This is the third installment reissued on cassette by Holodeck Records of Smokey Emery's great Soundtracks For Invisibility series. Based on field recordings from various locales and processed into tape loop constructed compositions, this series has always shown a deeper range between pieces. Recorded between 2006 and 2010, the trademark cavernous dronework here is augmented by degraded guitar pieces that bring a wondrous melancholy to the grey din. Vaguely romantic and tender, yet raw and chilling, a piece of gorgeously disquieting contemplation.
Comes with download code. Limited to 200 copies.
ALSO ON VINYL, WHOOHOO!
Still boggles the mind that this underground New York art rock band somehow were permitted into the mainstream... y'know the big leagues, but it's that mammoth wealth of resources that allows the release of special reissue editions such as this one.
So, what's your fave Sonic Youth album? If you took a poll around here, chances are you'd hear the names of a select few of their early albums come up repeatedly -- Bad Moon Rising, Evol, Goo, Sister maybe -- but none may be quite as beloved as Daydream Nation. Simply put, in pretty much every aspect -- album art, title, song sequence and the songs themselves -- Sonic Youth nails it. It's a superbly realized art rock album that balances melodicism and dissonance, traditional song structures and soundscapes.
The extras that make this version deluxe include a home demo version of "Eric's Trip" and an entire disc of unreleased live tracks from the Daydream era as well as some great covers of Kraftwerk, Mudhoney, The Beatles and Captain Beefheart.
We'd been hearing rumors about this band for ages, a new group featuring ex-members of late great nineties post/noise rockers Unwound, who were easily one of our favorite bands EVER. And while we were were prepared to be disappointed, we were actually super pleasantly surprised. The sound definitely has some Unwound too it, but it's WAY popper, and to these ears actually sounds a bit like the Melvins in places, certainly the vocals. But the music itself is some weird nineties beholden post punk / noise rock, with a serious Black Flag vibe throughout, plenty of Greg Ginn-ish guitars, the sound dynamic, and intricate, certainly some post/math rock going on, but then in the middle of a tense post punk jam, the song will blossom into impossible poppiness. Just check out opener "Divine Mob", which is super Melvins-y in the beginning, and unfurls some tense droned out guitar melodies, and some motorik drum pound, before the chorus delivers s hook that KILLS, and then that chorus gets all pulled apart, the vocals wrapped around angular guitar noise and more drum pound.
Frontman Justin Trosper of Unwound is reunited with the original drummer from Unwound (now on guitar), so there's bound to be some Unwoundisms, but Survival Knife is a whole different beast, they actually sound like the kind of band that 15 years ago major labels would be losing their shit over, scrappy, but still pretty polished, noisy and heavy, but also plenty catchy and poppy, lots of broody minor key churn, even some shimmery acoustic guitar strum in the mix. Ultimately, this is just a killer slab of nineties beholden post punk / noise pop, that fans of Unwound will definitely love, but really, anyone who grew up on groups like Sonic Youth, The Swirlies, Sebadoh, and all that Homestead / Touch And Go / Dutch East stuff, this will definitely hit the spot.
Two strange releases on this week's list from local black metal label Acephale Winter Productions, the other is a collection of Joy Division covers, and this is the first we've heard from UK avant blackened psych duo Synsophony, who's sound is a bit difficult to describe, the title track begins with a long stretch of sculpted static, pulsing rhythmically, over a bed of extended tones and drones, before suddenly slipping into something much more murky, buried voices beneath softly undulating layers, all softly distorted and blurred into hazy chordal smears, a crumbling, noise drenched black ambience, that builds to some serious noisiness, before finishing off as a whispery thrum. That track gets remixed by someone called EGB, who mostly makes it even more murky and abstract, and near the end, even noisier, a black industrial sprawl that oozes and crumbles, and eventually howls and grinds into a psychedelic blacknoise frenzy. The final track, clocking in at over 23 minutes, slips from hushed abstract minimalism, processed field recordings and ambient murk, to weird abstract strings stretched out over static pulses and distortion drenched squelches, the final stretch almost choral, with monk like chants off in the distance, beneath a barely there haze of blackened shimmer. Cool stuff, but only for the most open minded of metalheads, although definitely recommended for fans of black industrial, and minimal ambient noisescapery.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!!
Sweet! This is the sort of thing that makes for a good Record Of The Week both 'cause of how it sounds (always the biggest consideration of course!!) and also 'cause the back story is pretty cool, too. We'll start with that. T.R.A.S.E. stands for Tape Recorder And Synthesizer Ensemble, a name that, if used by a band nowadays might seem just a bit unimaginatively straightforward & blandly self-explanatory, or perhaps meant ironically academic-sounding somehow. But when you learn that T.R.A.S.E. were a DIY "ensemble" masterminded by a precocious British schoolboy back in 1981, making experimental electronic home recordings that sound not too far from stuff such modern-day outfits as Emeralds and Umberto and Soft Moon would be doing years later, then the name becomes fairly endearing, eh? Just take a look at the cover photo, two skinny teenagers, one looking kinda cool in T-shirt and shades, standing with electric guitar in hand, the other kid in sweater and jeans, looking a bit dorkier as he sits amidst a cluttered array of electronic keyboards, amplifiers, reel-to-reel tape machines and other assorted audio gear. The latter teen is T.R.A.S.E. founder Andy Popplewell, most definitely an A/V geek at his school, who put together his own six-channel audio mixer at age 16 following plans in a issue of Practical Electronics magazine. Being into both sci-fi soundtracks and new wave music like The Human League, Ultravox and Gary Numan (one of the tracks here is a Tubeway Army cover) it wasn't long before that mixer, and other gear he built, like an "Elektor Chorosynth", was put to use to record his own music. Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Giorgio Moroder where among his other inspirations. T.R.A.S.E. recorded one unreleased cassette lp called Electronic Rock, and the deep diggers at B-Music/Finders Keepers have compiled tracks from that tape here along with other home studio / real studio / demo tracks by Popplewell and T.R.A.S.E., 14 total cuts of adolescent outsider synthsplorations, all tick-tocking drum machines and swells of droning synth, adorned with phaser and fuzz FX, replete with gentle melodies and warped "cosmic" soundz. These tracks are mostly instrumental, though a few have vocals, like the Messethetics-ish downer electro pop of "Talk To Me" and the sad, fuzzy "Unrequited Love". So much primitive shimmering synth beauty, the more abstract of the tracks glistening rhythmically, the more song-like coming across like lo-fi coldwave cuts.
Perhaps the best recommendation we can give this, is that playing it in the store, generally results in customers asking about it and buying a copy. Probably the best "long lost tapes" release of vintage unknown electronica since that Rodion G.A. record!! One of those serendipitous discoveries, occasioned by a fortuitous meeting between Andy Popplewell and Andy Votel of Finders Keepers.
The cd booklet includes color photos and vintage synth kit adverts, alongside detailed and very revealing liner notes penned by Popplewell himself, who in the wake of T.R.A.S.E. later became a BBC radio engineer, now works in audio media restoration, and who currently studies conspiracy theories and other esoteric knowledge in his spare time.
Fyi, we momentarily had an import vinyl version of this a while back, but it took 'til now for the cd to materialize, glad it finally did, though it's too bad we don't have the vinyl anymore (maybe again, someday?).
"Careful arrangements of sonic rubbish." That's one hell of a great artist's statement, courtesy of Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab). Over the past decade or so, this Australian sound-artist has quietly produced some of the finer examples of composition through field recording. His work is hardly the stuff of pleasantries from a soft ambient whoosh set as the backdrop to various birdsongs plopped willy-nilly for the intrepid listener to identify. Nope, there's always the threat of psychological, psychic, and existential violence lurking throughout Sprod's work. When the insect chorales push through to the foreground, it's symbolic of pestilence, disease, blight, and the simple fact that much in the outback can fucking kill you. It's easy to tap into the ultra-violent, post-apocalyptic, doomsayer, and/or isolationist scenarios mapped out elsewhere through the Australian psyche (e.g. Mad Max, Chopper, On The Beach, Bad Boy Bubby, etc.); and Sprod carves out his own niche in digging through the hinterlands of urban neglect, locating meaning of psychogeographical import (or the lack there of) within a recontextualized sound object. Since his debut Surfacedrift back in 2004, Sprod's work has steadily exhibited a maturation in conceptualization and aesthetic complexity, culminating in the schizophonic collage-tactics of I'm Lost.
The opening salvo of leaden thud, turbine roar, and pressurized blasts of air slithering through release valves is a torrent of concrete-actions, jump-cuts, and dead-ends, as if Sprod has decided to dematerialize the listener and purposefully mistranslate the coordinates between alternate realities of equally miserable / fascinating locations of industrialized bleakness. When he settles upon a singular space-time continuum, it's a vat of uranium churning at the bottom of an oil drum, while the container itself quickens its half-life through atomic fission. Another turn and Sprod channels an ethereally unholy skree of a thousand particle accelerators amassing their beams on a single contact microphone, ending up with something akin to a far more uncomfortable Phill Niblock or Rhys Chatham, manifested through what could be fluorescent bulbs. The quiet passages of textural rummaging that Sprod intersperses throughout I'm Lost have the queasy feel of somebody pulling off scabs from old wounds. Equal parts Cronenberg and Schimpfluch (Lanz, Phillips, Eb.Er., Zeier, etc.) - so of course, it's fucking awesome.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em. It's the return of Tobacco, the vaguely-hiphop-ish electro-weirdo alter ego/side project of the quite similar really Black Moth Super Rainbow. We're big fans of both, though Tobacco tends to take things to even more of a bizarre extreme even than BMSR, and Ultima II Massage pushes all the buttons, flips all the switches, turns all the knobs, etc., we were hoping for this time out. Totally trippy, effects-damaged synth shuffle, overdosed on DayGlo distortion, some tracks with processed pop vocal hooks, others all about the glitchy grooves, like we said before, its like Fuck Buttons got Daft Punk'd, or M83 going all skweee.
Tobacco brings the noise here, but also doesn't neglect the melodic side of things either, in kicking out these fuzzy, funky jams, perverse party pleasers for sure - at a party we'd imagine features strobe lights, LSD spiked punch, and a sweaty, shambolic dancefloor. Well, there's tracks here for the dancers, and others for the partygoers passed out on the carpet. Good stuff!
Writhing forth once more from the most shadowy cracked wastelands of forsaken Brooklyn, Tombs returns with their third full length of glistening, gleaming extreme metal. And indeed extreme metal is the only genre tag that really works for this band, since they've made it their crusade to cherry pick the absolute best traits from a myriad of metal subgenres to mathematically create some of the most monolithic, ferocious and enormous metal being recorded today. A brief vaguely funereal dirge ushers in a flurry of pummeling helicopter double bass, wild eyed doom-laden heaving guitars, and a hurricane of rolling snare drum and hammering blast beats. There are hints of Souls At Zero-era Neurosis or even Deathspell Omega in the dissonant hypno-riffing. The circling, maddening guitar work and sickening Lovecraftian grooves sometimes recall early Morbid Angel. While elsewhere you might hear hints of the wasted urban scrawl of vintage Godflesh or the slithering futuro-insectoid crawl of latter day Celtic Frost / Triptykon. But there is not one moment of Savage Gold that sounds like homage. Instead, these influences are blended together seamlessly, creating a sound all encompassing, familiar and unique all at once. The vocals are a cold emotionless howl, which lends otherwise innocent lyrics like "life is a dream" a twisted rotten air. It's an extremely dense record. Guitars seem to avalanche upon one another, building a higher and higher wall of black glistening sludge, ready to collapse in on itself again at any moment. There are melodic moments as well. The regal grind of "Portraits" especially brings to mind Ludicra or Wolves In The Throne Room, but with a more obsidian metallic sheen. Compared to their insanely critically-acclaimed last album Path Of Totality, Savage Gold feels much more streamlined, smooth and clean (mostly thanks to a production job from Hate Eternal's Erik Rutan), but it's not at all a detriment to this record. Instead it gives the band the sound of some well oiled calculated killing machine. The spaciousness of the production really lends an extra sprawling quality to the band's more epic moments, while somehow magnifying the menace of the darker passages. And while there's still plenty of doom, sludge, groove and twisted death metal, Savage Gold has really upped the black metal influence. Labyrinthine tremolo whirlwind guitars seem to spiral upward like some Escher staircase, leading to realms shadowy, alien and obscured! A shining black monolith that shows metal can be forward-thinking, modern and unique without sacrificing any of the heaviness, ferocity or... well... metalness! Absolutely recommended, and sure to make more than a few metal best of the year lists come January 1st.
There's a Cyrillic transcription affixed next to the name of this project, which is even more cryptic in appearance than the onomatopoetic moniker Uhushuhu, rendered as Yxywyxy. Supposedly in both languages, this transliterates somewhat close to the call of one of the larger predator owls bellowing to another owl in the forest. U'hu! Shu'hu! - or the Boy Scout mnemonic "Who Cooks For You?" asks the Barred Owl (whose habitat includes both Russia and North America, fyi). But taken outside of the context of avian communication, the hushed blur in whispering Uhushuhu could easily stand in as a whoosh or hiss as pure description of their dreamy, forest-dwelling drones. And yes, the Uhushuhu collective have been known to perform and produce their work under the canopy of the Russian forests outside of St. Petersburg, making them something of a Russian reincarnation of Jewelled Antler. There's much more of an electronic underbelly to Uhushuhu than Jewelled Antler, while retaining the pine-cone drone ethos of luminously radiant psychedelic dronescaping. The first track actually holds a number of aesthetic similarities to the long form works of Motion Sickness Of Time Travel - sinewy, seductive, and slippery passages of intertwining synth melodies softened through reverb and spaciousness, furthered along by watery field recordings and damp ruminations on subterranean lairs, wormholes, and caves. Each of the album's three tracks clock well past the 15 minute mark, leading towards deeper, more shambolic explorations of sublime atmosphere. Quite a lovely piece of work, but it's limited to just 77 copies!
Here's some uneasy listening courtesy of Finland's Umpio. We had discovered the work of Umpio by way of a collaboration with the long-time aQ-favorite irr. app. (ext.), upon which Mr. Umpio (nee Pentti Dassum) reconstituted a bunch of irr. app. (ext.) material into an album that sounded remarkably like irr. app. (ext.) - profoundly strange collages of mudsucking torpor and psychically unstable gloominess. Muelas is none of that, standing in fully erect glory as a throttling, self-perpetuating explosion of noise-junk, signal-overload, and gleeful sonic destruction. The album's artwork connects the dots of the noise to the phobias and fears of going to the dentist, only to discover the man behind the dental drill is quite the sadist. There's a faux-outsider-artist drawing of phallic creatures with equally phallic dental drills who are converging on the poor patient suffering from some unfortunate tooth malady. There's the standard dental X-ray; and then there's a strange photograph of what actually looks like a dismembered jaw floating in the bottom of a jar, complete with fleshy tissue and decayed molars. Gross. Suitably, the noise that Umpio generates is sharp, crackling, and brutal, with plenty of cut-up configurations that sit somewhere between the pre-digital work of Merzbow and the scatological aktions of Runzelstirn & Gurglestock. Somebody on the internet postulated that the track "Night Goat" might be an uncredited Melvins cover. Why not?
Another winner from Sublime Frequencies. And while we made sure to stress that past "vinyl-only" were indeed vinyl only, lately, those vinyl releases have been slowly making it to cd. BUT, for the vinyl folks out there, these do disappear fast, and fetch big bucks on eBay once they're gone, so you're not gonna want to snooze on this one. Listening to this again, now, for maybe the 20th time in 2 days, it's becoming clear we'll probably have to make this a Record Of The Week as soon as it comes out on cd, but for now, even though it's only a highlight, it really couldn't be more of a MUST OWN.
And like many of the Sublime Frequencies before it, we find it hard to not think that maybe folks don't need to be making so much music, releasing so many records, when so much amazing outrageously creative music is already being and has been made all over the world, for so long, much of it never heard outside of a very few people. Maybe we should have some sort of national policy, where bands can turn in their instruments, and in exchange get a recorder, a plane ticket, and an expense account, with which they can roam the world bringing back some of that unheard and lost music. Heck, sign us up right now!
Anyway, this new release is a collection of Rai music from the early seventies, from Algeria, and these particular cuts are samples of some of the sort of "outlaw" Rai performers, a modern strain that has been neglected and ignored, and takes this classic Algerian music form, and adds electric guitar, trumpets, wah wah pedal, and whips it all up into an infectious brew equal parts Ethiopiques, Bollywood and garage rock. Or something close to that. This stuff is truly hard to describe, and the liner notes, while informative, are printed on an eye popping blue on red old school 3-D colored background which makes the text swim and sway before your eyes. And offer more on the history and the players than what Rai music actually is (there's a good description on Wikipedia). But for the purpose of this review, as it should be, we'll just focus on the sound. And what a sound!
Warm whirring organ drones, trumpets EVERYWHERE, really the defining sound, wild chaotic tribal drumming, crooned dramatic vocals, groovy, soulful, funky, raw and lo-fi, like a garage rock Ethiopiques, but with a strangely raw Bollywood vibe, the trumpets peppering the murky grooves with strange fanfares and jazzy melodies, here and there distorted guitars surface, wrapped in wah wah, reverb and echo all over the place, some songs super frenzied, others laid back and dreamy, Indian melodies draped over almost surfy grooves, really pretty fantastic. Hard to imagine that folks who have been digging all the Sublime Frequencies releases, or the Yaala Yaala reissues won't go crazy for this stuff.
Group Doueh, Group Inerane, and now this, a pretty mind blowing, near perfect, far out world music three-fer, and that's not even counting the 30+ release that came before. ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED.
LIMITED TO 1500 COPIES, 180 gram vinyl, super thick gatefold sleeve, full color, with tons of photos and liner notes inside.
One can always count on Johnny Trunk of the amazing Trunk records for making a mix that is as hilarious and head-scratching as it is beautifully listenable. When asked by strangers what kind of music his label releases, Trunks's response is usually, "you know, funny old shit", which if you think about it is the perfect response to describe the kinds of audible curiosities he reissues, from long forgotten children's TV show soundtracks to obscure novelty records and forgotten jazz greats. A few of the tracks included here are from earlier out of print reissues in the Trunk catalog such as Leona Anderson's wonderfully awful Music To Suffer By, but many of the tracks are from Trunk's private record collection, likely highlighting the best tracks on perhaps otherwise less interesting albums. You get a full gamut of styles and genres from novelty calypso songs from Robert Mitchum and Bernard Cribbins, space-lounge jazz from Alain Romans and Sergio Mihanovich, musique concrete from Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaffer, the punk dub of The Jellies, classical piano from Glenn Gould, ethnic music curios and warped kid songs. So great and for a real nice price, you'd be foolish not to pick this up! (And sorry, the more expensive vinyl version is now gone it seems.)
Amazing compilation of lost folk and blues from this relatively new Northwestern label (even though they're called Mississippi), who apparently have tons more killer comps on deck and coming soon. We can hardly wait! But for now, we're perfectly pleased to just dig into this one (and the other new Mississippi release, the�Lipa Kodi Ya City Council comp of African music, reviewed elsewhere on this list), a gorgeous chunk of dusty, sepia toned old timey blues, recorded between the years�1927-1948, all of it fantastic. Like a modern day Folkways, Mississippi has gathered up a gorgeous and varied collection of lost music, from campfire fiddles, to tap dance rhythms, to smokey night club joints, to brassy big band, to amazing yodeling, to Latin flavored rhythm and blues, to back porch stomps, to soft and shimmery crooned blues, it's all fantastic, the recordings raw and emotional, immediate, fuzzy and lo-fi, straight from the original 78's. Absolutely essential. The perfect vinyl addendum to your Smithsonian Folkways'�Anthology of American Folk Music box set.�
This barely even needs a review at this point, which at AQ customarily means a long and very extensive review will follow, but we're serious this time. We can barely keep anything on Mississippi Records in stock. This small Portland store turned reissue label has been releasing an amazing bunch of old timey gospel and blues comps, African comps, as well as some killer jazz. I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore, Life Is A Problem, Lipa Kodi Ya City Council. All sold out in the blink of an eye. Mississippi have been gradually repressing those, as well as readying a whole 'nother batch of musical goodness. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the Washington Phillips lp, and then there's this here beauty of a comp, Last Kind Words, an amazing collection of old timey blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, a ton of rarities, not the usual blues suspects at all: Edward Clayborn, Isiah Nettles, The Anglin Brothers, Kid Prince Moore, Lulu Jackson, Louis McDaniels & Gid Smith, Sister O.M. Terrell, Robert Wilkins and a bunch more.
A couple of our favorite tracks are the title track by Geechie Wiley, her voice so lovely and raw, a gorgeous mournful melody, and a hook that is so catchy, all it takes is one play in the store, and we're all humming it all day, and "Catfish Blues" by Robert Petway, some raw stomping stripped down blues, with some amazing guitar playing, but it's the voice that does it, a raspy soulful croon, that sounds like it was crafted using whiskey, cigarettes and sandpaper, occasionally soaring to an almost falsetto, but just as smoothly slipping into super low growl.
As if the music weren't enough, and believe us IT IS, Last Kind Words also features original artwork, by aQ pal and bad ass artist Chris Johanson. Also includes a printed cardstock insert with the track info and very little else. As always SO RECOMMENDED. And as always, be prepared for us to sell out of these right quick. We'll do our best to restock as quickly as possible, assuming the label doesn't sell out too...
The fifth in this ongoing series of limited double lps collecting some of the best songs from classic Italian Westerns. Named for Ennio Morricone's iconic song from the Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Ecstasy Of Gold gathers up some equally iconic tracks, as well as plenty of rare and mostly unheard gems, the list of artists should have Italo-Western soundtrack nerds freaking out: Bruno Nicolai, Nico Fidenco, Francesco De Masi, Lusi Bacalov, Stelvio Cipriani, Alessandro Alessandroni, Nora Orlandi and a bunch more. And like the past volumes, the tracks here are overflowing with dramatic crooned vocals, swoonsome strings, plenty of twang, galloping rhythms, fluttering woodwinds, flamenco guitars, wild percussion, a sound most folks are probably familiar with, but a bunch of songs and artists they might not be. And just like after digging into the other volumes, our list of must-see Italian Westerns just keeps getting longer and longer. Top of the list now is Matalo from 1970, the track here from Mario Migliardi sounds like some lost heavy psych gem, or some modern retro-psych outfit, like something you'd here on Rise Above or Cardinal Fuzz, the vocalist a dead ringer for the guy from Redd Kross (themselves genus sixties psych revivalists), with fuzzy, almost metallic riffing, and some seriously psychedelic shred, definitely need to see that movie, and hear the rest of the soundtrack. And the rest of this collection, while not all as fuzzy or psychedelic, is some seriously primo Italo soundtrack gold for sure!
Packaged in a super swank full color gatefold sleeve, adorned with bad ass illustrations from vintage Italian Western movie posters, as well as iconic images from the films themselves. LIMITED TO 750 COPIES. No download.
If any compilation series deserves to go to six volumes, the Electric Asylum series devoted to cult '70s British "freakrock" does. At least, we can't get enough of the stuff, so we're stoked on this latest installment, which brings us another big batch of obscure old acid psych / garage prog / hard pop weirdness sourced from rare 45's. 20 tracks, all circa 1971-'76. We recognize a few tracks - like the biker fuzz funk of Frog's "Living Dead", which also appeared on the soundtrack to Psychomania - but most are new to us. You get bubblegum glam, you get Moog-laden psych, you get novelty sci-fi grooviness... regarding the latter, John Pertwee, one of the actors who played TV's Dr. Who, contributes a track called "Who Is The Doctor", based on the Dr. Who theme!
Great & sometimes goofy stuff all around. The other artists on here include: Pioneers, Danaa, Bambi, Smoke, Marsha Hunt's 22, Barron Knights, Colin Young, JSD Band, Jeff Smith, Rococo, Jigsaw, Buster, Dawn Chorus, C. Star, Winston, Chris Garrett and Sweet Poison, Memories, and Henry Turtle. 16-page cd booklet provides notes on each, plus vintage color photos/graphics.
Another twisted electronic gem from Mr. Aaron Funk, aka Venetian Snares, and much like or favorite records of his, and there have been many, My Love Is A Bulldozer, is another dizzying mashup, this one, combining his wildly tangled drill and bass and frenzied jungle, with jazzy torch songs, and haunting Scott Walker like ballads. Sounds like a weird mix, and it is, pretty jarring too, but in a really cool way. All it should take is a few minutes of opener "10th Circle Of Winnipeg", which begins with swoon some strings, then jazzy drum skitter, then throaty female vox, then some thick dub step bass warble, the drums gradually cranking up, the sounds wreathed in weird little flitting fireflies of FX, before exploding into a gloriously chaotic drum and bass freakout, all wound around that swoon some torch song opening, veering wildly back and forth between buzzing droned out skitter, to wild cascades of spastic drum programming, to dark jazziness, and back again, often all of those edges blurring and bleeding into something confusional and downright mad scientist brilliant. And heck, that's just the first song.
The rest of the record is rife with strings, and choirs, the sound classical, baroque, folk, Flamenco, in equal measure, with long passages that could be mistaken for some lost Arvo Part piece, but inevitably, the sound explodes into some classic Snares drum programming.
The male vocals, presumably Funk's, are super emotional and distinctive, dramatic and over the top, sounding a little like Scott Walker, and when wound around dizzying drum programming, it's pretty stunning.
And those vocals definitely define much of this record, those tracks sounding like some weird seventies prog-folk record re-envisioned as modern warped electronica, while other tracks (like "Dear Poet"), are epic and cinematic, and sound like they could be the score for some Game Of Thrones style epic, or some steam punk space opera, the jungle perfectly meshed with the orchestral stapes, the droning synths, the strange chorales, the strings, totally over the top, confusing, and utterly and entirely addictive. Like every Venetian Snares record, we can't stop listening to this one, and feel compelled to proclaim it the best yet, at the very least it's currently our favorite, which is saying something, considering that the Venetian Snares catalog is pretty much all favorites. Needless to say, WAY recommended.
We've been trying to get enough copies of anything on the amazing Sylvan Screams Analog label to review and list, but previous releases were so limited, that we were only able to get a couple. And while they're just as limited, we did now manage to get a handful of the two most recent releases, this one is super raw, primitive old school black metal, the label references Blazebirth Hall and Les Legions Noires, and it most definitely has that feel, the guitars swarm insect like, the drums skeletal, the bass inaudible, the vokills a buried rasp, like a lot of that stuff it's about emotion and energy, the feel and the vibe, and the vibe here is definitely grim and frostbitten, even though these guys (this guy?) hail from Georgia. They somehow manage to channel France and Scandinavia, into something equally kvlt, blown out and brittle, sounding like it was recorded in practice space, a forest, or a cave, the second track is a weird creepy dirge, all stumbling lumber, and frosty black buzz, the vocals in-the-red, the whole sound blurring into blacknoize before settling back into that death march creep, only to eventually explode into another blast of galloping black buzz.
LIMITED TO 44 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered.
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Some abstract, cinematic, late-night (or early morning) drone-whoosh here from this academic/electronic/experimental composer. He's now based in Toronto, but we know him from his years in SF, as he's an aQ customer of long standing. Recorded between 2003-2012, the seven tracks here encompass warm waves of blissed out ambience, glitch-distressed hauntology, and cold glacial drone. 'Tis nicely varied from track to track, and within each one as well, there are enough dynamics and textural shifts to hold one's interest, if you're actively listening - though a more relaxed listening practice could easily result in simple mesmerization.
Apparently, this disc is the first release in a trilogy, documenting Warwick's latest program of "audio research". The title of this one, Something Borrowed, is in reference to his compositional process here - the basic sound materials are all "borrowed" (samples from cds, synth presets, etc.) and then manipulated with the use of computer software. Not that you'll recognize the sources or anything.
Fans of stuff like :zoviet*france: and Tim Hecker should perhaps investigate.
Record number three from these Canadian punks, whose first two records were big faves around here even though they never made it onto the list. Their sound seems loosely aligned with Perfect Pussy, in that they're noisy, and have a bad ass female vocalist, but where Perfect Pussy embraces abrasive noisiness, White Lung are much more concerned with melody and songcraft, reminding us of a super charged Team Dresch, which is most definitely a good thing. The production on this new one is massive, the guitars heavy and almost metallic, splintering into shards of keening high end, swirls of angular crunch, all wound around a super tight rhythm section, and of course, vocalist Mish Way, who flits easily from feral how, to throaty croon, and the songs, so catchy and well crafted, the multiple guitars winding multiple melodic lines into killer harmonies, the sound dense and lush and layered, making for something that definitely transcends punk rock, it's anthemic, epic and majestic, but also super personal, and emotional, not hard to imagine White Lung being primo mixtape material, particularly vitriolic breakup mixtapes, it's got that sort of anger and energy and passion. So killer. Odds are you'll end up wanting the other two records as well (and we can get em for you, just ask!)...
Another warped gem from the Tri Angle label, this one, a dark, brooding, moody bit of skittery slo-mo soul, in the tradition of other Tri Angle artists like Vessel, oOoOO, Holy Other, Balam Acab, How To Dress Well, etc. The weird bit being that this is no mysterious electronic producer, or bedroom misanthrope (well, okay, he could be that), but it's actually the side project of James Kelly, who readers of the aQ list might know better from his day job, playing in post black metal outfit Altar Of Plagues. And it's not like there was lots of stuff like this lurking below the surface in AoP. Or maybe it was, just WAY beneath the surface.
There's literally nothing metal about Kelly's Wife project, so metalheads steer clear. And really, we might expect a metalhead making a weirdo avant electronic soul record to come up with something seriously damaged and demented, but really, amidst the other above mentioned Tri Angle artists, Wife tends a bit more toward the mainstream. Sure the sounds are strange, the arrangements too, and apparently these songs are crafted from found sounds, filed recordings and homemade instruments, but the final project is surprisingly polished, very poppy, still murky and mysterious, but one of the few records on Tri Angle that has breakthrough potential. Fans of more mainstream fare like Portishead and Massive Attack and even to a degree Radiohead, will definitely dig a lot of what's going on here.
And we're not trying to downplay the weirdness. It's still plenty weird, it's just that the weirdness is deftly woven into songs and sounds that are much more accessible. We also hear a little Majical Cloudz (on tracks like "What's Between"), dark, crony electronic torch songs, with lushly layered vocals, dreamy gothic ballads, haunting and darkly lovely, the sound is utterly mesmerizing, and really quite gorgeous, and again, we'd never guess this was the work of a metalhead, but we're digging it a lot. And obviously, fans of other Tri Angle stuff will definitely dig, but for folks who have been thinking abut dabbling in weirder electronic music, this might be the perfect gateway record.
The lovely St. Vincent is this issue's cover star. Also, inside: producer Lee Gamble, electronic musician / vocal improviser Trevor Wishart, aQ fave krautrocker Gunter Schickert, and Moog master and field recording maven Bernie Krause takes the Invisible Jukebox test. Plus plenty more, including the usual slew of interesting reviews. Also, stuck to the cover this time 'round is another installment in The Wire's free "Wire Tapper" sampler cd series, with 20 tracks from all sorts of strange sound-makers, among 'em Alan Licht, German Army, and Kim Hiorthoy to name a few we actually recognize.
We're super into this, but avant black metallers Wolves In The Throne Room have gotten a lot of flack for this new record of theirs, which seems to be more based on them as a band, than the record itself; like Deafheaven or Liturgy, the fact that they're 'hip' and 'cool' and lots of non metalheads dig them makes them ripe for criticism from the 'troo cvlt' black metal crowd. Also that they're doing something a bit different. A LOT different, here. And we applaud it! 'Cause taken objectively, as in, if you didn't even know this was WITTR, you might find yourself pretty into it.
The deal is, there's really no black metal here, just pure spaced-out synth shimmer, completely cosmic and kinda New Agey, even. It's total Tangerine Dream worship, but with plenty of dense bombast and thick layered drones. More like Emeralds than Emperor. The sort of thing some black metal bands dabble in as "intro music", taken to the full-length extreme. And it's pretty good - the first track sounds like it could be an alternate soundtrack to Bladerunner. Haunting and ominous, lush drones and buried melodies... Elsewhere, the swaths of thick synth-iness sound almost like Salem, some beatless almost witch-housiness... There's even some Carpenter-y electro beats on "Sleeping Gold Storm". The moaning horns and other elements, in the more cacophonous crescendos, builds up the drama and edginess, but it never gets metal, nope. It's the intro to itself, instead.
Thumbs up from us! And, black metal and/or WITTR fans who aren't open-minded enough to approve of this, don't fret, it's just meant as an electronic "companion" to their last album, 2011's Celestial Lineage, not a follow-up. You still gotta keep waiting for that, but in the meantime, you could try to relax and enjoy these surprisingly spaced-out sounds. Plus, it's not like there's not precedence for stuff like this in the realms of black metal, from Neptune Towers to Alturaz... And for other folks, more into synths and drones than metal, this could easily be the first (only?) WITTR you'll ever need.
