Here's a 'what the fuck?' tape for you to sink your teeth into. Bernard C. was part of a French DIY avant-garde community which loosely banded together under the flag of Illusion Production beginning in 1979. The surrealistically charged ensemble DDAA was probably the best known entity that came out of Illusion Production. Stylistically, DDAA came across somewhere between Nurse With Wound's autodidacticism, Franco Battiato's concrete-songwriting, and Alain Neffe's idiosyncratic vision across all of his Insane Music projects; and Bernard C. is not all that far removed from that aesthetic synthesis.
Lieu Magique was Bernard's only full album, getting pressed up in 1985, sporting a broad catalogue of aesthetic frameworks all of which are typically sparse, held together by minimal electronic rhythms and loosely clattering tribal percussion that bend more towards a free-jazz mode than the ritual-industrial sound that was commonplace in the underground at the time. The vocals, often whispered or situated low in the mix, seem to harken from the sound-poetry of Dada and some of the tamer variations of the Aktionists. It's an eclectic mix for sure, but one that held nicely by the claustrophobic atmosphere and primitive use of effects / electronics. On this Sanity Muffin reissue of Lieu Magique, one of Bernard C.'s other rare recordings - the Socialist Realism single from 1981 - is tossed in at the end as bonus tracks. Limited to 100 copies!!!
A while back, we reviewed a gorgeous double lp from a New Orleans outfit called Chef Menteur, whose sound was a gorgeously blissed out psychedelic sprawl, all drugged out space rock and hazy shimmery drones, brooding psych-kraut and lush pastoral ambience. We sold a ton, and figured that maybe that just might have been it. But finally, here's a cassette-only follow up, and right out of the gate, it's another stunner. The opener is a hushed drift, all abstract Appalachia, wheezing harmonica, muted chordal thrum, sculpted feedback, like the prettiest Sunroof! track ever, a sort of spaced out raga, pulled apart into something even more ethereal and abstract, gorgeous and meditative and dreamlike. We figured that maybe the band had shifted their sound, and embraced their lighter, more ethereal side, but then in swoops the second track, with a rapid fire rhythmic melody, some almost funky bass, and some swirling electronics, quickly building into a sort of psych-funk that reminds us a lot of Swedish outfit Goat, which is definitely not a bad thing. As the song unwinds, the sound expands, adding more and more layers, extra instrumentation, eventually getting pretty dang heavy, with some swirling organ, building to a fierce finale.
"Death Wraith 2000" is a much darker and heavier beast, sounding like something on Cardinal Fuzz, murky riffage, swirling psychedelia, pounding drums, the sound shifting from dark and tribal, to wild and noisy and seriously freaked out. The rest of the tape finishes off two more heavy psych groovers, the first a lush, slow building Godspeed style space rocker, with gorgeous long stretches of moody minimalism, between the more in-the-red bombast, while the second and final track, brings the organ back in, things get droned out and trancey, a little bit noisy, a sort of garage prog that eventually mutates into a gorgeous stretch of soft noise, before one final blast of psychedelic space rock crush.
Probably super limited, we have a handful...
BACK IN STOCK!!!
First release from the oddly named Cvbe Ov Falsehood, the new project from one of the guys in aQ faves Servile Sect, and like that group, whose connection to black metal is tenuous at best, CoF deliver some seriously avant blackness, to sidelong 15 minute tracks that combine drifting drones, with symphonic fragments, layered strings, pizzicato melodies, churning blurred riffage, swirling psychedelic FX, what sounds like field recordings, the first track/side begins with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up, while in the background, the earth begins to rumble and the crust of the earth collapses into subterranean caverns. But that tectonic/Teutonic rumble, is soon smoothed out into a glorious bit of black drone drift, laced with all manner of subtle sonic fluctuations, buried industrial rhythms, the whole thing coalescing into a sort of murky kraut-psych, wreathed in dense black ambience. Soon the sound is wreathed in hiss and static, a cloud of swirling sibilant shimmer, that gradually becomes more and more caustic, before transforming into a strange staticky rhythm, churning machinelike to the end of the side.
The flipside begins with the sounds of a gamelan (we think), lush, lustrous, resonant tones, ringing out, the sky filled with the ripples of subtle overtones, mysterious samples surface from the murk, the low end becomes more active, a strangely muted melody, pulsing, super distorted, over another barely there industrial rhythm, the result a pulsing sprawl of blackened kosmische, that gradually becomes more and more abstract and tranquil, before beginning another slow build, beginning with a burbling thrum, laced with cricket like chitter, and distant keening melodies, all draped in a black sonic gauze, suddenly erupting into some serious caustic crunch, grinding and corrosive, but somehow also weirdly melodic and psychedelic, the burst brief, soon settling back into a final stretch of deep tones, and hushed ambient dronemusic.
Gorgeous packaging too. A clear tape in a black and white J-card adorned with black and white space diagrams, the whole tape then housed in a black on black embossed, textured cardstock slipcover. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Some of which include a Tarot card!
One of six new tapes from the always awesome Holodeck label out of Austin, Texas is a double album of intrepid dancefloor excursions divided into day and night moods. Dylan Cameron is the engineering mastermind behind most releases of the Austin underground, including Troller and Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as most of the Holodeck catalog, but on Samsara, he brilliantly displays a knack for crafting rhythm and nuance. The A side, Causes, is all big four-on-the-floor house music jams full of bubbling acid synth textures and diva-ish vocal samples hearkening back to the Hacienda sound from the mid-to late-eighties with a more refined modern sense of compositional detail that one might find on Kompakt or Hot Flush.
The B side, Conditions, is a suite of more late night, two-step grooves that have a more ambient dub-step feel. The vocal samples are more filtered and hazy. The mood more pensive and dark, like an uptempo Burial, but a nice coming down counterpoint to the more high-energy A side. Also features a remix of an unreleased Troller song. Limited!
Another warped export from the weird and wonderful wilds of Finland, this one in the form of psychedelic sludgelords EXO, who are a three piece, two bass players and a drummer, and thus deliver a punishing wall of sound, all dense low end dirgey, this churning dual-bassed low end onslaught held together by some dense drum pound. And as you might imagine, with two basses, and being mostly instrumental, EXO, traffic in a sort of tranced out riff repetition minimalism that's hypnotic, cyclical, and churning. When the vocals do surface, they're some sort of garbled underwater demonic burblings, which adds a sort of blackened, demonic vibe to the proceedings. Otherwise, the music itself is equal parts OM, Godheadsilo, the Melvins, that sort of murky, super distorted sludge, but more econo, minimal not maximal. Think Dutch instru-metal outfit Gore, and you're definitely in the ballpark. It's psychedelic and spacey at times, but for the most part, EXO are masters of the downtuned, low end doom-dirge trance, the coolest moments being when the two basses deviate, one going high, the other low, sometimes obviously, as if one was playing some sort of lead, but more often, just creating strange harmonies, octaves, thirds, whatever, but the result is a gorgeous headfucking dissonance, that suits EXO's lumbering, monolithic pummel. Fans of all thing slow and low, check this out for sure.
One of several new tapes on this week's list from local label Acephale Winter Productions, and another group new to us despite, as the title explains, having been around for a more than a decade, this tape being a sort of best of from this Canadian horde. And seeing as it's a best of, drawn from multiple releases, spread out over years, the sound, and sound quality varies greatly, but we have to say, we're digging pretty much all of it. The opener is furious drum machine driven slab of epic black metal, with a distinctly post-BM vibe, soaring and epic, with chiming guitars, the production lush and HEAVY, some cool weird breakdowns too with woozy, fretless sounding bass, and strange percussion, some foresty folk here and there, but for the most part, it's just epic and majestic, frosty, wintry black buzz. But the second track is totally different, way more lo-fi, and super symphonic, gnarled black buzz, and crumbling distortion wedded, to majestic orchestral pomp, with some classic metal chug, more weird bass, and some serious shreddery, we almost like this even more than the first track. And FF continues to confound, the third track sounding like a slightly more lo-fi Dimmu Borgir, retaining that symphonic sound, but adding dramatic spoken word, swirling synths, the results are pretty fantastic. From there on out, it seems like we're digging deep, with some tracks sounding like demos, super lo-fi, but with the same aspirations of metallic grandeur, which translates pretty well, even with the obvious recording limitations, the band also delving into blackened doom, as well as some sonic surprises like "Riding In The North", that seems to channel Borknagar, plenty of midtempo black buzz, but with dramatic piano, and some gothy crooned clean vocals, before the tape finishes off with two blasts of frosty black grimnity, one with some almost Queen sounding harmonized leads!! Killer stuff, that will definitely have us tracking down some of FF's full lengths!
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Guessing these won't be around for long...
For a band who existed so briefly, with only handful of live performances, and a single record to their name, San Francisco's late great black metal masterminds Weakling cast a mighty long shadow. Many consider their Dead As Dreams debut/swansong to be one of the best US black metal records EVER, and hell, who are we to argue. Andee's tUMULt label put it out, after all. It's also inspired at least three tributes/homages that we can think of, Jabladav's weirdo worshipful Dead As Duck album, then there's the band Dead As Dreams, and now there's this two song tape from Texas/Oregon black metal outfit Grst, entitled Fire Therein, on which the trio tackle two Weakling tracks, "Cut Their Grain And Place Fire Therein" and "Dead As Dreams". And on first listen, these guys do a pretty good Weakling, especially the anguished wailed shrieking vokills, the music itself is a lot more polished and less raw than the original, the organ/synth way higher in the mix, the drums too, it sounds like they've added some subtle twisted of their own, but it's obviously a pretty reverential homage, and for anyone who loves the original, which should be all of you, it's pretty cool to hear someone else's interpretation, and the fact that it still sounds so good, most definitely speaks to the power, the energy, and the uniqueness of the original. Same with "Dead As Dreams", a song we've loved so much for so long, that even hearing an entirely different version, the minute we hear that riff, that instantly recognizable melody, it gives us chills, and again, hearing a different version/interpretation, gives us new perspective, and makes us want to dig into the original all over again. Which is pretty much everything you want from a tribute/cover/homage...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. With cool pitch perfect Dead As Dreams styled cover art.
It's been over 4 years since we last heard from these guys, having raved about a stunningly handcrafted cd release back in 2010. Their sound, at the time, described as "black rituals for the vastness-appreciative", which essentially amounted to haunting black ambience and dark, minimal dronescapery, and their M.O. hasn't changed too much on this new tape via local label Black Horizons. Three tacks of creeping sonic malevolence, and brooding sinister soundscapes, if anything, their sound has developed into something a bit more industrial, the opener all dark chimes and shimmering metallics, pointalist piano and soft swirls of FX, spoken word vocals, and motorik percussion, the black ambience seemingly blossoming into a sort of death industrial, a lumbering gloom rock, slowed way down, flecked with moaning horns, and thick rumbling bass, distorted synth blurt, smears of chordal shimmer, giving way to something almost like black jazz, a soft noise drenched drift that unfurls like a black fog, anchored by spare percussion, and twisted fractured anti-rhythms, culminating in the hazy, dreamy closer, a swath of distorted thrum, draped over more spoken word, glacial riffage, spread out into blurred drones, before letting all the distortion, grit and grim wash away, leaving just a stretch of hushed shimmer, woozy minimal buzz, and terrifying whispers, a gauzy, darkly psychedelic finale, a slow build/fade blackened, mysterious and otherworldly. Whew.
Like all Black Horizons release, the packaging is exquisite, a die cut six panel J-card, silver metallic ink on matte black, black and silver cassettes, and of course EXTREMELY LIMITED, only 100 COPIES!!
Somewhere, an old T-shirt from Illusion Of Safety exists (the last we saw was affixed to Sigtryggur from Stillupsteypa some 10 years ago) with a deadpan/ironic catch-phrase "Illusion Of Safety gives you that soaring feeling" next to an image of a man tumbling headfirst out of a skyscraper window. Such a calculated juxtaposition of word and image was emblematic of the '80s art world (e.g. Barbara Kruger), often speaking to the underbelly of callousness, cruelty, violence and general amorality within consumerist society. Outside of this bold piece of iconography, Illusion Of Safety has operated within a more liminal state of mysteriousness through signifier and meaning. Even in their most placid albums of soft-focus ambience, the specter of some unknowable threat lurks in the background. More common in the Illusion Of Safety catalogue is an iron-fisted grasp of that sense of foreboding and dread through psychologically tense sound design. Over three decades in existence, this Chicago based project has been whittled down to its core member Dan Burke - with a few comrades-in-arms joining him occasionally - and is probably the longest running American industrial project, having produced a very impressive body of work. The 2014 album Surrender fits comfortably next to some of the masterpieces of the IOS back catalogue (e.g. Cancer, In Session, Historical, etc.) through the trademarked juxtaposition of noxious frequencies snaking in and out of harmonic phase patterns only to snap out of existence with a razor-cut edit into an electrical burst of tesla coil noise (for example). Disjointed rhythms, mediated collages, decontextualized field recordings, and psychoacoustic phrases map this album with incredible control and precision. Illusion Of Safety proves once again that they are one of the greats of industrial culture. Grab this album before it disappears, the pro-duplicated cd-r is limited to just 100 copies. Same for the cassette.
Warner Jepson was one of the pioneering electronic composers of the 1960s, working in the San Francisco Tape Music Center and later at the shortlived organization called National Center for Experiments in Television (seriously, there was such a place!). Through both of these small think-tanks, Jepson had the good fortune to work with an incredible amount of early electronics, most notably the Buchla synthesizer. Despite some choice commissions and some friends in high places, Jepson's explorations with electronics only amounted to one proper album - the avant-garde electronic Totentanz recorded as a score for the San Francisco Ballet in 1967. The album was originally pressed up in an edition of 300 copies and sold almost entirely at the stagings of that particular ballet. Nonetheless, Jepson purported to have hundreds of hours of material on cassette that he made during his heyday in the '60s and '70s.
The story behind this cassette's discovery and release is a pretty good one too, as Mr. Sanity Muffin himself was trawling through the cassette bins at Urban Ore - a storied recycling and junk shop located on the industrial outskirts of Berkeley, California, and spied the name Warner Jepson handscrawled on the spine of a tape next to the random home dubbed tapes of REO Speedwagon, Boston, and Carole King albums. The tape turned out to be one of those lost Jepson recordings, and Sanity Muffin has seen fit to release this cassette exactly as it was found. One of the many commissions on Jepson's resume was for the David William's installation Tullian. No idea really what that was, or if this is excerpted music for that piece, or if the Tullian Beach Bum was just a riff on that title. But the sounds within are a delirious polyphony of semi-rhythmic, semi-melodic squiggles across the Buchla with echoing patterns at various timbers, reverberations, and pitches swirling throughout the sound design. There are plenty of similarities in the painterly serialist and programmatic approaches that were commonplace in the high-minded works of academic composers from the mid-20th century, all mapped out on the Buchla and tape machine. But there's also plenty of wide-eyed sci-fi expansiveness through zoner-patterned synths that have all of the awe of a Jovian sunrise seen for the first time by human eyes. Fans of Daphne Oram and Tod Dockstader will have a field day with this stuff.
The Northwest's harshest militaristic horde returns with this cassette-only collection: five tracks (including three covers!) of hateful in-the-red black metal, grim neo-folk and crumbling black ambience. Opening ominously with an eerie choral wail, before launching into an overwhelmingly noisy cover of Emperor's "Ye Entrancemperium" (complete with an actual sample of the original's spoken word intro), dragging this classic regal monument of symphonic black metal into the realms of clattering lo-fi, taking a song that was already labyrinthian and opaque and plunging it into even murkier, more impenetrable depths. "Sleep Is The Enemy" is by contrast simpler, but that's not to imply it's any easier of a ride - opening with the foreboding ticking and chiming of some monstrous clock before emerging as a massive tuneless dirge that shifts into a wall of frantic blasts, buried subliminal growls and ghostly breathy whispers, but always returning to the dreamy surreal horror of that looming haunted chime. L'Acephale's take on Darkthrone's "As Flittermice As Satans Spys" (easily one of the best/weirdest BM song titles ever) is the biggest departure here - building this timeless piece of simplistic shadowy black metal into a grim neo-folk march, complete with the rapid strum of a mandolin, cracking militaristic thuds and inhuman howling. "Passing Into Sleep" is an atmospheric wash of moss-flecked black ambience. The single deathly groaning note of a haunted piano tolls endlessly underneath a wall of droning loneliness, creaking and shifting under the weight of its distant feedback and echo drenched operatic vocals. Closing out the proceedings is a reworking of Current 93's "Let Us Go To The Rose" (here translated into the French "Allons Vior Si La Rose"), taking the sparse folk melodies of the original and letting them drift hazily over a minimal, mid-paced, very Burzum-esque drum beat, before morphing into a churning trance of grinding tremolo guitars and furious blasts. And as this is being put out by Black Horizons it goes without saying that the packaging is minimal and beautiful, even including a miniature black and silver printed poster, incorporating the original artwork from Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger into an abstract surreal collage.
These two most recent release from Ukrainian one man black metal band had us seriously confused. We originally reviewed the OTHER one that wasn't out yet, thinking it was this one, then did properly review that one, and are now finally reviewing THIS one, a 4 song, 20 minute ep that was originally released as a super limited lp on Prison Tatt records. Not surprising we'd be confused, as we mentioned in out other review of the OTHER new Moloch tape, these two come on the heels of over ONE HUNDRED releases! And yet, every time we hear something new, we immediately remember why we've always dug Moloch so much, and Depressive Black Metal Plague is no different, a loping, dirgey, depressive black metal that is thick with crumbling buzz, primitive stumbling drumming, sung/spoken vocals, the first track a slo-mo creep, that lumbers along before the sound grows gradually more and more noisy and buzzy, building to an almost psychedelic blackened squall before the guitars and drums drift away, leaving just the bass to wind down to the end. Somehow the second track cranks up the distortion even more, thick swirls of blown out crumbling buzz, the vocals too, and anguished wail way up in the mix, those two elements almost entirely obscuring the haphazard drumming below, harsh and lo-fi, grim and melancholically black, that sound oozing into the next track, droned out and trancey, the biggest sonic shift coming in the final track, which sounds almost freeform by comparison, the guitars cranked and in-the-red, the drums total free jazz freakout mode, a dense dizzying blast of black buzz dirgery, before everything drops out, leaving the final few minutes to just stately synths, and mournful melodies.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
A few lists back, we mistakenly reviewed THIS Moloch tape, instead of the one we actually had in stock (Depressive Black Metal Plague), even though this one had not officially been released. We'll review THAT one next time, but for now, Verwustung is in fact finally out! If you were one of the few folks who ordered the other one, based on the wrong review, but still dug it, you're probably gonna want this one too. For everyone else, here's the RIGHT review for this, the latest from this Ukrainian one man black metal / black ambient project, and while we knew he had tons of releases, it's still hard to believe this is in fact his TWELVTH full length, out of almost NINETY (!!!) releases since 2004 (!!!!). Number twelve, Verwustung, is one of the harshest and heaviest things we've heard from Moloch, grim and brutal, anguished and minor key, the sound raw and fierce, the guitars buzzsaw black, pounding drumming, and some seriously intense vokills, equal parts guttural demonic growl and hysterical shriek, the vibe still darkly depressive, but unlike past records, that depressiveness is on display here mostly in mood and vibe, with the music itself furious and frenzied, relentless and intense, with the sound only occasionally slipping into doomy miserablism, and here and there, exploding into full on noise drenched chaos, that sounds surprisingly psychedelic. But really, Verwustung is just, raw, pure, true, grim Ukrainian black metal, the very essence of cult one man BM, the sound infused mysterious black energy, which is reflected in the opening and closing tracks as well, displaying the other side of Moloch's sound, both haunting, droning, moody and minimal sprawls of black ambient drift...
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Probably the last we'll ever see...
Only got a tiny handful of these, but couldn't pass up on a new project from aQ pal Mick Barr (Krallice, Oldest, Orthrelm, Ocrilim, etc.), who is teamed up here with former DC hardcore kid and current NYX avant gardist Chuck Bettis (credited here with "Throat + Electronics"), so you can probably imagine a Mick Barr driven duo of guitar and electronics and 'throat' won't be any sort of easy listening, and guess what? It doesn't take much more than a few seconds for that to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. That said, these two, while kicking up a serious skree, a wall of keening, glitched out noise, do manage to work the sound into something weirdly listenable, with Barr doing his super intense, frenzied almost black metal riffing, sheets of fast picked high end unfurl into tense sprawls of upper register drone, swooping into more 'traditional' riffage' before splintering into more WTF shrieking shreddery again. Bettis more than holds his own, wrapped Barr's guitar in dense swirling clouds of crumbling distortion, woozy low end thrum, wild squelches and glitches, electronic squiggles and malfunctioning electronic curlicues, heaving robotic bloops and bleeps, layers of analog blorp, percussive thumps and dense tangles of grinding psychedelic noise, Bettis' vocals woven into the roiling backdrop, occasionally leaping to the fore, and slipping back into harDCore howl mode, transforming the sound into some muscly alien sci-fi noise-punk, or something. Black metal shrieks buried beneath avalanches of furiously roiling riffage, the vibe weirdly heavy and almost metallic, but simultaneously abstract and free form, black noise, power electronics, a super twisted, skull caving, ear shredding, metallic psychedelic noise juggernaut, that pounds and pummels, drones and grinds, dense and intense, and kinda fucking awesome! Definitely recommended for the iron eared, long time Barr fans will feel right at home, and noiseniks might dig Barr and Bettis' warped strain of noise, which while right on the edge of harsh noise, remains textured and dynamic, subtly melodic, like some super intense avant metal record, pulled apart, reassembled into strange shapes and then melted down into a swirling pool of caustic blackened sonic crush. Super cool. And SUPER limited... TO JUST 66 COPIES!!!!!
We were first turned on to Poison Ring by the guys in Sutekh Hexen, and managed to meet the man responsible on a recent trip to Seattle. We were initially not sure what to expect. The tape packaging, while beautiful, evokes something else entirely, something maybe more gothic, and Mr. Poison Ring himself is quite elven, in appearance and attire, but instead of some gothic renn faire flutter, we were treated to something much more intense, dark and atmospheric, a hazy, faded landscape of woozy soft focus murk and buried melodies, a sound that definitely had us thinking of Philip Jeck and The Caretaker and Tim Hecker. While it's impossible to tell exactly what's producing these ghostly sounds, it does sound like a handful of dusty old turntables, spinning lazily in some giant abandoned ballroom, a series of gauzy melodies, and slowed down samples, layered and woven into softly undulating blurs, melancholy and mournful, imbued with a introspective otherworldliness, the perfect haunting lullaby for nights beneath pitch black skies, devoid of stars, a gorgeously abject drift into some other/underworld, laced with moments both sinister and ominous, but those moments seem to always eventually unwind, the sound eventually and inevitably diffusing into another stretch of blessed out somnambulant ambience.
On some of the tracks, the source does seem to be obviously old records and broken down turntables, and yet, instead of taking away from the mystery, it simply adds more color and depth, often some sort of disembodied rhythm, reminding us again of Jeck, but also Strotter Inst, especially in the stretches anchored by electronic squelches and distorted pulses, like some alien, haunted house music, an industrial creep that manages to evoke a strange tension, while still remaining otherworldly and lovely. The flipside spends much of it's time lysergically loping through fields of murk and pitch shifted melody, an achingly wistful sprawl of dreamdirges and waking sonic feverdreams.
Housed in a beautiful handmade slipcover/sleeve, with a built in mini booklet, printed on vellum, each copy hand numbered, LIMITED TO 89 COPIES!!
A while back we made the record World, by Aussie noise rock / shoegaze outfit The Bunyip Moon, our Record Of the Week, a gloriously blown out, chaotic sonic gem, that even now we have trouble keeping in stock. So were were psyched to discover that one of the guys from The Bunyip Moon had a new solo record, a tape in fact, under the name Pronoun, and like World, it's weird and wonderful.
But UN-like World, Faux is not all bombastic noisiness and buried blown out melodies, instead, it's a darkly moody, lush, almost cinematic creep, right from the get-go, we're sucked into some mysterious soundworld, that to our eras exists right between the epic with house of Salem, and the soundtracky synth bombast of M83. So if that sounds good to you (and why the heck wouldn't it?!), then there's much to dig here.
The opener unfurls as a brooding plod, all primitive drum machine, over processed strum and thrum, before majestic synths swoop in, faux strings, the whole thing epic and stirring, but with just the right amount of distortion and noise, gristly, and staticky, and distorted and psychedelic, but even at it's most explosive, it's still lilting and lovely, it's a tough one to describe for sure, but it's pretty stirring stuff.
The whole record expands from that sound, with some of the tracks a bit more garbled and chaotic, darkly noisy and murky, sounding a bit like a way more abrasive Caretaker (which is most definitely a good thing), while others, slip into a more kosmische haze, all swirling chordal thrum and deep, lustrous sonic swells, and on at least one track, the sound slips into some strange, tripped out avant shoegaze new wave, although the best moments of course are when those disparate sides collide, which they do often, resulting in blissful noisiness, and noisy dreaminess in equal measure, culminating in the strangely gristly garble of crunched static and crumbling decaying distortion of the closer, which ditches pretty much all poppiness in favor of a strange sprawling field of grinding textures, and the sporadic sputter of alien transmissions from the ether.
Fantastic, and so so so recommended. The packaging is pretty ace too, totally over the top. The tape housed in a sleeve, housed in a second embossed outer sleeve, then housed in yet ANOTHER sleeve, hand silkscreened and ink splattered, a weighty arts/sound object, LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered. Includes a download code too...
We at aQ are big fans of Brooklyn-based psych-splorers Rhyton (made their Thrill Jockey debut a Record Of The Week in fact) and Rhyton it seems are fans of us too it seems, since they were nice enough to dub us an exclusive limited supply of a new cassette of theirs, originally something they made only for merch sales on a recent European tour. aQ is the only store carrying this release, and we only have 20 copies, that's it forever!
Unity Bailout is 30 minutes, four tracks, of live and rehearsal recordings, the sort of spacey, druggy, drifting jams we expect from these guys (members of No Neck Blues Band and Psychic Ills, by the way). The tape starts off with the 12 minute "Mold Channel", a sprightly, trippy-hippie improv session of head-nodding abstract humid burble all right. Then the darker, dronier "At Endless Buggy Pt. Alpha" begins, featuring more militant marching drum beats and skree-ier guitarwork. Flip the tape and that piece continues into "Pt. Beta", adding some more mumbled, distorted vox, the guitar (and electric saz?) lines getting more sinuous and scrambled, noise and volume building, that buggy of theirs heading down a bumpy road indeed, losing a wheel or two along the way! Such a style of caveman krauty damaged jam is in full effect on the tape's final track too, the almost ten-minute long "In Silent One", even louder and heavier and kinda Haino-esque, with fuzzy feedback guitar carving whale-calls through the murk, propelled by steady drum splatter. It gets pretty freaky, satisfyingly so, 'specially if you like the idea of Burnt Hills or Doktor Kettu jamming on some almost unrecognizable Dick Dale surf licks or something like that. The pulsating moldy walls of Rhyton's presumably subterranean practice space sure absorbed a lot of intense stoner vibes during the recording of this tape. Thanks, Rhyton, for letting us in.
The tape's covers are hand stamped metallic ink on black paper.
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.
Don't really buy that Star Turbine's sound is of "a new age nature" as the press release claims, even as that same statement qualifies this Scandinavian duo as being rather noisy and concrete. Much of the cassette culture that spawned releases such as this some 30 years ago was opposed to or at least was dubious of the propensity of the late '70s / early '80s new age movement to navel gaze. Instead projects like Zoviet France, Cranioclast, or even Psychic TV used the notions of audio hypnosis and trance inducing musics to craft metaphors which spoke against systems of control. Sure the end results may encourage a liberation of the self, but the new age movement's self-identification and self-determination has been argued to have given rise to Thatcher and Reagan era politics. Lest we launch into a PhD thesis on cosmology, aquarian religions, and their impacts on culture and politics, Star Turbine ain't new age, not even in the coying retro pastiche idioms tossed out by NNA Tapes and Not Not Fun. Nope, this is a grimy and dirty cassette of what once might have been deep-space transmissions and radiophonic impressionism but has gone through so many iterations from shitty cassette to microcassette and then back to mangled cassette that the murky drones speak of oil-stained / shit-strewn wastelands. At times, Star Turbine's amalgams of spluttering tape noise and tarnished ambience gets downright beautiful, but those sounds are are seen through the lens of decay and not that of a crystal. Nicely done boys, but get your metaphors right next time. Limited to 100 copies and printed on opalescent paper as is the brand standard for Black Horizons.
Super limited tape from these two noisy Texas outfits. Haints deliver some seriously sick, feedback drenched noise rock pummel, all downtuned dirgery laced with distorto sung/spoken vox, over rib cage rattling, bass-heavy churn, some weird samples too. Reminds us of that classic pigfuck sound, the sort of thing we we're digging from our favorite bands back in the day, a la Homestead / AmRep records...
Sure are a pretty good match, with the same basic template, but their sound is a bit less noisy and knuckle draggy, more druggy and droney, an old school dirge/noise rock but spaced out, with some Sonic Youth-y guitar noise, shards of feedback, and chiming chords. All wrapped around some reverb heavy, distorted mumble mouthed vocals. Plenty noisy, but with loads of spaced out echoey slow burn psychedelic jammage, swaggery, a little bit swampy, a twisted noise rock / psych-blooz hybrid that sounds a lot like some lost Aussie post punk combo. Killer stuff from both bands. And Sur has another tape on Sleeping Giant Glossolalia which we'll review soon too...
The debut demo from these East Bay doomlords gets a deluxe vinyl reissue, and will be the first time most folks get an earful of Swamp Witch, and in a seriously overpopulated scene, SW definitely do their own thing, in fact, from the first few seconds, we were a bit thrown off, cuz the vibe was way more stonery and classic metal, not sludgey or really even all that doomy, we were ready for some soaring eighties style metal vocals to swoop in, they definitely would have fit, but before that can happen, the song shifts gears and slows to a lurching crawl, accompanied by some demonic vokill bellows, some serious stonery sludge, but then that opening riff resurfaces, and adds some serious melody to the proceedings, this time with added sort-of-leads, but it's what keeps this from being just another slab of boring doom, and it's that push and pull that makes the track so good, the band easily shifting from that lurching crawl, to the more propulsive classic metal rocking and back again, the cool thing being that you can almost feel the pull of the opposing sound the whole time, the sludge-y parts sound like they desperately wanna explode into melodic metal, and the melodic metal parts feel like they're on the edge of being sucked into the black tarpit dirge of the sludge parts. Then at the end it gets sort of psychedelic, with some crazy, sorta shrieked vocals. Such a killer track, definitely worth the price of admission right there. Then there's the second track, which is a bit more traditionally stonery sludge, but with a KILLER main riff, that again, slows down to an absolute slo-mo creep, a chugging, churning crawl, and so it goes again, the band lurching from stonery dirge to creepy crawl, finally culminating in an outro that's all swirling psychedelic feedback.
The sidelong flipside is a doozy, the brooding title track takes ages to get revved up, building lots of tension, the vibe super cinematic, all swirling feedback, and groaning bass rumble, keening melodies, all blurred into smeary swaths of mournful minor key sound, and when the song kicks in, it's MASSIVE, so heavy and blown out, some seriously brutal ultra doom crush, the sound remaining mostly entrenched in a tarpit dirge, the variations this time for the most time arrangement wise, some mathy chugging, a slightly more midtempo, groovy stretch, with some killer psychedelic guitars, which eventually bliss out into another feedback drenched guitardrone finale.
So killer. Not sure how we haven't heard these guys before now.
And if these three tracks are still somehow not sludgey enough for you, do some searching on the internet, and you can find a killer 'chopped & screwed' version, which finds the whole thing slowed way down, fucked with, looped and layered, stuttery and staggery, replete with weird scratching and DJ manipulations, as well as woozy, pitch shifted DJ Screw like vocals. Wish they would have pressed up an extra lp and included this version too...
Super nice packaging, a heavy gatefold sleeve, with a little baggie with two buttons, the lps pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Also includes a poster, a patch and a download code!
No, this is not the soundtrack to the George Lucas film THX1138; this is a project called THX113 which presumably is a quartet of unknown characters who issued a private pressing of nocturnally painted quasi-songs and tape-loop driven abstractions back in 1980. There's no documentation of the existence of the private pressing in question, nor are any citations that we can find of the members of THX113 doing anything hither or yon. So, we'll state our skepticism and agnosticism as to the plausibility of this actually being of the era. Eh, there are worse problems to have. If we are to believe the backstory, then we could easily imagine this quartet developing in the late '70s from an electronic music class at some sodden community college in the cornfields of Iowa where the earnest and bearded professor proclaimed Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain as the pinnacle of achievement for tape music with Morton Subotnik's Silver Apples On The Moon holding the same title in terms of pure electronic composition. The advent of punk, new wave, and no wave may have been irrelevant to this imagined professor; but to the young men of THX113, the Promethean spark of DIY recording and raw expressionism was already lit inside their collective heads. Armed with a primitive knowledge of electronics, tape loop techniques, and even a small ability to play guitar and bass, THX113 crafted nine untitled tracks of ghostly loops for jangled 12-string guitar, sonar-pulse synth tones, sunbleached electronics that allude to an Ash Ra Tempel album degraded over multiple generations of home copies upon copies, and even some of the hand-percussion hippie-dom of Woo. A weird one for sure! Limited to 100 copies!!!!
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This Chilean band holds the distinction of being the first band to get an Aquarius CASSETTE Of The Week award. Their Bestias Solares tape on Black Horizons so blew everyone here away, we couldn't not make it thus. And we later reviewed their double cd on Beta-Lactam Ring too, both of those records displaying this strange group's sound, a sound which found us describing the group, not at all succinctly, as an "occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra". That's a pretty crazy and over the top description, but the this is a pretty crazy, over the top outfit, and we're happy to report, that they haven't gotten any less crazy this time around, in fact, to these ears, they keep getting weirder and weirder. The brief opener is all chanted monk-like vocal harmonies wrapped in warped, woozy electronics, hand-clappy drum machines, witchy female vocals, garbled speaking in tongues, strange FX, and while you might think it was just a weird intro, the next song continues down into the sonic rabbit hole, murky bass squelch, a pulsing almost techno beat, more swirling electronics, grunted demonic vocals, accompanying atonal piano pound, that piano exploding into wild psychedelic squiggles, while the rest of the track sounds submerged in fields of static, the result is a sort of warped, woozy, blackened, electro avant techno chamber music? Or something. It's sort of gothic, definitely freaky and fucked up, sort of electronic, whatever it is, we dig it, a LOT!
The third track is a creaking, crumbling drone, that sounds like it could be some lost Nurse With Wound outtake, all deep dirge-y tectonic thrum, sounds like recordings of motorcycles or moaning docks, blurred into dense sonic swells, shot through with distant minor key melodies, dark and meditative, and a bit haunting as well. And finally, things finish off with another brief blast of WTF weirdness, deep drone-y thrum, under spacey synths, plucked pizzicato melodies, swirling wind like whirs, bizarre glitchy percussion, and near the end, primitive drum machine, and glimmering fields of sci-fi planetarium show electronics. So twisted. And so good.
And like all Black Horzions tapes, super fancy packaging, four panel J-card, offset silver printing on bronze metallic paper, purple tapes, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Second label sampler from Hanged Man, and like the first it's chock full of twisted noisiness, spaced out ambience and everything in between. Featuring a handful of names we know (Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Knifecream, Crystal Hell Pool, Brain Fruit) and a bunch we don't: HT Manor, WaMu, Unnatural Ways, Forrest Friends, Overcasting, Egregor and a bunch of others. If you're familiar with the Hanged Man label, or some of the names above, you have an idea of what to expect, or maybe you don't: grim grinding black buzz, murky malevolent shimmer, dreamy kosmische drift, psychedelic electro-kraut, shrieking chaotic noise rock, skittery free jazz that transforms into dirgy metallic math rock, field recording flecked ambient blacknoise, gorgeously crooned minimal songsmithery, cinematic pianoscapes, twangy campfire desert folk, modern minimal shimmer, grim buzzing lo-fi black metal and more more more.
Fantastically packaged, a fancy printed vellum insert inside a printed J-card, with a song tile insert as well, the whole thing housed in a hand printed metallic card stock slipcase. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
