New issue of this wonderful little experimental/electronica 'zine out of Texas. Interviews and features this time include: Matmos (yay!), Carl Stone, Plastikman, Matthew Thomas, Thomas Brinkmann, Japan's Zero Gravity label, Germany's Kreisel label, heroin house, and lots more! There's even an essay by Terre Thaemlitz about his new Gary Numan piano interpretation project. A great issue, except maybe for the part where the editor calls AQ-faves The Champs awful crap. Except for that minor lapse in judgement, tho, this rules...
Yay! The welcome return of this great all-girl Japanese psych band. Now a power trio, Angel 'In Heavy Syrup still produce the beautiful, trippy sounds that made their previous three discs AQ-faves. Guitar-heavy psych rock, often evoking triumphant, epic soundtrack themes to Western movies, but with delicate, lovely vocals drifting into the mix. Hopefully this release means that the band will be coming to the States to play some shows again, sometime soon. Recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Everything this band ever recorded, before they became the celebrated VSS.
This is the second album from NYC-based female rock trio Angelblood (featuring ultrachic artist Rita Ackermann and fashion designer Jess Holzworth). Musical styles on "Masses Of The Daggers" vary from riff-laden rockers (topped off with falsetto vocals
Angelblood, with their vaguely black metal name and packaging (the gothic logo/typeface, forest images), immediately confuse. They are actually an all-girl trio of primitive psych jammers from Texas! Seemingly inspired by Amon Duul I, Yahowah 13, and the No Neck Blues Band (well, the latter two have Captain Trip releases that are featured on this disc's obi!), it does make sense that the Japanese kraut/psych worshippers at Captain Trip HQ would want to put this out, although how Angelblood got hooked up with them is a story I'd like to hear (well, artist Rita Ackermann is a member of the trio, so maybe it was her connections that did it). Considered by Forced Exposure to be "easily the most vital non-reissue release from Captain Trip to date." Dunno about that, but this does have a Shaggs-on-acid sort of charm, as the label suggests.
Reissued on ultra limited vinyl! Here's what we had to say about the cd:
A few years back, Michael Gira dissolved the Swans, and effectively split his band's aesthetic in two, with the soiled ambient project Body Lovers / Body Haters on one side, and the orchestrated songs of Angels of Light on the other. "How I Loved You" is the second Angels of Light album and, as could be gathered from the title, is a collection of love songs. The album begins speaking of love with elation, as in "Evangeline," where Gira pleads to his object of desire with the wistful innocence of a school boy. The following "Untitled Love Song" is a strolling duet between Gira and ex-Pain Teen's singer Bliss Blood, both of whom seem uncharacteristically full of sweetness and light. With those being the most benevolent images of love that he has to offer, Gira then guides the album down a steep slope of sexual dependency, perverse lusts, and a gristled despair in which Gira's body continuously betrays his mind's wishes to never fuck again.
From there on, each track from "How I Loved You" begins with a simple languid melody that could easily be mistaken for anything from the recent Low record but steadily builds in complexity, driving into deeper, darker, and more intense realms. So nice!
Now on vinyl! Right after the dissolution of Swans in 1997, Michael Gira released two albums of haunting psychoacoustic music as The Body Lovers and The Body Haters, and apparently gave up writing songs. Fortunately, this hiatus was merely temporary, as Gira delivers a new collection of acoustic guitar based songs as The Angels of Light. At times lush in orchestral swells of strings and vibraphone, at others angular and tense, New Mother is quite good indeed. Lovely reissued as double LP by Broken Sparrow in conjunction with Important Records and limited to 500 on black vinyl.
With the third Angels Of Light album "Everything Is Good Here / Please Come Home," Michael Gira has succeeded in severing the major ties to his former Swans, a band which admittedly underwent several distinct stylistic shifts in its 15 year lifespan. A few strands obviously remain, as Gira's voice is still central to his music, a proud and defiant baritone responding to the catastrophes of Gira's world, self-created or otherwise. Beyond his voice, fleeting reflections of the hypno-rock grooves of Swans' mid period albums "White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity" and "Love Of Life" manifest themselves in the self-described 'lonesome angry cowboy productions' of The Angels Of Light. As powerful and magnificent as the Swans were in the '80s and '90s, the suffocating abjection of those albums rendered them a climactic exaggeration of spectacle and theatricality. Don't get me wrong, "Filth" and "Children Of God" are still two of my most treasured (if that's the right word) albums. It's just that in Angels Of Light, Gira has eased up on some of the control tactics and allowed for his emotional core to speak unrestrained by the artistry of his productions. While continuing to express his aggression and rage, he has recognized the need to expose his weaknesses and his ignorance. For in those human traits, there is the possibility of profound beauty and tender wisdom. And I think it's fair to say that he's found an honest way of articulating those emotions on this album. At the same time, Gira allows for himself to take a backseat on occasion to the Angels Of Light, the band that he happens to be in. Throughout "Everything Is Good Here..." elliptical patterns of post-country / western motifs cycle and flutter with the motorik hypnosis of German krautrock. Another incredible, dignified release from M. Gira.
The UK's Anna Planeta (a band) presents a double cd of recordings they made in a derelict Catholic school house that has been empty since 1980. The band improvises on a number of acoustic instruments and guitars powered by cheap battery powered amps in the once-grandiose assembly hall of the school that is now filled with shattered glass, empty beercans, and spent glue-sniffing bags. It sounds like any number of, to use our coined terminology, "pipe fight" or "lithium drone" bands (No Neck Blues Band, Organum, or Skullflower) recording one of their albums with the microphone right next to a electric transformer or a buzzing light bulb. Very nice work, combining improv "outsider rock" with atmospheric environmental recording. Oversized silkscreened cardboard packaging, and a nice price for 2 cds!
Last night we were playing this in the store and the consensus amongst customers and staff is that The Anniversary sounds like a mix of Modest Mouse, Rainer Maria, PEE and the Get Up Kids. Makes sense since this is on the Get Up Kids' Heroes and Villains label. Dueling girl/boy vocals over angular melodic shards. Super catchy. From Lawrence, Kansas.
What the hell happened here? The Anniversary has poised themselves as the heir apparents to the emo / power pop throne now occupied by labelmates the Get Up Kids, yet with their second album "Your Majesty," these kids from Lawrence, Kansas suddenly think they're Noel and Liam, constructing a bombastic album of baroque pop with lots of harmonizing choruses, extended guitar solos, dramatic piano chords, and distant nods to The Pixies and Supertramp. This record was a real slow burner. In the beginning we all hated it, wondering what happened to our emo pop anniversaries, but the more we listen, the more we began to understand. I began catching Jim or Cup listening to it when they thought no one was the wiser. And Windy is pretty much playing it nonstop in her car: http://aquariusrecords.org/windyscar.html. So now, we give it a thumbs up. The only bummer is the one guy singer who whispers in a earnest croon and ends up sounding lame. Outside of that, they're probably the best Brit pop band America has. A few painfully public inter-band squabbles and loads of coke and the sky's the limit!
Thrashy noisy hardcore GONE METAL?! Woo Hoo! Seems like all those punk kids have GONE METAL. But who am I to complain? I mean, I -do- like metal more than punk. And this -is- good, just not terribly groundbreaking. Think equal parts, Coalesce, Converge,
23 Mother Goose rhymes set to vaguely British-Isles-style folk by Ned Oldham, Will's brother.
Ned Oldham (Will's bro) sets quaint children's poetry by R.L. Stevenson to music, with the help of, among others, Aram Stith, Will Oldham, Paul Oldham, and Dave Pajo. No, Long John Silver does not make an appearance, but poems like "Land of Nod" and "Fairy Bread" are delightfully rendered in musical form. For ages 3 to 30, and up...
Singer/songwriter Ned Oldham (brother of Palace's Will Oldham y'know) presents his band's third full-length.
If you prefer vinyl, the Anonymous record is available here (although not with the J.Rider tracks which are on the *cd* reissue of it).
Heavily influenced by the psychedelic sounds of the Byrds, the Beatles, Crosby Stills & Nash, Heart, the Mamas and Papas, etc. If this material had been released in the late '60s instead of '77, he would've had a hit on his hands, but instead the records languished in obscurity until being reissued this year. Lush 12-string guitarwork, unison male/female vocals, epic song structures and a heavy California psych vibe permeate the music in a really good way. Very fresh and pretty.
Crushing noise breaks and musique concréte from Jason Skeet, co-owner of Ambush along with DJ Scud, whom
Skeet has collaborated with regularly. Harsh.
Former Cradle of Filth guitarist Stuart Anstis offers a solo album on the experimental Iris Light label (Szeki Kurva, Aube, Maeror Tri, Band of Pain, etc.). It's not black metal, but more of an electronic soundscape thing with beats...not bad, but not too
Since Richard D. James has recently been hiding from the public with no indications as to when or if another Aphex Twin album will be happening, this rare Australian import collection of Aphex Twin's mid '90s singles is certainly a welcome arrival! "51/13"
During this period of Aphex Twin's sound, he was continuing his mutations of hardcore techno breakbeats, which had been popularized by the likes of The Prodigy, Meat Beat Manifesto, and XL Records. For those who care about such things, this breakbeat sound was instrumental in the birth of drum 'n' bass, yet is drastically different in that the hardcore breakbeats are internally constructed by a drum machine (usually a Roland 909), whereas drum 'n' bass actively sampled its breakbeats from the history of soul, funk, and jazz. As a result of the technological process of the creation of the breakbeat, these three Aphex Twin singles have a particularly cybernetic feel to them. However, Aphex Twin uses this sound as a counterpoint to the oddly whimsical melodies from his re-wired and re-programmed MIDI patches for piano, harp, calliope, and bells. These are the same sounds that the Aphex Twin droned out on his beautiful "Selected Ambient Works Volume 2." "51/13" also features the seemingly incongruous collaboration between Aphex Twin and Philip Glass! For this piece called "Icct Hedral," Glass scored a dramatic orchestral piece around the repetition of a distinctly Aphex Twin melodic phrase. It's surprising how well this particular piece works.
For a lot of electronica, history tends to date and make obsolete certain sounds and artists... But this has never been the case with Aphex Twin.
The title track of this ep scared the pickles out of me. And the video will do the same. Must hear. Must see. Richard D. James, you rule.
It's been five years since the Aphex Twin unleashed his Surrealist-tainted slab of brilliance "The Richard D. James Album," which jauntily skipped around the accepted boundaries of contemporary electronica with surprising ease and an almost voiceless black
From the get-go, Aphex Twin wisely sidesteps the currently hip clickery of the Ritornell / Raster labels, jumping straight into his tried and true forms of bastardized drum 'n' bass punctuated by delicate piano-ambient interludes. Unfortunately, Aphex has been following the rather tepid stylings of 2 step and speed garage, instead of the vibrant spasticity of Lesser or the mentally damaged dancehall of DJ Scud. Thus, the ambient artifacts -- which come across as Satie's "Furniture Music" for the H.R. Giger set, being both deliciously macabre yet tonally beautiful -- are the more interesting moments found on the first half of the album. Disc two offers a few classic Aphex sounding tracks of smoldering acid squelchiness, time-stretched vocal snippets, and complex grooves built out of constantly counterpointing rhythms. Again, these are spaced between delicate halcyon piano ambience, something which at times appears as dinner jazz for the IDM set.
While certain individual tracks flash a programming brilliance cast with his ever-present sideways smirk, easily putting his contemporaries to shame, "Drukqs" as a whole never really finds a direction; nor, does it makes much progression though all of the various electronica agendas. Nevertheless, those of you already cardcarrying members of the Aphex fanclub won't be disappointed.
The mad-scientist of electronica - Richard D James aka Aphex Twin - released I Care Because You Do in 1995; and now in 2012, that classic electronica album gets a 2lp reissue by way of the 1972 label, who also recently reissued Aphex's Selected Ambient Works Vol. Two on triple lp.
This album's single "Ventolin" stood as one of the more cantankerous tracks that RDJ had recorded to date. A harsh, tinnitus-inducing squeal permeates the sequencing of clunky rhythms and dum-dum melodies of that single thumbing its noise at everybody who took the whole Intelligent Dance Music thing way too seriously. At the time, the track was a blatant provocation, and after all these years, it still sticks out as a grotesque distortion, with the album moving somewhat like a palindrome around that track - progressing up to that nasty piece of electronics from more stately and subdued tracks before reversing course. One of the tracks that brackets "Ventolin" is the majestic "Icct Hedral" which spirals around an orchestration worked out by Phillip Glass for Aphex Twin, with James girding the cauldron of repetitive woodwinds and strings with his trademarked crunching breakbeats and phase-shifting parametric filter sweeps. The sweaty acid-breakcore track "Come On, You Slags!" is the other bookend to "Ventolin" with more introspective abstractions pooling on either side with plenty of counterpointing rhythmic complexities tossed in for good measure. It was on this record that the Aphex sense of humor - with its broad spectrum from the strange to the village idiot - first came into its own as a unique facet to Aphex Twin's vocabulary. So much of this work still sounds amazing after all these years, and it's also great to see this on vinyl again finally, too! (Even moreso since it seems the cd version has gone out of print.)
Finally released in the USA, this includes a whole album plus the Girl/Boy e.p. we love so much. Instrumental lovesong features soaring violins & chiming xylophone, comes complete with chorus, tension, progression and melody (yes melody) that -emotes- more than unneccessary lyrics ever could. Richard James' first foray into jungle rhythms is wildly successful in no small part because it FEELS exactly like the best rock song but doesn't sound at all like rock. You know?
The album from which Richard D. James' electronica genius became obvious. Selected Abient Works 2 is as if James sonically replicated the post-slumber / pre-waking state when sunlight first strikes the dream riddled eye within the memory banks of his rewired samplers. A beautiful, synaesthetic and haunting post-techno ambient that really must be heard!
We listed this back on #108, when it first came out as an import (we were stocking the Canadian version, thanks to our friends at Scratch Records in Vancouver who ordered 'em for us and smuggled 'em down here) but it's taken over a year for this to get a
We've been huge fans of this Finnish all-cello quartet for a while now, and how could we not be? Their first record was of them sawing away at all Metallica covers! Their second record was almost all covers too, not just Metallica, but Sepultura and Faith No More. It's not all that surprising that these pseudo classical instrumental versions of metal songs worked so well (sometimes better than the originals), especially considering the epic Wagnerian quality of a lot of metal, especially Metallica.
On their third record though, Apocalyptica have almost completely abandoned their metal/Metallica covers (except for a couple bonus tracks) in favor of originals, and the result is probably their best record yet. They have obviously learned all they can from the masters (classical and metal), and have struck out on their own, to create something new, certainly not conventionally metal, but not classical either. Definitely 'heavy' though! The four cellists (here augmented by double bass and all sorts of percussion) craft explosive and complex, super intense epics, fusing classical movements with traditional song structures, bizarre techniques with impeccable chops, all delivered with decidedly un-classical aggression, making for a record way heavier and better than anything Metallica themselves have done in the last few years. Not bad for a bunch of cellists!
This new US edition is a little different than the import -- the bonus tracks are the same (two Metallica covers plus their version of Grieg's "Hall Of The Mountain King"), but they've also included a new version of their song "Path" that adds vocals from the woman from the band Guano Apes (who I guess are popular in Europe), and there's also a cd-rom video included for that same cut. While it's neat to see them flailing away at their cellos in the stylish video, if you already have the import it's not enough to make you trade it in for this version. But if you *don't* have the import (and we know quite a few of you missed out), now's your chance to pick up this awesome album!
(Oh, quick note to the people who write press sheets for Spitfire: "Hall Of The Mountain King" is NOT a Savatage cover, guys!)
Tracks from the first Apocalyptica album were prominently featured in the recent film Your Friends and Neighbors as this cello quartet performed blistering versions of Metallica songs. Their second album is a far more advanced affair as the quartet was granted a larger budget for recording. Not just Metallica is represented as we are treated to renditions of tunes by Sepultura, Faith No More, and Pantera, as well as two quite excellent self-penned Apocalyptica tracks of completely intense metal riffs played exclusively on cellos! Very highly recommended by all who work here.
The title really says it all, doesn't it? From Finland. Their version of "Enter Sandman" blows Pat Boone's out of the water. And then there's "Master of Puppets," "Creeping Death," "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)," etc.
Dark and forlorn hillbilly country dirges from this Scottish group. Very reminiscent of Palace or Songs:ohia (to the point where, when we play this cd, people always ask if it is Palace), so fans of Will Oldham will LOVE this. Sparse and achingly beautiful.
Appendix Out are a Scottish outfit whose plaintive neo-folk style has been compared to Palace's Will Oldham. But Appendix Out's sound is free of the patented Oldham quirkiness that I can't seem get past anymore, that calls more attention to its style than the beauty of simply written and performed songs. Somehow, after hearing Olhdam records for so many many years, Apprendix Out
Really nice, stark, warm yet wintry folk from Scotland group. Newest Drag City release will DEFINITELY appeal to Palace fans.
The return of the most polished and shiny of the Elephant 6 pop groups. The songs are slower, more layered, and more substantial than on previous Apples records, which is a good thing: for example, if you like Strawberry Fields Forever you will LOVE this album. In fact, any fan of the Beatles should welcome this record with open arms -- yes it is that good. Robert Schneider's voice is even more perfectly juicy than ever before. Highly recommended.
Always the ones to offer up an ep of odds and ends to tide their fans over 'til the next full length appears, the perky Elephant 6ers Apples In Stereo have collected together a live track, an acoustic studio outtake (of a song that appears on Discovery Of A World Inside The Moon), a Powerpuff girls tribute, a demo of the same song, and one other track. As bouncy and jubilant as we've
A new song from Robert Schneider and co. new album "The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone" (forthcoming in April) plus four extra tracks with no prior US release. Fans of Elephant Six pop are sure to rejoice. Did you know that The Apples call their recording studio Pet Sounds? Not surprised...
One of our favorite pop bands collects early releases, b-sides and sundry out-of-print gems, plus one new song. You may have seen this recently available as expensive Japanese import.
Wonderful new work from Elephant6ers.
Though Lawrence, Kansas based Appleseed Cast has been around since 1998 they haven't been as widely heard as their contemporaries The Get Up Kids and The Anniversary, and I would have imagined that the release of "Low Level Owl" volumes one and two would
The thing that really kicks a hole in our pants with these albums is the obvious love and meticulous care that went into recording them. The band apparently spent three months recording all the tracks; laying down the initial tracks and then sculpting them with additional overdubs and extensive tweaking, even miking leaves blowing along the driveway outside the studio and including it as a segue between two songs. In fact, both albums are obviously meant to be listened to in their entirety, with nary a second of silence between songs, as tracks bleed and drift into one another. Volume two begins, quite ingeniously and literally, where volume one leaves off -- with a brief reprise of the ending track. It could be me, but volume two seems to contain more Mogwai style extended jams and instrumental musical forays and experiments. So if you wish to start with a more "pop" oriented record, choose volume one and if you want more of a drifting and pensive record, choose volume two. Chances are that you'll wanna pick up both eventually anyhow. Everytime we play this in the store, someone buys a copy or two.
Though Lawrence, Kansas based Appleseed Cast has been around since 1998 they haven't been as widely heard as their contemporaries The Get Up Kids and The Anniversary, and I would have imagined that the release of "Low Level Owl" volumes one and two would
The thing that really kicks a hole in our pants with these albums is the obvious love and meticulous care that went into recording them. The band apparently spent three months recording all the tracks; laying down the initial tracks and then sculpting them with additional overdubs and extensive tweaking, even miking leaves blowing along the driveway outside the studio and including it as a segue between two songs. In fact, both albums are obviously meant to be listened to in their entirety, with nary a second of silence between songs, as tracks bleed and drift into one another. Volume two begins, quite ingeniously and literally, where volume one leaves off -- with a brief reprise of the ending track. It could be me, but volume two seems to contain more Mogwai style extended jams and instrumental musical forays and experiments. So if you wish to start with a more "pop" oriented record, choose volume one and if you want more of a drifting and pensive record, choose volume two. Chances are that you'll wanna pick up both eventually anyhow. Everytime we play this in the store, someone buys a copy or two.
The first thing worth mentioning about the geniusly warped and bafflingly brilliant debut release from Apprentice Destroyer, is that the whole thing was recorded at Guitar Center. Secretly and surreptitiously, over the course of months (maybe years?). Repeat trips were made to capture bass parts, drum loops, synth melodies, essentially treating Guitar Center like an impromptu multitrack studio. And as any one who's been to Guitar Center knows, it's often infuriating, as random folks pound away on drums, or shred on guitar. So now imagine one of those guys was actually recording an album. Playing whatever part was needed until an employee would make him stop. Enlisting his girlfriend as a distraction, to keep the clerk busy while he bashed out another drum part of another layer of sound. That alone had us sold. It almost didn't matter if it was even good or not. Just the concept, and the execution. And of course, that's not to mention that Apprentice Destroyer is the work of the same madman behind sci-fi tech-prog improv black metal one man black metal band Mastery, as well as actual one man black metal band Pandiscordian Necrogenesis (as in he plays drums with his feet, while playing guitar and singing) AND he also sings and plays bass in SFBM horde Pale Chalice! But don't be expecting metal, Apprentice Destroyer is more psychedelic krautrock styled, tripped out kosmische spaciness, wild, FX drenched 8-bit bleep and bloop, whirring zoner dronescapes, skittery mutant electronica, a little bit of all that fused into a totally trippy, mesmerizingly moody sprawl of heady, sonic delight.
The opener sounds like Neu! hopped up on amphetamines, or some early Stereolab B-side spinning at 78rpm, all cascading arpeggios and sped up motorik grooves, the sound switching back and forth as if some mad scientist producer with ADD was cycling between channels. The whole record isn't as maddeningly hypnotic, in fact, much of Glass Ceiling Universe is nearly ambient, there's the churning cosmic swirl of the title track, sounding like music from some twisted planetarium show, or an alternate score to the retro-thriller Beyond The Black Rainbow, or the hazy pulsating shimmer of "Downward To Greendeep". The record does deliver moments of super charged crunch and energetic, rhythmic disruption throughout, the almost Afro-noise sounding "Welcome, Destroyer", or the gristly electro-skitter of "Metamammal", but they're surrounded by surprisingly tranquil soundscapery, and moody, muted, softly rhythmic pulsations, that make Glass Ceiling Universe align more with sonic bliss out than blow out.
It's easy to forget that this was recorded at Guitar Center, and not in a proper studio, which is a testament to the genius involved, and the perfect foil to what is ultimately a gimmick, but the fact that that gimmick is subverted by these incredible, and fantastically realized sounds, is really what makes this so special. But just to make sure you DON'T forget, there's a whole track made from recorded snippets of Guitar Center employees, including some serious dude/bro talk, somehow expertly woven into a cool, smear of murky, psychedelic kraut-drone!
In case it wasn't obvious, this RULES, and gets THEE highest aQ recommendation. And you can expect this to end up on a lot of our year end lists. And we're guessing very likely yours too!
We are so excited to see this incredible score to one of our all time favorite films finally issued on vinyl. Long unavailable in any format, the electronic scores that Eduard Artemiev created for Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's fantastic and meditative seventies sci-fi films Solaris, Mirror and Stalker are some of the most incredibly moving and brooding soundtracks we have ever heard. So much so, that the movies would not have had such a deep emotional impact without them. This original 1972 Solaris score (not to be confused with the later eighties re-recording, also being reissued on another label) in particular is eerily contemplative, full of chilling electro-acoustic drones, romantic Bach organ fugues and dreamily ponderous passages wrought with field recordings, gongs, and ghostly choruses, that are both beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
Solaris can be seen as the Eastern European counterpart to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, as both films are meditative existential ruminations on the metaphysical schism that divides human and alien understanding. Based on Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel, the film centers on a space psychologist Kris Kelvin who is sent to investigate the mysteriously stalled progress of a space expedition sent from Earth to study the strange planet Solaris. When he arrives, he finds the three person crew oddly isolated from each other and the station in disarray. The mystery deepens when he awakens the following morning and sees his late wife (who killed herself years ago) asleep beside him. It seems that the planet Solaris is actually a sentient life-form that is using the passengers' past memories as a means of communicating with them. However, not understanding what consequences may come about when confronted with uncanny manifestations of painful memories from the past, the planet's attempt at making contact with the expedition causes the crew to become emotionally dysfunctional and self-destructive. In Tarkovsky's multi-layered narrative, no amount of space travel can separate us far enough from the past that continually haunts us.
In 17 movements, Artemiev's score is centered on Bach's "Choral Prelude for Organ in F Minor" as a recurring theme. The mix of classical and electro-acoustic music underlies the visual set design of the space station which also features oddly enough, reproductions of Old Master paintings, in particular the 16th century series "The Months" by Pieter Bruegel The Elder. The confluence of past and future motifs in the film as well as the score is startling effective allowing for an uneasy ruminative moodiness on the nature of time. The frigid electronic passages give voice to an oceanic planetary presence that is absolutely awe-inspiring beset in harrowing timbres that calm and intensify in subtle slow-moving waves. Only Tarkovsky can make windy wild meadows, foggy woods and tumultuous oceans feel so unfamiliar and freakishly alien. The second side opens up to more dreamier and stranger sonic passages, including a theme based on Kelvin's dead wife Hari that is beautifully haunting with a short choir interlude. From there, that leads into a snippet of Russian folk-song, and field recordings of birds, dogs, voices and gongs, with eventually both the Bach organ pieces and the cavernous electronics intermixing more and more intensely together with epic results.
Comes beautifully packaged with 3 variant covers featuring different film stills (sorry, we can't guarantee which one you will get!), and a full color booket of static shots from the film. Another win for the increasingly amazing Superior Viaduct label. Essential!
It's a weird thing, but we've always noticed that musicians, especially avant outsider musicians (and even then ESPECIALLY metal musicians) seemed inordinately fond of electronic music. Every time a band would come in the store, they would head straight for the electronic section and end up buying a bunch of weird techno or jungle or whatever.
Which then might make it less surprising that recently some of our favorite noise makers seem to be heading in that direction with their own music. Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel is gone, and in its place, Our Love Will Destroy The World, whose first record was indeed some bastardized dance music, a strange hybrid of blurred buzzy drone music, and thumping club jamz. Similarly, Neil Campbell, aka Astral Social Club has been peppering his recent record with similarly club worthy jamz, but again, those sounds still soaked in the same sort of blissed out psychedelic ambience that most people associate with his Astral Social Club.
For this latest full length, Campbell once again starts things off with a track that would almost sound more at home on Planet Mu than VHF. A skittery bloopfest, with a thick grinding synth bass line, and bloopy bleepy beats, but all wreathed in processed guitars and blurred soft focus buzz, which leads right into the second track, still electronic, but not actually danceable, it sounded more like a club jam on 45, the beats stumbling over one another, like a jumbled, almost hyper speed Pierre Bastien, a million little mechanical men, spewing a symphony of clicks and bleeps and loops, all wound around buried melodies and long thick streaks of hiss and fuzz.
We kept expecting things to switch gears, and for the sound to gradually bliss out into the more 'traditional' ASC sound, long form ur-drones more along the lines of Sunroof! or Skullflower, but most of us were hoping just the opposite, that maybe he'd push further, take ASC somewhere no band like that had really felt at home, the dancefloor, albeit, some strange seriously fucked up and drug addled ALIEN dancefloor. And so he has, for the most part. The first half of the record is indeed, all fractured beats, and warped loops, woozy tripped out grooves, effects swirling and whirling everywhere, the beats playful and not quite funky, stuttery skittery, and seriously fun. This is the kind of stuff that just might lure the perpetual wallflowers out onto that dancefloor.
BUT!!! Hidden between the opening salvo of beats and loops, and the closing outer space house jam, lurks some of the prettiest droned out ambience we've heard from ASC. Processed glitchery, smeared into grainy expanses of glistening blur and shimmery starburst, draped with delicate melodies, gradually growing into a glorious wall of warm fuzz, super thick grinding buzz, smoothed into hypnotic loops and pulsing soundscapes, a more caffeinated Tim Hecker, gauzy and washed out but propulsive and kinetic, glorious sun baked upper register blow outs, wrapped around crystalline acoustic guitars, all woven into a wheezing heaving whole, some sort of super abstract avant garde raga, and finally, a brief but fantastical tangle of crunch and buzz, off hiss and glitch, warped melodies and damaged arrangements, lo-fi tape hiss slithers beneath stuttering chopped up samples, again all blurred into something dreamlike and bleary eyed. WOW.
It all might seem a little schizophrenic, and it is, but it's also the best of both worlds, and the key being that the more beat oriented tracks, are still able to function like the more ambient drone based sounds, if you're laying in the dark, headphones strapped on, those beats might not induce you to shake your tail feathers, but they'll still be able to suck you under, to transport you to some crazed soundworld, to totally mesmerize and hypnotize, which makes the whole record either the weirdest most fucked up electronic dance record EVER, or quite possibly just the best Astral Social Club release so far. Maybe both...
Most people probably know Sasha Grey for what she is most (in)famous for, and that would be for being a porn star. Even folks who don't know porn stars might still know Grey as an actress, who recently starred in Steven Soderbergh's film Girlfriend, and has been on HBO's Entourage, but few probably know her as a musician (although aQ customers might remember she sang on a Current 93 record!). And we're not talking cheesy club diva, a la Tracy Lords, crooning terribly over bad house music, no we're talking as a proper musician, one who apparently has been making music since she was a teenager (influenced by KMFDM and Throbbing Gristle), and whose current group aTelecine is some sort of blackened industrial avant drone sound collage thing, that would put most of the current crop of experimental musicians to shame. The label hypes Grey's music as being heavily indebted to groups like Nurse With Wound and Coil, and while we're tempted to think this is just the label trying to make the band seem 'cooler' and more authentic, it only takes a few minutes listening to aTelecine's new full length to realize, it's not all that unlikely. This stuff is dark, and corrosive, haunting and fierce, otherworldly and intense, a little bit industrial, a little ambient, a little witch house-y, a little black metal, doomy and new wavey and seriously dark, a dizzying churning cauldron of field recordings, samples, loops, electronics, distorted guitars, programmed beats, FX drenched vocals, throbbing basslines, plenty of glitch and clang and rumble and buzz.
If you're anything like us it'll just take a single song, the first one we heard (even though this is aTelecine's 3rd or 4th record), the super creepy, super intense "I Came, I Sat, I Departed", a lumbering blackened industrial creep, all downtuned chug, low slung slither, laced with some seriously fucked up and freaky hissed whispery vokills, the sound crunchy and glitchy, but super hypnotic. The song gets more and more chaotic, with anguished howls, more distortion, the song seeming to crumble before our ears into a hellish reverb drenched miasma. Terrifying and incredible.
The rest of the record stacks up pretty well too. "A Cassette Played" is all woozy low end and rumbling bass over snippets of crowd sound, a sort of collaged dark wavey drift, with some super minimal skittery Autechre style fractured beats, a sprawling expansive dronescape, laced with skitter, and ominous synth swells, strangely cinematic keyboards, the sound becoming almost John Carpenter-esque near the end, before slipping directly into "Chroeg Xen", which sounds like Steve Reich or Terry Riley as interpreted by the current crop of retro futurist sci fi new wavers. "Elijah's New Sun" is a fluttering field of hiss and static, of shortwave interference, buried synth pulses, strange processed vocals, and minimal synth melodies way off in the distance.
"It's All Write" is an avalanche of song fragments, woven into a woozy, series of melodic swells, streaks of buzz, bits of sampled voices, a minimal barely there beat, slowly unwinding like some out of focus sonic charnel house. "Kitchen Light" is a surprisingly lovely bloopy bleepy bit of spacey synthiness, while "Never Was A Dreamer (vox)" is a swirling synthy crawl, all whispered tangled voices, and layered shimmery drones. "She Is Beautiful" is another bit of sci fi synthery, which leads into the short closer "Some What Daft", a gorgeous creepy glitchscape, of muted melodies, fractured drones and alien squelches, all over a sort of krauty pulse, the sort of track that we would have loved to see go on way longer. Which is pretty much how we feel about almost every track here.
Sure, the fact that aTelecine is Sasha Grey's band is the hook, but it hardly matters really, besides bucking the convention of actresses turned terrible musician, or certainly porn star gone pointlessly mainstream, this stuff is incredible, dark and dense and extremely well crafted, occasionally playful and mysterious, but more often fucking chilling and intense, and definitely makes it plain for all to see, that if Grey ever did decide to give up her day job, as sad as that would be, at least we'd have more of this amazing music to look forward to.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've all been keeping a watchful eye on Mr. Atom Heart lately. Watching bemusedly as his relocation to Chile prompted him to reinvent himself as Senor Coconut, and listening, as his techno turned to mambo, and his obsession with the indigenous music of his new home seeped into every facet of his music making. The first Senor Coconut record (out of print, it seems) was a glorious mix of Perez Prado style mambos and Squarepusherish drum programming. The Senor Coconut we listed on the last AQ list took a bizarre turn no one could have predicted, consisting of all Kraftwerk covers done Chilean style, all mambo and rhumba, barely a hint of his former Atom Heart remained. On "XXX", Atom hooks up with Chilean rapper Tea Time, for a wickedly clever record of X rated rapping (in Spanish of course) and convuluted hip hop, complete with plenty of turntablist trickery and hard disc scratching. And it's practically perfect; funny and catchy and smooth and super wicked. Tea Time's got a super smooth flow (sounding a bit like MC Solaar) and the music is just completely bizarre, lots of hiccuping loops, low end rumble, crazy scratching, and bizarre hard disc editing, making for probably one of our favorite (albeit quite odd) hip hop (Latin American glitch-rap?) records of the year, and it's easily the best Atom Heart...er...Senor Coconut record yet.
So I know most of you don't remember the band Pond, which is a damn shame. We've been trying to track down copies of their sadly now out of print final album Rock Collection forever so we could list it, to no avail. It's one of the greatest weirdest pop records ever, though. And like lots of great weird records, it got them dropped from their label and most likely led to the end of the band. I always wondered how a band could make a completely brilliant record, see it overlooked and ignored and not just give up. But lucky for us these guys just won't give up. We have an amazing array of absolutely brilliant post-Pond projects: Charlie Campbell's Goldcard which we raved about a few lists back, and now the second album from Pond frontman Chris Brady's Audio Learning Center. Where Goldcard was an eccentric hodgepodge of ultrapersonal diary-like ditties, home recorded and all over the place, Audio Learning Center is definitely a band, a ROCK band. But it's unlike a lot of the rock you'll hear these days. Very similar to the final Pond record, guitars warble hypnotic little melodies before roaring riffs overtake them, retreating just as quickly leaving just delicate little melodies for Brady to sing over. And as with most bands, it's the songs, AND the voice. The songs are weird convoluted minor key prog-pop excursions, meandering dizzily from part to part but always returning to a hook that pierces your heart and sticks in your head. And Brady has such a unique voice, throaty and gravelly, but at the same time whine-y, almost cracking and straining to reach those high high notes, lending everything an intensely earnest, almost desparate cast. Think Built To Spill, the Weakerthans, Afghan Whigs, but way more rocking and hypnotic, and way more dark and angst ridden. Sure it's on Vagrant, THE emo label, and ALC does fit to a degree, but Brady's emotions and neuroses are so much deeper and more desperate than most of emo's typical girl/boy/my parents don't understand sentiments. But sonically, there's just some one-in-a-million, alchemical intangible perfection, THAT voice and THESE songs, that give this record such resonance. Hard to know how to process this stuff. Makes you want to jump around and bang your head and air guitar, but at the same time makes you want to hole up in your room, and think about everything and everyone you've lost, and try to figure out what the hell anything means. Which is exactly what makes this record, and this band so fucking great.
Part of the joy of music for us is seeing various genres stretched to the breaking point, testing the creativity of the music maker, whether it's electronic, black metal, indie rock, whatever, it's what really keeps music exciting for us. Not that we don't love us some buzzing blasting grim black metal, or perfectly poppy indie jangle, but sometimes all it takes is that black metal being twisted up a bit, or that pop music tweaked a little, or heck even better, combining the two into some impossible grim black indie jangle, to really get us going.
One genre that seems to offer limitless possibilities is DOOM. We've had funereal doom, true doom, black doom, doom folk, doom pop, and within those various permutations, there are still more subsets, ultra doom can be abrasive and harsh and heavy, or washed out and dreamy, doomgaze anyone? But we have to say, we pretty much love most doom, all the various shades of slow and low, doooooooom, the more o's the merrier, the slower, the heavier, the prettier, the more abstract and minimal the better. Which brings us to Quebec's Aun, who to some ears might indeed sound like doom, and heck, certain elements of Aun's sound are most definitely doom-like, but Aun is a perfect example of the above mentioned experimentation. The tropes that define the sound remain the building blocks, but are approached as something malleable, able to be twisted into any shape, and it seems the shape Aun has chosen is something closer to the glacial crawl of SUNNO))) and the metalgaze drift of Nadja. Which is a pretty killer combo, especially in this case, as Aun manages to make that sound, sound pretty unique.
The opening track of this new album is a slow motion sea of heaving black swells, downtuned and thunderous, but blurred into gritty streaks of low end, wreathed in glitch and crackle, underpinned by sheets of coruscating feedback, buried in the mix, offering a subtly melodic counterpoint to the mesmerizing glacial pulse of the thick crumbling near static riffage. The result is a totally mesmerizing, almost raga like doomdrone, that manages to be both tranquil and crushing, dreamlike and HEAVY AS FUCK.
The second track begins hushed and shimmery, minimal and ethereal, while way off in the distance a churning riff begins to pulse and throb, eventually emerging as a thick pulsing wall of crumbling sound, very much like old Earth, but like the track before, crackling with electricity, and then the drums come in (courtesy of none other than Voivod's Away, wow!!), but not like a normal beat, they sputter and skitter, little explosive bursts, not fully kicking in, just peppering the black expanse with machine gun bursts of percussive crunch, before eventually locking into a rhythm, the track becoming a strange almost krautrocky groove, while all around those sheets of guitar undulate wrapping their blackened tendrils around the beat, shades of Aluk Todolo.
The next track is more of the same, that motorik drum beat, but this time the guitars are muted and smoothed out, unfurling haunting melodies beneath the drums, epic and cinematic, and the cool thing is it never gets properly heavy, the guitars remain washed out and minimal, a little spacey, a little psychedelic, the production almost sounds like Xasthur, weirdly lo-fi and lush at the same time, before the track sort of splinters to pieces at the end, allowing the drums to sort of drift off, while those churning guitar drones slowly rev down.
The 'final' track (more on that in a second), returns to the incendiary guitar crunch of the first few tracks, spreading out another dronescape of warm buzz, glimmering glitch, and blown out blurred melody, all hazy and super distorted, there's a brief bit of drum driven dirgery, before the track settles into some softly crackling shimmer.
After the 'final track', there appears to be an unlisted extra track, sounds like maybe it could be live, hardly matters, it fits perfectly with the rest of the record, another expansive buzzscape, all layered ever shifting drones, truncated melodies, strange textures and timbres and overtones, the most abstract of the bunch, a swirling shimmering blackened drift, still heaving and heavy, but way more ethereal and space-y, the perfect final movement for sure.
Equally recommended for doomlords, dronelords, and pretty much anyone who likes it slow, low, mysterious, heavy and BEAUTIFUL.
It's hard to know exactly what to say about these guys, we have to fight our urge to just gush madly, and as you all probably realize by now, we can only put up so much of a fight... the last Austerity Program record was a bombastic homage to the drum machine fueled acerbic brutality of the late great Big Black, which we absolutely loved. But this record somehow manages to retain that sound (how could it not at least a little, especially considering the lineup is guitar, bass and drum machine?) while taking it so much further. Sure Big Black were amazing, as were the legion of drum machine driven behemoths that followed, but the Austerity Program are way more than the sum of their parts. Especially the drum machine part, which seems to define most bands that utilize one... The drum machine here doesn't always sound like a machine at all, which is the key, it's super tight, and precise, but could maybe be an actual drummer. Occasionally the band do take advantage of the machine's super human abilities, but for the most part, the drumming while crushing and brutal is also weirdly deft and subtle. The vocals also can't help but give a nod to Albini and Big Black, it's not a hellish howl or a guttural growl, it's more of an angry nerdy wail, a hyper literate, snarky rant delivered in a sung / spoken, regular guy shout. But the vocals are generally few and far between, which means it's mostly all about the bass and guitar...
And fuck if these aren't some of the heaviest, and thickest guitar sounds ever. It helps that the riffs totally destroy, super catchy, weirdly melodic, soaring and epic as often as they are metallic and pummeling. Sometimes super affected, but just as often a straight forward chest caving crunch, the bass throbbing and pulsing right along, often offering up some super unlikely melodic counterpoint, never content to just be a low end presence, the bass grinds and growls as intensely as the guitars.�
The overall sound ends up being some strange hybrid of Big Black (obviously), Harvey Milk, Jesu, a little bit of Fugazi and some hints here and there of black metal buzz, all tightly wound into an utterly intense crushing blast of beautiful brutality. From the first track, you'll be pretty much knocked the fuck out. It's a super complex mathy metallic workout, the guitars, swirl and soar, slither and shimmer, all the while pounding out some of the most bad ass riffs ever, and it's super dynamic, with the drums and guitar locked tight, stopping to emit little squalls of corrosive feedback before spiraling back into walls and washes of furious buzz. All the tracks are impossibly gorgeous and melodic, as well as being super ultra tight and clinical,�guitars are massive, roiling and thick, the riffs warm and dense, but jagged and razor sharp, and the arrangements are mindblowing, super complex, but not to the point of destroying the flow of the songs, just perfectly obtuse and tangled, so much so that it sounds like one of these guys must have gotten some sort of calculus degree just to program the drum machine. But it's not all pound and crush,�some tracks are slow and brooding, the guitars building and building, a haunting groovy�Fugazi like percussive chug, that eventually builds to a completely catchy, massive grinding guitar / pummeling percussion battle that manages to take the shape of a crazy catchy song at the same time.�
We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the fact that these guys are also really fucking funny too. But in that all to rare way, where the music is absolutely NOT funny, the humor is subtle, and clever, and just a bit snarky, but it's all over the place, EVEN in the music, but subtly so. From the sticker and obi text on the outside, to the lyrics (especially the part where they scream�"Here is my favorite part" before, well, what just might be their favorite part), to some of the clever arrangements, some of the strangely almost recognizable melodies, right down to the WTF liner notes, a chunk of pseudo-scientific data analyzing the various songs on the album, based on things like "distinct drum patterns", "average tempo", "vocal references to death", "abrupt pauses" and more. There are graphs and charts, and lengthy descriptions of how the "Divergence Index Value" of each song was calculated. Even the cover art, various swaths of old lady plastic flowers... these guys just totally rule. They're heavy and ultra brutal, but don't take themselves too seriously, they're funny, but the music is not, the humor is smart and funny, and somehow perfectly compliments the sheer epic intensity of the music...
They also had a contest celebrating the release of their new record with the grand prize being your very own customized song, and as if that weren't enough, have a peek at this amazing Austerity Program infomercial:
http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=1WcsV7hQ1V4
As if it weren't already painfully obvious, absolutely essential, totally recommended, one of our favorite new records, and a no brainer for record of the week!
We first discovered Author & Punisher via a super limited dvd, cuz really, as good as the music is, and it is amazing, you sort of have to see the music being made to understand just how fucking nuts this stuff, and this guy really is. A&P is one man, Tristan Shone, who builds his own instruments, which in and of itself is nothing new, but we're not talking cobbled together rickety speakers and Amps For Christ style plywood soundmachines (although we love that stuff), we're talking gorgeous, precision machined instruments, that look like modern art, huge smooth steel drums, strange handles that slide along metal rails, bizarre triggers and stainless steel mouthpieces fitted with multiple microphones, Author & Punisher's setup looks like some post modern Rube Goldbergian sonic mousetrap, all glimmering metals and smooth expanses of perfectly fitted machines, the live performance as physical as any normal instrumentalist if not more so, Shone spinning the huge metal; drum creating thick swells of rib cage rattling low end, slamming the strange handles along the steel rails producing booming bursts of percussion, the strange Cylon like microphone producing an inhuman alien bellow. Even sans sound, the performance is riveting. Mesmerizing. We were lucky enough to host an Author & Punisher instore, and besides being incredible to see up close, the sounds produced shook the old wooden building that houses aQ so hard, that our upstairs neighbors came down in a panic, explaining that the whole hose was vibrating, and things were falling off shelves and tables.
Now imagine that sort of physical energy, converted into sound, but not just any sound, but totally mesmerizingly epic, crushing buzz drenched post industrial heaviness. A sound that falls somewhere between the industrial crush of Godflesh, and the blown out electronic buzz and glitch of Digital Hardcore, but all blurred into a sort of abject blackened industrial doom. All manner of low end pulsing and buzzing, rumbling and whirring, the beats skittery and stuttery one second, pounding and Teutonic the next, and then there's the bass generator, which we assume comes from that huge metal disc, cuz a sound that thick and intense should really come from a massive 300 pound hunk of spinning metal, that impossibly dense low end, weirdly woozy and almost liquid, the tones being adjusted on the fly, so much so that it sounds like the speed of the recording is being messed with, the sound warbly and woozy, warped and darkly damaged and druggy. While at the same time being heavy as fuck, and pretty much WAY more brutal that bands with real drummer and a phalanx of guitarists in front of rows of amps.
It's amazing how much of the physicality is captured on the record, more so here than on past recordings, the sound managing the delicate balance between blown out amp destroying crush, and tightly wound, barely controlled chaos. The songs slipping from lumbering doomic lurch, to swoonsome skittery abstract dronemusic, from noisy metallic pummel, thick, sinewy digidub, and from thick almost metalgaze drift, to super spare haunting minimal skitter.
Ursus Americanus is definitely the culmination of past recordings and live performances, managing the seemingly impossible task of creating something that stands on its own musically, but that captures a soundmaking method that you're unlikely to experience from anyone else. Totally incredible. And obviously, if you get the chance, see A&P live, and have your mind (and ears) blown.
Finally! The long out of print nineties releases from legendary industrial / power electronics / UK noise / black drone one man band AX once again see the light of day. Longtime fans of the mighty Skullflower, will no doubt be familiar with AX, the project of one time SF member Anthony Di Franco, who also did time in a number of other bands you might also be familiar with: Ramleh, Novatron, Ethnic Acid, JFK. But we always had a soft spot for AX, whose first two vinyl lps (collected here), Nova Feedback and II, originally released in 1994 and 1995 respectively, were for some of us our first taste of power electronics, and unlike much of the more harsh, ear shredding power electronics, AX trafficked in something much more droned out, a sound that whether intentionally or not, seemed to foreshadow the sort of slowburn sludge, and crumbling slo-mo ultra-doom that would follow. It's hard not to hear hints of Earth and SUNNO))) and Bunkur and Khanate or even groups like Troum and Maeror Tri, for all of its noise, and it IS noisy, that noise is sculpted in such a way as to render it impossibly listenable, totally hypnotic, and utterly mesmerizing. You can almost imagine a primitive hybrid of Troum and SUNNO))), the dark trancelike dronescape of the former, fused to the impossible black hole heaviness of the latter, but then the whole thing doused in a haze of caustic industrial crunch, and liberal swaths of grinding howling feedback.
This collection opens up strangely enough with one track that is NOT from either of those two 12"s, but is instead plucked off AX's only proper full length cd, 1997's Astronomy, but that track, "Kortex", is definitely the perfect opener, and in some ways the perfect introduction to AX. The doomiest of the bunch by far, due in no small part to its plodding slow motion 'beat', a gristly metronomic crunch, that sounds like a snare hit slowed down a hundred times and run through a bank of dead distortion pedals, over which Di Franco lays down a churning layer of crumbling blackened distortion, wreathing those plodding squashed bug beats in squalls of overloaded powergrid buzz, it's a sort of primitive electron-level ultra doom, snakelike tendrils of hiss wrapped around sheets of grinding metallic buzz, all driven by that sinister blacknoise pulse. Which leads directly into "Nova Feedback 1", a swirling psychedelic wash of rumbling black buzz, and phased out thrum, evoking the whole guitar-against-the-amp style near-static minimalist doomdirge. Fans of the late great Vulture Club and other practitioners of that sort of doomdronedrift will be in heaven.
"Heavy Fluid" is near symphonic, a sprawling 11 minute soundscape of layered guitar buzz, gristly electronics, shards of static, clouds of hiss, some serious proto-SUNN extreme slo-mo heaviness, which had us thinking a bit of another recent aQ fave, Blackwolfgoat, unfurling an endless cascade of woozy guitar buzz and melting blackened psychedelic riffage, the tones shifting constantly, as if someone was continually fiddling with the pitch knob, or more likely, an endless fiddling with the tuners, letting notes morph into other notes, to dip down into an even murkier thrum, before slowing drifting into a near howl. The sort of track, that we could listen to ENDLESSLY, only really exploding about 8 minutes in, when the original detuned creep is barraged by scrapes and squiggles and an avalanche of still more roiling guitarnoise. There are moments of pure noise, "Theme One", is in fact pretty much a four minute blast of face melting, ultra corrosive, blacknoise blur, but it almost acts like a palette cleanser, as it leads directly into the title track, which might be the most tranquil jam here, again foreshadowing the sort of bleak black soundscapery of groups like Wolf Eyes or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer or Gnaw Their Tongues, a gorgeously abject stretch of haunting post industrial buzz and hum, super cinematic, laced with all manner of grinding guitar noise, and strange moans and creaks, slipping easily from hushed drift, to cavernous bellow, and back again.
We then move into the two tracks from AX's II 12", the first a 10+ minute of grinding power electronics bliss out, which after an opening blast of speaker destroying crunch, seems to gradually settle into something more spaced out and atmospheric, but really no less noisy, buried voices, shards of feedback, and all manner of metallic crunch, are blurred and smeared into a softly heaving sprawl of dense, droned out, psychedelic free-noise drift. The second part begins as a low level hum, distant heaving moans buried beneath layers of static and hum, super dense and tense, the perfect cue for the final shot in some long lost seventies horror movie, but soon the haunting elements are all but subsumed by the swirling noise, the result a roiling sea of hiss and howl, grinding metals and churning buzz.
Finally, the collection finishes off with the last two tracks from Nova Feedback, the first, a dreamily psychedelic swirl of prismatic deconstructed guitar shimmer, and process chordal whirl, pulsing and pulsating, easily the prettiest track here, those strange melodies a recurring theme throughout the track, but gradually pulled apart and recontextualized, drifting dreamily one second, chopped up, looped and layered the next, wreathed in delay and reverb, and sent swirling into the ether, keening melodies over soft focus background guitarnoise, here rendered a dreamlike haze, totally hypnotic, and strangely tranquil. And finally, "Cluster" finishes things off, with what sounds like a classic chunk of black metal buzz, but here looped and layered and stretched out into an endless stretch of guitarbuzz mesmer, again reminding us of Blackwolfgoat, or perhaps Mick Barr, if he was restrained to just using the lowest strings, but that sort of near symphonic buzz, a churning tangle of blackened riffage, but blurred into something much more amorphous, a dreamlike cloud of psychedelic black shimmer, that is the perfect finish, to a near perfect collection.
Needless to say EXTREMELY recommended, and not just for nineties industrial obsessives (although obviously, for those folks, this is a no brainer), but if you dig minimal guitar mesmer, psychedelic doom, abstract heaviness, post industrial soundscaping, all strains of drone, especially heavy guitardrone, this collection will blow your mind.
