Back in 2011, Dark Entries released a great comp, vinyl-only, called BART: Bay Area Retrograde. All Dark Entries style stuff - vintage minimal wave / new wave / punk electronics - from the SF Bay area. (For those who don't live around here, BART also stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit, the local commuter train system.) Just today, we just got a 2nd volume of Bay Area Retrograde, on vinyl, which we'll review as soon as we can, AND also this, a compact disc containing both volumes, yay!!
So, we're listing this cd now, though we can't say much yet about the stuff on here from Vol. 2, other than what we've heard spinning it so far has been great, and it seems maybe a bit more raw and punk and experimental, with tracks from the likes of Factrix, Chrome and Red Asphalt. So, more on that Vol. 2 when we get a chance to properly review it next time, but here's what we said before about Vol. 1, and by itself it means this cd is quite recommended:
A few years back, Minimal Wave offered some choice crate digging collections of nearly forgotten darkwave and post-punk electronics through their Lost Tapes and Found Tapes collections, highlighting the differences between the European and American models of underground new wave. Dark Entries produced this anthology in that same tradition, focusing even more tightly on the geography of the Bay Area. As Johnny Ray Huston so rightly points out in the liner notes, San Francisco in the '80s had its own unique crucible of local events that shaped the Bay Area's particular sound (e.g. the assassination of Harvey Milk, the growing AIDS epidemic and the fear surrounding the disease, etc.). While there's none of the art-damaged abstraction filtered from The Residents, Snakefinger, or Tuxedomoon in an obvious lineage to the artists featured here, BART (named after the subway that connects Oakland, Berkeley, and other parts of the East Bay to San Francisco) is a great collection of quirky minimal wave electronics, with a fair amount of unreleased material from obscurant Bay Area new wave bands.
Nomimal State opens the compilation and was from the suburban hamlet of Danville, recording this demo 1983 with a militantly uptempo drum machine and urgent synth lines. It's a track that easily fits next to the likes of The Units and Nervous Gender in terms of manic, punkish use of electronics. Speaking of The Units, they round out the compilation in contributing their sci-fi pop anthem "Mission," which is still bitchin' after all these years! Voice Farm is the other 'big name' to appear on this compilation, contributing a sinewy darkwave number from their 1982 album "The World We Live In." Batang State, Quiet Room, and Necropolis Of Love offer more Joy Division / Wire / Kraftwerk atmospheric post-punk number with considerable panache. The Wasp Women were a crossdressing trash-punk outfit, whose demo featured a wastoid lo-fi number and had appeared in the 1982 film "What Ever Happened To Susan Jane." Danny Boy & The Serious Party Gods offer a fabulously campy disco number with suitably over-the-top raunchy lyrics that ramble on and on against anthemic synths. If there's one track that you need to hear from this compilation it's this one! But the whole collection is very well done, and comes highly recommended as with everything that Dark Entries releases.
Earlier in 2014, the multimedia artist John Davis presented an amazing series of expanded cinema at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, showcasing Bay Area artists whose work operate in the liminal regions between avant-garde composition and experimental filmmaking. The most visible and vocal proponent of such work is San Francisco's Paul Clipson, whose 8mm and 16mm films of in-camera edits & overlaid imagery have long been the visual accompaniments to the likes of Barn Owl, Grouper, Tarentel, Joshua Churchill, and Brendan Murray (just to name a few). Clipson's work was just one of many artists presented during the month-long festival that Davis curated, with this weighty object - two slabs of vinyl, a hefty book, and four dvd-rs each dedicated to one of four filmmakers - documenting a handful of the pieces that were exhibited / projected / performed during the festival. So, there are filmmakers Lawrence Jordan, Craig Baldwin, and Kerry Laitala joining Clipson on the video programs; and Tashi Wada, Maggi Payne, and Ashley Bellouin & Ben Bracken joining John Davis as the composers. There were far more notable artists whose work did not get covered in this compendium (e.g. Keith Evans, Beige, Mary Helena Clarke, Steve Dye, Andy Puls, and aQ's own Jim Haynes), meaning that there's more than enough material to warrant a second volume.
The two slabs of vinyl contain long-form tracks from each of the aforementioned composers, whose work corresponds to the soundtrack of the video programs, but these sounds are also designed to be listened to independent of the image, harboring an indeterminacy to the marriage of sound and image as well as its severance. Bellouin & Bracken are stalwart performers here in the Bay Area, who sadly have not released any of their work up until now. Overtones and harmonics from bowed metal rods, handcrafted glass harmonica, and subtly reinforced electronics offer an amazingly rich composition of melodic sound pools progressing at the pace of a late period Morton Feldman composition. Davis has released his own work through Root Strata and Students Of Decay over the years, with world-weary delicacies of sonic filigree suspended upon field recordings and cracked electronics. Here, he takes on the contemplative sequences of analog synth / library musics with fragments alluding to Susanne Ciani that darken over time through scratchy loops and radiant black drones. The iconic Bay Area minimalist Maggi Payne slips through her quiet hush by way of downpitched white noise into thrumming masses, Shepard tone glissandos, and ice-sharp textures. Tashi Wada's downtuning compositions for two violins resonating acoustically in near lockstep with each other is a perfect recapitulation of Tony Conrad's ideas behind Slapping Pythagoras. Brilliantly done by all of the composers!
We'll leave the video components alone for the time being; as Gravity Spells is strictly limited to 100 copies, many of which were sold at the festival itself. There's only a handful of these left. A true labor of love from John Davis, and it shows!
When we first heard about the collaboration, it sounded like a joke, like some internet meme. It did seem crazy, and on the surface, pretty hilarious, but eventually it was proven to be an actual thing. Then when we first heard a little snippet online, we weren't entirely sold, Walker sounded even more over the top than usual, and the title Soused seems to indicate that maybe Walker was in fact completely wasted when he recorded his vocals, cuz it definitely sounded like it. But when we finally got to hear the whole thing, it suddenly all made sense, Walker's vocals, while still insanely dramatic and over the top, were somehow perfect, and SUNNO))), instead of just doing the guitars-against-the-amps drone thing, really seem to be working way outside their comfort zone, and in fact, lots of this record sounds extremely, sonically uncomfortable. Fantastically so. We were so smitten by opener "Brando", we had trouble digging any deeper into the record. Right from the get go, opening with Walker crooning over a whirring organ, shimmery and sun dappled, and what sounds suspiciously like the Guns 'N Roses "Sweet Child O' Mine" guitar lick, but then the thick, viscous drones creep in, accompanied by strange ticks and pulsations, as well as what sounds like a bull whip, as well as the occasional burst of distorto guitar, the combination of that low end creep, and Walker's vocals, as well as a cool feedback/high end that seems to echo the vocal melody, it's pretty powerful, and stunning, weird, but also weirdly beautiful. "Herod 2014" was our next obsession, with it's weird squelchy electronic rhythm, buried in thick rumbling thrum, it's Walker who carries the song, some sort of demented, and yeah, likely seriously soused, torch song, flecked with static, and driven by a slo-mo Sabbath riff stretched out into near static sprawl, Walker's vocals wreathed in lots of mysterious noise, the whole track peppered with what sounds like some strange banshee wail, or pterodactyl cry, but it's somehow so perfect, that it becomes as integral to the song as any other element.
"Bull" is downright balladic after the previous heaving monoliths, but not for long, the song exploding into some serious Swans like pummel, with Walker kicking it up a notch, some loose chaotic drum damage, some junkyard percussion, and a 'hook' that manages to be the catchiest bit on the whole record, the song slipping into slo-mo somnambulant creeps, before launching right back into that 'chorus'. We have to be honest, the first three songs are so perfect, it's not until maybe the 20th listen that we even made it to the last two, but they're similarly broody and bombastic, "Fetish" featuring some seriously buzzed out bass (assuming that's a bass), and like "Bull" before it, another killer 'chorus', that sounds like Swans gone haywire, dosed on some serious narcotics, a wild cacophony of elephant like electronic bleats, churning metallic riffing, monstrous drumming, before settling into what sounds like some sick, mutant strain of kraut-doom. And don't even get us started on Walker's INSANE lyrics, in this case, a refrain of "Choo Choo, Choo Choo mama", which sounds ridiculous, but in the context of the song, it sounds mad, maniacal, and like some sort of twisted genius, which we're assuming it is. Finally, there's "Lullaby", which is one, at least for a moment, until another blurt of atonal, moaning, keening, doom cabaret explodes from the murk, only to settle right back down, most of the track spent in hushed lowercase mode, finishing off super dramatically, a field of barely there guitar rumble, distant sonar like pings, ominous swells, mysterious insectoid clicking, and one final, haunting stanza from Walker. Most definitely a twisted outsider masterpiece, and considering how skeptical we were, it's even more surprising that this might just end up being a record of the year contender for some of us!
There's a weirdo theory in the realm of parapsychology (yes, the ultimate land of weirdo theories) that inanimate objects can absorb the psychic energy from the living, especially during that of extreme stress. This postulation is called the Stone Tape Theory, as stone (along with wood) is the most common media for this stored energy that can be replayed in the form of ghostly ectoplasm, disembodied knockings, and just bad vibes. While the peripatetic sound-artist Simon Whetham seems far too sensible a bloke to hold the Stone Tape Theory dear to his heart, we have to wonder if he was spooked at all during the recording sessions for From The Mouths Of Clay. The source material in question was a collection of prehistoric and contemporary South American burial urns. It's unclear if these urns were actually used for the intended purpose or if the remains had been removed during his recording sessions; but it's very clear that these objects can generate quite an ethereal tone. Whetham's tactile investigation of these objects divined a slippery, rasping drone within the ebb and flow of his subtle electronic augmentation (layering, pitchshifting, EQ, etc.). So pure are the harmonics that they have the feel of a glass harmonica - you know, the parlor trick of rubbing a wine glass with a wet finger. Whetham allows these tones to waft in elegant suspension, giving the impression that if they were the sounds from ghosts, then the spirits embrace an enlightened, transcendent, and celestial aloofness, avoiding the baseness of anything physical. At various times throughout the recordings, Whetham drags a contact microphone across the surface of those urns, amplifying prickly textures that scatter with an anarchnoid irregularity. It's an unnerving counterpoint of earthly abjection to offset the innervision luminosity and holy minimalism from Whetham's drones. Think Alan Lamb, Andrew Chalk, Eliane Radigue, Phill Niblock. Yeah, it's that good! Absolutely gorgeous work, and easily the best thing we've heard from Mr. Whetham.
Recently, through several friends of aQ, we've been introduced to a bunch of really cool indie rock from China, Boyz & Girl (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Pairs, Snapline, Mr. Graceless, Carsick Cars, Duck Fight Goose, but the one that really grabbed us the most was this one right here, the oddly monikered White+, which is in fact not really indie rock at all, but is in fact an experimental offshoot of the Chinese indie rock group Carsick Cars. This duo describe themselves as being a "hardware electronica band", although the friend who turned us on to these guys, described them as sounding like Neu! crossed with Yellow Magic Orchestra, which thankfully is pretty dang accurate. Utilizing a set up of customized keyboards, pedals, samplers, loops and live drums (and the occasional bit of spare ethereal vocals), White+ lay down some droned out, super mesmerizing, darkly motorik krautrock influenced electronic hypnorock, that sounds like a weird hybrid of Circle, the Boredoms and Fabulous Diamonds, or something like that, just check out the opening track here. A cascade of skittering programmed beats, looped and layered, chopped and collaged voices, live tribal drums, swirling electronics, dizzying FX, the sounds warped and constantly shifting speed, the vocals processed into strange streaks of psychedelic melody, the various other loops slipping from crunchy chug, to spaced out shimmer, the whole track churning and propulsive and utterly hypnotic. The second track is where the Neu! first pops up and shines through big time, the band locked into a serious psych-kraut groove, a sound that positions these guys squarely in the current movement of kraut-psych space rock revisionists, but their sound is definitely more electronic, and much more beholden to classic krautrock, albeit here wreathed in psychedelic effects and layered with warm washes of keyboard melody, not to mention clouds of swirling FX.
And here's where we'd usually say something like "and that's how it goes from there on out", but these guys aren't so simple to peg. The next track takes seriously driving drums, and adds some electronic bagpipe sounding synths, the result some twisted Amps For Christ / Maserati hybrid, with brief bursts of twisted FX heavy warpage, where the sound slips into near Aphex Twin territory.
From there on out, all bets are off, bloopy and bleepy, skittery and playful one moment, all lilting melodies, and hazy dreamlike kraut-age shimmer, brooding buzz drifting atop wild dense drum damage the next, all supporting soaring echo drenched vocals, the vibe ritualistic and trance-like, definitely a sound that fits perfectly alongside modern day Boredoms. The live drums are really what make the band, even the most ethereal sprawl of soft focus electronic ambience, takes on a whole new vibe when anchored by some pounding rhythms, and the mix of programmed beats and real drums makes for a heady rhythmic concoction, with the surrounding sounds just as compelling, equal parts melodic pulsation, kosmische cascade, and tripped out sonic swirl, some tracks sounding like a full on, heavy as hell hypnorock band, others like ultra abstract avant kraut experiments, the vocals transforming some of the tracks into near popsongs, but more often than not, the vocals splinter and are transformed into something more textural or rhythmic, the song following suit, taking that pop element and wedding it to something much more abstract and psychedelic.
A unanimous new aQ favorite, and literally every time we play this in the store, we sell a copy! We have a whole bunch, but when we sell out, we'll have to get more from China, so might take a couple weeks. Needless to say, grab one NOW! Super deluxe packaging too, sweet design, massive booklet, obi, etc.
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How had we never heard this band before. A Japanoise grind/noise/powerviolence trio, featuring a vocalist and two drummers and that's it. No guitar, no bass, but you might never know it. When we first heard it, we thought it was some super obscure metal band, but knowing it's just drums and vocals makes it even more ridiculous and cool, some track are wild chaotic, near metallic freakouts, others are blurred Merzbow style blowouts, but the vibe/sound is way different, that it's all drums and vocals, there's even shards of squealing feedback, that again give the impression there are guitars, and sometimes the drums are so blown out and distorted, they sounds like blurred buzzing riffage, the vocals too, go from wild Boredoms like yowls, to death metal grunts, to hysterical shrieks, to straight up, face melting white noise. The sound sometimes settling into some weird rhythms, just the drums pounding away, before the sound explodes again into full on noise mode, brutal blurred fury, that manages to remain musical, while destroying your speakers and eardrums. We just might have ourselves a new favorite Japanese band. thanks Ormolycka. And yeah, once again, these tapes are pretty dang LIMITED!!!!!
One of two new releases on the newly launched Psalm 88 label, an offshoot of local black metal cassette label Acephale Winter, and the first we've heard from Xarkrinur, a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD one man (boy?) black metal band from Bangladesh (!), whose warped, home-brewed, weirdly produced depressive black buzz immediately reminded us of late great weirdo black metal horde Benighted Leams. Similarly stumbling and damaged, the guitars brittle and buzzy, the programmed drums machinelike and robotic, the rhythms stiff and strangely static, but it's the vocals, a raspy, whispery growl, that seal the deal, WAY up in the mix, eclipsing the music with every foul utterance, we're also reminded of local lo-fi sort-of-black-metal wacko Fastest, a similarly delivered, super dramatic hushed vokill style. But Xarkrinur conjure up a seriously stunning atmosphere, the second track, slows things down, and gets super atmospheric, with some strange harmonic overtones, and a murky, melancholy main riff, the vocals shift too, becoming more hissy and feral, but the music, super emotional and darkly lovely, sans black metal affectation, could be some tripped out lo-fi post rock. The other two songs here are similarly split, the third another brittle blast of raw primitive buzz, while the closer is a smoldering doomic creep, with thick crumbling chords (that sound like an organ almost), the vocals more wasted and weary, a harrowing sprawl of depressive downer doom that we are digging a LOT. For sure need to hear more from this guy.
LIMITED TO 88 COPIES!!
