We ran out of the special Record Store Day limited tote bag version of the AMF reissues, but we just got the last remaining copies of the vinyl reissues (sans tote bag) direct from the band. Both lps are again sadly out of print. But while they last, we have a handful of the nice priced 4lp set which includes both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence... Here's our review of both when we listed this back around Record Store Day...
In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (!), our very own Andee was asked about what Record Store Day Releases we were most excited about. He mentioned a bunch, but the two they actually included in the magazine, were the utterly hilarious music nerd classic Rock, Rot And Rule (now sadly out of print), and these two vinyl reissues, from recently reunited / reactivated nineties post/math/noise rock combo A Minor Forest, which as many of you know, is in fact Andee's band! He was kind of joking, and a bit embarrassed when THAT was one of the ones they picked to print, but really, we WERE pretty excited. These two records have been out of print on vinyl for a decade, and have been remastered, now come with digital downloads, and one has all new artwork! But instead of making Andee further toot his own horn, we figured we'd try to be more objective, and let some other folks weigh in. A couple reviews from the past, and a couple from the present. So when we first reviewed these back in the day, for AMF's debut, Flemish Altruism, we asked beloved aQ-pal Douglas Mosurak to say a few words about that record, here's that original review from years and years ago:
"October 22, 1996: Bay Area rock trio A Minor Forest stop indie rock dead. Their new double LP on Thrill Jockey is so incredible, and subsequently so complete, that no other records of its kind need to be produced anymore. Lesser bands of their stripe are currently being petitioned to break up immediately to save embarrassment. And while some people will miss, like, June of 44 or the Archers of Loaf for a little while, with the proper exposure to Flemish Altruism, they'll forget all about it. AMF manage to piece together everything good about every post-Big Black and every post-Heroin outfit into a seamless, epic sound; fairly dense, deeply emotional and thoroughly human. They have the sense of humor required to lift it off, too. Some of their songs prefer to hide in the corner; some lunge for your throat. Their style is such that their original ideas fill in with ones borrowed from their rich lineage in such a manner that pays tribute without disrespect. It's a thoroughly engaging sound that I'd rank up there with the Bitch Magnet discography, with the Bastro LPs, with the Gore records, with the cream of the Gravity crop, even with the Shellac album. Best rock record of 1996, and currently outweighing all proposed rock concepts until the close of the millennium. Buy two. Wow."
Then, the follow up Inindependence was reviewed thusly by us upon its original release (when aQ reviews were still concise and impossibly brief):
"Simply put, this may be the last bastion of rock on Thrill Jockey, before they devolve into a purely electronic/jazz label. Sure we may be boasting a little, because A Minor Forest is our very own Andee Connors' band. But this truly is a great record of delicate math rock instrumentations executed with violent precision!"
So here were are 15+ years later, and both records, now reissued and available as a swank 4lp / tote bag set, in honor of the just passed 2014 iteration of Record Store Day, are ripe for reassessment, a new listen to some old sounds, with fresh ears, a bit of distance, and years of subsequent music making in their wake. So, here's what the illustrious Pitchfork site had to say this week about both AMF records:
According to legend, the A Minor Forest song "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck" - a high point of the post-rock group's 1996 debut album, Flemish Altruism - was swiped from an inside joke that had circulated for years among the punk kids of Rapid City, South Dakota. A Minor Forest wasn't from Rapid City; they hailed from far-off San Francisco. But the band toured extensively throughout the country during its 90s-spanning existence, playing many of the same DIY venues that hosted the burgeoning post-hardcore and emo bands of that decade. If there's one thing that brings people together, it's cruel humor - and A Minor Forest, brooding and abrasive as well as downright delicate, knew a good joke when they heard it.
Flemish Altruism was reissued on vinyl for this year's Record Store Day, alongside A Minor Forest's other studio album, 1998's Inindependence. The rollout has been humble one, and it can't help but be compared to Slint's deservedly lavish Spiderland box set this month. Slint blazed trails with its dour, eerie ominousness; A Minor Forest, on the other hand, neither innovated nor intimidated. That doesn't make Flemish Altruism any less tense. The shadow of Slint - as well of Slint's slower, icier cousin, Codeine - loom large over A Minor Forest's distended syllables and dangling chords. The group had been honing that sound on singles and EPs since 1994, but Flemish Altruism tracks like "...But the Pants Stay On" and "Jacking Off George Lucas" groped for a new vocabulary out of the fragments laying around after post-rock's early-'90s Big Bang. What resulted was pidgin Slint-but in that process of restructuring, A Minor Forest came damn close to inventing post-post-rock, where the subgenre's self-seriousness was wrestled with until it laughed, gasped, and collapsed.
Steve Albini and Bob Weston produced Flemish Altruism, and the nerve-tightening cello they'd previously captured on Nirvana's In Utero feels almost deliberately evoked on the album's most arresting song, "Perform the Critical Straw Transfer". Singer/guitarist Erik Hoversten opens it with a deadpan punch line: "Guess you really lucked out�" he begins, his numb voice trailing off as bassist John Trevor Benson screams bestially yet faintly in the background, "�on this one." Sarcasm never sounded so black. Beneath them, cellist Dominique Davison saws with quiet strength, as if mocking and apologizing at the same time. The screaming gets pushed to the fore on thoroughly non-dainty "Dainty Jack and His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket", an erratic spasm of dissonance that shows an affinity for San Diego screamo (A Minor Forest had previously recorded with Matt Anderson of Heroin), only broken up here and there with squibs of pinpoint jazziness. The balance is struck almost perfectly on "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck", a 10-minute noise-cycle of mood swings, red herrings, and curdled blood.
The wiseass, scattershot racket of Flemish Altruism settles into a more predictable groove onInindependence. Concise and controlled by comparison, A Minor Forest's second and final album (not including their 1999 singles-and-EPs collection, ...So, Were They in Some Sort of Fight?) drags more algebra into the rhythm and more calculation into the off-kilter melody. It wouldn't be fair to say the band had begun to take itself either more or less seriously - but the music is more serious, and even the song titles are less crass. If "Erik's Budding Romance" is to be taken at face value, that relationship flip-flopped randomly and often between coy, candlelit dinners and table-flipping eruptions of lust. Drummer Andee Connors, an unsung hero of his instrument and era, is in top form, coaxing every shade of texture, dynamic, and emotion out of the kit. There are honest, unabashed hooks on the deliciously brief (that is, under four minutes) centerpiece, "�It's Salmon!!!", as well as in "Michael Anthony", which skips a sweet melody across a minefield of disjointed changes and chords. At the same time, the album's 18-minute monster "The Smell of Hot" never fully jells; as A Minor Forest's recording career drew to a halt, patience-testing jams occupied one extreme of their spectrum, while a hint of pleasing pop teased at the other.
A Minor Forest's legacy is not a towering one. Most notably, Hoversten went on to play with Pinback, where he was able to indulge his love of angular melody much more avidly. The band never seemed to want to make bold statements, and it always punctured whatever atmosphere it crafted with wiry self-deprecation and perverse wit. When A Minor Forest reunited in 2013 after a 15-year hiatus, Hoversten said in a radio interview, "[This reunion is] sort of like, take an outfit you wore 15 years ago, then put it on today. Clearly you liked it at one point, but it's not exactly the outfit you would have chosen today. That being said, it's not like I'm being asked to put on a clown suit." Despite their crank titles and in-jokes, A Minor Forest was never a funny band. But they had fun, and that fun seeped into their music. And that makes Flemish Altruism and Inindependence two of the most endlessly rewarding albums of the 90s post-rock boom, if never the most monolithic.
And finally, here's a review of both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence from the always awesome Pop Matters:
The bare truth behind two classic albums from the 1990s.
I remember it clearly: the road was a hazy sequence of distant glares kept together by a dense, hazy lull immersed in the purest of mists. My friend, the proud owner of the CD, was holding the music artifact with one hand, while the other occasionally found its way up and down the wheel, now on this side; now on the other. I never knew how both hands also managed to offer such an accurate interpretation of the drumming, but his abilities ceased to amaze me when my side of the car hit a guardrail that seemed to have popped out from nowhere. My friend carefully placed the CD case in the glove compartment and met me outside the vehicle, where we assessed the damage. "That drumming! Oh boy, that drumming!", was all he had to say.
Not much has happened in the 16 years that followed that day. My friend got married, paid his way to a divorce and when we meet, I drive, so he can be Andee Connors and I can take good care of our lives. In the real world, the influence of a band like A Minor Forest - a scruffy bunch of lads from San Francisco - still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic. Inheritors of the legacy initiated by bands like Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol and Shellac, A Minor Forest's name appears, rightly or wrongly, almost invariably as part of the American post-rock scene, as if their own legacy could not be singled out and stand on its own two feet. But while most people blame them, together with a whole bunch of Midwestern acts loosely located in the "Corn Belt", for the explosion of the math-rock plague, the impact this short-lived ensemble has had on indie rock is probably still far from being recognised.
Their two classic albums, Flemish Altruism and Inindependence, reissued on vinyl by Thrill Jockey for Record Store Day on 19 April, are both presented with an array of previously unpublished pictures in a special four-LP set that includes download cards. However, what matters the most is that these albums, which have been out of print for a decade, have been remastered from the original tapes. The sensuality of the naked, raw sound that was the core of that scene (and I hereby use this term in the artistic, rather than in the geographic sense) is therefore faithfully represented in all its purity and ingenuity. "The Dutch Fist", "So Jesus Was At the Last Supper" and "...But the Pants Stay On" are some of the finest representations imaginable of noise as the most spontaneous by-product of the deconstruction of rock grammar. This primary necessity regulated by tradition - Erik Hoversten (guitars and vocals) and John Trevor Benson (bass) had both studied music at Berkeley - found its champions in Steve Albini (who else?) and Bob Weston (he too of Shellac fame), whose uncompromised affection for stripped-down sounds and total lack of artificiality constituted the perfect match for the band.
Flemish Altruism is the result of this formula, and tunes like "Jacking Off George Lucas" or "Ed Is 50" betray an improvisational approach which heavily relies on the dichotomy between the extreme unpredictability of noise and the discipline usually behind melodic patterns. The almost mandatory (at least back then) tour of most of the US would lead, two years later, to the recording of Inindependence: an album that followed the path traced by its predecessor, perpetuating the angularity and eclecticism that would make A Minor Forest easily recognizable years after their dissolution.
Flemish Altruism and Inindependence are the band's only full-lengths and it could not be otherwise. Although a collection of much of their out of print material, plus a couple of new tracks made it onto the Were They in Some Sort of Fight? CD on My Pal God Records in 1999, these two albums vouch for an incredibly inspired band which disbanded once they realized that the traditional rock instrumentation was starting to restrict their enormous potential and creativity. Does this awareness affect these two records? Not at all. A Minor Forest didn't live long enough to see their craft surpass their inspiration, and for this reason their legacy is definitely safer now than it was 20 years ago!
As mentioned above, both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence have been remastered, both include digital downloads, and are housed in swank full color gatefold jackets, Flemish Altruism has all new artwork!!
Atomos is the most recent release from this offshoot of all time aQ guitar-drone faves Stars Of The Lid. Adam Wiltzie from that group, and his partner in A Winged Victory, Dustin O'Halloran, are joined here by a few other collaborators, most notably another big time aQ fave, Ben Frost! Whereas the last AWVFTS record seemed to focus on the piano, Atomos is much more orchestral, sprawling string-laden drones, chordal swells, extended tones, all woven into a haunting, elegiac threnody, darkly melodic and achingly melancholic, the A side is almost poppy with its exaggerated main melody, the dynamic swells almost jarring, but soon, the swirling background strings swell up and swaddle that melody, before dragging it back down into the dark, leaving something much more hushed and haunting, a sound that fades and blurs gradually, before dissipating completely, leaving just a single distant drone, which bleeds into the next track, at which point the piano returns, for a brief bit of wistful chamber music, over a smear of distant dronemusic, drifting atop a bed of excited strings, all woven into a gorgeous backdrop for the aching piano melodies which ebb and flow dreamily.
The flipside begins with some abstract softnoise, before quickly building to a gristly, buzz drenched psychedelic crescendo, like multiple Spacemen 3 layered on top of one another, until some strings swoop in, and are quickly transformed Ben Frost style, into angry buzzing blackened swells, but only briefly, leaving a final movement, all hushed ambient shimmer, ethereal and abstract, over delicate piano, settled way down in the mix, and slow moving chordal thrum, a darkly dreamy, and gorgeously heartfelt coda. Fantastic!
Wanted to get a bunch of these, but alas, only a few came into the shop. Strange elliptical tape loop manipulation of glittering tones hung against the black sky and laced with ample amounts of tape hiss from one of the few from the black-noise imprint Vaald who has stepped outside the veil of anonymity. Even so, the Finnish sound-artist Olli Aarni doesn't offer much in the way of context, though the title from his native tongue does translate as something rather poetic and effusive: "Sunrise In Pixels".
Limited to 30 copies. Sold out at the label.
D'you think that back when psychedelic-guru-to-be Kawabata Makoto first started growing a beard, he ever thought he'd release quite so very many albums? Heck we've reviewed more releases by his band Acid Mothers Temple than any other artist EVER. (We should check on that, but it's probably true.) Yet each AMT album still seems like a bit of an event, with cosmic significance.
What's special about this new one? Well, aside from having the dubiously excellent invented word "Astrorgasm" in its title, it features the dulcet tones of singer Cotton Casino, a big fave of many AMT fans, back after a long absence from the band. She sings sweetly over the spaced-out sounds on offer here, which range from the quietly folky, to full-on freakout action.
There's four looong tracks, a side of vinyl apiece (it's a double lp, alternatively available as a really long cd)
Track one is a new version of their "Dark Star Blues", previously heard on 2002's Does The Cosmic Shepherd Dream Of Electric Tapirs?, the "Dark Star" reference making us think about just how much AMT has become a (cool) Grateful Dead for a certain segment of underground music hipsterdom, the band ironically embracing/encouraging the comparison (and why not, it's not a bad business model). This song starts off as one of the folky ones, with a stately, vaguely Middle Eastern feel, but builds up and erupts into acid guitar wailin' before too long. That's followed by the delicate dronery of track 2, "Pleasure Mantra Of Sorrows", with swooshing (and sometimes intense) electronics sounding like field recordings of birds atwitter or insects abuzz. Lovely.
Lovely, too, and repetitively mesmeric, is track 3, "Kiss In The Tangerine Dream House", which subtly segues into total guitar freakout. Then there's the final, title track, an "astrorgasm" indeed, with krauty propulsion and even more noisy freakout guitar, getting into extreme Mainliner or Musica Transonic territory. Something for everyone, who's a Kawabata (or Cotton Casino fan), in other words.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
In addition to the eagerly awaited new Agalloch full-length on Profound Lore that we're listing this week, a few copies of this ultra-limited new Agalloch 7" just walked in the door, too - originally only available at their album release shows in Portland and Seattle! The two tracks here are to be considered as missing material from The Serpent & The Sphere. Get it while you can, we're told it's already on eBay for crazy dollars. Pressed on clear wax and limited to a hand numbered 500 copies!
It's full length number five from Agalloch, and after releasing undoubtedly the most critically acclaimed metal record of 2010 (not to mention an equally well received EP in 2012) we find these titans of earthen blackened folk metal undeniably at the height of their powers. The Serpent & The Sphere greets the listener first with sparse solitary folk guitar, the minimal plucking of strings, like the last dying embers of a bonfire - before a doom dirge erupts, layered with enormous thunderous toms and shimmering clean guitar. It's a sound that verges on funeral doom, only a few steps away from Asunder. And then things drop down again into a folky acoustic strum, before morphing into a melodic doom plod accentuated by epic harmonized guitar leads and cryptic rasped vokills. And this organic doominess seems to color much of this album. Agalloch draw not just from classic Norwegian black metal here (we always thought early Ulver was a pretty good reference point for these guys), but also from the organic expanse of latter day Neurosis and even the melodic death doom of bands like Shape Of Despair. There's a progressive flair too, some of the guitar leads bringing to mind newer Enslaved, while the hints of acoustic psych folk recall '90s Opeth. The focus on doomier plods and more midpaced driving rhythms over blastbeats or hectic time signatures really allow the melodies space to take center stage, resulting in a more streamlined and immediate Agalloch record, not to mention maybe their most headbangingly heavy metal yet!
Note, we also got a super limited new Agalloch 7" too, kind of a companion to this full-length, see our listing nearby...
One of our favorite musicians considered part of the new wave of modern Appalachia / guitar soli, has to be Portland guitarist Marisa Anderson, who manages to take that classic sound, and essentially transform it into something all her own, which is no small feat, considering how many modern guitarists try. It's even more impressive here, a record, as the title makes clear, of traditional and public domain songs, like "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic", "Will The Circle Be Unbroken", et cetera.
Anderson played an instore a while back and we were all spellbound, her playing fluid and lyrical, able to conjure up aching melodies, as well as dense noisy squalls, and here, these classic songs are given new life. Anderson's version of "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic" is the perfect example, it's somehow faithful to the original, while being almost unrecognizable, in fact those unfamiliar with the song, could easily assume this was one of Anderson's originals, which is true of all of the tracks here. Anderson's guitar, warmly distorted, fuzzy, and pulsing hypnotically, weaving together lush layers of melody, and unfurling delicate dreamlike instrumentals, some surprisingly fierce and almost psychedelic, others hushed and minimal, spare and spacious. So great. And so pleased that she's finally getting so much well deserved attention, with this lp, as well as the recent reissue of her Mercury record on Important.
These are extremely limited, so be warned that if we run out, it may take us a while to restock, assuming we can get any more at all! (Though fortunately, there will also be a cd version upcoming.)
Finally, the original scores of Andrei Tarkovsky's films Mirror and Stalker get a proper reissue. We previously listed the eighties re-recordings of this soundtrack music on Mirumir a while back, but this Superior Viaduct reissue is, dare we say it, far superior, filling out the Mirror score with some of the nostalgic Russian folk music and classical elements that the other reissue lacked.
The Stalker score, short as it is, might just be our favorite of Artemiev's recordings. A mix of epic alien ambiance and pastoral psych melodies of flutes, and guitars in metallic acidic washes. It evokes a more intense version of Popol Vuh's iconic scores for Werner Herzog. A perfect accompaniment to Tarkovsky's existential and brutalist spiritual journey that seemingly borrows from The Wizard of Oz's dual worlds of black and white and color, but suggests a more creepy pre-Chernobyl vision of the transformative magic of a toxically-charged colorized environment. Mirror on the other hand is an uncompromising headlong dive into a darkly magical past of longing, regret and the unreconcilable effects of memory. The music, brooding and intense, full of liturgical ambiance and an unsettling sense of nostalgia, punctuated by old world folk tropes and romantically distant classical fugues weighs heavy. Both scores, as well as the films they accompany are beautifully powerful and deep, and come highly recommended!
Ah, the many tentacles of Gordon Ashworth. Once, this Portlander recorded as Concern delivering an updated version of American holy minimalism through Riley, Maclise, and Conrad in fine style. He also had his wall-noise moniker Oscillating Innards, and plenty of black/grind/scuzz-fuck/noise projects to extend his aesthetic range (e.g. Knelt Rote, Deep Jew, etc.); but it was always the work of Concern that tickled our fancy. While he shelved Concern as a project back in 2010, this solo album released under his given name seems to be carrying on that aesthetic thread. Languid drones blur between field recordings from his one-time job as a taxi driver and subtle melodies sketched out via banjo and piano for the first couple of tracks, lend a less digital but equally favorable comparison to Tim Hecker's fizzing post-ambience. On "Suite For Broken Sex," Ashworth really hits his stride through the billowing minimalism for a hypnotic piano, churning through notes akin to Lubomyr Melnyk's less frenetic compositions, all brightly rasping with overtones and swirling raga-drones from the interlocking arpeggiation. The wistful banjo fingerpicking of "To Be The Man I Want To Be" and "Desperate & Indebted" takes on a Tim Hecker / Christian Fennesz jaggedliness adhering to the hillbilly minimalism of Henry Flynt, plucking away at a tearjerkingly maudlin series of melodies over the course of side two. Gorgeous stuff for sure! Limited to 300 copies on clear vinyl with a download.
Jeremy Bible is the man behind the Experimedia label/distribution/empire, which has humble beginnings as a small imprint for his own compositions for melancholy dronemusic and amorphously treated field recordings. Admittedly, it has been a while since we've heard any of Bible's output; and on Collisions there's a considerable shift from the soft-focus, ambient-grounded smears and blurs from those earlier recordings to the neutron smashing and amplified laboratory hum found the aptly named cassette. The field recordings do persist with chapters of nocturnal tree frogs and daytime birdsong bracketed by passages of clinical electronics, possibly rendered through blorping modular synthesis or some sort of digital equivalent. The tones, nonetheless, are sharp and abraded, reflecting similar rhythms from barking tree frogs and mellifluous thrushes. Bible's jittery splutter of tone into jagged sawtooth patterns and erratic squiggle recalls some of the polydactyl, generative work from Keith Fullerton Whitman or the scabrous digital errata of Florian Hecker. At times, it's a frenzied, furious work; and at others, it can be austerely designed in the vein of Asmus Tietchens. Super limited, and packaged in a swanky box with foil stamping.
First full-length lp from Nelson Bean, aka Black Hat, whose previous two releases blew our collective minds, and this new one is somehow even better. Bean traffics in a sort of psychedelic, dark cosmic electronica, that in the past, has touched on aQ faves like Demdike Stare, Tim Hecker, Techno Animal, DHR, even weirdo industrial like Esplendor Geometrico. On this new one, it seems that all of those influences/references have been distilled into something much more pure and organic sounding. Three sprawling tracks, the first, a hauntological skitterscape, that fuses slow-beat lope to heaving swells of pixelated crunch, a little bit witch house, a little bit IDM, but blurred and blackened, transformed into something more sinister, and more abstract, the opening 9+ minute track in constant flux, so much so, that it's nearly impossible to review without explicitly describing each iteration, and yet, over the course of the song, Bean manages to keep some sort of sonic narrative, the song not at all fragmented, and not sounding like a bunch of random ideas mashed together, instead, the sound blossoms and unwinds, from hazy, washed out skitter, to dense gristly thrum, rife with rib cage rattling bass pulsations, to claustrophobic minimal electro that sounds like it was plucked from some obscure cassette release on Hospital, to blown out industrial techno crunch, and that's just the first track.
The second half of the A side is much more abstract, with gorgeous swirls of chordal thrum, drifting and shimmering, a sort of sinister new age, dense and cosmic, lush and layered, a sprawling landscape of overlapping tones, and buried melodies, the sounds unwinding in slow-motion, hazy, and washed out, bleary and blackened, but smeared into strangely prismatic streaks of sound, hauntingly hypnotic. The whole of the B side is taken up by the nearly 18 minute "Memory Triptych", and might be Bean's finest moment, an epic sprawl of hushed skitter, of murky loops, of keening, melancholic melody, all woven into something at once bleak and mysterious, but also warm and lovely, the sounds warbly and woozy, the beats more like constellations of crackle and pop, wound around soft swirls of static soaked shimmer, and strange alien pulsations, at one point, a melody surfaces, that sounds almost like humming/crooning, that 'vocal' is accompanied by a sonic shift, where the sounds begin to fracture, and become more agitated and aggressive, the vibe much more industrial, but fused to a sort of wistful pop ambience, a dizzying dream-drone dirge, driven by a strange rhythmic tangle buried beneath the surface, the sound gnarled and roiling, before about halfway through, like a storm breaking, the sounds shift dramatically, and become downright lovely, laced with what sounds like faux birdsong, the sounds suddenly warm and lush, softly soaring, all the grinding industrialism, now pushed into the background, smeared into a dense, churning backdrop, that adds a soft bit of shadow, to the otherwise, glimmering, gristly, glitchy dreaminess...
Super swank packaging, heavy full color jacket, with printed insert, and download code!
Not a split, but a proper collaboration between these two doom/sludge combos, and strangely enough, the band math sounds exactly how you think it would - dense flurries of double drumming, underpin, thick, viscous, downtuned riffage, there's probably bass in there too, but it's more like a thick undulating slab of low end droned, plenty of squealing feedback, and warped melodies, not to mention dueling vocals, the harsh demonic rasp of Thou, with the inhuman hysterical shriek of The Body, all wound up into churning sprawls of lurching, lumbering noise drenched heaviness, the first three tracks blurred into a sort-of songsuite, epic, and crushing, downtuned heaviness, total head shearing, gut rumbling chug and churn, the best part maybe the clouds of guitarnoise and twisted FX, that seem to swirl in squalls around the song proper, not to mention some bad ass processed drumming, that gives the sound a twisted sort of black doom dub vibe, the whole thing culminating in a cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Coward". Both bands are masters of the cover song, each having transformed some classic jams into their own warped mutations, and this one is no different, starting off all lovely, except for the distant vocal shrieks, and when the hammer falls, instead of exploding into full on metal mode, the two groups unfurl a bed of rumbling, gristly distortion, and drape a blown out disorto-melody over the top, before devolving into a gloriously dirgey and doomy creep, with huge booming drums, thick walls of crumbling distortion, and more harsh vokills, that somehow manages to preserve the melody and vibe of the original, while essentially burying it in gristled murk and thick black buzz!
Gorgeously packaged, fancy heavy weight jackets, letter-pressed inserts, and pressed on 180 gram vinyl. NO download.
A film version of Strange Lines And Distances has made the rounds at some of the established film festivals around the globe for the past few years; and now Experimedia offers the video documentation of the piece along with an edit of the soundtrack specifically rendered for vinyl. Bonnetta's work is conceptually driven (and is exceptionally well executed), based upon the first wireless transmission that Marconi broadcast from one side of the English Channel to the other. Out of this single transmission, we not only have a lineage that begets radio then television then cellphones then iPhones then 'the cloud' and onto whatever the next means of immediate communication may be on the horizon; but we also have all of the miscommunications, hidden messages, lost transmissions, EVPs, numbers stations, alien voices, and any other tech-gnostic renderings of the machine as a telepathic device communing with the divine. Bonnetta's piece is a suitably eerie score of shortwave radio drones and oceanic field recordings, compositionally reflecting Marconi's notion that the radio transmission does not actually disappear but just becomes incrementally fainter. As such, Bonnetta's audio sensibilities owes a considerable amount to the long-shot works of Alan Lamb, Jim Haynes, Thomas Koner, and BJ Nilsen. The video work operates on a simple, yet effective conceit with two channels of video representing both sides of the Channel. The video was all shot on 16mm film and maintains a muted color palette of wintery grays and cold blues as Bonnetta tracks through both landscapes which hold numerous environmental similarities, tied through Marconi's idea that his first wireless transmission is still bouncing back and forth between these two sites albeit infinitesimally faint. It's a really beautiful piece of work; and not surprisingly won a handful of awards. The lp contains extended compositions of the soundtrack, a very lengthy piece of critical analysis of the work, a dvd with the film itself, and digital downloads of both the video and the audio. Whew!
Hot on the heels of last week's listing of the new double cd release on tUMULt from Bay Area hypersonic one man black metal band Mastery, comes something even stranger. Yet another mysterious one man black metal horde (and another double disc), rising from the fertile SFBM underground. The scene that gave us Leviathan, Draugar, Crebain, Pale Chalice, Sutekh Hexen, Dead As Dreams, Dispirit, Horn Of Dagoth, Pandiscordian Necrogenesis, Amocoma, Elk, Necrite, Palace Of Worms, and more, has now spawned the oddly monikered Botanist, an odd moniker only until you realize that all the songs here are about plants and flowers, and all of the artwork following suit, old faded images of strange and wondrous flora and fauna, but that's not nearly the strangest thing about Botanist. Nope, the strangest thing would be the fact that there are NO guitars, and there is NO bass, just drums, vocals, and HAMMERED DULCIMER. That's right, eerie and esoteric, buzzing and baffling, drum and dulcimer driven black eco-terrorist black metal. And as strange as that may sound, the SOUND is even stranger, the dulcimer a particularly haunting and strangely melodic instrument, the typical black metal riffs replaced by maniacal dulcimer melodies, repeated motifs, flurries of cyclical notes, the sound buzzy and brutal in it's own way, with an almost old-timey feel to the sound, the drums mathy and intricate, often sounding strangely like a demonic drumline, the vocals a hellish raspy croak, but it's the dulcimer that drives the sound of Botanist, a distinctive metallic buzz that's eerily creepy and darkly cinematic, with many of these tracks sounding like they could be some alternate soundtrack for a lost seventies giallo or some super surreal art film.
The tracks are mostly short sharp blasts of metallic buzz, the dulcimer alternatingly offering up dense overtone-rich clouds of frenzied tangled melody, but just as often, unfurling stretches of haunting atonal shimmer, occasionally spacing way out, and weaving sprawling dreadscapes of minor key tension and slow build terror, the sound of the dulcimer so strange, sometimes evoking old pianos in ghost town saloons, other times impossibly melodic, with the songs on the verge of pure poppiness, or as poppy as something as twisted and confusional like this can be. The sound of Botanist is definitely black metal, in form, in structure, in intent, in spirit, even to a degree in sound, but it's also something wholly other, the relation between the rhythms and the melodic component of the dulcimer's haunting buzz and chiming metallic tone hard to quantify, and obviously even harder to accurately describe, then there's the dulcimer's traditional station as a folky Appalachian instrument, it all adds to the crazy, confusional appeal of Botanist's warped sonic world, one that manages to be both heavy and buzzy and blackened, but also haunting and hypnotic and strangely soundtracky, a swirling, hazy, chaotic sound, densely melodic, relentlessly rhythmic, fantastically fucked up and bafflingly brilliant.
The discs are housed in super swank full color mini-lp gatefold style Stoughton jackets, with a thick booklet of lyrics, the jacket and booklet both printed to look like an antique botanist's field journal. ENTER THE VERDANT REALM!!
The return of Botanist, the SF eco-terrorist black metal one man band, whose curious weapons of war are pretty much just drums, voice, and hammered dulcimer! Sound strange, and it most certainly is, and black metal fans have definitely been divided, too weird, and no nearly metal enough for some, perfectly twisted and mesmerizingly oddball for others. We, like many of you, definitely fall into the latter camp, our own Andee having released Botanist's double disc debut, a sprawling collection of short sharp bursts of brittle steel string buzz and furious blasts, but as you may have gleaned from the title of Botanist's third record, some things have changed this time around. Most notably, the tempos are slowed way down, the tonal palette too is much more varied, the sound surprisingly lush, and describing some of the sounds here as simply doom, would definitely be selling short the twisted innovation and warped songcraft on display here.
Just check out the record opener "Quoth Azalea, The Demon (Rhododendoom II)", a swampy, dirgey, slithery creep, that reminds us more of groups like Woven Hand or Der Blutharsch, where the dulcimer manages to sound almost like a piano at times, and the melody is so wistful and melancholy, if it weren't for the raspy vokills, this could be some dark apocalyptic folk ballad. And so goes the rest of the record, unfurling darkly and dramatically, from loping doomy dirge, to creepy slo-mo deathmarch, to strangely propulsive almost post rock, much of this record sounding like something, that sans vox, could be on Temporary Residence, brooding, slow building, majestic and epic, all shot through with a healthy helping of drone, the steel string buzz creating mesmerizing layers of subtly shifting overtones, and woozily tangled melodies. Some of the tracks have a distinctly cabaret vibe as well, but even then, the sound tends to return to something more stately, trudging through thick fields of chiming notes and shimmering buzz, the vocals often buried, but sometimes a demonic croak, and strangely enough, the vocals tend to be at their most demonic, when the music is at its most lovely, which makes for a potent, and fantastically confusional combination.
Fans of the first record will definitely not be disappointed, but folks into brooding slow build post rock, and dark drone driven doom folk, should give a listen as well.
As a bonus, also included is a second disc, called Allies, which finds friends of the Botanist creating their own tracks using drum tracks from the Doom In Bloom sessions. The sounds and songs vary sonically quite a bit, there's strange staticky hushed ambient drift, crushing sludgey slo-mo doom, blown out, soaring hazy mid tempo black metal buzz (courtesy of the Botanist's other band, Ophidian Forest), some corrosive noise too, but there's a clutch of tracks that might surprise folks, the witchy, doomy female vocal driven Bestiary and the pop flecked almost Opeth-y melodic metal of Lotus Thief, but probably our favorite reworking comes from Arborist, whose version starts off as a sort of lumbering, lo-fi bit of screamo-y slo-mo creep, which explodes into a super psychedelic blast of woozy heaviness, the riffs and melodies slipping and sliding and seeming to melt before your very ears. Definitely hope the Arborist and the Botanist do more together in the future (which seems likely, as the Arborist actually records all the Botanist records)...
And if three records is still not enough Botanist for you (it's not for us!), fear not! There are already at least three, if not more, full lengths on deck. We can't wait!
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has always been a musical chameleon. Aside from loose adjectives like "dreamy" and "ethereal," the aesthetic framework for each of his albums is slippery, although the quality is always topnotch. This would include the expansive avant-shoegazing propositions for his work in Tarentel or the cinematic psychedelia from The Alps or gossamer-crush from his dream-pop distillations in Raum or that Love Is A Stream album he did for Type a while back. Songs Of Remembrance collects half-forgotten / half-dreamt / half-remembered melodies and builds hazy, gauzy fragments of songs, set along the oceanic current of the '80s synth ballad, draped with maudlin electronics and murky guitar smears. The sounds are cinematic and melancholy, and most are fused to primitive drum machine rhythms. Lovely Durutti Column like guitar figures dot hushed dronescapes, which in turn are peppered with strange electronics and bits of glitch, with some of this sounding like an alternate soundtrack to Twin Peaks, check out the brief opening few minutes, with its very eighties sounding, reverb heavy drift, echoey guitars floating above loping programmed rhythms, and laced with mysterious almost 8-bit sounding sonic filigree, and it continues to drift dreamily from there, the sound a woozy sprawl of chiming distant chords, and barely there melodies, minus the strange squelches, it would be downright tranquil and serene, the drum machines swoop back in throughout, and again, each time, we're transported back to some alternate universe eighties, all dark streets and cloud choked skies, dingy all-night dives and late night wandering. The 'songs' here are ultra brief, some barely a minute or two, playing more like a strange compilation of sonic vignettes, musical short stories, Cantu-Ledesma displaying a knack for creating lush atmospheres in a matter of seconds, and then letting them fade into nothingness just as we're getting settled in. It says something that we wish almost every track here kept going and going and going�
Lots of the tracks here have a very M83 feel to them as well, lost in time, faded memories, soundtracky, but seventies art film soundtracky, long Super-8 shots of the landscape rushing by through a train window, of glittering city lights, we find ourselves imagining this music set to the films of Paul Clipson, Cantu's long time collaborator, the sounds here evoking similarly abstract and melancholic visuals. There are some 'noise' pieces too, but even then, it's more soft noise, and usually those segue right back into some reverby eighties drum machine drift.
Songs Of Remembrance seems to reprise the fictional USSR electronica of Oneohtrix Point Never, the unintentionally brilliant moments of hypnogogic-pop from James Ferrara, and of course, the delusional, sunshine-noir aspirations from Ensemble Economique!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Already out of print at the label, so these are the last copies we'll be able to get!!! Includes a download too...
Killer debut of swaggery, gothy murk-punk / noise rock from these East Coast knuckledraggers, whose sound seems to channel everyone from the Stooges to His Electro Blue Voice, Slug to Pussy Galore, Unwound to Cop Shoot Cop. Shambolic and chaotic, wild and unhinged, a sort of bastard blooze, with loose-limbed octopoidal drumming, filthy guitars, howled feral vox, all recorded super hot and in-the-red, lurching from wild almost psychedelic freakouts, to doomy, dirge metal creep, some moments smack of classic glam rock (a la Hanoi Rocks, Smack) but doused in distorto-noise and rolled in dirt and broken glass. Even at its noisiest, some killer melodies and surprising hooks surface throughout, moments of extreme poppiness here and there, but almost always buried beneath an avalanche of crumbling distortion, strangled guitarnoise, flurries of drum damage, psychedelic squalls, out of which emerge some seriously kick ass and weirdly groovy sludge punk not to mention some unlikely and impossibly catchy, dirge-gloom noise pop. Killer stuff.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!
In addition to the new Circle (Ex-Falcon) full-length album reviewed this list, the prolific Finns have also unleashed a new 7" single. Unlike the gentle, folky "atmos-psych" of the Leviatan album, on this 7" Circle take on capitalist society with two tracks of raging punk!! Kinda like the short, sharp hardcore punk tracks that erupted in the middle of Circle's Panic album a few years ago. Intense shit, meant to "reveal the plight of those exposed to the idiocies of blatant consumerism" and probably also to spark some slam-dancing. Rabid vocals in Finnish spit words of societal critique over surprisingly catchy guitar-heavy tunage (the chorus to the A side reminding us of a song by Faust, oddly enough). Wow, Circle, they've kind of become the Everything band - eventually there won't be any musical style or subculture that they haven't dabbled in and made sincerely Circular somehow.
WOW. Maybe it took taking a while off, and letting some other guys make a super-heavy (death metal!) album under the name Circle, while goofing around with the ironic '80s pop of alter-ego band Falcon, but Circle, now that they're Circle again, have really managed to blow us away with this one, even entrancing some of us here who aren't the 'usual' Circle fanatics. Despite all the silly high concept stuff they delight in, Leviatan once again proves that these guys are serious artists, geniuses really. No sharks have been jumped as yet.
The sticker on the cover proclaims: "Circle (ex-Falcon) have returned from Falcon-land in exquisite atmo-psych form!" which we can surely attest to and wholeheartedly agree with. Leviatan pretty much became a unanimous store favorite as soon as we first laid ears on it. Yet before we did, we didn't quite expect what they meant by "atmo-psych" to actually be such a beautifully delivered kraut-tinged acid folk record almost entirely played on acoustic instruments, conjuring up legendary associations with Comus (especially on the song "Protectorate"), Fresh Maggots, Faust, The Inner Space, Joakim Skogsberg and other ye olde folky aQ faves and yet also sounding as intense and psychically heavy as the latest Swans album, To Be Kind (though not quite as sprawling!).
Opening with gentle and primeval filigreed acoustic guitar riffs churning like smoke, swirling and building in on each other, anchoring subtle spacey tones taken from NASA satelite recordings and setting the tone for a processional recitation of an old Finnish text. Next, a medieval trio of banjo, bouzouki, and hand percussion and some deep monolithic chanting propel a kind of ritual invocation that nearly turns savage as Mika's vocals get more intense and paganish. But every dark passage on Leviatan is mirrored by some of the prettiest music we have heard from Circle in a while, especially on the Faust-ish ballad, "Post-Kapitalismus" and the sweet instrumental "Rakeita". Elsewhere moody folk jams, deep mystical paeans and avant Finnish-folk group sing-alongs, lead us to a final rounding call of solemn guitar weaving and ghostly breaths in what could only represent a slow-fading chiming forest-y death. Incredible!
We mentioned that Cold Cave threw us for a loop with all of the roccoco flourishes that adorned the gloomy synth-pop of their 2011 album Cherish The Light Years. Since then, Cold Cave has steadily released a handful of singles through their own Heartworm imprint, many of which have disappeared almost as soon as they were released. We might have had one or two of those singles at one time or another, but we were never able to get enough stock to list any one of those. Thankfully, Wes Eisold, the man behind Cold Cave, has compiled all of those singles, recorded from 2011 to 2014, on to this single disc right here. These singles represent the simpler, skeletal sound of Cold Cave that struck our fancy way back when. A drum machine, a step sequenced melody, an icy yet harmonic counterpoint, and Eisold's deep monotone croon. That's pretty much the successful formula for a great Cold Cave song, and Eisold pretty much sticks to this strategy. The one notable exception is the Jesus & Mary Chain distorto-crush electronics of the Oceans With No End single. The other singles that round out the compilation include A Little Death To Laugh, Black Boots, God Made The World, and a handful of digital only cuts.
You wonder about a vinyl version? The answer now is a resounding maybe...
With the stated instrumentation of church organ and hurdy gurdy, this album would seem to allude to a hallowed piece of shimmering minimalism on par with the likes of Charlemagne Palestine or Phill Niblock; but these two stalwarts of the French avant-garde offer a wide swath of sound-making strategies that pivot between a hushed electro-acoustic dispersion and an unhinged, staccatic blossom of freeform serialism. The initial 20 minutes finds these two generating acoustic debris through performative gestures, very similar to some of those unfathomable Leif Elggren / Sons Of God performances involving amplified ovens that oozed with foul gruel or numerous beds covered with tiny copper crowns. By the end of the second chapter of this work, the reedy drones of the hurdy gurdy begin to huff and buzz in small expansions of activity alongside similarly constructed lurches on the church organ which seem to be struggling to push sound through all of the muffling sackcloth that Cordier and Guionnet have shoved into the pipes. Actual notes begin to blossom, albeit in constellations of irregularly tuned modernist anti-musical phrases. As the album comes to a conclusion, rasping drones swell with baleen majesty and deep-sea eeriness, rising to the surface and tumbling back down into the depths. If you were thinking of Keiji Haino's hurdy gurdy arrangements, you would be pretty damn close... Nice?
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You think you've got some weird cds in your collection? Make room for this one if you dare. Heck, as soon as we peeped the crude fantasy cover art, we were like, new favorite album!
'80s Mexican heavy metallers Cristal Y Acero (Crystal And Steel) were responsible for this strange record, originally released in 1984, billed as the "Primera Opera Rock Mexicana". Kuman was indeed a wild Spanish-language rock opera, apparently about a muscular Tarzan-type character (...in SPAAAAACE!!!). We're not sure, but from the photos included here we think this Kuman musical may have been an actual stage production, or maybe even something filmed for Mexican TV. It comes off like a weird, metallic mash-up of, like, Meatloaf and Os Mutantes, combining Cristal Y Acero's hard n' heavy old-school metal riffing with a variety of other pop musical genres - proggy pomp-rock, sappy soft rock, piano balladry, and more. It of course gets cheesy but in an amazing insane kitschy way, and always Cristal Y Acero's fuzzy hard rock riffage, harmonized leads, and gruff vocals come back in to kick ass, after whatever else happens. There's slinky lounge grooves, guest female vocals, '50s rock & roll pastiche, and METAL.
But that's not all, this cd also includes all the tracks from Cristal Y Acero's more traditional self-titled debut album from 1983, with some songs sung in English. It's pretty charming and cool too, with chugging guitars, widdly solos, and lots of raw old school metal might, in the style of such bands as Saxon and Accept - but Mexican, and on a budget. Presented together with Kuman, this disc is something for both cult metal aficionados and those into straight up WTF? strangeness.
Packaged in a mini-lp style sleeve, with inserts. Perhaps not remastered from the original master tapes.
To most folks, the name Stephen Cogle might not mean much, but to avid New Zealand music nerds like us (and maybe you), that name conjures up some of our favorite groups from that era/region, think Vacuum, The Victor Dimisich Band, the Terminals... Exactly. So Dark Matter is Cogle circa now, and while much of that old sound remains, here it's recast as something much more dignified and dramatic, a sort of gothic psych, via Christchurch style Flying Nun post punk. The label compares Dark Matter to the Chills, Television Personalities, the Scientists, Roxy Music, the last one especially, but we're also hearing plenty of Scott Walker, and other oddball crooners, the music is simple, yet lush, jangly guitars are wreathed in layers of string shimmer, slowly unfurling landscapes of brooding dark pop mesmer, with Cogle's dramatic vox over the top, and dramatic they are, we're almost reminded of those song-poem records, but instead of songs about aliens or cowboys, the subject matter here matches the musical gravitas, and even when the vocals fade out, the music left on its own is seriously stunning, check out the second half of "The Long Count", which is tense, and minor key, darkly lovely, mysterious, beholden to the classic NZ sound, but still plenty modern, and then when the vocals swoop back in, it's transformed into something bombastic and intense, harrowing and yet still lush and lovely.
Strange dark post punk torch songs that should also appeal to fans of Nick Cave, Woven Hand, Crystal Stilts, King Dude, Swans and other purveyors of moody, dark songcraft, and these guys get compared to Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos (arguably our favorite NZ band EVER), even though the sonic connection seems to be more about mood and atmosphere than sound, which should be all the recommendation you need!
Cover star, the late great Oderus Urungus (R.I.P. Dave Brockie). Also: Floor, Stoneburner, Young Widows, Goatwhore, Lord Mantis, and more - including a Q&A with Marty freaking Friedman. Shred!
Stellar 2nd album from Salt Lake City psychedelic stoners Dwellers - whom our Andee just got to see play live when they opened for A Minor Forest's tour stop in their town. He says they were GREAT, which we'd have expected since we liked their first album, and this one too. Compared to the debut, this new one seems a bit more mellowed out, at first anyway, but really it runs the gamut, from dusky balladry to heavy jams (often delivering both at the same time), getting especially epic on numbers like "Rare Eagle" and album-closer "Call Of The Hallowed Horn". Loping and bluesy, with a bit of a down home, Southern feel, this pure good heavy, hazy music from a trio that knows what they're doin', employing (besides guitars, bass and drums) such additional instruments as cello, organ, and Rhodes piano, along with "real" singing for sure... previously we'd mentioned how the vocals made us think of some good old Seattle grunge, now that comparison could resolve into a more specific Mark Lanegan reference. Recommended! FYI, vinyl version due in July.
Aside from a couple of respectable collaborations and some soundtrack work, Christian Fennesz hasn't released a proper solo album since the album Black Sea, which came out on Touch WAY back in 2008. On Becs, Fennesz returns to the label that introduced him to the world, in Editions Mego; and he pretty much continues along the same path that he set for himself on that last album he recorded for them, the much lauded Endless Summer from 2001. That was a fracturous record of polygonal melodies bathed in a candy-crush fuzz of pixelated, shoegazing blur, always alluding to the sunkissed glow of the California Dream, whatever that may be. Becs may not have the advantage of following up one hell of a single by Fennesz (in the very late '90s, he covered The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones, the latter of which was originally commissioned for tUMULt's Painted Black anthology!), whereby he contextualized his sonic dislocation within the lineage of rock'n'roll and all of its mythologies of dissent, rebellion, sex, and whatnot. Yeah, it's a tough act to follow; but Becs is a wildly adventurous album with a substantial parity when it comes to the risk/reward equation. A heavily flanged, blindingly bright corona of digital treatments surrounds the Fennesz' guitar sound at the album's introduction, with all of the soft melodies buried in twinkling electronics and mirrored refractions. Fennesz follows this with a detuned alarm-call pulse that forms an insistently crawling rhythmic structure blasted with a malleable distortion, which in turn he counterpoints with a gorgeous, cathedral drone of sustained harmonics. An incremental retinal burn of guitar distortion shapes the brilliant track "Liminality" built upon a beautifully bittersweet, slowcore guitar chord whose roots lie in Slint, Codeine, or maybe even the Durutti Column. Sparkling ambient passages beget discordant piano treatments akin to a computer-cracked Angelo Badalamenti which in turn beget more blossoming noise. Fucking brilliant.
It's been ten years since the last full length from these sludge pop legends, but mainman Steve Brooks has most definitely been keeping that sludge pop legacy alive with his new band Torche, and really if you dig Torche, you're gonna dig Floor too, as they're both cut from the same sonic cloth, insanely downtuned riffage, crushing drum pounds, and soaring super melodic vocals. Killer pop hooks swaddled in doom/sludge churn, and it's a potent combination. The fact that Brooks has been writing Torche songs (haha, get it?) for so long, does mean, that while this is a whole different band, the jams here still essentially play out like new Torche songs (haha, again), and we're not complaining, it's a sound we can't get enough of, epic, crushing catchiness, impossibly hooky metallic crunch, the band slipping easily from tarpit dirge, to more hard rocking heaviness, check out the opening one-two punch of the title track and "Rocinante", the former, a gloriously skull caving slab of doom-pop creep, like Queen crossed with the Melvins at 16rpm, the latter, a furious blast of headbangable pop metal riffery, the melodies crazy catchy, but buried beneath some serious badass riffage. But then hold on to your fucking hats for "Trick Scene", which begs the question, how the fuck do these guys tune their guitars so low, and why does it sound so goddamn good?! Brooks popsmithery has never sounded better, OR heavier, there's always been a whiff of Nirvana's Bleach to Floor (and Torche), which is in no way a bad thing, and it's like Bleach, only louder and heavier and slower and sludgier, which is of course most definitely a good thing! Amidst all this chug and churn, there does lurk a few sonic surprises, some new waviness on one track, some pure pop dreaminess on another, but ultimately, this is just absolute sludge pop bliss, and maybe the best thing we've heard from Brooks with ANY of his projects. Which is saying a while heck of a lot...
Not. For. The. Faint. Of. Heart. Nosirree, you know this is gonna be wonderfully, brutally OUT. And you probably know if you want it or not already... Japanese psych-improv free rock masters Fushitsusha, lead by shamanic guitarist/vocalist Keiji Haino, teamed up with one of the true titans of saxophone skronk, Germany's legendary Peter Brotzmann, holy crap! Batten down the hatches!! Turns out this fancy new Utech triple cd release is not in fact a new recording, it's an archival find from the '90s, thus boasting the classic Fushitsusha lineup of the era, Haino accompanied by Jun Kosugi on drums and Yashusi Ozawa on bass. Plus of course a very special guest on saxophone. And y'know, they're not a band who can have just anybody sit in with them. No, any Fushitsusha guest (and there haven't been many) had better be heavy duty. Peter Brotzmann, he qualifies. Seriously, he's the guy whose perhaps best known album, from 1968, is called Machine Gun, and to this day he's famed for his uber-intense, scorched earth, red-in-the-head playing style. Who better really to collaborate with Fushitsusha, "the most important rock band of the past 25 years" (according to Haino hagiographer Alan Cummings, writing in this set's liner notes - our Allan also agrees).
This triple cd set documents an entire concert (maybe the first complete Fushitsusha show on cd?), recorded April 26th, 1996 in Tokyo. That's two days after Haino and Brotzmann went into the studio to record their duo disc on PSF, Evolving Blush Or Driving Original Sin. As fans, it's amazing to find out now that, there's more, and with Haino's whole band, even better!
When at full-bore roar, the Fushitsusha trio create a clangorous, cavernous environment for Brotzmann's sax to soar and slither around in, intertwining with the muzzy sheets of sound emanating from Haino's guitar/amp. Rather than the players competing for sound-space, it's a synthesis; you might not even be able to tell what's Haino and what's Brotzmann amidst it all. And despite the potential (often realized!) for noisier-than-thou onslaughts, there's subtle beauty here too, moody melodious moments, quiet stirrings before/betwixt the storm... disc one, for instance, begins with glistening chiming sounds and restrained percussive skitter-scatter, quite lovely. It's a while before Haino's trademark distorted guitar squall, let alone the saxophone of Brotzmann, even makes an appearance, and that's just fine.
We can't rightly review the entirety of these three discs (approximately three hours), words fail. Plus, you should have your own experience of discovery - like finding out that Haino busts out the hurdy-gurdy for some drones on disc two! But as any Fushitsusha fan will expect, it's unique, abstract, massive, magnificent, building from delicate solos and duos amongst the players to HEAVY total group aktion, getting more 'rock' than Brotzmann even ever did in Last Exit. And really, that Brotzmann's on board is a bonus, but even if he wasn't, heck, it's a Fushitsusha triple live of uncommon beauty and power regardless.
Utech's art and design is always really nice, but this one's especially elaborately packaged, with many, many inserts wrapped/folded together with the 3 discs (though, be careful with the outer plastic sleeve, as that's what's holding it all together).
Latest from local label Time Released Sound comes in the form of this 3" cd from cellist/sound artist Guy Gelem, who crafts a lovely avant chamber music with just treated cello, swoonsome melodies drift over deep rumbling tones, and softly undulating layers, pulses and pulsations are molded into abstract pizzicato almost-rhythms, the sound pastoral, wistful and melancholic, dark loveliness that reminds us a bit of the late great Rachel's, with tracks ranging from dreamily propulsive and effervescent to more somber and funereal, the latter, unwinding as aching, brooding threnodies, laced with subtle sonic colors and constantly swirling atmospheres, often blossoming into the former. Beautiful stuff, and fans of other TRS releases will feel right at home!
LIMITED TO JUST 90 COPIES, and unlike other Time Released Sound releases, this one is ONLY available as a deluxe version, which as always, is super swank, a hand stamped mini-disc, housed in a star-punched, black felt covered sleeve, wrapped in a handworked super long, Japanese style obi, hand stamped of course, inside is a stamped insert made from vintage, hand notated sheet music, everything tied together with strands of Mongolian horsehair (!) and a handmade rubber tie down button made from a used bicycle tire tube (!!).
It seems Japanese psychedelic noiserock insanity in the tradition of the good ol' Boredoms is alive and well! We're talking crazy Boredoms back in the day, at their hyperdelic height, but NOISIER. This debut album from Japanese outfit Gezan (in English, that may mean Descending, which makes sense given a close look at the cover art), unleashed over there in 2012, now gets a domestic release via Important and we gotta say, hell yeah, 'cuz Gezan rulez! Don't just take it from us - Gezan has garnered adulatory cover-blurb endorsements from the likes of Merzbow, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins) and Agata (Melt-Banana); and apparently Acid Mothers Temple guru Makato Kawabata was the one that brought 'em to the attention of Important, citing Gezan as his favorite live band in Japan. Seems like those guys all think of Gezan as nextgen torchbearers for the classic Japanoise surreal psych sound, and we're hearing it here, freshly intense and energized, dark and psychotic.
The buzzing distortodelic chaos of the aforementioned early Boredoms comes to mind right away, as leadoff track "Mishima To Kuchibeni" hoves into earshot, riding a headcaving Butthole Surfers sorta riff, warped and damaged, FX bubbling up everywhere. The in-the-red 'Tokyo Flashback' acid rock sound of psychedelic speed freak gangs like High Rise and Mainliner is obviously also deeply encoded in Gezan's DNA. And even harsher stuff, like Eye from the Boredoms' earlier noise unit Hanatarash, is touched upon here too - the industrial-strength devastation of "Kouchuu No Wakai", ferinstance, sounds like Merzbow meets Guitar Wolf! Meanwhile, the likes of "Kyoushin" channel the blackhole heaviness and lumbering, lurching feedback-drenched doomic riffery of such notorious Japanese psych-prog heavies as Zeni Geva, YBO2 and even Fushitsusha. Dang. Gezan do it all, in terms of freeform, unafraid, bold & bombastic freak flag flyin'. Never a dull moment.
You get glitched-out rhythmic cut-up shenanigans, organized screaming, spacey shoegaze warble, fractured blues, even some bleakly beautiful parts. There's often strange, sudden segues into cinematic samples, echoing whisper-voiced interludes, and distortion-bombed soundscapes. But these are structured songs, mind you, and as experimental and extended and distended as they are, there's eventual rock n' roll payoff, usually. Also, Gezan are capable of surprises all the way through to the end, treating us to the (mostly) melodic blissed out finale "Haru No Hiza", didn't see that one coming. Nice.
We've made a ton of references here to other Japanese bands - and should also mention some more, Gezan is likely also for fans of LSD-March, DMBQ, Omiode Hatoba, Up-Tight, and Boris (if they went totally nuts). But you don't have to be a Japanoise nerd to get into Gezan. Or at least, you don't have to know you're a Japanoise nerd, yet. Gezan's blown-out, blown-up brand of noisy psychedelic mayhem could and should appeal to lots of folks yet to delve into Gezan's overt antecedents. Just be into distorted, damaged, freaky, rocking WTF-ness and you'll dig this!
Jack Ruby was a sporadic NYC art-fuck project from the mid '70s that existed before such a thing as No Wave could be codified as an actual 'scene' or else they would have no doubt been lumped alongside Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Beirut Slump, Theoretical Girls, and Mars. The band only managed to get into a proper studio a couple of a times and played about five shows during their brief start-stop-start-stop 'career'. By the time the band finally ceased to be in 1977, none of the founding members had stuck around to see the band dissolve. The title track to this compilation was recorded in one of Jack Ruby's very rare studio sessions, made as a demo for Epic Records who may have been looking for the next Stooges, but instead had on their hands a psycho tune of hotwired proto-punk underpinned by strutting monofunk rhythms and an unkempt guitar/violin squalor on top. What would have been the B-side to that unreleased single is an atonal carcrash of anti-rock entitled "Mayonnaise." Had Jack Ruby continued to make tracks like these two, they may have been destined for greatness; but as it is, the band was only a whisper of a footnote, barely remembered by anybody from back in the day.
If the chronology is to be understood properly, the first incarnation of Jack Ruby involved electronic wrangler Randy Cohen, who splattered sounds across his Serge synthesizer with free-noise squiggles courtesy of the mononymous performance artist Boris (later known as Boris Policeband) and mumbled anti-poetry from Robin Hall. The recordings from this incarnation of Jack Ruby comprise the second disc, very much a precursor to the libertine, DIY electronics of Nautical Almanac. When Cohen, Boris, and Hall added guitarist / bassist Chris Gray into the fray, Jack Ruby transformed into the splatter-rock outfit that earned them that one longshot possibility to record for Epic, taking up purposefully tasteless raunch-rock akin to the Electric Eels and Destroy All Monsters. Boris, Cohen, and Hall all slowly departed, with Gray finding other members to bash rhythm and thrash vocal cords. One of Jack Ruby's latter-day members was George Scott III who matriculated into No Wave royalty as a member of the Contortionists and 8-Eyed Spy. This compilation's booklet features historical revisionist epistles from Thurston Moore and Jon Savage as well as lengthy interviews with the various members of Jack Ruby. What no texts from Byron Coley? The anti-canonical ethos of this compendium has his name written all over it.
Making up for lost time, the infamous Stefan Jaworzyn, he of Ascension, Skullflower and the legendary Shock label, returns with yet ANOTHER new record, the sixth in the last year? Almost like an industrial/noise Robert Pollard, Jaworzyn continues to churn out the hits, and by hits, we mean willfully difficult electronica, this time around, wild squall of synth misfires, and analog noise, set to rambunctious rhythms, reminding us a bit of Cut Hands, but trading in the African obsession for analog synth / primitive drum machine nerdery, and it suits him, the first track here, the awesomely titled "Biorigged", is all relentless rhythms, wreathed in bleeps and bloops, cascades of glitch and squelch, noisy and chaotic, but also super groovy and a little bit funky, we can definitely imagine some sort of Cut Hands / Jaworzyn mash up in the future, some sort of demented full circle culmination of the Skullflower / Whitehouse collab we always hankered for (wait wasn't Jaworzyn in both? Whatever).
That opener sets the bar pretty high, and while the rest of the record isn't always nearly as high energy, it is all pretty mesmerizing, "Festival Of Lies" is a murky pulsing churn, sounding like some weird Hospital Productions release, gristly and fuzzed out, the background noisiness gradually overwhelming the minimal beta, and fractured rhythm, while "Dawn Of A New Ice Age" is downright kosmische, blossoming into some tripped out softnoise new age, all swirls and swoops, maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from Jaworzyn EVER (that one's the download bonus track btw).
It's on the B side where things get fierce, "Gland Collector" sounds almost like Jaworzyn doing his best John Carpenter, thrumming sinister synth pulses, implied rhythms blossom from weird synth-riffs, the sound almost metallic, a sonic helicopter rotor sends musical rotor wash out in heady waves, churning, roiling, pulsating, this makes all that other creepy soundtrack synth stuff folks have been flipping out for lately sound like Shadowfax. Finally, "Apocalypse" returns to the sound of the opener, sounding about as unapocalyptic as possible, unless the apocalypse was gonna take place in some strange alien danceclub, which who knows, it probably will, regardless, it's another twisted batch of avant / primitive analog electro, that KILLS.
As always, with Trensmat releases, includes a download, the whole record along with the above mentioned bonus track!
We NEVER see any actual documents from Opal Tapes, the cult electronica imprint run by Stephen Bishop (aka Basic House). Well, we've never seen anything until we got in a pitiful number of copies of this Ketev tape, and this one is a gem of Andy Stott / Demdike Stare / Regis inspired grimy, dirty techno seemingly composed on an overdriven 4-track whose internal gain compression creates much of the dankly phased patterns crunch along the hypnotic, sinister techno. Hopefully a preamble for another album, as this stuff is too fucking good just to exist on tiny (and currently out of print) cassette edition! Modern Love would be our bet for the label of Ketev's future.
There are a handful of purposeful mispellings of this project's moniker. For the sake of simplicity, we'll just go with the spelling on the cover. Konstruktivist was essentially the solo project of Glenn M. Wallis, who had been affiliated with Throbbing Gristle as something of a bouncer / heavy, given the rather suitable title in some texts as their "control agent." Would you really think that Genesis P-Orridge could take and/or throw a punch? No, Glenn Wallis did that for TG. After their mission was terminated in 1980, he began to explore the darker regions of electronic music and deconstructed minimal wave under those variously spelled Konstruktivist recordings, as well as maintaining an artistic relationship with Chris & Cosey and moonlighting as one of the revolving door members for Whitehouse on stage and on record. A languid synth melody introduces the record with a deathly pall resembling that of a Tibetan thighbone horn (whose eerie bleats graced Lustmord's Heresy album), that slides into a deliciously turgid piece of DIY garage-electronica for creeping drum machine and distorted basslines sounding like those great tracks by Cabaret Voltaire from way back when. A slippery piece of step sequenced synths on "Karnage" much more of a darkly kosmische vibe taking up the sci-fi electronica of Conrad Schniztler. The plodding "Karnal" follows the murky, abstractions that TG created with a distant, heavy drum machine, atonal guitar formations, and subliminally suggestive media collages. Wallis mostly fashioned his disenchanting rhythms and electronics to be instrumental, and when vocals did creep into the mix they tended toward a bleak monotone. The three bonus tracks on this cd seamlessly blend into the dour, DIY electronics of the original album; but sadly this cd reissue is also limited, to just 300 copies.
This is a reissue of one of those deep "in-the-know" records that we're perplexed that we had somehow never heard of before now, especially given its pedigree. It seems to be one of those weird anomaly recordings that when it's not acting as a "proto" example of genres that now exist today (dub-step and minimal techno), it works as a bridge between genres we never imagined being connected before (new age and industrial music, minimalist composition and new wave, minimal synth and ethno-folk music). It's a rare six-degrees-of-separation record that bafflingly connects Suicide to John Fahey, and it's utterly gorgeous to boot.
Craig Leon may not be a well-known name to most, but he was the producer or co-producer behind many of the bands of our youth including Blondie, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Suicide, The Weirdos, DMZ, The Zero's. The Bangles and 45 Grave. But he's also a classically trained composer and orchestrator who has worked with Lucio Pavoratti, Sir James Galway and The London Symphony Orchestra. Nommos was the first album of his own material, originally released in 1981 on John Fahey's Takoma label and there really is just nothing quite like it.
With evocative titles like "Donkeys Bearing Cups", "Four Eyes To See The Afterlife" and "She Wears A Hemispherical Skull Cap", Leon uses minimal synthesis to explore repetitive rhythm and texture in hypnotic trance inducing compositions. The opener, "Ring With Three Concentric Circles" explores a kraut-y kosmiche sound employing cosmic synth washes over skeletal mechanical rhythms, but it's the second track, "Donkeys Bearing Cups" that prognosticates many of the production tropes of modern dubstep and minimal techno, the shuffling almost dance-y mechanized rhythms, as well as the squelched siren noise that opens it. Many of the tracks could be paired down backing tracks for Suicide songs, minus Alan Vega's vocals and Martin Rev's knack for propulsion. Instead Leon seems to dwell on the nuance of his robotic rhythms, tweaking the reverb and decay in bass pulses and cymbal clangs, but encasing them in a beautiful floating stasis.
The longest track at nearly 12 minutes, "Four Eyes To See The Afterlife", seems to have the least going on. It's plodding hiccupping rhythm stretching for minutes before we notice a woman's voice almost operatically singing way off in the background. Her voice almost feels like another synthetic texture in the composition and we at first had to turn the volume down to see if we were hearing things, but it's just another impeccable detail that Leon is carefully layering and weaving into seemingly bare-bone compositions making us ever conscious of the meditative nature of the work. This is definitely a producer's record, and an incredible one at that! If you are a fan of modern techno composers like Vladislav Delay, Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, anything on the Dead-Cert label, or even outlier composers like Moondog, Julius Eastman or Barton Smith, this is essential!
Download card included!
An "electronically charged reconstruction of organic sound matter" reads the preamble from Klara Lewis' debut for the righteous electronica label Editions Mego. Lest you think this slides into the territories of Small Cruel Party, :zoviet*france:, G*Park, or even Matmos with their snapping shrimp and balloon popping adventures, Lewis thoroughly renders those unspecified organic sources into murky loops that snap into place along a spine of minimal techno. The darkly chiming repetitions of Ett wistfully recall the early days of MIDI sequencing, without any of the headaches that came from all of the mathematical engineering in order to trick those samples to align themselves properly against a rhythm and vice versa. There are molten rumbles, granitic scratches, feral screeches, disembodied voices, and ventilator gasps which adhere to Lewis' dub-klang swipes at op-art repetitiveness. "Untitled" thrives in the medical-supply factory of various blips and bleeps, grafted onto a punchy techno underbelly that could have been constructed by the likes of Coh or Ryoji Ikeda. With some of the more abstracted pieces - like the dreamily aquatic "Shine" and the ectoplasmic shuffle found on "Altered" - she settles into an eerie spaciousness which decontextualizes the source material further by situating these patterned squiggles and sonic mark-making onto deep-space backdrops of nothingness. An impressive and beguiling album!
Lord Fist is a neat/dumb name that sounds pretty metal, eh? And yep, Lord Fist are metal all right, from Finland, via Jussi from Circle's Full Contact vinyl imprint. Now, Jussi's Ektro and Full Contact labels have brought us plenty of "NWOFHM" - New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal - bands before, yeah. But those quasi-joke (or are they?) bands were never quite the real deal like Lord Fist, who on this debut four song 12", actually sound authentically NWOBHM - New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a la Angel Witch, Cloven Hoof, Satan, etc.!
And dang, they're good. The youthful foursome of Lord Fist dish out rippers like "Lord Of The Night" and "Velvet Gods", chock full of high pitched screams (for vengeance!), jaunty galloping riffage, wailing leads, catchy choruses, and epick & mystickal vibes.
Could easily be up there, someday soon, with the best of today's crop of throwback metal bands like Enforcer and Cauldron, though the 'cult' feel here surpasses those. Man, Finland is making our heads bang lately, with the Ranger 12" (also on Full Contact) and now this!
Wow! We were blown away when we first heard Nigerian organist Mammane Sani Abdullaye's La Musique Electronique Du Niger record reissued last year on Sahel Sounds (and now sadly out of print, it seems). Reissued from a rare cassette that originally came out in 1978, we thought that was Sani's only recording, but now Sahel Sounds has unearthed this doozy of a release, which takes Sani's minimal organ pop to a whole new Afro-futuristic level. Taken from unreleased studio sessions made in the mid-to-late eighties, when Sani began programming his own rhythms, the music here, derived from Saharan folk-ballads re-imagined for a cosmic future, is more spacious and exploratory, laid back and atmospheric, yet still loping, circular and groovy, perfect for astral-cruising across planetary deserts. For fans of the Ethiopiques series or that Personal Space electronic outsider RnB compilation we always raved about, and library music heads and minimal synth-lovers will find lots to love here too.
When we first heard about Millie & Andrea, the duo of Miles Whittaker aka Miles, whose brilliant Faint Hearted record we raved about here a while back, and Andy Stott, whose gorgeous, ultra minimal techno we've been raving abut forever, we were expecting this collaboration to be some fusion of the two - skeletal, abstract, ambient, hauntological, ultra minimal. For the first few seconds, our guess was pretty much right on, the first track beginning with a field of reverb heavy clattery rhythm, deep bass pulses, but with something lurking just below the surface, as if the sound could take off in any direction. The sound grew more dense, more secondary rhythms surfaced, the results super hypnotic almost trancey, but still plenty spaced out and abstract... So, we were settling in for an extended occultic electro bliss out, when track two kicked in and BAM, suddenly, we're transported directly from our insular listening space, to some nineties dancefloor, the duo laying down some skittery, swirly, crunchy, clattery techno, with super distorted synth sweeps, and stuttery hiccuping beats, the vibe hovering right between old school ravery, and something more modern and freaky, some heavy IDM influences too, as well as jungle, drum and bass, garage, but the production changes everything, fantastically blown out and in the red, which gives every sound a weird psychedelic feel, like some weird sonic halo, transforming what could have been straight up dance music into something noisy and trippy and fucking awesome! The next few songs offer up variations on this way back electronic time trip, with "Temper Tantrum" getting straight up jungle, pretty sure that's a mutated 'Amen' break, but again Whittaker and Stott fuck it up big time, adding all sorts of rhythmic filigree, and part way through, some swoonsome synth swirl. "Spectral Source" is another fantastic throwback, with a stuttery vocal snippet peppered amidst synth squelch, hand claps, gristly bass buzz, and a murky pulse, all transformed by the gloriously cheesy late night chill out synths, which like much of the record, finds its niche in this weird push and pull between avant electronic experimentation, and pure, sweat soaked dancefloor groove from back in the day.
"Corrosive" begins all robotic electro draped over a background of blooping bleeping melodies and gurgling low end before exploding into full on No U-Turn style tech-step, a killer blast of distorted noisy jungle that no one makes anymore, but we still LOVE. The title track two, a churning bass heavy slab of classic jungle/drum & bass, albeit plenty fucked up, and of course midway through, they fuck it up even more, pulling it apart, and cranking up the bass, thick buzzing, undulating rumbles and whirs.
Nearing the end of the record, things seem to start drifting closer to the sounds we were expecting from Whittaker and Stott, albeit fused to the jungliness that came before. "Back Down" is all murky swirling melodies, hazy vocal harmonies blurred into black smears, churning, grinding bass, skittery rhythms, all wreathed in a dense sonic murk, sounding almost industrial, industrial via Huperdub maybe, and finally, the closer, wraps things up with a gorgeous bit of haunting ambience, swirling Basinski like loops beneath weird bits of rhythmic clatter, gristly tape hiss, static and glitch, all washed out, hazy, druggy, dreamy and divine.
Finally reissued and available once again, thanks to the fine folks at Slumberland, this time on colored vinyl [whoops, almost all gone already, being repressed though], and CASSETTE!!
Fans of local pop geniuses the Ovens, which are a whole lot of you, but should really be ALL of you, rejoice, and enjoy another incredible blast of noise pop songsmithery courtesy of Ovens mainman Tony Molina, whose solo sound is essentially, and really EXACTLY like the Ovens, fuzzed out pop, metallic chugging, soaring harmonized guitars, a dreamy croon, and ridiculous self deprecating lyrics, INCREDIBLE hooks, and the sort of poppiness that will get lodged in your head forEVER. SO yeah, anyone who bought and loved the Ovens cd Andee released on his tUMULt label, well, you're gonna want, nay, NEED this. As always, Molina's songs (and by extension, the Ovens' as well) are equal parts Weezer, Thin Lizzy, the Beatles, Guided By Voices, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, and pretty much every other fuzzy jangly pop band you ever loved, but all that boiled down and rendered into ultra brief, fragmented blasts of micro pop brevity, and we're talking boiled down as in thirteen songs in twelve minutes! One of those records you'll no doubt play over and over and over.
There are tracks like opener "Nowhere To Go", which sounds like it could have been plucked right off the Ovens cd proper, so much crammed into so little time, soaring harmonized guitars, the occasional metallic chug, the fuzzy main riff, the laid back vox, the melodies impossible to resist, and like many Ovens songs, blink and you'll miss it. None of that verse chorus verse shit, if you're lucky, you'll get verse chorus. Sometimes just verse! Like on tracks like "Sick As Riff", where you don't even get a riff, more like a dreamy little acoustic guitar interlude. Check out "Change My Ways", which should most definitely have J Mascis looking over his shoulder, the Dinosaur Jr vibe HUGE, right down to the guitar tone. And like we've said before, if Tony wasn't so brilliantly ADD, and could make a song longer than 90 seconds, he and the Ovens could/would/should be HUGE. But we're not complaining, it's part of their charm, the barrage of crazy hooks, perfect melodies, definitely pushing a lot of the same buttons Guided By Voices do.
So yeah, needless to say, these 12 minutes the probably gonna be our favorite 12 minutes of pop music this year, so grab one of these before they're gone, and leave a little space at the top of your 2013 year end lists, cuz even only two months in, and we're pretty sure, unless there's a new Ovens record that somehow pops up, this one's gonna be tough to beat.
Another awesome electronic oddity from the fine folks at Hospital Productions, this one the work of a duo called Ninos Du Brasil, who, true to their moniker, traffic in a strain of Brazilian music - but a warped, experimental version, the likes of which you've likely not heard before. Brazilian carnival music is definitely a reference point but so too is Southeast Asian gamelan music, as well as various strains of techno and electro, we hear shades of fellow modern experimental techno-technician Cut Hands for sure, and heck, they even have a song called "Sepultura", which is apparently in fact an homage of sorts to that Brazilian metal band, and their later records on which they did in fact incorporate traditional Brazilian percussion into their music. Weird stuff, but sonically, it all meshes into something super mesmerizing and hypnotic, and something not altogether removed from some of the other Hospital releases, like Vatican Shadow, Ron Morelli, Christian Cosmos, Silent Servant, etc.
After a brief bit of straight up Brazilian percussion over a bed of birdsong, the record quickly slips into some murky house, all deep muted pulsations, over which, wild percussion comes tumbling, and then also some synth bass, and martial snares, the result is a strange hybrid of Brazilian funk, drum corps and avant minimal house music, with the Brazilian percussion WAY up in the mix, and driving the sound. The song is also peppered with plenty of FX and subtle dub-isms, and once they lock in, barring some subtle fluctuations, it's totally looped and tranced out and endlessly mesmeric.
The more minimal tracks, like "Legios De Cupins", definitely sound right at home on Hospital, again, murky and a little bit muddy, strangely sequenced arpeggiations, the Brazilian influence much more subtle, but still groovy and darkly funky, with occasional bursts of more traditional percussion, the coolest bits are when they all blur and bleed into some fantastically heady hybrid. The "Sepultura" track, perhaps predictably, is the fiercest, the drums and percussion, blown out and super distorted, sounding very much like a Brazilian marching band, we could easily have listened to a whole album of this, but it soon slips back into something more traditional sounding, "Miragem" sounding like Brazilian street music, underpinned by some super subtle techno filigree, before blossoming into maybe the most 'party' sounding of the bunch, with distorted call and response vocals, more wild percussion, all anchored by a four on the flour techno pulse, before finally finishing off with the gorgeous sprawling "Novos Misterios", a low slung, downtempo creeper, sounding a bit like a Brazilian Tom Waits, all steep drum melodies, wreathed in record crackles and warm swaths of tape hiss, the rhythms here laid back and subtle, woozy and weary, and the perfect comedown, at least until the final few minutes, when the sound quickly builds to a noisy, psychedelic, heavy house, stutter rhythm / droned out finale!
It seems like the demise of SF's favorite garage rockers has been greatly exaggerated, considering there's now this, a brand new record, and the fact that the band are about to embark on another massive tour. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief, save our mourning for some future date, and for now, can revel in yet another blast of garage pop brilliance from John Dwyer and company, whose latest, Drop, is as we might have predicted, a doozy!
After a brief bit of percolating synth shimmer, which had us thinking that maybe Dwyer's solo record as Damaged Bug might have bled over into his main project, the song explodes into what might be the heaviest hookiest jam yet from these guys, but fuzzed out guitars, swirling sci-fi synths, almost stonery and spacey and psychedelic sounding, but as always rife with melodies and hooks galore. And from there on out, it's just classic Oh Sees, fuzzy, jangly, hooky, albeit with a bit more synth than we remember (seems like maybe that whole Damaged Bug thing did have an effect on Thee Oh Sees!), "Encrypted Bounce" adds wild tangled angular guitars, and squiggly synth shimmer, to a stripped down garage groove, as does "Savage Victory", all spaced out and laced with strange sound effects, big blurts of fuzz guitar crunch, all trippy, and very psychedelic, with fields of swirling backwards guitars and affected noisescapes, that experimental noisiness all over Drop, the band crafting some of their catchiest music yet, but then going hogwild on the psychedelia, creating a sound that's at once totally beholden to the classics, but all tangled up and twisted into new, weird, far out shapes, and Dwyer not shying away from whatever the fuck he wants to do, whether it's the strange horn blurts on "Put Some Reverb On My Brother", the almost Redd Kross sounding sixties buzz pop of the title track, the lysergic Beatles-esque baroque pop of "King's Nose", or the synth heavy shoegaze trip out of "Transparent World". And yet, it all remains distinctly Thee Oh Sees. And we say it every time, but this really might be the best record yet from these guys, and if it really is the last one, what a way to go. But here's hoping, that even with Dwyer's move down south, they can keep this going, cuz we're already playing this to death, and already looking forward to more...
Only on cd for now, lp repress coming soon!
Brand new single from this Michigan retro-psych crew, and like the recent full length, it's a druggy doozy, all hazy, wasted, sixties style jangle pop that doesn't even sound retro, as much as it sounds like some lost psych artifact, right down to the sound, vintage, sun faded and blurry, gorgeously warm, and crackly, and bleary and dreamily druggy, with just a little but of a dark tinged shadow to the proceedings, the A side all low slung and loping, a shuffling drum beat beneath trebly guitar shimmer, slithery bass lines and reverby vocals doused in reverb, some serious downer pop jangle grooviness. The B side adds some harmonica and some serious swagger, "Deadfall" almost snarly, acoustic guitars wrapped wound wild drumming, the vocals a bit venomous, the song dark and intense, but still jangly and fuzzed out, the record finishing off the the brief, flute flecked "Black Night", all campfire trippiness, bongos and acoustic guitars, the vocals drifting above a bed of processed flute flutter, heady and lovely, and way too brief!
Warning: Emotional devastation alert! Planning For Burial is a one man project from New Jersey whose been toiling tirelessly (and gloomily) for a good few years now, and although this is only his second proper full length, Thom Wasluck has at least 12 releases to his name and with this latest monolith of gorgeously devastating post rock finally seems primed to reach the wider audience he so rightfully deserves. Coming courtesy of the ever-reliable Flenser Records, a local label fast gaining a Profound Lore-like reputation for its meticulous selection of dark fringe music free of genre constraints, Desideratum is an enthralling and mesmerizing blend of post rock, doom, shoegaze and ambient. It's at times pummeling but also beautifully melodic, undeniably sad but also lush and warm - a warmth that's offset by clinical programmed drums, all regimented and martial - which lend a really cool contrast. Contemplative piano rises over the plod of monotonous percussion and the heartbreak static wash of layers upon layers of guitar. The dusty fading light of drifting cinematic synths melts into freeform vocalizing and woozy guitar picking. Sparse riffing builds and builds to the point of breathless exhaustion. Then that dirge of sludgy downpicked guitar emerges again, draped over distant mournful singing and minimal synthetic drums. It's that perfectly irresistible crossroad between abrasive noise and gut wrenching bittersweet melody. At times bringing to mind Jesu and at other times Soundtracks For The Blind-era Swans, or even our recently reviewed (and raved about) Nothing and Have A Nice Life records. For fans of those bands and anything heavy & heartstring tugging this is a total must have, and a no brainer for an Album Of The Year contender.
The Finnish avant-classical duo of pianist Eva Polgar and visual artist Sandor Valy are back with a brilliant postmodern musical reimagining of one of the oldest surviving pieces of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This is the duo's third collaboration together and unlike the first two, The Bruegel Variations and The Mondrian Variations, where the scores were defined by visual elements found in the paintings of Breugel and Mondrian respectively, Gilgamesh was conceptualized in a completely different way. The Epic of Gilgamesh was an epic poem from Mesopotamia dating back to the 18th century BC, and chronicles the mythic life and adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk and his companion Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to distract Gilgamesh from oppressing his people. Together they fight monstrous mountain guardians, giant bulls, battle jealous Ishtar, and in the end after Enkidu's violent death, the story chronicles Gilgamesh's desperate search for Immortality and the meaning of life beyond death. The epic was originally discovered carved on twelve stone tablets, and here lovingly reproduced as 12 QRC codes (when scanned, each brings up part of the poem), the duo of Polgar and Valy have created a 12 part musical piece that doesn't seek to illustrate the text as much as to compartmentalize the story into the moods of its integrated characters and the ancient civilization they inhabited. Valy began creating key melody lines for each part which Polgar would elaborate on then give back to him and slowly, through an exchange of female and male composed tropes echoing the back and forth male and female interchanges of Gilgamesh and Ishtar, the piece came to fruition. Gilgamesh finds in itself a companion to their earlier work, in the duo's penchant for minimalist composition and complex rhythmic structures, this time adding instrumentation of clarinets and violins, zithers, kettle drums and chaotic horns to the fray, channeling not only Philip Glass, but John Zorn at times as well. Epic indeed!
A couple of years ago, we championed a cd boxset of the early cassettes and unreleased material from the British sound alchemist Colin Potter. Nowadays, Potter is a constant foil within Nurse With Wound and Monos; but he has quite a history of his own recordings that ran the gamut from abstracted electro-pop to elegant, hallowed minimalism to kosmische electronica. During the heyday of the DIY cassette underground, Potter released a considerable amount of tapes through his ICR imprint, which continues to this day albeit transitioning to the compact disc. Two Nights was originally pressed up on ICR back in 1981, and made its way on that aforementioned Ancient History boxset (which is currently out of print). This set was easily the best material from the Ancient Material box, and on its own stands as a great piece of futuristic electronics that is a must have for anyone keen on John Carpenter and Goblin soundtracks! The two original side long pieces both extend from the cosmic swoosh into dynamic kraut-disco jams with incremental sequences accelerating through drum machine, neon-lit synth cascades, and more heavily phased guitar solos. Limited red & green translucent vinyl whose colors are exposed through the die cuts in the artwork. Not long for this world!
Not only does this mix come from our favorite 'techno' label, Kompakt, but it was compiled by a Mexican DJ/producer, Rebolledo, who's got a thing for Filipino '70s psych rock guitarist Wally Gonzalez (of Juan De La Cruz fame, down & dirty Filipino proto-metallers par excellance). aQuarius customers might remember, we even reviewed cd reissues of Wally's two late '70s solo albums some years ago, one of which, 1978's Wally On The Road, provides the intro and outro tracks on this disc, via Rebo's edits of "Wally's Blues" from that album. Perhaps surprisingly, Wally's space-ily effected soloing totally works in the context of all the propulsive and powerful electronic music elsewhere on here. Not only that, but the cover photo has been done as an homage to Wally On The Road, as well - Rebolledo has carefully recreated that album's cover scene, posing identically to Wally, seated on a dirtbike in front of a Porsche, with a pair of fancy cowboy boots on the ground nearby.
So that's pretty cool, and odd, as is this disc, really one of the most captivating, hypnotic, groovy techno mixes we've heard in a while, with lots of interesting standout tracks. 'Bangers' if you will. Among 'em, several exclusive cuts, including Rebo's own studio contribution, the amazing "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", an intensely, relentlessly mesmeric track with bizarrely accented/inflected vocals repeating the title phrase over and over with fierce emotion. The duo Rebo's in with Superpitcher, Pachanga Boys, is here too, and they and he both do some remixes as well. Other artists appearing: Wolfgang Voigt, Red Axes, The Love Supreme, Justus Kohncke, The Twins, C.A.R., Christian S., Sebastian Bouchet, Gebr. Teichmann, Barnt, Slove, and Vox Low. An excellent, idiosyncratic mix we just kinda can't stop playing!
Cd-only, but in June Kompakt will be releasing a 12" vinyl ep featuring an extended 'raw' mix of "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar" as well as two more cuts taken from this album also previously not on vinyl, so any discerning DJ's out there ought to look for that when we have it.
NOW ALSO HERE ON CD, with bonus trax!
Awesome obscure late sixties/early seventies British blues rock outfit's only album, originally released in 1970, newly reissued! Some of it's melodic acoustic folk psych with mellow, rustic vocals, while other tracks are more like lumbering, proto-metal blues, with heavy guitar riffs and really raw, rough vocals, kinda like Captain Beefheart singing for early Black Sabbath. There's some harmonica blowin' too along with the grungy guitars. Other reference points: Edgar Broughton Band, High Tide, The Doors, Fraction, Josephus...
This compact disc edition includes five bonus tracks, getting more Tull-soundin' but with violin instead of flute!
What do you get when you cross weirdo Spanish noiseniks Billy Bao with filthy Swedish garage sludge punks the Brainbombs (and by extension, weirdo noise rock minimalists No Balls)?? Apparently you get Regler, a twisted, extremely noisy, high concept, SUPER group, who deliver some seriously difficult listening. Two distinctly different stripes of difficult listening, in fact.
The A side, as is further evidenced by the graphical representation on the jacket, is straight up D-Beat blasting, for the entire side. That's right, furious noise drenched riffing, and frantic, relentless drumming, locked in a continuous frenzy for the entire A side, the result is by turns mesmerizing and infuriating. Folks looking for 'songs' or 'music' (why would you be looking for those on a record like this in the first place?) will definitely be disappointed, but if you're after some dense, heavily layered, modern minimalist metal, this might just push those buttons, cuz really, after a minute or two, it's easy to get lost in sound, much like the trance inducing properties of black metal, the sound here is relentless and totally hypnotic, with the sound changing subtly throughout, the sonic shifts much more dramatic once you're locked in and listening close, the drumming too, seems to phase weirdly, producing still more off kilter weirdness. Needless to say, not for everybody, but for us, we're pretty into it. and that's at 45rpm, slow it down, and suddenly it's a bit more Brainbombsy, still tranced out and repetitive, but sludgier and murkier filthier.
The flipside might even be more frustrating for most folks, the sort of thing that might have been right at home on the recent Sounds Of Silence compilation we made Record of The Week a while back, what we're assuming, is an edit of all the NON-musical elements in the recording of the A side, lots of silence, some blurts of drum freakouts, some weird chordal fadeouts, it's literally like someone grabbed the bits of tape before and after every take and edited them into a single weird near silent it of conceptual sound art. Some breathing, little bits of music here and there, lots of tape buzz and hiss, super weird, but actually very cool. Headphones are required, and then cranking the volume too (although the occasional blast of sound, might freak you out), but then if this wasn't meant to freak you out in the first place, we'd be pretty surprised.
So yeah, while we endeavor to get sufficient copies of the new Brainbombs 2lp, maybe this will tide you over. But really, it probably won't. Recommended for anyone into arty noise, modern minimalism, warped metal experimentation, field recordings, and willful sonic provocateurs of all stripes. Cool cover art, no download, and LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!
Finland's weirdo minimalist black metallers Ride For Revenge might just be in the running for most aQ Records Of The Week, especially if you count RfR electronic offshoot Will Over Matter, and even moreso if you consider the fact that even if we didn't make one of their records a ROTW, we thought about it, and likely wanted to, and probably didn't for some non musical reason, like having to get them from Finland, or ordering a bunch and selling most of them before we even get a chance to review/list it, and really, in retrospect, not sure why we didn't just institute permanent/perpetual Record Of The Week status on these guys. What we're getting at, is even though this is NOT a Record Of The Week this time around, it basically IS. And will always be, cuz if any band demanded the slavish worship of the aQ crew it's these guys, who manage to take a genre we already love, and transform it into something that barely sounds like that genre at all, and yet somehow makes us love it even more.
This latest batch of jams is another black-dirge / noise-rock wallop, this trio delivering some ultra primitive heaviness, with some of the sickest, grittiest, gnarliest guitar buzz ever, not to mention thick, organ dissolving low end, and chaotic, shambolic, caveman drumming of the highest order, all wound up into extended dirges that play like krautrock melted down into a brew as black as pitch, then reconstituted with some sort of ancient black magic, the resulting lumbering sonic ritualism is as mesmerizing as it is terrifying, the sound in constant flux, whether it's stumbling black metal primitivism, doom-ed tarpit creep, psychedelic blacknoize, or wild, thrashing metal-punk, it all bleeds into one massive, epic, demonic sonic sprawl, in fact, so much so that song titles, and even song breaks seem superfluous, nobody's gonna grab this and think to themselves, let's throw on "The Fog Is Green And Pungent" (okay full disclosure, we actually did!), no this is a fully immersive experience, this is the sort of black bog filth you're meant to luxuriate in, to get lost in, to let wash over you, and pull you under, just surrender, let the churning molasses riffage and pounding dirge-drummage ooze into your every orifice, and transform you from the inside out, headphones on, you become a shambling, blackened acolyte to these mysterious priest of blacknoise/occult rock ritualism, and suddenly it's transcendent, the sound becomes shape, the shape becomes divine, the underworld rises up and swallows the surface dwellers whole, and the soundtrack to this apocalypse becomes, a gnarled, filth encrusted thing of grim black beauty, and we honor this epochal convergence, by sacrificing ourselves, and as our souls wither and die, we become one with these ancient spirits, approaching the black gates of the netherworld, we all join together, a hulking black shape, horned and fiery, and for eternity, we Ride For Revenge!!!!
