Following hot on the heels of The Body's somehow surprisingly/supposedly "poppy" full length No One Deserves Happiness on Thrill Jockey comes this release on Neurot, which sees The Body, a band noted for their affinity for collaborations, teamed up with former tour-buds, Maryland's Full Of Hell, whom we know best from a previous collaborative effort of theirs, with Merzbow. This one stacks up well with that, and with that recent album from The Body, as well. With The Body on board, of course this disc is heavy and strangely catchy, intense and idiosyncratic, a destructive, dynamic onslaught of blackened industrial cathartic clank & blast, laced with feedback, samples, ambience, and a disquieting variety of vocals. Meanwhile, Full Of Hell, themselves always a raging attack of experimentally inclined hardcore noisethrash, definitely keep up their end, adding to the intensity and heaviness no doubt. But this does however really sound more like a record by The Body than one by Full Of Hell, due to the dynamics - and those vocals, both The Body's trademark ear-hole abusing, pained vocal shrieks and the conversely quite lovely female vocals they provide as well. Damn, some harrowing & extreme shit here, pretty compelling, might actually dig this more than No One Deserves Happiness!
Once you know what CFM stands for, a lot of you will instantly know you want this. CFM = Charles Francis Moothart, or Charlie Moothart (sometimes Moonheart), the multi-instrumentalist who is one of Ty Segall's partners in fuzzed out garage psych crime, playing alongside Ty in both Fuzz and the Ty Segall Band, and elsewhere. So for sure fans of blown out bluesy garage fuzz (and the band Fuzz, of course) will say HELLS YEAH to this, Charlie's first solo joint, full of exactly the sort of toe-tapping, amped-up garagey goodness you'd expect, with lotsa melodic strum & catchy choruses as well amidst the distortion. Needless to say, super recommended, especially to fans of Fuzz, Ty Segall, Charlie's other buddy Mikal Cronin, Thee Oh Sees, Castle Face stuff� and also, what with the way these tracks are so often laced with laced with big dollops of synth wizzery and wild spacey FX, this is suggested for those into Comets On Fire or the likes of Simply Saucer too! Freakin' good stuff.
It's hard to imagine a record nerd that doesn't NEED this on their bookshelf! Imagine this, it's the cold war era in the Soviet Union, and the recording industry is strictly regulated by the state. Western music is essentially forbidden, and thus arises an underground black market, that offers a solution to satisfy people's desire to hear all this banned music, and that is to bootleg the recordings, which essentially meant building homemade record pressing machines, and copying those illicit recordings onto a medium that was more readily available than vinyl, that being X-rays spirited away from hospitals! The story itself is a good one, but it's the records themselves that are truly incredible. Imagine the cover to Faust's self titled debut, with its iconic skeleton hand cover art, but as an ACTUAL SKELETON HAND X-RAY RECORD!!! And the music is probably the Beatles or something. Even if this were simply a picture book, it would be well worth the price of admission. Image after image of stunning, homemade records, displaying ghostly images of skulls and hands, of spines and ribcages, and these records are still floating around, but as this story has been popping up on podcasts and other various places, they now fetch a pretty penny, so this is the next best thing. Besides the stunning photographs, the aforementioned story is told in great detail here too, offering up fascinating interviews with and contributions from collectors, historians, bootleggers and musical commentators.
And yeah, while this may be the next best thing, and is obviously highly recommended, if you're anything like us, you'll still find yourself with the uncontrollable urge to hunt down an actual Russian bootleg X-ray record for yourself! Good luck.
Excellent reissue! Out of print since its release in 1972 when it went almost completely unnoticed, this album is finally available in special 30th anniversary boxed double disc format! A shorter version of it was available briefly in 1993 but this features a whole other disc of extra material.
It wasn't until after playing and performing for over ten years that the now-legendary experimental violinist Tony Conrad finally put his music down on wax. This was after his tenure as an integral member of the Theater of Eternal Music's Dream Syndicate with Lamonte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale, and Angus MacLise (NB: the latter two being founding members of the Velvet Underground, which got its band name from a paperback Conrad found lying in the street.) The Dream Syndicate's raison d'etre was exploring the sonic depth, meaning and sound of the almighty DRONE. A chance meeting with producer Uwe Nettelbeck resulted in an intense three-day recording session at Faust's secluded farm slash studio and it was here that Conrad finally got to breathe life into his own take on the drone. The Faust fellows supply a warm, insistent drum beat and a just as unstoppable bass throb. Both the bass *and the drum* are 'tuned' to specific notes over which Conrad lays his droning violin. And that's it. For half an hour. So great! Not boring at all -- your ears quickly become attuned to the waverings, harmonies, and other minute changes amongst the three elements. Fans of Neu, Can, Kraftwerk, and of course Faust NEED this. As does anyone into hypnotic droning rock ala AQ faves Circle, Highly recommended, definitely seminal album by one of the pioneers of drone.
We know the black hearted AQ legions rely on us to trawl the dark depths and the fiery pits, in search of any essential blackness, that their cursed souls would wither without. With that in mind, we have been trying, for ages now, to get a hold of these two mysterious releases from Swiss black metal horde Darkspace. Those of you in the know, probably realize, that one of the cloaked and corpsepainted members of Darkspace is the man responsible for the epic frosty buzz drenched majesty that is Paysage D'Hiver. And judging from how big a hit Paysage was around these parts, it's no small leap to think that EVERYONE who bought the Paysage absolutely NEEDS this as well.�
Whereas Paysage was one man's vision, twisted buzzing glorious epic blasts of grim black metal and extended Tangerine Dream like sythnscapes, gorgeous subterranean drones and hushed ambient shimmer, based around themes of winter and spirituality, darkness and astral projection, the music stitched into expansive worlds of sound, Darkspace is an actual band, and in many ways is WAY heavier than Paysage. The focus is on the riff as much as the ambience, if not more so, and the riffs are some of the best we've ever heard, downtuned and super distorted, minor key and crunchy, thick and dense, twisted and black, gnarled but incredibly catchy, often, the band explodes into furious wintery blasts, dense chaotic furies, topped off by huge sweeping melodies that sound like washes of keyboards (although no keyboards were used), before settling back into a gorgeously loping buzz encrusted mid tempo, a weird black groove, haunting and intense. But fast and fierce is the order of the day, and these guys are indeed true Blizzard Beasts, whipping up nearly impenetrable walls of swirling, roiling black frost. Which is sort of why the slow parts have such impact, the riff just sort of emerges from the dense black blur, to chug briefly before being swallowed up again. And whereas in most music, sound samples and snippets of dialogue from films, usually mean less re-playability, and often eventually bug more than they enhance, here are used to fantastic effect. Darkspace are futuristic black metal voyagers, the stars, planets, the universe the cosmos, the music is all about space, and it sounds like it, epic and so MASSIVE, simultaneously like a black hole sucking up all light, and a blinding supernova, the bits of dialogue are buried in the mix and delivered like some mysterious transmission from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The fast bits and Burzumic passages are balanced by tripped out ambience, crazy dub drenched interludes, long drawn out SUNNO)))-scapes, huge walls of guitar, riffs splayed and spread out over epic expanses of low end drone, rumbling murmuring ambience....
Listening to Darkspace, we almost wish we hadn't used so much hyperbole in the past, or described other black metal bands as epic, or majestic, or even intense or brutal, or frosty and grim, because this is the music those adjective were designed for. In fact, we're almost compelled to create new words, a handful of superlatives, black metal specific, in order to do justice to these sounds. To explain just how fucking massive and intense this stuff is. NOW is the time for hyperbole, but it's not hyperbole if it's true right? And never has anything sounded this intense and blown out, heavy and black, we almost forgot how completely mind blowing this stuff was. But hearing it again, it makes us wonder why most black metal bands even bother...
The first album is separated into seven parts (1.1-1.7), with song lengths averaging about 10 minutes. Each one a burst of black chaos, little epics compressed into the length of a normal song, like it must be some trick of the light, as if unleashed they would expand and stretch out forever. Their second album is split up into just three tracks, two of them 20 minutes plus, with a much more ambient bent, a ten minute sprawling drone separating two lengthy black metal spacescapes, and much of those are taken up by drifting black hole ambience as well, but the metallic fury everywhere else is positively overpowering...
And�there's a reason that both these releases have the same review, besides the fact that they are both sonically similar, it's that BOTH are essential, they are two parts of a bigger whole (with a third in the works), they might as well have been released as a double cd, they flow perfectly into one another, one massive journey through the endless blackness of space... You can certainly buy one without the other, but you will quickly find that you need more and can not live without both...
As if the music wasn't enough (and it is), their aesthetic is just as intense and mysterious. The band, all in matching corpsepaint and high necked robes, look like some alien black metal priests, or cenobites even, the band's logo, simple and subtle, a pentagram within a crescent moon, the artwork, spare and sparse, just the band logo, and the name of the record, either I or II, the song titles are numbers, "Dark 1.1", "Dark 1.2", "Dark 2.8" (you can go to their website and download the first demo, titled -I for free), a barely visible alien image beneath the tray card, everything printed in bluish silver on black, very austere and space-y...
A gloriously blinding sonic dying sun, a burst of pure blackened brilliance, both discs, separate or together, obviously black metal record(s) of the year, this year, or whatever year they actually came out, maybe black metal record(s) of forever. And yeah, we're serious.�
Unwelcoming analog synth tones of negative energy and beguiling tape-machine experimentation from the principal agent behind the obscure Italian industrial outfit Teatro Satanico. These tracks date back to the late '80s and early '90s, though their origins beyond that are left unresolved. What we do have is a cassette displaying two distinct aesthetics of Devis G.'s work, with the A-side sporting four intense tracks of densely layered, jack-hammered square-waves and unrelenting oscillations tumbled into squalls of dissonant electric noise that are equal parts immersive and malevolent spilling from the toxic, death-obsessed ethos of industrial culture. Think MB or Nocturnal Emissions. The flip is smoldering series of demagnetized tape loops, backmasked locked grooves, and varispeed drone chorales of iridescent hum and flutter. Here's much more of a sublime strategy of the machine itself, as if attempting to commune through the tape deck. For all of the bluster and diabolical fright of the A-side, the B-side calls up the early radiophonic works of Daphne Oram or more precisely F.C. Judd.
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It's been awhile since we've heard a band that channels the hook-laden swagger, sex and fuzz-filled ferocity of bands like The Breeders and Elastica at their mightiest without at all sounding nostalgic, but goddamn! this debut by LA based outfit Feels is just pushing all the right buttons! Produced by Ty Segall on the always on-point Castle Face label, veering from garage to punk to hard indie rock on the thinnest of dimes, we've been playing this in the store as often and as loud as we can. Tight and direct, surfing a mighty force without going over the rails, Feels clock in a killer set and leave us wanting more. For fans of Ex-Hex, X, The Mallard, Marnie Stern, Helium and any of the bands mentioned above.
FYI, vinyl verison already gone, Castle Face never presses enough initially do they? But hopefully back soon.
While many of his Kompakt labelmates have displayed moments of sonic brilliance over the years, Axel Willner's The Field has still managed to continually raise the bar, by creating consistently wonderful albums with a dizzying array of stunning sounds that totally transcend the trappings of most minimal techno/electronica. This is the music we want blasting in a dark dingy basement, flooded by fog machines and strobing lights, as we lose track of time, ourselves, and the world around us. The Field continue to excel in creating a rare strain of techno, one that hits the body hard, while also massaging the mind. The Follower, like previous records by The Field, unites techno nerds & dark dance music heads with folks who aren't usually too deep into that scene. Those non-dance-music outliers can latch on to the Reich/Glass like repetition and Willner's densely mesmerizing fields of experimental avant electronica.
Total contender for Electronic Album of the Year!
Espers On Fire? Why not! Heron Oblivion is the new supergroup featuring former members of Comets On Fire, plus Meg Baird of Espers on vocals and drums (!), and it sounds exactly like how you would think the two groups would sound merged together: heavy, psychedelic, druggy and beautiful! We saw them open for Kurt Vile last year, and they killed! Huge squalls of acid-laden guitar fuzz that clear away for Baird's incredible vocals that transport us back to the British psych-folk of Trees and Fairport Convention. Mystical, rapturous and, did we say heavy? Recommended!
A necessary reissue of the one-off collaboration between two provocateurs in the British industrial / noise scene - JFK (aka Anthony DiFranco of Ramleh) and The Grey Wolves - that originally came out in 1998 as a commemoration of the assassination of President Kennedy. The mood is that of closed-circuit paranoia, accentuated through the heavy rhythmic loops that lock a murky drum machine phrase into place with the same head-snap arrhythmia that occurs when watching a video loop of the Zapruder film of Kennedy's death. Piles of nuclear fallout feedback, ominously tape-damaged drift, and filthy snarls of synth & guitar malformations amass throughout the hypno-psychosis from the barrage of loops and rhythms. This is more of a disquieting album than a punishing one, which makes this a peculiar release for both projects given the intensity of the JFK / Ramleh axis and the power electronic sermons of Grey Wolves. Nevertheless, its power lies in the decidedly ungroovy electronic rhythms and the mysterious slab of industrial noise bellowing from the sewer grates. Limited to a mere 300 copies and pressed on clear red vinyl. Restocks unlikely.
Well over a decade ago, David Keenan published England's Hidden Reverse - covering much of the origins, ideas, and histories pertaining to Current 93, Coil, and Nurse With Wound, the three highly influential outfits that blossomed in the wake of the Industrial Culture established by Throbbing Gristle. The book's interviews slant heavily toward the verbose David Tibet of Current 93 with his lyrical pantheon of infatuations, obsessions, and visions that haunt his work. The original book was published right before the death of Coil's John Balance, making much of the citations of his substance abuse all the more alarming as a cautionary tale. The rich history of Nurse With Wound picks through the first couple of records notably Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella from 1979 that continues to confuse and befuddle to this day. It may be a minor quibble that Keenan doesn't spend as much time on Nurse With Wound as on Coil or Current 93; but his investigations reveal what we always assumed about the characters involved, that Tibet, Balance, Sleazy, Stapleton, et. al. are an eccentric lot with bold visions for their art and the in world in which they live. This is the (quite hefty!) paperback version, revised and expanded to speak most notably about the deaths of Sleazy and Balance; but this does not feature the cd that came with the original.
A breathtaking album of restrained minimalism from the ever impressive Jacob Kirkegaard, whose recent journeys into psychoacoustics have plied the tones from the inner ear rendering them audible, and amplifying the resonance from abandoned buildings around Chernobyl, inquiring if the intrinsic sound of that space was also radioactive? This album marks a more conventional commission, that of the soundtrack to a silent film. The film in question was 1928's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, with Kirkegaard constructing an immersive piece of sound design that alludes to the angelic conversation that Joan Of Arc had with the divine. These long-tone compositions bend with a sinewy, silvery grace through the harmonic interplay between suspended drones and deep thrumming bass rumbles that weep with an affecting gravity. Kirkegaard has always been a spectacular composer, and Arc is no exception even as the content shifts from the investigative to the emotional. Absolutely beautiful.
"Somebody needs to reissue this!" has been often uttered around aQ in reference to this 1983 gem by Lifetones, a one-off band created by Charles Bullen of This Heat. And finally, after years of praying and hoping and wishing, our wish has been granted! Our fellow music obsessives at Light In The Attic have stepped up to bring this all-time favorite the attention it so richly deserves. For A Reason is one of those rare records, that from the very first time you hear it, immediately seduces with its immediacy, uniqueness, and zoned-in sonic focus. And after that first listen, it's likely that you'll find yourself addicted, and craving more, as the record only hits harder and deeper with every listen.
It's shouldn't be a surprise to the aQ faithful that we would be raving about a This Heat related project (This Heat being a unanimous all time aQ favorite, their vinyl reissues being recent Records Of The Week here too!), we've gushed about other post This Heat music from both Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams in projects like Flaming Tunes and Camberwell Now. But really, Charles Bullen has always been the underrated/unknown/unsung part of the This Heat equation, as very little was ever written about him or his post This Heat endeavors. Just like those Hayward and Williams projects, the record Bullen made after the demise of This Heat somehow manages to transcend and creates its own distinct soundworld.
Influenced by dub, Indian rhythms and instrumentation, as well as the deep-in-the-groove elements of krautrock, Lifetones has this magical ability to sound like no one else while feeling strangely and warmly familiar. It's like the band/record we always imagined in our head, or wished existed, proof that experimentation and smart sonic vision can also be so totally enjoyable and utterly irresistible.
While this record has been a cult secret for way too long, it's undeniable that many of today's brightest altered-zone music makers have been touched greatly by these magical and mysterious sounds. We hear echoes in Sun Araw, Fabulous Diamonds, Panda Bear, Peaking Lights, Anika, Blues Control, and we can't quite put our finger on it, but there is an ineffable sonic sexiness, tension and tone that even reminds us of when we first heard Interpol's debut way back in 2002.
Imagine Public Image Ltd's Second Edition melted and warped into African Head Charge's Songs Of Praise, and then somehow dissolving into Can's Tago Mago - it's that sort of entrancing, exotic, indescribable sonic alchemy that might give you a clue of what For A Reason is all about. But really, beyond the intoxicating sound, there are the songs - each one rife with incredible hooks and profound lyrics that hit their mark and cut deep.
Thank you thank you thank you from the bottom of our music nerd hearts to Light In The Attic for finally doing justice to one of our favorite records of the last 35 years!
The vinyl reissue comes in a gatefold jacket on high quality wax and both the vinyl and the cd versions come with an essay and a download card.
Whoo-hoo, after many, many years, repressed on vinyl, limited blue/gray milky vinyl to be precise! Here's what we said about this album, Melt-Banana's fifth or so, way back on list #103 in 2000 when it originally came out:
Ultra hyper Japanese art-spazz combo Melt-Banana have really perfected their assault in recent years, and this new album is nothing short of incredible. This record somehow manages to sound like a catchy old punk rock lp played at 78rpm, or faster, being scratched by some maniac DJ... Plus there's sirens going off in the background, and explosions, and all kinds of crazy guitar shit, almost-d'n'b breaks, and studio manipulations. It's a not-of-this-earth rock experience. Squeaky, freaky, and really good.
The Melvins have previously done albums in cahoots with Lustmord and Jello Biafra, ferinstance, but this collaboration kinda makes the most sense - released at long last, here's the long lost team-up of everyone's favorite heavy weirdos the Melvins and the somewhat less well-known but equally heavy and weird godheadSilo - or, rather, one-half of the godheadSilo duo, bassist Mike "Mike" Kunka! It only took 'em 16 years to complete the album, mostly recorded in 1999 shortly after godheadSilo disbanded and left unfinished until just last year, a bass-heavy cornucopia of lurching, frenetic noise rock mayhem and out-and-out WTF?, which runs the gamut from the wild distortodelic speediness of "Limited Teeth" to the queasy quasi-ambience of "Dead Pile Of Worthless Junk" to the blackened grindcore noise-splatter of "Art School Fight Song". There's a cover of "Annlisa" by P.I.L., there's the herky jerk creepy crawl groove of "Dead Canaries" (with sinister whispered vocals singing lyrics like "My car won't start / It's a shopping cart"), and then there are even more confusional constructs like "A Friend In Need Is A Friend You Don't Need", a track which is part drum solo, part canned crowd noise, graced with a squealing guitar freakout and a few ironic, non-sequitur lines of spoken lyrics.
Yep, can't imagine that fans of the Melvins, or godheadSilo, or even The Cows (former band of Melvins bass player circa '99, Kevin Rutmanis), won't enjoy banging and/or scratching their heads to THIS. What else is lurking in the vaults, guys? (Vinyl version comes with mp3 download, btw.)
When is a drum circle way more than just a drum circle? When it's a KRAUTROCK drum circle, complete with electronic FX. Here we have all three albums from this all-or-mostly percussion oriented, instrumental krautrock ensemble, spread across two compact discs - you get Niagara's self-titled, entirely drum-driven debut from 1970, plus 1972's S.U.B. and 1973's Afire, the latter two of which added other instrumentation, like electric bass, guitar, piano, horns and flute (nothin' wrong with some flute!) to the drums, congas, timbales, cowbell, maracas, etc. But still, even with the expanded lineup, rhythm & percussion remains the main emphasis across all these Niagara platters. With Latin and African influences, the two sidelong tracks on the debut are simply killer funky jams, while the other records can get more jazzy and fusion-y, while still bringing the funk, in ways that fans of electric Miles and early Funkadelic and the swingingest "library music" will heartily approve. It's not a surprise that Niagara's debut, especially, is sought after by crate digging DJ's in the know, total breakbeat nirvana there. Krautrock at its grooviest!
US black metal has come a long way since the caveman primitivism of Von and Judas Iscariot. It seems like, finally, American musicians are pumping out quality, top-shelf black metal at a rate that's quickly approaching that of the early Scandinavian masters. Panopticon's Austin Lunn has been a part of that explosion, arguably peaking with 2012's Kentucky, a melodic and twangy tribute to his current home. On Autumn Eternal, gone is any trace of Scandinavian kvlt grimness, as Lunn has opted for boisterous, sun-drenched production which suits these songs magnificently. Gone, too, is Lunn giving equal time to bluegrass banjo and blackened buzz, instead focusing almost exclusively (minus a pitch-perfect opening track and some interludes) on the power of his black metal songwriting, which has admittedly improved in every way. There's nothing exceptionally flashy here, just pure, powerful, epic metal. Gorgeous.
As longtime readers of the list no doubt realize, we love The Austerity Program, a dynamic duo of guitar and bass, accompanied by a drum machine, who are heavy as fuck, technical and brutal, but catchy too, their unabashed Big Black worship and goofy sense of humor as much a part of their sound as anything else. So we were pretty thrilled to discover there was in fact a band that came before The Austerity Program, called Polonium. So what was that band all about you ask? Well, they were a two piece, same exact members as The Austerity Program, instrumentation is just guitar and bass. Like The Austerity Program. And they had a drum machine. And they were pretty metal. Like� well you know. The label makes a point of talking about how Polonium played death metal, and we of course foolishly assumed they were being serious, foolishly because the label is in fact run by the Austerity Program guys themselves, who can not be trusted (remember this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WcsV7hQ1V4). Thus we quickly discovered that Polonium were not in fact death metal at all, but our disappointment was short lived, cuz what Polonium DO sound like is the goddamn Austerity Program! In fact, this is essentially proto-AP, churning and chugging, machine rhythms driving downtuned riffage, Justin Foley's howled vocals in full effects, gnarled drum machine prog meets tranced out metal minimalism, the band noise rocking with the best of them, but then locking into total hypno-metal blowouts that go on for ages, totally mesmerizing, and even in this more lo-fi and raw form, totally fucking amazing.
Obviously essential for Austerity Program fans, but really, anyone into avant robot metal, downtuned noise rock nerdcore and/or churning dirgey heaviosity should definitely get a load of these guys.
Down to just a handful here, we will run out fast, so we hope one of our distributors can eventually get us more copies of this, as we were originally thwarted by Posh Isolation who for some reason didn't want to sell us any. Boo.
Puce Mary is the Danish queen of power electronics, whose work we have championed over the years on cassette and the rare piece of vinyl all of which has gone out of print. The Spiral is a surgical album that applies the psychoacoustic investigations that John Duncan and Zbigniew Karkowski plumbed and fuse those to the industrial sermons barked by Consumer Electronics, Ramleh, and Whitehouse, honed through a craftsmanship for perversity and transgression. The pure, piercing electronics superimpose into scalding walls of glassine noise and psychic negation amidst thrashes of machined lumbering rhythm and Puce Mary's yelped vocals cast as self-hypnotized chants in monotone through piles of effects that may obfuscate the content but none of the existential horror. One of the early contenders for noise album of the year 2016.
Not that long ago, Ramleh played their first ever shows in California, performing four sets in four nights, switching off between "rock" Ramleh, the blown out assault of newer releases like 2015's Circular Time, and "electronic" Ramleh, the classic Broken Flag style wall of sound for which they first were known. This 12" is in a way a taste of what attending both those shows was like (as several aQ staffers did, including Jim who opened for Ramleh's electronic set with a blistering set of his own).
On the A side, you get "Conquest Play" an abstract, throbbing, glacial movement that sounds equally good on 33 or 45 rpm. On the flip side, "Clockwork" is a more subdued assault, albeit with the same speaker-blowing decibel-porn that Ramleh always delivers. Both are fantastic additions to the Ramleh catalog. A limited release, restocks might take a while.
Galloping like a ton of bricks, to mix metaphors massively, Ravensire's The Cycle Never Ends is a must for anyone into triumphing true metal. Storming right out of the gates with opener "Cromlech Revelations", these proud Portuguese barbarians make it quite evident that their new effort possesses a foe-slaying energy, and an arcane, idiosyncratic X-factor, that sets it apart from other, more ordinary efforts by the worldwide true metal legions. There's a powerful heft to their folkish, majestic riffage and an edge to their not-so-clean yet sufficiently melodic vocals (that sound like a bit like Paul Di'Anno gargling with Baron from Amebix) that just delivers the damn goods. We've liked their previous releases - which include a split single with Irish epic metallers Terminus - but this is their best record yet, and gets not just thumbs up from us, but fists waving in the air. It's not only damn heavy and has a dark, atmospheric gravitas, but also brings the riffs - ones that Slough Feg fans in particular (like these guys themselves are, having had Mike Scalzi cameo on their preceding album) will certainly appreciate - they're very Feggy indeed.
Perhaps in homage to fellow Italian Maurizio Bianchi recording under the acronym MB, Roberto Drago took to calling himself himself RD. Drago and his brother Giancarlo had recorded as The Tapes throughout the '80s, releasing a series of impressive minimal wave / cold industrial rhythmic recordings, suitably on cassette. Treni Lirici is a collection of tracks dating from 86-89, all of we are assuming were self-released in small editions back in the day. The electronic emanations of uneasy synth drone and anxious sequencing follow in line with what The Tapes were up to, affixing such forms to a rhythmic spine, amounting to a claustrophobic set of dystopian proto-techno recordings that remind us more of the revered Japanese efforts that dot the enigmatic Vanity Records imprint, as well as Nord or even the synth hymns of Grim. A really amazing archival find!
Finally reissued on vinyl!!
Twenty-two years after his death, the music of Arthur Russell is more alive than ever. Mostly known as a left-field disco producer and classically trained cellist, Russell was also an accomplished avant-garde composer, as evidenced here. Listed by us recently on limited cassette, and once reissued on cd in 2006 as part of the Audika collection First Thought Best Thought that documented his orchestral work with luminaries of the New York Downtown Scene (Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson and Peter Gordon) following his stint as musical director at The Kitchen in New York, Tower Of Meaning was originally released on Philip Glass's new music label, Chatham Square in 1983.
A suite of seven movements performed by an ensemble of horn players and conducted by Julius Eastman (whom like Russell, was a gay modern classical iconoclast), Tower Of Meaning has a slow epic funereal vibe reminiscent of Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of The Titanic, or indeed like a Philip Glass piece in slow motion. While not quite as emotionally devastating as the Bryars piece, the horns in Tower Of Meaning play out long plaintive tones simultaneously resulting in unusual intonations and harmonics as the tones overlap creating modalities of clustering chords that aurally seem to both march forward and float upward without ever quite resolving itself, the "meaning" in the title forever remaining elusive and out of reach.
The Bryars connection is a bit ironic however, because Tower Of Meaning was originally intended as incidental music to accompany a staging of Robert Wilson's Medea, but creative squabbling between the two forced Russell out and Gavin Bryars took over the project. The resultant recording is only a fraction of Russell's score which included voices and other instrumentation as well. Embittered by the experience, it was sadly Russell's final orchestral effort.
An impressive collaborative debut from two Italian turgid noise projects, Skag Arcade and Meanwhile In Texas. The A-side floats along a sea of corrosion and toxic blooms by way of discordant coronas of controlled feedback and amplifier form destruction. These layers of grit, dust, debris, hiss, and fuzz bleed together into a murky swirl of noise, whose tangles appear carcinogenic at first but devolve into desolate atmospherics tinged with dread. All of this wouldn't be out of place next to any of Matthew Bower's freeform projects of psychedelic noise (Sunroof!, Total, etc.) or even more drone-centric aspects of the NZ free-noise community (Dead C, RST, and especially Surface Of The Earth). The B-side bares its teeth with a ferocious amount of scalding noise that strafes the aggregated drones of coalesced fuzz and woozy yet radiant tone-floats. As with all of the Luce Sia cassettes, limited to 60 copies.
So now the Richard Avedon photo and the Disneyland photos have been blacked out of the cover. Soon enough the planet Saturn, Halley's Comet, and those woolly cows from the Swiss Alps will be threatening legal action, leaving only the typically lurid photo from Richard Kern as the only remaining appropriated image on the cover of Sister, which can be pegged as either the fourth or fifth SY album depending on whom you ask. Sister was first issued back 1987, and the album's lead track "Schizophrenia" is actually an homage to Kim Gordon's brother, who had been afflicted by that disease since his late teens. It's a suitably maudlin track raked with Sonic Youth's quintessential dissonant pop, holding back the dynamic avant-punk swagger that became their signature throughout the late '80s and early '90s. It's a gem of a track, opening the gates for all of frenzied discord and volatile noise-rock to follow, including one hell of a great cover of Crime's "Hot Wire My Heart" and the funhouse fluid psychosis via angular art-punk of "Catholic Block" to the Manson slasher dirge of "Pacific Coast Highway". If you've not picked up this record, you really should. Sister is a goddamn essential album.
A stalwart of the Italian industrial / noise community, Paolo Bandera is founding member of Sigilum S, with this being his long-standing solo project. Sshe Retina Stimulants has an extensive catalog of cassette releases dating back to the early '90s, with a few getting the Urashima reissue treatment. The Colloidal Semantika Sessions feature two long-form sets of synth-tone miserablism interwoven with a slow-crawl of vocal utterances played back at half-speed, further creeped out by CV pulse noise, snarls of phasing signal vibration descending into anxiety-ridden irradiations, and analog tone-sweep detonation of grim distortion. Everything is mired in the suffocating death-industrial fug that prevails throughout the best works of Brighter Death Now and Whitehouse. Hand numbered, limited to 60 copies.
With cover art and lettering by free improv legend Peter Brotzmann, you might expect skronkity-skronk improv from this drums and guitar duo, and yes it's improv, but not nearly so skronky as some can be, instead being something rather more massively, miasmically mesmeric. The guitarist unfurling moody jet airplane drones (sounding a bit like Brotzmann's son, Caspar, or maybe Keiji Haino) is none other than SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley, while the endlessly riffing percussionist is one of O'Malley's bandmates in abstract ensemble Aethenor, Steve Nobel, the noted British avant-garde drummer and one time member of Rip, Rig & Panic.
Recorded at the St. Francis De Sales Church, Philadelphia, the two long tracks here reveal O'Malley and Nobel to be well suited improvising partners, neither of 'em hogging the proceedings, O'Malley providing a billowing cloud of amp worshipping drones for Nobel to punctuate with nervous cymbal shimmer and propulsive freeform thwap thwap. It's all purely texture and arrhythmic exploration, of ominous & hypnotic proportions.
Fyi, vinyl version forthcoming as well.
It was only a matter of time that the far-flung influences of Khun Narin Electric Phin Band and psychedelic Thai folk would work their way West, but the indelible sound of the electric phin, a Thai style lute, is a key ingredient on the Castle Face debut from LA noise/improv collective Sunwatchers. But to Sunwatchers' credit, Thai folk is but one of many ingredients in their pantheon of sound, and they bring so much more amped-up wattage to the proceedings. With instrumentation consisting of guitar, electric phin, standup bass, drums and saxophone, Sunwatchers unfurl a wailing wall of hypnotic drones and grooves that also channel The Third Ear Band as well as the sound of Tony Conrad and Faust. Intense, focused and ferocious!
FYI, we already sold out of the vinyl version, Castle Face should have pressed more! Back soon, hopefully.
The Tapes were the collaborative project by Italian brothers Giancarlo and Roberto Drago, who operated on the fringes of the vast network of cassette culture in the '80s; their work was recently unearthed through Not Waving's Ecstatic imprint via a double LP overview of their extensive catalog. Here, we have a reissue of one of the original cassettes from The Tapes - the Glasaugen album from 1988. Like plenty of malcontents in the US and Britain taking humbrage against Reagan and Thatcher, the Drago brothers found themselves mired in the stagnant socio-economic and cultural landscape in Italty, taking out their frustrations through a dystopian, minimal wave engineering through monosynths, primitive sequencers, and flanged drum machines. These proto-techno strategies and slinky electonic tracks harbor an angular, disjointed production that parallels the dark hypnosis of Borghesia or even Colin Potter's forays into sequenced experimental pop, coupled with more than a fair share of plaintive electronic lullabies predating the Ghost Box / Broadcast axis of instrumental sci-fi pop melancholia. Limited to 60 copies.
The Moons At Your Door is a literary anthology curated by David Tibet / Current 93, featuring many of the pieces of horror fiction, supernatural tales, visionary prophecy, and religious scripture that have influenced him and his work since he was a young lad. He does include some horror classics from MR James, WW Jacobs, Count Stenback, and Thomas Ligoti (an occasional collaborator with Current 93 on a couple of the more frightening albums of the recent C93 era) as well as a rare piece of fiction from Aleister Crowley. Tibet has also translated portions of The Thunder: Perfect Mind, a Gnostic poem written originally in Coptic and laying the groundwork for one of C93's best albums, that being Thunder Perfect Mind. The rest of the authors include Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Elizabeth Gaskell, LA Lewis, Arthur Machen, Guy De Maupassant, Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, and HR Wakefield. Over 450 pages of the macabre, the creepy, and the hallucinatory!
Yes! Maximum damaged Swedish guitar psych jamming in the house! Knowing how much we at AQ LOVE the sixties Swedish psych sounds of Parson Sound/International Harvester/Harvester/Trad Gras Och Stenar (multiple manifestations of basically the same band, whose crucial original LPs and unreleased recordings have been reissued on cd over the past couple of years, a boon to music-lovers everywhere -- see elsewhere on our website for reviews) you can imagine how excited we were to find out that TWO MORE Trad Gras Och Stenar LPs of early seventies vintage were now being reissued by new US label 1/2 Special, who indeed do a bang up job with these two discs. The booklets feature lots of photos and posters, a discography, and detailed liner notes from the band (delving into remembrance of the personal and social transformations of the hippie era). Plus, each disc's got a hefty bonus track (32 minutes on "Djungelns" and 27 on "Mors")! And of course it's the music that really makes these essential.
Influenced by Scandinavian folk music, drugs, radical politics, Terry Riley, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Indian ragas, etc. this is some awesomely messed-up far-out rock music for sure. If these guys were German instead of Swedish, we'd be talking about a Krautrock legend. TGOS, as the final incarnation of group that started as Parson Sound, features a stripped-down line-up playing music that is perhaps more conventionally "rock" based than earlier formations, but definitely the heavy minimalism of Parson Sound and the Amon Duulish folked-out trippiness of Harvester remain important elements of their lugubrous sound.
"Djungelns Lag" ("Jungle Law" in English), originally issued in 1972, collects tracks recorded by TGOS on tour in Sweden and Norway during the summer and fall of 1971. You get extended dual guitar tangle and lovely sad folk laments, brief bouts of sunshiney nonsense vocals backed with acoustic guitar strum ("Dibio"), and even hippie hoedown jaw-harp jams ("Munfiol"). Wherever they wander, this is generally mellow yet moving, always measured and stately even when at its most abstract and electric.
Likewise with "Mors Mors" (aka "Bye Bye"), a 1973 album of tracks originating on tour in Sweden and Denmark in '72, which continues with both the gentle freakiness and distorted thud. The Rolling Stone's "Last Time" gets a TGOS treatment (not quite as blasted as their take on "Satisfaction" found on their self-titled album, though) and again their originals feature plenty of what we dig: moments of ragged Haino-worthy axe attack, tripped-out Quicksilver leads, and lovely pastoral folk-drone...
So it's appropriate that both discs were reissued simultaneously, if you want one you'll want 'em both. What else can we say...well, anyone who buys Acid Mothers Temple discs ought to be sure to take some Trad Gras Och Stenar home too, that's for sure. As with all the reissues from this camp, highly recommended.
Yes! Maximum damaged Swedish guitar psych jamming in the house! Knowing how much we at AQ LOVE the sixties Swedish psych sounds of Parson Sound/International Harvester/Harvester/Trad Gras Och Stenar (multiple manifestations of basically the same band, whose crucial original LPs and unreleased recordings have been reissued on cd over the past couple of years, a boon to music-lovers everywhere -- see elsewhere on our website for reviews) you can imagine how excited we were to find out that TWO MORE Trad Gras Och Stenar LPs of early seventies vintage were now being reissued by new US label 1/2 Special, who indeed do a bang up job with these two discs. The booklets feature lots of photos and posters, a discography, and detailed liner notes from the band (delving into remembrance of the personal and social transformations of the hippie era). Plus, each disc's got a hefty bonus track (32 minutes on "Djungelns" and 27 on "Mors")! And of course it's the music that really makes these essential.
Influenced by Scandinavian folk music, drugs, radical politics, Terry Riley, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Indian ragas, etc. this is some awesomely messed-up far-out rock music for sure. If these guys were German instead of Swedish, we'd be talking about a Krautrock legend. TGOS, as the final incarnation of group that started as Parson Sound, features a stripped-down line-up playing music that is perhaps more conventionally "rock" based than earlier formations, but definitely the heavy minimalism of Parson Sound and the Amon Duulish folked-out trippiness of Harvester remain important elements of their lugubrous sound.
"Djungelns Lag", originally issued in 1972, collects tracks recorded by TGOS on tour in Sweden and Norway during the summer and fall of 1971. You get extended dual guitar tangle and lovely sad folk laments, brief bouts of sunshiney nonsense vocals backed with acoustic guitar strum ("Dibio"), and even hippie hoedown jaw-harp jams ("Munfiol"). Wherever they wander, this is generally mellow yet moving, always measured and stately even when at its most abstract and electric.
Likewise with "Mors Mors" (a 1973 album of tracks originating on tour in Sweden and Denmark in '72), which continues with both the gentle freakiness and distorted thud. The Rolling Stone's "Last Time" gets a TGOS treatment (not quite as blasted as their take on "Satisfaction" found on their self-titled album, though) and again their originals feature plenty of what we dig: moments of ragged Haino-worthy axe attack, tripped-out Quicksilver leads, and lovely folk-drone...
So it's appropriate that both discs were reissued simultaneously, if you want one you'll want 'em both. What else can we say...well, anyone who buys Acid Mothers Temple discs ought to be sure to take some Trad Gras Och Stenar home too, that's for sure. As with all the reissues from this camp, highly recommended.
The Traditional Fools were an early group featuring glam garage troubadour Ty Segall, and their sole full length, released in 2008, was a raw shot of noisy garage rock blooze. So here's a companion of sorts, a collection of 7" singles and unreleased tracks, even more raw and lo-fi than the record proper. A gloriously ramshackle and totally trashy surf-scuzz, heavy on the surf this time around, in fact, TF sound like a proper surf rock band here, albeit one that's blown out, gritty and garagey. Plus they cover the Damned, Love, the Mummies, Redd Kross and Gary Glitter!
In reality, the population of hillbilly, honkytonk country crooners, and the folks they sing about, who happened to see flying saucers or get abducted by aliens (as chronicled in Volume 1 of the Twisted Tales From The Vinyl Wastelands series, UFO On Farm Road 318, reviewed last time) was probably a lot smaller than the number who at some point ran afoul of the law and wound up locked up, behind bars, lamenting that sad fact. And that's what Volume 2 is about, songs pertaining to penal servitude, of which the compliers had a much larger assortment to draw from, which means these 19 tracks aren't all by unknown 'hicks', there are some better known names on here like Lee Hazlewood, Stonewall Jackson, and aQ fave Eddie Noack, among others. It's again an enjoyable, entertaining collection of kitschy, cult classic country tuneage that Johnny Cash would be proud of, and should keep you on the straight and narrow, or at least make you feel a bit better if you're listening to it while doing time in your own jail cell. Songs on here include "Ninety Nine Years To Go", "Life To Go", "The Rest Of My Life", "Walla Walla State Prison", "Lewisburg Prison", "Cook County Jail", not one but two different tracks titled "Death Row", and many more.
Not sure if there's still a romantic connection between these two bands, but there's certainly a sonic one, both obviously sharing much of the same musical DNA. This second installment in the two groups' Summer Is Forever series. Best Coast cover Nirvana's "Dumb", and what was already a gorgeous creepy crawl, becomes even more murky and moody, the sound super lo-fi, stripped down and skeletal, brittle guitar strum and echo drenched, wasted vocals, all wreathed in a blurred, hazy fug. Wavves offer up a brand new original, a sublime slice of super catchy, beachy, garage/power pop jangle and crunch. Also lo-fi, but less like moody murk of Best Coast's track, and more a sort of Joe Meek-ish, home brewed retro surf-psych, which most definitely harkens back to the group's less polished early sound. Both sides/tracks rule! And as is often the case with these sorts of things, guessing these are probably pretty limited too�
We've thrown around maybe every possible adjective to describe Woods' instantly recognizable lo-fi-ish, reverb-happy, poppy psychedelic folk: "summery", "dark", "hazy", "jangly". But amidst the flurry of shape-shifting sound over their now nine-full-length career, Woods have consistently remained one thing: really fucking good.
Their newest album, City Sun Eater In The River Of Light, pushes them in a direction we haven't heard yet - with dubby beats and wavery organ, this album adds something especially slinky and groovy to their usually jammy sound that even suggests to us Jamaican reggae or Ethiopian jazz (a la our favorite Ethiopiques discs). We're hit with this right off the bat on opening track "Sun City Creeps" (named for seminal aQ faves Sun City Girls), which also features muted horns that serve well the fuller arrangement Woods have been moving towards on recent releases. The mood switches quickly but not unnervingly on third track "Morning Light", which opens with a sweeping steel guitar, recalling Harvest Moon era Neil Young. The straight up groovy rhythm section on "Can't See At All" creates something which, in the best way possible, belongs on the soundtrack to an action-packed '70s cop drama.
A Woods record would, of course, not be complete without a requisite dose of dark psychedelia, and City Sun Eater delivers on the second half of this album, especially in the powerful, woozy breakdown of "The Take", while "I See In the Dark" seems to be channelling the relaxed motorik drive of Can. This album really covers its bases in highlighting all the aspects of their unique sound and is tied together as always by the silvery thread of Jeremy Earl's delicate, signature falsetto.
Woods have masterfully mixed the richer, reverent production of their recent releases and the experimental shroomy weirdness of their early albums. Side two's "Politics of Free" proposes "in a world of shit, let's tune out tonight", and we can't wait to do just that again and again to the sounds of City Sun Eater In The River Of Light. Unforgettable.
Interplanetary cosmic space-slamz? Hyperwarp tech-death cyborgization? Computronic brutality from the event horizon? Surely aQuarius of all places would champion these genres, if they were real. Luckily, Spain's Wormed invented all of them! Their third album, and somehow the first we've reviewed, Krighsu, explores a distant future where the last human lineage seeks to save the universe from destructive nanomachines. The music to accompany the story is easily the most over-the-top, hyperspeed, mind-meltingly technical brutal death slamz you will hear between now and the distant cyberfuture. Somehow, Wormed are indeed humans, and how humans created these sounds is beyond us. So deep into the abysss of mechanized brutal death metal that it will surely appeal to people who don't normally dabble with the gore-obssessed simpletons that they would otherwise avoid. Top notch stuff!
One of our favorite purveyors of all things heavy, Gilead Media has been responsible for a ton of our recent obsessions � Kowloon Walled City, Krallice, False, Bastard Sapling, Geryon, and Thou, to name a few. They, along with Profound Lore, seem to be THEE go-to for current forward-thinking metal. Enter Brooklyn's Yellow Eyes, two brothers who, along with Mike Rekevics (also of Fell Voices, Vanum, and Vorde), recorded Sick With Bloom in a Connecticut cabin, the atmospherics of which spill into the tremolo-picked whirlwind riffage that takes center stage. At times they conjure the melodic melancholy of Rekevics' Vanum project, other times they sound more like the more hypnotic and straightforward passages of Krallice's idiosyncratic brand of black metal, but the end result is a sound that is no-nonsense, corpsepaint-free U.S. black metal that surely would have topped many year-end lists had it not come out in the very last weeks of 2015. No gimmicks, no pretension, no irony, just crushing, wind-swept black metal. Gilead does it again.
