The latest from aQ beloved occult rockers Aluk Todolo begins sounding like a black metal This Heat, and it only gets better from there. These metallic minimalists from France are masters at maximizing their instrumental guitar/bass/drums assault, taking what most bands uses to make some regular old rock and roll, and instead weave lush, elaborate rhythmscapes, unleash throbbing sprawls of textured and nuanced noise, create math-metal in the guise of dark psych, and conjure psychedelic krautrock in the form of barely harnessed black buzz. Like on previous releases, the music here is less about songs and more about movements, and movement - fiendishly deft arrangements of sound, like miniature black symphonies. It's hard to articulate just what Aluk Todolo do, cuz honestly it's kind of difficult to even understand it.
From a purely sonic standpoint, all analysis and deep digging set to the side, the music is pure, organic, and emotional. It's dark, but not theatrically, or even introspectively, so. It's a constantly shapeshifting musical chimera, seemingly always more than what it seems, moody and mesmeric, melodic and measured, unhinged and chaotic, heavy and hellish, delicate and abstract, jazzy and atmospheric. The drums are just as often used to create textures as they are rhythms, while moments surface throughout that sound like some lost Goblin soundtrack, sometimes morphing into a brief moment of almost Van Halen worthy riffery, other times blurring into tension filled stretches of blackened mesmer.
Some tracks sound like Australian jazz minimalists the Necks covering Motorhead, some sound like Godspeed You Black Emperor tripping on acid and amphetamines, the moody broodiness of that group whipped up into a cloud of pulsing, chaotic black energy. This record in particular is their least metal so far, and maybe the jazziest, the drums are in constant motion, with frenzied skitter giving way to abstract shuffles, the bass too, no simple basslines, dense tangle and knots of sound, the rhythm section somehow impossibly, inhumanly tight, yet totally loose at the same time, balancing on a razor thin line between composition and collapse, and it's the constant push and pull that makes every moment fraught with energy and emotion, passion and pathos. And that's not to say there is no metal, the band effortlessly rip into jagged shards of downtuned crush, and furious frenzied riffing without batting an eye, but contextually, those moments seem to be more about evoking a certain feeling, or reaching a certain musical destination, but with the idea that this whole record, and arguably this whole band, is entirely and utterly about the journey. Every song here could be stretched out forever, and as a listener, we would not hesitate to let ourselves get sucked in, and LISTEN forever. And ever. The energy of Aluk Todolo is transcendental, a concept that if removed from sound would seemingly exist beyond human comprehension, but here, delivered as pure, instrumental, sonic energy, it takes on a form we understand, and fundamentally enjoy, a sound that touches on many other sounds near and dear to our hearts, and souls, but it's the arrangement, the composition, the delivery, the power, the depth, the ineffable otherworldliness that transforms this divine musical message from the great beyond, into something that speaks directly to us, in a language we all understand.
San Francisco's electronic psychedelic trio Bronze returns with their third full-length, In Stone, delivering another solid slab of raga-influenced songs. While not departing too much from their established, unique sound (no complaints!), there's some really awesome noisy bits on this newest album. "Maniac," for instance, definitely draws more from the cacophony of This Heat than from the rhythmic pulses of electronic psychedelia to which we've compared Bronze in the past (Silver Apples, Emeralds, etc.). The extent to which Bronze's limited instrumentation can fill out their songs is incredible, a testament to their individual skills: there's really only Brian's drums, Rob's vocals, and the ever-mysterious box that Joe manipulates. Their sound is huge, both live and recorded. FYI, Not Not Fun only did a cassett - a vinyl version of In Stone was released on a Spanish label for some reason, but we only managed to get two copies from the band (and only have one left, maybe, if you act fast). However, all you vinyl lovers, be aware there is a forthcoming live lp soon to be released on John Dwyer's Castle Face label, which we will definitely be reviewing, as Bronze is one of the best live bands currently performing!
Here's a heavy AQ fave, finally repressed after more than a few months MIA, and back in stock! From our New Arrivals list #184 last year:
Buried At Sea are a bulldozer, shovelling clods of earth down your earcanal. Clods of toxic corrosive landfill, to be precise. And if you love heaviness and doom like we do, you'll understand that we mean that's a good thing, and you'll definitely want to pick up this, the first release from a quartet of Chicago doom-mongers who possibly named their band after the Saint Vitus song "Burial At Sea" (and are not to be confused with fellow doomsters Graves At Sea!). Slow, sludgy sickness for doom-heads. Crushing. Feedback. Disturbed vocals (or indeciperable samples?) buried in the mix. And once in a while, the Buried At Sea guys strip the mastodon they're riding down to a skeleton of bones and bask in the beauty of its terrible form (i.e. quiet parts, occasional interludes of even doomier loneliness and despair). Three untitled songs, 39 minutes! Thus it's closer to a full-length than an ep, although ep priced. The nastiness of Khanate meets the post-rockiness of Pelican, with the heaviness of both. The hole they're digging has also previously been excavated by the likes of Electric Wizard, Eyehategod, Warhorse, the aforementioned Saint Vitus, and all the other bands who operate heavy machinery under the influence of drugs and alcohol in hopes of unearthing the long-buried lich-corpse whose Satanic shadow Black Sabbath was but the first to glimpse...sorry...getting a little carried away there! But with their relentless grinding riffage and use of space and dynamics Buried At Sea are worthy newcomers whose Migration is an excellent debut.
These unapologetically '80s oriented Canadian headbangers are back with their fourth album, AND were back in town the other day on tour with Swedish speed metallers Enforcer - they stopped by aQ and so we picked up these cds from 'em in person, yay! We've been big Cauldron fans for a long time, 'cause out of the currently trending retro-metal contingent, they really bring back an important part of the '80s metal thing that most other bands don't - the POP element. Their speedy, dark, fist-waving metal has a slightly glam, LA Sunset Strip vibe that has always reminded us a bit of '80s era solo Ozzy, not a bad thing. We hear that again on In Ruin for sure, an album that does what all Cauldron albums do - rocks hard and feels immediately, satisfyingly familiar. The melodic soloing, vocal harmonies, and catchy choruses can't be denied, while avoiding excessive cheesiness, perhaps 'cause of how the pop is balanced with certain sense of melancholic moodiness & majesty, here perhaps best illustrated by the lengthy (6:37) instrumental "Delusive Serenade".
These British warriors of 'Caveman Battle Doom' return once again, this time to wreak their particular brand of sonic, um, Revengeance. And like past installments, it's another punishing, knuckle dragging, sword wielding, foe vanquishing crusher, equal parts stonery sludge, furious metallic pound, and brutal downtuned doom. The vocals remain super unique, one a deep bellow, the other a whiney wail, both wound together over the group's impossibly heavy churn. So if the Melvins, Sleep, Corrupted, Harvey Milk, godheadSilo, Karp, Electric Wizard and the like are your cup of sludgey black mead, then saddle up, strap it on and bow before the sonic skull-cavers of Conan.
In any other hands, the very idea of remixing Mahler might not only be preposterous but abhorrent; but Christian Fennesz is far from the average electronic musician. After all, he beautifully fragmented the fun-fun-fun-in-sun pop of the Beach Boys for his iconic Endless Summer album; and he's more reverential of the original Mahler material than on he was of the source material for Endless Summer. It is but a sliver of the Mahler oeuvre that Fennesz extracts, the yearning harmonies and lush orchestral swells (as opposed to Mahler's counterpointing brass marches of bombast and discord); yet Fennesz deftly layers elongations and dilations of tone into impressionist pools of reflective sound, flecked with his rasping buzz of tricked out digital noise and a couple of Philip Jeck style intrusions of antique turntable surface noise with a haunted melody struggling to peer outward. Fennesz further injects his aesthetic into that of Mahler's by reprising the guitar melody he penned on "Liminality" from his 2014 Becs album. This languid strum settles into the bed of electrical hums and soft-moss orchestral drones, though it is dramatic leap from the 19th century into the 21st from one Austrian legend to another.
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Listening to old Flaming Lips, it's nearly impossible to imagine them as the stadium rock, Miley & Ke$ha collaborating mainstream musical superstars they've become, cosidering they started life as a drugged out, cacophonous mess, on par with fellow psychedelic noise makers the Butthole Surfers. But even on those early records, there were hints of what was to come, and what the Lips were capable of. Over the years, the band got less noisy, less druggy, less fucked up, and popper, their songcraft developing by leaps and bounds, and somewhere right in the middle was the absolute sweet spot. Actually not somewhere, RIGHT HERE. Clouds Taste Metallic is the Lips finest moment, and that's in a career of mostly fine moments. It perfectly balances the unhinged noisemaking, with the impossibly catchy pop, wound up into quirky, psych pop perfection that unfurls and unravels fantastically. It's also a record swaddled in crazy, FX drenched guitar noise, and marks the final appearance of the man responsible for that noise, twisted axe wrangler Ronald Jones.
How could a perfect record get any more perfect? Add two whole discs (Due To High Expectations...The Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles For Your Balloons/The King Bug Laughs, and Psychiatric Explorations Of The Fetus With Needles: Live In Seattle 1996), collecting pretty much every EP, every demo, live track, radio session and random recording from the era, a collection brimming with tons of unlikely gems. So worth it for the bonus stuff for fans, but if you've somehow never ever even heard Clouds Taste Metallic, you are about to have your mind, and eardrums BLOWN.
The THIRD repress of this exquisite album on vinyl. If you missed it the last two times, don't expect this one to last any longer! The only difference is the black & white artwork, but the musical content is the same. Here's what we said way back when...
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with an entirely characteristic yet coy swell of effected elemental smear, crumbling delicately yet forcefully, until giving way to what is, to date, and here is the coy part, Liz Harris' most songwriterly and structured album. As opposed to the rich swaths of drone that up until now defined her sound, Harris has shifted from the abstract towards a more distinct and figurative sound. True to the title, the record unfolds like a sort of mysterious and morbid fairytale, innocent in its clear and elegant melodies, yet creepy and highly abstract in its more droney and sublime interludes. For the most part, her guitar playing is laid bare, removed from the dense fog of effects that typically occlude them. And what we discover is actually a pretty strummy record, with plenty of clean guitar articulation though certainly the aroma of her previous tech heavy approach remains in what is relatively speaking still pretty effected. At times she even reverts back to the gorgeous icey crunchy string attack of some previous efforts. With so much space liberated in the absence of drones, we also get to hear her stunning voice. Furthermore, the occasional audible lyric creeps to the surface, one standout fragment being "Love Is Enormous," a somewhat shockingly affirmative sentiment from an otherwise darkly mysterious and abstract persona. From start to finish Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill lulls you into its graceful murmurings and hypnotic thrumming. An exquisite addition to an already compelling discography. Recommended.
Grouper's Liz Harris seems to be settling in comfortably on the Kranky label, with the release so far of the two AIA lps on cd for the first time, the debut from Mirrorring (Harris's duo project with Jesy Fortino from Tiny Vipers), and this "new" release, The Man Who Died In His Boat, which has come out in conjunction with a lp and cd reissue of her 2008 record Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, an AQ favorite. The release/re-release of both records together is no coincidence as the tracks on The Man Who Died In His Boat were recorded during the same sessions as Dragging A Dead Deer, and the new record has a long lost twin feel that we haven't heard on subsequent Grouper records since then. While she still employs the waves of foggy reverb and layered far away voices, there is a reappearance of fully formed songs and a sheen of less-filtered clarity. Both records are informed by key childhood memories, this one by a discovery with her father of beached sailboat, and their speculation about the man who disappeared sailing it. The ocean roar, swelling waves of reverbed sound, and the far away sadness of acoustic sea shanties pour throughout the release creating a moving hypnotic spell which invariably holds us helpless in its grasp. Beautiful!
Currently, we only have the cd version, but the vinyl versions of both this and the reissue of Dragging A Dead Deer are supposedly alredy being repressed.
It's official. Guided By Voices are no more. But what a streak. Hundreds of songs, dozens of releases, almost all of them awesome! That's a pretty good record by anyones standards. But if forced to pick THE record that best exemplifies what made Guided By Voices so special, it would have to be Bee Thousand. Originally released in 1994, Bee Thousand perfectly captured both sides of GBV, the frustratingly experimental fragmentary side, with short 30 second bursts of pop brilliance that burnt out before making it out of the first verse, exhausting in under a minute, the sort of hook other bands would kill for and would most likely repeat 50 times in a song if they had come up with it, and classic pop songsmithery, with gorgeously hooky, jangly pop gems, cobbled together from bits of the Beatles and the Kinks and other pop stalwarts, all filtered through GBV frontman Bob Pollard's non-sequiter flecked lyrcal flights of fancy and a distinctly drunken desire to ROCK! It's impossible to describe exactly what makes this record so great. The songs sure, but also the way they are recorded, and the sequencing, and the way some songs are butted up right against each other, and some songs just cut off and trample all over the end of another songs. It's absolutely perfect. One of those rare records where the spaces between songs and the random bits of sonic detritus are jus as catchy as the songs themselves. Sort of like the way you would find yourself humming the drum fills in Nirvana songs, GBV records were a single dense collection of sounds and songs and parts and pauses and chunks of rock and pop assembled in a seemingly haphazzard arrangement, but on closer inspection, it couldn't be any other way, and most certainly couldn't be played by any other band. The first ten minutes of Bee Thousand is perhaps the finest opening salvo in musical history. "Hardcore UFO's", "Buzzards And Dreadful Crows", "Tractor Rape Chain", "The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory". A 1-2-3-4 punch! And while the record is basically solid, no filler to be found, there are a handful of POP CLASSICS scattered throughout: "Echoes Myron", "Goldstar For Robot Boy", "Awful Bliss", "I Am A Scientist" and more... This record is definitely one of the best indie rock records of all time. Fuck Slanted And Enchanted. Sure that's a great record, but it's irony-heavy and too cool. Bee Thousand is just a regular bunch of beer drinking yokels from Ohio who love pop music, love to rock and somehow struck gold. If you don't own this record, for fuck's sake GET IT!
It demonstrates a lot of confidence to name your deathly black metal (or blackened death metal?) band something like Imperial Triumphant, but this NYC outfit really do mean business, business that includes not only brutal, technically twisted death/black metal but also lots of avant-garde, arty elements from free jazz sax squeal & piano improv to dramatic, droned-out 20th century classical passages, at times making the one wonder if you've put on a Cecil Taylor or Krzysztof Penderecki disc instead of this one! Lots of atmosphere, lots of shred, with swarming fuzz, lurching seasick song structures, dissonant breaks, crazed battery, and confusional genre-jumping interludes that would make John Zorn proud. No surprise this was produced/mixed/mastered by eccentric metal guru Colin Marston of Krallice, Behold The Arctopus, Gorguts, Encenathrakh, etc. Will appeal to fans of such recently-raved about avant-death weirdness like Aevangelist and Chthe'ilist, we're pretty sure, along with Portal, later Gorguts, Liturgy, Deathspell Omega, and other extreme metal strangeness.
New single from these unbeatable garage pop faves, featuring stuff tracked during the Mutilator Defeated At Last sessions: A-side "Fortress" is a new one, a hypnotic, dream-pop ripper, and then there's the even dreamier "Man In A Suitcase" on the flip, a longtime live staple from the old days.
Ojerum is one of the few artists from the informational black hole that is the Vaald label that we can say a few things about; but even then, it ain't much. Ojerum has a name and it's Paw Grabowski. That's it. On this cassette, he presents two elliptical pieces each about 10 minutes long for acoustic guitar and dulcimer, both intertwining in trancelike chimings of meditative harmonics and melodies. The timbre of these pieces allude to the oblique neofolk, minor chords of Sol Invictus, but his playing is far looser, keeping true to the vanguard minimalism of Alexander Turnquist, with these ghostly figures on acoustic instruments hypnotically cycling amidst subtle wash of windswept field recordings. So lovely, and so limited.
The first we've heard from local doom/sludge/psych/noise duo is in fact their second release, and the second half of The Cosmic Trigger diptych. The first half was a limited cassette, still available direct from the band (and who knows, maybe here soon), and the second is this one right here, a just released lp, that is one serious sonic motherfucker. Two bass players, a drummer and a shitload of FX, unleashing a blown out barrage of crushing, churning, tranced out hypno-noise rock. The opener sounds like a more pissed off OM, the band locked into a single riff, and just hammering away at it hypnotically. There's a stretched out ambient noise jam that closes out the first side, mesmerizing in its own right, before the massive and monstrous 19+ minute flipside, which starts out much more driving and aggressive, before gradually, splintering, and crumbling, into another epic downer dirge, that again, invokes some serious minimal metal, ur-trance bliss and should have doomlords and sludgenerds freaking the fuck out.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES! Includes a hand numbered insert, and a download code of BOTH Cosmic Trigger eps, as well as their Live At The Stork Club set!
Two of our favorite pieces of all time from minimalist composer Reich, available again! Both pieces were recorded in 1970, one at the Guggenheim in NY and the other at the University Museum in Berkeley. This is electric organ overdrive! Four Organs not surprisingly is a piece played on four electric organs (with Reich playing one as well as his good friend Philip Glass...), while beneath the organs is the repetitious shaking of maracas. The short pulsations of the organ gradually stretch out, lasting longer and longer, creating a totally dynamic tension that evokes standing in a massive and grand church that's empty except for the mesmerizing sounds of the organs lulling you into some sort of a trance. Phase Patterns manages to increase the tension with the four players using identical organs and playing to a precise strategy that Reich has calculated. These pieces predate and predict so much of the minimalist electronic and experimental music to come over the next three decades.
The original Shandar lp of Four Organs / Phase Patterns has been reissued on cd before, but it's nice of Superior Viaduct to bring it back on that format, AND they're planning a first ever vinyl reissue of this classic in March, fyi!
Imagine a massive, dusty, vintage organ being played on the streets amidst urban decay... Now add extra psychedelic dirge and murk and you begin to have a good idea of the captivating and trance-inducing sounds that Douglas Katelus creates with his aptly named project Solo Organ.
A longtime fixture of the Bay Area underground film community, he started Solo Organ around 5 years ago, after scoring his ideal organ on Craigslist from a former preacher in San Jose. He started playing his version of the early Pink Floyd classic Atom Heart Mother around town, and anyone at those shows immediately took notice. As he's progressed with this project he has really ecome one with his instrument, travelling deep into droniness in the way he plays, making full use of the analog warmth and depth of the organ.
This transparent blue slab of vinyl is the perfect introduction to Solo Organ, but if you're in the Bay and get the chance to see him live don't miss out, as it's a totally transformational experience.
This is limited to 300 copies so act fast!
With a name like The Star Pillow, you pretty much know what to expect, and some beautiful dreamy spaciness is exactly what you get. But it's not so simple as that. The latest bit of ambient bliss-out from local label Time Released Sound is a hushed, shimmering spawn of deep reverberant thrum, haunting cinematic drones, and lush, sonic swells, the vibe is darker and more tense than much of TRS' other releases, and all the better for it. It's a haunting, cinematic gem that falls somewhere between the sculpted guitar ambience of Stars Of The Lid, and the brooding, nocturnal drift of Ben Frost at his most blissed out. The final track especially is a sinister stunner.
As always, there are two different versions. The super deluxe, this time limited to 55 copies, is packaged in a vintage Kodak film can, each in its original box, with a 1969 expiration date, the year of the moon landing. The cans are collaged inside and out, with NASA photos, and inside is a 3D diorama, with all sorts of stuff embedded in polyurethane, a tiny astronaut, meteorite chunks, melted bits of space craft, shards of metal and other space detritus. The whole thing is housed in a stamped box and wrapped in a folded and tied antique NASA photograph, with a hand printed and numbered insert as well. Also, there are 100 of the less limited standard edition digipak and features a non 3D recreation of the artwork from the deluxe version.
With a name like The Star Pillow, you pretty much know what to expect, and some beautiful dreamy spaciness is exactly what you get. But it's not so simple as that. The latest bit of ambient bliss-out from local label Time Released Sound is a hushed, shimmering spawn of deep reverberant thrum, haunting cinematic drones, and lush, sonic swells, the vibe is darker and more tense than much of TRS' other releases, and all the better for it. It's a haunting, cinematic gem that falls somewhere between the sculpted guitar ambience of Stars Of The Lid, and the brooding, nocturnal drift of Ben Frost at his most blissed out. The final track especially is a sinister stunner.
As always, there are two different versions. The super deluxe, this time limited to 55 copies, is packaged in a vintage Kodak film can, each in its original box, with a 1969 expiration date, the year of the moon landing. The cans are collaged inside and out, with NASA photos, and inside is a 3D diorama, with all sorts of stuff embedded in polyurethane, a tiny astronaut, meteorite chunks, melted bits of space craft, shards of metal and other space detritus. The whole thing is housed in a stamped box and wrapped in a folded and tied antique NASA photograph, with a hand printed and numbered insert as well. Also, there are 100 of the less limited standard edition digipak and features a non 3D recreation of the artwork from the deluxe version.
Mysteries continue to emanate from Vaald, here propagated by the completely unknowable Styrenhet. Plodding, industrial dirge rhythms and synchronized melodic miserablism accompany synth-noise shadowiness for the A-side, not too far from the primitive gasps of Nocturnal Emissions or Factrix. The B-side (both tracks garner Swedish titles, a fact that may or may not indicate the origin of this project... let's assume so) trawls the synth noise melody with a DIY, sci-fi simplicity again girded to rounded kick-drum thump. The scant 15 minute program on this cassette is matched by the tiny pressing of 24 copies.
Semtex was and is a strange record, and one that bridged what seemed to be a vast chasm of aesthetics that dominated Bristol in the early to mid '90s. On one hand, there was the bleached and blanched sounds of Flying Saucer Attack (and the vast satellite of projects that spawned from FSA's rural psychedelia) and then there was the convoluted dub and trip-hop noir of Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead; and right in the middle of these two was Matt Elliott's Third Eye Foundation, adhering a buzzing shoegaze melancholy to deft Amen break drum'n'bass programming, all slammed through an overdriven four-track. Admittedly, the tape compression keeps Third Eye Foundation from crushing the bass-bins, but the dub-crunch hiss-murk is a brilliant hyper-exaggeration of the Lee Perry productions from two decades earlier. Elliott - who spent time in Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone, and Amp - has a knack for the blown out guitar smear that all of those Bristol projects embraced, with the drum'n'bass skitter and breakbeats building one hell of an album of post-MBV noiserock. Strange to think this album is now 20 years old, and it holds up remarkably well; now fleshed out with 23 bonus tracks (8 of which are on the vinyl, and the other 15 are on the digital download).
Acouasme is the first proper full length in two years from these aQ beloved dronelords, and finds the duo attempting a harsher, more industrial sound, but harsh and industrial, at least in the hands of Troum, ends up sounding way more beautiful than brutal, a series of hypo-drone rituals, dense and dark, droney and dreamy.
Each of the six tracks here is a sprawling wash of groaning metallic buzz and grinding subsonic thrum, pocked with fleeting flecks of melody and driven by abstract rhythmic pulsations, again, not so much harsh, as sinister and cinematic, shadowy and ominous. In fact, much of Acouasme is actually quite lovely, albeit that grim, foreboding sort of loveliness that evokes all sorts of existential dread. Tracks unwind languorously, like a creeping black fog of abstract ambience, occasionally giving way to blurred choral shimmer, or collapsing into rib cage rattling sub-bass throb. Amidst these tranquil soundscapes, lurk both blurry bursts of blackened beauty, and heaving, churning tarpit rhythms, all wreathed in gristled swirls of decayed sound, getting downright heavy at times, but always seeming to settle back into more hazy, hypnotic black drift.
The closer is the most obviously rhythmic, an inky morass of layered swirl and roiled grey noise, wound around strange sonar pings, fractured sine waves, and distant melodies, all driven by a loping, lumbering slowcore beat, the end result sounding a bit like a drugged out, droned out Aluk Todolo, or some lost This Heat record spinning at 16rpm!
Straight from sunny Southern California comes this blackened compilation (on cd or purple vinyl) from the hordes of the Black Twilight Circle, the coterie of incestuous projects of all things black and bizarre. Desert Dances & Serpent Sermons isn't as thorough as the massive Tliltic Tlapoyauak compilation that they released back in 2014, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. 4 tracks by 4 bands, at least 2 of which we've heard of before (Volahn and Arizmenda) and two band new to us (Shataan and Kallathon). All four tracks are superb additions to the BTC oeuvre, spiritual expeditions into the desert night by way of bestial black metal. The real prize here, though, is the opening track by Volahn. That particular one will surely go down as our no-bullshit favorite black metal track of the YEAR. A seriously Morricone western intro that builds into Volahn doing what they do best - jawdroppingly epic and melancholic black metal. A wonderful addition (or introduction) to the Black Twilight Circle discography, which is quickly becoming some of the most impressive black metal being made in the US.
San Francisco Community Radio was born out of the ashes of KUSF 90.3fm, one of the most beloved underground/community radio stations in the country, where our own Irwin served as music director for many years.
Not to be stopped by the greed/corruption that saw them get booted from the airways, they launched KUSF-In-Exile with the help of WFMU, as a way to bring attention to the efforts to Save KUSF. In fact along with Irwin, Andee and Scott both had shows on Exile. While the effort via the FCC to Save KUSF was denied, that didn't stop this determined community radio brigade who are now called San Francisco Community Radio. While they wait for the possibility of getting on the radio dial through Low Power FM they are still streaming online.
This benefit compilation beautifully curated/compiled by Claudia Mueller (DJ Meta) features 15 exclusive tracks including tracks by aQ favorites like Devendra Banhart, John Vanderslice, Kelley Stoltz, and Snickers. As expected from a community radio station this comp features an eclectic mix of bands, from the spaced out goth-operatic sounds of Galaxy Chamber, the stripped down punk of The Grannies, and the warm rocksteady of Titan Ups.
Lots of great tracks on this and an easy way to support community radio in San Francisco. Recommended!
What with The X-Files back on TV, it's good timing for this comp, which reminds us that aliens and UFOs have been a pop culture obsession since the 1950s at least, including as the subject matter of a remarkable number of hillbilly, honkytonk, country kitsch classics, a bunch of which you'll find here on this highly entertaining collection of "little 2 minute dramas pressed on shitty 45 rpm records by nobodies long dead or worse" (as the liner notes put it). Songs like "UFO Go Away", "Lookin' For That UFO", "Tiny Space Man", "The Martian Band" and others, all about flying saucers and little green men, replete with spacey FX as well as, of course, plenty of twang. But it's not all sci-fi, there are equally weird cuts here featuring country singers proud to be poor white trash ("Poor White Trash"), midgets ("Little Jimmy"), man-haters ("I Hate Men"), and inveterate drunkards ("I Like To Booze It"), among other oddities. Hella strange, often goofy, occasionally gorgeous, all 18 tracks are recommended listening, for those that "want to believe", or don't. Nicely illustrated and informative booklet/liners too.
Radioactivity is Kraftwerk's seminal album from 1975 of electronic pop, touching on a distinctly German melancholy whilst pioneering the future of music with an elegant, simple sci-fi pop for synths and drum machines. Matthew Bourne and Franck Vigroux offer their replicant revisoning as an homage in celebration of the classic krautrock album's 40th anniversary. Vigroux, we know from a recent collaboration with Mika Vainio, while Bourne we're just making an acquaintance with here.
The album begins true to the original with a click pulse simulation of a Geiger counter (not a real Geiger counter, mind you) leading into the heavenly synth pop of the title track. The latter half of the record veers away from the original with a particularly atonal and noise-crunched version of "Antenna" and the hushed vocal abstraction of "Radio Stars". The differences in technology between 1975 and the present day become apparent only in these more abstract and dissonant moments, though the synth patches that Bourne & Vigroux dial up are particularly rich and well suited to Kraftwerk's original sound. It may not be as good as the original, though Vigroux and Bourne have plenty of solid ideas for this new take on the material. Well worth checking out, and since we never got a chance to make the original Radioactivity a Record Of The Week, this is certainly deserving.
The vinyl comes with a cd version too, and the cd edition comes 24-page book packaging.
Japanese heavies BORIS make the cover of this month's issue of The Wire (in anticipation of a new collaboration with the mighty Merzbow, we're told). Also - a look at church organs in contemporary music, lo-fi hiphop from Atlanta, house/techno artist Andrew Weatherall doin' the "Invisible Jukebox" feature, a scene report from Calais, and more, including all the usual millions of reviews!!
