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Half off! Was $34, now just $17, while they last! We got a tonne of these for Record Store Day 2015, and most of 'em blew out of here back then, but we are such big Heads fans maybe we overdid it a little on the order, 'cause as it turns out somehow we still have a handful of these, and now are slashing the price to move 'em out. Heck, even if you picked it up on RSD maybe you wanna get one for a friend who is a felow Heads completist, at this price...
Not too long ago, we reviewed the reissue of UK psychedelic space rockers the Heads' year 2000 classic Everybody Knows We Got Nowhere, a primo slab of blown out heaviness, psychedelic hypnorock, and dense, damaged jammage. That reissue came in several forms, a double cd, a double lp, and most impressive of all, a massive FIVE lp box set, which also included a bonus cd, called Nobody Knows, a selection of unreleased rarities culled from the group's rehearsal tapes and cd-r archives. This here special Record Store Day release finds that cd being reissued on vinyl!! So now some of you are probably thinking, well, I already bought the box, so I already have this. But, and Heads fans should be used to this, nothing is ever easy with these guys. While it's true, it is -essentially- the same release, or at least could be, mostly, it's definitely not completely the same. We haven't done a side by side comparison, so we don't know how they're different, or how different they are, only that supposedly they are, and that there's a bunch more stuff on this here RSD lp version.
So Heads/vinyl nerds, even if you have the box, you might wanna think about getting this too. But for everyone else who didn't get the box, well this is a no brainer, cuz this collection RULES. Track after tack of droned, out, heady, hypnotic psychedelic space rocking, veering from low slung and trancey, to full on face melting freakout, from damaged collage noisescapes to full on Stooges-y swagger, and from jazzy, lysergic skitter, to fuzzed out, speaker destroying garage psych pound. It's a lot more lo-fi than most of the Heads' catalog, but really that only makes these tracks that much cooler. More raw and noisy and blown out and seriously psychedelic.
LIMITED TO 1200 COPIES, includes a poster.
SklavenTanz are a Korean duo who craft site specific soundworks and performances, rooted in an exploration of what lies beneath their sprawling city, and the various unheard sounds that lurk just below the hubbub of daily life, in this case, they broke into an old abandoned rainwater pumping station, and used the space's natural acoustics and incredible reverb, to weave a gorgeous, and hauntingly bleak soundscape of industrial sonic ruin, skeletal rhythms, mysterious pipe fights, and hushed industrial mesmer. At its core lies the natural sounds of the space, dripping water, distant rumbles, the space resonating along with the city around it, but then SklavenTanz begin to create incidents, interacting with the space, rubbing wood on concrete, stomping their feet, striking metal railings, there also seem to be some sort of actual instruments, as subtle melodies surface throughout, and drift forlornly in austere expanses of barely there shimmer, some of the moments are downright beautiful, serene and tranquil, meditative and mysterious, while others explode into acts of sonic violence, pounding metal on metal, echo drenched howls, primitive musical rituals, howling and feral, urgent and angry - but those moments are few and far between, with the bulk of the record spent in a dreamy subterranean drift, monk-like chants, extended chordal drones, intercepted shortwave broadcasts, all wreathed in a patina of disuse and decay. However, the last ten minutes, shrugs off much of that sonic ruin, and letting the warm melodic thrum underpinning the action move to the fore, softly pulsing and undulating, rife with rich overtones, finally transforming into a strangely lovely, sun dappled ur-drone, as if emerging from the dank dark and into the light, all the while, in the background, the duo continue to mine mysterious sounds from the space, creating a strange background framework, over which is laid this gorgeously serene and mesmeric coda.
Comes in a full color digipak, with a printed poster/insert with photos and liner notes.
It's been almost 3 years since we've heard from turntable mad scientist and alchemist Strotter Inst., whose haunting mechanical record player mini-symphonies evokes mysterious worlds, populated with shadow creatures and amorphous figures operating strange turntable like machinery, everything shaded grey, with a patina of rust, or perhaps dust, the machines wheezing as turntables spin lugubriously, multiple tone arms like a child's mechanical toy octopus, everything held together by rubber bands and bits of strings, a Rube Goldberg style contraption, designed to create a new world of sound, the above mentioned shadowy kingdom, where we can wander and get lost.
Strotter Inst. is Swiss musician / tinkerer Christoph Hess, who customizes old turntables, using whatever is at hand, to create loop making machines, collages of skipping sounds, but unlike the playful melodiousness of Pierre Bastien, or the gauzy ambient drift of Philip Jeck, Strotter's sound is much more raw, and almost heavy, feral even, tons of low end, drones everywhere, hiss and buzz and rumble, in fact much of the time, the turntable sounds like it has been transformed into some sort of instrument of destruction, conjuring up some seriously abject Wolf Eyesian dirgescapes, heaving and roiling expanses of looped blackness, as if some evil genius unleashed his army of automatons, a landscape dotted with Steampunk style contraptions, all gears and ratchets, spewing steam and lurching forward in unison, in fact much of the time, if one didn't know better, one might not even realize that the music of Strotter Inst. was created with turntables. Until the sound shifts, and suddenly a staticky crackly record begins to skip, and becomes the rhythmic source for whatever might come next. Sometimes the sound will hew close to that stuttering skeletal framework, other times, the skipping record is immediately engulfed by thick slabs of sonic blackness, churning machinelike whirs, and percussive low end thrum, this is industrial music for sure, especially if the industry in question was antique turntables. Seriously though, the sounds here are occasionally pretty intense, and heavy and abrasive, which sort of shames the various noisemakers who need a table top full of pedals and a bunch of amps, and a million patch cords and cd players and mixers to make their music, especially when one old man with a handful of record players, a pocket full of rubber bands, a soldering iron and a pile of turntable parts, can kick up a rhythmic din just as hard and heavy as any of 'em. But it's definitely not all hard and heavy, those blasts are balanced by long loping stretches of motorik rhythms, looped and hypnotic, locked into totally mesmerizing grooves, a symphony of percussive thumps and twanging rubber bands woven into strange alien krautrocky dirges.
So fantastic! We often forget to include him in the aQ turntable pantheon, but he absolutely belongs: Jeck, Tetreault, Otomo, Bastien, Fun Years, and Strotter Inst.!!
Packaged in a beautiful cardstock sleeve, with a super striking fold out poster.
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Third Wave Holocaust is the latest sonic assault from this Philadelphia based black noise / industrial / black metal collective, whose acronymic moniker stands for Total Occultic Mechnical Blasphemy, and whose process involves setting up in all sorts of locations with emotional or historical import, old abandoned buildings, decaying churches, sites of deaths, murders, with the goal, we assume, to channel that psychic energy into the sounds, and the sounds, shit, even sans whatever psychic energy these guys conjure up, is seriously crushing, totally speaker shredding blown out blackness, bordering in places on pure white noise, overwhelming walls of Merzboic brutality, the pure sonic chaos of performing at extreme volume in huge spaces with massive natural reverb and delay, a swirling vortex of sound, furious and frenzied, and in many cased blurred and smeared into indistinct bursts of caustic sonic malevolence, those moments balanced with more nuanced ritualism, voices, chiming bells, dense rumbles, distant drones, thick low end reverberations, the sound slipping easily between hushed demonic drifts and all out aural punishment, with most of the record straddling the two, the best moments when the blacknoise oozes into the more tranquil passages, or when the strange vocal incantations somehow make it to the surface, from beneath a morass of churning, roiling buzz and howl, sometimes peppered with strange fragmented rhythms, but just as often, those perceived rhythms splintering into just more layers of crumbling chaotic sound.
It makes sense that this is on Black Plague / Malignant, as it's closer to noise/industrial than it is black metal, but adventurous black metallers still just might find this grim and hellish enough, but really, anyone into black/drone/noise/industrial ritualism, these guys are for you...
This new cd from Norwegian avantgarde ex-black metallers Ulver isn't really new, as it actually is a reissue compilation of their two limited edition, now out of print eps "Silence Teaches You How To Sing" and "Silencing The Singing" on one handy, domestically issued disc (by a new label run by Aaron of tUMULt's noise-pop artists Iran, who met Ulver while in Norway filming a documentary about the black metal scene!). So, you don't need it if you already have those two import discs, but if you don't, we most certainly recommend it -- both eps are two of Ulver's best post-black metal efforts to date, as they move into unclassifiable experimental/electronica realms. To sum up our previous commentary on these eps: "Silence Teaches You..." is a single, 24 minute track of electonic experimental improv, a slowly-unfolding collage of organic drones and beats and clicks and field recordings and post-rock piano melody etc., that might remind you of everything from Tarwater to Philip Jeck to Fennesz to Mogwai... Quite mellow, dark and beautiful, a soundscape composed, in part, of static-y electro-grime overlaying scratchy vinyl looping with occasional wordless drifting vocals. It was constructed from material recorded in a one-night "Dead City Centre jam" during the sessions for Ulver's previous full-length album, the love it or hate it "Perdition City". Unlike that album, though, this ep benefits from a lack of horrendous vocal and saxophone contributions! The similar in method/sound "Silencing The Singing" follows, three tracks providing another half hour of music, constructed of repetitive melodic and non-melodic loops (some notes on a piano, scratchy vinyl surface noise, what might be far-off voices), gradually joined by electronic blips and beats. The mood is quiet and languid, as are the rhythms, although the last track builds into a lovely few final moments of loud distortion.
Ulver of course originally made their name in the black metal scene, with such classic the-forest-is-my-throne-style albums as "Nattens Madrigal" and "Kveldsanger", full of church-burning riffs and wolverine vocals (and acoustic folk music in the case of "Kveldsanger"). And we won't deny that that's some of their best stuff -- it is. But since those days they've abandoned black metal and morphed into some sort of odd, willfully abstract electronic/experimental band -- and as well, Ulver leader Krystoffer "Garm" Rygg started up the fab Jester label to release music by all sorts of likeminded (i.e. fucked) Norwegian artists (including AQ faves When, Bogus Blimp, Origami Galaktika, Rotoscope, and of course Ulver).
And while Ulver's black metal past isn't overtly evident on these recordings, we could suppose that their earlier appreciation of the grim, lo-fi, trance-like ambience created by their (former) heroes Darkthrone and Mayhem is still a part of Ulver's sound, explaining their music's current immersion in a grimy (if not grim) background of constant crackle and buzzing drones. Well, that and the fact that such sounds are now as hip in experimental/electronica circles as they are cult in metal.
