Keiji Haino, Takashi Mizutani, Munehiro Narita, Kawabata Makoto... these are (some of) the gods of Japanese psych guitar. Add Suzuki Junzo to the list, if you haven't already. He's quickly becoming one of our faves, for blacker-than-blues guitar/feedback wrangling. Back with another solo disc for the always-on-it (and out-there) experimental Utech label, Junzo, who has played guitar for such bands as Overhang Party and Miminokoto, delivers a gorgeous, darkly entrancing mixture of both noisy, heavy-duty distorto drone whoosh and quietly lovely acoustic atmospheres. Regarding the former, the epically titled (and epic otherwise as well) opener "When The Grey Skies Turns Into Blood Red" launches right into a session of wind-tunnel psych guitar grind, tumbling end-over-end with skittering percussion accompaniment to match, courtesy of Junzo's colleague Ikuro Takahasi (LSD-March, ex-Fushitsusha, etc.). That 15 minutes and 15 seconds of amp-worship improv is beautiful in its way, as is the quite contrasting next track (and title cut), Junzo shifting gears for an intimate acoustic reverie, a la James Blackshaw or Jack Rose.
Junzo is back to laying on the ghostly reverb (and some whispery hushed vocals too) with track 3, "La Notte", and the freely-textural percussion returns as well. That one's lovely enough, but then the finale, at 17 minutes even more epic than the opener (and with an even more epic title, too: "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible Tower In The Ring Of Holy Mountain") takes us a way on a tremulous trip of slow sad strum and minimalistic string buzz. Tune in, zone out.
Yeah, another very nice one from our man Junzo!! In the usual swank Utech packaging.
Symbol is the incredible debut solo effort of Christopher Royal King, founding member and guitarist for epic post-rockers This Will Destroy You, as well as founder of the Light Lodge label which has brought us some of our favorite Austin scene releases by Pure X , Silver Pines, Survive and Sleep Over. Online Architecture is the latest release on Holodeck, and it's a perfect follow-up to the label's last release of Ssleeperhold's Ruleth, leaning on the more brooding side of ambient synthesis. Not quite as goth as Ssleeperhold or Troller, instead Symbol plays into the more Tim Hecker/ Fennesz side of faded and worn down sounds, cinematic and epic, but also remotely nostalgic and beautifully melancholy. Sound sources are parsed through multiple filters and blurred into psychic layers of damage and decay, yet still sound so intriguingly tranquil and elegant. Deep, slow and heavy, Online Architecture is a thoughtful and considered release, embarking on an introspective journey into what may be a futile future. Highly Recommended!
Also, maybe the coolest, most striking record cover / album art we've seen in YEARS!!
Ough!!! Let's get that out of the way right off the bat. It only takes 30 seconds into the first track to get that trademark verbal expulsion, courtesy of metal's most uncompromising (and often misunderstood) artisan Tom G. Warrior. And that's worth the price of admission alone! But luckily there's plenty more bleak metal greatness to be found here as well. After already cementing himself a Metal Legend status with his early works in Hellhammer and Celtic Frost (not to mention 2006's superb CF reunion record Monotheist), Tommy G is back with the second full length of his most recent passion project Triptykon, and man oh man it does not disappoint. Sickening, slithering grooves are bent to their breaking point. Riffs seem to go in and out of tune even in the middle of a single note. The riffing is simple yet compelling - hypnotic and enveloping, like some musty lightless cocoon. Tom Warrior's vocals are as commanding as ever. He seems to be hurtling dogma from a pulpit with the passion of a mad zealot - his influence on vocalists like Satyricon's Satyr or Immortal's Abbath never more apparent. The drumming, freeform and almost jazzy at times, nicely offsets the vocals and the guitars, bringing something a bit more organic and human into the fold, but they still get very tribal and seriously heavy when they need to be. It's a rotting alien obelisk of an album. Even the brooding gothic balladry of "Boleskine House" with its ethereal female vocals, or "Aurorae" with its drifting reverbed guitar and lazy drum shuffle, seem to lurch and twist on a nauseous alien wave. And although occasionally we'll be assaulted with a thrashy downbeat pummel, Melana Chasmata is almost entirely a downtrodden affair - wallowing in the pits of mid-paced despair and dreadfully doomy inevitability. But for all its forlorn pallid squalor and slimy dissonance, it's still a bewilderingly catchy record - the chorus from opener "Tree Of Suffocating Souls" almost guaranteed to earworm its way into your psyche, whether you want it there or not! At over an hour, it's an exhausting, all encompassing experience, more akin to something like Swans' The Seer than your average metal record. And like that album, while it may not always be the easiest listen, it's more than worth the effort if you're willing to follow the dark corridors and shadowy labyrinthine passages of Melana Chasmata.
The Profound Lore label begins what we hope will be an extensive reissue campaign, focusing on some of the more obscure members of the Twilight Black Circle, a tightly knit USBM scene/collective based in Southern California, similar in sound/spirit to the legendary French Black Legions (Mutiilation, Vlad Tepes, etc.), which counts bands like Dolorvotre, Volahn, Blue Hummingbird On The Left, Ashdautas, Arizmenda and others among its members.
Tukaaria, which is an Yaqui word meaning 'the night', is another one man band, whose sound, like many of his Twilight Black Circle brethren, is raw and repetitive, but unlike the lush layered chaos of Odz Manouk, whose reissue can be found elsewhere on this week's list, Tukaaria is definitely more on the primitive and old school side, churning murky riffage, and furious stumbling blasts, but this primitivism is tempered with a seriously experimental bent, that manifests in strange and subtle ways, introducing plenty of warped weirdness, and providing a bizarre production/arrangement that make the sound something altogether different than your run of the mill black metal.
Repetition is a big part of Tukaaria's sound, with the sound constantly locking into long stretches of looped black mesmer, whether it's blurred churning riffage, or slippery tangled melodies, it's all driven by urgent, on-the-verge-of-collapse drumming, the vocals a buried in the mix demonic rasp, those drums flat and weirdly produced, set amidst a landscape of echo drenched droned out riffage, muddy, and blurry, and hazy, and woozily washed out, the vibe almost psychedelic, definitely mesmerizing, total tranced out black buzz bliss, with the sound occasionally splintering into something more melodic, more textured and spaced out, but seemingly always returning to something heady and heavy and hypnotic, a murky and mesmerizing.
This cd reissue of Raw To The Rapine includes the 2011 full length of the same name, and tacks on the Tukaaria tracks from a 2011 split with Odz Manouk and his 2010 split with Volahn.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, housed in a super swank oversized A5 book style digipak!
Ready to revisit (or discover for the first time) some "wild sounds from past dimensions"? One good thing about the march of time is that every six months or so, we get treated to a new issue of this magazine, one of our faves, THE magazine for '60s/'70s psych, pop, garage stuff, celebrating and illuminating both the legends and the obscurities. Issue #37, which weighs in at 184 pages, is now here and we wish we could sit down and absorb it to the obsessive extent that we want to, except first we have other reviews to finish. But, a cursory flip-through gives us plenty to look forward to readin'� There's a super in-depth interview with singer Phil May of The Pretty Things (who'd pretty much be the Ugly Things house band, if they had one). Also interviews with Ian McLagan and the late Steve Marriott of The Small Faces, pieces on East Germany's Joco-Dev Sextett (see, obscurities!), Thursday's Children from Texas, psychedelic sixties songwriters Carter & Gilbert, San Diego's class of '77 alumni The Hitmakers, LA punks The Gears, prae-kraut pandaemoniacs The Loosers, and much more. All of it super informative and interesting, even if you didn't think you'd think so� Plus, there's another installment of our favorite feature each ish: Cyril Jordan's San Francisco Beat. And of course tons of reviews of reissues, books, etc.
Along with a new record from one of our favorite purveyors of kosmische kraut-psych and spaced out synthscapery, Expo '70 (found elsewhere on this week's list) there's another new release, from Japanese psych crew Up-Tight, also on aQ beloved Brazilian label Essence, and like that Expo '70, this is in fact a PRE-ORDER for the super deluxe, super fancy, handmade BOX SET version, which comes not only with a bonus disc, but also housed in a crazy handmade box. It's limited to 91 copies and that's IT. We might be able to get 15, but even then, we're only getting as many as we get pre-orders for, so if you want one, order it now, we'll get them in sometime in the next few weeks, and they can either ship with your current order, or on their own. You will be charged for the box NOW, but then the shipping will be sorted out when we actually send the box (and it'll ship by weight, not as 1 item).
We've long loved Up-Tight, and this new one is another good one, if you're already a fan, maybe a super fan, odds are you're gonna want one of these, the box is super striking, all bird beaks and eyes, in an oversized, handmade boxset, that unfolds revealing still more artwork, along with a hand drawn third eye canvas collage. And along with the new record proper, it also includes an exclusive bonus album, a cd-r called Sweet Sister Session (Uncut) - For Lucrezia, a whole set recorded in 2004 during the sessions for their Alchemy release Lucrezia, and is ONLY available in this box. So needless to say, Up-Tight nerds grab one before they are gone.
The record itself, The Night Is Yours, is another slab of dark heavy psych from these masters, and from the first few seconds, we're hurled into the void: thick, distorted bass, simple, pounding drumming, and wild, shredding, blown out, in-the-red guitar-shred freakout, no preamble, no slow build, just straight into some heart-of-the-the-sun heaviness. The leads do fade out, letting the song breathe a bit, the vibe dialed down a notch, for the echo drenched vocals to drift in, and suddenly, it's like a super distorted, even more blown out Les Rallizes Denudes, and before you know it, that guitar swoops in, and whips the song into a noise drenched Japanoise-psych squall. But as fans know, it's not all freakout, these guys are capable of brooding beauty, which is what the second track offers, a woozy crooning drift, a dark psych ballad, all wreathed in reverb, it's not until the last minute that things get at all heavy, wild vocalizations, swirls of guitar noise, a quick blast, and then right back into the dark chanted creep that began the track. Two of the remaining three tracks are more pretty than heavy, the first, a dreamy bit of sun dappled jangle, that almost sounds more like American slowcore than Japanese psych, the second, a brief bit of dark strum, murky, and haunting, hushed and mysterious. And then right in between, the nearly 16 minute "So Alone", which is ALL noisy and distorted, a churning death march pound, swirls of jagged feedback, arcs of guitarnoise, the guitars grinding and howling, fields of skree and shriek, hurts of face melting buzz and shred, all the while the bass and drums, locked into a churning, doomic pound, the vocals too wild and feral, doused in FX and battling the wild guitarnoise. So good!
And as we mentioned above, we'll only be able to get about 15 copies of this box, and that's IT. So if you want one, order it now. We'll charge you and let you know when it arrives. If you're after the normal version, let us know that too, and we can put you down for one of those, but this listing is specifically for folks who want to nab one of the boxes before they're gone for good.
FINALLY AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!
Here's our review from way back in 2005, when the cd version was first released...
Just when you thought you'd heard everything, in comes Sublime Frequencies to fill in the gaps you never thought existed. How many cds of Iraqi pop do you have in your collection? Until now we certainly didn't have any, let alone anything remotely traditional from Iraq. For a country that's so important to our war mongering presidential administration it's perhaps a little surprising that more interest hasn't been piqued about the culture of Iraq. But then again, everyone but W seems to understand that the real reasons for plundering this nation wasn't to "liberate" anyone. In fact, W would probably rather that no one even pay attention to any of this music, which has the awkward fortune to have been produced almost entirely (with the exception of three early 70's tracks) during the reign of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime ( tracks here range from 1980 on up to 2002!). In spite of his - well deserved - reputation as a cruel dictator, he was also an avid supporter of both education and the arts - such are the complexities of life W would rather not acknowledge - and for better or worse, kept the fabricated nation state as stable as it has ever been. Hussein promoted secular arts and music, starting cultural centers for both, and even dubbed singers the "eighth division" of the armed forces (his nation had seven military divisions) - not to paint too rosy a picture of Donald Rumsfeld's former pal and business partner, who was also a sadistic tyrant after all. Compiled by Mark Gergis (I Remember Syria, Molam, Cambodian Cassette Archives), Choubi Choubi is a collection years in the making. Gergis scoured the earth for the source material on this disc, travelling through Syria, Europe and the Iraqi neighborhoods of Detroit, Michigan. The anthology starts off with a folk rock track from '70s Socialist singer Ja'afar Hassan, a song that could easily compete with the best psych tracks on Hava Narghile or Turkish Delights for the crown of Middle Eastern psych champ. But if you're expecting another psych compilation, you're going to be disappointed as Choubi Choubi is much more than that, way more. Most of the recordings on the album have no western instruments on them, nor hardly any western influence. These tracks rock out much harder with no electric instruments, but with huge string sections, pounding drums, and monstrous oud playing. Maybe it's also the super bluesy sounding (to the western ear) melodies, it's no wonder that it sounds so fresh and familiar to us. It really is weird, when we first listened to this record we could have sworn there were more songs with electric guitars on it, but there aren't that many at all. It just sounds so fucking heavy, and rocks so hard that we remembered it as being a "rock" record. Really, really, really fucking great!
Here's another super limited missive from the mysterious black-noise-goth-dirge imprint Vaald, with Malediction being a compilation featuring the suitably enigmatic projects Lock, White Resin, Interference, and Marble Verse. As is the case for pretty much everything that Vaald has released, there's no information about who, what, where, when, or how. It's just as well, as Vaald could simply be opening up a portal for phantoms, fallen angels, and wandering ghosts to channel their ectoplasmic energies into a dark foreboding pall, with each moniker being less a pseudonym for a particular artist and more of a chance meeting between this world and another. We've managed to get a good chunk of titles from Vaald, but not always in quantities to list; and Malediction maintains that same limited, fetish-quantity productions. It's a 46 minute cross-section into Vaald's aesthetic proclivities for black noise and dark electronics. Crumbling distortion, greasy turbine noise, and aggressive metal bashed aktionism gird the activities of the first three projects with White Resin shifting more towards the Italian Industrial axis (MB, Mauthausen Orchestra, Murder Corporation, etc.) and Interference pushing towards the non-structural passages of Le Syndicat. After doing some web-sleuthing, it seems that Lock is the noise project of Rachel "Motion Sickness Of Time Travel" Evans working with free-noise artist Leslie Grove. Marble Verse maintains the ghastly vibe, albeit with less of a the strong-arm tactics of the other three. Here, it's a drifting cauldron of creeping, half-melodic black ambience that could easily be mistaken for those non-BM Paysage D'Hiver albums. Sad to say that this was released in just an edition of 20 copies - all housed in a oversized case - and we have VERY few. Too bad, as this album and label deserves much wider attention!
V/VM was the first project that forced sonic hermit Leyland Kirby into the public eye, when he emerged as a giddy figurehead for the amphetamine-amped drill'n'bass that blossomed around the likes of Hrvatski, Aphex Twin, and Atari Teenage Riot in the late '90s. For all of the hype that surrounded him, Kirby's 'sound' was essentially, a purposefully aggravating, immature brand of cheap musical humor by turns, brutal, noisy, dumb and occasionally sort of genius, although it mostly tended toward the goofy - which included shameful plunderings of '80s dreck ballads, by running a Chris Deburgh or a Lionel Richie song through a ring modulator. Yeah, much of the V/VM material was ridiculous, puerile, and lots of times borderline unlistenable. But that sort of seemed like the point...
Not surprisingly, we avoided much of the early V/VM stuff, circa '90s and '00s; but those glimpses of genius, would later blossom into the sublime transcendent beauty of Kirby's Caretaker persona, and we were not alone in finding Kirby's work as The Caretaker thoroughly sublime, a stunning haunted ballroom approach to ambient composition through massive amounts of cathedral reverb and ample chorales of surface noise from antiquated '78s.
That said, The Death Of Rave project is perhaps the one body of work from V/VM that should most certainly be heard. And which maybe not surprisingly ran concurrent with some of the earlier explorations as The Caretaker, first being released online as a massive archive of over 200 dancefloor anthems being time-stretched and reworked into rave's anti-apotheosis. No rhythm, no release, no exhilaration, this was all grey sculpted noise and decommissioned electricity. This 'partial flashback' represents the best material from that unwieldy catalog which now seems to have vanished from the internet. (Long live the physical medium!) The Death Of Rave cultivates a slow, almost industrially-minded tension of granular electronic noise, with a sense of fictional memories similar to those created in Kirby's dilated 78 recontextualations as The Caretaker. Here, those would be the fabricated memories sought by Roy Batty and his fellow replicants in Blade Runner, flickering repetitions of pixels into dense networks of cold data that in another context would be a jacked-up acid track or a sensual deep-house groove. But here, it's poetically and poignantly vacant - a residual memory recoded as the empty warehouse itself, where a party once happened, with the floor covered in crushed plastic cups, two-day old vomit-n-beer, broken high-heels, and cigarette butts. And in the maudlin mind of Kirby, that's something quite beautiful.
Apparently this came out last year, but it's new to us, and when we saw it, we had to get a few, just 'cause of WHO plays in Vardlokk. Check out the lineup: Grutle from Enslaved on growly vocals (in English, with Norwegian for the choruses), Tim Lehi of Draugar on guitar (and excellent cover art as well), Dave Sweetapple of Witch on bass, Terri Christopher of 27 and Dusty Skull on drums, and Iver Sandoy of Enslaved and Jazkamer contributing electronic effects and Moog playin'. Wow/weird. Together, this unlikely underground supergroup kick out a couple heavy cuts of Viking-themed blackened doomic crush, with lots of fuzz, and lyrics about the Vikings arriving in North America circa 1000AD. How can that not be cool? We really wonder just how these particular peeps got together to do this - and if there will be more from Vardlokk or if this is just a one-off...
White vinyl, limited.
Why it has taken so long for this to be reissued is baffling, but we're just so glad it's finally here. We have raved about Leslie Winer's musical work on two previous archival releases from Tapeworm and its offshoot label Wormhole, but those really only hinted at the genius of Witch, her only previously released record, from 1993 (though much of it was recorded in the late eighties). Records don't get more cult than this. Released on a white label, using the copyright symbol as her moniker, here designed as a circle of Ourobouros that was originally hand stamped onto blank white sleeves. Even the album and song titles with their alphanumerical wordplay ("N1ear", "1nce Upon A Time") would fit right at home with the obscurant syntax of witch house, even though this was recorded nearly 20 years before. Witch has been labeled as "proto-trip-hop", which it sort of is, as this record predates what Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky were doing just a year or two later, and even Winer herself has been called by NME "The Grandmother of Trip Hop", a label she has rejected and rightly so. "Grandmother" doesn't have the same aura of respect as what the music press names male musical innovators such as "Godfather" or "King", and Winer, a poet and formal model with a chic androgynous style who was close friends with both William S. Burroughs and Jean-Michel Basquiat is hardly a little old lady.
Witch is both a product of its time and far ahead of it. On the surface, it's not that far removed from Sinead O'Connor, especially her song "I Am Stretched On Your Grave" with its James Brown drum sample and spoken intonations, but Witch is much darker, cooler and more subdued. It has a very London feel to it, a feeling of frustrated action against cultural stagnation and trying to create something new out of nearly nothing. Winer doesn't necessarily sing as much as observe and respond with cool detachment, a sort of soundtrack of her experiences relayed poetically to an unknown listener as beats, dub rhythms (from Jah Wobble no less), and musical samples and snippets of dialogue coalesce around her. It's a heady mixture, definitely dreamy and druggy, but she refreshingly doesn't try to endear the listener to her own personal entanglements and positions on gender, beauty and social norms. It's more like she's having a searching complicated conversation with herself.
Musically, what Witch really predates is the contemporary woozy and warped electronica of Peaking Lights and Maria Minerva, especially in the layering of breezy dub rhythms in hazy reverb and abstract murk. It's a beautifully extraordinary work that continually rewards the more we listen. Big thanks to Superior Viaduct for making this more widely available. Incredible and soooo recommended!
Yoshimi from the Boredoms is this issue's cover star, on occasion of her other band OOIOO having a great new album coming out soon (the gamelan-inflected Gamel, out on Thrill Jockey next month). Also in this issue: Alan Courtis of Reynols, the Stockholm electronic music studio EMS, Shanghai noise act Torturing Nurse, an Invisible Jukebox session with grime dudes Butterz, James Toth writes about Raffi (yes, Raffi in The Wire!!), there's also the usual ton of authoritative reviews and other essential information...
Hark! Courtesy of the ever reliable Flenser Records comes the gravely unsettling return of this boldly unclassifiable unit, hazily haunting the very outermost fringes of metal, goth, noise rock and industrial, and most certainly on our shortlist of bands that everyone should be listening to that not nearly enough people are (although a current stint opening for Deafheaven will hopefully change that!). For those uninitiated, W&R are a two piece loosely based in Los Angeles comprised solely of a live drummer and a man with a sample pad (live it looks like he's playing a giant light up calculator!), both gifted with a talent for terrifying screams, howls and yelps, who manage to sound as dense and textural as any full band. Want assaults you immediately with a burst of disorienting percussive soundscapes, the vocals an exhausted world-weary yell, the music (if it can be called that) a collage of white noise, Hawkwind style cosmic swirling dust, and a synthesized monolithic chanting that is either coming from a human or a machine, it is almost impossible to say. And that's just the first couple minutes of a wildly dense, emotionally ravaged technological avalanche of a record. There are moments of relative restraint, but these are perhaps even more emotionally intense. Funereal piano lilts under stream-of-consciousness spoken word, clattering cymbals and agonized screams. Sparse robotic percussion hammers cold and steadfast under unnerving atonal singing and a shrieking digital cacophony, like musical notes malfunctioning, rotten with cancerous programming. Lonely nocturnal melodies drift above spidery rhythms eerily offset by freeform howling. The songs can be lush, almost beautiful in their own oily alien way, but never without a sense of foreboding, a constant dissonant creep leaking into the foliage. They can be contemplative and desolate, like some sort of future wasteland, all barren metals and burned out circuitry. At other times the record is almost operatic and martial, sounding like some warped Soviet anthem infested with insectoid parasites, pulsating like an anxious transparent heart - an orchestra sucked of all its triumph and hope, sometimes even recalling something from Burzum's Filosofem, but completely rewired - sparking and glistening in a damp windowless room. Want is like a collage - some tracks feeling like snippets or fragments of ideas and memories, the kind we do our best to keep buried. It is a lonesome technological assault, the black oil of crackling urban despair seeping into the pores of every moment. The ominous hungry march of progress that will consume us all! Very highly recommended for fans of Pinkish Black and other recent Flenser faves like Have A Nice Life and Planning For Burial...
