This one shouldn't need much of a review at all. A killer 'local' band comp, featuring a bunch of our fave West Coast groups from San Francisco, Oakland, LA, and Portland: Warm Soda, Sonny & The Sunsets, Burnt Ones, Chris Cohen, the Sandwitches, Magic Trick, Little Wings, Cool Ghouls, Jessica Pratt and more. Warm Soda kick things off with a groovy blast of retro garage pop, all Yellow Pills style fuzzy, jangly power pop, that once again reminds us what a total genius Matthew Melton (Warm Soda, Snake Flower 2, Bare Wires). But there's plenty more good stuff here. Burnt Ones offer up their own retro blast, theirs significantly more murky and woozy and washed out. Ex- Deerhoofer Chris Cohen delivers an achingly lovely ballad, all distant shimmer, acoustic guitar shimmer, and glimmering harmonics, and those grogeous vox. The Sandwitches' track is all echo drenched lo-fi jangle, while Sonny & The Sunsets (whose Sonny curated this whole comp) give us some sun dappled, strum and jangle fuzz pop dreaminess, while locals Cool Ghouls get all sixties girl group, with reverby female vox, shimmery guitar strum and a hazy psychedelic production.
The best part about comps, for us at least, is as much about new discoveries as old faves, and Pure Bliss are the big discovery this time around, all shimmery jangle, deep dramatic vocals, classic old school dream pop that had us hankering for LOTS more. Speaking of which, there's lots more here too, tracks by the Memories, Fronds, Sunfoot, Wet Illustrated and Earth Girl Helen Brown!
Pressed on heavy, marbled slime green vinyl, that matches the zombie afro vampire cover art, includes an insert/comic, as well as a download code!
A while back we reviewed a compilation called American Noise / Volume One, which was a killer collection of tracks from the L.I.E.S. label, run by Ron Morelli, whose recent album Spit, a hypnotic collection of murky electronic minimalism, was a big hit around here. That comp featured a handful of folks we had heard before (Steve Moore, Legowelt) but loads more we hadn't. A sprawling and super varied sampling of the L.I.E.S. label's best and brightest, more of which is on display here, with most of the new-to-us artists from that first comp returning again (Svengalisghost, Beau Wanzer, Vapauteen, Terekke, Marcos Cabral) along with still more new names. And if anything, this comp might be even better than the first. Whereas American Noise definitely still seemed geared to the dancefloor to a degree, Music For Shut Ins seems to be true to its title, as most of the tracks here are more deep headphone listening, dancemusic for folks who wouldn't be caught dead on a dancefloor, claustrophobic, psychedelic, murky, minimal and abstract, once again straddling the line between the Kompakt and Hospital labels, slipping from dubbed out Euro-house to gristly post industrial electro, from robotic bunkurfunk to slo-mo soul, and from tripped out techno to noise drenched nineties style blunted beatscapes a la techno Animal.
Some of our favorites include Terekke's "Amaze", which is all murky, hazy, barely there rhythmic skitter, swirling slowed down vocal samples, all heavily dubbed into a druggy drift, definitely for fans of Burial, Vessel, oOoOO and the like, the washed out hyper rhythmic abstraction that is Gunnar Haslam's "Aisepos", which buries everything under a woozy haze, the beat a bleary cascade of skitter and stutter, laced with soft synth swirls and what sounds like faux horns, but all blurred and smeared into something ghostly and ethereal. There's the distorto-house of Entro & Terri, which sounds like classic club music given a psychedelic noise makeover, or the squelchy FX drenched electro of TX connect, Daywalker & CF offer up some John Carpenter electro, if that even is a thing, all cinematic and sweeping, tethered to a tangle of overlapping rhythms and beats, all washed out and beautifully bleary, while Svengalisghost delivers some churning industrial electro that sounds like it could be another Dom Fernow project (Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos,etc.).
There's plenty more too, with some tracks definitely falling closer to the actual dancefloor, but even those all seem at least a bit tweaked and twisted. Definitely recommended for all you electronic music shut ins, which most definitely describes many of us as well!!
There's been a recent upsurge in free jazz compilations documenting the creative upheaval that followed the revolutionary call for social justice in the sixties and seventies throughout Europe and America. There was the great Spiritual Jazz series, as well as the Flying Dutchman label Liberation music comp, and also another disc we haven't had a chance to review yet called Bridging The New Age which looks really great too. Hopefully we can review that one soon, but in the meantime, there is this new comp called Mobilisation Generale that documents the creative post-1968 revolution period in France. Back then, students were rioting and the whole country was practically on strike. While rock music may have been the protest soundtrack in America, in France, they were inspired by the American free-jazz of Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and most notably the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The latter group's historic concert at the Theatre du Vieux Colombier in Paris opened many minds to a freer music made by a community of politically charged musicians unfettered by traditions and structures. The group went on to record music both with radical chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine and French black actor Alfred Panou (both included here), setting up a stage of free music that set to break boundaries musically throughout the seventies. Documenting the fertile period between 1970-1976 before punk and disco changed everything, Mobilisation Generale is a look into the radical underground made urgent through groundbreaking ideas and a vital communal need for change. Includes tracks by Brigitte Fontaine and Areski, Alfred Panou & The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Atarpop 73 & Le Collectif Le Temps Des Cerises. RK Nagati, Frederic Rufin & Raphael Lecomte, Francois Tusques, Mahjun, Full Moon Ensemble, Baroque Jazz Trio, Michel Roques, Chene Noir and Beatrice Arnac.
Another modern day Christmas comp featuring some psych heavies, many of them aQ favorites, including Dead Meadow. Psychic Ills, The Cosmonauts, Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Sleepy Sun, Elephant Stone, The Movements, Iggy Pop and many more. Get it while you can still stomach Christmas tunes!
A pretty fucking choice compilation of wintery dronemuzik, post-classical bleariness, and somber variations on the pop ambient theme divided equally between the heavy hitters and the newcomers, with a couple of San Franciscan dudes making the grade (including our own Jim Haynes!).
The former Slowdive drummer Simon Scott opens the album with a blissful shimmer of amorphous shoegazing blur'n'drone pocked with echoing synth tones twinkling like satellites glinting the suns rays back to earth. A Winged Victory For The Sullen (one of the projects that blossomed from the ashes of Stars Of The Lid) twinkles a series of heartwrenching piano motifs laced with stringed orchestrations all bathed in a beautifully maudlin atmosphere. The lugubrious melodies from Black Swan reprise those hauntological strategies of Leyland Kirby's recontextualized 78s with equally emotive results. When it comes Haynes' track, Jim quipped that he tried to make something pretty but the colors of the rest of the album rendered his track much more ominous than anticipated. A stealth mode piece of shortwave drone, billowing noise, and scabrous textures, considerably darker than anything else on the compilation, but it's certainly a top shelf slab of isolationist griminess. Immediately following is En, who open their track with a bright strum across a koto, those plucked tones become the painterly gestures of a wintery landscape as seen from the comforts of a stone farmhouse surround by snow and frost. The Swedish outfit Pjusk slows down a monophunk bassline to an undanceably slow torpor, suspending deep-space ambient transmission pulses for a track that does remind us of the bleak atmospheres found on that fantastic Raime album Blackest Ever Black released in 2012. Noveller's take on the Durutti Column's guitar impressionism is a beautiful way to end this exceptional album. There is a very clear narrative arc that Ghostly International has scripted through these tracks, one that is evocative of the many moods of late autumn and early winter with grey skies and sheets of bonechilling rain giving way to clear sky nights for winter solstice dreams. (Also available on vinyl, but we're waiting for copies.)
Another great Dust-To-Digital comp here! This one's actually a reissue of an lp originally released in 1975, and should be welcomed by the same folks who loved such Mississippi-label collections as Life Is A Problem and In The Storm So Long.
The subtitle kind of explains the focus here, but to get more specific, all the tracks are recordings dating to between 1965 and 1973, documenting spiritual and gospel songs "performed in informal non-church settings". And in many cases the performers are either "active or former blues artists". Guitar accompaniment is the norm, though there's also at least one fife & drum band on here too.
Both the cd and lp formats come with a big booklet of liner notes and b&w photos, with details on each track and artist as well as an essay pertaining to the general thrust of the compilation, to highlight "the important role that religious music plays in the Southern black communities and in the daily lives of individuals", written by ethnomusicologist David Evans of the University of Memphis, who was one of this album's recordists and producers.
There's sixteen tracks, from artists including Robert "Nighthawk" Johnson, Ephram Carter and His Fife & Drum Band, Reverend Rubin Lacy, Eddie Lee "Mustright" Jones, Babe Stovall, Willard Artis "Blind Pete" Burrell, Napoleon Strickland, Pattie Rosemon, and more.
Beautiful, evocative, moving music for sure.
We had to do it. How could this NOT be an aQ Record Of The Week? Some folks will no doubt cry foul, and accuse us of arty pretension, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sure we love lots of strange stuff, and we love difficult listening, and challenging, arty sonic WTF weirdness, and have been known to champion some seriously bizarre records and groups, but we do love all that stuff. Like we love jangly pop, and buzzy black metal, we also love field recordings of abandoned buildings, we love the sound of record crackle, tape hiss, we love industrial sounds, the whir of heating units, the thrum of traffic bleeding through the walls, we love the drone found in everyday life, the music hidden in the most unmusical of places. In fact, it's almost become a running joke around here, we'll be somewhere, and some piece of machinery will be buzzing or humming, or some construction site will be emitting a strangely rhythmic crunch, and our first thought it often "We could definitely sell a bunch of these at aQ!" And after all these years, we know you're right there with us. Buying recordings of hospital rooms and life support machines, recordings of mating deer and drag races, records made entirely from runout grooves, we could go on and on, but c'mon, you love that stuff as much as we do. Which brings us to Sounds Of Silence, which as the title suggests, is in fact a collection of the most famous musical silences! That's right, a silent record. Or at least mostly, bear with us.
We've had other 'silent' records at aQ before, from the not-so-silent Blank Tapes, which found Argentinean weirdos Reynols constructing a whole record from recordings of, yes, blank tapes, that disc a fantastic sonic landscape of hiss and hum, subtly textural and weirdly mesmerizing, to (in the used bin once), a purported compilation of Billy Joel's "Greatest Hits", which was in fact a recording with no sound at all, an obvious artprank jab at the ubiquitous piano man. Hell, we even poked fun at ourselves by listing a cd that didn't even exist on our April Fools list a while back, waxing poetic about the 'nothingness' and the 'void' and the concept behind the lack of actual music, we even made a mock up with an empty jewel case, that spent a good long while on the employee favorites shelf in the store. But the thing is, we do love silence, or at least, the attempt to capture silence, in a world, where true silence doesn't actually exist. From barely there recordings by Francisco Lopez and Bernard Gunter, to field recordings of industrial spaces, it's not so much about the silence, as what surrounds it, and what threatens to destroy it.
So yeah, maybe you'd have to be a pretty big music dork to want to pay thirty bucks for a silent record, but then, we're all pretty big music dorks after all. C'mon, check out the lineup! Andy Warhol, Ciccone Youth, Sly & The Family Stone, Robert Wyatt, Afrika Bambatta & Family, Orbital, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Crass, Whitehouse, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Soulfly, John Denver, The Count Backwards and lots more. Maybe the most unlikely lineup on a compilation ever. Who knows if this is some super provocative art-prank, or a lovingly curated collection of experimental sound, or heck, a little of both, it's pretty goddamn fascinating, and weird, and cool, fans of lowercase sound will find much to dig, lots of crackle and hiss, of course even beyond the original recordings, depending in your method of playback, each person's listening experience will be different, more noise and hiss and hum and crackle and pop, you could even scratch the shit out if it before you play it and truly individualize it, Christian Marclay style! But the sounds themselves are surprisingly varied, those that come from digital sources, are truly nearly silent, while others are actually not so silent, and still others, don't even exist at all, their length listed as 0'0'', presented here as they were when they were originally 'released', the original intention unclear, high concept, political statement, who knows, but tracks like Sly & The Family Stone's "There's A Riot Goin' On", which was mentioned on the album cover, but was then conspicuously absent from the actual lp, or Andy Warhol's "Silence (Copyright 1932)", which was supposedly created by Warhol when he was 4 years old, or the Afrika Bambatta track "Beware (The Funk Is Everywhere) (Silent Version)", which was originally presented as a "Radical Mix". But fear not, Sounds Of Silence, is not all high concept, there are actual tracks, well, actual sort of silent tracks, it seems a little pointless to describe each one, since, they are all essentially 'silent', and they ARE, both sides, track after track of barely there thrum, fields of crackle, the occasional pop, most of that we're guessing from OUR turntable, but close listening reveals much of the source, some tracks have barely there sounds, whether it's the sound of the room, or the vinyl from which it was mastered, or who knows, maybe we're just hearing what we want to. Maybe there is nothing but silence. A long time ago, we at aQ dreamed of a record made entirely of vinyl lp crackle, which led sound artist Loren Chasse to do just that (sort of, he simulated it with field recordings of surf and rain actually), so in a way, if you remove the high concept angle, Sounds Of Silence, is kind of like that, like maybe a more minimal version of our long dreamed of record crackle record. Either way, you know if this is your cup of tea or if you think it's a total crock of shit. If you've read this far, we're guessing you're in the first camp, but really either way, we LOVE this. It's brilliant, hilarious, confusional, baffling, there are extensive liner notes too, track by track discussing where each one came from, why each one is important, the concept behind them, there's even an essay on silence, it's of course fantastically packaged, and totally over the top. Well, as 'over the top' as a silent record can be.
Recommended for music nerds, weirdo sonic obsessives and anyone who would dig having such a ridiculous record in your collection. Don't believe us? Check out the sound samples? What sound samples? Exactly!
Cool Simon & Garfunkle parody cover art too. LIMITED TO 250 COPIES ONLY!!
Apparently sharing their name with a progressive metal 'djent' band from the Isle of Wight (ha, first mention of djent on the aQ list ever!), the When Prophecy Fails responsible for THIS tape is from right here in San Francisco, and is in a fact yet another project by our pal Monte Cimino (Burial Tree/Time Spent/Dark Matter Halo). Hopefully none of the djent band's fans will accidentally get this or they'd become very confused, possibly upset. 'Cause it's all cassette-dubbed, electronically processed, wind tunnel / vacuum cleaner noise style sonics. Think, the lighter side of Merzbow, basically. It's pretty noisy, but also it's noise that's pretty, 'cause in keeping with Monte's other projects, while (often) loud, it's got a soothing side to it. New Age Noise, perhaps? Drones with dynamics, sudden lulls and stretches of quiet beauty before the volume ramps up again.
The first side of the tape consists of two songs: the 14+ minute title track, made with cello (and copious electronics we infer), sounding a lot like noise guitar in the vein of Urthona or Sunroof. That's followed by an approximately 3 minute piece called "Hiding Under The Guise Of Religion", done with organ and drums. Side two features two tracks, each about 9 minutes long, given the great title "Life May Be Fleeting, But You're An Asshole, pt. I & II". Made with contact mics and "misc. surfaces", this detailed and abrasive droning also sounds like abstract feedback drenched guitar noise.
Hmm, just the other day we got in a used copy of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny's notorious "noise" album from 1993, Zero Tolerance For Silence. After listening to this, we know just who we're gonna try to sell it to. If he doesn't already have it. Seriously, though, if you agree that "noise" can be good or can be bad, this is GOOD noise. We're not kidding, for noise stuff we like this a lot.
By the way, winning an award for most annoying packaging idea this week, the cassette case is full of loose leaf black tea. Argh!
Woot! It's the big year-end wrap-up issue of this essential new music magazine from the UK. Featuring their Top 50 of 2013, another Top 50 of archival releases that came out this past year too, lots of personal views on the year's ups and downs from Wire's stable of writers and contributing musicians, plus a plethora of in-depth essays on what went down in 2013 in underground music as the Wire sees it, including Simon Reynols on "monumentalist reissues" and Clive Bell on "the rebirth of the new age", and much more.
Of all the Chinese releases we've reviewed lately, and it's been a LOT, this might be the most over the top, with some of the most fantastic packaging we've ever seen. Xiao He was a new name to us, but apparently he's of the most respected avant garde musicians in China, and the genesis of this record was via an especially wild performance, during which Xiao leapt from the stage and broke both his feet. While stuck at home recuperating, under doctor's orders, Xiao wrote these songs, apparently in the style of many of his records, a lush classic folk, fused to more modern indie balladry, his vocals a warm, emotive croon, simple strummed acoustic guitar, piano, minimal drumming, multi-tracked vocals, lilting and wistful, with some lovely harmonies, the vibe actually sounds almost like African music in places, and we're also reminded of folks like Sufjan Stevens, albeit a bit more mellow and minimal. Really nice stuff for sure, but it's the packaging that really pushes this over the edge. Presented in a massive, full color, hard cover art book, each page adorned with a gorgeous colored pencil drawing of a leaf, leafs that Xiao found on his walks in the countryside during his recovery, the colors warm and autumnal, each page folding out gatefold style revealing lyrics to each song, the whole thing housed in a slipcover, also adorned with a leaf drawing. But there's no cd, or lp, instead, the music is contained on a flash drive, built into the book! Complete with volume controls, on/off switch, buttons to skip tracks, the little player lighting up, glowing white, just plug in headphones (which are also included), find a nice place to sit, open the book, push play and let yourself get lost.
So cool! LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!! We only got a handful!
Note re: the player - FYI, once the battery charge runs out, to recharge the player requires an old school cellphone charger (as in, not the new fangled iPhone style chargers!). ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
