Moog-enabled synth punk subversion straight outta San Francisco in the late '70s/early '80s, entertaining n' agitating electronic New Wave action excavated and reissued! And it's totally timely considering how many bands in today's scene would so love to sound like this.
We won't pretend we were familiar with The Units before this fantastic anthology album showed up. Perhaps we'd heard the name before (or maybe we were confusing 'em with ol' Jandek's 1978 debut album, also under the name The Units), but we knew nothing about this band 'til we heard this disc a few weeks ago. And as soon as we did, it went into heavy rotation here at the store. These Units were definitely a important piece of San Francisco punk/new wave history, but just a bit before our time. Well, not Aquarius's time, just us folks who work here now! Actually, a close reading of the thanks list in the cd booklet will find a shout out to Aquarius, 'cause (if you didn't know) Aquarius was THEE punk/new wave record store in San Francisco in the '70s... (Which reminds us, we've got to get more of our history up on the AQ website.) And, in fact, The Units' debut lp Digital Stimulation was the very first release on seminal SF indie 415 Records (who had their biggest hit with Romeo Void), a label run in part by Aquarius' owners at the time. So this most certainly isn't the first time that The Units music has been blasting regularly in the Aquarius shop, it's just been a few years, is all.
Putting things in proper place/time/scene perspective, this archival disc starts off with an audio snippet of the late SF punk "godfather" Dirk Dirksen on stage at Mabuhay Gardens, good-naturedly mocking both The Units (accidentally referring to them by the name of another band, the Zeros) and their cheering fans (with the sardonic comment "obviously, people with as little taste as yourself would become ecstatic over such average talent"). Then, making us ecstatic, twenty tracks of prime Units music follows, The History Of The Units containing most all of the tracks from their 1980 415 Records album Digital Stimulation as well as a handful of stuff taken from early 7"s and demo tapes, as well as more experimental pieces recorded for film soundtracks and art happenings and other ephemera.
Not unlike Devo, The Units had a concept thing going, all about a critique of alienated modern industrial society, dehumanizing conformity, and corporate culture, with songs like "Cannibals" and "Work". Perhaps perversely choosing to use machines to make their point, The Units tried to take the human element out of the rock band equation, preferring for instance to project their own propaganda films rather than allow the audience to focus on a frontperson. And yes, they do also sound quite bit like Devo at times, which is way okay by us!
Their synth-obsession was also in part an anti-guitar thing, a reaction to the mainstream. In fact, they took their anti-guitar philosophy to the extreme of not only having a "stamp out guitars" logo, but also making fake guitars out of plywood to smash on stage, while letting their synths play on "cruise control". So definitely The Units were highly conceptual, art schoolish, but not academic - the liner notes are clear that the idea was to be an all-synth band that "kicks ass" (the full quote being: ""I wanted an all synthesizer band... and not some fucking polite, socially acceptable electronic experiment in academia. I didn't want a doctorate in electronic doodling. No, I'm talking about a synth band that kicks ass!") and according to what we're hearing here, they succeeded. And they were not without contemporaries. There were The Screamers, Nervous Gender, and of course Devo; all of whom wanted to take the synthesizer into punk. For many of the Units tracks, it would very easy to replace the lead synth lines with guitars and have an equally kick ass rock song, but the fact is that these are Moog-powered cuts which do oscillate between a quirky sensibility with angular chops and a full-throttle punk car-crash. If you would think the former finds the Units sounding like Devo and the latter like the Screamers, you'd be right!
Yes indeed, the songs on this disc range from urgent Devo-esque pop punk and Screamers-y rants to moody proto-'80s dance tracks to more abstract, instrumental, rhythmic/textural electronic pieces like "Tight Fit" and "East West". There's loads of electric energy, some goofy humor, and certainly serious intent. So many gems here, incorporating buzzing droning distorted synths, propulsively skittering drum beats, and monotone vocals (both male and female).
Their incredible singles "Cannibals" (a tempestuous, driving song that was pure '70s punk), "High Pressure Days", and "Warm Moving Bodies," are prominently featured here, all of which were impressively catchy. Their ability to write these hooks earned them a deal with Epic, who released two seminal 12" singles (which couldn't be licensed for this compilation) and has been sitting on another collection of recordings since 1983. But beyond the hook, the Units were plenty weird, as seen in their peculiar lullaby melodies on "Red" which almost comes across like a Rodd Keith song-poem with a very sparse arrangement. Despite the band's curses toward academic music, a few choice intertwining moments of the Units minimalist grooves come awfully close to sounding like a punked out Terry Riley! Hardly polite music!
Other selections here include the cold wave weird science of "Digital Stimulation", the gloriously grinding downer melody of "Contemporary Emotion" (apparently a cover, a song by some contemporaneous hard rock band we've never heard of called Trakstod Station), and there's even an ode to our very neighborhood, "The Mission Is Bitchin", with lyrics about burritos and marijuana!
Of course it's all a bit dated, of its era, and that's part of the charm... but like we said, a lot of this also sounds like it could be put out by a band today, since everything old is new again and the '80s New Wave / synth thing is a current retro craze. Definitely this is a good time for The Units to be reissued!
And Community Library have done a really nice job of it, the gatefold cd sleeve containing a thick 32 page cd booklet with elaborate colorful collage style liner notes by bandleader Scott "Dr. Tex Nology" Ryser, a Units manifesto of sorts, he also talks about the wild and crazy San Francisco of the '70s/early '80s era, and also there's several pages of old fliers for Units gigs at the Fab Mab and other SF punk venues... we noticed one for the Warfield too, with The Units opening for OMD and Gary Numan. Also shows with Romeo Void, Dead Boys, Soft Cell, Psychedelic Furs, Dead Kennedys, Crime, Screamers, Iggy Pop, the Police, Tuxedomoon... Definitely makes us young 'uns wish we'd been around in SF back then. (Another note about the packaging, it says copyright 2007 on the back but that that's a mistake, it's when the artwork was initially prepared, this is indeed a brand new 2009 release, with also a vinyl version upcoming as well, not sure when, though.)
This past Record Of The Week NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! There's fewer tracks than on the cd version, but at least the lp includes a download code to get mp3s of ALL of the tracks from the cd reissue. No booklet unfortunately (although it seems some of the booklet is reprinted on the cover), but there is an insert, with some liner notes, as well as an explanation for the song choice on both the cd and lp, the lack of the Units' major label material and the reasoning behind less songs on the lp. Regardless, totally essential, especially now that it's on vinyl. Here's what we said about it before:
Moog-enabled synth punk subversion straight outta San Francisco in the late '70s/early '80s, entertaining n' agitating electronic New Wave action excavated and reissued! And it's totally timely considering how many bands in today's scene would so love to sound like this.
We won't pretend we were familiar with The Units before this fantastic anthology album showed up. Perhaps we'd heard the name before (or maybe we were confusing 'em with ol' Jandek's 1978 debut album, also under the name The Units), but we knew nothing about this band 'til we heard this disc a few weeks ago. And as soon as we did, it went into heavy rotation here at the store. These Units were definitely a important piece of San Francisco punk/new wave history, but just a bit before our time. Well, not Aquarius's time, just us folks who work here now! Actually, a close reading of the thanks list in the cd booklet will find a shout out to Aquarius, 'cause (if you didn't know) Aquarius was THEE punk/new wave record store in San Francisco in the '70s... (Which reminds us, we've got to get more of our history up on the AQ website.) And, in fact, The Units' debut lp Digital Stimulation was the very first release on seminal SF indie 415 Records (who had their biggest hit with Romeo Void), a label run in part by Aquarius' owners at the time. So this most certainly isn't the first time that The Units music has been blasting regularly in the Aquarius shop, it's just been a few years, is all.
Putting things in proper place/time/scene perspective, this archival disc starts off with an audio snippet of the late SF punk "godfather" Dirk Dirksen on stage at Mabuhay Gardens, good-naturedly mocking both The Units (accidentally referring to them by the name of another band, the Zeros) and their cheering fans (with the sardonic comment "obviously, people with as little taste as yourself would become ecstatic over such average talent"). Then, making us ecstatic, twenty tracks of prime Units music follows, The History Of The Units containing most all of the tracks from their 1980 415 Records album Digital Stimulation as well as a handful of stuff taken from early 7"s and demo tapes, as well as more experimental pieces recorded for film soundtracks and art happenings and other ephemera.
Not unlike Devo, The Units had a concept thing going, all about a critique of alienated modern industrial society, dehumanizing conformity, and corporate culture, with songs like "Cannibals" and "Work". Perhaps perversely choosing to use machines to make their point, The Units tried to take the human element out of the rock band equation, preferring for instance to project their own propaganda films rather than allow the audience to focus on a frontperson. And yes, they do also sound quite bit like Devo at times, which is way okay by us!
Their synth-obsession was also in part an anti-guitar thing, a reaction to the mainstream. In fact, they took their anti-guitar philosophy to the extreme of not only having a "stamp out guitars" logo, but also making fake guitars out of plywood to smash on stage, while letting their synths play on "cruise control". So definitely The Units were highly conceptual, art schoolish, but not academic - the liner notes are clear that the idea was to be an all-synth band that "kicks ass" (the full quote being: ""I wanted an all synthesizer band... and not some fucking polite, socially acceptable electronic experiment in academia. I didn't want a doctorate in electronic doodling. No, I'm talking about a synth band that kicks ass!") and according to what we're hearing here, they succeeded. And they were not without contemporaries. There were The Screamers, Nervous Gender, and of course Devo; all of whom wanted to take the synthesizer into punk. For many of the Units tracks, it would very easy to replace the lead synth lines with guitars and have an equally kick ass rock song, but the fact is that these are Moog-powered cuts which do oscillate between a quirky sensibility with angular chops and a full-throttle punk car-crash. If you would think the former finds the Units sounding like Devo and the latter like the Screamers, you'd be right!
Yes indeed, the songs on this disc range from urgent Devo-esque pop punk and Screamers-y rants to moody proto-'80s dance tracks to more abstract, instrumental, rhythmic/textural electronic pieces like "Tight Fit" and "East West". There's loads of electric energy, some goofy humor, and certainly serious intent. So many gems here, incorporating buzzing droning distorted synths, propulsively skittering drum beats, and monotone vocals (both male and female).
Their incredible singles "Cannibals" (a tempestuous, driving song that was pure '70s punk), "High Pressure Days", and "Warm Moving Bodies," are prominently featured here, all of which were impressively catchy. Their ability to write these hooks earned them a deal with Epic, who released two seminal 12" singles (which couldn't be licensed for this compilation) and has been sitting on another collection of recordings since 1983. But beyond the hook, the Units were plenty weird, as seen in their peculiar lullaby melodies on "Red" which almost comes across like a Rodd Keith song-poem with a very sparse arrangement. Despite the band's curses toward academic music, a few choice intertwining moments of the Units minimalist grooves come awfully close to sounding like a punked out Terry Riley! Hardly polite music!
Other selections here include the cold wave weird science of "Digital Stimulation", the gloriously grinding downer melody of "Contemporary Emotion" (apparently a cover, a song by some contemporaneous hard rock band we've never heard of called Trakstod Station), and there's even an ode to our very neighborhood, "The Mission Is Bitchin", with lyrics about burritos and marijuana!
Of course it's all a bit dated, of its era, and that's part of the charm... but like we said, a lot of this also sounds like it could be put out by a band today, since everything old is new again and the '80s New Wave / synth thing is a current retro craze. Definitely this is a good time for The Units to be reissued!
Ahhhh, Unrest. There was a time when Unrest were IT. They could do no wrong. Mark Robinson (Unrest / Teenbeat Records mainman) was king of the indie scene. And listening to this record there is no doubt in our minds as to why. While the records before Imperial were sloppy and chaotic (in a good way!) and sort of punk rock, they were also dark and dreamy and sweetly melancholy, all hinting at some doleful sensitive underside, lurking like a shy boy, beneath Unrest's spikey exterior. So along comes Imperial (originally released in 1992), and it was sort of like that shy boy finally got up the guts to talk to that girl he had been longing for all year, and while she still ignored him, something about reaching that point made him realize he didn't need loud noisy punk rock, or smashing chaos, he could just be himself, and the sound of being himself, finally unveiled on Imperial, managed to suddenly illuminate the pop treasure map Unrest had been following since day one. All that sweet sweet pop was now the focal point, the foundation, no longer hiding bashfully behind the crash and clang. Gone were the willful snottiness, the distorted guitars, the ramshcakle drumming and in their place, a languid, lustrous jangle pop shimmer, bathed in reverb, and laced with dreamy soulful crooning, lilting guitar melodies, and sweet sweet hooks, with the ultimate mixtape lyrics. "I Do Believe You Are Blushing". I mean, c'mon!! How sweetly romantic is that?! I for one must fess up to at least several tracks on Imperial making their way on to many a mix tape.
And while a few tracks do 'rock' ("Suki" has to be one of the best rocking pop songs EVER!), it's in that sort of liquidly propulsive Neu! meets Beat Happening sort of way, a droney jangle with repetitive guitars and shuffling rhythms, mesmerizing but a little bouncy too. However, on Imperial, it's all about the blissed out shimmer pop, lazy electric guitars, and distant throbbing bass floating delicately atop a slowly unfurling popscape, simple and absolutely beautiful, with Mark Robinson's gorgeous hearfelt croon as well as the occasional delicate angelic female vocal. So so so so beautiful!
This re-issue also tacks on 8 bonus tracks that while not included on the original, definitely sound like they could have just been placed anywhere throughout the record proper and would have seemed right at home. A massive 13 minute reworking of the title track, stretched out into a druggy, dreamy ambient janglescape, swoonsome and sweet, slowly shifting from a tripped out acapella blur to endless instrumental bliss-out. A trip hoppy version of "Isabel" that sounds just as good as the original, a couple ambient experiments that add more mystery to Imperial's moodiness, the dirgey , pretty slowcore crawl "Wednesday And Proud" and a few others. Inexplicably, they left off the infamous Unrest classic "Yes She Is My Skinhead Girl" which was only on a 7" and was once included as a bonus track on the import version of this. But that's hardly a complaint when faced with such a stunning slice of pop perfection. Listen to the sound samples and you will understand just what we mean.
Another winner from Sublime Frequencies. And while we made sure to stress that past "vinyl-only" were indeed vinyl only, lately, those vinyl releases have been slowly making it to cd. BUT, for the vinyl folks out there, these do disappear fast, and fetch big bucks on eBay once they're gone, so you're not gonna want to snooze on this one. Listening to this again, now, for maybe the 20th time in 2 days, it's becoming clear we'll probably have to make this a Record Of The Week as soon as it comes out on cd, but for now, even though it's only a highlight, it really couldn't be more of a MUST OWN.
And like many of the Sublime Frequencies before it, we find it hard to not think that maybe folks don't need to be making so much music, releasing so many records, when so much amazing outrageously creative music is already being and has been made all over the world, for so long, much of it never heard outside of a very few people. Maybe we should have some sort of national policy, where bands can turn in their instruments, and in exchange get a recorder, a plane ticket, and an expense account, with which they can roam the world bringing back some of that unheard and lost music. Heck, sign us up right now!
Anyway, this new release is a collection of Rai music from the early seventies, from Algeria, and these particular cuts are samples of some of the sort of "outlaw" Rai performers, a modern strain that has been neglected and ignored, and takes this classic Algerian music form, and adds electric guitar, trumpets, wah wah pedal, and whips it all up into an infectious brew equal parts Ethiopiques, Bollywood and garage rock. Or something close to that. This stuff is truly hard to describe, and the liner notes, while informative, are printed on an eye popping blue on red old school 3-D colored background which makes the text swim and sway before your eyes. And offer more on the history and the players than what Rai music actually is (there's a good description on Wikipedia). But for the purpose of this review, as it should be, we'll just focus on the sound. And what a sound!
Warm whirring organ drones, trumpets EVERYWHERE, really the defining sound, wild chaotic tribal drumming, crooned dramatic vocals, groovy, soulful, funky, raw and lo-fi, like a garage rock Ethiopiques, but with a strangely raw Bollywood vibe, the trumpets peppering the murky grooves with strange fanfares and jazzy melodies, here and there distorted guitars surface, wrapped in wah wah, reverb and echo all over the place, some songs super frenzied, others laid back and dreamy, Indian melodies draped over almost surfy grooves, really pretty fantastic. Hard to imagine that folks who have been digging all the Sublime Frequencies releases, or the Yaala Yaala reissues won't go crazy for this stuff.
Group Doueh, Group Inerane, and now this, a pretty mind blowing, near perfect, far out world music three-fer, and that's not even counting the 30+ release that came before. ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED.
LIMITED TO 1500 COPIES, 180 gram vinyl, super thick gatefold sleeve, full color, with tons of photos and liner notes inside.
Everyone has a specific music they're especially fond of. And sure we're all pretty omnivorous when it comes to the music we love, but there's always that one sound or style you find yourself returning to again and again, that one thing on your iPod that gets played over and over like crazy, around here, folks tend to be partial to jangly pop, blackened metal, abstract noise, seventies proto metal, field recordings, sixties psych, Warped Tour emo metal, techno, or dubstep, among other things. But one thing everything here can agree on, is the importance of 'sleeping' music. Those blissed out sounds that are perfect for late nights, for that moment when your consciousness begins to drift, where for a moment, you get just a glimpse of the other side, before the curtain parts and your incorporeal self slips past, and doesn't return until the next morning. The soundtrack for that crossover is also very personal, some folks listen to buzzing black metal to drift off, others the mesmerizing thump of minimal techno, but there is a certain strain of ambient music that everyone here is equally enamored of. Minimal techno label Kompakt has coined the phrase Pop Ambient for this strain of electronic music, one that is not so much standard ambient music, or even new age, but more an electronica/techno with the beats removed, leaving just the ethereal ephemera, that at one time was a backdrop for the beats, but sans rhythms, those sounds become the focus, and are loosed from any sort of proper structure, allowed to flow and drift, to swirl and shimmer, this new music that is indeed ambient, and perhaps even a little new agey, but is ultimately something much more evocative and experimental, songs and sounds that acts as mysterious soundtracks for sleep, music that simultaneously serves as background ambience, but can also invoke active listening, allowing the listener to immerse themselves in the sound, to travel sonically to these otherworlds, to explore, and to get gloriously lost.
This double disc collects some of the current crop of ambient alchemists, a handful who are already aQ faves including Leyland Kirby, Klimek, Biosphere, Oneohtrix Point Never, Atlas Sound, Wolfgang Voigt, Markus Guentner, and Maps And Diagrams (whose cd on Time Released sound we reviewed recently), but even more that are brand new discoveries, all of whom are poised to become new favorites for sure, and pretty much instantly, this comp became out go-to late night listening collection.
The first disc is heavier on the new discoveries, opening up with a track by Orla Wren, who weaves a glitchy stretch of crystalline skitter, that reminds us a bit of Oval, all warm and liquid, hushed and delicate, but which soon blossoms into a lush thick swirl of layered buzz and softly swirling shimmer, laced with chiming melodies, and hazy bell like tones, one track in, and we already find ourselves wanting to hear more, which happens again minutes later when Rafael Anton Irisarri's track begins, a warm, swirling cinematic thrum, a very Caretaker-sounding sprawl of murky muddy strings, of looped string section shimmer, all blurred into something hazy and drifty, wreathed in soft hiss and warm record crackle, looped and lovely and hauntingly mesmerizing. The oddly named Let's Go Outside continue with their own brand of dreamy drift, a blissed out dreamdrone raga of metallic buzz and lush layered loveliness. Bvdub (aka Brock Van Wey, one of the curators of this collection) offers his own bit of looped and layered swirl, all effected steel strings, a sort of folky flutter smeared into lush string like swells, the lengthy track peppered with epic majestic bursts of heaving high end buzz, again all blurred into something more more ethereal, and so it goes, this is one of those rare comps, that not only plays like a proper album, but that doesn't slip up once, every single track here is gorgeous, and is woven deftly into the sonic fabric of the whole.
The second disc is where most of the more familiar names can be found, many of those Pop Ambient veterans, Klimek (who even released a record called Music To Fall Asleep), starts things off with a field recording flecked slow burn drone, very darkly dramatic and ethereal, which leads directly into a track by Andrew Thomas (the other curator of this collection), his number a moody chunk of shimmery slowcore, all twangy Earth-like guitars over a hushed hazy backdrop of warm strings and glistening analog crackle, sounding almost like a Pop Ambient Barn Owl. Oneohtrix delivers some very minimal and dreamy celestial kosmische, while Biosphere weaves a gorgeous bit of orchestral thrum, all deep swirling strings, pizzicato melodies and mysterious percussion, while Markus Guenter finally introduces a beat, a murky minimal pulse, beneath another gorgeous sprawl of glistening droned out shimmer, and again, so it goes for the rest of the second disc as well.
ANYone who loves the Pop Ambient series will flip for this, as will fans of all things darkly dreamy, be it minimal electronica, abstract krautdrone, cinematic ambience or anywhere in between.
When our Andee was away on his vacation to Finland last year he got turned on to this compilation of early ('60s/'70s) Finnish experimental music. It also has been getting a good deal of airplay on our favorite radio station, New Jersey's wonderful WFMU (www.wfmu.org, tune in!). So, now we're real happy to have finally gotten this in stock, and felt it deserved Record Of The Week status for several reasons: it's Finnish, it's fucked, and it's also of historical import. Mainly, though, it's just fucked. In that fun way we at AQ totally dig. Sure, "Arktien Hysteria" (translation: Arctic Hysteria, if you couldn't guess) is all experimental and avantgarde but definitely not super serious -- heck, it starts out with a veritable symphony of burps, and one of the best artists on here is known as The Sperm. These tracks tend to feature (one or more of the following): early "sampling" cut-ups, druggy proto-punk psychedelic rock freedom, free jazz noise, groovy oddball electronics n' drone, conceptual flux, and vocal derangement. Arktien hysteria indeed! The freakouts on here should prove that none of the art-punk noiseniks of today can make a noise that hasn't been made already. Such as the turkey gobbling style sax and maniacal percussion of Jouni Kesti & Seppo I. Laine's "Analysis of Revolution".
Not that it's all zany hijinks, there's abstract soundscape stuff on here too, some of it really dark and weird. Quite a few home-built instruments/machines/synths feature here, along with tape loops galore. Thougth some folks make do though with just sheer frenzied performance gusto. All tracks were taken, we believe, from rare LPs originially released circa 1967-1970 by the legendary Finnish label Love Records. Actually, one cut even dates from as far back as 1961. The cd booklet's got photos and (thankfully) some liner notes in English, though there's more text in Finnish, oh well.
Pan sonic and Circle and Keuhkot and Kemialliset Ystavat and all the rest of Finland's current avant/underground scene start to make a lot more sense when you hear what their aunts and uncles were up to a few decades back, makin' noise at live happenings, or constructing tracks in primitive DIY studios built in their sauna huts. Damn, what a cool compilation. Insane, and arguably essential.
MPEG Download: BLUES SECTION "Shivers Of Pleasure" [/audio/arktinenblues.mp3]
MPEG Stream: BLUES SECTION "Shivers Of Pleasure" [/audio/arktinenblues.m3u]
MPEG Download: JUKKA RUOHOMAKI "Mika Aika On" [/audio/arktinenjukka.mp3]
MPEG Stream: JUKKA RUOHOMAKI "Mika Aika On" [/audio/arktinenjukka.m3u]
Continuing in Lo's series of today's electronic artist's selections of "classic" unheard music (the first being Luke Vibert's Nuggets), Add N to (X)'s Barry 7 scours the libraries of Chappell, Southern and PIL for some rare gems screaming to be heard. For
While only one of us here has actually been to Turkey (that would be Allan, the lucky bastard), we'll all pretty obsessed with Turkish psych/prog/folk music for quite a while now, as is evidenced by the fact that we review pretty much everything we can get our hands on. Edip Akbayram, Erkin Koray, 3 Hur-El, Mogollar, Bulent, Selda as well as comps galore, Love Peace And Poetry, Turkish Delights, Hava Narghile, we just can't get enough. The one aspect of Turkish music we haven't really explored is 'club' music. Could be that we generally don't even like American club music, as none of us are or ever were really what you might consider clubkids. Or it could be that there was never any really comprehensive collection of Turkish club music. Probably a little of both.
But leave it to Germany's mighty Trikont label to set us straight. With such a big Turkish population in Germany, the Istanbul music scene has a following there too, and Trikont asked popular DJ Ipek Ipekcioglu to put this collection together. Underground Grooves Of Turkey covers a wide expanse of Turkish sounds, from straight up dance floor pop, to weird guitar heavy grooves, to dub and hip hop, and pretty much every stop in between. While the sound veers dramatically all over the sonic map, there are definitely aspects that seem to be present in most, if not all of these tracks. We hear LOTS of Bollywood music stylings. The more playful upbeat tracks, the ones with big beats, wild rhythms and strings all over the place, it's hard not to imagine huge big budget dance scenes, dancers twirling, epic and massive and WILD. The more low key, laid back tracks alternately remind us of Muslimgauze, Dead Can Dance, and Jaz Coleman and Anne Dudley's Middle Eastern themed Songs From The Victorious City released several years back. As well as obviously all of the vintage Turkish music we have been digging.
Every single one of these songs is totally unique in its own way, and distinctly Turkish, incorporating all manner of other sounds while managing to sound fresh and original. The first track on the comp, The Night Session's "La Mirage" had us at hello. Imagine 50 Cent's "In Da Club" with its loping laid back swagger, mashed up with haunting minor key, Eastern tinged strings, fluttering flutes and soaring Arabesque vocals. Pretty kick ass. Could definitely be a club hit here. Surprised this track hasn't already been snapped up by that whole Sounds Of The Asian underground scene. With a comp this varied, probably the best way to approach it is track by track. Worth it for the opening song alone, but the rest of the disc is dense and dizzyingly wonderful as well:
-- A soundscape of dense swirls of playful, festive Bollywood exuberance, with amazing vocals from Sivan Perwer, one of the most famous Kurdish vocalists, now living in Germany.
-- Cay Taylan from Vienna, doing a more modern take, a downtempo triphopped version of a traditional Turkish dance, with lots of strings, Eastern percussion, lots of spacey FX and some groovy dubbed out rhythms.
-- A super pop gem from Nil Karaibrahimgil. A mix of drum and bass and hip hop, a childlike rhyme about the weaknesses of men, a sort of Eastern version of the Spice Girls or M.I.A., kind of sassy, and playful, fun, and funky,
-- Baba Zula mixes traditional jazz with Eastern psychedelia, a heady swirl of dreamlike vocals, traditional percussion and melodies, and plenty of late night jazzy shuffle. Some of his past recordings were produced by Mad Professor!
-- Orient Expressions are from Istanbul and carry on the musical tradition of Alevites, a religious minority of Turkish Islam, with a track based on a Kurdish folk song, taking traditional religious music and giving it a dubby electronic makeover, with washed out atmospheres, lilting vocals and super laid back beats, almost like a much more Eastern Enigma or Dead Can Dance
-- Ayhan Sicimoglu is the first Latin musician in the Turkish music scene and offers up a bad ass dancehall jam, a stuttery funky beat over a buzzing kazoo-like melody played on a Zurna, a traditional Turkish folk instrument with just a hint of the dreaded Reggaeton sound (which sounds KILLER here)!
-- dZihan & Kamien are a Swiss / Bosnian duo from Vienna, who craft epic trip hop dubscapes of shuffling slithering rhythms, minor key strings, strange vocal snippets, all wrapped into super catchy laid back grooves.
-- Ceza is one of the biggest names in the still developing Turkish rap scene. He gets compared to Eminem all the time, cuz of his rapid fire flow and whiney voice, and that's not far off the mark. If you can imagine Eminem rapping IN TURKISH over a killer bed of swooping Bollywood strings, fuzzy bass, and skittery almost dancehall rhythms... Wow!
-- The music of Burhan Ocal is really hard to describe, VERY Bollywood sounding, epic and dense, lots of funky rhythms, strings soaring and stirring, elements of Turkish traditional folk music, and some really strange female vocals from Emal Sayin, "the dame of Turkish art-music". She has a strangely strangled sounding mewl that goes from guttural growl to throaty croon, all over super dense and complex string parts and skittery electronic drums. Cool!
-- Baba Cay unfurls a groovy laid back ambient chillout groove, a sort of blissed out R+B, a little hint of new age swoosh, and plenty of Turkish filigree BUT it's not sung in Turkish, instead he sings in a made up language a la Magma or the Ruins.
-- The band with the very un-Turkish sounding name of Brooklyn Funk Essentials are all about super festive party music, equal parts USA and Turkey, with elements of Klezmer, ska, acid jazz, funk and hip hop, a wild block party groove, with loads of horns, that go from ska bounce to dizzying Klezmer swirl in the blink of an eye. Almost like a Turkish / Klezmer version of Jurassic 5!
-- Burhan Ocal is a famous Turkish percussionist, who weaves an intricate percussive backdrop over which traditional instruments like saz and oud buzz and swirl, a droning gorgeous rhythmic ritual, simultaneously ancient and modern, near the end a drum kit kicks in and then it sounds like some modernized Zakir Hussein jam. So good. Very reminiscent of Muslimgauze.
-- Goksel is a modern Turkish pop singer, with a breathy passionate voice, very melodramatic, performing here some sort of displaced modern American pop ballad, filtered through a distinctly Eastern vibe, reverbed guitars and traditional percussion mixed into soft focus Turkish moody pop, with a slight Western (as in country and western) twang. Her voice actually sounds remarkably like Nina Persson from the Cardigans!
-- Replikas are a guitar heavy underground rock band, who have been written up in the Wire and have even worked with Sonic Youth (and downtown NY) producer Wharton Tiers. Big distorted guitars, pounding drums, driving rhythms, sprinkled with distinctly Turkish bits here and there, soaring vocal melodies, moody strings, all makes for a gorgeous and strangely affecting track...
Not sure how this fits in with the rest of these "underground grooves" but pretty cool nonetheless.
-- Finally, the last track comes from Taner Demiralp, a young conductor / composer who delivers an almost liturgical sounding piece based on a traditional poem, praising the sultans, composed in the style of court music from the Ottoman Empire, including the lyrics and vocals, which are sung and composed in a traditional style no longer in use. Gorgeous crooned melodies over mournful minor key strings, all over a shuffling stuttering electronic beat. creepy and quite beautiful.
Absolutely essential for fans of Turkish music, and anyone who loved any of the Turkish psych compilations we've listed in the past. And all you folks who dig stuff like Kruder And Dorfmeister, Tosca, Peace Orchestra, Kid Loco and the like and just might be open to something a little more exotic, might really dig this stuff.
Like all Trikont releases, Beyond Istanbul is packaged in a full color digipak, and includes a massive set of liner notes, with a history of modern Turkish music, notes on each song and artist, as well as lots of photos!
We were already sold on this before we even heard it, just based on the title alone, and likely you are too! And having heard it, we're all the more into it. This latest Finders Keepers/B-Music release is not just another Bollywood - or even Lollywood, or Kollywood - compilation, not that there would be anything wrong with that. Their recent Pakistani picture house collection Life Is Dance is still in heavy rotation 'round these parts, as are others of its ilk. But Bollywood Bloodbath is even better, thanks to its specific, scary theme. Cooler 'cause these songs, as you may have guessed, are all taken from the soundtracks to Hindi horror movies! Ghost stories, killer thrillers, zombiethons, that sort of thing... but unlike American slasher flicks and Italian giallo from the same period (the '70s mostly, though this disc ranges as far back as 1949, and up to the '80s), these Indian fright films are, of course, like other Bollywood productions, elaborate musicals. So the bloodbath sounds like it's taking place at the discotheque!! It's a perfect mix of the over-the-top pop groove-a-delica of the best vintage Bollywood stuff, infused with the even weirder, wilder, and wiggier sounds demanded by the horror movie genre, like shocking screams, stabbing cacophonous chords, and impassioned female vocals pleading for mercy.
Yep, it's pretty brilliant the way this collection combines two of our favorite soundtrack genres into one. Gotta give it up to compiler Andy Votel and his diligent research (involving hours and hours of viewing cheap old VHS tapes found at the Indian grocery store, no doubt), as he's dug up a delightful 'best of' from a hybrid cinematic genre we've yet to explore ourselves. And even if these songs were sourced from Z-grade movies, there's for sure some top talent involved on soundtrack side of things, including even the legendary RD Burman.
Although there's a modicum of ominous, atmospheric creepiness to be found in most of these cuts, moments that are mystical and mysterious, truth be told it's not all that frightening, as the spookiest stuff always gives way to urgent uptempo beats and zipp-zapping "seance fiction" synths, lively rock/disco orchestration and spirited singing, i.e. typical Bollywood bombast! If anything, rather than, say, John Carpenter or Goblin (our usual go-to's for suspense/horror soundtracks), some of what's here reminds us more of stuff from far out Spaghetti Westerns.
Since we're making this Record Of The Week, we should pause to state that if you're not already into Bollywood soundtracks, you need to check 'em out! And this, despite its specific slant, would certainly give you a good idea of what you've been missing - total WTF kitchen sink psychedelic percussive song-and-dance Eastern-inflected rock opera funked up madness.
22 tracks, 78+ minutes. Complete with cd booklet of copious, obsessive, expert liner notes from Votel. And lots of cool creepy colorful graphics of course. (In addition to this domestic cd release, there's also import vinyl available, but we're pretty much out, hoping to have some more from overseas next month, FYI.)
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Completely hilarious bloopers will keep you in stitches. Andee keeps telling the story of how he had to listen to Joe from Souled American imitating the drunken John Wayne! Everyone from William Shatner to Elvis, Colonel Sanders, Tom Brokaw, Liz Taylor, Billie Holiday, The Beach Boys, Barry White, Casey Kasem (of course), Jack Palance, and more.
BACK IN STOCK! We thought these were gone for good a month ago, but we've just managed to get a few more!
Here's the soundtrack to your wildest blaxploitation-fueled fantasies, baadasssss R&B with an acid rock edge. You'll never need to ask, "Mommy, what's a funkadelic?" after this.
"Chains & Black Exhaust" is a compilation of late sixties/early seventies raw, fuzzed-out funk put together by some young, devotedly-crate-diggin' Memphis DJs, who apparently don't think we need to know what exactly we're listening too, 'cause there's no artist info, no track listing, nothing -- heck, the title of the comp appears nowhere on it, even! They give us a tantalizing but unhelpful glimpse of some original 45 labels in a photo in the cd booklet, which is otherwise illustrated with snapshots of black motorcycle club insignia. We can't imagine this lack of info is for copyright reasons, perhaps they just don't want their finds being identified & scooped by other DJs...? And unfortunately, none of us here, despite our enthusiasm for this stuff and general musical expertise, can tell you what's on here, nor did we locate a tracklist on the internet.
Oh well, whoever these mystery artists are, what's important is that they kick out the jams big time here: hard, heavy stuff full of wailing acid-psych wah wah leads, driving organ, killer grooves, and soulful vocals. It's funk verging on rock, with Black Power meets garagey rock n' roll attitude. Of course, these old singles tracks are served up with lots of lovely ol' vinyl crackle, just scratchy enough to lend that extra level of authenticity and atmosphere to the party. Highly recommended -- if you're into *early* Parliament-Funkadelic you'll dig these 16 cuts. This is one of those albums that just sells itself the second we put it on over the stereo -- even our pal DJ Z-Trip bought one instantly. Enjoyed that Peanut Butter Wolf-produced collection of unearthed funk singles? Then you'll love this one too. Right on.
We're told that *perhaps* someday this will get reissued with proper liner notes (the kind that actually tell you who is on the record at least) but that's at least a year or a year and a half off, if ever. So, we'd recommend grabbing these copies now, while you can, before they're gone, again...
Just when you thought you'd heard everything, in comes Sublime Frequencies to fill in the gaps you never thought existed. How many CDs of Iraqi pop do you have in your collection? Until now we certainly didn't have any, let alone anything remotely traditional from Iraq. For a country that's so important to our war mongering presidential administration it's perhaps a little surprising that more interest hasn't been piqued about the culture of Iraq. But then again, everyone but W seems to understand that the real reasons for plundering this nation wasn't to "liberate" anyone. In fact, W would probably rather that no one even pay attention to any of this music, which has the awkward fortune to have been produced almost entirely (with the exception of three early 70's tracks) during the reign of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime ( tracks here range from 1980 on up to 2002!). In spite of his -- well deserved -- reputation as a cruel dictator, he was also an avid supporter of both education and the arts -- such are the complexities of life W would rather not acknowledge -- and for better or worse, kept the fabricated nation state as stable as it has ever been. Hussein promoted secular arts and music, starting cultural centers for both, and even dubbed singers the "eighth division" of the armed forces (his nation had seven military divisions) -- not to paint too rosy a picture of Donald Rumsfeld's former pal and business partner, who was also a sadistic tyrant after all. Compiled by Mark Gergis (I Remember Syria, Molam, Cambodian Cassette Archives), Choubi Choubi is a collection years in the making. Gergis scoured the earth for the source material on this disc, travelling through Syria, Europe and the Iraqi neighborhoods of Detroit, Michigan. The anthology starts off with a folk rock track from '70s Socialist singer Ja'afar Hassan, a song that could easily compete with the best psych tracks on Hava Narghile or Turkish Delights for the crown of Middle Eastern psych champ. But if you're expecting another psych compilation, you're going to be disappointed as Choubi Choubi is much more than that, way more. Most of the recordings on the album have no western instruments on them, nor hardly any western influence. These tracks rock out much harder with no electric instruments, but with huge string sections, pounding drums, and monstrous oud playing. Maybe it's also the super bluesy sounding (to the western ear) melodies, it's no wonder that it sounds so fresh and familiar to us. It really is weird, when I (Byram) first listened to this record I could have sworn there were more songs with electric guitars on it, but there aren't that many. It just sounds so fucking heavy, and rocks so hard that I remembered it as being a "rock" record. Really, really, really fucking great!
First off, anyone who bought the Minimal Wave Tapes compilation, another recent aQ Record Of The Week, is most definitely gonna want this too, another killer collection of, like the title says, Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics, a perfect part two, or companion, and fear not, the only overlap is one single band, who do appear on both comps, but with different tracks, so this is essentially an all new (old) collection of vintage coldwave dark synth sonics, which, if you're anything like us, and we're beginning to think you are, you can't get enough of.
It's pretty strange how cold / dark / new / synth wave have made such a huge comeback, bands like the Cure, Depeche Mode, Human League, Front 242, Soft Cell, are now cited as huge influences on a new breed of dark synth driven combos. Also funny considering something similar happened 8 or 9 years ago, when a rash of bands were exploring similar territory: Adult., The Faint, Fischerspooner, Erase Errata, etc. But music is definitely cyclical, and as a new generation discovers the treasures of the past, they start bands mining that past, and revist that past via reissues. The most recent issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian offers a mini primer on the difference between the various waves: darkwave was early industrial and goth rock, cold wave the French version of darkwave (as we first discovered on the amazing So Young But So Cold comp), Synth wave was like cold wave but more sparse and moody, and new wave, well everyone should know what that is by now.
Lately, it seems most folks make little distinction between the various waves, instead lumping them all together as cold wave, or minimal wave or whatever, since regardless of the variations, they definitely all share a similar sound and vibe, and speaking for ourselves at least, it's a sound we dig big time. But then most of us never really stopped digging that stuff to begin with. Lots of former goths here for sure. And every time we discovered a band exploring the sounds we dug so much back in the day, we went way out of our way to gush about them big time, like one of our 2009 Records Of The Week, from Soror Dolorosa, a black metal side project that sounded like some lost Joy Division jam, or rare cold wave antiquity, and more recently records by groups like Blank Dogs, who may not have grown up listening to this music, but if they didn't then must have had a super hip older brother.
But as was demonstrated on the Minimal Wave collection, there were tons of bands outside of the obvious above mentioned references, who were just as cool, if not cooler, the underground of a scene that for a while was very mainstream, on the Minimal Waves comp, it was Crash Course In Science, Tara Cross, Das Kabinette, Ohama, Das Ding, Martin Dupont, Deux, Bene Gessert, Turquoise Days, and others, a few of the more wave-informed folks here knew many of those bands, but to the rest of us, it was a revelation. So much amazing music, so many new groups. On this Cold Waves collection, it's Absolute Body Control, Ruth, The Neon Judgement, Stereo, The Vyllies, Days Of Sorrow, Land Of Giants, End Of Data, Eleven Pond, Ausgang Verboten, Nine Circles and more more more. And like before, a few groups we're familiar with, but a whole bunch of mysterious new names, all of which contribute killer tracks, and most definitely have us hankering for more from all of them.
The obvious ones, Ruth of course, a long time aQ favorite, whose track here also appeared on the out of print So Young But So Cold, sort of Kraftwerk meets Gary Numan, Linear Movement, who also had a track on the Minimal Wave comp, whose track here is awesome, catchy and swirly, with super hypnotic synth melodies and awesome vocals, groovy bass and that clipped new wave drum machine rhythm, Absolute Body Control, who recently received the deluxe Vinyl On Demand boxset treatment, with some awesomely gothy gloom pop, in fact, this collection sounds WAY poppier than the Minimal Wave collection, so much so, that almost all of these bands sound like they should have been right up there with Depeche Mode and the Human League.
Needless to say, this is another fantastic comp, with some incredible songs, and already has us hankering for volume 2!
Nice thick gatefold sleeve, tons of liner notes, and pix, also comes with a download card. CD coming soon too... ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Do you like run away drum machines? Dubby echo? Danceable DIY '80s underground electronics? Homebrewed minimal electro pop? The Vox Populi! anthology we made a Record Of The Week last year? All the many cool synthwave reissues on Dark Entries? Then please give THIS your attention, you won't be sorry.
The Color Tapes label - later known as Color Discs for the vinyl editions - was the cottage industry of UK art-rock synthesist Gary Ramon, who with the music documented on this collection, sort of comes across like a new wave doppleganger of Cleaners From Venus. And there actually was a split cassette release between Cleaners From Venus and Ramon's band Modern Art (who later morphed into psychrockers Sun Dial) from 1986 or so. Here was a prolific songwriter of coldly sequenced and somewhat quirky minimal wave albums, mostly all of which were released on cassette with a small audience that radiated outward from the coastal village of Waltham, England. He, along with a loose collective, recorded in a handful of interchangeable projects - Modern Art, Mystery Plane, and WeR7 being three with the largest discographies, each with at least a dozen albums recorded in a six to eight year period. The former two projects later warranted vinyl anthologies from Vinyl On Demand; and it seems that the interest in this material blossomed from there.
Ramon and his cohorts were a talented bunch, following the rabbit-hole of darkly minded electronica. Think Factory, Sheffield, Industrial Records, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and all of those Wire side-projects and you'll be able to triangulate the sound of Color Tapes. There was a knack for the pop-hook and the death-disco backbeat present this material that makes all of this material age very well. The opening track to the comp is from Berserk In The Hayfields, with its clamorous electro-bongo fills girded to a taut techno pulse sounds very prescient of the Belgian EBM scene some five or six years later. Live Of Angels and The Lord were two non-Ramon projects and both peddled in weird-science blorp and effects-happy guitars above spry programming. But the strongest material is through the streamlined step sequences and deft rhythms that showcase Ramon's engineering prowess. The vinyl edition of this is almost all gone and out of print (we only have a few), but please note there are two bonus tracks on the cd not found on the wax.
As listed on our in-betweener last week, this aQ Record Of The Week from last year is now again available on vinyl, we'd only had a few before (in fact, it was only the cd version we had been able to list as Record Of The Week at the time). And it's a bit cheaper now too. We ALSO just got in on vinyl a Volume 2 of Cold Waves Of Color, which we'll hopefully list next time!! (If you want one now, please just ask).
Anyway, here's our review of Volume 1 again, if you missed it...
Do you like runaway drum machines? Dubby echo? Danceable DIY '80s underground electronics? Homebrewed minimal electro pop? The Vox Populi! anthology we made a Record Of The Week last year? All the many cool synthwave reissues on Dark Entries? Then please give THIS your attention, you won't be sorry.
The Color Tapes label - later known as Color Discs for the vinyl editions - was the cottage industry of UK art-rock synthesist Gary Ramon, who with the music documented on this collection, sort of comes across like a new wave doppleganger of Cleaners From Venus. And there actually was a split cassette release between Cleaners From Venus and Ramon's band Modern Art (who later morphed into psychrockers Sun Dial) from 1986 or so. Here was a prolific songwriter of coldly sequenced and somewhat quirky minimal wave albums, mostly all of which were released on cassette with a small audience that radiated outward from the coastal village of Waltham, England. He, along with a loose collective, recorded in a handful of interchangeable projects - Modern Art, Mystery Plane, and WeR7 being three with the largest discographies, each with at least a dozen albums recorded in a six to eight year period. The former two projects later warranted vinyl anthologies from Vinyl On Demand; and it seems that the interest in this material blossomed from there.
Ramon and his cohorts were a talented bunch, following the rabbit-hole of darkly minded electronica. Think Factory, Sheffield, Industrial Records, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and all of those Wire side-projects and you'll be able to triangulate the sound of Color Tapes. There was a knack for the pop-hook and the death-disco backbeat present this material that makes all of this material age very well. The opening track to the comp is from Berserk In The Hayfields, with its clamorous electro-bongo fills girded to a taut techno pulse sounds very prescient of the Belgian EBM scene some five or six years later. Live Of Angels and The Lord were two non-Ramon projects and both peddled in weird-science blorp and effects-happy guitars above spry programming. But the strongest material is through the streamlined step sequences and deft rhythms that showcase Ramon's engineering prowess.
Note there are two bonus tracks on the cd not found on the wax, unfortunately.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Wow! As if the Tony Allen reissues and the stellar Club Africa compilations weren't enough, the excellent UK label Strut has undertaken to compile a look back at the early days of *underground* disco when disco was an outgrowth of both New York punk and "No New York" proto new wave. This record is fantastic. It is ass kicking stripped down disco with no affectations and no stupid fashion victim Saturday Night Fever synth action to muck up the groove. Wailing JB's-style horns, chiming guitars and staccato bass, all backboned by totally organic percussion that makes you think "fucking kick ass live drummer" instead of "hmmm, good drum machine programming". Sure, this music has been sitting around for years and most of you have probably heard a track or two contained here, but Strut's stroke of genius has been to compile these tracks *together*, coming as they do from seemingly totally disparate groups who don't (to our ears today) share much in common -- from Yoko Ono (a track she began remixing on the day John Lennon was killed) to Liquid Liquid (the classic "Cavern", whose bassline was stolen, er, appropriated by Grandmaster Flash for "White Lines")... to Bill Laswell, Ian Dury, Steve Miller(!) and Don Cherry(!). The pages and pages of liner notes do a lot to bring these artists together in a musically logical sense, and I have to say that the Loose Joints track "Tell You (Today)" is hands down my fave single of the year -- thank god for "Disco No Disco" or I never would've heard it (we put almost the whole seven minute track up on the website so you can hear it in all its glory -- it starts in one place and ends up in quite another and you're not quite sure how you got there but you're glad).
If the word "disco" makes you cringe, get ready for your world to change. And if you thought that band !!!'s record funkified your indierock life, they ain't NOTHING compared to "Disco Not Disco".
P.S. Someone really needs to tell Neil Hamburger he sounds exactly like Steve Miller on "Macho City".
The humble drum machine. It's had a tumultuous existence, equally loathed and loved, no more so than in metal (where for the most part it tends to be loathed). Without it, there's be no techno, or hip hop, or grime or industrial music. Or maybe there would be, but it would sound drastically different. It opened up a whole new world of sound, allowing musicians to program beats and sounds that they couldn't necessarily play or make themselves. So it was only a matter of time before extreme musicians discovered the sort of speed and brutality one could wring from that little box. It's nothing new, metal bands, grind bands and the like have been using drum machines for ages, but as extreme music gets more aggressive, more fucked up, more complex and more extreme, folks making this sort of music are pushing the limits of what a drum machine can do. Before, a band couldn't be any faster than their drummer could play. Now there is no limit, 100 bpm, 200 bpm, 300 bpm or more, speed is now no longer an issue. Nor is arrangement. Now a deft drum machine programmer can fit millions of beats and an insane number of different rhythms into a one minute song. Faster, more furious, more freaked out, we love it. From the murky blackened dizzyingly complex mechanical drums of black metal outfits like Draugar, to the pounding industrial grooves of Godflesh, to the lightning fast blasts of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, we can't get enough, we love the sputtering stuttering pounding skittering drum machine. Not as a replacement for real drums, and a real drummer (lord knows that usually the best part of seeing a band live is seeing a kick ass drummer totally destroy) but as another tool in the already formidable arsenal.
So here we have Drum>MachineGun, an audio report on the current state of grind. And metal. And more specifically, just what these grindmetal freaks are doing with their drum machines. And what they're doing is totally fucking mind blowing and face melting and completely confounding. Forget about music you think is fast, or heavy, or complicated, or freaked out, or fucked up. Because whatever you think, these songs, and these bands are more. Much more. 20 bands playing 67 songs in 73 minutes. Average song length about a minute. Average number of parts per song? More than our puny minds can handle. If you could imagine the most insane, most complicated, heaviest weirdest grindmetal band in the world, this comp is the record they would make. Each band linked in some ways, sometimes obviously, sometimes not so. But it makes for an incredibly cohesive listen. Which is rare for comps in general, especially one with 20 bands and almost 70 songs.
Probably our favorite discovery amongst the bunch is Noism, who might possible be our new favorite band. Imagine a group that sounded like a skipping Pig Destroyer cd. Or like multiple Agoraphobic Nosebleed cds playing at the same time. A totally mind blowing freaked out shredfest, impossibly convoluted rhythms, bizarre and brutal riffage, splattered all over the place, but sometimes lopping and skipping into bizarre industrial metal breakdowns, like a death metal Oval or something. Drum patters that are mind blowingly complex, and chugging squiggly guitars that somehow sync up perfectly. It's like a super scratched up, skipping grindcore 45, played at 90 rpm. We are dying for more than these 5 minutes. Then there's Jet Jaguar Kr3 Kill Spree, maybe the weirdest of the bunch. Imagine any of the other bands on this comp, having their blasting grind picked apart, chopped into tiny pieces and then flung haphazardly into a swirling black froth by V/VM or someone equally demented. An industrialized black metal music concrete. There are riffs and harsh vocals and all that but they are scattered amidst all sorts of bizarre sounds, damaged FX, and random looped samples. Some familiar AQ faves are present as well as a whole bunch of bands we'd never even heard of but were immediately blown away by. On the familiar side, BIG faves Black Mayonnaise, who we hadn't really expected to find on this comp, but they do indeed employ the machine made drums, although BM use them much differently. A sludgy ambient freaked out drug dirge world of fucked up home recorded doom. Noxious ambience, dense clouds of grinding guitar grrr and swooping FX drenched synths, all over a relentlessly pounding simple machine made beat. Like Hawkwind with a drum machine, or a super blissed out on-the-nod Butthole Surfers, a deliriously dark lugubrious creepy crawl. And no drum machine grind comp would be complete without Agoraphobic Nosebleed, the patron saints of mechanical grind, the lords of drum machine destruction. A technical grind metal juggernaut, who choose to instead indulge their industrial techno jones here, spewing forth a thick wash of pounding doom drenched gabber, with creepy vocal snippets, whirling clouds of synth fuzz and lo-fi hiss, all over a relentless 4/4 pound. Then there's Nemo, who we last heard from years ago on a split cd released by the now defunct Rage Of Achilles label. And we went absolutely apeshit for their new wave video game death metal grind. Wishing for a full length that never came. Thankfully not much has changed. If anything, they've gotten weirder and faster and more fucked up. It's like classic eighties metal chopped up and sped up, splattered with drum machines, run through some 16 bit video game system, and then performed by some grind metal super group. Yowza!
On the new to us side of things, there's Mecha Bongzilla, who we're tempted to believe is Bongzilla's faster, less stoned alterego, but it's a bit hard to tell. One track is downtuned buzzing blurry techgrind, but with INSANE vocals, like some alien gargling with a mouthful of kazoos and croaking frogs. Although their other track is downright sludgy and doomy so who knows? Also, Mad Cow who spit out weird echoey blast beats and spastic rhythmic splatter underneath thick sheets of low end guitar grind and super fucked black vomit vocals. Oh and a bunch of bird calls, monkey sounds, and a totally bizarre sped up super affected Elizabeth Clare Prophet sample right in the middle!!!! Woah!
Ok, it'll probably be easier to go through the rest of the bands in list form:
Artificial Intelligence Agency: more of a strange series of interludes, mostly weird sound effects, movie snippets, found sounds, bizarre FX, and only the occasional bit of music, and it's NOT metal, more some sort of weird ambient porno funk.
Voltron: chugging super fast gurgling vocalled death metal grind, with guitars and vocals so indistinct they are just blurs of low end sound and of course lightning fast drum machine blasts.
Submachine Drum: murky lo-fi industrial grind, so fast it's all a dizzying blur of hyperspeed drums and looped processed guitar riffs.
Slough: Not related to the similarly named Slough Feg... and take away the Feg and you've got a guttural grindmetal shred fest. Impossibly downtuned guitars, all a growing gurgling blur.
Scumfusion: some seriously shredding grind, but with plenty of wheedily lead guitars, grinding sludge metal riffs over ridiculously fast rhythms and super weird processed vocals, that sound like some underwater alien. Surprisingly melodic, but still furious and fierce, pounding and pummeling.
Prosthetic Cunt: We reviewed these guys' full length ages ago, a gleefully perverse and sick sick sick take on ultragrossoutgrind. Super blown out guitars and a drummachine cranked to 11 and programmed at about 300 BPM. And of course lots of goofy movie samples.
Ocrilim: No comp of insanely technical grind would be complete without some Mick Barr madness. Ocrilim is Barr (Orthrelm, Octis, Crom Tech) shredding wildly to sputtering spastic machine drums. SO insanely inspired but incredibly hard on the ears. In a good way.
Nerve Not Found: Prog gone grind. Keyboards swoop in and out of super complicated arrangements. Like the Locust covering Magma.
Hellz Army: Pounding DHR style industrial gabber. Big static repeating guitar riffs and pounding four on the floor drum machine pummel with bizarre samples of fifties rock, Space Ghost and tons of other random weirdness.
Genghis Tron: We sure do love these guys. Imagine Slayer sped up to impossible speeds, a grinding super technical satanic death metal, then mix in a bunch of fuzzed out new wave synths, hip hop breakbeats, samples and prepare to have your mind melt.
Decomposing Serenity: These guys represent the old school. Super blow out death metal gore grind. Downtuned riffing, chugging guitars, machine made blast beats, and a vast array of gurgling, strangled, alien, monster growls. Bits of this are almost even funky, making them sound at times like a gore grind Chili Peppers.
Data Clast: Another grind new wave hybrid, but with a bit of a prog bent. Heavy and super pummeling but with plenty of thick fuzzy synths, and convoluted song structures, complex arrangements, and processed guitars that skip and stutter as much as they riff. And of course some huge slow and low grumbling monster gurgle vocals.
Cocoon: Stretched out industrial black ambience, one of the few tracks whose drum machines are more a part of their whole vibe than the driving focal point. Crackling, rumbling drones, clouds of drifting glitch, and shuffling stuttering rhythms, an ominous dreamlike subtly drum machined drift.
This is the kind of record that leaves you bruised and bloody, beaten and exhausted. Like having the musical shit kicked out of you. This is a seriously intense bout of heavy listening. Hard listening. Nothing easy about this at all. Super furious, totally relentless, loud as fuck, faster than a speeding bullet, grinding and gurgling and bellowing and blasting and skipping and looping and crushing and pulverizing and pummeling and shrieking and shredding and so goddamn amazing.
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Here's Forced Exposure's apt description:
Debut release on a new CA-based IDM label, focusing on that sparkling electronic machine crinkle that can sound just right. OST's track, "August" is a legitimate classic, that could easily fit somewhere within the Warp "Artificial Intelligence" series. Many other tracks are of similar vintage & emotional quality. The CD features obscure US artists such as: Solenoide (aka Office Products, aka Mr. Pharmacist; currently been doing work with Mark Hosler of Negativland, while having escaped an earlier life of hacking, sits behind the door and thinks about asthetic pranks'), Lillianthal (Arrow Kleeman, NYC, has performed with the Silver Apples, before becoming Lillienthal, "hoping that his search for sound found and personal mood will set him aside from the even flow of contemporary electronic dance music, this is his debut'), If.Then.Else. ('playing bass, playing jazz, discovers the synthesizer all hell break loose; not to be seen until now, he hides with the machine in attempts to beat it at it's own games'), Sybarite (aka Xian Hawkins, who has also performed and recorded with Simeon of the reformed Silver Apples), O.S.T. (aka Rook Vallade, has recorded on Switch Records, Plug Research, Worm Interface, remixed Spacetime Continuum, etc.). [/cat/compilationsplit40.html]
Holy shit, this is what we've been waiting for! Soul Jazz comes correct with an essential collection of the fierce and fired up sounds of the early queens of hip-hop. This is basically everything we love about hip-hop, captured in one monstrous collection, perfectly reflecting out love of both old school hip hop and more specifically female MC's, proving one again that the ladies knew how to do it best!
Filled with sass, strength, humor and charged sexuality, these ladies weren't just trailblazers, they made songs that still sound so damn catchy and irresistible all these years later.
While a big shift happened for sure it's important to remember that hip-hop's origins were strongly connected to strong females and even queer spirit. Coming out of the disco and funk scenes of late '70s New York there was a whole generation of girls who grew up empowered to take the mic and take no prisoners as they did so. So many of those amazing women are on this collection. Roxanne Shante, Sweet Tee, Sequence, Cookie Crew, JJ Fad, Queen Latifah (yes, she once was way fierce!), MC Lyte, Dimples D, Missy Elliott, and way more. There are those of us who remember these tracks from back in the day and we're equally excited for a whole new generation to get blown away by the colorful energy in these sounds, kids who have grown up on MIA, Lil' Kim, Fannypack, and Yo Majesty will get to hear just where those sounds came from! While the early '80s was the heyday for these sounds, what makes Fly Girls such a cool collection is that it's a three decade retrospective which brings the best of the female MCs from the late '70s all the way to the early '90s. These tracks make us wanna dust off our old sneakers and head to the playground with nothing but a boombox, a piece of cardboard and some friends 'cause with these songs blasting that's all you need for an instant party!
Holy shit, this is what we've been waiting for! Soul Jazz comes correct with an essential collection of the fierce and fired up sounds of the early queens of hip-hop. This is basically everything we love about hip-hop, captured in one monstrous collection, perfectly reflecting out love of both old school hip hop and more specifically female MC's, proving one again that the ladies knew how to do it best!
Filled with sass, strength, humor and charged sexuality, these ladies weren't just trailblazers, they made songs that still sound so damn catchy and irresistible all these years later.
While a big shift happened for sure it's important to remember that hip-hop's origins were strongly connected to strong females and even queer spirit. Coming out of the disco and funk scenes of late '70s New York there was a whole generation of girls who grew up empowered to take the mic and take no prisoners as they did so. So many of those amazing women are on this collection. Roxanne Shante, Sweet Tee, Sequence, Cookie Crew, JJ Fad, Queen Latifah (yes, she once was way fierce!), MC Lyte, Dimples D, Missy Elliott, and way more. There are those of us who remember these tracks from back in the day and we're equally excited for a whole new generation to get blown away by the colorful energy in these sounds, kids who have grown up on MIA, Lil' Kim, Fannypack, and Yo Majesty will get to hear just where those sounds came from! While the early '80s was the heyday for these sounds, what makes Fly Girls such a cool collection is that it's a three decade retrospective which brings the best of the female MCs from the late '70s all the way to the early '90s. These tracks make us wanna dust off our old sneakers and head to the playground with nothing but a boombox, a piece of cardboard and some friends 'cause with these songs blasting that's all you need for an instant party!
Holy shit, this is what we've been waiting for! Soul Jazz comes correct with an essential collection of the fierce and fired up sounds of the early queens of hip-hop. This is basically everything we love about hip-hop, captured in one monstrous collection, perfectly reflecting out love of both old school hip hop and more specifically female MC's, proving one again that the ladies knew how to do it best!
Filled with sass, strength, humor and charged sexuality, these ladies weren't just trailblazers, they made songs that still sound so damn catchy and irresistible all these years later.
While a big shift happened for sure it's important to remember that hip-hop's origins were strongly connected to strong females and even queer spirit. Coming out of the disco and funk scenes of late '70s New York there was a whole generation of girls who grew up empowered to take the mic and take no prisoners as they did so. So many of those amazing women are on this collection. Roxanne Shante, Sweet Tee, Sequence, Cookie Crew, JJ Fad, Queen Latifah (yes, she once was way fierce!), MC Lyte, Dimples D, Missy Elliott, and way more. There are those of us who remember these tracks from back in the day and we're equally excited for a whole new generation to get blown away by the colorful energy in these sounds, kids who have grown up on MIA, Lil' Kim, Fannypack, and Yo Majesty will get to hear just where those sounds came from! While the early '80s was the heyday for these sounds, what makes Fly Girls such a cool collection is that it's a three decade retrospective which brings the best of the female MCs from the late '70s all the way to the early '90s. These tracks make us wanna dust off our old sneakers and head to the playground with nothing but a boombox, a piece of cardboard and some friends 'cause with these songs blasting that's all you need for an instant party!
We're pretty damn excited by Sun City Girls 33.3 percenter Alan Bishop's new Sublime Frequencies label. "Dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers" Sublime Frequencies is slipping on the shoes apparently discarded by such pioneering labels as Smithsonian Folkways, Nonesuch Explorer, et al. Unlike previous explorers in such unheard music, Sublime Frequencies is not restricted by academic or commercial purposes. The latter probably deserves a bit more explanation; for where much of the post-Explorer purveyors of "world music" shamelessly produce an endless slough of slick garbage that sounds like the crap you can hear on any U.S. top 40 radio station merely sung in another language (Christ, if I had a wooden nickel for every fuckin' starry eyed NPR music review extoling the uniqueness of some generic world music outfit that combines electronic music with traditional folk, yadda, yadda, yadda the world's forests would be clear cut by now) the recordings you'll hear presented by Sublime Frequencies come from the cracks in the pavement of the culture makers. Through field recordings (many made by Bishop himself in his travels), radio and shortwave broadcasts some of the most fucking great music and audio you've never heard has been culled together. Balls to fidelity, none of the artists here would be allowed within 10 miles of a Putamayo AR executive, this is the punk rock of field recordings!
Assembled from cassettes acquired by Alan Bishop through trade or purchase in 1989 while traveling through Sumatra, "Folk And Pop Sounds" contains some of the most obscure recordings of the three initial CD releases from Subliminal Frequencies. Located on the furthest Western edge of the Indonesian archipelago, Sumatra is big (as big as California) and widely unexplored in the audio realm in comparison with its neighboring islands to the East, Java and Bali. The disc begins with the Haba Haba Group in which a male singer is accompanied by flute, two alternating gongs and percussion and secondly by an unknown Sumatran Dangdut (crazy overdriven pop with a heavy Indian film music influence). The most immediately noticeable difference in these recordings from Sumatra to Bali & Java is the overt Arabic influence on the music. The Dangdut track even sounds similar to the music on a Somalian CD, "Jamiila" which we used to sell here years ago before it went out of print. As if to admonish us against generalizations, another later Dangdut track, with runaway farfisa organ, pleasant arppegiating electric guitar and female vocals sounds not dis-similar to the "keroncong" music of The Steps CD from Java released on Warn Defever's Time Stereo label. While the disc may begin innocently enough, the sequencing of the tracks seduces the listener into the strange world of Sumatran music. The very Arabic sounding Indang Pariaman which features a female singer who's melody line interweaves beautifully with end blown wooden flute and some more incredibly nutty buzzing electric keyboard (one can only imagine that the sound is intended to imitate a double reed instrument of old) is moved along by jovial electric bass and casio-rhythm. The combination of acoustic and archaic electric instruments is shamelessly wonderful. Later an orchestra of sorts, complete with violin, electric organ, bass, drums, female voice leads us down a fragrant path that's oddly reminiscent of a Sun City Girls track. Speaking of which, though this one technically isn't, there are a couple of tracks on here which indeed are songs covered by the Girls, can you figure out which ones? Along with the songs proper included here, there are some great excerpts from dramas. The first instance begins with sweet flute and what's supposed to be a rooster crowing, but emulated by what sounds like an old air raid siren played through a broken megaphone. A melodramatic dialogue ensues between a terribly afflicted female and a stoic male voice. needless to say, this one comes highly recommended!
Cup has been raging about it for months. Allan finally got a hold of an import dvd of it (and a t-shirt!). Andee's just about to watch it. And we've got the import soundtrack compilation in stock now!
Sooo, what's with all the hubbub?! Well, the center of attention is a mockumentary indie film which may be described as "Driver 23" meets "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" meets "American Movie", but... Canadian. It's all about the tragicomic misadventures of two Molson-chugging burnouts (think a Canadian Bill and Ted, ten years older and wasted most of the time) spewing stoner wisdom like "turn up the good, turn down the suck!"
If that piqued your interest (or not), give the following news a moment's ponder too...
This cd contains a couple of extra special songs performed by AQ ultra-fave Canucks the New Pornographers *and* Sloan (psst, they even do a Rush song)! This very well could be the only peep you'll be hearing from those NPs until they unleash their new album sometime next year, and who knows when we'll be hearing from those Sloan boys? So if you need your fix... FUBAR is where it's at! It's also where you'll find NoMeansNo, Chixdiggit, The Sweet, Girlschool and more. For the most part the concept here is Canadian indie/pop punk bands doing covers of Canadian rock/metal classics from the past: thus, NoMeansNo does Neil Young, GOB tackles Kick Axe's "Heavy Metal Shuffle", Sum 41 performs the Helix anthem "Rock You", while other bands cover April Wine, Loverboy, Toronto, BTO, etc. And lets not forget he-man Canadian metaller Thor (a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek 80's relic himself) doing the film's catchy theme, "FUBAR Is A Super Rocker". Throw in some originals from Creeper (loser metal band of Fubar star "Dean") and some out-of-context dialogue from the film, and what other album could possibly be more fun and surreal?? ...Know what else? These filmmakers received funding from the Canadian government to do this. Fill yer boots, eh!
Finally as a little aside, we'd like to clarify that the Aquarius Records who released this compilation is not us, but a Canadian label with the same name. But, unlike most things on their label, we'd be proud to have put this out ourselves if we were a label... Canada + Comedy + Metal + The New Pornographers + Helix + Thor + Sloan + Kick Axe = Aquarius Record of the Week Big Time!!!
Sure, Tzadik titles've been really spotty lately and it's getting to be hard to tell the good from the bad, but surprise: the label has totally hit the mark this time. Not only do Bacharach's standards cry out for reinterpretation, but this cd functions as a hearty sampler of downtown NYC scene as it stands today. Thus, while Bacharach's used to Dionne and the Carpenters paying tribute (and royalties), this is a weird and 90% wonderful collection of mostly twisted (but some lovely straightahead) covers of his songs, from Wayne Horvitz's *sublime* "Close To You" to Marc Ribot's signature guitarwork on "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" to Medeski, Martin and Wood's "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," which sounds like it was recorded underwater. Other contributors include Faith No More's Mike Patton, Shelley Hirsch, Lloyd Cole, Robert Quine, Eyvind Kang, Bill Frisell, Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda with Sean Lennon, Dave Douglas, Zeena Parkins, Erik Friedlander, and Guy Klucsevek.
We can not tell you how psyched we are to have this back in stock. We've been listening to this like crazy. We had almost forgotten how totally far out and mind blowing this collection was. Since we first carried this years ago, there have been tons of diverse and eclectic collections of musics from all over the world, psych rock compilations (Love, Peace & Poetry, Thai Beat A Go Go, etc.), the Sublime Frequencies series, and loads more, but as good as those are, they can't hold a candle to Ho!: Roady Music From Vietnam! So completely fascinating and fun, wild and so so weird! Everytime this gets played in the store, customers and employees alike have to check to see what the heck it is we're listening to!
Ho! is an amazing collection of pieces from Vietnamese street musicians. The folks that travelled to Vietnam and recorded these pieces gave themselves the tongue-in-cheek name Nuoc Mam Dirndl'n, evidence of their humor in the light of collecting the sort of music they suspect the Vietnamese government would perhaps NOT appreciate as a representation of Vietnam. Ho! ranges from raucous, percussion-heavy funeral songs played at midnight by 'young people provided with drugs' to traditional material played on the one-stringed dan bau to melodramatic love songs favored by the son of the owner of the hotel the folks stayed at. There's even a 'tasteful schmaltzy song' which is what the Vietnamese record-store saleswoman played for them when they asked for some traditional Vietnamese music! Check out the following excerpt from the fascinating liner notes, and, like us, marvel at the freshness inherent in the refusal to adopt the omniscient voice-of-authority tone taken by so many ethno-compilers: "We are stunned by the Vietnamese 'Lebensgefuhl' actually corresponding to our western idea of 'subculture': lively, anarchic, loud, dense, hearty; the people are living working, eating, sleeping, and holding their funeral ceremonies between house and street. We don't know yet if there is any subculture in Vietnam; if there is e.g. (organized) political counterforces to the one-party regime -- nobody talks about politics (with us) -- maybe there is no need for it, because everybody can do whatever he/she wants: though street trading is prohibited everybody does it -- under the hardly vigilant eyes of the law -- raids are very rare, then the stands are carried away quickly and when the mischief is gone it goes on... What matters is that people LOVE TO SING which, like in our part of the world, hide in gloomy basements and play till the ears/souls are ringing: every band in Vietnam needs a license for its existence, for every gig, every song. And because there is no basements in Vietnam, people like to use the karaoke machines in their homes, bars and special karaoke houses. Saigon's street musicians are rather despised by the yuppies of Vietnam: 'shit music.' The yuppies prefer Sting and western style in general." Highly highly highly recommended!
Living in the Bay Area, we've obviously been hearing all about Hyphy for about a year now, a distinctly Bay Area sound, not all that dissimilar to Crunk or the chopped and screwed sound of the Dirty South, but with a vibe that was distinctly, well Hyphy (a mix of hype and fly btw). A sound that supposedly just sort of sprouted up in the beginning of 2006. We'd heard tracks by all the main movers in the scene, Keak Da Sneak, Mac Dre, E-40, and while we dug it, it didn't really sound all that different from the Bay Area hip hop we'd been hearing for years, and it sort of smacked of the great hype machine, coming up with a catch phrase to make something old and tired sound new and fresh again. But maybe we weren't hearing the right tracks, cuz we got our hands on this comp, featuring all the best Hyphy bangers from the first year, and HOLEEEEEEEEE SHIT, is this stuff amazing. Fucked up and funny, funky and fun and so totally over the top. Absolutely irresistible. In fact we sold one to a customer, who called us from his car ten minutes later FREAKING OUT about how great it was, and how every track was so good, he'd skip to the next one, expecting it to be a dud, only to discover it was even better. We had the exact same experience. We listened to a few minutes of each track, constantly skipping forward, not believing that every track could be that fucking great. But they were, and they are!
We've been freaking out about grime for ages, a killer UK hybrid of hip hop and jungle (Dizzee Rascal, Lady Sovereign, Wiley...), we can't get enough of that grimey sound, so fucked up with killer beats and weird loops, and some of the funniest freaked out flows we've ever heard, dense and tongue twisting. With our new found love of grime, we had been lamenting the sad state of US hip hop, the same beats, the same boring gangster rap, the same glossy MTV stuff, but damn if these tracks don't push the exact same buttons that grime does, sounding fresh and thrilling all over again.
But what does Hyphy actually sound like? It's kind of hard to pinpoint, it may be about location as much as sound, the scene as much as the music, but most of the tracks have some common elements. Synths for one. Lots of synths, thick and fuzzy, often the main hook is just a massive buzzing synth melody over a shuffling laid back rhythm. And the rhythms, they don't bang and pound as much as sort of slink. And the rapping, some seriously strange flows, from marble mouthed mumbles, to urgent whispers to Lil' Jon style hollerin' but it's not just the delivery, it's the actual words, a confusional mix of Hyphy slang that has you scratching your head as often as laughing out loud. Check out "I Got Grapes", the main lyric being a wailed "I got graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapes" over a super stripped down beat. Or "Yadadamean" where the main hook is a strangely affected "Yadadamean" repeated over a weirdly epic cinematic synth line. WTF?!? So amazing.
I wish we could describe it more explicitly, but you just gotta hear it. If you're anything like us, you'll be grabbed in the first 30 seconds and won't be able to stop. Normally we're pretty skeptical of 'hits' collections like this, but it's hard to argue with a comp this jam packed with stunners, and we're not about to. Did you dig the B'more Music comp? The Science Faction: Grime comp? The Rio Baile Funk comps? The Warrior Dubz comp? The Razor X Productions comp? Well, you just might have a new favorite. THE dance party record of the year. Whether you're slow rolling with the top down, cranking it through the headphones, or bumpin' and sweatin' up the dancefloor, this disc is THE ONE.
A while back, we went a little crazy for a series of three limited edition (and now long out of print) 7"s, a series of Hawkwind tributes, by some of our favorite modern psych rock heavies, tracks from Kinski, Bardo Pond, Acid Mothers Temple, White Hills, Mudhoney and Mugstar, all of them amazing. So now finally, those 7"s have been compiled onto a cd, including not only all of those original tracks, but also some bonus tracks to boot, more Hawkwind covers by Moon Duo, Magoo and *another* cover by aQ faves Mugstar. More on those in a moment, first, let's talk about those original singles, and of course the mighty HAWKWIND!
Where to even start... HAWKWIND. The mighty lords of drugged out space rock, without whom, most of the bands we love might not even exist. These four Hawkwind records: Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall Of The Mountain Grill, In Search Of Space, and Space Ritual, are pretty much all anyone needs to know about space rock. Or whatever it is that Hawkwind do, long sprawling jams, extended psychedelic workouts, heavy and trippy, totally drugged out and divine, while at the same time, surprisingly catchy. But yeah, aQ folks probably already know how much we love Hawkwind.
So if we were to pick bands to cover classic Hawkwind tunes, we might not have picked exactly these, but then again, we very well might have: Mudhoney, Mugstar, Acid Mothers Tempo And The Cosmic Inferno, White Hills, Kinski, Bardo Pond. Holy hell! If this were simply a comp with those bands, we'd be all over it, but the fact that they're covering Hawkwind seems like it was made just for the aQ faithful, and who knows, maybe it was.
So how does each band fare? Pretty marvelously in fact, let's run through the track shall we?
Kinski are up first, and they definitely get their Hawkwind on, covering "Master Of The Universe", not so much making it their own, as transforming themselves into a vessel through which the spirit of Hawkwind can flow, and flow it does. That main riff is such a killer, all the band have to do is ride it out, adding plenty of freaked out effects and psychedelic leads, the vocals buried in the mix, not getting in the way of the endless spacepsych jamming.
Bardo Pond add female vocals to their take on "Lord Of Light", the vocals drifting ethereally, over a roiling black cloud of FX drenched guitars and some seriously pounding drums, even a bit of flute (we think), and maybe more than any of the others managing to meld the sound of the original with their own, plenty of wah wah guitar, loads of effects, most of the track spent drifting through space, cloaked in blown out super distorted psych guitar and shimmering outer space ambience. Surprisingly heavy and totally blissed out.
Acid Mothers Temple are an obvious choice to pay homage to a band who was doing the AMT thing 30 years ago, and in true AMT fashion, Kawabata and company go for it, covering "Brainstorm" although it's difficult to tell, as it's buried under sheets of wild freaked out psych guitar and blown out space rock effects EVERYWHERE. It really doesn't sound all that different from any number of other AMT jams, but that's basically because every AMT jam is a tribute to Hawkwind, isn't it?
NYC's White Hills ditch much of their usual spaceiness for something a bit harder, tackling "Be Yourself" with crunchy chugging guitars, pounding drums, wild tangles of distortion drenched leads over the top, the band not so much covering the original, as transforming it into an endless psychedelic hard rock loop, the band churning and grinding out a steady stream of psychedelia over that endless main riff, before drifting off into a cloud of glittering soft psych shimmer.
Mudhoney tackle "Urban Guerilla" and totally make it their own, so much so, that minus a little chunk of extended droney space rocking in the middle, those not well versed in Hawkwind would certainly be forgiven for thinking it was a Mudhoney original.
And finally Mugstar throw their space rock hat into the ring, and are a DEAD ringer for Hawkwind, their sound murky and muddy, squalls of psych guitar, clouds of swirling spaced out FX, droned out jams, all tangled up and slowly unwinding into a long sprawling space rock jamscape. Hawkwind would be proud.
Phew, even without bonus tracks, this would be a serious killer, but for the cd reissue there are three! The one most folks seem to be super excited about is the Moon Duo jam. Moon Duo, for those not in the know, is the two piece drum machine driven space kraut offshoot of SF psychedelic rockers Wooden Shjips, and they take Hawkwind's "Hurry On Sundown" and stretch it way out, skeletal drum machine, woozy organ drones, reverbed Suicide like vox, dark and hypnotic and spacey, only to erupt about halfway through into something way more rocking, grinding distorted tendrils of psychguitar smolder wrapped all around that unrelenting motorik groove.
Magoo, who we don't know too much about, tackle "Space Is Deep", and stay pretty true to the HW formula, thick fuzzy bass, fiery effects drenched guitars, stripped down and minimal, the vocals sounding very Geddy Lee, eventually the track builds to a seriously spaced out fuzzguitar stomp, unleashing that wild chaotic heart of the sun Hawkwind style extended outro that pretty much WAS the hallmark of every incredible HW space jam, and they nail it.
Finally, Mugstar gets another go, and they take on "Paradox" and like their version of "Born To Go", they might as well just fess up to being the reincarnated spirit of Hawkwind, cuz holy shit, for all thebands who ape that Hawkwind sound, few capture the mood and spirit and vibe and SOUND as well as these guys, crunchy fuzzy guitars, super melodic basslines, vocals buried in the mix, everything wrapped in swirling streaks of whooshing sci-fi effects, slipping easily from blissed out almost krautrock style groove, to fierce almost metalic crunch, culminating in, yes, another gloriously blown out, extended hypnotic space rock freak out finish.
It may be a comp, and it may be all covers, but this is still most definitely a contender for freaked out, psychedelic space rock record of the year!!
Wow. The London based Soul Jazz label does it again. They've already documented the global history of funk and soul in several astonishingly well-executed collections including the universally loved "100-500% Dynamite" series of Jamaican soul, rocksteady, and reggae; the Philadelphia Roots collection; the Nu Yorica albums; that ESG reissue, and even an Art Ensemble of Chicago album. Yet none of these albums has been as highly anticipated or so spot-on timely as this new one from Soul Jazz, "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm."
This compilation succeeds in encapsulating that heady time between the years 1978 and 1982, when the "second wave" of British punk bands found inspiration in both the musical and political power of reggae. As the situationist propaganda of Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols spawned a global theater of anarchist shock tactics, even such right-wing idiots as the skinhead, white power, and neo-Nazi parties dared to embrace punk's celebration of chaos. Thus, those (mostly white) musicians within the punk movement who were *opposed* to such unsavory politics stood in solidarity both politically and aesthetically with their black brothers in Jamaica. Incited by the offbeat attack of The Clash and the huge dub bass production from Public Image Limited, the late '70s punk movement began a vast exploration into possibilities of bridging dance music with the revolutionary anthems of punk.
While neither The Clash nor PIL are included in this compilation, "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm" does collect some of the best tracks from the huge vaults of post-punk, many of which might have gone forgotten had it not been for this album! Even 20 years after their initial releases, the bands here -- including Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo, The Pop Group, A Certain Ratio, The Slits, This Heat, Human League and Throbbing Gristle -- still sound fresh, often melding choppy rhythms with angular slash-and-burn guitar, spit out vocals, rubbery bass, and nascent forms of electronica.
We'll say it again -- the music here is simply perfect -- the punk holds back dance music's tendency to get too mechanical 'n boring, while the dance elements impart melody and groove to the punk. Highlighting the compilation are A Certain Ratio's urgent amphetamine funk on "Shack Up" and "Knife Slits Water", melding the unlikely combination of Joy Division's grim urgency with a George Clinton funk arrrangement. Gang Of Four's "To Hell With Poverty" marks their transition from the agitated punk grooves found on their classic (but impossible to find) debut "Entertainment" into a smooth dancefloor-friendly attack punctuated by Marxist rhetoric. The Human League -- who are unfortunately best known for their chart topping new wave singles -- had incredibly adventurous beginnings on the often forgotten punk label Fast (also early home for The Mekons and Gang of Four). Their early offering "Being Boiled" is a primitive piece of spartan electronics loaded with theatrical tension and dark arpeggiations more expected from people like Coil and Throbbing Gristle (who contribute their perverse fascination with ABBA in the subversive aesthetics of "20 Jazz Funk Greats").
But, why is this compilation so short? Judging from how few people today remember or even have heard Section 25, Tunnelvision, DAF, or Fad Gadget, there's plenty more work for Soul Jazz to do in compiling more compilations of this sort! Not just recommended, this is *required* listening. Strongly recommended to any and all!
The Western obsession with India's prolific film industry, and even more so the musical numbers that drive the narratives forward, has nearly reached its saturation point. The amount of "best of Bollywood" anthologies released to date seems to almost equal India's annual theatrical output. Which all just makes it that much harder for us when we want to tell you that Indiavision is quite assuredly the best collection of Bollywood music we've come accross. See, so much has come before that such a claim will be immediately written off as so much of the usual record reviewer hyperbole. So just hear us out. First of all, what is it that makes Indian film music so great? Well, one of the things most often cited by fans is the over-the-top arrangements on some of the better numbers. The really great film music composers like Kalyanji & Anandji and Laxmikant & Pyarelal are some of the most worldly specialists in all genres of music, integrating the talents of Ennio Morricone's Western period, entire western orchestras, regional Indian classical music, the newest in electronic developments and whatever fad happened to be big in the year which they were composing (Hawaiian slide guitar, psychedelic music, soul, funk, you name it). The greatest film scores manage to somehow meld all that together in a way that just begs for some kind of clever culinary analogy (which we will spare you from in this review).
What else makes a great Bollywood song? The vocalist(s). A good song can survive without a male vocalist; they're only needed in duets with the female lead. The female vocalists in Indian film music are the equivalent of lead guitarists in the golden age of American rock and roll, and their vocal chords have the same dynamics, presence and range as most amplified guitars. Singers like Asha Bhosle (India's shining star of singers), featured heavily on this collection (and all collections) have a way of disembodying their voices from their bodies. When Bhosle sings her voice cuts through the speakers like a scalpel. Half of this phenomenon is due to her amazing lungs, the other to the insane engineering skills of the producers who record these scores who choose to overload the microphone preamps and super-saturate the magnetic tape during the loudest passages resulting in an unholy natural compression of the signal. Second only to the likes of Lee Perry in his Black Ark period of the early seventies or dub master King Tubby, the production values of Indian film music is singularly twisted in their techniques. Like the aforementioned Jamaican demigods of the multi-track, the recordists here have an arsenal of reverb, echo and compression tools that -- while not as new as the gear used in Hollywood's recording studios -- are used to their absolute functional limit. All of those essential elements of Indian film music are represented on each and every song here. But unlike many earlier collections, which focus their range on a particular era, composer, or vocalist, Indiavision draws from a wide range of sources. The tracks included here date from as far back as 1966 on up to 1984, it includes such film score heavyweights as father S.D. and son R.D. Burman, Laxmikant & Pyarelal, Kalyanji & Anandji and Bappi Lahiri. The broad time spanned by the tracks makes this collection as a whole more varied and easy on the ears. There's also quite a good variety of both slow, sultry numbers and completely batty comical ones. Some, like the title music for "The Burning Train" (listed as an instrumental), which features gruff female vocals like those of Yma Sumac, or the "Cabaret Dance Music" from the film "Dharmatma" with its maniacal laughter are completely off the wall. Others, like "Yashomati Maiya Se Bole Nandala" -- a deadly serious romantic number with crooned vocals by Lata Mangeshkar -- and "Come Closer" -- a mellow and sincere funk/soul song sung by Salma Agha -- are beautiful respites from the cornball antics which are more often the songs of choice for Bollywood anthologies. Comes with a 30 page, full color booklet with plentiful liner notes in both French and English. Highly recommended!
Sometimes, in the midst of all the excitement we feel at the release of a new blippy cutting-edge electronica disc, or the next undiscovered indie-rock pop gem, we lose sight of the fact that much of the best music made has nothing to do with computers or hip scenes. Instead, it's made by musicians you've never heard of who are unlikely to ever grace the cover of The Wire or Magnet. Especially, musicians in the Third World, who have a contemporary, living, often innovative relationship with the musical traditions of their communities. People who do what they do with a great deal of feeli guitar music that we've ever celebrated on this AQ-list. We're all quite taken with it, and thus chose to make it Record of the Month. Indeed, the disc's final track, a song called "Fajar Di Atas Awan" written by Irwansyah Harahap, is assuredly the most gorgeous seven minutes of gentle guitar folk-drone and female vocals that we've been blessed to hear, ever.
The guitar, though rarely mentioned by ethnomusicologists, has been a part of Indonesian music ever since the Portuguese introduced it to the region back in the 16th century. Over the years it has made its way into various musical idioms and been paramount in the formation of others. At times used to imitate traditional instruments such as the Kecapi (a Sundanese zither), or, conversely, to play the bizarre, Indian film music styled electric pop of modern Dangdut (see Volume 2 in this series, "Indonesian Popular Music"), guitars (or "home-made instruments resembling guitars") have had a rich history in Indonesia. Featuring primarily solo guitar and vocal accompaniment from Sumatra, Java, Sumba, Timor and Sulawesi, this cd, with its very informative 32 page (!) booklet, is yet another testament to Yampolsky's dedication to documenting the multi-faceted musical world of Indonesia, in all its riches and wonder.
With twenty volumes in the series, we can't be too sad that this is the last, as it's certain that even picking up only this (a good start) and a few of the others would keep the adventurous music fan thrilled for a long while, and perhaps hook them on a whole new realm of sounds. The other two most recent installments are Volume 18, "Sulawesi: Festivals, Funerals, And Work", ranging from sorrowful flute pieces to drum and vocal based harvest celebrations, and Volume 19, "Music of Maluku: Halmahera, Buru, Kei", a variety of musics from the Molucca Islands, including music from a Sufi-derived ritual that involved men stabbing themselves with iron awls! Like the rest of the series, both too are recommended and are also 15.98 a piece.
While we haven't had the the opportunity to list very many of his works, we have listed a few, and it should be obvious from those reverent reviews that some folks here at aQ are big, big fans of Harold Budd's special brand of ambient artistry. Just take a look at our write up of Budd's most recent opus, In The Mist: "Forget about the Pop Ambient series, and other modern dreamy music makers, when it comes to simply stunning, calming and beautiful sounds it just doesn't get better than Harold Budd." But of course, we ARE also huge fans of the Kompakt label's ongoing Pop Ambient compilation series (and by saying we, that probably includes you). So, that's why this new release (on a label distributed by Kompakt) is so perfect and makes for a great Record Of The Week, as it brings together a host of current electronic/ambient/lowercase artists, including AQ faves like Biosphere, Xela, and Deaf Center, all paying tribute to Budd. But, it really wouldn't matter at all if you've never heard any Harold Budd before, we'd recommend this as much as any Pop Ambient comp, and that's a big recommendation indeed. Lost In The Humming Air (that title referring perhaps to one of Budd's own inspirations, the telephone wires humming in the wind out in the Mojave Desert where he lived) has become our current go-to disc for our falling-to-sleep-music needs, and as always we mean that in a good way.
Budd, originally an avant garde academic composer back in the '60s who went on to ambient/new age glory in the '70s and beyond, collaborating with Brian Eno and others, certainly does have lots of devoted fans, who love his recordings of atmospheric, usually piano-based bliss... Many of those fans are musicians too, for whom the music of Budd is a touchstone, and who got the good idea of doing this disc, with profits being donated to Budd's favorite charity.
The thirteen recordings here aren't necessarily specific interpretations of Budd's own music, but are pieces inspired and informed (perhaps even moreso than usual for these artists) by Budd's aesthetic, making references to his work, from opening cut "Plateaux" by Deaf Center, with its drifting deep dark bass drones and exquisite, sparse piano... all the way through to the end of the disc, Brock Van Wey's collaboration with his mother, pianist, Criss Van Wey on the elegiac "My Father, My Friend". Along the way, there's plenty of glimmering drones and muted melodies, and even a gently pulsating "Harold Dubb" from Mokira.
Besides the names already mentioned, you'll find the following on here: Loscil, Martin Fuhs, Marsen Jules, Andrew Thomas, Christopher Willits, Taylor Deupree, Rafael Anton Irisarri, and Porn Sword Tobacco.
We won't try to describe this track-by-track, suffice to say that each artist present reveals their own appreciation of Budd's special sort of ambience, and all share a soft, shimmering, swelling magic, so the listener will indeed be Lost In The Humming Air the whole way through...
Ignore the cheesy pinup girl cover art and instead give thanks that someone finally compiled someof the best tracks from Latin American psych pop groups of the '60s, most of whose original LPs now change hands for hundreds of dollars, and whose cd reissues even seem overpriced. We're talking bands like Traffic Sound, Laghonia, Kissing Spell, and Kaleidoscope, etc. A great intro to this scene, provided you have a very strong stomach for Beatles ripoffs; it sounds very much Of Its Time.
We were so excited when we heard that the newest installment in the always-cool Love Peace And Poetry series was going to focus on Turkish Psychedelic music! For a few years now, we've been loving all the '60s and '70s Turkish psych we could lay our hands on (which unfortunately is not as much as we'd like). We've had reissues of such bands as Mogollar, 3 Hur-el, Erkin Koray, Edip Akbayram, and Bulent. So, when we heard about this comp, we were excited -- but also wary of getting TOO excited, faced with the possibilty that this would simply consist of tracks by artists we already know and love, from records we already own, with nothing new and unknown to sate our appetite for more Middle Eastern psych treats. Well, holy halva! We couldn't have been more blown away when we finally got this in. Of the sixteen tracks, only five were by the above mentioned artists, while the rest were by artists totally unknown to us. And on top of that, EVERY track is amazing! From the Eastern-tinged, faux sitar, raga-like sixties garage rock of Selda, to the sunny proggy keyboard heavy folk of Ozdemir Erdogan, to the crooning soulful psych of Alpay, to the almost disco-y wild guitar groove of Hardal, to the strange Ethiopiques meets ska horns of Erkut Tackin. Wow! A lot of killer cuts on this one. We just can't stop playing it. Definitely lives up to the standards set by the two compilations that pretty much first introduced us to the Turkish psych scene, Hava Narghile on Bacchus Archives and (the now out of print) Turkish Delights on Grey Past.
And why do we like Turkish psych so much? Well, Turkey has a long tradition of musical talent to begin with, and being a part of Europe as well as Asia, the whole phenomenon of East-meets-West hybridization (in this case, traditional Anatolian folk and '60s pop beat) makes for some amazing music that couldn't come from anyplace else. Plus, psychedelia as a musical genre has always held a fascination with the East, the exotic... so psych music FROM such lands has a built-in advantage. Just check this out and you'll see.
We've long been champions of the mighty mysterious Fflint central label and their beautifully bizarre droning electronic weirdness. And we've raved about every single one of their cd-r releases. So we were pretty excited when the kind folks at Birdman decided to collect the best bits from all those releases and compile them on a real cd to create the ultimate Fflint primer. Essential for those of you who have yet to discover the amazing sonic world that is Fflint Central; absolutely necessary for those of you who have worn your old Fflint cd-r's down to spinning plastic nubs; and don't think you Fflint obsessives are getting off easy, there are several exclusive tracks never before released that you of course need! We could go on and on and gush endlessly, but since our very own Andee wrote the liner notes, we might as well just let you read what he had to say:
What the fuck is Fflint anyway? A place? A label? A bunch of cheeky bastards who have, in the matter of a few short years, rendered all other UK electronica obsolete? Umm, a place?
In the world of popular music, world-changing things get old fast. With the advent of punk rock, it was a thrill realising that anyone could start a band, but that wore off -real- quick, once everybody did. And then, when the laptop replaced the guitar as the "instrument" anyone could buy and thus have their own" band", it wasn't long before we found ourselves at shows, watching nerds check their emails on stage while we sipped overpriced drinks and fantasized about slipping into the bar to play some Galaga. And then came the cd-r. Christ, you thought the tape was bad. At least with tapes you always had something laying around to dub the new Van Halen or Motley Crue record on. But cd-r's, c'mon. Fuck. Not only can you not tape over them, but even my mom has a limited cd-r release. (And it's not half bad!)
So when you discover some mysterious group, who are quietly releasing cd-r's filled with sounds that are beautiful and perplexing and dreamy and annoying and dark and mesmerising and fucked beyond all possible comprehension, you cling to them like you were a mama bear and these cd-r's were your newborn cubs. But at the same time you are constantly wondering why -- knowing that these sounds exist and are somewhat readily available -- anyone would knowingly choose to listen to the rest of the shit out there.
Well that's all about to change.
And I guess that brings us back to the big question. What the hell is Fflint anyway? Obviously it's music, after all you're holding their cd in your grubby little paws as we speak. But is it electronica? Noise? Dark ambience? Twentieth century? Twenty First Century? Who the hell knows? And honestly, who gives a shit.
This is sound, pure and not so simple. An endless series of unlikely musical events. Some soothing and serene, some droning and delirious, and some so harsh it hurts to even listen. But all of it, every single bit, is unlike anything you've ever heard. Or ever will hear again. It's not just music, but the sounds of music. And the music of sound, entering your ears from the inside, filling your wide open skull with malfunctioning maelstroms of stuttering, fuzzed out synth and hiccupping bursts of thundering glitchery colliding with sputtering clicks and oscillating low end rumbles, draped over chest rattling modulated pulses. Ultra harsh noise smeared over a strange man humming into a broken telephone, while an orchestra of detuned guitars tries desperately to compete in the background. Thousands of tiny hands unwrapping cellophane candies in a hyperbolic chamber, while little girls in tap shoes run laps around your eardrums. Epileptic bagpipes and faraway seal calls rub up against scratching and scraping woodblocks, timestretched into sinister growls or raw and ultra distorted high end melodies, while player pianos are reverbed to death until they become an ominous hum, like a swarm of mechanical wasps pinned down by loping, stumbling Autechre-ish loops and rhythmic workouts: all stuttering thumps and slow motion handclaps, like Timbaland being held down in your bathtub struggling for air. Mysterious and sing-songy Krautrock, jangly and noisy, rambling and shambolic, giving way to shimmery skree, melodies shifting and eventually splitting apart and forming new more abstract melodies, while chirping birds and guttural Orc-ish vocalisations convulse atop a bed of keening chimes and high end swells. Abstract IDM gets deconstructed into shards of jagged dance refuse, beats, shuffling and skittering beneath shifting chords and slabs of minor key sound. Rich sheets of dense sound, layers of sweet ambience, and the metallic hum of excited strings, eventually becoming clipped and static, a hypnotic looped rhythm over accordions, crowd sounds and more bird calls. Grinding scraping pulsing drones unfurl like a small village being over run by snakes made out of bowed cymbals and broken samplers. A dense, crushing melodic downpour, like laying prone in a pool of Rephlex 12"s while hundreds of 'electronica artists' piss on you from above. Hissing ambience created by a choir of tracheotomy patients with malfunctioning hearing aids spewing intercepted shortwave transmissions, interrupted by occasional gunfire; only the bullets are Masonna cassettes and Merzbow cd-r's. A skittery but smooth drone-dirge, like someone drugged Boards of Canada and then pushed them down the stairs, while outside the Fflint guys try desperately to start the getaway car.
Yes, but is it music? Can I dance to it? Will it make the opposite sex swoon and want to sleep with me? No, probably not. Actually, most definitely not. This is not like the music you're used to. This is not music you'll hear on the radio or download from iTunes or hear on a car commercial. This is not music to dance to, or fuck to, or headbang to. Or maybe it is. At least for some of us. But that's precisely what makes Fflint and their divine din so special. And so goddamn important. This is pure sound, sound outside of music. But music the way we wish all music could be: Pure and freed from all the constraints that keeps "popular music" so boring and pointless and well, popular.
This is unpopular music. We are unpopular people.
And we couldn't be happier.
PS: actually, we should say that this is Record of *next* Week, technically. Since we actually can't sell it 'til its "street date" on Tuesday, the 12th. But go ahead and mailorder it now, 'cause you won't get your shipments until after then anyway. Locals, line up Tuesday morning!
The first mix cd from dubstep diva DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, Warrior Dubs, was a sort of greatest hits snapshot of the dubstep/grime scene at the time. Lots of well known names, tons of aQ faves: Milanese, Burial, Kode9, Bug, and loads more. And while it was an incredible comp, for those of us who had already been obsessively tracking down as much grime and dubstep as we could get our hands on, it was a little light on new discoveries, a terrific mix for sure, but one we might have made ourselves. Which is ironic considering that dubstep, like jungle and garage and techno before it, is a genre that thrives on the newest thing, on the latest tracks, so much so that all the great DJ's tend to spin dubplates, unique copies of discs that have yet to be commercially released.
This latest collection from Miss Hobbs is something completely different though. And precisely what we were hoping for. Not only does if feature a whole mess of new names and never-heard-of's amongst the usual suspects, it also spreads out sonically, way beyond the realms of grime or dubstep, incorporating all manner of other electronic musics, but all somehow woven into something incredibly cohesive, and darkly groovy.
Much of this collection is super minimal, laid back and downtempo, lots of murky production and slowly skittering beats, some haunting almost completely ambient tracks, but some serious bangers as well. But before we get to all those, we might as well talk about the biggest surprise here, "Theory Of Machines" by Ben Frost, a nine and a half minute slab of slow burning blurred dronemusic, that over the course of its 9 minutes builds from soft shimmer to dense crumbling Tim Hecker style blurred beauty, to thick caustic blown out soft noise, to an super distorted almost-trip-hop. The sound is immense and epic, and so gorgeous, wreathed in crackle and underpinned by buzzing downtuned lowend, streaked with soaring synths, the track's climax, all skittery beats beneath clouds of hiss and whir and crackle and fuzz is totally intense and gorgeous. And the fact that it's dropped right between a super spaced out reverb drenched out chunk of muddy dubstep and some sun dappled Boards Of Canada style downtempo shuffle, speaks to Hobbs' skills as a DJ. Song choice, arrangement, segues.
Even with the artists we know, Hobbs didn't necessarily pick their big hit, instead opting for the song that best suited the mix, and it pays off. Opening with Ital Tek's glitchy dubby stutter, and closing with Claro Intelecto's hushed techno whisper, a soft washed out dreaminess over a barely there pulse, the tracks in between manages to be all over the map, without sounding random or just thrown together. A grinding buzzing synth heavy grime jam from Wiley follows hot on the heels of Cult Of The 13th Hour's Kode9-ish slow dub, replete with a motorik pulse, some muted muddied skitter, and some deep spoken word vocals. DJ Pinch offers up some super abstract dubstep, the usual synth buzz relegated to a distant murmur, the main rhythm, surrounded by little flurries of tribal shuffle, which is quickly followed up by Magnetic Man's electronic dub, that minus the dubstep synth warble brings to mind On-U-Sound or the Dub Chemists. Surgeon offers up some awesome Kompakt style techno, all looped and hypnotic, minimal and murky, which quickly gives way to a Boxcutter track that almost sounds like some electronic dub infused free jazz, all abstract skitter, crooned vocals, throbbing bass, strange space FX, bits of free freakout, even some whirring organ.
Definitely not the mix for someone looking for a dubstep greatest hits, we've got the recent Steppa's Delight collection among others for that, this is more a collection of modern electronic music, a glimpse into the future of sound, how these various tracks fit together, how electronic music continues to change before our very ears, dub becomes dubstep but what will it become next, techno and grime and downtempo and trip-hop seep back into the 'new' sound and makes it even newer, hybrids of hybrids of hybrids, how these sounds look to the past to reach the future. But more importantly, you can dance to them. Well, sort of.
Last list one of our 'Records-of-the-Week' was the awesome "Wild Dub" compilation of punk-era dubs. This week, we've got another culture clash -- though, like "Wild Dub", it's less a clash than a perfect match -- with this mix of reggae meets hip hop mixes.
Not to be confused with Heartbeat's venerable compilation of disco-mixes which bears the same title, Soul Jazz's "Nice Up The Dance" is no less of a great collection. While the earlier genres of Jamaican music have drawn inspiration from the States in varying degrees since the 1950's, it's only recently that tables have turned and artists from the U.S. have begun importing ideas from Jamaica -- so much so that rap and dancehall are practically joined at the hip. Dancehall artists are not only cameo-ing on albums by prominent rap artists, but even getting some major label attention of their own. Along comes Soul Jazz to bridge the not-so-wide gap between hip hop and dancehall. On the one hand you have Jamaican artists here like Sean Paul, who has apparently been enjoying some MTV and major label attention right now. His 1996 track "Infiltrate", which has some sick sub-harmonic bass for those of you with subwoofers (the "Playground" riddim), is included here. And on the other you have American artists like J-Live with his track "Satisfied" which pays homage to Jamaican music by using Augustus Pablo's "East of the River Nile" as its foundation, and NY producer Kenny Dope with his trunk rattling dancehall/hip hop crossover classics "Boomin' In Ya Jeep" (featuring Screechy Dan) and "Gunshot" (featuring Shaggy). The best thing about this collection is that it's not some academic attempt to point out the missing links between hip hop and dancehall, but -- like Soul Jazz already has demonstrated time and again -- to collect some of the best tracks into a mix that will stay in your system this summer. This is going to be the album to blast at your next bar-b-q, or in your car on the way to the beach/park/club through the coming hot months (for those of you who are blessed with warm summers). Along with the aforementioned tracks is Cutty Ranks' kick ass come back tune "Who Say Me Done", a fucking wicked Tuva-drone toast from Pompidoo aptly titled "Synthesizer Voice", Steelie and Cleevie's electro-bass remix of Dawn Penn's "No, No, No" (admit it purists, this mix grows on you), another mix of the ever so popular "Ring The Alarm" by Tenor Saw and more. But the absolute bestest, most kick-assessed track on the album is Ward 21's gut pounding, steamroller of a bassline "Petrol" (from 2002 -- no it's not on the Mentally Disturbed album) which features tag team vocals from both the growling baritone and the 200-words-per-minute auctioneer cum toaster. And for those of you that can't live without it, there are some nice liner notes tracing the paths of Jamaican and American music here for you. Highly recommended!!!
Let's face it, most tribute albums suck. I can count on one hand the number of tribute albums I have *loved*. (Well, actually on one finger, namely the Roky Erickson trib.) Now along comes this FANTASTIC collection of songs performed by a perfectly-chosen array of alt country musicmakers, all paying their respects to Kris Kristofferson with achingly gorgeous renditions of his songs. I'm hard pressed to even name highlight tracks, because *all* of them are lovely. The mood is consistently downer, the performances retain the flavor of the individual contributing bands, but let the brilliance of Kristofferson's songwriting show thru. And who doesn't love "Me and Bobby McGee", "Help Me Make it Thru the Night", and my personal fave "Sunday Mornin' Coming Down"? If you're not a Kristofferson fan (yet), get this anyway -- it serves as a wonderful intro to the perpetual outsider with the progressive politics who mopped floors at a Columbia's Nashville studios just so he could slip Johnny Cash tapes of his songs! (The liner notes go into his life story a bit -- quite fascinating -- he was involved in the Central American conflicts, visited the Sandanistas, is working to free Leonard Peltier, etc.)
Participants include Souled American, Calexico, Radar Brothers, Zmrzlina, Virgil Shaw (Dieselhed), Richard Buckner, Howe Gelb (Giant Sand), Grandaddy, Deanna Varagone (Lambchop), Court and Spark, Califone, Handsome Family -- all artists already established as wonderful. Hear them pay tribute. Take it from me, the picky tribute listener -- this one is GREAT. It will make you love Kristofferson while also providing a stunning snapshot of the current alt.country scene. Highly recommended!
On first look, and even first listen, Plantation Gold will probably seem quite familiar to a lot of folks, the faded cover image, the list of performers beneath the album title in big gold letters, inside, lots of twanging guitars, foot stompin' rhythms, slippery lap steel, booming stentorian male crooners, rich dulcet female vocalists, tales of love and loss, heartbreak and tragedy, all the sort of stuff you would expect from country music in the sixties and seventies. But look, or listen, even a tiny bit closer, and Plantation Gold reveals itself as just about the furthest thing from traditional country you can imagine.
The Plantation label (later SSS) was the brainchild of a man named Shelby Singleton, who over close to a decade, gathered up some of the most idiosyncratic, unique, and plain crazy country music artists EVER. The closest to gold that Shelby and Plantation got, and probably the only name / song here that will be truly familiar, is the country classic "Harper Valley P.T.A." written by Tom T. Hall and performed by Ms. Jeannie C. Riley, which was in fact a bona fide hit record, the single went on to sell hundreds of thousands, the album millions, and even convinced Singleton to put together a singing group actually called the Harper Valley P.T.A. to cash in on the hype, as well as inspiring a handful of homages, the weirdest one included here, more on that shortly. The rest of the tracks on these two discs range from full on over the top whatthefuck, to slightly skewed, sometimes incorporating strange sound effects, bizarre instrumentation, but sometimes playing it straight, letting the song subject and the lyrics take what on the surface sounds like regular old country music, turning it into something way more freaked out and gleefully goofy (and on occasion borderline offensive to today's more PC sensiblities).
Dee Mullins' "I Am The Grass" seems pretty straight ahead, minus the lyrics about Bigfoot and the freaky metallic effects laden hissy psychedelic refrain in the chorus. Neil Ray's "Big Fanny" is one of those Johnny Cash style talking country songs, the subject of the song a metaphorical 300 pound ugly woman in Vietnam. Weird. "Sold To The Highest Bidder" by Johnny Moore And Col. Tex Herring, is the story of all the happy memories and the family home being sold at auction, featuring an actual auctioneer reeling off the list of everything that must go. Becki Bluefield offers up the surprisingly saucy "Somebody's Gonna Plow Your Field". And then there's "Happy Valley C.I.A.", the aforementioned problematic version of Plantation's big hit, here laced with groovy sixties sitar, the vocals delivered in a very politically incorrect faux Chinese accent.
Johnny Credit offers up his theme song, featuring the clever refrain "I ain't never had no cash", and sounding, as you might guess, just like the Man In Black himself. Best country song title award would have to go to "I'm The Mail She's Waiting For" a innuendo laced love song by Chuck Wood. Then there's The Harper Valley P.T.A.'s "I Dig Dangling Participles", a clever bit of country wordplay. The other star attraction here is Tokyo Matsu, who sounds like an Asian Patsy Cline, all woozy reverb soaked twang, barrelhouse piano, slippery slide guitar, and Matsu's thickly accented croon.
And that's barely getting into the FIRST disc. There's LOTS more on disc one, and 30 MORE weird and wonderful twangy jams on disc two. Every song is a gem, whether it's laugh out loud funny, clever or subtly racy, or heartfelt and dramatic. We could pretty much go track by track, "Four On The Floor (And A Fifth Under The Seat)" is a dark brooding morality play sung by an actual police trooper, "Groovy Grubworm" is a countrified funky hoedown by Harlow Wilcox & The Oakies, and then there's Rod Hart's "C.B. Savage", the tale of a gay trucker, and his suggestive transmissions, another politically incorrect gem, the kind of song that makes you laugh, but also makes you a bit uncomfortable, and is most definitely the sort of song no one could get away with anymore.
Every time we play this in the store, people stop what they're doing to listen, to laugh, most of the time they come up to see what the heck it is we're listening to, and more often than not, leave with their own copy. The booklet is massive, with a history of Singleton, Plantation and SSS, and a fairly in depth description of each artist and all the songs, as well as tons of photos and reproductions of some of the jackets and record labels.
Some seriously twisted outsider country genius, WAY recommended, even if you're not necessarily that into country music, and all you folks into 'incredibly strange music' kind of stuff and those song-poem compilations we love so much, should definitely check this out!
We were never all that into techno. Especially house music. But then along came the Chain Reaction label, and removed everything from the house music equation -except- for the beat and some leftover sonic detritus. And suddenly we found ourselves digging this new sort-of-house music. So now along comes Kompakt, and this time, they strip away all the -beats-, leaving just dreamy soundscapes, swirling eddies of sound, lonely chords, melodies drifitng lazily into space
with no beats left to keep them earthbound. The result is a gorgeous, shimmery ambient music, angelic and ethereal, eschewing all of its techno roots, instead positioning itself somewhere between the late night chill out of the Orb, and that sort of barely-there music for meditation. New Age? As much as classic Tangerine Dream was new age, which is to say, a little certainly. But these Pop Ambient compilations manage to be soothing and shimmery without crossing the line into Windham Hill / Yoga tape schmaltz. Think AQ faves Gas with the beats stripped away completely. Or think an even more blissed out, less glitchy Oval. Gently strummed guitar chords, spaced far enough apart that you can almost hear the notes dissipate into the ether, gradually mutating melodies are stretched over a vast expanse of pastoral hum, shrouded in clouds of whir, subtle sonic swells create 10 bpm rhythms that don't sound like rhythms at all, tinlking chimes create shimmery waves that move slowly outward forever like ripples in a pond. So good. Perfectly dreamy and relaxing. Impossible not to love, this is volume four in Kompakt's Pop Ambient series and they just keep getting better. And more ambient. At this rate by volume 6 or 7 there may not be any sound left at all, just gentle whispers and inaudible drones. Can't wait. (fyi, the cd has one more track than the vinyl.)
Another year, another collection of gauzy, washed out atmospheric shimmer from Kompakt. The latest in their ongoing series chronicling the more ambient (and poppy?) side of techno, but unlike past installments, there has been a serious shift this time around. Not only are there a bunch of new artists, but the sound itself has definitely been transformed. Before, Pop Ambient seemed to be more about processed electronics and bleary eared synthscapes, like techno with the beats stripped away, but this time around, while those electronic and synth elements haven't been abandoned completely, the sound seems much more organic, more Kranky than Kompakt, more like a sound unto itself. We use Pop Ambient to describe much of our favorite drone music, hazy, shimmery, gauzy, dreamy, be it Tim Hecker, Aidan Baker, Jesu and the like, Pop Ambient, for us at least, has become a sort of analog to shoegaze, a drifting sound blurred and smeared and indistinct, while somehow remaining melodic and mesmerizing. Its relation to techno tenuous, if entirely nonexistent at this point, having taken off a life, and a sound of its very own.
Every Pop Ambient comp has been a huge hit around here, so much so that we just naturally assumed that we had probably made all of them Records Of The Week in the past, but upon checking, we realized only one had made ROTW. Well, now TWO.
2009's Pop Ambient focuses much more on real instruments, horns, guitars, pianos, all woven into the already familiar landscape of soft synths and barely there rhythmic pulses, a swirling slow moving ambience, that flits from haunting chamber music, to looped post rock, to deep drone.
The first thing you might notice, is some very aQ artists amidst the usual suspects, sure there's Klimek, Andrew Thomas, Burger / Voigt, but then also Tim Hecker and The Fun Years, as if they had asked for our 2 cents in putting together this year's comp. And sonically, we couldn't have done better ourselves. Much darker, and more mysterious than past installments, surprisingly varied, but it works beautifully as an album, not just a collection.
Warped orchestral fanfares are slowed down and blurred beautifully, with a subtle rhythmic undercurrent, warm woozy horns blurred into sun dappled streaks, shimmery dramatic strings wind around plaintive piano, gorgeous and soundtracky, moody free jazz records get spun at 16 rpm, the piano plucking out a funereal dirge, flutes woven into wavering sheets of sound, record crackle everywhere, bits of electronic shimmer get stretched out into gauzy looped soundscapes, simple repetitive guitar figures lope dreamily over long stretches of harmonized horns, epic sweeping swells of dramatic buzz ebb and flow over buried melodies, distorted guitars unwind amidst swirling clouds of gritty textured ambience, skittering Oval-like loopscapes stutter and glitch soft focus tendrils of electronic whir, spidery guitars tangle with looped samples, locking into impossibly dreamy drifts of hypnotic repetition.
It's a breathtaking collection of sonic wonder, of sounds we truly consider to be Pop Ambience, haunting and otherworldly, subtly dark, sometimes ominous, always gorgeous, and of course totally recommended. And while this is a no brainer for the Pop Ambient obsessed, the minimal techno folks, and the Kompakt fanatics, this record might prove to be a new favorite for anyone into Stars Of The Lid, Pan American, Labradford, Eluvium, Windy And Carl and other purveyors of deep drone and nocturnal drift.
Of the now thirteen (!) volumes of Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, we've only ever made two of them Records Of The Week, at about three year intervals, which is a bit surprising considering how much we've dug them all, and the fact that the term itself, Pop Ambient, has become a frequent bit of aQ review shorthand we use all the time to describe the numerous variations of blissed out shimmer and dreamy washed out drift we can't seem to get enough of. And as with each past installment, this latest is another stunning collection of experimental ambient music, lush atmospheric electronica stripped of beats, the backgrounds pushed to the fore, abstract and hauntingly atmospheric, the lineup featuring a handful of familiar names, but some new faces as well. And another reason for making this latest Pop Ambient collection a ROTW, is that there seems to be a growing darkness in the sounds of these comps, a grim musical undercurrent that infuses these tracks with a brooding quality that most ambient music lacks, the artists pushing well past a sound that initially was simply a beatless Kompakt style techno, toward something that over the years morphed into fully fleshed out modern minimalism, expansive sprawls of cinematic soundscapery and gorgeous snippets of avant chamber music, but all retaining that sort of Pop Ambient haze, a soft focus murk that makes the music sound like it's being transmitted from some other world, or some other time.
Leandro Fresco starts things off with a gauzy bit of hushed shimmer, laced with what sound like alien field recordings, and pocked with haunting little sonar like pings, and wreathed in soft chordal swells. The vibe is very much like the soundtrack to some slow panning shot across a fog shrouded landscape, lit by the moon, and a sky full of flickering stars. Kompakt mainstay Michael Mayer follows up with a dark thrumming sprawl (remixed by another Kompakt regular Wolfgang Voigt), wedding a deep rumbling low end to a woozy looped susurrus, whispery and wispy, but shot through with a strangely sinister drone element, that lurks in the background, but gives the track some serious sonic malevolence. Jens-Uwe Beyer dials back the darkness, and unfurls a bit of slowly blossoming soft focus glimmer, the sound reminding us of Machinefabriek or Jasper TX, a slo-mo, melodic drift, all softly shifting overtones, and undulating layers, gauzy and darkly dreamlike. Triola delivers a strangely circus-like track, that conjures up images of a brightly lit carousel, viewed through a thick fog, a very Something Wicked This Way Comes vibe that is deftly molded into something much more playful and pretty.
Marsen Jules returns to the dark side, with a lush, layered landscape of long tones, of minimal percussion, and blurred melody, woven into a tense, slow building brood, before the sound bursts into a dense, percussive, almost doomlike lumber, almost like a fuzzy, soft focus, dreamdrift SUNNO))), crashing percussive bursts of swirling sound, surrounded by streaks of bleary hum and thrum, a darkly churning, hauntingly cinematic epic that is WAY to short. Mikkel Metal keeps it dark, introducing his track with a distorted churning rumble, laced with swirly psychedelic backwards swoops, and a clipped hissing pulse, the noise sculpted into majestic swells, the vibe blackened and industrial, building to a thick, caustic, but still woozy and washed out, climax of dense black swirl. Anton Kubikov brings things back into the light, but a grey, dying sun sort of light, wrapping reverbed piano in thick swaths of gauzey swirl and crumbling textures, sounding a bit like a lost Caretaker track, weathered and worn, melancholic and otherworldly. Wolfgang Voigt returns, this time with his own track, which plays like a collage of orchestras tuning up, simultaneously symphonic and cacophonous, a dizzying collage of tangled loops, of fuzzy textures, murky ambience, warbly melodies, flutes surface at one point, as do strings, not to mention some epic orchestral swells, but they all seem to be sinking into a gorgeous, whirring black sonic morass. Leandro Fresco lightens things up with his second track, sounding more traditionally Pop Ambient, all hazy, lush textures, slowly shifting, glimmering melodies, and softly pulsing overtones, again super cinematic, dreamily epic, gorgeously melodic, a sun dappled dreamdronedrift that definitely plays like the sonic denouement, the musical light at the end of this hauntingly dark tunnel. Which is followed up by the finale, another field recording flecked stretch of swirling electronics, and dark droning swells, adding shadow to the previous track's light, and then surprising us all but coalescing into an actual pop song, all strummed acoustic guitar, and echo drenched dreamy sad boy vox, all wreathed in softly swirling clouds of woozy thrum, and all manner of forest sounds and bird calls, pastoral but again, just slightly sinister. So good.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Well, I suppose it had to happen. Or did it? And boy were we torn. On the one hand we really don't want to support this kind of thing. Electro versions of Iron Maiden songs?? But on the other hand, before even hearing it, we knew that we were gonna have to order a ton of 'em, and that we would ALL have to buy one. And as if to seal the deal, we threw it on the stereo the minute we got it, and within 15 seconds a customer was already at the counter telling us they NEEDED whatever we were playing. And our guess is that you're gonna need one too. I mean c'mon ELECTRO versions of IRON MAIDEN songs!! And the timing couldn't be more appropriate with the recent tragic passing of Anton Maiden, the original powerslave, who sang tunelessly over MIDI versions of Iron Maiden songs downloaded from his computer (which some of us liked even more than his singing...). And basically, this is just Anton Maiden with a way bigger budget. Which is a good thing. All those timeless riffs we love and adore played by fuzzed out analog synths and turned into buzzy alien melodies, the throbbing, unmistakable basslines of Steve Harris become burping squelches and rumbling pulses, and of course those dual lead guitar harmonies are transformed into wild squeaky squiggles. Does it work? Hard to say. It does sound great though. Funny and wild and fun and silly. We'd think they were taking the piss, but the liner notes take great pains to explain that the album 'was conceived with the greatest respect' and by having each artist pick their favorite Maiden song and album, often not the track they performed. There are a few familiar names here, Legowelt and Kitbuilders, but most of these artists are new to us (some other names: Captain Ahab, Rude 66, Maxx Klaxon, Ra-X, Imatran Voima, Luke Eargoggle...). The best track has to be Hidari / Platzgumer's Number Of The Beast, which starts so fucked up it's almost impossible to tell what song it is, and the drum programming is so fucked that the rhythm ends up being a damaged and stuttery mess of clicks and crunches. The vocals start out super vocoded and distorted, sounding quite alien / monsterlike, until the clean vocals kick in, and then the melody is sung weirdly, tuneless-y and strangely familiar a la Anton Maiden. Whatever reservations we had were definitely quelled once we heard this whole comp. How could they not be? And it's approved by original Maiden vocalist Paul Di'Anno himself. A fitting record of the week and for us, a fitting "moment of silence" for Anton Maiden. R.I.P.
Psych. Funk. India. The '70s. Yes it's gonna be awesome. Sitars and Bollywood stars, badass grooves and acid rock guitars. This excellent new collection comes from the same folks (deeeeeeep diggers they are) who brought us that incredible international Psych Funk 101 comp a while back. They are EXPERTS. It's not entirely a joke that they present these comps in the guise of academic coursework, their research is extensive and if you pay attention you're gonna learn somethin'. According to the liner notes, Psych Funk 101 is considered a pre-requisite to this new "seminar", which is subtitled "Aesthetic Expressions Of Psychedelic Funk Music In India". Fortunately they don't carry the academic gag too far, and keep grad school jargon to an amusing minimum. (By the way, if you don't have Psych Funk 101, well, we figure you can still audit this course... though we DO recommend picking that one up too).
So, what's this Sa-Re-Ga! all about? 20 tracks, all killer no filler, circa 1970-1983, that showcase several "key figures / movements in Indian Psych Funk", from the garagey late '60s Sgt. Peppery stuff you'd expect from a former British colony (and from anywhere else in the world the Beatles had made their way), to the work of genius Bollywood composer R.D. Burman (and his eventual wife, the famous singer Asha Bhosle), to the Go-Go stylings of brothers Kalyanji Aalyanji Anandji, to hard rock bassist Keith Kanga's "wild beat group" Atomic Forest and related acts. Much information is provided about all of those artists and more in what must be the BIGGEST damn cd booklet we've ever seen. 52 pages!! The digipack sleeve can barely contain it. Packed with tons of dazzling full color graphics and learned text. Totally gettin' your money's worth with this one. (It's packaged like the Forge Your Own Chains comp, equally fat and deluxe.)
But even without the frills, just the music alone would make this a must. You can't listen to this without getting a gleeful smile on your face, from the get-go it's great and then somehow each song manages to top the one before it, with insistent propulsive percussion, bombastic orchestration, impassioned vocals, musique concrete techniques, and indeed some heavy, Hindi, FUNK. We're having trouble picking individual tracks to single out, only because they're ALL so good. But we gotta mention just a few of the super standouts, one of 'em being a live version of the classic "Dum Maro Dum" performed Bhosle and Burman and band at the Royal Albert Hall in 1978. That's a song you've heard before, most likely (the Kronos Quartet even recorded it, on their 2005 album with Bhosle), and it helps to realize that not only does a lot of the music on this disc seem like it oughtta be the most popular stuff in the world, in many cases, it really was quite popular, and not just in India. This rendition of "Dum Maro Dum", which means "Take Another Toke" by the way, was their concert's deliriously ecstatic, well-received finale. Then there's "Freak Out Music", another R.D. Burman number, that couldn't have been a hit, but is certainly Freaked Out. (And it's not even the one here by him that combines the sounds of strings with that of smashing glass.)
We also were excited to hear more from Atomic Forest, a band that provided the title track to the great international fuzz compilation Obsession a few years back (now out of print). They do a cover of a Deep Purple tune, "Mary Long", and of course laden it with extra fuzz. Another one for classic rock fans would be Bappi Lahari's "Everybody Dance With Me", which sounds suspiciously like Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" given an exotic Indian disco makeover, with bongos and wild wails... And, conversely, as an early example of Indian groove filtering into the West, the compilers have included a track by krautrocker/fusioneer Klaus Doldinger, "Sitar Beat", which is indeed just that, and must have been a highlight of the 1969 spy movie soundtrack on which it originally appeared. Which is interesting, 'cause the entry by Indian garage band X'Lents, "Psychedelia", originally from the Simla Beat 70 compilation, sounds like it would be perfect for a James Bond style spy movie too.
So, in sum, quite a lesson, and definitely a fun one. We'd go so far as to say this should be a required course/comp. We've been lucky lately with the quality of comps and other archival releases coming out, documenting vintage music from (for us) far off lands. We recently made the Soundway's The Sounds Of Siam a Record Of The Week, now this Sa-Re-Ga! is making us so happy... and we've got our eye on an upcoming Now-Again comp devoted to '70s Indonesian rock and funk, called Those Shocking Shaking Days, we've got high hopes for that one, it promises to be rad too. The vaguely connected network of collectors and DJs who are responsible for these comps, true labors of love, deserve all our thanks!!
As we said, the compact disc version boasts a massively thick booklet, and the swank double vinyl comes with a large 20 page one too.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
That's right, 500 lock grooves (250 per side!) from the likes of Sonic Youth, Terry Riley, Derek Bailey, Aube, Bruce Gilbert, Zoviet France, Otomo Yoshihide, 2000 Dying Rats, Jan St. Werner, Marcus Schmickler, His Name is Alive, Mortician, Exit-13, Today is the Day, Brighter Death Now, Soilent Green, Masonna, Id Battery, and 482 more! Hilarious and very very cool listening. Some are 2 seconds long, some run up to 10 or so. Adventurous DJs should buy this, most of us did...
When we first got wind of this comp, for some reason, we just assumed it was gonna be another amazing Soul Jazz reggae comp, it didn't even occur to us that it would be a collection of killer classic jungle jams from the early nineties. But we threw it on, and were just knocked on our asses, transported back to '93/'94 when we first discovered jungle, particularly, ragga-dancehall-jungle or whatever you wanted to call it, a killer blend of traditional Jamaican dancehall, and this new breed of sped up hip hop that had grown out of the rave scene in the UK.
The history and genealogy is complex, but there's been plenty written about it, the liner notes here are particularly informative, tracing the development of ragga-jungle from the early Reggae sound systems, through the rave scene, UK hardcore hip hop, and beyond. Ragga jungle was a flash in the pan, existing for 3 or 4 years before most of the folks making it moved on to two-step, garage, drum and bass and on an on. But for our money, this was it. This was THE music we had been waiting for. We have loved dancehall forever, the harder and faster the better, so here was the toasting and melody of dancehall, draped over chopped up stuttering and pounding hip hop beats, all sped up into a rhythmic frenzy.
If there's one track that sums it up for us, it's DJ Zinc's "Super Sharp Shooter", with its interminable vocal and squelchy synth intro, the loping creeping reggae groove, the buzzing melody, the simple shuffling drum beat, the slowed down Method Man sample, and that's all before the track actually even drops, and when it does... Whoooowheee. We remember hearing this for the first time in one of the few clubs in SF that played jungle back in the day, and it nearly knocked us out of our seats. We ended up buying a DJ mix tape from one of the DJs spinning, and thankfully it had "Super Sharp Shooter" on it, and from that point on, we listened to it over and over every day, in the car, cranked as loud as it would go, bass pumping (as much as the bass could be said to pump in a crappy old van). So fucking heavy and hooky and funky. When the track finally kicks in, it's massive, relentless serpentine pass line, ultra complex drums, funky and groovy but so tangled and dense, every once in a while the bass line locks on a single not and just hooooooooolds steady until it drops, hard, and we're off on another junglistic jam. As far as we're concerned this would be worth it just for this track, but thankfully, the rest of the disc is just as kick ass.
Lots of familiar reggae and dancehall names, Ninjaman, Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Cutty Ranks, and for those in the know, the rest of the names read like an early nineties jungle all star lineup: Ragga Twins, Poison Chang, Ragga Twins, DJ Zinc, Shy FX... but even if you don't know any of these names, the music speaks for itself. Check out "Original Nuttah" by UK Apachi & Shy FX, beginning with some super hooky sing songy reggae vocals before the track launches into a maddeningly dense rapid fire snare workout underpinning a raw and tongue twisting flow. Furious and intense and so goddamn good. Then there's tracks like Ragga Twins' "Illegal Gunshot", with its playful and circusy melodic loop, but juxtaposed with some seriously aggro toasting, some Bomb Squad like production, and some outrageously funky drumming.
Pretty much every track on here is a killer, never has a record so much made even us non-dancers want to head for the dancefloor and go fucking nuts. The cool thing about this stuff, is even if you're dancefloor phobic, is that these tracks are so dense and multi layered, full of convoluted rhythms and mad drumming and rapid fire rhymes and wild toasting and strange melodies and killer grooves, that they're almost as fun to listen to as they are to dance to. Almost.
Like all Soul Jazz stuff, gorgeously packaged and extensively researched. Tons of liner notes, track notes, photos, all wrapped up in a full color slipcase.
It seems like of all the Sublime Frequencies releases, all of which are incredible, many so incredible we felt compelled to make them aQ Records Of The Week, none has been as hotly anticipated as this one, ever since word of this release first surfaced, we would constantly get requests and inquiries, folks DYING to get their hands on a copy, and we'd be lying if we said we weren't pretty excited ourselves. So finally, here it is, Saigon Rock & Soul, a collection of fuzzy psychedelic Western influenced Vietnamese garage rock and pop, from the late sixties to the early seventies, heavily influenced by Western music of the time of course, but still somehow so totally and uniquely Southeast Asian.
And like most of these collections, the sounds vary greatly, from super distorted acid drenched psychedelia, to fuzz guitar funk, to wild ramshackle garage rock, to dark smoky soul ballads and pretty much every stop in between.
The history of this music, and the story of its creation, is as amazing as the music itself, as all of these tracks were recorded while the Vietnam war raged, recorded in makeshift studios, sometimes in US Army, camps, released as super limited 45's and tapes, the sounds constantly evolving as local musicians were exposed to the music American G.I.'s would bring over with them, from the surf rock of the Ventures and the Shadows, to stuff like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Santana, Deep Purple, Blue Cheer, Jimi Hendrix, hence the heaviness of some of these tracks, with bands emulating that super distorted guitar tone and that druggy sixties psychedelic vibe.
And some of this stuff really is heavy, the record opens with CBC Band's "Tinh Tuyet Voi", which explodes out of the gate with some seriously fuzzed out caustic guitar riffing, and then there's the "yeah yeah yeah" chorus, that almost sounds like the record is skipping, totally psychedelic and mesmerizing, wild drumming, lysergic leads - here's hoping Sublime Frequencies has a CBC Band reissue in the works!
The rest of the tracks, while maybe not quite as heavy, are still super fuzzy and rocking and groovy, from wild horn drenched exotica, to organ driven garage rock grooves, to funky psychedelic soul, horns all over the place, wild psych guitar leads, super distorted fuzz basslines, pounded piano, loose chaotic drumming, lots of distortion and reverb, even some sampled birdsong (!), the vocals wailed and howled and growled, some of the tracks getting all dark and soulful and smoky, no doubt a nod to the Motown sound, also a huge influence on Vietnamese music of the time, but for the most part, the sound of Saigon at the time was fuzzy and buzzy, wild and rambunctious, rocking and totally psychedelic. Fantastic stuff, and while many of the groups featured here are some of the most popular artists in Vietnam at the time, most of them have remained pretty much entirely unheard by Western ears, until now.
SUPER LIMITED of course, vinyl-only, and it's pressed on nice heavy vinyl, and housed in a thick full color gatefold sleeve, with extensive liner notes on the music, the musicians, and the era, as well as some amazing photos.
Holy crap! This record almost immediately became our favorite new record, while at the same time, proving to be maybe the most fantastically aggravating record of all time. Folks from Baltimore are probably well familiar with this kind of stuff, DJ Technics and the like. A sort of dizzying mash up of Miami bass, four on the floor techno, and druggy house music, but stripped down to its bare essence, usually a single loop, synths, drums and vocals, repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. But somehow we just can's stop listening to it. Super primitive, and maddeningly catchy, this must drive people fucking nuts on the dance floor. This is get wasted and dance until you drop club music for sure. Like those Rio Baile Funk comps, all cranked up, looped and let loose. Not many of us around here actually go dancing, but this relentlessly funky disc has at one time or another got every single AQ staffer if not dancing, at least bouncing or swaying, which is a serious testament to the sheer dance floor funk power of these joints.
Some of the tracks are fierce and gangsta like "Murdaland" with it's gunshot percussion, almost jungle rhythm and raspy voiced rapping. Others are like nursery rhymes set to club music, like "Oxy's Anthem Featuring Roxy Cottontail", with a tired sounding club girl talking about shaking her ass endlessly over a super mesmerizing shuffling loop. And some are just bizarre, like "Kidstuff" featuring vocals by a gaggle of kids, over a stuttering, chopped up house beat. And those are just a few picked at random, every track here is somehow totally fucked, totally catchy and absolutely irresistible. Absolutely, THE dance party record of the year. Just toss this in your player, push play and let it spin over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
Another super limited lp installment in Sublime Frequencies' ever expanding collection of fantastic and mysterious world musics. It's unclear, why a few releases have been vinyl only, and if the shelf-life of the last Sublime Frequencies lp was any indication, these won't last long at all.
So what is Shadow Music Of Thailand? Well, it's Thai pop heavily influenced by UK instrumental rockers The Shadows of course. More specifically it's a strain of sixties Thai guitar pop heavily influenced by Western music, rock, garage and especially surf. The guitar being the most obvious influence.
So here we have a collection of some of the most notable purveyors of "Shadow Music": The Son Of P.M., P.M. Pocket Music, P.M 7 / Jupiter and Johnny Guitar. You may have noticed the recurring P.M., well that stands for Payong Mukda, one of the most prolific composers and performers of the time and the music genius behind all of those P.M. groups.
On first listen, the Shadow Music here doesn't sound all that different than much of the Thai Pop we've heard before on other collections, and no doubt there is some overlap. But keep listening, and all sorts of strange and unique little sonic flourishes reveal themselves. Really, where else can you hear gamelan percussion with super fuzzed out ? And The Mysterions style organ and wailing surf guitar? From groovy garage rock to shimmery surf, lots of organ, and plenty of gamelan, vibraphone, xylophone, gorgeous vocals, strange harmonies, mysterious melodies, but it's those guitars, it buzzes and howls, chugs and twangs, woven into all of the songs here, creating this strange hybrid, Thai Pop, Bollywood, surf rock, blues rock, latin, soul, all woven into a wild groovy psychedelic fuzzy funky garage folkpop that will totally hit the spot for fans of exotic grooves and wild and wonderful sounds.
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF ONLY 1500 COPIES. 180 gram vinyl, super thick, gatefold sleeve, full color with tons of original Thai artwork and extensive liner notes.
Alright all you hard ragga nuts, pick this fucker up! Damn, seems like it's been a while since we've got some real crazy shit in here that we could get really excited about and adamantly recommend to customers with complete confidence. Many of the tracks here have already appeared as 12"s and 7"s on Tigerbeat6's Shockout imprint. But those of us lacking turntables or too lazy to lift those heavy slabs for a mere 3 minutes of pleasure have been left out of the game... until now. Looking for some DJ Rupture? Looking for The Bug? Looking for something to replace those worn copies of DJ Scud's Murder Sound or yearning for a return of Panacea circa Low Profile Darkness? You'll find your fix embedded here in the digital pits of this here humble aluminum disc. Brutal two-step cut ups with gut churning bass, brain rattling hardcore ragga jungle and levelled off with some of the most phlegm inducing, distorted and gruff toasting you'll ever hear. Along with some of the heaviest singles in the Shockout series thus far by the likes of The Bug, Ove-Naxx, Soundmurderer & SK-1, Timeblind, Kid606, and Eight Frozen Modules, there are exclusive tracks from DJ Rupture, Com A. and Guislain Poirier (nice to hear some French in the mix for once). Plus this Shockout comp also includes the original "Killer" single by Rootsman and He-Man that The Bug remixed, which sounds like a madman trying to burp his way through a vocal dub. Verbally slobbering over this collection wouldn't be complete without mentioning the exceptionally great track sequencing. The comp kicks off with Strategy's mellow "Dunes Dub", a springy dub track with a Fela Kuti-esque keyboard line, and slowly works its way up in ferocity through the the next several tracks. Strategy bookends the collection in fact, with the A-side to their Shockout 12" "Going Street Dub" finishing things off. In flow, Shockout reminds us of DJ Rupture's now classic Minesweeper Suite. Everyone who loves those Ward 21 albums, DJ Rupture, The Bug's new ragga incarnation or the Kid (as in 606) should pluck this sucker up post haste. Highly fucking recommended!
We were in absolute buzzing raga drone, funk soul heaven when we learned that those amazing and totally fun vinyl-only releases in the Sitar Beat series had now been compiled onto a cd. Most of us were never lucky enough to get the lps but now we can get our sitar funk on all the same! Chances are if you've been in the store in the last couple weeks you've heard us playing this, as this is one of those rare records that every single one of us can't help but be in love with. '60s, '70s and early '80s Bollywood jams and Indian-influenced psych-grooves HEAVY on the sitar. R.D. Burman, Ananada Shankar, Asha Bhosle, Serge Gainsbourg, Klaus Doldinger just to name a few of the responsible parties East and West who will henceforth be making your parties way more fun!!! But be prepared for tons of questions when all your friends start asking you what it is you're playing. We've been fielding those questions for weeks, but we're more then happy to answer with a simple reply: "It's Sitar Beat!..." and before we can even finish our sentence said questioner is on his or her way out the door with a copy. We rest much easier at night knowing that we're doing out small part to spread these amazing soul stirring buzzy freak funk grooves far and wide, filling ears and shaking souls!
