Up until now, SF garage popper Mikal Cronin seemed to exist mostly as sideman, his name usually following an ampersand, which in turn seemed to typically be preceded by the name Ty Segall. Thus most of our experiences with Cronin had been the duo of Segall & Cronin, and everything we had heard we dug, a LOT, but it was hard to tell what exactly Cronin was bringing to the table, versus Segall, but listening to this now, seems the answer is EVERYTHING! And as much as we love Ty Segall, we're thinking that maybe much of that garage pop magic was coming from the other side of the ampersand, cuz WOW is this record totally great. Anyone at all into the SF garage pop scene, Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, Bare Wires, etc., will go absolutely nuts for this. And if this record doesn't immediately catapult Cronin into the spotlight, then there's something very very wrong with the world.
It's a perfect blend of sunshiney jangle, garagey fuzz, paisley pop and noisy psychedelia. And for all the warped fuzz and reverbed drenched lo-fi crunch of his peers, it seems Cronin has much more of a pure pop heart. That pure pop is however gloriously corrupted by little bits of wild flute flecked freakouts, strange horns, noise rock jams, and whatever else struck Cronin's fancy it seems, yet whatever sonic weirdness Cronin adds to the mix, it never sound gratuitous, it always sounds like an organic part of the song and the sound, and without fail, the song is crazy catchy, and the sound is fantastically lush and psychedelic and utterly ruling.
The first track manages to sum it up pretty perfectly. Starting with some dreamy Beach Boys a cappella harmonies, then some big distorted guitar crunch, pounding drums, before slipping right into some dreamy almost folky jangle, acoustic guitar strum, fuzzy bass, sweet vocal harmonies and HOOKS FOR DAYS, like the best song the Fresh & Onlys never wrote, but a little bit more twisted and a little bit more Byrds / paisley pop, but with plenty of crunch and fuzz, a little bit proggy in its arrangement, and then out of nowhere, with about a minute left, the song explodes into a double time pounding psych rock blow out, complete with jagged guitar crunch and a wild flute freakout (courtesy of John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, who knew he played flute?). We've probably listened to that song 50 times since we got this in.
But once we dug deeper, we realized that pretty much every song here is an absolute gem, "Apathy" with its start/stop acoustic strum, wild feedback, and total classic pop hooks (reminding us melodically of The Olivia Tremor Control actually), "Green And Blue", with its thick crunch droned out guitar buzz, dirgey drumming, thick blown out wall of sound and wild tangle of psychguitar freakout, "Get Along", which is another acoustic guitar driven chunk of practically perfect dreampop, rife with sweet harmony vox and some cool tripped out backwards psych guitar melodies, "Slow Down", a lo-fi, organ driven ballad, all stretched out drones and fuzzy reverbed vox, "Gone", another crunchy, riff heavy rocker, that should have Thee Oh Sees fans frothing at the mouth. And so it goes, the perfect mix of modern garage pop and classic indie jangle, and some of THEE best songs EVER. This week's list is chock full of contenders for pop record of the year, but if any of the other ones are gonna come out on top, this is gonna be the one to beat.
Oh, if you're wondering if it's vinyl-only, no it's not. But we're just listing the vinyl format this week, 'cause for some weird reason, the cd version we originally received turned out to be a cd-r. However, the label has fixed that and pressed some actual, real cds, we're just waiting for them to show up. They're on the way, should be here sometime next week, so if you're a cd person, or just prefer the cheaper format, let us know and we'll put your name down for one. We'll also of course list it on our next list.
BACK IN STOCK! A restock on this Record Of The Week from back in July finally just arrived via the slow boat from Tasmania. Here's the review again if you missed it:
Terror from Tasmania!! (Or perhaps from Italy, depending on what you wish to believe). The mysterious Crypt Vapor is the latest and one of the greatest, we think, in the realm of the New Wave Of Horror Soundtrack Sounding Stuff or whatever we ought to call it (there's gotta be a better name for this phenomenon, but we can't think of one right now). You know, underground musicians making Goblin and John Carpenter inspired, instrumental "imaginary soundtracks" that sound like they come from obscure '80s witchcult slasher flicks and badly-dubbed sci-fi suspense films. We're thinking of such VHS-loving artists as Umberto, The Night Terrors, Nightsatan, Zombi, Zombie Zombie, and of course John Carpenter himself, whose Lost Themes album on Sacred Bones we also made a Record Of The Week recently. If you loved that, you'll love this, though rather than an actual band recording, Crypt Vapor are very much a DIY, lo-fi deal, probably just one guy alone in a bedroom, basement (or crypt) with a 4-track and some secondhand electronic gear. Almost comes across like sinister "skwee" music at times.
A portion of this compact disc was originally released as cassette tape put out not long ago by the same outfit that now brings us this cd version, the cult Tasmanian metal label Heavy Chains Records And Tapes run by the front man for aQ-fave eccentric doomsters The Wizar'd (although, this is NOT metal, more like electronic music). In addition to including that prior (and already out of print on tape) Erotik Maniac ep, this disc features the brand new six-track Tombe Della Citta ep, and an additional three tracks from an earlier tape called Panic Night, for 17 tracks in all of Crypt Vapor's exceedingly spooky synth ditties, full of creepy drones and thudding heartbeat bass lines; urgent reverbed-out rhythms and eerie atmosphere. Plus a dose of almost-psychedelic synth soloing let loose here and there. Very effective, all of it, really pretty much exactly what we want from this sort of thing. Reminds us of what felt when we heard the very first Umberto cd-r, just YEAH, this perfectly captures that '80s synth-laden, hypnotically groovy, sinister soundtrack vibe. Crypt Vapor's style is simple and to the point, doing nothing unnecessary or unwanted. The synths are so raw and fuzzed out; the melodies eerie and earwormy. Ideal for listening to on a night drive through the wrong side of town, or waiting for the train on a desolate subway platform. If you dare.
Each moment of music on here, even the most danceable, sounds like it could be the last thing you'll ever hear - as your life is suddenly ended by the thrust of a knife in the back, or a blade across the throat. STAB! SNIP! Or, fade any track out, and it's a slow death, strangulation by black-gloved hands, or suffocation in the vacuum of space as the airlock is emptied... Anybody making a retro giallo horror movie or low-budget sci-fi thriller ought to sign up Crypt Vapor for the soundtrack, and seriously, some specialty label like Death Waltz or One Way Static should get on this, stat, and put out a fancy vinyl version for all the horror soundtrack obsessed LP collectors!
Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
When the first Cut Hands disc came out in 2011, we raved, saying "It's kind of insane, kind of incredible", and a year later we're still pretty obsessed with it. In hindsight we feel we should definitely have made it a Record Of The Week, just like this one. Not sure why we didn't, but maybe at the time we were taken so much by surprise, since it was the work of William Bennett, the Englishman best known for the misanthropic harsh noise of underground '80s outfit Whitehouse. But even those of us who don't care at all about Whitehouse, absolutely loved Cut Hands. It has a noise element, but also an "Afro" one. "Afro-Noise" instead of Industrial Noise. Meaning, intense rhythmic workouts utilizing authentic ethnic African hand drums, mixed with electronics and distortion, in the tradition of a (possibly fake) compilation he released some years before, called Extreme Music From Africa. Pretty original (excepting perhaps the "cultural appropriation" factor, which can be debated) and compelling and so incredibly well done. Really remarkable that the person famous (or infamous) being a seminal artist in the noise genre would, later in life, come up with something if not completely different, at least pretty darn different, and do it so well that we suspect Bennett could have a career with Cut Hands to rival the success of anything he did with noise terrorists Whitehouse. Bravo.
So, here at last is Cut Hands' follow-up full-length, named for an especially venomous snake, and we're excited, our appetite for this whetted also by having seen Cut Hands in person down the street at San Francisco's Elbo Room a couple months ago, on his US tour. When we went to that show, at first we were a bit disappointed that the stage wasn't covered with exhibits from Bennett's extensive collection of Congolese and Ghanaian hand percussion instruments to be played live, and instead it was evident that he was going to be performing like a techno DJ, mixing pre-recorded sounds from multiple laptop computers, all the while dancing spasmodically and ecstatically with his shirt open. But pretty soon we, and everybody else in the club, were completely enraptured and entranced, the frenzied rhythms invading our nervous systems. Sure, some of the people in the place were probably on drugs, but they didn't need 'em. When his set at a certain point devolved into a rhythm-less Whitehouse-like pure noise barrage, that broke the spell, but up 'til then were were, in a word, possessed. We were wondering if this new Cut Hands would go to that level, and have that same raw, quasi-techno sound to it, some of it does, but there's also lovely stretches of much mellower, if eerily sinister, ambient/drone drift here too. But for us, yes, it's about the beats, stunning, stuttering polyrhythmic tick-tockery, in and out of which Bennett weaves elements of distortion and noise to great effect. So it's a lot like the debut, only with the "almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion" perhaps pushed to further extremes, but the harsh noise factor in fact toned down somewhat. Bennett's carefully constructed attacks of primal boom bap and metallic click-track chaos are powerfully "possessive", a pleasant sensation in combination with the more ambient, moody elements of this disc, of which there are plenty. Easy to understand why several tracks from this have already been utilized for cinematic soundtrack purposes (even for a documentary set in Siberia, oddly enough, didn't know they had voodoo cults up there). Very impressive and immersive, and highly recommended! (By the way, if you're a fan who has been desperately looking for the expensive, hard to find, Japan-only Cut Hands cd ep release that came out sometime last year: among the twelve tracks here you'll find all 3 songs from that ep, yay.)
Wow! I can barely remember the last time I heard a record as jubilantly bursting with Life and Laughter and Energy as this lost treasure of Dutch jazz. This record swings and stutters and gallops like Charlie Mingus' "Black Saint", like Rahsaan Roland Kirk's almost-rocking sets, like Otomo Yoshihide's spirited Ground Zero outfit. Imagine Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts piano taken on a roller coaster ride, and Charlie Brown's running around swearing like a sailor, and there's lots of thrills amidst the cacophony, and Lucy's stomach turns over when the roller coaster's upside down, and at some point Charlie loses his virginity. Yeah. That's how good this record is.
Recorded in 1981(!), the only existing document of pianist Leo Cuypers as leader, this recording also features the all star talents of unbelievably great percussionist Han Bennink, legendary reedist Willem Breuker, and bassist Arjen Gorter. All players had at one time or another been part of the esteemed Willem Breuker Kollektief, but here under the guidance of Cuypers, their skills are combined to produce one of the most EXUBERANT pieces of modern avant jazz I have ever heard.
We've long championed the work of Joel Phelps, an unsung hero of the indie underground, beginning with his stint in Silkworm - he was the group's secret weapon, with an aching, about to break voice that could soar into a powerful howl, his songs tense and intense, delicate balances of hushed brooding shimmer and explosive angular crunch, his wild guitar wrangling the perfect match for that utterly distinctive voice. Then came a clutch of solo records, all stunning, and almost all completely under the radar. And then, nothing. He seemed to have disappeared. Stopped making music. Until now.
There's a new Phelps solo record, which is fantastic, and we'll review that one soon too, but this new project is something else entirely.
We often talk about bands or records that seem custom made for aQuarius, and this definitely seems like one of those. Joel Phelps, teamed up with Stuart Dahlquist, of Burning Witch, Asva and SUNNO))), the result very much like you might imagine, and like we would have hoped, the best, creepiest, Silkworm songs, fused to the slow, droned out creep and crawl of Dahlquist's previous bands, ultra-doom torch songs, indie rock fused to Arvo Part, avant drone meets intimate songsmithery, a difficult combination for sure, but one that rewards patient and deep listening. Fans of either/both Phelps and Dahlquist will marvel at this haunting soundworld the two have conjured, from the brief opening, with Phelps, crooning over simpler percussion, and slow shifting layers of chordal shimmer, aching and heartfelt, bittersweet and melancholy, seemingly setting the stage for something much more like Phelps' previous works, but instead, the sound shifts, the second track "Stravinsky" unwinding as a dense layered drone, and when the vocals swoop in, they explode into strange harmonies, those harmonies woven into thick bass tones, the result some sort of alien chorale, downcast and stirring, even sans vocals, it would be a gorgeous sprawl of bass driven droned out dirgery, at once ethereal and atmospheric, dense and down tuned, but the song, like the whole record is rife with dramatic dynamics, long stretches of airy organ, drifting weightless, other movements bordering on avant doom, and still others dreamlike and choral, which is a sonic microcosm of the rest of the record.
Dahlquist delivering some breathtaking sound design, field sod digital glitchery, wound around glimmering soft focus swirls of sound, heaving low end thrum, soundtrack like melodies, all wound into tense slow-builds, sometimes transforming into some hushed Phelps like downer slow core pop, othertimes blossoming into something even blacker. On tracks like "The Chant", simple percussion underpins Phelps' harrowing vocals, which are soon joined by keening organ drones, the vibe intense and sinister, until another cascade of thick bass buzz swoops in, and Phelps' vocals explode into incredible and alien harmonies, the sound mutating into drowsy, sun dappled doom, laced with twinkling electronics, and buried dreamlike melodies. And without going track by track, the rest of the record continues to expand, prismatically, slipping easily from strangely psychedelic indie pop, albeit fractured and flecked with weird steel drum like percussion, to field recording laced dronescapes, to quietly broody stretches of moody agent pop, psychedelic slowcore drift, to minimal, almost liturgical ambience.
Dizzying in scope, stunning in execution, a practically perfect, and perfectly IM-perfect, hybrid of haunting avant indie rock and modern composition, brooding, downer folk minimalism and expansive sound designed dronescapery, dreamlike torch songmithery and outsider, cinematic ambient bliss.
Record number two from Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer in his Damaged Bug electro synth pop guise, and like his first outing under that moniker, Hubba Bubba, Cold Hot Plumbs is another strangely delightful collection of quirky home-brewed pop, that sounds a little like Thee Oh Sees, but without guitars, and produced by Joe Meek and Brian Eno. And as much as we love Thee Oh Sees (and we do, a LOT), we find ourselves digging Damaged Bug even more.
The record begins with a brief bit of cheesy Casio sounding schmaltz, before launching into "What Cheer", all synth buzz, laid back vocals, and wild, tribal drumming, pocked with some Stereolab style squelches, as well as some sax (!). "The Mirror" is up next, and it's very reminiscent of the first record, and sounds like an electro pop version of Thee Oh Sees, you can definitely imagine it recast all distorto guitars and yelped vox.
But it's here where Cold Hot Plumbs gets REALLY good, and demonstrates Dwyer's pop song smarts, the record darkening considerably, but at the same time revealing previously unplumbed (yup!) depths of songsmithery. "Jet In Jungle" is anchored by an arpeggiated synth melody, the vocals are wispy and falsetto, all driven by propulsive rock drumming, and everything wreathed in wheezing synth buzz, and laced with cool, creepy backwards vocals, the sonics are practically perfect, but the song is too. We got to this song and spun it about 20 times before we could move on - and then were quickly rewarded with what might be our favorite Dwyer jam yet, Damaged Bug or otherwise, the brooding, moody "Der Mond", with its woozy melody, skittery rhythm, and moody vocal croon. Every time this song comes on, we almost forget what we're listening to, it sounds like some lost electro-folk rarity from the sixties or seventies, and yeah, just like "Jet In Jungle", we played this track to death before digging any deeper.
And you'll probably not be surprised to discover, that Cold Hot Plumbs had much more to offer seeing as we weren't even halfway in. From playful singsongy electo-glam, that sounds like a more new wave Ty Segall, to pulsing almost krautrock sounding groovery, wreathed in swirling shimmer and bouncy synth chords, to synth-funk electro reminiscent of Perrey & Kingsley, albeit with some swoonsome vox over the top, to wild spacey, psychedelic synth pop, to full on synth drenched garage rock crunch, to what sounds like some lost seventies library music. All impossibly catchy, and super melodic, and sonically lush, and really, fast becoming our favorite Dwyer record EVER.
We had been hearing about this for a while, John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees' 'electro synth pop' solo record, and while we were envisioning lots of things, it wasn't this. It's definitely electro pop, lots of synths, and programmed rhythms, but there's still plenty of the fuzzy, jangly garage pop of Thee Oh Sees, and Dwyer's songwriting is in fine form, so much so, that this is fast becoming our favorite set of Dwyer jams in ages. Listen to opener "Gloves For Garbage" and you'll know just what we mean. Ostensibly, it could really have been an Oh Sees song proper, just with more synths, but it reveals itself as something else entirely, a gorgeous chunk of gloomy pop, with some of the catchiest hooks we've yet heard from Dwyer, the vocals delivered in an uncharacteristically deep, dramatic croon, plenty of clean guitar jangle and simple drumming, surrounded by pulsing, fuzzy synths, not to mention an end of song breakdown where things crumble into a cool churning sprawl of motorik kosmische, Dwyer's vocals draped over the top, totally blissed out electro-gloom, goth pop that we can't stop listening to. So much so, that it took 4 or 5 listens before we even made it to the next song. And if you need more clues as to what Damaged Bug is all about, the most telling is probably the inclusion of a painting of Brian Eno included in the record's futuristic psych-ship cockpit cover art, cuz if you can imagine Eno as a SF garage rocker / synth wrangler, you wouldn't be that far off the mark.
And the rest of the record, maybe unsurprisingly, is just as good. "Eggs At Night" sounds like a more lo-fi version of something you could hear on the radio. Instead of the swoonsome moody distorted vocals, you can almost imagine some overproduced diva, but instead, it remains a quirky little electro pop gem, with some mid-song synth swirl that transforms the song into some alternate universe John Hughes misunderstood-teen movie anthem.
There's another side to Damaged Bug, which is a serious krautrock obsession, which first pops up via the unabashed Neu! / Kraftwerk worship of "SS Cassidinea", all motorik pulse and psych-kraut throb, but continues to surface throughout. There's plenty of Radiophonic Workshop style bloop and bleep, often wound around woozy primitive electro pop creep, the result strangely dark, all moody and broody, but that's balanced by plenty of spaced out, synth driven fuzz pop, with awesome swaths of thick, rib cage rattling low end, but before you know it, the sound swoops back into some warped electronic kraut-pop, complete with some weirdly effected vocals that sound almost Germanic, and remind us of a certain infamous Dwyer project of old, Zeigenbock Kopf, but this isn't nearly so leather-y and Teutonic, instead, Damaged Bug slips easily from billowy and dreamy in places, like on the super spaced out sonic fever dream of "1/2 An Airplane", to gurgly, rumbling synth-doom dirgery like on "Metal Hand", the dirge-y doominess somehow blossoming into another gorgeous tranced out sprawl of kraut-synth mesmer. And yeah, it's an electro pop record, so there are of course some vocodered vox, but they're usually all tangled up in sounds not so distinctly electro pop, whether it's spaced out rhythmic skitter, fuzzy, garage-y jangle, or shimmering, pulsing drones. The record finishes off with a heady, hypnotic blast of wild, chaotic, non-programmed, actual drumming, pounding away through fields of lazer zap squiggles and thick, fuzzy, squelches, almost like some free-synth freakout, but not noisy, just sorta swirly and psychedelic and totally hypnotic, and then the vocals come in, and the song quickly takes the shape of yet another practically perfect. dreamily dour electro pop gem, but only briefly, before disappearing in one final swirl of electronic starburst swirl...
We first heard about this Indonesian sixties all girl garage group when three of their records were reissued on Chicago label PlusTapes, we all went nuts for them, as did you, we couldn't keep them in stock, but sadly they were crazy limited. Even at the time, and even on tape, we wanted to make one or all of them Records Of The Week, but they disappeared before we had a chance. But now Sublime Frequencies swoops in and saves the day, reissuing on a compact disc all three of the Dara Puspita's records proper (all the stuff on the cassettes, and then some!). But what's so great about these ladies? Read on....
Dara Puspita (Flower Girls in English) were Indonesia's most successful girl group in the sixties, and one of the few -actual- bands, who played their own instruments as opposed to just singing with all male backing bands. Even though rock and roll was banned at the time, with some bands being jailed for performing rock music live (Koes Bersaudara in particular, whose Sublime Frequencies disc we reviewed a few lists back - Dara Puspita and Koes Bersaudara had very similar histories, their careers often directly influenced by each other, the whole story to be found in the copious liner notes). Dara Puspita took their influence from that banned rock music, borrowing liberally from the Rolling Stones, The Beatles (whose songs they were warned by the authority to not perform, the very songs that got Koes Bersaudara jailed!) and the like, but giving it their own twist.
Performing a mix of covers and originals, these ladies were legendary for their wild live shows, but they really shine on record, with a totally distinctive and keen pop sensibility, gorgeous lilting vocals, an awesome rhythm section and some really excellent guitar playing. Dara Puspita weren't avant garde or super far out, not really heavy or psychedelic, instead they were just a kick ass pop group, an awesome garagey rock and roll band, catchy and fun, super energetic and with a distinctly unique vibe that makes this sound so special. Just listen to the sound samples. You'll be hooked in no time.
Lavish packaging, a full color six panel digipak, with tons of photos, a huge booklet of liner notes, with the story of the band, of the recording, more about the state of Indonesia at the time, the producer and more more more. So great!!
So cool! And cold wavey. A wonderfully produced piece of vinyl to replace those crappy downloads which have been bouncing around the internet for the past five or six years. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutchfield, who first worked with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks with whom to work. The second (and last) Dark Day record was recorded in 1982, with Crutchfield going into the studio with a bunch of cheap electronics and toy synthesizers with Bill Sack to flesh out the accompaniments on similar instruments. Their interlocking arpeggiations are punctuated with blooping electronics that are equal parts Trio and Kraftwerk with an underlying dread to the spiralling songs that detoured from Kraftwerk's utopian vision of man-machine hybrids and down a paranoid vision of man being at the mercy of his machines, no matter how innocent their intent. Dark Day's songs are insistent and catchy despite their utterly simple structures. "Metal Benders" and "Danger / Dance" are probably the closest thing to being 'hits' on the album as weird / anti-romantic variations of Young Marble Giants with whip crack rhythms and spectral pre-X-Files electronic whistling melodies. Coming out of the NYC No Wave scene helped craft Dark Day into a something other than neo-Romantic post-punk outfit with electronics. This was a wholly unique band, who never got the attention that many of their contemporaries. Kudos to Dark Entries once again on a splendid reissue!
We'd been warned about this next-big-British band from our friends overseas. But mere warnings weren't enough to prepare us for what has quickly become our favorite new record / not-so-guilty pleasure. Everytime we play this in the store, people freak out and either ask "What the fuck??" or buy one on the spot. It's that good. And weird. More on that in a minute. This is easily the best RAWK record in forever. Huge catchy, crunchy riffs, big eighties drums, hooks galore, equal parts AC/DC, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Pat Benatar, Billy Squier, Rick Springfield, Journey, REO Speedwagon, John Parr (remember him? 'Naughty Naughty'?) but nothing could've prepared us for the vocals. And once those vocals kick in it's all over. Think Bon Scott meets Tiny Tim, Freddie Mercury meets Vince Neil, the singer from Comus meets the singer from Nitro, or an opera singer thrust on stage and forced to front Def Leppard. It's that amazing. The vocals slip effortlessly into a falsetto that then leaps wildly from note to note, octave to octave, stretching single words into multi-syllabic whoops and wooooahhhs. So amazing. Yet somehow they fit the music perfectly. From big balls-out riffy cock rock, to melancholy FM radio ballads, to good ol rock and roll, all just slightly tweaked by the unorthodox vocals. Plus the amazing song titles and lyrics fit perfectly with the whole vibe and seemingly could be delivered in no other way than a howling ridiculous falsetto. "Black Shuck, that dog don't give a fuck", "Love on the rocks with no ice" and "Keep your hands off of my woman, moootheeeerfuuuuuuuuckeeeeeer" with motherfucker spanning 8 or 9 syllables and 2 or 3 octaves. So fucking brilliant! The vocals move this from the catagory of good retro rawk act that would be a guilty pleasure to the we-can't-believe-this-is-popular, it's totally fucked and practically avant-garde yet insanely catchy and commerical. Wow.
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.�
There have been plenty of contenders so far for metal record of the year. The grim noise drenched buzz of Korean one man (boy) band Pyha, the fucked up almost industrial dramatic dirges of Urfaust, the freaked out flute flecked prog blackness of Quest For Blood, the blown out blacknoise of Nekrasov, Leviathan's latest (read: last) and greatest of course, Jumalhamara, Wrnlrd, Fen, Varghokarghasmal, Happy Days, Leaden, we could go on and on and on...
But the thing is, for any and all of those records to even be metal record of the year contenders, one simple requirement had to be met. That there was no new Darkspace record. And the fact that the long anticipated III was just released, means that all of those other records will have to settle for runner up status. Because the music of Darkspace is not just black metal, not just metal really, and in some ways not even simply music, Darkspace is in fact the sound of 'dark space', of vast black expanses, of collapsing suns and colliding galaxies, rendered in a black metal template, only insomuch as there are distorted guitars, harsh wailing vocals, and blasting drums, but even within a somewhat familiar framework, those parts become something alien in the hands of Darkspace, and are woven into epic black tapestries of sound, like ancient sonic maps, depicting the whole of the universe, all of creation, laid out before us in a series of super distorted noise drenched howling black blasts of drone and buzz.
The songs are long, and repetitive and hypnotic, so much so that they often seem to smooth out into pure drone, like staring at something until your vision blurs and the object is transformed into a series of streaks and smears, there are structures here, and parts, and melodies, but those basic elements are more often than not subsumed by furious roiling black clouds of buzz, a relentless blur that stretches into mesmerizing black shapes, the drums barely exist, if anything, they are the beast's bones barely visible through its skin, machinelike and industrial, rigid and dense, but wrapped in thick veils of rich thick blackness.
Synths are everywhere here too, but unlike most metal bands, Darkspace don't employ keyboards as delicate little melodic interludes, instead those swirling swaths are an essential part of the blackened soundscapes, adding soft swells of warm whir, or near static single note tension, adding a distinctly psychedelic vibe to the proceedings, like 1349 crossed with Tangerine Dream, but often bearing the brunt of the song's heft, relegating the buzzing guitar to a supporting role, but without losing any power or heaviness.
While most of the record is in fact spent droning relentlessly, one gloriously massive blown out ethereal blast of blurred buzz after another, when the band does shift gears, slowing things down into a sea sick chug, or a doomy pound, it only serves to sound that much more intense, but even then, when the band seems to be exploring something much more traditional, the chug and pound is routinely unfurling beneath a gauzy veil of swirling spaced out synths, peppered with glimmering star like harmonics, deep swoonsome swells, strange super effected guitar glimmer, most notably on the second half of "3.13" (all the songs are named numerically), an intense repetitive space math black groove that is as heavy and brutal as it is dizzying and ethereal, and the end of the final track "3.17", where for the first (and last) time, the band slows things down into much more traditional songform territory, a fingerpicked clean Slint style guitar melody, space-y synthesizers, simple understated drumming, a gorgeously melancholy and musical outro to a record that in its extreme and abstract beauty, up until the very last few moments, seemed to exist in a world entirely of its own invention.
As with all sounds transcendent, the magic here is ineffable, there is definitely some sort of musical alchemy going on. The sound of III is rooted enough in black metal orthodoxy to appeal to fans of the more traditional forms, but at the same time, the sound is so abstract, so free, the process is so transformative, that fans of all things heavy and dark, minimal and repetitive, should be equally enthralled. It's impossible not to hear elements of new age, of modern minimalism, of free drone, all deftly woven around an incredible collection of churning black heaviness.
Once again packaged in that immediately recognizable minimal black packaging, housed in a black and silver slipcover, adorned with mysterious diagrams of some 'dark space'.
Break out the headphones, relax the body, and close the eyes, it's another one from the devastatingly droney and dark Darsombra, whose debut Ecdysis disc we really liked a couple years back. We like this just as much, maybe more. There's a great deal of melancholic, mesmeric beauty in Darsombra's isolationist grinding and evil ambient shimmer. We can imagine Darsombra's human operator, Brian Daniloski from the Maryland metalcore band Meatjack, up late at night alone in his home studio, lights dim, wreathed in smoke, hunched over his guitar and synth and effects and whatever else he uses to conjure this music, willing himself off into another place, out into the void of space, riding the dense waves of his own creation, returning only at dawn with another track for this album finished.
Let's discuss these tracks, but not in order... The echoey minimalism of "Drops Of Sorrow" is simply glorious, it's Riley or Reich from a psychdronedoom perspective. Or perhaps krautrock's Achim Reichel & The Machines playing Black Boned Angel!? Elsewhere, there's more gloom and glory, from the hushed sinister soundtrack melodies of opener "Auguries" to the haunting, spacey drone-whispers of "Night's Black Agents" - this disc's longest track at 17:34, reminding us of the 'Vox Insecta' work of old AQ fave Q.R. Ghazala. Then, with an intro of ommming voices (or synth) there's "Lamentings / Auguries", featuring sparse melodic guitar weepery buried beneath fuzzed out layers of deep, electronic drone and distortion. Again, this definitely sounds like it would make good soundtrack material for some eerie, arty Italian horror flick. And further cementing our love affair with the abstract attractions of Eternal Jewel, the calmly vibrating "Incarnadine" brings some rays of light to this disc at its very end, with its peacefully repetitive clusters of gentle chimings over a quiet drone.
Packaged by Public Guilt in a nice black, gothically graceful gatefold sleeve, this is definitely recommended. Imagine Expo '70 cloaked in black, performing a seance with Tony Conrad and Lustmord, and you'll have an idea of how much we must like this!
The Date Palms debut lp on Root Strata, Of Psalms (now sadly out of print) was one of our standout favorite records from last year. A blissful combo of Eastern drone classicism and hypnotic psych fluidity. Now the core Oakland-based duo of Gregg Kowalsky and Marielle Jakobsons follow their debut up with this stunning, no doubt limited, vinyl-only release on Mexican Summer (which comes with a download card).
Composed of two side-loooooong tracks, the structure of Honey Devash is set up in the form of two ragas as their basic foundation but open wide enough to allow a number of key compositional elements to play through. The title track is the morning raga stirring softly at first with slowly energizing phase shifts and bowed violin drones setting up the mood before the heavy bass riff bursts forth into a forward moving momentum aided by percussive elements and all sorts of sonic layering: oscillating bloops, arc-ing violin loops and modal electric piano phrases. Slowly-burning upward toward a white hot light, the gorgeously smoldering momentum breaks off into a purifying hypnotic cosmic bliss punctuated by spacy violin figures before a long slow fade.
The second side track, "Honey Dune" is the evening raga and it cools down with a wide drifting expansiveness lke the end of a long desert heat just before twilight. The mood is less propulsive, more contemplative but beautifully rich with added instrumentation of bass clarinet, tampura and cascading piano motifs. Melodically pretty and explorative, the track gives ample room for each instrument to stretch out and play yet remain tethered to a unifying whole by the grounation vibes of Trevor Montgomery's basslines.
Like some heady hybrid of spiritual Eastern jazz and rockish psych extrapolation, fans of Bruce Palmer, Dadawah, L. Shankar, Brightblack Morning Light, and Spacemen 3 should definitely scoop this up.
This is the perfect soundtrack for hot desert nights, staring at the stars. Sooooooo gooooooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Psychedelic rock music inspired by and/or the cause of various psychological anomalies and psychic phenomena! Seriously. The Davis Redford Triad is the fully levitational drone-rock unit centered on the outer-mind guitar explorations of Steven Wray Lobdell (just don't call him Stevie Wray!). He's the bearded hippy with the brow, holding the dog in his lap, both of whom stare out at you from the back cover of this release. You may also know him from his other projects (Baseball Astrologer, Sufi Mind Game, and the lovely acoustic solo set "Automatic Writing By The Moon", also on Holy Mountain). Oh, and of course he's also the guitarist in Faust! Yes, although Lobdell's from the Pacific Northwest, he somehow ended up playing guitar with those re-united krautrockers on their last few albums. Faust of course wouldn't hire just any old long-hair to play guitar, and our favorite 'new Faust' album "Ravvivando" wouldn't have been nearly as excellent without him.
We really liked the Triad's second album, 2000's German-titled but Eastern-tinged "Ewige Blumenkraft" but really, *really* liked their much heavier first LP, "The Mystical Path Of The Number Eighty Six". Originally released in 1997 as a limited edition vinyl artifact, the Triad's debut album has long been in need of compact disc reissue, and at last here it is. This classic has now re-emerged in remixed and re-sequenced form, and includes a theremin track mysteriously missing from the LP version...
It's a really good late night listen, as Lobdell & co. conjur a kosmic kraut vibe via deep, droney instrumental psych jams on guitar and organ, with drums on one track and some electronics thrown in. But mostly guitar, lots of guitar! It's essentially a solo album. Fans of Kejiji Haino (another Faust collaborator) and his band Fushitsusha should dig this...though Fushitsusha can be a lot more abrasive. Lobdell's clouds of distortion are rather more 'round' and pleasant than the extremes of Haino's skree. Yet amid the Triad's transportational anthems you'll find some abrasive distorto-grind to be sure (right in the very loud, very dark first track actually). Other comparisons could be made to guitarists like Caspar Brotzman (at his most Hendrix-feeling), or Blue Cheer's Randy Holden (at his most abstract)...
Truly essential for anyone into heavy drone-psych guitar from Bardo Pond to Population II to Fushistsusha. Even if you have the original vinyl, you should check this cd out, as it's quite a bit different. And look for a new Triad release in the fall.
Boy, has this reissue been a long time coming! Seeing that it's been a holy grail for new age collectors and long-form music heads long before the new age revival began revving up nearly a decade ago, it's surprising how long it has actually taken. We in fact have been listening to our ripped mp3's for the past few years courtesy of Greg Davis's incredible (and deeply missed) new age tape music blog, Crystal Vibrations. But now Jordan De La Sierra's masterpiece from 1977 has been given the deluxe reissue treatment it deserves, and for the very first time has been released as it was meant to be. Four gloriously long form well-tuned piano tracks (one per side for the lp, 2 for each cd), that hypnotically spiral and cascade in delirious transcendent clouds of chordal clusters and glacial repetitions. Recorded and edited from hours of sessions, the subsequent tape recordings were then taken to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and taking advantage of the space's unique acoustics and 30 second natural delay, played back and rerecorded as they transmitted throughout the deep resonant space.
Hailing from California's Central Valley and later influenced by Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Pandit Pran Nath as well as teachings from his spiritual explorations in India, De La Sierra wanted to take his classical music training to a different place when he was granted a scholarship at San Francisco's Conservatory of Music where he immersed himself in the avant garde and performed works by John Cage, Robert Ashley, and Earl Brown. He eventually moved into Project Artaud right here in our own Mission District where he worked with small ensembles of like minded artists and musicians. His spiritual curiosity led him everywhere and under the tutelage of Pandit Pran Nath, to composing music in India. But he eventually worked his way back to the Bay Area, where he met up with Stephen Hill who ran the legendary radio program Hearts in Space on KPFA, who championed De La Sierra's music and led him to the fledgling Bay Area label Unity Records, which released Gymnosphere, but not without a few hiccups. Poorly managed and hemorrhaging money, the label ditched the planned release of a double lp by De La Sierra complete with booklet of Indian inspired drawings and poems and instead only released the first half on one lp. The process had taken so long that by the time of the release, De La Sierra had moved onto other projects, one of them forming the Dylanesque folk ensemble The Jemstone Band. Gymnosphere sank into obscurity.
So now The Numero Group has restored the original release to its originally intended glory, including a full catalog of drawings, poems and liner notes, housed in an embossed outer sleeve with a tantric design. Beautifully packaged, this long awaited reissue has long influenced many modern day soundmakers like James Blackshaw, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Gregg Kowalsky. Fans of Iasos, Lubomyr Melnyck, Ariel Kalma, Anton Batagov or any of the musicians mentioned above, this is essential!
AN AQUARIUS EXCLUSIVE!!!
Yeah, Bernard Sumner may have claimed the computer as the ultimate punk instrument; but not everybody in 1982 could afford a computer to program samples while sipping cocktails at the Hacienda. Tape - now THAT is a punk as fuck tool. It was everywhere; it was cheap (not so much anymore, mind you); and the tools to edit tape could be as simple as a razor blade and a tape recorder. Andre De Saint-Obin was of this DIY mindset, a musician making the most out of the least, utilizing that aforementioned punkest form of technology. This Dutch fellow was home-taping for only a few short years in the early '80s, releasing a couple of singles and a cassette... and then he just disappeared. An impressionable Frans De Waard (the man behind Korm Plastics, Plinkity Plonk, Vital Weekly, and too many bands to mention) was smitten by that De Saint-Obin cassette back in the day, and years later, he embarked on a quest to seek out De Saint-Obin in hopes of reissuing the album. We'll skip forward through the bits about interminable internet searches and dropped conversations due to artist idiosyncrasy and flighty weirdo behavior; for here we have the glorious fruits of De Waard's labor of love - a minor masterpiece of Dutch post-punk / minimal-wave eccentricity: Sound On Sound by Andre De Saint-Obin.
The title refers to means-of-production, De Saint-Obin didn't have a multitrack recorder, but rather he could overdub tracks onto a single piece of tape in the tradition of Les Paul and the earliest of sound engineers. Yup, in mono! Built up from the bottom up, starting with drum machine, then bass, the guitar, and finally voice, each of Andre De Saint-Obin's songs required considerable foresight and architectural planning. The process was a destructive one, so if he fucked up on one of the last layers, he would have to start all over again. The fact that these songs are so fractured, so lysergic, so dystopian speaks to the cracked vision of De Saint-Obin. The opening number (eponymously titled "Introduction") is an instrumental cut with swollen basslines plucked with the swaggering panache of a Peter Hook or a Simon Gallup, punched with spark-plug guitar jitteriness and mechanoid electronic rhythms. It's pretty damn close to being a perfect piece of gloom pop, but fixed to a woozy DIY axis instead of a baroque goth polish. The spasmodic anti-funk number "Dance Till I Die" sports jagged guitar fuzz and exasperated vocals above a backbeat of machined click and churlish basslines, lending to visions of Pere Ubu or James Chance in a fit of epileptic delirium. The manic-depressive bounciness of "Hey You" sways toward sexual frustration, and "I Got Plopmusic" veers towards the truly bizarre in the vein of Fad Gadget or any of those synth-punk ditties that Colin Potter put to tape around the same time.
The accompanying cd, in addition to the record proper, features 5 bonus tracks, including the predatorily creepy yet captivatingly catchy "Stay Tonight" and the much sought after "Everytime We Say Goodbye" originally released on one of Alain Neffe's Insane Music compilations. Sound On Sound finds company with a few contemporaries in the head-scratching Factory Records ensemble Crawling Chaos and Pete Shelley's aptly named Strange Men In Sheds With Spanners; but was very much a precursor to what the Blank Dogs and Ariel Pink attempted several decades later.
We should note that aQuarius is the ONLY shop in North America that you can get one of these, and get one you should!!! Fuck yeah!!!
Newly reissued on vinyl, our very favorite record from New Zealand noise rock legends the Dead C. This is IT. One of THEE most perfect slabs of abstract free rock ever set to tape. Yes, noise rockers, this is where it all started. Originally released way back in 1992, about five years into their recorded career. Long out of print and finally available again (on vinyl, cd still sadly out of print). We're of the mind that the Dead C never made a bad record, but of their entire recorded output, Harsh 70s Reality continues to be our all time favorite. Most of the vestiges of pop that showed up in their past records, the legacy of their NZ pop heritage, were jettisoned or at least transformed into something much harder, and much weirder. The pop remained, but drastically altered, more often twisted and tangled, buried or burned, a soft glowing core barely visible through the Dead C's abstruse ambient noise. Truly hard to describe, there are guitars and drums, but Harsh 70s Reality never really rocks, it does however manage to be heavy and psychedelic and dense and droney all at once. Blissful, tranquil, harsh, jagged, dreamy, dark, atonal, an impossible collision of sounds and emotions. This may be noise rock, but it's not precisely noisy, nor rock. By this point, the Dead C were channeling Cale and Conrad and Maclise and the Taj Mahal Travellers as much as any rock or noise outfits.
This is immediately evident on the opening track, the 22 minute "Driver U.F.O.", a massive dirgescape of angular guitar, clanging and keening, a sound that hinted at the noise to come, their future trajectory, headed for sonic worlds even further out. A world first visited here, of strange little abstract chordal figures, not riffs per se, just strange smears of sound repeated over and over, totally mesmerizing, but completely alien, sheets of guitar noise, big slabs of metal percussive clang, creepy wheedly little melodies, lots of drone and drawn out streaks of feedback. Sounds almost like the first musicians ever, musical cavemen, suddenly stumbling upon a stage full of amps and drums, and curiously exploring, discovering all the strange ways the different instruments can be poked and prodded and struck to create an abstract and gorgeous primitive din. This is divine dronemusic. A clattery atonal dronescape. If you took this first track, stuck it on a crappy cd-r, made up some crazy name, Black Tomb Resurrect or something, added some xeroxed cover art, and sent out a handful to the Wire and Eclipse and Volcanic Tongue, made sure it was limited to 100 copies, you would have indie hipsters shitting themselves to get their hands on one, buying copies on eBay for $100. It's that prescient. Either that or the current breed of noisemakers are not hiding their Dead C obsession AT ALL.
The shorter tracks here do actually 'rock'. Sort of. As much as a jagged smear of super distorted crumble and crunch can 'rock'. "Sky" sounds like the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" covered by Reynols, a stumbling rock drum beat beneath a white noise riff, all crumbly distortion and blown out fuzz, and some strange sort of crooned vocals drifting in and out. "Suffer Bomb Damage" is a haunting keyboard drone, all off key lo-fi Casio wheeze and reverb spring percussion, very reminiscent of NZ legends Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos. "Love" sounds like the Velvet Underground fronted by Jandek, covering the MC5, lurching fuzzy garage stomp with damaged guitar and weary, drawled vocals. "Constellation" is some long lost Velvet Monkeys joint, an East Village folkfuzz jam, throbbing and saturated in dense distortion and wrapped in thick sheets of druggy droney guitar swirl, all wrapped haphazardly around a cracked pop hook. The record ends on a truly strange note, a sort of fuzzy folk drift, warm acoustic guitars are picked and strummed, a mournful lament, crowd sounds and occasional bursts of distorted fuzz, as well as a brief stretch of wailed anguished vocals and a few splatters of snare drum, but for the majority of the nearly ten minutes of "Hope", we drift lazily through a murky world of soft muted guitars and sad, mumbled vocals. So lovely. A most perfect noisefolk elegy. It's hard to understand how the hell this record ended up here, drifting dreamlike and swathed in murky folk, especially after the 20+ minutes of face melting freaked out abstraction of "Driver U.F.O." Or the blown-out deconstructed noiserock in between. But that's exactly what makes the Dead C so special. This is exactly where it had to end up. Where you were meant to emerge. It seems like an impossibly confusional journey, an improvised exploration. And it is. But taken as a whole, Harsh 70s Reality is exactly as it was meant to be. Perfect. Perfectly imperfect. A world of noise that slips from sound to sound, taking many forms, many guises, a world where letting fuzzy folk guitars and soft vocals wash over you is not all that different than letting a wall of crumbling guitar grind and feedback freakout collapse and bury you alive. Two different sides of the same glorious noise.
Includes a download coupon as well.
Has it really been more than 25 years? And close to 40 releases? These NZ noise rock legends have been making their particular brand of abstract, avant free-noise beauty for what seems like forEVER. And somehow, over all those years, and all those releases, they've both managed to keep making music that is distinctly and defiantly their own, while constantly re-inventing that sound in a way that has kept that sound impossibly interesting, extremely relevant and ridiculously influential on legions of other noisemakers, whether they realize it or not.
Listening to Armed Courage, we were initially forced to wonder, what exactly it is that makes a Dead C jam a proper record? Cuz barring their flirtations with pop songs (and there have been many), the sound of the Dead C, and of Armed Courage, does in fact sound like a band letting loose, jamming endlessly... Both the tracks here sound like the could have been plucked from even more epic jams, as if someone just pushed 'record' in the middle of a 24 hour jam, affording us a glorious glimpse into what could only be a never ending noise rock jam, our glimpse's brevity dictated by the limitations of recorded media. It tickles us to imagine Bruce Russell, Michael Morley and Robbie Yeats locked in a perpetual jam, the Hawkwind style heart-of-the-sun freakouts recontextualized into something WAY more loose and abstract and while not perhaps lo-fi in sound, certainly in spirit.
The two tracks here offer up the two sonic sides of the Dead C, alternately crafting an alien lo-fi avant indie rock minimalism, and at their most fierce and free, with Yeats delivering some of the wildest drumming we've heard from him on the opening track, a tangle of multiple free jazz freakouts, locked into weirdly unhinged krautrock style motorik grooves, that constantly splinter, fall apart and somehow come right back together again. All the while, Russell and Morley transforming their guitars into noisemakers, the drums wreathed in billowing clouds of rumble and whir, of crumblingly distorted drones, and fragmented riffs, tones pulsing and undulating, all blurred into constantly shifting sheets of smeared sound, the occasional bit of loose clattery percussion, the cool second half of the first track, where the band lock into a crazy Necks-like minimal groove, all skittery rhythm, pulsating distorto-buzz, and a cool, almost electronic sounding field of percussive guitar scrape that sounds a bit like a damaged synth, the whole thing barreling forward with a strange buried propulsion. It seems impossible that something this formless, and free, this shapeless and abstract could somehow be so sonically mesmerizing, but for all its shapelessness, the sound is teeming with strange sonic shapes, and for all its looseness, the group sound impossibly tight, flying into wild musical tangents, but always finding their way back, or not, sometimes just following each other on those tangents and changing the direction of the song and sound entirely. Nearly 30 years of playing together will do that to a group.
The second track shifts gears completely, the band slipping into their warbly low fidelity songcraft, the sound unfurling sedately, with a field of rhythmic static, some woozy guitars, some strange percussion, lots of tape hiss ambience, and weary, whispery, crooned vocals, the band seemingly locked into a somnambulant drift, before Yeats lets loose again, his octopoidal skitter mirrored by caustic guitar scrabble, and gristly electronic buzz, all still anchored by some detuned strum, the drums building, driving the song into a dense driving noise rock jam, laced with streaks of high end guitar freakout, before shedding all the noise and bash and howl, leaving just a shadowy sprawl of murky mesmer, which again, slowly builds from hushed creep, to a weirdly math bit of motorik churn, simple, but loud drumming, over FX wreathed wah wah, and streaks of droned out warble, a stumbling bunkurfunk dirge that gradually loses momentum, eventually disappearing into a soft fading cloud of Jandekian guitar-warble.
Fucking fantastic.
All right, while Andee is the biggest Dead C expert here at Aquarius, we're ALL fans of New Zealand's long-running noise rock geniuses. And since he took responsibility for writing the extensive and effusive reviews we've published in recent weeks for the repressings / warehouse finds of The Dead C's Harsh 70s Reality and Trapdoor Fucking Exit albums, I (Allan) thought I'd step up and take over reviewing this brand new release, which is in fact a sort of "best of" anthology selected and compiled by the band themselves, featuring 22 tracks spread over two compact discs, spanning their career to date. Not being as much of an expert as Andee, but still a fan (I've got a few of their albums, and would have more but missed out on some releases when I wasn't as 'hip' to this band as I am now), this 2cd is just what I needed: a primer of sorts on this sometimes confusional, confounding, and obscure-but-important band. And as far as reviewing goes, what's to review? THIS SHIT IS ESSENTIAL! End of story. It's an ideal introduction for newbies and even the most dedicated Dead C fanatic will want it as well. Even if you've collected every last rare tape or vinyl track from these guys it's still nice to have a few of 'em on cd.
You'll hear how The Dead C trio of Michael Morley, Robbie Yeats, and Bruce Russell blazed their own unique path through the down under underbelly of indie-rock experimentation, pushing the boundaries of (between?) noise and rock in their New Zealand laboratory. True originals, appreciated at first only by a hardy few (themselves, mainly, as well as the likes of Sonic Youth). Their deliberately lo-fi, song-subverting, willfully 'wrong' music-making was and is perhaps an acquired taste. We'd venture to guess though that at this point, few regular AQ customers would have less than positive reactions to The Dead C's seasick lurchings, to their sounds of droning flybys from UFOs made out of straw, and feedback stomp and damaged thrash. No complaints about caustic liquids somehow coursing through guitar strings, amps, and ears. Thumb up to their hazy hints of melodies, buried beneath solid static storms of guitar distortion, or their moments of quietly emotive indie-pop prettiness in the NZ tradition, left to rust and decay.
The tracks are arranged chronologically, from "Max Harris" off their 1988 Flying Nun album DR503 starting off the first disc, to the track "Truth" taken from The Damned released in 2003 that ends the second disc. Disc one might be considered a survey of their "songier" era, going up to about 1992's Harsh 70s Reality, while disc two deals with material from 1994 on that saw them becoming less of a particularly noisy indie-rock band and more of truly abstract, improvising noise band, still with some rock and pop elements weirdly woven in. The tracks selected comprise both some "greatest hits" (things we'd have picked too, for sure) and some total rarities from long-deleted cassettes and limited vinyl-only releases, like the Clyma Est Mort LP, The Operation Of The Sonne LP, the Xpressway Pile-Up cassette comp, and the Helen Said This mini-LP, among others. Actually most of these tracks are rarities, in the sense that a lot of their '90s cds on Siltbreeze like The White House and Repent, and even more recent albums like the incredible self-titled double disc on Language Recordings from 2000 are out of print now too. There's two tracks from Harsh 70s Reality, but strangely enough nothing from Trapdoor Fucking Exit, by the way.
The thick cd booklet contains essays, in ascending order of non-fictional detail, from Seymour Glass of Bananafish mag, Tom Lax of Siltbreeze, and Nick Cain of Opprobrium fanzine. And there's track-by-track commentary from Bruce Russell as well, adding to the "primer" value of this release. It may be true that this band's stuff takes a while to "get". Years maybe. But this crash course gives a great head start.
The blurb sticker on the front of this proclaims The Dead C as "the GREATEST noise/drone rock band of all time" and we really might not have any argument with that at all! It goes on to suggest that fans of Wolf Eyes, SUNNO))), Lightning Bolt and Growing would/should dig The Dead C quite heavily. Probably true as well. The implication being, though, that fans of those bands wouldn't have heard of The Dead C before. Perhaps -- and if that's the case, and that's you, you definitely should check this out!!! We'd probably go on to say that as much as we enjoy all those bands, The Dead C is much closer to our hearts for sure...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The Dead C is the stalwart collective of free noise / avant rockers from New Zealand comprised of Bruce Russell (member of A Handful of Dust and boss of the Corpus Hermeticum label), Michael Morley (aka Gate), and Robbie Yeats, beloved of Bananafish readers and Siltbreeze junkies everywhere. We thought that perhaps their day had passed but, think again, they've gone and created a superb new album! This new, long awaited release is a sprawling double cd that finds them in the least-rock space they have ever occupied. Recorded over the past 5 years, this album is saturated in a langurous humidity produced by guitar feedback scrapes, ring modulation, and the buzzing din of improperly balanced amplifiers.
Disc One is the noisier of the two, dominated by the epic 33 minute "SpeederBot" which passes from militant percussive stabs into twin tremolo guitar feedback, similar to the controlled chaos found on their masterful "Harsh '70s Reality" album. But Disc Two is where this eponymous Dead C release really shines. Sort of like an analogue version of Main, or like a Raster record coming in badly on a shortwave radio, full of erratic hissing and eerie static. The trio striates the slow motion hypnodrone of sampled guitar feedback (yup, the lo-fi mirror version of My Bloody Valentine) with creaky little events. It's apparent that all of the recent drones from New Zealanders like Lovely Midget, RST, and Surface of the Earth have definitely made huge impact on the Dead C. They've picked up the gauntlet and, after a few years in their lonely NZ laboratory, have again come up with something that can be only called Dead C music (more so than it can be called rock or anything else). Adventurous, idiosyncratic, fantastic.
This is as recommended as it limited (to 500 copies and may not see a repress, sorry). Buy now or cry later!! (as we like to say.)
For years now, the cryptically (and coolly) monickered Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words has been quietly and consistently releasing some of the most haunting and beautiful minimal dronemusic we've heard, a blend of soft skittery glitch, brooding guitar loops, deeeeeep drone, dreamy drift, and experimental post-everything soundscaping, that is as good if not better than anything produced by the legion of overhyped sound makers constantly fawned over by the public and press alike. We've only managed to review two DLSODW releases so far, both sadly out of print now, but the release of this new one, quite possibly his best, seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally throw our weight behind Dead Letters, and hopefully open some ears to these mysterious and wondrous sounds, and reveal to the hordes of dronelords and free music freeks just what they've been missing.
Dead Letters is the work of Swedish musician Thomas Ekelund, and over the years, his music has drifted from extreme near silent ultra minimalism, to warm whirring dronescapes to muted crunch and clatter to shimmering underwater ambience, but on Lost In Reflections, all of those elements are present, in lesser amounts, the perfect distillation of a lifetime of sounds, here presented more as background then the main event, that main event here being the guitar. Each of the six tracks, however distorted or refracted or fragmented or obfuscated, seems to be borne of the guitar, with Ekelund working his mysterious alchemy and transforming those buzzing steel strings into wholly new shapes.
The opener, "This Room Seems Empty Without You" held us spellbound from the very first few seconds, a bit of reverby guitar, moody and minor key, very post rock, slow core and abstract, the notes hovering in a dark expanse of overtones and deep low end shimmer, the guitar unfurling gradually, subtly processed, peppered with a strange percussive glitch, that gives the music a sort of downtempo vibe, still droney and abstract and free, but with a little Portishead or Bowery Electric mixed in. The glitches coalesce into an almost-rhythm, the end result is some strange minimal instrumental downtuned Galaxie 500 mixed with the brooding barely there drift of Bohren, and a sort of late night lugubrious skitter.
The next track, "Lost & Losing", takes a whole 'nother tack, beginning with bits of scrape and creak, amp buzz, muted harmonics, a subtly percussive textural soundscape, quietly and slowly surrounded by a gorgeously hazy sea of sun spots and solar flares, taking the shoegaze-y shimmer of Nadja and Jesu and dialing it way back, until it's a glimmering sheet of prismatic buzz, all the while those strange sounds from the song's beginning continuing to weave a buried barely there rhythm, everything locked into deep woozy bleary eyed swells.
We have the tendency to go song by song, describing the sound of each, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it's not just the sound, it's the mood and the vibe and the feel and the deft and delicate arrangement of those sounds. And Ekelund is a master, taking simple strummed guitars, and wrapping them in a gauzy patina of blur buzz, locking the original riff into a loop, and then gently adding bit of melody, bits of texture, turning something simple into something complex and gorgeous, there are hints of Earth all over Lost In Reflections as well, a particularly abstract bit of fuzzy drift, will suddenly part to reveal a dark elegiac guitar line, slowed way down, creating some sort of underwater blues, while elsewhere, the twang and pluck of the guitar strings is wreathed in sonic sunlight, the sounds allowed to overlap and tangle up, the notes and melodies all wound up, spinning slowly and spitting out sparks, bits of glitch and high end tones, streaks of feedback, until those sounds are smeared into one long undulating stretch, and over the top a string of chiming notes are hung like Christmas lights on a tree, the, guitar often disappearing completely, leaving just a bit of twang to hover and then fade away.
The final track is a monster, nearly 20 minutes, imagine Nadja, Merzbow and Tim Hecker covering Arvo Part, and you might be close. This is some sort of soft noise, blindingly effulgent upper register ur-drone chorale, the streaks and shards of guitars sound like voices, the distortion thick, the effects crumbling and swirling, a glancing listen reveals a wall of sound, but headphones are like a diving bell, allowing us to sink into this roiling sonic sea, that seems to stretch out forever, bottomless and endless, part way through, the song changes shape, that which constituted the whole of the sound up until that point is relegated to a background for these new sounds, a sweeping, loping epic bit of post rock, still washed out and woozy, but with a simple propulsive rhythm, and a gorgeously melodic chiming central riff, darkly fervent and slightly ominous and hauntingly epic, the swirling sounds around those new elements growing more frenetic, thickening, while the song just grows and grows, sprawls and expands, as if any second the heavens will open and the song will become the sonic manifestation of the rapture. So totally intense and powerful and moving and majestic, and simply breathtaking.
Droning dirge-y sludge records are a dime a dozen at this point. It's still a sound we love, but we're rapidly reaching a saturation point. The punk rock ethos of 'anyone can start a band' combined with the fact that everybody has a cd burner, and the seeming 'ease' of making doomy drone music, just means that now, it requires a whole hell of a lot of digging and sifting thought mounds of mediocre doom and so so sludge, to discover something as fucked up and far out as Dead Peni.
We first hear Dead Peni on a compilation a year or two back and were immediately smitten. The name evoked some sort of blackened take on Rudimentary Peni, but the sound was nothing of the sort, instead Dead Peni trafficked in an expansive sprawling riff based blackened doomdrone, that was anything but static, like a slowed down tarpit space rock, an even doomier murkier Godflesh, or Wolf Eyes with some rhythmic heft. It was hard to get a feel for what DP were capable of just on the basis of the music on the comp, but it was definitely enough to know we needed more.
And -more- has arrived, in the form of this three track, 47 minute, mysteriously monickered slab of blackened crush. 2-4+1 begins all hushed shimmer and deeeeeep low end whir, a sound that could be any cd-r, until some ungodly beastlike growl emerges from the depths and the guitar explodes, super distorted, crumbling and processed, but weirdly muted and warm. A single crash, allowed to ring out, transforming into a charged electronic buzz, streaked with feedback, and underpinned by that monstrous gurgling voice. Finally the drums kick in, a slow motion drum machined doomic plod, and we're gone. Total buzzing black doom industrial noise nirvana, lumbering and druggy, minor key and surprisingly melodic. A bit of Godflesh, a little Gore, some classic old school funereal doom run through a bank of Wolf Eyesian cracked electronics and malfunctioning effects, the weirdest part is the crowd noise, what sounds like the chanting of a rally or demonstration, snippets and samples, wrapped in rippling sheets of feedback, and woven into massive churning waves of crumbling distortion, a cinematic and weirdly dreamlike doom / industrial / noise hybrid. Like the sound of some super fucked up post apocalyptic political rally, tattered flags, burning buildings, a crowd of shapes and figures clad in rags, some mysterious shadow, on a raised parapet, delivering his message in a gurgling rumbling barely audible vocals, almost like goregrind vocals, but buried so low in the mix they end up sounding like another layer of droning rumble. One guitar weaves a soaring almost majestic melody, but still woozy and washed out sounding, while the track lurches glacially onward, the crowd cheering and chanting, the whole thing like some mysterious soundtrack to the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as we know it. But we can't help but willingly submit.
The following track begins with nearly 4 minutes of rain, thunder and lightning, voices, field recordings, laid over an almost imperceptible high end, which gradually grows and grows into a symphony of feedback, tones and overtones tangling and intermingling, creating all sorts of alien melodies, until finally the riff comes in, a super simple caveman dirge sort of riff, locked into a neverending loop, repeating over and over and over like some sort of proto metal mantra, while all the while, the rainfall continues, the random sounds drift in and out, the feedback swirls in little squalls and tangles, the only deviation, being some brief bits of classic doom like melody, before the riff inevitably returns to it's original looping dirge.
The final track begins with an explosion of blown out guitar and buzzing rumble, before drifting off, leaving the staticky detritus over a simple robotic pulse, and a sea of glitch and squiggles, the various elements finally locking into some sort of super abstract doom metal, but one that is hardly doom, or metal, more like some fragmented space drone, peppered with squalls of superdistorted guitar, the occasional clanging crash and crunch, all very muted and muddy, wreathed in a layer of gauzy distortion, voices, dogs barking, all manner of random sounds, and finally, a fierce howled processed demonic voice, wrapped in distorted riffage, and creating a super spare, spaced out sort of doom, where the riffs spend most of the time buzzing and drifting, only to rear up and spit out a bit of fractured melody and harsh hissy pummel, before recoiling again, and resuming its slow burning black drone. It almost sounds like Butthole Surfers ultra-doom, the same sort of effects drenched trippiness, and off kilter dementia, but way blacker, and way more fucked up and frightening.
Any of the three tracks could have been stretched out to album length, and we most certainly would have bought all three, but the three pieces here definitely work together well, as some sort of hellish, demonic, slow motion black doom drone dirge, that plays out almost like some impossible Wolf Eyes / Moss / Arvo Part mash up, if that makes any sense. Which it doesn't, but which is exactly what makes Dead Peni so amazing.
In addition to the 3 audio tracks, there's a fourth track included as a quicktime video, another blown out glacial buzz drenched dirge, this time accompanied by strange abstract visuals, black and white, giving way to green and blue, what seems to be buildings or ruins, but ultimately are so overexposed they just become shapes, the perfect visual representation of Dead Peni's abject black doom.
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We've long loved Paul St Hilaire, aka Tikiman, THEE voice of minimal dub geniuses Rhythm And Sound, his gorgeous, otherworldly croon adding some serious soul to R&S' darkly digital world of gristly dubbed out, slow skitter creep, and really, if there was ever one of those 'could sing the phonebook' voices, it's St Hilaire's. Years back, St Hilaire performed with Deadbeat, aka Scott Monteith, another aQ fave, a dub scientist in Berlin by way of Canada, whose sound was and is equal parts Rhythm & Sound skeletal dig-dub, and Pole style click and pop minimalism. Over the years, Monteith and St Hilaire stayed in touch, even playing the occasional show, but this is the first proper recording the two have made together, and it's a total stunner. And as you might imagine from the above, it's pretty much just what you'd expect, a sprawling collection of gorgeous super spare electro dub, a lot like Pole crossed with Rhythm & Sound. But that sound is stretched way out, some of the tracks here almost house-y, some very Kompakt sounding, but regardless of the sonic influence or inspiration, Monteith and St Hilaire make the sound totally their own, conjuring up some spiritual musical magic that makes The Infinity Dub Sessions totally divine. Especially the first track, which is worth the $18 price tag all on its own. Maybe the most perfect, and perfectly mysterious and moody modern dub track we've heard, all woozy, thick bass rumbles, wreathed in static, deep mesmeric swells, laced with dubbed out upstroke chordal thrum, as well as the occasional dubstep style bass wobble, little bits of glitch and squelch scattered throughout, super minimal melodies drifting like bongsmoke in the background, even instrumental, this would be totally hypnotic and irresistibly mesmerizing, but add St. Hilaire's gorgeous croon, and it becomes something even more transcendent.
Nothing else is quite as dark and bass heavy, but all the tracks are tranced out, softly swirly and psychedelic, the sound simultaneously minimal and skeletal, but also deeply lush and layered, ranging from the super percussive churn of "Dopa", with some seriously twisted, echo drenched vox, to the more reggae sounding "What The Heck Them Expect", St Hilaire's vocals the focal point, the background music a dark, languorous groove. "Working Everyday" is a dubby, dreamy sprawl, all soft focus and prismatic, billowy chords drifting atop a lazily propulsive rhythm, while "Rock Of Creation" is a hazy techno-dub ballad, a field of gristly and crackle the framework for shimmery synths and hushed melodies, St Hilaire crooning seductively amidst ethereal clouds of sound. The final three tracks have a huge Kompakt vibe, but imagine if Kompakt was headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, with The Infinity Dub Sessions a chronicle of St Hilaire and Monteith's mobile sound system, the streets of Jamaica sonically transformed into some otherworldy dream-dub dancehall.
We really can't get enough of the dark, cinematic soundscapes conjured by so many of the artists on such likeminded labels as Type (UK) and Miasmah (Norway). This new release on Type by Norwegian duo Deaf Center (cellist Erik K. Skodvin and pianist Otto A. Totland) is our current fave, it's just their second full-length in six years, as clearly it takes time to craft music this moody and gorgeous, this time around produced in a proper studio, in Berlin, on analog equipment for maximum fidelity. Also the two members of Deaf Center have been busy with their own, individual projects - Skodvin, for one, is the man behind another AQ fave, Svarte Greiner, plus he also runs the Miasmah label! And if you like the "acoustic doom" of Svarte Greiner, you should also appreciate Deaf Center's evocative combination of modern classical, ambient, and electronic strains on Owl Splinters.
Atmospheric opener "Divided" sets the mood, all abstract, monastic moan and droning string-scrape, hushed and floating. Then "Time Spent" introduces sparse melody, played on pensive, pretty piano, alone in the dark. Third track "New Beginning (Tidal Darkness)" is one of subtle crackle and glitch, the music ebbing and flowing through drone build-ups and more exquisite piano reveries. Once again, moody and somber, but beautiful. And so it goes, Deaf Center getting much heavier (eventually) in the midst of the grinding epic, "The Day I Would Never Have", the album's nearly 11 minute long centerpiece (which is infinitely longer on the vinyl version, as it ends the first side with a locked groove). Dense tones resonate with great emotional presence.
Skodvin's deep cello sawing can get spiky too, as on the nervously dramatic "Animal Sacrifice", though all is soothed by the luminous fuzz of the ambient background. Another epic track appears before the end of the disc, "Close Forever Watching" being 8 minutes of glorious, massing drone shimmer - play loud!!
With its balance of delicacy and weightiness both, Deaf Center's Owl Splinters coincidentally in some respects reminds us of two other releases recommended on this week's list - the new album from Earth, and also the Klute soundtrack! The recent Ural Umbo lp highlighted here last time also comes to mind.
Essential for fans of all things Type and Miasmah, particularly (of course) Svarte Greiner, also Elegi, Jacaszek, Fjellstrom, etc. A great going to sleep album for some of us, if you're ready for some perhaps suspenseful dreams.
Please note that the vinyl version, as is often the case with Type releases, is packaged with a bonus cd, in this case containing a 46 minute reworking of the album tracks by Skodvin under his Svarte Greiner guise, entitled Twin. Why they want to deprive cd purchasers of that, we don't know.
Death & Vanilla should hardly be a secret anymore, as the Swedish retro-futurist outfit has catapulted their low-key releases on Hands In The Dark to the seminal British independent imprint Fire Records. Those earlier albums were on the shortlist of those albums we'd play in the shop on busy Saturday afternoons, knowing that we'd capture the imagination of our enlightened customers here at aQuarius. In years past, others on that list might have also been Os Mutantes, Neutral Milk Hotel, Boards Of Canada, shit even the Conet Project, and yes The Beta Band (which we had known to tickle the ear well BEFORE it was the punchline in High Fidelity). Seductive retro-art-pop of sci-fi dreaminess and bachelor pad slinkiness, that's the stuff of Death & Vanilla. Their soft-as-snow production has all of the feel of an all analog recording by the Silver Apples or the United States of America, with the ghostly vocals of Marleen Nilsson rippling through the echoplex and spring reverb before settling onto the tactile magnetic tape drawing magical daylight out of the arctic dark nights. To Where The Wild Things Are doesn't seem to have anything to do with the beloved Maurice Sendak book of a very similar name. Given how much control and precision they exact over their references, what else might the title refer to? The interwoven melodies and harmonies for Nilsson's voice, those analogue synths, and the bell-tone tremolo guitars latch onto a deluge of impeccably written drifting waltzes, motorik Kraut rhythms, and jaunty beat-pop grooves. We're not alone in seeing the obvious connection between Death & Vanilla and lamentably late Broadcast; and the Swedes are clearly channeling the ghosts of Broadcast in their studio sessions as seance, but there's much that Death & Vanilla brings to the table that's their own. One of the most charming pop records of 2015.
AVAILABLE AGAIN ON VINYL FOR A LIMITED TIME.
An all time AQ perfect pop favorite! Here's our brief yet concise review from way back in the 20th century before these guys had gotten HUGE:
At the risk of slipping into hyperbole, which we try avoid at all costs (snicker...), this is hands down, one of the best (and possibly most overlooked - we almost missed it ourselves, gasp!) indie rock records ever. Landing somewhere between 'There's Nothing Wrong With Love' and 'Perfect From Now On', Death Cab craft a Built-to-Spill-ian universe, full of lazy sad pop, intricate compositions, jangly melodies, shifting structures, odd time signatures, and haunting cellos. This record has been an unbelievable hit in the store. It's pretty much never ever been played without at least one person buying it, sometimes 2 or 3!
Gosh. What can I say? This is absolutely the finest moment of Deerhoof's recorded output. At 34 minutes, there is absolutely no filler on Reveille: it is an astonishingly precise and accomplished half hour of some of the most challenging, interesting avant-rock we've heard in a long long time. Jeff loves this album so much he almost started a record label just to put it out! The local trio of Satomi Matsuzaki, John Dieterich and Greg Saunier are old school; you can hear in their music the lessons they learned from vintage Bay Area weirdos like Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Caroliner, and from the famously avant garde Mills College music program -- all of which have resulted in a great, eccentric band whose aesthetic is fully formed, mature and confident. Satomi's light, singsong vocal delivery (similar to Boredoms' Yoshimi, Blonde Redhead, Yoko Ono) careens from stereo left to stereo right, a dose of melody and almost j-pop sweetness that plays perfectly against the macabre repeating guitar lines and the great, unpredictable, muscular drumming. Sudden stops and starts punctuate eight minute songs against one minute collages of noisy audio squiggles. Much like the Thinking Fellers did, Deerhoof juxtaposes melodic passages against weighty, distorted guitar a la Sonic Youth; they rarely descend to all-too-easy verse/chorus/verse trad songwriting, yet amazingly enough the album is quite accessible. Experimental music that everyone can enjoy. Wonderful. This record is perfection.
The Scots certainly have a magic touch when it comes to creating absolute pop splendor. Just think of artists like Belle And Sebastian, Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub, Arab Strap, not to mention supergroup The Reindeer Section... and then there's this band! You might recall Windy and Cup both gushing over the Delgados' last album The Great Eastern a couple of years back. Oh my! Well, we're happy to report that with this, their fourth full length, they've picked up right where they left off. That is, continuing to finely craft their splendid compositions full of a swirling carousel of strings, woodwinds and horns, honey-sweet male and female lead vocals, and an angelic choral accompaniment. Plus they've done so once again with the notable presence of Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Sparklehorse, Mercury Rev) in the producer's seat. Such a wonderful combination it is! Making for an even grander big picture than they created together on the super lush Great Eastern. Clouds of shimmering cymbal crashes punctuate the glorious, dramatic atmosphere, definitely revealing that distinct Fridmann touch. Wistful, lulling melodies are introduced in the most spartan of settings -- a lone voice and guitar -- but soon build to epic proportions. And the lyrics? Ah yes, quite capable of stirring heartswelling sighs and misty eyes from the coldest of men with their crushingly bittersweet imagery (lyrics are included in the cd booklet). If you've even a glimmer of affection for glorious orchestral pop, the Delgados are for you! Luminous and lovely and so very recommended.
Note: Includes a video for their song "Coming In From The Cold" and two bonus tracks not on the Mantra UK pressing.
Back in October of 2000 when the Deltron 3030 album came out we expressed our sadness that an album of such great potential was sullied by the pedestrian vocal stylings of Del "Tha Funky Homosapien" and hoped that at some point Dan The Automator would
We would have made Demdike Stare's sprawling quadruple vinyl 12"s epic Elemental our Record Of The Week had it not been for a few things. One, the four records were released over the course of several months, two, the combined cost of all those records ended up being nearly $100, and three, we knew it was eventually gonna come out on cd. So now that the cd version is here, we can finally make this twisted hauntological epic our Record Of The Week, which is great news for everybody, EXCEPT maybe crazy completists, who will be dismayed (or perhaps perversely thrilled) to discover, that not only does the double cd version tack on a bunch of extra tracks (nearly 33 minutes worth!!), but it also features alternate versions of some of the tracks from the 12"s. So it's really up to the folks who already shelled out for all four 12" if they want to buy it all over again, but for everybody else, we can't recommend this highly enough. More on the bonus tracks at the end, but let's talk about Elemental proper first...
Elemental was probably one of the most anticipated records around here recently, the sprawling epic from hauntological duo Demdike Stare, a four part songsuite, Chrysanthe, Violetta, Rose and Iris, the duo's new sound seriously dark, much more industrial sounding, the vibe blackened, the sounds layered and way more dense.
Chrysanthe opens with "Mephisto's Lament", which is all foghorn buzz, deep whirring drones, keening high end melodic fragments, murky buried rhythms, peppered with creepy synth squelches, and when the song gets rolling, it's almost like a hauntological SUNNO))), the same sort of roiling downtuned heaviness, but here stretched into something a bit more sinister and abstract, almost like the soundtrack for some subterranean factory, all rumble and clang, all shadows and very little light. "Kommunion" is up next, a lush looped slow build, all repeated piano motifs wreathed in chanted vocals, and all blurred into fuzzy soft focus swells, the sound suddenly expanding into a blisteringly blown out in-the-red buzz, a swoonsome melody hidden in there somewhere, the sound slipping from caustic and crunchy to blurred and murky, before switching gears completely, lacing a sprawl of staticky hiss to a skeletal trip hop pulse, extra percussion provided by found sounds, clatter and crunch, atonal piano, all woven into a strange almost Art Of Noise sounding beat. Then comes "Unction", a super creepy stretch of undulating lowend, demarcated by a strange sonar ping rhythm, one that is quickly augmented by a twisted effected croaking frog skitter, and another beat seemingly assembled from the sounds of workman scraping and dragging, a crunchy noisy lurching groove, that is soon overtaken by another cloud of reverberating pianos, which finishes off the side with a coda of swirling minimal washed out thrum.
The second part, Violetta, begins with "Mnemosyne", a blissed out sun dappled bit of witch house-y skitter, all hazy and gauzy and dreamlike, until a sudden burst of clattery noisy rhythmic crunch changes everything, and then assembles itself into a strange lumbering cacophonous beat, the sound eventually underpinned by some Eastern style folk music, which drifts briefly, before that clattery beat crashes back in, now accompanied by that Eastern melody, sounding like a weirdly stuttery bit of gypsy electro. Which leads directly into "In The Wake Of Chronos", which opens with some distant mysterious melodies, some sprinkler like textures, some super minimal skeletal skitter, and some seriously deep bass thrum, the minimal drift soon peppered with short sharp bursts of metallic crunch, clipped bits of hiss and skree sculpted into a sort-of-beat, also soon joined by tinkling melodies, wreathed in echo, the sound gradually expanding, and becoming more and more lush, that beat drifting off, leaving the various other sounds to shimmer and hover ethereally over a blackened backdrop of blurred hum. And finally, Violetta finishes off with the title track, a soft cacophony of pounded piano, the chords allowed to ring out and slowly fade, all subtly warped, an ominous sort of avant classical doom, laced with little sonic squiggles, and wreathed in clouds of hiss and static, soon those little squiggles transform into beats, a wild chaotic looped rhythm, which is strangely at odds with that funereal piano, still pounding away in the background, a twisted bit of hauntological IDM, the piano subtly replaced by a hazy sprawl of synth simmer, which is left to fade out once the beat drops off, a thick swirling final movement, washed out and woozy.
Part three is Rose, and begins with a churning industrial chug, grinding through a woozy washed out haze, wreathed in a distant ethereal vocal drift, looped and mesmerizing, the sound is most definitely epic and cinematic, the sound laced with bits of clatter and crunch, and than BAM, the track is transformed into a gorgeous stretch of Middle Eastern string laden groove, all wrapped around that opening industrial rhythm, sounding like a more dense, more psychedelic Muslimgauze! The second track is more murky and dubbed out and spacey, anchored by a muted slo-mo house beat, buried in the murk, the beats wreathed in soft metallic billows, the surrounding sounds swirling dreamily, hazy melodic streaks and blurred background shimmers, clouds of tripped out drift, through which that industrial flecked rhythm soldiers druggily on.
The third track begins as a gauzy, ethereal thrum, that seems to hover wraithlike, before suddenly in drops an impossibly dense and heavy ribcage rattling bass pulse, accompanied by cool spare tabla like rhythms, that Muslimgauze vibe is definitely huge here too, a keening high end sine wave tone flutters over fragmented chunks of dubstep bass wobble, all drifting in the sonic ether.
Finally comes part four, Iris, which might be the grimmest and darkest of the bunch. Opening with buzzing cellos, and swirling blackened drones, which are soon joined by a plodding doomy rhythm, laced with streaks of prismatic feedback and hauntingly melodic harmonies, all the whole in the background, textures and layers softly swirl and undulate, the result is definitely creepy and cinematic, but also a bit blackened and industrial. The second track dials it down even further, unfurling a hushed, blurred thrum, a wash of hazy shimmer, a dubbed out murk laced with mysterious industrial percolations, reverbed clatter, and strange squelches, like a field recording of an old abandoned office building with all the air conditioners and printers and computers whirring away, a creepy disembodied hum which is soon enveloped by crunchy caustic high end, keening shards of buzz and skree, growing ever more dense and noisy. Next up some surfacing sonar pings, over a skittery, skeletal beat, shuffling through clouds of effects swirl, droned out bass warble, and more of that unidentified background shimmer, the sound is cavernous and hypnotic, the background sounds gradually solidifying into sheets of chordal whir, all wreathed in a cowl of soft buzzy sonic gauze, all the while that rhythm churns relentlessly, and that bass thrum stretches out into a strangely undulating low end drone.
Obviously, that should be more than enough to sell you on it, but folks who are after the bonus tracks will not be dissappointed, more than a half hour's worth minutes of extra music, six tracks, the first of which, "New Use For Old Circuits", opens up the set with a blast of psychedelic noise, before oozing into something much more liquid and murky, a sort of subaquatic space dub, a little bit like Chain Reaction style 'heroin house', but instead of hearing the music through a wall, we're hearing it through the thin steel walls of a submarine, stranded in the inky blackness of the deepest sea. "Shade" is a short stretch of gauzey high end shimmer, a haze of blurred melody and buried plink plonk piano, while "10th Floor Stairwell" is a fantastic chunk of thrumming low end pulsations, a minimal blackened drone that slwoly blossoms into something more tonally colorful, eventually becoming a sort of blackbuzz raga. "Metamorphosis" takes a field recording of voices and wraps it in soft swirls of static and tape hiss, soon introducing more of that impossible low end, the voices locked in a chant-like loop, while that skull rattling bass tone, pulses ominously, eventually introducing some throbbing 4 on the floor house music, but all murky and muddy, as if blasting in an upstairs apartment, just the rhythm oozing though the walls, a darkly propuslive slab of late night housemusic murk. "All This Is Ours (Sunrise)", unfurls soft swells of new age synth shimmer, a crystalline drift that soon sinks into a thick layed morass of crumbling bass-synth squelch and gradually intensifying distorted crackle, before finishing off in a squall of soft noise and sc-fi FX swirl, and finally, "We Have Already Died", strings some tribal skeletal skitter into a looped almost Muslimgauze sounding groove, all draped over an ominous sprawl of post industrial hum and layered swirls of blurred ghost-grey ambience.
Packaged much like the last Demdike Stare, in an oversized six panel digi-sleeve, with original Andy Votel artwork, mirroring the artwork from the original quadruple gatefold sleeve that housed all four 12"s...
Finally, Demdike Stare's dark and dizzying, murky and mysterious hauntological black dub triptych, previously available via three separate slabs of vinyl, is now available on cd, gathered up into a single, nicely packaged triple disc set. And loaded with bonus tracks (nearly 40 minutes extra all told), which makes this pretty much a shoe-in for Record Of The Week...
Demdike Stare are one of the few bands who seem to be a unanimous aQ favorite, everyone here LOVES these guys, and judging on how many of the various lps we've sold, everyone out there does too. Which makes sense, when you consider, DS basically create a kind of black metal dubstep, or as we (and others) like to describe it, a blackened dub record on Chain Reaction. Either one should give you an idea of the sort of dark sonic energy these guys conjure up. Thick claustrophobic atmospheres, skeletal rhythms, thick throbbing bass, skittering dubbed out beats, disembodied voices, stuttering minimal sort-of-dubstep, looped and processed African folk music (??), swirling glitched out electronics, deeeep pulsing dronemusic, reverb drenched post-rock-via-techno skitter, all woven into a swirling organic mass of dub flecked blacktronica, dark and sinister and dubby, and weirdly house-y, sprawling and epic and creepy and so totally sweeping and cinematic.
The first disc, Forest Of Evil, was originally two sidelong tracks, the first starts out all deep shimmer, with a softly melodic buzz, spidery acoustic guitars, long stretches of billowy black ambience, bits of shuffly jazzy drift, peppered with thick shards of buzzy fractured dub bass and Kompakt style skitter, giving way to glistening late night techno, whirling pop ambient, and blissed out ethereal dronemusic, while the second is darkly dramatic, epic and majestic, like some lost Italian soundtrack, big drums, orchestral and ominous, looped samples, blurred melodic smears over deep pulsing bass, whirling clouds of cymbal shimmer, insectoid FX buzz, jumbled atonal melodies (hints of Bernard Herrmann), the vibe tense and haunting, with some dubstep bass buzz, that slowly dissolves into a Caretaker like outro, all layered strings wreathed in hiss and crackle, hazy and druggy and divine. The bonus track "Quiet Sky" conjures up just what the title implies, a quiet sky, but a dark, bruised midnight sky, flecked with stars, soft swirls of metallic shimmer like gauzy clouds, the song gradually developing a strange minimal hiccuppy rhythm, underpinning the deep melancholic swells, a strange almost industrial tinged bit of pop ambience.
The second disc, Liberation Through Hearing, is thematically related to the Book Of The Dead, and focuses on the space between death and rebirth. Rendered in greys and blacks, in buzz and rumble, beginning with some woozy late night Portishead style downtempo trip hop, low slung looped skitter and swell, lush swirls of cinematic strings, ghostly choirs, a softly lurching rhythmic stutter, a deep cavernous throb, sounding like a ghostly stripped down dubstep. Which gives way to heaving expanses of black tidal thrum, muted scrapings, all wound into hypnotic pulses of dark energy, laced with distant chiming melodies, a haunting, gauzey faded memory in sound, drawn from radios with dying batteries and gradually slowing turntables, a soft focus symphony of creaks and rumbles and blurred low end shimmer. The first half finishes with a swoonsome smear of looped ambience, like a field recording of an after hours nightclub captured in a temporal loop, warm and druggy and fuzzy, strangely hypnotic and rhythmic, totally trancelike, a creeped out wasteland soundscape, mysterious and chilling, which is eventually augmented by thick slabs of corrosive low end, and heavily reverbed industrial clatter, which eventually emerges into a strange sea of crackle and hum, of warbly rhythms, chiming bells and distorted crunch, sounding a bit like Jeck spinning Pole record, abstract and spaced out and hauntingly lovely.
The second half opens with thick streaks of ghostly mesmer, all washed out and slowly decaying, underpinned by thick swaths of dubstep style bass wobble, but muted and smoothed into soft smears of undulating blackness. Subtle skitter surfaces, as do distant voices, the sound getting more and more dubby, a bit like a Caretaker record on Chain Reaction, that sort of hazy abstract drift, but anchored to barely there beats, the buzz building to an intense coda, all the while wrapped in throbbing woofer punishing low end.
Some super stripped down rhythms are laid over a swirling ghostly backdrop of fragmented melodies and a buried house music thump, tangled and blurred strings wrap the proceedings in a veil of softened reverb and subtle echo, the almost Eastern sounding pulse and swell reminding us a bit of the late great Muslimgauze.
Finally, the record collapses into some sort of melancholic sonic reverie, a hushed ambient outro, a tranquil sea of soft swirling swells, clouds of echo and reverb, a dreamy darkness, a blackened bit of blurpop minimalism, laced with muted streaks of fuzz and hiss, but all gradually sinking into Demdike Stare's endless trancelike billowing blackness.
The bonus tracks on this one (3 of them, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes) continue the record's surreal sonic journey, spidery rhythms, and chiming melodies are looped and layered over a simple pulsing propulsive groove, the whole thing slightly warped and warbled, as if recorded onto an old piece of tape, and played back on some dusty old ramshackle tape player, ghostly, but surprisingly playful at first, before slipping into some seriously creepy, deeeeeep droning rumbles, wreathed in shimmering solar winds, softly billowing sheets of hiss and static, eventually shedding all of that, leaving just a thick morass of softly undulating low end, shot through with a slo-mo house music pulse, only to have the hiss and whir return, this time relegated to the background, until the track finishes surprisingly with what sounds like a bit of African style funkiness, before disappearing in a brief cloud of swirling hushed buzz.
Finally, the third disc, Voices Of Dust, unveils the Tryptych's final movement, opening with "Black Sun", a short stretch of some super minimal electronic dronemusic, all layered overtones and strange sonic shadings, which gives way to the chopped and looped and stuttery vocal driven "Hashshashin Chant" which takes tribal drums and traditional folk music vocals, and twists them all up, and tangles those elements with strange percussion, industrial buzz, the whole thing a dizzying chunk of hypno-electronic collaged psychedelic mashup weirdness, before slipping into the much murkier and minimal "Repository Of Light", which unfurls like some sort of Hawkwind-meets-Pole spaced out digi-dub drift. And so it goes, the sound flitting between impossibly realized miniature sound worlds, cinematic electronic ambience, ominously pulsing low end rumble, hazy glitchy dubbed out Jeckian smears, super blown out electronic big beat bombast, almost industrial sounding avant big band abstraction, roiling corrosive soft noise, bellowing foghorn-like melodies, warped and woozy scratchy old lp warblescapes and beyond.
The bonus tracks are the perfect, hazy, ghostly coda, the first, a warm, whispery bit of keening abstract melody and thick pulsing thrum, all very washed out and space-y and dreamlike, a constantly vibrating living thing, a throbbing organic expanse of minimal space drone psychedelic ambience, until finally, the whole disc is laid to rest with 9 minutes of heaving, glacial, metallic creep and creak, wreathed in record crackle, the final sounds unfurl like some old dusty Tim Hecker 45 spinning at 16rpm, mournful moaning melodies, buried rhythmic thumps, shimmery sitar like buzz, all hazy and smeared and lysergic and mysteriously murky, the perfect slipping-into-darkness, leaving-this-world-behind finale...
Gorgeously evocative, creepy and cinematic, abstract and otherworldly, druggy and dreamy, fantastically haunting and utterly spine tinglingly stunning. And thus, absolutely recommended.
Packaged in a super swank, oversized, hardcover book style digipak.
If Martin Newell from Cleaners From Venus or Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices somehow grew up in the sleepy San Diego suburb of La Mesa, CA in the seventies, managed to secure a bunch of instruments and recording equipment from garage sales and swap meets and then recorded in their bedroom an elegiac ode to the ordinary charm and civic pride of their childhood hometown, you would get something very close to this brilliantly lo-fi slab of DIY bizarro-pop wondrousness!
Recorded in 1984 by Joseph D'Angelo and a handful of friends, At The Medieval Castle Nineteen 100-Year Lifetimes Since (one of the best titles ever!), is the kind of obscure scrappy visionary recording (along with the likes of Daniel Johnston, Sun City Girls and The Frogs) that is embedded in the DNA of so many indie bands that came afterward - from Yo La Tengo and The Supreme Dicks to The Unicorns and the bands of The Elephant 6 collective. It's a hotly Technicolor teenage daydream of nostalgic childhood, of Sears Christmas catalogs, Disneyland, skate parks and summer carnivals, that is slowly fading away, as some songs here delve into more ornery young adult concerns, like the psychedelic pseudo anti-drug PSA of "An Open Letter To The Seniors From Mackenzie". Layered riffs of guitar, horns, organs and drum machines, sometimes used in pondering twee instrumentals, but more often in wide-eyed and wobbly surreal psych-pop confections, seemingly sung by earnest but very warped high schoolers. In our minds we can imagine Departmentstore Santas trying to enter this record in a city wide talent contest sponsored by the local chamber of commerce and barely squeaking by with an honorable mention from a baffled jury. So very great and weird!! Thanks to the folks at Superior Viaduct for digging out this obscurity. A must have for fans of any of the above bands/artists mentioned!
We can probably count the major female figures of Krautrock on one hand. Most of them like Rosi Mueller of Ash Ra Tempel, Renate Knaup from Amon Duul II, Djong Yun from Popol Vuh, or Sabine Merbach from Gila were either singers or muses for their male-led bands. And don't even mention Clara Mondshine, which was a pseudonym for Walter Bachauer, a very real actual man. But even among those women, you don't find too many female krautrock composers. Actually, we really couldn't think of any, offhand. Can you? If so, please enlighten!
Thankfully, the brand new reissue label, Medical Records, who has bolted out the gate running with not only one but two amazing (and amazingly limited!) vinyl-only reissues, sets the record straight! The other reissue, Alexander Robotnick, reviewed elsewhere on this list, is a weirdo Italo-disco / French electro classic we've known about for awhile and we're super psyched to see finally reissued. But this one, Deutsche Wertarbeit , the solo project of Dorothea Raukes, is altogether completely new to us and what a fantastic discovery it is!
Released on Sky Records in 1981, Deutsche Wertarbeit was Raukes' first solo effort after years of being the singer for a German Progressive band we're not familiar with called Streetmark, who started in 1968, and released 4 lps between 1976 and 1981. Two of those were also released on Sky Records and one of them was even recorded in collaboration with Wolfgang Riechmann, the same year he was murdered. What? Really? Why didn't we know of this already? Just goes to show, there are still many treasures to be unearthed.
And if you dug Wolfgang Riechmann's Wunderbar reissue, that we raved about awhile back, or Klaus Schultze, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Peter Baumann, or even some of the later Manuel Gottsching recordings such as New Age of Earth, then add Deutsche Wertarbeit to the essential kosmiche synthscape canon. But while she definitely fits in with those artists, she carves out her own defining sound of warm minimal hypnotic rhythms and vocoder voicings that display a joyous exhuberance you don't see as much in artists like Schultze or Baumann. In fact this would fit in well with the stuff on that Dirty Space Disco comp, as it sounds like a mystical combination of Vangelis and Popol Vuh, expansive and cosmic, upliftingly propulsive while keeping it all beautifully reigned in.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each 180 gram colored vinyl and hand-numbered. We're not sure how long we'll have these, so don't wait too long. Highest Recommendation!!!!!!
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Some records walk through the doors of aQuarius with a gravitas about them, some sort of heavy indefinable weight that's apparent before we even hit play for our first listen. Oceanclots, the umpteenth release from Dhampyr but only the second one we've stocked, is one such album. Written and recorded by the minimally monickered H.L. after the tragic death of his girlfriend (with the help of some collaborators, including vocal contributions from Jacob Thomas of local blown-out hypno-black metallers Dunnock), Oceanclots serves as a harrowing, cathartic, beautiful, singular tribute to her - a swirling, mesmerizing watercolor flurry of hazy blissful psychedelic black metal. Everything about the album is immersive, not least of which the in-the-red wall of sound production, almost indiscernible at first, inaccessible, and then as your ears adjust suddenly alive with lush shimmering detail, like your eyes adapting to the darkness of a jungle. Everything blends together and then seems to come apart. The distant ghostly spoken vocals and the anguished piercing screams. The cloudy melodies like half-memories drifting in and out, impossible to determine even what instrument they might belong to. The crumbling static of white-noise guitar enveloping everything (apparently all of which, due simply to H.L. not having any other way to record, are acoustic, but altered later on to sound like a blistering avalanche of gravelly static - just another piece of evidence that this is an album born of raw emotional necessity.) The truly blissful quiet passages, draped in alien echoes, haunting reverb, and glittering ambience. But beyond the music, as wonderfully and brutally psychedelic as it is, there are so many other details that complete the surreal portrait of this album. The ocean theme, a perfect compliment to the sounds you'll hear, which are like your eardrums bursting and the blissful drift of floating atop the ocean waves all rolled into one. The gorgeously labyrinthine song titles like "Mine Isabella Of Frosts & Poppypins" or "A Kodak Of Guncotton Shipwrecks". The surrealistic and heart breaking free form prose that adorns the booklet. And the final track, the beautiful dreamlike "Sea-Eclogue For Genevieve", seemingly an abstract drift of melodic reverb complimented by pulsing bass & plodding percussion, but which is in fact composed entirely using manipulated recordings of H.L.'s late girlfriend's voice, molded and twisted into an unending landscape of woozy hypnotizing beauty. The perfect end to such an exhaustingly harrowing yet euphorically cathartic album. An essential listen.
Imagine the soundtrack to some strange, and apocalyptic planetarium show, all celestial and cosmic, but exploding in a supernova of looped mesmer and cyclical psychedelia, or picture Steve Reich or Terry Riley composing for minimal electronic trance music, or even the music of doomdronelords SUNNO))), transcribed for processed guitars and synths, and reduced to their rhythmic essence. Record number three from composer / guitarist Mario Diaz De Leon, is a little bit all of those, a dizzying collection of processed synths, and looped abstract guitars, all woven into sheets of blurred crystalline power electronics, smoldering slow build looped minimal majesty, and abstract epic heaviness.
Not metal precisely, but still quite metallic in places, and most definitely HEAVY. Too dense and noisy and chaotic to be strictly minimal, but in composition and arrangement, it has more in common with modern minimalism than anything else really. It's as much about texture and tone, as it is about melody and rhythm, the sound is at once atmospheric and cinematic, cosmic and abstract, pieces drifting through space only to explode into churning thrum, and alternately grinding away like some blurred tarpit spacedoom only to blossom into a kaleidoscopic series of dizzying synth swells.
Opener "Oneirogen" starts off with a flurry of layered synths, a dizzying big of melodic swirl, that immediately begins to gain momentum, blossoming in slow motion like some sort of sonic supernova, before exploding in a soft cacophony of prismatic melody, the synth sounds more distorted and frenetic, managing to strike a fine balance between hypnotic and intense, the sound pulsing and throbbing and buzzing before blurring into a soft focus cloud of gloriously blissed out dreamdrone shimmer, only to build right back up again to something much more caustic and corrosive, yet still somehow ethereal and spacey. "Consumed" displays Diaz De Leon's other more metal side. unfurling thick grinding downtuned gouts of guitar rumble and keening high end melody, all over streaks of pulsating synth, the result sounding a bit like Jesu as performed by Steve Reich, that sort of thick, blissed out, warm whirling guitar heaviness, but arranged in layers and loops, a heaving heaviness that blossoms into some sort of blackened minimal shoegaze drone-psych doom, that will have Nadja fans losing their minds.
The rest of the record finds Diaz De Leon flitting from churning downtuned crush to flurries of celestial synth, in most cases combining them to great affect, "Hypnocaust" fills the sky with wild tangles of sci-fi synth melodies and stuttering chips and chitters, while beneath, a strangely processed guitar rumbles and thrums, unfurling a crunchy bit of oozing disembodied riff-borne dronedoom, while "Cinerum" is something else all together, a hushed bit of hiss and hum wreathed drift, the shards of synth left to float weightless, over a warm woozy swath of lush chordal thrum. "Kukulkan" begins life as a noisier take on the current crop of psychedelic space synth retro futurism, but quickly (d)evolves into almost like an abstract black metal, with fast picked riffage blurred into clouds of droned out drift, before exploding into a kaleidoscopic squall of thick low end swells and pulsing synth swirls, and "Dissolution" revisits the sound of the opening track, again sounding like that planetarium show gone haywire, perhaps signaling the end of Diaz De Leon's dizzying sonic journey. But our favorite track might just be the 8 minute "Faithless", with its hazy, washed out intro, all lush blurred shimmer, and more stuttering synth throb, but here it's much more dreamlike and serene, laced with ghostly voices, definitely reminding us of Zombi, Majeure and the like, super cinematic, but then gradually, those sounds begin to transform, the sound intensifying, and then at about three minutes in, in a squall of high end skree, a thick ribcage rattling slab of low end surfaces, heaving and softly roiling, while the synths continue to churn over the top, it's the abstract minimalism equivalent to THE DROP in electronic music, it raises the hairs on the back of our neck, a sudden burst of energy and emotion and sonic power, which dissipates as quickly as it began, disappearing in a swirl of hushed shimmer, before splintering into a blast of caustic chaotic noise, processed vokills, low end synth buzz, all tangled up into a blackened squall, before finally fading out in a static wreathed drift of soft focus synth and almost Caretaker like melancholia.
Utterly fantastic.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Dieselhed's 4th album is a sweet collection of all of the slow songs and ballads that have become their well loved standards in their live sets, yet have not made their way onto tape until now! Their 'real life' catalog of straightforward, quotidian lyrics about life in Eureka, drunken mishaps on Alaskan fishing boats, lap dancing, etc... are perfectly complemented by twangy, melodic hooks and stunningly sublime harmonies worthy of comparisons to Louvin Brothers and Lennon-McCartney. One of Windy's all-time favorite bands.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
One of San Francisco's best bands breaks out with their 3rd full length, a little more twang and slow and a little less rock than their previous work but JUST AS GREAT. We can't stress enough how rewarding a close reading of Virgil and Zack's lyrics can be ("Is that paint, I can't tell / A white square where a picture fell"). And don't forget to wait for the last hidden track, "Yoga Instructor").
Wow. Dirty Three's fifth album is a masterpiece of instrumental melancholia. Quiet percussion and layers of evocative guitar are overlayed by the most emotional violin parts ever. Much of this album's brilliance is due to what our ears discern as the first time the band has overdubbed distinctly different violin melodies over each other. Although they've obviously overdubbed tracks before, it was mostly similar melodies meant to fill out the sound (perhaps they were worried about being able to do it live). This time, the delicately plucked and bowed violin parts weave in and around each other to deliriously lovely effect. One of their best albums. Highly recommended.
Wow! Given the acrimonious break-up of Disco Inferno after their aesthetically fraught album Technicolour in 1996, we're a little shocked, yet totally stoked to see anything from Disco Inferno back in print, let along the rare EPs reissued here. This London trio formed in 1989, releasing three albums and seven eps that amounted to a brilliant mish-mash of sample-based technology, post-punk intensity, and a profoundly British mope that hangs throughout their catalogue. The first recorded forays by Disco Inferno found the group wearing their influences proudly on sonic sleeves - Joy Division, Wire, Durutti Column, and The Smiths - with the band twisting those influences into a narcotized torpour through an elliptical rhythm section that grounded the suitably delay-riddled, arppegiations and repititions from guitarist / vocalist Ian Crause. The band quickly took to MIDI technology, often sampling Crause's own guitar and alchemically rendering those into percolating satellites of effervsecent sound that orbit the song with peculiar trajectories and angles. Over time, the sampling became more and more of the focus in the band, appropriating sounds outside of their studio and fracturing all of those sounds into a more and more bizarrely splintered electronica that mutated into something grotesquely baroque, all the while hanging onto the core principles of the pop-art melody. This emphasis on sampling was an obsession for Crause after reading what David Stubbs and Simon Reynolds were championing in NME, as those two fixated on a technological thread that ran through My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, and The Young Gods. Crause was single-minded in his pursuit of figuring out how technology could be seemlessly integrated into the context of a British art-rock band, in frantic anticipation of what anybody might be doing elsewhere in the world. As such, Disco Inferno and Robert Hampson's post-Loop project Main were at the vangarde of ostensible pop bands disintegrating themselves before their audiences' eyes and ears. Where Hampson did achive escape velocity from rock's heavy gravitational pull with little to show for it after Motion Pool, Disco Inferno's internal disputes over where that technology needed to go caused so much strife as to destroy the band, with none of the members doing anything memorable since.
The 5 EPs featured here showcase that transition from an artful post-punk project conjuring the ghost of Martin Hannett into a complicated electronica ensemble that predicted how Christian Fennesz would deconstruct the spirit of The Beach Boys, but without the benefit of granulating laptop tricknology. We mentioned above that the band released seven EPs, the first two of which were compiled with their first album on the anthology entitled In Debt. The first EP in this anthology is "Summer's Last Sound" from 1992 and features two tracks that sparkle with harsichord-like patterns from the sampedelica, pulled back down to the ground by the thickly strummed bass from Paul Willmot, not to mention Crause's wistful, unpretentious vocal delivery of his deeply sad lyrics. "A Rock To Cling To" from 1993 finds the band in more of a traditional rock mode with guitars, bass, and drums, whose repetitive groove is offset by soaring bursts of sampled vocals that stretch like vapor trails glowing in moonlight. The B-side to that EP, "The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea", introduces a sample that would become common place in the ever-abstracting repetoire of Disco Inferno, that of shattering glass whose tinkling fragments of sound lock into an elegant Terry Riley patterning of minimalist rhythms. "The Last Dance" (also from 1993) features two versions of the title track, where Ian Crause has penned a damn good song that could have fit neatly in with the Johnny Marr songbook of The Smiths, but with jittery electronics and melancholy appropriations of schoolyard song puncturing Crause's crisp guitar lines. The B-side of "D.I. Go Pop" (the name of their second record, which didn't feature this track, oddly enough) is a manic affair of tape-revving guitar noise, threatening to unravel and unhinge as a spastic dervish. "Scattered Showers" is the other B-side, a beautifully poetic abstraction of British melancholy through sampled motorcycle engines forming the patterned tension beneath Crause's rain-drenched guitar strum. This EP and the next, "Second Language" from 1994, stand as the best material in Disco Inferno's short-circuited career. The title track of the latter single finds the band recycling Crause's sparkling Vini Reilly guitar into enchanting, hypnotic echoes out of which Crause concludes the track with a triumphant Brit-rock riff obviously alluding to the comtemporary bombast of Oasis. "At The End Of The Line" follows the aforementioned "Scattered Showers" as Disco Inferno's penchant for beautiful miserablism cast through refracted guitar lines into shoegaze bliss. The final single "It's A Kids World" finds the band at odds with itself, creating a jubilant kaleidoscope out of the drum crash from Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" with Umbrellas of Cherbourg-esque flute trills of baroque pop guiding this atypically uptempo number. The B-side "A Night On The Tiles" is a Felini-esque collage of vaudevillian records, screaming girls, and smashed glass coming across more like a diabolical Nurse With Wound track than anything else found in their catalogue. Whew!
If you've just so much as glanced in the direction of Stereolab, Notwist, Fennesz, My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, and/or Animal Collective, you really owe it to yourself to check out Disco Inferno. They really are that good! We can only hope that D.I. Go Pop and In Debt (both of which are long out of print) will see the light of day once again, given the inevitible interest that will come from this anthology from one of the pioneers of avant-rock.
Yeah, I know we listed this last time, but it sort of got short shrift, especially seeing as this record, and this band are the absolute masters of technical grind, and have taken their chosen form and stretched it farther then anyone could have imagined, creating something furious and brutal and violent and frightening, but absolutley stunning at the same time. And stunning in ways other than musical, which is remarkable for a genre that often shuns the avant garde, or doesn't understand it. The cd comes housed in a DVD box, allowing for more artwork, and the gorgeous minimal cover art certainly benefits. The cover and the booklet, continue the DA tradition of hyper minimalism, obfuscated text, and a wicked eye for design. Sleek and smooth, warm, and slightly sinister. And that subtlety bleeds into the sound as well. You would think that a 17 song, 24 minute cd would be short on subtlety and long on bombast, and maybe you'd be half right. DA temper their lightning speed metalcore bombast with, complex song structures, a breathtaking technical prowess, and fleeting moments of dark ambience, classic metal riffing, and face melting noise. This is about as close to perfection, both visually and sonically, as any grindcore/metalcore I have ever heard or seen. Seriously.
Just the sight of that immediately recognizable underlined, lower case 'd' logo sends shivers up our spine. Some of you already know exactly what we're talking about, and just reading this far has probably got you all in a tizzy as well. For those of you who are new to the lower case 'd', prepare yourself for diSEMBOWELMENT!! Even the name, replete with mandatory case change, conjures up all sorts of bleak lifeforce snuffing, soul crushing sensations, at least for fans of mysterious otherworldly doom and bizarre slow motion grind!!
diSEMBOWELMENT were but a brief flash in the underground doom metal scene, existing for a scant three years in the early nineties, but in that time, they recorded one of the all time classic HEAVY records ever, Transcendence Into The Peripheral. A mind blowing record that somehow melded extreme brutality with delicate beauty, a record that totally changed the way some of us listened to heavy music. Referring to the music of diSEMBOWELMENT as doom might give folks the wrong impression. This is not regular old doom like Black Sabbath or My Dying Bride, it's not even funereal doom like Skepticism or Esoteric, although it definitely spends most of its time a lot closer to the slow motion sludge end of the spectrum. diSEMBOWELMENT most definitely inhabit their own unique sonic space. It's slow, sure, but not always, bursts of pounding blast beats will erupt from a bleak tranquil soundscape, gutteral inhuman grunts, machine like percussion, buzzing riffs, all intertwined into a blazing near-death metal onslaught, but it's not long before big reverb drenched guitar melodies begin to fall like some sort of black rain, the metallic pummel sort of stumbling to a seasick lumber, turning the whole thing into a creepy crawl, lurching, plodding, downtuned guitars and spare, simple rhythms, a crushing slow motion dirge, with haunting atonal clean guitar parts and moaning melodies. And even during these vast expanses of atmospheric tranquility, you can never rule out sudden blast beat, or a throat shredding vocal part, or a sudden crushing riff. The magic of diSEMBOWELMENT though is that somehow the metallic crush and the melancholic ambience are perfectly balanced. The whole thing is a dark and depressive, minor key and mournful masterpiece. But it's all so fucking heavy! Even the not-so-heavy parts manage to sound completely massive and totally crushing! So intense and emotional and just absolutely beautiful. Yep, beautiful. Lovely even. Like few records we can remember, and certainly one of the only records this heavy and brutal that manages to be absolutely beautiful. Sonically it's a bit like Napalm Death's Scum, and Carcass's Reek of Putrifaction, that classic Earache sound, a bit lo-fi, lots of reverb, big drums, buzzing guitars, all boiled down into a viscous blackened sludge, sprinkled throughout with brief melodic flares and occasional glistening guitars, like rays of sunlight just barely penetrating the suffocating atmosphere of thick low hanging riffs and bleak, brutal ambience.
Disc one contains all of Transcendence Into the Peripheral, and hell, we would have been happy with just that, a long overdue reissue of one of our all time favorite discs. But disc two contains the quite rare Dusk ep, as well as a rare compilation track and the five track Mourning September demo, all of it suitably genius! And, for a very limited time, we have managed to get a hold of the "mailorder only" version of this diSEMBOWELMENT reissue (limited to 1000 copies worldwide) that comes with a whole extra, third, disc! Disc three contains an unreleased version of "The Spirit Of The Tall Hills" (from Transcendence Into the Peripheral), as well as rehearsal versions of The Spirit Of The Tall Hills and Your Prophetic Throne Of Ivory (also from Transcendence Into the Peripheral). These versions are a lot weirder than the album versions, faster, with way more deranged and damaged vocals! Also includes a Necrovore (who we'd never heard of) cover, a murky, fuzzy, droned-out thrash workout! Wow.
Obviously totally and completely essential. Like we mentioned before, the three disc version is super limited so we're not sure how long we'll have those. Packaged in an oversized 3cd jewel case, with a booklet of photos and liner notes, including lyrics and a history of the band from drummer Paul Mazziotta. When the 3cd version is gone we will have the 2cd version, which is cheaper and comes packaged in an embossed double digipak.
Sometimes it's easy to see an aQ Record Of The Week staring you in the face before even hearing a note. Case in point, this here album. All the indicators were immediately present: it was put out by Omni, whose masterful grasp of obscure country music is equaled only by their masterful grasp of obscure electronic awesomeness; a vague but intriguing album cover with the words "Song Of The Second Moon: The Sonic Vibrations Of Tom Dissevelt / Kid Baltan"; and, a quick glance at the back cover with song titles like "Moon Maid", "Sonik Re-Entry", "Twilight Ozone", and "Night Train Blues", recorded between 1957-1961. So yeah, we were pretty much sold, but as we read on it was clear that this would be even more rad than we could have hoped for. Before getting started on this album itself, it helps to start with some historical background, so here goes:
Holland's Phillips Research Laboratories ("Natuurkundig Laboratorium") was founded in 1914 with the goal of furthering technological innovation. To make a long story short, they did just that, having invented the first artificial reverberation, modern loudspeaker design, early attempts at surround sound, the cassette tape, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, among many other things. All very nice and essential to the way music effects our lives, for sure. But damn if the creation of this album isn't the coolest thing on that long list of achievements, leading us to wonder how exactly something this amazing could have remained such a mystery - not a soul among us was even aware of its existence, despite being great enough for Stanley Kubrick to consider using it as the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey - ironic, as 2001 was the year Natuurkundig Laboratorium would go kaput. Perhaps not surprisingly given the way things often go Songs Of The Second Moon was a commercial failure, but we are thankful to have it presented here with the "rare" stereo mix, along with some outtakes and alternate versions.
The men responsible for this album, Tom Dissevelt and Dick Raaijmakers - aka Kid Baltan - were employed by the Natuurkundig Laboratorium to research acoustics, but eventually ventured into more exotic waters with some of the earliest synthesizer experiments. Using tone generators in addition to traditional instruments like a grand piano, the time consuming process of capturing and creating these strange and wondrous sounds was carried out over a period of about 3 years, during which time the composers experimented with tape loops (often for rhythmic purposes), delays, and filters to create something that went beyond just sound experimentation. Dissevelt himself had come to the job as a highly respected musician and arranger with an interest in Stockhausen's twelve-tone and serial compositions, while Raaijmakers is recognized as a pioneer in the field of electronic and tape based music. The greatest thing about the album is just how musical it is, with songcraft never taking a back seat to the all encompassing technological aspects of the project. Soundwise, things are on par with the majesty of Delia Derbyshire and other pioneers of BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, and anyone keeping up with recent reissues from Daphne Oram, F.C. Judd, and Bruce Haack (whose Electric Lucifer masterpiece was also rescued by Omni) will find plenty to obsess over. The 1950s idea of "The Future" is exactly what this sounds like, with adventurous electronic tones for the Cold War era. As such, there are the hints of the paranoia, tension, and fear that tend to accompany widespread technological innovation and a standoff between two trigger happy superpowers, with plenty of nightmarish melodies, electronic pulsing, and harrowing white noise. Of course, there are also moments that sound happy, fun, and quirky, like strange disembodied jazz music with heavy drones. This stuff could have (and probably did) inspire the electronic pop of Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley. The results are cinematic and elegant, while standing well on their own for a unique listening experience that STILL sounds light years ahead of us.
Kudos to Omni for introducing this lost classic to an unsuspecting but eternally grateful public. Record Of The Week indeed.
So by now, you've probably at least heard of Dizzee Rascal. He has been the talk of hip-hop / underground music circles for the last year, having won the 'prestigious' Mercury Prize, made every critic's best of list, all before he turned 20. And as with most things like that we had steeled ourselves to be bitterly and utterly disappointed. Look at that Streets record from a year or two back. We were fully ready to have our socks knocked off, but sadly, the socks stayed on. Way on. So we're happy to report, that Dizzee totally lives up to the hype, and then some! Taking the root of his sound from UK garage (pronounced GAIR-ij, we're not talking White Stripes here, ya know), a bastardized (and super simplified) varient of drum 'n bass, with pounding two step rhythms, fat distorted synths, and huge rolling bass lines, but all super spare and stripped down. Very similar (to our ears at least) to ragga/dancehall. Super repetitive and ultra danceable (in a robotic head banging hip shaking sort of way) each song is basically one or two parts, drilled maniacally into your skull, pounding and bouncing, hiccupping and stuttering, while Dizzee flows crazily, in his high pitched Jamaican / Cockney drawl. So crazy and so wickedly addictive. Fairly sample free except for the amazing "Fix Up Look Sharp", which is built entirely from a Billy Squier song, complete with the vocals! We know we don't tell you this often, so please believe us when we say, believe the hype.
