Which came first Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz? If one is to merely look at the discographies of the twin kings of digitally tricked out guitar sculpting, the chronological answer is obvious: Christian Fennesz. But in the four years that have transpired between his brilliant album Venice and the 2008 opus Black Sea, Fennesz must have seen a younger protege in Tim Hecker coming up in the rear view mirror with his own dramatic sound for smeared guitar whose beauty is similarly rendered through error. Not only does Black Sea feel like a response to Tim Hecker's work, it also stands as Fennesz' most fully realized album, perhaps even more so than the sunburst explosion of meta-pop on Endless Summer.
Fennesz works best in the cold, with ice, snow, and frost dusting the strings of his guitar and seeping into the circuitry of his computer; and the cold landscape is exactly where he situates himself on Black Sea. Not surprisingly, Touch's Jon Wozencroft perfectly matches a photograph of an abandoned train track set onto a barren wintry landscape, looking a hell of lot like the photographs that Anselm Keifer uses as a background over which he dumps tar, paint, cement, lead, ash, and whatnot into his alchemical paintings.
Black Sea opens with the fizzling crunch of digital errata getting mangled even further by digital means, with Fennesz sculpting a sea swell of a half melody in the distance. Considering the contemplative and cold nature of the rest of the album, this track is a bit discordant; but Fennesz isn't going for the Menche / Merzbow attack, just something of a wake-up call. But gradually, even this first burst of noise quells in a plaintive round of finger picking on the guitar, out of which a beautiful cloud of vaporized drone begins to amass and a subharmonic throb of distortion settles in. These sounds become the template for the rest of the album, all wrapped in gray, muted timbres. When noise bursts through Fennesz' circuits, the attack almost immediately blurs into clustered loops, drones, and sympathetic noises to smooth the edges into a shimmered glisten of remarkable beauty that exhibits a cold, overcast, and gray soundsmear, certainly on par with the sleepytime shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine. After an exceptional collaborative track with Rosy Parlane of lunar landscape ambience riddled with dust before opening into a hymnal melody, Black Sea comes to an end with one of Fennesz' best tracks ever in "Saffron Revolution," with its soaring vapor trail of tone-bent guitar drone and a majestic crescendo of sustained, soft focus distortion. A truly marvellous piece of work.
Experimental electronica (particularly the glitch techno and collage work on the Mille Plateaux label) is getting dangerously close to self parody, with the definitions of very specific electronic music forming ever increasing legions of devoted followers
Fennesz' third album -- the aptly titled "Endless Summer" -- picks up where his ep of Rolling Stones / Beach Boys covers left off with a digital dispersion of "fun in the sun" rock mythologies. While there are no obviously discernable pop culture references, Fennesz builds a sound that really is quite summery from odd duets between disintegrating acoustic guitar strums and the coalescence of digital errata. Thus, this album has the feeling of the classic Beach Boys sound, but very little of that structure. These are NOT Beach Boys covers; but if he said they were, we'd have no basis to call him a liar. Regardless, Fennesz's "Endless Summer" is just fucking great.
Over the past couple of years, it has become apparent that there are two modes of production for the esteemed Austrian electro-glitch artist Christian Fennesz. On one hand, there are the studio driven productions where he focuses on the digital decomposition of various guitar signatures (exemplified within the "Plays" single whose beautiful cover of The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" was originally commissioned for the ill-fated "Painted Black" compilation -- due soon on tUMULt), and on the other, there's the live improvisation techniques he brings to any number of European free-jazz / new music ensembles (i.e. MIMEO, FennO'Berg, Polweschel, Golden Tone, Orchestra 33 1/3, etc.). While his technical prowess and expressive immediacy can be quite graceful on those electro-improv recordings, Fennesz excels in the studio.
"Field Recordings 1995:2002" -- which is NOT a collection of Chris Watson-esque field recordings -- picks up some of the studio driven scraps that had been released on compilations, special projects, and film soundtracks during the past 7 years. Of particular note, "Field Recordings 1995:2002" features all of the cuts from his amazing "Instrument" debut EP released on Mego in 1995. Even before such incredibly powerful programs as SuperCollider and Max/MSP had been as widely available as they are now, Fennesz has always been interested the atomization and disintegration of digital recordings at their most basic level. While all of these tracks from "Instrument" still sound great by today's standards, there is a strong connection with the sampledelica guitar trickery of '90s UK post-rock of Seefeel, Main, and Disco Inferno as hyperactive, time-stretched kaleidoscopes of post-MBV distortion and skittering electronica rhythms. The other tracks include reworkings of the soundtrack composed for "Blue Moon," remixes Fennesz did for Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephan Mathieu, and compilation tracks from "Decay" (Ash International), "RKKCD13" (Reckankreuzungklankewerkzeuge), "Clicks and Cuts 2" (Mille Plateaux) and "Krev X" (Ash International) -- that last contribution being a digitally fuzzed-out cover of America's "A Horse With No Name."
While many 'loose-end' collections run the risk of being full of cast-away tracks from the proper albums, Fennesz' "Field Recording" is as good as any of his previous albums, and shouldn't be missed!
THIS AQ RECORD OF THE WEEK FROM A DECADE AGO, NOW ON VINYL FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME!!
Christian Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer firmly established him as one of the electronic avant-garde's greats with his delirious balance of hotwired digital glitches and a nostalgic revisitation of summery pop sensibilities. The assimilation of overloaded digital filtering technologies and guitar driven song fragments has continued to be Fennesz' strongest asset through his celebrated arrangements for David Sylvian's Blemish album, and has even earned him a curious forthcoming collaboration with Sparklehorse! Venice is his fourth studio album and clearly stands as his best work to date. According to Asphodel's Naut Humon, Venice was almost a doomed project, as Fennesz' hard drive crashed less than a month before he needed to deliver the record to Touch. With about a quarter of the album salvageable, he scrambled to reassemble the album from memory. While it's hard to say if this time constraint benefited or detracted from his process, the album itself is stunningly good. Just as Endless Summer channelled the acid fried spirit of Brian Wilson, Venice also finds itself an album with a muse: Kevin Shields. There have always been short-circuited elements of My Bloody Valentine shot from Fennesz' tricked out guitar sound; but Venice pushes Fennesz affection for shoegazer's bucolic atmospheres and sublime melodies to the forefront with marvelous results. Each song appears to be nerve-rattlingly familiar; yet just as Endless Summer invoked Brian Wilson without ever resorting to self-conscious quotation, each of his tracks glides along the same oceanic currents authored by Slowdive, AR Kane, Ride, Loveliescrushing, and The Cocteau Twins. Again, no direct references can be heard in Venice; rather Fennesz taps directly into the hopelessly romantic sentimentality of shoegazer music and replicates it perfectly behind a light dusting of digital pixels.
The one track which gives us pause on Venice is the single collaboration with David Sylvian. While this track on its own works as good if not better than anything on their aforementioned Blemish album, it sticks out like sore thumb against the sublimely textured ambience which dominates the remainder of the record. Here on the double lp redux of Venice, Fennesz had the sense to lead the second lp with that track, thus remedying much of the disconnect found with the cd listening experience. Venice stood as one of the finest electronic albums of 2001; and it's still an excellent album a decade later, now fleshed out in its 10th Anniversary vinyl edition with two short bonus tracks of pastoral, pixelated blur, "The Future Will Be Different" and "Tree", presumably recorded at the same time.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The relative ease with which this German band outshines the post-rock-fanboy holy-grail trio Don Caballero (keeping in mind that we really like Don Cab), makes one wish that the general indie rock audience at large was harder to please. Then perhaps more bands would try to expand on the Don Cab sound instead of incessantly aping it, and more records would sound as jaw droppingly brilliant as this one. In place of Damon Che's non stop avalanche of 'Moby Dick'isms and DonCab's metal-in-post-rock's-clothing is a complex sonic tapestry of hypnotic drones and cyclical riffs. Feuhler take the droning single note repetition of Tony Conrad, the scraping stones of Loren Chasse, the heavy prog of Voivod, the dynamics of Slint, and the slowly evolving Reich-ish rock of Circle, and fashion a music at once emotive and heavy, intellectual and kick ass.
Following a wholly unique progression, from drug-addled psych rock jam band to off kilter pop geniuses, the Flaming Lips keep on stretching the boundaries of 'pop' music, never losing sight of the song. They seem to have a unique understanding of the absurdity of the music they produce. We're not talking about the garden variety, pedestrian pastiche efforts of so many of today's indie pop bands (i.e. avant garde = birdsounds or 'out there' segues). The Lips' weirdness isn't manufactured or forced, it seems rather to be the result of some sort of dropped-on-their-head childhood mishap or an unprecedented series of synaptic misfires. It comes as less of a surprise then that this band was dragged kicking and screaming into mainstream success by a catchy little pop song about masturbation.
The Flaming Lips seem to be taking great advantage of their lofty position on a major label, doing their best to piss off the business minded folk of Warner, while at the same time managing to make truely amazing and creative records, like their last release 'Zaireeka', a 4 cd set composed to be listened to simultaneously on four separate cd players. While certainly not as labor-intensive for the listener as Zaireeka, The Soft Bulletin is another set of perfectly imperfect popsongs, albeit now accessible to the traditional one cd player household.
It's hard to describe The Flaming Lips without providing a visual reference, take their live show at Slims a few years back. It began with a pathetic solitary spotlight illuminating the band huddled around their instruments and plucking fragile solitary notes. With the initial crack of the drums, a dizzying kaleidoscope of tens of thousands of Christmas lights burst to life and engulfed Slims, offereing a hallucinatory visual equal to the Lips' psychedelic pop dadaism.
The Lips' disparate and patently un-pop elements; huge and fuzzy John Bonham-esque percussive bombast, ultra low frequency Moog oscillations, Wayne Coyne's still-getting-out-of-puberty voice crack, bizarre song struture, and an insane mastery of recording studio-as-instrument, come together more seamlessly than ever on The Soft Bulletin, making it our record of the week, and for some of us, record of the year.
I'm kind of shocked that it's taken people so long to catch on, as the last 3 Flaming Lips albums are as essential as the new one, and currently in stock: Clouds Taste Metallic (1995), Transmissions From the Satellite Heart (1993), Hit to Death in the Future Head (1992).
We never really stopped digging the Flaming Lips. We'll always probably be partial to the early days, the chaotic, drug addled noise rock psych pop era of course, but even more so that transitional three album arc that marked the band's transition from fucked up underground legends to weirdo stadium rock popstars, Hit To Death In The Future Head, Transmissions From The Satellite Heart and Clouds Taste Metallic. With The Soft Bulletin, the band embraced their pop side, and it paid off, and we have to say we're pretty thrilled, that a band this weird, could end up being one of the most popular bands in the world. And it's pretty heartening, that even while they were crafting these crazy commercial records, they continued to be willfully difficult, and extremely experimental and unconventional. From crazy elaborate performances to bizarre limited releases (thumb drive in a human sized gummy skull!), they're essentially one of the only bands who never seemed to be corrupted by success, and who never let that success go to their heads, or really affect their music. In fact, if anything, the Lips seem to have peaked pop wise with the trilogy of The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and At War With The Mystics, and ever since, they seem to have been getting less and less commercial, like some sort of musical Benjamin Buttons. 2009's Embryonic was pretty weird, but The Terror trumps it big time.
Originally rumored to be a return to the band's old sound, The Terror instead finds the band slipping into a sort of abstract experimental almost krautrock sounding psychedelia. The sounds are lush and layered, fantastically atmospheric, the vocals sparse and minimal, no proper pop songs to be found anywhere, instead, The Terror delivers long sprawling dream-psych jams that are some of the best songs we've heard from these guys in ages. The opening tracks set the scene, pulsing electronics, woozy looped synth melodies, skittery drums, hazy vocals, the opener "Look... The Sun Is Rising" maybe the closest to modern Flaming Lips, and actual pop song structure, but even here, there's lots of jagged angular crunch, droned out synths, shimmering layers, everything washed out and hazy, the song leading directly into "Be Free, A Way", which is like an even more abstract extension of the opener, with a woozy soporific hook that will stick in your head forEVER, all over a lush landscape of synths and electronics, and murky pulsing rhythms. "Try To Explain" continues on in that drifting ethereal ephemeral psychedelic dream pop style, laying vocals over a lush bed of electronic pulsations, soaring symphonic arrangements and weird sound effects.
It's on "Your Lust" where the band seem to slough off the vestiges of pop that defined the opening few tracks, unfurling a heady sprawl of hypno rock electro-kraut grooviness, all sun dappled and woozy, eventually fading out into a lush and lovely coda of warble organ, and distorted chiming melodies.
And while there are moments of poppiness popping up throughout the record's remaining five tracks, those tracks seem to bleed together into one gorgeously lysergic sprawling songsuite. The rhythms minimal and motorik, the vocals wispy and ethereal, the sound often bursting into weirdly corrosive crumbles, or densely swirling buzz, blossoming into blown out shoegaze heaviness, before settling back into a twisted bit of swirling sci-fi kraut-pop drift, or some stripped down Can like minimal mesmer, but all wreathed in a constantly shifting cloud of effects and textures and disembodied voices, at one point the band slip into some hushed electronic creep, with falsetto vox, and lots of glitch and buzz, sounding a bit like Thom Yorke's solo record The Eraser, but things here are much weirder, the sound exploding into a noise drenched buzz pop, before devolving into the gorgeously abstract weirdo noise-pop prog of the closer "Always There In Our Hearts", which manages to be both poppy and impossibly catchy, as well as dense and claustrophobic, intense and super dramatic.
The whole record bleeds into one fantastic and lysergic whole, it's hard to pick out a single song, or even a single part. in fact we've yet to NOT listen to the whole record in a single sitting, the only thing that separates the songs for us is hearing a phrase, or part of a title, the record in many ways feels like one huge piece, an interconnected songsuite, and while with every listen, certain parts stick in our heads, certain melodies, specific sounds, even textures, or rhythms, we still just can't bring ourselves to not listen to the whole thing, all the way through, over and over and over.
(By the way, we're still waiting for the vinyl version of this to arrive, we're now told next week, supposedly.)
Superior Viaduct does it again, bringing us much needed reissues of not only one but two classic LA underground records from 1981: The Flesh Eaters' amazing A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die, and The Gun Club's incredible debut, Fire of Love. We're gonna (gotta!) make 'em both Records Of The Week!
Death, drugs, sex, voodoo, evil blues, macabre horror and a sublimely detached southern gothic sensibility pervades the sound of these two bands who sat somewhere between the margins of the "death rock" and "cowpunk" or "gothabilly" genres in the LA punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties without fitting neatly into either.
Chris Desjardins, or Chris D., was the central force behind The Flesh Eaters as well as producer for The Gun Club, and other bands of the era such as Tex and The Horseheads (featuring his then girlfriend Texicala Jones) and his later band, The Divine Horsemen. Once a writer for the popular underground fanzine Slash, Chris D assembled The Flesh Eaters from many bands of the scene, such as The Blasters, Wall of Voodoo, Los Lobos, and X, and indeed no Flesh Eaters record had quite the same line-up. Their second release, A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die remains the band's most critically regarded effort and it's easy to see why. Featuring John Doe and DJ Bonebrake from X on bass and marimbas respectively, Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman from The Blasters on guitar and drums and Steve Berlin from Los Lobos on sax, the band's swampy but driving voodoo rhythms marked most notably by the unusual use of marimbas and saxophone and Chris D's horror-spun lyricism and guttural vocals put them in a similar scene as bands like 45 Grave and The Cramps, but with a fiercer edge and far less campy aesthetic. Instead, A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die is like a dark spaghetti western full of werewolf marauders, evil curses, night fevers, grave-digging and a rollicking hell-bent fury. Essential listening for fans of The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and any of the bands mentioned above.
We had almost given up on ever hearing from Flying Saucer attack ever again. After all, it's been 15 years since the last record (2000's Mirror), and now nearly twenty since Rachel Brook left the band to focus on Movietone. They (or now he really, as it's essentially been a David Pearce solo project for a while now) still rank amongst our all time favorite psychedelic shoegaze outfits EVER. And even on this new one it's easy to see why.
While not a proper new -album- per se, Instrumentals plays out more like a collection of sonic sketches, impressionistic textures and guitarscapes, still covering much of the same found that FSA did back in the day, be it chiming, pastoral psych-folk, or shimmering ambient drift, or distorted, washed out soft-noise. The songs are mostly short here, none breaking the 10 minute mark, and many hovering around 90 seconds or less, and yet somehow, it manages to sound cohesive, these ideas, sonic suggestions, these hazy movements, all flow and ooze and bleed into one another, the whole thing gorgeously amorphous and mesmeric.
Fans of the group probably didn't have to even read this far, news of a new FSA record is likely all it took, and those folks will not be disappointed. But somehow, Instrumentals serves as a perfect introduction to the group, an easy entree into a catalog of subtly difficult music. And there are difficult moments here too, guitars detune, explode into squalls, settle into hushed whispery thrum, but even at its most caustic or bombastic, there's a tranquility, a depth and weight to these sounds, that unfurl like pieces not songs, fragmented for sure, but the fragments are allowed to billow and expand, the layers piling up, and often peeling away, as much about texture, timbre and tone as mood and melody, if not more so. The songs are even named generically, as if to not color the listener's impression, allowing the sound to reveal what lies beneath, and within. And like all the FSA records, this is far from a high fidelity affair, the sound gritty, and grimy, amp buzz, and tape warble, hiss and hum, all subtle shadings in the sound, and in many cases, perfectly blended with the music itself, to add heft, or gravitas, or hell, just some extra noise.
Throughout, it's hard not to be swept away. Pearce conjures up a musical world that's at once magical and mysterious, the sound transcendent and transformative, minimal on the surface, but hiding a maximal energy within. And yeah, we're far from objective. We've loved this band forEVER, and were dying for this record when we first heard about it, and were definitely inclined to love it no matter what. But after repeated listens, what at first seemed like a sonic sketchbook (albeit good one at that), has blossomed into something more purposeful. There's a melancholic, meandering, musical path that runs through these 15 tracks, a path that leads simultaneously inward and outward, and coheres into a darkly delicate songsuite of somnambulant lullabies and softly psychedelic threnodies.
When Third Eye Foundation first experimented with fusing drum & bass beats with guitar dissonance, it stood as the awkward realization of what one might imagine My Bloody Valentine's (as yet undocumented) drum & bass sound to be...
While Third Eye Foundation's sound has since developed into gritty drum & bass dirges, fellow Bristol space rockers Flying Saucer Attack have also taken up the drum & bass / bliss rock challenge, with a rather groovy yet wholly blissed-out result. While half the tracks from "Mirror" are injected with the hyperactive speed of jungle breaks, their breathy Nick Drake style pastoral folk songs are remain, and of course "Mirror" is still laden with sleepy guitar fuzz. Complete with colorful, psychedelic cover and gatefold art by Savage Pencil.
Another fantastic Miasmah release, this one from FNS, aka Fredrik Ness Sandoval, who besides playing in a whole bunch of Norwegian bands we've never heard of, has collaborated with members of Acid Mothers Temple, 1/3 Octave Band, the Cranes, Zeni Geva, and Marble Sheep, but here on his solo debut, Sandoval crafts a gorgeous expanse of minimal psychedelic folk, that reminds us both of local dronefolk duo Barn Owl, but also space kraut astral travelers Expo 70.
Imagine folk music transformed into druggy drifty dreamy space ragas, and you'll be getting close, acoustic guitars unfurl gorgeous trancelike stretches of almost Appalachia like strum, while all around, effects swirl, other guitars are layered and woven into the original guitar, creating fantastical stretches of psychedelic drift, of abstract dronekraut minimalism, all infused with a subtle pathos, even the sunshiniest of the tracks here, brood with a somber undercurrent. The record opener sets the stage perfectly, an acoustic guitars strums a melancholy chord progression, while another guitar churns and chugs, a rhythmic counterpoint to the woozy drift of the acoustic, this undulating space raga is laced with tinkling chimes, swooping backwards effects, all wreathed in a sort of otherworldly shimmer, and allowed to loop and repeat and mesmerize, growing subtly more intense and loud, but never fully letting loose, instead, eventually shedding all the extra guitars and strange production, leaving just the warm strummed acoustic, and little streaks of backwards swoop. We say it a lot, but Sandoval could have stretched that out to 40 or 50 minutes and we'd STILL be raving about it. And that applies to all the tracks here.
"Sappelur" is a smoldering blackened dirge, roiling clouds of processed buzz, muted feedback, lots of layered tones and lush chordal blur, a lovely blown out psychedelic haze that just throbs and pulses and drifts, right into "Wooden Leg", which returns to the folk of the album opener, but unlike that track, the progression here is much more subtle, it's nearly 2 or 3 minutes before a strange drone begins to surface, along with gorgeous angelic female vocals, soon male vocals join in as well, not singing so much as sort of crooning along, the result is a darker, more menacing take on classic seventies British acid folk.
"I Think She's Asleep" is more abstract, a gorgeous shimmery dreamscape, all layered tones, and pulled apart melodies, haunting and otherwordly, hushed and lovely, very reminiscent of folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX. "Dream" is surprisingly less dreamy, sounding instead like some strange sonic ritual, spidery guitars wrapped around twisted damaged electronics, while the vocals transform the sound into something almost liturgical, lots of reverb and echo, as if it were being performed in some massive black cathedral, the effects swirling and swooping, and pushing the sound into the realms of spacekrautdrone for sure.
Finally, the record closes with the epic 12 minute "Flaggermusvingers Vift I Dimmet", which again begins as a slowly unfurling lush sprawl of melancholy Appalachia, all minor key and mournful, while just below the surface, some thick blackened buzzing is birthed, and as the track progresses, it grows more and more caustic, roiling and churning, eventually nearly swallowing the Appalachia whole, transforming the sound into some washed out doomgaze, all woozy and swirly, the low end swells laced with tangled psychedelic melodies, before dropping out completely, leaving just a soft focus cloud of distant reverbed shimmer, a distant cosmic vibration, that seems to gradually fade, like the stars disappearing behind the clouds.
Dark and dreamy and druggy and so so gorgeous... For fans of Expo 70, Svarte Greiner, Barn Owl, Jacaszek, Nadja, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Fear Falls Burning and other purveyors of doomfolk, krautdrone, spacefolk and all sorts of abstract minimal guitarscapery...
Folks hankering for their seventies psychedelic biker doom fix need look no further than these Texas downer rock scuzzlords, who it seems took all the time and effort they DIDN'T put in to the cover art of this lp, and instead devoted it to maximizing the amount of FUZZ found on here. Fogg traffic in the same sort of drug fueled, garage-bound heaviness as outfits like Satan's Satyrs and Uncle Acid. The guitars appropriately fuzzy, the wailing Ozzyish vocals a perfect compliment, but unlike the punked out heaviness of the Satyrs, or the bell bottomed doominess of Uncle Acid, Fogg somehow sound more wasted and washed out, the sound less heavy, a bit brittle and tinny, extremely lo-fi, but it suits their mesmerizing heavy hippy psych punk swagger.
Opener "Time Ride" sets the scene, right down to the lurching stop start bridge, and some scuzzy guitar shred would around the murky main riff, that's as Sabbathy as can be, but decontextualized into something a bit more ramshackle and loose. And while seventies biker rock might be the core of their sound, they also get pretty sixties, "Rainbow" finds the guitar and bass playing strange harmonies, over a wildly groovy shuffle, laced with still more shred, lysergic and laid back, but on the verge of exploding into full on headbanging at any moment.
And yet for all that, when need be, these guys can conjure up the ghost of doom past, just check out the massive lumbering "Fried Cheer", which does actually sound like some especially acid fried take on Blue Cheer, the song lurching from swagger lumber to furious punky pound and back again. The more we listen to these guys, the more we hear outfits like Earthless and Hot Lunch, that sort of skate shred, woven into Fogg's Sabbathy swing.
They also stretch out (way out) on a handful of tracks, locking into almost krautrock-like stretches of hypnomesmer, as well as meandering space rock/jam rock, the song unfurling into waves of heady/heavy mesmer, tripped out and sinister, and downright sludgy, like on the appropriately titled "Sludgemother", that sounds like a downer Uncle Acid, a glorious slab of wasted skater doom, or witchy downtuned zoner psych, whatever you call it, it's heavy and tranced out and freaky as fuck (oh and there's a DRUM SOLO). Oh yeah, and of course stick around for the closer, another awesomely titled jam, "Womb To The Tomb", that sounds like a more poppy, way more brain damaged Electric Wizard, dirgey and droney and totally messed up and mesmeric, and just about the best thing we've heard in ages. This is a record that no doubt will be right at home right wedged between that played to death lp of Blood Lust, and that scratched up vinyl version of Die Screaming, or next to your copy of the Darkscorch Canticles compilation.
Vinyl-only, and sorry, no download.
Apparently, this UK duo, Ben Moon and Richard Sides, aka Forest Creature, have dabbled in all manner of noisemaking in their brief existence, creating huge crushing walls of speaker shredding brutality, or super glitched out psychedelic beat heavy crunch, or howling, live, drum driven psychnoise freakouts, and while traces of those sounds are still present, we have to say, we're pretty partial to the twisted noise captured here, a seeming distillation of those disparate sounds, into something much more refined and focused, perhaps equally varied sonically, but somehow still strangely cohesive, and epic 'song' suite, due in no small part to the editing and sequencing as the actual music making itself.
The label drops names like Black Dice, Fuck Buttons, Animal Collective, Autechre, and those all do pretty much apply, but to our ears, there seems to be much more to Forest Creature than just aping their influences, we hear the ominous cinematic synthiness of Goblin, the intense late night noir buzz of recent aQ faves D.A., the murky swirl and shimmery out-of-time new age-y drift of the recent crop of pop hypnogogists, but here, those influences, as well as a handful of purloined sounds, are all reimagined, reinterpreted and all tangled up into constantly squirming and unraveling soundscapes, that skitter from almost kraut-like mesmer, to nineties style IDM, to looped woozy minimal synth wave, to gorgeous haunting murky heroin house, but no matter what the sound, or where the songs seem to be headed, Forest Creature mold all those elements into something truly original, lush, and deep, and dark, sometime super chaotic and hyper rhythmic, other times hushed and ominous. "Edit 4" begins as a foreboding minimal slow burning drone, but eventually builds to a warped synth loop, that gets more and more crunchy and buzz, the low end billowing out like a black cloud, the effects eating away at the original loop, super intense and totally mesmerizing. "Edit 5" is all rumbling low end whir, a distant beat, buried way down in the murk, looped and skittery, hovers below a black ambience that seems to swirl and shimmer in slow motion. "Edit 3" might be the prettiest of the bunch, beginning with a skeletal high end looped rhythm, which is soon joined by some warm warbly synths way off in the distance, the rhythm remains steady, but that low end grows thicker, and buzzier, creating thick warm slabs of chordal hum, playing out a gorgeous melancholy slowcore melody, a haunting depressive slow pop crawl, run through with that skeletal skitter, until both the buzz and the beat, begin to crumble, and intensify, until the song is transformed into a noise drenched psychedelic swirl.
So awesome. And a little bit surprising coming from Blackest Rainbow, whose past releases have tended more toward groups like Jazzfinger, Barn Owl, Bong, Starving Weirdos and the like. Frustrated Analogue is some fantastically twisted, blissed out, synth heavy electronic psychedelia, repetitive, hypnotic, spaced out, warped and glitchy, drone-y and rhythmic, moody and mysterious, a dizzying melding of This Heat, Goblin, John Carpenter, old Warp Records 12"s, early Chain Reaction, modern synthdrone, early analogue synth music, and the groups we mentioned up top (Fuck Buttons, Black Dice, Animal Collective, etc.). Way way recommended. Easily one of our new favorites...
It was only a matter of time. If Forest Swords hadn't done it, someone definitely would have, but hard to imagine it could have sounded as good as this. DRONESTEP. That's what they call it. A fusion of dark post-rock ambient drone music and skittery spaced out dubstep. Warm languid guitars, brooding atmospheres, and laid back downtempo grooves. In the wrong hands it definitely could have been lame, but Forest Swords nailed it, the result so organic and warm and mesmerizing, odds are the last thing you'll be thinking about is what to call it. Instead you can just sit back, and let these lush droned out grooves carry you off.
Had this not been on Olde English Spelling Bee, it certainly wouldn't have been out of place on some upstart dubstep 12" label, it definitely has the same sort of lugubrious soporific feel as Burial or Kode9, murky, washed out, muted, muddy and bass heavy, but instead of being sample based, guitars unwind, spidery melodies all tangled up in clouds of hazy reverb, vocals drift in and out all spectral and ethereal, in fact if anything, it's like some awesome, nineties slowcore jam, Codeine, or Seam, or someone like that, remixed by Portishead, transformed into a different kind of slowcore, a bleak, moonlit, forest dancefloor slowcore, everything bathed in dark blues and soft blacks, smokey and gauzy, the beats skeletal and minimal, the guitars chiming, glistening and glimmering, the bass, rumbling and throbbing, a rib cage rattling hum, samples woven into the mix, but doused in effects, so vocals becomes little swirling clouds of truncated melody, and melodies drift heavenward like wisps of grey smoke. Every track here is a smoldering late night blur, a bleary ear-ed slither and skitter through some soft focus soundscape, dreamlike and hypnotic.
Gorgeously dark, otherworldly, warmly mysterious, and darn close to being our favorite new record this year...
Comes with a download coupon as well...
We've said it many times before, but the best album discoveries are the ones that come totally out of nowhere. Forests came to us on a tip from a friend, a Taiwanese band with little in the way of press or internet presence, and one minute into the first track we heard and we were hooked. Think "Mix Up" era Cabaret Voltaire but with the a drummer that falls somewhere between the skeletal pulse of Disappears and the repurposed junk-drumming of Einsturzende Neubauten. A lysergic swirl of strange, effects-laden synths and electronics, dark, brooding post-punk bass lines, hypnotic rhythms, and monotone vocals, all with a kind of outsider approach that makes you wonder if they've even heard the bands they sound like. Quite a welcome departure from their previous incarnation as a more Sebadoh/Pavement style indie rock band, we must say. Weird, awesome, and highly recommended!
(We got these direct from the band in Taiwan, so if/when we run out, we will get more but it might take a little while, just fyi.)
We first heard of the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project on :zoviet*france:'s fantastic podcast A Duck In Tree, and we were certainly baffled to discover that this enigmatic project from the outskirts of Chicago has been in existence since the early '80s. A cassette here or there might have materialized throughout the years, but it seems that the bulk of the output was just secreted away until some of this stuff started showing up on their website, revealing a dreamy, narcotic ethos of post-industrial tape-loopery. Think Phillip Jeck. Think Terry Riley. And most of all, think :zoviet*france:! The etymology behind the name Fossil Aerosol Mining Project harkens to the act of rummaging through abandoned warehouses, whose crumbled surfaces were dappled with graffiti. The remnant waste from all that graffiti was the never-ending supply of crushed and spent spraypaint aerosol cans. So, the punk-scavenger miscreants who would find themselves sifting through the rubbish of those abandoned warehouses in search of a motherlode of 16mm film or reel-to-reel tape machines would undoubtably come across countless, discarded cans. Quite a poetic allusion for this tape-heavy Mining Project.
The quotations of bird song and the pleasant ambient wash of the initial 30 seconds snap into something quite foreign with a series of radio communication bursts and snippets of slow-motion monologues from Ronald Reagan, whose soothing, patronizing declarations would raise the hackles of many critical thinkers and agit-prop artists during his presidency. Nowadays, it's something of a distant, sonorous ghost, something that we're supposed to dread but can't quite figure out why. The Fossil Aerosol Mining Project cycles through a myriad of sympathetic loops, each of which harbors its own patter of delay, lending to a complex web of crumbling sound furthered along by backward tapes of textural scrabblings and iridescent drones. This network of eerie, diaphanous sounds and hypnotizingly soft-focus rhythms which may have their origins in a thoroughly forgotten fragment of a song, whose content was wholly lost to the magnetic erasures, dubbing-upon-dubbing-upon-dubbing, and / or the bacterial decay which flecked away the ferric oxide leaving behind an entirely different set of chemical stains. What's left is just a shadow of whatever emotion might have been imprinted onto the tape. It's a beautiful coagulation of sound, the musical equivalent of a Joseph Cornell box... either that or the recapitulation of the classic :zoviet*france: albums (e.g. Look Into Me, Assault & Mirrage, Just An Illusion, etc.). One of the best albums of 2014.
In light of recent events, we figured that this reissue of "Hard Rock From the Middle East" would make a great choice for record of the week...no, we don't mean 'cause of the current war, we mean because of the popularity of the "Turkish Delights" and "Hava
The cover art shows the band hangin' in the desert in front of the pyramids of Egypt -- but don't be fooled, they were actually mostly Arab-Americans, based in New York City. Still, their rock n' roll was as authentically "Middle Eastern" as their Turkish contemporaries. They could have held their own with the likes of Erkin Koray and Mogollar.
Ok, now we'd better explain about this particular cd (pay attention, it gets kinda confusing): Sony's Collectables has reissued two long-out-of-print 1967 albums by two totally different bands on *one* disc. The bands are tenuously connected through the friendship of The Freak Scene's Rusty Evans and Felix Pappalardi of The Devil's Anvil, as the two had played together four years previous. Okay, so maybe it's a bit of a stretch putting these two albums together on one disc. Whatever. The real treasure here is The Devil's Anvil album.
The Devil's Anvil got together in the happenin' mid sixties Greenwich Village scene, playing their Middle Eastern influenced music at folk cafes and rock clubs. Eventually they hooked up with classical musician-turned-rocker Felix Pappalardi (producer of Cream's "Disraeli Gears", later to play alongside Leslie West in Mountain). He began playing bass with the band and eventually scored the group a record deal. The resulting album was truly one-of-a-kind and would certainly made greater impact had it not been released on the very eve of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. Thus, no New York radio stations would play it and unfortunately the album has remained an expensive collector's find until now.
The rock contained herein is absolutely kick ass, with bluesy and impassioned Arabic vocals, electric (or at least amplified) oud, bouzouki, tamboura, durbeki as well as the usual rock suspects of (fuzz!) guitar, bass and drums. The majority of the tracks here are either rock arrangements of traditional Middle Eastern and Greek numbers or original compositions, but a couple are actually straight traditional numbers with no western instruments at all. Plus there's an excellent Middle Eastern-esque rock arangement of "Misirlou" that's perhaps the best version ever recorded, IMHO. And the record ends with a Devil's Anvil original that kinda reminds us of one of the Beatles' more Eastern-influenced tunes. This is about as good as it gets. Even if the Freak Scene album doesn't interest you at all, this cd is still worth buying for The Devil's Anvil alone. Very, very highly recommended! Nay, ESSENTIAL.
(As for The Freak Scene -- you might guess from that band's name and album title, The Freak Scene were a bit of a psychedelic-era novelty, a studio project put together by producer/songwriter Evans for CBS Records. The record exploits all of the trippy tropes of the times, from Eastern-raga modes to LSD-inspired lyrics. It's no classic, but does include at least one truly great psych-pop track, the Nuggets-worthy "A Million Grains of Sand". The Freak Scene also indulges in dated but amusing free-form sound-collage experiments like "...When In The Course of Human Events (Draft Beer, Not Students)" which tries to make a statement about the whole sixties counterculture vibe. It's a mix of Pete Seeger, Laugh-In, an LSD party -- Vietnam-era pop culture hippie kitsch -- consider it a free bonus that comes with The Devil's Anvil album.)
Yes! The cd debut of this fantastic Finnish four-track project... We actually meant to list this, like, a month ago, but unfortunately the original review we wrote of it was lost in one of our several recent arggh-inducing komputoor crashes, but actually that's a good thing, 'cause it gave everybody here at AQ more time to listen to this, over and over, at home and in the store, and have us all decide that this HAD to be a Record Of The Week. So we ordered more copies from Finland, and re-wrote the review (which, in our memory, was actually probably better written the first time, so trust us on this) and here we go!
Ah, Finland. We've said it before, we'll say it again. So many of our favorite bands hail from Finland, from the hypnotic NWOFHM space rock of Circle to the the funereral doom of Skepticism, with all the freaky forest folk of Kemialliset Ystavat, et. al. in between. And now Fricara Pacchu, solo project from a member of such underground Finnish acts as Avarus, Anaksimandros, Maniacs Dream, and yes Kemialliset Ystavat.
Hopefully you remember our review of the Fricara Pacchu 7" and accompanying art/collage booklet that the Fonal label put out not too long ago (we may still have a few of those babies in stock, if you act fast). Both Allan and Andee accidentally wrote separate gushing reviews of it, that's how much we all liked it! That 7" left us eager to hear a full-length, and now here it is, courtesy of Lal Lal Lal. 12 wigged out instrumental tracks of Fricara Pacchu's undefinable, eccentric, psychedelic weirdness. We had compared the 7" to everything from the Boredoms to Oliva Tremor Control, and that goes too for the all-instrumental music on this cd, to which we can add such other disparate references as Neu! and When and Fuck Buttons. Fricara Pacchu's music is part techno, part noise, part pop... all awesome.
Recording at home on a four-track, Pacchu creates a woozy, rhythmic soundworld filled with distortion and delight. A world of magical gnomes with chugging machines spewing colorful clouds... clouds of mysterious, maybe illegal substances that coalesce in pretty patterns you can hear, as well as kaleidoscopically see. There's dense, druggy layers of guitar feedback with electro beats; lo-fi fuzzy loops, gurgly computer bleeps and sci-fi sound FX swooshes; throbbing pound and gentle ambience. Fricara Pacchu produces fragile music box melodies that exist amidst exploding minefields of noise, like the detonations of distortion that rhythmically obliterate parts of "Four Seasons Of Violins". Noise that is taken to an extreme with the utter, surging distorto-destruction of "Sky Helicopter"...
Whew! Wow. Maybe if the glorious synthscapes of fellow Finns Shogun Kunitoki were way grittier and guitar-ier, done more D.I.Y., and wrapped in steel wool and played backwards on a cheap cassette, that would sound something like the quirky and compelling music of Fricara Pacchu. By which we mean, this is great!
We were immediately blown way by this twisted slab of primsatic psychedelia, all lo-fi rhythms, bagpipe like synth squelch, and spidery snakecharmer melodies. It's crunchy and fuzzy, feedback drenched, droned out and totally hypnotic, like a dizzying mix of the shamanistic mesmer of Dan Higgs, the minimal zoner kraut-psych of Zomes, and the warped rainbow rhythm-ed distorto-hop of Black Moth Super Rainbow (and BMSR offshoot Tobacco too)! And really, this record totally came from out of left field, we had no expectations, in fact at first we had no idea who Dan Friel even was, being mostly unacquainted with his band Parts & Labor, and what little we did know had us thinking maybe we wouldn't really even be all that into P&L anyway. But Total Folklore definitely has us rethinking everything.
The first track alone is worth the price of admission, and even if the record had consisted of nothing but that lumbering, 12+ minute chunk of deliriously distorted, noise drenched, outsider grooviness, we'd still have made it Record Of The Week. After a short squall of tangled buzz and swirling tones, the sounds coalesce into a buzzing raga like melody, draped over a super crunchy, crumbling rhythm, a sort of hip hop / industrial lumber, each beat a burst of staticky buzz, sculpted into a dense, driving, motorik caveman groove, while over the top, those melodies are constantly shifting and swirling, stretching out into layered drones, streaks of feedback doused shimmer, and when the melodies to abate, leaving just the beat, to pound and stutter, when they do swoop back in, the result is a sort of chaotic noise-raga, that manages to be loose and freeform, but simultaneously tranced out and hypnotic. Eventually, the sound slips back into that opening groove, this time, all the synths and buzzing melodies even more distorted and blown out, making for a heady chunk of multi-hued noise industrial drone-pop zoner-psych that will have you setting it on repeat for sure.
The rest of the record is divided into way shorter fragments, none of the remaining tracks clocking in at more than 3:45, with a handful of ultra short 'intermissions', but all of those tracks, intermissions and songs proper, displaying the same sort of blown out psychedelia. "Windmills" sounds like Sunroof! and Our Love Will Destroy The World mashed up and transformed into something a bit more playful and groovy, while "Valedictorian" drapes ethereal shimmer over what sounds like stuttering fuzz pop riffage, a swirling super catchy melody, and it's about as close as this comes to some mutant strain of ultra hook heavy noise pop. It's not hard to imagine this as some warped remix of a classic early era Flaming Lips jam. "Velocipede" is all woozy crumbling distortion, tweaked electronics, in-the-red synth buzz, a noisy blur that somehow ends up sounding more dreamy and psychedelic than chaotic.
The rest of the tracks split the difference between tripped out experimental electronic groovescapes, dense noisy psychedelic swirls, pulsing pulsating komische freakouts and crazy catchy pop in electronic mad scientist's clothing, with each and every variation displaying an impossible knack for dense, heavily layered, ultra distorted productions that are pure headphone blossouts, but also even the most obtuse fractured bit of noisiness is somehow hooky as hell, whether it's the chugging blurred out crunch of "Landslide", or the crumbling feedback drenched electro-kraut churn of "Badlands". AWESOME!
What more could be said about these two Fripp & Eno records than we've already written in countless Expo '70, Growing and Aidan Baker reviews? That's because these records are pretty much ground zero for all of the dark dreamy drifty processed guitar / tape / synth drone that we can't ever seem to get enough of. Perhaps there are other earlier influential touchstones such as Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, perhaps Stockhausen and Terry Riley as well, but none seemed to have come so totally out of nowhere from two relatively mainstream players as these two records. Manuel Gottsching, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music all came a little later.
After every other Eno solo album and collaboration (from Cluster to David Byrne) has been reissued, we are lucky enough to finally see both of these classic releases newly 24-bit remastered by Fripp himself reissued on his DGM imprint. These have never sounded better! No Pussyfooting even contains an extra disc featuring both tracks in reverse and a 40 minute bonus track of "The Heavenly Music Corporation" recorded at half speed that we know all our customers into glacial doomy drone will want, nay, need to own! Even if you own this record already, you may just need to buy it again for the stellar extra material!
It's easy to take for granted nowadays the influence of Brian Eno as the "godfather of ambient music", but in 1973 before he had even released his first solo record, Here Come The Warm Jets, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno were mainly known for their previous roles in King Crimson and Roxy Music respectively. Then this mysterious record parenthetically titled (No Pussyfooting) appears with its cryptic cover, a sort of ultra-modernized take on a hermetic alchemical engraving depicting the two artists (Eno at his most androgynous) looking in opposite directions, sitting in a small mirrored room with no doors reading tarot cards on a mirrored table with what sort of looks like a line of coke (?), next to a mirrored guitar in a mirrored case in the corner, a translucent mannequin and an antique silver radiator behind them under glass shelves filled with old books. The back cover showing the same scene with both artists and tarot cards missing. With its two side-long awesomely titled tracks "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and "Swastika Girls", what kind of music would this be? Rock? Prog? Glam? No one probably would realize until they purchased it and brought it home, that it would be this organically cerebral deep listening experience of the highest order. It's kind of a downer that we have such easy access to information nowadays, because when this came out, it was a true mystery object, which added to its esoteric appeal. But it still is to an extent, as numerous listens over the years still never fail to captivate, or confound how exactly the sounds are being made. Apparently,utilizing a system later dubbed, Frippertronics, two reel to reel tape decks were used to allow audio elements to be added onto a continuing tape loop building up dense layers of sound that would slowly decay as it turned around the decks' playback head. On "The Heavenly Music Corporation" layers of deep synth drones are layered in phased washes with Fripp's unique bowed guitar sound ringing ascending solo lines on top that sometimes loop and sometimes don't. Eno wrings out what sounds like synth lines in counterpoint to Fripp's part in similar tones so that at times it gets harder to tell who is making what sound as the piece intensifies. "Swastika Girls" starts with high pitched cascades of processed piano like tones with scraping synth squelches looping in counterpoint, before low rising bass notes and Riley-ish piano repetitions appear. Then Fripp's searing guitar crash-lands into the mix almost disrupting the whole process, but somehow it all works. Much more distorted and dissonant than "The Heavenly Music Corporation", it doesn't take the process for granted that everything will sound harmonious but remains still somehow cohesive, though far from easy listening.
While the backward tracks are equally amazing, they highlight a different kind of listening experience altogether. The seams show a bit more, the entrance and exit of new sounds more abrupt, but still strangely alien. Their inclusion here came from out of the listening experience of their first (and probably only) complete UK radio broadcast in 1973 courtesy of the late John Peel. Because the tapes were stored "tail out" but played as though they were stored "front out", the broadcast played the music in reverse. When Eno called in to say the music was being played backwards, he was met with a "that's what they all say" response.
But the real bonus of this deluxe package is the 40 minute "half-speed version" of "The Heavenly Music Corporation". When there were 16 2/3 rpm options on early record players, a lot of young guitarists would use the speed to slow down 33 1/3 rpm records to learn and practice their favorite guitar lines. Here it makes the drones so deep and heavy, Fripp's guitar lines more crushing, the layers creep and slither sounding like it could be one of the weird drone cd-r's we sell tons of. If it was in a black sleeve with skulls on it, and was called Skulled Space Outrosphere or Radiant Black Blood, and sealed with wax or wrapped in twine,�and was limited to 100 copies,�we'd sell a million of em (well, okay... 100!!). Sooooooooooooo Recommended and Essential!
What more could be said about these two Fripp & Eno records than we've already written in countless Expo '70, Growing and Aidan Baker reviews? That's because these records are pretty much ground zero for all of the dark dreamy drifty processed guitar / tape / synth drone that we can't ever seem to get enough of. Perhaps there are other earlier influential touchstones such as Tony Conrad, and La Monte Young, perhaps Stockhausen and Terry Riley as well, but none seemed to have come so totally out of nowhere from two relatively mainstream players as these two records. Manuel Gottsching, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music all came a little later.
After every other Eno solo album and collaboration (from Cluster to David Byrne) has been reissued, we are lucky enough to finally see both of these classic releases newly 24-bit remastered by Fripp himself and reissued on his DGM imprint. These have never sounded better! While this reissue doesn't feature any bonus material, we still think it's a must have for any fan of kosmiche experimental drone music. If you haven't owned this before, now is the time!!!!!
Judging from the cover and title of 1975's Evening Star, it would be easy to dismiss this as a generic new-age record by Shadowfax or Mark Isham. It does look a bit Windham Hill-ish. But while its more melodic and dreamy than No Pussyfooting, this is certainly not pure relaxation music. It's way more cerebral and at times quite unnerving. Teaming up with Fripp once again after releasing three brilliant solo pop albums (Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and Another Green World), Eno started concentrating on his ambient period culminating later that same year in what would be his first solo ambient record Discreet Music. Using the same dual tape machine system as on No Pussyfooting, the tracks here feel more composed and purposeful. Starting with "Wind on Water", layered washes of phased high toned analog synths and flittering guitar drones pulse like a breathing entity before the Cluster-like piano figures of the stunning title track, "Evening Star" emerge augmented by a ringing guitar arpeggio and one of the most gorgeous Fripp solos ever put to tape. This track is like an early predecessor to Eno's soundtrack work for the NASA film Apollo, almost a decade later. So beautiful! The next couple of tracks delve further into gentler territory, with "Wind on Wind" being an excerpted version of a piece later included on Discreet Music. But the nearly thirty minute final piece, "An Index of Metals" returns us to the dark intense drone of No Pussyfooting. Sounding more metallic and cosmic than anything on that record, "An Index of Metals" with its deep resonant pulsations and expansively spatial guitar work at times sounds like the melting magma of a dying star, or Edward Artemiev's coldly terrifying soundtrack work for Andrei Tartovsky's Solaris. Awe-inspiring yet very chilling! So Essential!
You probably know artist Andy Goldsworthy -- the British 'sculptor' (I guess you'd call him a sculptor?) who works with materials found in the natural environment, creating amazing pieces constructed from leaves or sticks or rocks or ice, on site? If not, check out his books -- for his works often exist only long enough to be photographed -- they're certainly some of the best, widely available volumes to hit the coffee tables of the world in recent years. Last year, a beautiful, beautiful documentary film called Rivers And Tides took viewers into Goldsworthy's world. Hopefully you saw it. When that film was basically taking over San Francisco (it was at the Roxie for a loooong time), we got many requests for the soundtrack, which didn't yet exist. We knew though that if it ever did come out, we'd sell a ton. Composed by the amazing Mr. Fred Frith, it was a big part of the film's appeal, no mean feat considering that the visuals were so great already. And now at last, we're happy to announce, here it is, the highly anticipated soundtrack to Rivers And Tides. And yes, it is as good as you remember it -- not some uninspired background music this! The album draws you in immediately, the main melodic theme slipping out effortlessly within the first 30 seconds of the album and repeated throughout. Running water gives way to highpitched soprano sax only to be subsumed under the surface of Frith's calm, stilling guitar, plucked Brazilian berimbao, and other, droning ethnic instrumentation. Tension and calm ebb and flow like, er, the tide. The reed instruments interweave, sprightly and evocative. Even if you haven't seen the film, this soundtrack rates as major highlight of one of our favorite experimental composer's ouevre. Highly, highly recommended!
The packaging is also gorgeous as per Winter & Winter's norm, with heavy duty digipak, letterpressed cover, and full color multipanelled foldouts of Goldworthy's works.
We first discovered the oddly monikered Frkse (pronounced 'forks' we think?) via aQ pal Matt, one half of industrial doomdirgedrone duo Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead, who was raving about this lp, and got some from the 'band' to pass on to aQ. It was suggested to us, that anyone who loved the weirdo power electronic abstract industrial weirdness of former Record Of The Week-ers Will Over Matter, would also dig Frkse, which was definitely enough for us, but barely prepared us for what Frkse was really all about. A one man band / mad scientist / audio alchemist, who takes loops and rhythms, weird murky samples, and all manner of noise, hiss and whir and hum, and deftly arranges them into strangely robotic grooves, android symphonies of rhythm and textures, sounding at times like some impossible hybrid of Pierre Bastien, Philip Jeck, Thomas Brinkmann, and Strotter Inst. There's the warped warble of experimental turntablism, the lush hazy washed out textures of that sort of blurred ambience, and the rhythms and grooves all sound very machinelike, as if Frkse simply built an army of machines to do his bidding, that bidding just so happening to be creating these stripped down minimal loopscapes and tripped out abstract constructs.
Each track here seems cobbled together from building block like sonic elements, a loping beat, a strange detuned strum, a disembodied melody, a whirring buzz, all strung together into an ingenious series arrangement that manages to be impossible catchy and mesmerizing, even at its most minimal.
Robotic loops churning through clouds of hiss and buzz, a woozy rhythmic drag, like some strange melted tape 33 rpm jams spinning at 16rpm, the sounds saturated and warm, lush in the way only 4 track tape hiss and old busted analog machinery can be, it's hard not to imagine Frkse's strange underground lair, dusty piles of corroded equipment, nothing grounded or properly shielded, arcs of electricity leaping between various hand built implements, the vast array of buzzes and strains of hiss, carefully cataloged to be used later, and to perhaps be mixed with other separate strains, creating whole new breeds of low fidelity noise. And for all its raw primitivism, each track tends to reveal gorgeous expanses of hissy, buzz drenched minimal mesmer, like a steam punk android Steve Reich, tracks peppered with sudden bursts of almost jungle like drumming, which upon closer examination reveals themselves to be simply endless rhythmic loops piled atop one another, in such a way, that they create glorious cascades of kinetic rhythms.
At times it's like a home brewed, post industrial minimal techno, at others, it's a thick caustic almost shoegazey blacknoise blur, and still others a noise drenched abstract electronica. The sound constantly shifting, a burst of gristled crumbling industrial churn will transform into a stretch of mournful almost Slint like minimalism, gradually expanding into a loping post rock drift, all skitter and stutter, unwinding hypnotically like a super stripped down lo-fi This Heat, everything caked in a dusty patina of chordal hum, a glorious maddeningly mesmerizing collection of robo-rhythms and psych-kraut dirgery, of hazy soft focus loop-grooves and tranced out motorik mesmer. And yeah, fans of Will Over Matter will flip, fans of M Ax Noi Mach too, but even more so, folks into haunting low fidelity experimental loopscapery: Jeck, Strotter, Caretaker, Bastien, Tim Hecker, Belong and the like.
SUPER LIMITED!!! Housed in hand silk screeened / hand stamped covers with a photocopied insert.
We first discovered Ben Frost on, of all places, a dubstep comp. It definitely worked, this long brooding chunk of creeped out electronic dronemusic plopped down right between to stuttery stripped down dubbed out jams. It quickly became our favorite track on that disc, and got us to hunt down his full length, Theory Of Machines, which was just as good as that track. A strange assemblage of mysterious psych jams and minimal techno, drones and glitchy electronica, but all shot through with a mysterious darkness, that seemed to infuse every track with a bit of malevolence.
But if that record was dark and mysterious, then his new one, By The Throat, is downright terrifying. Who knew electronic music could be this harrowing, this epic and intense?! Mixing organic instruments, field recordings (lots of wolf howls and growls) and fucked up glitched out electronics, Frost has conjured up an incredible cinematic electronic dronemusic masterpiece. Sounds like hyperbole, but it's not. This record is amazing, playing out like a soundtrack to some lost-in-the-woods Italian horror film, pianos and strings, dense swells of static, the aforementioned wolves, all wound into tense soundscaped vignettes, each one rife with tension, and emotion, and a sprawling darkness.
The opening track is worth the price of admission alone, a series of slow building sonic swells, each a wall of crumbling distorted hiss, throbbing over a minimal stretch of subtle glitch and muted melody, the tones are jagged and sharp, the melodies are fragmented and minor key, bits of acoustic guitar drift over the squalls, ghostlike, while beneath, thick ominous low end rumbles and whirs. It's like a more electronic, more minimal, and much darker Godspeed.
That track segues right into "The Carpathians", where the wolves make their first appearance, howling over Bernard Hermann like strings, their growls providing seriously scary low end, the baying matched by the mournful melodies, it's easy to imagine being lost in the snow, miles away from civilization, wandering through the dark, the night filled with the howling of wolves.
The whole record really does play out like a soundtrack, each track evoking a certain mood, "O God Protect Me" is all clipped abstract rhythms and muted crystalline melody, soft glitches and distant beeps, pretty and melancholy and subtly ominous, while "Hibakusja", which starts out with a simple guitar melody and what sounds like the moan of horns, becomes the scariest track on the record, the wolves growling processed into fucked up glitched low end stutters, that original opening guitar remains, but beneath those fucked up grinding glitchy growls, totally intense, before becoming more and more staticky and abstract.
If there's not a movie, someone needs to make it NOW. The rest of the record evokes still more strange territory, skipped Jeck-like loopscapes, all glitchy and tense, the skipping records offering up snippets that on their own would be fairly haunting and mysterious, but recontextualized become something even more, thick swells of buzzing cellos and harmonized voices transformed into massive crumbling walls of sound, various melodies and elements resurfacing throughout, especially a main theme that seems to define the record, and sounds like a simple melody, but here is infused with the terror and fear of the surrounding sounds, long stretches of layered high end shimmer, more glitched out electronic minimalism, again, all rife with tension, with a cinematic weight, that makes this record sound like so much more than just a collection of songs and sounds.
Gorgeous cover art too, all reflective inks on a matte background, all images of snow and wolves and empty landscapes, the spare frostbitten white wasteland, where the seemingly imaginary events described by the sounds on By The Throat could have taken place. Intense and amazing.
The one, the only, the...fucking...Champs! After three years, finally we get their second album (called "IV" on account of the couple of cassette releases that preceded "III"). Ok. Here's the run down, for those who do and who don't know the Champs (and to know them is to love them): they're a trio, they have two guitarists very interested in harmonies, but no bassist, they have song titles like "These Glyphs Are Dusty" and "Thor Is Like Immortal", they play metal but pass it off as indie rock in order to be popular (hey, they're on Fucking Drag City), and they are primarily an instrumental band. Oh, and they have lots of self-imposed problems with their name, always worried about being confused with those "Tequila" oldsters. This time, they're the FUCKING Champs (I prefer: The C'fuckin'hamps myself), but you've probably run across that amazing "III" record by C4AMP5, it's the same band of course. So, how's the new album? Well, it rules. It's a lot shorter than "III" (which was a double LP for goshsakes) at 38 minutes, and pretty much each and every one of those minutes is packed with Thin Lizzy/Maiden/Metallica/Van Halen lovin' genius. There's a lot less of the techno keyboard interludes that they did on "III", this has its gentle moments but none of that Trans Am-ish stuff. (Although it is on current heavy rotation in Windy's 1980 Firebird Trans Am, hey! ) It's also a bit poppier, on the whole. And in another brilliant move the Champs make you wait until the very last song ("Extra Man") to hear vocals. Drummer Tim Soete's vocals and the catchiness of the tune are certainly manifestations of their Thin Lizzy worship, but, being the Champs, even this vocal cut has a lot of instrumental sections, including a lengthy bit in the middle that seems dropped in from a hypothetical black metal math rock record. You'll be playing it over and over again, along with the rest of the disc. The Champs are probably the best (=least boring) post-rock band in the world, 'cause they're in fact a METAL band.
(And let's face it guys, if you're not metal, then you're a novelty act...but if one indie rock kid gets into Thin Lizzy or Carcass 'cause of The Champs, then more power to 'em!) Recommended, if you hadn't guessed! The perfect back-to-school rock soundtrack.
Following the digital obfuscation of public domain recordings found on his "Frequency Lib" album, Stephan Mathieu presents his "Edits" series, dramatic remixes of his contemporaries' work under the Full Swing moniker. Originally, these edits of Laub, Kit Clayton, Antenne, Autopoesies, Raumgestaltung Eins, Ekkehard Ehlers, Monolake, Yo La Tengo (!), and Akira Rabelais were released as a series of 10" on Kit Clayton's Orthlorng Musork label, and now have been collected conveniently on one CD. What is immediately striking about this album is how strong and how unique Mathieu's signature sound is becoming. While the archetypal application of laptop DSP synthesis ends up tainted by antiseptic, clinical, or cold tones, Mathieu manages to wrap all of his digital pixelations in a dreamy, warmly crackling, and wholly inviting atmosphere, not unlike the beloved Aphex Twin album "Selected Ambient Works Vol II."
For the Laub remix, Mathieu centers his recontextualization around one of Laub's lilting synth melodies, which slowly loops through flickering wisps of static, hushed drones, and occasional vocal interjections from Antye Greie-Fuchs, whose Bjorkish voice collapses pixel by pixel. For both Monolake and Kit Clayton, Mathieu re-arranges the original Chain Reaction pulse into deep low end fluctuations, amidst fractilized clatter. The work of Raungestaltung Eins has been stripped down to the root frequencies, sounding like a downpitched morse code transmission, with hyper-pointillistic surface noise crackle and time-stretched drones. Of all of the remixes, the Akira Rabelais reworking of a Carte piano study is the least deconstructed, by overdubbing subtle modulations of Rabelais shimmer and vibrato into a beautifully spun web of spindly tonalities.
While Mathieu's work may hint at the discourses of ownership in a digital landscape since he has chosen to develop his sound almost exclusively through pre-existing work, his music ranks way up at the top the increasingly prolific laptop community alongside Fennesz, Carsten Nicolai, and Stilluppsteypa. "Edits" will undoubtedly rank as one of the best electronic record of 2002.
This has to be one of the most anticipated black metal releases of the year, especially around here considering how much we LOVED the last Funeral Mist, Salvation, which managed to be blazing fast and technical but at the same time super heavy and well produced, none of the heft sacrificed for speed or buzz. Most definitely giving Deathspell Omega and Katharsis some serious competition. But Funeral Mist sort of dropped off the map, with mainman Arioch dedicating all his time to his other band, Marduk.
The with very little warning, word got out that there was a new Funeral Mist, and almost as quickly people started weighing in, most proclaiming Marantha to be shit, many bandying about words like 'nu-metal' to describe their sound, comparing them to Dimmu Borgir and Cradle Of Filth. Which more than anything had us dying to hear it.
We're happy to report, that while there's definitely a serious sea change in FM's sound, and they're definitely experimenting A LOT, they still destroy, and anyone who loved Salvation will most likely find much to dig here. Take record opener "Sword Of Faith": after some strange field recordings, a man screaming "It's the plague, it's the blood of Jesus!", tolling bells, strange beastly grunts, the band explodes into a burst of frenzied buzzing that to these ears sounds as good as anything on Salvation. Plenty of warped Deathspell style riffage, furious lightning fast drumming, some soaring Nordic style melody, the vocals seems to be the main difference, much louder in the mix, much gruntier and howly, less black metal shriek more guttural and almost hardcore sounding, the music around it sways and swells, slipping from doomy plod to insane lightspeed riffing, the band locked into intense mathmetal workouts, the whole sound dizzying and nearly overwhelming, the vocals getting a bit pirate-y here and there, but that just adds to the madness, if the whole record sounded like this, no one would be complaining, or at the very least they'd complain that the band hadn't progressed, but then comes "White Stone" and all bets are off.
Hard to even explain, the track begins with some tinny distorted riff, which gives way to a lurching dramatic doom, that sounds more Birthday Party or Swans than black metal, but then the guitars and the kick drum lock into a strange muted pulse, chugging away over near constant amp buzz, the vocals are WAY present, loud in the mix, backed up by weird chanting, the overall feel is gothic, almost industrial, but it's weird and twisted and black enough that it pretty much seals the deal for us. This record rules. Any black metal record that has the true grim hordes in an uproar must be doing something right.
But that bit of weirdness only lasts 4 minutes, and we're immediately thrust back into some seriously swirling sonic chaos called "Jesus Saves!", everything frantic and on the verge of total collapse, the vocals bizarre, almost Popeye-esque at times, growling over brief stretches of tranquility, sometimes slipping into hysterical howls, at one point the guitars actually get LOUDER, as in the sound of the whole record is suddenly bumped up making for some really strange dynamics, before the band slip back into some sort of brittle riffing, doomy drumming distant chanting and those monstrous growly vocals, and then inexplicably, the metal fades out, letting the last 3 minutes of the song play out as some strange almost looped sounding folk.
Minus that one track, it's really hard to see what people have been complaining about. This is some seriously twisted and heavy shit, the arrangements much more varied for sure, the vocals most definitely bizarre, but the music is just mindblowing, the riffs killer, with some awesomely fucked production, like during "A New Light" when the tape seems to melt leaving just the vocals, doused in some weird effects, making them sound like some sort of processed synth, before the song explodes again, only to slip into a weird plodding midtempo a few moments later, the drums beneath an angelic sounding choir while the vocals grunt and groan. Then there's "Blessed Curse", at nearly 12 minutes, all midtempo pound, and soaring minor key guitars, and trombone or trumpet part way through, making the band sound a bit like a blackened Beyond Dawn, the effect is awesome, haunting, ghostly, makes it seem less weird that Arioch's other band Marduk does a pretty killer Woven Hand cover. We can only imagine it sounds a little like this.
The last three songs offer up more of the same, that freaked out furious tangled blackness, rife with all sorts of what-the-fuck parts, some really bizarre almost Eastern pop sounding vocals dropped right into a swirl of black riffing, long stretches of gloomy almost new wave sounding trudge, Swans like riffing, tortured vocals, lots of creepy atmospherics, all culminating in a strange orchestral outro, timpani's and horns, dramatic and mysterious like some strange Bernard Hermann score.
Fuck the haters. The more we listen to this, the better it gets, and the weirder it gets, not just the riffs, but some of the fucked up parts and the weird effects have gotten stuck in out heads, this is some awesomely progressive, damaged and demented blackened genius, once we got into it, and sort of let it all sink in, we found ourselves practically unable to listen to anything else, so we're hereby declaring this as a contender for black metal record of the year. You have been warned.
We talk a good game about different black metal bands being the weirdest or most fucked up, the most damaged, even the most retarded, and there are plenty of bands vying for that top spot, whether they know it or not. But the count is finally in. and Furze are the hands down winner. This latest blast of whatthefuck grimness proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Let us count the ways. This new record is in fact TWO new records, making the full title of the album UTD: Beneath The Odd-Edge Sounds Of The Twilight Contract Of The Black Fascist / The Wealth Of The Penetration In The Abstract Paradigms Of Satan. Phew. Then there's the song titles: "Demonic Order In The Eternal Fascist's Hall", "Beneath The Wings Of The Black Vomit Above", "Deep In The Pot Of Fresh Antipodal Weave"... and it only gets stranger. Besides the baffling lyrics inside there is also a warning: "Don't stop the Furzement! 'Furze' is the name of the blade on The Reaper's scythe. Furze is the one and only trademark of the one and only Reaper, made (that vibration in the whole wide world called) "music" !!! That fire which burns (Candlelight) and that which penetrates golden walls by organic thorns (Furze) supports to take heed approach the Reaper." Indeed. Then there is a completely confusing thanks list, some truly strange iconography, and finally the center panels of the booklet are simply an advertisement for Furze's other two albums (because apparently the original artwork, featuring a drawing of Jesus fucking Mohammed, was just too shocking). Alrightee then. All of that would be a bunch of pretentious crap, if the music didn't sound just as fucked up and demented. But it does, maybe even moreso.
It's hard to even explain what this sounds like, it is obviously black metal, lots of buzz, loads of distortion, blast beats, growled shrieked vocals, but every one of those elements is totally tweaked. The guitars first and foremost, tinny and razor sharp, slippery and all tangled up, impossibly convoluted riffs, produced in some weird way that allows the guitar to go from ear piercingly loud to murky and muddy, often in the same phrase. Then there are the drums, insane and splattery, blasting and octopoidal, sometimes a blast way down in the mix, sometimes a stumbling fill spilling out all over the next part. The vocals are similarly damaged, shrieking, growling, mumbling, howling, sometimes super distorted, sometimes sounding like they are being shrieked from a hundred yards away, sometimes it sounds like they are being spat right in your ear. And the production?! Holy fuck, drums explode swallowing the rest of the sound whole, before the song eventually blasts forth, the guitars duel with the vocals, a damaged dance to the death, it's almost like Faxed Head producing Benighted Leams, with occasional guitar contributions from Greg Ginn and a doped to the gills Yngvie, mix in some drunken fretless bass and some underwater yodeling vocal bits and some freaked out psychedelic guitar skree, all played through a tiny practice amp. The sounds, and the recording, and the concept, is it possible that this is all just accidental? No, it's TOO weird, too bafflingly obtuse, too perfectly skewed -- this guy is a genius. And the thing is that even within all this confusional sonic damage and demented blackness, these songs are catchy, really catchy, how can some convoluted buzzing slippery buzz saw riff get stuck permanently in your head? Or some shrieked line of obtuse black poetry? Only Woe J. Reaper, the man who is Furze, knows for sure.
So completely and utterly recommended. Black metal record of the year for sure...
Yowza. Hells to the yeah. It's Fuzz II time. If'n you don't know, Fuzz is the stomping heavy psych power trio featuring garage pop wunderkind Ty Segall (playing the flailin' drums) as well as the Ty Segall Band's Charlie Moothart, wailin' on the guitar, and rounding out the trio, Chad from The Meatbodies is now their bassist. After a couple brilliant singles, Fuzz released their eponymous debut in 2013, blowing us away and earning Record Of The Week honors at aQ. Now they're back... with another ROTW, natch!
Fuzz II means the next level of Fuzz. Advanced Fuzz. Definitely more Fuzz - there's 14 tracks here, some short blasts, but others mega jams - including a lengthy, 13+ minute album-ending epic freakout that is apparently titled "II" (yes, a numbered album with a title track, brilliant!).
Of course, if you call your band Fuzz, that's what you gotta deliver. And they sure do, job number one. Lots and lots of fuzz, check. Moothart again channels the likes Leigh Stephens, Randy Holden, Martin Weaver, and other legendary axe-wielding fuzzmasters of yesteryear. Ye olde stoner rawkin' Blue Cheery, Black Sabbathy heaviness is a big part of the Fuzz equation, as are the garage psych pop smarts Segall is known for on all his other records. For us, it's a killer combination!! And this time 'round their longhaired retro-proto-metal riffage is maybe a mite more proggy and complexified, more Sir Lord Baltimore baroque than Blue Cheer basic. Well, they still turn the air into cottage cheese, but there's a whiff of some fancy camembert in there too, with a couple tracks bringing in some orchestrated sounds (must be by the guest credited with "InterstellarStringSweeping"). And there's keys and synths and stuff too. Not that it's nothing but muscular hard-hitting rock action though, sounding like some lost late '60s / early '70s classic that just couldn't be, 'cause it's so grindingly badass and freshly in your melted face.
We're digging it big time, all the freaky sounds and hooks and riffs and FUZZ. Ty Segall never lets us down, and as serious heavy psych lovers, Fuzz is one of our favorite projects of his. For fans of all its proto-metal inspirations like Sir Lord Baltimore, as well as the music of Ty's pal King Tuff, and even moreso, King Tuff-related band Witch.
At first blush, the debut full length from local trio Fuzz, sounds a lot like a Ty Segall record, as it should, since Fuzz is actually Segall's new band, which was originally described to us as sounding like Ty Segall crossed with Black Sabbath. Needless to say we were pretty skeptical at first, but their preceding 7"s proved the point, and now that the highly anticipated full-length is here, goddamn if this isn't some seriously heavy garage-psych proto-metal retro-rock radness! In fact, you'd most certainly be forgiven for thinking this was in fact some genuine lost proto metal artifact, the songs, the sound, the guitar tone, all harken back to the classics, that sound we here at aQ obsess over, in fact, if we were trying to describe Fuzz with some succinct rock band math, we might replace Sabbath above with groups like Power Of Zeus, or Dust, or the Groundhogs, cuz it definitely has that old school hard rocking vibe BIG TIME.
The interesting thing about Fuzz, is that while Segall is still singing, he's now behind the kit, and is actually a seriously kick ass drummer, very much in the style of say Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell, busy and loose, slipping from wild octopoidal freakouts to locked in hard rocking grooves and back again, while guitarist Charlie Moothart (who also plays in Segall's band, as well as the Moonhearts) proves himself to be a serious shredder, who should be getting the same sort of love that dudes like Isaiah Mitchell does, in fact fans of Earthless will find much of the jamming here right up their alley, with Moothart unfurling, crumbling, blown out heavy rock riffs, alongside wild blasts of mega shred psychedelic freakout. And while most of the songs her are loose and jammy, with much of the record sounding like different parts of the same mega-jam, rife with lots of space, and stop/starts, stretches of amp hum, lurching abstract almost doomy breakdowns, even some almost-drum solo bits, a few pop gems surface here and there, like "What's In My Head", which would have sounded right at home on any of the Segall record proper, so catchy, with a hook to die for, but still somehow fitting into Fuzz's retro fuzz-rock soundworld. That sound in full effect on "Loose Sutures" which is about as loose as these guys get, the midsong breakdown total heavy seventies psych-prog radness, complete with fuzzed out bass solo, killer drumming, and when the main riff comes back in, SO HEAVY. The record finishes of with three more blasts of blown out riff heavy psych rock that kills, lurching from fuzzy lope, to full on near metallic crunch, to total classic old school heavy psych, and as much as we love pretty much everything Segall has done, this Fuzz record is fast becoming our favorite.
Killer psychedelic space dragon cover art, the lp includes a download code as well!
Well it's about time!!!!!! After years of wallowing in the hazy convoluted mists of legend, hearsay, and hipster influence, only to be obtained through ultra expensive imports, rare bootlegs, or ripped vinyl blogs, this long unavailable but hugely influential work by Serge Gainsbourg finally sees its first domestic reissue almost forty years after its scandalous release.
You won't need a translator to understand the sublime perversity at the heart of this concept record, arguably Gainsbourg's most accomplished full studio album. Released in 1971, Histoire De Melody Nelson is a seven song suite about an underage English nymphet (the titular Melody Nelson) and the wealthy lecherous older Frenchman who, after nearly running over her in his Rolls Royce, takes her in, falls in love and eventually deflowers her. And of course, like most love stories, there is a tragic climax. While the story is largely lifted from Kubrick's cinematic version of Lolita, the concept was undertaken in actuality as a symphonic love letter to Jane Birken, the British actress and singer (she sings the part of Melody). Though, not underage when they began their affair, she was twenty years younger than Serge, and their relationship became controversial with the release of their 1969 duet "Je t'aime....mon non plus" (originally recorded with Brigitte Bardot) with its sounds of a simulated female orgasm.
But Melody Nelson is not only Gainsbourg's finest moment, its musical reputation would be nothing without the orchestral arrangements and progressive grooves of Jean-Claude Vannier (see our review of L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, to get some highly praised background). The underlying score is less obviously song-oriented and more atmospheric than previous Gainsbourg outings, yet deceptively simple. The opening and closing tracks each at nearly eight minutes mirror each other with a sinewy descending bass groove and classic drum breaks (sampled heavily by De La Soul, David Holmes and Dan The Automator), which set the stage for acid-y guitar fills, swooning strings and Serge's own seductive speak-singing. The closing track ("Cargo Culte") ups the transcendent quality of the climax by adding a mass choir and full orchestra to the swirling tower of sound. In between these two tracks are shorter but artfully arranged pieces of folk-groove, French chanson, acid rock, and cinematic sonic bliss that move the story forward. It's one of those records that slowly grabs you, lures you into its spell, and eventually hooks you, so you'll want to keep listening to it over and over.
Though it was a flop on its initial release - Gainsbourg was largely a singles artist before this point, and the leap from that to concept album, especially one of this perverse nature, was perhaps too wide for French audiences - Histoire De Melody Nelson has gained a significant cult following over the years, perhaps reaching its greatest influence in the nineties with bands like Portishead (Dummy), Pulp (This is Hardcore), Massive Attack (Protection), Radiohead (The Bends), Air (Moon Safari), Blonde Redhead (Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons) and Beck (Sea Change), nearly lifting the basic sonic template of this album wholesale.
This awesome, nicely packaged reissue comes with a beautiful booklet of drawings, essays and interviews, outlining not only the full extent of the making of this amazing work, but charting its larger cultural impact as well.
Reissue of the year!
This is the first we've heard from Alastair Galbraith since a couple years ago, when he teamed up with Matt De Gennaro for an album of Ur-drone we absoultely loved, gorgeous bowed piano and violin strings, shimmering and shuddering. Really dreamy and mesmerising. And it seems like Galbraith is continuing even further in his trajectory away from song based forms and toward more free and abstract sound. And we couldn't be happier. While we love everything this man does, our hearts belong to the drone. For these two lengthy tracks, Galbraith teams up with fellow Kiwi legend Constantine Karlis, drummer for High Dependency Unit, to craft delicate and spidery abstract soundscapes of buzzing, scraping and keening violin, treated guitar loops, and scattered free drumming. The result is absolutely divine. Spare and spacious, the violin occsionally hints at eastern sounding ragas, playing almost-melodies, before slipping back into wavery drones, squeaky and swaying, while the huge, cavernous sounding drums are splattered throughout, sometimes a basic primal rhythm, sometimes barely-there flourishes, and sometimes a full on squall of percussive brutality. At it's free-est it's a bit like Angus Maclise or Tony Conrad backing up a free jazz drummer, when proceedings get a little more structured, you can almost imagine Damon Che of Don Caballero or...maybe even...ME (I tried to think of another drummer but Allan made me put me, Andee Connors), drumming for Lamonte Young or John Cale. So highly recommended. A new favorite late night record for the drone-prone among us.
Oh, we love art made from glitches, errors, surface noise, smudges, corrosives, and just plain mistakes. Just look at how we've championed Caretaker, Phillip Jeck, William Basinksi, and Oval, and how many times we applaud something for sounding antiquated, garbbled, warbling, or just utterly fucked-up. Which brings us to New York based sound artist Richard Garet and his atypical electronic systems involving lo-tech circuits, radio transmitters, and dismembered speaker cones, we seem to have found yet another artist whose beautiful demolition deserves our attention.
Back in 2011, Garet presented an audio-visual live piece at SFMOMA, which involved a wildly stroboscopic, flickering projection that triggered jittery noises from his table top of toy walkie-talkies and bits of circuitry. With the potential for gnarled interference and ugly distortion that the cross-currents and bare wires might impart, Garet's performance was somehow instead jaw-droppingly elegant, drawing a taut line from minimalist drone & crackle through John Duncan's psychoacoustics and back to David Tudor's Rainforest excursions, but shifted just slightly towards a hauntological mesmerism with ghosts of melody seemingly buried within. Areal works in the same way as that piece; and dates back to a different installation Garet presented at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he flooded the space with fog and shot color-field projections into the space swirling together with the eeriely divine drones. The music on the disc in all likelihood is a distillation of the Issue Project Room extravaganza, heightening the drama and intensity of the sounds without having the benefit of a fog and light show. Garet cites radio as a source material for Areal, but damn if he doesn't get the device to sound like a Rhys Chatham guitar symphony, a field of chromatic density and shivering heaviness blossoming from supple tones and crunched noises. The album's lush atmospherics wax and wane with variable degrees of intensity, with ethereal drifts collapsing into scrabbled texture later to be engulfed in a harmonic cauldron of buzzing thrum. Garet reveals his hand at the end of the 50-minute composition with some unkempt radio interference that snaps to a sudden conclusion. You may hear bits of Tim Hecker and bits of Phill Niblock in Garet's work. Everything Garet has done up until this album has been very good; but with Areal, he's taken it to another level. Absolutely required dronemuzik listening!
Not sure where to even start with this one. Everyone here at aQ, heck almost everyone we know loves Gas, the blissed out minimal ambient techno project of Mr. Wolfgang Voigt. But don't let the word 'techno' scare you off, as the music of Gas can easily win over the most ardent techno-phobes. The techno element in the sound of Gas is only a tiny part of Voigt's magical soundworld, often just a shadow, a distant heartbeat like pulse, sometimes more pronounced, but usually just a murky throb or a rhythmic murmur, the music of Gas is Gauzy and shimmery, blurred and softly buzzy, it's like an even more dreamlike Oval, or perhaps Porter Ricks crossed with Labradford, or Tim Hecker recording a record for Chain Reaction. When we talk about Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, Gas is the template, that which we measure all other 'pop ambience' by. The sound is at once ethereal and intimate, haunting and mysterious, lush and expansive, the beatless tracks drift endlessly, each a divine blur of soft chordal whir and looped effervescence, the more beat heavy tracks, retain that same washed out otherworldliness, but manage to infuse them with a subtle, barely-there groove, sometimes adding gritty crackle, or subtle dubbed out delay, but always sounding light and airy, weightless and darkly blissful. We once described Gas as sounding like being adrift in a sea of electronics, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. And we're not sure if we could describe it better. But we'll try.
Nah Und Fern collects all four Gas albums, all of which have been out of print for ages: Gas, Zauberberg, Konigforst and Pop. And when we were first preparing to review this set, we were all ready to describe Gas' sonic arc, from the more overtly techno debut, to the much more ambient and ethereal final album. But on returning to the s/t debut, we discovered that the sound of Gas changed very little over the course of 4 albums, instead, each is like a movement in a massive symphony of gloriously murky minimalism.
The self titled debut deftly balances pure ambience with some of the most propulsive Gas tracks, including a 14 minute epic that seems to be assembled from a Chariots Of Fire loop, but in the hands of Voigt, it's transformed into something otherworldly. It is techno, but not for dancing, for many of us Gas serves the same purpose as dronemusic, sounds to lull you to sleep, to allow you to drift off, to disengage and let your mind float freely, led by your ears, entranced as they are by the beautiful shimmer and motorik soft focus propulsion of Gas.
As much as we love all of these records, the two middle records Zauberberg and Konigforst make up the heart of this Gas box. Both luminous and exuberant, yet subdued and melancholic. Sedate technotic pulses beneath wind swept drones, expansive orchestral sprawls burnished to an exquisite golden luster. Voigt's subtle dub techniques on these two discs coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, realizing a fantasy fusion of Wagner's teutonic vigor and a disembodied dancefloor drone.
The final disc, Pop, is in fact the poppiest, or so we always believed, but in context with the other three discs, we are once again surprised by how consistent the Gas sound remained, while still managing to subtly expand on the sound Voigt virtually created and perfected over the course of the first three full lengths. Much like the original cover art, Pop is the metaphorical sound of the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistency of Voigt's monophunk beats. Where the earlier works were dark haunts wherein deep fluid ambience topped the nonstop pulsating rhythms, Pop is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's surreal soundworld of hypnodub washes. The lost beat resurfaces finally on the last track which is a beautiful looped repetition of the previous ambient modulations, but subtly and gracefully merged with a muted, insistent underwater dancefloor throb. Breathtaking.
A modern minimalist electronic masterpiece, four stunning parts of one majestic whole, finally united into one magnum opus, spanning years, yet sounding to our ears, utterly timeless.
Each disc is packaged in a full color sleeve, along with four inserts, all adorned with blue and green tinted forestscapes, and all housed in a gorgeous matte finished cardboard box, also adorned with a similar image, and the letters G A S embossed across the top of the box.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Recording under the Gas moniker, 'Pop' is yet another exceptional album in the continuous stream of Wolfgang Voigt's techno structuralism. While he has recorded under a number of pseudonyms (Mike Ink, All, Studio 1, M:I:5, etc) to varying degrees of success, the Gas recordings have clearly been his strongest work. This is especially true when Voigt applies one of the odd (and few) metaphors to his work, as the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistancy of his monophunk beats. Where the trilogy of "Zauberberg," "Oktember", and "Konigforst" were dark haunts where deep fluid ambience tops the nonstop
pulsating rhythm, "Pop" is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's penchant for hypnodub washes. For those longing for the beat of Voigt, simply wait for the last track which is beautiful repetition of the previous ambient modulation, with his insistent techno. It's a trick he used on the 20' to 2000 series, and it's trick I hope he uses again. Breathtaking.
Why do I keep thinking Terry Gross is going to do a special on these guys soon? Very very appealing fragmented post rock post everything that wears influences on sleeve (Fahey, bluegrass etc). It doesn't hold together all that well but then again that's always kind of been the point with Gastr del Sol. Recommended!
Before we delve into a detailed discussion of Gate's latest release, let me just say that this album is gorgeous, droney and dreamy and about as un-noisy as noise gets, with chirping electronic whale-call blips and bleeps and luscious gossamer washes of
Michael Morley's output in the New Zealand free-noise / avant-rock ensembles Gate and AQ-faves The Dead C has always been purposefully unsettling. He's primarily armed with gritty, somnambulent guitar noise and a half mumbled voice, yet "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart" offers a drastic shift in his aesthetic focus, as he has recently put down the guitar in favor of electronics. This double CD features reworkings of two previously recorded pieces, with a condensed and vastly different remix of Gate's 1999 vinyl only double album "The Lavender Head" and a recapitulation of his 1996 soundtrack to the cacophonous sound installation "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart."
For Morley, the use of electronics is not just about the technological filters and modulations offered by drum machines and synthesizers, but also the ability to recontextualize and deconstruct the sampled fragment. Morley's use of the quotation may not seem anything new in comparison to, say, Amon Tobin, until he brings the woozy melancholia and troubled combativeness of his earlier guitar-based work to these electronic compositions.
"My Dear Sweet..." is a series of electronic dirges made by collaging together various samples of contemporary electronica onto a really noisy 4-track with lots of tape hiss. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 2," Panacea's "Twisted Designs" and something resembling Biosphere or Orbital are some of Morely's sources. These are pretty simple overlappings of rhythmically synchronized loops with elements of his guitar noise phasing in and out of the mix. And on "The Lavender Head" Morley loops his patented guitar grit into abstract slow-motion warbles, forming downtempo rhythms that appear lost in a sea of lo-fi tape hiss -- something *NEVER* heard in any other electronica. Really nice!
Originally released way back in 1994, and reissued again a few years back, Gate's The Dew Line always seemed to disappear before we could get enough copies to list. Which was a shame as it still ranks as one of our favorite discs. A mesmerizing noise-pop-drone jem from the Dead C's Michael Morley, an improbable mix of NZ noise whir and skree, minimal drifting drone and lilting indie pop. Think the Dead C at their very poppiest, crossed with Sentridoh at its most minimal and raw�
Gate's Golden record was one of our favorite 'noise' records ever, and we do hear a lot of that Golden noise in this chunk of damaged deconstructed pop. Long drawn out expanses of crumbling guitars, buried-in-the-mix sad boy vocals, all very raw and lo-fi, but strangely lush and heavy in that way only blownout bedroom recordings seem to sound. It's a little like Lou Barlow if he was raised on Throbbing Gristle and Suicide instead of indie rock. Guitar jangles transformed into thick sprawling atonal riffage, verse chorus verse transformed into verse verse verse, and the vocals adding a strange sweet sadness.
Dense clouds of electronic glitch and amp buzz, the riffs more textural than melodic, long stretches of shirring lo-fi organ, mournful and almost funereal, strange haunting minimal percussion, drifting alien FX, disembodied guitars unfurling crunchy textures and barely there melodies. Much of the tracks are vocal-less haunting guitarscapes, riffs and layers, looped and repetitive, extended into grinding washed out mantras. Cyclical and gorgeously hypnotic. Which makes the tracks with vocals sound all the more poppy. Especially "Have Not", which is essentially a single, super catchy, languid distorted guitar riff, looped and cyclical, minor key, sounding a bit like a slowed down drum-less Rein Sanction, with drawled Neil Young / Dinosaur Jr. style double tracked vocals, laid back, emotive, and hauntingly monotone. Nearly 13 minutes long, a single riff, a subtly changing vocal line, but it's just so mysterious, sad and perfect, the whole record could easily have been a 70 minute version of this track only and we would have been just as happy...
But then we would have missed out on the melancholy minimalism of "Needed All Words", a lonely vocal line, drifting above a glacial sea of organ drone and fractured effects, or the looped stuttering industrial buzzscape of the title track, or the divine washed out crumbling grind of "Triphammer", the final song, which manages to turn 3 minutes of abstract distorted riffage, into a chunk of dark moodiness.
Way recommended. This disc is old enough that for many of you, we're probably already preaching to the converted, but if you missed out on this, here's one more chance to sink deep into Morley's mysterious musical miserablism.
And be warned, while we finally managed to get a bunch of these, it took forever, so if or when we do run out, please be prepared to be patient, since it could take a while to get more.
It was sort of inevitable that this disc would end up being an aQ record of the week. But before we tell you the strange tale of how we got to this point, how we discovered this band and this disc, let's offer up a quick, succinct, three word description that might render the rest of this rambling review moot:
CAVEMAN THIS HEAT.
Sold? We would be. Imagine Man Is The Bastard transported back to the early seventies and let loose in This Heat's Cold Storage recording studio, or take the black hypno kraut noise of former aQ record of the week, Aluk Todolo and strip it down to its bare essence, a sound based almost entirely on rhythm. A pounding, Neanderthal groove, pelted with squelches, and laced with a strangled inhuman mewling, huge chunks of grinding minimalism and long swaths of dreamy shimmering bliss, an ultra intense slab of kraut-doom power violence for sure.
The weird thing is, the first time we hear Geronimo was several years ago, when Circle came to play some shows on the West Coast, and so I (Andee) was happily drafted to drive them around, roadie for them, all that stuff. So one of the shows was at Arthurfest in LA Circle were playing with SUNNO))), in a way-too-small seated theater, based on how many angry folks were turned away (as in HUNDREDS!). I spent the whole time, running back and forth, up and down the stairs, trying to sneak as many people into the show as possible, through the emergency exit, the backstage door, every time I went back out I would run into someone who wanted me to get them inside. While this was all going on, a band started playing, and they were AMAZING. A bunch of cholo looking dudes, handkerchief headbands, all sort of just standing there, behind huge racks of busted looking equipment, making the most unholy racket, a gorgeously destructive rib cage rattling pummel, eventually I had to stop running back and forth, cuz this band was totally sucking me in, and so I just sat down on the floor and let the band's vibrations wash over me, the floor literally shaking violently with every note.
Well, we later discovered they were called Geronimo, but no one knew anything about them, and the folks waiting for Circle and SUNNO))) didn't seem to get it or be that into it at all. We never got to talk to them in the chaos of getting Circle sorted. And eventually it sort of just slipped my mind.
So flash forward two years to the end of 2007, when we highlighted that No Skull Left Unturned comp a list or two back, collecting the various offshoots of Power Violence pioneers Man Is The Bastard. And we were particularly taken with the band Sleestak, a doomy math rock variant on MITB's bassy grind, and their sound reminded us of THAT band, the one that opened for Circle back in 2005. Then we sort of randomly stumbled across this here disc, and suddenly everything clicked, THIS was the band we saw and loved so much, and whaddayaknow, Geronimo just so happens to feature folks from both Man Is The Bastard and Sleestak. And it sounds even better than I remember, heavier, groovier, way more fucked up and WAY more freaked out. So here's a song by song breakdown of this devastating chunk of brutal beauty and monstrous minimalism:
The opener, the 18 minute "Firewater", is perfectly placed to test the listener's mettle, an endless epic stretch of looped high end klaxons and choked cymbal crashes, like a metal intro stretched into an entire song. All around this constant crunch and whine, whip flurries of electronic glitch and crunch, swaths of grinding crumbling analog buzz, while beneath it all a rumbling minimal bass line lopes lazily, until about half way through, when the track suddenly switches gears, and turns super abstract, minimal smears of drone and muted feedback, LOTS of space, and huge percussive crashes spread WAY out. It's like a super minimal abstract doom. But with bits of atonal keyboard and strangled vocals. Like the rhythm section of Khanate scoring a Dario Argento movie. That soaring high end from the beginning of the track returns, along with some speaker destroying analog buzz, still spaced out around long stretches of silence, finishing off with a brief burst of intense fury, distorted vocals, thick wall of crumbling distortion, If you survive the first track, then track two, "Headdress", is your reward, a short sharp shock of rhythmic groove, it's all about the drums, a simple, killer rhythm, the drums slightly distorted, locked into a relentless loop, while all around it, malfunctioning synths and skittering shards of glitch and skree soar and swoop, until it too shifts suddenly, into a mathy breakdown, another mesmerizingly minimal and hypnotic looped drum fill, pounding its way through a sky filled with creaks and groans and whirs and garbled grinding lo-fi squelch, finishing off with another furious blast, this time a spray of super distorted bass riffing, howled ultra effected vocals, and total drum destruction.
"Spiritwalker" offers up another side of Geronimo, the strange homemade electronics muted and smeared into much softer shapes, allowed to drift and shimmer, the drums a muffled pulse, lots of low end rumble and whir, darkly droning and cinematic, thick swells of minor key melodies, over a wasteland of glitch and buzz, slow motion tribal percussion, everything wrapped in a gauze-y haze of psychedelic textures, low end murk, and abstract FX, a gorgeous soundscape, of slow black krautrock ambience. "Medicine Man" is another brief chunk of abstract doom. A simple plodding rhythm, a thick grinding rumbling low end synth, huge blasts of effects-drenched crunch, and ominous spoken vocals and shrieked demonic howls,
And then there's "Facepeeler", which begins with a propulsive drum part, a serious metallic jam, huge bass riffs, shrieked maniacal vocals, and speaker shredding, super stereo panned effects, until suddenly the song slows down into a lurching doomic plod, the drums blown out and in the red, locked into another super simple, but completely intense and relentless slow motion rhythm, again, the sky full of FX, squealing and grinding and buzzing and screeching, but now sprawled over Geronimo's angular what-the-fuck minimal math doom, are some of the most fucked up and intense vocals ever, alternately growling, roaring, howling, whispering and mewling, it sounds a bit like an industrialized Wolf Eyes-ian Oxbow, until you realize that the vocals in question belong to one David Yow, of Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid (if only Qui sounded this bad ass). The suddenly it begins to sound like some Jesus Lizard outtake, slowed down, pulled apart and run through a bank of rusted and duct taped effects. One of those songs that easily could have been stretched out to the length of a whole record. Abrasive and brutal and hateful and super intense and heavy as fuck, but somehow weirdly hooky, and impossibly catchy, it's almost like having your pain and pleasure centers swapped, so having that anvil dropped repeatedly on your head ends up feeling so so divine. Definitely the song we keep coming back to, and playing over and over and over and over...
Finally, the band finish things off with the uncharacteristically mellow "Prints Tie", wrapped around a fluid almost jazzy bassline, drifting keyboard melodies, and shuffling abstract percussion, the Neanderthal electronics are still present, but used much more sparingly, gorgeous and glimmering, a soft smeared minimal workout that almost sounds like a more lo-fi Necks. Super dreamy and darkly shimmery, and just pretty enough to almost make you forget the 47 minutes of glorious sonic punishment you just endured. Almost.
So so so recommended. The minute we threw this one, we knew, THIS WAS THE ONE. Definite contender for record of the year (and actually, since I got it in December, it WAS my record of the year for 2007, even having only had it less than a month!) Folks who dug the Aluk Todolo will for sure dig this too. Likewise if the idea of, say, Mammal doing This Heat songs sounds cool to you too. Basically anyone into brutal rhythms and abstract minimal heaviness NEEDS this...
It seems Japanese psychedelic noiserock insanity in the tradition of the good ol' Boredoms is alive and well! We're talking crazy Boredoms back in the day, at their hyperdelic height, but NOISIER. This debut album from Japanese outfit Gezan (in English, that may mean Descending, which makes sense given a close look at the cover art), unleashed over there in 2012, now gets a domestic release via Important and we gotta say, hell yeah, 'cuz Gezan rulez! Don't just take it from us - Gezan has garnered adulatory cover-blurb endorsements from the likes of Merzbow, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins) and Agata (Melt-Banana); and apparently Acid Mothers Temple guru Makato Kawabata was the one that brought 'em to the attention of Important, citing Gezan as his favorite live band in Japan. Seems like those guys all think of Gezan as nextgen torchbearers for the classic Japanoise surreal psych sound, and we're hearing it here, freshly intense and energized, dark and psychotic.
The buzzing distortodelic chaos of the aforementioned early Boredoms comes to mind right away, as leadoff track "Mishima To Kuchibeni" hoves into earshot, riding a headcaving Butthole Surfers sorta riff, warped and damaged, FX bubbling up everywhere. The in-the-red 'Tokyo Flashback' acid rock sound of psychedelic speed freak gangs like High Rise and Mainliner is obviously also deeply encoded in Gezan's DNA. And even harsher stuff, like Eye from the Boredoms' earlier noise unit Hanatarash, is touched upon here too - the industrial-strength devastation of "Kouchuu No Wakai", ferinstance, sounds like Merzbow meets Guitar Wolf! Meanwhile, the likes of "Kyoushin" channel the blackhole heaviness and lumbering, lurching feedback-drenched doomic riffery of such notorious Japanese psych-prog heavies as Zeni Geva, YBO2 and even Fushitsusha. Dang. Gezan do it all, in terms of freeform, unafraid, bold & bombastic freak flag flyin'. Never a dull moment.
You get glitched-out rhythmic cut-up shenanigans, organized screaming, spacey shoegaze warble, fractured blues, even some bleakly beautiful parts. There's often strange, sudden segues into cinematic samples, echoing whisper-voiced interludes, and distortion-bombed soundscapes. But these are structured songs, mind you, and as experimental and extended and distended as they are, there's eventual rock n' roll payoff, usually. Also, Gezan are capable of surprises all the way through to the end, treating us to the (mostly) melodic blissed out finale "Haru No Hiza", didn't see that one coming. Nice.
We've made a ton of references here to other Japanese bands - and should also mention some more, Gezan is likely also for fans of LSD-March, DMBQ, Omiode Hatoba, Up-Tight, and Boris (if they went totally nuts). But you don't have to be a Japanoise nerd to get into Gezan. Or at least, you don't have to know you're a Japanoise nerd, yet. Gezan's blown-out, blown-up brand of noisy psychedelic mayhem could and should appeal to lots of folks yet to delve into Gezan's overt antecedents. Just be into distorted, damaged, freaky, rocking WTF-ness and you'll dig this!
Hallelujah! Ghost are back! Since Drag City's simultaneous release of their Snuff Box Immanence and Tune In, Turn On, Free Tibet albums back in 1999, we hadn't heard hide nor hair of Japan's wonderful acid-folksters Ghost (unless you count their liason with Damon & Naomi). Indeed we'd begun to wonder what was up with Masaki Batoh, Michio Kurihara and crew -- we missed them! And in those four or five years, it seemed that fans of '70s inspired Japanese psychedelic music had switched their allegiance to the much more prolific Acid Mothers Temple camp led by Kawabata Makoto who emerged in the meantime. But we Ghost fans know that, as good as AMT can be, in the realm of cosmic communal Japanese hippy rock, there is no comparison. Ghost rule that particular hypnotic underworld. Depth, beauty, originality -- on all those counts they have it over AMT. Unlike the excessive pastiche of AMT, there's nothing tongue in cheek about Ghost. And as for quality control, well, you do the math.
So, needless to say, we were supremely excited to get this brand new Ghost album! The sun was sure 'tangging' the day this showed up. Word was that this might be Ghost's best album yet, and while we each have our favorites (mine's Lama Rabi Rabi, with their self-titled debut in close competition) this was immediately revealed as a contender. In short, it's freakin' great. Ghost explore some heavier, rockier, more prog-tastic directions in some of these songs, yet let their incomparable delicate psych-folk flow as well. Stirring guitar/drums workouts coexist with Batoh's fragile vocals and trembling sunshine melodies. And Terrascopic trainspotters will be interested to know that Ghost interpret songs by both Syd Barrett and the obscure '70s Dutch prog-rock act Earth & Fire, and make them completely their own. The album takes its name from the four-part, 25-minute suite that opens this disc, which ventures from lovely, hazy jazz-inflected jams to bombastic, utterly prog-rock flourishes complete with grandiose choirs. That alone is worth having waited four or five years for!
FINALLY, this long out of print, all time unanimous AQ favorite gets re-pressed and is available once again!
The Conet Project from beyond the grave!?! Perhaps that's a good way of describing this baffling, terrifying, occasionally laughable, but always compelling album. It's been out of print for a very long time, and we're pleased to see The Ghost Orchid haunting our shelves once again!
To recap, The Ghost Orchid documents instances of something called "Electronic Voice Phenomenon," the paranormal appearance of strange voices (which at times sing and speak in multiple languages) on magnetic tape when there shouldn't be any voices there at all... Respected parapsychologists have postulated that these voices are those of dead people (i.e. ghosts) or possibly of extraterrestrial origin! Unlike The Conet Project, which cross referenced the audio tracks with written information, The Ghost Orchid presents these recordings with the audio commentary of one of several researchers (Nadia Fowler, Raymond Cass, and Lief Elggren -- the Swedish performance/audio artist and a part time collaborator with the Hafler Trio), explaining the findings. These recordings are the findings of a number of parapsychologists including Dr. Konstantine Raudive, Friedrich Jurgenson, and Raymond Cass.
While there is something wholly terrifying about these recordings, there is an absurd question about these ghostly voices that we have to ask: Why are the majority of these recordings in Latvian? At any rate, The Ghost Orchid manages to be both spooky and silly, and is definitely a fascinating listen from a pure sound perspective regardless of how disturbing and/or amusing you might find the alleged sound source itself. For non sequitur pop culture reference, the sample "You are sleeping, you do not want to believe" which concludes The Smith's "The Rubber Ring" hails from an old recording made by Raudive and can be found in its entirety here. Brilliant!
At one time, the collaborative project between Michael Gira (Angels of Light / Swans) and Dan Matz (Windsor For The Derby) was called Ourselves, but the two had opted against that in favor of their names. While this may be a silly semantic decision, it
Originally released as two separate, ultra limited vinyl volumes, this sprawling psychedelic opus has finally been combined onto epic psychedelic songsuite, all on one shiny aluminum disc - which gives us a chance to make it our Record Of The Week, which was impossible before.
Unlike Gnod's more experimental electronic Presents... Dwellings & Druss lp, which we reviewed recently, Chaudelande finds the band in full on kosmiche space-psych mode, the sort of thing fans of outfits like Carlton Melton, White Hills, The Heads, 3 Leafs and the like, will flip for, assuming those folks aren't already heavily into Gnod. Which many probably are, as we've raved about these UK psychedelic space rockers on past lists, and who we first discovered via a split with NY space rockers White Hills. Gnod would later go on to share a split with another aQ fave, Bong, as well as releasing a clutch of their own records, which as you might assume, had all the space/psych rock fans around here flipping their lids. Chaudelande, originally released in 2012 and split into two separate 12"s, is another heady concoction of heavy psych rock bliss, swaggery space rock crunch and shimmery lysergic sonic drift, the first three tracks, originally volume 1, are sprawling epics, the shortest a little over eight minutes, the longest originally taking up a whole side at 17+. Where on past records, Gnod did a lit of drifting and spaced out shimmering, the opening track here wastes no time, well, okay, a little time spent spaced out and ethereal, before exploding into some full on space rock stomp, equal parts Hawkwind, the Stooges, heck, even a little Monster Magnet, the drums are massive, pounding away, the guitars thick, and crumbling with distortion, swaggery and spacey and seriously psychedelic, everything wreathed in swirls of effects and swaths of blurred buzz, the vocals a reverbed yelp, the bass thick and slithery, the whole thing on the edge of slipping into full on freakout. Sort of mirroring the sonic shift White Hills displayed on their most recent record. The second track dials it back a bit, drifting into a more Moon Duo-ish territory, that sort of mesmerizingly cyclical propulsive space-kraut, but Gnod mix it up by adding some thick grinding bass buzz, and clouds of constantly shifting FX, not to mention layer upon layer of swirling guitar murk and celestial shimmer, and while it does go through several permutations, at its heart, it's a seriously heady slab of blissed out zoner psych.
But then the third track displays a whole different side of Gnod's sound, opening up with some fluttery folk, wreathed in field recordings of bird calls, and all manner of voices, as if it were some hippy commune fireside jam. The sound darkens considerably, a low slung bass line driving some skeletal rhythmic shuffle, the sound hazy and fuzzy and droned out, but peppered with bursts of incendiary guitar noise, wild squalls of psychedelic freakout, wheezing organs, eventually exploding into a pounding noise jam second half, that finds the sound cranked, all the pedals pushed to their limited, the whole thing held together by a raga like buzz, heady and heavy and gloriously noisily spaced out.
The second half of the cd, originally volume 2, begins very tranquilly, with some bells and chimes, a fluttering flute, bird song, and folky chanted vocals, all driven by a simple plodding rhythm, very old timey and ritualistic sounding, but then a few minutes in, the song gradually splinters into a murky, pounding punkish churn, that sounds almost industrial, like a space rockier version of Crash Worship, tribal drumming beneath chugging crumblingly distorted riffage, wrapped in keening synth drones, and pocked with yelped reverby vox, the vibe is very Circle-like, a sort of Neanderthal space-psych hypno-rock, that does eventually transform into something that sounds almost like death rock, or some sort of goth-psych, that shuffling almost disco-y rhythm, deep crooned vocals, slithery basslines, but all nearly obscured by sheets of wah wah-ed guitar noise, pretty goddamn weird, but also one of our favorite Gnod jams yet! The follow up track Entrance, is a similarly minded sprawl of psychedelic hypno-rock. churning, pulsing, pounding, the drumming much busier, but still seriously motorik, the sound growing gradually more intense and heavy and blown out, a sort of space-punk sprawl, and the sort of mesmerizingly tranced out psychedelic space jams that end way too soon, even after 10+ minutes.
And like the first volume, the second volume (and the collected compact disc version of Chaudelande)
ends with an epic, previously sidelong mega-jam, this one the awesomely titled "Genocider", which begins with a full on "Hey Mickey" style drum beat, which is quickly buried under an avalanche of crumbling riffage and howled echo drenched megaphone vox, the song a mesmerizing space garage stomp, with the guitars growing ever more unhinged, spraying wild tangles of psych-freakout over everything, but then something strange happens, the guitars begin to recede, and the drums begin to become a bit dubby, the timbre shifting, the low end dissipating, with beats careening back and forth, the sound breaking down into a twisted brittle psych dub drum jam, before exploding right back into another stretch of roiling space stomp heaviness, that pounds on relentlessly, until crashing to a halt in a final squall of blown out noise-psych crunch. So awesome.
We've been waiting for this one for ages. After an insanely limited 7" single, which was so scarce, no one we know has actually ever even seen a copy, let alone bought one, and a teaser video on YouTube, and all sorts of rumors about this Swedish band who were influenced by African music and voodoo and came from some mysterious village no one had ever heard of, well, needless to say, we were DYING for the full length, and it does not disappoint.
So the story goes, in a tiny village in Sweden called Korpolombolo, there has existed a band called Goat for generations, this is just the first incarnation of the band that has captured any of their music on tape. Supposedly the village was cursed by some sort of voodoo witch doctor, who was put to death for being a witch, and introducing voodoo worship to this tiny village. It only takes one Google search to discover that there is no such village, or so say the skeptics, but we choose to BELIEVE, and that village is just so obscure and tiny and tucked away, that it has even escaped the notice of Google. And whether it's true or not, the IDEA of it definitely influences the music of Goat, whose sound most definitely has a serious African vibe, the percussion, the vocals, it's heady concoction of wild psychedelic space rock, all driving krautrock rhythms, and tangled squalls of electric guitar freakout, and dense rhythmic percussion, and almost double dutch sounding vocals. When we first threw this on, our first impression was that it sounded like a weird mix of Konono No.1, The Heads and (believe it or not) the Go! Team, which even now, after constant listening doesn't seem that far off.
The tracks are dense, and psychedelic, heavy, fuzzy, definitely Stooges-y at times, Hawkwindy at others, several of the tracks display a Miles Davis style grooviness, sounding like a SUPERCHARGED ultra heavy Bitches Brew, others pound away sounding exactly how you might imagine some ancient voodoo ritual would sound reimagined by some modern Swedish psychedelic space rock outfit. "Goatman" (from the 7") is the perfect intro, after a strange sample, and some tribal drumming, the guitars come cascading in, wild squalls of psychedelic wah guitar, and keening high end wails, then the vocals come in, belted out over the fuzzed out bass, the percussion wild and groovy, it's total Swedish Afro-psych, or something, if this one track stretched out and filled up the whole record, it STILL would have been Record Of The Week.
The band do have a surprisingly broad palette though, whether it's the subdued acid folk Appalachia of "Goathead", or the organ driven Afro-groove of the appropriately titled "Disco Fever", with its percussion heavy funk swaddled in progged out organs, and then there's the equally funky "Golden Down", that sounds like some Southeast Asian Sublime Frequencies jam, but here cranked up, the guitars super distorted, the bass dangerously buzzy, the sound blissfully in-the-red, the drums wild and loose, the ultimate heavy psychedelic dance band, for those three minutes you can almost imagine these guys jamming out at the edge of the world in some alternate dimension seedy dive, with a dancefloor full of damned souls. Sweaty and swaggery and fierce as fuck. "Let It Bleed" delivers a more laid back groove, and even introduces some saxophone, which gives it the vibe once again of some psych-ed up Ethiopian groove. "Run To Your Mama" melds serious Sabbath-y riffage to some wild tribal percussion, and wailed vox, while "Goatlord" unfurls some dark psych folk, replete with super distorted heavy psych leads, over urgent strumming and cooed echo drenched vox, sounding a bit like a more psychedelic Comus in fact.
And finally, the record finishes off with the epic "Det Som Aldrig Forandras", with its bagpipe sounding opening, that quickly explodes into a heady psychedelic groove, droned out and hypnotic, the sort of jam that should/could have been ENDLESS, but instead, works its way back to a seriously heavy psychedelic coda, bookending the brief 3 minute opener, again, the sort of jam they could have stretched out for another twenty minutes, and we would have been in heaven, but the fact that it loops back around to the beginning, only adds a strange sort of endless ritual vibe to the proceedings, and makes it that much easier to play it all over again. And again. And again. Forever.
Super swank, die cut, eye popping artwork too, on the cd and lp both!
I am so so so in love with this record! (I'm Windy.) If you don't have any Goblin records then you want to forgo this temporarily (it's just not typical of their material) and get Suspiria first. But if you already have at least one Goblin album, then get this one now. Of course, at first you had to be a little trepidacious about Il Fantastico Viaggio Del Bagarozzo Mark, released in 1978, for the following reasons: [1] it's one of only two Goblin albums that weren't commissioned as soundtracks (the other being Roller), and [2] it's also supposedly their only album with *vocals*. Coulda crashed and burned if you ask me, but it turns out this album is awesome and the vocals just send it over the top! Massimo Morante's voice is dramatic and urgent yet at the very same time super melodic. And it sort of makes sense that without filmic visuals to provide visible stimulation, the vocals provide just the right amount of narrative "human" element. The songs here are so melodic and hook-filled, with tremendously beautiful minor-key climaxes that really satisfy. So great!
Comes with mpeg footage of the band (in 2001) playing music in the same Cinevox studio where they'd always recorded, and also there's a rare interview where they reveal that much of Il Fantastico Viaggio Del Bagarozzo Mark is about saying no to drugs.
The second release from the Canadian nine piece ensemble is about as epic as 28 minutes can get. As with 'F#A#oo", Godspeed render the psychic desolation of the Canadian tundra as an intense soundtrack that swells from glacial strings to dense yet melodic orchestrations for guitars, bass, bells, percussion, and their string section. Certainly inspired by Morricone's mighty scores, "Slow Riot..." is also reminiscient of the dark musings of their contemporaries: Village of Savoonga, Rachel's, Mogwai, etc...
Haunting. Beautiful. Awesome. A unanimous staff favorite.
In a world (our world at least) full to overflowing with drone records, dirge records, doom records, and yes, dirgedoomdrone records, the mysterious Gog have somehow always managed to transcend. From their very first release, the subtly spectacular Noriah Mills, Gog have continued to mine similar territory as so many other soundmakers, but with the resultant whole so much more than its constituent parts.
The music of Gog, while on the surface, perhaps seemingly simple, minimal, abstract, is the sort of sound that requires deep listening, upon which, the guitars then reveal themselves as so much more than electronic tone generators, the long strands of feedback and the layers of dense billowy buzz, so much more than just texture and timbre. And while on past releases, the band hinted at something a bit more black, their occasionally blissed out ambience drifting into darker and darker greys, on Mist From The Random More, the band have fully committed, creating what for them is a haunting otherworldly black metal suite, a droned out, blissed out, buzz drenched, almost static expanse of smoldering grimness, shot through with glimmering glistening effulgence, a bit like wrapping a black gauze around an exploding sun, the results, again, transcendent.
The record begins with a gorgeous, slow burning bit of guitar drone, that owes more to the kosmiche sounds of krautdrone than the downtuned glacial fug of more doom-ed entities. These guitars soar and shimmer, warm gouts of feedback enfolded by deep rich sheets of coruscating soft focus heaviness, any other band would stretch this out to fill up a whole album, and rightfully so, we'd probably be gushing just as much if Gog chose to do the same thing, but these Sunroof-ian solar sonics are only part of Gog's grand vision for Mist From The Random More.
The title track, taking up the bulk of the record, finds Gog fully immersing themselves in black metal, or at least their (very) loose approximation of what black metal is, or could be. The sound is grim, and frosty, but only in the sense that it reflects much of the black metal that came before, in every other way, it's anything but, the guitars glow, the riffs are fluid, organic, wrapped in a soft burnished buzz, that reminds us a bit of Jesu or Nadja, but the arrangement is more Necks. In fact, a shorthand descriptor might be "a black metal Necks", which if you're anything like us, would be all it would take. Simple skittery minimal drumming, almost looped sounding if it weren't so abstract, beneath a roiling cloud of layered guitars, grinding and whirring and hissing, and within that cloud, some gorgeously melancholic low end melodies, difficult to describe the strange blend of loveliness and heaviness, but there it is, a distinctly lovely heaviness, washed out and blurry, and hypnotic and epic and melodic, within this seemingly static structure, the sound swings and slips through various incarnations, moving from total blurred buzz, to a more slowcore lope, always wreathed in swirling clouds of blackened shimmer, until the end, when the track explodes in climax of effects drenched psychedelic churn.
The closing track offers a chance to decompress, a strange assemblage of soothing tones, shot through with streaks of feedback, very cool and clinical, almost a Raster-Noton sort of sound, there's a brief burst of super distorted crumbling sonic chaos, almost Merzbowian in its intensity, transforming into a haunting post industrial doomscape, before again returning to the relative tranquility of the first few minutes, eventually leaving just a single upper register tone, which also finally fades into the shadows.
Another fantastic record from Utech (after a whole mess of incredible releases, including last list's Aluk Todolo Record Of The Week), gorgeous packaging, an abstract skull, rendered in some kind of white dust (cocaine?), on a spare black background, a gatefold with printed liner notes inside, and yes, probably limited...
