What do you get when a trippy, spaced out communal psych rock outfit like Japan's Acid Mothers Temple decides to do a cover of classic doom metal nugget "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath? An extra-psychedelic version appropriately retitled "Space Paranoid", of course, which also is worked into the name of this iteration of the AMT collective, with their latest lp-only release being devoted entirely to slow and doomy jams, total stoner heaviness inspired by the Sabs. Sounds good? It is. And interestin', considering that on several of AMT's other recent efforts, we'd be hearing a lot of Led Zeppelin influence. Guess they decided to make it clear that Sabbath means a lot to 'em too. Though of course, AMT still sounds more like Hawkwind than either of those bands, with a heck of a lot more synth swirling around.
"Space Paranoid" is but one of three tracks on this 32 minute platter, propelled by drummer Okano Futoshi, who we should note used to play in the great Subvert Blaze, probably the most Sabbathy band in Japan in the '90s!
Limited to 500 copies, includes digital download.
Two stalwarts of the industrial underground team up on this split cassette from Black Horizons. There is a vinyl version too of this album on Peripheral Records out of the UK. Sadly, we don't have the vinyl. Cassette, we do have - at least, for the time being.
This Dismal World is an apt title for these death-industrial maelstroms of suffocating blackness, malcontent noise, and hammer-smashed rhythms. The German outfit Anemone Tube graces us with "Threnody For The Dejected" whose two tracks are lumbering representations of dread and horror through ashen clouds of hiss and pitch-black synth tones. The first track rises and falls with the dying breath of a leviathan beast fully aware that its next existential moments may simply be its last or perhaps worse be trapped in infernal damnation. Hardly could this be described as pleasant listening; but those infatuated with SPK, Lustmord, and Anenzephalia should take note. Japan's Ichiro Tsuji (aka Dissecting Table) has long specialized in apocalyptic orchestrations of bone, throat, and steel; and there's no shortage of slowly bashed scrap-metal and guttural utterances here. His monotone ritualized incantations at the beginning of this track are consumed by the aggregate white noise from reverberant klang and overblown distortion with blood-garbling screams and bellows emanating throughout. It's as if Tsuji is drilling into his own skeleton, embedding machined technology and armored plates creating his own cybernetic reinterpretation of the human form, all done without the benefits of anesthesia. Early Neubauten? Missing Foundation? Yes!
We are so excited to see this incredible score to one of our all time favorite films finally issued on vinyl. Long unavailable in any format, the electronic scores that Eduard Artemiev created for Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's fantastic and meditative seventies sci-fi films Solaris, Mirror and Stalker are some of the most incredibly moving and brooding soundtracks we have ever heard. So much so, that the movies would not have had such a deep emotional impact without them. This original 1972 Solaris score (not to be confused with the later eighties re-recording, also being reissued on another label) in particular is eerily contemplative, full of chilling electro-acoustic drones, romantic Bach organ fugues and dreamily ponderous passages wrought with field recordings, gongs, and ghostly choruses, that are both beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
Solaris can be seen as the Eastern European counterpart to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, as both films are meditative existential ruminations on the metaphysical schism that divides human and alien understanding. Based on Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel, the film centers on a space psychologist Kris Kelvin who is sent to investigate the mysteriously stalled progress of a space expedition sent from Earth to study the strange planet Solaris. When he arrives, he finds the three person crew oddly isolated from each other and the station in disarray. The mystery deepens when he awakens the following morning and sees his late wife (who killed herself years ago) asleep beside him. It seems that the planet Solaris is actually a sentient life-form that is using the passengers' past memories as a means of communicating with them. However, not understanding what consequences may come about when confronted with uncanny manifestations of painful memories from the past, the planet's attempt at making contact with the expedition causes the crew to become emotionally dysfunctional and self-destructive. In Tarkovsky's multi-layered narrative, no amount of space travel can separate us far enough from the past that continually haunts us.
In 17 movements, Artemiev's score is centered on Bach's "Choral Prelude for Organ in F Minor" as a recurring theme. The mix of classical and electro-acoustic music underlies the visual set design of the space station which also features oddly enough, reproductions of Old Master paintings, in particular the 16th century series "The Months" by Pieter Bruegel The Elder. The confluence of past and future motifs in the film as well as the score is startling effective allowing for an uneasy ruminative moodiness on the nature of time. The frigid electronic passages give voice to an oceanic planetary presence that is absolutely awe-inspiring beset in harrowing timbres that calm and intensify in subtle slow-moving waves. Only Tarkovsky can make windy wild meadows, foggy woods and tumultuous oceans feel so unfamiliar and freakishly alien. The second side opens up to more dreamier and stranger sonic passages, including a theme based on Kelvin's dead wife Hari that is beautifully haunting with a short choir interlude. From there, that leads into a snippet of Russian folk-song, and field recordings of birds, dogs, voices and gongs, with eventually both the Bach organ pieces and the cavernous electronics intermixing more and more intensely together with epic results.
Comes beautifully packaged with 3 variant covers featuring different film stills (sorry, we can't guarantee which one you will get!), and a full color booket of static shots from the film. Another win for the increasingly amazing Superior Viaduct label. Essential!
A brand new record from Arcata black metallers Ash Borer, and more importantly, their first album with a title! Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find a review of the recent vinyl reissue of AB's debut 2009 demo, which we mistakenly listed last time as being the vinyl version of their 2011 full length (the confusion due mostly to both records being self titled and having nearly the same artwork).
On Cold Of Ages, the band continue to hone their sound, still delivering their black buzz missives in the form of lengthy sprawling epics, the shortest here clocking in at 11+ minutes, the longest 18 minutes. And as on previous records AB are masters of crafting majestic longform blackbuzz epics - "Descended Lamentations" opens the album with a long stretch of softly pulsing ominously minor key synths, over a barely there rhythmic churn, wreathed in clean guitar swirl, and a gauze of crumbling distant buzz, haunting and harrowing, the song proper doesn't kick in until three minutes in, but when it does, it's a furious thick, heavily layered blasting blur, rife with all manner of melody, and surrounded by a strangely shoegazey halo of soft focus production, that smoothes some of the edges and gives the sound more of a washed out vibe, which suits the music for sure. Dizzying and cyclical, woozy and psychedelic, halfway through the track shifts to a more midtempo pound, before blissing out completely, unfurling a sort of droned out abstract doomic dirge, which gradually builds back to the initial buzzing blackness.
"Phantoms" starts off all midtempo and minor key, a Buzumic riff swaddled in thick swirls of layered guitars and howled vox, everything again washed out and strangely sun dappled and glimmery, but like all these songs, the music is constantly shifting, here it flits to churning chug, to furious buzzing tangle, to soaring almost black metal Godspeed and finally to hushed delicate ambient dronescape. "Convict All Flesh" is the longest track here, and starts off with an ominous and stately riff, suspended in the ether, before it's joined by more guitars, creating a strangely psychedelic layered raga like ur-drone, which is soon dragged into motion by a creeping doomdirge rhythm, everything swaddled in distant synth swirl, slowly building to a seriously furious bout of black buzz, and throughout the rest of the track seasawing back and forth, although the best bit is the middle stretch where the group weds a furious blast beat to the doomy opening guitar creep, and an equally doomy chiming guitar melody, piling layer upon layer of buzz and crumble, creating a strange bit of black psychedelia that hover somewhere between furious blast and abstract drift, which could have (and maybe should have) gone on forever, but instead it eventually swallowed up but a billowing cloud of blackened static riffing, a haunting droned out coda.
Finally, the record finishes off with "Removed Forms", starting off all tripped out almost dubby guitar melodies, choral female vocals, drifting over a dark expanse of almost Barn Owl like sinister dusky twang, before exploding into a blur of brittle high end buzzing blast, mesmerizing and almost looped sounding, before splintering into a creeping Burzumic dirge, and building to a dense, mathy, layered final movement, the various elements peeling away, leaving, thick slabs of buzz drenched guitar to churn in a dark droned out finale.
What really needs to be said about Best Coast at this point? Seems like you'd have to have some sort of black heart to not enjoy their sunshiney, summery jangle, that said, this new EP does feel a bit darker, the music a bit crunchier, the sound a bit more biting. Still channeling the same sunshine vibes as past records, but with some extra heft that suits them big time. Opener "This Lonely Morning" sounds like the Bangles via the Blake Babies, Cosentino's voice sounding more and more like Neko Case with every record, which is not a bad thing at all, the melodies a bit minor key, the sunshine just barely holding back the shadows. aQ pal Bobb Bruno supplies most of the music, his love of all things heavy, seeming to influence the sound of Fade Away a bit, but really Best Coast is all about Bethany Cosentino's songs of love and loss, simple lyrics, simple melodies, crafted into some seriously timeless fuzz pop gems, the fuzz cranked up here, which is making this our fave BC record in a while for sure. Stick around for the closer "I Don't Know How", which at first, is a primo slice of dreamy classic girl group pop, and of this batch of songs, the most reminiscent of BC's early sound, until it bursts into a crazy catchy fuzzed out rocker!
Early on in the history of Sublime Frequencies, we can only imagine Alan Bishop (yup, of the Sun City Girls) giggling in his inimitably sinister way as he compiled the Radio series of Burroughsian leaps and jumps across the AM, FM, and shortwave bands recorded whilst he travelled through India, Sumatra, Morocco, Thailand, Palestine, and elsewhere. Bishop occasionally would let the dial stay on a particularly choice pop song, a weird commercial, or a flamboyant call signal mimicking the worst of the worst American conceits; but often these recordings were attention deficit disorder informed collages with lots of wild-dial twiddling and ear-fatiguing, media-saturated overload. For Radio Moderna, Bishop holds up the mirror back to the US with our own talk-radio demagoguery, legalistic religiosity, and crackpot tautologies. The first side of this tape is given the suitably blunt title "Complete Fucking Idiot Losers" with Bishop injecting those sutured textual collages with shards of shortwave noise, squalidly detuned FM-pop, and his own "go fuck yourself" commentary that's a less beatnik version of his infamously belligerent Uncle Jim persona. The flip "Quality Information" is far more difficult / Dada in the smattering of talk-radio decontextualized by the brain-jamming jump-cuts of Bishop bouncing between five or eight different radio stations. Of course, this damn thing is limited.
Long-awaited vinyl reissue of one of the dreamiest and influential records of the nineties has finally arrived! We were sure we must have written a review sometime back in the day, but its 1998 release long predated the list, and whenever there was a subsequent reissue, we only mentioned what an essential and classic album it is, never really needing to quantify why it was so, because basically we have to assume everyone knows about it, right? But fifteen years on, let's try to put it in words how much we love this record and what it means when we have said in so many following reviews since this came out about that ubiquitous Boards of Canada "sound".
Having released a couple of obscure singles and a hard-to find full length, Boards of Canada seemed to have come out of nowhere when they made their major-label debut. Named after and inspired by the seventies documentary film company The National Film Board of Canada, this band of Scottish brothers Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison created one of the first IDM outfits that built off the futuristic electronic and downtempo beatscapery of genre pioneers Autechre and Aphex Twin while infusing their music with a warm, nostalgic and sun-dappled melancholy. It was hard at first to pinpoint what created that distinct nostalgic feeling, because back then not many folks were as clued into the world of library music (essentially instrumental soundtrack music made by private companies for use in commercial and industrial films including the educational-minded National Film Board of Canada) as we are now. Many of the melodies and themes on Music Has the Right to Children seem to be lifted straight from those elementary school educational films, the type that inhabited our childhoods as well. The music gives off a warbled lilting pastoral vibe that prismatizes into a sunburst of kaleidoscopic reverie, evoking memories of hip educational graphics of basic science concepts like geometrical forms, color spectrums and weather patterns that would allude to a larger sense of wonder that we, as adult listeners, no longer seemed to have. How it was made, whether through instrumental musicianship, a sophisticated sampling and filtering process, or a combination of both remains mysterious today. A few years back when the philosophic concept of Hauntology (a past premonition of a future that never was, to put it very simply) was being bandied about a lot with groups like Broadcast & The Focus Group and The Caretaker, many have spoken of this album as a key musical touchstone. It does indeed have a strange quality of being both of and beyond its time, a quality in turn that continues to bedazzle, beguile and bewitch. Essential!
The Body return with another sprawling epic of avant experimental doom, after having recently relocated from Rhode Island to the Pacific Northwest. While their last release, a sort of stopgap ep called Master, We Perish, found the band mostly ditching all the experimentalism of their debut, All The Waters Of The Earth Turned To Blood, instead offering up something much closer to actually seeing these guys live, as in pure, physical brutality, blown out ultra doom-noise crush. But here, the band continue to push the boundaries of doom, their Assembly Of Light Choir in tow, for a record that is the perfect follow up to All The Waters. Just check out the opener, and you'll be sold. After a brief ambient intro, "To Attempt Openness" unfurls a bit of hazy static, before in come the drums, the churning riffage, and the choir, all blurred into something strangely hymn-like, as if it were the music for some bizarre religious sect, a twisted pagan offshoot of some strange arcane faith, the music blurry and blackened, laced with all manner of noise, industrial buzz and caustic whir, buried melodies, constantly shifting textures, super dynamic, noisy and off kilter, the guitars dropping out at one point, leaving just shrieked vox way back in the mix, and pummeling drum pound over a field of glitch and gristle, before eventually devolving into full on noise.
And of course it doesn't end there, nor does it get any more typically doomy. "Melt Away" drapes samples over lumbering tribal drumming and glimmering shimmer, haunting and ambient, and even when the doom drops, it again is more sort of spectral and chorale-like, the choir way better integrated on this record, less singing intros and outros and now woven into the Body's blackened sonic fabric, the song unwinding as a harrowing dirge. "An Altar Or A Grave" introduces strings, transforming the song into a strange chamber music slow core crawl, that's as lovely and melancholic as it is downtuned and brutal, the sound lurching back and forth between shrieking ultra-doom and that chamber sludge loveliness.
The songs are WAY shorter this time around too, allowing the band to flit from sound to sound, a 3 minute blast of face melting sludge gives way to some female vocal driven blackened ambience, churning feedback drenched industrial doom lumber collides with ultra slow doom-drone-drift dreaminess, all ethereal vox and processed drums, electronics and rumbling whirring synths, fields of hushes static give way to churning psychedelic kraut-doom creep, until finally, "Bearer Of Bad Tidings", one of the two longest songs here at about seven minutes, closes things out with a field of tangled guitar noise, that explodes into a full on blast beat, everything distorted to the point of structural failure, grinding, blown out psych-doom-noise, that splinters into some seriously avant, out there, electro-doom, black noise dirgery, reminding us of Bastard Noise or aQ faves Geronimo. Some seriously next level doooooooooom that we are digging like crazy.
Two different Silkworm related releases on this week's list, a new one from Joel Phelps, an early member of the group, whose super distinctive vocals defined what might be our favorite Silkworm records, and this one, the latest from Bottomless Pit, the post Silkworm project of Andy Cohen and Tim Midgett, and of the two, it's the one that sounds the most like where Silkworm would have headed, and perhaps ended up, had the band not broken up after the tragic death of drummer Michael Dahlquist. And like the last Pit record we raved about on our list, Shade Perennial is another fantastic collection of emotionally charged indie rock, dark, and brooding, heavy and rocking, introspective but aggressive, in fact, the opening track reveals the band sounding heavier than ever, the guitars thick and distorted, Cohen's guitar dense and psychedelic, the rhythm section locked tight, letting the guitars and vocals swirl over the top, the result is haunting and harrowing, tense and intense, as I'm sure we said about the other Bottomless Pit records, they just don't make music like this anymore, except these guys do, and it sounds incredible. We described Bottomless Pit as sounding a bit like a heavier My Dad Is Dead, which is still pretty apt, although, at this point we'd imagine less people know who the hell MDID is than Bottomless Pit, but if you do remember MDID, then a heavier version is definitely a good thing.
Imagine the darkest, moodiest moments of the later Silkworm records, crank up the distortion a bit, and that'll give you a rough idea of Shade Perennial, but like all the BP records, and the Silkworm records too, there's lots going on, and tons of subtle touches that make those records so mysterious and special, the melodies, the textures, the lyrics, the phrasing in the vocals, the arrangements, it's all impossibly meticulous without sounding like it. Much of Bottomless Pit seems to exist in the shadows, a dark, brooding record, even the seemingly upbeat rocking tracks, still seem to be infused with a melancholia, a fantastically depressive modern indie rock classic, with some of the best songs we've heard from both Cohen and Midgett. We've been spinning this pretty much constantly, along with the old Silkworm records it reminds us of...
Originally released in 2008 by the always impressive Type Records, Peter Broderick's debut album gets a deserved reissue, and sonic update, courtesy of the post-classical imprint Erased Tapes. Broderick has recently gone on to some rather quirky albums of indie-minded songwriting laced with classical idioms and charming bits of electronics. We first came across his work through a collaboration with Machinefabriek, although the dark grandiosity of that album is a considerable detour within Broderick's oeuvre. Entirely instrumental and mostly scored on piano, Float could very well be an ersatz soundtrack to any number of IFC produced films for bittersweet whimsy steeped in unresolved tragedy. There is a lush sentimentality to Broderick's motifs which are occasionally jaunty but often lilting with subtle augmentation from various strings and electronics. At times, he exhibits the orchestrated spaciousness found in the more celebratory hymns of Godspeed! You Black Emperor; but often, there is a hushed delicacy like that found in library music anthologies and '70s film scores alike.
One of many characters in the whole post-industrial diaspora who we have not really carried in part due to the difficulty in getting a hold of many of Brume's releases on small European imprints and in part due to not knowing where to start, especially with a catalog that tracks somewhere around 100 releases over 25 years. So, we'll take our cue from Drone Records and their Subtantia Innominata series of 10"s for this introduction into the woolly musique concrete and viral electronics from the French artist Christian Renou. His is a very creepy type of sound design with B-side backmasking, nightmarish vocals all laced throughout atonal, sci-fi tension, squiggled radiophonic explorations, and dark ambient swells, it's almost a cross between the incidental moments of the Logan's Run soundtrack and Coil's Musick To Play In The Dark. The A-side situates a low-end thrumming that's all brooding and ominous in the Svarte Greiner and Deathprod means of shadow-sound manipulation; but out of nowhere comes a crushed horn that's probably a saxophone, but sounds way more like a Tibetan horn with an unkempt scratchiness and apocalyptic fervor made all the more evident through a slow and heavy mechanical iron-on-stone hammering that brings this track to its definitive end.
For a label inspired in spirit by Brian Eno's legendary Obscure imprint, we bet once-local label Root Strata was super psyched to be able to release a Harold Budd recording, especially one so incredibly beautiful. Perhaps is a live 2006 recording performed at Cal Arts on the occasion of the memorial of former academic colleague, composer and friend James Tenney. This 75 minute completely improvised piece is Budd at his most moving and restrained. Inspired by a kind of oblique instruction or aphorism given to Budd by Tenney in the seventies, that suggested something "very long, nearly white", Budd creates elegiac clusters of melodic fragments and stretches them out letting long notes decay and drift, never seeming to repeat himself. Only previously available digitally, this is the first time Perhaps has been released in a physical format and comes with absolutely the highest recommendation!!!!
Few bands have managed as perfect an opening career salvo as Texas drug addled psychedelic noise rock weirdos the Butthole Surfers. Sure lots of bands have pulled off a perfect debut. And of those, a handful somehow avoided the sophomore slump, and even then, a few managed to make a third record as good as the first two, but by record four, we're talking a very select few, a handful of pantheon worthy bands, who made four records in a row, each one as good, if not better than the last, one of those rare bands would indeed be the Butthole Surfers. Their first four records are pretty much untouchable, their 1984 debut, Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, Locust Abortion Technician from 1987, and finally 1988's Hairway To Steven. Each a very different, very dementedly fucked up beast, but each a stunning milestone in knuckle dragging outsider psychedelic drug rock, and all four, recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in ages.
All four of these records are essential, and hell, even if you already have all four, these are the kind of records that are worth buying again, and again, and again. And if you've somehow made it this far through life without damaging your brain with these cranium crushing sonic gems, now's the time to do some catching up and start eroding those brain cells (and destroying those ear drums)...
Hairway To Steven, was the group's last truly great record, and truly great it is, worth the price of admission alone for the opener "Jimi", which is totally one of the greatest songs of all time, thick, buzzy guitar, killer twisted psychedelic leads, garbled processed vocals, low in the beginning, than pitched way up later on, the sound woozy, and warped, oozing and melty, and tripped out and absolutely confusionally warped and warble, and Paul Leary's guitar playing is like a Texas drug rock burn out Hendrix, knuckle dragging guitar god nirvana, and it just goes on and on, and somehow it just gets weirder and weirder and weirder, and then suddenly, after a blast of lazer beam electronics, the song turns into a detuned blues jam, laced with bird song, and the sounds of goats and other barnyard animal, dogs barking, the song trippy and creepy and a weirdly haunting coda to the dirge rock crush of the first half. There's also the classic "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas", which sounds a little like R.E.M. after a bad batch of meth, meaning AMAZING, there's the stream of consciousness WTF weirdness of "John E. Smoke", with some of Gibby's best lyrics by far, not to mention the crowd sounds, and more of Leary's amazing guitar playing, and of course "Backass", another track that displays the band as maybe way more accomplished than they pretend not to be, a moody psychedelic dirge that's hypnotic and hauntingly lovely. And like the other Buttholes records, that's only the tip of the iceberg...
Few bands have managed as perfect an opening career salvo as Texas drug addled psychedelic noise rock weirdos the Butthole Surfers. Sure lots of bands have pulled off a perfect debut. And of those, a handful somehow avoided the sophomore slump, and even then, a few managed to make a third record as good as the first two, but by record four, we're talking a very select few, a handful of pantheon worthy bands, who made four records in a row, each one as good, if not better than the last, one of those rare bands would indeed be the Butthole Surfers. Their first four records are pretty much untouchable, their 1984 debut, Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, Locust Abortion Technician from 1987, and finally 1988's Hairway To Steven. Each a very different, very dementedly fucked up beast, but each a stunning milestone in knuckle dragging outsider psychedelic drug rock, and all four, recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in ages.
All four of these records are essential, and hell, even if you already have all four, these are the kind of records that are worth buying again, and again, and again. And if you've somehow made it this far through life without damaging your brain with these cranium crushing sonic gems, now's the time to do some catching up and start eroding those brain cells (and destroying those ear drums)...
This might be the most famous/infamous Surfers record there is, and a great place to start for newbies, it's definitely the weirdest, with the least proper 'songs' and the most warped sonic experiments, starting with the oft quoted opening intro, culminating in Gibby howling "SATAN SATAN SATAN�" before the band kick into their own damaged version of Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf", hear rechristened "Sweat Loaf", one of the group's finest moments for sure. Then we oughta skip ahead to "Human Cannonball", which is the Surfers at their poppiest, one of the catchiest jams in their arsenal, and were it by any other band would have been a massive hit, but here, it's just still to twisted and freaky and goddamn great. Then there's the truly terrifying "U.S.S.A", with some of the most intense and freaked out vocals ever, all over a weird bed of pulsing buzz, and balloon animal squeak, there's also "Kuntz", a pretty much straight up sample of some Southeast Asian folk song, with just the chorus manipulated to accentuate the unfortunate refrain, all twisted up and pitch shifted and somehow, it becomes crazy and confusionally catchy, and finally, there's "22 Going On 23", which takes a phone call to some sort of call in radio show, and sets it to some classic Buttholes dirgery, and transforms this poor woman's story into the 'lyrics', for one of the most haunting and harrowing songs in their catalog. And somehow between all these classics, there's still even more killer stuff...
Few bands have managed as perfect an opening career salvo as Texas drug addled psychedelic noise rock weirdos the Butthole Surfers. Sure lots of bands have pulled off a perfect debut. And of those, a handful somehow avoided the sophomore slump, and even then, a few managed to make a third record as good as the first two, but by record four, we're talking a very select few, a handful of pantheon worthy bands, who made four records in a row, each one as good, if not better than the last, one of those rare bands would indeed be the Butthole Surfers. Their first four records are pretty much untouchable, their 1984 debut, Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, Locust Abortion Technician from 1987, and finally 1988's Hairway To Steven. Each a very different, very dementedly fucked up beast, but each a stunning milestone in knuckle dragging outsider psychedelic drug rock, and all four, recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in ages.
All four of these records are essential, and hell, even if you already have all four, these are the kind of records that are worth buying again, and again, and again. And if you've somehow made it this far through life without damaging your brain with these cranium crushing sonic gems, now's the time to do some catching up and start eroding those brain cells (and destroying those ear drums)...
On one of the most perfect debuts EVER, "Concubine" starts things off with a detuned dirge, dueling tribal drumming, and Gibby's hysterical insane vocals, the sound loose, and unhinged, and weirdly crazy catchy. Which really describes most of Psychic, but other highlights include "Negro Observer", which might just be the catchiest Buttholes song ever, there's even some bleating sax, not to mention that main guitar part that is pretty much perfect. There's the old school punkiness of "Butthole Surfer", the stumbling, lumbering "Woly Boly", with its ridiculously demented vox, but then it gets really good. "Lady Sniff", is a lurching sound effects loaded psychedelic dirge, with Gibby doing his best raspy bluesman vocals, and did we mention those sound effects, pure genius. Then in rolls "Cherub", that's like the Buttholes doing krautrock, tranced out and motorik, and it goes on and on, every track here a WTF classic.
Few bands have managed as perfect an opening career salvo as Texas drug addled psychedelic noise rock weirdos the Butthole Surfers. Sure lots of bands have pulled off a perfect debut. And of those, a handful somehow avoided the sophomore slump, and even then, a few managed to make a third record as good as the first two, but by record four, we're talking a very select few, a handful of pantheon worthy bands, who made four records in a row, each one as good, if not better than the last, one of those rare bands would indeed be the Butthole Surfers. Their first four records are pretty much untouchable, their 1984 debut, Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, Locust Abortion Technician from 1987, and finally 1988's Hairway To Steven. Each a very different, very dementedly fucked up beast, but each a stunning milestone in knuckle dragging outsider psychedelic drug rock, and all four, recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in ages.
All four of these records are essential, and hell, even if you already have all four, these are the kind of records that are worth buying again, and again, and again. And if you've somehow made it this far through life without damaging your brain with these cranium crushing sonic gems, now's the time to do some catching up and start eroding those brain cells (and destroying those ear drums)...
Rembrandt Pussyhorse found the Butthole's sound getting a little more polished, but no less demented, starting with "Creep In The Cellar", a haunting, malevolent tribal dirge, with some great lyrics, a wicked hook, and some wild, psychedelic fiddle playing that makes the song. And of course there's the Surfers version of the Guess Who's "American Woman", which has to be one of thee greatest covers EVER, the woozy guitar, the heavily effected drum pummel, the weirdo vocals, the whole thing is just fucking twisted, and yeah, totally genius, with some wicked blown out psych guitar courtesy of an unsung guitar hero, Paul Leary. It's hard to review any of these records without going through the whole thing song by song, cuz they're all so good. "Whirling Hall Of Knives", creepy and weirdly lovely, "Moving To Florida", perhaps the creepiest, grossest blues jam EVER, "Waiting For Jimmy To Kick", piano driven, sample heavy WTF creep out, "TP Parter", who knows what the fuck is going on, or why it's so good, but it is, as is every single song here.
As we've mentioned in the past few lists, we've been getting more and more sounds from the Chinese underground, so many that it's been difficult to listen to them all, let alone get them reviewed. White+, Boyz & Girl, Dear Eloise, P.K.14, Duck Fight Goose, Snapline, Skip Skip Ben Ben, Streets Kill Strange Animals, just to name a few. The one we were most excited to review was this outfit, based partly on their name, as well as the crazy cartoon alien lazer gun 4-eyed fish cover art. It was only recently we were actually able to get enough to list. And while we may have been expecting something way weirder, we ended up digging their sound, which like much of this new wave of Chinese bands, owes much to the nineties US indie/college rock underground. Carsick Cars take classic fuzzy jangle pop and angular noise rock and fuse it into something hooky, catchy, dark and difficult, with boy / girl vocals, crunchy guitar, plenty of noise, tribal drumming, wild flurries of piano, the result falling somewhere between Sonic Youth and Pavement and Sebadoh and Polvo? They definitely sound like the kind of band that would have been on labels like Matador, Homestead, even Touch And Go back in the day. The songs tend toward fuzzed out noise pop / indie rock crunch for the most part, but there's a lot of weirdness going on, and plenty of more abstract experimental noisiness, with the two sides of the band's sound bleeding into each other throughout!
While Grass Widow are on a hopefully temporary hiatus, bass player and singer Hannah Lew is staying busy with her brand new outfit Cold Beat. Worms/Year 5772 is their punchy debut single and it's augmented by a remix of each track by Pow! and Mikey Young respectively. Cold Beat has a harder driving beat and garagier gloss than Grass Widow, but the dreamy vocal harmonies of that band have translated over well to this new project.
We're assuming they borrowed their name from a song by the post-punk band The Sound who had similar affinities with guitar driven urgency and high energy rhythms. The remixes mechanize the music by switching out the guitars with synths and providing a dreamier and poppier sheen to the songs. Looking forward to hearing more from this group for sure!
Column One are a hermetic lot, and that even may be something of an understatement. What we can ascertain is that there's one or two key members in this ensemble that have been producing albums and multimedia events mostly in their native Germany since around 1990 or so. Within their decentralized workflow and Dada strategies, Column One's output can fluctuate wildly from Geniale Dilettanten aspiring synth noise to rhythmic militancy to radiophonic explorations, all the while keening towards a Teutonic winteriness and attitude of dour post-industrialism. The two tracks that Column One deliver for the exceptional Substantia Innominata series of 10" vinyl from Drone Records couldn't be more different from each other. The A-side is a plunderphonic-style collage of wacked-out musique concrete and eviscerated spluttered sound that hedges toward the Sylvie & Babs end of the Nurse With Wound spectrum of demented silliness. The B-side finds a couple of Column One's participants within Die Sibirische Zelle (The Siberian Lodge), a space which the collective operated as an alternative performance space, and it also seemed to have some rich acoustic properties as well. With the three participants setting up in three different chambers of the space with gongs, bowls, and bells to create a darkened, occluded piece of ritualized meditation music. It's still more Zoviet France than Iasos, with the harmonics clearly situated in the mystical realms of the sacred. This is as beautiful as the flip is scatterbrained.
This impolitely named band is back from Down Under with another irreverent dose of negative-fun, punked out rock, throbbing with abrasive sonics and wallowing in their own bad attitude. In other words, a real cool time if you dig stuff like Flipper and Pissed Jeans.
Gruff vox sing about all sorts of sick yet quotidian subjects, backed by feedback laced, splintery guitarwork, with tracks like "Solid Mates Theme" almost delving into Brainbombs hypno-sludge territory. Dunno what life's really like in Melbourne, but these aren't jingles the Tourism Board would be happy with. We sure are, though, when in the mood for some humorously abject scuzz punk!
Gatefold sleeve, comes with a digital download.
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.
We love Nate Denver. Not only is he just about the nicest guy we've ever met, he's also utterly batshit crazy, musically at least, the stuff he comes up with is totally baffling and brilliant, often goofy and puerile, but always hilarious and impossibly catchy, or punishingly heavy. He was the frontman in the short lived weirdo metal band Dig That Body Up It's Alive (which also featured John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees), and he played with SF noise punks Total Shutdown, he's done hip hop, folk, he's obsessed with metal, and he's a paramedic. He's also a writer, and has published at least one book, which was hilarious and touching in equal measure.
So here we have the latest musical missive from Nate Denver and his musical Neck, and it's a doozy. We figured the elaborately photoshopped cover art was a put on, it looks like an old taped up and beat up thrift store lp of Swan Lake, the ballet music, but it says Nate Denver in the same font, and Rock is Hell too, it's gorgeous, but like we said, we figured it was a goof, we flipped it over, and there's the story of Swan Lake, told in Denver's bizarre and ridiculous style, so we still weren't really sure what the music would be like. And then whattayaknow? It's Denver, and an acoustic guitar, singing the story of Swan Lake, a single repeated chord progression for the whole of the side, with Denver's delicate croon, spinning the tale of Swan Lake. And weirdly it's a fantastic listen, mesmerizing, and crazy catchy, we couldn't stop, and even now we have little turns of phrase and bits of melody sticking in our head, but after all it is Nate Denver, so when it comes time for the ultimate battle between the protagonist and Boris Smith his archenemy, Boris' lines are delivered by a full on death metal band, grinding guitars, blasting drums and guttural gurgled vox, Denver easily flitting between the two, and we won't tell you how it ends, but you can probably figure it out.
The flipside, as far as we can tell, contains the ACTUAL ballet music from Swan Lake, presumably the music that was on the original record that came with the original cover, and it's of course beautiful, and bombastic, and bears pretty much no relation to Denver's version of the events.
So totally recommended, as is pretty much everything Denver plays or writes. Comes with an insert featuring some Nate Denver artwork, and is pressed on orange vinyl and is LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
Mark Deutrom might be best know for (previously) playing bass in the Melvins, but as longtime readers of the aQ list can attest to, his solo records are pretty goddamn great, and weird, and heavy, and freaking cool. And this new one is no different. A brief three song 12", the title track of which is the soundtrack to a totally eye popping video, check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r22d9BxVV_8
And it's not just the visuals that are amazing, the music more than lives up to the crazy video, a wild, mathed out, prog-metal, noise rock jam, that's bombastic and crazy catchy, freaked out and super psychedelic, an instrumental blowout, that we played like 5 times in a row, and would have probably played more had we not wanted to check out the other two jams here, both of which, equally awesomely mathy and metallic, progged out, intricate, super dynamic, catchy like crazy, wild and weird, and really really good. It's a wonder more folks aren't hip to this guy and his solo records. It's short, but totally worth it. Killer cover art too, with artwork from the Ruckus Juice video. LIMITED TO 207 COPIES, each cover hand silkscreened!
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.
When we reviewed the Gnod record Dwellings & Druss a while back, at the time we didn't realize that Dwellings was in fact an entirely separate project. We described that record as diverting from the group's usual psychedelic space rock heaviness and into a twisted dark strain of electronica, which makes sense when you realize Dwellings is in fact the name used by the bass player of Gnod, when he's making, yup, you guessed it, twisted electronic music, which is exactly what you'll find here. Shouldn't be too much of a surprise as a handful of the recent Trensmat releases seem to have been exploring a sound well removed from what had become a sort o 'Trensmat' sound. Here, Gnod's bass player weaves a dense landscape of minimal Kompakt percolations, swirling stuttery rhythmic skitter, that explodes into driving, pulsing, noisy, psychedelic electronica, wild tangles of beats, swirling atmospheres, buried heavily reverbed vocals, looped melodic fragments, the opening track begins sort of chaotic, but for the last few minutes locks into a seriously tranced out, murky hypno-groove, that we kinda wish would go on forever. "Drone Invasion" follows a similar pattern, starting out more rhythmic, but gradually, the surrounding sounds building to a dense pulsing drone, blown out and super distorted. "Holographic Mirror" is a lot more skeletal and brittle, super mesmeric and hypnotic, but the final track, "Wave Propagation", is a dark pulsating gem, sounding like Vatican Shadow crossed with some dark Kompakt jam, thick swaths of swirling low end, skittery beats, minor key melodies, all blurred into a murky, moody, motorik haze. So good.
Includes a link to download the whole record, as well as a 17 minute bonus track not on the lp! Already sold out at the label, when we run out, not sure we can get more, but if we can, it might take a little while, so act fast, or be prepared to be patient...
Just a few weeks back we had the pleasure of hosting an in-store performance by godly guitarist and all around nice guy Isaiah Mitchell, playing solo, just guitar and singing, doing songs from his Black Elk Medicine Band project, some Golden Void stuff too, and he was GREAT. But even better is hearing him in full flight with the rhythm section from his mega power trio Earthless backing him up, as presented here on this brand new full-length from that band, their third studio slab. As expected, it's another excessive exercise in badass bluesy stoner jamming, Isaiah and Co. just wailing away endlessly, the bass laying it down solid, the drums rolling and tumbling, the guitar soaring and searing, these three latter day heavy hippie rockers achieving total psych-fuzz nirvana for the duration. 4 songs, 65+ minutes, utter transportational heaviness, epic and all-instrumental, rendered with taste and chops off the charts. Mitchell sure shreds, but in a psych not metal sense of shred, very sixties sounding, the jamming getting moody and mellow on the likes of "Equus October", but mainly very fluidly ripping and riffing, the album's rockin' tour-de-force being the super energetic title track, first previewed on the band's Live At Roadburn recording, here taking up a whole side-and-a-half, truly a jam "For The Ages". File alongside our recent Record Of The Week by Fuzz, for nonstop guitar-heavy psych-rock awesomeness.
Note: we're running too low on the vinyl right now to list that format too, but hopefully next time...
Full length number three from these Cascadian black metallers, who always seem to exist in the shadow of their more popular brethren in Wolves In The Throne Room, and while both groups are sonically similar, Fauna definitely have their own take on the whole Pagan / Cascadian black metal thing. Avifauna is three long tracks (the shortest 17:02, the longest 29:23) separated by a couple brief interludes, the record beginning with the sound of the Cascadian forest, all birdsong in insect chitter, in fact the music doesn't even start until 90 seconds in, and even then, it's just acoustic guitar, and soon after, cello, and deep, dramatic crooned vox, a sort of haunting Pagan folk, that explodes at about the 8 minute mark into some dense, blasting blackness, thick insectoid buzz, yowled feral vokills, wild drumming, the whole thing epic and majestic and super melodic, eventually slowing down into a dirgey, doomy lope, before settling back into that foresty folk that opened up the proceedings, this time with some strange percussion, the sound slowly enveloped by more black buzz, the sound expanding into a sort of slomo Godspeed style finale, blackened and psychedelic and epic. The second track follows a similar pattern, opening with acoustic guitars and strings, the vocals this time a raspy growl, the vibe still haunting and hypnotic, and again, the song bursts into a furious black frenzy, way more dense and chaotic than the opener, more roiling and minor key, with a break in the middle for some loping post rock, all clean guitar, before slipping right back into distorted, gnarled heaviness, this time more midtempo, hypnotic and heady, before a surprisingly super melodic, and almost poppy coda, male/female vocal harmonies over soaring melodies, majestic and melancholic.
After a final interlude, all hushed shimmer and subterranean ambience, the album finishes off with "The Harpy", a whirring blackened buzz, beneath minor key guitar strum, the buzz slowly building, fragmenting into angular riffage, accompanied by anguished vox, the sound quickly slipping back into folkiness, all swirling soft strings and that acoustic guitar, before another burst of blackness, buzzing and frenzied, the sound lurching from blazing blast, to roiling buzzing dirge and back again, eventually the drums dropping out completely, leaving just a gorgeous hypnotic expanse of layered guitar buzz and blurred psychedelic riffage. Tranced out and mesmerizing. Fans of Wolves In The Throne Room who have yet to check these guys out, now's the time to right that wrong. And anyone who dug the last two Fauna's, are gonna no doubt dig this one too!
200 gram black vinyl, housed in a heavy matte laminated gatefold sleeve with spot varnishing.
Simply superb. The Field could release the same damn album over and over again, and we'd be completely content, so perfect is his signature style of minimal techno. Cupid's Head is his fourth album in six years, a relatively slow pace of output for such top shelf work; so with each album comes the opportunity to savor what Alex Willmer is up to. From Here We Go Sublime was the debut album that introduced the template for all of Willmer's other albums; and like Wolfgang Voigt's pinnacle of minimal techno - the four Gas records - Willmer's success is through the presentation of inventive variations on a theme. His begins with a sparkling arrangement of delicately arpeggiating pixel points and micro-samples, which might have been lifted from soft-rock ballads of the early '80s; and with the skill of a crafty plastic surgeon, he deftly eviscerates an ugly source material and renders it exquisite and wholly refined. All of his taut melodic phrase and clipped gasps of romantic exhortation latch perfectly onto the archetypal Kompakt monophunk techno pulse. The minimalism of Cupid's Head is not one of stasis, as there are rather broad gestures of emotional dynamism even within the framework of a constant beat. "Black Sea" begins with a classic set of The Field's pink-n-pastel electronic colorations, but slips oh so gradually into a more nocturnal set of jet-blacks and engorged reds that really would be the perfect transitory track between Ulrich Schnauss and Surgeon. These long-view structures look backward to how Arthur Russell produced with some of his slowly developed strings that slowly resolved a melody over a 10 minute New York house track. Radiant, glassine, and downright rapturous.
We've been accused of being house music haters. And there's some truth to that. But is one certain obtuse branch of the house music family tree that had us the second we laid ears on it. A while back, the Chain Reaction label introduced a super stripped down, minimal house music, that was quickly dubbed "heroin house", for it's murky druggy laid back feel. It was like hearing house music through a drug induced haze. Or hearing the sound of throbbing four on the floor dance music seeping through the floor of your apartment from the late night dance club below. A super minimal throb. just a pulse really, a completely hypnotic, barely there rhythm, that just shifts and shimmers and works its way into your head, into your chest, into your soul. Hard to imagine people dancing to this music. It's a little like chillout music, but way more rigid and rhythmic. It sounds a little like the music that was created for those 3 o4 people still on their feet, after a night of serious imbibing, who are unwilling to stop dancing, but can't muster anything more than a druggy shuffle, or a barely visible shimmy. Playing on and on and on until the final one drops. For those of us who don't dabble in either drugs OR dancing, this music fulfills a function much like drone music, in fact, it is a sort of drone music, the beats and throbs and pulses are like a segmented drone, a completely hypnotic static sound that carries us into oblivion.
Fluxion's Vibrant Forms just might be our favorite of the Chain Reaction bunch, the most skeletal, the most monochrome, the most everything minimal, it's like techno music composed by Steve Reich. Slowly shifting subtleties and barely drifting overtones, over a framework of repetition. Loops that shift ever so slightly, creating the sensation of change, while keeping us suspended, drifting, in a state of dreamlike suspension. Maybe one of our favorite "techno" records ever. Fans of Gas and the more rhythmic end of the Pop Ambient spectrum NEED this. As might the more daring dronesters amongst you...
On vinyl only via this 12" ep, some fine new material from these local indie pop faves, following in the footsteps of last year's Long Slow Dance full-length. Once again, well-written, upbeat catchiness, mostly sunshiney, very sixties smooth, classic-sounding stuff. Gotta hand it to the F&O gents, they're good at this! So for your melodic indie rock needs, it's easy to predict that Soothsayer's six songs will fit the bill.
Handnumbered edition of 500 by the way.
Another amazing archival find from the Sanity Muffin label of unreleased interviews from one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
R. Buckminister "Bucky" Fuller (1895-1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth" and "synergetic". He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, including the widely known geodesic dome and Dymaxion car.
What's fascinating about hearing him speak is how direct and plainspoken he is, speaking about high-minded concepts in ways that make them easily accessible and question our very understanding of how the world is perceived. For example, he opens the first interview with an anecdote about speaking at a conference of scientists. He asks them how many of them had ever seen the sun come up and was flabbergasted at how many hands were raised. Here we have outstanding members of the scientific community and most still only understand the world largely in constructs that we have placed upon it, not operating in the real world where concepts like "up" and "down" do not actually exist. From there on we were hanging on every word!
This limited cassette version has 4 panels of embossed artwork and insert. Highly Recommended!
It's unfortunate that we've not listed any G*Park recordings until now; but it's certainly better late than never. G*Park is the work of Marc Zeier who has been quietly generating some of the most evocative musique concrete / electro-acoustic whatnot / broken drones / softened noisejunk since the mid '80s. These recordings had mostly been on cassette back in the day, with a couple of discs appearing over the past decade thanks to Blossoming Noise and the defunkt Zabriskie Point label. He's also an auxiliary member of the aktionist Schimpfluch collective, although his work shares little of their scatological hyper-violence of smeared fish guts, vomit, and bloodletting. Yet, the G*Park recordings mirrors the sinister vibe of Schimplfuch through his delicately disfigured field recordings and tape-cut manipulation. Zeier presents a masterful collage of disjointed repetitions from handcranked mechanisms that rupture with bellowing drones and aqueous gurglings. Elsewhere, air raid sirens explode through the laser-whipsnap recoil of cellphone tension wires being struck, and the reverberation of prepared piano abuse slams against densely packed drones into thunderous punctures. These pieces are clinical studies of decay amplified from a microscopic order; and considering that Zeier's occupation is a plankton fisherman (seriously!), perhaps these are the birth pangs and death throes of those tiny creatures. A very highly recommended piece of sound art!
There's a choice photograph on this album's innersleeve of a portable cassette player denuded of its plastic exterior, leaving behind an exposed array of circuit boards, gears, and miniature belts with a contact microphone shoved unceremoniously into these mechanics. Presumably, these mechanics still work or least they create some sort of flappity electro-acoustic spluttering that Richard Garet can use as source material in composition. This strategy of amplifying a malfunctioning object is one that Garet has investigated before on such records as the former Record of the Week, Areal, from early 2012, whereby he incorporated broken speaker cones, fizzing cross-wired circuits, and plenty of radio noise in that elegant album of cracked dronemuzik. Blank Tape Positive is more caustic due to all of the tape decks in various states of workability and non-workability. It was probably Wobbly who once waxed historical about a David Tudor performance in the mid to late '60s during which he made full use of a soldering iron in the middle of the performance to fix some piece of electronic gear that had failed. Garet's performances, installations (which recently included a high-profile exhibition at MOMA in New York!), and recordings engage a similar tension - conceptually, strategically, and aesthetically. Throughout this album, Garet tangles the electro-magnetic hisses from all of the circuitry with the plastic-gear clattering of the working tape deck parts all of which blooms into Kirlian drones of spectral proportions. The unstable forms on BlankTape Positive are not all that dissimilar to those strobe-light electro-acoustic pieces that Loren Chasse crafted so many years ago. Occasional warblings of varispeed start-n-stop expose the source material's more recognizable signatures; and Garet typically interjects these elements as he's abstracted everything else into a haunted Tim Hecker-like smear of rapturous drone. Garet's work has always impressed us, and this album is no exception. As with everything on Contour Editions, the album is packaged handsomely oversized sleeve with archival ink printing and a professionally duplicated disc. Limited to 150 copies.
The return of Gog, and yet another monolithic slab of avant heaviness, this time based on, according to the label at least, the death of the American dream, with much of the sounds coming from Gog mainman Mike Bjella's family blacksmith shop, hence the title. And sonically, it is a gorgeous dark and depressive epic, the opening track a strange bit of atmospheric ambience, constructed from a weird brittle blast beat, beneath a crumbling all of distorted low end, buried melancholic melodies, and what sounds like the clank and clatter of metal on metal, the sound eventually builds into something much more melodic, that opening buzzy brittleness, overlaid by a dreamy washed out guitar, all blurred and shimmery, eventually the buzz and blast dissipating completely, leaving just spidery guitars over the sound of churning machinery, plaintive piano, before finally exploding into a wall of Tim Hecker like buzz. The rest of the tracks aren't all so lovely, instead they often veer toward blackened industrial crunch, and smeared blacknoise, often with deep vocals drifting over the top, but just as often left to churn and squeal and howl and rumble.
"God Says To Love You In Chains", though, IS as lovely as the opener, at least in the beginning, another melodic noise hybrid, delicate buzz, echo drenched anguished wails, pointillist piano, all beneath a crumbling cascade of blown out distortion, and mysterious percussion, building to a caustic and chaotic frenzy, the strange percussion giving the track a tribal fee, all the while wheezing swirling synths or organs drift beneath, adding a strange bit of atonal drone to the proceedings. "A Promised Eternity Fulfilled With Cancer" too is a dark beauty, haunting piano wreathed in a cloud of static and hiss, crunch and crumble, a more abject take on Tim Hecker / The Caretaker, or perhaps a more blissful lovely take on Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, either way, the sampled sound of machinery, or what sounds like it, drives the track, grinding away beneath the piano, and the psychedelic haze. After a track of what sounds like pure processed field recordings, those sounds murky and muffled, gradually more and more processed, into sheets of noise and haunting rhythmic pulsations, the record finishes with a lovely bit of melodically sculpted noise, "I Draw My Strength From You", is a brooding drift, rife with thick blurred swaths of low end, and the distinctive sounds of hammer on metal, a gorgeous bit of collaged ambience, the sounds gradually growing more and more corrosive and distorted, crackling and in-the-red, a coda of blown out buzz, which quickly settles back into a long slow sprawl of grey noise and lush, textured ambience.
Packaged in a super striking black on black embossed jacket, includes a download coupon, and is LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
The three most recent volumes of the ongoing Black Tar Prophecies series from cinematic psych rockers the Grails get gathered up and collected together onto one release, including volume 4, which was previously released as a 12", volume 5 which was half of a split with Finnish heavies Pharaoh Overlord, and volume 6, which is presented here for the first time. The tracks are all jumbled up, but since we already reviewed 4 and 5, we'll revisit those before weighing in on the three tracks that make up the latest volume.
Once we got over our initial disappointment that the track "I Want A New Drug", on the Grails' long in the works 4th volume in their Black Tar Prophecies series, was not, in fact, a Huey Lewis & The News cover, we could move on, and proceed to get good and lost in the Grails' glorious sprawling psychedelic post rock. The aforementioned "New Drug", and its second half counterpart, seem to be more intro and interlude, consisting of deep whirling black shimmer, disembodied metallic clang, haunting distant voices, reverb and rumbling distortion, hazy drifting ambience, strange effected samples, and muted murky pulses, which separate the musical meat of Black Tar Prophecies 4, the first of which is a brooding, majestic, cinematic post rock epic, all slow swelling melodies, big muscular drumming, guitars that chime and buzz, slipping from spidery melodic filigree, to metallic chug and back again, like Godspeed crossed with Scenic crossed with some Rachel's mixed in. Strings soar and sing over some Morricone-ish desert twang, the various tendrils of melody interwoven into lush almost dronescapes, it's all very soundtracky, even more so on the other two main tracks, lots more piano, tons of space, mysterious ambience and atmosphere, woozy bass, pizzicato strings, melancholy minor key melodies, definitely a chamber music vibe, also an eighties sort of soundtrack feel, way more mellow than the other Black Tar installments, but somehow more refined, more minimal, more moody, sure it's less psychedelic, but it's still definitely Grails, just exploring another facet of their ever evolving sound, which even in its heavier moments, still included many of these same elements. Gorgeous stuff for sure. Definitely curious where volume 5 will take us...
Volume 5 starts things off with some dark, brooding, Morricone-esque soundscaping, all atmospheric and a little bit gothic, swoonsome chordal swells beneath lush layered shimmer, a definite Godspeed vibe, but Godspeed via Barn Owl. The following track adds some twang to the proceedings (someone here thought it sounded a little like the intro to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive"), wreathing the deserty drift in FX drenched swirls of buzz, all driven by some woozy somnambulant riffage. There's definitely a bit of an eighties vibe going on to, with much of this sounding like soundtrack music from some strange thriller on late night cable, the sound at times slipping into surprising soft prog grooviness, but eventually settling into a shadowy sprawl of twangy post rock dreamdrift thrum.
Volume six continues in much the same manner, beginning with "Invitation To Ruin", which unfurls as a twisted sprawl of dark soundtracky grooviness, spidery guitars over almost funky drums, all wreathed in squelchy synths and deep rumbling low end swells, distant voices, and electronic pulsations, a hazy, heady bit of downtempo dolor. "Corridors Of Power III" sounds a bit like a drum machine driven Earth, all woozy and hauntingly washed out, soft tangles of psychedelic guitars, over a loping propulsive rhythm, and again, everything wreathed in a rumbling, swirling soft focus gauziness, the melodies minor key and melancholic, very late night cinematic sounding. And finally, "Penalty Box" finishes the whole thing off, with a murky, lugubrious creep, a blend of subterranean electronics and Portishead like slo-mo groove, all wound up into an almost Godspeed style slow build epic, the instruments smeared into one majestic swell, and peppered with backwards swoops, subtle bits of glitch and buried FX. Gorgeous!
On vinyl and cd, the vinyl features some fancy etching in the run off grooves too!!
This longtime aQ fave now remastered and reissued on vinyl, with all new artwork, here's what we hads to say about Prazision when it was reissued on cd back in 2007...
The one frustrating thing about the list, and the aQ website in general, that sometimes drives us crazy, is that it only really began in earnest in the mid nineties, thus there are SO many records that we love, and that we reference all the time, that we just always assume MUST be on the list, but aren't, so we try to review those records anyway once in a while, if they're still available, but even better is when one of those discs gets reissued, giving us the opportunity to shower it with the praise we would have back in the day. Which brings us to the gorgeous debut from Labradford (which was also the very first release on Kranky!).
Originally released in 1993, the sound of Prazision LP was so prescient, the current crop of cd-r noisemakers have nothing on these guys, in fact, almost anything you hear now on some super limited cd-r, you could hear on Prazision LP more than a decade earlier. A gorgeous blend of shimmering ambience, fractured folk, minimal pop, sculpted noise and experimental soundscapes that seems to be constantly in flux, a fluid, organic collection of sounds and songs, a murky melancholy mood music rendered in soft strummed shimmer and haunting abstract ambience.
The opening track is the perfect send off, as we depart on our journey, dark billowy drones, keening distant high end streaks, a strange almost mechanical non-rhythm hovering in the foreground, beneath it all deep dark sonic swells, a muted mysterious melody, everything seemingly drifting weightless in a hazy expanse of underwater sunlight. But before we can settle in and float weightlessly into the ether, the second track introduces an actual song, simple strummed steel string guitar, melancholy Jandekian sadboy vocals, over a haunting multilayered drone. The next track is more pop, but even more druggy and unhinged, vocals buried in a murky muddy swirl of effected guitars and sprawling minor key melodies, reminding us of an even less propulsive Spacemen 3 or a way druggier Galaxie 500, no beats, just the voice and the various smeared sounds floating heavenward. In fact the whole record has that vibe, sort of wasted, bleary eyed, druggy, dreamy, drifting, on the verge of simply fading away, or floating into the sun to be consumed and turned to ash.
The rest of the record is balanced pretty evenly between Velvets style lo-fi downer pop, lazy and languorous and laid waaaay back, guitars glistening and glimmering, and thick mesmerizing slabs of slow shifting glacial whir, often a breathtaking combination of the two. Absolutely gorgeous and so forward thinking. One of our favorite records ever, a dark and doleful experimental abstract ambient pop masterpiece.
For the vinyl reissue, one of the tracks from Labradford's first 7" is included, and is just more of that haunting mysterious beauty. Totally recommended.
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.
Another blast of nekro-black "morbid dead metal" filth from this aQ fave, the solo project of Andorkappen, the drummer of LA black metal trio Harassor. And like the previous tape on Universal Consciousness, this is some dark, sinister, hateful heaviness, the sound raw and primitive, filthy and crusty, the sound lo-fi, but still somehow weirdly lush and LOUD, buzzing guitars, pounding practice space drumming, and some seriously sick demonic croak vokills. The sound is all over the map, slipping from super brittle and tinny, to murky and muddy and sludgey, the songs too, dirgey ritualistic creeps, frantic lightning speed blasts, pounding punkish d-beat blowouts, the sounds not at all typical, with clean effects laden guitars and warped FX, wild tangled psychedelia, field recordings, all woven into this twisted black epic. 36 minutes, 20 brief blasts, plus a super creeped out almost 20th century sounding piano dirge outro, spare and abstract, percussive and darkly ominous. The whole track repeats on both sides. The label describes this as "primitive devotional caveman soul music" and who are we to argue.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in super deluxe, embossed, heavy textured metallic paper J-cards, each one hand numbered and sealed with a sticker, each copy marked with Mr. Lord Time's actual blood!
A Melvins album without Dale Crover playing drums? What's next, is Buzz gonna get a normal haircut? Well, wait a sec, let's explain. On their latest, Tres Cabrones, Dale moves over to bass (no prob there, he plays guitar in Altamont, and played bass long long ago in Fecal Matter with a pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain) letting one Mike Dillard take over the drum stool. Mike Dillard having such rights 'cuz he was in fact a founding member of the Melvins, leaving the band long before they ever made a name for themselves. Now (temporarily, we assume) he's back, and the band gets to hang out with their old buddy and pretend like it's 1983 again (that's why it sez "1983" on the back, or is it the front, speaking of which, why just one goat, shouldn't there be three?). But they're not playing old songs, at least, it doesn't sound like it. Sure, there's a bit of juvenile silliness (such as, a truncated cover of "99 Bottles Of Beer"!!) not that the Melvins don't always often include some silliness on all their records. But mainly it sounds like the usual solid Melvins music they've been making for decades, heavy and catchy and all that good Melvins stuff, topped with Buzz's distinctive vocals. They once again display their brilliant ability to meld off-the-wall weirdness with classic sounding, hard rockin' riffage, so there's plenty of new tunes here that any Melvins fan will be fully stoked on, whether it be the chugging slow-and-low creepy-crawl of something like "American Cow" or the distorto-glam stomp of a track like "Doctor Mule", among many highlights here. As "reunions" go, a total success!
What's next, we wonder? We guess when you've made sooo many albums (this is, like, their 22nd) to such a high standard of quality, you wanna keep things interesting and challenging and find ways to be different. Hence of late Los Melvins have seemingly been approaching each recording session as a stand-alone concept/project, what the all-covers disc that preceded this, and the Melvins "Lite" album that came before that (with Mr. Bungle's Trevor Dunn on bass), etc., etc. Heck whatever works for them, we're just happy they're still going and going strong.
Some of us were lucky enough to go to the Stella Natura festival recently, and one of the bands we were most excited to see was Hell. Longtime readers of the aQ list no doubt remember reading reviews of the first two Hell lps, both oozing blackened ultra-doom, and live, they were awesome, especially the drummer's backwards-pig vocals, but then a strange thing happened, a Hell related band ended up stealing the show. This band in fact, Merkstave, who take the already depressive doom of Hell, even further into the ether, self described ' cosmic funerary drone', Merkstave deliver three epic cosmic crawls on this, their debut lp, which finds the band reworking some tracks from earlier and impossible to find demos. And their sound on record, like live, is stunning, achingly mournful, the first few minutes of the two part nearly 30 minute epic "Lament For Lost Gods", is a woozy sprawl of slowcore creep, lots of space, the notes suspended in air, the drums minimal, the whole sound delicate and tenebrous, even when the heaviness kicks in, somehow the sound remains spare and spaced out, the guitars distorted and crumbly, brittle and blackened, the vocals, a monstrous bellow, the notes ringing out, the sound at times almost choral, especially when the clean vocals join the grim vokills, reminding us a bit of Bell Witch, the same sort of heaviness meets slowcore beauty. Although Merkstave's sound is by far more grim and abstract, depressive and harrowingly haunting. Then suddenly, about 10 minutes in, the song explodes into full on black metal blast and buzz, the vocals transformed into a super dramatic shriek, the sound blurred and blackened, a smeary expanse of furious churning heaviness, before slowing down again and slipping into some tarpit ultra doooooom sludge, the vokills shrieked, the drums flitting from caveman plod, to weird motorik pound. The second movement/part opens up with more clean guitars, draped over simple rhythmic drum pound, the vibe her more trad doom, super melodic, epic and majestic, before transforming again into a churning, chugging classic metal workout, replete with pinch harmonics, and some seriously murky riffage. The final track is a dense sprawl of crumbling doom / sludge that oozes ominously, and is laced with some soaring melodic guitars, the sound almost psychedelic, with the occasional clean part, super melodic interludes interspersed between the downtuned doomic bombast, and then finally, a haunting piano outro. The cool thing about Merkstave is the sound versus the sound, as in they've crafted this majestic, uber epic ultra doom, but the recording is really raw and low fidelity, the guitars brittle, it's an idiosyncratic heaviness that perfectly suits the bands strange sonic brew.
As with all Pesanta Urfolk releases, the packaging is stellar, heavy vinyl, full color heavy sleeves, the whole record mastered, produced and recorded completely analog. And who knows, probably pretty limited too...
Polyglot might be just the right word to describe what Robert Millis and his Climax Golden Twins have been up to for the past two decades or so. An album might be a ramshackle collage of blisterfuck noise-rock, another might be a graceful set of murder ballads, and yet another might hypnotize the listener through an alpha-state minimalism. And then, there's Millis' acclaimed collections of olde-timey '78s and raw field recordings of indigenous folk songs, much of which has been released through those tasty labels Sublime Frequencies and Dust-To-Digital. The solo work from Millis tends more toward the dronemuzik and hallucinatory collage axis of CGT's multi-headed agenda, although he has been known to strum out a sadsack blues number that might straddle the worlds of Alan Bishop and Roscoe Holcomb; but here on the impeccable new album Relief, Millis tunes in and drops out with a blearily psychedelic album of forgotten sounds, ghostly fragments, and Pacific Ocean drones. The album begins with a comedic outburst from one of Millis' 78s with a helpful direction to "hear the secret sentence played out on the talking typewriter" followed by a jaunty clatter of a manual typewriter all wrapped in scratchy-vinyl, crackling goodness. Immediately, the album delves into a swarming tone-float of harmonic overtones pecked with trilling glissandos. The source for this sound has got to be a plung - a Bangladeshi mouth-organ used specifically by the Murung peoples living deep in the rainforest, as this sound is uniquely atonal and wrigglingly eerie in its wavering notes. Millis furthers this wooziness by rarifying these sounds into the holy minimalism conjured by LaMonte Young, Angus Maclise, and company. After swimming here in these golden pools for a good five or six minutes, Millis drops the needle on a dramatic orchestral swell that would be the envy of the Caretaker's sunken ballroom recordings. A couple of hip-swaying recombinations of temple music rhythms and Les Baxter exotica glide in and out of Millis' glassy-eyed shimmeriness and post-Eno piano constellations. The album's finale is an impressionistic driftscape of languid, temple bell & gong tones stretched into a gorgeous, expansive cloud of lush harmonics giving way to a metronomic wooden rhythm that leads to a set of solitary piano notes suspended over Mariana trench diving-bell ambience. Limited to 400 copies, and comes with the requisite download code. So fucking good.
Monster Magnet might just be one of our favorite bands ever. Pretty much every incarnation too. From the early days, the "satanic drug thing you wouldn't understand" era, all Hawkwind channeling heavy psychedelic drugged out stoner rock megajams, to the Kiss worshipping, over the top, cockrock ridiculousness of Dopes To Infinity and Powertrip. The crazy videos, the insane lyrics, the impossibly catchy songs, the choruses to die for, if we were doing a Weird Science sort of scenario, but instead of building the perfect dream girl, we were conjuring up the perfect band, it very well might end up sounding just like Monster Magnet.
We were warned that this new one was something different altogether again, that it was darker and moodier, and not nearly as bombastic or heavy, all of which is true, but even so, we're digging this like crazy, the core sound still pure Monster Magnet, the brooding, dramatic majesty, the crushing metallic heft, the psychedelic space rock shredding, and while songs like the opener are sort of moody and minimal, there are just as many tracks, like the title track for example, that are just primo MM, pounding drumming, space lord motherfucker riffage, Dave Wyndorf's distinctive dramatic rock god vox, and again, hooks galore, the band able to take crazy poppiness, and disguise it as spaced out heaviness. And yeah, lots of Last Patrol is dark and folky, lots of acoustic guitars, the vibe actually sort of MM via Spacemen 3 which as you might imagine is not a bad thing AT ALL. In fact, we'd say maybe 50 percent of the record is sort of dark, acoustic, psychedelic, druggy space folk, the vibe very classic seventies, think all that classic acid folk, but done MM style, and for every bit of bongo laced, string laden acoustic guitar cosmic broodery, there's some classic heavy psych drug rock heavy metal stomp to balance it out.
Another classic from these space lord motherfuckers, and thus, needless to say (but we'll say it anyway), WAY recommended. And while they last, we have the digipack version with bonus tracks.
In past reviews of other records from psych-folk duo Natural Snow Buildings, we often mentioned that theirs was a sound that would benefit being unrestrained by the restrictions of format, the sort of epic jams that could and likely should go on for ever and ever and ever. And while that's still likely not possible, this SIX cd set is about as close as we'll get. And as we predicted it totally suits their sprawling soundworld.
Originally released as an insanely limited five cassette set in 2009, Daughter Of Darkness has now been reissued on cd, still pretty limited, just 500 copies, but thankfully a chance for everybody who missed out the first time around (including us!) to get lost in these epic sonic drifts. And epic they are, no tracks shorter than 6 minutes, most closer to 20, or 30, a handful 40+, but again, these sorts of amorphous psychedelic drifts are meant to unfurl and unwind leisurely, lush, majestic slowburns, even from the very first track, the title track that opens up disc one, you'll immediately understand, a swoonsome, softly undulating, buzz drenched ur-drone, steel string shimmers over warm chordal swells, tangled melodies in the distance, shards of feedback, lots of overtones, a weirdly wonderful sound that manages to be both nearly static, a hazy tranced out drone, and yet in constant motion, slowly transforming and morphing before your very ears, lulling you in, and then wrapping its warm musical tendrils around you, until you're nearly totally enveloped, and believe us, you will have absolutely no desire to extricate yourself.
It would be difficult to describe the sound of NSB, or to go track-by-track with such a description, but imagine a warm, minimal, psychedelic folk, blurred and smeared into something more abstract, into hazy, gauzey drifts of dreamlike sound, a glancing listen reveals warm shimmers and softly kosmische drifts, but dig deeper, and let the various layers wash over you, peel back melodies, and textures, dig deep and get lost in a dense world of carefully constructed sound, a sound that seems to draw equally from seventies acid folk, and modern avant garde minimalism, from Eastern ragas, and experimental noise music. Each track a dizzying concoction of abstract vocals, of buzzing strings and buried melodies, of epic soaring string like majesty, and fuzzy riffy psychedelia, ritualistic and trance-like, abstract and melodic, moody and mesmeric, seven plus hours of utterly divine, deep listening drone-folk kraut-psych dreaminess.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Includes two bonus tracks NOT on the vinyl version (which was mailorder-only direct from the label, sorry), each cd in a stickered sleeve, and all housed in a hand painted box, every one unique!!
An album that has been lauded as the next great hope for electronica, R Plus Seven marks another curious sonic direction for Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never. At one time, he was deftly composing geometric patterns of drones as the forgotten soundtracks to unwritten Philip K. Dick novels, all of which took 1982 as a technological jumping off point. But things have changed.
There has always been an awkwardness to Lopatin's pastiche oriented aesthetic; and it is not without its charm. On R Plus Seven, the clunky Russian sci-fi allusions dissolve into the intellectual domains of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich in the late '80s who were dabbling with digital technologies, sprinking their chunks of non-melodic synth blort with skittered vocal samples in compositions that wore their technological limitations on their sleeves. Like the recent revival of late '80s EBM, this was a style that we never expected to come back into fashion again. But here's Lopatin taking up this ivory tower aesthetic. Leave it to Lopatin to make another uncool sound seem relevant.
As much as we loved the late great Silkworm, and ALL their records, we'll always have a special place in our hearts for those first few, the ones that featured Joel Phelps, whose super distinctive vocals, aching and soaring, and dripping with pathos and emotion, made those first few Silkworm records like the most EMO indie rock records ever. And the fact that 3 of the 4 Silkworms sang, it made those records super diverse, and each of the vocalists had dramatically different voices, which made for wildly divergent sounds, and strange, but impossibly unique harmonies. That said, Phelps was always our favorite, and while we were heartbroken when he left Silkworm, he continued to make amazing records solo, in fact his 1995 debut, Warm Springs Night, might still rank as one of our all time favorite records EVER.
So now Phelps, with his longtime backing band the Downer Trio have returned with a brand new record after almost a decade, and it's so great to hear that voice again, still as strange and beautiful and emotional as ever, the music a perfect match for his heartfelt oddball delivery, a sort of woozy, bluesy indie rock, dynamic, noisy, space-y, with lots of space, the guitars distorted, beautifully gnarled, and when Phelps belts it out, it still gives us chills, the opener "Nashville Sound" manages to transport us back to 1995, but at the same time, manages to sound modern and kind of timeless, the arrangement, very reminiscent of classic Silkworm, but with Phelps stunning vox, transforming the already powerful, nuanced music into something truly next level.
It's really hard to be objective, Phelps is easily one of our favorite vocalists ever, the old 'he could sing the phone book' thing is totally cliched, but impossibly true when it comes to Phelps, it is an odd voice though, love it or hate it for sure, but if you end up loving it, which we're guessing lots of you will, it inspires the sort of love that borders on slavish devotion, and he's not just singing, all that strange guitar playing, that's Phelps too, who works his guitar like he does his vocals, nothing standard or even remotely traditional about it. Instead, Phelps and his Downer Trio have crafted yet another totally distinctive, and utterly unique collection of songs, that traffic in a strain of indie rock, that seems to be the exclusive domain of these guys, and nobody else, anywhere. So impossibly great...
Yet another DIY electronic-industrial album from the wacked archives of Alain Neffe. This Belgian was a mover and shaker in the cassette culture of all things industrial, post-punk, minimal wave, and otherwise zonked musics in the '80s. His Insane Music imprint released something close to 60 cassettes, most of which were compilations of his own constellation of projects including Bene Gesserit, Cortex, Human Flesh, and Pseudo Code. His work garnered one of the early Vinyl On Demand boxset; but that only covered a small sliver of Neffe's output and a number of labels have embarked on the daunting task of sifting through all of that material. Pinkity Plonk has now published three such Neffe / Insane reissues, first being that wistful Cortex collection of sci-fi tone poems (which we lauded as a Record Of The Week back in early 2012), the second being a Human Flesh album (albeit with that project 'pretending' to be Pseudo Code), and now a proper collection of Pseudo Code material. Pseudo Code was ostensibly a trio of Neffe, Xavier S., and Guy-Marc Hinant (who later went on to found Sub Rosa Records), and With Helpful Hands finds that trio augmented by some of Neffe's other cohorts. Pseudo Code operates well within Neffe's visionary pursuits of snaking drum machine rhythms, ominous synth chords, and scatterings of judiciously extemporaneous sci-fi guitars. These four lengthy tracks including one drugged-out, 34-minute voyage of inner/outerspace explorations simultaneously recalling Conrad Schnitzler, the Legendary Pink Dots, and Cabaret Voltaire. Limited to just 300 copies, we might add!
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.
FINALLY available on vinyl! Here's what we had to say about the cd version WAY back in 2009...
Sublime Frequencies record number two from the mind blowing Omar Souleyman! In reviewing the last Souleyman disc we compared the sound to something resembling a Middle Eastern Aavikko, which if you're anything like us, sounds AMAZING. Totally over the top chaotic world music rife with soaring strings, cheesy eighties drum machines, wild synths, and amazing buzzing saz melodies, and if anything this new disc is even more over the top.
More than ever, Souleyman's music sounds very Bollywood, festive, wild, sweaty, energized, intense and relentless, rooted around rhythm, the various melodies and vocals slither and swirl, unfurling woozy Eastern melodies over the nonstop beat. It's definitely dance music, and party music, just not the sort of dance / party music we're used to.
The recording is fantastic too, very lo-fi, the texture and timbre of the sound shifting constantly, from murky and muddy, to bright and brilliant, could be that these cuts were culled from various tapes recorded and released over the past decade, but that only adds to the fun, and if it's anything, this music is fun. Funky, groovy, and fun fun fun. Sometimes the melodies are so rapid fire it begins to sound like some sort of alien video game music, then moments later it will slip into something darker and folkier, before exploding again into a wild burst of psychedelic dance chaos! Dabke apparently is a style of music, THIS music, a kind of party music rarely heard outside of Syria, as it's considered not important enough to export, but as far as we're concerned this is some of the most amazing music we've ever heard. For more background info on Souleyman, check the review of the older record on the aQ site, plenty of background on his life and his music, but it's hardly necessary, the sounds here definitely speak for themselves, and what they're saying, is buy this record now! It's so so so so so essential.
Don't really buy that Star Turbine's sound is of "a new age nature" as the press release claims, even as that same statement qualifies this Scandinavian duo as being rather noisy and concrete. Much of the cassette culture that spawned releases such as this some 30 years ago was opposed to or at least was dubious of the propensity of the late '70s / early '80s new age movement to navel gaze. Instead projects like Zoviet France, Cranioclast, or even Psychic TV used the notions of audio hypnosis and trance inducing musics to craft metaphors which spoke against systems of control. Sure the end results may encourage a liberation of the self, but the new age movement's self-identification and self-determination has been argued to have given rise to Thatcher and Reagan era politics. Lest we launch into a PhD thesis on cosmology, aquarian religions, and their impacts on culture and politics, Star Turbine ain't new age, not even in the coying retro pastiche idioms tossed out by NNA Tapes and Not Not Fun. Nope, this is a grimy and dirty cassette of what once might have been deep-space transmissions and radiophonic impressionism but has gone through so many iterations from shitty cassette to microcassette and then back to mangled cassette that the murky drones speak of oil-stained / shit-strewn wastelands. At times, Star Turbine's amalgams of spluttering tape noise and tarnished ambience gets downright beautiful, but those sounds are are seen through the lens of decay and not that of a crystal. Nicely done boys, but get your metaphors right next time. Limited to 100 copies and printed on opalescent paper as is the brand standard for Black Horizons.
Over the last few years, we, and most readers of the aQ list have become a bit obsessed with the Caretaker, as well as the man behind the curtain, Leyland James Kirby, who as the Caretaker, and also nder his own name, has created a body of work at once moody and mysterious, murky and out of time, a series of releases that sound like the musical version of faded photographs, old 78's spinning in ghostly parlors, that ethereal, ephemeral sound a glimpse into some lost era, or some alternate otherworld, needless to say, pretty much everyone at aQ is utterly smitten. Apparently, The Stranger is yet another moniker Kirby has employed in the past, although this is our first exposure to him as The Stranger, and maybe not surprisingly, this iteration of Kirby's The Stranger has ended up on Modern Love, home to lots of other aQ faves, including most notably perhaps Demdike Stare and Andy Stott. Which makes sense considering the sound of The Stranger, which seems to be a darkly minimal, hushed and hauntological, slo-mo electronic creep, positioning itself somewhere between the skeletal electronic minimalism of Stott, and the ritualistic psychedelic hauntology of Demdike Stare. With plenty of Kirby's washed out, faded sound, buried melody mystery lurking just below the surface. And really, below the surface is where most everything is going on here. The sound is extremely minimal, hushed and at times barely there, a few cursory listens in the store, has us thinking this was a bit boring, like nothing was going on, barring some hissy static, and buried rhythms, with all of the tracks bleeding into a single monochromatic whole. But what a difference some headphones make, and we do recommend headphone listening for this, cuz once the volume is cranked, and the rest of the world is shut out, The Stranger reveals itself as something warped and wonderful, some twisted deep listening, heavy on the rhythm and texture, in fact, it's essentially a deftly crafted landscape of slow shifting rhythms and textures, straddling some sort of avant ultra-minimal techno, and something much more atmospheric, the 'beats' are barely there, often fragmented shards of percussion, buried pulsations, clouds of static that just seem to have haphazardly formed sort-of-rhythms, on some tracks they do drive the proceedings, but on others, they simply bleed into the background, with a few tracks sounding like pure ambient field recordings of subterranean pipe fights, "We Scarcely See Sunlight" sounds like Kirby recording himself in the sewers, playing the iron ladders, creating primitive rhythms from metal on metal, while all around him the sounds of the city filtered from above add deep moans and distant rumbles, while "Spiral Of Decline", sounds almost like the gothic industrial of Vatican Shadow, albeit with Kirby's strange idiosyncratic sound design (the cool main rhythmic component that sounds like marbles rolling around in a plastic tube!).
"Providence Or Fate" comes about as close to the Caretaker as anything here, with it's crackle wreathed orchestral shimmers, the faded melodies and washed out ambience, the whole thing hushed and darkly lovely, reminding us of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck as well, but here those dreamy swatch of sound are tethered to a primitive tribal rhythm. And so it goes, from clattery crunch to blurred thrum, tinkling chimes wreathed in rainfall like static, to glitchy avant drone dub minimalism, barely there downtempo slowcore electro drift, to groaning gothic dirge.
As always, super striking Modern Love packaging, the cd in an oversized multi-panel sleeve, both the cd and lp adorned with mysterious, dripping, grey scale images of an old abandoned building.
