We're going on instinct here, as the batteries on the Walkman are really struggling to hold any kind of charge. So the playback of these live recordings from the Brooklyn neo-kosmische outfit Afterlife is riddled with erratically warbling tape-speed variations that do make for a cool effect... but this is probably not what Afterlife intended. That said, these woozy drunken drags of tape across the playback head follow our longstanding infatuation with vinyl crackle or playing tracks intended at 45rpm at 33 instead. Here, our dying tapedeck slurs the twinkling tones of Afterlife's crystalline hybrid of Emeralds, Popul Vuh, Klaus Schulze, and Cluster, all performed live at three gigs -- Shea Stadium in Brooklyn, Upstate Artists Guild in Albany, NY, and at a house show in Wilmington, Delaware. Off to buy more batteries... Pro-duplicated, 73 minute tapes in an edition of 100 copies.
Brand new blast of shit kicking heavy rock from this local outfit, who have been pretty much out of action for close to a decade. But this new two-fer on local label Valley King finds Altamont in fine form, fronted as always by none other than Dale Crover from the Melvins, stepping out from behind the drum kit to strap on an axe and man the mic. He's backed up by Joey Osborne, from another bunch of local stoner heavies, Acid King, along with Dan Southwick, also of Acid King, and they're joined this time around by Coady Willis from Big Business and the Melvins, and Toshi Kosai, also of Big Business. And yeah, this is the first new music from Altamont since 2005, but it almost sounds like the first new music since, say, 1978!! Total hard rocking classic rock a la AC/DC, Blue Oyster Cult, etc., with a bit of extra noise rock heft, but really, "Mrs. Creech" could be some long lost seventies B side from some super obscure hippie heavies, sounding a bit like the Melvins covering Skynrd, distorted vocals over some serious Southern rock style heaviness, complete with a cool, weird feedback/harmonic solo. It's not hard to imagine some sixteen year olds parked behind the 7-11, drinking beer, making out, car doors open, tape decks cranking this jam right here.
And then on the flip, they tackle a Blue Oyster Cult classic, which if you weren't sure already where these guys are coming from, well, there's no doubt now, and they do it pretty straight, total seventies hard rocking radness...
Super limited as usual, with awesome Alan Forbes cover art. Swank silk screened sleeves, each one hand signed and numbered by Forbes, and each single includes a sticker as well.
Anywhere began life as a sort of Mars Volta side project, featuring Cedric Bixler Zavala and Mike Watt as well as members of Sleepy Sun and Triclops, but after two singles, Zavala and Watt are out, and Anywhere now seems to have morphed into something a bit more ambiguous, a sort of ever shifting musical collective, which this time around includes Dale Crover (The Melvins, Altamont), Ethan Miller (Comets On Fire, Howlin' Rain), Toshi Kasai (Big Business), Krist Novoselic (Nirvana!), Christian Eric Beaulieu (Triclops), Jonathan Hischke (Hella), Bret Constatino (Sleepy Sun), Matt Holliman (Sleepy Sun) and Cyrus Comisky (Drunk Horse, Howlin' Rain). That's a lot of cooks in this musical kitchen, but it works, and really doesn't stray too far from those early singles, spaced out psychedelic prog jams, all big booming drums, swirling guitars, tangled melodies, buried vocals, the opener is pretty epic and bombastic, slipping into some near Queen like majesty at one point, while the second track drift into a more acid folkiness, all softly strummed acoustic guitars, wild bongos, not sure if it's just us, but we might be hearing a little Comus going on here, which is never a bad thing.
The flipside remains in acoustic guitar mode, sounding almost like a continuation from the A side, the urgent steel string strum, and frenzied hand drumming now augmented by some cool psychedelic lead guitar, the vibe very seventies prog-folk for sure, before drifting into the spaced out closer, all hazy, drowsy, druggy drift, churning rhythms, more acoustic guitar strum, even some harmonica, but all blurred and smeary, and sort of Spacemen 3-ish, a sprawling, smoldering slow build space jam that is seriously psychedelic, and wouldn't sound out of place on Rocket or Agitated, spacey stoner psych bliss!!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! With some seriously kick ass eye popping full color picture disc art by Alan Forbes.
Latest offering from Alexis Georgopoulos's outfit Arp, which this time around moves away from pastoral kosmiche electronics and leans toward Brian Eno-inspired full-fledged pop songs with vocals. In fact, on a surface listen, you might think More was a long lost recording from Eno's Before and After Science period dug up from the vaults. But those who are familiar with Georgopoulos's sonic aesthetics from his early work in Tussle and The Alps know that his influences are played up in loving and dedicated homage and not as easy hipster pastiche. Nowhere was that more apparent than with his RVNG collaboration with Anthony Moore a few years back. He's well aware that if you are going to channel inspiration from important music that you need to make your own efforts stand apart and More succeeds in being a great pop record. And while the spirit of Eno looms large, what More really taps into is a zeitgeist of exuberant '70s art rock from the likes of John Cale, Judy Nylon, Anthony Moore, Robert Wyatt and Chris Cutler. It's a sound that has seemingly gotten little retreading with as much attention to detail as Georgopoulos lays down here. The songs are both beautifully lush and light as air. One might call it baroque-pop minimalism. So good!
Seefeel plus Slowdive plus Locust plus Mojave 3. That's the kind of musical math that should have most aQ customers freaking out just a bit. And what happens when you add all that up? You get the debut from Black Hearted Brother, which is in fact a trio featuring both Mark Van Hoen (Locust, Seefeel) and Neil Halstead (Slowdive, Mojave 3), along with Nick Holton (Opulent Oog, Coley Park), who together have crafted a dreamy bit of psychedelic shoegaze, equal parts motorik krautrock-style mesmer, distortion drenched noise pop bliss out, and shimmery electronic flecked indie pop, all in equal measure, depending on the track, often fusing all of that into something heady and fantastic. Just check out the opening title track, which blossoms slowly from drone-y synthscape, to softly pulsing slowcore, to full on psychedelic kraut-pop space out, the whole thing laced with hazy minor key melodies, warm swirls of soft focus chordal thrum, plenty of drones, and effects and subtle electronics, fans of Stereolab and the New Lines and other retro poppers will find much to love, although the sound is not necessarily strictly retro, it does harken back to certain sounds and groups of the past, a fabulous pastiche of old favorites and new sounds. But that opener is really just one side of the group's sound. "(I Don't Mean To) Wonder" is a very Flaming Lips sounding dream pop trip out, with heavily effected vocals, and some seriously crunchy guitars, while "This Is How It Feels" sounds like some lost Mercury Rev jam, epic and majestic, bombastic, and noise drenched, but perfectly poppy, rife with hooks and melodies, all obscured by clouds of fuzzed out sounds and soft little electronic flurries. And so it goes, from fuzzed out electro-pop ("Got Your Love"), to loping FX drenched minimal psychedelic slowcore balladry ("If I Was Here To Change Your Mind"), to soaring anthemic noise pop ("UFO"), to super experimental psychedelic blowouts, equal parts hushed strummy folk, and free form space jam ("Time In The Machine"), to woozy, warped, damaged downer pop weirdness ("Oh Crust"), to sweet shimmery electronic pop dreaminess ("Take Heart").
Fantastic stuff, definitely recommended for fans of any of the members' previous groups, as well as other modern more experimental pop groups like Phoenix, the Flaming Lips, etc...
Latest sprawling psychedelic space doom epic from this UK crew, a 40+ minute track split over two sides of an lp. Longtime fans no doubt know what to expect, and won't be disappointed, and there are a few surprises lurking amidst the swirling clouds of sonic bongsmoke. Newbies to the delightfully druggy world of Bong will find this as good a place to start as any. In fact, this time around, the guys in Bong lure you in gently, opening with a hazy, heady bit of psychedelic drift, all Eastern melodies, and droned out softly buzzing raga. Soon, a thick low end swell surfaces, adding some serious sonic heft, pulsing and throbbing beneath the field of hazy psych-drift mesmer, we'd have been perfectly happy if this dreamy creep was all there was, a gorgeously laid back dreamdirge that spread out over two sides of vinyl, would be fantastically soporific, but about 5 minutes in, you'll notice something out of the ordinary: vocals. And not just any vocals - haunting, witchy, female vocals, delivering in a wordless croon, a sort of zoned out incantation, the whole thing hauntingly ritualistic, and remember what we said a few sentences back? Well, by the end of side one we were almost convinced that Idle Days was gonna be just this gorgeously slow smolder. But fear not, the B side fades in mid-jam, as if minutes, or perhaps even hours, of free form freakouts took place in the mere moments it took to flip the record over. The B side much more recognizable as spaced out psychedelia, simple dirge-y drumming, beneath a cloud of swirling tangled melodies and drifting textures, drones and textures, the raga vibe still in full effect, but here woven into a lumbering motorik dirge, laced with what sounds distinctly like piano (!), the sound abstract and constantly shifting, the drums anchoring the rest of the music, but even then, the sound flits from doom-ic crawl, to loping post rock, to almost jazzy shuffles, often dropping out completely, letting the rest of the instruments drift freely, only to swing back into action, and lock right back into another head nodding, droned out zoner-psych groove, the whole thing eventually petering out, the drums sputtering to a halt, the guitars fading into the ether, leaving just reverbed ripples of sound, which also eventually disappear into a final woozy, washed out coda.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES, on 180 gram black vinyl. Includes a download code.
The latest from these psychedelic krautrockers sees the band pushing in a decidedly different direction, at least on the opening track, which is straight up fusiony psych-kraut funkiness. And we're not talking slightly funky, we're talking total kraut-funk FUNK, groovy rhythms, wild percussion, slithery guitar jangle, woozy, burbly basslines, some spidery wah wah guitar leads, definitely pretty tranced out and hypnotic still, but definitely seriously funky. This IS however, Cave after all, so we were prepared for something twisted to maybe happen, yet after 4 or 5 minutes we were convinced maybe we were mistaken, and the band had decided to just go for it, but then, BAM, super heavy guitars swoop in, for some heavy rock riffage, still funky, but now a sort of seventies style heavy rock groove, like a super charged James Gang or something, totally psychedelic, and spacey, and yeah, funky and groovy, but more like Goat sort of, once those guitars kick in, a total heavy groove rock bliss out. But it only lasts a few minutes, soon, the guitars peel away, as does much of the funk, leaving just a super spare sprawl of pulsing, shuffling, grooving minimalism. Strange, but seriously cool.
From there on out, the band slip back into more familiar Cave territory, the groovy kraut-y hypnorock of "Silver Headband", that sounds like a more crystalline and sun dappled Circle, replete with constantly shifting sonic cycles, layered melodies, and again, near the end, some seriously heavy, almost metallic guitar crunch, the song exploding into yet another blast of rad riffiness. And the funk isn't gone, it resurfaces in "Arrow's Myth" but much more subtly, the band doing their best Bitches Brew, all murky freeform psychedelic space-funk, flurries of wah guitar, warm whirring organ, murky atmospheres and motorik drumming, plenty of percussion, but everything sorta blurred into a heady, druggy sprawl, until about three quarters through, when the groove proper kicks in, and in come the HORNS, and again, it's total seventies jazz-funk worship, and it KILLS. The last two tracks are classic Cave, two sprawling space groove epics, the first, sounding a bit like Stereolab crossed with Goat, and given a heavy psychedelic jazz makeover, the second more laid back and dreamily psychedelic, spaced out and droney, the band locked into one of those endless woozy grooves, that falls somewhere between psychedelic space rock, and drowsy, Spacemen 3 style bongsmoke fueled mesmer...
The cool photos of the synths on the cover, and the band name might be enough for some synth obsessives, without any further coaxing. But also note the label: Sun Ark, home to Sun Araw. And that's who's on here: Cameron Stallones of way out dub masters Sun Araw (and Magic Lantern, let's not forget his other great psych outfit) with several of his usual cohorts, including M. Geddes Gengras. We only have the vaguest notion of the story behind this project - apparently there's a multimedia cultural center in Rotterdam called The Worm, and they have quite a collection of synthesizers, and they let Stallones et. al. have at 'em last year, and thus The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group was born. Or something like that. Dunno if it's a one-off or what, but the sprawling double vinyl (-only) lp that has resulted is pretty nice, if gurgling whoosh and burbling bleep and rhythmic Geiger-counter clicks and other classic "synth noises" are what floats your boat. With cryptic track titles like "4P4C Slack" and "Worm = Spice" this is tech-head retro-proto-techno music, for gear lovin' sci-fi nerds, for sure! If the Creel Pone crowd went clubbin' this is the kind of synth jammage that they'd wanna get down to.
The last full length from these NYC garage gloom rockers, 2011's In Love With Oblivion, might just rank in the pantheon of all time aQ favorites, and one of the few records that pretty much everyone here loved like crazy. Due in no small part to the opening track, the impossibly catchy "Sycamore Tree", which almost immediately became a mixtape staple around these parts. We dug the subsequent Radiant Door ep, but it just wasn't enough and we were still itching for more. So we were pretty psyched to see a new full length, although Nature Noir has gotten a sort of mixed reception around here. And even after repeated listens, it's obvious why, while the sound remains similar, the vibe is way more dour, the sound lugubrious and sloooow. Total late night, wasted downer pop, that at first seems to be missing much of the hookiness that made that last record such a classic. In fact opener "Spirit In Front Of Me" is a strange choice to start things off, being a murky, muddy crawl, lugubrious and woozy. It's actually pretty dreamy, but it's easy to understand how to some ears it could seem a bit low energy, almost like it's spinning on a portable turntable with dying batteries (which of course sounds awesome to us!), but especially when you hear the second track, "Star Crawl", which is immediately more poppy, with a main hook, that will lodge in your head like crazy within seconds, and that's just the verse, but it's a doozy, and harkens back to In Love With Oblivion for sure. And then right after that, the band cranks it up a bit, and infuses their mope rock with some high energy crunch, and by that point, we were smitten all over again. Nature Noir is maybe a grower, but once it hits, it hits hard, and like the Crystal Stilts records before it, seems like it's suddenly all we want to listen to.
And in the past we constantly compare these guys to Aussie post punks like Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, and this shift in sound, this more dirgey sonic torpor only makes that comparison more apt. But for every moment like that, there's a track like "Sticks And Stones", that sounds downright polished, bringing to mind the Tindersticks actually, or possibly something even more mainstream, like the National, the same sort of dour moody gloom pop, some tracks laced with strings, somber string swaddled ballads that are actually quite darkly stirring. But ultimately, it's just another great Crystal Stilts record, and repeated listens most certainly yields optimal results, and while it probably won't bump In Love With Oblivion out of the pantheon, it will most definitely get played to death. And "Star Crawl", as well as a few others, will most likely make it on to a bunch of mixtapes as well...
Record number two from the mysterious Ms. Dalt, a Spanish chanteuse, whose newest record, like her last, conjures up a wildy witchy and hauntingly otherworldly sound that incorporates some of our favorite sonic elements. A gauzy ethereal drift a la Grouper, a brooding gothiness a la Chelsea Wolfe, as well as reminding us of a whole slew of other modern practitioners of that sort of blurred, washed out psychedelia we can't seem to get enough of (US Girls, Valet, Inca Ore, Juliana Barwick, Fursaxa, Noveller, etc.). But Dalt continues to push that sound and make it very much her own, adding a way more experimental / avant / electronic element that ends up defining her sound. Her vocals not the focal point at all, instead it's the darkly delicate soundscapes she creates, woozily percussive, swirly and totally dreamily druggy, the opener sets the tone with a flurry of arpeggiated melodies, what sounds like weirdly effected piano, then maybe xylophone, the cascades of notes layered into a warm undulating backdrop, driven by buried electronic pulses, deep bass swells, and strange shards of high end skree, wall wrapped around her breathy vox. Imagine a WAY more tripped out and ultra subdued Bjork and you'd be in the ballpark.
The second track takes some darkly twangy guitar, and drapes that over an ominous synth tone, whispered vox, and distant cavernous reverb, not to mention a barely there Morricone melody, it all adds up to a warm and woozy, slow-core dream-dirge creep, that is so quiet at times it threatens to fade out completely, but strap on headphones and crank the volume, and the song reveals itself as something strange and lovely, and indeed very very mysterious. The rest of the record plays out similarly, the dynamics differing from track to track, some unfurling like primitive electronica, wrapped around pastoral folk ("Soliloquios"), others murky and atmospheric, warped and dementedly processed, but then sculpted into something dark and delicate and truly beguiling ("Vitti"), while others weave creaking, skeletal doom folk, from dubbed out percussion, Bernard Hermann strings, moaning cellos, reverbed industrial clatter, and insectoid clouds of electronics ("Volaverunt"), and some even edge into near techno territory ("Mirage"), but even then, it's a spare spaced out electronic sprawl of plink plonk pulses, lush lovely vocal harmonies, and fields of static charged tones and distant organ thrum. Fantastic stuff.
Wot is the first proper solo record from Mike Donovan, aka Sic Alps, and as is often the case with bands that are really essentially one man shows, at first it's not entirely clear what exactly made this set of songs a Donovan solo record, and not just a new Sic Alps record, cuz really, on the surface, and with the first few listens, the songs really does sound like Sic Alps, how could they not, and had it been presented as such, we probably wouldn't have batted an eye. But it IS different, the songs themselves are actually much more stripped down and folky, channeling the classic sixties psychedelia that no doubt informs Sic Alps, but here that sound is much more straight ahead, no fucked up recording, no lo-fi his, no tripped out WTF weirdness, in fact barring a few moments, nothing on Wot is at all as overtly psychedelic, freaky and fractured as Sic Alps. In fact, this could totally be some lost sixties rarity reissues, it's got that same sort of vibe, sunshiney, California hippie, dope smoking grooviness, think Moby Grape, Have A Nice Day, those sorts of Sixties Fillmore bands, there's harmonica, trumpet, bongos, lap steel, the songs are laid back and dreamy, Donovan's vocals sound as good as they ever have, the songs too are pretty, and softly psychedelic. The typically fucked up song titles ("Baroque Ass", "Sexual Reassignment Surgery Blues", "MP3 Farm", "New Fieldhand Bop") and occasional twisted lyrics are really the only things that point to Donovan's more warped sonic past in Sic Alps, with most of Wot sounding like Donovan seemingly strapped on an acoustic guitar, and pulled songs from some lost American songbook, some of the songs swampy and bluesy, reminding us of Railroad Jerk or even the Rock*A*Teens, others remind us alternately of Dylan or Skip Spence, we hear a little Kinks here and there, some seriously dreamy, and darkly delicate ballads, some lush horn flecked Appalachia, some garage-y folk, and some slithery blooze. Sic Alps fans will definitely dig, but so will folks who maybe found that group a little too far out. And who knows, this could be the sort of record that lures those folks over to the musical dark side. Here's hoping...
Autumn Sunday mornings just got a little sweeter with this release we have been waiting ages for. We first heard Molly Drake, the mother of the British folksinger Nick Drake, years ago on a compilation of early Nick Drake recordings called Family Tree that featured only a couple of her songs. While that compilation attempted to position her as a key influence on the popular folksinger, we weren't quite convinced back then, but we sure are now. Squirrel Thing, the New York label that brought us the sad and lovely Connie Converse album a few years ago has compiled an amazing collection of 19 original songs that not only confirms Molly Drake's indelible influence on the musical output of her son, but also showcases Molly Drake as an amazing artist and songwriter in her own right. These intimate original songs recorded in the fifties and featuring just her voice and piano are beautifully poignant and moving. Like the work of Connie Converse and Sibylle Baier, they reveal a veiled melancholy in their pure-toned and dryly heartfelt delivery as well as their charmed combination of majestic wistfulness and simple plainsong. One can see clearly now that Molly Drake's seemingly simple but technically complex arrangements, sadly wise and effortlessly delivered as a key compositional influence on the songwriting of her son. Highest recommendation!
Vinyl is packaged in a beautiful die-cut sleeve. Download card included.
The guys in Enbilulugugal have been sending us cd-r's for a while now. Each one a perfectly putrid blackened slab of black metal drenched in full on NOIZE. Buzzing and snarling and speaker-melting white noise brutality that ended up falling way more on the noise side of things, with riffs subsumed by huge washes of scalding electronic fuzz, and any semblance of songcraft, dropped kicking and screaming into the fiery pit. On this latest cd-r, their first 'official' release, Enbilulugugal have finally harnassed their two sides, the confrontational head smashing noise side, and their troo, grim, cult BM side, and have somehow managed to put it all together into a crushing face-melting blast of ultragrim blacknoize, equal parts brutal lo-fi black metal, Whitehouse style pummel, and Faxed Head fuckedupness. Killer riffs collide with bizarre tape drop outs, howling demonic vox come screaming from dense clouds of Merzbow worthy analog skree, blastbeats become so distorted they sound like your speakers are malfunctioning. On top of all that they heap plenty of forest sounds (wind, owls, etc... ), demonic laughter, blooping bleeping damaged electronics, fucked up effects, and about a hundred extra layers of grime and girt and fuzz. Imagine Darkthrone circa Transylvanian Hunger, with Merzbow on lead guitar, Masonna on drums, and a steam locomotive on bass, remixed by Alec Empire, and you wouldn't even be close!
We made the first record from Forest Swords, Dagger Paths, a Record of The Week, way back in 2010. And like we said in that review, how could we not? Music that was originally described to us as "drone-step", and did in fact live up to that descriptor. That record definitely had a Burial / Kode9 vibe, and since then groups like oOoOO and Vessel have definitely channeled some of the same sound, but Dagger Paths sounded like outsider dubstep, created in a vacuum, and home recorded, the sounds raw and rough around the edges, as if someone who had never heard dubstep, and had been raised on experimental 4 trackery and abstract minimal noise music, figured 'what the heck? I'll give it a try.' So it was, lots of guitars, blurred into droning swaths, lots of reverb and hazy vocals, huge bass rumbles and murky beats, everything spectral and ethereal, sorta Codeine crossed with Portishead. So we were definitely taken aback a little by the new record, which at first blush, is way more polished, and lush, and high fidelity, and as much as we try not to be like THOSE people, who don't want bands to change, and just want the band to make the same record we love already over and over, it was hard to not miss the grit and the grime of the old record. But honestly, that knee jerk reaction lasted all of about 30 seconds, cuz holy shit, the new sound is equally awesome, woozy, and dark, and druggy, and lush, and layered, the beats hypnotic, the whole sound mesmerizingly tripped out, guitars are still in the mix, but they're more deftly woven into the sound, so they sound almost like orchestral swells, the vocals too, here garbled and distorted, becoming yet another part of the bigger picture, that picture being the sort of murky tarpit slo-mo soul we can't seem to get enough of. And yeah, if you already love Burial, oOoOO, Vessel, the most recent Haxan Cloak, Holy Other, etc., we're guessing a few seconds of the first sound sample below and you'll be sold BIG TIME.
Everything we loved about that first record is still present, but just a bit more polished and recontextualized, the vibe is still a sort of darkly psychedelic electronic slow-core, the sonic palette is much expanded though, giving the songs here a seriously prismatic sprawl, total wasted, zoner, late night come down chill out club jamz, with occasional forays into slightly more upbeat climes, a little jungle-y skitter here, a bit of dubsteppy throb there, dub looms large everywhere, in the liquid basslines, in the reverbed and echo drenched beats, and fear not, it's still occasionally weird as fuck, with songs splintering into chaotic drifts, or crumbling into warped noise, twisted samples and Morricone-esque guitar twang, all before lumbering back into another fantastically tranced out stuttery, skittery, electro-dub drone-soul lope. So good!
Killer split from two aQ faves. Gate is Michael Morley of NZ noise rockers the Dead C, and his side here sounds like it could have been plucked right off his classic The Dew Line record, a creepy, lurching noise rock dirge, all billowing clouds of distorted guitar, and a lumbering motorik rhythm, all wrapped around plaintive, softly effected sad boy vox, everything gorgeously crumbling and decaying, hissy, washed out, mournful and melancholic. Tom Carter (of Charalambides) counters with a beautiful bit of gristled, glitchy raga-drone guitarscapery, if that even is a guitar. It actually sounds more like electronic bagpipes, an alien bleating that gets stretched into a heady hypnotic field of raga-drone mesmer. Dreamily distorted, and very reminiscent of all time aQ faves Amps For Christ which is a very good thing indeed!
LIMITED TO 313 COPIES!!! Pressed on random different colored vinyl, the packaging super deluxe, a cool origami style Stumptown Arigato cardstock silkscreened sleeve, with a digital download as well.
These legendary sinister soundtrack prog masters from Italy, currently on tour in the US for the first time ever (they played at the Warfield in SF last weekend, it was great!!), deliver four classic tracks ("Profondo Rosso", "Roller", "Suspira", and "Tenebre"), re-recorded, updating that classic sound to reflect their current live line-up. We'd say more but, as you might imagine, these are SUPER LIMITED, we only got a small handful, and then pulled some strings to get just a few more, but they've been blowing out of here fast - and we're pretty sure the ones we have now will be the last copies we'll be able to get...
Pressed at 45rpm, on 180 gram red vinyl, with ghoulish cover art from artist Graham Humpreys.
J. Graf is character we've not encountered in quite some time; but here she presents an album of theatrically unstable industrial-folk madrigals. She's probably best known for her work in the circuit-bent-noise-squiggle duo Metalux; and some of the thrift-store electronics and autodidacticism carries through on The Future Is A Faded Song, but a blister-popped noise album this ain't. A few of the tracks draw from the Mars / Factrix strategies of murky amorphousness with a broken-femur gait applied to growling, slumped bass distortion; but throughout the entire album, Graf's vocals are cleanly recorded and presented front and center. As such, she comes across like a wild-eyed visionary akin to Diana Rogerson, who graced many of the early Nurse With Wound recordings with her witchy monotone, sometimes also reminding us of a totally drugged-out Faun Fables. Some of the tracks drop the gnarled grit leaving hypnotic churns of death-folk dirge strummed out on acoustic guitar; here, Graf and company reflect the transcendentally bad-acid vibes of those early Suzanne Lewis projects that nobody remembers from the mid '80s that never fit in anyway (e.g. Corpses As Bedmates, Thinking Plague, etc.) A compelling record for sure; and limited to 300 copies only.
Got three new releases from the Carbon label on this week's list, one being this kick ass one sided silk screened 12" from an outfit called Green Dreams, who take old school AmRep style noise rock and inject it with some serious poppiness, reminding us at times of Alice Donut (especially the vocals) and another recent aQ fave Roomrunner. Seven songs in 16 minutes, thick distorto bass, fuzzy crunchy guitars, frenetic drumming, and some seriously cool/weird vox, each song a churning tangle of wild riffage and animalistic drum pound, but rife with some serious hookiness, as well as some muscly metallic moments as well. The vibe is seriously reminiscent of Nirvana's Bleach for sure, but the whiney nasally vox definitely give the sound its own distinctive vibe. Crazy catchy and seriously infectious, heavy and noise rocking in a style that seems to be making a resurgence of late - the nineties never sounded so good!!!
The packaging is super sweet too. A folded over silkscreened eye popping almost 3D looking sleeve, the vinyl silkscreened on the B side, includes a xeroxed insert and a download code as well.
Damn, girl, what took you so long? Strangelands is Camilla Hannan's first full album in close to a decade, with a smattering of compilation tracks dotting the way back to her debut album More Songs About Factories which was released in 2005. It has to be said that the Etsy-craftsy-cutesy cover of a felt collage of a cuddly human couple with teddy-bear heads is about as far removed from what Hannan has constructed on Strangelands as can be. No twee-pop balladeering about lunchroom crushes and pigeon toed growth spurts to be found here; this is a bleak and artfully composed album of environmental toxicity and greasily machined rumble. Think Organum. Think Francisco Lopez. Think BJ Nilsen. Hannan plays up the psychogeographical references of her native Australia being situated at the end of the world (both navigationally and eschatologically) with plenty of citations of outback desolation marked with wild-eyed slashes of Road Warrior violence. Hannan's work begins with field recordings, so filled with vivid cinematic details that she easily builds allusions of the aftermath from a nuclear holocaust through her recordings of abandoned warehouses populated by swarming flies, rank sewer pipes that resonate the thrum of some leviathan breathing apparatus churning 20 miles below the surface of the sea, creaking harbors on the verge of rusting into the sea, and uninhabited islands that are uninhabited for being so uninhabitable. Dingy, grimy, and fucking bloody knuckled, let's go to Australia!
Pro-duplicated cd-r in a nice die-cut sleeve with the aforementioned felt collage imagery.
Years back, we reviewed a strange record by a musician/soundscaper/sound artist named Brian Harnetty. That record was called American Winter, and consisted of various recordings, radio transmissions, oral histories, that Harnetty gathered from the audio archives at Berea College where he was a member of the Appalachian Music Fellowship Program, he then took those recordings and used them to create what we described as sounding 'like the slowly disintegrating pages of a stranger's scrapbook', a haunting collection of dark sonic landscapes wrapped around these voices and transmissions, to this day we still haven't heard anything like it.
A few weeks ago, Harnetty got in touch to let us know about this, his latest project, another collection of recordings, this time culled from the Sun Ra / El Saturn archives, which is a collection of rare Sun Ra rehearsal tapes, studio recordings, recitations, live recordings, as well as tons of unlabeled sonic mysteries. Harnetty and a handful of musicians (including Fred Lonberg-Holm) got together to record some accompaniment to these recordings, employing piano, celesta, saxophone, flute, cello, bass clarinet and vibraphone, all woven into a dark jazz backdrop, which when all mixed up with the original recordings, makes for a super psychedelic sonic trip, where it's often difficult to tell whether it's Harnetty and his crew or Sun Ra's band or both. One can only imagine that at times, it's the modern band playing along with those old recordings, but just as often one or the other, the songs in constant flux, voices, and studio directions, varying degrees of audio fidelity, what sound like commercials or instructional tapes, fragmented plunderphonic collages, some gorgeous stretches of jazzy bliss, paired with still more mysterious voices, awesome rehearsals, killer breakbeats, the original tapes crumbly and staticky so it sometimes sounds like Tim Hecker gone jazz, it's hard to describe, other than to say it's a pretty fantastical trip through the past via the present, a glimpse of what went on behind the curtain, as interpreted by modern day sonic archaeologists, unafraid to join in, the resulting sonic document, unendingly fascinating, and the sort of thing that should appeal to classic jazz lovers as much as outsider avant/experimental music obsessives. So cool!
Canadian soundscaper and noise sculptor Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced musicians on the aQ list. Whenever we try to describe something that's gristly and pixelated, blown out and noisy, yet somehow still impossibly lovely and lilting and warm and lush, Hecker is the man we point to. And why not, record after record, Hecker performs impossible sonic alchemy, harnessing often harsh noise, and somehow transforming it into lush, layered dreaminess, weaving all manner of textures and fractured drones, warped samples and manipulated recordings, into something stunning and fantastical - including at one point a whole record using nothing but Van Halen records as source material! That in particular sounds like one of those instances where the process is more interesting than the music itself, but nothing could be further from the truth, that disc was in fact utterly and heartbreakingly gorgeous, and even with no knowledge of the music's provenance, you'd have to be dead inside to not be totally blown away.
With every record, we found ourselves more and more in awe of Hecker's ability to create these impossibly pretty dronescapes, to constantly conjure up worlds of sound that evoke truly deep emotion in the listener, a rarity in music for sure. And then even beyond that, every record is quite different. Sure some of the sounds and processes remain the same, but each album, most definitely stands alone, even after a dramatic sonic shift. That said, Virgins might be the most dramatic shift so far in Hecker's catalog, utilizing what seems to be an entirely new sonic palette, which includes live, intimate recordings of woodwinds, pianos, synthesizers and electronics, and working together with other musicians, including another aQ fave, Ben Frost. The results are dramatically different, so much so, that on multiple occasions, someone would be playing this in the store, and we'd have to go see what was playing. Which not only speaks to the uniqueness of the sound, but also to the fact that whatever it was playing, was so good we felt compelled to find out what it was. And every time, once we discovered it was Tim Hecker, we were somehow simultaneously surprised, and not really all that surprised. So after all that, what exactly does Virgins sound like? Like all great records, it's really difficult to describe, it still sounds like a Tim Hecker record, sort of, but this time around, much of the music has a modern minimalist vibe, the influence of both Terry Riley and Steve Reich loom large, especially in the opening salvo, the brief almost psychedelic sounding loopscape of "Prism", which sounds like a strange Philip Jeck / Steve Reich mash up. Repetitive and hypnotic, with subtle (and not so subtle) pitch shifts, making the whole thing woozy and slightly off kilter, but still lush and prismatic, and that sonic template set up in the first song, is elaborated in "Virginal I", which brings the piano to the fore, reminding us of Melnyk and Batagov and the Necks, all our favorite modern minimal pianists, but here, the piano is layered and looped and accretes into a seriously dizzying jumble, which is soon joined by what sounds like cello, and then the tape speed begins fluctuating, and it gets noisier and noisier, and soon, it's not that far removed from past Hecker efforts as we thought, a swirling, dense squall of sound, that manages to be both impossibly tangled and intricate, and at the same time totally mesmerizing and dreamlike.
Some tracks here, like "Radiance", definitely harken back to the Hecker sound of old, airy and ethereal, warm and lush, a dreamy bit of manipulated sound, a smeary sonic blur that's softly psychedelic and utterly mesmerising, but others, like the two part "Live Room" suite, deviate dramatically from what we're used to. The title obviously referring to the room in which the piece was recorded, the sounds wreathed in natural reverb, a haunting melody pecked out on a prepared piano, over a lush swirl of strings and synths, the sounds gristly and distorted, even some seemingly inadvertent feedback, the sound here reminiscent of Ben Frost's more harrowing sound design for sure, but again, Hecker and his cohorts manage to wrangle the disparate and often caustic sounds into something that sounds strangely composed, atmospheric, haunting, moving, emotional, it seems impossible that these sounds could be harnessed into something so lovely, but the sound ends up being truly, and impossibly lovely. A sort of fractured chamber music, that for the second part of the 'suite' slips into something much more hushed and heavenly, symphonic sounds wreathed in tape hiss and static, with seemingly no effort to remove the various non musical sounds, voices, conversations, the effect is quite intimate, and again, strangely moving.
The rest of the record unfolds in an equally unorthodox manner, slow somber piano pieces are flecked with scrapes and shuffles, the notes slightly detuned, plenty of pitch warble, and subtle sonic tweaks, while elsewhere the previous plinked piano sounds are piled atop one another, along with bleating horns and woozy synths, resulting in a warped chamber kosmische that really sounds unlike anything we've heard. The record closes with a dreamlike sequence, that begins with fluttering flutes blurred into an ethereal drone-like shimmer, before splintering into what sounds like a Steve Reich piece broadcast through a malfunctioning transmitter, accompanied by pointillist piano and wrapped in gauze-y hiss and hum, only to shed the hiss and hum, and unfurl a dreamily hypnotic sprawl of slowly cascading pulsations, and finally, one last abstract blowout, all moaning strings, metallic buzz, keening high end, buried melodies, sitar like shimmer, all gradually blurred into an abstract smear of prismatic sound. Stunning!
This unanimous store favorite has been newly reissued on vinyl with a beautiful gatefold sleeve. Come on, who could resist that classic cover of a mysteriously sexy lizard alien in a retro space helmet? Surely not us!
Ok, anyone into Magma and/or Moogs pay attention! Pretty much anything by Heldon, the pioneering French electronic rock act from the '70s comes highly recommended by us, but Interface perfectly combines Pinhas' Frippertronics guitar obsession with (what are now) vintage synth sounds into some of the best psych-prog sci-fi jamming EVER. Interface was Heldon's sixth LP, dating from 1977, and features the latter-day Heldon trio line-up of Pinhas (guitar, various Moogs, electronics), Patrick Gauthier (later of Magma, on the Moog bass and Minimoog) and Francois Auger (drums and synthesized percussion). Tracks like "Jet Girl" and the nearly twenty minute title cut are kinda like King Crimson meets Suicide or something like that. It's at once both hectic and contemplative, filled with dynamic energy and industrialized nervous ambience. Essential!
Some time ago we reviewed a double cd featuring (supposedly) everything ever recorded by this obscure, outsider-y late '70s / early '80s UK psychedelic "hippy punk" outfit called, variously, Afflicted, The Afflicted Man, and High Speed and The Afflicted Man. It's been out of print for a while - but now, both of the albums that constituted that set's second and best disc, the one where, as we said, the fuzz really hits the fan, have been reissued again, almost simultaneously, with Permanent putting out 1981's I'm Off Me 'Ead on vinyl (only), and Spanish reissue specialists Guerssen doing 1982's Get Stoned Ezy on cd (with vinyl forthcoming as well). Both are issued under license from The Afflicted Man himself, guitarist/vocalist Steve Hall, unlike that previous collection, apparently.
Get Stoned Ezy in particular has been raved about, quite deservedly, as a Holy Grail of wah-fuzz-feedback psych insanity, kind of an unknown precursor to the blown-out speed freak sounds of Japanese heavies like High Rise and Mainliner. Bearing the not entirely hyperbolic warning on the sleeve "This Record Is Very Powerful And Could Give You Earhole Damage", Get Stoned Ezy consists of three lengthy throbbing songs of rollicking fuzzed out guitar splooge with unhinged vocal drawling and pounding repetitive rhythms from this loosey-goosey power trio, total swarming distortion jams to the max.
Meanwhile, the slightly earlier I'm Off Me 'Ead is really almost as good, just a bit different, being marginally more song-oriented (well, there's more of 'em here) than Get Stoned Ezy, more shambolic and "Messthetics-y", if you're familiar with that series of UK DIY comps. It's definitely also about the monomaniacal, messed-up distortodelic guitar wrangling, you're in for plenty of that on either album.
Charming stuff for fans of Hendrix, Hawkwind, The Stooges, Wicked Lady, Groundhogs... and with the vocals factored in, these albums also oughtta appeal to fans of aQ fave Michael Yonkers, big time!
I'm Off Me 'Ead, limited to 500 copies, features remastered sound, and a full color inner sleeve with rare pics, a previously unpublished Steve Hall interview, and more.
Get Stoned Ezy is also remastered from an original vinyl copy (cuz the master tapes are long gone), and the cd booklet contains vintage photos of the band in action plus extensive & enthusiastic liner notes newly penned by the editor of Black To Comm 'zine, Chris Stigliano.
If you need any more convincing, heed the cover sticker blurb on that release from Ripley of Wooden Shjips, who sez: "Fucking essential". Speaking of Wooden Shjips, yeah if you like them and other current practitioners of "heavy psych", like White Hills and The Heads and Carlton Melton and Mainliner and Gnod and Earthless, then really you need to expose your toughened-up earholes to both Get Stoned Ezy and I'm Off Me 'Ead, pronto.
What a crazy release! Imagine a drug-addled Doug Blunt turning his outsider RnB synth grooves into something even more strange and rarefied, as if he somehow discovered a primitive synthesized folk-blues through ritual sculpture building and obsessive, constantly shifting meta-narratives about space and technology.
Lonnie Holley has quite the backstory. Born in 1950 in Alabama, the seventh of twenty-seven children (!) and the byproduct of the state's poorly regulated foster care system, Holley had a difficult childhood that he overcame through art and music which he developed on his own, his creative output manifesting itself through drawing, painting, sculpture and performance (examples of his artwork are included in the booklet that comes with this cd). Holley had never recorded his music previous to this release, which marks the first time that the Dust-To-Digital label has brought an artist into the studio and it's unlike anything we've heard on the label before. While Holley may look like a Sun Ra type eccentric, and this record was in fact recommended as being very 'Sun Ra-ish', there really isn't a whole lot of that kind of instrumentation or jazz sound, instead, the minimalistic music is mostly layered and woozy psychedelic synth washes and percussion. What's most noticeable and remarkable is 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 vocalizations, evoking at first an old-world sound until he starts going off about cellphones and other modern technology. This is a pretty amazing release for folks with a penchant for bizarre outsider figures such as Ariel Pink, Doug Blunt and Jandek. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it is definitely wholly original!
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.
Pearl Mystic is the first we've heard from this UK psych rock outfit, and just describing them as 'psych rock' probably has most aQ psych-nerds frothing at the mouth, imagining long sprawling sheets of swirling guitar shimmer, and droned out, heart-of-the-sun mega space jams, and while that stuff is definitely part of Hookworms' sound, those are not the only parts, the band tending toward a sound much more song based and focused, sure fans of Carlton Melton and the Heads and White Hills and all the rest will no doubt dig, but so will folks more into outfits like Spiritualized and Psychic Ills. Imagine a strange fusion of Spiritualized's long-form tranced out psych soul mesmer, and the more blown out sonic explorations of those other above mentioned bands and you'll get a rough idea of what's in store for you from Hookworms.
Opener "Away/Towards" is the perfect opening blast, displaying both sides of the groups' sound in equal measure, the first few minutes, presumably the "Away" portion, finds Hookworms unfurling a slow, undulating dronescape of Spacemen 3 like guitar pulsations, over a bed of churning tribal rhythms, and a sky full of weird super FX heavy yowled vox, the sound a brooding slow build, that eventually explodes into full on space/psych pound, the guitars wild and fierce, everything wreathed in clouds of dense drugged out swirl, but that only last for less than a minute before the sound shifts gears again, moving into what can only be the "Towards" section, with the sound settling into something less crunchy and chaotic, and more woozy and washed out, pulsing and motorik, the guitars a bit muted, and now wrapped in whirring swaths of chordal organ, the vocals, still echo-ey, but much more 'sung', totally tranced out and hypnotically groovy, at one point getting kinda swaggery, with a soaring chorus, and some cool stretches of guitar buzz sixties style garage-drone psych groove, that we can not get enough of. And that's just the first song.
That swagger definitely informs much of the rest of the record, with the sound shifting easily from Stooges-y like stomp, to tripped out Moon Duo like mesmer, to explosive, blown out, noise drenched heavy psych crumble (check out the end of "Form And Function"!), to woozy, bongsmoke swirled, zoner psych drift, all dreamy and droney, often touching on all of those in a single track. The record is peppered with title-less interludes, which are cool abstract stretches of experimental guitar drift, and wild FX drenched freeform, backwards FX laced ambience, and murky, drug-drong dreamdrift mesmer. Those interludes alone could have easily been stretched out and expanded into their own record (also most likely an aQ ROTW!), but it's the songs here that drive Pearl Mystic, from the murky, psych ballad "In Our Time" that almost sounds like Sub Pop era Afghan Whigs recast as modern retro psych, with its crooned, reverby vocals, prickly distorted guitars, and gorgeous backdrop of lush psychedelic swirl, to the epic slow burn Spacemen 3 style drug-rock dirge, infused with lush, soaring, swirling shimmer, and driven by some super mesmerzing motorik rhythms, all the various parts swirled and smeared into what might be the dreamiest, druggiest jam here, to the wild, tribal pound of "Preservation" with its yowled vox, clouds of fierce blown out psych guitar, fierce drumming, and its crushing, speaker melting final blow out that would most definitely give any and all other aQ approved psychedelic space rockers a run for their money.
Hookworms deftly balance actual songs, with wild, free-form, heavy space-psych excursions, an experiment that could easily have blunted both, but instead ends up the best of both worlds, and might just coax drugged out psych nerds into the light, and drag the psychedelic dabblers just a little bit toward the dark side. Awesome.
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!!!
Hey, we like surprises, especially pleasant ones like this. The return of longtime aQ faves Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, the project of Belgian musician Stef Heeren, is indeed a bit of a darkwave departure from his previous work, but still totally welcome, once we got our heads around it. Perhaps the purple-and-black cover graphics should have been a clue to something new, 'cause all earlier Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat covers were black-and-white.
KTAOABC's previous four albums, while each varied to some degree (the introduction of drums, and heavier drones, on 2008's The Nebulous Dreams being a bold move back then), all hewed to the same basic sound/concept: foreboding experimental apocalyptic doom folk, that caused us to draw strong comparisons to the likes of Current 93 (especially Current 93!), Comus, Richard Youngs, Swans, and even Woven Hand. KTAOBAC's witchy rituals were dark and ghostly, a mix of sparse pagan folk and deathly industrial drone, with vocals intoned like David Tibet.
But, with Weltuntergangsstimmung, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat has really taken a new tack. If we thought drums were a change, how about drum machines? The sinister old KTAOABC sound is present, but transformed. It sounds like Heeren has been listening to a lot of early '80s minimal new wave music (perhaps there's influence here from Belgium's own Snowy Red and The Neon Judgement?), and has now made a very song-based album with electronic instruments that, if it were an authentic release from the era, would fit in nicely on a reissue label like Dark Entries. Or indeed, we wouldn't have been surprised had this come out on Wierd, alongside the likes of Xeno & Oaklander.
His vocals here are reminding us less of C93's Tibet, and more of another favorite folk shaman, Daniel Higgs. But imagine Daniel Higgs making a gothic coldwave record!! Clicking-ticking drum machine beats and electronic handclaps underpin reverb heavy electric guitar lines and washes of analog synth, over which Heeren croons his lyrics of sadness and surrender, baring his soul in a catchy new gloom-pop context. (There's also a bass player, and some female backing vox.)
We're loving it, even though now KTAOBAC sounds more like Bauhaus or The Cure, than Comus. But, while quite different, this is rapidly becoming one of our favorite KTAOABC albums yet, we can't stop playing it. And, we all can be happy that Heeren at least didn't see any need to change the delightful name of his band.
FYI, there's a vinyl version of this too, on OnderStroom Records, that we hope to get in sometime soon as well.
First there was Death Waltz, then Waxwork, and now One Way Static throws their bloodied and battered hat into the horror soundtrack vinyl reissue ring, with their reissue of David Hess's soundtrack to Wes Craven's depraved exploitation classic Last House On The Left. We listed this on last week's special horror soundtrack vinyl in-between list, but figured we'd list it proper again this week.
Composer David Hess has an interesting history, having recorded the original version of "All Shook Up", before Elvis Presley's version became a number one hit just a year later. But Hess ended up writing songs for Presley, as well as Pat Boone, eventually ending up an A&R man, before finally becoming an actor / writer / director, although for us, he'll always be the serial killer and gang leader in Wes Craven's Last House On The Left, although the strangest part of this whole story, and this soundtrack in particular, is that not only did Hess star in the movie, he also composed and performed all the music! Even stranger, is that the songs are folky and poppy, and weirdly catchy and upbeat, a strangely lovely contrast to the horrific images on screen, a legendarily stomach churning display of depravity and ultraviolence, much of it perpetrated by Hess himself!! There are moments of abstract experimentation, and weird studio FX, but for the most part, the score consists mostly of groovy seventies folk, fuzzed out psychedelia, strummy, sunshiney pop ballads, funky almost Blaxploitation sounding wah guitar workouts, and yeah, the occasional bit of synthy weirdness or brooding ambience.
The packaging is super swank as well, deluxe tip-on style gatefold jackets, with printed inner sleeves, no doubt Death Waltz fans (and Waxwork fans too) will dig big time! Note, this is also eventually coming out on as a limited edition digipack cd, with 4 bonus tracks. Both formats include extensive liner notes and photos.
Lazyboy is the work of MX-80's Bruce Anderson and Dale Sophiea, with the former providing spidery guitar melodies and cascades of sinewy drone and the latter a vertiginous wash of cloak-n-dagger electronics. The two have also worked in a live soundtrack project called Grale, which is closer to MX-80 as a reference informing where these two are coming from. Sophiea's sound design meanders from an industrial dub introduction that recalls some of the earlier engineering that Kevin Martin did as Techno Animal, Ice, and God, with all of those digital effect-laden abstractions of samples and guitars smeared into slithering tones and drones cast amidst thunderously plodding electronic rhythms. As these heavier electronic beats subside, the two slide into the dreamtime space neighboring O Yuki Conjugate's ritualized ambience of temple bells and clattering wooden rhythms. Toward the end of the 20 minute piece, Anderson's shimmering guitars pulls back the curtains on Sophiea's production prowess with shifting beds of grumbling distortion grounding his radioluminescent melodies. Limited and numbered to 70 copies!
We reviewed the self-titled demo from this Australian duo a while back, and were immediately smitten by their twisted take on black metal, which was in fact way less metal, and more a sort of shoegazey minimal post punk noise pop, that just so happened to contain some black metal elements, but whatever you call it, we dug it like crazy. That whole demo is included here as secret hidden bonus tracks, we'll include the review of that demo below, but first, the new Loss Of Self record, Twelve Minutes, which thankfully clocks in at nearly seven minutes more than that! No sprawling epics, no 30 minute megajams, nope. Ultimately, even though they're on Flenser, and are constantly described as a black metal band, they are ultimately really just a weird blackened pop band, so under 3 minute song lengths are ideal. Opener "Paradise Overgrown" is pretty much the perfect sonic representation of what these guys do, clan indie guitar jangle, soon joined by a sort-of-blastbeat, raspy vokills too, but the music, super melodic, fuzzy and shoegazey, minus those vox, this would be some seriously blissed out pop, even with the blast beats, and then midsong, when it slows down and gets even more pretty and melodic, it really is only those vokills that keep this from being pure pop. "Isolt" strives to be more black, but purposely foils that plan, adding deep dramatic clean vocals, and thick swaths of fuzzy guitar shimmer, all wrapped around more grim vox and another blast beat, but this song too, near the end this time, transforms into a weird almost new wave sounding post punk. The title track too, soaring and super melodic, total fuzzy dream pop, with weird mathy drums, and a cool super melodic bassline, this track IS peppered with some actual black buzz blasts, but they're surrounded on all sides by some seriously sun dappled shoegaze poppiness. And so it goes, the second half of the record a push and pull between melodic poppiness and blackened buzz and blast, to be fair, there are more moments on the second half that approach proper grimnity, but even then, the sound can never seem to shrug off that poppiness, although we're guessing they're not trying that hard anyway. Love this stuff, and so psyched that the insanely limited cd-r demo is included here too. Here's what we had to say about that one:
The first demo track is a sort of gloomy, dirgey creep, at least in the beginning, all chiming guitars, and woozy, moody atmospheres, sinewy basslines and crumbling distorted chords, all hanging weightless in a field of what feels and sounds like classic shoegaze, the drums super distorted and blown out, the vibe laid back and languorous, at least until the last 45 seconds (the song's only 2 minutes long after all), where the song explodes into a dense tangled blast of blackened math metal, all shrieked vokills, pounding drums, squiggly psychedelic guitars, and swirling hazy atmospheres. The second track is more of the same, starting off galloping furiously, but the sounds washed out and gauzy, yeah, there are vokills here too, but the music is downright dreamy, sans the vocals, this would be pure shoegaze pop, lots of jangle and chiming chords, which is precisely what you can expect on track three too, although everything is slowed way down, the drums a swinging shuffle, the guitars woozy and bleary, everything sun dappled and prismatic, the sound slowly building to a epic, majestic, swirling post rock style crescendo, before finishing off with a final blast of pounding black shoegaze blissout.
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!
Among Ethiopian Jazz aficionados, Hailu Mergia may not have as big of a name as Mulutu Astatke or Mahmoud Ahmed, but this 1985 recording of traditional Ethiopian jazz pieces played on analog synth, piano and accordion could of easily (and SHOULD OF, in our minds) been part of the great Ethiopiques series. That we come late to the pleasures of being wowed by Mergia's dexterous multi-instrumental talents, only tells us that there are many more riches of African jazz are out there waiting to be discovered.
Mergia cut his teeth with The Walliaa Band, the legendary group founded by Mulatu Astake, and has backed many of Ethiopia's greatest bandleaders (the band still performs to this day at the Addis Ababa Hilton). But it's this solo excursion, played in true one-man-band style that takes the sensual loping rhythms of ethiojazz into realms so warm and personal and utterly unique. Recommended!
Way back in 2010 we made the debut from this UK outfit our Record Of The Week. This awesomely named outfit, with an equally awesomely named record (This Beat Is Necrotronic) delivered what was at the time, and really still is, one of the weirdest sonic combos we could imagine, churning downtuned drone-doom heaviness, and wild programmed electronics, a crazy collision of metal ambience and electronic beats, that had the potential to be a modern Judgment Night soundtrack (and by that we mean AMAZING, but reviled, hate mail welcomed). And while rap and metal never made the best mix to some ears, there was no arguing with Necro Deathmort's musical math, which resulted in the sort of dancefloor heaviness that just didn't exist, and perhaps some would argue shouldn't. We however flipped out, this was like dance music for metalheads, electronica for dronelords, big beats and brutal blackness fused into something spaced out, hypnotic, fucked up and seriously dementedly genius.
So after raving endlessly about three records in a row from these guys (This Beat Is Necrotronic, Music Of Bleak Origin and The Colonial Script), EP1 marks NdM's first ever vinyl release, and we're happy to report that everything we loved about these guys is still in full effect, after a creepy ominous synthed out intro that sounds like the beginning of some druggy planetarium show, the record really kicks off with "Titan", which sounds like dubstep at 16rpm, the beats doused in echo, dubbed to high heave, the tempo a lumbering, lurching lope, and all around that beat, thick swaths of gristly glitched out low end, dense swells of crumbling thrum, thick synth bass throb, we'd have been perfectly happy to just listen to that creeping droned out pound endlessly, but instead, the sound blossoms into something nearly house-y, a little bit Carpenter/Goblin too, pulsing synths, twisted minor key melodies, only to collapse into something a bit more introspective, as "Probe" starts out all kosmische and shimmery, before a driving beat surfaces, and the sound becomes more a sort of psychedelic space rock, the sort of thing you might expect to hear on Agitated or Rocket, a spacey groove, surrounded on all sides by strange electronics and atmospheric swirls.
"Kingdom" is where things darken again, a smoldering creep, thick washes of buzzing synth, a pulsing 4/4 throb, lots of churning, roiling low end, and then surprisingly, things get downright dance-y, sounding like some fucked up Kompakt release, maybe remixed by James Plotkin or Stephen O'Malley, the core sound skittery and electro, but the sounds themselves, thick and buzzy, blackened and crunchy, again, a seriously dancefloor darkening jam for sure. "Void" sounds like SUNNO))) run through Dom Fernow's new Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement project, spare and murky, moody and atmospheric, blackened and bleak, with buried beats barely audible through the sonic murk, while close "Scanner" finishes things off on a surprisingly upbeat note, with some blown out glitch-step, the beats super warped and fragmented, and set amidst a backdrop of billowing serene synth dreaminess, a strange juxtaposition that results in a sort of new wave draped electro-glitch, that sounds like our favorite classic IDM gone haywire. Which is most definitely a good thing.
Includes a download code as well!
Finally, a complete discography of this proto-Riot Grrl outfit from Portland, Oregon, who only released a couple of eps and singles in their 5 year life-span from 1978-1982, but who inspired generations of Northwest and West Coast bands with sharp-witted songs and disaffectedly casual delivery. Evolving from up-tempo punk to a more nuanced and politically moody new wave, Neo Boys operated heavy on the rhythmic tendencies similar to that of other bands of the day like Pylon, Delta 5 and The Raincoats, but with their own unique voice. Neo Boys were fronted by sisters Kim and K.T. Kincaid on vocals and bass respectively and their two friends Jennifer LoBianca and Pat Baum on guitars and drums. They often played at parties, basements and art galleries, but also opened for such acts as The Wipers, Nico and Television, and were the first all girl group of their kind in the heavily male-dominated Portland music scene. Sooner Or Later details both sides of their trajectory with 44 tracks from rough and dirty punk to the politically charged and complex rhythms of their later output. An amazing revelation and real treat for fans of Grass Widow, Slant 6, Casual Dots and Sleater-Kinney!
Yet another blast of fantastically noisy indie rock from China, this time from a group called Next Years Love, who sound gloriously distorted and super blown out, the guitars crumbling and noisy, the drums a simple tribal pound, everything wreathed in psychedelic noisiness, but then the vocals, a wild Kim Gordon like caterwaul, which gives the sound a definite Sonic Youth style noise rock vibe. The flipside, dials it back a bit, getting a bit more broody and introspective, a little bit shoegaze-y, sounding almost something that could be on Sacred Bones or Captured tracks, but still rife with plenty of seriously crunchy noise guitar.
Pressed on bright blue vinyl!!
Latest chunk of noisy, super distorted, soul flecked garage rock from Lamont Thomas, drummer for psychedelic noise rockers Puffy Areolas, who late in life decided he wanted to step out from behind the kit, and make some music on his own. And in a short while, he's racked up an impressive body of work, this latest three song blast included. The A side sounds like some classic movie musical converted into blown out distortion drenched pound and howl, impossibly poppy, with a chorus other bands would kill for, but all buried in layers of buzz and hiss, the distortion CRANKED, but even then it's impossible to disguise how goddamn catchy it is. The B side remains amped up and punked out, with the first track being about as punk as it gets, aggro and heavy and noisy, a short sharp burst that also displays a subtle poppiness, before finishing of with a cover of the (pre-Alice Cooper Band) Spiders' "Don't Blow Your Mind", which infuses the punky garage crunch of the rest of the record with some serious glammy swagger. As always, so goddamn good!!!
Space rock collides brilliantly and violently with blackened post metal on this third bleak transmission from an exploding alien nebula (otherwise known as Finland), courtesy of some of its weirdest astral wanderers: the incomparable Oranssi Pazuzu. Valonielu is at once a contradiction - cosmic yet organic. Simultaneously lost drifting in the stars and seemingly mired in the moss, brandishing gibbering secrets both ancient and interstellar! Oranssi Pazuzu aren't a band that's easy to compare to any other. The easiest quick description is Hawkwind meets black metal, but that descriptor doesn't really do 'em justice. There's a similar overwhelming extraterrestrial dread as Voivod, but without any of the technicality. The more psychedelic moments of Nachtmystium or Ancestors might be a good reference point, if this weren't so much weirder. Maybe if Jean Michelle Jarre were commissioned to score a black metal soundtrack to Event Horizon? Yeah, that's pretty close.
On the surface the music is minimal - simple riffs layered with atmosphere, drenched in otherworldly affects. The vocals a bleak and emotionless rasp, but delivered with precision and authority (think Immortal, Deathspell Omega, Inquisition...) But that's just another contradiction, because the listening experience is anything but minimal. This album is dense and entirely overwhelming. The album opens with the dissonant pulse of cosmic synths above dizzying repetitive riffing recalling Hymns-era Godflesh. There is an immediate sense of hypnotic vertigo - a sort of warm fascinating nausea. But Oranssi Pazuzu only up the psychedelic ante as things progress. Tribal bonfire drumming alternates with a militaristic snare shuffle. The bass seems to float above the earth - a cyclical ascent and descent - while the guitars echo like the pings of a submarine's distress call. Stuttering palm muted guitars remind us that what we're experiencing here actually is a METAL record, although not much like one you've ever heard. Elsewhere in "Uraanisula" unsettling clean guitar drifts along a disquieting new age breeze before a wash of low end distortion and the sound of metal grinding against metal ushers in a minimal thrusting groove. It's 11 minutes of driving outer space suffocation before building and finally decaying into a wash of doomy crashes swathed in ambience, seeming to crash to the planet's surface like a lost satellite - clattering and rolling before finally slumping into its eternal lonely resting place.
On the instrumental "Reika Maisemassa", we're met with the slow motion plod of timpani over insectoid clicks - like something from King Kong in negative focus - before the cosmic murkiness sets in and the track takes on its own nocturnal alien form - slithering and jerking like a leech. "Olen Aukaissut Uuden Silman" is as close to black metal (in the traditional sense anyway) as the record comes - guitars buzz and grind over disco drumming and the cyberorchestral hum of horror movie strings, before erupting into a section of blasting that sounds like something from Transilvanian Hunger, if Darkthrone might have taken that brown acid everyone was avoiding at Woodstock. The 15 minute "Ympyra On Viiva Tomussa" closes things out, starting off with a lazy creeping loungey menace, sounding like something from a French B-movie horror film, complete with delicate plucking and softly rolling toms - bringing to mind a barely clad 1960's vampiress stalking the alleyways by moonlight - before building headfirst into some seriously mountainous Neur-Isis post metal riffage, once again swathed in that ambient piercing of laser echoes that drenches the entire record. Valonielu is black metal in the most literal sense - the sounds from a colorless void, the crushing airless vacuum of a black hole, the last terrified scream from a doomed spacecraft - oxygen levels at 10 percent and dropping.
Surveillance is the latest release from Evan Caminiti, one half of aQ beloved drone/doom duo Barn Owl. And displays Caminiti's gradual shift away from purely guitar based ambience, toward something more dark and dystopian, and beat driven, shedding much of the twang flecked duskiness, in favor of murky fragmented rhythms, and gristled textures. Barn Owl too has displayed a similarly dramatic sonic shift over the last few releases, introducing drum machines, and synths, and similarly Caminiti's partner in Barn Owl, Jon Porras, has expanded his solo sonic palette as well, occasionally shoegazey, but also dabbling in witchy electronics, most notably as DVVLLXNS. But Surveillance might be the closest either have come to crystallizing such a distinctive, and distinctively entrancing sound, one that channels seventies and eighties soundtrack music, abstract electronics, modern minimalism, minimal house music (a la Chain Reaction), and who knows what else, into something stunningly mesmerizing, hauntingly bleak, and strangely alien. Yet somehow, still quite beautiful.
Surveillance does play out like some sort of soundtrack, with a few moments touching on the Carpenter/Goblin sound that seems to be so prevalent these days, but those moments definitely don't smack of any sort of bandwagon jumping, instead existing as just one sonic element, deftly woven into a much more sprawling and epic whole, with most of the tracks blossoming into something altogether stranger, lurching, pulsing, revealing mysterious arrangements, unfurling constantly shifting textures, rhythmically mesmeric one second, a creeping tar pit ooze the next. "Event Boundary", sounds a bit like a futuristic Muslimgauze, a simple skeletal rhythm, drifting atop a whirring raga like buzz, and wreathed in soft melodic swirls, heady and heavenly hypnotic, gradually growing more and more sinister, the electronic buzz sounding almost like processed horn bleats, the strange tangle of electronics dense and tense, haunting and harrowing for sure. "Leningrad" is similarly bleak and barren, with another field of buried pulsations, beneath arcing fields of tones, and soft focus synth sweeps, not to mention some dubbed out beats, all in a softly psychedelic haze. "Flesh On Tape" is about as close to the current Carpenter craze as it gets, but even then, the sound is much more minimal and softly glitchy, the Chain Reaction influence in full effect, maybe Carpenter on Chain Reaction is good band math, and it sounds just as good as you think it would.
"Shadow Gamelan" sounds like it was plucked from some obscure seventies Euro-art film, not hard to imagine this on a soundtrack for a movie like Possession, softly squiggly guitars, disembodied buzz, lots of echo and dreamlike reverb, hazy and soft focus, but underpinned by a subtle sonic malevolence, while "Loft Life" sounds like something on Kompakt slowed way down, and wreathed in shadow, before finally, the record ends with "Stalker" (an homage to Tarkovsky maybe?), which is a gently noisy, swirling psychedelic shimmerscape of keening high end, buzzing swells, buried pulsations and strange hissy vocal emanations, a stunning sprawl of harrowing cinematic soundscapery that again, like much of Surveillance, seems to effortlessly blur the line between hushed haunting loveliness, and brooding, blackened sonic intensity.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on 180 gram vinyl.
Ripping jazzed-up proggery here from this new SoCal band, featuring members of Radio Moscow and Astra. As big fans of Astra's already impressive authentic '70s style spacerock we were intrigued, and Psicomagia are right on the money, with their early '70s sounding blend of organ/synth wig outs, heavy bass grooves, propulsive prog drumming (which never lets up!), and energetic saxophone eruptions - with plenty of psychedelic, esoteric atmosphere as well, thanks to ritual bells and gongs and occasional dramatically chanted lyrics in Spanish (though this is, appropriately, mostly instrumental).
The four long tracks find the band constantly hurtling forward, the rhythm section in particular always on the boil. Imagine Acid Mothers Temple, with horns, on speed! Or, likewise, a prog version of Earthless, with sax and keys instead of guitar. Definitely AMT and/or Earthless aficionados open to the endless jams of another band, and who like a little bit of free jazz freakout, should give this a whirl (or let it give you one). Obviously influenced by such vintage '70s jazz meets prog and acid rock greats as Magma, Soft Machine, Out Of Focus, Tony Williams Lifetime, and electric Miles Davis, Psicomagia successfully bring all that together in a compellingly badass yet quasi-mystical way. Bravo!
NB. There's a vinyl version too, we should be listing next time.
Fans of dark electronic murkiness, and avant industrial minimal house, or fuck, whatever you want to call the sort of electronic music that creeps and oozes and lurches and lumbers, if you've yet to discover the black sonic joy or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (aka Dom Fernow, he also of about a million other projects, most notably perhaps, Prurient and Cold Cave, and most recently, Vatican Shadow and Christian Cosmos), here's another chance to catch up on some of what you've been missing. Two super limited cassettes, now available again as most likely equally limited 12"s, The Plant With Many Faces finds Fernow pushing his sound into more mysterious directions, the opener the oddball here, falling squarely in seventies soundtrack territory, with pulsing Carpenter like synths, arpeggiated bass pulsations and thick clouds of psychedelic blacknoise, before the sound quickly settles into the more minimal drift of previous releases, soft-focus chordal swells, wrapped in swaths of pixelated washed out thrum, a hazy barely there swirl of abstract sound, near ambience flecked with abject sinister sonic shadows. The flipside continues to sink deeper into whatever subterranean world these sounds emanate from, delivering a noisy industrial hum, slow shifting layers, buried melodies, all smeared into a grey-gaze atmospheric sprawl that sounds like a more desiccated Caretaker, which is precisely how the final track winds down, extending that hissy subterranean ambience, but adding some low end warble, some distant percolations, a buried rhythm that sounds like it's being broadcast from the bottom of the sea, the vibe a sort of sonar symphony of shadows, hauntingly abstract and bleakly ultra minimal, but still stunningly and obliquely beautiful.
Folklore Venom is the perfect companion for The Plant With Many Faces, opening with a heroin house creep, a slo-mo techno swirl that is soon enveloped in a cloud of hiss and softly caustic crunch, that relentless pulse, a motorik constant at the heart of the track's dense drift. The sound quickly shifts to something even more abstract and atmospheric, a sprawl of sonic dread, a high end haze draped over keening far away melodies, a wasted industrial dronescape, rife with strange sonic cascades and underpinned by deep rumbling throbs, blurred into near stasis, the whole thing a dense black thrum, laced with softly psychedelic overtones. The final track is the closest either of these reissues has come to the newer RSE records, weaving a tripped out softly noisy soundscape, constructed from what sounds like manipulated field recordings, bird song, animal calls, the result is at once strangely dreamy, and yet utterly and totally alien.
You can't go wrong with either, but if dark electronic weirdness, and murky psychedelic ambience is your thing, best grab both before they are gone for good...
Fans of dark electronic murkiness, and avant industrial minimal house, or fuck, whatever you want to call the sort of electronic music that creeps and oozes and lurches and lumbers, if you've yet to discover the black sonic joy or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (aka Dom Fernow, he also of about a million other projects, most notably perhaps, Prurient and Cold Cave, and most recently, Vatican Shadow and Christian Cosmos), here's another chance to catch up on some of what you've been missing. Two super limited cassettes, now available again as most likely equally limited 12"s, The Plant With Many Faces finds Fernow pushing his sound into more mysterious directions, the opener the oddball here, falling squarely in seventies soundtrack territory, with pulsing Carpenter like synths, arpeggiated bass pulsations and thick clouds of psychedelic blacknoise, before the sound quickly settles into the more minimal drift of previous releases, soft-focus chordal swells, wrapped in swaths of pixelated washed out thrum, a hazy barely there swirl of abstract sound, near ambience flecked with abject sinister sonic shadows. The flipside continues to sink deeper into whatever subterranean world these sounds emanate from, delivering a noisy industrial hum, slow shifting layers, buried melodies, all smeared into a grey-gaze atmospheric sprawl that sounds like a more desiccated Caretaker, which is precisely how the final track winds down, extending that hissy subterranean ambience, but adding some low end warble, some distant percolations, a buried rhythm that sounds like it's being broadcast from the bottom of the sea, the vibe a sort of sonar symphony of shadows, hauntingly abstract and bleakly ultra minimal, but still stunningly and obliquely beautiful.
Folklore Venom is the perfect companion for The Plant With Many Faces, opening with a heroin house creep, a slo-mo techno swirl that is soon enveloped in a cloud of hiss and softly caustic crunch, that relentless pulse, a motorik constant at the heart of the track's dense drift. The sound quickly shifts to something even more abstract and atmospheric, a sprawl of sonic dread, a high end haze draped over keening far away melodies, a wasted industrial dronescape, rife with strange sonic cascades and underpinned by deep rumbling throbs, blurred into near stasis, the whole thing a dense black thrum, laced with softly psychedelic overtones. The final track is the closest either of these reissues has come to the newer RSE records, weaving a tripped out softly noisy soundscape, constructed from what sounds like manipulated field recordings, bird song, animal calls, the result is at once strangely dreamy, and yet utterly and totally alien.
You can't go wrong with either, but if dark electronic weirdness, and murky psychedelic ambience is your thing, best grab both before they are gone for good...
A quiet composer of the remnant, forgotten sounds of the everyday, Mathieu Ruhlmann has crafted a small if impressive body of work that parallels the soundart of Loren Chasse, Richard Chartier, Steve Roden, and even the likes of Luc Ferrari minus all the sex talk. This Star Teaches Bending is a sober album that was constructed during the final six months before Ruhlmann's mother succumbed to a rare lung disease to which there was no available cure. The title itself is a reference to one of the final painting by Paul Klee, who had also suffered from a protracted illness with no known treatment at that time. Ruhlmann's pace is slow and deliberate in his compositional placement of his variable scratches and squigglings, which he's collected through contact microphones investigating the medical equipment that surround his dying mother with voltage bursts, tactile abrasions, and blankly humming electricity being much of what he gathers, although there is what sounds like a racoon rummaging about in one of the tracks. In the hands of a Joe Colley or a Francisco Meirino, these sources would exist in volatile crucible of psychological tension, but Ruhlmann frames his work with an existential resignation about the finality of his mother's inevitable fate. It's not easy for sure, but there is an underlying poetry of loneliness, sorrow, and grief found within. Nicely packaged in a die-cut sleeve with a professionally printed insert and a pro-duplicated cd-r.
Oranur III is a classic postindustrial album from Schloss Tegal, a cryptic American duo who traded in death-shroud ambience and paranoiac aesthetics - both of which feature prominently here. Originally, released back in 1995, the album drew inspiration from the latter day ideas of Wilhelm Reich. This Austrian psychoanalyst from the early 20th Century had attempted to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, causing the beginning of a rift with some of the more conservative elements within his field. Over time, his ideas about human sexuality and the energies of the human body became more radical and more bizarre, including such notions of orgone energy and its convoluted mythological system that included extraterrestrial beings, UFO manifestations, deadly forms of radiation, and his tool to fight such nefarious entities - Reich's cloudbuster.
It's these more metaphysically loaded ideas that Schloss Tegal are employing as allegory for the demise / deterioriorization of society, paralleling much of the critiques mapped out by Genesis P-Orridge, SPK, and Monte Cazzaza in the heyday of industrial culture. Schloss Tegal settles all of their tracks with a heavy, foggy atmosphere that gives the sense of being anesthetized whilst various engineers and technicians probe, prod, and invade the body. Murky repetitive samples, some of which speak directly to experiences with extraterrestrial beings, cycle throughout Schloss Tegal's mercury poisoned dronings and irradiated windstorms of blurred noise. The work is not quite as oppressively dark as Brighter Death Now, but embraces a similar existential horror. Great to have this one back in print, now with two bonus tracks not found on the originals.
Spacey, synth-based prog/psych from the early '70s (or whenever!) doesn't get much better than this. The trio Sensations' Fix captured something pretty special on their tripped out, ultra-underground sounding debut, originally released by Italian Polydor in 1974 and now reissued on vinyl for the first time, by local archival label Superior Viaduct. While it sounds like it could have been made in a synth-stuffed bunker in Berlin, or somewhere in the pastoral English countryside (outside, under the stars, towards the break of dawn), this was actually recorded in an suburban basement in the USA, on a 4-track, by an Italian musician, Franco Falsini (the composer, credited with "guitars and synthesizers"), and two Americans he recruited, Richard Ursillo ("bass guitars and electronic pedals") and Keith Edwards ("drums and percussion"). Though for much of this, Mr. Edwards sits out, as the mysterious floating electronics and blissful strum of Fragments Of Light are ofttimes purely ethereal, only occasionally lashed to propulsive beats, and even those are may be machine-made, with what sounds like live drumming on really only one of the tracks (however, he's apparently the guy that turned Falsini on to LSD, so he should get some musical credit for that).
Song titles include "Nuclear War In Your Brain", "Music Without Gravity", "Music Is Painting In The Air" and "Telepathic Children"; all seem quite appropriate, even the cryptic ones we don't understand. The drifty, druggy, echoing synthed-out weirdness of this, however, is balanced (or, rather, enhanced) by Falsini's knack for wonderful melodies, that's the key to this varied and delightful basement-recorded, often melancholic Minimoog fantasia.
As you may recall, last year we were super excited to highlight a Sensations' Fix anthology, Music Is Painting In The Air, put out by the RVNG label. We mentioned then how we've been longtime fans of this band's hard-to-find debut record, which we hoped hoped hoped would someday be reissued in its entirety (the anthology included just a few tracks from Fragments Of Light, in alternate versions). So, big ups to Superior Viaduct for making this happen. Man, we're not engineers so we wouldn't know about the superiority of their viaducts, but we do know the label's choice of records to reissue certainly is superior! Third aQuarius Record Of The Week this year already - Craig Leon, Devo, now Sensations' Fix! And, there's *another* great SV reish reviewed this list too, Heldon's Interface - and we also just got in their lp of the Solaris soundtrack, too!
In our review of the RVNG collection we said some stuff we may as well more-or-less repeat 'cause it applies here completely. SF's electronic-based driftworks have a quite lovely "pop" side to 'em too, sometimes - while mostly instrumental, a few tracks do have gentle, breathy Robert Wyatt-ish singing to go with the hazy, meandering, meditative atmospheres. It's definitely not the usual sort of quasi-operatic, over-the-top, classically influenced Italian prog that we're used to (and love), from bands like Il Balletto Di Bronzo, Le Orme, or Osanna, no. Also fairly far from the sinister soundtrack funk of Goblin. Sensations' Fix are different, having more in common with the kosmiche krautrock electronics of the era - such as Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Popul Vuh, Michael Rother, Ashra, A.R. & Machines, and You (among others who came before and after). They also may have indeed been influenced by the Canterbury sound of bands like the Soft Machine, so one Italian prog act we could compare them to would be Picchio Dal Pozzo. We could also compare 'em to a kinder, gentler version of Richard Pinhas & Heldon, from France, with a similar futuristic comingling of synthesizer and effected guitar, for sure (and thus is makes sense Superior Viaduct would release this simultaneously with the aforementioned Heldon lp too). Also the Heldon comparison brings up another big influence - Robert Fripp. Indeed, this record bears the inscription: "Dear Robert, you'll be glad to know that the heavenly music organisation is here too", a reference to the track "The Heavenly Music Corporation" on the A side of Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting album from '73. Oh, and on the surprisingly sunshiney vocal track "Do You Love Me?", we get a bit of an early Yes vibe.
So, if you want to something to enjoy that's just sooooooo very cosmic and dreamy and melodic, this is highly recommended!!
Another big glossy colorful issue of this UK mag devoted to the cool music of (mostly) yesteryear, psych pop folk prog garage etc. The theme this ish is "Beatleisms", which means there's an article all about the sometimes obscure bands/albums that tried to carry on the sound of the Fab Four into the '70s (like Emmit Rhodes, Rockin' Horse, Blue Ash, We All Together and tons more), and also specific features on some of most interesting/successful/weird/notable, like Klaatu, The Rutles, Stackridge and Harry Nilsson... Plus there's stuff on '70s solo Paul McCartney too.
Also, not quite so Beatlesly, this issue also features The Hammersmith Gorillas, The Hollywood Stars, Simones, The Deviants, and more.
Cover stars (of course!!) are Carcass, back doing deathgrind surgery after so many many years. Also in this issue of the UK's premier 'extreme' metal magazine: Emperor (also making a return!), Saint Vitus, Satyricon, Gorguts, Vista Chino (aka Kyuss, basically), Fyrnask, Ministry, Subrosa, and plenty more. Plus the usual magazine stuff - reviews, ads for cool European metal festivals you'll never get to go to, reports on cool European festivals you didn't get to go to, etc. And, a free sampler cd stuck to the cover.
There's the amphetamine fueled goth of the Sisters Of Mercy and Bauhaus with all of their wastoid glam-punk vamping and sexually nihilistic anthems; and then there's the soporific romanticism that is equally as bleak, but softened by a couple bottles of blood red wine and a tear stained visage. This latter vantage point eschews any wild-mood-swing mania in favor of a maudlin introspection captured in the empty spaces of the latter halves of Joy Division's Closer and The Cure's Seventeen Seconds (or Faith, your choice). Here lies the aesthetic of Camella Lobo's Tropic Of Cancer. Over the past few years, Lobo has earned a cult following through her affiliations with the Sandwell District's Karl O'Connor (who produced this album) and Juan "Silent Servant" Mendez (who partnered with Lobo in writing much of the early material), although her work shares little of the brutalist architectural modes of Sandwell's techno thump. Instead, it is all ghostly whisps and a gloomy weightlessness suspended over skeletal melodies and the sparest of rhythms.
Restless Idylls is her debut album and holds a very steady course set forth by those singles and EPs she crafted with Mendez. Highly spatialized, the songs push her haunted croon into dusty corners bumping up against spider webs and black lace. behind the foregrounded one-two-one-FOUR slow-motion drum programming that she uses almost exclusively. Between these two bookends, guitars, bass, and synths glide with an elegant ease, even as the moods she is crafting are ponderous and melancholy. "More Alone" is the closest thing that could be qualified as a single, with a considerably more uptempo variation on her heartbeat rhythms and death-disco synth lines. The uniform emotional torpor of the album becomes rather hypnotic once you get locked inside the album with its slow pulsing rhythms and tremulant wash of melting, sad-girl echo. Dejected and blighted, nice!
Brand new super limited 7" from this awesomely monikered drum and bass duo, and like their previous lp, I Wish My Wife Was This Dirty, these two jams deliver some seriously stripped down, doom / sludge / noise rock minimalism. The bass super distorted and almost guitar-like in its riffery, the drums suitably caveman like, the sound churning, and lumbering, super dynamic with plenty of mathiness, but ultimately, it's some serious Neanderthal heaviness, like OM with a frontal lobotomy, or a more abstract / avant version of Aussie heavies Dead. Needless to say, if you like it slow and low, heavy and hypnotic, this is the sort of minimal hypnorock heaviness that should push all your buttons. Especially spinning at 33, at which point it turns into pure, rib cage rattling slo-mo sludge!!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! Pressed on random different colored vinyl, the packaging super deluxe, a cool origami style Stumptown Arigato cardstock silkscreened sleeve, with two silkscreened color prints, and of course a digital download as well.
Some seasons have passed, earth energy forces have again gathered, and now we are happy to herald the return of Urthona - aka Neil Mortimer, guitar-wielding Briton from the West Country, a man who channels the pagan spirits of his native land in the way the ancients intended - with massive psychedelic electric guitar/amplifier feedback! Just ask Urthona's sometime accomplice, the archdruid dude himself, Julian Cope, he'll tell you. Or ask us. We've raved about Urthona's "heavy rural sound" over the course of several releases. For this one, Urthona conjures up a storm, seriously, that's the idea - this is a concept album about a historic storm that swept across the southern British Isles in November of 1703, or so we're told (we didn't consult an almanac). Must have been a doozy to deserve this disc, which consists of a single epic track (38 minutes and 3 seconds, no more no less). Don't get the wrong idea - this "storm" is portrayed with a lot of nuance, moments of respite, suspenseful dynamics; it's not a full-on blow-out for the duration. All-instrumental, as always, this begins with the (ominous) calm before the storm, a mix of windy, watery field recording ambience and quietly keening guitar feedbackdrone, slowly building, surging, unfurling, as the storm approaches. Mortimer's carefully collected and edited environmental field recordings lend verisimilitude, concept-wise, but it's how they blend with the howl of his guitar that gives this its amazing power, you hear the wind and rain but also what the imagination can only conceive of as celestial sounds, like sad angels singing wordlessly (don't laugh). 'Tis glorious stuff. Imagine, if you can, a Caspar Brotzmann / Chris Watson collaboration.
Even at about ten or twelve minutes in, the storm hasn't fully struck, in fact, maybe there's a break in the clouds, some sun shining through, but you know that's not going to last... no, but it's another tantalizing and beautiful feedback-sculpted ten minutes or so more, before the drones of Mortimer's guitar and ambient weather recordings truly build into storm-of-the-century proportions, at the tempestuous climax of which Mortimer's abstract axe/amp wrangling (talk about guitar "squall") is further augmented with some "destroyed drumming" (or maybe this is when the drumming really kicks in, it could have been there all along, just buried under / indistinguishable from the distortion). Better batten down the hatches if you haven't already. And then, at the end, feel cathartic peace, the (sonic) storm having washed away all cares. Altogether a lovely experience for those who dig the elements: wind, water, electric guitar.
We're always impressed with the amount of thought and care that Urthona/Mortimer puts in to his music, conceptually and compositionally - and that's carried through with its packaging every time as well. So once again, a super nice physical artifact, the disc coming in a T-shaped four-panel folding sleeve bearing color photos of Mortimer in a red anorak, with his trusty Les Paul, clambering around on WWII era anti-tank defenses on a beach in Dorset. It includes two inserts, a small hand-printed one and a larger, folded one; the latter with b&w photos of stones accompanied by some intriguing quotes.
