Before we had actually heard Andy Stott, we had a procession of folks come into the store and tell us how incredible his stuff was, and how we should definitely get whatever we could, and yet, with every 12" release, they disappeared before we could get any copies at all, and before we knew it they were gone. We did manage to hear bits and pieces, enough that when we discovered that two of the records were being reissued together as a double cd, we could barely wait, and once it arrived, well, pretty much everyone here has been playing it nonstop. UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life. The bonus tracks on Passed Me By, are much more active, the pulsing house-y "Stitch House" sounds like Stott covering The Field, still all fuzzy and washed out and Pop Ambient, but much more rhythmic, and less murky, while "Love Nothing" lets the rhythms come front and center, skittering and shuffling over a rubbery low end melody, and swirling synthy chordal swells, not to mention a deep dramatic croon. It almost sounds like a sketch for a future song that would find the various elements dipped in pitch, slowed down and blackened.
The second disc does dial back the murk a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
The bonus tracks on We Stay Together, in some ways mirror those on Passed Me By, in that they actually sound more like their opposite, "Work Gate" is super minimal and sketch-like, a little dubby and darkly Portishead-y, while "We Stay Together (Part Two)" begins life as a hushed blur, but gradually blossoms into another Field like chunk of looped techno mesmer.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave, and definite contender for Record Of the Year!
Packed in a super striking oversized gatefold sleeve, with a different cover for each album depending on which way you're holding it, both stunning black and white photos culled from the pages of National Geographic.
Okay, seriously, how could we resist? The band is called Totally Radd. That's Radd with two D's. That's like the rad version of Hott with two T's. The record is called Shark Attack Day Camp, and features eye poppingly garish artwork depicting two kids playing video games in an arcade full of bloody zombies, including one who has been pushed head first through the monitor of another game. Oh and that game just happens to be called Hammer Hamsters. Inside the illustration is of kids in full Lord Of The Flies mode, wearing animal skins and heads, also covered in blood, in a grassy field peppered with dead elks and bears not to mention a huge pile of dead bloody rabbits, not sure how any band would expect to live up to the promise of all this ridiculousness, but somehow Totally Radd do, delivering totally over the top eighties soundtrack, NES, 8-bit keytar, glam rock, dork pop cheesiness that is hilarious and totally dumb, but crazy fun and way catchier and funnier than it has any right to be. But the second we threw this on in the store, we were immediately obsessed, and have been playing it non-stop, much to the chagrin of some people no doubt, but fuck 'em!
If you've been paying attention to the aQ list lately, you may have noticed us referencing eighties training montage music, several records we've gotten in recently have sounded inexplicably like that music, from cheesy VHS tapes, the sort of inspirational RAWK that always accompanies training for the big fight, or the big race, well, this stuff REALLY does sound like that. It also sounds a bit like metallized video game music, it also sounds like a brain damaged Sparks, falsetto vox slip into monstrous demonic vokills or screamo shrieks, total Legend Of Zelda 8-bit sputter collides with chugging metal guitars, super catchy punky pop becomes wild video game music and vice versa, the lyrics are completely silly, about cross dressing, and video stores, and all kinds of random stuff. There are songs named after video games, and we originally assumed those would be covers, but instead are simply songs ABOUT those video games! And speaking of covers, our favorite part might be the bonus 7" that comes with the lp, which starts off with a killer version of Phantom Planet's "California", given a sort of bubblegum synth / electro pop makeover, with vocodered vocals and squiggly synths, wrapped around a Weezer-ish power pop core. Then there's a cool, goovy, broody chunk of ballady electro-pop, a sort of video game Weezer slowdance number, before the awesomely titled "2 8-Bit 2 Quit", which is the most 8-bit of the bunch, sounding like Perry And Kingsley by way of Donkey Kong...
The B side of the 7" starts off with a jam that almost sounds like nineties era black metal, via 8-bit pop nerd dorkiness, brooding and dramatic, with Rob Zombie vocals, which goes right into a cover of Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train" with a very misleading intro that's essentially a pitch perfect take on beginning of "Just What I Needed" by the Cars, before slipping into a dangerously straight ahead version of the Soul Asylum original, with extremely overly dramatic vocals, and a swirly psychedelic synth solo in the middle, but otherwise, a pretty straight rock (piss?) take...
It's all dumb and fun, and falls somewhere on the sonic spectrum between Steven Schultz and that MSG Songs From A Gated Community lp we reviewed a while back, but with more Mario Brothers, more pixie stix, more gratuitous violence, more blood thirsty zombies, more after school specials, more boobs, more masked serial killers, more BMX bikes, more gleaming the cube, more lost boys, more revenge of the nerds, more� well, you get it. GET IT!
On last week's list we reviewed What's The Hubub Bub from Tronics, a lost classic from this early eighties post punk / protest folk / art rock one man band, and described said record as a "twistedly brilliant DIY post punk holy grail", which if you've been into the store recently, you've no doubt heard more than once, cuz it gets played like crazy, a head spinning mix of minimal punk folk, catchy as fuck post punk anthems and weirdo collages and experimental electronics. Seriously ahead of its time, and honestly, every time we play it in the store, someone comes up to see what we're playing, and more often then not ends up buying a copy. Say! What Is This? is a sort of companion, a collection of odds and sods, most of which have never been heard before, and while it has much in common with Hubub, it's much more straight ahead punk rock / post punk. Opener "Punk People" sets the mood, with a main riff, that sounds like it could be some Toy Dolls B-side, bouncy bass, crunchy, jangly guitars, and a killer hook, a little bit glammy, catchy as all get out, it ranks right up there with "Shark Fucks" on Hubub as a song we get stuck in our heads constantly.
The rest of Say! What Is This? ain't too shabby either, the lo-fi, reverb drenched pop punk blowout "Do You Hear Me", the angular punk folk dirge "Squiddly Diddly", which sounds like it could have ended up on Hubub, the live garage rock jam "Wild Cat Rock", the fifties rock sounding doo wop-ish "Tonight", the short sharp burst of bass driven punk freakout of "Punk Noise", the almost new wave power poppy sounding "Luna Love", which almost sounds like a Replacements song, and the closer, a fuzzy garage stomp called appropriately "Goodbye", and peppered throughout, still more punky poppy gems, that while not nearly as weird as anything on Hubub, are still so goddamn great! Recommended for sure!
***MISSISSIPPI ALERT***MISSISSIPPI ALERT*****
Mississippi brings us another incredible collection, this time of Hindustani classical vocal music from 1930-1955 compiled from rare 78's. During the time this music was recorded, the British rule of India was losing its hold, and by 1947 India had become independent. So this is music made during much strife, from different regions. peoples and cultures that make up the population of India, a place Westerners tend to think of as a singular monoculture. Vocal music to most Indians is considered the higher musical art form over instrumentalists, because the range, complexity and connection to breath and life of the voice is the idealized standard to which all other instruments are based. In the voice, all the variants of cultures, regions and religions are represented and can be distinctly understood from each other and how they relate to the concept of a unified India. This beautiful collection of vocal music features both female and male singers both well-known and obscure (though they are mostly all obscure to us!) including Faiyaz Khan Hirabai Barodekar, Dattreya Vishnu Paluskar, and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, with instrumental accompaniment of tambouras and sarods, that is dreamy, meditative and powerful. Comes with a booklet with photos and liner notes biographical and historical background of all of the singers, written by Ian Nagoski. Amazing!
Sacred Bones have their work cut out for them, if they wanna catch up with the Killed By Death series. That blatant bootleg series compiled collectible/obscure punk singles from all around the world, pressing them onto crappy vinyl and kickin' them out the door at a blazing pace. The numbers affixed to Killed By Death were a red herring; there were only a couple dozen released in the late '80s and early '90s but had volume numbers like #41, #77, #33, #202, etc. We're hoping that Sacred Bones will keep things sensible, but not too sensible, as they should continue to delve into the dustbin of the catch-all term "deathrock" for more and more and more compilations from back in the day.
Of the eleven artists on this album, we had only ever heard/heard of a few - Kitchen & The Plastic Spoons being one, which also garnered a Dark Entries reissue of their weirdo-synth theatrics, and Glorious Din, only cuz they were from San Francisco way back when.
As for what "deathrock" means, the obvious references to goth do apply as in the poppier veins of Christian Death or X-Mal Deutschland; but it can also be rather punky and snarly (as in Taste Of Decay's full throttled take on the Damned). It can also relate lyrically as well. "I Wanna Be You" by Your Funeral is a bouncy, jangly number that wouldn't be out of place next to The Clean or The Bats or any of the ecstatic DIY popsters on Flying Nun; but lyrically the band utters a raw, suicidal desperation. Both Twisted Nerve and Afterimage dissect Joy Division's classic single "Transmission" with the former wholesale lifting the bassline from that track, and featuring a crooner who sounds exactly like Julian Cope, while the latter adopts Bernard Sumner's pop-hook panache. Screaming For Emily (not to be confused with the equally goth-tastic Screams For Tina) explode with a hi-hat frenzy of death-disco rhythms, Teutonic melodies, and deepthroated vocals for one of the many high points on this album. The aforementioned Glorious Din lay down an archetypally gothy bassline swimming in liquid flange, with an almost nonexistent guitar scratch and pummeling rhythms that lie somewhere between Crispy Ambulance and Savage Republic. The Naked And The Dead reprise Sex Gang Children's uncanny ability to seem feral and freaked out in their unhinged guitars, randomly tumbling percussion, and sexpot/deathwish vocalizations, while strangely maintaining a grounded sense of compositional control. It is true that all of these bands on Killed By Deathrock have their references and antecedents, but the quality in all of these genetic mutants is top fucking shelf.
Thanks for killing us with deathrock, Sacred Bones. Let's do it again sometime!
It's rare that any series makes it all the way to a 14th volume, and probably for good reason, it's hard to imagine any musician, or artist or TV show or film series sustaining a level of creativity and originality after all that time, somehow remaining relevant, beholden to the past, but always looking to the future. And yet somehow, we've arrived at the 14th installment of Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, one every year since 2001, and if anything, it sounds as good as ever. Pop Ambient has even become a part of the aQ lexicon, used to describe any music that's washed out and dreamy, and when anyone comes in to the shop, looking for the best chill out music, whether it's for something specific, massage, mediation, or something more abstract, driving music, falling asleep music, late night come down chill out sun coming up soundtrack, it's the Pop Ambient series we always go to. And there literally hasn't been a dud in the bunch, not in 13 years. Now 14 counting this new volume, which is equally divine.
The record is bookended by two tracks from Ulf Lohmann, who we no doubt have raved about in reviews of other volumes, opener "Sicht" is all pastoral shimmer, softly swirling psychedelia, looped and layered and utterly dreamlike, while closer "Pcc" is a slightly shadowier variation, melancholic and nearly symphonic, but still darkly, dreamily ambient. In between, there's Thomas Fehlmann's hushed drift, lightly dusted with some glitch, and peppered with delicate piano, all wound up in soft billows of synthy shimmer, and Mikkel Metal's buzzy mesmeric raga "Patience". There's Marsen Jules' "The Philosopher's Trap", all cinematic and spacious, and Cologne Tape's playful kraut-ambient "Moorpark", and Simon Scott's "Fur Betty", which is a drowsily looped Jeckian field of Caretaker-like orchestral swells. The Bionaut's "Aquamarine" gets remixed by Triola", the result a woozily murky bit of subterranean pulsation and swirling droned out thrum, and Wolfgang Voigt's "Ruckverzauberung 8" which might be the most minimal of the bunch, a field of sculpted grey noise, all staticky, deep swirls of hiss and hum. And finally what might be the most exciting thing about this new volume, the return of Pop Ambient legend GAS! Remixing The Field! And it's just as good as you would imagine, tense, and intense, dark and droney and ominously mesmeric. Here's hoping there's a proper new Gas record on the horizon!
Like pretty much every single Pop Ambient collection, this will almost for sure be our new going to sleep / chill out music, at least until next year's installment (or a new Gas record!)! Needless to say, absolutely and whole heartedly recommended!
Brigitte Fontaine wasn't the only influential feminine avant-gardist of french chanson. The recently celebrated domestic reissues of Fontaine's first two records have coincided with this incredible reissue of obscure cosmic dream-prog by Jacqueline Thibaullt, better known under her recording pseudonym Laurence Vanay. Vanay, wife of Laurent Thibault, the bassist and guitarist for Magma, recorded Galaxies in 1974, and on it, the classically trained composer, keyboardist and songwriter takes us on a deeply epic trip of dreamy Hammond organ and fender rhodes led spacy jazz-prog that is incredibly beautiful and unique. A mysterious and moving mix of Gong, Alain Goraguer, Igor Wakhevitch, Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes, and even Magma at their most gentle. Yet the music seems to have teleported from some insular private place in a far-off dimension. Its intricate arrangements, and the complex moods they convey seem very otherworldly, like the lonely astral-psych chanson of a remote dying alien race. Listening to a song like "Le Bateau", it's apparent Vanay had as much an influence on bands like Stereolab as Brigitte Fontaine did. Wonderful.
The cd version features 9 bonus tracks.
We'd been hearing a lot about this guy, a UK soundscaper named Louis Johnstone, who records as Wanda Group, and while we dig this quite a bit, none of the descriptions we read though really prepared us for what it actually sounded like, two sidelong sprawls of darkly psychedelic avant noise collage, the sounds all over the map, from dense blasts of white noise buzz, to mysterious field recordings, to minimal flurries of skittery percussion, distant foghorn drones, conversations, the cries of seagulls, gristly crackling rumbles, like contact mic'd fire, shimmering dronescapes, muted murky drifts laced with random bits of ambient noise, scrapes and bumps, footsteps and whatnot, gorgeous stretches of near silent shimmer, hushed lowercase thrum, fields of blurred vocals, which sound like grunting and groaning processed into disembodied swirls of sound, looped Jeckian warble, symphonic fragments, all layered and mashed up into woozy washed out streaks, thick industrial grey ambience, all manner of random noise, field recordings and room sound, tangled up into heaving swells of densely reverberating thrum. And that's just the first track/side. The flipside is essentially a sonic continuation, lots more grey, gristly sounds, more murky field recordings, buried voices, hiss and static and hum, crackle and glitch, some Ryoji Ikeda style clinical sine wave / minimal tone scapery, haunting dronescapes laced with fierce grinding buzz, bursts of staticky shortwave transmissions, dense swirls of fragmented power electronic pummel, deep cavernous rumbles, crumbling staticky swells, malfunctioning machinery symphonies, blurred into grim industrial smears, all settling into an uneasy blackened drift.
Noisy, austere, haunting, brutal, abstract, ambient, a twisted epic expanse of experimental sound that should definitely appeal to fans of twisted modern minimalism, avant drone, soft noise and lowercase exploration.
Includes a download code too!
One of three new releases from UK tape label The Tapeworm, and yet another one we'd never heard of before. Where Is This, the project of one Mark Ward, is a seriously dense wall of sound, a heaving, crushing sprawl of blacknoise, power electronics, and blown out psychedelia. There's certainly an element of Merzbowian brutality, as in to the weak eared, this might come across as pure noise, but with headphones, and heck, even in places without, the sounds here are super nuanced, textured and dare we say melodic, with streaks of chordal color draped across churning expanses of white noise skree, arcs of feedback are sculpted into melodic fragments, and then woven into thick, dizzying swirls of crumbling distortion, and fried zoner drones, the whole tape is a constant squall, but once you're full immersed, the sounds surround you, and wrap you in mysteriously melodic bits of sound, a cascade of crunchy, buzzy, blistering shriek and howl, somehow tamped down and muted, and woven into some seriously mesmerizing psychedelic noise, the sort of thing, that somehow becomes more and more listenable and lovely, the longer you listen, all the while not shedding a bit of its searing sonic intensity. Noise is often a tough proposition for us, but when done right, it can be something impossibly brutal and beautiful, epic and majestic, and fantastically transcendent, and Ward really does do it just right!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
It's been a while since we've heard from Aussie heavies Whitehorse, but they've returned on this split with East Bay grinders Negative Standards, Whitehorse's contribution to the split a sidelong sprawl of downtuned miserablism, a song that takes WH's usual knuckle dragging tarpit doom sludge, and adds some insectoid black buzz, the swirling fast picked guitar weaving a strange backdrop to the band's monstrous lumber, bellowed vokills and caveman drum crush, the song droning and tranced out, devolving into a killer stretch of power electronics midway through, a field of garbled static and solid state feedback, before lurching back into action, slipping right back into an epic sonic trudge, that like past jams, sounds a bit like a more abject, slo-mo Godspeed, before returning to that opening black metal riff to finish things off.
We had never heard, or even heard of Negative Standards before, even though they hail from across the Bay, but they definitely make a good match for Whitehorse, their sound not doomy as much as crusty and grindy, opening with an extended intro of blackened ambience, and swirling FX, before launching into some fierce D-beat pound, lurching from crusty churn, to furious fastcore grind and back again, the vocals a seriously sick demonic rasp, the sound relentless, until the doomy midsong breakdown, the song slipping easily into slo-mo, downtuned creep, all knuckle dragging pound that evolves into some near Neurosis level epicry, before exploding into one final salvo of blasting, grinding fury. Things finish off with a short sharp burst of crusty grind, beginning with a brief blast of static/feedback power electronics, before exploding into some frenzied metallic crush, the relentless blasting crust, peppered with a few seconds of seriously spaced out doom midway through.
Killer artwork from Sutekh Hexen's Kevin Gan Yuen! But no download, sadly.
HOLY CRAP! The cover star of this issue of monthly music magazine The Wire is none other than Sterling Smith, aka Jandek himself!!! Sure he's been playing out live in recent years after decades of being about as reclusive and mysterious as JD Salinger, but the mystique remains, and this is the first ever interview we've ever read with the representative from Corwood Industries! If you don't know what we're talking about, well, it's a kind of a big deal, read this and find out why we care.
If the Jandek exclusive wasn't enough, this ish also features '90s noisnik Stefan Jaworzyn (he's back), Russell Haswell (taking the Invisible Jukebox test), Roly Porter (writing about what the Metalheadz logo means to him), Japanese guitarist Katsuyoshi Kou, and more, including tons and tons of reviews.
But really, with ten pages of Jandek revelations, the rest is gravy. Not that he gives it all away in the interview, in fact, he remains quite odd and obfuscatory, which in a way is a relief.
