When the pioneers of techno began laying down their tracks in the mid '80s, the futurist sound of Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson had little to do with the ideals and / or decline of the Detroit automotive industry. The sleek, motorik tracks were reflective of cultural dialogue with German electronics in parallel with a distinct African American science fiction emphasizing racial and class-based tensions. Detroit Techno's incredibly long shelf-life results from the mirage of club culture that emphasizes the new and the innovative while recycling the dominant lexicon of whumped basskicks, ecstatic melodies, electronic minimalism, etc. Those dudes did it first back in 1987 and it still sounds bad-ass. Siobhan (nee Travis Galloway) hails from Detroit and creates his own fucked / Goth-jam techno that has no discernible connection to the prevailing aesthetic of Detroit Techno. These crunchy, lo-fi tracks have none of the sleek production tricks from those Detroit elder statesmen, rather Siobhan takes a guttural, rock approach to production, compressing the fuck out of everything, cranking the tracks into the red, and probably even recording onto tape. One gets the sense that he could be jamming these tracks in an empty warehouse (or nearly empty with a couple of wasted goth-girls headnodding alone this corners) through a daisy chain of guitar amps and recording the result through a single microphone. As rough as that sounds, he's a damn fine programmer - squelchy acid percolations that would make Richard James blush, ghostly melodies channeled from Cold Cave, and potent industrially minded drum programming akin to mid-'80s Ministry, 242, Skinny Puppy, etc. One of our favorite cassettes in recent memory, and it makes for a great introduction to a hitherto unknown musician.
In our quest for the heaviest, trippiest, sludgiest, most psychedelic doom ever, we thought we had finally found the holy grail, in the form of UK outfit Bong. No beating around the psychedelic stoner doom bush, no 'cosmic whatever' or 'high priests of blah blah blah', no, Bong got right to the heart of it, naming themselves after the very relic that truly must have inspired most of the bands we love. We can almost imagine a massive bong, painted gold and surrounded by demonic seraphim, hanging above an altar in some sort of alternate universe cathedral, where all of our beloved groups worship, attaining divine inspiration, delivered to us in the form of drug soaked, tripped out ultra heavy sonic blissouts. But one thing we forgot to consider, one element that could, and very likely would, trump the simple bong, one thing that would elevate that essential and beloved stoner relic to the next level, more cosmic than earthbound, an implement derived to catapult the group, and the group's listeners to the heart of the sun, taking the legacy of all the came before, from Hawkwind to Bong, from Pink Floyd to Bongzilla, and sending them into space. It worked for Jason Voorhees (Jason X is INSANE), and it works for these Aussie doomlords, the awesomely named SPACE BONG, whose name promises extreme spaced out psychedelic heaviness, and most definitely delivers!
But, while you might be expecting, dirgey, abject, Bunker-like sludge, or even droned out Bong like psychedelia, the truth is Space Bong land somewhere inbetween, adding a healthy does of melody, their sound beholden to classic doom, as much as newer, weirder, slower stuff. Four loooooooong tracks, the shortest 12 minutes plus the longest over 21 minutes. The sound is massive, downtuned guitars, pounding drums, dueling vocals, one a demonic bellow, the other a Khanate like shriek, and while the ingredients aren't all that different than other doom outfits, it's what they do with it that counts. The opener, begins with a weird ambient intro before launching into a glorious sprawl of plodding slo-mo crush, then out of nowhere, super catchy guitar harmonies suddenly surface, soaring over the churning chug below, and then dissipate, leaving a field of pulsing feedback over tribal drumming, weirdly hypnotic and tranced out, and when the vocals come in, the result is some sort of super tripped out avant abstract psychedelic doom drift, which instead of slipping back into the doom that started things off, locks into a weird droned out deathmarch chugscape, before finally exploding into a final blast of furious psych doom.
And the thing is, it's not all doom in Space Bong land, the second track is downright rocking, almost stonery in fact, a killer main riff, swaggery and snarly, but it's really just a feint, cuz a minute later, the song collapses into another stretch of feedback drenched glacial creep, this time, buzz heavy bass drives the woozy churn, the sound super dynamic, lots of starts and stops, weird stretches of tranced out guitars, bursts of feedback, drones galore, not to mention some psychedelic noise, some glitched out ambience, processed vox, and all sorts of other chaotic noise woven into Space Bong's twisted druggy doom.
And we're only halfway through! The second half of the record plays out similarly, big bombastic drumming, some seriously classic metal sounding riffing, more harmonized guitars, wild squalls of keening feedback, fields of grinding guitar noise, super tripped out near ambient dronescapes, stretches of twisted mathiness, and a little bit of groove here and there, the closer displaying some seriously Sabbathy swing, and some killer psychedelic leads, and a super crazy catchy almost NWOBHM sounding final few minutes, albeit on the tail end of some seriously extreme dirge/sludge crush.
Random copies will come with a Space Bong patch!
Spoon records are a curious thing in this day and age. Drop any given Spoon record onto an iPod and hit shuffle on said device; each of Spoon's songs will just disappear without their neighbors to act as buffer, buttress, or whatever it is that makes them work so well. It's not that Spoon has ever constructed meta-narratives or long-form mythologies within their albums; they peddle in the brevity of a perfect short story. Get in, get out, get on it with. Girls Can Tell (2001) was arguably the best example of this aspect to Spoon, though pretty much any of their albums (minus a couple of swarthy tracks on Gimme Fiction) would follow this rule of thumb. As has been restated elsewhere by everyone, Spoon took a well needed break following their 2010 album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga; and the band holed up in a studio with Dave Fridmann (of Flaming Lips production fame) and luxury-brand caliber producer Joe Chiccarelli. It's gotta be said that the songs that Spoon write are the songs that Spoon are ALWAYS gonna write: smart-ass lyrics with world-weary earnestness gracing some impeccable post-power-pop hooks and laced upon those tautly jangled / white-boy swaggering grooves. Fridmann and Chiccarelli roll up their sleeves and give these tracks much more polish than has ever been realized on a Spoon album. It's enough to be noticeable, but not enough to be fussy or get in the way of Spoon's bare simplicity. Like every other album by Spoon, They Want My Soul succeeds in the art of bravado expressed through all the little things that make a perfect pop song.
Ikuus is the full length debut from this one man experimental black metal 'band' from Finland, although calling it black metal might be a stretch, cuz like much of the black metal from Finland, Suruni's sound is beholden to so much more than blast and buzz, in fact, the majority of the record is spent drifting, jangling, creepy, swirling, it's definitely raw and lo-fi, and the vibe is haunting and mysterious, but it's more a sort of stumbling avant gloom rock, with plenty of clean guitars, distorted drumming, and when the buzz does come in, like on the opener, it doesn't so much transform the sound into something blacker, as add more moodiness, the buzz more diffuse and atmospheric, the sound lumbering back and forth between a spidery almost Slint-like lope (right down to the whispered vocals), to something more distorted and blown out, replete with some aching, almost bluesy leads, and the vocals, when they finally do come in, a distant howl, all the sounds blurring and bleeding into a glorious, almost psychedelic and chaotic whole. And that's just the first track. If we had to whip up some band math, we might take Varghkoghargasmal's 'wooden metal' and the slow doomed out experimentation of another Finnish favorite of ours Opium Warlords, but then with some twisted poppy jangle, a la Circle Of Ouroborus, and even some metalgaze, as much of this does have that sort of sun dappled, blissed out vibe, not to mention samples and field recordings.
The second track is another hushed sprawl of mesmerizing minimalism, all simple clean guitar strum, and stumbling skeletal drumming, and again, there's some blackened buzz, but like the first track, all it does is add texture and density, if anything, the sound gets even prettier, laced with more aching leads, and more ethereal atmosphere.
That said, there is some black buzz scattered throughout, but then there's also HARMONICA!!! Some tracks devolved into punky blackened plods, others blossom into hushed heartfelt shimmers, and some, like the twisted "Akana", sound like some sort of harmonica driven sea shanty, albeit one wrapped in sheets of gristly distorted guitars. But it seems always, the sound eventually settles into that haunting, gloomy, almost post rock sound that opened the proceedings, it's easy to imagine lots of these tracks as part of the score for some experimental com in of age indie art film, you can picture Gummo like kids, wandering through forests, or living in run down trailer parks, the sound evocative and emotional, a black metal that seems mostly removed from the tropes of traditional BM, sonic and otherwise, instead, taking some of those elements and using them to craft a sound that's super unique, strangely introspective, and beautifully, beautifully strange.
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?).
We first got a couple of these in a few weeks back ('cause we were curious) and it didn't take long before we realized we had a Record Of The Week on our hands. It was obvious, really, since some of us here ending up getting so obsessed with this that it was just about ALL they'd listen to, for days, getting home after work and throwing it on, listening to it going to sleep at night, and when they'd get up in the morning, playing it at the store too... At first, though, we thought well heck maybe that's just us, maybe we're weird to like Tony Tears that much. But of course, we ARE weird, and so are a lot of AQ customers, and that's why this is definitely a good choice for Record Of The Week. Anything this hypnotic and dirgey and doomy and last but not least weird, has got AQ (and possibly you) written all over it.
We had to go to some trouble to acquire enough of these to list, contacting Tony Tears via MySpace, importing copies from Italy, getting all the cds we could lay our hands on. Which means we may or may not be able to get more when we run out, and if we can, it will certainly take a while, so be forewarned...
Tony Tears? So what IS that, you ask? Actually when we first saw the name, we thought it said Ebony Tears, which is the name of another band. But no, it's Tony Tears, as in a guy named Tony, last name Tears. And the "band" is indeed just the work of one man, whose (we presume) stage name gives this its monicker. How perfect is that, a mournful Italian doom metaller named Tony Tears? Already you feel sorry for him. Awww, Tony Tears...
Tony Tears' MySpace page is also perfect for this sort of depressed, lonely sounding music. It's really stark and plain, with a sort of electric purple/pink background color. He's got, like, only 66 friends (one of 'em us), and in his "top friends" listing he still has Tom. You know, Tom the founder of MySpace, who is automatically your first and only friend when you first sign up, but then of course you remove Tom 'cause he's not actually someone you know or care about... But lonely Tony, grateful for Tom's friendship, keeps him around.
So, anyway, to answer your question, this is some sort of underground doom metal, but also Italian in that spooky proggy soundtracky way, so it's kind of like Goblin crossed with St. Vitus, or Umberto teamed up with Trollman Av Ildtoppberg. Or, our early '70s proto-doom prog faves Jacula, channelled through someone's (Striborg's?) basement 4-track today.
Tony wrote the lyrics and the music, sings, and plays all the instruments... there's layers of fuzzy, foggy bass, gorgeously melancholic psychedelic electric guitar leads, eerie Goblin-y synths tinkling and droning, and a rhythmic foundation of slightly stumbling drum machine programming. Along with enough echo effects to give parts of this a bit of a dubby, or druggy, vibe.
Perhaps most crucial to our enjoyment of this are the vocals, which are spoken rather more than sung, and are all in Italian. Which works great, it's a language which even when simply spoken still sounds rather musical, we LOVE hearing Italian in this manner (we're reminded of old fave "Ordine Pubblico" by Starfuckers, especially by the track "Antichi Messagi" here), and we feel Tony's echoing, emotional chant-like recitations further enhance the hypnotic aspect of this lugubrious music. We can imagine Om fans zoning out to this quite easily!
Speaking of hypnotic, one of the times recently we had this playing in the store, a customer asked if it was some sort of new Circle side project... we can see why he thought it might be.
The overall atmosphere of this record is sooooooooo sad, yet somehow comforting. Even though we don't understand the Italian, this comes across as being very intimate & personal, and not just because of a certain sparseness to the mix that speaks to this being a one-man effort.
Tony Tears' repetitive lumbering heavy riffs and dark keyboard coloration, punctuated with mechanical, but not entirely predictable drum beats, awash with flangey, spacey effects and further embellished with his poetically mannered, incantatory Italian, has had quite an effect on the psyches of those here who can't help but keep this in heavy rotation. While rather raw and ragged in a charming DIY home-recorded way, the results are sheer beauty, weird weeping dreamlike beauty.
Definitely in the tradition of such strange Italian dark underground metal/prog/psych as Death S.S., Paul Chain, and Black Hole. But quite something else besides, with no prior interest in that tradition being necessary for appreciation of this. Even moreso maybe than The Puritan album we ROTW'd last time, being into doom metal isn't a prerequisite, as long as you like unusual music. Being into Goblin though might help.
If we can persuade a ton of folks to buy this, hopefully that won't make Tony Tears any -less- unhappy, because we're looking forward to more from this miserable, mesmerizing, and altogether unique act... stay doomed Mr. Tears!
We've long loved Japanese psych crew Up-Tight, and this new disc on aQ beloved Brazilian label Essence is another good one, another slab of dark heavy psych from these masters. 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. Awesome!
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.)
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
This compilation ain't no fun-in-the-sun style calypso music, it's more like APOCALYPSO music. Song titles include "Death", "The Horrors Of War", "When Me Body Lay Down In The Grave", "Inequality Of Life", "Exploiting", "African War Call" and the title track, among others! A reminder that calypso originated in part as sociopolitical protest music, and could certainly reflect the darker side of life. Artists, some famed, all classic, include Lord Invader, The (Roaring) Lion, Lord Executor, Atilla The Hun, Lionel Belasco, and more. Sweet, sad stuff, the only Calypso comp we know of to mention double murder and suicide on the back cover...
This latest issue of this indispensable 'new music' magazine from the UK has got Dean Blunt (aka Hype Williams) on the cover. Also brainwave composer David Rosenboom, Justin Broadrick of Godflesh/Jesu doing the Invisible Jukebox test, Drew Mulholland aka Mount Vernon Arts Lab, grime producer Slackk, Berlin-based composer Catherine Lamb, and more, including a Primer on the works of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and all the usual reviews, news, etc.
The third collection of X Ray Pop tracks in as many years finds this duo of frenetic eighties French synth-poppers in their later era (1984-1989) with catchy songs pulled from lps and cassettes that while still as zany and edgy as the music on the earlier collections, also shows both more polish and dreaminess with more complex instrumentation and arrangements. Their first two collections showcased both their demos in minimal synth-wave form and their full-length releases with a hyper-punkier edge. This collection reminds us even more of French pop groups like Les Rita Mitsouko and Stereo Total with a richer poppier sheen that's effervescent and bubbly but still very weird. Includes bonus material of early demos of their classic songs like "Alcool" and "L'Eurasienne" sung by male member Doc Pilot. This is fast-becoming our favorite of the three collections!
The Gunter Schickert renaissance continues. The mesmeric German guitarist, previously fairly obscure in the annals of Krautrock, has seen several of his crucial solo albums reissued in the last few years, all of which are amazing, big aQ faves. Schickert's discography isn't that extensive, but everything we've heard has been pretty special - he's a three time aQ Record Of The Week honoree, in fact. We made the reissues of 1974's Samtvogel, 1977's Uberfallig, and 1983's Kinder In Der Wildnis ALL Records Of The Week.
Some years ago, somehow we got on his mailing list, so occasionally we get emails from him (all in German and thus mostly unintelligible to us; we think they often have to do with yoga), and know Schickert is still active, making music. However, this album represents the first brand NEW (rather than reissued) material from him we've ever heard, and we're pretty excited. Ziguri, whose name is derived from a hallucinogenic cactus, is a pulsating power trio originally formed by Schickert with the rhythm section of Udo Erdenreich and Dieter Kolsch. The band actually dates back all the way to 1987, when they first formed, playing gigs in punk squats and other underground venues but not it seems recording anything. They then had bit of an hiatus for many years, though, but now are back with what's apparently their first album, produced by Schneider TM. And it's basically exactly what we'd want / expect a new Schickert set to sound like!
It starts off with a strange song called "General Klickman", in which sweeping, spacey, chiming textures from Schickert's effects laden guitar merge with heavy duty bass & drums groove, a deep dark choogle coming out of some backwoods kraut-swamp� vocals are at first a chipmunk babble, then a raspy chant, in English, about a "General Klickman", who is "in the sky", apparently "waiting for you". We're not sure what it MEANS but they sound like they mean it.
Then, on track two, "Massa", an instrumental, the essential echoing nature of Schickert's guitar style comes to the fore, his repetitive patterns interlacing hypnotically, very much in the vein of his classic earlier solo album material, gorgeous and darkly dreamy. The rhythm section provides solid back up, with some fairly heavy and emphatic build ups. Next, "Yoyodyne" (a Crying Of Lot 49 reference, presumably, or perhaps one to the Buckaroo Banzai movie?) is another vocal number, the chanted vocals and woozy late night blues psych stumble reminding us a lot of an earlier, classic krautrock trio, Guru Guru - there's definitely a Guru Guru vibe to a lot of Ziguri's music. "Bella Hopp" follows (on side B of the vinyl), with much in the way of percussive trance-inducement (from all instruments), it's on the same spectrum with AR & Machines, and GR & Machines too, again as with much else on the album. The babbling vocal part that sounds like "haw haw haw" gives a nod to ZZ Top, perhaps, as well.
And then, the throbbing, bass-heavy snake dance of "Goa Constrictor", the album's nearly 12-minute finale, is something that fans of bands like Circle. Pharoah Overlord and Salvatore will fall for; ominously atmospheric, inexorably propulsive, adorned with wordless, exotic sounding vocal scat-chant. It and the other psychedelic mantras here are manna for admirers of Schickert's earlier work (especially the more band-like Kinder In Der Wildnis), he's still got it; furthermore, as we said, fans of Circle-like krauty hypnorock in general, ought to dig it too.
The lp version includes a copy of the cd, but the cd version does not come with a copy of the lp.
