You could argue that EVERY record from these Texas via UK via Texas noise rock weirdos is sort of a 'dance' record. Every one rife with rhythms and grooves, hypnotic and repetitive, tranced out and yeah a little bit groovy. Although most of that was countered by blown out distorted bass buzz, squealing noise made by squeezing air from balloons, thick swaths of analog synth blurt, crushing down tuned bass buzz, multi drummers, bizarre and ultra creepy costumes, but really, at the core of $&$, was rhythm. And as the band has shed its revolving phalanx of multiple drummers, and slimmed down its ranks to what is essentially just one man, $&$ mastermind Craig Clouse, the sound has changed as well, with Clouse pushing the music of his previously bombastic noise rock juggernaut into something more electronic, the entity that is now Shit & Shine, instead of being some weirdo noise rockers, are in fact some twisted, avant, and yeah, still noisy and WTF version of electronic music, one that's not strictly electronic, just to muddy the waters just a little more.
In fact, right from the get go, the sound is akin to the Butthole Surfers recording for Warp, or some extremely bastardized version of that new slo-mo soul sound. Opener "Hiss" sounds like Burila or How To Dress Well, but all drugged up and doused in FX, at least for a minute or two, then in comes some proper guitar some synths, and the 'band' sound like an actual band, a cleaner, more streamlined, more 'danceable' Buttholes perhaps, but in the history of $&$, it doesn't sound all that out of place, even though it is a lot different than most of what's come before. But we dig it, a noisy, rock groove, peppered with swirls of squelch and gristle, some buried progged out synths, FX that send sounds stuttering into cloud of dizzying psych, but al wedded to that unwavering groove.
And that's just the beginning, with Clouse utilizing his kitchen sink approach, but in this case, the kitchen sink in question is a dirty rusty sink in an old abandoned meth lab on an empty lot somewhere in bumfuck Texas, but that only adds to the WTF of Clouse's 'electronica' and doesn't prevent him from conjuring up squelchy little bas driven synth heavy grooves like "You Can't", which sounds like some warped version of Neu!, or the ultra minimal glitchy electro skitter static of 'Pearl Drop", or the big bass, block rockin' "PG 13" that takes a super funky groove, adds some metallic vokill screech, some distort blasts of psych noise, all of which eventually devolves into a sort of eighties soundtrack groove. From there on out, there's the demented James Brown-ish "Blowhannon', which sounds like his back up band was either Earth Wind And Fire or Rusted Shut or BOTH. "Who's Your Waitress", is a shittier shinier take on FM radio yacht rock, a smooth groove, laced with just enough subtle WTF-ness to keep it confusional, "Value" is all big beat bombast, sounding like it could be some lost DHR b-side or another Meat Beat style cruncher. There's more of course, from low spun, creeps wrapped around rubbery bass billows, and dubbed out drum splatter, and some pounding 4 on the floor acid house, albeit equally acid fried, and wreathed in some creepy John Carpenter synthiness. And if you're lucky, and remain a cd person, the aluminum version has bonus tracks from the last $&$ 12", one a cool collaged rhythmic groove, replete with mangled vocal samples, skipping bass blurt, some gurgled cookie monster vox, even some guitar crunch, one is a full on disco blowout, albeit a bit distorted and twisted, and FX heavy, especially toward the end, where it seems to melt into a sort of Butthole Surfers megamix, and one is a murky skitter, that slowly builds to a sort of warbly dubbed out funk-murk electro dirge, that is about as danceable as it is weird. Which is 'very' on both counts.
We LOVE Street Trash, one of the silliest, goriest, goofiest movies ever, and easily one of our favorite good 'bad' movies. The label describes the 1987 horror flick as the ultimate "melt movie", which is definitely true, although we never realized that was an actual genre. And for lots of you, that probably makes no sense at all. But it will. Street Trash begins when a liquor store owner finds an old case of 'Tenafly Viper' in his basement, some kind of cheap wine, and decides to sell it cheap. It's of course snapped up by the city's homeless population, who begin to, yep, you guessed it, MELT!! THEY MELT!!!
There's also a subplot about a mean Vietnam Vet who rules the junkyard, but really it's all about the glorious gore, and again, it's not bloody gore as much as it's a sort of over the top Technicolor gore, with the hapless victims of the tainted malt liquor dissolving into greasy pools of rainbow hued goop, most notably one guy who sits on a toilet to drink in peace, and who begins to melt and drip and ooze and eventually becomes a mushy prismatic pool in (and around) the toilet bowl...
And really all the rest is just window dressing, you know, there's some story and a little plot and all that, but it's all about the melting, a grossout hobo holocaust that is like that head melting scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark stretched out into a feature length film!
And like a lot of these films, we didn't necessarily remember the music, but revisiting now, we were pretty blown away. The score by Rick Ulfik is pretty cool, creepy and synthy, some tracks all weird echoey percussion, moody, haunting atmospheres, really cool stuff, but it was the eighties, so there's also plenty of goofy synthy drum machine dorkiness, and some geniusly cringeworthy, ultra cheesy sax driven groovers, what one aQ staffer described as 'trashjams', but to our ears sounds like the retro-futuristic schmaltzy VHS mall music of ex-Skater James Ferraro. One of those tracks is so good (bad?) that it gets lodged in our head like crazy, and we find ourselves not just digging it, but humming it to ourselves at odd times during the day, LONG after having actually listened to it.
But the bulk of the record is made up of grim, ominous creepscapes, the whole thing in fact reminiscent of another aQ fave soundtrack, The New York Ripper, a similarly weird mix of cheesy eighties funkiness and seriously scary soundtrackery, the difference here being that most of the sound FX are left in, we're guessing because no real masters exist, so perhaps this was all mastered direct from someone's original VHS copy, and it sounds like it, as it's sort of tinny, and lo-fi, but it suits the sounds, and the movie if you've seen it, perfectly. And that's also a part of the score's charm, that most of the cheesiest tracks are bookended by the anguished FX drenched howls of some hapless soul melting, screaming in anguish, those screams turning into wordless gurgles, and usually leading right into another long stretch of creepy, synthy ambience.
Then there's the final song, what we remember as the end credits track, a sort of bastardized version of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" kind of jam, with some of THEE most ridiculous and hilariously over the top lyrics EVER. In fact, we had forgotten about that track completely, and the first time it played in the store, had we all been drinking, it would have induced some seriously comedic spit takes, as it is, we were in stitches, lines like:
"Shut your face, you little scumbag", "You can stop the bullshit cuz this is the end", "Oh what's this?? I'm startin' to ooze! you little creep! What's this fuckin' shit??" and of course "Your face I'm gonna reshape - I'm gonna eat your fucking eyeballs like grapes", all delivered in a dramatic croon, one that becomes increasingly more unhinged as the track progresses, and as the singer presumably begins to melt himself!
So great! Easily one of our favorites in this recent spate of horror movie reissues (obviously, as it's our Record Of The Week). And the Lunaris label, the latest to throw their bloody hat in the horror movie vinyl reissue ring, did a great job, killer new artwork, extensive liner notes, the whole shebang. And like all the best soundtracks, it has us wanting to watch Street Trash again SO BAD!!
Jussi from Circle (how many of our reviews start with those 3 words?) is a big big fan of this band, a stripped down minimal blues boogie duo who also hail from Finland, and now have this compilation cd out on Jussi's Ektro label.
One chord, two chords, three chords maybe, they do the most basic blues progressions over-and-over-and-over-again, it's super simple and super repetitive stuff, hypnotically head noddin' for sure, kind of lazy and laidback. They do sound a bit like Circle, if Circle were just guitar and drums and played the blues out on a backporch somewhere, drunk on moonshine, endlessly chooglin' away. A few tracks add a bass player, a few also have singing, but mostly this is all instrumental, just drummin' and strummin', primitive stompin' and geetar honkin', nothin' but. Real simple. Zen blues or something. It's so monomaniacal it almost gets ridiculous; we mean really, while we do like this, at the same time, it might be totally stupid. Or awesome. We can't even tell. But like we said, Jussi from Circle is a big fan. And there's 80 minutes of this stuff here, the disc is packed to the brim, 23 tracks in all, five of 'em previously unreleased, the others taken from 7"s and albums going back to 1995.
Most of us went to see Surf Nazis Must Die back in the day (the day being 1987) based entirely on the movie title, and the awesomely over the top poster which featured a a nazi with a machine gun in one hand, his other hand a metal claw, on a surfboard, pierced by a chainsaw, riding a wave, about to land on a terrified bikini clad beach bunny on another surfboard, the beaches burning in the background, with the legend: "The beaches have become battlefields... The waves are a warzone!"
Who could resist? Certainly not us. Although it's been a while, but if memory serves, the plot was pretty goofy, like most Troma movies. An earthquake destroys the West coast, neo nazi surf punks battle for control of the beaches, but when a boy is killed, the boy's grandma breaks out of her nursing home for REVENGE! It got a rating of 1.5 stars on IMDB, and 1 star on Rotten Tomatoes, but we remember it being pretty funny. What we did NOT remember was the soundtrack, which has never been available until NOW. And you would think a Troma movie from the eighties would have an appropriately cheesy soundtrack, you might be surprised by John McCallum's score, which is very creepy and synthy, a little bit John Carpenter, a little bit Tangerine Dream, swirls of synth buzz, and moody minor key melodies, some squiggly FX. Lots of the tracks are tense and driving, that very classic 'chase scene' sound, with programmed drums, the vibe sort of soundtracky but new wavey, for sure Carpenter fans, and folks who've been digging this new renaissance of retro-synth music, will flip for sure, even without seeing the movie. And while that original poster was so cool, the new artwork is pretty bad ass, a huge chrome skull, floating in a blue sky over the Pacific Ocean, above two crossed surfboards (skull & crossboards?), with the legend: "Welcome To California"...
LIMITED TO 800 COPIES, housed in nice thick jackets, with new liner notes from McCallum, the director, and various crew members. The new artwork was done by McCallum too!!
Asmus Tietchens albums are uniformly austere, and his collaborations with Thomas Koner are no exception. Those two pioneers of German sound-art have collaborated over the years under the banner of Kontakte Der Junglinge, whose title itself is an homage to Stockhausen, another German artist with a penchant for austerity matched only by his gravitas. Sinkende Schwimmer dates back to 1991 and marks the earliest collaboration between Tietchens and Koner, as the elder statesman processed and manipulated source material from the younger Koner. While the ghosts of a glacial ambience trace from Koner's source material (whatever they might have been), Sinkende Schwimmer is very much a Tietchens productions, described through his serialist actions for electronic mark-making and mathematical formalism collaged into an exacting piece of abstraction. Tietchens has long been an advocate of 'absolute music' implying that there are to be no external references interfering with the sounds themselves. Sinkende Schwimmer fights with this definition somewhat as the irregular pointillism, ring-modulated atonalities, and sterile grey drones deflect much of the signifiers; but the gasping shadows that haunt this album (perhaps thanks to Koner's presence) speak to a vacancy and an isolationism that hold a subtle poetry at the edges of these complex compositions. Limited quantities on this original pressing from back in the day!
The return of this Dutch drone/dirge/doom weirdo, courtesy of local label Sanity Muffin (their second for the label), and yet another batch of gloriously grim atmospheres, psychedelic power electronics, and twisted avant industrial noise. Like the previous two, it's a dizzying din, with SUNNO))) like guitar heave wedded to garbled, demonic vokills, all wound around streaks of blown out feedback, coruscating guitar noise, and constantly shifting sheets of blurred noise, and somehow, amidst all that going on, some of the sounds seem to coalesce into some sort of rhythm, giving the sound the momentum of some sort of lumbering sonic behemoth. We're reminded a bit of Gnaw Their Tongues for sure, as well as Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead (who turned us on to this guy in the first place), but Torture Corpse inhabit their own bleak corner of this harrowing sonic universe, the tracks peppered with all manner of strange sample voices, moaning, or chanting, crooning or mewling, all the while a black cauldron of sound roils and churns in the background, often oozing into one massive black hole swirl, but just as often, splintering into jagged shards of grey noise and clattery percussive splatter, and in both cases, the sounds are often processed into something else entirely, dense tangles of squelch and glitch, or stuttering fields of hiccupping static, and yet, those processed sounds are still set amidst haunting shimmers, and mesmerizingly psychedelic drones. Sans headphones, it can all sound like a wild, chaotic jumble, and it sort of is, but deep listening definitely reveals a sonic underworld of surprising complexity, a twisted landscape of sculpted white noise, of looped raga-like mesmer, of punishing, head cleaving skree, and of droned out industrial bliss, all woven into something sinister, blackened, brutal and beautiful.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Each one hand numbered in gold ink, the distressed black and white artwork also splattered with gold ink.
Tujurikkuja is a meeting of San Francisco musical minds, namely Kit Clayton and Chris Dixon. It has been a very long time since we've heard anything from Clayton, the digital wunderkid who recorded a handful of deliriously glitched-out dub albums around the turn of the millennium and also ran the highly influential Orthlong Musork imprint which released work by Stephan Mathieu, Blectum From Blechdom, Akira Rabelais, AGF, Timeblind, and Gold Chains. While he hasn't released much of anything in the past six or seven years, he does perform here in the Bay Area mining the gaps of audiovisual errata as well as DJ-ing full-frontal techno sets. His partner in the Estonio-phonically named Tujurikkuja has recently been copping a dour drone-noise pose under the guise Earth Jerks, but he's long been a noisenik artrocker in Death Sentence Panda and Murder Murder. This one-sided lathe-cut 7" sports a spaced-out electro-drone mantra with Dixon churning through a shoegazing riff muffled through a mountain of cotton candy FX, and with Clayton delicately layering analogue (or seemingly analogue) electronic tones and drones throughout. Very lovely stuff; and we do hope to hear more from Tujurukkuja very soon. For those who care about such things, the lathe was cut at Funky Frankenstein the heart of middle Tennessee on a sheet of polycarbonate which shouldn't degrade or do any damage to the needle. Limited to 50 copies!
As we wait anxiously for a new full length from these aQ beloved psychedelic stoners (as well as their first ever SF show coming up soon!), for now we have one new track to tide us over. And fear not, it's a groovy good one. Nothing new really, but then we didn't actually want any sort of massive seismic sonic shift, we just wanted MORE, and that's just what you get. A new track called "Runaway Girls" that sounds like it could have been plucked right off of either of their albums proper, with a cool slithery riff, distorted wailing vocals, super melodic Sabbathy basslines, shambolic drumming, wild psychedelic leads and gorgeous guitar harmonies, the whole thing all warm and washed out and dreamily distorted, sounding like it could have been transported from some hard rocking alternate universe sixties, the song twisting and turning, from almost metallic riffing, to shimmery, melodic drift and back again.
The flipside is an acoustic version of what might have been our favorite track from Mind Control, that record's closer "Devil's Work", here recast as something darkly dreamy, and hauntingly folky, the track still fantastic, but more hushed and moody, like some lost Wicker Man track, or some deep cut by an ultra obscure seventies British acid folk combo. Cool!
SUPER DUPER LIMITED!! The batch we got is on blue vinyl, but hard to say if we'll be able to get more when we run out, and what color the next batch will be. And oh yeah, it's a pretty pricey import!
The Sanity Muffin cassette label just keeps bringing out the gems. This one is a fantastic mix of obscure psych guitar gems from Asia from the '60s and '70s. From cinematic Spaghetti Western-ish sojourns to go-go pop, electric guitar weirdness, pastoral exoticism and funky eastern soul. Like the Teenage Dance Music from China, Indonesian guitar, Shadow Music of Thailand and Cambodian Rock comps, this is an incredible mix of little heard guitar driven music coming out of various Asian countries. Here are the groups included: The Red Stars, Cousen Brothers, M. Shariff and The Zurah, Salim I., The Caterpillars, Adnan Othman & The Wanderers, The Tones, The Steps, Jong-Yee Sho, The Hawks, M. Johari & Quandos, TLA Production Group, Mei Fong W/ Tony & The Polar Bear Five, Charlie and The White Cloud Orchestra, Group 123, and Apollo Band.
Super limited to 100 copies! Get it while you can!
Another amazing installment of the Spiritual Jazz series, and after volumes focusing on America, and Europe, and Americans in Europe, this time the series broadens its focus to the rest of the world. No small feat there, since the idioms of how jazz became defined in America and in Europe developed from a multiplicity of cultural musical traditions around the globe. But this volume is not about the ethnic origins of jazz, but how the popularity of jazz reflectively spread its influences back into the ethnic communities from which they originated. Largely culled from major label recordings as well as obscure private releases, this volume travels from remote Africa to Great Britain, Argentina to the Caribbean, and across Russia through Asia to deliver an incredible account of how music gets transformed through regional influences and nuances.
Includes tracks by: Charlie Munro Quartet, Paul Winter Sextet, Fitz Gore, Ahmadu Jarr, Eric Nomvete's Big Five, The Braz Gonsalves 7, Tete Mbambisa, Aquila, The London Experimental Jazz Quartet, Hideo Shiraki, Chivo Borraro, Jazz Semai, Jazz Work Shop, Virgilio Armas Y Su Cuarteto, Louiz Banks, Oladepo Ogomodede, and Jorge Lopez Ruiz.
Every volume has been spectacularly great, and this one is a fine place to start if you haven't heard the others.
The globe-trotting British sound artist Simon Whetham found himself in Shreveport, Louisiana in 2011 where he was commissioned to develop a body of work based on the defunct MacNeill Street Pumping Station. This artifact of the 19th Century was the last known steampowered water plant in the United States and has been a historical site for several decades now. He was one of many acclaimed artists asked to contribute to the seemingly inactive MacNeill Street Pumping Station New Music Festival, alongside Tim Hecker, Lawrence English, Mark Fell, Eli Kezler, and about a dozen other denizens of avant-garde soundcraft. It was a great idea to have all of these artists develop compositions, installations, and performances within such an interesting space; and we can hope that the festival is merely on temporary hiatus. Needless to say, here we have the stereo mix of Whetham's multichannel installation that he presented at the festival. His source material consists of drones from the huge metal pools and the network of pipes from that space, focusing mostly on the resonant frequencies of the ghostly drones and watery tones. Overlapping, sinewy electric vibrations tumble into a pool of isolationist dank at the beginning of the album before a reverberant flute utters a solitary bellow amidst the metallic klang reverb articulating two of the techniques of Whetham's sound-hunting - that of the contact microphone on sonorous objects and the open-air recordings of those reflective surfaces. Deep, low-end rattlings gird the bulk of Hydrotasic with wind-swept thrumming, agitated found objects, and plenty of nocturnal clutter being moved around by the ghosts that lurk in the sticky humidity of a Louisiana swamp, or at least that's what it sounds like. Brilliantly akin to the processed field recording work of Jonathan Coleclough, Thomas Koner, and BJ Nilsen.
The latest release from local label and psychedelic powerhouse Valley King is the latest record from stoner psych space rock visionaries White Manna, and like the two Holy Mountain records that came before, Come Down Safari, is another gloriously tripped out sonic sprawl, all hazy, buzzy throb and tranced out heart-of-the-sun mesmer, looooong tracks that seem to unfurl endlessly, the drums and bass weaving lush languorous backgrounds, that seem to pulse and ooze, over which the guitars soar and howl, melodic streaks blurred into heaving washes of chordal shimmer, riffs stretched out into druggy sonic mantras, the sound slipping effortlessly from churning psychedelic heaviness, to soporific, dream-drone drift, WM channeling the sound of their psychedelic forefathers, into heady, abstract sonic rituals, that manage to take the sound of classic early space rock and fuse it to a more modern take on retro psych.
Fans of the usual suspects (the Heads, White Hills, Mammatus, Carlton Melton, etc.) should already be WAY into these guys, and if they're not, this should fix that pretty quick.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, eye popping psychedelic picture disc artwork by Alan Forbes!
We've been reading the Wire for a while, don't remember them putting King Crimson's Robert Fripp on the cover before, about time. Also this issue: the noisy Pharmakon, Grumbling Fur doing the Invisible Jukebox, improviser Jeremiah Cymerman, Tuareg singer/guitarist/actor Mdou Moctar, Gazelle Twin, Bruce Lacey, and more... Plus the usual very informative section of reviews, also news, charts, columns, etc.
