and thus a Record Of The Week!) is this collection of archival recordings from famed female Hindustani classical singer, Kesarbai Kerkar. For fans of the Ustad Abdul Karim Khan and Pandit Pran Nath lps released previously on the label, this is an essential addition. What makes this release extra special is the lovingly designed booklet (with a beautiful tantric painting on the cover and English transcriptions of all the included ragas) that chronicles Kerkar's rise from her lower caste position as a courtesan to one of the most revered women in Indian classical music.
The lp consists of seven ragas, mostly morning ragas (but also an evening, late evening and monsoon raga), accompanied by saranji or harmonium that she recorded for the British label HMV on 78's between 1944 and 1949, Kerkar's unique style and vocal range is incredible to listen to, but is made more profound by the unfathomable struggles she had to endure throughout her life. Ridiculed at her very first public singing performance while employed as a kept women at the age of 26, she angrily vowed revenge by seeking to become one of the best singers India had ever witnessed. Her dedication to this task would not only involve some clever trickery, and ultimately separate her from her lover and patron and their only daughter, but also meant that she would have to enter into slavish servitude with her guru Ustad Alladiya Khan, and pay him for ten years of rigorous vocal training. But this ultimately paid off, for her master, who like many esteemed singers of his generation did not consider recording a necessary component of artistry, and had a devotional emphasis on obscure ragas, which gave Kerkar an unrivaled repertoire when it became her time to finally record while she was in her forties and fifties. Having toured the country extensively, the recordings only increased her fame and renown in India and beyond. Here we hear a voice that is unlike others we have heard before in its intricate extended modulations, sounding completely otherworldly and ritualistic, solemn and ceremonial, but with a devoutly serious temperament that singers like Maria Callas and Diamanda Galas could surely appreciate. So beautiful!
It's been ages and ages since we last heard from Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. All three of the previous KTAOABC records: An Interlude To The Outermost, If the Sky Falls, We Shall Catch Larks and The Nebulous Dreams, were all huge hits around here. KTAOABC, aka Stef Heeren is a Belgian musician, who also builds his own instruments, and past records have all played out like some impossible mix of Comus, Woven Hand, Swans and Current 93. A brooding, dark apocalyptic folk, that has definitely evolved over the years, always spare and haunting, but also always mysterious and ominous, slightly sinister, and a little witchy. Heeren employed quite a varied sonic palette as well, the core vocals and acoustic guitar augmented by piano, bells, strings, and on the last record, even drums, transforming the more drifty vibe of past records into something more rocking and propulsive.
But on Hewers Of Wood, Heeren seems to pull back a bit, there are still drums, but the songs seem more subdued, hauntingly minimal, back to the creepy dirgey folk of Kiss The Anus records of old. In fact, more than ever, KTAOABC is sounding like Woven Hand / Sixteen Horsepower, a similar knack for melody, the same sort of strident vocalizing, at times his voice a dead ringer for David Eugene Edwards, the swampy bluesy folk, it's a sound we love, and Heeren is a master, and these songs are super intense and emotional, hypnotic and mesmerizing, and so catchy and gorgeously creepy.
The first three songs are practically perfect, the slo-mo Comus-y waltz of the title track, the buzz flecked urgency of "All Your Ghosts Are Worried", and "Argonaut And Magneto" which could easily mistaken for a Woven Hand song (if it wasn't for that Belgian accent), so much so that it almost sounds like a cover, but also means it's gorgeous and powerful intensely moving.
The whole record oozes with a sense of foreboding, as if each song was some sort of cautionary tale, stories of lives lost, loves lost, forgotten memories and other, better times, and this sense of loss and regret, as well as some hope for redemption and forgiveness, that all seems to seep into every note, every lyric, helping transform this swampy bluegrassy folk music into something more, acid tinged, subtly psychedelic, emotionally powerful, sonically revelatory, dark meaningful music. Gorgeous!
This long time AQ fave is NOW ON VINYL!! When this soundtrack first came out on compact disc, we made it a Record Of The Week, that was years and years ago, the cd is long out of print, so not only will fans of this great record who would like it on vinyl be happy, but we bet there's folks who haven't encountered it before who will be blown away. So very recommended.
Here's what we wrote about it back in 2004 when we made the Blast First Petite cd reissue a Record Of The Week, for the first time:
We weren't really sure what to expect with this one. A lost soundtrack from 1971 (a magic year for music, just ask Allan - though it turns out the music was recorded in 1969, also not a bad year) to a movie none of us had ever heard of, directed by and starring Peter Fonda. Could go either way. But the second we threw it on, we knew this was IT! A dark and languorous abstract country psych folk gem. Seriously. Hearing this for the first time, you'd be forgiven for guessing it was Scott Tuma, Souled American, Califone, Golden Hotel, Thuja, Woven Hand or some totally obscure cd-r on some little tiny label from some mysterious band of psychedelic country folk minstrels. Slow and mournful, delicate and dreamy, acoustic guitars, farfisa organs, harmonicas and an echoplex. Spare and skeletal, mini epics of melancholic twang. Imagine if Sergio Leone had Ennio Morricone assemble a band cobbled together from members of the Jewelled Antler Collective, the No Neck Blues Band and Souled American to score one of his Westerns. Definitely recommended if you dig any of the folks mentioned above (including Morricone). And if like most of us, you've been digging all sorts of those obscure so-called "new weird America" outfits, maybe it's about time we all dug into some "OLD weird America."
And by the way, now we HAVE seen the movie (it was re-released on dvd in 2006 or so) and it's GREAT! Not a feel-good hit though, or a typical Western shoot 'em up, at all. The soundtrack is perfect, for this beautiful film.
180 gram vinyl pressing, limited to 1000 hand-numbered copies.
This is the first we've heard from this Midwestern outfit, whose sound is a dark, psychedelic shoegaze stoner pop, rife with heavy guitars, clean crooned vocals, and warm whirring organs, the songs simple and heartfelt, but disarmingly so, the A side offering up some washed out woozy jangle and warm muted crunch, and some seriously anthemic choruses, before suddenly exploding into a furious frenzied squall of wild psychguitar heaviness, and blissed out shoegaze heaviness. The flipside is more of a dark brooder, reminding us of a poppier, less slowcore True Widow, the instrumental passages are heavy and heady, tranced out and hypnotic, and the B side spends plenty of time chugging and churning hypnotically, the drum heavy, guitar swirled outro is a gorgeous chunk of spacey heaviness that we would have liked to see stretch out another ten or 15 minutes. We also have LT's split lp with another Midwestern outfit called Men Of Fortune, which we'll review next time, or check the 'in stock not yet reviewed' if you can't wait...
The most recent full length from French fuzz pop duo Liminanas was a surprise hit around here, we can barely keep it in stock! A fantastic mix of raw garage pop and space-y psychedelia, warbly organs, new wave basslines, sultry vocals, and weirdest of all UKULELE! Which definitely added a twangy twist.
We managed to get just a handful of this limited new 7", which features two more tracks of glorious, campy garagey fuzz pop, the A side straight out of the Serge Gainsbourg songbook, the music a woozy slab of exotica, simple propulsive groove, twangy reverbed melodies, wheezing organ chords, dreamy female back up vox, low slung bassline, and over the top, a a deep dramatic voice, speaking in French, sexy and sultry. The flipside channels the spirit of Stereolab for a sweet slab of Francophile dreaminess, all krautrocky shimmer, and hazy, dream pop fuzz.
Comes in a cool black and red jukebox style sleeve, and includes a download coupon.
Latest vinyl-only release from these SF psychedelic space rockers, whose sound has gradually grown funkier with each record, culminating in the recent Transmissions From Telos Vol. IV tape, which found the band aligning itself with Bitches Brew era Miles and Sextant era Hancock, not bad company at all for sure. And while that release, a tour only tape oddity that found the band experimenting in the studio, was twisted fun for sure, this new Horizon Structures 12" finds the band getting back down to business, this time the business of crafting four futuristic jams, equal part seventies jazz funk, eighties new wave, and some mutant strain of kosmische synth exploration. The sounds here definitely hew closely to the cover art, a 3-D rendering of some psychedelic tripped out spacescape, with the opening track a pulsing sprawl of buzzing synths, and laser beam bloops, spaced out and cinematic, and seriously poppy, maybe the poppiest thing we've heard from these guys, percolating swirling melodies, FX drenched vocals, a sort of space-y future pop, that culminates in a percussion heavy, wah guitar dowsed final freakout groove! The second track on the A side is a minimal new wave dirge, laced with all manner of percussion, and like the rest of the tracks here, with a sort of retro futuristic sheen.
The first track on the B side is the killer here, a groovy blast of sci-fi space funk, peppered with electric piano blurts, woozy basslines, wheezing keyboards, swirling synths, dense driving percussion, which then seems to get reworked on the second track, the same groove, but this time even groovier and funkier, wild freaked out drumming, chaotic synths, tripped out FX, all leading up to a dreamy kosmische synth finish. Cool.
Packaged with, according to the sticker on the front, "4D glasses for access to transdimensional viewing portal", which to these eyes seem more just like 3D glasses, but the cover looks AMAZING viewed through those specs, and if you DO wear them outside (with Lumerians blasting in your headphones, we'd imagine) they do seem to make things glimmer and sparkle, a secret glimpse of what lies beneath/beyond?
One of two new tapes on this week's list from UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one might be the heaviest / noisiest thing we've heard on that imprint yet, a live freeform freakout from Norwegian free-noise duo Maranata, a sax/guitar/electronics combo here joined by a couple extra hands, belonging to the drummer from Japan's Nisennenmondai, so you're in for a dense barrage of free jazz / free noise chaos. Sounding like vintage Japanese psych, fused to Zorn's double quartet Spy Vs. Spy, or Borbetomagus jamming with Lightning Bolt, this is furious droned out heaviness, wild tangles of guitar, crazed chaotic drums, and the sax, which sounds less like a sax, and more like a burst of sci-fi laser blurts, the sound grinding, and blown out, the group slipping easily from loose improv, to frenzied blasting, to creeping, almost doomlike plod, this is heady, wild, psychedelic stuff. Borderline white noise at times, but displaying loads of texture and nuance, this is some intense freaked out shit! Extreme free music obsessives will dig big time. And folks thinking about dipping their toes into the world of free jazz/rock weirdness/wildness, this would definitely not be a bad place to start. Exhausting and exhilarating.
Marsfield is a project featuring the premier UK drone artist Andrew Chalk along side Vikki Jackman, Robin Barnes, and Brendan Walls. This collective recorded The Towering Sky back in 2005, only to see if released some five years later. Given the gap in recording to release, we have to wonder what else Mr. Chalk has buried in the vaults of his Faraway Press that one day might see the light of day.
The recordings reflect the strategies of David Jackman, who had employed the talents of a much younger Andrew Chalk many many moons ago in his Organum ensemble. The Marsfield participants have all gathered various pieces of resonant metal (maybe a large piece of sheet metal, maybe a long stringed instrument, probably a gong or two, and definitely a singing bowl or four) and extracted sustained textures, prolonged scrapes, deep bellowings, and elegantly warbled tones in a large reverberant room. With all of the room noise with its spectral echoing, damp reflections, and incidental ambience, the Marsfield sessions sound as if they could have been recorded in some abandoned factory somewhere in the Northeast of England. The first Isolde record that Chalk and Barnes had constructed a few years back is not all that dissimilar to The Towering Sky, with the first half of this record appearing as shape-shiting ghosts of corroded, droning haze, and shifting into the latter half of the record pocked with distant plucks and small hand bells that dissolve into field recordings of English rain showers. As with all of the Faraway Press titles, this is beautifully packaged; and as with all Andrew Chalk releases, this is very highly recommended.
The Swiss electro-acoustic tactician Francisco Meirino has proven a deft hand in cajoling caustic jolts of static and searing chunks of noises from electro-magnetic sources, growing leaps and bounds from his earliest recordings as Phroq to the intensely dynamic output he's been steadily releasing under his own name over the past couple of years. This album's title refers to the UPIC system developed by Xenakis as a means of drawing on a digitizing tablet which provides vector coordinates to a program controlling particular sound sources, which for Meirino's purposes include snow falling, bones cracking, magnetic field disturbances, and insect noises. As interesting as Xenakis' UPIC system is, it's reassuring that Meirino treats the device as just another tool in his arsenal to direct his own aesthetic and not let the tool itself speak any louder than necessary. Radioactive streams of static electricity and piercing sinewaves ground the scattered tactile events which at times sound more like resonant gongs and small scraps of metal whose trailing decay undulates in rippling patterns that parallel Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie. Throughout the 37 minute piece, Meirino returns to the densely phased, atonal concoctions of sinewaves and static that accelerate and deflate out of pockets of agitated acoustically sourced sources. Where those cracking bones are in the mix is anybody's guess, as he adheres a sharply toxic aura to all of his sounds. Like Dave Phillips and G*Park, he's at the vanguard of contemporary Swiss electro-acoustic malevolence. Limited to 350 copies.
Latest from this aQ beloved duo, made up of Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, aka Mountains, and once again, they've crafted a supremely dreamlike songsuite, that finds them conjuring up billowing clouds of blurred synth drifts and soft focus drones, weaving all of their disparate sound sources, electronics, synths, cellos, organs and more into something that sounds surprisingly organic, a glimmering, glistening kosmische new age drift. All of Mountains' records are sort of ethereal and blissed out, but this one might be the most pastoral and meditative of the bunch. Mixing a sort of modern minimalism, with classic ragas and drones, Centralia finds the group crafting a sonic analogue to Stars Of The Lid in a way, with Mountains being the light to Stars' darkness. If we were to create a diurnal soundtrack, Mountains would handle sunrise, and would paint the sky and the landscape in warm, glowing colors, until dusk, where they would hand it off to Stars Of The Lid, who would fill the night sky with streaks of black and glimmering fields of starlight, before dawn rolled around again, and Mountains once again took over.
In fact, the sound of Mountains on Centralia is almost like dawn expanded to fill the whole day, and the whole record, a timelapse recording of this music unfurling and blossoming prismatically into a wide open stretch of softly undulating layers, of muted buzzing shimmers, laced with all manner of slow shifting textures and singing strings. A few of the tracks find the duo adding acoustic guitar to the mix, the vibe more psych folky, but still wreathed in swaths of gauze-y thrum. But it's the long tracks here, that truly let us get lost, epic expanses of hazy, blurred ambience, pixelated fuzz spread into a thin patina, all of the sounds glowing from within, on "Propeller", that sound is briefly infused with a dark tension, a sonic shadow that adds some dark and dreamy pathos, before fading into yet another glorious stretch of glistening, glimmering sun dappled shimmer.
Record number two from these mathy noise rock heavies, and like the first one, it sort of sounds like it was transported here directly from 1995. It's actually some lost record that was meant to come out on AmRep in 1994 but never did. Multicult are that band that opened for Helmet on the Born Annoying tour, the one who only had crappy cassettes for sale and shirts they had screen printed in the parking lot before the show. But they're not. In fact, we'd be willing to guess these guys might even be too young to have been there the first time around. But sonically, they sound like grizzled vets, this is the sort of music that makes us think big beards, shaved heads, old broken amps and a beat to fuck drum kit, touring the country in broken down old white Econoline, and whether or not that's all true or not (and it most certainly is NOT), fans of that stripe of noise rock heaviness, this is the sort of stuff, you probably find yourselves wishing bands still played, and thankfully, some (very few) still do! The songs are dense tangles of angular guitars, thick slithery serpentine bass, pounding intricate drumming, howled vocals, and a surprising amount of catchiness, like the first record, repeated listening is required for these jams to blossom into the kind of songs you get stuck in your head, but take it from someone who has, they do. If your record collection looks (or looked) like this: Big'n, Halo Of Flies, Slug, Surgery, Tar, Helmet, Unsane, God Bullies, Janitor Joe, King Snake Roost, Chokebore, the Cows, Guzzard, Hammerhead, well, odds are you're gonna wanna add Multicult to that motley crew.
Includes a download coupon.
Finally, a brand new record from aQ pal Ernest Gibson, who as Net Shaker, and solo, creates some of thee most warped, and idiosyncratic music we've ever heard. And it seems like every record not only gets better, but somehow also gets weirder. It's always been incredible to describe Gibson's music, even after four releases, we still struggle to put into words, what he manages to conjure up out of a seemingly super minimal sonic palette. The first thing we notice on I'm So Cold, is the groove, the opening track is downright groovy, at least for Net Shaker, a sort of slowcore, downtempo dirge, all shuffling rhythm, wreathed in swirling murk and hushed vox, it's like Starfuckers covering Portishead, or something, but definitely super polished and dare we say, 'danceable'. But fear not, the second track returns us to the cracked sonic underworld that Gibson rules over. A sprawl of throbbing pulses, of heaving industrial moans, and echo drenched anguished voices, chopped up and layered into weird textures, and when the rhythm proper does kick in, it's just a trash can lid cymbal hit, monotonous and robotic, all the while, the sounds underneath swirl and sway, the whole thing on the verge of total collapse. Which is sort of what Net Shaker seems to be all about. A series of meticulously assembled sonic epics, which on some level, reveal an intricate array of inner workings, like the musical version of one of those visible man medical dummies, but in so doing, also reveals that all of these sounds, these melodies, these arrangements are balanced precariously on a knife edge, this impending doom, this black hole that seems to lurk beneath each of these songs, somehow imbues Net Shaker's music with a dark glow, a restless tension, that makes the songs exude a nervous energy, which is even more remarkable for the fact that many of the songs are near somnambulant, in a sort of circular stasis, yet still displaying some sort of warped gravitational pull to the surrounding sounds.
The cool thing this time around is that the loose abstract sonic mysteries, seem to be balanced by more composed jams, minimal dubbed out dirgescapes, the sort of sound that's even too slow and low for a label like WordSound. Tracks like "Be Back" are like Spectre on Thorazine, a creepy, murky crawl, a slo-mo space dub, that measures grooves in minutes instead of seconds. And once you're locked into Net Shaker's nocturnal flow, the record collapses and the sound is transformed into a field of Geiger counter flutter, or swirling smears of soft focus thrum, but before long, another beat surfaces, and Gibson hangs whatever bit of melodic murk or tortured texture he has handy, and away we go, tranced out and mesmerized, until the cycle repeats, and we tumble into the next sprawl of garbled sonic detritus, as we wait patiently for the next beat to pass by. And yeah, this record is another weird one, but some of the songs here display a surprising sonic mastery, that's beginning to make us think Gibson is working really hard to try and NOT make music that's more accessible. But his struggle makes for fantastic and twisted listening. ESSENTIAL.
It's been a little while since we've heard from these long time aQ faves, the near unpronounceable one man black metal band Njiqahdda, but this latest quickly reminds us why exactly they've remained out of our favorite bands. A lot has changed in the Njiqahdda camp, sonically and spiritually (E., the man behind Njiqahdda, runs the E.E.E. label, which was home to most of the UNblack (Christian) metal bands we knew about), but that's part of what made this band so exciting, and wow, the sound on this new one is incredible, the production is massive! The songwriting is expansive and almost proggy, the first track alone, the six minute "Gaia" is a multi part mini epic, the sound not so buzzy and black, but more sprawling and chuggy and churning, wild dense tribal drumming, bellowed raspy vokills, the guitars thick, almost Neurosis like at time, the sound weirdly (and purposefully we assume), distorted and overdriven in places, strange squalls of percussion, some soaring leads, all wound into a dense, and tense blast of moody metallic heaviness, that while maybe not buzzy and black enough for the grim hordes, the rest of is can revel in these twisted, avant sounds. And it doesn't get any less far out and progressive. The second track is even more dense and mathy, the drumming more intricate, wound around flurries of notes, before finally coalescing into a chugging pound that sounds almost more hardcore than metal, that same sort of ferocity, and it suits the sound, which weds this punk fury to blasting double kick drumming, and swirling sinister ambience, not to mention, a super melodic / dynamic breakdown, complete with crooned vocals, and crazy drum splatter. As amazing as it is to listen to this, the thought of how someone conceives of music this twisted and intricate and perplexing is still a fantastic mystery.
The record never slips into pure black buzz, so for folks looking for THAT sort of blackness, better steer clear, but if you like your blackness laced with gloomy death rock ("With Clouds"), or twisted spaced out psychedelia ("She Which Water Holds"), or groovy Khold like blackend Nirvana style heavy riffing ("Exclave"), then there's plenty here to love. And yet amidst all the aforementioned sonic weirdness, there's plenty more, all deftly woven into a bigger, and impossibly cohesive whole, metallic heaviness, warped riffing, dreamy dark psych drift, hooks galore, crooned gothic vocals, spidery math rock breakdowns, loping post rock rhythms, and soaring epic sonic majesty. As much as we love everything we've heard from Njiqahdda, it's hard to believe how far this sound has come, and how much it's grown and expanded over the years, somehow managing to retain the black energy that made those early records so vital, but infusing it with a wide eyed experimental streak, that most definitely makes this a contender for metal record of the year. So great!
Sadly though, this is ALREADY OUT OF PRINT!! We got about twenty copies, but these are the last we'll be able to get, so act fast. Packaged in dvd style cases with full color printed inserts.
In 1986, Steven Stapleton released Automating Vol. 1, filled with some choice selections he had produced for various compilations during his previous eight years of existence as Nurse With Wound. Given just how much amazing material Stapleton produced in the prolific NWW catalog, it's not surprising that his tracks for compilations were pretty damn good even as some of these pieces were drastic remixes and edits of material already on other albums, or they were tracks that didn't quite 'fit' onto one of his already eccentric takes of industrial-psychedelic-concrete constructions by way of classic Surrealism.
So, jump to 2010, and Stapleton has now released Automating Vol. 3 (yes, there was a Volume 2), with equally astounding results again demonstrating his studio magic.
The compilation moves mostly in chronological order, starting with a track from 1984 and traversing almost to the present with a 2008 piece. The earliest number came from a Japanese compilation called Sound Cosmodel, spliced from metallic slashes and the spoken word of a breathy French woman, providing a typically unsettled Nurse collage. The comedy side of NWW comes by way of "Antacid Cocamotive 93" with a funhouse cover of the early '60s hit "Do The Locomotion" that nearly spins off the rails with Diana Rogerson offering her zombified vocals to accompany the warbling silliness of the tune. Another Rogerson duet appears by way of the track "Beetle Crawls Across My Back" recontextualizing the material that she and Stapleton used on one of the Chrystal Belle Scrodd records. Very creepy, dark atmospheres, with almost ritualist percussion buried way down deep upon which Rogerson snarls her nightmarish tale, you guessed it, about insects crawling on her back."Ubu Noir" is a 2006 redux of "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" - the Appalachian standard that grew notorious via Patty Waters' version in the 60s. Here, Stapleton's cybernetic vocals rasp above blackened loops and leviathan plods. But perhaps the most atypical track is the remix that Stapleton did for the death metal band Cadaverous Condition. Given the uncanny success Stapleton had with the SUNNO))) remix a few years back, this shouldn't be too much of a surprise, as he stretches out the thunderous rhythms, adds haunted chorale loops, and smears the chugging riffs into chunks of mutant noise. Yeah, it's a diverse mix of material; but what Nurse With Wound album isn't? And yeah, it's definitely recommended!
BACK IN PRINT!!!!
Steve Stapleton has always viewed Insect And Individual Silenced as a monumental failure. So much so, that he had resisted every attempt by friends, colleagues, and other labels to convince him to reissue this album. Yet, with this reissue, he's finally been convinced to the contrary. Insect And Individual Silenced emerged as the fourth Nurse With Wound album back in 1980, and found Steve Stapleton out on his own as the principal soundmaker for the ensemble. Yet he had convinced Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Trevor Reidy to join him in the studio, just to see what would happen. According to the liner-notes, the studio sessions found Thirlwell fucking around with his amplifier, cable buzz, and the jack-plugs; Reidy brought in a drum kit, which he skitters across on one of the three original cuts on the album; and Stapleton had his arsenal of junk, toys, and tapes. Through the aid of drugs and alcohol, Stapleton mixed and mastered the album; and quickly sent it off to get it pressed. When the albums arrived, he admits being horrified by the results, qualifying it as "a dismal failure, a dreadful pressing, and an appallingly carefree mix -- in fact a seriously misguided project altogether." So he vowed to never reissue the album by burning the masters.
Yet some 25 years later, a confluence of events forced Steve to reconsider his position, and as Steve finally returned to the work, he now admits being "pleasantly surprised." That said, Insect was reissued through Raash Records in 2007, with that label dissolving amidst unseemly rumors; and now the album gets a proper reissue through Stapleton's United Dairies, complete with a lengthy bonus track that was commissioned for a unpublished 'suitcase edition' through Raash.
Insect is an album guided by the slice of a razor, as tape edits had to be done by hand. Stapleton's collage techniques have always been deft in their erratic disruptions and maniacal detours, and Insect is no exception. The first track "Alvin's Funeral" is a wonderful and wild ride through demented sounds all going in multiple directions at once, which make it easy to get lost in this maze of distortion, sound effects, and splattered guitar noise. There's an urban gamelan of springs and bowls with the varispeed being fucked with as the tape drags across the recording heads; there's the screeched sound of metal dragged against the floor, overblowing what the magnetic tape could handle (ah, what a lovely sound compared to the ugliness of digital peaking!); there's a sampled scream from Disney's Haunted Mansion LP; and then some surprisingly sublime moments where a collaged section of distant female vocals duet with a string of shells being shaken. But the jump cuts and quick edits of dynamic volumes between the quiet and loud that keep this moving at a frantic pace. The second piece seems to have much more of that aforementioned studio session present with skittering drums and searing white hot guitar noise grating against the ears. The third track is a precursor to the screeching metal collages of Organum, albeit far more feral and atonal. This brings us to the the bonus track "Tooth, Teeth, Milk, Teeth, Skin" which is very much a contemporary collage of eerie female vocals looped into a mesmerizing ambience blown apart by harsh, musique concrete jump-cuts.
It's obvious that what Steve Stapleton may view as his own personal failure is greater than most everything that's come afterward from any of the post-Industrial soundscapers.
The title pretty much says it all, if you were to pronounce it "odd lot." That should go without saying for any given Nurse With Wound record, and this one certainly qualifies, even though technically Od Lot shouldn't be considered a proper Nurse With Wound record. Rather, this is a four-way split between the four touring members of Nurse -- Steven Stapleton, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, and Matt Waldron - each offering a set of solo tracks. Colin Potter's pieces are worth the price of admission alone, with the first being a creepy, creepy horrordrone that ranks as some of the finest that we've heard from Colin. Hissing pulses swell into an undergirding rhythm that guides a series of undulating, arching tones. Much closer to a really dark Biosphere or maybe even some of the later digitally sculpted Zoviet France pieces. His second piece plods with a mechanoid plod culminating in a huge guitar crescendo. It's surprisingly straight forward for a Nurse With Wound project; but it's actually pretty damn amazing, more like a brighty rendered Troum or Nadja piece. Mr. Liles offers a series of dada-exotica following his contributions to The Bacteria Magnet with some fucked-up skronk laced around slinky disco cuts with funky wah-wah guitars and freakish whisperings upfront in the mix. The Stapleton track features a vulgar rant by Hazel Two-Twigs against an unknown Texan hipster, who probably had "it" coming to him; and Stapleton's backing noise is a signature, wild collage of splutter, squiggle, low-slung prog basslines clinging to a breakcore rhythm (remember his long-promised hip-hop album?). Waldron's solo track is a splattered semi-improv number for bass, guitar, and drums, more in keeping with what's been found on his Perekluchenie album and some of the proggy live material he's done as irr. app. (ext.) in recent years.
Like May The Fleas Of A Thousand Camels Infest Your Armpits, Od Lot was to be a tour / mail order only release, but aQuarius was lucky enough to get a handful of these. Don't expect either to last long!
This killer slab of tranced out heaviness, now back print on vinyl, as a picture disc this time! Here's our review of Conference Of Birds when we first reviewed it waaaaaay back in 2006:
OM....OM... OM . . . O M . . . .
Their debut last year, Variations On A Theme, was heralded by many as the second coming of Sabbathy stoner/doom legends Sleep. No surprise, considering that Om consists of two thirds of Sleep, and pretty much sounds like two thirds of Sleep too. Same low-end bass (Al Cisneros), thundering drums (Chris Hakius), and druggy, chant-like vocals (Al again, stepping up to the mic). All that's missing is the guitar (Sleep guitarist Matt Pike is busy with High On Fire right now). We gave that album the thumbs up, won over by the psychedelic trance-like heaviness of their jams and their mantrically soothing yet (to us) unintentionally amusing singing, which made us giggle 'cause it just never let up, delivering endless deadpan lyrics of cosmic hippy nonsense in a zoned-out monotone. We don't want to say it was so bad it was good, 'cause it really wasn't bad, but there was some of that kind of bad/good alchemy going on. And we ended up lovin' it.
And of course, the resemblance to old faves Sleep helped too.
Now Al and Chris are back with the second Om opus. It's simultaneously a heckuva lot like their debut but even better somehow. Productionwise, yes. And also perhaps 'cause while the two-piece line-up on Variations sounded like Sleep without the guitar, and maybe (heck, definitely) would have been even better with a guitarist, now they've made that lack of guitar seem more the ways things should be, by getting more and more hushed and spacious and minimal here, thereby making it seem like just bass and drums is enough, not like something's missing. They've made a virtue out of a necessity, realizing that by really adopting a "less is more" aesthetic they'd be playing to their strength. And it works. Listen to it straight through (you'll want to... it's two tracks, about 33 minutes) and you'll find it quite floatational, even without chemical assistance. This riff-repetitive spaceout drone dirge drug is all you need. And Al's lyrics remain occultic, obtuse and slightly absurd, giving this the effect of a hypnosis tape meant to help build your vocabulary (along with heightening your consciousness). He uses such everyday words as "clesiast", "epison", "aurican", "tunnement", and "agurate". It's heavy rock that requires a heavy dictionary to decipher!
So if you liked the first OM, you'll love this. And if you weren't sure before, definitely check this one out. As with their first album, file with Sleep's Jerusalem, Electric Wizard's Supercoven, and UFOmammut's Godlike Snake.
OM....OM... OM . . . O M . . . .
We flipped for the first Opium Warlords record, so much so that we wanted to make it Record Of The Week, but like this new one, it was just too difficult to keep in stock and available. Otherwise you might be reading a Record Of The Week review right now instead of just a VERY enthusiastic highlight review! OW is the most recent, and most active solo project of S.A. Hynninen, aka Albert Witchfinder, he of late great doomlords Reverend Bizarre, not to mention, the man behind weirdo avant doom outfit KLV, as well as spaced out doom sludge psychedelic one man band The Puritan.
So here's mysterious missive number two from Hynninen's Opium Warlords, the very strangely named We Meditate Under The Pussy In The Sky, and if anything, it's even more far our and difficult to describe. We'd say it's doom, but really it's not, not really, or it is, at least in places, but otherwise, it's pretty experimental. We'd like to say it's heavy, and it is, but only in places, we CAN say, it's psychedelic, cuz it is all over, and weird, and warped, and demented and damaged. This is definitely one of those records, where all you can really do is describe the sounds.
The brief opener is a five minute drift of shimmering guitar, of clanging chords, a droned out psychedelic guitarscape, that flits from hushed drift to crashing chaotic clang and back again, it's slow building psychguitar intro to what is essentially the record's centerpiece, the 12 minute "Slippy", which also just happens to be the most whatthefuck track here. Beginning with tribal drums and haunted house organs, we were preparing for a sort of majestic creeping doom, but instead, after about 2 minutes, the sound shifts dramatically, like someone switched channels, and the sound is suddenly a weird sort of calypso-like prog, angular guitars, super distorted, bursts of jagged cymbal crash, harsh hellish vokills, looped and loopy, all over a strange sort of shuffling groove, but that only lasts for a couple minutes as well, before the sound slips into a hushed barely there drone, before exploding into that calypso prog freakout once again. Eventually, the sound settles into a dark bit of psychedelic shimmer, all clean guitar, minor key melody, clean vocal croon, sounding almost like fifties doo wop, this too goes on for ages, until suddenly, the track explodes into a heaving blast of lurching distortion drenched doom, laced with weird jagged dynamic stop/starts, and then again, slips into that weird calypso like percussion for the last minute or so. Holy Finnish whatthefuck. So nuts, but so genius!
The last three songs are on the shorter side and are not nearly so twisted. The first is a sprawl of doomic dirgery, laced with chiming clean guitars, and underpinned by roiling basslines, and what sounds like hysterical female screams, the sound growing more and more Eastern sounding, and buzzy, as the track progresses, sounding like some droned out snake charmer jam by the end. The second is a seriously distorted drum and bass dirge that sounds a bit like Ride For Revenge, super murky and minimal, before shifting gears partway through into a sort of Hypothermia style post-black metal / post rock clean guitar and drums groove, which is soon joined by buzzing psychedelic guitar tendrils, ending with an abstract sprawl of dubbed out FX drenched bass buzz. Finally, the third, and last track of the closing three, erupts in a billow of amp buzz and rumbling distortion, out of which emerges a dreamy tangle of guitar melodies, laid back and woozy, the final track playing out more like an outro, nothing too weird or tripped out, just a darkly psychedelic coda, surprisingly lovely considering the tweaked and twisted nature of the rest of the record.
Another blast of confusional brilliance from this Finnish master of baffling psychedelic heaviness and outsider minimal doom confusion. Recommended to all Finnish music freaks for sure, but also anyone into confounding heavy outsider weirdness, which we're guessing is a whole lot of you.
Pantha Du Prince was a revelation to us when we first hear his music, another instance of techno for folks who don't like techno, but with PdP, the sound was less beholden to techno music, and more a sort of techno infused avant dream pop, a concoction of electronics, warm melodies, bells and chimes and dreamlike melodies, which reminded us more of groups like Fourtet or Mum, that same sort of sun dappled soft focus dreaminess. And apparently, actual bells were indeed a part of PdP's sound, so much so, that recently, he began to perform and compose with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek named Bell Laboratories, a group of performers who play bells, cymbals, xylophones, marimbas and tubular bells, a sound PdP became so obsessed with he even had a massive carillon shipped to him.
So this new record is the result of this collaboration with the Bell Laboratory, and is essentially a symphony of metal, a sea of chimes and peals, in the opening track, delivered straight and seemingly unaffected, playing out like some obscure composition by Reich or Riley, but then as the record progresses, PdP works his magic, and begins to weave those tolling bells, the cascades of metallic melodies, into dreamily propulsive rhythmscapes, "Particle", only slightly removed from the opener, the processing subtle, but definitely groovy, the overtones drifting forever, adding all sorts of tonal color to the proceedings, it's like a music box orchestra, until about there minutes in, when the first sign of a bassline surfaces, as does a more obvious rhythmic pulse, a house music four-on-the-floor, that hovers amidst a field of bowed metals, of keening drones, the bell tones becoming more and more clipped until, they're almost unrecognizable, except for the hazy field of metallic shimmer that wreathes the dark housey groove.
"Photon" brings the bells back in, chiming over another woozy house music sprawl, the sound warm and rich, and again, the overtones drifting into lush, luxurious clouds of dreamlike sound, swirling lazily around the murky beat and slow shifting textures beneath. The record finishes off with another short bit of music box like mesmer, this one a dreamlike stretch of chimes, soft focus metal on metal, that is utterly divine and dreamy, but before we get to that, there's the nearly 18 minute "Spectral Split", which starts out hushed and delicate, spaced out and minimal, before gradually building to a sort of warm swirling, softly psychedelic kosmische, and then finally blossoming into a groovy stretch of warm, swirling, dreamlike house music, once again driven by xylophone melodies, and clouds of metallic shimmer, tolling bells, and warm rich reverberations, all above a blissed out trancelike groove.
Black Jazz was a record label based out of Oakland, California in the early seventies and focused on spiritual minded jazz with a community focus, often with funk and soul jazz overtones. We recently reviewed Calvin Keys' Shawn-Neeq record from 1971 and along with some of the recent Black Jazz reissues, there have been some DJ mixes released too, all mined from the label's extensive catalog. We weren't too psyched on the first mix by Japanese DJ Mitsu, but then we got this mix from esteemed BBC radio DJ, Gilles Peterson, and our opinion 180'ed. Peterson has the same reputation in British radio of soul, funk, jazz and international sounds as John Peel did with rock, punk, and post-punk, and his taste here is impeccable. He does do some mixing between songs, but he largely lets the songs go their own lengths without unnecessary intervention. In it, he creates an arc of the label's best sounds that range from exploratory soul jazz, rare groove funk, Latin-inflected rhythms and cosmic spiritual gems. The label was formed by pianist Gene Russell as an antidote to the more skronkier vibe coming out of the east coast, so the sound on Black Jazz has a smoother more melodic quality, but still quite beautiful and engaging with its own unique sound. Definitely the sort of deep sounds our pals at Groove Merchant Records in the Haight have been cultivating and turning people onto for many years. Artists include: The Awakening, Doug Carn, Roland Haynes, Walter Bishop Jr., Kellee Paterson, and Gene Russell, among others.
The return of ex-Pentagram axemaster Victor Griffin's born again stoner doom outfit Place Of Skulls, and damn if this ain't the best one yet! In the past we've always been a little bit wishy washy about Place Of Skulls. Sure, they sounded great, whether Griffin handled the vocals himself, or even better when he handed the mic over to Wino (Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan), but the songs just weren't that memorable. If we needed our Christian stoner doom fix, we could always turn to the almighty Trouble, but there was still something about Griffin and his band that kept us coming back, hoping that maybe suddenly, one day it would make sense and we'd be knocked out cold. Well, it never really happened. That is, until now. The sound is still perfect, if anything, fuzzier and more stone-y, heavy and super rocking, but the songs this time around are killer. The second track "Sense Of Divinity" might be one of the best stoner rock tracks ever. Sounding like some lost Acid Bath recording, dark and droning, a huge Trouble-some riff, with awesome psychedelic leads, and Griffin's voice, wow! We never would have guessed this was the same vocalist, a killer croon that sounds stronger than ever, still raspy and raw, but with way more emotion. There are plenty of slow songs too, all jangly strum and warm laid back groove, that sound quite a bit like Alice In Chains, which we don't mind one bit! In fact this whole record sounds like a gloriously perfect mash up of Trouble, Acid Bath and Alice In Chains, with some of the sludgier parts reminding us of other NOLA heavyweights like Down, Superjoint Ritual, Crowbar, etc.
Fans of all things Pentagram, Wino, stoner rock, Sabbath worship, NOLA sludge-groove as well as all you Christian doomsters who have worn your Trouble records to bits should be all over this.
Highly Recommended!
Here's a really great split cassette between Quiet Evenings and Former Selves released by the hitherto unknown Constellation Tatsu label. Quiet Evenings is, of course, the husband / wife duo of Rachel and Grant Evans - the former better known as Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, the latter as Nova Scotian Arms, Crippling, etc. and both run the exemplary cottage industry micro-label Hooker Vision. Here, the Evans produce a gorgeous, blissout, lo-fi ambience with freefloating wordless vocals, natural sounds of twittering birds (Bush Tits, if you must know), fuzzed guitar drones that brainmelt in and out of languid synth melodies, all sprialing together into more of an end-of-an-era vibe - that the dawning of the new age of the '70s was not all that it was cracked up to be. It's nice to hear Quiet Evenings engaged in a more bittersweet / darker sensibility as those are the moments that work best for both Motion Sickness Of Time Travel and all of Grant Evans various projects.
As good as the Quiet Evenings side is, Former Selves may have upped the ante with this magically, twinkling piece of lo-fi electronica. The spacious synth pads gradually lock into subtle techno rhythmic underbelly with accumulated melodic patterns that arrives at a really fantastic amalgam of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II, Suzanne Ciani's crystal powered tonecolors, and even the early tape loop experiments from Terry Riley.
