Full length number two from this Portland guitarist, whose debut The Golden Hour was a huge hit around here, and who delivered a truly stunning instore performance a couple years back. A modern master of classic Appalachia, Anderson is of course beholden to the greats: Fahey, Kottke, Basho, etc. As we mentioned in our review of her debut, should really be getting the same sort of accolades as her modern post-Fahey peers like Richard Bishop, Jack Rose, James Blackshaw, and the rest. Anderson is perfectly capable of aping Fahey, but usually chooses to forge her own sonic path, her take on Appalachia remains more psychedelic, more loose and noisy and a bit experimental, Mercury, like The Golden Hour, almost plays more like a collection than an album proper, the songs and sounds so all over the map, as if these records were just a sampling of what Anderson is capable of, which appears to be quite a bit.
Lush distortion drenched melodies unfurl into spare twang flecked drift, folky campfire blues blossoms into dense frantic picking, the sound gets jazzy at times, psychedelic at others, spare and hushed one moment, brooding and slow building the next. Some of the songs here seem informed by distinctly non-Appalachian sounds, at least one track sounds like Fahey via Godspeed, which is as cool as it sounds, while elsewhere, Anderson gets dirgey and distorted, adding slippery slide, letting notes ring out, rife with tension and pathos, woozy, dreamy psychedelia is transformed into spare, spacious dream folk drift, before slipping effortlessly into some vintage sounding classic Appalachia. A near perfect mix of modern and classic sounds, interpretations and variations of each, that are uniquely Anderson's. Gorgeous! And so totally recommended.
Housed in fancy old school tip-on style sleeves. On Mississippi!
There are unfortunately, some non-musical factors that contribute to what records we choose to be our Record Of The Week. Cost is one. There have been plenty of $30, or $40, or even $50 records that we've chosen to not make ROTW just because a record like that is often well outside a lot of folks' range of affordability. Once in a while we do make an exception, but that's usually when a record is SO good we just can't say no. Another factor is availability. No matter how great a record is, if we can only ever get 5 or 10 or 20 copies, often not knowing how long it will take to get more, or if we'll be able to get more at all, then we usually choose to highlight it, or if the numbers are super small, not list it at all (which is another reason visiting aQ in person is always a good idea, there's plenty of stuff that doesn't make it onto the list!). Anyway, the point of all this, is that we have been LOVING this Benge record, and until now we've only been able to get it in dribs and drabs, 5 copies here, 2 copies there, but we finally managed to get a bunch. A bunch in this case being about 15 copies. So fair warning, this disc is AWESOME, everyone is gonna want one, so when we sell out, please be patient, we're already doing our best to get more in, it just might take a while. So quick on the trigger, or be ready to wait patiently.
And what kind of record deserves all of these disclaimers? What kind of record can we be so sure all aQ list readers will want? How about a miniature hardcover book, containing a cd with 20 tracks, each track performed on a different synthesizer, from a different year, spanning the years 1968 to 1998, a sonic roadmap of the evolution of the synthesizer, from the first commercially available synths in the late sixties, to the introduction of fully digital synthesizers in the late eighties. Each page of the book featuring a full color photo of the synthesizer used to create that track, along with a schematic of that synth, as well as liner notes all about the synthesizer, as well as how the track was created. That all still might not be enough if the music wasn't amazing, but it is. Somehow strangely cohesive, even though 20 different instruments were used, the sounds here are uniformly blissed out and dreamy, a sort of new age droney drifty washed out shimmer, peppered with beautiful melodies and occasional percussion. Did you love the recent Bogner record of the week? Do you love Tangerine Dream? Popol Vuh? That Edmond De Dyster reissue? Deuter? The William Eaton reissue on EM? Steve Hillage's Rainbow Dome Music? Any number of avant electronic dronemusic cd-r's? Then you'll love this. Or if you're just a music geek that loves these sorts of 'objects', or tech-heads who love vintage gear. Hard to really imagine anyone not digging this big time.
So beyond the book, and the photos and the liner notes and the cool packaging, the music within is truly divine, and fairly diverse, from long slow oceans of sound, swirling and shimmering and sun dappled, to space aged glitch and skitter, hum and buzz, primitive robot disco bleep and bloop, to haunting Goblin-y synthscapery, to fluttery ethereal electronica rife with crystalline melodies and simple rhythms, to super creepy and dark cinematic ambience, to playful electronic shuffles, to blown out expansive cosmic shimmerscapes and on and on.
This could very well have been a super boring demonstration style record, and granted, most of us probably would have bought it anyway for the book and the pix and the strange sounds, being the huge music geeks we are, but thankfully, even with all the extras stripped away, we'd still be left with a gorgeous, playful, pretty, blissed out, warm and shimmery, slightly ominous, dramatic and epic, bleepy and bloopy experimental space age new age ambient electronic record. Which is even better.
Needless to say, WAY recommended. Amazing packaging, a miniature hardcover book, with tons of photos and liner notes and schematics, as well as an introduction by Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner. And again, these have been tough to keep in stock, so if we run out, please be patient while we wait for more to arrive.
Another new release from local label Time Released Sound, and another collection of gorgeous haunting mesmer, this one the work of a duo called Birch And Meadow, which is David Wenngren from Library Tapes, and a Swedish vocalist named Sara Forslund, the two whip up a dark droning concoction of soft noise mesmer and lush layered torch song minimalism, the opener is a thick sprawl of droning thrum, layered and softly pulsing, wreathed in static and hiss, shot through with high end sine wave tones and buried barely there melodies, Foslund's breathy vocals settled right into the drones, neither drowning out the other, minus those vocals, this would be a primo slab of minimal dronemusic, without the drones, some gorgeous singer/songwriter action, but together, it's a gloriously dark and hauntingly psychedelic bit of avant songcraft.
And while the whole record is not nearly as deep and droney, it's all haunting and languid, darkly mysterious and beautifully eerie, Wenngren crafting lush sonic backdrops, swirling tangles of reverbed guitar, strange creaks and moans, machine like metallic buzz, field recordings of footsteps and birdsongs, wheezing chordal swells, cricket like skitter and crumbling distorted low end, ethereal komische synth shimmer, weirdly processed melodies, haunting fields of crackle and hum, all of which Forslund winds her sultry voice around, channeling classic seventies British folk and transforming it into something more alien, more murky and moody, tense and intense, definitely one of the darker releases on TRS, and thus, maybe one of our favorites.
As with all the Time Released Sound releases, there are two version, one super limited and quite deluxe, and as always, no expense is spared with the packaging, the deluxe version this time around is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a hinged reel-to-reel box, which is adorned with collaged images from a 100 year old book on butterflies, the front of the box cut out, making it resemble an old fashioned specimen box, a small magnifying glass affixed to one corner of the box. The cut out reveals the insert an accordion like fold out adorned with more butterflies, and hand colored leaves and flowers, beneath which lies the disc, in a picture sleeve, with printed lyric sheet. So nice! Then of course there's also the less expensive standard version, which comes sans box and insert, housed in a simple standard picture sleeve, with a printed lyric insert.
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Another new release from local label Time Released Sound, and another collection of gorgeous haunting mesmer, this one the work of a duo called Birch And Meadow, which is David Wenngren from Library Tapes, and a Swedish vocalist named Sara Forslund, the two whip up a dark droning concoction of soft noise mesmer and lush layered torch song minimalism, the opener is a thick sprawl of droning thrum, layered and softly pulsing, wreathed in static and hiss, shot through with high end sine wave tones and buried barely there melodies, Foslund's breathy vocals settled right into the drones, neither drowning out the other, minus those vocals, this would be a primo slab of minimal dronemusic, without the drones, some gorgeous singer/songwriter action, but together, it's a gloriously dark and hauntingly psychedelic bit of avant songcraft.
And while the whole record is not nearly as deep and droney, it's all haunting and languid, darkly mysterious and beautifully eerie, Wenngren crafting lush sonic backdrops, swirling tangles of reverbed guitar, strange creaks and moans, machine like metallic buzz, field recordings of footsteps and birdsongs, wheezing chordal swells, cricket like skitter and crumbling distorted low end, ethereal komische synth shimmer, weirdly processed melodies, haunting fields of crackle and hum, all of which Forslund winds her sultry voice around, channeling classic seventies British folk and transforming it into something more alien, more murky and moody, tense and intense, definitely one of the darker releases on TRS, and thus, maybe one of our favorites.
As with all the Time Released Sound releases, there are two version, one super limited and quite deluxe, and as always, no expense is spared with the packaging, the deluxe version this time around is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a hinged reel-to-reel box, which is adorned with collaged images from a 100 year old book on butterflies, the front of the box cut out, making it resemble an old fashioned specimen box, a small magnifying glass affixed to one corner of the box. The cut out reveals the insert an accordion like fold out adorned with more butterflies, and hand colored leaves and flowers, beneath which lies the disc, in a picture sleeve, with printed lyric sheet. So nice! Then of course there's also the less expensive standard version, which comes sans box and insert, housed in a simple standard picture sleeve, with a printed lyric insert.
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Don't let the surfer dude moniker fool you. These Bitchin Bajas feature members of aQ faves Cave, and continue to deliver gorgeous collections of modern krautrock / new age bliss, this new one maybe the blissiest yet, totally tranquil kraut-psych drift that continues to channel the masters into two sidelong sprawls of smolder and shimmer, opening with some serious Michael Rother worthy kraut-age, all super distorted guitar melodies draped over slowly unfurling guitar figures and softly chiming tones, all woven into a deeply meditative mesmer, which builds to a seriously psychedelic coda, before settling once again into more blissed out shimmer. The second half of the A side is all swooping backwards melodies, tangled up with fluttering woodwinds, some serious prog-kraut for sure, lush layers, slow shifting textures, tinkling chimes, blooping basslines, and near the end, some progged out flute that adds a while new vibe to the proceedings.
The flipside begins with a brief piece for two prepared organs, and is a gorgeous stretch of lush, thick drones, rife with slow shifting overtones, the sound warm and rich, we would have happily got lost in that track for the duration of the side, but it's really just an intro, for the nearly sidelong "Turiya", which for some reason we were expecting to be super rhythmic, as if it would explode into some driving motorik groove, but instead, it's another fantastically blissful and tranquil drift, a percolating prismatic synthscape, hazy and shimmery, some buried buzz and dreamy distortion, bur for the most part, just a glorious sprawl of kosmische dreaminess.
No download code, but does include a small printed insert. Sorry no cd version, only lp and cassette for some dumb reason.
Another new tape from this local experimental soundscaper, whose 'day job' is playing in spaced out psych duo Von Himmel, but who, as Black Thread, tends toward a much more washed out and ethereally psychedelic ambience, the sound of Black Thread settling closer to folks like Tim Hecker, or Philip Jeck, or even more accurately, The Caretaker, as BT's sprawling soundcapes ooze the same sort of faded melencholia, sounding a bit like old records spinning lazily on broken dusty Victrolas, miraculously still spinning, as they sit in some old abandoned building, the sound drifting through the empty rooms, and out the broken windows, offering a fragmented glimpse of what once was.
Both sides of Pinkfire offer up a similarly wistful bit of audial ambience, the A side all gauzy and hazy and sun dappled, everything wreathed in hiss and hum, the melodies warbling beneath a patina of crackle and static, a sound out of time, the perfect lonely late night soundtrack, or alternately, the perfect score for a wander through some desolate city, an afternoon full of shadows painted by grey skies and impending darkness, gorgeously washed out and woozy, the sort of stuff we could listen to forever.
The flipside is a bit more abstract, as if someone was trying to broadcast the A side from another time, or another world, and the transmission arrives garbled, dragging much of the cosmic interference with it. More gristly and murky, the main melody a bit more pronounced but also more distorted and damaged, to some ears it might just sound like bad reception, but BT masterfully sculpts the original sounds, and the decaying crunch and crumble, into something that captures the same sort of emotion as the A side, loss and loneliness, faded memories, other times, other places, long forgotten. Fantastic as always. And LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
Here's a private pressing from the enigmatic project The Candlelight Service, whose various members have a very minimal public profile, consisting mostly of some ubiquitously uninformative Twitter accounts. But musically, this project, which seems to be centered around the production of one Josh Kinney and a host of female vocalists, is a pretty intriguing concoction of goth oriented italo-disco and downer-pop witch house vibes. The leading track "Alchemy" has the decadent emptiness of those Johnny Jewel produced disco tracks for Italians Do It Better (i.e. Chromatics, Glass Candy, Desire, etc.), furthered along by the cool detachment of vocalist Zoe DuFault. "Comfort" pushes a buzzingly punk guitar chord well into the distance behind a downtempo slink from the drum machines and blown out Nord synth lines to go along with the ice-queen vocals from Sierra DuFault, who seems to be the primary vocalist here, presenting more of a Karen O snarl and theatrical warble. The album works through its sparse arrangements for synth, drum machines, guitars, and vocals, with that minimal wave approach to the less is more production values. This is even true for the relatively noisy guitar track "Drink For You" which reprises another track on the album but with the gritty lo-fi goth vibe of Chelsea Wolfe. There's just 100 of these kicking around, and the lp does come with a cd-r of the whole record as well.
Latest batch of deliriously druggy psychedelic space-out from these local gents, and yet another killer collection of improvised slow burn sonic drift, as always, culled from hours and hours of wasted late night amp worship captured in 'The Dome' (a geodesic dome where all the CM stuff is recorded!). The core trio of Andy Duvall, Rich Millman and Clint Golden are once again joined again by unofficial member and (not so) secret space rock weapon, John McBain from Monster Magnet, and conjure up a smoldering sprawl of hazy, heady, darkly dreamy wasted zoner psych drift, on the mellow side of the CM canon for the majority of Four Eyes, the group unfurling lush, billowing clouds of blurred bongsmoke buzz, shot through with prismatic shimmers and lazy sun dappled melodies, all underpinned by hushed motorik drum skitter, gurgling synth thrum, all the sounds gorgeously indistinct, oozing and bleeding into each other, a gauzy cloud of tonal color, sculpted into woozy pulsing rhythms and slow shifting sheets of tripped out chordal mesmer, a lysergic slo-mo psych that's all about tripping / chilling / blissing out.
While opener "Personal Space" keeps the rhythms to a minimum, spending most of its time swirling lysergically, "Glass Home" tethers CM's freeform psychedelic drift to a simple caveman kraut rhythm, the sky above filled with reverb drenched melodic squiggles, and spidery melodies, all over a softly churning backdrop of deep rumbling shimmer, while closer "Mist" pushes the rhythm to the fore, with its Necks via Hawkwind throb, the only deviation from this drugged out mellow mesmer comes in the form of "Road Swagger", which does indeed display some rhythmic swagger, easily the most rocking of the bunch, like a super charged Spacemen 3, the drums driving and muscly, the guitars thick and almost metallic, still plenty drowsy and druggy, but with some sonic heft that positions the sound closer to the Heads or White Hills, that the more Bardo Pond-y bliss out of the rest of the record.
As always gorgeous stuff, and like all their records, seemingly cut from the same sonic cloth, as if Carlton Melton are permanently engaged in a jam for the ages, that dome actually some sort of space station, drifting through time and space, traversing sonic starfields into the endless blackness of the universe, playing endlessly to appease whatever gods truly rule over all, these songs the sound of a group, drifting further into oblivion, each record a mere glimpse into their epic cosmic journey.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl, and LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!!!
Breaking news!!! In what must be one of the most shocking and unprecedented moves in heavy metal history, Church of Misery have returned with the first installment in a totally unexpected space disco cabaret rock opera concept album trilogy based on the life and writings of Charles Dickens! Just kidding. It's doom metal about serial killers of course! And would you have it any other way?? That's right, Japan's most chemically imbalanced Sabbath worshippers have lurched back onto the scene in their finest bloodstained bellbottoms to exhume another immense slab of dirty, depraved and delirious DOOM. Thy Kingdom Scum is equal parts psychopathic and psychedelic, savage and spacey, way gory and way groooooovy, man. The riffs are lumbrous but with a distinct sense of hip swaying boogie-woogie, the drums a joyously off-kilter clatter, and Hideki Fukasawa's vocals are totally out of control - an unrestrained howling caterwaul, lending the songs a legitimate sense of menace when they could have just as easily been sunny summertime stoner jams otherwise. Fun and frightening all at once, and very far out. Imagine one of the wildest, most life affirming drug-den parties you could ever attend, only there's about a 50/50 chance that a Hell's Angel might sacrifice you at the end of the night in some sort of sordid Satanic biker blood ritual. Or maybe that moment right before your psilocybin trip dramatically shifts from a blissed out love-in to something much worse. The feeling of elation is still there, but the nightmare is starting to creep in... But you might as well enjoy it before that bad trip really starts, right?
PS Includes a Quatermass cover - the only song here not about a serial killer (we assume).
Latest blast of brooding shoegazey new wave gloom pop from this LA combo, and like their Love And Regret full length, the sound is all chiming guitars, swirling synths, driving rhythms and Joy Division bass lines, but the A side here blossoms into something noisier and buzzier, the sounds blurred and distorted, the vocals swooping in trailing a cloud of crumbling distortion, heavily effected, buried in the mix, a dramatic croon that's transformed into something a bit more fierce, but without taking away any of the tracks melancholic Cure-ness. The flipside is a smoldering gothic torch song, a piano driven dirge, moody and haunting, darkly psychedelic and softly swirling, an atmospheric Nick Cave like creep that's laced with some well placed saxophone which buzzes and bleats, adding some angular tension to the otherwise downcast proceedings.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Last year, we helped our pals in Common Eider, King Eider out an amazing, ambitious audio/visual document, a book + dvd + cd (+ patch) set that captured the San Francisco drone/ambient/folk band's quest to build a cabin in the wilds of Alaska. Both the book and the dvd offered up images of the process, from the flight up, the journey to the site, to the actual construction, as well as the gorgeous landscape surrounding the cabin (or cabin to be).
But now those of you who found the full $35 set with the book a bit too spendy, and really only wanted the cd and dvd (and patch), we've got a cheaper version available, the same thing but minus the book.
The dvd and the cd both contain part of the music, both of which are meant to be played simultaneously, Zaireeka style, the fusion of the two resulting in a lush soundscape of layered organ drones and haunting choral harmonies, the music on its own is moving and mysterious, but when coupled with the visuals, it's that much more powerful.
The dvd is a gorgeously impressionistic visual travelogue of the process, the first image is the plane soaring over the clouds, then the snowed-in city, the trip to the site through epic expanses of snow, the actual building of the cabin, from the ground up, the whole thing peppered with lots of stunning shots of the surrounding landscape, the snow that goes on for miles, gorgeous pink tinged skies, distant mountains and dense almost black forests, eventually, the shots are through the windows of the cabin, the trees bowing in the cold wind outside, the clouds drifting across stunningly blue skies, eventually, there's one more survey of the pristine landscape surrounding the cabin, animal tracks, frozen lakes, the setting sun, trees still green, gathering storms in the distance, and finally, the cabin recedes into the distance, and we're back on the plane once again, heading home.
The accompanying music is the perfect soundtrack, spare and spacious, the distant drone a constant underpinning, the vocals drifting in and out, we were worried at first about matching up the two discs, but realized it almost doesn't matter, we tried multiple mixes, and it always sounded fantastic, wheezy chordal whirs, the vocals layered and wreathed in echo and reverb, a mysterious chorale that instead of building and then fading out, remains somewhat constant, with different voices receding and resurfacing, each part of the music slipping easily from just organ, to organ and voices, making for a constantly shifting landscape of muted melody and vocal texture, the vibe is sort of Grouper-ish, but a bit more medieval, a bit more arcane sounding, as if it were in fact some ancient ritual, reenacted for the building of this structure, to imbue it with the spirit of the ancients. The music is dark, but infused with a mysterious warmth, the perfect analogue really for the whole process/project.
The cd and the dvd are both housed in stickered clear plastic inner sleeve, which itself is then housed in a super elaborate printed origami style fold out poster, sealed with a sticker.
Please note still have the book version too, though, if you're interested. Also, anyone planning on attending this year's Stella Natura festival, CEKE will be playing - with our own Andee on drums!!
We've been getting all sorts of music from China in recently, visitors to the store have no doubt noticed our overflowing Asia section, much of it from a blossoming Chinese indie rock scene which has spawned at least two aQ faves of late, a recent Record of The Week of abstract drums and synths spaciness from White+, and the shoegazey jangle pop of Boyz & Girl (both of which should be restocked soon, btw!). Another favorite that had yet to make it onto the list/site was a group called Dear Eloise, whose cds we constantly sell out of before getting enough to review. So we're happy to finally have enough of one of their records to be able to share Dear Eloise's fuzzy shoegaze dream pop with all our faithful, non-local aQ-ers.
This super limited 7" is some perfectly poppy, fuzz drenched jangle pop shimmer, all hazy washed out production, ethereal breathless vocals, everything wreathed in sheets of warm guitar buzz and laced with spidery melancholy melodies, wistful and woozy, the drums buried in the mix, more a rhythmic pulse than a proper rhythm, sun dappled and dreamily druggy, the A side is pure shoegaze bliss pop radness. While the B side gets a bit more experimental, laying down a sprawl of almost industrial rhythms, beneath billowing clouds of swirling hiss, and shimmery soft noise, buried within though are of course some dreamlike melodies, and lilting vocals. The song's swirling jangle pop core is tangled up in something a bit more abstract and psychedelic, making for a gorgeously blurred and fragmented avant shoegaze murk pop gem!
Pressed on clear coke bottle vinyl, and housed in hand screened covers, all different colors! And yeah, super limited of course...
Decibel, the premier metal magazine in the USA, is a must for any metaller who wants to keep current but doesn't want all their reading to be done online. And at a mere $4.95 it's a better deal than most magazines these days. This issue has Amon Amarth on the cover (ho hum) but plenty of cool stuff inside, about bands like Deafheaven, Witch Cross (yes!), Scale The Summit, Pig Destroyer (entering the Hall Of Fame for Prowler In The Yard), Aborym, Lesbian, Coffins, and more. Plus the usual informative & amusing reviews and columns (including John Darnielle of the Mountain Goat's back page South Pole Dispatch).
And, best of all for some of us here, there's an 8-page oral history of another metal magazine, the sadly missed Metal Maniacs (1988-2007), a staple of our metal-mad youth. Ah, the nostalgia!
It's nearly impossible to keep up with Decimus, the ongoing project of Pat Murano of No-Neck Blues Band (as well as K Salvatore, Malkuth, and a bunch more), but it's well worth the effort. We're up to installment 10 of a proposed dozen, and like the previous nine, Decimus 10 is another confusional sprawl of free form avant rock drift and experimental electronic soundscaping, a primitive musical ritualism filtered through a more modern, albeit cracked, sonic filter, resulting in some of the most twisted, and darkly mesmerizing sounds we've heard.
A collection of extended creepscapes, distant melodies drifting through fields of crumbling twang and churning industrial rhythms, softly noisy, almost wistful in places, haunting and atmospheric, the sound building to a strange sort of percussive workout, swaddled in fractured electronics and glitchy shimmers.
The whole record seems to be a soft sort of chaos, that is transformed into various sonic shapes, kosmische kraut-psych, that gets tripped out and seriously druggy, before evolving into something surprisingly focused and utterly mesmerizing. The chaos mutating constantly, every track here bleeding into the ones on either side, as if this were all merely one epic single track lp, which in turn was merely part of one single epic twelve record songsuite, the sounds drifting from rhythmic squelch to ambient swirl, processed disembodied vocals floating amidst grinding sonic primitivism and ominous pulsations. Woozy almost slowcore dirges fracture into shimmery electro weirdness and dark collaged ambience, before being buried beneath wild electronic tangles, and gorgeous lush layers, that seem to gradually be crumbling before our very ears. And that's just side one!
The flipside is more sort of synthed out and electronic, droney and rhythmic, gristly and distorted, like a more WTF Demdike Stare in places, slowly shifting into something a bit more abstract and ambient, cinematic and epic. Voices surface, and the sound grows almost symphonic, sounding like a lo-fi, avant-noise Arvo Part, a fractured chorale subsumed by overlapping rhythms and dirge-y orchestral swells. The whole B side has a weird sort of electro pop vibe, but electro pop via Nurse With Wound, that's freaky and fractured, damaged and psychedelic, but at the same time strangely melodic, and in its own dark and demented way, quite lovely as well.
Pressed on swirled blue vinyl, and housed in super striking hand silkscreened sleeves.
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A few lists back we reviewed a tape from an American Black metal band called Dressed In Streams, who specialized in "atmospheric Indian black metal", and while the black metal wasn't so much Indian as the sound was a mix of Indian music samples and buzzing black metal, we still dug it like crazy, and could barely keep it in stock. That tape is sold out now, but managed to get a hold of a handful of another tape release, the LAST handful in fact. There's meant to be some sort of cd compendium happening at some point, but not sure when that's happening, or if these tapes will be included, but for folks who dug that first tape, or who are intrigued by the idea of "atmospheric Indian black metal", you might want to grab one of these before they're gone.
Two sidelong tracks, the usual buzz and blast augmented here by swirls of synths, and weird echo drenched vocals, stretched out sprawls of psychedelia, chiming melodies, in fact part way through the first track/side, barring the vocals, this could be some weird mathy avant psych space jam, total heart of the sun trance out heaviness, tribal drumming, soaring guitars, squiggly synths, spacey FX, all before building back to more serious black buzz, before splintering into some fierce mathiness, all dense drumming, and super distorted chug, definitely the coolest thing we've heard from this guy (these guys?).
The flipside begins with more synth swirl, some tense minor key guitar shimmer, before launching into a woozy doomic plod, again, sounding almost more spaced out psych than black metal, it's not really until a few minutes in that the black metal kicks in, and even then, super melodic, and textured, the post rock vibe is huge, minus the harsh vokills and the blast beats, the vibe is way more moody and atmospheric, but the combo of the two is pretty potent, the song seesawing back and forth between melodic black buzz and loping minimal post rock meander, all wreathed in swirls of synth and shot through with surprising melody.
Killer stuff for sure. Can't wait for the comp, but in the meantime playing these tapes to death. We have less than 10 copies of this one, and after that it's gone for good, so grab one while you can!
Gorgeous split lp from these two drone combos, the A side is a single sprawling bit of foggy sonic murk, from local outfit Earthen Sea, whose most recent release, the Ocean Beach tape, channeled the cloudy coastline of SF in slow moving fields of softly psychedelic fug, and ES's sidelong track here explores much of the same, adding some deep low end pulsations to the mix, buried under layers of grey thrum and softly swirling melodies, a gradually unfurling, smoldering landscape of longform tones, and slow shifting layers, moody and muted, ethereal and gauzy, a hazy meditative bit of minimal mesmer, slightly sinister, the lush chordal swells swaddled in shadows, a ghostly overcast creep, that slips into something much more pretty and prismatic for the last few minutes.
Insect Factory, another one man band, changes things up dramatically, opening with a seriously sharp sine wave tone, keening and high pitched, while all around it weird little glitches and bits of fragmented melody bob and weave, tranced out in its own way, that main tone, soon seeming to fragment, and eventually joined by more tones, all tangled and gristly, glitchy and distorted, eventually erupting into what sounds like a wild blown out psychedelic swirl, reminding us of Amps For Christ or Dan Friel, crunchy and caustic and weirdly melodic, and ultimately strangely and inexorably mesmerizing. That abrasiveness is balanced by the much more tranquil and brief coda/closer, which is softly reverbed guitar, drifting in a field of barely there hum and shimmer, a sort of modern Appalachian solo guitar drift, that's really quite lovely, and nicely balances the crunch of the first track.
Fantastic stuff from both groups, and yeah, probably quite limited...
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It's been a while since we've heard from Ata Ebtekar, an Iranian sound artist and electronic composer born in Germany, who previously recorded for Warp under the name Sote, creating a clutch of killer records that were furious and fractured, beat heavy concoctions that found him fusing rave and drone and jungle into something much more dense and confusional. And dense and confusional is definitely a good way to describe the music he makes under his own name, a 'world music' of his own invention, but unlike the collaborative record he released with the Iranian Orchestra For New Music, released on local label Isounderscore, on which he took recordings and manipulated them, other than some prepared traditional instruments, Dear Iran is a wholly original work, of vast sonic scope. We read up on Ebtekar, and could have just paraphrased the dense academic description of his work, and this record, but odds are most folks just want to know what it sounds like, and Dear Iran is incredible, dense and dizzying, at times almost overwhelming, layer upon layer of textures and mutated percussion. There are no 'beats' to be found here, this is definitely not a beat record, but it is rhythmic, it just so happens that the rhythms are often implied, gnarled tangles of cascading tones, of garbled processed crunch, fractured melodies, and gristled fields of blurred glitch, it's actually quite difficult to describe, as it really does sound unlike most of what you've heard. Some tracks are almost cinematic, sweeping sheets of buzz and squelch, bits of clang and clatter seem to be pulled apart at the molecular level, and recast as flurries of splatter and skitter, which is then sculpted into almost melodic shapes, bell like tones surface throughout, lending the record most of its melodic heft, but those tones are often all twisted up, smeared into hazy chordal streaks, or laid atop one another creating strange pulsing harmonies, or alternately, lush minimal stretches of hushed bleep and bloop, all wreathed in clouds of electro static thrum. The rhythmic component surfaces throughout as well, but not in any way you might expect, a burst of tangled melodic squiggles, will suddenly coalesce and transform into a lurching stutter step pulse, before dissolving into a fog of pixelated prismatic flutter, or a seemingly freeform assemblage of rumble and whir, will gradually take the shape of mysterious propulsive soft noise streaks, before once again, splintering into a field of strange digital crunches and shimmery, or fractured swirls of darkly droney, woozy electro-minimal psychedelia. Gorgeous stuff for sure, as equally suited to academic deep listening, as pure sound, audial overload sonic bliss out. WAY recommended.
Killer slice of Bay Area psych from this new outfit made up of members of Comets On Fire, Drunk Horse and Nudity, a fierce blast of murky fuzzed out seventies style heavy psych hard rocking, that sounds SO much like the genuine artifact, wouldn't be at all difficult to believe that this was some lost seventies hard rock rarity/reissue, the production is super old school, the A side all big riffs, pounding drums, an epic catchy chorus, and of course some sweet shredding leads, definitely reminiscent of another Valley King artist, recent Record of the Weekers Golden Void, but where Golden Void are more sun baked and laid back, Feral Ohms, are, well, more feral for sure, fierce and snarly, crunchy and fuzzy and blown out, in the red, dense and driving, but catchy like crazy too. The flipside is a little bit more slithery and groovy, but still similarly hard rocking and psychedelic, distorted, a little bit lo-fi and super rocking.
As with all the Valley King singles, super swank silkscreened Alan Forbes artwork, each one hand numbered and signed. Includes a sticker and is LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
We try to carry everything we can from Time Released Sound, and we generally do, but some releases sell to quick, or are too limited, some are just too expensive, but well worth it, as those of you who've purchased one of TRS's over the top, extravagantly packaged deluxe editions can attest to. So this new one from Benjamin Finger, we almost weren't gonna carry for all those reasons, it's crazy expensive, and the label nearly sold out already, but there are a handful of aQ list readers who are pretty dang obsessive about TRS, so we managed to finagle a tiny handful of these, so at least a few aQ customers will be able to get their hands on one of these. Cuz holy cow are these incredible, easily the most fantastic packaging we've seen from TRS, which is saying a lot, since they pretty much pull out all the stops every time, but they've outdone themselves with this one for sure. The whole thing is housed in an extensively modified chocolate box, collaged inside and out, with century old educational musical strips, it's stamped and hand painted, the boxes feet made from brass piano capstans, inside the box is a bird marionette, a sculptural/skeletal creature made from the parts of an antique piano, that bird marionette is laid atop a nest of random piano parts, nestled in little sections, separated by antique and hand printed inserts. The mythical bird, the marionette in the box, is then described in extreme detail on the inserts, its history, and the story of its eventual extinction. Yowza, you sort of have to see it to believe it, and it's totally worth the price, just imagining how much time and work went into making every one of these sort of boggles the mind. And it's limited to just 70 COPIES, of which we have 3 or 4, and can NOT get more.
But enough about the packaging, it is a musical release after all, and a lovely one at that, Finger weaving hypnotic landscapes of looped piano, Reich and Riley like figures, wreathed in echo and delay, and laid over a soft swirling background of barely there thrum, the shimmery piano augmented by strange ethereal, processed voices, melancholy and wistful, some tracks shot through with a shadowy, slightly sinister vibe, but others purely pastoral, sun dappled and dreamy, the production is strangely lo-fi, giving the sound an immediacy, often sounding like you're right there in the room, but other times, the sound smearing and blurring into something more ephemeral, shadowy and softly psychedelic, those voices surfacing throughout, and giving the whole record a strange haunted faded photograph feel. Definitely cinematic, a little bit old timey, and definitely darkly dreamy.
The most recent release from these Chilean psychedelic space/kraut rockers gets a couple tracks remixed by some likeminded outfits you might have heard of. Stoned psych rockers Psychic Ills get all Spacemen 3 with their version of "9", not deviating too much from the original, but stripping away a lot of the effects and psychedelic noise, the result much more murky and moody, laced with lots of cool subtle backwards effects, both guitars and rhythms, droned out and trancey and super hypnotic. Be warned, you might already have this remix since it was included on the Todo Muere Vol. 3 special Sacred Bones Record Store Day Release.
Exclusive to this, though, Moon Duo tackle "Trees" - the original was pretty heavy, a spaced out stoner rock groove, but Moon Duo slow things down too, stripping away the excess, leaving just a woozy bass and drum groove, and then wrapping it in spidery tendrils of buzzing guitar melodies, the vocals even more laid back, all drifting atop a sprawl of droning thrum and distant swirling synths. Both reworkings here seem to cast the more rocking originals as zoned out late night versions, total droney, druggy, dreamily dirgey, hypno-rock space-kraut chill out!
The first we heard from these mathy noise rock heavies, was on a 7" split with Minneapolis noise rockers Buildings, and we finished that review by saying: "There's a Hawks full length out there somewhere, and these two songs have us begging for more!!" And here it is, a crushing collection of dense, mathed out heaviness, with bellowed Melvins like vox over churning downtuned riffage and big booming drums (recorded by Harvey Milk's Kyle Spence!), and that Harvey Milk connection can't be a coincidence, they're from the same state, and even though this isn't nearly as slow and low as the 'Milk, it is definitely drawn from the same sludgey well.
Think classic old school AmRep noise rock, Midwest Homestead style pigfuck, and nineties math rock, all wound tight into some serious RAWK action, the bass thick and grimey, super distorted, all tangled up with the wild, intricate drumming, while all around guitars grind and buzz, chime and chug, sometimes everything bleeds into surprisingly melodic and downright poppy shapes, but more often, it's all angular, chaotic crush and knuckle dragging caveman pummel, the finest moments here when it's a little of both.
Fans of current noise rockers like Gay Witch Abortion, Harvey Milk, the Melvins, Buildings, Seawhores, Kowloon Walled City, Hex Machine and the rest will flip for these guys. As will anyone who missed the good ol' AmRep / Homestead days...
Arguably one of the wildest of all the later-day female blues performers, Jessie Mae Hemphill (aka, "The She-Wolf"!) didn't achieve wide fame until later in life. Feeling Good wasn't her first record, but it was her first American release, coming out in 1990, three years before suffering a stroke that would sideline her career. In it she takes the primal North Mississippi hill country blues traditions of her family (her grandfather was the fiddler Sid Hemphill), in a raucous set of electric blues minimalism honing each song to wild repeating riffs and bare-bone percussion. Her voice all primitive holler and beguiling moan. Perhaps best known for her guitar playing (she started playing at age seven), she was an accomplished drummer as well playing snare and bass drums in various fife and drum units. And it's that rhythmic instinct that binds her musical style together. This set is jumping!
Fifth in the series of archival releases from Lee Hazelwood Industries, this is the first reissue of the complete recordings of this storied pop-psych girl group, Honey Ltd, whose sole album goes for big bank these days on eBay, though it failed to chart upon its initial release. We first heard them on the Hazlewood 45 collection released for the Black Friday "Record Store Day" last year (there's still a copy of that in stock, btw). Four friends, two of them sisters from Detroit, fed on the Motown sound, never thought they would form a band, but after a college talent show where they silenced the room, they formed a a group called The Mama Cats and even performed with a young Bob Seger. Pretty soon with riots in Detroit, the girls hitchhiked to LA and landed an audition with Lee Hazlewood. Taken by their angelic four-part harmonies and fresh faces, he changes their name to Honey Ltd. and immediately got them in a studio with the Wrecking Crew. For a whirlwind year, they performed on all kind of TV shows and showcases, meanwhile never realizing the studio had released their record (they thought they were recording singles) and then the record failed to take off. Relatively unphased by the news, the band soldiered on and joined a USO sponsored tour with Bob Hope in Vietnam before moving on. One of the girls got married and the rest formed the country pop trio, Eve. Though Honey Ltd. were amazing singers and they had a great repertoire, the late sixties was not the best time for girl groups, and even if they touched on some current social themes (for example, the anti-war song "The Warrior"), the group were hardly countercultural. But they did have some really great songs, and incredible harmonies, plus the production is top notch!
This remastered reissue includes comprehensive liner notes and interviews with all four members and never before seen photos. The vinyl version is 180 gram & includes a fold-out poster.
There was a lot of drama around the release of Huntress' debut Spell Eater, most of it focused on front woman Jill Janus, who besides having a sick vokill style, equal parts raspy metallic howl, and old school classic metal croon, also happened to be kinda super hot, a busty blonde usually dressed in furs and medieval bikinis and adorned in blood and warpaint, some metalheads seems put off by it, but to be honest, we're still not entirely sure why, especially when coupled with Huntress' ripping metal, which on that first record fused classic NWOBHM-isms with more modern thrash, the band does after all feature an ex-member of Skeletonwitch after all. Which means intricate and proggy power metal infused speed metal, which of course means if you liked Skeletonwitch, just imagine that band fronted by a bad ass metal chick with a voice that kills. What's not to love? Exactly.
So here's record number two, and right out of the gate, we're even more smitten, mostly, cuz they seem to have slowed things down, and pushed their sound even more in a retro classic eighties metal direction, in fact opener "Blood Sisters" totally sounds like a proper eighties metal jam, Janus doing her best Doro from Warlock, with super melodic leads, kick ass chugging old school riffage, and a KILLER chorus, the sort of chorus you probably haven't heard since the eighties, and it suits them, it was after all what for us at least made Huntress more than just another new metal band, that old school classic metal vibe, but here it's huge, "Blood Sisters" is maybe our favorite Huntress track so far, but then hot on the heels of that jam, comes the provocatively titled "I Want To Fuck You To Death", with lyrics by none other than Lemmy from Motorhead, not sure if it's meant to be a love song TO Janus, or written FOR her from her perspective, but Huntress give it the proper slightly Motorheady classic metal musical backdrop, and again, the vibe is total eighties metal, sounding like a track some band from the era might have written for the soundtrack of some low budget horror movie (Trick Or Treat? Black Roses?), which is not a bad thing at all. It's a sound we LOVE, and these guys (and gal) do it so well. And while we kept expecting their to be more modern thrash happening, like they would suddenly explode into some Skeletonwitch worthy crush like the first record, instead, they stick to their classic eighties metal guns, and it rules! Fans of Warlock, Lita Ford, Acid, Girlschool and old school eighties style metal will definitely dig big time! Bonus track: a cover of "Running Wild" by Judas Priest!
It's been a while since we've heard from Ignatz, aka alien-Appalachian troubadour Bram Devens of Belgium, who over the course of a handful of records between 2005 and 2008, created what was essentially an alternate universe of sound, one where blues and bluegrass and Appalachia somehow got all garbled, the notes warped and woozy, murky drones wreathing everything in creepy sonic patina, but something strange happened near the end of that stretch, the sound of Ignatz gradually got less and less alien, less noisy and murky, fewer effects, everything stripped away until the sound of Ignatz was essentially the sound of a man and his guitar, which is precisely what Ignatz is all these years later. Which is not to say that the sound of Ignatz isn't still strange, and idiosyncratic, and outsidery, it most definitely is, it's just that now, and even a little bit then, the strangeness comes not from adding noise and weird effects, it comes from these truly unique sounds, Devens crafting weird and wonderful sounds with just his voice, a guitar, and whatever piece of equipment he chooses to record on, which is definitely a part of Ignatz's sound, as the varying levels of production, the hiss, the echo, the muted melodies or the brittle high end, the sound is as much a part of the sound as the songs, if that makes sense.
We proclaimed in our review of III, from 2008, that it was in fact Ignatz's blues record, thinking at the time maybe it was an anomaly, but in fact, it marked what we can only imagine was a sonic shift. We missed a handful of releases between now and then, cd-r's and limited lps, but it seems to these ears, that Can I Go Home Now? is not that far removed from III, Devens vocalizing in a Dylany drawl, unfurling gorgeous bits of finger picked Appalachian, softly strummed psychedelic folk, moody and minimal, lo-fi for sure, but in a way that makes the music more intimate, campfire style, as if this was all recorded with a mic and a boombox, beneath the stars, in the middle of nowhere. All of that said, there is plenty of weirdness still going in, whether it's a sublte backdrop of swirling looped melody, or what sounds like a sped up tape recorder, looped and layered beneath some skeletal blues, or hazy, reverby music box melodies, sounding like a toy piano, or some woozy murky warble, that makes it sound like the tape is melting. All of these subtle little effects just add to the spare haunting songcraft, making these sound again, a little bit alien, just not so overtly abstract.
Equal parts Daniel Johnston, Jandek, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, John Fahey via some mysterious Sublime Frequencies compilation, songs gathered from the front porches of old rickety houses in the sticks, in some alternate universe, dark, droney, dreamy, bluesy folkiness that's hauntingly hypnotic and subtly psychedelic. We didn't realize just how much we missed Ignatz...
Anthony Di Franco is probably best known as a one time member of UK noise institution Skullflower, but outside of SF he was involved in and responsible for a whole bunch of other amazing projects, he was the man behind the industrial / power electronics / black drone of Ax (whose recent Metal Forest career retrospective we recently made Record Of The Week) as well as the power electronics / noise assault of Ethnic Acid, he was a member of Skullflower offshoot Ramleh as well as one half of industrial noise duo Novatron. As if that weren't enough, he also recorded as JfK, a 'group' conceived by Di Franco, to create "a total music, absorbing all possibilities", and while we're not sure he necessarily achieved anything quite that grand, what he did do is whip up some seriously kick ass psychedelic dirgery, and twisted post industrial noise rock that KILLS.
This collection gathers up a 1992 single originally released on Fourth Dimension and a clutch of rare and unreleased tracks, and delivers what will likely be some folks first exposure to Di Franco's JfK project, which one might expect to be caustic and noisy and harsh, but in fact is way more song based, sounding at times like UK space rockers Loop, and others, like some obscure home brewed bit of NZ style 4 track noise pop, and at others like a slightly dialed down Godflesh.
Opening with "Big Fat Sin", Di Franco sets the template with primitive programmed drums, jagged crunchy guitars, woozy effected layers, buried loops, shards of feedback, tense and intense, cleaned up a little, it could be some bit of late eighties gloom pop, but here it's presented in all its noisy glory, rough around the edges, loping and lumbering, crumbling distortion, it's pretty great, but even that hardly prepares you for the tranced out space-psych dirge of "Omen" which lays down a simple motorik rhythm, wraps it in a noisy chugging riff, wreathed everything in reverb and echo, then the vocals, an FX drenched croon, the 'group' locked into a groove that's total space rock trance-out, Loop for sure, but even fans of modern day outfits like Moon Duo and White Hills will find lots to like here, although the sound here is much more raw and rough. "Aktion In A 10/6" lays down a weird robotic beat, and then adds an almost metallic riff, but instead of sounding 'heavy' or 'metal', it's like Stooges at 16rpm, a slithery creep, laced with weird bits of percussion, the whole thing swaggery and snarly and surprisingly rocking.
But it's not all caveman riffage and space rock dirge, "Will To Love" is a wild concoction of detuned guitars, warped percussion, squealing feedback, which gives way to a swirling murk of buried vocals, and low end thrum, disembodied samples, a warped tangle that eventually erupts into some full on noise. Then there's "Avernus", which is like JfK via the Dead C, a crooned minimal bit of pop, wreathed in a cascade of impossibly distorted guitar crumble, and clouds of staticky hiss, or "Black Tower" which is all keening melody, and weirdly wistful poppiness, driven by some fierce fuzz bass, and some occluded noise rock jangle, or "Teenage Fantasy", which is a slo-mo creepy crawly dirge, driven by a buried tarpit rhythm, and wreathed in wild squalls of guitars and strange voices, effects and crumbling layers of sound, noisy for sure, but also hauntingly hypnotic.
The last two tracks are from the aforementioned 7", the A side a blast of propulsive psychedelic space rock, that fuses Godflesh like programmed beats to corrosive guitar buzz, and a darkly gloomy Jesus And Mary Chain style vibe, while the B side, a longer version of one of the unreleased tracks is like a super charged near metallic noise rock Moon Duo, which is most definitely a good thing.
Fans of post industrial heavy psych space outs (and who's not????) NEED this! We're so psyched Di Franco's various past projects are getting some long overdue love, and as much as we love that Ax reissue, this JfK record has been getting pretty much nonstop play since we got it in...
This would have certainly been a great fit on our last in-between list of amazing Christian-themed oddities. Otis G. Johnson might be known to some who dug the Personal Space compilation of electronic soul from 1974-1984 we listed a while back. Johnson's track "Time To Go Home" suitably ended that release with a quietly funky, but intensely devotional hymn urging us to prepare for Heaven. Performed on Hammond organ with repetitive riffs and a rudimentary rhythm machine, Johnson's vocals emitting a hushed and mumbled gospel cry turned inward, repeating in a soulful mantra that "It's time". That song was of course from this lone 1978 private press record nicely reissued on the Numero Group label and it has to be one of the most minimal gospel records we've ever heard. In fact, it's almost the opposite of gospel, as its restrained devoutness is so personal and intimate that it seems antithetical to gospel music's more well-associated louder, boisterous display. Reminding us of a rare combination of Zomes' plaintive melodic loops and the soulful economy of Timmy Thomas, the Memphis organist and singer whose biggest hit was "Why Can't We Live Together". Johnson's skeletal organ funk has a distinct charm for being a late night religious listen, filled to the brim with the Holy Spirit, and whispering soft and sweet amens in your ear.
Funny, before we even knew about this, we were wondering just the other day if Andy Kaufman had ever made a comedy album? Seems like every comedian in the seventies had them. Though we didn't imagine any of them to be quite like this. Kaufman was not your typical stand-up guy anyway, so his more famous bits such as, the Foreign Man (which he developed into the TV character Latke for the show Taxi), the Mighty Mouse and Elvis record player bits, and the like, wouldn't translate to a pure audio format as they had necessary visual components and punchlines. But between 1977 and 1979, he recorded 82 hours of material on a new hand held micro cassette tape recorder he bought for himself seemingly documenting bits and sketches in hopes of eventually releasing a comedy record. But this was also a time that marked a turning point in Kaufman's comedic trajectory from the wide-eyed surreal innocence of his early material, into a much darker antagonistic form of humor most noted by his abusive taunts to get women to wrestle him and the creation of his most unlikeable character, Tony Clifton, an audience abusing lounge singer that would sometimes be played by Kaufman's brother or partner in crime Bob Zmuda, as an on-going prank to suggest Kaufman and Clifton were actually separate people. So these recordings definitely showcase Kaufman's more assholic tendencies and the bits are never really "ha-ha" funny as much as they are "cringingly uncomfortable" funny. Often recording prostitutes or girlfriends after they had sex and plying them for details, for instance, or yelling at a cop for a traffic ticket he received while trying to convince his grandmother that the car was driving itself. "Andy, turn that *&*%& tape recorder off!!!!!" is heard often. There are moments where he's actually trying to make comedy bits (often introduced with an annoying narrator for some reason), like "Sleep Comedy" which is only supposed to be played for sleeping people, but there are very few of these, which tells us that he was much more interested in making people uncomfortable with the tape recorder, than he was in making them laugh. Still, for folks who like prank call tapes, the Dion MacGregor dream recordings or Judson Fountain radio dramas, this is pretty hilarious!!
Long overdue reissue of the long out of print 2008 debut lp from Kyle Thomas aka King Tuff, he of psych folk outfit Feathers, heavy psych rockers Witch (along with J Mascis) and aQ beloved power pop combo Happy Birthday, and like the self titled King Tuff record on Sub Pop from last year, Was Dead is a glorious concoction of home brewed power pop, swaggery glam stomp and fuzzy garage pop jangle, Thomas's distinctive whiny boy vocals over crunchy riffs, low slung bass, wheezing organs, kinetic drumming, hooks galore, catchy as all get out, a little bit laid back and stoney, fuzzed out and summery, just total (sun) baked jangle and fuzz garage pop, that ends up sounding equal parts seventies style Yellow Pills pop (Warm Soda / Bare Wires fans will flip) and more modern garage rock a la Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, Thee Oh Sees etc, but with a seriously classic pop bent. We're also reminded quite a bit of another band with a serious sixties/seventies fixation, Redd Kross, we're guessing Thomas is a big fan, if not, they must share some musical genes. Plenty of these jams could easily be mistaken for actual old school power pop tracks from back in the day, the arrangement, the hooks, right down to the recording itself, a little bit lo-fi, but still plenty loud and fuzzy, the perfect summer jams for sure, while it's still summer, and to keep the summer going long into winter as well!
We've been meaning to list this for a while now, but we were always stumped as to how to describe it. It's just so good, and so beautiful and so poignant, we weren't sure a review could do it justice. This is some gorgeously dark, dreamy, stripped down classic finger pickin' country blues, recorded on a 4 track in a shed on the side of a mountain. Cast King is a legendary (around some parts) picker and songsmith, playing since the 40's, even recording a handful of tracks at the legendary Sun Studios. Now in his eighties, these tracks were recorded a year or two back, with just Cast and Matt Downer, who tracked him down during a project to record the music and document the musicians of old Sand Mountain in Alabama.
The liner notes are hilarious, documenting how the two finally got together to "pick" and do some recording. The sound is super spare, stripped down, intimate and personal. King's vocals are warm and rich, weathered but still sweet and velvety. His strumming simple, his lead playing perfect. And his songs are stone cold classics. Any one of these songs, could have been played by Cash, or Jennings, or Haggard and been big ol' hits. In fact if the dice fell just a little bit differently, you'd be seeing Cast King tapes at truck stops all over the US. But as it is, he just sort of faded away, taking his "sackful of songs" with him.
And while this disc doesn't quite make up for the injustice of Cast King not being a household name or a country music legend, it's so damn good to hear these songs now. They definitely sound like timeless classics, so warm and familiar like you've heard them a million times before, but still original and distinctly Cast King. And as far as we're concerned, these are country classics, even if they were maybe never meant to be.
As we mentioned in our review of Korouva's recently reissued Shipwrecks & Russian Roulette record, originally released in 2007, Korouva, aka Miranda Lehman, is probably best know for having that record 'stolen' by black metal provocateurs Velvet Cacoon, but in fact, separate from the hype, it was and is a gorgeous collection of murky, melancholy outsider torch songs, and was in fact the first in a trilogy, of which this is the second part, originally released in 2009, and available again now courtesy of the Khrysanthoney label (and available exclusively from aQuarius), and like Shipwrecks, Sleepwalker is another gorgeously minimal and haunting bit of abstract mood music, Lehman's vocals a mumbled croon, seductive yet mysterious, the music a lush washed out hybrid of haunting chamber folk and brooding slow jazz mesmer, detuned pianos warble though clouds of hiss and static, the melodies lilting and achingly melancholic, tinkling chimes draped over slow chordal swells, and darkly brooding shimmer, faux strings swirling and soaring, everything muddy and murky, giving the proceedings a definite Caretaker vibe, as if these tracks were all culled from some old wax cylinder. Hushed minimal ballads drift into droned out black ambient creeps, which drift into what sounds at times like alternate universe Tom Waits, that sort of Nighthawks At The Diner, dingy dive bar, house band playing mournful laments for all the drunks and lonely hearts, and like on Shipwrecks, there's still a huge gloom/goth vibe, with Lehman's voice reminding us of Chelsea Wolfe and Zola Jesus. But Sleepwalker shows a definite development, slightly more polished, more textured, less lo-fi and raw that Shipwrecks, without losing any of the emotional urgency that made the first record so intense. Gorgeous, haunting, mesmerizing stuff, we of course recommend getting all three, the third will be reviewed on the next list, but you can grab it now (along with the first one, just ask), separate or as a trilogy, all three of these lps come highly recommended!
Fans of the late great Six Finger Satellite prick up your ears, John Dwyer's Castle Face label digs deep into Providence, Rhode Island underground rock history to unearth this rare unreleased record from 6FS offshoot La Machine, a two piece drum, bass, vocals and FX duo, who kicked out some seriously tranced out psychedelic bunkurfunk, stripped down minimal grooves, dubbed out and trancey, everything wreathed in flanger and phaser, like some seventies drum solo stretched out into some minimal cocaine dub-funk, the sound slipping from thick and bassy to brittle and crunchy, not sure if it on purpose or due to the old source tapes, but it's pretty cool regardless, the vocals, fragmented phrases ("Get drunk!", "Get High!"), doused in effects, heavily delayed and sent careening into the ether, dubstyle, each track a single bassline, a simple drum beat, locked tight, unfurling a fuzzed out groove, like the seriously heavy "Too Bad", driven by thick fuzz bass, all wound around some unfunky funky drumming, more echoe-y vocals, snarly and slithery, total late night, zoner party aktion, only the serious headz sticking around to get lost in these gangrenous grooves. "Supermaggot" might be THEE jam here, a bastardized "Maggotbrain" (or so we're probably just imagining), a looped, loopy bass line, over a noisy, clattery, skeletal rhythm, with some seriously Can like vox, modern retro kraut-funk that sounds like Six Finger Satellite stripped down to the bare essentials. Some of the tracks get fierce and noisy, like "Sucks To Come Down", which plays like a track designed for just that purpose, like as long as they keep playing, the comedown might never come, others get slithery and low slung, laced with blurts of electronic noise and malfunctioning electronics, but every track here a late night, divinely druggy sprawl of minimalist bunkurfunk that RULES!
At long last, the always heavily sought after soundtrack to Rene Laloux's 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winning animated feature La Planete Sauvage, an old aQ fave, is available again on compact disc! If the film itself is a hallucinatory masterpiece, the soundtrack - composed by Alain Goraguer (long time arranger for Serge Gainsbourg) - is as fitting as it is brilliant. Like an LSD dosed Isaac Hayes score, the music herein is at the same time both reminiscent of classic early seventies drama soundtracks AND completely surreal and strange. Lots of recurring leitmotifs recast in ever building and changing arrangements, including marimba, Theremin and bird whistles as well as the standard orchestral elements, guitars and funky organs. So great!!
Legend. They picked a good band name - an obscure legend, but legend nonetheless, in the annals of early, epic prog/metal. We first heard of 'em years ago when local true metal eccentrics The Lord Weird Slough Feg covered one of the songs from this record, a track called "The Wizard's Vengeance" - you can find Slough Feg's version, always a live fave, on their second album, Twilight Of The Idols (recently reissued in a 3cd 'box set' by Metal Blade). And the rollicking "The Wizard's Vengeance" is indeed one of the highlights here, it's a real ripper, both energetic and dramatic, but Slough Feg could have easily picked other tracks from this lp that they also could have made their own. That's because From The Fjords, this Connecticut band's only ever release, an ultra-rare private pressing from 1979, is a pioneering early example of progressive epic metal, similar in many ways to the sound that Manilla Road was developing around the same time - and thus also a forerunner to what Slough Feg sometimes sounds like too.
Legend maybe shouldn't even be considered a 'real' metal band, more like a hard rocking prog outfit, often quite majestic and moody, compositionally complex & indulgent. The vocals are perhaps one of Legend's most idiosyncratic elements, being super clean and clear, with some vibrato, capable of conveying intensity and emotion, but also kind of laidback and spacey at the same time, the lyrics mostly mystical, their sincere nerdy/hippie vibe definitely not very metal. On the other hand, like we said, Legend can rock pretty hard, having, most importantly, lotsa great riffs! So that tips 'em a bit more over into metal territory. And the singer does let out a scream once in a while. Their songs' titles and subject matter are also often very metal: "The Destroyer", "Against The Gods", "From The Fjords" (about Viking raiders, naturally). Musically, though, while they may have been listening to the heavy metal of the day, they also must have been big into prog and fusion too - Return To Forever as well as Rush, no doubt. Legend were a power trio and all three members possessed plenty of instrumental chops - the guitar, bass and drums each showing off whenever they can, with complex flourishes. You won't be surprised (and hopefully will be pleased) to find an elaborate drum solo breakdown in the midst of "The Iron Horse", ferinstance (the lengthiest of the two all-instrumental cuts on here).
Lest Legend seem too serious (and only inadvertently silly, with some of their non-ironic mythological/fantasy lyrics), there's deliberate comic relief with "R.A.R.Z.", a tongue-in-cheek track about how they're ready to sell out and become rock stars if they could only get a break. Good thing it's obvious from that song that they knew that wasn't ever gonna happen, and lucky for us too since they were clearly so much better at making a decidedly noncommercial, bizarrely weird and wonderful DIY prog/metal hybrid destined only for well-deserved cult status, that gives the sense of coming from an ancient time, as if we were centuries removed from 1979.
This long-awaited vinyl reissue, which includes a lyric sheet insert, is a European import, limited to just 400 copies worldwide; we got all the copies we're likely to ever get. Someday, perhaps, there will also be a cd reissue of this collector's item on the Vintage/Rockadrome label, but they've been promising it for a while, so we'll see. In the meantime, vinyl types into mystic-proto-epic-prog-metal better grab this now. This would have been a great one for the in-between list we did last week of "heavy ripping freaky prog" stuff!!
RIP guitarist/vocalist Kevin Nugent (died 1983).
Once again, it's time to dig deep into the murky musical underground of the great white north, Finland in particular, home to sooooooooooo many aQ faves over the years: Circle, Aavikko, Pharaoh Overlord, Doktor Kettu, Islaja, Avarus, Circle Of Ouroborus, Dead Reptile Shrine, Cleaning Women, Fleshpress, Magyar Posse, Hanoi Rocks (!), Kemialliset Ystavat, Keuhkot, Smack, Mr. Peter Hayden, Death Trip, Worms, Nightsatan, Reverend Bizarre, Ride For Revenge, Skepticism, Tiermes, Uton, Will Over Matter, we could go on and on and on. Oh and let's not forget recent Record Of The Weekers Billy Boys, who seem like the perfect segue into THIS week's Record Of The Week from another group of Finnish oddballs, The Leo Bugariloves, who are most likely virtually unknown to all but the most obsessive Finnophiles, or Bad Vugum completists, their sound pretty warped and WTF? even by weirdo Finnish standards. The label mentions Suicide, the Residents, and krautrock, which all definitely apply, but the LB's also have a weird sort of lo-fi exotica vibe going on, fusing looped Casio rhythms, to warbly synths, primitive programmed skitter wrapped around angular detuned twang, deep growly vocals delivered in a gruff barked croon, bits of Morricone-ish melody surface throughout, but there's plenty of swagger too, some songs slip into full on glam rock Gary Glitter style big beats, all under fuzzy synthy swirls, and chiming almost rockabilly guitar crunch, others get all Stoogesy, bluesy and buzzy, and still others get sort of Gobliny, some tracks laced with woozy horn bleats, others with swoonsome faux strings, but always, the LB's transform the sounds into their own twisted home brewed outsider avant electro pop concoction, and it's one that's weirdly addictive, and unlike the willfully difficult damaged sonics of the Billy Boys, the music of the LB's is playful, and melodic, and actually pretty fun, sure it's dark and brooding and fractured and fucked up at times, but even then it's often shot through with goofy melodies, or gradually transforms into some weirdly abstract bit of stumbling carnivalesque exotica. We can't help but mention another past record of the week, local outsider one man band Fastest, there's much of the same sort of idiosyncratic cinematic electro rhythmic weirdness going on, but the LB's are Finnish too, so this definitely has that weird ineffable Finnish special something that transforms what could have been pure home recorded weirdness, into something that's kind of warped genius, the LB's peppering their difficult listening with quite a knack for melody, plenty of popsmithery lurking in these buzzing, skittering, twangy, quirky, fractured and fragmented electro pop oddities, so much so, that repeated listens reveal these tracks to be more than just oddities, more like some alternate universe pop gems, that seem to have maybe been slightly damaged in their transmission between universes, and odds are, you'll find yourself impossibly hooked, with any of these tracks liable to get lodged in your head like crazy.
The Leo Bugariloves features members of legendary Finnish punk outfits Terveet Kadet and Death Trip (whose collected works reissued on Jussi from Circle's Ektro label we reviewed and raved about recently) but this is about as far as you can get from either of those bands, sounding more like some lo-fi mad scientist concoction of Devo, Fastest, They Might Be Giants, Dirty Beaches and Felix Kubin all run through some cracked Finnish music filter, and then molded into some sort of surreal David Lynchian Las Vegas lounge act. This two disc collection gathers up all sort of vinyl only rarities, long out of print gems, as well as a ton of unreleased stuff, including a handful of live and demo tracks, those tracks in particular displaying more of the group's mesmeric and murky lo-fi krautrock vibe...
Twisted, and bizarre, and most definitely baffling, but crazy catchy, yet another batch of fantastically fucked Finnish weirdness that we can't recommend highly enough!
Andrew Liles sure does like his monsters. This is part of an ongoing series dedicated, related, or inspired by the monstrous - with a vast aesthetic and conceptual swath that includes plenty of low-brow comedy situated within the sinister and the diabolical mythologies of his thematic conceits. The comical moments are mapped out most obviously on this album - which might very well be the 10th or 11th in this ongoing series - through the retardo-rock ditty "Sasquatch" with its primitive rockabilly swagger and a gravel-gargling M.S. Waldron (aka irr. app. (ext.)) doing his best / worst Tom Waits / Uncle Jim impersonation. Elsewhere, Liles' production is more in keeping with his surreal homages to Nurse With Wound's deranged take on exotica with madman bongo-beats collaged with atonal, vaudevillian piano plonkings, farmyard field recordings, disembodied screams in the night, and slack-jawed slide guitar meanderings. The Perez Prado inspired cover of "Phantom" by the Sisters Of Mercy is a nice touch with its tremolo guitar lines and beatnik bongo rhythms. Liles stomps out another cover with much less subtlty through the crunchy riffage and anti-boogie of UFO's "Natural Thing" rechristened here as "Unnatural Thing" again with vocals from Waldron. The 20 minute "Defeat Of Panga Panga" is the centerpiece of the album as a desolate collage of hand-crank machinery and cracked vocal operatics. Again, Liles owes a considerable debt to Nurse With Wound's sonic surrealism here.
The duo of Andre Foisy and Terence Hannum, aka Locrian, may have started life as purveyors of grim black ambience, and even with the addition of drummer Steven Hess, and an expanding sound that found their black buzz dronescapes blossoming into more rhythmic, and fully realized sonic sprawls, we still weren't entirely prepared for Return To Annihilation, which finds the group's crystallizing into something surprisingly melodic, what in the past might have been slow shifting fields of static rumble, and churning dark psychedelia, here has been transformed into something, dare we say poppy. Opener "Eternal Return" begins with some sinister synth buzz, darkly sci-fi and ominous, so we were prepared for more classic Locrian, but then BAM, the song explodes into some seriously prismatic, synth heavy dirge pop bliss out, think M83, Jesu, Mogwai. Minus the shrieked black metal vokills, this could be any of those groups, super melodic, dense and lush and layered, crazy melodic, epic and majestic, almost a crime it's over after less than three minutes.
But fear not, there's plenty more of this 'new' Locrian to be found. "A Visitation From The Wrath Of Heaven" begins like the opener, all crumbling, pulsing synths, woozy minor key swirls, again, seemingly setting us up for some droned out black mesmer, but instead, in come the drums, some swirly backwards melodies, and the track gradually settles into a sort of dreamy, drifting slow-core, something you might expect to be on Kranky, everything wreathed in psychedelic shimmer, but all smeared into a softly fuzzy, hypnotic rhythmic churn. Although they do drop in some harsh vox right near the end, really, again that's the only thing keeping this from being some weird minimal experimental drone pop. That and the crushing minute long doom/sludge finale, that soars majestically, the buzzing guitars wrapped around wordless vocals, and draped over some seriously crushing drum damage.
And so it goes, the record unwinding in all sorts of sonic directions. "Two Moons" is all softly tangled acoustic guitar, over a buzz drenched post rock lope, a sort of Mogwai / Tim Hecker hybrid, heavy certainly, but more heady and hypnotic than anything, then there's the title track, which begins as a brooding gloom pop, before blossoming into a freeform bit of black metal riffing, but blurred into something much more abstract, a gorgeous sprawl of minor key distorted guitar crumble, before returning to a sort of Mogwai / Godspeed style post rock slow build, albeit augmented with some extra metallic heft and more vokills. The final three tracks drift from hushed buzzy thrum, beneath soft curlicues of reverbed guitar shimmer, noisy blown out freeform guitar noise, laced with wild drum splatter, and harsh howled vox, to the final 15+ minute sprawl of "Obsolete Elegies", which begins as an acoustic guitar / piano threnody, dark, twang flecked swirls, set amidst billowing clouds of soft psychedelia, brooding and dusky, a little bit of Barn Owl maybe happening, moaned vocals, buzzing sci-fi synths, the sound transforming part way through into some strange dubbed out synth-prog, before once again launching into some epic, super distorted post rock majesty, soaring melodies, churning drum crush, all of which fades out into a field of synth swirl and disembodied sitar buzz, muted and haunting, only to eventually explode into a final blast of heaviness, of blasting black metal in fact, chugging and churning at first, before in swoops a second guitar transforming the sound into some insane and epic black prog heaviness, and suddenly we find ourselves wishing for a whole record that sounds like the last two minutes. Fingers crossed for next time.
First off, LOVE the cover painting, by Orion Landau, and his artwork elsewhere on this release, all of occultic subjects like skull faced spectres and winged demons, rendered in garish colors, greens and purples. It's art that looks like it's been taken from the cover to some lurid old pulp sci-fi/fantasy paperback. Then there's the music. Lordy lordy. Portland's Lord Dying sure kick out the hard-hitting sludge jams here on their debut full-length for Relapse - take heavy, and make it heavier! (The Sanford Parker production doesn't hurt.)
As attested to by the ugly, throat-ripped vokills, there's a bulldozing, brute force approach to Lord Dying's sometimes thrashing, sometimes grooving doom, but their metallic constructs have more to 'em than that, with the sheer aggression of their sinewy, sledgehammer riffage enhanced by roiling drum patterns, interesting progressions, and inspired leads, along with the artful use of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects. It's extremely satisfying "extreme music" when you're in the mood for a heavy-duty headbang. Definitely for fans of High On Fire, Red Fang, and the late great Karp (a band whom Lord Dying covered on a self-released 7" single that preceded this Relapse release), among others.
The latest from daydream ambient electronic soundscaper Scott Morgan aka Loscil, comes in the form of this super limited 7", perhaps misleadingly titled "Sine Studies 1", which had us expecting a very clinical collection of super Spartan tones and Raster-Noton like academic minimalism, but instead, the A side here is warm and lovely, softly swirling fields of hum and thrum, draped over dubby percolations, softly hazy and dreamily washed out, laced with swaths of rhythmic skitter, all very hushed and spare, darkly motorik and mesmeric, plenty of space and softly shimmering tones, almost like a dreamier more soft focus Pole, an abstract digidub made even more abstract and almost ethereal. The B side ditches most of the rhythmic elements, leaving just the tones, lush and layered, softly pulsing, shimmering fields of distant pulsations, and lazily unfurling melodies, all blurred into billowing expanses of ephemeral thrum. So nice.
At this point, pretty much the entirety of Maurizio Bianchi's catalogue of cassettes, lps, and compilation tracks chronicling his frenzied output from 1980 to 1984, should have been exhausted by now through various reissue campaigns. But even after the multiple boxsets and reissues, there's still somehow enough material to warrant an exceptional collection of frigid electronics from the latter days of MB's seminal output. We've long told the bizarre tale of Maurizio Bianchi, but here's his background in a nut shell: Bianchi was one of the pioneers of Italian industrial music compressing the already bleak synthmuzik of Conrad Schnitzler into an existentially devastating morass of electronic drones, echoing rhythms, and deadened wastelands. His early recordings were released infamously under the moniker Leibstandarte SS MB, and released through the Come Organisation and laced with Nazi speeches and true crime dramatizations. Bianchi and Come's William Bennett disagree over who authorized the inclusion of the morally questionable Nazi recordings, but those albums sealed Bianchi's reputation as a blunt composer of early power electronics. Between 1980-1984, Bianchi recorded incessantly producing a weighty archive of tapes and albums before he publicly quit music in pursuit of his religious beliefs. The last four proper MB records from that time period - Endometrio, Carcinosi, The Plain Truth, and Armaghedon - marked an aesthetic and conceptual shift for Bianchi as gloomy introspection settled through the work's iron-gray ripples that replaced the panzer rhythms and genocidal allusions. Those four records are easily our favorite work here at aQ; and we're very happy to report that the bulk of the material on Giudizio Finale was composed during this same time period. The first five tracks are drawn from super obscure cassette compilations, with the last three being unreleased material of the fizzing high-voltage patterns of Bianchi's marching drum machines and metallic noise that dominated such albums as Symphony For A Genocide. While a lot of the MB archival collections (especially those Vinyl On Demand boxsets) are designed with the collector in mind, Giudizio Finale actually makes for an impressive introduction to his work. At the same time, none of this material has been featured on any of the reissues so far, well, to the best of our knowledge at least. A limited release of 250 numbered copies.
Few records in recent memory have had us so excited in anticipation for their release, but this outsider visionary gem is so unquantifiably unique that it has worked its magical charm on us in such an intense way that we knew we had to make it Record Of The Week. Even before we heard a lick of music, the album cover, title and artist had us asking so many questions. That simple but puzzling orange cover with a vintage stock photo of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, the mysterious and oddly misspelled title, Liter Thru Dorker Vibes, by an even more mysterious and misspelled artist name, Medico Doktor Vibes. Dorker Vibes??? What on earth could this be? Only a small text in the bottom right corner that said, 1979 Compton, CA and the record label Bi-Russell Records offered any clues to its origins. But the music inside, even stranger still is a primitive bedroom concoction of Caribbean-inflected outsider rock made with electric guitar, kalimba, synthesizer and drum machine that is an equally woozy, weird and introspective set of spell-casting witch-doctor psych groove.
Folks who bought Johan Kugelberg's excellent book on Private Press records, Enjoy The Experience, may recognize the cover as it was featured in that book as well as the opening song, "Diska Limba Man" which was included on the companion musical compilation, but its curious lack of back story in the book only give the record a more mysterious aura as if beamed into our world from another dimension. And it's almost like it was, as this record was just discovered at an Oakland Colosseum flea market only a few years back and made its way to the ever-curious vanity record enthusiasts at Companion Records. Companion, who has brought us some incredible private press reissues from Stan Hubbs, Michael Farneti, The New Creation (whose Troubled just got a vinyl release, reviewed elsewhere on this list), Marc Mundy and Luie Luie, did the legwork (with help from Rob Sevier of Numero Group) to track down the artist, who it turns out is a Guyanese man named Bill Russell, and worked with him to see this unique release resurrected. True to Companion's mission, they have reissued the record in the same form as the original with an old style tip-on sleeve, blank back cover and no liner notes, so as to experience the record as it is, unfettered from preconceptions. However, we did press the label for a little context and we'll get into some of the record's back-story a little later.
Each of the seven songs here vary in tone, but they are united by the instrumentation mentioned above in different combinations and Russell's accented softly mumbled delivery, as well as a seemingly urgent determination to get each song recorded as envisioned. As primitive as the recording and performances are, every song seems to have a deliberate focus, with moodier songs on side one and more rocking songs on side two. The record doesn't seem to have been made to promote himself as a professional or as a demo to make better produced recordings. In that, it is a perfect one-off record, its only obvious influential musical touchstones apart from some Caribbean musical rhythms, might be a bit of Santana and Hendrix perhaps (though this doesn't quite reach their heights, quite the opposite), but we're hearing a bit of Chrissy Zebby Tembo, Otis G. Johnson and even some Suicide in there too. It really just sounds like Russell plugged all his instruments directly into a 4-track, hit record and worked around the mistakes, never letting them curtail his vision.
The opener, "Diska Limba Man" sets the tone with an off-kilter synth sequencer and wonky slow-disco rhythm, the tempo slowing down and speeding up in an elliptical groove while an electric guitar and a tinny kalimba add melody and texture respectively. Russell's voice thickly accented but emerging from an introspective murmer sings of a small musical instrument and the man who plays it, embarking on a hypnotic repetition as the song progresses into a sort of subdued dark disco trance. The second track, "Kalimba Tune", is just that, the kalimba alone in a beautifully played magical weaving instrumental that borders on the minimalist composition of Philip Glass. The third track, "Take A Closer Look" ends the first side with a slow looping organ dirge with a loping martial rhythm, inflected with a simmering guitar melody that adds a mystical resonance. The song urging the listener to "take a closer look at the life you are living" points to the lighter ("liter") and darker ("dorker") vibes the album title implies.
Side two has more of a heavier rock feel. "Givers of Affection" opens with a motorcycle blues guitar riff and what sound like harmonica blasts and rudimentary drum machine in a Canned Heat style, Russell's voice double tracked in a driving falsetto. "Lonely No More" has a more laid back sunbaked Zam-rock vibe, with funky Caribbean rhythms and freaked out synth leads, filtered through homegrown distortion and double tracked vocals layered incongruously into a strange psychedelic brew. "Dig This Calypso" is a stoned sunny and breezy take on the origins of the calypso beat, and we're usually not that big on calypso, but as with all the songs on the second side, this one layered with warm distortion and gritty guitar squalls all filtered back in a lo-fi Caribbean funk groove, makes it one of the better calypso inspired songs we've heard. The final track, "Water Late" is an instrumental with a medium-fast shuffled martial rhythm, and some seriously wonky exploratory guitar leads as if Doug Blunt was fronting some primitive cave rock band like Cromagnon. It ends the record on a slightly open ended note as we're left to wonder what in the hell did we just listen to? But that is exactly the kind of naive quality in this record that makes us want to put it back on and listen to it again, figure out the words and try and put together what it all means, and why for all of its outsider artistry, these songs remain so hopelessly and wonderfully implanted in our brains. And most importantly, who or what is Medico Doktor Vibes?
The folks at Companion filled us in a bit. Bill Russell is an immigrant from Guyana who came to the United States and served in the U.S. military in the seventies. He came from a musical family and after serving, settled in the LA suburb of Compton and decided to make a record. He bought the recording equipment and instruments he used on the record all at once and set about making this one and only LP. He chose the cover image carefully by color because he thought it matched the mood of the record and thought it would appeal to people, even though he oddly didn't notice the Golden Gate Bridge, or at least it didn't register any additional symbolic meaning for him and he didn't have any Bay Area connection. The title though intentional is logically vague. The story goes that Russell saw the recording as a bridge between "light" and "dark" people, but felt that just calling it Lighter Through Darker Vibes was too politically charged and so he twisted the words to "Liter" and "Dorker" in avoidance (this must have been before the word "dork" came into a more common parlance). His hopes were that both Light and Dark people would come together and groove out to his music , though it was distributed modestly with only 100 original copies and went absolutely nowhere. Perhaps now with this reissue, Russell's original vision will finally come to pass. We certainly hope so.
Limited to 500 copies! Sorry no download code.
While Dan Melchior is probably best known for his Broke Revue, and for playing with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly, we've been digging his solo records quite a bit, the weirder the better, with the recent C.C.D.E. Music being the weirdest so far, at least until now. The Heron sports a sticker proclaiming this to be "more experimental" and is on a label called Limited Appeal. Couldn't be more appropriate cuz this stuff is pretty far out, freaky and psychedelic, but not like garage rock psychedelic, more sort of tripped out WTF? psychedelic, with much of the record sounding more like the Shadow Ring, with Melchior delivering deadpan spoken word in a thick English accent over all manner of strange noises, freeform fuzz and warped electronics. FX heavy percussion drives much of the record, that slips from tangled glitchy weirdness to space acoustic guitar strum to dirgy noisy psych to crunchy riffy plod, replete with fluttery woodwinds. Melchior's vocals are also sampled and sliced and diced and looped into the background music, adding still more weirdness, and his wife Letha delivers some spoken word as well, their vocals constantly tangled up and morphing back and forth. We're generally not huge fans of spoken word, but the Shadow Ring style vocals kinda sound cool here, especially with all the sonic weirdness going on in the background. There are bits of atmospheric ambience, and collaged textures, and some moments of truly sublime beauty, which do balance the more unhinged audio experiments, and free wheelin' abstract psychedeic freakouts. Stick around for the closer too, with its rad harmonized guitars and minor key melodies, buzzy and psychedelic and really super cool.
LIMITED TO 231 copies, each one stickered and hand numbered. Housed in a diecut jacket, with a printed inner sleeve and printed insert.
As heavy-ish late sixties psychedelia from the garage goes, this one-off 1969 album from Long Island's Morgen is a worthy contender. The b&w Edvard Munch "Scream" on the cover is perhaps a clue that this will be fairly dark and tripped out, and it is, with druggy lyrics like: "Come take a bite from my gingerbread house, and let your troubles fade away...". That's from the album's first (and we think bestest) track, a definite fuzz psych classic, "Welcome To The Void". The fuzz is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. The singer (who's a better guitarist) delivers some turned on tales of popular nursery rhyme characters, but mainly you'll be hearing fuzzzz. And there's lotsa wild guitar and more fuzz as the album goes on. For fans of Electric Prunes, Plastic Cloud, The Litter, etc. If you haven't found a previous reissue of this already, we now have this limited numbered edition put out in the UK by Phoenix.
Rachel Evans has definitely been on a roll recently, with a very steady and very consistent stream of cassette only releases and with a proper slab of vinyl seeming to come out about once a year for her impeccable Motion Sickness Of Time Travel project. While we try our best to get a good amount of stock for each and every one of her records, it's not always possible. Some escape our grasp, some we only can get a two or three copies which quickly disappear as soon as they hit the floor. But, sometimes we can actually get a bunch. This cassette is definitely of the latter, with is thankfully the case with this new one on Constellation Tatsu, limited this time to a more sensible 250 copies, meaning it'll be around for a little longer than usual. Here, Evans presents a split release with her long-time friend Lynn Fister, the Southern transplant now living in the Bay Area who records under the moniker Aloonaluna. Like Evans, Fister pedals in a bleary dream-pop / komische deconstruction with ethereal, and at times witchy vocals that wordlessly orbit the amorphous synth sequencing and fizzing electronics. The Motion Sickness track is a rare instrumental for Evans, with her streaming waves of sparking synthing tones and slippery undulations of drone-pop narcotic. So nice!
Originally released way back in 2001, now available again, with a clutch of killer bonus tracks, as well as new liner notes from Mr. Mountain Goat himself, John Darnielle. Here's an updated version of our original review of AHWT, which was of course his last record before moving to 4AD, and before the MG sound changed dramatically...
The most lo-fi of John Darnielle's recent albums is paradoxically also one of his best. He spends much of the liner notes explaining how the recording was mostly made on a battered, thought-to-be-broken Panasonic 4-track, the self same 4 track that much of the older MG records were recorded on, and this here record was that machine's swansong, before finally giving up the ghost, resulting in a sound quality that's intimate and warmly fuzzy, and awfully well-suited to his sound. And the songs? While the tried and true prolific Mountain Goats *musical* formula pretty much remains the same with each record (furiously melancholy strummed acoustic guitar, half spoken / half sung vocals), it's Darnielle's lyrics that color each album differently, thus keeping 'em interesting while adding more facets to the expanding Mountain Goats oeuvre. (Yes, we said oeuvre! In the case of John Darnielle this is more than appropriate.) Interestingly, this album has none of the series songs (Alpha, Going To...) that've appeared on his albums since the beginning. Well worth it just for "The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton", which might be our favorite track here, but that one's definitely got lots of competition, nearly every song a potential MG classic, all woven together into one of Darnielle's strongest albums...
So, for fans of the old Mountain Goats sound, the gloriously intimate and stark lo-fi warmth and warble here will absolutely hit the spot. For fans of more recent, full band MG records, at first this might not seem like your cup of tea, but give it a chance, the new songs are really essentially just old songs all fancied up, and hearing them stripped down and raw, definitely reveals the true strength of Darnielle's idiosyncratic songcraft.
First proper full length in nearly 5 years from Planet Mu label head honcho Mike Paradinas, aka Mu-Ziq, and the first Mu-Ziq record we've reviewed in over a decade! So what's changed since we last heard from Paradinas? Quite a bit it seems, at least based on the last record we heard, 2003's Bilious Paths, at which point he still trafficked in a strain of genre hopping short attention span ADD-core, his modus operandi all splattery splice and dice drill and bass, but with the remarkable ability to weave millions of little blurts and squelches into something both melodic and weirdly catchy, densely rhythmic and furiously frantic.
But on Chewed Corners, it seems Paradinas may have mellowed a bit, which is not entirely a bad thing, and we're definitely digging this new sort of sprawling, rhythmic, atmospheric, almost cinematic sound. Check out the opener "Taikon", which starts off with a wistful little melody, before in swoops a crunk-ish beat electro beat, and some thick almost dubstep bass buzz, woozy and moody, shadowy synths, al shimmery and minor key. And while the beat does splinter and get a bit skittery, the rest of the sounds get sorta cosmic and spacey, sounding a bit like some eighties style Goblin-y synth score, swirling processed voices drifting over the top, all tangled up with bass buzzing skitter. Which is pretty much how all of Chewed Corners plays out, very cinematic and synthy, sweeping and epic in places, "Christ Dust" is a plodding synthy dirge, epic and dramatic, Paradinas tweaking it by adding weird ominous low end pulsations, as well as some prismatic chordal swirls, but otherwise it remains moody and atmospheric. "Wipe" does get a bit more stuttery and manic, but eventually remains tethered by some sinewy bass synth and cool cheesy eighties drum bombast, all wound around some swirly John Carpenter synths. And speaking of Carpenter, some of the tracks get downright creepy, check out "Monyth" with its looped minor key melody, that sounds very Halloween-like, but here it's beneath layers of moaning drones and prismatic synth shimmer, not to mention some cool rhythmic skitter, and so it goes, a pretty fantastic collection of epic sountracky electro synthscapes, textured and atmospheric, darkly rhythmic, a little psychedelic and kosmische as well, all of which should for sure hit the spot for the current crop of cinematic synth nerds without pandering to the flavor of the month, and most likely won't disappoint fans of the old Mu-Ziq. We dig!
What would happen if the Shaggs had found god before recording their seminal LP? We've found the answer and it is The New Creation. Recorded in 1970, a year after the Shaggs' "Philosphy of the World" was released, one wonders if the group may have been inspired by the Shaggs D.I.Y. attitude. Hailing from Vancouver, B.C. The New Creation were the most unlikely blend of Christian evangelism with a flower-power hippy outlook which propelled their unique vision through an extremely off-kilter musical vehicle pieced together with leftover body parts: the Velvet Underground taped to the side of the Shaggs chassis with a rebuilt Pat Boone engine under the hood. Ramshackle and tentative, but so earnest and heartfelt and surprisingly catchy. And the lyrics aren't as positive as the music and the presentation might lead you to believe, focusing more on damnation, and fire and brimstone and b
Biblical tales of God's might and power. The biggest surprise is the opening track 'Countdown To Revolution', an epic, acid fried, unstructured freak out with strange effects, 'trippy' reverb, and all manner of TESTIFYIN'!! Creepy but cool!
From the same folks who brought us the amazing Teen Dance Music From China And Malaysia compilation.
Latest from Mr. Lamont Thomas, aka Obnox, former member of the Bassholes and This Moment In Black History, current member of Puffy Areolas, Corrupt Free Enterprise his EIGHTH release in 3 years, a sprawling double lp that finds Thomas, a drummer, who only recently taught himself to play guitar and all the rest of the instruments here, kicking out some of the sweetest jams of his brief solo career.
After a clutch of killer singles, and a handful of full lengths, Thomas delivers a mighty blow in the form of these four sides of howling, super distorted, soulful garage punk bash and howl, crunch and buzz, the whole of the A side a blown out blast of furious pound and stomp, in the red and doused in distortion, some seriously fierce noise rock garage pop crush, it's not until the side closer that some of that soulful side that popped up on past singles surfaces, with Thomas getting all woozily groovy. The B side begins with a blast of distortion drenched hip hop, all blown out beats and echoey vox, groovy and soulful for sure, but also raw and lo-fi, which leads directly into a handful of covers, all delivered Obnox style, including a totally reworked version of Tom Waits' "Way Down In The Hole", doused in buzz and noise and transformed into some seriously psychedelic garage noise, and rendered nearly unrecognizable, but holy shit, so rad! And so it goes, the second lp delivering track after track of gristly, speaker shredding garage punk, and fuzzed out noise pop, with the occasional bit of soul infused into the proceedings. Like all the Obnox before, totally recommended! Packaged in a super heavy full color gatefold jacket, with printed inner sleeves, featuring photos, liner notes and lyrics.
Perhaps most famous for his 1937 cantata, Carmina Burana (whose "O Fortuna" is the go-to score to represent medieval horror and fascist power in film), our favorite Carl Orff works are actually the musical exercises he developed with Gunild Keetman for educating young children. Developed in the 1920's and popularly known as "shulwerk", or "schoolwork", the music is elemental and combines movement, singing, playing, and improvisation. Often played on what is known as "the Orff instruments": glockenspiels, xylophones, metallophones, drinking glasses, violoncello, bells, cymbals, drums, and the triangle, but also plenty of hand-clapping, knee slapping and feet-stamping, the exercises were largely rhythmic and percussive in nature and were designed for instructors to tailor the material to the students specific needs and playing levels. Instructors were also allowed to add popular children's songs and rhymes from their home-country to the repertoire. Translated from the German by Margaret Murray and performed by the Chorus of the Children's Opera Group, The Speech Ensemble from the Italia Conti School, and The Instrumental Ensemble, this Trunk records reissue was originally released in 2 lp editions in 1958. Most songs are under a minute for a total of 85 songs (for this reissue, the lp version has been distilled to 48 tracks on a single lp, but you get 'em all on the cd version)! This UK version features many nursery rhymes like "Pat-A-Cake" and "Tinker-Tailor", but also has some old British folk songs lincluding the very oldest song "Sumer Is Icumen In" and some creepy ones like "The Witch Scene from Macbeth" and "Tommy's Fallen In The Pond", that give some of the singing a spooky feel. But it also hearkens back to a seemingly lost time, where music education for young children was a serious endeavor available and encouraged for everyone. Delightful!
We really weren't sure what to expect from this, a reissue of a lost collection of 'musique concrete' from warped pop weirdo Ariel Pink, when he was in fact, still Ariel Rosenberg, and long before he would perfect his damaged pop-out-of-time style, fusing lysergic seventies beholden FM radio damage to classic pop music tropes all filtered through some woozy drug addled WTF/ADD sonic experimentation. That said, on first listen, these early tracks, from when Ariel fancied himself a "20th century composer", don't sound all that far removed from what would later become his signature sound. Which is not a bad thing at all. The whole 'musique concrete' tag just smacks a bit of pretentious artworld bullshit, lots of comparisons to Pierre Schaeffer and Xenakis and Luc Ferrari, and sure, some of the techniques here are definitely borrowed from those masters, much of Thrash And Burn assembled from varispeed tape loop experiments, abstract collages, processed primitive loops, home made electronics, all fashioned into a sprawling twisted minimalism, but one that to be fair, definitely looks forward to the warped outsider pop in Pink's future. In fact we'd opine that most ambitious underground music makers tend to employ musique concrete techniques, having grandiose ideas and a limited budget with which to realize them. Fucked up 4-tracks are the modern equivalent to the 20th century composer's tape machines. And if this is Ariel Pink's musique concrete record, then hell, 20th century composer Lou Barlow should get some serious kudos for his musique concrete masterpiece The Freed Weed! Cuz there's some seriously warped, tape damaged, fucked up avant garde sound art experimentation going on all over that record...
But really, fans of Ariel Pink, ourselves included, will find much to dig here, a sprawling collection of damaged, minimal lo-fi abstract art pop, much of it in sketch form, as it seems these were culled from piles of busted up old tapes and scratched cd-r's, recorded in the nineties, only recently found on the floor of Pink's Beverly Hills bedroom, the detritus of a crazy prolific composer, and it's easy to see how some of these could have become proper AP tracks, but here, in their super raw and skeletal form, they definitely display another side of Pink, and they perhaps do reflect his interest in 20th century composition, but it's all all filtered through his funhouse mirror warped pop aesthetic. Many of the tracks are really gorgeous, minimal and rhythmic, layered and textured, psychedelic and hauntingly austere, others are like AP pop songs, stumbling programmed rhythms, warbly organs, wavery crooned vocals, everything wreathed in hiss and hum, and still others definitely display an early form of that VHS tape/retrokitsch/eighties Z-movie score sound that folks like Pink and James Ferraro among others would transform into a modern genre. So yeah, all pretension aside, this is a fantastic glimpse into the early years of one of our favorite modern outsider songwriters, it's woozy and warped, dreamily druggy and fantastically fucked up, it's also abstract and minimal, and experimental enough, so that perhaps to certain ears, it could be cast it in a different light, less a weird pop record with experimental tendencies, and more an experimental record with pop tendencies. Either way, whichever you prefer, we like it a lot!
