Aphid Palisades is the Canadian duo of Ryan Connolly and Lee Tindall, offering up an obtuse and abstracted take on lo-fi kosmische dronescaping. Soft focused guitar and synth drones float out of the introduction of the first track, whose placid nature gradually gets consumed within dub-inflected echos of electrified skitter and murky ice-floes of erratic noise. The feral slump of the Celebrate Psi Phenomenon ethos girds the second track, with a half-melodic din of languid guitar noise that would make Michael Morley proud, with the general torpor of such sounds giving way to a radiant bloom of stratospheric arches from the guitars, synths, pedals, etc. The tape's B side is a side-long sparkle of Ashra / Popul Vuh atmospherics graced with subtle melodies and pastoral, yet stoned vibes. Another nice find from Hooker Vision!
Super limited cassette of "retro futuristic dunestep" from aQ pal JD Short, aka Bassdblr, who made these tapes exclusive for aQuarius, limited to just 100 copies, and if you're not a sucker for experimental dubstep, and/or a sucker for DUNE themed electronica, there must be something really wrong with you. A bass player by trade, Short infuses his particular brand of dubbed out beat heavy stutter with REAL bass, so the sound is thick, and buzzy, a little proggy, and in its own way sort of heavy. The sound looped and hypnotic, cyclical and a bit tranced out. But then it's hard to pin down cuz the sound is all over the place.
Opener "Atrocity Arms The Future" is some seriously bass heavy dubstep electro prog ambience, sounding like a dubbed out soundtrack to some creepy eighties sci-fi epic, all looped beats, woozy distorted bass, and electronic pulses that give the sound a teensy bit of a Carpenter vibe. And that live bass also give it a sort of post rock feel too, but the beat is most definitely dubsteppy. "IX" is almost like Pinback crossed with Squarepusher scoring some zombie flick, all dark and tense and low slung and ominous, warm fluid basslines wrapped around a pulsing electronic rhythm, while "Long Live The Fighters" sounds like it could have come out on Not Not Fun, a fuzzy, percolating bit of retro electronica that is like a more progged out caffeinated version of the current crop of Goblin/Carpenter worship. "The Scattering" takes thick sludgey bass and wreathes it in fluttery flute like melodies, and crunchy electronic glitch for something swirly and almost psychedelic sounding, Bassdblr's dirgey basslines lending it some un-electronica sounding heft.
And so it goes, from stripped down, loping-bass-lined cinematic creep, to gristly, super distorted electro-buzz, from blissed out skittery / prismatic kosmische electronica, to old school VHS synth-funk, to grinding glitchy dirge dub stutter, to super melodic lilting electronic buzzpop, and from proggy, glitchy retro-futuristic electro ambience, to finally, a a last blast, a more distorted take on the opening dubsteppy jam, all anchored by Short's heavy cyclical dark-prog Dune-driven bass. Super rad stuff for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Available only at aQ, includes a download coupon as well!!
We first heard Dale Cornish in the context of a different tape on The Tapeworm label, that one from his mysterious ensemble Baraclough, which sounded like some warped and stumbling mix of No Neck style free form clatter and drift, and droned out modern minimalism. Much of that sound surfaces here as well, the main difference being that Fleshpile Thematic seems to be a showcase for Cornish's spoken word, which gives this whole tape a definite Shadow Ring vibe, Cornish's voice an accented deadpan, that only occasionally slips into something resembling a croon (at which times he sounds a bit like a wasted - or more wasted - Scott Walker), but more often than not, delivers his strange prose is a quite reserved manner, occasionally stretching out the syllables, and once in a while slipping into something that sounds almost cockney, but the background music is what makes this so good. Shifting constantly, from shimmery static, distant voices, chiming tones that sound like struck glasses or tiny bells, soft focus clouds of hazy static drift over smoldering chordal swells, lots of deeeeeep drones, woozy, turntable manipulations unleash truncated samples slowly shifting into warbled melodies, the rumble and swirl of music speeding up and slowing down, the white noise of television static, sculpted into strange shadowy, granular shapes, eventually splintering into a weird collage that sounds like Jeck, if most of his turntables were spinning Merzbow records, or were simply TVs turned on to some dead channel at 3am, noisy, but the hiss and wow of the static is muted and blurred into something downright soothing, the whole end of the A side is like a blissed out soft noise record.
The flipside begins with looped metallic shimmer over field recordings of rainfall, and more reverberant tones, the spoken word, now a sort of croon, over haunting swirls of sound, dark and looped and hypnotically droney. The sound shifts eventually into a sort of clanging metal junkyard cabaret, the spoken word dramatic and croony, deep and sonorous and a little over the top, laid over what sounds like someone playing the inside of a piano with a hammer, before dissolving into deep rumbling tones, that blur into a washed out thrum in the background, finally disappearing into a field of electronic hum, droned out and crackling.
Super cool. But definitely depends on your love/tolerance of spoken word, definitely seems like Shadow Ring fans might dig a lot!
It's like Christmas around here (we know, it is ACTUALLY like Christmas around here right now), whenever we get a new batch of tapes from Auris Apothecary, not only is it bound to sonically all over the map, without fail the packaging is totally stellar, often high (or low) concept, meticulously hand assembled, often involving organic matter, or broken glass, or sponges, or scrolls, or who knows what else. Needless to say, every AA release is special, and is often as much a work of sonic art, as it is a piece of music.
We reviewed a record by Dante Augustus Scarlatti (the group, not the person, we think) a while back, a fantastic collection of rumbling drones and blurred psychedelic soundscapery, and this latest one is sort of a continuation of that, utilizing 15 separate drones, culled from strings and voices and organs, in the form of buzz and hiss and skree and thrum and hum and whir, laid atop one another, bleeding and oozing into each other, the sound MASSIVE, and thick and layered, the sounds crumbling and constantly shifting, on the surface, this is a noise tape, but the noise is blurred and washed out, and more droney than noisy, thick billows of sound, textured and strangely lush (but still fairly low fidelity), dubbed onto recycled tapes, with the idea that any imperfections in the original tapes, be it bleed through of the original sounds or decay from worn magnetic tape, would all contribute to the sound, and those random imperfections only serve to add texture to the already heavily textured dronescapes. Fear of noise should not keep anyone from enjoying this stuff, cuz as we mentioned, it's a warm, thick, muted undulating noise, that washes over you like a glorious low end avalanche.
LIMITED TO 405 COPIES, each one hand printed, in ELEVEN different color variations, a printed insert along with the tape housed in a stickered and sealed plastic bag with a spray painted white printed label.
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 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.
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.
A whole bunch of new releases this week on local label the Flenser, the weirdest of the bunch might just be this one, mostly since it's way different than anything else The Flenser has released so far. Unlike the mostly metal Flenser catalog, there's very little that's overly metal about this release from guitarist Nick Millevoi, other than plenty of buzz and distortion. Instead, we're reminded of a more droned out abstract take on the sort of minimal psychedelic guitarscapery of another aQ fave, Blackwolfgoat.
The guitar tone here is thick and crunchy, buzzy and plenty distorted, Millevoi taking riffs and looping and layering, the opener here starting out as something blown out and raga-like, before the playing grows more frenzied, and does take on a bit of a metallic vibe, but it's like Reich or Riley composing with metallic riffs, growing more and more frantic, before melting into a roiling morass of long tones and endlessly sustaining chords.
"Slowly Dark" is all overtones and sustain, a bit like SUNNO))) crossed with Derek Bailey, that sort of obtuse fretboard scrabbling, set amidst long rumbling tones and deep reverberent thrum. The two part "Super-Lith" gets even more abstract, ditching much of the heavy drone, leaving notes to drift, keening high end shards, and woozy chordal shimmer, which grows more and more intense in the second part, reminding us of an even more abstract Mick Barr, the guitar emitting gouts of grinding high end laced with bits of scrap and skronk.
The tape closes with the 14+ minute "Endless Unfolding Hallways", which might be the 'prettiest' of the bunch, mixing some dreamy lilting melody, into wild squalls of swirling psychedelic high end, and heaving near heaviness, along with long stretches of softly pulsing drones, all peppered with fragmented melody and softly atonal chords.
Cool stuff. Probably pretty limited too!!
Possibly named for an Incapacitants track from many moons ago, Necklacing is a collaborative project between the LA drone-plus-noise artists Matt Sullivan and William Hutson, the former working under the guise Earn and the latter as Rale. This is much more of a full-on noise project than what we've heard from either of them previously, as they're seeking the harness the power of various 'white noise generators.' It seems to us, that these generators include amplified tape hiss and shortwave radio static all blown out with overdriven gain and well-tempered distortion. No delicate introduction here, just a blast of a white noise that opens both tracks of this tape, and a plateau of noise is sustained throughout streaming into an thick low-end underbelly and topped with a very hectic stream of tactility. In their evenhanded application of the noise, Necklacing offer a perspective of clinical detachment, somewhat like the manifestations of tape noise on the brilliant, if long forgotten Reynols album Blank Tapes. The second side, which begins and ends just as the first, exhibits more from the shortwave, with rapid fire blips from utility signal transmissions bleeding through the agitated surface noise. Necklacing is an entirely different animal from the kaleidoscopic frenzy of Merzbow, the primal energy of Menche, and the psychological pressures of John Duncan. Very well done, and very limited. 100 copies altogether.
Longtime readers of the aQ list might remember Myles Of Destruction, fronted by long time aQ pal Myles Donovan. A kick ass trio of drums, bass and violin, a little bit metal, a little bit grind, a little bit gypsy stomp, an unlikely cross between Amps For Christ, Warlock Pinchers, Emperor and Magnetic Fields maybe. Well Myles is back with a new band that's a bit darker and a whole lot doomier, the evocatively monikered Negative Queen, which we initially surmised came from the Pansy Division song, but according to the liner notes is actually something someone said to Donovan at one point, oh and it might be worth pointing out at this point then Negative Queen are purveyors of QUEER DOOM. And while we weren't sure what to expect sonically, would it be ultra blown out sludge, or downtuned metallic plod, we were pleasantly surprised to discover it was neither, instead, something more spare and sparse, more moody and melodic, tapping into a sort of swampy apocalyptic creep more than anything, hints of Woven Hand and Nick Cave, a sort of gothy grim moodiness that wreathes the minimal drumming, the spidery minor key guitars, the warm low slung bass, and the deep dramatic croon. And while it's definitely heavy and dark enough that metalheads should give this a chance, it definitely sounds like something that would be way more at home alongside the darkwave and slowcore in your collection. Did we mention Swans? The Swans vibe is huge too. The sound lush and layered, hauntingly atmospheric, just instead of pounding and pummeling, it creeps and slithers, drift and plods, dark and doomy for sure, but also strangely dreamy.
We've got two new tapes on this week's list from the Merzbild label, the newly expanded offshoot of Merz Tapes. There's the latest from Swedish death drone dealer Trepaneringsritualen, and then this one, the years in the works Yksityisyys from Finnish dronescaper/sound sculptor No Xivic, who we had only heard before on a Drone Records single, but who here is give the space to flesh out his vision, a glorious, sprawling vision that includes field recordings, sampled machinery, mysterious voices, drones and textures, buried melodies. The tape starts off almost tranquil, with birdsong, and little else, evoking a summer day, but soon, black sonic clouds gather, a brooding dense thrum, that threatens to swallow the other sounds whole, atonal chords blurred into slow shifting swells, the sounds pocked with crackle and crunch, the vibe growing ever more ominous, the sound billowing outward, soon blotting out the sun, leaving everything in shadow. Chanted voices, droning organs, a grim swirl of dark sonic shimmer, which eventually settles into something even more bleak, a minimal foghorn like rumble, beneath the sound of rainfall, or perhaps traffic on rain slicked streets, foot steps, the vibe urban and industrial, that heavin wall of low end rumble surfacing again and again, threatening to crash down violently, but instead, fading out, leaving just footsteps, that seem to be walking into darkness, the surrounding sounds again, growing more and more threatening, and the field recordings, less recognizable as human, hissings and buzzings, all blurring into something truly torturous, but yet rife with some sort of melodic melancholy, lurking most often just below the surface. The whole tape is a series of sonic set pieces, musical renderings of lost places, the sort no human should dare tread, a place that one can not find, but a place that finds you, and lures you to your doom, and by playing this tape, the listener seems to be slowly sinking into whatever black horrors lurk on the other side.
Ultra minimal packaging, just a purple tape, with silver printing, housed in a clear plastic case, no art, no J-card. And like the other Merzbild tape, EXTREMELY LIMITED.
New on local label the Flenser, two of SF's best one man black metal bands join forces, Palace of Worms offer up nearly a whole new record, while Mastery (whose insane double disc demo collection was released recently on tUMULt) kicks down an 8 plus minute sprawl of blackened metal insanity.
PoW launch straight into it, starting things off with some surprisingly classic metal riffery, loads of melody, lots of texture, and a cool woozy breakdown, before the second track blackens considerably, erupting right out of the gate with gouts of black buzz and blasting beats, but even here, the sound soon grows blurry and doomy and weirdly psychedelic, PoW's sound seeming to drift between the two, classic black riffery, and tripped out doominess, culminating in the super chuggy black psych dirgery of closer "Temple Of Failure" which weds churning riffage and black buzz, to swoonsome chordal swells, so fucking cool!
Mastery counters with something much more gnarled and frantically gnarled, "Egregorian Synapse" is a warped slab of lighting speed sci-fi blackness, that slips easily from dense blast-buzz to twisted tangles of melodies, the sound never letting up for the whole 8+ minutes, but constantly flitting between different arrangements and sounds, like some warped ADD black metal mutation, the rhythms too, blasting furiously one second, stuttering chaotically the next, the guitars wild warped squalls, the riffs slippery, slithery, warbly and blackly psychedelic, the track fading out mid frenzy, leaving us to imagine that this is only a fragment of the endless epic from which it was so clearly culled.
We've yet to get enough copies of ANYthing from this mysterious one man band, Pye Corner Audio, aka a mysterious man behind the curtain called the Head Technician, and this Tapeworm tape is no different. We tried to order 20 copies, and instead got 5, too few to list, but figured we'd give you tape nerds a chance to snag one, so here it is, a super limited cassette from this strange electronic audio alchemist, whose sound is equally mysterious, from sci-fi futuristic soundscapery, to blurred slomo Caretaker-ish drift, from home brewed IDM style skitter, to crackle drenched hum and psychedelic zoner bliss out. Fans of Demdike Stare, the Modern Love, Pre-Cert and Dead-Cert labels, odds are you'll dig this a LOT. And again, be warned, we only have FIVE copies, it's already out of print and sold out, so once these are gone, that's IT.
The latest mysterious musical missive from now local label Moon Glyph comes in the form of this gorgeous bit of collaged ambience from M. Sage, who sound hovers in the shadows between the Caretaker, Philip Jeck and Tim Hecker, a woozy loopscape of random radio snippets, of treated instruments and muted moody melodies, processed guitars drift wraith like over haunting field recordings, wreathed in hazy swirls of static, the various sounds all blurred into soft focus impressionistic drifts, that just seem to fade in and out, like the flickering of an old filmstrip, or the world viewed through the dusty old window of a beat up car, driving through empty towns and long abandoned neighborhoods. Sound become distorted, gristly and crunchy, shards of caustic buzz surface here and there, but are quickly smeared into another layer of sweetly swirling sound. And when proper instruments do surface, they give the sound a haunted otherworldly twang, or a glistening prismatic cosmic shimmer. The sound constantly shifting from sun dappled dreamlike glimmer, to murky, faded drifts, softly churning dronescapes, all slowed down sounds and softly keening melodies, warm whirs and hushed crackle, to darkly cinematic mesmer, the crackle almost becoming a physical presence, the dreamy lilting thrum beneath almost wholly obscure by this glorious patina of crunch and crackle, turning sound into something impossible tactile, a blissed out sprawl of heavenly soft noise. So utterly, and hauntingly gorgeous.
Another blast of sinister grimness from this local tape label (who in the past have brought us Sunchariot, Surt, Uruk Hai and more), this time in the form of this two way split, featuring two bands who are not so much black metal as blacknoize, two strains of mutant death industrial. Sirius are up first, unfurling a caustic crawl of power electronics thrum, and noise drenched rumble, all blurred and glitched out, shot through with fragmented melodies, and swirling textures, as well as buried churning rhythms, over which a strange voice, doused in effects and heavily processed, delivers some arcane incantations, the sound roiling and blackened, dense and intense, caustic and corrosive, but also muted and murky, making it more listenable than a full on noise record, with the sound constantly shifting, and often settling into tripped out psychedelic drifts and sprawls of primitive lo-fi electronics, all whirling grey noise and burbling gurgling glitches, dark cascades of woozy melody, tumbling into gnarled black tangles of sound, one sound in particular sounding like that horn they always blow at sporting events, but here slowed waay down, and heavily processed into a creepy atonal bleat. The sound continues to unfurl, and unravel, detuned pianos, over warbly loops, and bowed buzzing metals, darkly hypnotic, and seriously warped and woozy, with most of Sirius's side of the tape tending toward creepy ambience and atmospheric mumbled mesmer.
Cosmic Breath begin with a serious of reverbed cosmic concussions, ringing out over a field of caustic crunch, before abruptly cutting out, and slipping into a haunting bit of atmospheric drift, all tinkling melodies, and moaning drones, of swirling synths, all woven into a gently undulating sprawl of glimmering psychedelia, and woozy droned out dirft. Minor key melodies seeming to melt over a dirge like churn, while the sky above is filled with high end streaks and shimmering sine wave like overtones, the sound transforming into stately synth marches, all wistful and melancholy, but paired with sick, raspy demonic vokills, that changes the cinematic synthiness into something much more menacing, the juxtaposition truly warped and bizarre, and it continues like that, creepy lo-fi Carpenter / Goblin style synthscapery, drifting and slithering and creeping beneath those monstrous shrieks, occasionally slipping into something much darker, wreathed in feedback, droning ominously, a super tripped out collection of grim black-synth cosmic ambience that definitely has us wanting to hear more!
Tape number two from this local one man band, who as we mentioned in our review of his first tape, has an awesomely skewed take on black metal, as is evidenced again here, on the haunting delictae opening, a lilting melody that is repeated over and over, creating a trancelike mood, before the buzzing guitars swoop in, but again, in keeping with the warped blackness, the guitars here are muted and washed out and weirdly quiet, a hazy buzzy blur, undulating and pulsating, beneath bellowed vokills, the drums, if there are any, absolutely buried beneath a blackened haze, which is how the whole tape plays out, a blurry sprawl of droned out buzzscapes, the drums occasionally making an appearance, but revealing themselves as more of a distant buried pulse, the vocals too, here and there leap to the top of the mix, a wild monstrous demonic croak, the music still blurred in the background, the result is somewhere between a super raw, ultra lo-fi rehearsal tape, and some sort of avant experimental blackness, either way, we dig it a LOT, and we're imaging most of you into weirdo black metal will find this tranced out black metal minimalism right up your alley.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered!
This latest batch of tapes from local label Merz Tapes finds the label expanding and rebranding, now known as Merzbild, and no longer limiting themselves to cassettes. It is however this most recent batch of cassettes we're here to discuss. In this case, it's this collaboration between SF black metal / blacknoise outfit Sutekh Hexen, and long time Nurse With Wound collaborator Andrew Liles.
There would be a time when Liles remixing a black metal band would seem crazy, but the fact is that at this point, SH are really only tangentially black metal, as they spend much of their time weaving dense dronescapes, or sculpting bursts of feral ear splitting noise into tense and intense walls of blown out sound, granted, there's still plenty of blast and buzz, but it's often obfuscated and recontextualized. Each side of this tape seems to offer up both the original track, and then Liles' reworking. On the A side, SH unfurl a dense blurred rumble, peppered with muted bombastic thuds, and subterranean pulses, buried voices, and a tranced out sprawl of undulating layers, blacks and greys, haunting and harrowing, a sound that's bleak and abject, the perfect launching point for Liles, who takes that track and stretches it from a little under 6 minutes, to almost 18, making the focal point a haunting, reverbed piano, drifting in soft billowing clouds of what we take to be the original track, letting the occasional drum blat leap out, or spidery tendrils of industrial buzz, gnarled tangles of voices speaking in tongues, and then suddenly, at about 10 minutes in, the song is transformed into what sounds like a sort of industrial rock? Chugging metallic guitars, big drums, all over that churning Sutekh brood, there's even some psychedelic guitar leads, unclear if somehow those sounds were buried in the original track, or if Liles just went nuts and essentially turned SH, at least briefly, into a weird industrial metal band, but then suddenly, it all fades away, leaving the track to slither ominously to the end, trailing a cloud of buzzing detritus in its wake. Wow.
The flipside finds SH exploding right out of the gate with a blurred blast of black buzz, murky and swirling and dizzyingly dense, before settling into another long sprawl of black ambient drift, much more haunting, abstract and serene. And again Liles takes SH's 5 minutes and more than doubles it, the whole thing, a brooding blackened driftscape, the tones oozing and rife with what sounds like some sort of demonic chorale, a blurred black raga, laced with sheets of harsh noise, jagged shards of processed vocal hiss, building to an impossibly dense and noisy, speaker destroying crescendo, that sounds like multiple Herman Nitsch compositions playing at once, atonal, droned out, and weirdly mesmerizing, underpinned by what sounds like organ or calliope, the vibe very cinematic, the sound collapses into a cacophony of smashing bottles, before beginning the slow build again, this time to a blown out, smeary drone, seemingly constructed from the blast and buzz of the original, but here recast as something more Tim Hecker like, massive crumbling distorted swells, and granular sheets of sound rife with melodic murk, gradually collapsing into a strange stuttering digital freakout, and one final burst of smashing glass.
Super sweet packaging, printed silver-on-smoky-clear tapes, reflective silver on swirly green and black J-cards.
If you read our in-between list last Friday, the one where where highlighted some of our favorite things on the Holy Mountain label, you may remember us mentioning this new, soon-to-be-reviewed Holy Mountain release, the debut album from Swiftumz. As promised, here it is, and it's awesome. But, those of you you familiar with Holy Mountain's usual output might be expecting something deeply psychedelic, acid folky, or even experimentally abrasive... so Swiftumz might throw you for a loop, 'cause instead it's quite poppy. Hum-along, stick in your head, lalala-ishly poppy, wow! But it's lo-fi bedroom indie pop, of course, kinda on the Ariel Pink or Art Museums tip, delirious and distorted enough to find favor with the Holy Mountain mystics. REALLY distorted on opener "Don't Cha Want Me Back?" in fact.
It's the work of a local fella, super nice guy and man about town, Chris McVicker. Who until now, we hadn't realized was such a hidden pop talent. Perhaps we should have known, apparently he wrote a hit single for Hunx & His Punx, but we tend to think of him as the guy who hangs out with Oakland heavies Pigs and brings us their records (and one of the Pigs guys plays on this, as does Myles Cooper and some other folks). So, surprised were we that this was such a catchy affair, inspired by the '80s British stuff from the C86 scene, but also reminding us of all kinds of other good ol' underground indie faves like Dinosaur Jr and The Supreme Dicks. There's plenty of strummy guitar jangle, shimmering FX, tick tockin' drum machine beats, and gentle vox to lift these tracks to the top of the pops in your heart. Really good stuff, it was tough to pick which songs we liked best out of the bunch to make sound samples of, 'cause they're all so good. Some mellow and dreamy, others uptempo energetic, all hooky and hazy and full of heartache.
By the way, that cute name, Swiftumz, is that McVicker's secret nickname or something? Sounds kind of like a term of endearment - or perhaps the opposite. "Good one, Swiftumz!" one could say, sarcastically. But we will say it sincerely, this IS a good one, Swiftumz, we're impressed!! Enthusiastically recommended. And by the way, the phone number that's on the sticker on the front cover, below where it says "call me", that IS McVicker's phone number! And he really doesn't mind if you call him.
Though unfortunately vinyl-only, this does include a mp3 download code.
Another batch of new tapes from now-local label Moon Glyph, brings us new sonic treasures, quite literally in this case, the latest from Treasure Hunt, a one man band from Texas, who offers up a blissed out serious of psychedelic collages, tinkling chimes, jazzy horns, all sorts of strange loops and field recordings, fractured melodies, a plunderphonic freakout, that almost sounds like a proper band, albeit one with maybe a hundred members. The vibe is most definitely free form and abstract, the opener delves into a sort of avant new age, while the follow up, unfurls a sort of heavily panned but of woozy droney murk, the panning downright dizzying, with the sounds swooping continuously from ear to ear and speaker to speaker. But that effect, along with the, looped melody, and the strange disembodied vocals, make for a heady bit of psychedelia.
The rest of the tape continues to explore a sort of avant free-jazz collage, plucked strings, what sounds like harp melodies, subtle shuffling rhythms, strange robotic clockwork creaks and groans, mournful strings, heavily effected acoustic guitars, birdsong, percussion, wheezing organs, buried voices, a sort of spectral chorale, strange bits of electronic glitchery, sampled voices, layers of hum and crackle, sliced and diced Christmas carols, wild squiggles of primitive electronics, the tracks occasionally bursting in top near chaos, but otherwise settling into something dark and dreamy. A super nice surprise, and one of our favorite Moon Glyph tapes yet!
