Trains. Yup, this cassette is all about trains. The sound of locomotives rumbling through the urban landscape. The sound of toy trains clattering in an elliptical pattern. The sound of vintage records that captured the rolling thunder of a romanticized notion of locomotion. AMK is a one-man noise project out of Los Angeles, shruggingly active over the past three decades; and he also runs the highly prolific if not well distributed label Banned Productions with more than 200 titles in their catalog. Much of the Banned / AMK ethos is one of noise indifference, whereby the act of releasing / cataloging / documenting so much work could be seen as more important that the data held within a cassette or a business card cd-r. The amphetamine frenzied Fluxus of AMK / Banned is not without its transcendent moments though, and Spur N is one of those instances. Yeah, it is all about trains - field recordings of trains, contact mics on toy trains, and the vinyl cracked appropriation of thrift store vinyl about trains - but through this crosshatching of quietly collaged loops, AMK has created a beguiling, hypnotic mantra. Yeah, Neil Young digs the sound of trains, too. Look it up.
Seems like not a list goes by without a new release on local label Time Released Sound. And for this we are truly grateful. And once again, TRS does not disappoint, with this fantastic double disc from the oddly monikered The Angling Loser, who is in fact a fella by the name of Lee Anthony Norris, whose debut double cd The Author Of Twilight, seems to have a sort of fishing focus, hence the name, and the packaging (more on that in a moment), but really, it's not so much about the fishing, as it is, the setting, warm, summer afternoons, sun dappled trees and slow moving shadows, softly rippling water, and the gentle sway of the boat, or the hypnotic sound of the water on the shore, imagine those images created in sounds, and that's The Author Of Twilight. Softly swirling synths, billowing softly beneath mesmerizingly trance-like guitar figures, everything wreathed in field recordings, chirping birds, chittering insects, the lapping of water, the vibe is truly tranquil and dreamy, and most definitely fits perfectly with TRS's sonic aesthetic. A few of the tracks seem softly blown out, the sounds crumbling and blurring into indistinct smears of sounds, with almost a Caretaker vibe, while others are hushed and haunting. There's definitely an Appalachian vibe too, but it's an Appalachia in a much more verdant setting, green grass, and thick foliage, deep blue water, and clear cloudless skies, but always with shadows, lurking just out of site, the threat of impending darkness, and of the shadows always looming, gives the music a dark, slightly sinister tinge that imbues the sound with even more emotional heft.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, there are two different versions, there's the deluxe, which in this case, is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a square, hand stamped green translucent envelope, inside a hand sewn flip book, antique fishing photos and postcards, a page from an antique angler's journal, and a printed, two sided insert. Each envelope is also tagged with a hand stamped vintage fishing cigarette card, and each one comes with an actual vintage fishing lure! Then there's the standard version, which comes in the same green envelope, and includes the insert, but leaves out all the rest. As always, WAY recommended.
Seems like not a list goes by without a new release on local label Time Released Sound. And for this we are truly grateful. And once again, TRS does not disappoint, with this fantastic double disc from the oddly monikered The Angling Loser, who is in fact a fella by the name of Lee Anthony Norris, whose debut double cd The Author Of Twilight, seems to have a sort of fishing focus, hence the name, and the packaging (more on that in a moment), but really, it's not so much about the fishing, as it is, the setting, warm, summer afternoons, sun dappled trees and slow moving shadows, softly rippling water, and the gentle sway of the boat, or the hypnotic sound of the water on the shore, imagine those images created in sounds, and that's The Author Of Twilight. Softly swirling synths, billowing softly beneath mesmerizingly trance-like guitar figures, everything wreathed in field recordings, chirping birds, chittering insects, the lapping of water, the vibe is truly tranquil and dreamy, and most definitely fits perfectly with TRS's sonic aesthetic. A few of the tracks seem softly blown out, the sounds crumbling and blurring into indistinct smears of sounds, with almost a Caretaker vibe, while others are hushed and haunting. There's definitely an Appalachian vibe too, but it's an Appalachia in a much more verdant setting, green grass, and thick foliage, deep blue water, and clear cloudless skies, but always with shadows, lurking just out of site, the threat of impending darkness, and of the shadows always looming, gives the music a dark, slightly sinister tinge that imbues the sound with even more emotional heft.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, there are two different versions, there's the deluxe, which in this case, is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, and comes in a square, hand stamped green translucent envelope, inside a hand sewn flip book, antique fishing photos and postcards, a page from an antique angler's journal, and a printed, two sided insert. Each envelope is also tagged with a hand stamped vintage fishing cigarette card, and each one comes with an actual vintage fishing lure! Then there's the standard version, which comes in the same green envelope, and includes the insert, but leaves out all the rest. As always, WAY recommended.
Latest blast of tranced out black buzz from this Arcata horde, and quite possibly their best, which is saying a lot considering how much we've dug pretty much every goddamn thing they've released. We were actually lucky enough very recently to see these guys play in the middle of the night, in the middle of the forest, barely lit on a stage in the middle of nowhere, beneath millions of stars, and it was seriously transcendent, their songs less 'songs' and more sort of movements, organic fields of dense droned out sound, totally mesmerizing and utterly hypnotic, the sort of buzzing blackness that simultaneously inspires frenzied headbanging AND lulls you into a glorious torpor. We were sprawled out on a big rock right in front of the stage, and the sound was overwhelming, we were totally entranced, and that vibe is perfectly reproduced here. the band infusing their raw black buzz with more melody then ever, but without losing any of the furious blackened energy that made their music so compelling. Two side long tracks, the first, beginning all washed out and shimmery, before exploding into a crushing avalanche of sound, one that's super psychedelic and weirdly produced, with at least one passage that sounds like the thundering of horses' hooves orchestrated into dense squalls of buzzing black noise. And of course for all the tranced out stretches of blurry buzz, there are sprawls of lumbering doomic churn, of roiling tribal drum driven drones, even some Caretaker-ish drift, all gauzy and woozy and hauntingly lovely.
The B side too, begins with a long intro, of super melodic, minor key guitar, slow smoldering riffage, over chiming tones, and strange industrial rumbles and pulsations, and this time, instead of exploding into buzzing blackness, the sound blossoms into a loping doom, all spidery distorted guitars, and pounding double kick drumming, although that moody doom does eventually burst into more furious blackness, a churning heaviness that seems to somehow be both doom and black metal at the same time. more midtempo than blast, but the energy is pure grim blackness, laced with soaring melodies, and punctuated by super dynamic arrangements, and unexpected textural and compositional shifts. Some darkly emotional, seriously next level blackness, that while perhaps best enjoyed under the stars in the middle of a deep dark forest, sounds pretty goddamn good right here.
On black vinyl, limited to 800 copies, includes an insert and a download code.
Another new release on the Trensmat label. Last time we highlighted the latest from Italian cosmic psych folk siblings My Cat Is An Alien, and now there's this, the latest from Neil Campbell, formerly of Vibracathedral Orchestra, who now creates distorto electronica as Astral Social Club, having seemingly ditched the ur-drone ragas of his former outfit for something more fractured and beat driven - although you'd be forgiven for thinking this was in fact VCO, based on the first track. Sure there are beats, but they're spare and abstract, and mostly seem to be adding rhythmic texture, to a shimmery field of folky almost Appalachian sounding guitar strum, and swirling, smoldering buzz and thrum. Hazy, and dreamy, and druggy, a glorious washed out drift that's super mesmerizing and ultra hypnotic, and goddamn if we wouldn't have been perfectly happy if this track had filled up both side of this here lp. But this is Astral Social Club, so the second track explodes into an FX heavy frenzy of pounding almost happy hardcore sounding beats, buried beneath an avalanche of swirling psychedelic dream-noise, wild tangles of blown out shred, a swirling, dizzying sonic squall, that sans those beats might sound more like the more abstract moments of Birchville Cat Motel or Our Love Will Destroy The World, albeit with some heavy psych overtones. And like past ASC jams, it's pretty irresistible, in some ways, it's almost like some warped hybrid of caveman techno and Japanese psych, which for most aQ-ers we would imagine would be pretty goddamn enticing.
The rest of the record seems to split the difference between the more dense, driving, beat heavy noisescapey, and more washed out, ethereal kosmische sprawl, "Rainbow Weather" sounding almost like Astral Social Club new age, again, still slathered in buzz and thrum and wreathed in a halo of squiggly effects. But then again, "Twenty-Four Times Yes" swings back into some alien electronica, the beats buried beneath another wild concoction of druggy swirl, fractured noise and playful primitive electronics. "Valley Of The Left-Handed Depilator" seems to emerge full formed from the pervious track, but quickly blissed out into a soaring shimmering dream-drift epic, the churning rhythm, not so much adding propulsion, as just more texture, totally heady and super psychedelic, before things finally finish off with "Boiling Up The Bones", which sounds like Astral Social Club via Kompakt, minimal and spare, but with some weirdo sounds, tweaked percussion, and plenty of twisted shit going on below the surface.
As always, crazy limited, already sold out at the label, we may be able to get more, but probably best to snag one now just in case. And includes a link to a full download of the record as well.
Could this be any cooler of a concept for aQuarius consumption?! It's a disc of urban field recordings, it's on the always-excellent experimental Utech label, and it's by none other than Michel "Away" Langevin, best known as the amazing drummer and visual art director of French-Canadian sci-fi prog-thrash metal legends VOIVOD!! Heck, we love Voivod, we love Utech, and we love found sounds and environmental recordings. And this is a good one. Away, who did the cool cover art in his distinctive Voivodian style, has apparently been keeping his ears active outside of playing in his band, seeking out and recording interesting sounds - from the natural to the man-made, and often musical - while wandering about his hometown of Montreal or wherever in the world Voivod's touring has taken him. As per the album title, the pieces on this disc were each recorded in different cities - Montreal, Chicago, Mexico City, and various burgs in Europe. Edited into concentrated sound-collages, each track here holds many unique charms, rapidly unfolding in seamlessly seguing ambient soundbites, this sorta "plunderphonic" approach to real world recordings getting somewhat dizzying in its kaledoscopic changes from moment to moment. You'll hear the droning hum of passing traffic, industrial noises, church bells chiming, loudspeaker announcements, birds twittering, crowds chanting (sports fans? protesters?), what sounds like an ethnic festival or three, and lots of MUSIC, snippets of many sorts - it's part of our environment more than we know, as this disc proves. Away's microphone was drawn to all kinds of busking street musicians, marching bands, radios playing in stores, boom boxes blaring� there's pop and classical and gypsy folk and more.
These recordings sound celebratory at times, intimate at others, but always convey a sheer love of sound. They definitely transport the listener, as effective field recordings do, right into very specific and "real" yet still somehow mysterious places and times. Anyone who likes the methodology of many of the Sublime Frequencies releases that take us armchair travellers to other lands will enjoy delving into this.
We've read that Away has said, "I've always been fascinated by field recordings, tape collage and musique concrete. I was introduced to it by [late Voivod guitarist] Piggy as a youngster." Still, who would have thought that Away's first solo album would be a disc of field recordings?
It's interesting, since Voivod tends to imaginationally explore the outer reaches of the cosmos in their space-metal constructs, that for this solo project Away would come up with something so "down to earth", but the spirit of exploration is the same.
As usual with Utech, a nicely designed package, comes in slim but heavy black jacket printed with Away's art in metallic silver and white ink. Limited to 500 copies.
Second release from Bird Of Omen, the new-ish project from the man behind Monument Of Urns, whose gorgeous blackened doom, spread out over six super limited cd-r's, was a huge favorite around here. And as we mentioned in our review of Eulogy, the first Bird Of Omen, the sound, while still ominous and doomy, was well removed from the crumbling distorted sludge of Monument Of Urns, and instead trafficked in something more akin to groups like Barn Owl and Earth - dusky and atmospheric, haunting twang-flecked drone-folk.
On What Was Once There Is Now Gone, the sound of Bird Of Omen seems to have bridged the gap between the two groups, taking the more refined melodic sound of Eulogy, and adding some seriously abject atmosphere, the opening track here a hauntingly harrowing creepy crawl, a moody, mournful, melancholy sprawl of distant black metal guitar buzz, blurred into dreamy smears of sounds, laced with delicate piano, and intense minor key chords, beneath which seems to lurk a gristly buzzing low end synth. It's so atmospheric and cinematic, it sounds like it could be the score for some super austere arthouse horror flick, in fact it has a sort of Carpenter credits vibe, especially, when the helicopter synth pulsations surface, and things get a tiny bit kosmische, still within the context of the blackened ambient moodiness.
The bridged gap is even more evident on the second track, which explodes immediately into full on doom. Churning, crushing slow motion dirgery, but dragging some of that opening track atmosphere with it, the choppy rhythmic pulsing synth, the blackened shadowy swirls, all draped over a glacial tarpit trudge, that distant black metal buzz slightly more prominent, and endless sonic death march, that eventually sheds much of the crumbling buzz, leaving just the pointillist piano, and atmospheric shimmer of the first track, the outro returning to that funereal creep that started things off, before one more blast of blurred downtuned slo-mo doom-sludge, but again, while it's all churning heaviness, the sounds are muted, and blunted and smeared into something weirdly atmospheric, washed out and a little woozy, shades of Finnish doomlords Skepticism for sure, but BoO's sound is more caustic, building to a fierce noise drenched coda, before winding down into a strange bit of droned out mesmer, replete with weirdly effected twang, and gristled ominous thrum. Once again, fucking amazing stuff. How some big label hasn't swooped in by now we'll never know, both Monument Of Urns and Birds Of Omen and pretty much everything this guy does, definitely deserves much more widespread exposure, but for now, grab this, and anything else you can get your hands on. You won't be sorry.
Like all the Urns releases and the other BoO, fantastically elaborate handmade packaging, an oversized full color sleeve, with a printed vellum outer cover, released on the artist's own Hand Hewn Timbre label, and yeah, probably pretty limited...
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We flipped for the first installment in Guy Blakeslee's Thirdeye Memories cd-r series, which we described on the last list in our review of Volume 1 as falling somewhere between Fahey-like devotional Appalachia and more droned out abstract looped and layered psychedelic ragas, and for those of you (like us) who felt like one volume just wasn't enough, well, you might want to grab one of these before they're gone, cuz like the first one it's limited to just FIFTY copies (and we do have a tiny handful left of volume 1 if you missed out). Blakeslee is the frontman for psych rockers The Entrance Band, but for these solo excursions, the sound is much more intimate, and delicate and lovely, the opener here is a glistening sprawl of dreamlike guitar melodies, super fluid finger picking, the vibe almost carol-like, a warm glowing swirl of lovely Appalachian folk. But it doesn't take long for the disc to drift into far trippier realms, "Digital Sage" takes the sound of the opener and turns it inside out, flips it backwards, adding gloriously slippery reverse melodies and woozy shimmery FX blur, it's the sort of dreamy sonic trip out we could get lost in forever. And so it goes, the whole record unfurling in a washed out kosmische dream folk haze, slipping from crystalline beauty to dreamily dizzying trippy psych swirl, and back again, perfectly balancing sweet melodies, with something a bit more shadowy and lysergic. Like the first volume, fantastic! And like the first volume, packaged in a simple screen printed origami style sleeve, LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered!
Full length number two from these new wave / chill wave retro revivalists, which surprisingly finds the duo ditching their synths and drum machines completely, and crafting a gorgeous blast of guitar driven, nineties style indie rock dream pop that we're digging like crazy. Just give a listen to the title track, all processed ethereal female vox, draped over acoustic guitar strum, and some shimmery swirls of shoegaze guitar buzz, simple drumming, all anchored by some murky Joy Division-y bass, a hazy swirl of killer hooks, warm psychedelic jangle, a little guitar rock crunch, all sculpted into some seriously catchy gloom poppy dreaminess, that positions Blouse Mk. II closer to groups like the Dum Dum Girls, or Beach House, their sound woozy and druggy, seemingly channeling the spirt of the Velvets and Mazzy Star, through something a bit fuzzier and janglier. Our favorite tracks tend to be the crunchier, fuzzier, noisier ones (check out "In A Glass"), but even with some sonic heft and distorto guitar buzz, the sound remains gloriously washed out, dreamy, druggy and drifty. LP includes download too...
With the breakup of Sonic Youth, we have Kim Gordon's vision and voice coming through her new project Body/Head, a duo with Bill Nace - a New England improviser whose run of collaborators also includes Michael Morley, Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, etc. Nace's freeform strategery of low-impact, buzzsaw guitar blur met with stompbox feedback-dinosaur roar dynamics is equaled by Kim Gordon's intergenerational channeling of Patty Waters and Jandek, in separate but equal parts. The songs are decidedly atonal, zombified, anti-blues numbers, following what Gordon brought to the experimental portion of the Sonic Youth equation, especially, her songs from those obtuse SYR albums. Anybody hoping for "Kool Thing" should know better, as she's long passed out of her pop-tune phase. Small two note phrases waft in and out of the minor-chord slumping strum, occasionally punctuated by squalid scratchiness, purposefully wonked cable hum, and "I just shit my pants" bursts of guitar excitement.
An intriguing collage of manipulated field recordings and mysteriously generated acoustic noises, this release is purported to be authored by the exquisitely named Andy Bronofksi and Fjordor Polygrafovic, who might as well be hitherto unknown Slovakian literary dissidents whose subversive post-structuralists texts led them to the utter dissolution of the written word in favor of the polyglottal mumblings and aural tumors from the urban landscape. Local smokestack Jim Kaiser was responsible for discovering these recordings, and piecing together some of the rougher patches in the Bronofksi / Polygrafovic melange of tape disintegration. Plausible or otherwise, the spacious sound design that these two have produced is a pretty impeccable document falling somewhere near the unsettled tape machinations of Chris Watson era Hafler Trio. The recognizable sounds are few and far between, with cathedral bells chiming away on one interlude and the reverb-clad mutterings of conversations in a bar, cut-up between strange metallic creakings, motorized hissing vibrations, and fingers-on-the-chalkboard abrasions. About halfway through, the duo recontextualize the found text of an unknown woman whispering in monotone in an unknown language. While the content is lost, the intonation of her monotone is that of Dion McGregor's somniloquies, whereby the dreamer speaks to the waking world of what is occurring in her dreams. Burroughs would be very proud... Limited to 70 copies.
We're kind of running out of superlatives for these guys, and new ways to describe the deliriously druggy din they whip up. If only there was a psychedelic space rock thesaurus... So bear with us if it sounds like we're repeating ourselves, but in a way, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because even though every Carlton Melton record definitely stands up as its own album, they all sound linked, which makes sense, as they're all recorded in the same space (the DOME), and are all culled from sprawling mega-jams, but instead of sounding simply 'jammy', it's almost as if these guys are psychedelic shamans, tapping into some alien sonic continuum, that the rest of us just aren't privy to, and CM are the conduit, the portal, channeling mysterious cosmic vibes from the ether, and transforming them into some of the sweetest (and hard rockingest) psych we've heard. The core members of CM are once again joined by unofficial 4th member John McBain from Monster Magnet, and together, whip up another gorgeous blast of wasted zoner dreaminess, and driving tranced out kraut-psych. The opener here is definitely familiar territory, easing us in with a sound that seems like it bled over from one of the other recent records, all softly billowing shimmer, and blurred melodic tangles, abstract and dreamily drifty, a serious kosmische kraut-age vibe, and as always, if these guys had stretched that out to fill up the whole record, we'd have been perfectly happy. Instead though, they mix it up, with "Keeping On" being one of the weirder jams we've heard from these guys, driving and propulsive, drum heavy, with thick crumblingly distorted guitars, and some awesome progged out synths, that give the sound a serious seventies prog epic/opus vibe, that these guys manage to craft into something way darker and meaner, with some seriously kick ass drum pound, and wild psych freakouts, super heavy AND heady.
"Spiderwebs" pairs creepy Carpenter-ish cinematic synth with some lazy sun dappled slo-mo dream-psych languor, while "Sarsen" seems to fade into a jam already in progress, one that sounds like it's been going on since the beginning of time, primal and primordial, another muscly hard rocky, drum driven psych-kraut blow out, again laced with swirling synths and dense clouds of freaked out FX, all the while the band locked tight into some serious post-Hawkwind heaviness, and finally, "The Splurge" finishes things off with a sound much more raw and blown out, sounding like it was captured live, lots of reverb and echo, like they're playing in a big concrete bunker, the sounds crumbling and in-the-red, the vibe sorta German Oak-ish, definitely super bunkurfunk mixed into the slow-burn psych, noisy, and trippy and fucking awesome.
Killer psychedelic cover art. The cd is housed in a digipak, while the vinyl comes in two versions, one on green wax, one on black wax with a poster, make sure you order the one you want, they're listed as two different items. (And maybe let us know if you're willing to take the other, if we run out of one...)
We're kind of running out of superlatives for these guys, and new ways to describe the deliriously druggy din they whip up. If only there was a psychedelic space rock thesaurus... So bear with us if it sounds like we're repeating ourselves, but in a way, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because even though every Carlton Melton record definitely stands up as its own album, they all sound linked, which makes sense, as they're all recorded in the same space (the DOME), and are all culled from sprawling mega-jams, but instead of sounding simply 'jammy', it's almost as if these guys are psychedelic shamans, tapping into some alien sonic continuum, that the rest of us just aren't privy to, and CM are the conduit, the portal, channeling mysterious cosmic vibes from the ether, and transforming them into some of the sweetest (and hard rockingest) psych we've heard. The core members of CM are once again joined by unofficial 4th member John McBain from Monster Magnet, and together, whip up another gorgeous blast of wasted zoner dreaminess, and driving tranced out kraut-psych. The opener here is definitely familiar territory, easing us in with a sound that seems like it bled over from one of the other recent records, all softly billowing shimmer, and blurred melodic tangles, abstract and dreamily drifty, a serious kosmische kraut-age vibe, and as always, if these guys had stretched that out to fill up the whole record, we'd have been perfectly happy. Instead though, they mix it up, with "Keeping On" being one of the weirder jams we've heard from these guys, driving and propulsive, drum heavy, with thick crumblingly distorted guitars, and some awesome progged out synths, that give the sound a serious seventies prog epic/opus vibe, that these guys manage to craft into something way darker and meaner, with some seriously kick ass drum pound, and wild psych freakouts, super heavy AND heady.
"Spiderwebs" pairs creepy Carpenter-ish cinematic synth with some lazy sun dappled slo-mo dream-psych languor, while "Sarsen" seems to fade into a jam already in progress, one that sounds like it's been going on since the beginning of time, primal and primordial, another muscly hard rocky, drum driven psych-kraut blow out, again laced with swirling synths and dense clouds of freaked out FX, all the while the band locked tight into some serious post-Hawkwind heaviness, and finally, "The Splurge" finishes things off with a sound much more raw and blown out, sounding like it was captured live, lots of reverb and echo, like they're playing in a big concrete bunker, the sounds crumbling and in-the-red, the vibe sorta German Oak-ish, definitely super bunkurfunk mixed into the slow-burn psych, noisy, and trippy and fucking awesome.
Killer psychedelic cover art. The cd is housed in a digipak, while the vinyl comes in two versions, one on green wax, one on black wax with a poster, make sure you order the one you want, they're listed as two different items. (And maybe let us know if you're willing to take the other, if we run out of one...)
We're kind of running out of superlatives for these guys, and new ways to describe the deliriously druggy din they whip up. If only there was a psychedelic space rock thesaurus... So bear with us if it sounds like we're repeating ourselves, but in a way, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because even though every Carlton Melton record definitely stands up as its own album, they all sound linked, which makes sense, as they're all recorded in the same space (the DOME), and are all culled from sprawling mega-jams, but instead of sounding simply 'jammy', it's almost as if these guys are psychedelic shamans, tapping into some alien sonic continuum, that the rest of us just aren't privy to, and CM are the conduit, the portal, channeling mysterious cosmic vibes from the ether, and transforming them into some of the sweetest (and hard rockingest) psych we've heard. The core members of CM are once again joined by unofficial 4th member John McBain from Monster Magnet, and together, whip up another gorgeous blast of wasted zoner dreaminess, and driving tranced out kraut-psych. The opener here is definitely familiar territory, easing us in with a sound that seems like it bled over from one of the other recent records, all softly billowing shimmer, and blurred melodic tangles, abstract and dreamily drifty, a serious kosmische kraut-age vibe, and as always, if these guys had stretched that out to fill up the whole record, we'd have been perfectly happy. Instead though, they mix it up, with "Keeping On" being one of the weirder jams we've heard from these guys, driving and propulsive, drum heavy, with thick crumblingly distorted guitars, and some awesome progged out synths, that give the sound a serious seventies prog epic/opus vibe, that these guys manage to craft into something way darker and meaner, with some seriously kick ass drum pound, and wild psych freakouts, super heavy AND heady.
"Spiderwebs" pairs creepy Carpenter-ish cinematic synth with some lazy sun dappled slo-mo dream-psych languor, while "Sarsen" seems to fade into a jam already in progress, one that sounds like it's been going on since the beginning of time, primal and primordial, another muscly hard rocky, drum driven psych-kraut blow out, again laced with swirling synths and dense clouds of freaked out FX, all the while the band locked tight into some serious post-Hawkwind heaviness, and finally, "The Splurge" finishes things off with a sound much more raw and blown out, sounding like it was captured live, lots of reverb and echo, like they're playing in a big concrete bunker, the sounds crumbling and in-the-red, the vibe sorta German Oak-ish, definitely super bunkurfunk mixed into the slow-burn psych, noisy, and trippy and fucking awesome.
Killer psychedelic cover art. The cd is housed in a digipak, while the vinyl comes in two versions, one on green wax, one on black wax with a poster, make sure you order the one you want, they're listed as two different items. (And maybe let us know if you're willing to take the other, if we run out of one...)
We got a very small handful of these, the last copies in fact, released as an exclusive for the Stella Natura festival, which took place a few weeks back in the woods up near Lake Tahoe, and featured a crazy collection of bands performing on stages set up in the forest. Some of the performers included Esoteric, Stargazer, Sutekh Hexen, Saturnalia Temple, Ash Borer, Hell, Aldebaran, Dispirit, Hexvessel, Kinit Her, Loss, Knelt Rote and a bunch more.
This document of local experimental ambient doom-drone outfit Common Eider (which now boasts our very own Andee on drums), features four lengthy tracks, and documents CEKE's shift into darker realms, featuring Andy Way from Sutekh Hexen on vocals, CEKE's usual haunting arrangements of ritualistic chorales, and swoonsome viola drones, are augmented by harsh, whispered vokills, that occasionally erupt into near demonic shrieks.
The opener, "Uksur" is a dark ritualistic incantation, that fuses black ambience to Arvo Part like sweeping epic-ry, infusing that hybrid with a blackened malevolence, the whole thing blurred into a darkly dreamy, ashen sonic sprawl. "As The Soil Rises Up Past Our Bodies" continues the descent into darkness, layered vocals drift atop a bed of tape hiss and distant rumbles, meditative and liturgical, a harrowing and haunting soundscape that evokes barren wastelands, crumbling cathedrals and black skies casting entire civilizations in shadow, the vocals slipping into a higher register for the final movement, adding a dramatic pathos to the proceedings. Also included is an excerpt of the fantastic "Sense Of Place", which was released via aQ as a super deluxe book/cd/dvd combo (later as a stripped down bookless version), chronicling the building of a cabin in Alaska, the music split into two parts meant to be played simultaneously. And finally there's "Caribou People", which is anchored by a dreamy, softly reverbed guitar loops, and gradually blossoms into a beautifully brooding dirge, laced with clouds of buzz drenched noise guitar, woozy Spacemen 3 like basslines, and minimal percussion, all whipped up into a wildly psychedelic squall, that fades into a hazy druggy drift. Fantastic.
And, fantastic packaging - the tape is housed in a multi panel, pocketed mini sleeve, hand silkscreened, bundled with a charred block of wood, the wood silkscreened with the CEKE sigil, the tape, the sleeve, and the wood, wrapped in a silkscreened oversized slipcover, held shut with a printed sticker. SUPER LIMITED. Last copies ever. So act fast if you want one... Mailorder folks, be aware that 'cause of the size and weight of the charred wood block, this will count as more than one item (which will probably only matter if it's all you were to order), so media mail or UPS will be your best domestic shipping options.
Just the other day we had someone come into the shop looking for ambient music on cassette� well, we do have lots of DRONES on cassette, but they're often the dark, dire, experimental kind, at the extreme end harsh and noisy, or at best still fairly grim and gritty. Which is great, but not quite what the customer was looking for. They wanted something more dreamy and blissed out, pretty and Eno-ish in its ambience. We did manage to find them a tape or two that fit the bill, but had this new Dark Matter Halo cassette been in stock then, it would have been absolutely perfect!
Dark Matter Halo of course is the solo ambient drone project of our pal Monte (also of Burial Tree and Time Spent), and this is DMH's latest release, following closely on the double cd collection Hermetic Drone Vol. 1 & 2 we reviewed here a couple weeks back.
This new opus was recorded using both digital and analog technology, a process influenced by Monte's work with another local dronester, Black Thread, who got Monte thinking in terms of ye olde 4-track cassette deck again. And of course it's been released on limited edition DAA cassette as well, though if you check out DMH's Bandcamp page for this release, you can also download a free bonus digital only track, just fyi.
Side one, the title track, is all whispy and drifty and quite lovely, total waking-moments music, ethereal sounds to be heard at the dawn, of the dawn, of something wonderful. Introduced by some appropriate nature sounds, it then flows into gentle, cyclic synth washes, shimmering and warmly embracing, but light in touch, slowly moving along for over 22 blissful minutes. In a word, nice!
Side two, "Under The Sky" (named for the Paul Bowles story) is equally lovely, but a bit darker in tone, denser and quietly "howlier" if that's a word (ok, it's not). The cyclic whoosh of the drones and tones woven into this piece build and build, and go on and on (over 24 minutes this time), still shimmering, but in more of a haunting way. Its prettiness is tempered by a unsettling, foreboding feeling. It'd be a great isolation tank track (for the brave psychonaut) or excellent for cinematic soundtrack purposes.
We loved the first Dead Sea Apes on UK space/psych label Cardinal Fuzz, a collaboration with another outfit called Black Tempest, which found those two groups conjuring up some seriously heady psych-drone drift, and while we loved what we were hearing, we were also sort of curious to hear what Dead Sea Apes were all about on their own, especially considering we had heard them described as 'post rock', but the sound here definitely still falls squarely within the realms of fuzzy, murky spacey psychedelia, with long stretches of rumbling drones, dense swirls of spaced out FX, minimal motorik drumming, super hypnotic and totally trance-y.
The opening one-two punch is a doozy, "Pharmakon" is 7 minutes of dense dark swirl, laced with sitar like drones, and weird low end pulsations, the vibe modern minimalism meets murky ritualistic doom, a shimmering black ambience, that seems to slowly blossom into a roiling soft focus ur-drone, leading directly into "Knowledge And Conversation" which takes that sounds and harnesses it to something more akin to Date Palms take on Spacemen 3, woozy, warbly, drowsy and dreamy, laced with spidery guitars and Morricone like twang, swooping backwards FX and skittery shuffling rhythms, almost like a heavier, meaner, druggier Necks, the track a languorous slow build, that eventually reaches a sort of critical mass, but doesn't explode so much as get more dense and tense, rife with shards of keening high end and driven by pounding drums.
The rest of the record drifts back and forth between short little sonic sort-of-interludes, to sprawling spaced out epics, some tracks atmospheric and dusky, sounding not unlike Earth or Barn Owl, others abstract and dubbed out, sounding almost like some sort of experimental noise rock/dub hybrid, and still others delicate and haunting, aching melodies wreathed in blackened swaths of thrum and whir, driven by slow motion loping basslines, and washed out guitar shimmer.
Gorgeous stuff. Cardinal Fuzz fanatics, and we know there are a lot of you out there, should probably grab one of these before they disappear, and really, anyone into dark atmospheric psychedelia and brooding spaced out psych rock, this will definitely hit the spot.
On the cover, Swedish sensations In Solitude - the blurb being, "Have they made the album of the year?" (No, please Decibel, don't ask that, you're ruining it for us, you know how music/metal nerds are, there will be a backlash.) Too much hype or not, it's an interesting article about an interesting band who have made a pretty cool and unexpected record. Plus: Monster Magnet, Skeletonwitch, Bad Religion (Hall of Fame induction), Ghoul, Shining, ex-Kyuss dudes Vista Chino, Morbid Angel (talking about Covenant, NOT their last album), Grave Miasma, and more, including all the usual amusing reviews and columns (why more Mountain Goats fans don't buy this just for John Darnielle's South Pole Dispatch, we don't know).
And there's a special feature on "The real cost of illegal downloads in metal", but if you buy a print magazine you probably also buy records and cds so it won't be a guilt trip for most of you.
For some reason, we thought we had posted reviews of Grant Evans' noise project Crippling, but alas we had not. Under that moniker, Evans steered far from the genteel ambient songcraft that he and his wife Rachel produce as Quiet Evenings. Instead, Crippling had something of the accusatory, even maledictory tone akin to Weakling, a bandname that was not self-descriptive but directed outward at the audience in contempt and pity. So, in Crippling, Evans invoked the history of noise projects that threaten and provoke, whereas the new age communes reflect and meditate. Roman Persuasion follows from where Evans left off with Crippling, but this cassette is shifts towards more of a post-noise aesthetic on a similar trajectory as Pedestrian Deposit, with creepy-as-fuck, ash-crusted melodies washed onto the crumbled shores of abject noise compositions. Not to worry, there's still the full-throttled explosions of gnarled distortion and guttural bad vibes. Jittery, crank-twitching circuity is engulfed in flanging washes from Jovian storms, squalid amalgams of pierced sawtooth frequencies engage dental-drill nightmares, and monosynth dirges slump into black-noise oblivion. Released on the suitably mysterious noise imprint Vaald, in an 'unspecified' edition, which probably means it'll be sold out sooner rather than later.
Simply superb. The Field could release the same damn album over and over again, and we'd be completely content, so perfect is his signature style of minimal techno. Cupid's Head is his fourth album in six years, a relatively slow pace of output for such top shelf work; so with each album comes the opportunity to savor what Alex Willmer is up to. From Here We Go Sublime was the debut album that introduced the template for all of Willmer's other albums; and like Wolfgang Voigt's pinnacle of minimal techno - the four Gas records - Willmer's success is through the presentation of inventive variations on a theme. His begins with a sparkling arrangement of delicately arpeggiating pixel points and micro-samples, which might have been lifted from soft-rock ballads of the early '80s; and with the skill of a crafty plastic surgeon, he deftly eviscerates an ugly source material and renders it exquisite and wholly refined. All of his taut melodic phrase and clipped gasps of romantic exhortation latch perfectly onto the archetypal Kompakt monophunk techno pulse. The minimalism of Cupid's Head is not one of stasis, as there are rather broad gestures of emotional dynamism even within the framework of a constant beat. "Black Sea" begins with a classic set of The Field's pink-n-pastel electronic colorations, but slips oh so gradually into a more nocturnal set of jet-blacks and engorged reds that really would be the perfect transitory track between Ulrich Schnauss and Surgeon. These long-view structures look backward to how Arthur Russell produced with some of his slowly developed strings that slowly resolved a melody over a 10 minute New York house track. Radiant, glassine, and downright rapturous.
At first blush, the debut full length from local trio Fuzz, sounds a lot like a Ty Segall record, as it should, since Fuzz is actually Segall's new band, which was originally described to us as sounding like Ty Segall crossed with Black Sabbath. Needless to say we were pretty skeptical at first, but their preceding 7"s proved the point, and now that the highly anticipated full-length is here, goddamn if this isn't some seriously heavy garage-psych proto-metal retro-rock radness! In fact, you'd most certainly be forgiven for thinking this was in fact some genuine lost proto metal artifact, the songs, the sound, the guitar tone, all harken back to the classics, that sound we here at aQ obsess over, in fact, if we were trying to describe Fuzz with some succinct rock band math, we might replace Sabbath above with groups like Power Of Zeus, or Dust, or the Groundhogs, cuz it definitely has that old school hard rocking vibe BIG TIME.
The interesting thing about Fuzz, is that while Segall is still singing, he's now behind the kit, and is actually a seriously kick ass drummer, very much in the style of say Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell, busy and loose, slipping from wild octopoidal freakouts to locked in hard rocking grooves and back again, while guitarist Charlie Moothart (who also plays in Segall's band, as well as the Moonhearts) proves himself to be a serious shredder, who should be getting the same sort of love that dudes like Isaiah Mitchell does, in fact fans of Earthless will find much of the jamming here right up their alley, with Moothart unfurling, crumbling, blown out heavy rock riffs, alongside wild blasts of mega shred psychedelic freakout. And while most of the songs her are loose and jammy, with much of the record sounding like different parts of the same mega-jam, rife with lots of space, and stop/starts, stretches of amp hum, lurching abstract almost doomy breakdowns, even some almost-drum solo bits, a few pop gems surface here and there, like "What's In My Head", which would have sounded right at home on any of the Segall record proper, so catchy, with a hook to die for, but still somehow fitting into Fuzz's retro fuzz-rock soundworld. That sound in full effect on "Loose Sutures" which is about as loose as these guys get, the midsong breakdown total heavy seventies psych-prog radness, complete with fuzzed out bass solo, killer drumming, and when the main riff comes back in, SO HEAVY. The record finishes of with three more blasts of blown out riff heavy psych rock that kills, lurching from fuzzy lope, to full on near metallic crunch, to total classic old school heavy psych, and as much as we love pretty much everything Segall has done, this Fuzz record is fast becoming our favorite.
Killer psychedelic space dragon cover art, the lp includes a download code as well!
It was really only a matter of time before Finnish stoner-sludge noise rock weirdos Hebosagil found their way to Jussi from Circle's super eclectic and equally weirdo Ektro label, we're sort of surprised it took this long actually. The metalheads around aQ have long been fans of Hebosagil, whose sound in the past touched on lots of our slo-mo sludge favorites (Sleep, Bunkur, the Body, Monarch, etc.), but who here on their most recent, ditch much of that glacial tarpit crawl for something a bit more high energy, a punked out metal that borrows from classic old school heavy metal as much as modern day pigfuck noise ruck crush, the songs almost proggy in their arrangement, slipping easily from blasting almost blackened blasts, to woozy stonery sludge, to wild noisy churn, to swaggery, almost Stooges-y hard rocking, the most distinctive thing the vocals, which sound really Finnish to us, if that makes any sense, it's not hard to imagine Hebosagil as some twisted Jussi side project, super dramatic and way up in the mix, a raspy gravelly bellow that sounds more like Turbonegro or Scissorfight or Fucked Up than any vokills that might be more appropriate, but it's that strange mix, that makes Lahto so appealing. And while the band may be more rocking these days, they can still lay down some seriously sludgy downtuned heaviness, the band constantly locking into churning caveman riffage and Neanderthal drum plod, but then those vocals come in, and it's transformed into something much more strange, and really, much more fun. Not to say this is a 'fun' record, it's still plenty heavy and dark, noisy and chaotic and metallic, but it's also Finnish, which means it's geniusly fucked, totally batshit rocking weirdness that you can add to your Finnish whatthefuck collection, which by now includes (or really SHOULD include) Circle, Pharaoh Overlord, Ride For Revenge, Undor, Stench Of Deacy, Will Over Matter, Arkhamin Kirjasto, Billy Boys, Death Trip, Dead Reptile Shrine, Steel Mammoth, Uton, Cardinals Folly, Keuhkot, Lurk and we'd imagine a whole lot more.
We reviewed a record from local garage pop indie rockers the Herms way back in 2006, and if memory serves, we did dig it, but Castle Face head honcho and Oh Sees mainman John Dwyer insisted we forget all about that old record, and revel in this new one, which is not actually a proper record so much as a collection of demos and outtakes and unreleased rarities, but all the songs were hand picked by Dwyer, and definitely demonstrate the sort of lo-fi outsider pop what-the-fuck weirdness these guys were capable of, which wasn't really even hinted at on that way more polished record proper from back in the day. In fact, all it should take is a quick listen to the first track, the awesomely titled "Power Joystick", which sounds like some alternate universe Kinks, with way more bass buzz, some trippy psychedelic keyboard noodling, everything just a bit detuned, maybe recorded on a boombox, and with a totally unexpected midsong burst of blown out super distorted baroque pop majesty, before lurching right back into more of their noisy, jangly, wobbly Velvets-y groove. Fuck, so good. We had to listen to that track 5 or 6 times before letting it play any further. And if you dig that first one, pretty much all of Drop Out Vol. 1 is gonna push all the same buttons. "The Organisation" sounds like some weird archival track from the sixties, replete with dramatic spoken word vox, over warbly whirring organ, crunchy trebly jangle and simple drum pound. "Volleyball" ups the fidelity a bit, hinting at the band's more polished potential, but it all still sounds just a bit off kilter, the mix kind of just slightly wrong, the vox down in the mix, the keyboard melodies WAY up front. Hooky, and fuzzy, and jangly, and pretty much a perfect fit on Castle Face. Fans of Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, the Mallard, Bare Wires, and of course Thee Oh Sees will definitely dig. We're also reminded a bit of the idiosyncratic home brewed poppiness of Cleaners Of Venus, albeit the Herms are a bit more ramshackle and garage-y. For every moment of classic garage pop jangle, or fuzzy hooky indie pop crunch, there's some twisted, almost avant sounding blast of fractured art rock to balance it out, or sometimes completely cancel it out, often in the same song. A new (old) aQ fave for sure!
A weird thing happens when we're figuring out our end of year faves. Beyond the record nerd arguing about -exactly- when certain records came out, and the endless struggling of trying to whittle down our lists to a manageable amount, we also often end up with two dramatically different lists. There's the one that we post and share, which features mostly stuff we've reviewed on the New Arrivals list, lots of our Records Of The Week, etc. But there's always another one, packed with slightly stranger faves, guilty pleasures certainly, things we thought maybe aQ folks might not care so much about, records we weren't able to get for the store, or weren't able to get enough to review, but every once in a while, a record that belongs on the first, somehow ends up on the second. Which is almost what happened with this, the first we'd heard from these Ohio indie rock geniuses. It was another instance of a record that just showed up in the mail, and immediately blew us away. We were instantly hooked, even before we heard it, first off, there's the band name obviously, c'mon, how good a name is Herzog, and then the awesome album title and the cartoonishly ultraviolent cover art featuring horrified onlookers peering through the glass at what appears to be a blood splattered nursery, with two very self satisfied looking seals wielding bloody clubs! And then there's the music, the opening two track one-two punch is perhaps the catchiest, most kick ass blast of fuzzed out indie rock noise pop radness that we've heard in FOREVER. So the pop nerds around here began listening to the record like crazy, as in ALL the time, and for whatever reason, it just didn't occur to us that hell, we should try to get these for the store, until someone pointed out just how obsessed we'd become. So we finally did, and after a few attempts to get in touch with the band, here it is, and right off the bat, before we go any further, just know that this is hands down, a contender for pop record of the year. Maybe even top spot on the year end top ten list, regardless of genre, certainly if you base it on how much we've listened to it. Anyone out there in aQ land who's been digging other recent aQ faves like Mrs. Magician, the Ovens, Violent Change, Telekinesis, etc. But really, Herzog sound like a band out of time, think of your favorite indie rock bands from back in the day, Weezer, Pavement, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., the whole record oozes with that classic sound. And while ANY band can fake the sound, no bands can fake the songs, and the songs here are SO crazy catchy, fuzzy, crunchy, hook filled, with super funny lyrics, killer choruses, weird arrangements, all wound up into pretty much perfect jangle rock noise pop jams.
Just give a listen to opener "Fuck This Year", with its cool busy / frantic super dynamic stop/start verse, the awesome lyrics, the super catchy slithery guitar melody, the chorus that will stick in your head only slightly more than the verse, there's warm chiming harmonics, the sound lush and layered, hell, there's even some cowbell in there, and it rules! And as if the song wasn't catchy enough, near the end the band toss in a whole other part, that's somehow even catchier than the song proper. The second part of the aforementioned one-two punch is just as good, with it's slow build opening, and weirdly syncopated verses, wreathed in tangly spidery guitars, some cool crunchy riffage, and again, super memorable vocals, and impossibly hooky melodies, and then after some soaring falsetto vox, and some shredding noise guitar, they do the same thing here too, tossing in a part right near the end, two parts in fact, that are SO crazy catchy, any other band would have turned them into their own songs. But instead, it's just a barrage of constant catchiness that we can guarantee, doesn't lose anything, even after literally hundreds of listens.
And while we could go song by song, we'll just nerd out over one other one, the awesomely titled "Rich People Ballad", which sounds again like it was transported here from 1995, with its crunchy super distorted J Mascis style guitar shredding, its lilting moody indie rock brood, not to mention, yet another classic pop chorus, super heavy guitars, wild drumming, the sort of song you might have expected to hear from Weezer circa the blue record, and yeah, it's that good. And these three songs have gotten so much play, we barely made it to the rest of the record, but there's so much more good stuff lurking further in. "You Clean Up Nice" threatens to give those first three a run for their money, with its flanged riffage, and classic pop hook-age, then there's "Dreaming Man II" which slows things down, even adds harmonica (!!) for something a bit more swoonsome and twang flecked, heck there's even some shimmery slide guitar too, and then comes "Feedback", which is all quirky organ driven garage rock, but peppered with cool oddball pop moments, sounding almost baroque at times, and laced with some seriously heavy noise pop blowouts throughout. There a few more seriously rocking noise pop blowouts... plus throughout, Beach Boys like vocals, Beatle-esque harmonies, and on one track a little Camper Van Beethoven (!), all get woven into the mix... Every song here a gem, worth it alone already for those first four for sure, but really Cartoon Violence is truly one of those rare pop records that really is all killer and no filler, AT ALL.
So totally essential... Indie rock / noise pop nirvana! And for some of us here (Andee in particular), this has been almost the only thing that gets listened to literally every day, for going on six months now... Which is obviously about the highest recommendation we can give...
The jackets are really nice too, the aforementioned amazing artwork with some super cool (and subtle) metallic ink printing, and includes a download code too!
Who'd have thought we'd be so taken with an album that opens with a song about "Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants"? For that matter, who the heck would MAKE an album with a song called "Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants"?? Well, a 63 year old 'outsider' artist, Alabama's one of a kind Lonnie Holley, would, and did. This is it, and it's pretty special.
We highlighted Holley's Dust-To-Digital debut last year, Just Before Music, which was not only Holley's first released recording but also Dust-To-Digital's first 'contemporary' release (as opposed to all their well-researched vintage reissues), and this is the equally fantastic follow-up.
Apparently Just Before Music garnered him some fans, as two of the seven tracks here, including the lengthy & hypnotic 13+ minute "Other Side Of The Pulpit", find him collaborating on the music with Bradford Cox (Deerhunter, Atlas Sound) and Cole Alexander (The Black Lips). At first, we were like, oh no, he doesn't need hipster indie rockers messing with his sound - but actually the music on those songs fits in perfectly with all the other tracks that he did all by himself, so no harm done, and probably a great experience for those guys.
Holley's music, if you've heard the debut, you know is sparse and minimalist, with some thumb piano, some synth wash and warble (making us think of Tennessee's improv hillbillies the Shaking Ray Levis at times), and a bit of simple drum machine and other percussion. Reminds us a bit of some of the tracks on that Personal Space comp of electronic '70s soul. Often hypnotic and lovely, and an important part of Holley's unique sound, the electronics and instrumentation still take a back seat to his singing, the main event here, which we'd have to compare to an "outsider" Louis Armstrong when Holley belts it out, with lots of rough garrrrrrgle in his voice. His more gentle, mumbling moments are more akin to Arthur Russell, as we mentioned in our review of Just Before Music ("Holley's vocals, which come across as a shamanistic Arthur Russell as he sings a primitive-futuristic brew of blues mantras that twist into strange abstracted vocalization").
That's for sure true, and those vocalizations - sometimes multitracked, as on the very much mantric "Sun & Water" - when not utterly abstract, convey some wonderful lyrics, poetic and sometimes quite strange. That "Six Space Shuttles" song, one of the hardest to grok here, has something to do with the Queen's birthday (Queen Elizabeth II?) and how Holley wants to celebrate it by sending "expandable, transformable, solar adaptable" space shuttles the size of "the Hindenburg and the Titanic both put together" off into the universe, and when they come back "they can heal the air and fix the water", and wouldn't that be nice? Not sure if we quite get what he's sayin', but we're digging it a lot anyway. Other songs, however, are much more straightforward, like the aforementioned "Sun & Water", its title the main portion of its lyrics.
What all his lyrics have in common is that Holley is "testifying", as he describes it in his brief liner notes. All his life, he says, he's been testifying, in both is visual art and now his music, testifying about his life, a life that almost ended before it really began, when he was dragged under a car as a small child and left in a coma for three months. His life and thoughts since, both happy and sad, is what he's Keeping A Record Of, in his art and music - that's where the title of this cd comes from. And we're so glad Holley has chosen to share his testimony with us, especially since so much of it is such a "joyful noise", as one short piece here, a conversation with members of his church, makes reference to.
There's been so much amazing, dark minimal techno lately we can barely keep up, and so much good stuff, that even the techno haters here have come around. Recently we've been inundated with killer records from Shed, Terrence Dixon, Chasing Voices, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Kowton, Miles, Function, Silent Servant, and even techno influenced outliers like Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, etc.
You can add Huerco S. to the list. And while we know, a quick Google search, and we could tell you all about Huerco S., his real name, where he's from, what other group's he's played in, all that jazz, but sometimes not knowing anything is way better, especially when it comes to music like this. Colonial Patterns sounds so mysterious, it's murky, and moody, washed out, minimal and abstract, the sounds are crumbly and faded, the beats are barely there, more like buried pulsations, hushed rhythmic swells, a rumbling throb, wreathed in all manner of sonic detritus, so much so, that we're loathe to even really qualify this as techno. It has techno elements for sure, but to these ears it has much more in common with folks like Tim Hecker or the Caretaker, atmospheric ambience, everything wasted and decayed, even the melodies sound half formed, and ancient, as if over the course of the record, they've gradually been eroded, existing now more as sonic shadows, as audio imprints of sounds lost and faded away, some tracks are formed from fragmented vocals, looped into maddeningly tranced out soft focus stutters, which gradually blur into pure sound, the 'vocals' absorbed into something greater, like a way more arcane, abstract version of the Field, the beats are barely ever actually beats, more like skeletal arrangements of rhythmic elements, on some tracks, the beats consist of nothing more than fractured fields of static, possibly the result of gunked up tape heads, yet somehow, the results are magical, and yeah, mysterious. The tracks that do exist closer to proper techno, even those display all manner of warped sonic anomalies, swirling and psychedelic, on the verge of collapse, held together by the most skeletal of rhythmic support, while others are purely abstract arrangements of sound and rhythm, rhythm and sound, dubby, droney, drowsy, dirgey, strange samples surfacing throughout, only to be re-engineered into something wholly other, stumbling, skittering, stuttering, lurching, lumbering, woozy, meditative, hypnotic and mesmerizing, totally alien, yet strangely warm and soothing, tranquil and totally and utterly entrancing. Definitely a contender for year end lists, electronic / techno or otherwise, and a new unanimous aQ fave!!!
Light the seance candles and ready the Ouija board, Sweden's In Solitude have returned from realms unknown to deliver the third installment in an unholy trinity of ominous occult heavy metal, this time distilling their sound with a healthy dose of '80s goth rock and some serious stadium sized chops. While In Solitude's previous records wore their Mercyful Fate infatuation well and truly on their tattered sleeve, Sister takes their sound to strange new frontiers. While the misshapen shadow of King Diamond certainly still looms large over this record, there's just as much influence from bands like The Mission U.K., Fields of the Nephilim, and '80s Damned to name but a few! The production is perfectly sparse and simple, seeming to stretch and creak like rotting floorboards leading to dimly lit entry ways. Singer Pelle Ahmen sounds like a man in a trance, a restless spirit faintly crying out from the astral plane. He still definitely conjures the lower register ghostly wail of King Diamond, but just as often his crooning drawl recalls Danzig, Nick Cave, The Cult's Ian Astbury, and on the album's acoustic opener especially The Sisters of Mercy's Andrew Eldritch (could the album title be an homage??). While the fist pumping heavy metal of In Solitude's previous two records often revealed Ahmen's limits as a vocalist, in the context of their newly stripped down, more rock and roll sound he works absolutely perfectly, totally dominating the record with his unearthly presence. And for all the arcane occultism and haunting imagery, Sister is absolutely full to the brim with hooks and accessibility, often sounding a bit like Ghost (whom they're rumored to be aligned with member-wise somehow!) without all of the Scooby-Doo cartoon hokiness, but with just as much of an eye toward pop songcraft and classic rock'n'roll.
"Lavender" is almost like The Doors soundtracking a haunted house horror film with its Technicolor hints of '60s psychedelia and guitars spiraling with a circus acrobat's abandon over that ever present haunting vocal croon. Album closer "Inmost Nigredo" opens with a lush dreamy opium den crawl, like Pink Floyd at their most clinically depressed, before slumping into a doomy graveyard lurch layered with echoey fluttering black metal guitar leads, sounding a bit like a less obtuse Negative Plane or Occultation. Meanwhile the album's title track and possible album highlight grooves with a serious slithering swagger, seeping through the speakers like the undead sibling of G'n'R's "Mr. Brownstone" unearthed from some forgotten unmarked burial plot! Sister is the perfect example of tweaking a band's sound subtly, but just enough that it absolutely changes everything. In Solitude sound imbued with a vibrant new energy and a renewed sense of purpose, and Sister is most certainly a late in the game contender for metal record of the year, even though some might argue that this isn't (entirely) metal anymore.
(Heck Andee and Allan are both convinced that Sister reminds them a bit of an old fave from the '90s, the reverby Southern Gothic indie garage act the Rock*A*Teens.)
Body Horror is the second record from Iron Forest, whose sound is a dizzying mix of crushing industrial rhythms, blacknoise terror, power electronics, mutated dub and churning downtuned doom dirgery. Longtime aQ list readers might have crossed paths with the man behind Iron Forest, maybe without even knowing it, with him most recently contributing a B side remix to the newest 7" from USBM weirdos Venowl, but going way further back, operating under the name Crown Of Amaranth, a harsh, harrowing drone project that was an early release on the Crucial Blast label imprint Crucial Blaze. Iron Forest definitely displays much of the same sonic malevolence as CoA, but has honed it into something more focused and rhythmic, taking thick swaths of gnarled and gristled sound, and anchoring it to blown out, almost Digital Hardcore sounding beats. The opening track is strangely lovely, a black sprawl of reverbed melodies over distant rumbles, and grinding glitched out buzz, wrapped around a skeletal stretch of dubbed out pulses, and peppered with machine gun bursts of spastic drum splatter, somehow managing to be both grim and fierce, but haunting and sort of space-y and atmospheric. And that carries over to many of the tracks here, although some like "Rust And Decay" sound a bit like the robotic machine music heaviness of Author & Punisher, lurching and lumbering Godflesh like through fields of static and churning doom-crush riffage. The sticker on the front had us prepared for more of an all out noise assault, but in reality, this could have been some weird Wordsound record, or some Alec Empire related jam from back in the day, not hard to imagine this as being some weird Kevin Martin project too (Ice, God, etc.). tracks like "The Divide" lay down warm, woozy swaths of majestic slow build thrum, and inject weird bits of fragmented rhythm, and shards of more caustic noise, but all of that is sort of smeared into the whole, making for a seriously heady and hypnotic listen. In fact barring a few moments of doom-ed heaviness, the whole second half of the record is all sinister doom-death-dub sprawl, beats for doomheadz, haunting, textured, cinematic, noisy, psychedelic, grim and totally tranced out and hypnotic. So good!
Packaged in an oversized dvd-style case, LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered, inside a printed insert, as well as a handful of full color art cards, wrapped in a black on black printed cardstock cover, and held shut by a similarly black on black printed Japanese style obi!
A few lists back we made a record called Ndagga Versions our Record Of The Week, that record was released at the same time as this one, and we essentially a 'dub' version of this record, as in less vocals, a bit more tripped out. But we loved that record so much, as did loads of you, that we figured we oughta list the record proper. And a funny thing happened when we returned to this one to review it, we realized that even though this is the 'vocal' version, the vocals are still a pretty minimal component. That said, some of the vocals are fantastic, and it's nice to hear them incorporated into the dense Senegalese rhythms. Needless to say, some folks who bought Ndagga Versions, might feel like they don't need this one, or more of this sound, but we're guessing lots of folks who read the aQ list are like us, and ALWAYS need more. So this is essentially the same review as Ndagga Versions, slightly altered, so just know that it's much of the same music, but with more vocals, check out the sound samples to hear what we mean, and read on, we recommend 800 Percent Ndagga almost as much as Ndagga Versions... And if you don't have either, you might actually want to start with this one, if you like to hear singing.
Mark Ernestus is probably best known as one half of the Basic Channel production team and record label (along with Moritz Von Oswald). The two also ran the Chain Reaction label, and both continue to make and release music, Ernestus most notably recently remixing tracks by Konono No.1 and Tony Allen as well as co-releasing the amazing Shangaan Electro compilation we reviewed a while back. Apparently, over the last few years, Ernestus became increasingly obsessed with Senegalese Mbalax music, which is super rhythmic, featuring multiple drummers playing wildly syncopated rhythms, the drums augmented with marimba like synths, the music wild and tangled, dense and driving, groovy and funky, dubbed out and super trancey - it's not hard to see why a techno visionary would find this stuff utterly mesmerizing. And thus was born Jeri-Jeri, a collaborative project between Ernestus and a griot clan of Senegalese drummers. At first we were maybe expecting a sort of African/techno hybrid, but wisely, Ernestus let's the drummers and other musicians do their thing, while he mostly mixes and produces. And that THING is track after track of hyper rhythmic grooviness that definitely speaks to the sort of looped mesmer of techno music, here accompanied by a handful of amazing vocalists including Baaba Maal and Youssou N'Dour doing their own thing over these rhythmic workouts. Even with vocals, the drums are obviously the focal point, but there's also sinewy basslines, the occasional keyboard and synth, often adding yet another rhythmic component, and some subtle melodies, some guitar jangle here and there, adding some minimal tonal coloration, and echoes and fragments of the various vocal lines surface throughout, dubbed out and heavily effected even on the non 'version' version, but really, every track here is a glorious celebration of rhythm and sound, of drums as divine, and they sound so divine here, with most tracks featuring both a complement of Sabar drummers as well as a drummer on a traditional kit, the overlapping rhythms, the syncopated grooves, the barrage of beats, cascading grooves, all wound around simple looped melodies, and locked tight, it's totally irresistible, the sort of singular sound that is both dancefloor ready, but also dense and nuanced enough for headphone listening, some track wild and raucous, others tightly wound and darkly groovy, all of them sublime, emotional, and energetic, lush and organic and ALIVE. Drummers, and fans of drum music will be in heaven, but really, anyone and everyone who is drawn to the rhythm in sound, whether it be techno music, world music, metal music, will be hard pressed not to be totally mesmerized by these sounds.
Do we forgive them for the band name? Supposedly, this is a riff on the beloved avant-folk songstress Joanna Newsom, to which we have to ask "What the fuck, Joanna Gruesome? Really? What did Ms. Newsom ever do to you?" Sure, we've lauded the benefit / curse of having a laughably, ridiculously bad name; and this one may be nearing the top of the list, just 'cuz we can't think of a single reason why this band name should exist. But here it is, and fuck if Joanna Gruesome's sound doesn't completely right shine through their questionable moniker. In the best possible light, the name is an awkward commentary on the awkwardness of being an awkward indie-dork who is enduring the awkward growth spurts of late-teendom and who somehow has figured out to play guitar, bash drums, and sing harmonies in spite of the gangly legs and stubborn baby fat. This five piece hails from Wales, and couldn't have found a better home than Slumberland Records, which they share not only with current indie pop darlings Veronica Falls but also stalwarts of the fuzz-pop jangle like The Aislers Set and Black Tambourine. The songs on Weird Sister have a brilliantly schizoid ability to shift in style without sounding out of place at all (belying that awkward teen gangliness, mentioned earlier), with a dreamy, bubblegum pop-punk vibe that crashes into a riotous, overblown riff, sounding like a Veronica Falls vocal harmony smashed into a sugarsmacked noise-pop tune from the Swirlies, one of America's finest forgotten answers to My Bloody Valentine from back in the '90s. Vocalist Alanna McArdle (formerly of Evans The Death, fyi), alternates between the coy harmonizing chanteuse and the charmingly beligerent riot-grrl brat. Come by on a Saturday afternoon here at aQuarius, and the chances are this will be on the stereo. Yeah, a noise-pop classic for fuck's sake!
A hitherto unknown to us British sound artist, Alice Kemp seems to have honed her craft of cloak-n-dagger electroacoustics through the realms of performance art, with this long-form piece being a reworking of the sound designs that were commissioned by the performance art duo Weeks & Whitford. The imagery and allusions from Weeks & Whitford are gruesome (with Rebecca Weeks holding a malformed Eraserhead-like creature molded from livers and hearts in one of the photos accompanying this album) and spooky (a human hand made of frozen wine that melts all over a wedding dress worn by Weeks), in "tracing the scars that are left as the trophies of love." Admittedly, there's only the various project descriptions and photographic evidence of those pieces, but Kemp's sound design must have been a disturbing, claustrophobic addition to those performances, as this album would easily make her an honorary member of the notorious Schimpfluch-Gruppe. In fact, she was invited to perform at the Extreme Ritual festival alongside all of the Schimpfluch artists (e.g. Rudolf Eb.Er, G*Park, Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Raionbashi, etc.) with the participants and audience members alike astonished / aghast at her work. The tick-tock rhythms of a clock brace empty spaces and shadowy rumblings of tactile sounds that could very well be the calving of massive icebergs or the amplifications of blood vessels hemorrhaging just underneath a trepanned skull. Taut wire snaps and VLF crackle slowly enter the fray as Kemp's overarching composition follows what Nurse With Wound's Stapleton did on Salt Marie Celeste, with a leviathan crawl of incremental psychic intensity. Lets hope this album isn't just a minor excursion for Kemp; but as it stands now, this is all we know of... and it's a pro-duplicated cd-r in a nice digipack with an edition of just 100 copies.
The Sahel Sounds label (responsible for Music From Saharan Cel Phones, Harafin So, and many more great lps of music from the Sahel region of Africa) strikes again with this amazing reissue of an uber-rare vintage cassette, the lone album circa 1978 by Nigerian "electronic music pioneer" Mammane Sani Abdullaye. We're told that if you live in West Africa, you'd likely be familiar with Mammane's instrumental music to some extent, as his tunes have apparently been used frequently in the background on radio and TV broadcasts over the past three decades. For us though, his sounds are an exciting discovery! Mammane plays the electric organ, in a fairly minimalistic and repetitive style, his music full of charming, simple melodies; it sounds very live and intimate, recorded with hardly any overdubs (it was done on a 2 track machine) and pleasingly lo-fi, with a little bit of tape hiss (just like we like it).
Some of the songs are woozy, sweetly dreamy sound paintings, others are more uptempo and percussive, with tick-tocking rhythm backing tracks, and Mammane joyously tickling the keys over top. Chiptune/skweee fans might enjoy the more video-game-y blip blip bleep of the calm yet jaunty "Bodo", while the laidback grooviness of the likes of "Tunan" should appeal to fans of the Ethiopiques series, even though this is from a completely different region of Africa.
Many of the melodies are based on traditional Nigerian folk music - as the label's notes say, "Mammane electrifies the nomadic drum of the tende, the polyphonic ballads of the Woddaabe, and the pastoral hymns of the Sahelian herders". Others are entirely original. And all are quite lovely indeed. Such a find.
Highly recommended in particular to fans of Francis Bebey and his African Electronic Music 1975-1982 collection that we also made a Record Of The Week a while back. An absolutely delightful record!
It's a limited vinyl-only edition of 500 (for now, but we can hope that they'll do a cd too).
As of the end of 2013, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art has temporarily closed its physical doors at its Third Street location, with plans to expand outward and upward from that structural footprint. Collin McKelvey and John Davis are two Bay Area media artists who happen to work at SFMOMA; and the two embarked on their Episteme project to document the ephemera and non-Art objects that would have typically gone unnoticed by the visitors and even the staff. A book was published for a short-lived exhibition of the visual documentation of said ephemera. Included with that book was a 7" of processed field recordings of the more banal, behind-the-scenes sounds at SFMOMA. The book seems to be sold out, but we did get a hold of some of these 7" singles of which we think there were about 100 copies in total. Each artist offers their own interpretation with McKelvey taking an abstract, phonographer approach with various shuffles, creaking wheels, HVAC purrs, and forgotten institutional clatter. Davis' track takes an opposite approach, recontextualizing various snippets of field recordings into motorik rhythms and radiophonic swarms with a nice Schnitzler / Moebius vibe.
We were looking back at our review of the last Melt-Banana record we reviewed, Initial T., which we listed way back in 2009, and yeah, it was just an ep, but even then we were bowled over by how these masters of grinding math pop / noise rock, continued to reinvent themselves and surprise us with every record. The surprise that time was a dramatic shift, into a sound more electronic, one that at the time we described as sounding like a sped up Deerhoof, or like Fuck Buttons. And goddamn if they haven't taken that sound and pushed it even further, transforming their sound, which was already insanely unique, and ridiculously difficult to describe, and literally unlike ANY other bands out there, into something even MORE. Just the first track alone should convince you, it's a total mind blower, a dizzying collision of a million different genres, and so many seemingly incompatible sounds, brilliantly woven into some total next level electro-metal-grind-pop weirdness, that manages to be both the weirdest thing we've heard from M-B, which is saying a LOT, and possibly also the catchiest! That track bears some in depth description, since it pretty much sets the template for the rest of the record. Opening with some glistening kosmische shimmer, some field recorded waves lapping on the beach, some swirling heavily effected guitars, those guitars gradually coalescing into some seriously crunchy riffage, laced with thick sinewy bass-lines, kick ass drumming, weird sound effects and wild FX, before splintering into insane mathiness, the song swinging wildly from indie rock groove, to mathy psychedelic tangle and back again, those super distinctive ultra high chirped vox, before the song breaks down, the guitars locked into digitized loops, peppered with blasts of metallic guitars, more swirling sci-fi FX, some wild double kick drumming, that drumming getting more frantic and chaotic, slipping into full on metal briefly, before launching into a final burst of mathy psychedelic noise pop. It's insanely complex, and impossibly dense, and how the fuck do they cram all that into just 4 minutes? No idea, but we LOVE it. And we won't say it gets weirder, or better, cuz that's not really possible, but it DOES stay that weird, and that good, which is a feat in itself, frenetic, hyper, chaotic, mathy, metallic, poppy, crazy catchy, confusionally fractured, some songs slipping into impossibly soaring epic electronic flecked majesty, others collapsing into dizzying grind-pop freakouts, still others getting all avant experimental WTF? Boredoms style noisiness, and even still others exploding in gouts of wild electro-punk jangle-metal weirdness. A few songs find dreamy guitar shred devolving into long stretches of field recordings, or blossoming into super melodic pop experimental video game krautpop, what a fucking amazing and totally weird record! After all these years, Melt-Banana continue to confound, confuse, inspire, freak out, inspire and blow us the fuck away. Every M-B record is so good, it's hard to proclaim this as their best yet, but you be the judge, cuz, really, we're beginning to think it most definitely is. So totally and absolutely recommended!
We first discovered this Greek trio via their mind blowing Som Sakrifis lp on Pan, which was the first time we'd heard these guys, their unorthodox instrumentation (cello, contrabass and oscillators) creating stunning longform modern minimalist dronemusic. We sold tons of that lp, and then tons more of their Roto Vildblomma cd, and at the time managed to get just a few of a deluxe triple lp box set called Spiriti. Well that boxset (which is still available, we can order you one, just ask, it's pricey, and comes direct from Greece so might be a while, but it's worth it), was equally stunning, and was just reissued on cd, so now that it's available at a more reasonable price, we figured the aQ dronelords and droneladies out there, might want more Mohammad, cuz we sure did.
Not nearly as ultra-minimal as the other two records, Spiriti opens with what essentially sounds like ultra doom played on string instruments, SUNNO))) for string quartet (or duo in this case), moaning chords, slow motion thrum, buzz and rumble, slow shifting overtones, rib cage rattling low end, as we're listening to this first track for the fourth or fifth time, we're thinking it's already worth the price of admission. Ominous and haunting, moody and brooding and seriously sinister, but also strangely lovely. The rest of the first movement (the first lp in the box) expands on that sort of string-drone dirgery, woozy chords, melodies that blur and bleed into each other, incredibly heavy, the sound of those vibrating strings and the reverberating instruments totally mesmerizing, and near physical in the way the soundwaves seems to envelop your whole body.
The second movement (lp) finds the band delving back into the more minimal sounds that made up much of the other two records, hushed rumbles, distant shimmers, and near silence, ultra minimalism, at times sounding a bit like the recent record of the week from Will Over Matter melted down into its very sonic essence, the second movement, slipping from that hushed Teutonic rumble, to more moaning strings, and back again, the stringed instruments offering a strangely melodic counterpoint to the barely there low end passages, like Kornos Quartet jamming with Francisco Lopez!
Finally, movement three (originally the 3rd lp in the box), unfurls a rumbling, roiling sprawl of chordal churn, cinematic and sinister, tense and intense, which eventually devolves into another stretch if industrial whir, a field of hiss and hum that's more physical than sonic, only to be augmented by grinding synth swells, and deep low end pulsations, before finally finishing off with another stretch of buzzing string-ed chamber doom. So goddamn good. And absolutely recommended for drone fanatics, and fans of modern avant minimalism.
Like Asylum before it, the latest from doom crust heavies Morne, featuring members of Grief and Disrupt, owes much to the mighty Neurosis, their sound similarly epic and majestically downtuned, with some Sabbathy swing to it too. Looong songs are of course the rule, the five here ranging from 7+ to 12+ minutes, and they're slow going, in more ways that one, the riffs and songwriting seem to take a backseat to the vibe and the sound, so it sort of depends on your mood - dedictated doom addicts will no doubt dig, but some may find Shadows trance inducing, but perhaps not in the way the band intended...
An album that has been lauded as the next great hope for electronica, R Plus Seven marks another curious sonic direction for Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never. At one time, he was deftly composing geometric patterns of drones as the forgotten soundtracks to unwritten Philip K. Dick novels, all of which took 1982 as a technological jumping off point. But things have changed.
There has always been an awkwardness to Lopatin's pastiche oriented aesthetic; and it is not without its charm. On R Plus Seven, the clunky Russian sci-fi allusions dissolve into the intellectual domains of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich in the late '80s who were dabbling with digital technologies, sprinking their chunks of non-melodic synth blort with skittered vocal samples in compositions that wore their technological limitations on their sleeves. Like the recent revival of late '80s EBM, this was a style that we never expected to come back into fashion again. But here's Lopatin taking up this ivory tower aesthetic. Leave it to Lopatin to make another uncool sound seem relevant.
We've been reviewing tons of amazing Chinese indie rock and experimental underground rock over the last year, we even made one record by the duo White+ our Record Of The Week, but have also raved about Boyz & Girl and Dear Eloise, and if you come in the store, you'll see a Chinese Rock section overflowing with artists and titles, that we're attempting to gradually get reviewed and up on the site. One of those groups is P.K.14, one of the longest running (going on 15 years now) and most respected bands in the Chinese underground, and beyond, having won lots of awards and performed with lots of big name bands, this newest record found the band flying to the US and recording with none other than Steve Albini. But don't be expecting any sort of noise rock, P.K.14 are more like Television, or maybe the Talking Heads, their sound stripped down and a little bit angular, the vocals in particular super distinctive, a keening croon, often soaring into a near falsetto, emotional and dramatic. But the music on 1984 definitely suits Albini's aesthetic, a darkly brooding hypnorock, that at times sounds a little bit like Nirvana, at others a bit like the Pixies, the sound slipping from angular jangle to moody minimalism, the traditional rock instrumentation augmented by piano, which is often employed in weirdly angular clusters, giving the sound a dark off kilter sound. And again, this is not super underground, not especially noisy or psychedelic or krautrocky or whatever. This is basically dark moody rock music, definitely bordering on mainstream, maybe an American analogue would be Radiohead, or the Editors, or something like that. But there's definitely some excellent songcraft going on here, and the production is fantastic. The lyrics are Chinese, which makes the sound more interesting as well, but on the lyric sheet are translated into English too, so you can (sort of) follow along. Very few copies of these, got them direct from the label, features some super twisted intense cover art, includes a printed inner sleeve with liner notes and lyrics in Chinese/English, and a download coupon as well!
On The Path To Triumph is full length number five from this long running (since 1996) Canadian black metal one man band, whose only appearance on the aQ list, was in the review for the Eight Acts Of Origin split lp, which featured Pagan Hellfire, alongside such aQ faves as Ash Pool, Akitsa, Woods Of Infinity, and a bunch more. We described PH's track thusly: "Another blast of brittle lo-fi black metal, plenty raw and buzzy, with a cool loping bridge, and some crazy wheedly guitar shreddery". But much has changed in the seven years since, the sound of Pagan Hellfire is still plenty raw and buzzy, but way less brittle and lo-fi, the production pretty heavy and thick, the guitars lush and layered, the songs rife with melancholy melodies and not much shreddery to be found, instead, it seems the Pagan Hellfire of 2013 traffics in something much more moody and melancholic, a little bit depressive, in fact, the record opens with some downright pretty midtempo blackness, that wouldn't be out of place on an Alcest or Amesoeurs record, and even when the song splinters, and explodes into something more blasting and buzzy, the melodies remain, woven into the texture of the song, infusing it with a surprisingly gorgeous dark energy. And that dark energy continues throughout, the overall feel of the the whole record a sort of mournful, wistful blackness, the sound drifting from frenzied grim black buzz, to swoonsome melodic blackness and back again, with most of the record existing right in between. Classic black metal, epic and majestic, frantic and furious, yet rife with haunting melodies and subtle sonic shadows. Really fantastic stuff.
Former aQ Record Of The Weekers Pinkish Black are back with album number two - surprisingly released by big metal label Century Media, their first was on Handmade Birds - and it's another lurching amorphous mass of droning psychedelic deathrock tinged weirdness! Though they may hail from Texas, Razed to the Ground is an altogether unearthly album - conjuring mental images of bizarre alien landscapes, black slime oozing from every pore. It's a sprawling cosmic nightmare, like H.P. Lovecraft chewing on a mouthful of rotten magic mushrooms. Pulsing black ambience throbs like leeches slithering up through damp soil - before erupting in a churn of dizzying cyclical noiserock, all while science fiction B-movie synths swirl overhead and a ritualistic voice chants emotionless in the distant void. Pummeling yet patient drumming recalls the hypnotic grace of latter era Neurosis. The vocals are an eerie lush croon, at times invoking the same kind of dead-eyed fanaticism of Peter Murphy or Rozz Williams but while maintaining a sort of detached ambivalence that actually doesn't sound too far off from Josh Homme. Bass distortion bubbles like tar while insectoid synths hum and whine like something from a monstrous Dr. Who horrorshow. Or maybe a demented zombified Gary Numan. Elsewhere, creeping haunted house piano sluggishly hammers out a funereal dirge before tumbling toms usher in an ominous slab of heavy spaced out synthesized doom rock. Near the album's end, a melody emerges that could almost be described as uplifting. Almost. But it only serves to accentuate the dystopian extraterrestrial bleakness of the rest of the album as the track abruptly fades to silence, before returning with the lonely haunting pluck of discordant notes and the sound of a chill biting wind, ending the record in a way that could be described as about the furthest thing from comforting. But it's certainly appropriate from a band who named themselves after the grizzly scene left behind by the suicide of one of their former bandmates. It's not a pretty journey, but damn is it a fascinating one. If the fringe synthetic avant-garde heaviness of Wreck & Reference or the decayed blackened death rock of Atriarch is your curdled cup of tea, then this is absolute essential listening.
Newest album by this experimental string composer combining Eastern tuning with Western compositional structures. Using a variety of exotic string instruments (cumbus, mandolin and ukelin) with computer and electronics, Pitre along with a cello and a soprano saxophone player create two side-long suites that embrace a soundworld both contemporary and ancient. Similar in feel to the spatial string composition of his last full-length Feel Free, where the performers were given only loose instructions to create a more open compositional approach, this time around Pitre removes that randomizing element and exerts more compositional control, touching on sonic elements of accumulation and dissipation for a fluid composition that breathes with a light touch and a beautifully heavy resonance.
Frankie Rose's Interstellar record, from last year, was an immediate hit around here, pretty much every song was practically perfect, whether it was hushed torch song balladry, or fuzzed out M83 style bombast, or fuzzy sixties girl group garage pop jangle, we played that record to death. So expectations were pretty high for this new one, and on the first few listens, nothing grabbed us quite as immediately as lots of tracks from that last record, but then, as it often does, a funny thing happened, and suddenly, Herein Wild sort of blossomed into something equally special, different certainly, but pretty fantastic nonetheless, repeated listens revealing another collection of shimmery, reverby jangle pop gems. This time around, with a much more glossy production, and a sound that definitely edges closer to eighties style new wave, but it definitely suits her. The days of the more rough and raw garage rocking as drummer for the Vivian Girls, the Dum Dum Girls and Crystal Stilts are long gone, and in its place something much more measured and mature, dark and moody, but rife with classic popisms, and lots of sonic references to the eighties, Rose having grown into quite the songstress, with Herein Wild displaying a serious knack for warm, languid, new wave pop, laced with swirling synths, soaring strings, lilting melodies, and of course Rose's ethereal vox. Not to mention some seriously grandiose, and quite lovely arrangements. It might be a grower, but all it took really was a few listens for this to end up on pretty heavy rotation!
We're slowly working our way through the Rudimentary Peni catalog, as all of their confusingly brilliant releases gets reissued, and as much as we love all of em, Cacophony is one of our faves, a super bizarre concept record originally released in 1989, not really sure exactly what the concept is, but it must be something demented, cuz as weird as the other RP records are, this might be the weirdest, sonically, it's got all the warped death rock weirdness and twisted post punk crush we love, sinewy basslines, jagged angular guitars, the super distinctive caterwaul of frontman Nick Blinko, but it seems like even the most straight ahead songs eventually devolve into total WTF weirdness.
"Nightgaunts" is less than a minute, but fuses garbled deep voiced speaking in tongues with frantic almost metal guitars, burbly basslines, and some frantic hyper punk rock pound, while "the Horrors In the Museum" starts off with a weird spoken word bit, before launching into one of the poppiest RP jams ever, bass driven and super melodic, peppered with some creepy crawly vocals and a noisy psychedelic sort-of-bridge, only to break down about half way through, into a free form noisescape, clouds of crumbling guitar distortion, disembodied riffage, noodly bass runs, and a wild tangle of bizarre voices, sung and spoken, high and low, a demonic choir of sorts, the song continuing to devolve to the very end. And so it goes, some tracks are snarly and swaggery and mean as fuck ("The Only Child"), others are wild and psychedelic and oozing all sorts of wild warped guitar noise, as well as still more bizarre vox ("Architectonic And Dominant"), and others are classic UK post punk, all Joy Division bass and rad angular guitar crunch ("The Evil Clergymen"), we could go on but just trust us, this is 30 tracks, 43 minutes of genius outsider creepy downer death rock noise punk that's equal parts drug addled what-the-fuck weirdness, impossibly hook filled poppiness, twisted over the top art-rock, metallic riffing, punk rock pound, and just tons of confusing non-musical sounds, including lots of voices, to the point where it sounds like a play is going on while RP perform, the production pretty twisted as well, it's not hard to imagine Cacophony as some sort of death rock musical, being performed at a creepy abandoned theater, the full moon lighting the stage through the crumbling remains of the roof, the band garishly costumed and performing for a crowd of ghosts and shadows, wraiths and demons. Total art damaged post punk genius! And as always, adorned with Nick Blinko's maniacally intricate hand drawn artwork.
Finally the 'forgotten' Saint Vitus album, C.O.D. (which stands for Children Of Doom, not Cash On Delivery, nor Care Of The Devil) gets its due with this first ever reissue, complete with bonus tracks. When this album originally came out, back in 1992, it was almost the end of the line for the veteran LA doom squad. Their '80s SST era, touring with Black Flag, long past, Saint Vitus, forever born too late, soldiered on. This was their sixth full-length album, and the only one to feature vocalist Christian Linderson, who was drafted in to replace previous frontman Scott "Wino" Weinrich after he jumped ship for greener pastures - his other band, The Obsessed, was signed to a major label! (For about five seconds�).
Linderson, also known as "Lord Chritus", was best known at the time for fronting cult Swedish doomsters Count Raven, and went on post-Vitus to sing in such bands as Terra Firma, Lord Vicar, and Goatess. His melancholy Ozzy-esque wail was of course a good choice for Vitus, though he sure had big boots to fill, and despite his abilities can't help but rank third amongst Vitus's trio of terrific vocalists (Scott Reagers #1!!!!). Not his fault though that Reagers and Wino were both so godly, and Linderson does a fine job here. Likewise, the music is prime Vitus, being ultra heavy and psychedelic garage punk Sabbath dirge rockers with lots of fuzz and muzz, guitarist Dave Chandler's wild and noisy leads cutting crazily through the cobwebs of these horror-stricken songs. The production, courtesy of (fun fact!) none other than Don Dokken, who was a childhood friend of Vitus drummer Armando Acosta, is somewhat more modern and clean sounding than had previously been the Vitus norm, but music this slow and low just can't be glammed up. And Don sure didn't stint on the bass frequencies.
While C.O.D. is probably nobody's absolute top Vitus fave, its ghoulish Jack-O-Lantern grins and grimaces are not to be neglected either, so true doonheads should consider the remastered reissue of this underrated record quite welcome - as are the two rare bonus tracks now included, "To Breed A Solider" and "The Chameleon".
One of the few remaining members of the Norwegian black metal old guard to still be swinging their rusted broadswords on the battlefield unscathed, Satyricon have returned after five years of silence with their eighth full length, and it's somewhat of a departure from their recent forays into more radio-ready mainstream metal, and it's also a record that a couple of us here at aQ HQ have found ourselves legitimately kind of obsessed with and enamored of. This new self titled record finds them settling into a much more regal and dignified sound. The record heaves and staggers like a world weary barbarian king, slumped upon his throne with nothing left to prove. It's fascinatingly minimal and dreamily hypnotic - shifting like tectonic plates between downtrodden black 'n' roll and desolate, almost jazzy clean guitar passages. It conjures up that same kind of timelost sadness as early Mortiis or Summoning but without any of the symphonic bombast, instead accentuating the simplicity of primitive yet melodic riffing and the occasional minimal keyboard accompaniment, recalling the lonely sparseness of Monotheist-era Celtic Frost or early Burzum. It's much more organic than Satyricon has sounded in a very long time and shows a patience and subtlety of songwriting not often seen in metal. Frost's drums sound like some steam powered machine, cold and martial, showing perfect restraint - his inhuman double bass fluttering like an overhead helicopter. At their most powerful the guitars call out like distant war trumpets, but elsewhere they seem to slump exhausted in the dirt like a doomed wanderer. Satyr's vocals vary from their usual authoritative emotionless growl to hushed deadpan spoken word, with the only major exception being "Phoenix" which features guest vocals cleanly sung by Sivert Hoyem of Norwegian rock band Madrugada, but even his vocals are tainted with a certain steely sadness - the sound of someone in their twilight years, who has done all there is to do in life, and now there is only the inevitable waiting. That feeling of dreadful inevitability is everywhere on this record in fact. A certain confidence intermingled with bittersweet nostalgia and a hint of regret. The production compliments this mood perfectly. The guitars are dry and surprisingly clean. The drums have virtually no reverb. Everything is stripped down and bare. It's a sound that's almost sterile but also possesses a strange warmth - like a shot of strong anesthetic into the gums. It's an album that rewards patience and attention, and while it may not be Satyricon's most immediate record, with every listen unveiling more and more subtle details, we wouldn't be surprised if history determines it to be one of their best.
A bit of a Schimpfluch kick going on at aQuarius lately, and that's hardly an infliction that's for the faint of heart. We recently got in the impeccable, existential blank stare of an album in G*Park's Sub, and now we have this super limited cassette from the overarching Schimpfluch-Gruppe. The loose knit Swiss collective of aktionists, noise tacticians, and performance artists mines the psychologically violent territories of the id, including the aforementioned G*Park, Dave Phillips (aka Dead Peni), Sudden Infant, and Rudolf Eb.Er (aka Runzelstirn & Gurglestock), amongst other malcontents. Here, the Schimpfluch-Gruppe is represented by Rudolf Eb.Er and Dave Phillips, neither of whom are artists known for their subtlety. Surprisingly though, this cassette is a rather slow burning affair based on manipulated field recordings. But lest you think this a droll exercise in phonography, Phillips and Eb.Er guide their composition into something very carcinogenic. Unsettled frequencies from dripping water and early morning bird twitter are extracted and molded into piercing drones, atonal billowing masses, and lurching loops of jittery white noise with horrific exasperated vocalizations from one of those two. Phillips in particular has a facet in his body of work that favors the hellish chorals of Southeast Asian insect noise that can be equally hallucinatory and terrifying; and that's not too far from what he and Phillips are doing here. Something around 100 copies in existence.
At this point, it's probably easier to think of the bands you used to love, who have NOT reformed, cuz this really seems like the age of reunions, not that we're complaining... Some of our favorite bands, alive and kicking, touring and making records again! What's not to love? And while everyone was freaking out about the resurrection of Dinosaur Jr, we couldn't help but think, even back when Beyond came out, Dinosaur's first record in a decade at the time, how amazing it would be if Lou Barlow reformed Sebadoh. We never stopped being a little kooky about that band, as much as we loved Dinosaur, Sebadoh always occupied a super special place in our hearts, in fact both reissues of The Freed Man and III we made Records Of The Week here, and heck, we probably should have done the same for Bakesale, so when Sebadoh actually started playing shows, we were giddy, and when this new record was announced, holy crap!
So here it is, the first new record in 14 years, since 1999's The Sebadoh, and we're pleased to report, it really does sort of sound like it could have come out immediately after The Sebadoh, the sound is warm and familiar, jangly and fuzzy, dark and broody at times, goofy and irreverent at others, but Barlow still has a knack for crafting dark, emotional jangle pop, and his partner in crime Jason Lowenstein (aka Jake) continues, we can only assume, to add his own twisted sonic perspective to the proceedings. And like on past records, there are moments of willful sonic spikiness, and some sweetly schmaltzy sad boy loner folk wistfulness, and this time some countryish twang here and there, but most of Defend Yourself, is just crazy catchy, classic sounding indie rock jangle pop that manages to channel the spirit and sound of the nineties, into something that doesn't sound nearly as nostalgic as it could have...
Both the cd and the lp have a swank diecut slipcover-ed packaging (though we are out of the cds at the moment, grrr).
Holy shit is this an incredible match up. Legendary industrial/noise/power electronics/experimental guitar/drone outfit Skullflower teamed up with local gnarled avant headfuck sci-fi blast-buzz one man black metal horde Mastery for this super limited 12", with each band delivering some of their best material yet. This is extremely limited too, once we run out, it might take us a while to get more, assuming we can even get more...
Skullflower's Matthew Bower has made no secret of his love for / fascination with black metal, and it's been seeping into the SF sound for a while now, but strangely, on a record where he's paired with an actual black metal band, when you might expect Bower and Co. to deliver some kvlt black buzz grimnity, blasting and howling and hellish, this is something entirely different. While it is in fact blackened and buzzy, it's much more atmospheric and droned out, weirdly hypnotic and majestic, keening arcs of blown out distortion, buried melodies, and lush crumbling textures, atmospheric, haunting and hypnotic and yeah heavy too, with a super intense in-the-red production, that gives the sound a feral ferocity, and makes every note feel on the verge of collapse, even though it's all actually, in its own fractured and fucked up way, quite lovely.
Mastery of course is in his own gloriously demented and ultra damaged sound world, delivering the sort of lightning speed, dizzying blackened sonic fury that few others can touch, so much so, that we continue to wonder how this guy isn't utterly worshipped by the grim hordes. Could be cuz it's just too goddamn weird, cuz it really is. We're talking far out freaky WTF beyond black metal outsider genius. The sound twisted and tangled, a buzzing blur, wild sonic smears constantly colliding, the vocals rasping and croaking over squalls of blacknoise, and impossibly furious riffing, not to mention inhuman drumming. The guitar playing in particular is totally next level avant insanity, Mick Barr better be looking over his shoulder, cuz at times this sounds like multiple Ocrilim records playing at the same time, all spinning at 78rpm. Beyond that there's all kinds of weird noisiness too, industrial churn, wildly sputtering drum machines, total black metal bliss out head fuck radness. If you've yet to discover just how fucking mind blowing the music of Mastery is, here's another chance...
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES! Cool colored vinyl, and super striking sleeves, with space wolf artwork similar to the double cd on tUMULt!
We've had half of this before, when the aptly titled Shivers & Voids was released on cd. That 3-track, 25 minute recording is now paired here on vinyl with a brand new ep from this side project of UK dark prog acts Guapo and Miasma & The Carousel Of Headless Horses. The new ep, Mirrors & Tides, brings another assistant into the fold, special guest Mika Ratto from our Finnish faves, Circle! He sings on an epic, ominous, abstract 17 minute track entitled "Coral Butterfly". Keeping with the Finnish theme, they also make use of some interesting metal percussion instruments collected by the late Finnish avant-garde jazz drummer Edward Vesala. And like we've previously said about The Stargazer's Assistant already, the results are creepy, soundtracky, dramatic droned out weirdness under the stars... stirring and sinister stuff.
Furthermore, here's what we had to say about Shivers & Voids, before: It may as well just be one long, programmatic piece, beginning with the nine minutes or so of "Night Soil", a seductive nightmare that finds the listener sleepwalking on a ghostly, imaginary battlefield somewhere, with explosive detonations and snare rolls violently sundering the heavy-drone-gloom that undergirds the track, making it even scarier. The title track then provides a 4 and a half minute interlude of clanking chains, acoustic guitar, and melodic, monkish chant, heavily layered and effected, delving a bit into Richard Youngs experimental folk territory, quite nice... And then "Dream Kingdom", at 11 minutes long this disc's truest epic, also serves up its most baleful bombast.
Should appeal to fans of the aforementioned acts, as well as the likes of Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Darsombra, and anything else you can imagine that would mix field recordings and doomy organ and electronic noise and droning loops... in other words, right up our alley, obviously!
Limited to 300 copies. Packaged in a 20" x 20" poster sleeve. Black vinyl. Includes download.
As we've mentioned on past lists, we've been digging so much amazing Chinese underground music, thanks to aQ pal Ricky, who seems to come in every week with more goodies to check out, this latest is yet more kick ass Chinese indie rock, this time a two track single from a band called Streets Kill Strange Animals, who sound like they've been studying their classic nineties American college/indie rock, and boy has it paid off, the A side is a killer blast of crunchy, fuzzy out Dinosaur Jr / Pixies style jangly noise pop, driven by big drums and laced with distorted sad boy vox, with a second half that erupts into some seriously rad noise guitar freakouts and wild synth tangles, the sound getting more and more shoegazey and noise poppy as the side progresses. The flipside is a bit more subdued, more of a broody indie rock dirge, spidery guitar melodies, buried vox, chiming melodies, simple skittery rhythms, with occasional blasts of grinding blown out guitar buzz, sheets of swirling feedback, but all wrapped around a slow moody groove that's super motorik and hypnotic. Great stuff!
