For us, the big musical surprise of last week was not Beyonce's new album, but the release of Dam-Funk and Snoop Dogg's throwback collaboration, 7 Days Of Funk. Working with a single producer for the first time since his debut, Snoop Dogg (billed here as Snoopzilla in homage to Bootsy "Bootzilla" Collins, and of whom Snoop also does a great impression of throughout) and Dam-Funk channel late seventies P-Funk as well as the smoother synth-funk iterations that came after in the early eighties, territory that Dam-Funk traversed with great success on his debut Toeachizown. It's hard not to love a production that is all about getting high and having a good time, especially when the grooves are so laid back, stoned-out and infectious. The match-up is pretty damn perfect, and for all of Snoop Dogg's indulgent musical excursions of late, like the reggae-inspired Snoop Lion, this is the one we have been digging the most.
Very little has changed in the Bardo Pond camp, even after all these many years, and nearly as many records. And we're grateful for that. Peace On Venus is another collection of stunning, sprawling, spaced out heavy psych bliss out, with skies full of swirling distorted guitars, anchored by laid back drumming, and minimal basslines, and as always flecked with ethereal fluttering flutes, and those super distinctive, wasted, female vox. Just give a listen to opener "Kali Yuga Blues", with its thick, super distorted, crumbling riffage, blown out and laid back dream-psych heaviness, that builds to a truly intense coda, with FX drenched guitar swirl, drifting atop swaths of swirling flutes, the vocals buried in the mix, loping and lilting, moody and melancholic, and seriously druggy and dreamy. And so it goes, "Taste", is a brooding dark psych ballad, the flute providing much of the melody, with a kick ass midsong psychedelic freakout, but otherwise drifting drowsily, while "Fir" is nearly metallic in its heft, the riffing massive and blown out, the vocals witchy and bewitching, a dirgey psych lumber, equal parts blissed out space rock shimmer and churning downtuned doom, maybe one of our favorite BP tracks ever!
The record finishes off with two 10+ minute epics, first, the folky "Chance", which begins just acoustic guitar and flute, before the psychedelic guitars drift in, the song another loping midtempo brooder, sounding almost like a more psychedelic druggy version of classic Silkworm (which is most definitely a compliment), but again, the flute provides most of the melody, the bulk of the song spent drifting lazily, until the big build, and final few minutes freakout, where wah wah guitars get all tangled and intense, the flute following suit, total psych-prog bliss. Which leads directly into closer "Before The Moon", which as a sort of seventies UK acid folk vibe, albeit cranked up a bit and distorted, lurching, and drowsy, the guitars again crunchy and crumbling, buzzed out and droney, maybe the mathiest of the bunch, the prog vibe blurred into the group's zoner psych drift, the flute drifting in and out, the whole thing getting seriously metallic for the last minute or two, sounding a bit like a more witchy doomy version of Bardo Pond, one that might just appeal to fans of Jex Thoth, Blood Ceremony, The Devil's Blood, Sabbath Assembly, Loon and the like!
We were introduced to the Peak Oil imprint through the lugubrious drone album by the Slow Walkers - a (probably) one-off collaboration between Liz Harris (aka Grouper) and Lawrence English; but a lugubrious drone album is not what you will find here. Black Deer, aka William Burnett aka Willie Burns, delivers a hybrid of DFA-styled disco-punk, summery bedroom techno cuts, and analogic minimal wave. The lead track "It's Like The Way It Used To Be" locks acid squelching sequences and meandering rounded melodies onto a motorik kick-drum pulse, with plenty of kosmische / autobahn references. The best tracks on the album - "First Of September" and "New Break" in particular - are those that align with the nervous if infectious productions from James Murphy or even Arthur Russell, woven with jittery guitars wracked with clockwork delay, automaton synth patterns, and Peter Hook style disco basslines. Limited to 400 copies and housed in hand-silkscreened cover.
Latest batch of brooding gothic balladry from Ms. Haley Fohr, aka Circuit Des Yeux, and like the three albums that came before, Overdue finds Fohr weaving, lushly ominous landscapes of gloomy psychedelic folk and brooding hushed minimalism, but the opening track is maybe the real gem here, showing Zola Jesus just how it's done, at least when it comes to fusing symphonic strings with gothic songcraft, Fohr's voice way up in the front, deep and lustrous, rich and nuanced, while swirling all around are sinister strings, and swoonsome swells, a super dramatic chamber music backdrop that is stunning and haunting, especially about halfway through, where the strings get all Bernard Herrmann like, intense stabs, notes sawed violently, while a dense squall of feedback and noise surfaces and begins to envelop the proceedings, before fading out, and leaving just the strings. That track had us wishing for an all orchestral / symphonic CdY record, but the following track returns to the Circuit Des Yeux of old, more stripped down and folky, mostly just guitar and vocals, but no less effective. But hold tight, the production on this record is fantastic, super varied and nuanced, a few minutes in, jagged shards of distorto guitar swoop in, and then in come more strings, this time though, the strings are all washed out and faded, almost like the song was given to the Caretaker for orchestration, resulting in something fantastically blissed out and woozily ethereal.
The rest of the record uses a similar template, but in all sorts of different ways, from the spare dubbed out apocalyptic folk of "Acarina", with some truly anguished vocals, lots of tripped out effects, and loads of space, to the feral distorted blown out guitar heavy "I Am", that sounds like a meaner, more unhinged PJ Harvey, or the FX heavy minimal dream folk of "My Name Is Rune", replete with backwards tape loops, and woozy buried melodies, and finally, the sprawling nearly 9 minute closer, "Helen, You Bitch", all murky rumbling drone, and weird sampled sound bites, eventually swallowed up by clouds of noise, distorted crumbling guitar buzz, and knuckle dragging tribal drumming, a killer, near metallic, churning noise-psych-dirge finale. Heavy and hypnotic!
Anybody making field recordings in Chernobyl is gonna get our attention. Couple that with an allegorical framework about the end of time rendered through allusions from the book of Revelation, and we're even more intrigued. Come Kingdom Come is an impressive modern classical record with all of these traits, those flourishes gracing orchestrations of strings, voice, and electronics, not too dissimilar to the likes of a Johann Johannsson or (dare we say?) Arvo Part. Colbert is an American composer currently living in Portugal with a hand in running the Binaural Residency Program, and has slowly been composing this body of work for years now. In fact, she performed a variation of this piece as a multimedia presentation collecting live VLF signals that she located within her glassine electronics and a video triptych (courtesy of Olivia Block) at The Lab in San Francisco back in 2012. For all of these terminal thoughts and ominous overtones, Colbert conjures a spacious, if somber atmosphere that hangs upon the languid swells from Colbert's sparse arrangements for plaintive piano and strings, sporadically accompanied by vocals from Gabrielle Crowe, who in turn alternates between chorale dreaminess and operatic libretto. The electronics and field recordings too are sparsely situated throughout the album, often presented as ghosts and echoes to the clusters of piano or strings or voice. Come Kingdom Come is a lovely album for sure and was released on Celer's imprint Two Acorns.
Self-taught Belgian composer Louis De Meester's brilliantly spooky electro-acoustic compositions get a specialized vinyl release courtesy of Demdike Stare / Andy Votel resurrection imprint Dead Cert. A versatile artist and thinker, De Meester worked his way up through the world of sound composition first through his role as music modulator for the Belgian Radio and Television broadcasting company (BRT), and then as head producer and artistic director at the Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM) from 1962-1969. All of this while gaining notice for his compositions for theater productions. In fact, De Meester's unique knack for theatricality is what set these three concrete productions apart from the more impenetrable fare of mid-century electronic music that was being made in Europe (particularly in Cologne and Paris) at the time. A visual artist in his own right, De Meester was inspired by avant-garde poetry, theater and film, and sought out to make sound that would also service these other outlets. Recorded between 1958 and 1972, the three pieces employ a complex amalgam of sonorous collage, manipulations of cello and flute, ghostly voices reciting a cut-up letterist text, and strange unearthly mechanical rhythms and squelches in magnificently dreamy and darkened fields of abstracted sound. Recommended, but like all Dead-Cert releases, extremely limited!
The year-end issue of this metal mag has ol' King Diamond on the cover, and the editorial staff's Top 40 albums of 2013 inside, always a fun read (#1 = Carcass).
There's also stuff on Oranssi Pazuzu, Funeral Circle, Corrections House, Andy Sneap, and Integrity (Hall of Fame for Systems Overload). Plus all the usual columns and reviews and stuff, including the reason to always read the last page of Decibel first, John "Mountain Goats" Darnielle's always amusing, or at least strange, South Pole Dispatch.
Fourth in this ongoing series of 'test pressings' (the first three are sadly sold out) from hauntological electronic duo Demdike Stare, and like the first three, number four finds DS continuing to explore the more overtly dancefloor side of their aesthetic, delving into a twisted world of darkened techno, that is really not all that far removed from their usual sound. At least mood- and vibe-wise, it's still all shadowy and hauntingly harrowing, although this time around, DS continue to move even closer to the post industrial murk of all the Dom Fernow projects (Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos etc.), and the dour techno gloom of Silent Servant, with the A side featuring a buried beat, wreathed in a keening high end drone, and driven by a thick distorted pulse, like a slowed down 4/4 throb, the beat mechanical and robotic, swaddled in a softly roiling cloud of psychedelic noise and layered drones, while the B side adds some skitter and stutter, maybe the grooviest thing they've done, with chopped up jungle beats, more big distorted bass rumbles, a wild tangle of greyed out ambience, and big beat crunch, all filtered through Demdike's warped electronic sensibilities, which has us hoping that maybe there's a Demdike jungle record in the cards somewhere down the line. Here's hoping!
Like the first three volumes, these come packaged in simple, black and white, paper test pressing style sleeves, and they're SUPER limited, we usually blow out of these crazy quick, so grab one before they're gone!!!
So, Glenn, do you even know how many bands / projects / monikers you've been in? Or are currently in? Somebody may know the answer to this question, but that person probably isn't Glenn Donaldson aka Edmund Xavier aka FWY! We can go all the way back to Mirza; and then there was Thuja, The Blithe Sons, Franciscan Hobbies, The Ivytree, The Birdtree, The Knit Separates, Tomes, and probably a handful of others aligned with the Jewelled Antler label; and we've also got the primitive punk stylings of Teenage Panzerkorps / Der TPK and Horrid Red, and we can't forget about the paisley-tinted art-pop of The Skygreen Leopards and The Art Museums. There's stuff we've left out of that list... Needless to say, Glenn Donaldson is a very prolific musician, adopting a new moniker with each new idea he has when it comes to recording. FWY! keeps true to the idea of an instrumental project of motorik post-punk dedicated to late night driving amidst the Byzantine network of Southern California freeway interchanges and nondescript four lane roads that might connect from somewhere in Orange County to somewhere in Los Angeles, or not. These wistfully nostalgic songs are aligned with some of the jauntier aspects of Factory records (especially The Wake's earliest recordings) or even some of those Cure demos which graced the expanded cd versions of Faith and Seventeen Seconds. Clockwork drum machines gird each of the songs that spiral through the harmonic interplay between the Marr / Reilly guitar melodies and the taut Gallup / Hook basslines. Nice work, Glenn!
Latest from this Seattle psychedelic horde, whose last tape was recommended to us by the late great Magdalena Solis, and like that first tape Beyond This Vessel is another collection of apocalyptic, ritualistic psychedelia, but UNlike that first tape, this time around, the sound is a lot more swampy and swaggery, in fact opener "On The Next Full Moon", sounds almost like a stripped/slowed down Stooges, or like some Stooges B-side being performed during the winter solstice by the campfire, guitars buzzing, simple tribal percussion, those drawled vocals, it's a lot more rock than anything on the last tape, but it works, and gives Geist more of a Woven Hand / Sixteen Horsepower vibe this time around, which is not a bad thing at all! The whole tape continues on in that vein, ditching much of the psychedelic shimmer, and abstract folkiness of the other tape in favor of a bloozy swampiness, not to say there isn't still a serious psych-folk vibe, there definitely is, when things slow down, we get a Comus vibe for sure, that same sort of demonic sonic malevolence, but invariably, the sound shifts to something more loping and lumbering, the drums much more driving, the guitars louder, the swampy swagger of some pagan psychedelic ritual. One track devolves into pure ambience, a soft noise drone-drift, laced with buried melodies, and that leads directly into the closer, which slows things down to a tarpit crawl, just acoustic guitar, and those drawled vocals, wrapped in a gauze of distorted guitar buzz, and blackened staticky noise, a gloriously demonic, abject doomfolk creep of a campfire ballad, haunting and ominous, and the perfect way to finish this ritual, and the song here most likely to conjure up whatever demons this sacred ensemble bow before.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
Neat little tape + 3" cd-r package here from this local (Oakland, CA) noiserock unit, nice precise fascist-chic graphic design work too, everything color-coordinated in red and grey. The ep-length tape and cd-r have the same music - with one extra, epic-length bonus track on the cassette, actually, almost as long as the other songs put together. Generalissimo call it a "digital + analog value pack". On these 5 (or 6) songs, Generalissimo blast out raucous, slightly mathy, aggro-poppy grunge-punk, pounding away in a kind of '90s AmReppy style, a la stuff like Unsane maybe, with vocals that urgently shout more than sweetly croon, though there's a bit of both. The music's all chiming and churning, full of stops and starts, guitars spiraling into sharp shards sometimes, with rhythms to make you jump up and down. And then, on the tape anyway, a moody, post-rocky grand finale. Digging it!
Note: LIMITED to 69 copies only.
There was a bit of confusion on the last list, when we finally got around to reviewing a record from LA minimalist murk pop duo German Army, we mentioned in the review that the band had lots of records, and as if to prove that point, we ourselves got confused and, uh, reviewed the wrong record. This week, all is put right, we're finally reviewing the 'right' record, the one we meant to review in the first place, and we got the other one in, the one we actually DID review. So double dose of German Army on this week's list, and odds are, if you're anything like us, you're probably gonna want both.
Last Language is not all that removed from their record on Skrot up, drawing from a similar sonic palette, opening with a bristlingly brutalist bit of electro-dirge pop, a glitchy skeletal rhythm, over haunting swirls of low end thrum, the vocals a mumbled whisper, wreathed in gristly buzz, the whole thing blurred and smeared into an abstract electronic creep, a slow stuttery skitter that almost sounds like it could be a backing track for some lost Sensational album, blunted and wasted and washed out, but also prickly and staticky, some seriously heady sonic miserablism. Not all of the record is so bleak and blasted, but it is all hauntingly spare and blissfully tripped out, the band's MO seemingly unfurling crystalline sprawls of rhythm and texture, with lots of space, the vocals almost like an afterthought, delivered in a sort of couldn't-be-bothered drawl, the sound slipping easily from twang flecked, woozy shimmer, to grinding industrial churn, and back again. The vibe definitely seems to fall somewhere near classic cold wave, but this is cold wave from some terrifying other dimension, fractured and freaky, this is some band from the eighties, the sort of band you might have seen at the Scream club, playing with Kommunity FK or the Abecedarians, but transported to some alien world, and then whisked right back, their music mutated and damaged in the process, the resulting sounds, a twisted outsider gloom-wave dream pop, some of the tracks downright lovely, like "Rebuild The Story", which is all hazy, casting some spidery almost Durutti Column sounding guitars amidst soft synthy swells, and some swooping, backwards effected rhythms, and some echo drenched vocal warblings, but others, like that aforementioned opener, are caustic and intense, and still others, elsewhere, drift from twisted new wave, to post-krautrock avant pop, to blown out industrial clatter, to mumbly Residents like art rock whatthefuck weirdness, to almost DHR like electro-crunch, to trippy, drifty, dreamy murk-wave shimmer, with most tracks somehow mashing all of those together.
Fantastic stuff. And like we said, we'd recommend grabbing both of the German Army lps on this week's list, and then tracking down anything and everything else you can find! you won't be sorry. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Includes a download code!
There was a bit of confusion on the last list, when we finally got around to reviewing a record from LA minimalist murk pop duo German Army, we mentioned in the review that the band had lots of records, and as if to prove that point, we ourselves got confused and, uh, reviewed the wrong record. This week, all is put right, we're finally reviewing the 'right' record, the one we meant to review in the first place, and we got the other one in, the one we actually DID review. So double dose of German Army on this week's list, and odds are, if you're anything like us, you're probably gonna want both.
This self titled lp is on Skrot Up, a label who in the past has given us records by the Grave Babies, Water Borders, Psychic Ills, and they released the recent lp from long time aQ fave and former Net Shaker Ernest Gibson. German Army's distinctive sound is in full effect here, a gloriously dour post punk murkiness, hauntingly rhythmic, ominous drones, creepy sung/spoken crooned vox, opener "Guinea Strong Arm" almost sounds like This Heat at their poppiest, but slowed way down, and filtered through a cracked cold wave filter, a minimal pulsing beat, throbs beneath long moaning tones, and buzzing spidery guitar melodies way off in the distance, all of the sounds gradually growing more and more intense, all except the vocals, which remain perfectly cool and detached, wreathed in occasional swaths of dubbed out echo and reverb, all eventually crumbling to a bleary blackened halt.
And that pretty much lays out GA's sonic template, and it's a good one, all six tracks here sounding like they could be lost eighties industrial post-punk rarities, from the arrangements, to the sound, to the recordings themselves. Lo-fi and raw, darkly primitive, murky and muddy and mesmeric, woozily psychedelic, the vocals in constant flux throughout, way up in the mix, strident and dramatic, then suddenly slowed down to a monstrous gurgle, before being quickly sped up a la Butthole Surfers, but all the while, the music remains a blurred, tarpit miasma, of loping, lumbering bass, primitive programmed tribal rhythms, and swirling old school FX.
Sadly, in the long journey to the US from overseas, the package was a little bit brutalized by the US postal service, so most of the jackets are a little worse for wear, some bumped corners, some slight bends, the usual, so if you're super anal and a collector who needs to have his records be pristine, then you might wanna pass on these, but for everyone else, come get a taste of one of our favorite weirdo outsider dirge-murk post-punk creep-wave combos.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! Includes a digital download too!
It's hard not to love these guys, their sound less and less metal with every passing day, sounding like some alternate universe Blue Oyster Cult, more hard pop, or psychedelic rock than metal, which is evidenced even more here, on this EP, collecting all of the group's cover versions. Most fans already have their Abba cover, as it was a bonus track on the US version of their most recent record, which was ironically the most metal song on that record! But unless you got the Japanese import of the first record, you probably don't have their Depeche Mode cover, a KILLER version of "Waiting For The Night". But even if you DO have those, this is the only place you'll get to hear their cover of Roky Erickson's "If You Have Ghosts" and maybe most surprisingly, Army Of Lovers' "Crucified", both of which could be Ghost originals. And to finish things off there's a pretty great live version of "Secular Haze" recorded live in NYC...
Darkthrone fans, check it out! It's a solo album - or at least, a solo ep, about 25 minutes long, with 4 songs on it - from Ted Skjellum, aka Nocturno Culto, one half of that idiosyncratic Norwegian black metal institution. Why he called his solo project Gift Of Gods we don't know, why not just call it the Nocturno Culto Band when you've already got a cool name like that? We also don't know why he didn't just put these songs on a Darkthrone album, 'cause in the liner notes, ol' Ted says this is his outlet for making music in the vein of '80s heavy metal, but of course that (in part) has been what Darkthrone has been doing on their last 4 or 5 albums anyway. Certainly any of the four tracks here could easily have appeared as one of the Nocturno Culto contributions to this year's Darkthrone opus The Underground Resistance, which alternated songs written and sung by Nocturno Culto with songs written and sung by the other half of the Darkthrone duo, Fenriz. The only real difference here is that N.C. is playing drums instead of Fenriz, as well as handling almost everything else: guitar, bass, lyrics, & vocals. N.C. does get help from his pal K.A. Hudbreider on rhythm guitar, while K.A.'s brother provides guests vocals on one track.
Punningly named opener "Enlightning Strikes" sets the tone, with its surging, doomic riffs and N.C.'s rasping vokills, singing lyrics that are both morbid and cosmic. It's heavy, headbanging stuff, which segues nicely into an equally heavy instrumental, the triumphant title track, again loaded with churning riffage as well as loads of glorious lead guitar. That's followed by the disc's most traditionally '80s sounding song, which turns out to in fact be a cover, a rockin' number called "Looking For An Answer", originally recorded by an obscure Swedish heavy metal band called Universe back in 1985. A pretty great song, actually, and it fits right in, even though N.C. brings in a ringer to handle the more melodic demands of the vocals (quite well done by the aforementioned brother). Finally the ep winds up with the downer, doomy "Last Solstice", a track lengthy and pounding like the opener. Pure melancholy majesty; the '80s metal being referenced here has got to be Celtic Frost.
So, basically, if you liked The Underground Resistance (we did!), then you can consider this ep the equivalent of previously unreleased bonus tracks, quite worthy ones at that. Now we'll be looking for a reissue of Universe's album...
Slipcased jewel case compact disc packaging (vinyl version AWOL at the moment).
Over the years, we'd only ever heard a track or two from these UK post punks, a band whose members would eventually go on to play in more high profile groups like Maximum Joy and The Pop Group, which should definitely give you an idea of where the Glaxo Babies were coming from. Local reissue label Superior Viaduct continues their idiosyncratic reissue campaign, which has included Devo, the Solaris soundtrack, 100 Flowers, Factrix, Henry Flynt, Phill Niblock, and now Brigitte Fontaine (reviews coming soon) and these two from the Glaxo Babies. The sound will definitely be familiar to fans of post punk of that era, angular metallic guitars, dubby rhythms grooves, repetitive almost chanted vocals, horns, all locked into cyclical, hypnotic grooves. Some tracks frantic and frenetic, others laid back and dreamily druggy. Both of these records were originally released in 1980. Put Me On The Guest List is a collection of the group's demos, recorded live with no overdubs, never intended to be released, but so glad they were, kinetic, almost power poppy, sinewy basslines and simple solid drumming, all in service of some killer guitar work, crunchy jangly riffs, and angular crunch, not to mention some super dramatic vocals, some tracks slipping into near doominess, others tense and intense, angular and atonal, check out "This Is Your Life", all minor key moodiness and heady post punk brood. A few tracks get all reggae / dubby, others skronky and jazzy, and still others super abstract and experimental, but most of Put Me On The Guest List is just primo UK post punk, and essential listening for fans of the Homosexuals, P.I.L., Gang Of Four, Wire and all the rest�
Nine Months To The Disco was the group's first, and only, proper full length, supposedly recorded in a single day, and it's a monster. How a record like this, and a group like this managed to remain so far under the radar is shocking after listening to Nine Months. It's funky and groovy, tense and wiry, the sound slipping easily from moody post punkiness, to downright dancey punk-funk, to super experimental krautrock style minimalism, "This Is Your Vendetta" is dark and creepy and so sinister, all spaced out and shadowy, laced with wild flurries of spastic drumming, spidery guitar melodies, and distant horn skronk, culminating in a truly harrowing sample over the brooding last minute or so. "Seven Days" is all churning jazz minimalism, sounding like a darker, dronier, post punkier Necks! The title track is all backwards rhythms, backwards basslines, and creepy droned out ambience, while "The Tea Master And The Assassin" is another abstract ambient experiment that evokes a sinister sense of dread. "Shake (The Foundations)" is the Glaxo Babies at their funkiest, a track that was often covered by the Pop Group later on, it's a dead ringer for Parliament! And the awesomely titled "Dinosaur Disco Meets The Swampsstomp" is not the funky jam you might imagine, in fact, it's something way more abstract and trippy. For all the post punk, and punk funk on Nine Months To The Disco, it's remarkable how much of the record is totally far our, psychedelic and experimental. Part of what makes it so essential. Like Put Me On The Guest List, Nine Months To The Disco is most definitely for fans of P.I.L, Wire, the Homosexuals, etc. but it's also the sort of think that might push all your This Heat buttons, plenty of kraut influenced rhythmic mesmer and FX heavy avant bunkurfunk. Needless to say WAY recommended!!
Over the years, we'd only ever heard a track or two from these UK post punks, a band whose members would eventually go on to play in more high profile groups like Maximum Joy and The Pop Group, which should definitely give you an idea of where the Glaxo Babies were coming from. Local reissue label Superior Viaduct continues their idiosyncratic reissue campaign, which has included Devo, the Solaris soundtrack, 100 Flowers, Factrix, Henry Flynt, Phill Niblock, and now Brigitte Fontaine (reviews coming soon) and these two from the Glaxo Babies. The sound will definitely be familiar to fans of post punk of that era, angular metallic guitars, dubby rhythms grooves, repetitive almost chanted vocals, horns, all locked into cyclical, hypnotic grooves. Some tracks frantic and frenetic, others laid back and dreamily druggy. Both of these records were originally released in 1980. Put Me On The Guest List is a collection of the group's demos, recorded live with no overdubs, never intended to be released, but so glad they were, kinetic, almost power poppy, sinewy basslines and simple solid drumming, all in service of some killer guitar work, crunchy jangly riffs, and angular crunch, not to mention some super dramatic vocals, some tracks slipping into near doominess, others tense and intense, angular and atonal, check out "This Is Your Life", all minor key moodiness and heady post punk brood. A few tracks get all reggae / dubby, others skronky and jazzy, and still others super abstract and experimental, but most of Put Me On The Guest List is just primo UK post punk, and essential listening for fans of the Homosexuals, P.I.L., Gang Of Four, Wire and all the rest�
Nine Months To The Disco was the group's first, and only, proper full length, supposedly recorded in a single day, and it's a monster. How a record like this, and a group like this managed to remain so far under the radar is shocking after listening to Nine Months. It's funky and groovy, tense and wiry, the sound slipping easily from moody post punkiness, to downright dancey punk-funk, to super experimental krautrock style minimalism, "This Is Your Vendetta" is dark and creepy and so sinister, all spaced out and shadowy, laced with wild flurries of spastic drumming, spidery guitar melodies, and distant horn skronk, culminating in a truly harrowing sample over the brooding last minute or so. "Seven Days" is all churning jazz minimalism, sounding like a darker, dronier, post punkier Necks! The title track is all backwards rhythms, backwards basslines, and creepy droned out ambience, while "The Tea Master And The Assassin" is another abstract ambient experiment that evokes a sinister sense of dread. "Shake (The Foundations)" is the Glaxo Babies at their funkiest, a track that was often covered by the Pop Group later on, it's a dead ringer for Parliament! And the awesomely titled "Dinosaur Disco Meets The Swampsstomp" is not the funky jam you might imagine, in fact, it's something way more abstract and trippy. For all the post punk, and punk funk on Nine Months To The Disco, it's remarkable how much of the record is totally far our, psychedelic and experimental. Part of what makes it so essential. Like Put Me On The Guest List, Nine Months To The Disco is most definitely for fans of P.I.L, Wire, the Homosexuals, etc. but it's also the sort of think that might push all your This Heat buttons, plenty of kraut influenced rhythmic mesmer and FX heavy avant bunkurfunk. Needless to say WAY recommended!!
Quebec's kings of technical death return with their fifth full length and their first in over a decade - this time with an entirely rejuvenated line up consisting of some of technical metal's biggest brains (members of Dysrhythmia, Origin, Behold the Arctopus and Krallice all play key roles). And while perhaps not as blatantly and stubbornly difficult as their widely regarded career highpoint Obscura (from way back in 1998), Colored Sands is still a bizarre, and at times strangely beautiful, slab of warped avant garde death metal. What makes this record work, and sets it apart from the legion of other soulless plasticine tech-death bands that have sprouted up like exhausting weeds in the 12 years since Gorguts released their last record, is the deft balance between virtuosity and mood. Sure there are bludgeoning blast beats aplenty and there's a glut of dizzying riffery and lurching avant-grooves that seem to obey no earthly laws of conventional melody or time keeping, but there are also moments of eerie reprieve. Spindling clean guitars provide unsettling moments of stillness. There are cavernous acoustic passages that seem to be breathed forth from some dusty forgotten catacomb. And in "The Battle of Chamdo" there's even a full four plus minutes of purely symphonic staccato strings and nightmarish lurking orchestral thrums that might provide the perfect soundtrack if Paul Thomas Anderson ever wanted to make a slasher movie. These moments of calm almost end up feeling more harrowing than the moments of intense metallic mutilations, not feeling like a calm before the storm so much as a state of helpless weightlessness, like a euphoric sense of ominous peace in the final moments of drowning. It's technical savagery refreshingly peppered with a genuine sense of mystery and wonder, like an absinthe addict mad artist's splattering need to create crossed with a mathematicians obsessive attention to detail. It's a line walked successfully very rarely in heavy music, bringing to mind such stand alone classics as Dillinger Escape Plan's Calculating Infinity and Nile's Black Seeds of Vengeance. Dynamic, cinematic, and an absolute sensory overload - like an overwhelming telekinetic attack. An ecstatic seizure of frenzied challenging death metal.
You might not recognize the name Peter Gutteridge, unless you're big NZ music nerd, cuz while Pure is the only solo record Gutteridge ever released, he played in a bunch of bands you most definitely DO know, the Chills, Snapper, the Great Unwashed, the Clean, the Puddle... holy cow! Pure was only ever released as a super limited tape WAY back in 1989 on the Xpressway label, and has essentially been unavailable ever since, but for fans of NZ underground music and Flying Nun, this is some primo home-brewed Kiwi pop, fans of Tall Dwarfs and Peter Jefferies will fall in love (if they weren't already). Totally of its time, but somehow utterly timeless, all it takes really is a couple tracks, the opener "Lonely" is all primitive drum programming, thick, droned out distorted guitar buzz, and some weirdly affected echo drenched multi tracked vocals, total 4 track pop genius, somehow heavy and noisy, but lilting and melancholic and sweetly dreamy. The next track is somehow even cooler, the drum machines seemingly gone haywire, spitting out a barrage of sped up spastic skitter, while guitars buzz and moan melodically, all wrapped in swirling, buzzing organs, again, somehow managing to be hypnotic and psychedelic, but also perfectly poppy. Which is pretty much how all of Pure plays out, Gutteridge laying down thick, distorted guitars, sometimes wrapped in weird FX, usually anchored by some Casio rhythms, his vocals often settled way down in the mix, but just as often crooning dramatically right up front, the whole thing fuzzy and washed out and definitely a bit psychedelic, with plenty of lo-fi home studio trickery, the sounds occasionally panned and swooping from speaker to speaker, not to mention weird hiss and buzz and drop outs (from the original tape we presume), some tracks sound like an underground NZ version of the Velvets, others super experimental and abstract, with fields of slow shifting static, pulsing bassnotes, blurred distorted drones, some sound all carnivalesque and tripped out, of course a bunch sound like classic NZ pop, and some border on almost Dead C-ish noise rock, the best moments of course when Gutteridge somehow fuses them all together, which happens more than should be possible. So great! For folks who have been flipping out over the recent Flying Nun reissue campaign, Pure is an absolutely essential NZ underground pop classic!!! Hopefully this means more reissued NZ rarities could be forthcoming, here's hoping for a comprehensive reissue campaign for the OTHER legendary NZ label, Xpressway!
Sadly, no download code (or cd version)...
Laurel Halo's last record, Quarantine, was a big hit around there, but it was also maybe her most divisive album yet, the vocals being a big sticking point for some, those vocals seemed to be the defining element of that record, in a way they had never been before. The vocals stark and unaffected, meant to ascribe a sort of fragility and vulnerability to LH's voice, but for some people, the heavily sample/processed vocals of the earlier releases were sorely missed. So for those folks, Chance Of Rain might just might do the trick, as it is, as far as we can tell, almost entirely instrumental, barring a few sample snippets here and there. And as if to make up for the missing vocals, the rhythms seem to have been pushed to the fore, cranked up to the point that much of Chance Of Rain almost sounds like Laurel Halo's take on Footwork. Think DJ Rashad, RP Boo, DJ Nate, Young Smoke, Halo seeming to build her psychedelic electronic landscapes from maddeningly repetitive loops and samples, often it's subtle, those stuttering loops blurred into dreamy Field like electro-bliss, but just as often, those repeated rhythms add fantastic tension, the best moments for us being when the sound is dialed WAY down, the looped stutter muted and minimal, the sound locked into a tranced out hypno-groove, that could go on forever!
Plenty of the record harkens back to past Laurel Halo jams, but even the familiar sounds are recast, even the dreamiest tracks, dark with sonic tension, rife with brooding minor key melancholia, lush textures in constant motion, except when they're not, and the tracks seem to lock into a glorious moment of sonic stasis, only to launch right back into the song proper. The sounds themselves tend toward the murky, the record for the most part super dark, shadowy and muted, but then a track like "Thrax" bursts out of the mire, a gout of sci-fi skitter, and synthed out squelch, only to slip right back into another sprawl of murk-house footwork minimalism, a fantastic blast of claustrophobic skittery electro-gloom, which is fast making this maybe our favorite Laurel Halo record yet...
On the last list, we reviewed an lp from Hot & Cold, a Chinese group who somehow found their way to Chicago label Moniker, and as we mentioned in that review it was a perfect fit, as H&C's twisted brand of lo-fi noise pop / minimal psych kraut / psychedelic noise rock was pretty well removed from much of the other Chinese stuff we've been reviewing lately, which tends more toward the jangly/fuzzy end of nineties style American indie rock. But we (and lots of you) dug that lp, and wanted more, so here's another blast of FX drenched weirdo pop noisiness, and if anything, it's equal to the Moniker lp, right from the get-go, opening with a feral blast of distortion drenched, feedback slathered, bass heavy crunch. Siren like melodies swirl atop a bed of tangled high end squiggles, some fierce distorto bass buzz, yowled Mark E. Smith style vox, all wreathed in a weird cloud of sculpted industrial feedback, and driven by a clipped minimal electro beat, and it's so good! One of those opening tracks we had to listen to 5 or 6 times before we could make ourselves listen to the rest of the record. Which is equal to that opener, albeit not all nearly as noisy and chaotic. "Simon's Angry Song" doesn't sound nearly as angry as that opener, but does deliver a tense sprawl of loping noise rock mesmer, with some crunchy guitar buzz, another drum machine beat, the vocals buried in the mix this time, but as we've come to expect, it doesn't take long for the song to splinter into full on WTF freakout, a twisted squall of wild psychedelic noise, and glitched out weirdness, all still draped over that original hypnotic groove. "Knife Fight" sounds like a more wasted, WAY more abstract Stooges, a single riff looped and layered into something super tranced out, like the other tracks, gradually getting more and more twisted and trippy. We could probably go through the whole record track by track, cuz every song here is a twisted weirdo gem, hazy zoner-psych krautrock style kosmiche, to loping, stuttering electro-murk grooviness, that explodes into damaged outsider rhythmic meltdown, to super blown out, noise rock damage, to druggy dirgey mesmer, that sounds a bit like Spacemen 3 and the Velvets, melted down and doused in hallucinogens, to crunchy, robotic new wave noise-pop...
Seriously twisted, WTF avant pop electro noise radness, an oddball sonic outlier amidst all the killer Chinese indie rock and noise pop that we've been reviewing recently, but one that's quickly revealing itself to maybe be one of our favorites so far!
This Paris synth / cold / new wave duo are the first contemporary release on the Medical reissue label, and they're a perfect fit, sounding like, if we didn't know better, and actual reissue of some Euro-wave obscurity from the nineties. Sure the sound is a bit more modern, more synth-gaze / darkwave than old school new wave, less low fidelity too, but for the most part, I.S. have THAT sound nailed. Buzzing synths, squelchy basslines, sequenced rhythms, swirling atmospheres, the vibe cold and clinical, with vocalist Christina delivering her best sexy ice queen croon, besides sounding like an actual band from back in the day, they also sound like they'd be right at home on Italians Do It Better. Fans of that labels Euro-disco synthwave and outfits like Desire, Chromatics and Glass Candy will be in retro-synth gloom-wave heaven. Many of the tracks are dark and dour, shadowy and melancholic, but a bunch fall closer to classic EDM, channeling Cabaret Voltaire and Chris And Cosey, and obviously anyone into the current crop of modern retro synthwave outfits will definitely dig! Usually when reissue labels dabble in contemporary music, the results are disappointing, but Medical obviously know what they're doing, and we can't imagine anyone who's dug ANY of the Medical reissues, wouldn't also dig Illustration Sonore!
Like all of Medical's reissues, Illustration Sonore's Undisciplined Strips Of Emotion is fantastically packaged, pressed on heavy clear vinyl, housed in a faux distressed full color jacket, with a full color insert / lyric sheet. And yeah, also VERY limited...
Justin Broadrick's Jesu continues to drift further and further way from the the churning industrial metallic pummel of his Godflesh project, which makes sense, especially considering Godflesh is back together and a going concern again. But then even before that, Jesu continued to move ever popward, most recently positioning itself alongside the electro-pop of M83, as well as the wistful eighties style John Hughes soundtrack sound. And for all of the heaviness and experimentalism that came before, Broadrick definitely demonstrated a keen knack for pop smithery, which is most definitely in full effect here.
"Homesick" might be one of the poppiest songs yet, still rife with heavy chugging guitar, but those guitars wreathed in shimmery, chiming melodies, and then extra super polished clean vocals, it's the sort of song that with a different production could be a proper 'hit', but thankfully, here it's still defined by Broadrick's production, and that heavy guitar part, which turns this into a sort of jangle sludge dream pop. "Comforter" is even less heavy, with a warbly effected guitar melody over ethereal synth drifts and swooping backward FX, subtle electronic pulsations, but like the opener, this dreaminess is soon joined by some crunchy downtuned guitar, before the whole thing settles into a weird woozy dream pop dirge, all melty and warbly, as if it was dubbed from a tape left in the sun too long. The rest of the record is more of the same, a sort of stripped down pop, the title track the sort of new wave jangle pop you might expect to hear on Captured Tracks, and the closer "Grey Is The Colour", is also all dreamy and jangly, strummy and shimmery, but right in between, lurks the 17+ minute "The Great Leveller", which begins with some stately piano, wrapped in soft swirls of symphonic strings, and martial snares, clouds of cymbal shimmer, before the sound is nearly swallowed by some seriously distorted and downtuned guitar chug and churn, which is offset by more clean melodic vox, but it's easily the heaviest track here, but again, heavy as in some super melodic sludge pop, but it does get a bit mathy and metallic, with a melancholic interlude partway through, stately and lovely, before returning to the majestic metallic chug, now offset by some seriously lilting melodies, the sort of combo that really shouldn't work, but somehow does, perfectly.
The Northwest's harshest militaristic horde returns with this cassette-only collection: five tracks (including three covers!) of hateful in-the-red black metal, grim neo-folk and crumbling black ambience. Opening ominously with an eerie choral wail, before launching into an overwhelmingly noisy cover of Emperor's "Ye Entrancemperium" (complete with an actual sample of the original's spoken word intro), dragging this classic regal monument of symphonic black metal into the realms of clattering lo-fi, taking a song that was already labyrinthian and opaque and plunging it into even murkier, more impenetrable depths. "Sleep Is The Enemy" is by contrast simpler, but that's not to imply it's any easier of a ride - opening with the foreboding ticking and chiming of some monstrous clock before emerging as a massive tuneless dirge that shifts into a wall of frantic blasts, buried subliminal growls and ghostly breathy whispers, but always returning to the dreamy surreal horror of that looming haunted chime. L'Acephale's take on Darkthrone's "As Flittermice As Satans Spys" (easily one of the best/weirdest BM song titles ever) is the biggest departure here - building this timeless piece of simplistic shadowy black metal into a grim neo-folk march, complete with the rapid strum of a mandolin, cracking militaristic thuds and inhuman howling. "Passing Into Sleep" is an atmospheric wash of moss-flecked black ambience. The single deathly groaning note of a haunted piano tolls endlessly underneath a wall of droning loneliness, creaking and shifting under the weight of its distant feedback and echo drenched operatic vocals. Closing out the proceedings is a reworking of Current 93's "Let Us Go To The Rose" (here translated into the French "Allons Vior Si La Rose"), taking the sparse folk melodies of the original and letting them drift hazily over a minimal, mid-paced, very Burzum-esque drum beat, before morphing into a churning trance of grinding tremolo guitars and furious blasts. And as this is being put out by Black Horizons it goes without saying that the packaging is minimal and beautiful, even including a miniature black and silver printed poster, incorporating the original artwork from Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger into an abstract surreal collage.
The previous full length from French fuzz pop duo The Liminanas, Crystal Anis, might be one of THEE most played records in the shop, even a year after it came out. Somehow it seems to ALWAYS be playing, and whenever someone can't think of what to listen to, that seems to be the record turned to most. And for good reason, it's a doozy. Besides being droney and jangly and hypnotic, and so crazy catchy, it also features lots of ukelele, perhaps in the only non-kitsch usage we can think of. They take the modern krautrock of outfits like Moon Duo, and meld it to the classic popsmithery of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg. The music simple and stripped down, but super hypnotic and melodic, boy and girl vocals, with plenty of sexy spoken word, that ukelele, a weird mix of folky strum, propulsive motorik groove, fuzzy garage rock, stripped down jangle pop, all wound into perfect chunks of brooding, moody, exotic, fuzzy, jangly radness that we literally could not get enough of. So we were THRILLED to discover a brand new record, and we're happy to report, it's just as good as the earlier one. In fact, it's one of those records, that on first listen seems like it couldn't possibly live up to what came before, but a few listens in, blossoms into something special, and before you know it, you begin to think it's even better, and then a little bit later, you're SURE it is. So that's where we're at now. The sound itself is definitely more lush and well produced, the sound a bit heavier and more layered, and while the songs still don't seem quite as catchy, they're sinking their hooks in a little more with each listen, and at this point, that means it won't be long, since this is pretty much all we want to listen to. Totally recommended, and bound to be playing next time you're in the shop, which as always, is about the highest recommendation we can think of!
Cold Mission is the debut full length from UK producer Logos, who has some connection to aQ faves Dusk & Blackdown, and traffics in a similar strain of post dubstep electronica. But unlike the cinematic ambience of D&B, Logos' sound seems to fall closer to the slow-mo soul of folks like Vessel and oOoOO, equal parts jungle, dubstep and grime, but given a druggy, drowsy makeover. Logos unfurls sprawling swirls of synthscapery wrapped around fractured beats, and gouts of rib cage rattling bass, but like much of this stuff, Cold Mission doesn't sound destined for the dancefloor, instead, the vibe is abstract and avant, more of a wasted late night chill out sort of feel, skittery rhythms drift amidst softly billowing clouds of chordal thrum, peppered with muted synth pads, and reverbed vocal fragments, many of the tracks almost sound like the intros to dubstep jams, stretched way out into proper songs, slow building and tense, as if some huge drop was just around the corner, but the drop never comes, instead, the sound just billows outward, like a time lapse film of a slowly expanding universe transformed into sound. There are also lots of field recordings woven into the mix, chirping birds, chittering insects, crickets, making the music sound strangely pastoral, even at its most sinister, it's not hard to imagine chilling out on some grassy knoll, the stars glimmering in a black sky, these sounds washing over you. The third track, "Surface Area" is where it first comes all together, weird metallic percussive clatter, peppering swirling cascades of arpeggiated synths, super kosmische and ethereal, all underpinned by thick waves of bass rumble, crickets off in the distance, total blissed out ambient dub weirdness, that might be our favorite jam here, but that's a tough call, cuz throughout, Logos conjures up all sorts of abstract trippiness, his post dubstep about as 'post' as it can get, check out "Swarming", another sprawling swath of crystalline shimmer, this one laced with minor key melodies, haunting FX, thick rumbling bass, DJ style rewinds, again, all blurred into something spacey and nearly psychedelic.
Even the more beat heavy tracks are pretty out there: "Seawolf" is all rubbery synth buzz, fragmented stutter beats, there's the cock of a shotgun in there too, as well as some video game 8-bit sound FX, the first few minutes sounding like an intro, again until you realize, there is no intro, the beat lurching and lumbering through fields of glitch and squelch and buzz. The one track featuring Dusk & Blackdown is actually the most straight ahead jam here, but that's not saying much, it's still super dubbed out and abstract, this time laced with voices, strange synth blurts, more rewinds, like most of the tracks here, never fully reaching terminal velocity, every time it sounds like the beats gonna kick in proper, the song fractures and morphs into a twisted tangle, although in the case of this track, the sound suddenly shifts into something synthy and spacey and unlike almost anything else on the record. From there on out, it's more of the same, which is to say, not the same at all. A lurching stuttery synth wreathed beatscape, bleeds directly into the gorgeously cinematic title track, all gristly glitch, swoonsome synth, and crumbling distorted bass, which leads directly into a strange bit of almost tropical sounding ambience, like the Field via the Orb via James Ferraro? Trippy, dreamy stuff for sure.
The record finishes off with a killer one two punch. First, "Wut It Do", where Logos lets his jungle freak flag fly, the closest to a proper jungle jam for sure, but even then, the song is constantly shifting, the various loops and samples, maddeningly repeated, footstep style, but ultimately, has us wondering what a slightly less abstract Logos record might sound like, pretty goddamn great we're guessing. But before we can think about that too much, the sound slips right back into the Cold Mission avant-dubstep / post jungle dreaminess, sounding a bit like a dubbed out jungle new age, all swirling synths, chirping crickets, tinkling chimes, some vocals and a little bass buzz, as well as some spaced out stuttery beats, those beats eventually dropping out, leaving the last few minutes to unwind as a super trippy, super dynamic new age / dubstep mashup!
Easily the coolest release from this year's Black Friday Record Store Day, and thankfully one that didn't disappear after the day, Joe Mansfield's Beat Box is a loving homage to the drum machines that have driven so much of the music we love - and holy cow, is this total record nerd / gear geek nirvana, a huge hardcover book, featuring page after page of glossy shots of pretty much every drum machine we've ever seen, as well as TONS we had never even heard of. In addition to pix of the drum machines themselves, there are also drawings, paintings, shots of the original packaging, old ads, even schematics and instruction manuals, totally obsessive and totally amazing! The drum machines covered go all the way from the fifties to the present day, big old hulking behemoths, to tiny toy like gizmos, the machines themselves displaying some incredible industrial design, the sort of thing that won't just appeal to drum machine dorks, but also design buffs, and heck, even folks who just dig big beautiful art books. Of course most aQ-ers probably find themselves in all three camps! We got a taste of this book on this past April's Record Store Day, with the release of a sort of mini-Beat Box, that featured a couple pages from the book, as well as two exclusive flexi-discs (we still somehow have a couple of those left, just ask!), but even that didn't prepare us for how crazy cool the actual book is. And it's not just the book itself either, the book comes housed in an oversized hard box/slipcover/leatherette case, that sort of has the feel of an actual drum machine, and in fact, one side of the box is printed with the schematic for the Rhythm Composer TR-808 drum machine, while the other side features little cutouts, one that houses a 7" single, with the legendary "Paul Revere" beat, as well as a cassette tape with bonus beats. The book also features a download card with beats from the various drum machines featured in the book! Easily just about the coolest Christmas gift we can imagine this year, even if (and maybe especially if) it's just a present for yourself!
No, not some quaint, lovey-dovey coupling between a waif-like chanteuse and her mustachioed beau-hunk. This is an Oakland minimal wave duo, whose emotional detachment through cold electronics and monotone vocals is hardly the stuff of romance. The former half of this duo is Max Brotman, who had released a pretty fantastic album of Sheffield-influenced synth-punk under the banner Brotman & Short. As good as that record (and this record is), we gotta wonder about the lack of imagination when it comes to naming his projects. Anyway, the latter is Mara Barenbaum, who records her Not Not Fun approved work of pop-surrealism as Group Rhoda. Let's hope this is not some one-off collaboration, as Brotman really seems to bring a sense of clarity and structural direction, and Barenbaum has plenty of weird-girl cards up her sleeve at any given time. The two come up with some choice synth-pop sequences on vintage gear reflecting a Chris Carter / Clock DVA sense of robo-funk. One of the rare outings from Dark Entries of contemporary work, but easily lives up to rest of the label's impressive catalog.
The mythology of Maurizio Bianchi / MB has been well documented here at Aquarius; as we have long been spellbound by many of his classic industrial productions. He began experimenting with electronics, noise, and 'tape decomposition' in the late '70s, recording at a feverish pace over a five year period. He released a handful of records on Sterile, Broken Flag, and Come Organisation, with a few albums being self-financed private pressings. All of these albums quickly went out of print, not only due to the quality of the recordings, but because of his mysterious disappearance from the music scene, spawning a number of implausible legends. In the late '90s, the Italian avant-garde label Alga Marghen embarked on a reissue campaign of MB's classic albums. Those 10 discs, too, went out print leading to yet another campaign of Bianchi's earliest work. Carcinosi was one of those 10 Alga Marghen albums, and has now gotten the reissue treatment from Menstrual Recordings.
If there is one MB record to own, it's Carcinosi - the existentially bleak synthesis of the divebomb synth squalor found on his early work like Symphony for a Genocide and the frigid drone exasperation of his finale Armaghedon. Originally released in 1983 as a private edition of 400 copies, Carcinosi is part two of his dyptic of 'bionic music' alongside Endometrio. The metaphors of cancer mutating within a technologized body parallel a text in which Bianchi refers to this work as a warning of another Auschwitz. Bianchi's Carcinosi masterfully actualizes his grim metaphors with a mesmeric carousel of dark fractures, muted noise and disorienting synthetic pulsations smothered in a heavily saturated wall of delay. Again just 400 copies of this are around, with an exact reproduction of the original artwork with the album itself pressed on clear vinyl.
We've long been fans of Ukrainian pianist and composer Lubomyr Melnyk. Have a quick look at the aQ site for much gushing, and a way more detailed of Melnyk and his 'continuous music' method of piano playing, which he invented, and involves the sustain pedal continuously depressed, turning Melnyk's rapid clusters of notes into gorgeous almost psychedelic sounding flurries, lush swirling clouds of sounds, which are once again in full effect here, which by the title, you can surmise does consist of three solo pieces, just Melnyk and a piano. Proper Melnyk releases are a rarity, since he decided long ago, that with so many releases, he would press up cd-r's, as a way to affordably have all of them available. But recently, Melnyk has been getting much more attention, having released a fantastic collaboration with James Blackshaw, and having several proper releases on actual labels.
Three Solo Pieces is as gorgeous as you might expect, the opener "Marginal Invitation" is brooding and melancholic, the playing measured and minimal, at least until a few minutes in, when the sound seems to transform, and suddenly, the listener is surrounded by warm, lustrous notes, and constantly shifting textures and melodies, the most dramatic part being where Melnyk abruptly lets up on the sustain pedal, and the notes suddenly snap back into a staccato framework, the notes still rapid fire, a different sort of swirling arrangement, dizzying and dramatic, Melnyk, slipping easily back and forth between the two. "Corrosions On The Surface Of Life" is atypically atonal, sounding much more '20th century' than most of his pieces, but no less compelling, a continuous cascade of notes and melodies, a blurred swirl of sound, tense and intense, the angular feel adding a sinister vibe to the proceedings, but before you know it, the sound is transformed, gradually shedding the more atonal elements, until it's downright lovely, before those dissonant notes gradually creep in again. The 18 minute closer begins like some famous classical piece you just can't put your finger on, the magic of Melnyk's mastery, conjuring up a piece at once utterly unique, but at the same time, one that sounds so familiar, the arrangement ingenious, as the low notes seem to be gradually shed over the course of the song, upper register melodies gradually coming to the fore, until finally, it almost sounds like music box melodies, dizzyingly repetitive, and mesmerizingly trancelike and tranquil. Fantastic!!
First we've heard from these local math/post/kraut rockers since their The Ringing Silence Between Your Ears 7", which we LOVED, and even then we were already hankering for more, so here we finally have a new full length, five new songs, clocking in at more than 30 minutes, and all it takes is about a minute of the first track to remind us of why we love these guys so much. If this was 1995, these guys would be HUGE, and fuck it, even in 2013, these guys should be. Equal parts old school math/post/noise rock and more modern slow build heaviness a la Mogwai, Minot are masters of nuance, so tight and controlled, the sound intricate, rhythmically complex, heavy as fuck, and somehow, totally crazy catchy, a tough feat for sure when you're all instrumental, but after repeated listens, we find melodies and riffs stuck in our head like crazy. Progged out mathiness fused to moody jangle, all wound up into sprawling hypno-rock mesmer. The opener manages to be alternatingly dizzying and moody and melodic, while the second track dials the math back a bit (except for the drums which seem to be in constant motion) unwinding a fantastic sprawl of mesmerizing minimal post rock, the track already locked into a super dramatic slow build, atmospheric, majestic and epic, but these guys mix it up like crazy, the track constantly shifting into dense rhythmic tangles, stuttering start/stops, some seriously dense metallic mathiness, somehow all the while remaining utterly catchy.
The rest of the record follows suit, the band deftly weaving super intense soundscapes of chiming harmonics, busy drumming, angular guitars, thick super melodic basslines, even some electronics, the band nimbly flitting from dense brood to majestic metallic swirl and back again, loping post rock waltzes that morph into psych-prog jams, woozy droney dirges that lead directly into minimal mathy skitter, only to somehow get even mathier, but again, remaining kind of melodic and catchy. Rare is the band that can pull that off, and pull it off so consistently, but if you haven't figured it out by now, Minot is one of those rare bands. Totally recommended. Essential listening for fans of mathrock / postrock then AND now!
The dronier, gentler (but not necessarily quiet!) side of Japanese garage rock maniac Shinji Masuko (DMBQ, Boredoms) is revealed here via the guitarist's new project, Moan, a duo with vocalist/keyboardist/bassist Makiko Toba (Water Fei). Waves of shoegazing distortion push needles way into the red on opening epic "The Murmur Of The Zodiac Voices", and it's a beautiful thing. Over 26 minutes of drifting, droning psychedelic soundscapey guitar graced with floating female vocals. It's obvious why they called themselves Moan. Parts sound like Boris at their most blissed out, other passages could be the heavy psych guitar explorations of Ulaan Khol.
With that massive track alone, the disc is already well worth the price of admission, but the murmuring continues on the lovely slowcore song "No No I", Moan dialing down the volume, getting moodier and even more melodic, before Shinji unleashes some searing distorted guitar like he's having a Tokyo Flashback or something in the second half of the song.
The remaining two tracks on the disc, the folky "Soda Song" (Shinji using effects, we assume, to create an effervescent "soda" sound that bubbles along in the background) and the equally-effervescent-even-without-soda-sounds "My Noctiluca Town" are also both individually interesting and pretty and mesmeric. Quite recommended, all in all.
We'd often thought that 'Moan' would be a good name for a funereal doom project, but with a record this fantastic (if non-funereal) we don't mind that Shinji & Makiko snagged it.
We're huge fans of Brooklyn psych folk combo Woods, as well as the more garage rocking Babies, both bands featuring Kevin Morby. Morby played bass in Woods, but fronted the Babies alongside Vivian Girl Cassie Ramone. Now he's apparently relocated to Los Angeles, and made this, his first solo record. And while we were secretly maybe hoping for another Babies style record, Harlem River is pretty great anyway, much more aligned with the sun dappled pop-psych of Woods, laid back and stripped down, mostly just guitar, organ and drums, Morby's vocals more world weary, delicately dusted with reverb, the songs minor key and melancholic. The opener "Miles, Miles, Miles" sets the tone, the whir of the organ wrapping everything in its warm chordal shimmer, the guitars hushed and minimal, the vocals, a warm, comfortable croon, the arrangement pretty straight ahead, except for a cool, rhythmic shift, that's one of those cool little details that sort of MAKES the song. But for the most part, this is a pretty straight ahead psychedelic folk / garage pop record, leaning toward the slowcore side of the spectrum, a dour indie rock, moody and minimal, personal and introspective, we're definitely reminded of Kurt Vile, which is not a bad thing at all. Repeated listens reveal lots of subtle details, melodies and hooks that seems to come into focus, the textures surprisingly lush, even though the instrumentation is so simple, lovingly arranged, the recording rich and warm and organic. It's the kind of record you might curl up with on a rainy day, sitting by the window, watching the water run down the glass, reading and daydreaming, Morby's wistful songcraft the perfect soundtrack. With every listen we dig this more and more...
If our review of Noctum's 2010 debut The Seance boiled down to saying this Swedish band's '70s-sounding Sabbath/Pentagram worship was definitely highly recommended to all Witchcraft fans ('cause it sounded a heck of a lot like aQ faves Witchcraft), then this time around, with their new album Final Sacrifice, we must recommend 'em to all fans of their new labelmates, In Solitude. 'Cause Noctum have added a BIG dose of Mercyful Fate to their sonic equation - which means, rather than Witchcraft, they now remind us more of In Solitude, or even Ghost. A lot of it has to do with the vocals, with their newfound wailing King Diamond-ish affectations (including the high falsetto, and horror story lyrics), which don't sound nearly as much like Magnus from Witchcraft as they used to. Instead, yeah, he sounds something like the guys from Ghost and In Solitude. There's also a Mercyful Fate riff or two hinted at in these songs for sure.
We don't want to accuse 'em of following trends, but have to admit it looks a little suspicious. In Solitude and Ghost, both displaying big Mercyful Fate influences, are of course two of Sweden's currently hippest/hottest hard rock exports right now, right? But it could just be a coincidence. And in any case, what does it matter? Nobody was accusing Noctum of being all that original in the first place. What's important, is, will you dig the tunes? And you will, if you like this sort of retro riffy occult metal action, a la In Solitude of course. Plus, Noctum DO still have plenty of the '70s/Sabbath/Witchcraft thing going on too, in fact, one song is progged out enough to feature flute, and it ends up being a pretty cool combo, Black Sabbath meets Mercyful Fate (or Witchcraft meets In Solitude), nothing wrong with that!! Also if you found the latest In Solitude to be "not metal enough" for you, this won't have that problem, they don't (yet) do the goth-rock thing. But they do mix in some possible other inspirations - there's a rollicking-ness to some of this that makes us think they've been listening to Southern/boogie rock like the Allman Brothers, Ram Jam or Pat Travers (!), and heck, any band that can make us reference both King Diamond and Ram Jam, we approve!
We've been big fans of Noveller's trance inducing guitarscapes for quite a while now. She's one of those artists that takes her sweet time between albums, and that sort of meticulousness and patience comes with rewards. While her first five records all seemed to showcase just what she could do with just a guitar and handful of pedals, this time out she's expanded her sonic palette, adding washed out synths, subtle piano, even some murky electronics.
What separates Noveller, and this album, from its peers, is that there is real song structure beneath the wall of sound that seems to cascade gloriously up and down and all around this whole record. Haunting melodies are deftly woven into the tracks, making the experience of listening to No Dreams one that taps into worlds of washed out memories, distant yesterdays, and a present moment that blurs the line between the material world and something much more ethereal and ephemeral.
With soaring sonic elements that remind us of Robert Fripp alongside majestic crescendos that recall Glen Branca and Rhys Chatham, No Dreams also has a cinematic quality that evokes the come down moments of some of our favorite records by folks like Godspeed You Black Emperor and Mogwai. Noveller has managed to create a record that manages to be drifty and dazy without ever getting stale or static. The perfect soundtrack for when all you want is to wash away you day and let dreams whisk you away, blast this at full volume, and let yourself disappear into Noveller's gorgeous world of No Dreams...
Ovens just might be the most underappreciated best band in SF. Although that looks like it could maybe be about to change. The various members live in different cities now, and only really play about once a year, but at their most recent show, a few weeks back, HUNDREDS of people showed up, and went NUTS, there was a pit, and crowd surfing, in a tiny little hole in the wall club. Which might have you thinking these guys are some sort of heavy punk rock band, when in fact, they're a pop band. An amazing incredible pop band, whose songs routinely clock in at about the 30 second mark, and whose lyrics are mostly about getting drunk, getting high, getting fired or getting hurt. We joke that if their songs were longer and weren't all about drugs, they would be THEE most popular band in the land. And we believe it. Their sound like some impossible mix of Weezer, Guided By Voices, The Beatles, Thin Lizzy (who they covered at that show), Teenage Fanclub, old Bee Gees (who they also occasionally cover) and the Fucking Champs. Total hook filled pop, with killer dual guitar harmonies, shredding leads, amazing hooks, like the sort of hooks most bands would KILL for, but these guys toss out hooks like that in 20 second songs and simply move on to the NEXT killer hook. Hell, our own Andee loved Ovens so much he put out their debut full length (much more raving about these guys in that review elsewhere on the aQ site, and heck, if you don't have that yet, you should buy it NOW).
This latest blast of perfect pop is just that, perfect. Nine songs in 8 minutes, the longest song 1:59, the shortest :34, the band kicking out feedback drenched fuzzy power pop one second, lilting Beatles-esque ballad the next, a dreamy acoustic guitarscape leads right into a woozy chunk of nineties style indie rock, but with those guitar harmonies, that kill, and then it's right into another perfect chunk of miniature pop, in the amount of time it's taken to write this review, we've listened to the whole single 3 times in a row, and the thing is, now that the review's almost done, doesn't mean we have any intention of stopping.
Easily one of our favorite local bands, heck, local or not, these guys are incredible! And if you get a chance to see one of their rare (and usually brief, not to mention littered with eighties hardcore covers, although at that most recent show, they covered Leeway!!) performances, don't blow it, if there's any justice in the world, these guys will be HUGE, and the world will be humming along to their jams, 30 seconds at a time!!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Another enigma from the cassette underground via Black Horizons. Presumably, this is a contemporary project; and presumably, they / she hail from France (there is a recognizably female voice that appears throughout the album); and presumably, there's a guest appearance from one of the members of the post-industrial outfit Novy Svet. Nope, that's not a lot of context to frame this album, as the sounds within certainly could have come out way back when, on Inner X, Dead Man's Curve, or any of those Rising From The Red Sands compilations. Santa Espina provide us with 16 tracks, mostly of loop based material whose antiquated murkiness and dour drone-pulsations seems to be a codeine-sloshed bout of method acting that might have aspired to the Legendary Pink Dots / Edward Ka-Spel strategies of chemical sound, if Santa Espina weren't so woozy. When the French lady vocals do come into the mix, they are whispered almost like dreams or forgotten witchy incantations, onto a microcassette recorder and layered amidst various states of damp tape detritus. Limited to 100 copies. And as always, some super fancy packaging to boot...
This is the third reissue of a recording by German guitarist/soundscaper Gunter Schickert that we've listed - and also the third that we've made a Record Of The Week. That ought to tell you a little something about just how much we like the music of Herr Schickert! Up until fairly recently, Schickert's work has been shrouded in obscurity, the original albums being super rare and hard to find, reissues equally scarce. But thankfully, just in the last couple of years, several legit, long-deserved reissues, appearing on the Bureau B and Important labels, have helped to make Schickert's mesmerizing music more widely known - and has hopefully established him where he belongs, as one of the crucial names in the classic krautrock pantheon, up there with contemporaries like Klaus Schulze, Manuel Gottsching, Achim Reichel, and Michael Rother. Certainly as far as we're concerned, he is! If you dig any of the aforementioned gentlemen, you should definitely get to know Gunter Schickert as well.
The previous two albums of his we've Record Of The Week-ed, 1974's Samtvogel and 1979's Uberfallig, are both all-time aQ faves. There's not much more to Schickert's small discography - but there is this, and it's another fave for sure. Originally released as a cassette tape in 1983, then reissued again on cassette in the '90s and on cd-r in the early 2000's by the Freeman brothers (of Auricle Magazine / Crack In The Cosmic Egg fame), the material on Kinder In Der Wildnis consists of disparate DIY recordings drawn from Schickert's archives, so it's a bit more varied than either of his earlier albums, though if you've heard those, you'll recognize right away that you're back in Schickert's sonic realm, one of organic field recording atmospheres and trance-inducing minimalist pulsations... but something about this is so much more nervy and dark. More "rocked out" too at times. Maybe it's the influence of the NDW, aka Neue Deutsche Welle (punk new wave music of Germany), but we're still talking krautrock.
Even though Schickert does EVERYTHING himself (guitar, tape, vocals, percussion, trumpet) it somehow sounds like a whole band, and that band sounds like Amon Duul II and Faust trapped together in a bunker, jamming endlessly in the middle of the night, the music dark and claustrophobic despite the environmental nature sounds that (as always) Schickert likes to weave into his recordings. There's the children's voices on here too (his daughter sings on the jittery title track) but that's in stark contrast to the druggy darkness of so much of this. Tracks like "Rabe In Der Nacht" and "Hollentanz" are a dense lo-fi mesh of percolating beats, wailing psych guitar, and sound FX. Bird twitter-y field recordings (and crazy crow-like cawing from Schickert himself, we assume) meet overdubbed layers of chanting vocal parts, including more animal-like cries, in the hallucinatory mix. Swirling drones of synth coalesce into hypnotic throbbing rhythms, over which lilting keyboard motifs hint at the likes of Goblin. Also significant is Schickert's sad, electronically-treated trumpet, heard ferinstance on "07.Mai", alongside pleasingly placid repetitive guitar, phasing effects, and field recordings of fireworks exploding (heard elsewhere on the record as well) that sound like sferic squiggles of electronic sound, buried in the mix along with disembodied unknown voices. The trumpet here foreshadows the future sounds of Supersilent, while the pulsating patterns of proto-glitch music also remind us of This Heat's Repeat.
Yep, it's a freakin' great record all right. Trippy and weird and psychically round the bend. In other words, super satisfying. How it stayed so far under the radar for so long is crazy. Big props to Bureau B for giving it a proper reissue now on both compact disc and vinyl for the very first time, with excellent artwork, liner notes, and even two bonus tracks (on the cd only).
The bonus tracks, fyi, are feeling a lot more NDW, Schickert employing a drum machine it sounds like, a bit dancey, still dark and damaged, looping layers of vocals coming and going amidst the beats. Could easily be something Dark Entries of Medical Records would be expected to reissue. Very cool, fans of Pyrolator / Der Plan will enjoy these as well as the rest of the album. But with or without the bonus tracks, Kinder In Der Wildnis is super recommended, in heavy rotation in the store right now, a record that with Schickert's other two solo albums makes for an impressive trifecta of unsung krautrock genius.
Who is The Space Lady, you ask? Well, among San Franciscans who were here from the late seventies to the nineties, many may remember The Space Lady's (aka Susan Dietrich) busking presence on the streets of the Castro. Wearing her plastic winged helmet with a flashing red light on top, and flamboyantly dressed, she would sing dreamy covers of popular hits ("I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night", "Major Tom") and some originals too, with just a Casiotone, or sometimes an accordion and a reverbed microphone, adding a cosmic flair to her sound. Always pushing her wares, she would often pause mid-song to passers-by and hawk buttons, tapes, postcards, all featuring her winged-helmeted profile - Scott here still treasures his original tape! Before San Francisco, she busked in Boston/Cambridge and has been seen in Berkeley too, but nowadays resides in Colorado, where she is still at it. She even travels to Roswell, New Mexico and plays often in front of the UFO museum and research center. Like other notable eccentric street musicians of San Francisco like Omer (notoriously known around the aQ neighborhood as Bum Jovi) and the loincloth-wearing violinist Thoth (who was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary short), The Space Lady was previously featured in the Songs in The Key of Z compilations of eccentric outsider musicians. All three have moved on from San Francisco leaving our neighborhoods a lot less exciting (though in Omer's case, people are probably getting more sleep now). The Space Lady was the best of them all, and it's so awesome to have her music on vinyl for the first time. Perfect for anyone into the charmingly eccentric outsider sounds of free-spirited performers like Medico Doktor Vibes, Michael Farneti and Mij. Highly Recommended!
Damn. This is quite a find. Tank Of Danzig was a band that few people remember from back in the day, and even fewer must have actually heard them; but this German art-punk quartet wandered into Conny Plank's studio sometime in 1982 and emerged with a pretty incredible album that they released through the equally obscure Idiot Records. It doesn't seem that anybody in the band did anything noteworthy either before or after, making this album something of a mystery. We did discover that Tank Of Danzig had a split release with Biting Tongues - another impressively obscure art-punk project, although BT's Graham Massey did go on to considerable notoriety with 808 State - but that was all to be gleaned of the history of Tank Of Danzig. The frontman was a character with the single name of Schengel, and who had a commanding rasp to his barked English lyrics, often running the gauntlet of punk dialectics about totalitarianism, capitalism, nuclear war, and the pending revolution that should take place in the face of all of existential threats. His jittery, chicken scratch guitars snap in step with the punk-disco-funk rhythm section which could have given A Certain Ratio a run for their money on a good day. Schengel shared the front of the stage (so to speak) with another man with one name Kohl, who very well could have been Germany's answer to James Chance, with his blurting, squawking sax solos that thankfully are fully aware that punk economy would never tolerate a perpetual wank. Not Trendy was the band's only album, and this cd reissue lumps this album with the band's first two singles. Fans of The Ex, James Chance & The Contortionists, Abwarts, and Swell Maps would be well served to check this out!
We loved the last tape from this French psych pop act, and so did all of you considering how quickly we sold out. A stunning collection of baroque pop equal parts Stereolab and Ennio Morricone, and we're happy to report that this new one offers up more of the same, expansive, cinematic, brooding and moody cosmopolitan pop music, that sounds like it was plucked from some Euro arthouse flick. Skittery drumming beneath ominous pianos, swirling synths, buzzing steel string guitar, a little bit of twang, a little bit psychedelic, so good! In fact the whole tape this time around is way more cinematic, even divided into songs, and what seem to be interludes, short little sonic vignettes, some creepy and ominous, others jazzy and jaunty, but all sounding again, like they're straight from some sixties French soundtrack. The songs themselves are essentially extensions of those interludes, less 'songs' proper, and more fantastic bits of mood music, organ everywhere, and the bass too, holding it all together, while the guitar adds color, as do some swoonsome strings, even what sounds like theremin, all wound up into a sort of retro-futuristic pop exotica, imagine John Carpenter via Stereolab, or Morricone covers by the New Lines or Still Corners, the big difference this time around really is just how dark much of this is. Sure, there are tracks like "L'Enquete", with dreamy female vocals (in French of course), over swirling synth melodies, very Stereolab sounding for sure, or "Vague A L'Ame", which drapes hummed melodies over vibes and intricate fingerpicked guitars, there's even one song that gets super fuzzed out, a sweet slab of dreamy electro shoegaze fuzz-pop for sure, but most of the record is more brooding and soundtracky, perfectly balancing the more ebullient sunshinier numbers, the whole thing, even the poppier tracks, an imaginary soundtrack to a film we're now suddenly dying to see!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
Vacant store fronts, abandoned buildings, and empty lots are increasingly harder to find in San Francisco these days. Even the former wastelands well to the east of our Mission location are filling in with all manner of development, from modern office spaces to sleek steel & glass apartments. Complaints of gentrification can hardly be made when such buildings are constructed on purportedly mitigated toxic sludge or the settled landfill of crumbled highways from the '89 earthquake. These dead zones in the urban landscape nevertheless are thriving ecosystems of feral plants and animals that can exist sprouting through broken asphalt and plumping themselves on the scraps of whatever can be pulled from nearby garbage cans. Few would pine over the loss of such spaces, and the Australian sound artist Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) is one who would actively explore vacant lots instead of ignoring them. Over the years, Sprod has released a small catalog of brilliant, if understated albums that reflect these dead spaces in the urban landscape, often with apocalyptic foreshadowings through his compositions. He patiently builds this work through layers of sparsely processed field recordings and found object manipulation often recorded directly in such environments - empty warehouses, military bunkers, dry sewer ducts and the like. For Strata, Sprod has documented something of a concrete island on the outskirts of Melbourne, bordered by train tracks, highways, and drainage ditches. In collecting his recordings, he would dig and claw through the broken concrete, construction refuse, bum trash, and aggregated debris, amassing a whole array of crumbled textures and noises that would also echo with the distant din of cars and trains roaring by, many miles away. What is always impressive about Sprod's albums is the incredible clarity of detail which pops into focus, as the bright frequencies of found metal debris take the shape of obsidian shards with possible diabolically mystical qualities. The compositions coalesce into churning swarms of texture that snap into expansive rumbles paralleling the desolation of Thomas Koner's polar treks, giving way to doppler-effected field recordings of trains with the grinding of brakes and the pulsing thunder of the engines. It's that rich attention to detail that warrants comparisons to Chris Watson's impeccable phonography, but the compositional approach strikes a balance between the psychological implications of Luc Ferrari and those damn-near perfect collages by Small Cruel Party. As with all of Tarab's work, this is very highly recommended! Limited to just 200 copies!
Paradise Lost & Lacuna Coil on the cover. Also: Onslaught, Kataklysm, Brutal Truth, UFOmammut, Skeletonwitch, Corrections House, Sepultura, Monster Magnet, Sahg, Toxic Holocaust, Pestilence, Dimmu Borgir, and more - including a look at the history and origin of Roadburn Festival. Plus a free cd sampler stuck to the cover. If you like metal, and you have a bathroom, you should be purchasing Terrorizer (and Decibel) every month, really.
A bunch of new tapes this list from (now) local label Moon Glyph. Including this one from Texas psychedelic sonic collagist Treasure Hunt, aka Myles Byrne-Dunhill, who like on the last Treasure Hunt tape, Toys Unatic, continues to craft stunning, layered, soundscapes of found sound, mysterious jazz ambience, out psychedelia, it's almost dizzying how much is going on in these tracks, but somehow, the multiple sounds are assembled so deftly and meticulously, that it sounds like these could in fact be proper songs, albeit, dense and insanely layered songs, but it makes for perfect deep listening, with headphones, these tracks reveal a sonic depth that is constantly blossoming and revealing some new detail, melodies drift in and out, sound are locked and looped, layered into weird harmonies, pulled apart into fragments that drift and form new melodies entirely, rhythms are sliced and diced and reassembled beneath shimmering clouds of chimes and vibes. acoustic guitars are blurred into melodic streaks and lashed to strange metallic percussion, surrounded by mysterious electronic squelches and alien voices, honking horns, and wild drumming, the sounds collapsing into near chaos, before somehow falling perfectly into place, and once again settling into something more songlike.
Imagine an ADD DJ Shadow, obsessed with creating a psychedelic jazz masterpiece, and constantly adding parts, and pieces, and layers, until it becomes something even more than a psych jazz collage, it becomes a wildly abstract soundworld all its own, at times, tranquil and mysterious, lush and lovely, and at others, chaotic and twisted, confusing and bordering on total collapse. But even then, there's definitely a method, the sonic madness on display here not as mad as one might think, instead, it feels like a musical thinking well beyond the realms of mere music, a sort of kosmische kollag-ery that ends up sounding like some twisted, and until now as yet undiscovered, strain of avant psych-kraut, dream-drone, space-jazz!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
Yup, a well-curated compilation of abject sound poetry, discombobulated avant-turntablism, and thrumming noise decomposition from the German imprint Fragment Factory with contributions from some heavyweights like Leif Elggren and Aaron Dilloway, some stalwart sewer dwellers in AMK and GX Juppiter-Larsen, and a sampling from the global noise sub-underground. Joachim Montessuis hails from this latter camp, and opens the comp with a harrowing rendition of the Hugo Ball poem "Karawane", which was a piece of Dada nonsense from 1916 predating Schwitters' opus "Ursonnate" by a few years. This version is bellowed, gasped, and gargled not only through larynx acrobatics but also a scabrous array of sound obliterating devices and death-ray granular synthesis. Leif Elggren and Michael Barthel offer similar variations on the art-damaged madman, with Elggren channeling the neurotic dreams of dead queens and philosophers amidst a barrage of radio static, while Barthel takes a more classic sound poetry approach of chopped syllables and pained yelping. Of the more collage / noise / drone / fucked tracks, Krube's manipulation of rusted found objects, rocks, and bones is in a state of constant shattering, with eerie beds of crudely prepared piano drone all recalling the early creepfests from the NWW/C93 axis way back when. GX Juppiter-Larsen powers through grinding noise loops whose incessant rhythms achieve hypnosis through information overload. The Dilloway track is a bit surprising as a raw presentation of field recordings with radioactive tones and drones, with hardly any Frankensteinian overtures through lurching loops. It's a nice turn in Dilloway's aesthetic, and one that we would certainly welcome. AMK, Philip Marshall, Giuseppe Ielasi, Michael Muennich, and Michael Esposito round out this limited compendium, released in an edition of 300 copies.
Even if we hadn't already been familiar with the first volume in the Angola Soundtrack series, we would have been pretty curious about this new one. The cover art, to start with: a super psychedelic, color tinted image of four women with spiked out antenna-like hair, and in the foreground, a hulking figure, head shaved and shirtless, wreathed in shadow and smoking a cigar, his belly hanging over his belt, it almost looks like a still from some crazy psychedelic arthouse film, and then there's the compilation's subtitle: Hypnosis, Distortion & Other Sonic Innovations - all right! And while it's maybe not as freaky and far out as all that might lead one to believe, it's still pretty fantastic, and the perfect follow up to the first volume for sure.
The first track should have most folks totally smitten, an instrumental psychedelic groove, all spidery guitar melodies, some wah wah here and there, and a seriously Latin sounding rhythm, which is not all that surprising, considering that we discovered with the first volume, that Latin music was a huge influence on the Angola sound, and that's super obvious throughout volume two as well. As we mentioned in that original review, having no context, we really might have assumed that this music was in fact from Central or South America, but it's that fusion of Latin and African that makes the sound so unique, so vibrant, joyous and alive. A lot of the tracks have a big band Afro-Jazz vibe, but some sound like fuzzed out Afro-Latin garage rock, others more balladic and croony, and still others almost like they could be music from Italian Westerns, but all the tracks here are incredible, from energetic and joyously raucous to moody and melancholic, such fantastic stuff, and like the first volume, on heavy heavy rotation, which as always, is the best recommendation of all...
Like all Analog Africa releases, the packaging is fantastic, the aforementioned cover art, a heavy slipcover. Inside, the disc in a full color digipak, the accompanying book, massive, overflowing with extensive liner notes on the artists, the songs, the region, as well as the music and culture of the time, tons of rare photos too.
People might not use old fashioned calendars so much anymore (or cameras, or watches either), since most of us have a newfangled electronic one in our phone anyway, but the Classic Blues Artwork calendar is definitely worth having, jam packed with amazing original artwork from classic/rare/obscure blues records from the 1920's, not to mention tons of rare photos as well. C'mon, June features "Rattle Snake Groan", July reminds you "Your Enemies Can Not Harm You (But Watch Your Close Friend)", September is "She's A Long Tall Disconnected Mama" and March is all about the "Mean Black Cat Blues". Each month celebrating a different record, from Mother McCollum, "Papa" Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, E.W. Clayborn The "Guitar Evangelist", Lueela Miller, the Mississippi Sheiks, Charlie Patton and more! And like most calendars that mark the various holidays, this one does too, but also includes all the important moments in blues history, birthdays, deaths, record releases, etc.
And along with the calendar, there's also a compilation cd featuring classic songs and rarities from Charley Patton, Henry Thomas, Furry Lewis, Blind Blake, Mother McCollum, Tenderfoot Edwards, Blind Percy, Jim Thompkins and lots more!! So cool. We look forward to the new version of this calendar every year.
A great modern Christmas compilation on vinyl featuring a lot of great indie musicians and it's for charity too! Featuring Christmas-themed songs by Rob Crow, Quasi, Wooden Wand, The Music Tapes, Mike Watt, Terry Riley and a host of others. Proceeds got to Homeless Youth Resources, a mighty worthy cause this holiday season. So throw away that warped Bing Crosby record you drag out every year and buy this and help some kids out!
We were super excited by the sudden re-activation of the Shock label. Run by Stefan Jaworzyn (Skullflower, Ascension) and home to some of THEE most amazing industrial / power electronics / noise rock of the last several decades. Seriously, a list of releases on Shock reads like an aQ dream team: Skullflower, Ascension, the Dead C, Cul De Sac, Cosmonauts Hail Satan, Drunks With Guns, Coil, Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Ramleh, we could go on. Needless to say, the legacy of Shock looms large over pretty much all of the weird noisy heavy music we dig today. We recently reviewed the White Trash Motherfuckers comp, which was reissued recently along with two Ascension records and this comp right here, although we still think Jaworzyn just found a bunch of boxes of unsold cds from back in the day, out in his shed, but fuck it, either way, it's amazing to have these available again. For folks who may have missed out the first time, but also for a whole generation of music nerds who might not have even been around back in the day. Deep Funnels Of Entry collects some of the best tracks (from singles and comps) from some of our favorite bands on the Twisted Village label. And while sonically, Twisted Village tended more toward tripped out psych, there is definitely still a sonic connection between groups like Vermonster and Skullflower, who in their early days, would have been right at home on Twisted Village.
So yeah, check out the lineup, folks already into Twisted Village will be drooling, and folks not familiar, well the band names alone should give you a clue: Vermonster, Bongloads Of Righteous Boo (best band name ever?), Luxurious Bags, Crystallized Movements, The Garbage And The Flowers, Wormdoom (second best band name ever?), Tono Bungay, Bimbo Shrineheads, and Brother JT appearing here as simply JT. A quick earful of Vermonster's "Black Crack Boogie" should give you an idea of what you're in for, endless heavy psych space jams, dirgey, loose, chaotic, freaked out and WASTED. Total next level zoner psychedelia of the highest order. Classic psych super charged and dosed on mescaline and PCP, and captured in endless basement jams. Each track here sounds like it was yanked from an hours long jam, these little snippets our glimpse into whatever drug fueled sonic bacchanalia produced all of this glorious psychedelic noise. Bongloads Of Righteous Boo deliver a similar track, that is until the INSANE vocals come in, a WTF falsetto, that has to be a joke? Or does it? BoRB are sort of a classic rock, melted down into something much more warped and woozy, the vocals, seemingly the only remnant, otherwise the sound seems bound for the heart of the sun, arriving there by way of lots and lots and LOTS of drugs.
Luxurious Bags would later morph into more of a noisy pop band, and some of that is present here, but the lilting sad boy vocals, and indie jangle is buried beneath gouts of crumbling distortion, and blown out drum damage. Crystallized Moments fuse their heavy psych to a slowcore moodiness, sounding like a supercharged Low, before they explode into their own squall of dizzying psych damage. NZ noise poppers the Garbage And The Flowers are the most traditionally song oriented here, their sound buzzy and droney, but still darkly poppy, but fear not, it doesn't take long for Wormdoom to obliterate that poppiness, and explode in a frenzy of primal, primitive psych-noise bliss, with some of the most amazingly distorted crumbling guitar buzz EVER. Bimbo Shrineheads who we never heard outside of this comp are also on the poppy side, but darkly frenetic and post punky, enough that they don't even seem like that much of an outlier here. JT delivers some woozy freeform psychedelic drift, while Tono-Bungay is all hard rock by way of cosmic psych, churning and riffy, with some wild endless shredding. And after that, Luxurious Bags, Bongloads Of Righteous Boo, Crystallized Movements, Vermonster and The Garbage And The Flowers all get another go! But it hardly matters, by this point, your grey matter is all melted down into a prismatic puddle on the floor, your smoking headphones telling you this is essential damaged outsider psych, and you NEED it.
Back in 2009 we reviewed a dvd called Palace Of The Winds, which documented Sublime Frequencies' Hisham Mayet as he returned to West Africa, to search for some unknown musicians he had heard on Moroccan radio, this new lp is sort of the audio companion to that, and is a stunner. Much like that dvd, the music on this lp, was captured mostly live, proper performances, intimate home recordings, many replete with the hubbub of daily life, voices and traffic and city noise, there are field recordings too, which capture vendors and stalls as they go about their daily (or actually, nightly) business, music blaring from boomboxes and speakers, it's a fantastic sonic journey.
Included are Mayet's first ever recordings of the aQ beloved Group Doueh (the band Mayet had returned in search of!), and their tracks here are wonderful, the first lo-fi and raw, swirls of intricately picked stringed instruments, wreathed in swirling organs, wild percussion, and some amazing vocals. The second sounding like an African Sunroof! All buzzing psychedelic shimmer, and softly tangled melodies, the sound blearily blown out and smeared into lush chordal clouds of raga-like thrum, beneath more soaring vox. A couple new discoveries that blew us away, were Abdul Rahman Al-Gheid", whose deep raspy voice sounds almost Tuvan, like he could burst into proper throat singing at any time, his Tom Waitsian growl rumbles and soars in equal measure, over a lush, slightly murky sonic swirl. And the Sadoum Ouled Aida track too, a bed of dense intricate melodies unfurling beneath another gorgeous vocal, also rough and raspy, but warm and velvety at the same time, the sound woozy and washed out, peppered with some passionate exaltations in background. Then there's the rollicking dessert blues of the Sadoum Group who wind buzzing strings around propulsive percussion, and some super intense call and response, male/female vocals. There's plenty more too, including the aforementioned field recordings, which are totally chaotic, sonically dense and dizzying, mysterious, noisy, and super exciting. As always, so good!!
And also as always, fantastic packaging, the lp pressed on heavy vinyl, housed in a full color old school tip-on style sleeve, and of course, it's VERY LIMITED!
