THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Seems foolish to write that much about this even though it's AWESOME. It's limited to only 90 copies, it's already out of print, so all you need to know is it's Jon from Barn Owl solo, guitars, Fender Rhodes, harmonica, trumpet, harmonium and flute, all woven into a beautifully creepy expanse of slow burning twang flecked drone. Not all that far removed from more modern Earth, but much murkier and way more ominous.
Elm manages to be sweetly sinister, darkly brooding, and HEAVY without being heavy. It's all about the drone, and Elm manage to explore all sorts of dronemusick here, from soaring high end ragas, to glistening glimmering sun dappled shimmer, to crumbling downtuned buzz to spare spidery drift. This stuff is awesome. And beautiful. Seems like such a shame to make it so limited. So for now, at least a handful of you will get lucky enough to snag one of these. If you want to be one of those lucky ones, best act fast....
Gorgeous packaging, cool skeleton forest drawing, the cd and sleeve, in a silver paper outer pouch, each one hand stamped with Elm written beneath the stamp in cursive. So nice!
Second solo record from our very own Jon Porras, half of dronefolk duo Barn Owl, after his first disc on Digitalis, Bxogonoas, sold out in a matter of days. This one is crazy limited too, so if you want one, better be quick.
Woven Into Light is more of the glorious same, a druggy, bleary eyed hybrid of slow shimmery free folk and deep minimal dronemusick, taking later period Earth somewhere much dreamier and darker. Muted twang and deep smoldering shimmer, all stretched out in diaphanous sheets across heavy clouded moonlit skies. Spidery tendrils of skeletal guitar spread out like branches on leafless trees, but rather than sounding wintry, Porras wreathes his guitars in soft billows of warm whir, gauzy and lightly blurred, where other bands might turn these downtuned tones into something doomy, Porras lets them drift wraithlike, the sound windswept and barren, the sound of flickering lights above the never ending expanse of desert.
Occasionally, the guitars wind into thick sinewy streaks of coruscating buzz, spitting sparks but still wreathed in a halo or reverb and delay, soft whispery strum transformed into squalls of muted psychguitar and slow shifting almost symphonic buzz. The sound touches on some familiar territory, Sunroof!, Fear Falls Burning, Earth, Nadja, Birchville Cat Motel, and the like, there's some hints of Morricone, Scenic, but Elm most definitely occupies it's own magical mysterious sonic space.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES. and if past releases are any indication, these will sell out quick, and there's a good chance this might be the last copies we ever see...
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
SORRY.
With the datapanic in year zero amounting to next to nothing (just a lot of government money spent), the countdown series by Raster / Noton to the year 2000 may seem a little anticlimatic... especially since the last disc arrived in the middle of January 2000. Fortunately, the musical content of the finale completes the brilliant and nearly perfect series on a rather bleak note. Coil's contribution to the countdown series is recorded under their Elph moniker, whose 1994 release "Worship The Glitch" was the metaphoric precursor to this series as well as such digital fuckery by Oval, Pan Sonic, Ryoji Ikeda, etc... Coil's menace, which was oddly lacking on the "Musick To Listen To In The Dark", returns as creepy lunar drones shift into an oppressive digital dirge and followed by a recombination of contemporary digital skitter with 1960's concrete / academic bleeping.
Back in stock. Might just be your final chance to pick one of these up!!
When we first heard about this record, a split release between some unknown band and ultradoom AQ crushworthy sludgelords Monarch, whose track was an hour long, we wondered how the heck that was fair to the other band. We then discovered that the other band was in fact French grinders Elysium, whose songs average around the one minute mark (one song here clocks in at a whopping 8 seconds) it started to make sense. And what an awesome idea, what a great combo, the two extremes, blazing buzzing hyperspeed grindcore and slow motion sludge. Two great tastes... er, sounds... So here we have 4 tracks from Elysium, total time 5:55, and one track from the mighty Monarch, total time 58:27. Fucking awesome!
So first up Elysium, fast and furious, guitars like squiggles of white hot lightning, the drums like rhythms being fired from a machine gun into your head at point blank range, vocals that screech and gurgle, everything a head spinning blur. Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Nasum, Rotten Sound, you might as well add Elysium to that elite list.�
But they're just the warm up, the appetizer, Monarch's "Amplifire Death March" is why we're here, and they do not disappoint.
So Monarch, for those who don't already know, are one of the slowest, heaviest bands in existence, whose artwork consists of weird Hello Kitty like crosses, skulls and burning churches, as is fronted by a very cute, non-tattooed, non-pierced, spikeless, leatherless, young lady in a sensible skirt and top, who howls like a banshee from the depths of hell and who write in the liner notes "Listen To Judas Priest"? How rad is that? RIDICULOUSLY RAD! And sure we'd be crushed out on Monarch just based on their lugubrious tarpit sonic sludge, we're just like that, but having an adorable frontperson just pushes it over the edge.
So yes, this rules, and is suitably funereal, appropriately slow and somber, so slow in fact it makes Khanate sound like speed metal. Okay, maybe that's stretching� it a bit, but this is some seriously slow motion shit. The riffs stretch out for ages, the drum hits are MILES apart, the vocals a screech / howl / moan, a mouthful of dirt and broken glass, a voice so harsh and hatefilled it seems impossible that it could come from Monarch's diminutive sensibly dressed leader. There are huge stretches of near ambience where it's just the hum of the amplifier, some soft lilting chords, a pounding single drum rhythm, vocals screeched across wide expanses of space, draped across fading riffs like flayed skin before the next chunk of sludge drops.�It's almost as if some leather winged demon was flying above, soaring through the black night sky, hurling huge hundred ton chunks of sludge at the ground every few seconds, or few minutes, where they splinter into a million pieces, filling our ears with shards of searing sludge. A pounding ultra-dirge, a tempo well below 16rpm, the sort of creepy crawl that were it to slow down any more would be just a single tone, albeit a crushing pummeling one. So heavy, and so slow it's almost stops being sludge and simply becomes some abstract heaviness. By now you should know what we're getting at. This is doom, ultramegadoom, doom with a page full of 'o's, wallowing in the same murk as Moss, Rigor Sardonicous, Stumm, Catacombs, Esoteric, and all who bow before the power of dooooooooom.
This is a split release between TEN labels (count 'em:�Shifty / Amanita / (((Parade))) / 213 / Throne / Amertume-Corruption #2 / Fidelio / Murder / Wee Wee / Solitude) which is kinda cool, but also kinda dumb, as each label only gets a handful of copies and therefore it goes out of print before you know it. We got 50 copies originally and those disappeared in a flash, and only now finally managed to get a handful more from one of the labels' secret stash! Probably the last copies ever.
Drifting backwards in time from the post-noise excursions into placid meditations for guitar and synth, Emeralds have become one of the favorites here at Aquarius; and for very good reason, everything they touch seems to turn to gold. Solar Bridge was a such a tease of an introduction for us, and probably was the same for many out there entering into the swirling concoctions of electronic drone; but it has been the two albums What Happened and Allegory of Allergies that really laid the foundation for their impending greatness. Not only do they have a strong grasp on the minimalist theatrics of the drone, but also Emeralds enjoys a selective memory of what made progressive electronics and progressive rock in the late '70s and early '80s great. The pastoral colorfields of Cluster, the alienated ethos of Heldon, and the insistent arpeggiations of Achim Reichel and Ash Ra Tempel all figure heavily into Emeralds sound.
This vinyl-only, eponymous record seems to percolate and bubble with electronics, at times veering into the same Omni Magazine territory that Oneothrix Point Never has been mustering for the past year. It may not be a surprise that OPN and Emerald's guitarist Mark McGuire have collaborated in a project called Skyramps, which is as good as you might imagine. The three tracks on the first side wrangle squiggling rhythms, bleepity squelches, and bending sustained tones generated by Emeralds' two synth jockeys John Elliott and Steve Hauschildt, while McGuire dishes out his best Manuel Gottsching impression. The second side is one of the epochal, long form constructs that slows everything on the first side down to an elegant pace with watery field recordings laced throughout. Pretty fucking awesome. And no doubt somewhat limited...
Perhaps you've already come across the cover of this album, it's one of those classic kitschy covers, two innocent looking teens, in cheesy white jumpsuits, unzipped in the front, with huge collars, one of the guys wielding a guitar, both looking pretty earnest and heartfelt. The record's called Dreamin' Wild, which is printed in bubbly red letters. We had seen this pop up on best/worst album covers lists forever, and like most everyone else, we had a chuckle and forgot all about it. But then we started hearing about this song called "Baby", most notably covered by weirdo outsider pop nerd Ariel Pink (the 12" of which we just got in today!), originally recorded by a couple kids named Donnie & Joe Emerson, and holy shit, we suddenly made the connection. We assumed the original version of "Baby" must suck, and Ariel Pink just took a crappy cheesy old song and weirded it up and made it warped and catchy, but instead, it turns out, the original just might be THEE coolest jam we'd heard in ages. Then we learned that Light In The Attic was gonna give this lost gem a proper reissue and we were pretty excited, even before we learned about the record's crazy backstory.
Apparently Donnie and Joe were raised in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Washington state, lived and worked on a farm, when their dad, after making them promise to focus on writing and recording original material, took a second mortgage out on the farm and built his sons a recording studio filled with amazing equipment, spending more than $100K! But that's not all, he also built them a THREE HUNDRED SEAT venue, complete with stage, ticket booth AND snack bar. As you might imagine, those 300 seats were never filled, and while the boys toiled diligently on their original music, even being featured in a local news special, all culminating in their dad paying to release the original version of this record, a selfless act that ended up causing the family to lose a significant amount of their farm when the record failed to sell. And thus, very little was heard from these boys, until now.
And while these days pretty much any old unknown record can be dug up and presented as some sort of lost treasure, very few deserve the accolades bestowed upon them, and even fewer fulfill the promise of crazy album covers and over the top backstories like Dreamin' Wild.
Really, just check out "Baby", somewhere between the sweet soulful shimmer of Shuggie Otis and the dreamy reverby pop of Roy Orbison, it's lush and lovely, the sort of mix tape killer that had we heard it before would definitely have featured prominently in past courtships. And while we're tempted to say, that it's worth the price of admission for that track alone, there's so much more to dig here, the wah guitar disco funk groove of "Feels Like The Sun", the classic rocking bass heavy buzz of "Good Time", the old school soulful smolder of "Give Me The Chance", the psychedelic yacht rock balladry of "My Heart" which manages to sound fantastically droney and druggy and dreamy, and makes it obvious just what had Ariel Pink so smitten. The record is rife with reverbed psychedelic guitars, lush vocal harmonies, ingenious arrangements, and some KILLER tunes, all cooked up by two teens in a basement studio on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So awesome!
Includes a massive booklet with extensive liner notes and tons of pix. And check out this mini-documentary on Donnie and Joe: http://vimeo.com/39424998#at=0
FYI vinyl lovers, this is on lp too, we've got a few but not enough to list, our supplier just happened to be out this week, but we should get some more soon!
This is going to be short and sweet. At the risk of some of you losing faith in my (Andee's) reviews, Emerson Lake and Palmer are the greatest rock band ever.
Period.
Everything you like about every one of your favorite bands, ELP do better. Heavy, bombastic instrumental virtuosity, gorgeous mellow pop chops, everything. A greatest hits record can't really do justice to a band who almost never wrote a bad song (at least until 1977), and if you were actually interested, you'd be better served buying one of their actual albums. Or all of them. But for the timid or the not so daring, this is not a bad place to start.
Thirteen tracks by of the most successful, most reviled, act in prog-rock history!
We go on and on at length about all the fucked up and damaged, weird as fuck black metal bands we love so much, but we don't really mention Emit usually, which, as we listen to this final Emit release seems just plain wrong. Might be due to the dearth of recordings, only 3 proper releases, one a split, now mostly unavailable, this latest is another collection, gathering up all manner of unreleased tracks as well as a handful from various demos. And holy shit is this stuff amazing. We absolutely loved A Sword Of Death For The Prince, but Abortions makes that one seem downright tame in comparison. This is a tough one to describe, but we'll do our best.
Emit exist somewhere between raw black metal buzz, and creepy black ambience, but their take on both is absolutely tweaked and damaged and pretty insane. The opener here is a thick wall of buzzing guitars, layers of feedback, and what could be analog synths, some serious drone, but all draped over a VERY un-metal rhythm, a weird jaunty shuffle, all offbeat high-hat, like a calypso or something, the beat changing tempo wildly and randomly throughout, speeding WAY up, then right back down again, while the track continues to undulate and buzz fiercely. Right after that the sound shifts to something much more abstract, a dark and brooding drift, laced with strange ambient sounds, warbly low end melodies, bits of crackle and hiss, only to immediately transform into a blast of caustic noise, before slipping back into minimal drone, and finally a haunting reverb drenched spoken word invocation. And we're only 4 tracks in. The rest of the record is equally and gloriously schizophrenic, some highlights: super spare drums over a thick whirring organ drone, and what sounds like a super high pitched harmonica melody, super angular and slightly off key black metal buzz, with an organ or a synth, making the whole thing sound super sinister like a busted metal music box and the drums still doing some sort of UN-metal beat, a totally bizarre, processed buzzscape, all stuttery and staticky, like a skipping cd, but shaped into something weirdly metal and very twisted, swirling thick clouds of black drone and chanted vocals, lots of quite beautiful dark ambience, all very creepy and haunting and ethereal, finally finishing off with the 13 minute epic "Visions Of Timeless Nought", a super obtuse sort of black metal jam, more of those fractured fucked up drums, vocals wrapped in reverb and careening wildly all over the place, guitars that moan and groan and squeal, everything weirdly dubbed out, the drums bouncing wildly, the high-hat loud and sizzling all over the place, the entire song sounding like it's being reflected in a funhouse mirror, warped and warbly and woozy, just listening makes your head spin, which is pretty fantastic actually.
The band has recently ceased to be, reinventing itself as Hammemit, with a new sound and new direction, so for those of you who have yet to discover the warped joys of Emit, and have been hankering for some new blackened weirdness, freaky and fucked up, druggy and confusional and so so so strange, this is probably your last chance...
Norwegian black metal emperors Ihsahn, Samoth and Trym are back with what's billed as their latest and greatest achievement in a career of evil that's second to none. And by latest we also mean last: supposedly this is their final album, ever, sob. And so
There aren't a whole lot of grim black metal bands from Michigan. And Empire Auriga aren't gonna do anything really to change that. They are grim, and black metal maybe, in their own way, but they're also industrial, gothy, a little new wavey, a bit shoegazey, even pretty poppy. In fact they're almost definitely more of all of those than they are 'grim black metal'. Yet they're on Moribund, and they are being touted as a sort of avant black metal outfit. We do see the appeal, black metallers have been expanding their horizons lately, opening up to bands like Brown Jenkins, Wrath Of The Week, Have A Nice Life, Nadja, and there have been groups like Blut Aus Nord and Spektr, distinctly black metal, but who have transformed their sound into something much more industrial and avant.�
So thus we have Empire Auriga, a duo from Michigan, Lansing to be exact, one guy on "communications", the other on "transmissions", and on repeated listens, we're gonna have to go out on a limb and say this isn't actually black metal at all, at least not in the traditional sense. The opener is all marital drumming, militaristic snares, over a nearly static sheet of slow shifting distorted buzz, some mournful horns (?) or at least a keyboard melody that sounds like horns, it ends up sounding like a metallic version of some medieval music, the vocals are a drawled sort of croon, more Joy Division than Darkthrone. And while it may not be black metal, it's still eminently cool. The next track is a lugubrious doomic trudge, super processed percussive pound, lots of drone and buzz, howled vocals buried in the mix, all very machinelike and lumbering, almost like a more washed out drone-y Godflesh. Later tracks get super industrial, the drums a mechanical pound, the vocals a demonic croak, again the melody distinctly medieval, almost like blackened Renn Faire music, others are just long stretches of staticky noise, buried radio transmissions, bursts of jagged interference, a weird sort of crumbling caustic drone, while still others are deep drifting stretches of creepy black ambience, rife with found sounds and disembodied voices. Only one track can really be called black metal, and even that one is pretty far out. The main riff is not so much a riff as a long drawn out buzz, the vocals are a strangled guttural growl, over the top a haunting Burzum like keyboard melody, but the cool thing about it, and exactly what makes it so not black metal, is the lack of propulsion, it's more like some fucked up buzz drenched ambient Whitehouse, really cool and creepy and grim, but only marginally black metal.�
All this talk about whether Empire Auriga is black metal or not, but to be fair, we could really care less, it's just the fact that they seem to get lumped in with other black metal bands, even though the connection is tenuous at best. But fuck it, we love black metal and we dig this big time. You won't necessarily love this if -all- you listen to is metal, but if you're into weird metallic noise, or dark rhythmic weirdness, or abstract blackness, or any sort of abstract arty heaviness, this is definitely all of that and more.
Most people probably remember Alec Empire best as the head of Digital Hardcore Recordings, or as the front man of Atari Teenage Riot, or for his various solo records, but here at aQ he's probably best know for the LOUDEST instore ever. It was pretty insane, not sure how we even got away with it. Folks were coming down from stores 4 or 5 doors down to see what the heck was going on. There was as big a crowd of lookie-loos as there was people to see the show. He was DJing with Merzbow albums or something.
But it's been years, and Empire has gone through a bit of a transformation since then, he's not so much into the super distorted jungle anymore, his more recent records have been more industrial, sounding like Nine Inch Nails or Ministry, but actually good. We dug his last, The Futurist, a slab of metal riffs and drum machine beats, of howled vocals and stomping garage rock. A weird mix, but one that definitely suited him. But this most recent disc is different all over again. First there's the glamour shot in the booklet, all bleached bangs and aviator shades, and the legend underneath the disc that says "This is an indie rock noise record...", and it is, sort of. But we'd also say it's a sort of industrial synth pop new wave record, borrowing HEAVILY from prime era Gary Numan, and a little from Suicide too. It may be derivative, but it's still awesome. The opener is worth the price of admission alone. A killer hook, total new wave goth-industrial dream pop, equal parts Interpol and Gary Numan (the synth line is criminally Numan), the vocals a bit robotic, a weird atonal bridge, but the whole song so fierce and catchy, and the sort of thing that would destroy a dancefloor filled with silver booted, multi-scarved glam pirates for sure.
There is some weird shit here too, robotic proto-funk, angular electro, murky ballads, groovy garagey buzz, it's all good, we're also reminded of the Mark E. Smith + Mouse On Mars project Von Sudenfed at times too. But the best parts are definitely rife with thick fuzzy synths, and killer beats, all wound up into groovy late night, strobe lit, stilleto heeled, funky, sexy blasts of buzzing new wave. Way cool.
Completely stunning, delicate and crystalline, slow motion dream rock. A bit like Movietone in mood, but Empress replace the murk, with a glowing diffused warmth and clarity, the musical equivalent of those little glowing orbs on the lens of a camera when it's pointed at the sun. Super nice. Definitely for fans of Low, Movietone, and the like. On the Pastels' Geographic label.
Empty Mirror is New Zealanders Ben Spiers and Karl Willis, utilising a strange array of soundmaking devices including acoustic guitar, violin, baby monitor, radio, reed organ, turntables, saucepan lids, dictaphone and more. In 'Extricate' (tracks 1-6) a
The guys in Enbilulugugal have been sending us cd-r's for a while now. Each one a perfectly putrid blackened slab of black metal drenched in full on NOIZE. Buzzing and snarling and speaker-melting white noise brutality that ended up falling way more on the noise side of things, with riffs subsumed by huge washes of scalding electronic fuzz, and any semblance of songcraft, dropped kicking and screaming into the fiery pit. On this latest cd-r, their first 'official' release, Enbilulugugal have finally harnassed their two sides, the confrontational head smashing noise side, and their troo, grim, cult BM side, and have somehow managed to put it all together into a crushing face-melting blast of ultragrim blacknoize, equal parts brutal lo-fi black metal, Whitehouse style pummel, and Faxed Head fuckedupness. Killer riffs collide with bizarre tape drop outs, howling demonic vox come screaming from dense clouds of Merzbow worthy analog skree, blastbeats become so distorted they sound like your speakers are malfunctioning. On top of all that they heap plenty of forest sounds (wind, owls, etc... ), demonic laughter, blooping bleeping damaged electronics, fucked up effects, and about a hundred extra layers of grime and girt and fuzz. Imagine Darkthrone circa Transylvanian Hunger, with Merzbow on lead guitar, Masonna on drums, and a steam locomotive on bass, remixed by Alec Empire, and you wouldn't even be close!
As faithful readers of this here aQ list no doubt figured out long ago, we love insane music. It doesn't even matter whether it's pop or metal, indie rock or hip hop, the more twisted, and damaged, and confusional and what-the-fuck, the more we love it. If you do a search on the aQ site for words like "fucked", "freaked-out", "demented", you'll get a (maybe not so) surprising number of results. And also maybe not so surprisingly, it would probably read like an all time aQ best-of. Knowing all this, a friend of ours suggested we check out Encenathrakh, the new WTF improv death metal / free grind outfit made up of a who's who of difficult heaviness - there's the inimitable Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers, Burmese, Hatewave, Cellular Chaos and lots of others), weirdo shredder Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Ocrilim, etc.), weirdo shredder #2 Colin Marsten (Gorguts, Behold The Arctopus, Krallice, etc) and weird shredder the third, Paulo Henri (Copremesis). If you're thinking all these shredders means a goddamn glorious, chaotic mess, you wouldn't be far off. Especially considering this stuff is supposedly all improvised.
Thus what you've got is a dizzying barrage of impossibly furious and frenetic, free-form death-grind. Not that far removed from the gore grind we love, all insectoid buzz, machine like blurred beats, and of course guttural gurgling vokills. But imagine one of those bands being covered by Naked City, or maybe the other way around. The drums are all over the place, brutal blasts to wild machine-gun splatter, the riffs too, like all three guys were shredding wildly in the studio sans headphones, a furious musical rat king like tangle, that will have your head spinning and your ears begging for mercy.
That's not to say it doesn't gel, cuz it does, at least sort of, well, maybe once in a while, or really about as much as you'd want something like this to. Which if you're anything like us is probably not much at all. Fans of the recent Mastery record, might find this even more wildly, and willfully, next level baffling, cuz really, for all the metal that's going on, it's almost like Borbetomagus, with the sax swapped out for more guitars. Churning, roiling, blurry, swaths of swirling buzz and blast, laced with blurts of atonal shred, and even some mysterious electronics, all wound up into what might be the craziest, coolest, metalhead-frustrating chunk of avant death metal EVER.
Oh, and here's a list of this album's selling points, according to the label: NO DIGIPAK. NO LOGOS. NO SONGS. NO TRIGGERS. NO LYRICS. NO BASS. NO SWEATPANTS. 1000 percent Technical Guttural Supremacy!
Latest from Encomiast, a long time aQ fave, whose expansive mysterious dark drones have never failed to blow us away, but this is not just a new album, it's a sprawling double disc concept record split between two separate groups, and recorded in one of the most haunted buildings in Colorado. The story behind this record revolves around the Belvedere Theater in Central City, Colorado, a group of musicians repeatedly visited with the idea of capturing EVP (aka electromagnetic voice phenomena), where else but an extremely haunted old theater would one be able to capture the voices of the dead, but alas, no such sounds were discovered or captured, BUT, the musicians did manage to record, and those recordings were reworked into the two discs found here. The first is by Encomiast, the second is by a group called The Copper Thieves, which is Encomiast along with members of Mandible Chatter. Both discs conjure up the dark spirit of that theater, each in its own way.
The Encomiast disc is downright frightening, all creaking moaning low end, deep ominous rumbles, all manner of tiny sounds drifting up out of the inky blackness, cold and sinister, abstract and ephemeral, the sounds of the theater's busted up old grand piano, smeared into blurred atonal clouds of clustered notes, the overtones drifting like lost specters, voices moan and bellow, the natural room sound as much an instrument as anything else, these deep dark drones totally evoke the spirit of that haunted space, headphone required, to truly get lost, and submerge yourself in these seemingly bottomless sounds.
The Copper Thieves disc is not nearly as minimal, but just as ominous and haunting, the piano again plays a big part, but the notes are distorted and blurred into a massive warm wall of softly crumbling sound, which gives way to a strange haunted house of thumps and creaks and glitches and disembodied voices, groaning layers of low end thrum, soft filed of overtones overlap chiming bells, pounded notes on the piano drift up from below like monstrous growls, the disc finishing of with long tones, that seem to glow, warm and almost sun dappled, as if capturing shafts of light, drawing delicate lines on the dusty floor, and illuminating the snowflake like motes drifting in the still air.
Both discs are fantastic, darkly evocative, and gorgeously droney, for fans of Lustmord, Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Troum, Organum and other droning denizens of the dark...
LIMITED TO ONLY 200 COPIES, a double cd-r housed in a textured cardboard box, hand stamped on the outside with two printed inserts featuring liner notes and photos.
It's been more than 6 years since we last heard from Greece's End, whose last record, entitled of course II, we described thusly: "For fans of Weakling, Eikenskaden, Khold, Satyricon, and Burzum - which means basically, if you like black metal, you want this! Actually, forget black metal for a second. If the idea of speaker-threatening fuzz-dirge loping from your stereo appeals to you, then you still want this."
Which heck, still holds true with this most recent disc, the only difference being that the sound is a bit more polished, a bit tighter. Whereas the first two End records were pretty raw, III finds End taking their raw buzz and furious blast and adding some heft, and a bit of groove. For every explosive face-melting soul-shearing burst of frenetic grinding black fury, there's some lurching, loping doomic dirge, often slipping into gorgeous spidery drifts, or drifting toward something much more post rocky than black metal, there's still plenty of acoustic guitar, but instead of peeling back all the other instruments, the buzzing steel strings are woven into the buzzing blackness, adding another woozy almost folky dimension.
And the mention of Khold in the old review is even more applicable now, and heck Code too, as this new End, spends much of its time droning dramatically, or in cool mathy gnarled bits of Deathspell-ed crunch, with lots of stop starts, dizzying arpeggiated guitars, warped almost gothic sounding breakdowns, soaring melodies all over the place, weirdly technical, and dramatic, and emotional, there seems to be a new wave of avant post black metal, and End seemed to have tapped into it, and perfectly fused it with their classic Greek blackness. III seems to be another one of those records that benefits from repeated listens, the poppiness and sonic mystery that pervades pretty much every song, seem to no longer lurk in the background, instead, driving these songs and defining End's awesome new sound.
Packaged in a super deluxe 6 panel digipak, with a big booklet, and some seriously gorgeous (and scary) black and white artwork.
These Greek guys just aren't happy about being a part of the human race. The grim, blasting, uber-distorto black metal musick they make is evidence of that, without one even needing to read the lyrics to such songs as "Pitiless Paranormal Reek" and "Humanitarianism". Pure nihilistic poetry. And even if you, like me, like being human, we all sometimes feel a little bit of what these guys feel, right? Anyway, we're happy they feel the way they do if only 'cause of the great music that they make as a result. If you like the droning distortion of such great acts as Burzum, Weakling, and Eikenskaden you'll want to experience End for sure. But, their metal has moments of quiet, too, with good use of synth and acoustic guitar and even what must be field recordings or at least pseudo field recordings (from the forest, of the sky?). RecommENDed. Oh, and we also must applaud End's record label for the following statement: "NOTICE ISO666 Releases support CD-R copying. We encourage anyone that cant afford to buy our releases to burn a copy from a friend. Let the music be spread. We are against to all labels that lock their releases to prevent copying."
We've long been fans of LA's retro black thrashers Lightning Swords Of Death, we'll get their record reviewed one of these days. But recently we've become even more obsessed with LSOD guitarist Roskva's other outfit, the much blacker and buzzier Endless Blizzard, who channel classic Norwegian style BM (we assume the Blizzard in their name is an homage to the original Blizzard Beasts, Immortal) through more traditional classic metal, with lots of prog going on as well, which you know we love. Heck, they even begin the record with their own interpretation of a classic Popol Vuh Track!
But at their heart (of winter), they are a blasting grim war metal beast, offering up epic majestic riffage, furious blasting beats, intricate melodies, killer hooks, and awesome shrieking vokills.
Most of the tracks are blackened juggernauts, roiling and relentless, but the record is peppered with unexpected sounds, the haunting liturgical organs of "Luciferian Crown" complete with soaring strings and mysterious chanted vocals, the looped medieval folk of "Under The Tranhelm", a totally mesmerizing stretch of mysterious buzz and moody melody, and the epic two part final track, "Buried Still Breathing / Remember Your Death", which begins with a whirring warbly organ, playing out a minor key melody, lots of wheeze and buzz, almost like some sort of bagpipe style raga, before shifting into a plodding doom drift, heavy on the buzzing synths, which shift into some deep minimal dronemusic, before acoustic guitars join in and allow the track to unwind dreamily.
But it's not just the weird bits that make this so good. The tracks, beyond being buzzy and heavy and complex, are also catchy as hell, blending classic eighties style metal with more modern black buzz, the riffs and melodies sticking in your head like crazy.
One of our new favorites BM records for sure!
Killer power violence tag team, in one corner, newbies The Endless Blockade, who more than almost any current band embody the sound and spirit of classic power violence, and in the other, the grandfathers, and direct descendants of the genre's namesake, Bastard Noise, who have returned to the sound of their Man Is The Bastard antecedents, while still incorporating plenty of twisted Bastard noise noise.
We haven't heard Bastard Noise sound this fierce and heavy in years, throbbing low slung bass, pounding caveman drums, howled feral vox, wild screeches, tangled riffs, all woven into tightly wound tarpit grind jams, lurching and stuttering, stop start, freaked out blasts of furious thrash bookended by lumbering doomy crush, all shot through with streaks of electronic skree, clouds of glitched out FX, in fact, if anything this sounds like the perfect mix of classic Man Is The Bastard and another aQ fave MITB offshoot, Geronimo: rhythmic, hypnotic, cyclical. There are some moments of droned out Bastard Noise electronics, but those moments usually end up exploding into shards of hyper rhythmic pound and chug. So awesome. This would be worth it alone for the Bastard Noise side, but we haven't even gotten to the best part of this split...
Which is "Advanced Directive", an Endless Blockade remix by legendary academic electronic pioneer Noah Creshevsky (we had a killer retrospective of his work on Japanese label EM!), that is a total skittery, stuttery, psychedelic plunderphonic freakout. Riffs and vocals chopped and looped and pitch shifted and reassembled into a weirdly hiccupping experimental power violence mash up, reminds us a little bit of the recent Record Of The Week by Whourkr, with its impossibly complex and head spinning heaviness. Wow. The fourteen minute track that precedes it is a killer too, pummeling, pounding doomic heaviness, that slips into a strange electronic flecked trip out breakdown, and then a super in-the-red grinding buzz drenched feedback slathered noise freakout, before lurching back into some riffy crunch to finish things off.
There is one more track, a remix by noisemaker The Rita, but that one is for the TRUE noise lovers only, 15 minutes of crumbling, blown out, earshredding Merzbowian digicrunch.
The second of two "Endless" black metal bands on this week's list. While the other Endless (Blizzard) channels the spirit of classic Norwegian blackness, this Endless (Dismal Moan), finds his inspiration somewhere much darker and way more fucked up. This is record number three from Japan's Endless Dismal Moan (aka EDM) and is another glorious blast of gnarled dissonance and off kilter metallic blackness. The work of a single entity, curiously named CHAOS9, EDM traffic in super repetitive trance like black metal, grinding buzzed out riffs, convoluted and obtuse, locked into mesmerizing loops, the tracks repetitive and hypnotic. The vocals are a maniacal shriek way down in the mix, the drums not always blasting, sometimes pounding out strange stuttery rhythms alongside the riffs, and it's all about the riffs, thick and massive and jagged, sometimes everything locks into super precise stop start dynamics, before exploding again into buzzing black chaos.
It's sort of hard to explain the sound of EDM, it's like the intro or a bridge of a traditional black metal track, all twisted up and stretched out into a whole song, super droney and woozy and tripped out and dizzyingly dense. There are a few brief respites, some Goblin-y horror movie keyboards, some creepy doomy almost industrial blackened crunch, bits of cinematic black ambience, a long loopscape of still more Italian horror movie style synths and weird machinelike rhythms, and the final track, a blissy almost shoegaze-y abstract drift, drums dense with reverb, the barely there melodies drifting in a sea of soft hiss and blurred muted buzz, which just barely balances the furious fractured blackness that makes up the rest of the record.
Yet another disc of essential fucked up blackened genius! TOTALLY recommended.
Debut release from this East Coast duo, who weave a dense swirl of softly rhythmic ambience, druggy dronemusic and abstract psychedelic space drift, utilizing a strange assemblage of instruments. Along with guitars, vocals and pedals, they also utilize a Gameboy, the result is not that far removed from the sounds of folks like Expo 70, Gnod, Sounding The Deep, Pulse Emitter and the like, but these guys describe their sound as "triumphant post-noise and stretched out bummer-wave", which translates to washed out expanses of skittery programmed rhythms, warm shimmery guitars, muted loops and subtle glitchery, everything raw and lo-fi but still lush and expansive, there are vocals, but they tend to be blurred into soft swirls of layered hum and whir, the sound is dreamlike and mediative, but not mellow, instead it's minimally propulsive and blissed out, sometimes slipping into full on Autechre-like skitter, but even then, the rhythms are set amidst dense layers of drone, disembodied melodies, hushed ethereal ambience, or tripped out soft noise. Cool, mysterious and definitely psychedelic, this is the perfect headphone drift soundtrack, or sounds for a rainy day lost wander, or music to help you achieve the next level, to leave your body and attain enlightenment, or to just put on and chill out.
SUPER LIMITED RUN, 53 tapes and 47 cd-r's, we only got the cd-r's, and each one comes bundled with a bad ass lazer etched black triangular talisman, that according to the band, will "bring you infinite power", and that Andee has been wearing since we first got these in!! (proof is here: http://twitpic.com/ya15g, http://twitpic.com/ya1cu)
Finally managed to get our hands on a few copies of the 2014 debut from this Japanese
'Catastrophic Noise Metal' band, newly reissued on domestic vinyl by our pals at Hydra Head, and holy shit, this is some crazy, noisy, confusional, brilliant stuff. And as always, a Japanese band takes a sound and transforms it into something completely next level and bafflingly over the top. Although in this case, it's like Endon took the music of ten different bands, and mashed it all together into one swirling chaotic metal mess. And it's glorious. It's like Boris crossed with Melt Banana crossed with Unholy Grave then run through a battery of damaged stomp boxes, adding all manner of industrial crunch and crumble, tripped out backwards FX, echo drenched vocals, the sound seems to be anchored by some unholy grindcore/black metal hybrid, furious blasting beats and frenzied riffing, but depending on the song, it can sound grim and black, or totally nutzoid and super psychedelic. The sound also can collapse into a sprawl of end-of-song noise, but sculpted into dense swirls of drones, freaked out blasts of feral hardcore can suddenly splinter into abstract electronics, demented ambience drifts through fields of chaotic noise-jazz-splatter, death metal vokills, doomy decay riffage, again all blended up into a dizzyingly WTF? sonic concoction. It's exhausting, but utterly exhilarating, and for anyone who grew up listening to the Boredoms, and Hanatarash, and the Ruins, and Space Streakings, and Boris obviously (Atsuo from Boris produced this record btw), this seems like a (il)logical metallic, sonic extension of all that wild and wooly weirdness.
We got VERY few copies of this, and while we should be able to get more, probably best to grab one quick, or be prepared to wait patiently as we try to restock.
Another disc we knew nothing about and just luckily stumbled across (with our interest whetted due to its label affiliation, Kning usually being quite interest-ing). We were initially struck by the gorgeous cover, an embroidered landscape, all oranges and blacks, the texture of the background fabric adding grit to the already dark and mysterious shapes and hues in the foreground. The words Farval Falkenberg printed in huge gold metallic letters, strangely poetic song titles.
We later discovered that this is in fact the soundtrack to a Swedish film, a coming of age story, sad and bittersweet, and the music couldn't be more perfect. The opening track had us completely smitten within seconds. A gorgeously melancholy acoustic guitar, spinning a soft sad melody, mournful and moody, the main melody is whistled, giving the track a certain childlike vibe, a bit of a Morricone / Bjorn Olsson feel too, it seriously gives us shivers just writing about it. Then the 'chorus' kicks in, and adds soft focus piano plinking in the background, another guitar higher up in the mix, simple tambourine percussion. It's so evocative, you can't help but let your mind start making up different scenes from this movie you've never seen. Lonely walks, sitting by the window, rain pouring down, wandering along railroad tracks, laying in bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Wow.
And the rest of the record is just as compelling. Every song a mini super emotional epic. Organs wheeze ominously, acoustic guitars flutter and flit, chimes drift and shimmer, the piano returns in dense swells, bits of static and glitchy hiss intrude like someone changing stations on the radio, there are creaks and groans, distant rumbles, bits of electronic skitter, subtle drones, chimes, bells, even the occasional vocals, but it's always about the guitar, it's delicate dreamlike melodies, and how it's so perfectly intertwined with the piano and the organ. So moving and intense. Think Rachel's, Dirty Three, Pinetop Seven, Japancakes, Godspeed, but somehow much less arty, and more genuine, subtly experimental, but practically perfect, dark, emotional, so incredibly moving. Makes us want to see the film so bad, but in the meantime, it's the ideal music for whatever film you have running through your head. And of course the absolutely perfect soundtrack for lonely walks, staring at the ceiling, staring out the windows in the rain, wandering along railroad tracks, etc...
We've been trying to get ANYTHING by this band, this GUY actually. A seriously sick drummer (he's been featured on SickDrummer.Com multiple times), the awesomely monickered Bornyhake, not only drums up a fucking storm, he also handles all the other instruments as well. Enoid is his one man band, but so is Borgne, and beyond that, he plays in 5 or 6 other bands, from doom to grind, but it's extreme blackness where he really excels. We'll keep trying to get some Borgne for the store, but for now at least we can extol the radness that is Enoid.
Right out of the gate, Ataraxiis explodes in a frenzy of blizzardy beastliness, furious and frenzied and frantic, soaring melodies, drumming so fast, we're thinking it might even have to be a drum machine, or he really IS a sick drummer, and while he may be Swiss, the sound is definitely Nordic, or Swedish, think 1349, or Marduk, Immortal or Satyricon even, this is super intense frostbitten blackness, relentless, sometimes the tracks breakdown into lurching grooves or pounding doom, but those moments are fleeting, it's never long before Enoid launches back into more seriously blasting black grimness. Brutal and kult, soul flaying heaviness that is definitely not for the meek. If you like it frosty and fast, grim and black, you probably can't do much better (or blacker) than this!
Allan and Andee's personal favorite album from these Viking metallers!! Epic, violent genius.
Formerly the undisputed lords of Swedish death metal, over the past few years Entombed's career has taken many turns: first these freaks invented "death n' roll", then lost drummer Nicke Andersen to stardom in the Hellacopters, and even went alt-rock with the unwelcome album "Same Difference", and now it's time for the big comeback! Well, it's not a return to the ravaging death grind of their classic "Left Hand Path" but it's a nasty, greasy, f**ckin' heavy noisy rock-metal juggernaut anyway, enough to get them on the cover of Terrorizer magazine and "Album of the Month" status therein. Damn good indeed. Includes cover of a Deadhorse song!
Finally available on vinyl!!
We've long been fans of Japanese rockers Envy, since they were furious hardcore thrashers, but over the last few records, they have been going through a pretty serious transformation, trading in much of their fury and aggression for deep introspection, their punk rock for post rock, and it definitely suits them. This latest ep, a split with the mighty Jesu, finds the band taking their sound even farther out, almost as if the songs were written specifically for Jesu. The first track is the perfect example, we actually weren't paying attention, and almost assumed it was in fact a Jesu track, the spoken Japanese vocals being the only giveaway. Beginning as a slow drift, the drums programmed, a nervous electronic skitter, before the band explode into some sort of droneblissdirge, distorted guitars, a thick wall of sound, laced with dreamy melancholy strings, Jesu fans who have been hankering for something else similar to get into might have just found their match!
The second song starts out all moody and meandering and post rocky, spidery guitar melodies, simple jangle, a bit maudlin and melancholy, the vocals breathless and buried, all very Slinty, a little Mogwai, well, actually a lot of Mogwai, some Explosions In The Sky, until with about a minute left the band explode in a frenzy of heaviness, a nearly hardcore blow out, but strangely, still cozied up to the drifty dreaminess of the first half of the song, like someone snuck in and added strings to some Converge jam, the results are truly unique and pretty kick ass.
The third song is almost the biggest surprise of the bunch, a big crunchy guitar super catchy indie rock jam. The only thing keeping it from being all over the credits of every teen movie is the growling monstrous barking vocals, but beyond that, the song is glistening and soaring, hooky with a total old school pop punk chorus, albeit dowsed in crunch distorted guitars. A bit schizophrenic perhaps, but has us dying to hear the next Envy full length. Lookout Explosions, these guys are definitely about to steal your post rock thunder, and in the process get it all tangled up with some indie rock and dronemetal to boot!
Jesu fans are a pretty loyal bunch, so most of you don't even need to know what this sounds like, and probably could care less about the band sharing this split, but what the heck, for those of you who are interested or are new to the slowly expanding Jesu universe, these two tracks, are a bit of a departure, but enough like 'classic' Jesu to hit the spot. The first track begins with a skittery lo-fi breakbeat, super old school, takes a few minutes but eventually crumbling distorted guitars tumble into the picture, and soaring fuzzy dirgepop melodies, the vocals breathy and eighties, a lot New Order, and barring the super obtuse song structure, this first track wouldn't sound at all out of place on the most recent M83 record. Very new wave-y, dreamy and melancholy, but with some definitely strange sonic shit going on, soaring high end streaks, the rhythms getting all chopped up and stuttery, some pulsing buzzing synths. It's not until halfway through that the guitars kick in, and they don't soar majestically, instead they're sort of simple and repetitive, and they're soon pushed to the background by the various other sounds, layer after layer of warm fuzzy swirls, until the end, when the drums drop out and the guitar unfurls lazily in a sea of static and crumbling sonic grit, a warm sun baked lo-fi fade out. Cool stuff. Definitely not the same old Jesu which is precisely what keeps it interesting, and makes every record a bit of a surprise.
The second track, and the record closer, begins with deep synthy bass, and glistening sonic twinkles, another slowed down stripped down breakbeat, skittering along beneath drone-y synthesizers, and softly effected vocals, once again channeling classic eighties dream pop. Until once again the track explodes into a murky blow out, the drums now a furious blast, the guitars woozy and super distorted, almost like Jesu speed metal, but never losing it's prismatic dreamlike bliss.
Great stuff from both bands. And while we're dying for more Envy, the more Jesu's sound slips ever closer to the eighties, the more we want the next split to be with sonic brethren M83. Or heck, at the very least Jesu should cover some New Order or Smiths...
First proper release from this French blackmetal horde, released on a new black metal label run by the guy who runs Turgid Animal, home to Skullflower and various other noiseniks. But this is not some noise / black metal hybrid, no Epidemia Mortaliis are grim and true and raw, and as with most black buzzers, owe much to their mighty Scandinavian forbears, but the cool thing about EM is they have their own distinct and slightly skewed take on black metal, which results in a sound both buzzing and brutal, but also stumbling and weirdly lo-fi.
The newest demo, has the band slipping from frenzied blast, to loping dirge, and back again, the vocals hysterical and over the top, the drums super loud in the mix, the arrangements convoluted and complex, the guitars mournful and thick, but sort of low in the mix, which gives the songs a sort of off kilter, damaged vibe, the drum fills and the cymbals drowning out the rest of the musicians when ever they kick in, but the riffing is awesome, weirdly woozy, also adding their own seasick vibe to the proceedings, and there is some really fucked up stop start parts, that sound almost like black math rock. It's not full on fucked up enough to appeal to the folks only into damaged freaked out blackness, but it is plenty weird enough to keep it from sounding like every other BM band.
The second half, which is the older demo, has weirdly enough a much better production, the guitars way higher in the mix, the songs too are much faster and more furious, the guitars wild and dense and layered, but the band still does all kinds of cool weird shit, slipping some Ved Buens Ende sort of mathiness into their black buzz, and the guitars again, all over the place, buzzing, sliding slippery and tangled, crunchy and crumbling, the vocals too, even more freaked out than on the newer demo, thick with distortion and reverb, a howling hellish falsetto, another layer of creepiness over an already creepy buzzscape. Definitely wild and weird enough to appeal to the black metal crowd into insane tortured vox. Much more melody on the older demo too, but woven subtly into the band's grim black assault. Nice droning haunting intros and outros on both demos, some backwards weirdness and some dense dark ambience. Definitely kicked our ass right away, but every listen has us digging this more and more...
In case you missed it on our mystery themed in-between list last week, something we reviewed just for that, for the first time...
Another one of our all time favorite bands who never made it on the aQ list, mostly due to the fact that all of the group's records, and in fact, their whole career (not counting the reunion), predated the modern incarnation of the New Arrivals List. We really wanted to include them on this week's list, for the obvious reason (obvious if you've sussed out the theme of this week's list, that is), but really we were basically itching for an excuse to gush like crazy over these indie pop legends.
Hailing from the same Canadian province that brought us other indie rock luminaries such as Sloan, Hardship Post, Jale, and lots of others, Eric's Trip were the very first Canadian band to sign to Sub Pop (who ended up popularizing the ensuing Nova Scotian pop rush, as it were), releasing just three full lengths before calling it a day. Love Tara, was their first, originally released in 1993, and is a glorious, ramshackle collection of perfect lo-fi fuzzy indie pop, like some delirious mix of the mopey sad boy 4-trackery of Sebadoh, the fuzzed out crunch of Dinosaur Jr, and of course the lush noisiness of the band who gave them their name, these guys and gal were absolute pop geniuses, even the most fragmented/abstract tracks here will get lodged in your head like crazy, and when they do let loose, they can definitely rock with the best of them. Hushed acoustic bedroom ballads, buzzy psychedelic indie rock blowouts, the production sweetly off kilter and home brewed, the bass lines fat and fuzzy, the guitars thick and gorgeously corrosive, the boy vocals, courtesy of Rick White and Chris Thompson (now of The Memories Attack, whose most recent record was released on Andee's tUMULt label), are earnest and heartfelt, that perfect plaintive sadboy croon, perfectly balanced by the sweet angelic voice of Julie Dorion, whose solo records we HAVE raved about on the aQ list, all in the service of some of THEE catchiest songs EVER. Alternatingly hushed and dreamy, heavy and hazy, even nearly two decades later, this record, and this band, put most other pop music to shame. So absolutely recommended, one of those rare records that we find ourselves listening to all the time, and have since we were in our twenties. Glad it's still in print. SO GREAT!!!
Yet more transmisssions from the wonderful world of Finland, from a name most AQ list readers should be familiar with by now, Es, the group headed by Sami Sanpakkila, who happens to run the amazing Fonal label who has brought us releases from Kemialliset Ystavat, Islaja and Paavoharju, and featuring luminaries from other Finnish free rock outfits like Avarus, Kemialliset and Anaksimandros. This vinyl only (for now) release compiles an entire lp's worth of newwly recorded material, as well as a sidelong piece from a few years back and live on the radio recordings from the recent Es tour of the States.
The new tracks are as lovely as anything we've heard, Christmas carol like harmony vocals, lilting and folky, delicate tangles of steel string guitar and tinkling piano, that slowly untangle into wispy smears of droney dreamy psych folk. Long languid organ drones laid across a field of tape hiss and record crackle, while hovering just beneath are sqeaking reeds, quavering strings, plonked piano, all so gorgeously lovely.
The live on the radio tracks sound like some lost pagan artifact, deliberately strummed guitars, insistent rhythms, an angelic chorus of female vocals all with a distinctly krautrock style pulse beneath.
The final track is a side long drone, constructed from two guitar tracks, played by not touching the stings, only brushing the knobs and strumming way up on the neck of the guitar. Haunting and creepy, warm, dark and lugubrious.
Luxuriously packaged in a thick matte finish gatefold (with printed inner sleeves, photos and linernotes) with dreamlike watercolor paintings of the band members in different states of psychedelic repose, over branches in trees, wrapped in a scarf or rainbows or with rainbows coming from their fingers!
Birmingham's self described 'dark, vicarious, pernicious, sinister, hateful, drug influenced, tortured, philosophical, and barbaric doom' band return with three tracks, clocking in at almost 45 minutes, of the most brutal doom we've ever heard. Even better than their two previous double cds, because now the production, always their one shortcoming, finally matches the sheer power and intensity of their epic doomscapes. Walls of inpenetrable low-end dissolve into slow motion, spaced out, dire and tortured dirges. Utterly Breathtaking.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Easily a shoo-in for heavy metal/stoner rock album of the month! The long-awaited domestic debut by this cult Japanese band of longhaired 70's Black Sabbath freaks. Although they actually sound less like the Sabs than fellow Sabs-worshippers Trouble. Some other influences that come through the pot haze include the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (this disc includes their cover of "Innocent Exile" from Meteor City's Iron Maiden tribute), '70s Japanese heavy psych bands like Blues Creation and Flower Travellin' Band, Thin Lizzy, Saint Vitus, Kyuss, and other heavies. Meaning, in addition to sheer psychedelic doom riffage (a la another Japanese band, Church of Misery) they really can write *songs* in the classic sense--one listen to, arguably, the album's highlight, "Easy Goin'" and you'll know. We didn't think they made 'em like that anymore. And stay tuned for the 'bonus track', an unlisted 15 minutes of improv hippie folk drone in the tradition of Japan's Taj Mahal Travellers. Very recommended indeed!!
We're slowly working our way through the blackened back catalog of the mighty Supernal label. They've been responsible for some of our all time favorite black metal weirdness (Benighted Leams, Fleurety, Meads Of Asphodel) as well as some seriously intense grim blackness (Drudkh, Hate Forest) and all sorts of gorgeous ambient dronemusick as well (M87, Dark Ages, Fall Of The Grey Winged One).
Ethereal Woods falls somewhere between the first two. They are definitely bizarre, strange arrangements, weird production, seriously unique sound, but at the same time they definitely have a traditional black thrash going on in there as well.
Ethereal Woods are some sort of Eco-black metal band from the UK, their unique brand of buzzing loping blackened thrash is rife with "dreamy mysticism and sylvan sensibilities", which is also represented in their song titles, band name, lyrics and the legend across the back of the cd stating: "Ethereal Woods support the campaign to protect rural England!"
And what better way to do that than by unleashing a strange black musical concoction equal parts fuzzed out guitars, simple spacey riffing, mournful arpeggiated melodies, bizarre growled vocals way up in the mix and lots and lots of dizzying circus-y keyboards swirling and warbling and whirring. While they do occasionally bust out some series black blasts, they tend to sort of hover between doomy dirge and sort-of-groovy midtempos, sounding sometimes like a more blackened, more moody and miserable Khold. The rhythms have a sort of seasick waltz feel to them, very hypnotic, and while the guitars buzz blackly, more often they just sort of drone beneath dreamy sad sounding melodies, with the keyboards drifting like black clouds, giving the proceedings a strangely epic slant. Quite cool, and as you might expect from Supernal, pretty weird too...
More metalcore. We just can't get enough. And this is most definitely the next contender for best metalcore record ever. So heavy and weird and catchy. And by now you know we especially love the metalcore when it's generously dappled with huge chunks of goopy, heart-on-your-sleeve, mix-tape, lonely-boy, bittersweet and broken-hearted E M O! There's plenty of downtuned chugging, and blazing blast beats, half-time, moshed out breakdowns, wickedly complex, stop-on-a-dime metallic crunch, pummelling percussive tumult and squealing feedback drenched harmonies. And Evergreen Terrace do completely destroy. This is seriously one of the best metalcore records EVER. But where they really prove their mettle is in the melodic breakdowns... the EMO. They're just so catchy and bittersweet, tiny pockets of perfect pop, like a little bit of Sunny Day Real Estate dropped in the thick of an At The Gates record. So fucking great. Make sure and stick it out until after the final song, 'cause there's a hidden track, a wickedly metallized Depeche Mode cover. Which is so good it just makes me long for a metal band that could actually write songs like that instead of covering em. Until then, who wants to start a crushingly heavy metal band called Violator, that just plays Depeche Mode's Violater album start to finish. Get in touch.
More amazing New York metalcore. Every Time I die play ultra heavy metal (very little 'core to be found here) with weird time signatures and off kilter rhythms. While their sound is similar to their contemporaries (Deadguy, Kiss It Goodbye, Coalesce) they
Sometime in the late eighties, John McBain, member of mighty space rockers Monster Magnet, frontman of psychedelic groovers Wellwater Conspiracy, and (not so) secret weapon of local space-psych explorers Carlton Melton, birthed this brilliant, sonic abomination. A dizzyingly tripped out sprawl of oozing, churning, abstract drone-noise-psych, In The Name Of All That Is Unholy sounds like classic psych rock, slowly unravelling, revealing all manner of crumbling sonic detritus within. The multiple movements shifting from plodding doomy creep, to tranced out pulsating dronemusic, to wild, blurred space shred, with sounds in constant flux, pitch shifts and tonal warbles, everything off kilter but somehow hanging together as some sort of drug addled, heart-of-the-sun, damaged cosmic epic.
To us, the heavier moments sound a bit like Philip Jeck or John Oswald constructing a Greyfolded style collaged megamix from old Butthole Surfers records, all smeared into hazy indistinct lopes and lumbers, the melodies distorted and processed, almost like some sort of acid fueled fever dream, the music melting before your very ears. The opening track in particular is reminiscent of the Butthole's "Jimi" (from Hairway To Steven), albeit slowed way down and stretched out into even more twisted brainmelt dirgery. But the deeper you get into the record, the more abstract and weirdly blissed out it becomes. Moments of extremely mesmerizing tranquility coexist alongside murky power electronics, and full on kosmische shimmer, the whole middle section is basically some sort of WTF? soundtrack for an alien planetarium show. You can almost hear the bizarre shapes and prismatic colors warping and curdling, before blossoming into a hyper-delirious barrage of flickering, fluttering, fractured melodies, all tangled up into a thick, layered stretch of hypnotic, undulating sonic mesmer.
But those sounds eventually rupture, and splinter, and lock into stuttering looped hiccups, all wrapped in more of those super distorted psychedelic leads, and underpinned by what sounds like growling beasts, locked into a skipping-record style riffage, delivered as some sort of mind-control metallic mantra. A mantra that quickly (d)evolves into more Jeck-like repletion, albeit a distorto-psych variant, the chug and churn slipping beneath a murky industrial pulse, before exploding again even more blown out, growly and buzzy, before a blast of uber-distorted, FX drenched guitarnoise, and some robotic/alien/monster vocals dissolve into a final squall of crumbling crunch and decaying distortion.
Truly some next level outsider, sampler-damaged psychedelia, that should of course appeal to fans of McBain's other groups, as well as like minded psychedelic noise makers, but also folks into wilder strains of electronic psych-noise weirdness (Our Love Will Destroy The World, Astral Social Club, etc.) will find much to dig here as well.
Originally released on cassette, now the full Evil Acidhead experience is available again, thanks to Agitated, on both on cd and swank double lp. The vinyl version comes on colored wax and also includes both a cd copy of the record and an 'eye-searing' poster!
At first the super striking cover art had us thinking this was in fact the original Evil Dead soundtrack, just given a modern makeover and re-released on one of the many horror movie soundtrack vinyl labels that have been popping up (Death Waltz, Waxwork, etc.). A closer look though revealed that this was in fact, music from the 2013 REMAKE of Evil Dead, and while we're not big fans of the remake, especially when it's a movie as iconic as Evil Dead, we have to say, over the last few years, some horror movie remakes have actually been pretty great. The new My Bloody Valentine was legitimately great, as was the recent remake of the slasher/exploitation classic Maniac. We dug the Hills Have Eyes remake too. Hell even the first half of Rob Zombie's Halloween remake was pretty cool (focusing on the childhood of Michael Myers), but even with all that, we LOVE the original Evil Dead, and as open as we are to remakes, Evil Dead did seem sort of sacrosanct. The movie itself is a whole different beast, VERY modern, and seriously scary, and WAY violent, the vibe though is totally different, sure it's kids in a cabin, and there's a book, and people get possessed, but otherwise, it really could have been called anything, it's not like that cabin in the woods trope is super original at this point. But still, from a pure horror movie perspective, it was pretty good, and the soundtrack/score, was AMAZING. Some seriously harrowing sound design for sure, that at times reminded us of Ben Frost, or even Roly Porter. It had us imagining that this is what might have happened if those guys were given a HUGE budget, and a full orchestra, and a seriously gore soaked movie to score.
The sound is modern for sure, but it's pretty epic, and really scary, some of the arrangements are super twisted, some are obvious cues, but others are just plain weird, there are operatic vocals, soaring female, and chanted male, symphonic blasts, lost of brooding hushed passages, plaintive piano, the tracks are super dynamic, lots of scary strings, tons of drones, and deep rumbling low end, lots of jump scare style symphonic stabs, pounding percussion, much of the soundtrack sounds like updated black ambient / industrial music, the bits with vocals sound like the scariest neo-folk you've never heard, much of this sounds like a totally terrifying opera, some bits are haunting and delicate, but much of this is just super intense and even removed from the visuals, induces a seriously intense sense of utter dread and desolation. And of course horror.
The vinyl is super deluxe, and thus pretty pricey, an ultra striking full color heavy gatefold sleeve, obviously designed to sit next to your Death Waltz / Mondo / Waxwork releases (it's a co-release with Death Waltz in fact, for overseas), the cd though is in a regular jewel case.
When we first heard this in the store, Harry was upfront manning the stereo, and we were actually convinced he was spinning some old glam rock record, so we were pretty surprised to discover it was actually Mary Timony from Helium's new band (named after a solo album of hers from a while back), and as much as we love(d) Helium, we never would have expected Timony to make a record that sounds so much like The Sweet. But she did, and it's awesome! At this point, we imagine most reviews will riff on the record title, but how can you resist, this record rips for sure, the sound super retro, but somehow modern and supercharged, the guitars fuzzy and reverbed, the songs swaggery and glammy, power pop stomps overflowing with crazy catchy hooks and amazing guitar melodies, and Timony's vocals seal the deal, the whole package sounding like some obscure seventies glam pop combo. We're immediately reminded of Matthew Melton's Bare Wires - Melton and Timony are most definitely kindred sonic souls, both mining a similar vein of retro psych/garage/glam rock, and both nailing it. We definitely hear hints of Timony's ex-Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte's nineties indie rock outfits Slant 6 and Quix*o*tic too, and of course the Runaways. Really though, Timony has always been a master, with Helium, and solo too, but this might be our favorite record of hers since Helium's 1997 masterpiece The Magic City, but imagine that sound reworked and recast as something way more retro and glam poppy, and you'll get an idea of what this sounds like. A new unanimous store fave, and one that will likely end up on more than one year end top ten...
It's frustrating sometimes that lots of our all time favorite records came out well before the aQuarius list was established. We occasionally pick old favorites, like Rein Sanction, Archers Of Loaf, Hardship Post, Green River, stuff that's still available, and review them on the list. Cuz as far as we're concerned, released dates and the concept of 'new music' are pretty much useless. All records are new and exciting to someone who has never heard them. But often times those old favorites are long gone and out of print. So when one of those records does finally get reissued, we jump at the chance to be able celebrate and share that amazing music via the list. Which brings us to this double disc reissue from weirdo eco-radical doom drug grinders Exit-13.
A band we have loved for EVER (so much so, Allan even interviewed them for the first issue of his old fanzine, years and years ago), Exit-13 were only loosely a grind band, sure they were fast and furious, guitars buzzed, songs were short and complex, the vocals a monstrous gurgle, the lyrics way political, all about the environment, vegetarianism, etc.� But for a grind band, they sure spent a lot of time spewing huge gory gouts of buzzing doomic plod, as well as incorporating convoluted jazz weirdness, freaked out psychedelic leads, thrashing punk rock, bizarre interludes with croony vocals, skittery rhythms, and noodly guitar jams, bits of angular retard-funk, Black Flag-ish gnarled riffing as well as confusional cut ups, dizzying collages of chopped and recontextualized vocals, Jello Biafra, bits of Jeopardy music, the theme from Underdog, Led Zep pastiche and whatever else they felt like tossing in there.
The best way we can describe it is John Zorn meets diSEMBOWELMENT meets Brutal Truth.
The original discs came with stickers that summed up the Exit-13 sound pretty succinctly:
"Mind warping philosophically contemplative environmental brain food from Pennsylvania's unique smoking grind rock extremists" (from Don't Spare The Green Love) and "An 80 minute head explosion of absolutely unique sonic intelligence from Pennsylvania's environmental grind rock hedonists. This band smokes, bud!" (from Ethos Musick)
Hard to argue with that�
So, High Life collects almost everything the band has ever recorded (minus the ep of '20s and '30s cover songs, all about reefer, sung by the Pain Teens' Bliss Blood): their one proper full length, as well as all of their various singles, eps and splits (previously released as Don't Spare The Green Love). And by now, you've probably realized these guys were all about the pot. The songs buzz by in dense clouds of bong smoke, lots of samples about marijuana, lyrics about legalizing hemp and pot. The back of the booklet even features a huge pot leaf and the "Stop the madness - Legalize Marijuana" legend. But that's only one of their causes, a quick look through the lyrics, reveals a seriously 'green' agenda, environmentalism, vegetarianism, there's even a whole track that's just a snippet of the Phil Donahue show, on which he interviews members of Earth First!
But none of that would mean anything if this band didn't completely slay. And thankfully they do. Heavy and fucked, weird, but weirdly catchy, buzzing and blasting, then pounding and chugging. Furious blasts of blown out lightning fast grind are butted up against lurching doom sludge, peppered with super fucked up free jazz breakdowns. Guitars are serpentine, jagged and angular, the drums go from pound to blast beat and back
the vocals harsh and gurgly, there are bits of weirdly classic rock sounding jams, over sound samples, electronics and Goblin-like keyboards...
"Anthropocentric Ecocidal Conundrum" begins with an insistent folky strum over chirping birds and burbling brook, until the guttural death metal vocals kick in and the drums, then it's some sort of metallic death metal folk freakout, finally morphing into some gnarled convoluted math grind jam. Elsewhere, cool creepy acoustic guitars drift over moaning synths, and splattery drums, super cinematic and haunting on "Only Protest Gives A Hope Of Life". There is plenty of weirdness. Damaged is a descriptor that constantly springs to mind, as does demented, and most certainly fucked. Silly too. But at it's core, this is heavy, heady stuff. Brutal but musical, fierce and fractured, forward thinking and seriously far out.
The second disc is the older stuff, and is at once more furious and thrashing, much more grind, but also has lots more sound samples, songs dotted with all sorts of film snippets, voices, bits of dialogue all tangled up with the growling harsh vocals. "Spare The Wrench Surrender The Earth" is half funeral doom, before launching into a more grinding blast of punk rock. The stuff from the first 7" is almost like old school goregrind, with impossible gurgling loooooow vocals, the guitars a furious blur, the drums a furious splatter. Then there's "Fingernails" hinting at the weirdness to come, with its fake horns, and frog-like croaking super effected vocals, and that classic funeral march melody mixed into the chaotic rrroooaaar.
Any fan of heavy music, be it black, thrash, grind, doom, or sludge should be able to get into these guys. And they're just weird enough to maybe also appeal to the less metal inclined looking for something freaked out and heavy.
An interesting note: like any self-respecting grind band, Exit-13 made a regular practice of releasing records with different versions of the same songs, so the song "Disemboweling Party" appears three different times, while seven other tracks appear twice. But in most cases, the various versions, while not totally different, are varied enough to keep it interesting, even if it's just that one is super hot and in the red, and one is super muddy and lo-fi, or even just that different samples were used.
Our only complaint, is that this is only sort of the complete Exit-13, 'cause they left off the extended, potentially-speaker-damaging noisedrone jams that closed out both their records, the 28 minute "An Electronic Fugue For The Imminent Demise of Planet Earth" from Ethos Musick and the 21 minute "Snakes And Alligators" from the Just A Few More Hits ep. Most of us wouldn't have minded paying a few extra bucks for a third disc, and ruined speakers, but what can you do?
Killer packaging, all the original photos, images, lyrics, quotes and propaganda reproduced in a huge booklet.
Back in stock, now way cheaper than before!
Ok, let's get the first question everybody has about this band out of the way: they've got nothing to do with our favorite Seventies proggers, Magma from France. The trio Exmagma was also from the '70s, but from Germany (featuring an expatriate African-American drummer though) and are known as Exmagma simply because they had originally called themselves Magma, until they found out about the French group and changed the name! Some understandable confusion resulted, we're told, because Exmagma's second record Goldball was only released on a French label...and the "real" Magma kinda sound more German than French what with their Wagner influence. Anyway, THIS band was more of an acid rock meets (free) jazz fusion kind of thing. Freaky, wild, and groovy. Laid back weirdness, some sax, lots of electric organ and piano, doublenecked bass/guitar...Mostly instrumental, with only some very rare Faust-like vocal parts. This disc contains their two albums, both recorded by Krautrock production maestro Conny Plank, with the first self-titled one from '73 being perhaps the more far-out and abstract, while 1974's Goldball more solidly grooved. Maybe. However, both LPs are "drug jazz" classics. Also, on the cover to Goldball (reproduced in miniature here) the band sports the craziest bellbottoms we've ever seen...they're on stilts under them I guess!
From the same label that brought you the godly Hatebeak ep, comes another crucial vinyl platter in the 7" format. While that band had perhaps the best vocals ever committed to wax (by a parrot), this Richmond, VA group features possibly the coolest packaging design for a 7" EVER with a die-cut wrist-slashing fold-over cover you're just gonna have to see up close to fully appreciate. The nice surprise though is, contrary to most bands that expel such energy in the presentation of their music -- the songs are fully ripping too. Think evil devastating metalcore like a possibly even more aggressive Converge, with serpentine odd-time guitar riffs crashing upon blasting drums. This band has (or had, it's hard to tell from their site) personnel from fellow Virginia hardcore and metal bands Cripus Attucks and ex-Enemy Soil alums The Index and the combination of all styles from grind and metal to straight-up hardcore mix brilliantly on four solid tracks. Get this or die!
Expansion Bay is the (more) spaced out ambient side project of Sandoz Lab Technician Nathan Thompson, who has also done time in Sleep, EYE and a handful of others like minded outfits.
Utilizing field recordings, laptop, an arsenal of heavily processed instruments as well as samples from his previous bands, Thompson has put together a gorgeously expansive ambient drone world that is rife with sonic action. None of that static drift, no pushing a button or pressing a pedal and letting things take their course, no, these three lengthy tracks are dense, and heavily layered, sounds atop sounds atop sounds, different sonic fragments bleeding into other bits and shards, melodies getting all tangled up with other melodies, droney and ambient certainly, but alive and constantly moving and expanding.
The opener is a nine minute stretch of glistening high end buzz and gleaming sonar shimmers, like a less soothing Oval, sort of underwater sounding, static on the surface, but just below, sounds are constantly shifting and vibrating and changing shape and texture. Bits of melody float by like strange microscopic creatures in a musical petri dish, beneath it all, various whirs and rumbles cause different parts and sounds to shift and birth other sounds.
The title track, is a 16+ minute drift through inner space, beginning with a high end whir, slowly shedding the upper registers, gradually slowing down to a dronelike crawl, the whole thing peppered with glistening glimmering sonic sparkles, like stars in some volatile solar system.
The final twenty minute is the most lush of the bunch, sounding at first like wheezing organs, but as the sounds separate and the fuzz clears away like clouds after a rainstorm, the sounds reveal themselves to be bells, or what certainly sounds like bells, a gorgeously dense cacophony of ringing and clanging, huge thick clouds of overtones, the timbre and tonal colors always changing, so gorgeous and nearly overwhelming, finally fading out in a muted minimal stretch of glitchy low end buzz...
What hath the Skaters wrought? In the wake of that group's ever expanding body of work, both as a duo and each member solo, has risen a whole movement of musicians channeling similar sounds and melding many of the same influences into that ethereal collaged anti-pop that the Skaters if not invented, popularized. A symptom of today's MySpace world, where the minute one group, or one sound, gets hyped, a million bedroom 4-trackers take it upon themselves to do something similar. See the recent lo-fi garage pop explosion for example. But heck, stealing from the bands you love is a tried and true rock and roll tradition, the key being stealing from bands YOU LOVE, not from bands that are suddenly popular and you want to be popular too. That shit is transparent. That's why in an avalanche of wannabe's there are always a few who shine, whose creativity had seemingly lain dormant just waiting for a trigger. Sometimes hearing a sound, makes you realize that someone else hears the same sort of sounds you've been hearing in your head.
This could all be bullshit, but the second we first threw on this Explorers records, we couldn't help but think of the Skaters. But like any good band, taking influence from another, it's not the sounds you steal or the ideas you borrow, it's what you do with them that counts, and the Explorers definitely do their own sort of fractured soundscapery as good as, if not even better than their forebears. Layered tangles of tones and squiggly melodies, wheezing textures and buried stumbling drumloops, a swirling soft chaos of blurred sounds smeared into streaked landscapes of broken tape deck new age, deep dense outer space buzz and washed out dream drone, the sift from sound to sound is sudden and sharp, like flipping the channel or changing the station. Imagine the sound of sound remote research station, all the machines left running, whirring in the darkness, pointed heavenward, as they sample and intercept transmissions and broadcasts from alien worlds and alternate dimensions. Gloriously tripped out and deliriously druggy. For fans of the Skaters for sure, but also anyone into weird and wonderful, freaked out and far flung sonic explorations (they don't call them Explorers for nothing apparently).
LIMITED TO 330 COPIES.
Now available on vinyl! And the lp version also includes the bonus remix cd...
We've always been fans of Explosions In The Sky. One of the post Mogwai, post Godspeed outfits so adept at crafting super epic and emotional instrumental soundscapes -- post rock, math rock, jangly pop, chamber music, all sort of whipped into grandiose cinematic swells. But past records, while sounding amazing, with the right balance of mood and metal, hush and heaviness, still stuck a little too close to the template of their forbears. EITS were like the perfect mix of Godspeed and old more bombastic Mogwai. And not much more. Nothing wrong with that really, it just never totally blew us away.
But All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone is different. And it does blow us away. In a big way. It still sounds like EITS, and thus still sounds a bit like Godspeed and Mogwai, but like any great band in the last 20 years, it's not who you steal from, or what you steal, it's how you make what you steal your own. And EITS have made epic instrumental post rock all their own. The opener is everything this sort of music could and should be. Super dense and dramatic, spacious and emotional, opening with keening high end melodies over big jangly guitar strum and huge percussive For Those About To Rock blasts, the guitars slowly intertwining and drifting off, fading to a moody minor key post rock drift, underpinned by layer after layer of fuzzy blissy guitar and a motorik rhythmic shuffle before the completely perfect bridge, a spaced out melody, all dynamic and epic, that will definitely give you goosebumps, before launching into a full on heavy math rock groove, incorporating that same hair raising melody, with some killer drumming and a veritable orchestra of guitars.
The rest of the record plays out in similar, albeit slightly less bombastic fashion. Each track perfectly leading into the next, an expansive post rock epic, separated into movements, chiming guitars, thick riffs, each track gloriously tangled and emotional, with long stretches of cinematic ambience, some shimmering strings, glistening melodies, lush harmonies, bits of piano, and some amazingly expressive drumming.
The All Of A Sudden lp also includes a cd, which contains an entire remix of the album, each track reworked by a different artist. Jesu turns the epic opener into a fuzzier, blissier, and toward the end a MUCH heavier beast. Adem's remix is all low key and abstract, acoustic guitars, simple percussion and glistening chimes, a whispery shadow of the original. The Paper Chase wraps the original track in a glorious swirl of murky ambience, adding a stuttery drum machine rhythm and all sorts of strange sonic filigree. Mountains gives their track a serious Pop Ambient makeover, stretched out and languorous, swirling and shimmery, ending with a long expanse of solo piano. Four Tet's reimagination is the most dramatic, a blissed out shuffling electronic workout, all processed drums, shuffling and skittering, with the original track nestled beneath layers of synth fuzz and strange subtle FX. Finally, labelmates Eluvium transform the album closer into a fuzzy smear of pixelated ambience, that builds and builds, much like the original, but in this version, into a blown out, super distorted fuzzy dreamscape.
Two versions of the same record, both stunning! So recommended.
As regular readers of the aQ list can no doubt attest to, we sure do love droning guitars. Whether downtuned and mostly motionless, or frenzied and buzzing, or blown out and shimmery, there's just something about the sound of those steel strings vibrating projected through massive walls of amplification. There's the primal primeval sound itself, the actual drone, a sound found everywhere in nature, then there's the power, the amplification, this transformed sound. The drone is most certainly linked to the machinations of life and the universe, we can only imagine, the Big Bang resulted in an aeons-long drone that hung over the nascent Earth, the sound of insects, the growls of beasts, the rumble of thunder, the white noise of the surf, all harnessed and sculpted into a more modern, more human experience of sound, into actual music. But the best drone music, with the most resonance, is the music that conflates the two. That creates a listening experience, wherein we find ourselves drifting off, sometimes to some man made universe, of songs and sounds and music, sometimes to someplace wholly other, where the music looses itself from the strictures of composition and arrangement, and is allowed to float freely, to drift. It's then, that the music maker becomes more than a musician, more than a rock band, almost more like and esoteric, ethereal wrangler of sound. The magic is creating music, that sounds like it wasn't 'created' at all, but instead, was discovered, unearthed, or if created, not from guitars and 4-tracks and drums, but from some strange energy, or some alternate universe, the sounds become glimpses into other worlds, or peeks into the music maker's soul. In creating these sorts of sounds, the listener is inexorably drawn in, and pulled quite willingly into a whole new dimension, where unlike the creator, who may have meticulously assembled the various elements, they are allowed to wander, and wonder, to float and drift and get lost, to allow the sounds to unleash emotions, to open up their mind, their hear, maybe in some cases even their soul.
As you might imagine, and we've mentioned it before, the drone is a mercurial beast, and one not wrangled easily. There are plenty of comers, who feel like once you've conjured the drone, it does the work for you, but such is not the case, as is proven time and time again, by sonic alchemists like Expo '70, whose take on the drone is less monochromatic, less one dimensional, whose dronemusic is infused with elements of krautrock, spacerock, postrock, but all woven into vast black expanses of sound.
Even more than past Expo '70 releases, Black Ohms manages to create some impossible world of sound, that is at once dark and sinister and foreboding, yet somehow dreamlike and serene, a collection of tracks woven into a seemingly continuous sonic drift, beginning with a deep, almost corrosive buzz, pulsing and undulating, shot through with streaks of melody, layered and textured, looped and hypnotic, heavy and dense and in its own minimal way, quite brutal, before giving way to something much more tranquil, a sea of glimmering, harmonics, and deep drifting tones, here the guitar is revealed as just that, a guitar, its abstract chords and minimal riffage, clipped and effected, draped in reverb and delay, and allowed to unfurl into softly propulsive rhythms, and spider web-like textures, again, infused with subtle melody, and blurred, burnished shadings.
The record wanders through miniature otherworlds of atonal melody, of machine like click and chitter, fifties computer bleeps and bloops, soft chiming jammy summer sun guitars, before returning to the deep, dark drone for a nearly 35 minute two part finale. The first part, a fifteen minute return to the sound of the album opener, the guitar again distorted and dark, not so much riffing as buzzing, a Niblockian soundscape of overtones and harmonics, a warm blackened bed for the ethereal melodic drift above, streaks of glimmering melody, soft stretches of wispy ambience, laced with an almost buried, looped guitar figure, all subtly rhythmic, a distant throb, like the pulse of some buried giant, muted and mysterious, but supporting the whole delicate structure.
The second, a 20 minute slow burn, a crystalline assemblage of barely there rhythms, deep layers of shimmering drone, this is the sound of a million dronemusic cd-r's fully realized, a smoldering chunk of minimal propulsion, rife with strange, tape speeds shift, but instead of jarring, it only manages to make the sound woozy, slightly alien, underwater, glimmering melodies, sparkling like black diamonds, fields of soft static like clouds of tiny insects, deep soft swells like the ebb and flow of some otherworldy tide.
Imagine the most minimal krautrock record you own, dubbed over and over and over onto the shittiest tapes possible, left in the sun, then played back on a car stereo, with only one woofer, but then render that in ear popping hi fi. The sound may seem murky and muted, but it is most definitely by design, there is nothing low fidelity about the sound of Expo '70, because within the meticulously and deftly obscured sound world, lurk all manner of sonic mysteries, each suspended in an impossibly beautiful blurred constellation of sound, which in turn is left to drift across a vast expanse of Black Ohms.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
We were sent a whole batch of cd-r's from this mysterious group Expo '70, and all the various cd-r covers were designed to look like old seventies krautrock or free jazz records. Which definitely grabbed our attention. Plus they're called Expo '70, so while we weren't exactly sure what to expect, we were definitely thinking it was bound to be good. And boy were we right. This is good. Great in fact. But that wasn't all, the faux vintage covers and the band name ended up being seriously indicative of the sounds within. Gorgeous drifting ethereal krautrocky ambience is what Expo '70 is all about, and eyes closed, you'd be hard pressed to not think this was some Ash Ra Tempel disc or some long lost A.R. and The Machines lp. Crafted entirely from guitars, sitar and Moog, each track here is some sort of lengthy, mesmerizingingly blissed out minimal drone jam. Guitar figures are looped into hypnotic cycles, over shimmery whirls of fuzzy sound and distant drones, the looped riffs slowly shifting and gently changing shape. It's almost like some sort of new age space rock Steve Reich. Swirling FX surround warm deep guitar tones floating weightless in a glistening expanse of muted color and twinkling sonic sparkles. So completely blissful and dreamlike and captivating. One of our favorite new discoveries.
Fans of far out krautrock, deep dark drone, and outerspace guitar exploration will be in absolute heaven, or at the very least in some darkened room, in a trance, drifting off to some druggy dreamy other dimension...
We were sent a whole bunch of cd-r's by the mysterious Expo '70 a few months back, each one with a strange cool cover, one was some seventies styled naked females making out, another (this one in fact) was an homage to one of those seventies Actuel jazz record label album sleeves. We were already kind of sold, but then we threw them on, and WOAH!! Not at all what we expected. We were imagining some sort of droney free noise whatever, but instead, we got an earful of some timeless cosmic space music, some lost ambient krautrock. So spaced out and lovely. We listed Exquisite Lust on the last list and everyone went nuts for it, so we decided to list another one, and it's just as good. A bit heavier on the guitar, but still completely and utterly droney and dreamlike.
Surfaces is a non-stop journey through inner space, an abstract world of drifting guitars, stretched out into whispy drifts of shimmery ambience, strummed steel strings reverberate over muted propulsive thrum, huge glistening expanses of thick flowing whir oozes from rumbling amplifiers, grinding low end fuzz slithers in and around wandering bass burble, bits of guitar melody break into fragments and float downstream, over a rippling undercurrent of spaced out FX. Totally mesmerizing and ethereal, but strangely rhythmic. Channeling the sprit of Eno, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, A.R. And The Machines and other kosmik travellers, Expo '70 weave guitars, Moogs, sitars, and loads of effects into an expansive ambient shimmer, allowing sonic ripples to slowly spread out into the ether. So good. Anyone who bought the first one will probably need this one too. And all you spaced out interdimensional Kosmiche drone explorers could hardly do better than Expo '70 as the soundtrack to your late night, outer space, journeys into the unknown...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is one of those releases that we would normally get maybe 100 copies of, maybe more, but this baby was strictly limited to 200, of which we got about a quarter of the pressing, but hell this is Expo '70, one of, if not our very favorite purveyor of heavy blissed out droney space kraut doom drift, AND this particular release, cassette only, is a sort of addendum to the Black Ohms cd (featuring outtakes from the Black Ohms sessions) which we made Record Of The Week a while back. And of which we sold crazy amounts. So apologies for the folks who don't manage to snag one of these. We always try to get as many copies of things as we can, but it seems that no matter how many we get, it's never enough, and often labels don't want to give so much of the pressing to just one place. But we do try, every time, to get enough for everybody, so again apologies for the fact that these will probably be gone in a heartbeat.
BUT, for the 25 of you who do managed to snag one of these, you will be in total kraut drone space out bliss rock heaven. From rumbling sludgey doom drift, to looped psych shimmer, to pulsing slow burning swells, to smoldering slabs of white hot buzz, more of what we freaked out about on the Black Ohms disc. Dark, dolorous, heavy, hypnotic, even the outtakes are mindblowing.
Beautifully packaged too, full color printed sleeves, the tape and sleeve wrapped in a printed vellum obi INSIDE the case, each one hand numbered. And LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! We have 25.
Sorry.
