Latest from this Euro synthwave/gloom pop combo, a three song 12", the new track "Chasing The Light", contains everything we loved about the last LFY full length, a buzzy, murky artpunk new wave creep, all pulsing synths and crooned, almost yowled vox, robotic beats fashioned into some sort of Eurodisco glooom/goth synth pop, swirling and psychedelic, a darkly droning electro-pop dirge. That track gets a reworking on the A side, which transforms the song into something a bit more murky and Skinny Puppy sounding, loads of echo and delay, the whole song seemingly being transmitted though a pillow, the beat more industrial, tranced out, droney and super hypnotic.
The flipside is a sidelong sprawl of gloomy, gothy electro, clubbed up just a bit, a more house-y beat driving the proceedings, but the whole thing still muddy and washed out, the various sounds buried beneath all manned of deathrock sonic grime, a gristle soaked electronic doomscape, that definitely reminds us of some of Dominick Fernow's projects, like Christian Cosmos or Vatican Shadow, which is most definitely NOT a bad thing!
You know that all over the world, there's dudes (and some dudettes), of the sort who habitually wear denim vests covered with heavy metal band logo patches, who are giggling like little kids at Christmas 'cause of this, a new album from old school underground metal overlords Manilla Road. This band's eccentric efforts back in the '80s would be reason enough for their diehard cult status, 'causing there to be bands today who try to sound just like 'em (e.g. Ironsword, Hyborian Steel, Realmbuilder); but Manilla Road, after a hiatus for most of the '90s, hasn't stopped making albums in their idiosyncratic epic style, keeping the fans happy with a new release every couple years. This new slab, Mysterium, follows up 2011's Playground Of The Damned, though we also got more-or-less a 'Road fix last year from the debut of side project Hellwell.
As usual with Manilla Road these days, this new one certainly evokes the glories of their past, in various ways. There's the uptempo thrashy bits like "Stand Your Ground", and lots of slower paced trudges truly displaying their majestic might, getting downright doomy on such cuts as "Do What Thou Will". All throughout, the album benefits from lots of Mark "The Shark" Shelton's ripping lead guitar. It's also of course got his trademark weathered, nasal vocals, augmented as usual by the more energetic but still similar singing of co-vocalist Bryan "Hellroadie" Patrick. One thing Manilla Road has got, that only seems to increase with age, is their ability to sing songs about battles and legends and ancient things, and sound so much more authoritative doing so than anybody else in the business!
There's an all-acoustic balled, "The Fountain", and they didn't forget to include at least one lengthy epic, the album-closing title track, at over 11 minutes long, which doubles down on the atmospheric intro thing by being preceded by an atmospheric, synth-laden instrumental, "The Calling".
Thankfully, the production here is a big improvement over the muddy Playground Of The Damned (admittedly, though, the drum sound is still pretty horrendous), and if you liked that album and Hellwell and other recent MR efforts, there's plenty here to please you too, though as usual we'd suggest that anyone entirely new to Manilla Road start with one of their reissued classics first.
We first heard these seminal French synth poppers on the awesome So Young But So Cold compilation from a while back. Their contribution, "Disco Rough" (included here), was definitely one of the highlights, dark and driving, a little bit krautrocky, driven by a pulsing synthesized bassline, the whole track peppered with all manner of glitch and squelch, and laced with tinkling chime like melodies, lots of noisiness, grit and grime, and most surprising of all, HORNS. A twisted combo, but one that sounded pretty great together.
Les Visiteurs Du Soir is the long overdue reissue of the group's classic 1981 album, originally released on Celluloid, and while the above description of their "Disco Rough" single, pretty much applies to their sound as a whole, the group were pretty inventive, and injected the new wave sound of the time with all manner of warped and twisted innovations, adding soaring strings, or xylophone, strange sonic combinations that definitely helped the band stand out. Opener "Paris, Tokyo" has a killer horn part, and is doused in clouds of descending electronic streaks, and the arrangement, as it is on many of the tracks here, is downright PROG, and with a different sonic palette, who knows, this might have been a whole different kind of record, the sound slipping into weird horn flecked chugs, blasts of baroque poppiness, angular, intricate melodic tangles, and more. And heck that's all in the first song. "TV Night" is a bit cold wavey, a little darker and dronier, with blurred swaths of keyboard shimmer, over throbbing low end synth pulse, and when the vocals come in, the synths and vocals lock into a progged out stop / start stutter, not to mention the busy drumming, and the weird distorted male vocals, oh and more horns of course! "Jungle Hurt" is another good one, with ELO like cellos draping moaning melodies over the sultry vox and the percolating synth grooves, dramatic and epic...
We could go on for sure, track by track, but needless to say, fans of previous Medical reissues (Axxess, Tony Carey, Drinking Electricity, Dalek I, Guyer's Connection, Lou Champagne System, etc) or local reissue label Dark Entries, will flip for this! As always, extravagantly packaged in a heavy full color jacket, pressed on 180 gram opaque grey vinyl, with a printed insert, with interviews and liner notes. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered!
We've always love musicians who make music out of ice, so we were super intrigued by this 7". The latest from Land and Sea, the Oakland-based imprint that publishes small run books and records from visual and sound artists, this is a beautifully minimal sound piece by artist and sound engineer, Colin McKelvey. Taking his inspiration from a famous conceptual sculpture from 1970 by Bay Area artist Paul Kos called Sound of Ice Melting, where Kos placed eight microphones around a large ice block to amplify the sound of its melting. Originally composed by McKelvey as a long-form composition called "Composition for Synthesizer, Voice and Ice", this 7" is two versions of various "canti" (a poetic division, or significant excerpt) from the original composition, a studio edit and a live edit that was performed at the Berkeley Art Museum in conjunction with a show that featured the Paul Kos sculpture. The piece is about space as much as it's about sound and the atmosphere involving the modular synth in varied frequencies along with the slow rumble of ice create a reverent but slowly destabilizing mood. The live edit has more of an echoing atmosphere given the reverberating properties of the architecture in which it was performed. Fans of the Touch label and experimental composers like Alvin Curran will find lots to love here. Beautifully packaged in an embossed white paper sleeve on clear vinyl with inserts including notes on the piece and an essay on the ambiguities of ephemeral sound. Limited to 100 copies, we have 5, we may be able to get more, but no guarantees, so you know what that means!
We love NYC noise rockers the Men, pretty much every one of their records ended up being a HUGE favorite around here, heck we even made Leave Home our Record Of The Week back in 2011. Review-wise we'd sort of been leapfrogging between records and sounds, having first reviewed, Open Your Heart, before reviewing their much noisier, WAY more chaotic debut Immaculada. And while we did love that record, it may have distracted folks from the fact that The Men had been growing steadily more poppy and less noisy with each record. And we'd been hearing rumblings recently about how this new one was crazy poppy, so much so that some folks just couldn't handle it. We were pretty skeptical, but listening to it now, we can definitely see what had people all worked up. Don't get us wrong, we still dig it, it's a pretty awesome record, but it IS crazy poppy, sounding way less like nineties noise rock, and way more like nineties indie/college rock, which might not seem like that much of a distinction, but in some ways it really is.
But if you're like us, and you love jangly pop as well, there's still some noise pop goodness to be had here, it's just now heavier on the pop than on the noise. Just check out the opening one-two punch of "Open The Dorr" and "Half Angel Half Light". The first of which is all acoustic guitar and piano, whirring organ, laconic laid back vocals, a little bit twangy, it reminds us a bit of the Woods, or for a nineties reference, a little bit like a less guitar heavy Dinosaur Jr, maybe Sebadoh? Might not be what we expected, but it's pretty great. And the follow up is definitely more rocking, but somehow it's even more nineties indie rock sounding, a la Replacements, Soul Asylum (when they were good, and when they were good, they were GREAT), Skunk... This could be some lost band on Minneapolis label TwinTone, with the heartfelt vox, the urgent jangle, the fuzzed out riffage, swirls of wah wah guitar and a big chorus. And that's pretty much how the whole record plays out, a killer throwback to the heyday of nineties indie rock, but these guys began life as a post punk / noise rock band, so they can't ditch that side of their sonic personality altogether, and when it pops up, it adds some awesomely noisy heft to the proceedings, like on "Without A Face", the stripped down verse give way to a wild squall of a bridge, complete with wild harmonica blowing (!!), or on "I Saw Her Face", the band unfurl a super blown out, crumbling distortion drenched dirge, wild and psychedelic, but underpinned by some serious poppiness. Elsewhere the band further confound with the stripped down jangle garage rock of "The Seeds", but return to melt faces with "The Brass", which could definitely have been plucked from one of their older records, and the sprawling 8 minute closer, which fuses dense drum pound with chugging, noisy distorted riffage, the whole thing tranced out and hypnotic, but laced with some stretches of pure poppiness, which are balanced by some fierce noise drenched psychedelic blowouts, sounding not only like an ideal final track, but probably a live set closer as well.
So yeah, don't believe the hype, odds are if you dug the other Men records, you'll likely dig this one too, unless you're extremely averse to pop, but in that case, what the heck is wrong with you?!?
Debut blast of noisy, filthy, swaggery, feral, gloom punk from this SF trio, who go by the lovely sobriquet Meth Sores, and these guys definitely live up (or down) to the name, spewing a seriously caustic brew of jagged, crumblingly distorted guitars, blown out bass buzz, yowled, reverbed vox buried in the mix, and a barrage of chaotic drum destruction, this raw, primitive sound only further enhanced by the medium, a hand made, one sided lathe-cut 7", which makes the sound that much more lo-fi, and in-the-red, perfectly suited to the group's vibe, but the end result is so awesomely distorted and damaged, it's hard to imagine the band sounding this good, and this utterly trashy and fucked up in the flesh. But check out the sound samples, it's the tracks before being carved into that slab of plastic, and goddamn if it doesn't sound just as good. Think Joy Division crossed with Lubricated Goat, or the Unsane covering Iceage, or something that fantastically noisy and gloriously gloomy, two totally blown out psychedelic noisepunk goth / gloomwave noiserock jams, easily some of the coolest local stuff we've heard in a while. And yeah, SUPER LIMITED too.
Fans of local pop geniuses the Ovens, which are a whole lot of you, but should really be ALL of you, rejoice, and enjoy another incredible blast of noise pop songsmithery courtesy of Ovens mainman Tony Molina, whose solo sound is essentially, and really EXACTLY like the Ovens, fuzzed out pop, metallic chugging, soaring harmonized guitars, a dreamy croon, and ridiculous self deprecating lyrics, INCREDIBLE hooks, and the sort of poppiness that will get lodged in your head forEVER. SO yeah, anyone who bought and loved the Ovens cd Andee released on his tUMULt label, well, you're gonna want, nay, NEED this. As always, Molina's songs (and by extension, the Ovens' as well) are equal parts Weezer, Thin Lizzy, the Beatles, Guided By Voices, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, and pretty much every other fuzzy jangly pop band you ever loved, but all that boiled down and rendered into ultra brief, fragmented blasts of micro pop brevity, and we're talking boiled down as in thirteen songs in twelve minutes! One of those records you'll no doubt play over and over and over.
There are tracks like opener "Nowhere To Go", which sounds like it could have been plucked right off the Ovens cd proper, so much crammed into so little time, soaring harmonized guitars, the occasional metallic chug, the fuzzy main riff, the laid back vox, the melodies impossible to resist, and like many Ovens songs, blink and you'll miss it. None of that verse chorus verse shit, if you're lucky, you'll get verse chorus. Sometimes just verse! Like on tracks like "Sick As Riff", where you don't even get a riff, more like a dreamy little acoustic guitar interlude. Check out "Change My Ways", which should most definitely have J Mascis looking over his shoulder, the Dinosaur Jr vibe HUGE, right down to the guitar tone. And like we've said before, if Tony wasn't so brilliantly ADD, and could make a song longer than 90 seconds, he and the Ovens could/would/should be HUGE. But we're not complaining, it's part of their charm, the barrage of crazy hooks, perfect melodies, definitely pushing a lot of the same buttons Guided By Voices do.
So yeah, needless to say, these 12 minutes the probably gonna be our favorite 12 minutes of pop music this year, so grab one of these before they're gone, and leave a little space at the top of your 2013 year end lists, cuz even only two months in, and we're pretty sure, unless there's a new Ovens record that somehow pops up, this one's gonna be tough to beat.
This is the debut release from this young local outfit, and it's a doozy. Obviously influenced by the post-metal heavies like Neurosis and Isis, they also infuse their sound with some seriously atmospheric twang flecked dreaminess a la Earth or Barn Owl. Two side long epics, each one a brooding slow build. Doomy for sure, but also atmospheric, and darkly psychedelic. Clouds of downtuned guitar shimmer ride atop, loping rhythms, all wreathed in a swirl of distant guitar shimmer. Opener "White Owl" begins total True Widow style slowcore, and we would have been perfectly happy if it just kept plodding along like that, hypnotic low slung doom-dirge mesmer, totally tranced out and dreamy. But then about four minutes in, the guitars com crashing down, blown out and in the red, huge heaving walls of cascading riffage. We sorta expected the band to stay locked into that doomy trudge, but instead, things settle down into that opening psychedelia again, before bursting into something much more math/post rocky, replete with some super tense leads, emotional and minor key, adds some serious pathos and drama to the proceedings, and again, we would have been just as happy if it never got heavy/loud again, but obviously it does, and we were pretty darn happy about that too, a dense, chugging mathy tangle, that explodes into a churning doomy groove, complete with bellowed, glass gargling vox, eventually slowing down to an almost ultra-doom sludge, before once again, returning to the dark psych-dirge opening, only to surprise with one final burst of skull caving heaviness right at the end.
The flipside offers up another variation, similarly structured but a bit more riffy, the vocals swooping in much earlier this time, the sound a bit like a more raw, and more fierce Katatonia, but with the same sort of minor key melodicism, and like the first side/track, the song seems to swing back and forth between the two, mixing it up here, by wedding those bellowed vokills to the clean guitar and rums breakdown, before once again bursting into some seriously headbanging riffery and some soaring, emotional Godspeed style crescendos.
Fans of all things slow and low, heavy and sludge-y, post metal and metallic post rock, will wonder where these guys have been all their lives. And as mentioned above, clear a little space between your Isis and Neurosis records, cuz while this might not be the most original sound ever, these guys do it really well, and add their own sonic twists, and while this is pretty great for a first record, it definitely points toward some bigger and better things to come.
Not the doom country we were expecting seeing that this country rock outfit features one of the dudes (THEE dude in fact) from ambient doom drone lords Horseback on guitar. Probably best to forget that trivial tidbit as Mount Moriah sound miles away from Horseback's dirgey and blackened sonic miasma.
Instead, Mount Moriah mine a late eighties/early nineties female fronted alt-country sound like that of Lone Justice, Cowboy Junkies and a bit of early Mazzy Star. Fans of Neko Case will definitely dig this too. Like a modern Dolly Parton album with a hipper backing band. Pretty, well-written songs that smack of heartbreak and bitter regret.
Another quite nice drone/bliss release on the ever reliable Time Released Sound label, available as per their usual operating procedure in two different versions: an ultra-limited edition in super deluxe packaging, and also a cheaper, no frills edition too. We're still enjoying TRS's previous release, by The Inventors Of Aircraft, and this other new discovery of theirs is equally dreamy. A thing of shimmering beauty, from a Japanese ambient artist we'd never heard of before. This may be his first release - we'll certainly be looking out for more in the future.
Ten tracks of slowly unfolding murmer and mesmerism, sunny sleepy afternoon music for sure, with gentle melodies (on piano, we think) and rhythms surfacing amidst the glimmering drones, Murkami's music seemingly inspired by nature and the seasons, possibly ghosts as well� Murkami thanks his ancestors, and one track is entitled "Vorie's Ghost Sanitarium".
The deluxe cd version is limited to 100 copies only, and comes in a handmade (stamped, sewn, assembled) six inch square booklet, composed of antique paper ephemera from Japan including fold out tissue maps and Meiji-era apothecary ledger pages, plus a double sided insert printed on bamboo. This booklet is banded by a strip of vintage 8mm film depicting scenes from the aftermath of the great Japanese earthquake of 1923, and is nestled with the cd inside a "clouded" translucent vellum envelope decorated with cherry blossoms. A Japanophile's dream! But if you don't want the fancy packaging, you can also get the cd more cheaply, packaged in a simple hand printed sleeve. Either way, recommended.
Another quite nice drone/bliss release on the ever reliable Time Released Sound label, available as per their usual operating procedure in two different versions: an ultra-limited edition in super deluxe packaging, and also a cheaper, no frills edition too. We're still enjoying TRS's previous release, by The Inventors Of Aircraft, and this other new discovery of theirs is equally dreamy. A thing of shimmering beauty, from a Japanese ambient artist we'd never heard of before. This may be his first release - we'll certainly be looking out for more in the future.
Ten tracks of slowly unfolding murmer and mesmerism, sunny sleepy afternoon music for sure, with gentle melodies (on piano, we think) and rhythms surfacing amidst the glimmering drones, Murkami's music seemingly inspired by nature and the seasons, possibly ghosts as well� Murkami thanks his ancestors, and one track is entitled "Vorie's Ghost Sanitarium".
The deluxe cd version is limited to 100 copies only, and comes in a handmade (stamped, sewn, assembled) six inch square booklet, composed of antique paper ephemera from Japan including fold out tissue maps and Meiji-era apothecary ledger pages, plus a double sided insert printed on bamboo. This booklet is banded by a strip of vintage 8mm film depicting scenes from the aftermath of the great Japanese earthquake of 1923, and is nestled with the cd inside a "clouded" translucent vellum envelope decorated with cherry blossoms. A Japanophile's dream! But if you don't want the fancy packaging, you can also get the cd more cheaply, packaged in a simple hand printed sleeve. Either way, recommended.
We never thought we'd say this, but it's been a while since we've heard from Nadja! Two whole years in fact. There is a collaborative lp we're been meaning to review, but this is the first proper new full length since 2010's Autopergamene, and even if we were inclined to dismissively think "oh, another Nadja record", we throw it on, and are immediately reminded why we remain sort of Nadja obsessed.
Another collection of super distorted, darkly blissed out metalgaze perfection, this time the guitars sound even MORE distorted, crumbling and blurring into washed out smears of chordal gristle, and if that wasn't enough to get you excited about a new Nadja, howabout the fact that in place of the usual drum machine, is none other than Jesus Lizard drummer Mac McNeilly, who adds some human heft to the equation, making Nadja sound more like a real band, a fantastically blown out dirge metal slowcore band, the opener, a lurching super dynamic slab of dream doom bliss out, with hushed vocals, pounding drums, and the aforementioned gorgeous guitar crumble, even at 11 minutes it's still not nearly long enough.
The second track almost sounds like a Jesus Lizard song, a little bit Slinty too, with its spidery minor key guitar part, you can imagine it recast as a burst of bombastic noise rock, but here, it becomes the framework for a cool, constantly shifting metallic blowout, which features some gorgeously hushed moments, but also Nadja at their most propulsive and rocking. The second half gets mathy, and again super dynamic, and it has us wishing Nadja had hooked up with McNeilly long before now. The title track is epic slow burn Neur-Isis style heaviness, a sound that Nadja borrowed, and opted to reimagine and make their own instead of returning, and they continue to do it better than almost anyone else. Soaring and majestic and crumblingly heavy! Which leads into the closer, a 14 minute sprawl of tribal drumming, smoldering drones, blown out psychedelic noise, buried vox, all smeared into a shoegazey shimmer, which fades out midsong, leaving the second half spare and spaced out, a slowcore creep, with big drums driving swirling guitars, delicate melodies, and barely there vocals. So good. And well worth the wait.
We know nothing about these guys, other than this is the latest release on LoBit Landscapes, who released the recent aQ Record Of The Week from Nihiti, For Ostland, and while there are some sonic similarities, NPS is a much more beat driven, dancefloor driven affair. Although from the opening of "Silver Miner", you might be forgiven for expecting something much more murky and abstract, beginning as it does with a weird pulsing landscape of squelches and swirls, a blurred smear of textures, but one that quickly blossoms into a weird sort of future funk, all motorik groove, and noisy, super distorted melodies, which almost sound like wild animal cries fashioned into tones, the result is something at once electronic, but also dense and psychedelic and a bit noisy. The second track too lays down a crumbling, distorted beat, and lays sheets of distorted electric guitar buzz over the top, and this time weaves in some mumbled vox, buried in the mix. It's a hard sound to classify, it's a sort of gloomy electro pop, but one that's both a bit gothy, and a bit noisy.
"Flying Penguin" unfurls a weird barrage of metallic melody, before in swoops a fractured, and convoluted stuttery beat, as well as swirling synths, and some alien vocodered vox, the end result being equal parts dreamy electro pop and experimental avant electronica, but with a definite caustic crunch. Although the closer, the awesomely titled "Sad And Fucked (Not Moving)" might be our favorite of the bunch, a swirling squall of metallic buzz, and dense chordal shimmer, seriously kosmische, the sounds airy and ethereal at first, but gradually growing more distorted and blown out, only to seemingly melt before our ears into a woozy, keening, droned out murky drift.
The Snowbringer Cult was a double cd originally released way back in 2008 on the Students of Decay label, and was the first proper cd release from French bedroom drone-psych-folk epic from Natural Snow Buildings, the boy/girl duo of Mehdi Amaziane and Solange Gularte, that double cd included a NSB full length, as well as an album from each of their solo projects, those being Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. That double cd is finally available again, but has also been reissued on vinyl for the first time, with each of the three parts being released separately as its own record.
Natural Snow Buildings have been a band since WAY back in 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last decade plus, have only really released a handful of records, and in the first 6 or 7 years, they only managed 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 of those releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! At the time we couldn't help wonder how a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, could generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. And thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in the case of NSB, and the two solo offshoots, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Amaziane and Gularte is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be constantly flooding the scene, this duo write actual songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
What happens when the two join forces, becoming Natural Snow Buildings? It would be way too easy to say that the sum equaled the parts, that if you took the sound of Isengrind and Twinsistermoon and combined them, it would equal the whole of NSB. There is certainly -some- truth to that, but it's not math, it's magic. Alchemy, musical sorcery, these are sounds not numbers, and thus are governed by forces far more magical and mysterious than physics or science. The two together join spirits, their natures become entwined, they draw from one another, each offering the other part of their soul, rendered in music. The results are truly divine. An assemblage of sounds, deftly woven into expansive shapes and hushed mystery, landscapes of drone and shimmer, of cinematic wonder and dark introspection. Some tracks are super abstract, layered near static drifts, longform movements that sonically evoke other lands, other times, the past long forgotten, the future not yet experienced, other tracks are wheezing sun dappled Appalachia, but turned inside out, the chords and notes seemingly drawn inward, toward the speakers, the vocals breathless and mournful, all laid atop a thick swirl of distorted riffage, other tracks are fragmented folk, all murky blurred piano, backwards guitars, heartsick melodies, wrapped in a thick gauzy production, smeared into snapshots glimpsed through eyes brimming with tears. Other tracks are space rock writ small, minimal dirges, drone jams, chanted vocals, strange stuttery percussion, and glorious buzzing guitars, culminating in the final track, which begins much like the others, all hazy and dreamlike, vocals ethereal, guitars spare and skeletal, until unexpectedly the band lock into some serious droned out space rock. A serious dark and druggy looped riff, a la Spacemen 3, Hawkwind, Loop, anchored by a simple pounding thudrock rhythm, driving intensely through swirling clouds of FX and warm whirring ambience, a seriously dense, propulsive krautjam, that just so happens to hide a soft drifting pop shimmer underneath, and while the track rocks with a surprising intensity, it's precisely what's underneath that turns the jam into something resplendent.
Holy shit is this amazing. Everything ever recorded by this eighties Brazilian blacknoize / thrashgrind / primitive death metal horde, whose sound was a sick hybrid of downtuned doom filth, blurts of caustic grinding noise, swaths of blackened buzz, and hyperspeed blackened grind, all of which is gloriously lo-fi, blown out, totally in the red, the production as warped as the sounds, plenty of tape drop outs, weird shifts in tone and timbre, the drums super loud, sounding like a primitive drum machine gone haywire one second, some strange industrial jackhammer the next, but always sounding as if they're being transmitted through a transistor radio, the bass is tangly and detuned, the guitars a smeary blur, a chugging droned out churn, everything wreathed in a thick gauze of crumbling distortion, the vocals for the most parts, almost white noise shrieks, staccato bleats that sound equal part demonic and animalistic.
The whole sound stumbling and damaged, lurching from wild chaotic blasts, to drunken doomic lumber, peppered with blurts of trash can cymbal clatter and noise guitar freakouts, the sound often blurring into almost pure noise, but just as often coalescing into some raw primitivistic punk bashing, or knuckle dragging metallic crush. Most of the songs are less than a minute long, some a mere matter of seconds, although the band do lock into some serious riffing, and some kick ass head shearing blasts of black metal like noise, but it always seems to devolve into some sort of glorious, strangely psychedelic, ear shredding, Satanic metal noise chaos. Fans of outfits like Anal Cunt, Sore Throat and other noisecore killers will flip, as will metalheads who like their metal raw, and primitive, noise drenched and seriously fucking twisted and tweaked. If the late great Faxed Head were not a joke band (wait, what?!??!?), they might have ended up sounding a lot like this...
Not sure why we didn't review this when it came out last year. Obviously everyone here loves the new Pornographers, and most of us love long defunct power poppers Zumpano even more, and the one thing those two bands have in common is Mr. Carl A.C. Newman, who sang in both, and whose solo records are pretty dang great as well. This new one is no different, the sound lush and layered, gorgeously arranged, a bit more laid back, the sound seeming to tend toward classic pop of the past, Van Dyke Parks, Zombies, Kinks, classic rock, singer songwriters, it's all the stuff that defined the sound of Zumpano, and New Pornographers to a lesser degree, but continues to sound so good, but then Newman has one of those voices that could sing the phonebook, and were this a different time, say the late sixties or early seventies, Newman would be one of THOSE singer songwriters, and would most likely be revered like Elton John, or Scott Walker, or Nilssen, his voice so distinctive, and so gorgeous, the songs here subtly catchy, and while we may have burnt out on the New Pornographers, every time we get out hands on a new Carl Newman record, we're reminded just why we like him so much. And as you might imagine, the best ones here remind us of Zumpano, like "Encyclopedia Of Classic Takedowns" and "There's Money In New Wave", but really if you're a fan of classic pop, it's hard to go wrong with Mr. Newman, and Shut Down The Streets is another winner!
Everyone who digs the downer dirge folk of the legendary Nico all have their favorite records. For many it's the intensely cinematic Desertshore, which just got the tribute treatment from members of Throbbing Gristle. For others it's the Marble Index, Nico's second record which was the first one that signaled a distinct artistic move away from collaborative arrangers. But for us, there will always be a special place in our hearts for Chelsea Girls, her first solo effort after The Velvet Underground & Nico album, but which also reads like that outfit's second outing as John Cale and Lou Reed both produced wrote and arranged songs along with her then lover at the time Jackson Browne. Perhaps her most accessible record, with timeless songs like "These Days" and "Little Sister", and of course, the long title track which effectively catalogs the last days of Warhol's Factory in all of its glamorous bummer ennui. The folk-rock is less dirgey and intense, but still cooly bittersweet and sublime with a melancholic pop beauty. Newly reissued on vinyl by those four bearded guys.
Now, a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
Automating Volume 1 is a collection of recordings that Steven Stapleton made for compilations between 1981 and 1986. The album starts out on a really wacky note with "Duelling Banjos" (from the United Dairies compilation "Hoisting The Black Flag" released in 1981.) An uptight drum machine relentlessly chuggs alongside whimsical farts and blurts of archetypal NWW sounds (as heard on "Alas The Madonna Does Not Function" and "A Missing Sense"). The second track, "Stick That Chick & Feel My Steel Through Your Last Meal" (from the 1986 Laylah compilation "The Fight Is On"), is a Fluxus-esque composition of creaky noise making, with spurts of groans, more fart sounds, party favors, zithers and percussion objects (a lot of the material found on "Homotopy To Marie" can be found here). The third track, "Nana Or A Thing of Uncommon Nonsense", is another silly track (featured on the 1983 X-tract compilation Elephant Table Album), starting out with a tasteless racial joke and then sputtering through a random collage of bongos and football chants (plus, a lot of the polka loops on the Sylvie & Babs lp are used on this.) The album then turns to Stapleton's dark side with his very creepy submission to the Come Organisation album Fur Ilse Koch (1982) on which a little German girl pleads for her father accompanied by an ever intensifying psychoacoustically irritating high frequency drone. What may in fact be more disturbing than this track is to hear my co-worker Byram muttering the little girl's words as syntatical anomalies in his already idiosyncratic vocabulary.
The remainder of Automating Vol. 1 revolves around Stapleton's fascination with Robert Ashley's compositions in one form or another. "I Was No Longer His Dominant", taken from the 1982 United Dairies release An Afflicted Man's Musica Box is a creepy homage to Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon". The aforementioned Ashley piece is an unsettling meditation on muffled conversations and muted electronics which mysteriously express a psychosexual overtone. Stapleton's homages to Ashley are a fortunately less academic sounding and pack more of a punch.
Certainly, this work stands with Homotopy For Marie and 150 Murderous Passions as the records to document Stapleton's formative years.
BACK IN PRINT!!! Nice digipak w/ original artwork.
Infamously receiving a rating of "?????" instead of the normal star system employed by Sounds Magazine in 1979, Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella was the first release, from what would eventually be a massive catalogue of sonic absurdity, from the mighty Nurse With Wound. Steven Stapleton began this album and the Nurse With Wound project during the serendipitous moment when engineer Nicky Rogers asked Stapleton, if he ever felt like making some noise on the weekend to come on over to the studio. He called up his friends John Fothergill and Heman Pathak with the frantic proposition: "I've got some studio time, go buy an instrument and let's see what happens!" The three brought over a cheap organ, an accordion, a guitar with a treble booster, a ring modulator (which Stapleton was somewhat saddened by), and as many "little noise making items" that Stapleton could carry (drills, handsanders, vacuums are some of the more obvious items), and they seem to have had access to the studio's in-house piano as well. After a mere 30 seconds of checking the levels and 'practice', Nurse With Wound began recording their first album. Random plucks, plinks, scrapes, and blurts from the NWW arsenal erupt with varying densities of reverb to create a surprisingly rich space for these improvisations. Making up for their lack of real musical training with years of collecting obscure music, Stapleton and company sat aloof amongst their mess, conjuring their own means of communication to some otherworldly plane. Obviously, Stapleton had enough sense to recognize that the power of studio editing, and didn't release this as a direct-to-tape improvisation. Chance Meeting could be positioned between Faust, Pierre Henry, AMM, and Sun Ra, but Stapleton's own unique view of how such a meeting would sound and his own application of Surrealist thought kept this album from being merely a meeting of minds.
FINALLY REISSUED!!! Of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and we like a bunch of them!), this is our favorite. Perhaps because this makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within Homotopy To Marie, Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularies of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as I could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
Homotopy To Marie is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. Stapleton's use of the vocal sample is at it's best here with two characters (a shy little girl and a confident woman) intermittently reciting ambiguous phrases "When I woke up I didn't know where I was" answered by "Don't be naive, darling!". The rest of the album is a clutter of non-descript distortion, feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
Homotopy To Marie is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece.
Now, a limited time, we have this classic recording on cassette! It is a little unfortunate that we've never reviewed this album, although it has graced the aQuarius shelves from time to time. 150 Murderous Passions sometimes designates the name of the 'band' and sometimes, it's the name of the album penned by Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound) and William Bennett (aka Whitehouse) in 1981. Regardless of how anybody wants to qualify the album, there are two distinct variations on these recordings, with both producers offering up their own take on the original source material. Bennett scoffed that the version Stapleton produced lacks the in-the-red intensity he envisioned for the album; and to be blunt, Bennett is totally fucking wrong. Stapleton (who published his through his own United Dairies, with Bennett's getting a Come Productions make-over) definitely offers the superior version, with Bennett -- despite all of his infamy in the late 70s and early '80s -- really not coming into his own until some five or six years afterwards. Yes, power electronics do require some finesse. But that's not to say this is a walk in the park for a Nurse With Wound album; there's plenty of atonal metal screeches, echolocation rhythmic patterns of klanging noise, stabs of feedback, and unholy screams which get collaged into a very claustrophobic, demented composition. Anyway, all of the other versions of these recordings are totally out of print, with their future reissue probability being a big question mark. So, if you don't have this awesome album already, get the tape. Now.
Originally released as a split LP, then later reissued on separate anthologies of each project, this is the cassette version of the classic Nurse With Wound / Organum split from 1986.
The Nurse With Wound side is "A Missing Sense" which is a brilliant homage to the ultra-quiet /proto-lowercase composition "Automating Writing" by Robert Ashley, which is a very subtle composition of cut-up vocals and gasps with distant rumblings all of which flutter just at the event horizon at the edge of perceptibility. Stapleton's construction was originally designed as a private tape to which he could drop acid to, as everything in his huge record collection was far too shattering for his lysergic states. "A Missing Sense" like Automatic Writing is very quiet, with small vocalizations and sexualized gasps punctuating the muffled incidental sounds of what could very well be somebody vacuuming their carpet upstairs. Very subtle for sure, but there's plenty of room to take in the absolute strangeness of Stapleton's visionary work.
Here's what we had to say about Organum's "Rasa" which was featured on the now out of print Volume One collection released through Robot Records: The timeless, acoustic drones that make up the music of Organum could have been made for the beginning of the world or for its final breath; yet Jackman has always avoided assigning any specific metaphors to his work. Instead, this is music that attempts to exist purely within its own context, unconcerned with anything beyond its self-defined borders. Grinding motorcycle engines, steel strung instruments, bowed metal, and Japanese flutes are the instruments that continuously reappear throughout Organum. However grim, Industrial, grating, dissonant, or punishing Organum could be with such instrumentations, Jackman always manages to arrange his work to emphasize the dynamic and often beautiful tonalities of those sounds.
A lot of OM related dub on this week's list, elsewhere you'll find a review of the latest dub single from OM mastermind (and former Sleep bass slinger) Al Cisneros, and here we've got a track from OM's most recent full length, Advaitic Songs, stretched way out, spread out over two sides of a 12", and then dubbed the fuck out! You'd have to be deaf to not here the dub influence in OM, even when they're engaged in churning metallic crush, their sound always had a dubbiness to it, lots of space, a definitely groove, but here, that sounds is allowed to flourish into something purely dub, but unlike Cisneros; singles, this dubbed out version of OM, seems to take less inspiration from classic Jamaican dub, and more from the eighties, On-U Sound style digi-dub, and it sounds great, in fact, once again, even though these are remixes, we find ourselves wishing there was a band who sounded exactly like this dubby doomy dreaminess.
The sound here is all looped programmed rhythms, vocals clipped, and chopped, doused in echo, and sent swirling into the ether, same with the snare cracks, each crack unleashing a sky full of sonic ripples, but the swoonsome darkly dramatic strings from the original remain, giving the sound a much more moody and mesmeric vibe, the B side adds some Tikiman like toasting (new OM member Robert Lowe? Cisneros himself?) while the track oozes and slithers, a downtempo groove that ends up reminding us of Muslimgauze and African Head Charge in equal measure. Fucking awesome. Here's hoping wither the whole record gets a dub makeover, OR, that the next OM record ends up being a pure, straight up dub record. Here's hoping!
It's been a while since Blue Screen Life (14 years!!), the debut from indie popppers Pinback, which at the time was a seriously exciting prospect as Pinback was made up of members of two of our favorite bands, Heavy Vegetable and Three Mile Pilot, and the band did somehow actually manage to create a pretty perfect hybrid of the two groups, the loping, super melodic basslines of 3MP and the crazy catchy poppiness of HV, and of course Rob Crow's dreamy croon. That record was brimming with perfect pop, warm and wistful, and really, every record since has been more of the same. And while to us, that seemed like a magical combination, we had no idea they'd become as popular as they are. And this most recent is yet another good one, heck, maybe even another great one, demonstrating both a more rocking approach to songcraft, as displayed on the last few records, and an ever more lush and luxurious production, not to mention of course the same fantastically dreamy songwriting. And sure, Pinback may not have the underground cool kid cache that the members' former bands did, but we're hard pressed not to dig these guys like crazy every time we hear them!!
Got a violent piece of vinyl here for all you proto-metal freaks - a reissue of a killer slice of science-fictional heavy rock, this obscure UK outfit's only album, a private pressing from 1974. Both proto-metal and proto-punk we reckon, heavy stuff with lots of psychedelic Hawkwindiness to it, basically everything you could hope for from a record that has both "Astral Traveller" and "The Ripper" as track titles!! And it does rip, the storming opener "Assasin" sets the tone, with throbbing riffs, wailing maniacal vocals, and wild soloing, reminding us of the Pink Fairies in particular when the guitarist tears into some licks from the old Ventures surf rock classic "Walk Don't Run", though with their amphetamine energy they'd remind us of the Fairies anyway. They also achieve Wicked Lady levels of guitar freakout. And with the use of Moog, and the sci-fi aspects of songs like "Cyborg", they have something in common with Simply Saucer, as well. There's dramatic organ runs, and strident marching riffage, and some softer sounds too - at their mellowest, on tracks like "Bad Omen", they can be fairly melodic and Wishbone Ash-y.
There's been a couple hard-to-find, long-gone compact disc reissues of this in the past (one on Little Wing Of Refugees, who changed the cover art and corrected the spelling of 'Assasin' to 'Assassin', and another on Killing Spell, who called it 'Cyborg Assassin', though that one also did include a few live practice space bonus tracks not found here). But this is the first time we've seen it reissued on vinyl, 180 grams to boot.
Holy shit, these guys just keep getting better! Since we first laid ears on Purling Hiss, we were totally and utterly smitten, whether they were kicking up squalls of wild noisy psychedelic freakout, or crafting impossibly perfect Yellow Pills style seventies era power pop. But nothing could have prepared us for this, easily their catchiest, most overtly poppy, and somehow rockingest record yet. All vestiges of their lo-fi past have been completely shed, their sound is now massive, the production HUGE, the guitars thick and crunchy and fuzzy, the vocals way up in the mix, it's dare we say, downright commercial sounding, but only in that it sounds like it SHOULD be all over the radio, the sound equal parts fuzz guitar freakouts, psychedelic wah wah riffage, blasts of feedback, cool harmonized guitar licks, cool falsetto vox, killer choruses, hooks galore, what started out as a super lo-fi power pop/psych rock hybrid, has blossomed into a full on hook heavy, indie jangle classic rock radness, that will no doubt bum out lots of folks who freaked out over those other records, but as far as we're concerned, this was pretty much the way they were headed anyway, but we definitely could not have predicted how kick ass the final destination would be.
There are definitely still nods to their noisier earlier incarnation, take the angular, post hardcore, angular guitar jam "Face Down", which starts off sounding like some lost SST rarity, but quickly, as if the band can no longer help themselves, the song blossoms into something crazy poppy, and then from there on out, it's a sort of push and pull between the serpentine punk rock swagger, and fuzzed out hook heavy pop, replete with rad shredding leads, and some Zeppelin-y vocal wails. That's a weird one for sure, maybe the weirdest jam here, but then there's the title track, which definitely dips back into a more lo-fi sound, the whole track sort of muted and muffled, a driving classic rock jam looped and locked, beneath wild squalls of super distorted blown out psych guitar freakout, swaths of squealing feedback, a fantastically fractured psychedelic noise jam, but like the rest of those sorts of moments here, it's bookended by two crazy catchy fuzzy jangly jams, the Dinosaur Jr like fuzzed out indie psych pop of "The Harrowing Wind" and the garagey jangle of closer "Mary Bumble Bee", all the songs here just a wee bit druggy, with just a bit of that droned out Velvetsy druggy buzz, but when that gets peeled back, it's total jangle pop nirvana. And while plenty of PH's classic rockisms abound still, the sound this time around here is pretty much pure pop, albeit a pop that's tweaked and twisted in places, but the songs are so great, and while those old records still rank among our all time faves, this new one is definitely making a seriously strong case for best Purling Hiss record yet!
We're so happy to have been introduced to the idiosyncratic experimental sound-worlds of Swiss artist Israel Quellet, via his several releases thus far on Sub Rosa. This is his third disc for the label and is as fantastic as the first two. When the first one, Oppressum, came out in 2007, we were like, Israel who? But upon hearing it, we quickly became fans of his home/field recorded, non-academic "musique concrete", microphone-as-instrument compositional technique, Quellet's mysterious, percussive music being both intriguing and original. 2009's Soni Sclavus was also great, and now at last here's Rhythmes d'Etain, to which we say, yay! And yep, Rhythmes is rhythmic all right, in fact some of the tracks here, like "L'Ere des Anches a Sonne" ("The Age Of Reeds Is Upon Us"), bordering on a sort of DIY, accidental techno.
One of the few conventional instruments, as opposed to non-instrumental sound-producing objects, heard on Quellet's debut was his town's local church organ. A church organ plays a much bigger role here, along with human voices singing in Latin, giving this something of a liturgical feel - but not as much as you'd expect, perhaps, because the organ is used more as a source of sampled sounds, for its majestic drones and tones, rather than being played as an organ normally would; and the voices, while suggestive of monkish murmer, are almost always manipulated or processed in some way, "sped-up, slowed-down, doubled-up, played backward" as he explains. The use of Latin is meant to create an abstract wordless-ness to the vocals, deliberately without meaning, the singers not affected by any understanding of what was nonsense Latin text to begin with.
Along with the organ and the voices, Quellet has restricted himself to just one more significant sonic element on this disc's compositions - that being, of course, percussion. Listed inside the digipack are a host of symphonic and improvised percussion instruments, including tympanies and bell-like tubular idiophones; the toms, cymbals, and hi-hat from a "deconstructed" drum kit; a bass drum and large skin drum; as well as "brutally shut drawers, slammed doors" and other ad hoc percussive devices.
So you can be sure it doesn't sound like you're in a church, when the beautiful, glorious pipe organ is accompanied by the rhythms of slamming doors, etc.! Or at least it would be a very unusual sort of church, filled with screwed-and-chopped choirs. 'Tis true too, the clink-clonk of the percussion sometimes takes on a carillion-like character, as if ringing from the church tower. Often lovely, quite dreamlike and mesmeric, all these sounds layered and looping, Quellet comes up with tracks here sometimes dominated by the playfully active rhythmic elements, at others by the ominous drones of the pulsating organ sub-bass frequencies (Quellet recommends listening on appropriate headphones), or both at once. Despite the varied character of Quellet's carefully constructed tracks, the focus on organ, voice, percussion gives this a definite cohesiveness, often calming into head-noddingness amidst eerie atmospheres.
We had been hearing about this record for ages, and even before actually getting a listen, we were pretty convinced we'd love it. A collection of nocturnal field recordings captured at Bush House, the home of the BBC's world service for seventy years it was recently relocated. Robin The Fog worked nights at Bush House, and spent much of his time there capturing the gorgeously creepy haunted house ambience of that historic site, the hum of air conditioners, the sound of the elevators, various sounds echoing through the empty halls and abandoned studios, the outside world filtered through the structure's thick walls, a barely audible murmur, an attempt to capture on tape, the spirit of a place, and the residual traces of all who had passed through, and the energy of what had taken place in those hallowed halls for the last seven decades.
Those captured sounds were then manipulated on an old 4-track reel to reel tape, and the results are truly stunning. A symphony of whirs and rumble, of echoey traces and ghostly shadowy sounds, moaning and creaking, scraping and rustling, voices surface now and again, as do little snippets of music. Unclear what the actual sources for those elements are, but they add a definite otherworldly mystery to the captured and manipulated minimalist soundscapes.
Imagine Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, the Ghost Orchid EVP recordings, the Conet Project, The Ghosts Of The Bush seems to occupy a similar sonic space, one where tones are blurred into shapeless drifts, echoes captured in dusty old stairwells becomes hazy swaths of weirdly melodic drift, clouds of static and tape hum cover everything like a layer of dust on discarded furniture covered in old grey sheets, long keening high end shimmers spread out like spectral transmissions from the past, it's hard to say how much of a hand the recordist had in the final product here, it's obvious quite a bit, but we like to pretend that perhaps nothing was done to the original sounds, that this is in fact that sounds old buildings make when there are no humans around to hear, creeping swaths of droning rumble, warbling loops of chordal throb and pulsating rhythms, all disappearing into a moonlit murk, scurrying away into the dark shadows in the corners of grey-lit rooms, fragments of music box melodies floating atop the sound of wood expanding and contracting, of scraping metals, and of groaning foundations, the creaking of rusted hinges woven into mysterious keening soundscapes, blurred fragments, echo drenched and slowly dissipating like some spirit called back to the other side, and of course the near silence that upon close listening is not silent at all, the invisible world that comes to life, when the lights go off, and the shadows swallow up the light, a dizzying array of sonic spirits that manifest, way from the ears of humanity, here captured surreptitiously, giving the rest of us a glimpse of what lies beyond, and just outside of our perception. So hauntingly gorgeous. And absolutely recommended for fans of strange found sounds and mysterious minimal soundscaping. And of course, EXTREMELY limited...
There is a very fine line between schizophrenia and a totally eclectic diverse creativity and we seem to enjoy music most when that line remains really blurry. This 2-cd set, recorded between 1980-82 by electronic alchemist Barton Smith definitely straddles that weird blurry line. One moment basking in tender beauty while the next moment flourishing into a noisy wall-of-sound. Very little was known about Smith. The fact that Smithsonian Folkways originally released these tracks on vinyl back in the early '80s, and still Smith remained a relative unknown, just adds to the mystique. The first disc opens up with what sounds like gamelan influenced percussion on homemade instruments, followed by pastoral pretty meandering guitar and then underwater sounding rumblings drenched in primitive sounding electronics. We have been totally intrigued and in awe of these recordings since we first got this set in a few weeks back. Listening to it nonstop, and trying to think about how this was received in the early '80s when even now it still sounds so ahead of its time. Former AQ-er Windy came in recently and jumped for joy to see this on the new arrivals rack, telling us how she scored an original vinyl copy years back at a flea market and it's always been a record she found so weird and wonderful and special. Outside of Windy, we haven't really come across anyone else who knew anything about Barton Smith. We've come to discover that these were recordings he made for modern dance troupes and we can only struggle to imagine bodies moving to his ever changing sounds. While for most musicians it can be tricky and problematic to change gears and sounds so often within an album, there is something so natural and lucid and smooth about the extremes explored on Reelizations. We can't think of many musicians who have the ability to explore such a wide range with this much success and intrigue. Moondog's versatility and eclectic output is someone who came to mind when trying to figure out how to classify Mr. Smith. From acoustic tranquility to electric outbursts this had us picking up on a totally diverse range of reference points: Sandy Bull, Jim O'Rourke, This Heat, Koji Asano. And for sure you could start seeing how years later groups would start exploring similar sonic atmospheres. Black Dice, Excepter, Loren Connors are some who come to mind. Scott even suspects that Kieren Hebden might have heard this at some point, as there is a really good chance that the Barton Smith track "Lotus" was sampled on the Four Tet album Rounds.
This is a record that we can't stop listening to or thinking about. We hear so much music everyday, when something kicks our ass this hard we know we've discovered something really special.
As with all releases on the fabulous Japanese reissue label EM, this is gorgeously packaged, coming in an oversized double jewel case, with a huge booklet, tons of photos and lots of liner notes -- those unfortunately all in Japanese.
It's been five years since we last heard from these French outsider industrial black metal weirdos, with their last record Mescalyne, which was as freaky and as fucked as the two preceding albums, all three of which we consider to be pantheon-worthy examples of confusional twisted blackness. We weren't sure what to expect from this new one though, a lot can happen in five years, but we've certainly seen other bands change a lot, and sadly, there does seem to be a tendency for bands' sounds to grow less weird with time, which who knows might be an inevitable side effect of getting better at recording, or playing, or just wanting more from music than making seriously twisted sonic shit.
Well, we should have know better than to worry about these guys, cuz it seems they're just as warped and damaged as before. In fact it took us a few minutes into the second track to truly be sure, the opener is all thick low end throbs, keening drones, tripped out effects, static and crumbling distortion, creepy samples, so we expected the second track to explode right out of the gate, but instead, it was more ambience, a creepy music box, lots of crackle and more static, and way down in the mix, what sounds like drums way off in the distance, shards of feedback, then the drums kick in, and it almost sounds like DJ Shadow or something, all distorted skitter over woozy samples, but then finally, BAM, the song splinters into twisted, inhuman industrial black buzz, lightning fast drumming that if it isn't a machine, the drummer is some sort of cyborg, the guitars warped and melty and psychedelic, the structure fractured and constantly shifting, not smoothly either, guitars cut out, stutter and burst back in, the sound swings wildly from lightning fast blast to stumbling doomy tangle, and back, the riffs, as in the past, are mangled and slippery, but here, the metal drops out again, and we're returned to that weird DJ Shadow music box thing, before again, bursting into more detuned black savagery, and so it goes, it's a ten minute track, and they cram a lot into it, lots of drones, and weird industrial breakdowns, there are hardly any vocals, but when there are, they seem to be just a wordless bellow, and that could be some weird guitar thing too, it's hard to tell, everything is chaotic and woozy, warbly and seemingly in constant collapse.
And while there's SO much going on, that we could pick each and every track apart, and describe all the twisted fuckery these guys conjure up, that first track definitely sets the template, with the long tracks super progged out experiments in avant blackness, that once again, set these guys SOOO far apart from the pack, this stuff is SO fucking tripped out and bizarre, and gloriously and fantastically idiosyncratic, it's hard to believe a regular band of dudes could conjure up something this bafflingly brilliant. The whole record is super glitchy, almost like the player is malfunctioning, but really it's all part of their warped master plan, that creepy crackly music box effect employed throughout, often the main black buzz riff, rendered as some disembodied old time melody, often under some sort of disembodied chugging, but somehow, always seeming to lurch back into twisted black aktion. More than half of the record seems to be spent exploring specifically non black metal weirdness, in fact five of the nine tracks are more sort of ambient explorations, textural experiments, and the songs proper are constantly in flux, again spending much of the time drifting, droning or creeping, but when they do launch into their black buzz, it's an alien strain that is pretty difficult to parse, so it's probably best to just let yourself get lost in Spektr's confusional black soundworld. Black metal record of the year so far for SURE.
The second volume in the ongoing series of singles compilations from legendary outfit the Sun City Girls was one of the many duds that frustrate so much of the die-hard SCG fanbase. It was especially frustrating given that the first volume - You're Never Alone With A Cigarette (which as of spring 2013 is sadly out of print) - was so fucking good, mostly due to the fact that much of that material was made up of tracks that were left off the group's masterpiece, Torch Of The Mystics. At one time, TOTM was slated to be a double lp set with the Girls working towards fleshing out the whole album with a bunch of similar sounding tracks. So when the album dropped just as a single slab of wax, all of the remnants ended up finding their way onto various singles back in the early '90s. As Volume One did feature many of those leftovers, Volume Three thankfully completes the task, with two of those discarded Torch tracks culled from the Three Fake Female Orgasms 7" (released on Majora in 1991) as well as all of the cuts from the Eye Mohini and Borungku Si Derita singles (both released through Majora in 1992 and 1993 respectively, the latter featuring a different version of "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" from Torch Of The Mystics, just to make things all the more confusing). There's also a different version of "Kickin The Dragon" from the other SCG masterpiece 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, as well as a live version of another Torch classic, "The Flower".
The title track here in particular is a classic Sun City Girls jam, with Richard Bishop's desert-blues inspired fingerpicking seamlessly shifting from Arabic flourishes to Southeast Asian folk-pop and the more commonplace No Depression styled Americana, all with brother Alan plaintively sounding out syllabically a maudlin melody that may or may not be complete nonsense or some polyglot of languages dialed in by the Girls' esoteric antenna to all sorts of wild and wonderful songs from around the world. "Gum Arabic" is a terse re-interpretation of heavy Turkish psychedelia which would certainly foreshadow Sublime Frequencies eventual reissue collection of Erkin Koray's works. "Abydos Carousel Tapsel" has a bad-ass south-of-the-border vibe which shifts into an unhinged jubliant psych-folk in "Borungku Si Derita" which strangely sounds a lot like Comus! With so much of the Sun City Girls catalogue terminally out of print, getting a hold of anything from the band is a cause for celebration; but getting an album as great as this, even a collection, maybe especially a collection, is all the more reason to rejoice. And for those uninitiated into the demented psych-punk weirdness of SCG, this is a really great place to start.
We've long been fans of this Swedish post-metal / dirge-sludge / metal-gaze duo, and their ever expanding discography continues to confound, as this is their sixth full length since 2000, and the sixth record without a title. So yeah, self titled, AGAIN, and as we mentioned in our review of their 2006 self titled record, they also chose to jettison song titles as well, which continues to be the case, this three song, 37 minute epic divided into 'movements', and each of those movements further divided into 'coda's and 'elegy's and 'finale's. Which may seem a bit pompous, they are after all a rock band, and a pretty stripped down one at that, being just a guitar player and a drummer (their set up pictured on the front cover), but as the saying goes, it's not what you got, but what you do with what you got, and these guys turn two instruments (and admittedly a LOT of amplifiers), into something mightily metallic and majestic, with long passages of dark dreamy droniness, and dense dynamic sprawls of droned out psychedelic math-kraut heaviness, as well as lumbering driving dirges, and yeah, of course, heaving walls of crumbling distortion doused sludge, all driven by some serious drum-damage bombast, and this time around, some super tripped out vocals, contributed by not one, not two, but THREE guest vocalists (one known simply as "The Cuckoo", who we like to think is the one contributing the weird heavily effected gurgle-vox). There's also some keyboards this time around, adding a little more swirl and spaceiness to the proceedings, but the sound is still in keeping with the previous five self titled records, heady and heavy, hypnotic and metallic. Maybe imagine a mostly instrumental Isis, stripped way down, and then slowed way down, and recording with Steve Albini, or Dutch instru-metallers Gore, with a slightly more expansive soundfield.
At this point Switchblade are truly masters of their craft, weaving lush landscapes of chug and churn, those landscapes often blossoming into impossibly majestic sonic sprawls, tranced out and mesmeric, peppered with the occasional dense sonic blast, or fluttery fields of ghostly psychedelic drift, the whole thing laced with all manner of warped sonic subtleties, but spending the majority of their time locked into endless stretches of head nodding hypno-rock drone-dirge-metal bliss out.
The cd comes in a six panel full color digipack, while the deluxe 2lp version is pressed on 180 gram vinyl and includes a download code.
We've been getting all riled up over some hot Afro-rock releases lately, first from those killer Nigerian comps put out by the Strut and Soundway labels and then The Peace's Black Power reissue. But the lo-fi fuzz that's really rocking our world is this gem from Chrissy Zebby Tembo & Ngozi family, 1974's My Ancestors. Though included on the Love Peace and Poetry African psych compilation, Chrissy Zebby Tembo may not be so memorable from that because their track was the one instrumental track from My Ancestors, and though it's great, it's not as good as the tracks where Tembo sings. Like an odd hybrid of Malcolm Mooney from Can and Sabbath-era Ozzy Osbourne, Tembo's English delivery over these fuzzed-out groovers is the reason to take notice. Hailing from Zambia, same as The Peace and The Witch (another Afro-rock group we'd like to see get more affordably reissued), Tembo wails over these rhythmically charged but largely western-style rock structures. The best being the Sabbath gone to South Africa "Trouble Maker". In constant rotation, since this first arrived a few weeks ago, we've finally managed to get enough to share with our customers. Don't hesitate, this whole record kills!
Viktor Timofeev is probably better known as a visual artist, this NYC resident hails from Latvia, and has been making a name for himself in the art world, but he also counts himself a member of electro synth-wave downer poppers Nihiti (whose new surprisingly folky ep is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list) and painted the very distinctive cover of the first Nihiti, his solo record is something totally removed from Nihiti, both the electronic and the folkier versions, on his own, he instead traffics in expanses of layered drones, and looped riffage, of atmospheres and ambience, but active ambience, with sounds blurred and tangled, rhythmic without actual rhythms, the label drops names like Stars Of The Lid, SUNNO))) and Godspeed, and we do definitely hear elements of all of those, it's droney and dirgey and haunting and almost classical sounding in places, but the tracks are super varied, while retaining an oblique cohesiveness, the opener is all dirgey blackened atmospherics, reminding us a little of Blackwolfgoat, looped and layered riffage, lurching and stuttering but super hypnotic, ultra lo-fi, muddy and murky, but the sort of thing we would have been into seeing fill up both sides of the record. The second track is totally different, instead it's lush and shimmery, a dreamlike dronescape laced with streaks of feedback and a haunting distorted melody that runs throughout. The final track on the A side begins with field recordings, birds and running water, all beneath a series of warped and woozy tape experiments, lush chordal swells, repetitive and mantra-like, finally transforming into an almost orchestral looped industrial outro.
The flipside is separated into three tracks, but they seem to be woven into one sidelong epic, a cinematic symphonic landscape of drone and melody that almost sounds like a black metal Arvo Part, droney and dirgery and dramatic, sinister and ominous, the vibe menacing and super intense, the sort of track that broods malevolently, but is totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, the whole side is like a sonic black hole, the listener immersed in the dense deep blackness, until the last few minutes, where the track finishes off with a strange bloopy almost new wavey sounding outro.
Definitely recommended for fans of dark drones and droney darkness, and for sure has us wanting to hear more sounds, and see more art from Timofeev.
Another missive from these Northwestern musical miscreants, and another sprawling black-doom ultra-sludge, grim-dirge epic, two tracks, nearly 30 minutes, opening with a haunting expanse of creepy droned out ambience, like the score that might play over the credits to some super arty horror film, all ominous ritualistic percussion, black sonic swirls and heaving low end rumbles, all of which are soon subsumed by dense squalls of keening feedback, building to a furious frenzy, before the hammer falls, and the song proper lurches into aktion, a monstrous, lumbering, slo-mo tarpit creep, all spaced out drum crashes, 10 seconds a part, avalanches of chordal crush, that ring out endlessly, wreathed in shards of feedback, the vokills a sick demonic rasp, the tempo glacial, total abject blackened ultra-dooooooooooom heaviness of the highest order. Well within the sonic realms of fellow doomlords like Moss, Monarch, Bunkur, Corrupted, Khanate, The Body, Fleshpress and the like. Trees don't necessarily add anything brand new to the equation, but they do craft a pretty gorgeous sprawl of droning doomic miserablism, which toward the end of the first track, begins to blur and smear into something much more psychedelic and abstract.
Which perfectly leads into the second track, which begins all feedbacky and freeform, all swirling keening feedback, chanted vox buried in the mix, and abstract drum splatter, before, like the first track, the sounds coalesce into another grim doooooom creep, this one even more spaced out, the notes further apart, the chords left to ring out and fade even more gradually, the timbre of their crumbling decay as much a part of the sound as the notes themselves, maybe even moreso, a slow, trudging, downtuned tranced out chunk of mesmerizing hypno-doom mesmer, that ends way too soon, even at close to 15 minutes...
The Snowbringer Cult was a double cd originally released way back in 2008 on the Students of Decay label, and was the first proper cd release from French bedroom drone-psych-folk epic from Natural Snow Buildings, the boy/girl duo of Mehdi Amaziane and Solange Gularte, that double cd included a NSB full length, as well as an album from each of their solo projects, those being Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. That double cd is finally available again, but has also been reissued on vinyl for the first time, with each of the three parts being released separately as its own record.
Natural Snow Buildings have been a band since WAY back in 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last decade plus, have only really released a handful of records, and in the first 6 or 7 years, they only managed 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 of those releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! At the time we couldn't help wonder how a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, could generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. And thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in the case of NSB, and the two solo offshoots, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Amaziane and Gularte is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be constantly flooding the scene, this duo write actual songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
Mehdi begins the Twinsistermoon record with a sound that perfectly compliments Solange's Isengrind record (and makes it obvious why the two work so well together in NSB), long drawn out glimmering high end tones, draped over a dark minor key folky strum, and simple percussion, while Mehdi's feminine sounding falsetto soars over the top, all infused with some sort of freaky folky Wickerman vibe. Gorgeous and haunting. That track is followed up by a short chunk of perfect dreamfolk, simple folky strum, and Mehdi's crystal clear vocals, ringing out, pure and impossibly high, if you didn't know better you might think this was some rare track by some lost seventies female folkie.
And so it goes, tracks weaving back and forth, from warm washed out blissy dreamy dronescapes, to simple stripped down folk, often the two sounds drifting into each other, cross pollinating, the folk songs short and seemingly serving to separate the longer sprawling expanses of drone and shimmer, the two sounds dramatically different, but somehow complimenting one another perfectly.
Once upon a time, there was a band called the Mint Chicks, whose sound was a total Pixies style blast of psych-fuzz jangle pop bombast, lush and super melodic, crunchy and crazy catchy, and while the pop kids around here were huge fans, for whatever reason, we were never able to get their records, at least not at a reasonable price. Hopefully someday those record will get (re)issued domestically, especially considering that one of the Mint Chicks has a new band, that's getting a lot of hype, and no undeservedly so. And while the music may not be super similar to the Mint Chicks, Unknown Mortal Orchestra do have a super distinctive sound, one that manages to fuse classic pop tradition and old school power pop songsmithery with warped home brewed DIY experimentation that most definitely manages to skew the sonic proceedings here into a more gloriously off kilter lo-fi indie rock direction.
On the first listen, the sound is immediately poppy and breezy, subtly psychedelic, very Beatles-esque for sure. If Tame Impala are the modern equivalent of Beatles-ish psychedelic bombast, UMO borrow more from the darker, dreamier, songier side of the Fab Four, taking swoonsome falsetto vox, shimmery jangle, woozy basslines, and irresistible melodies, and wrapping them in hazy swirls of sonic fug, a little bit lo-fi and a lot bit murky, but still propulsive and weirdly rocking at times, the songs most definitely possessed of a warbly AM radio sound, reminding us of Ariel Pink or John Maus, and at times Ween, but Ween at their perfectly poppiest, as well as recent Record Of The Weekers, Donnie & Joe Emerson. The songs tend toward the woozy, and lysergic, dreamy and drifty but often blossom into stretches both rhythmic and propulsive, groovy and a little bit krautrocky, but ultimately, the core sound is an old school sixties sounding jangle pop, hooky and heavenly, dark and dreamy, and just that little bit tweaked and twisted enough to make this more of a subtly out-pop record, which should appeal to fans of more mainstream sounds, as well as the usual aQ suspects into more underground murk-pop weirdness...
American Noise is a killer label sampler featuring all manner of minimal electronica, from skeletal abstract house, to squelchy acid grooves, to murky late night ambience, to woozy psychedelic electro, and pretty much lots of stops in between. The only thing we'd heard from the L.I.E.S. label before was a 12" from Steve Moore, of Zombi and Majeure, and he's one of the familiar names here, his 12 minute "Frigia" is another fantastic slab of haunting faux soundtrack synthscapery, melding Goblin / Carpenter like creepiness to pulsing futuristic Euro-disco, a lengthy Autobahn like sprawl of woozy pulsing psychedelia and house-y kosmische bliss out. Legowelt is another familiar name, his two tracks here are hazy, washed out electro-house groovers, that wed soft focus shimmering ambience to driving, motorik rhythms, wreathing the sounds in swoonsome chordal swells and distant swirling melodies, splitting the difference perfect between driving and drifting. But beyond those two names, most of the outfits here were new to us: Marcos Cabral, Torn Hawk, Terekke, Bookworms, Xosar, Vapauteen, Two Dogs In A House, Maxamillion Dunbar, Svengalisghost, Bonquiqui, Professor Genius, Beau Wanzer and Unknown Artist (not sure if that's a cheeky band name, like Various Artists, or in fact an unknown artist). And while we dig pretty much everything here, the most exciting discovery is most definitely Jahiliyya Fields, who starts things off with a glorious kaleidoscopic cascade of pulsating synths, and layered drones, a glimmering sprawl of kraut-psych shimmer, that gradually blossoms into a creepy sort of Eastern tinged cinematic ambience, and which had us DYING for more (thankfully there is a full length, a double lp, which we will have soon, and we'll hopefully review it on the next list).
Nothing is quite as ghostly and abstract as that first track, but there's definitely lots to dig here, most of the jams are darkly rhythmic, from glimmering Kompakt style minimal techno blissouts, to groovy, super retro sounding eighties style electro-funk, to crunchy, almost Latin sounding big beat workouts, to churning, near-gothic sounding industrial dirges that remind us a bit of some of Dom Fernow's recent projects (Christian Cosmos, Silent Servant, Vatican Shadow). Beyond that, there's also some super soundtracky chase scene electro, heavily collaged loopscapes, noisy and a little chaotic, as well as some cool lo-fi retro electro-pop that sounds like it could be backing tracks for some lost James Ferraro project. Also in the mix, a couple hip hop sounding jams, all 808's and 909's, along with some minimal rhythmic Muslimgauze like murk, and some seriously slinky, slithery slo-mo house music, not to mention one brief but bad ass closer, all super tripped out minimal psychedelic disembodied beats, drifting in a metallic haze. Awesome.
Oh, how we waited for this album! The British quartet's eponymous album from 2011 had become a staple here at aQuarius, hitting all the right sweet spots of jangly, retro indie rock with super catchy girl/boy harmonies that fit perfectly next to old favorites like Unrest, Heavenly, Beat Happening, and whatever your particular favorite C86 band might have been. There was probably a stretch of time when it would be an anomaly if that album *wasn't* being played in the middle of a Saturday afternoon at aQ.
So, Waiting For Something To Happen is an album that undoubtedly has really big shoes to fill; and admittedly, the first couple of listens found us wondering what happened to the tension between the sourpuss punk and the giggly twee, which left us with such a warm and fuzzy feeling on that the first album. Instead, the band has settled into a melancholy jangle that pushes towards those brilliant arrangements John Squire penned on the first Stone Roses record (sans the Madchester grooviness, Veronica Falls still champion the VU minimal-motorik-mono beat) or maybe those tunes Vini Reily wrote for Morrissey's first solo record, proving to be a deft replacement for Johnny Marr. Veronica Falls may have pulled the tempo down a bit, but they are filling in the gaps with a few more baroque flourishes (like something close to a guitar solo, which was entirely absent on the first album); but seriously, do yourself a favor if you loved the first record, pick this up and give it a few spins to let the songs sink into your skull. You'll be rewarded mightily!
In our reviews of the two most recent compilations on Castle Face, the Group Flex flexidisc book set Son Of Flex, and the Velvet Underground tribute, we singled out a group called Warm Soda, as being a new favorite, and in both reviews we mused "Who is this band?" And now we're kicking ourselves for not realizing it, but Warm Soda is the new group / project from big time aQ fave Matthew Melton, who has played in both Bare Wires and Snake Flower 2, as well as releasing a clutch of killer solo jams. And we're happy to report that Warm Soda pretty much falls in line sonically with all of those groups/records. Jangly garage pop, that unlike much of the current crop of garage rocker newbies, is much more beholden to classic seventies power pop and AM radio rock, the sounds here so genuinely seventies sounding, it would be easy to believe this was in fact a reissue of some long lost power pop gem. And really for all its garaginess and all of it's fuzzy riffage, Warm Soda is all about classic songsmithery, and hooks galore. Fans of another aQ fave Purling Hiss (whose new record is also reviewed this week) should flip for this big time. Think Dwight Twilley band, the Kinks, the Stooges, Cheap Trick, the Mice, even modern groups mining the same influences, like Redd Kross, and yeah, Purling Hiss, total Yellow Pills garage pop radness, with plenty of swagger and crunch, jangle and pound, but the sort of hooks most other bands would KILL for, and which Melton seems to toss off like it ain't nothing. Just check out the samples and you'll be hooked!
Hard to pick out a favorite track here, every listen, we become obsessed with a new song, or re-obsessed with a previous fave, needless to say, this is one of those rare records, where EVERY song is a potential fave, and in a perfect alternate universe, a total radio hit. And really, it's not just the music, but the sound, the production, appropriately lo-fi, but not shitty low fidelity, more like old analog tape style, early reel to reel 4 track, the sound lush and rich, and when things get distorted, the sounds ooze and bleed into each other, the way only old school analog recordings seem to.
Along with the Purling Hiss, and the Tony Molina solo record, another contender for pop record of the year on the same list!! Includes a download coupon as well.
This month's issue of this indispensable adventurous UK music mag features a cover story on minimal German composer Jakob Ullman. Also inside: Ashley Paul, Storyboard P, Mika Vainio (in an 'Invisible Jukebox' session), and more, including the usual columns and tons of reviews. Plus, a Wire Tapper sampler cd glued to the front!
All right, more '70s "ZamRock"! Last list, in our highlight review of 45,000 Volts by the awesome Ngozi Family, we mentioned that there was another crucial reissue from Zambia on the way that we were looking forward to - that's this, Witch! (Not to be confused with the present-day Witch that's got J. Mascis on drums, they're cool too, but couldn't ever be as cool as this.) The Witch's 1975 album Lazy Bones!! (the two exclamation marks are part of the title) is BADASS. It's got tons of rhythmic umph, and makin'-more-with-less third world charm. Again it's the western garage psych template with African extras.
Some tracks are heavy duty crunchers, such as the curiously named "Tooth Factory" (which sounds like Japan's Speed, Glue, and Shinki, we think), some more spaced and mellow, like "Strange Dream", and still others are loose limbed groovy jams, like the title track. And, you'd better believe there's plenty of fuzz throughout, you'll get your daily dose and then some. Wah wah guitars roam wild, The Witch managing to be wonderfully melodic, funky, and downright distorted across these ten tracks, providing everything we desire from the electric ZamRock phenomenon (similar too, to bands from Nigeria like Blo and Ofege). With English being the official language of Zambia, that's what the vocals are in, sorta nasal and accented and lovely in a gritty way. Kinda hard to know what else to say except, recommended!
There was a Shadoks vinyl reissue of this a while back, but it was prohibitively expensive (close to fifty bucks retail!) so we're really glad they got around to doing this much more affordable compact disc version, licensed from the sole surviving band member and featuring a booklet full of interesting liner notes (by Egon from Now-Again / Stones Throw) and vintage photos.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE** (well, the cd is on sale, the vinyl isn't.)
Bill Withers' second album Still Bill was not only one of the essential soul/funk records of the seventies with hits like "Use Me", "Lean On Me", and "Who Is He (And What Is He To You?)", but "Use Me" and "Kissing My Love", it's also been sampled on endless hip-hop records from Eric B. & Rakim, Jungle Brothers, Scholly D., Dr. Dre, Jamal-Ski, WC & The Maad Circle just to name a few. Stoned soul jams rarely get better than this. Compact disc version available at the **SALE **SALE* *SALE** nice price of just 5.00, or you freespending turntable types can get the freshly reissued 180 gram vinyl version!
Iannis Xenakis took up residence in the GRM studios in 1957 during the time when it was run by Pierre Schaefer. Over the next five years, Xenakis composed a handful of works, most of which have made their way onto this Editions Mego produced anthology, including "Concrete PH" (1958), "Orient-Occident" (1960), "Diamorphosis" (1957-1958), and "Bohor" (1962). Commissioned as the sound design for the 1958 Phillips Pavilion constructed by the acclaimed architect Le Corbussier, "Concrete PH" was sourced entirely from the sound of burning charcoal, with the crackling sounds being sped up and overdubbed via tape to enhance its brittle tactility in a dense cloud of tumbling sound. This simple piece of audio construction doesn't even reach 3 minutes in length, but is one of those early pieces of electronic music that has inspired countless adventurous musicians over the intervening six decades. Take your pick: Faust, Einsturzende Neubauten, Small Cruel Party, Scott Walker, etc. "Orient-Occident" is a recomposed extract from the soundtrack that Xenakis provided to UNESCO commissioned film by Enrico Fulchignoni. Here, Xenakis builds his piece through the sounds of bowed gongs, with aggregated crescendos of dense metallic reverberation which he intuitively balances with ambient rumblings and radiophonic sine-wave flutterings. Again, this is a very instructive piece of electronic music, not only an obvious precursor to Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie but also to Stockhausen's Mikrophonie which was begun a few years later in 1964. "Diamorphosis" is probably the closest that Xenakis ever came to producing a true musique concrete piece with its jagged start-stop assemblage and almost formalist, spider-web like passages whose loose interpretation of serialism serves him very well. "Bohor" was the last piece that Xenakis composed at GRM, and he dedicated the piece to Pierre Schaefer, who did not appreciate the piece whatsoever. Do keep in mind that Schaefer also didn't care of Eliane Radigue's work with feedback and minimalism, so the attack-softened clamorings from various tuned pieces of metal into a static amalgam is actually not that far from the maximalist / minimalist approach of Organum and the denser moments of early Andrew Chalk. Again some three decades before either were beginning their careers! Much of this work has been long out of print, even on CD, so kudos to Editions Mego for reintroducing these seminal recordings.
