A breathtaking album of restrained minimalism from the ever impressive Jacob Kirkegaard, whose recent journeys into psychoacoustics have plied the tones from the inner ear rendering them audible, and amplifying the resonance from abandoned buildings around Chernobyl, inquiring if the intrinsic sound of that space was also radioactive? This album marks a more conventional commission, that of the soundtrack to a silent film. The film in question was 1928's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, with Kirkegaard constructing an immersive piece of sound design that alludes to the angelic conversation that Joan Of Arc had with the divine. These long-tone compositions bend with a sinewy, silvery grace through the harmonic interplay between suspended drones and deep thrumming bass rumbles that weep with an affecting gravity. Kirkegaard has always been a spectacular composer, and Arc is no exception even as the content shifts from the investigative to the emotional. Absolutely beautiful.
How can you resist a band name like Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat? And with a name like that, what can one possibly expect musically? Well, surprisingly the music here manages to conjure up the same sort of dark confusional forboding that the name hints at. Forbidden? Taboo? Some sort of alchemical majick? Some sort of witchy incantation? Why else would one...um, well you know. On If The Sky Falls, We Shall Catch Larks, KTAOABC, the project of a young Belgian musician and instrument builder named Stef Heeren, unfurls a gorgeously dark, mesmerizing chunk of minimal, melodic, brooding, lilting and lovely doom folk. Harrowing and brooding, falling somewhere between the apocalyptic ur-folk of Current 93, the rickety, swampy biblical dirge of Woven Hand, the brooding acoustic bombast of later Swans, seventies pagan psych-folk (Comus, Incredible String Band, etc.) and even some of the strident prostletyzing of New Model Army. Very spare in its instrumentation and structure, aggressively strummed acoustic guitars underpinning ultra dramatic and slightly venomous vocals, occasional bells and strings and piano, subtle cooing background vocals, all very repetitive and hypnotic, churning in a thick fog of emotional turmoil and spiritual unease. Dark and droning, intense and intensely fervent, slipping from loose slithery balladeering to fiery and impassioned swells of soul-laid-bare sermonizing. Really quite amazing. Fans of C93, Nick Cave, Death In June, Comus, Swans, Der Blutharsch, Richard Youngs, Woven Hand and 16HP will certainly swoon, but this should definitely appeal to fans of all things emotional and dark, folky and forboding. Beautifully packaged in a minimally screenprinted fold over cardboard sleeve.
Occasionally working in the past as Spiracle, Hitoshi Kojo presents this thoroughly amazing piece of ancient-sounding drone music. No doubt, Kojo's work will be compared to that of the classic Organum sound; but considering that very few have even come close to replicating the power and mystery of such classic Organum recordings as Ikon or Horii, such parallels should be taken as the highest praise. Kojo claims that all of the sounds originated from various found objects. He doesn't specify beyond that, but all of the objects must be metal in origin, probably large pieces of sheet metal, or flexible rods of steel, or long pieces of wire, or something equally resonant and with a dynamic timbral quality. Each of these objects is bowed in order to coax a controlled dissonance of metallic screeches, protracted tonal bellows, and various acoustic drones. The two compositions are simple in their moderate pacing of the ebb and flow between all of these sounds, not too slow... but certainly not too fast. Through these recordings, Kojo offers very little in the way of digital treatments or effects of any nature. Just a terse edit of one layer here, or a reversing of a metallic gong decay there. The results are a timeless set of interlocking metallic rasps and gasping drones that rivals what Harry Bertoia, Taj Mahal Travellers, LaMonte Young, and of course Organum had done so impeccably in the past. Beautiful, mysterious, and very highly recommended!
Gorgeously packaged, gorgeous dronemusik!
Hitoshi Kojo is a Japanese sound artist and drone-centric expressionist who has recorded in the past under the moniker Spiracle and performs in the jubilantly psychedelic but still quite droned-out project Juupala Kaapio. Omnimoment is a collection of edits from Kojo's sound installations and site-specific work dating from 2006 - 2009, all of which extract and manipulate elemental forces of wind, fire, water, metal, wood, sand, etc. into blossoming thrums of sublime minimalism which run parallel to the works of Andrew Chalk, Loren Chasse, and John Grzinich. "Shiranui" was originally conceived at the MoKS residency program in Estonia, sourced mostly from the blades of an abandoned Soviet turbine left inexplicably out in the countryside. Kojo extracts pensive, metallic overtones from those blades that sound more like an ancient gong than some hulking industrial machine; and he amasses those sounds into semi-melodic phrases and ritualized acoustic dronings that Organum mastered in the mid-'80s. "Sea Migration" is an excerpt from an installation involving a feedback system and a bunch PVC pipes that hung from the top window of Germanic castle, looking sort of like a weird plastic octopus playing the part of Rapunzel. Those pipes captured the sound of the wind and the various frequencies of that feedback system creating a tactile, generative composition of pure tones and haptic events not too far from those far more composed works from Andrew Chalk's once prolific project Ora. The last three tracks demonstrate Kojo's ongoing strategies involving found objects through a process which he calls 'molecular communication' where extended vibrations and dense beds of accreted drone broadcast outward from Kojo's scraped metals, clinked glass, and rubbed sand. There's definitely some type of alchemy at work in Kojo's sound design, with mysterious energies transforming the commonplace into something sublime, otherworldly, or divine.
This is the limited art-edition of Omnimoment, which comes in a thick cardstock folio with a 24-page book and die-cut artwork. Certainly on par with what Faraway Press has done in their packaging department! Limited to just 88 copies! We most likely won't be able to restock the limited version, but will have the standard version soon.
Currently, Thomas Koner has been stepping outside of the heroin house persona that absorbed his work within Porter Ricks as the defining force for the Chain Reaction sound. Complementing his recent low-end frequency collaborations with Asmus Teitchens as Kontakt Der Junglinge, Thomas Koner's "Daikan" is a return to the isolationist aesthetics that were indicative of his earliest work (such as "Teimo" and the aptly titled "Permafrost"). Koner opens the album by breaking a pristini, black silence with deep bass rumbles that ominously plod, as if made by some Promethean creature from a Lovecraft horror story. Amidst these distant pulses (which resemble a 909 kick slowed way the hell down), cold washes of densely layered synthethic drones intrude into the audible realm, only to pass back into silence, but with an altered acoustic teleology, sounding sort of like the doppler effect. These fluctuations in and out of silence build up to a rather subtle climax in which Koner introduces a very simple descending three note melody composed out of those same synthetic drones. As simple a compositional technique, this melody, which only appears twice throughout the 54 minutes, is incredibly dramatic. For all of the metaphors and allusions that Koner implies in this work, it is a little odd that he would claim that it "will create a presence of sounds which do not refer to anything, and not only allow, but stimulates a complete awareness, free of dramatized illusion." While he's obviously intended something other than his end results, "Daikan" is a breathtaking vision into an existential void, just as powerful as anything Lustmord or Main has created in the realms of dark acoustic soundscapes. Very nice indeed!
Novaya Zemlya is a grand statement. But then again, Thomas Koner doesn't operate in any scale other than monumental. All of his albums (barring the somewhat lackluster La Barca from 2003) speak through the gasping drones of a bleak existentialism. For Koner, the human condition is mirrored in the environment around us, especially those rugged, barren locales at the poles, with his isolationist smears of grey sounds alluding to water, ice, permafrost, wind, radiation, and vast empty spaces above the Arctic Circle. The environmental site for this album is a suitably inhospitable Russian archipelago jutting far out into the Arctic Ocean toward the North Pole. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet Union used Novaya Zemlya as a nuclear test site, dropping the Tsar Bomba in 1961 on the landmass, which was permanently scarred by the largest atomic detonation in the history of the world. The thin layer of nuclear fallout which has buried itself in the frozen tundra of Novaya Zemlya commingles with radioactive isotopes from poorly managed storage facilities, sunken reactors, and scuttled submarines.
Koner describes this landscape through its hazardous potential, which is so much worse than the current situation. With global warming, the methane gas spewed from a melted permafrost will lift all of that radioactive material into the atmosphere and send that along the prevailing winds across western Russian over Scandinavia and into continental Europe. Perhaps, a greater catastrophe than Chernobyl. In speaking to that potential, Koner manifests pockets of near silence throughout the album with his signature tectonic rumblings and stealth-bomber frequencies gliding beyond the event horizon into the realm of the audible. Darkened crumblings of earthen material pocks the beginning of the first in a trilogy of tracks, sounding almost like slabs of ice thunderously collapsing into the sea. Drones swell and collapse into pools of resonant emptiness, broken on the second track by a disembodied shortwave radio transmission of garbled voices. The album returns to those cold, contemplative sounds until the end of the album draws near, when Koner introduces a few elegant, melodic plucks from what might be a harp. For all of the foreboding that looms throughout, the end is almost hopeful that humanity might just sort out this global warming puzzle. But then again, we might not; and then, we're fucked.
An easy contender for 2012's album of the year.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Thomas Koner's debut album Nunatak Gongamur was a record that quietly emerged on the Dutch label Barooni in 1990. With works from Nurse With Wound, Charlemagne Palestine, Roland Kayn, and Christoph Heemann also released by that same imprint, Koner's debut had some very good neighbors trafficking in a somewhat similar post-industrial murk and bleak minimalism. Unfortunately, the label went out of business after a ten year run, rendering many of those amazing records impossible to find. Two of Koner's other albums on Barooni - Teimo and Permafrost - were reissued on Mille Plateaux in 1997, only to suffer the same fate, when that company dissolved. In 2010, Type Records enters the picture and reissues Nunatak (now without the Gongamur) on vinyl, hopefully ushering in eventual reissues of all of Koner's early out of print material.
The German isolationist Koner has always been known for his dark, haunting ambient music which further froze the already chilly strategies that Brian Eno set forth on his seminal album On Land. Almost all of Koner's recordings (at least his solo recordings), speak to the tundra of the Northern environs, with a lot of allusions to the expanses of Greenland in particular. Nuuk was the name of one Koner record, which happens to the capital and largest city of that frigid island; and Nunatak is an Inuit word describing any rocky outcropping not covered in snow. And of course, Koner excels in the producing of cold cold music. There is a considerable difference between this album and the rest of his catalogue, as Nunatak is an electro-acoustic album entirely sourced from huge gongs. His other records definitely obliterated the source material (some of which was cited as being the sound channel on blank 16mm film stock) into deep space shadow and blackened noise. Here on Nunatak, Koner leaves the resonance of his metal gongs alone, occasionally catching them in languid loops but always focusing on vast deep rumbling overtones and the vast subharmonic frequencies. Given the rasping textures from the gongs, this one is less the all-consuming isolationism and more of an adventurous dronescrape as if extracted from the hull of a cargo ship. As with all Type vinyl, this one is strictly limited...
With the three key albums of Thomas Koner's work having recently been reissued individually on vinyl, Type has now collected those records - Nunatak, Teimo, and Permafrost - in a handsome oversized folio for presenting those albums on compact disc. Here's a recap of our reviews of these stunning pieces of glacial minimalism:
Thomas Koner's debut album Nunatak Gongamur (now truncated as Nunatak) was a record that quietly emerged on the Dutch label Barooni in 1990. Almost all of Koner's recordings (at least his solo recordings), speak to the tundra of the Northern environs, with a lot of allusions to the expanses of Greenland in particular. Nuuk was the name of one Koner record, which happens to the capital and largest city of that frigid island; and Nunatak is an Inuit word describing any rocky outcropping not covered in snow. And of course, Koner excels in the producing of cold cold music. There is a considerable difference between this album and the rest of his catalogue, as Nunatak is an electro-acoustic album entirely sourced from huge gongs. His other records definitely obliterated the source material (some of which was cited as being the sound channel on blank 16mm film stock) into deep space shadow and blackened noise. Here on Nunatak, Koner leaves the resonance of his metal gongs alone, occasionally catching them in languid loops but always focusing on vast deep rumbling overtones and the vast subharmonic frequencies. Given the rasping textures from the gongs, this one is less the all-consuming isolationism and more of an adventurous dronescrape as if extracted from the hull of a cargo ship.
Teimo is an album that was originally released as a cd on Barooni in 1992. Like its predecessor Nunatak Gongamur, Koner had sourced much of Teimo from recordings of gongs, using contact microphones and hydrophones to capture an unusual assortment of resonance, timbre, and decaying frequencies from his gongs. In these recordings, Koner was investigating what he qualified as an 'aesthetic of decline' shaped by the processes of decay, thermal cooling, and any gradual event that will achieve stasis. Water seeking its own level. Glaciers amassing in frozen landscapes. The metal fatigue of submarines, cracking under the pressure of an entire ocean. The long sustained metallic resonances of the gong is an apt tool for his conceptual framework, with Koner further manipulating his sources into elegant passages of subharmonic rumblings that utter subtle melodic phrases whilst shaking the bottom of the seafloor. Amidst the low-end drones and allusions to barren landscapes, Koner takes great care to keep the sounds immersive without imbuing them with terror. Yes, this is 'dark' ambient music, but his aesthetic of decline is far more clinical than say the theatrical drama that Lustmord can muster through his deadly recordings. Koner's quest is for the sublime, filled with awe and beauty simultaneously; and he has effortlessly achieved that quest throughout his career, certainly including this masterful record.
In Permafrost, we have the third and final chapter of this series of reissues from Type, documenting the long out-of-print isolationist composition from Thomas Koner. As with the previous recordings - Nunatak and Teimo - the German sound artist has masterfully captured the frigid atmospheres of the most northern ecosystems, and the title Permafrost leaves little to the imagination as to where this one will be travelling. Cold. Barren. Black. Sublime. The sounds are thoroughly abstracted into shifting blocks of grey noises slipping above seismic rumblings of infinitely bellowing low-end frequencies. By doing so, Koner eschews the use of the gong scrapes and metallic glistenings which graced those early records, adopting the bleak ethos which he continued to master on such albums as Kaamos and Daikan (the latter of which is probably the pinnacle of his career).
All of Koner's work is required listening for anyone who has been interested in drone-based recordings from any time period (e.g. Eno, Lustmord, Chalk, Hafler Trio, Roland Kayn, Alan Splet, Bernhard Gunter, BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, etc.). His subtle use of movement and half-melodic phrasing in his arctic-driven ambience has warranted him quite a reputation, and fortunately none of his reissues fail to sound timeless, breathtaking, and bone-chillingly beautiful. Highly recommended.
In Permafrost, we have the third and final chapter of this series of reissues from Type, documenting the long out-of-print isolationist composition from Thomas Koner. As with the previous recordings - Nunatak and Teimo - the German sound artist has masterfully captured the frigid atmospheres of the most northern ecosystems, and the title Permafrost leaves little to the imagination as to where this one will be travelling. Cold. Barren. Black. Sublime. The sounds are thoroughly abstracted into shifting blocks of grey noises slipping above seismic rumblings of infinitely bellowing low-end frequencies. By doing so, Koner eschews the use of the gong scrapes and metallic glistenings which graced those early records, adopting the bleak ethos which he continued to master on such albums as Kaamos and Daikan (the latter of which is probably the pinnacle of his career).
All of Koner's work is required listening for anyone who has been interested in drone-based recordings from any time period (e.g. Eno, Lustmord, Chalk, Hafler Trio, Roland Kayn, Alan Splet, Bernhard Gunter, BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, etc.). His subtle use of movement and half-melodic phrasing in his arctic-driven ambience has warranted him quite a reputation, and fortunately none of his reissues fail to sound timeless, breathtaking, and bone-chillingly beautiful. Highly recommended.
Here's the second of three vinyl reissues of the early, seminal work from Thomas Koner, who alongside Andrew Chalk may stand as the greatest drone artist from the past few decades. Teimo is an album that was originally released as a cd on Barooni in 1992. Like its predecessor Nunatak Gongamur, Koner had sourced much of Teimo from recordings of gongs, using contact microphones and hydrophones to capture an unusual assortment of resonance, timbre, and decaying frequencies from his gongs. In these recordings, Koner was investigating what he qualified as an 'aesthetic of decline' shaped by the processes of decay, thermal cooling, and any gradual event that will achieve stasis. Water seeking its own level. Glaciers amassing in frozen landscapes. The metal fatigue of submarines, cracking under the pressure of an entire ocean. The long sustained metallic resonances of the gong is an apt tool for his conceptual framework, with Koner further manipulating his sources into elegant passages of subharmonic rumblings that utter subtle melodic phrases whilst shaking the bottom of the seafloor. Amidst the low-end drones and allusions to barren landscapes, Koner takes great care to keep the sounds immersive without imbuing them with terror. Yes, this is 'dark' ambient music, but his aesthetic of decline is far more clinical than say the theatrical drama that Lustmord can muster through his deadly recordings. Koner's quest is for the sublime, filled with awe and beauty simultaneously; and he has effortlessly achieved that quest throughout his career, certainly including this masterful record. Limited to 500 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Mille Plateaux has seen fit to reissue two of the three early isolationist recordings from Thomas Koner. At the time (being the early '90s), those three records (sadly there's no sight of a reissue of the best of the three: "Nunatak Gongamur") stood as a bleak dark ambient monuments that were too alien for the global hippy ambience of contemporaries like The Orb or Future Sound of London. However, Koner's membership in Porter Ricks - which defined the trajectory of the Chain Reaction washed out techno minimalism - has inspired more than a few techno boffins to look back at Koner's post-industrial roots. Very nice deep listening drones.
As an objet d'art, Thomas Koner's "Unerforschtes Gebiet" is almost perfectly executed from beginning concept to final product. The title translates from Koner's native German as "Unchartered Territory," a common theme for electronica's isolationist whose previous work has prompted metaphors of arctic desolation, astrophysical emptiness, and Zen-like nothingness. Inscribed upon one of the loveliest picture discs we've ever seen with images of antique seafaring maps of the Arctic Ocean / North Pole, Koner's "Unerforschtes Gebiet" is a very quiet composition that explores variations of low frequencies which crawl very slowly in and out of audibility amidst down-pitched cracklings and muted rumbles. It could be assumed that Koner has kept this album relatively quiet and has geared-down all the frequencies to give more presence to the surface noise inherent in all picture discs (which for better or for worse never sound as good as a thick slab of 220 gram vinyl). Koner has stated that this album has its origins from his experiments with the projections of a really dusty piece of blank 16mm film; thus, he's done his best to cover all the conceptual bases between the historical references to those old maps, the surface noise, and that dusty film. Of course, if you can't stand surface noise, by all means stay away and be content with the knowlegde that a slightly different CD version of this album will be published later on this year. But if you waffle on this one, I guarantee you will miss out as Die Stadt has manufactured a mere 700 copies!
Two noted German electronic composers Thomas Koner (of Porter Ricks) and Asmus Teitchens gave this collaborative project a hybridized name of two compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen -- "Kontakt" and "Gesang Der Junglinge." Their first documentation is a bit unusual for both artists, as it is a live recording taken from a performance in Bremen, Germany in late 1999. While both
Fortunately, Die Stadt didn't issue "1" as a video, effectively removing the physical presence (or lack thereof) of Koner and Tietchens from the listening experience, and simply leaving the amazing sounds behind. The 45 minute Kontakt Der Junglinge begins as a slow 'n' steady series of deep rumbles which are gradually accompanied by very distant Arvo Part-like choral elements. Later still, oceanic swells of processed static and granular synthesis fluidly encroach into the mix and take over the low end rumblings. As Tietchens' DAT whirrs ahead, fragments appear from his "A-Menge" album of asynchronous computerized clicks. Koner treats these sounds with a considerable amount of isolationist reverb, eroding some of the sharp edges of Tietchens' clinical sounds. Altogether, this is an exceptional record easily on par with anything that either artist has produced to date. Well worth checking out!
As good as the previous three Kontakt Der Junglinge records are, "N" is perhaps the most perfectly realized synthesis of the aesthetics of Thomas Koner and Asmus Tietchens, the two artists who comprise Kontakt Der Junglinge. In their respective solo careers, both artists have developed exceptionally strong sound signatures, with Koner preferring an edgy isolationist quality in his cinematically grand drones, and Tietchens honing the language of cosmic electronics which he pioneered alongside Cluster, Conrad Schnitzler, and Brian Eno back in the '70s. Where the previous albums had either alternated between the two distinct styles or positioned each other's sounds in a dialogue of polite conflict, this album quietly merges the two voices into a singular expansive voice. Archetypally Tietchens-tones encapsulating a sterile plasticity, expand and collapse slowly throughout the album, while Koner's cavernous bass frequencies cradle each of Tietchens' sounds with his arctic atmospheres and lulling soundscapes. As with all of the Kontakt Der Junglinge album,"N" is a live recording; this time, the performance was held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and happens to also be the quietest of their collaborations, which certainly helps to achieve the album's delicate balance. Highly recommended to all fans of dronemusik.
Finally, the third in this series of reissues, of all three full lengths from Miranda Lehman, aka Korouva, who, as we mentioned in our reviews of the first two (Shipwrecks & Russian Roulette and Sleepwalker, which we still have in stock!), is maybe best know for having her 2007 record Shipwrecks & Russian Roulette, appropriated by black metal jokers Velvet Cacoon. We posited that she was probably in on it, and played some part in the hoax, cuz really it worked out for both groups, cementing VC's reputation, and getting Lehman's music out there and into the ears of folks who otherwise might not have discovered her creepy, gothic, piano ballads. And really, this is about as far removed from the black metal of Velvet Cacoon as you could get, hushed and haunting, dark and dreamily druggy, Unbearable Romance recorded four full years after that purloined Shipwrecks lp, yet instead of displaying a more polished production, or more full arrangements, in fact seems to have gone the opposite way, a super stripped down, bare bones, skeletal songsite, of mostly just vocals and piano, recorded live it sounds like, all the sounds bathed in natural reverb, and wreathed in warm swirls of tape hiss, total 4 track bedroom balladry that is so gorgeous. At times, we're reminded of PJ Harvey in fact, albeit super spare and stripped down, a bit like her White Chalk record. In the other reviews we mention Zola Jesus and Chelsea Wolfe as well, and those comparisons are still pretty spot on, fans of either of those women, will find much to love here, but the sounds on Unbearable Romance are much more intimate and personal, the sounds immediate and organic, more than the other two records, this sounds like Lehman is performing just for you, the listener, as if you're curled up in front of her piano, while he serenades you, her harrowing torch songs ghostly and spectral, mysteriously moody and so so lovely. If you bought the other two already, you're gonna want this one too. And if you've yet to check out Korouva, this record will very likely convince you to by all three!
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, packaged in a thick full color jacket, with an 8 page lyric booklet and a Khrysanthoney insert.
The Austrian post-industrial provocateur Michael DeWitt attained notoriety in the mid-'80s for his project Zero Kama whose sole album was sourced entirely from human bones and skulls, with plenty of smoke and mirror production techniques to arrive at a Crowleyian sound parallel to the likes of early Current 93, Coil, and Psychic TV. Beyond the one album as Zero Kama, DeWitt released another obscure recording in 1982 under the moniker Korpses Katatonik. This cassette - sometimes referred to as Sensitive Liberated Autistiks, sometimes as Subklinikal Leukotomy Aphrenia Spasmophilik Lyssophobo Asphyxia Sinister Lethal Anorex - delved into parallel concerns of societal pathologies and death-obsessed transgressions through very dark electronics. It's very much in step with the classic industrial productions of SPK (when is anybody going to reissue those records again?) and the pre-Brighter Death Now project Lille Roger, with blackened squalls of grim noise belched through slow-grinding rhythms and an ominous proclamation that "we're all fucked." Such doomspeak from Industrial Culture was commonplace, but DeWitt's Korpses Katatonik said it with just as much brutalist force and conviction as SPK, TG, and Cabaret Voltaire at their most zombified. All of the tracks from that cassette and a compilation track make up the entire body of work for Korpses Katatonik, which have been remastered and repackaged for this anthology. The template for much of what Wolf Eyes did later is found here. Terrifyingly great.
A lot of the soundtracks we review, are for movies we haven't actually seen. In some ways that's sort of liberating, at least from a purely musical standpoint, hearing the sounds solely for what they are, instead of having those sounds inexorably linked to specific images. And in a lot of cases, we have discovered some incredible films via their soundtracks, and not the more common other way around. We got this soundtrack to this 1981 French horror/thriller (directed by Polish director Andrzej Zulawski, and scored by his longtime collaborator Andrzej Korzynski, also Polish, but more on that in a second) in a few months ago, and instantly, become totally obsessed, spinning it multiple times a day, inevitably folks in the store would ask what it was, because it's so goddamn good. And creepy, and twisted, and pretty much the perfect score, but for what, we weren't sure, as we had not seen the movie. And while are obsession proves that you needn't see the movie to love this, once we actually DID see the movie, we flipped for that too, wondering how the hell we could have missed out on it all these years. It's literally one of the weirdest, most fucked up films EVER. And the soundtrack we had become so familiar with over the last several months, finally viewed in the contest of the film, made both even more bizarre and amazing.
So the film itself, banned until 1991, and at the time classified as a "Video Nasty", stars an American, Sam Neil, who becomes convinced his wife, Isabelle Adjani, is cheating on him, which she is. Neil hires a private investigator, eventually meets the lover, and the lover's mother, but there's so much more to the story, there's a crazily neglected child in the mix, some truly twisted parenting, and SPOILER ALERT!!!! Some sort of super gross oozing monster that lives in an abandoned building that Adjani is in love with, or is at least having sex with? There's tons of screaming and hitting and fighting, and one of thee most dramatic freakouts EVER, with Adjani losing her mind in a tunnel, and ending up spewing and oozing all sorts of weird fluids, there's a particularly psychedelic denouement as well, lots of crazy scenery chewing, the whole thing is utterly and unabashedly over the top. Even right after seeing it, we weren't sure what the fuck just happened. But we did know, we loved the movie, and suddenly, loved the soundtrack EVEN MORE.
Korzynski's soundtrack is a series of short cues, most less than a minute, that find the composer experimenting with synthesizers, drum machines, primitive electronics. It's actually quite progressive, and in places is reminiscent of Carpenter or Goblin, especially in the movie's 'theme'. Check out the opening track "The Night The Screaming Stops", and it will be stick in your head forever, the tense strings, the pulsing rhythmic throb, the mysterious percussion, the swirling synth, and the creepy sci-fi sound effects, not to mention the melody. It's so haunting and creepy, but in the film, it's over the most innocuous sequence, and it's that juxtaposition that makes it so effectively chilling. Seriously if this soundtrack was 2 minutes long, and consisted of that first track, we'd still want a copy!
But dig in, there's plenty more, haunting swoonsome strings, drifting over a lilting organ melody, dreamy and drifty, but so subtly ominous, there's some full on synth prog, again revisiting that opening melody, but with more heft, as the soundtrack unwinds, there's lots of percussion, shakers, little flurries of synth shimmer, deep drones, the orchestral theme is particularly stirring, a refrain of the opening credit sequence, but so much more creepy and hauntingly stately. There are also lots of brief blasts of synthy psychedelia, appropriately titled things like "Detective's Desserts" or "Bloody Embrace", and part of the reason these cues are so short, is that much of the movie is sans incidental music, so the cues come in to accentuate certain events, the sonic equivalent of jump-scares, but super effective, and they add a whole other level of surreal psychedelia to the proceedings, very 'Euro' for sure. The series of "Kreuzberg" variations are particularly freaky, sinister and mysterious, grim ambience and super tense orchestral weirdness. Oh did we mention "The Man With The Pink Socks"? Another perplexing plot point, and one that here gets the bookending closing sequence, revisiting "Meeting With A Pink Tie". Adding some extra wah guitar, and both revisiting that opening theme.
Listen to the sound samples and see if you can resist. But really why bother? You won't be sorry. Even removed from the movie, this score is fantastic, psychedelic, orchestral, proggy, tripped out and bizarre, and no doubt will have you headed to the video store to experience the baffling brilliance of the film, once your sated on the equally baffling and brilliant score.
Like all B-Music / Finders Keepers releases, includes a huge booklet with lots of liner notes and tons of rare photos.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Kranium was a short-lived project of Marco Corbelli (aka Atrax Morgue) from 1993 to 1995, with all three Kranium cassettes originally self-released via his Slaughter Productions. These recordings took a more restrained approach to Corbelli's obsessive aesthetics for sexual depravity, psychological disturbances, and ultra-violence. The three albums paralleled the dark ambient pursuits of contemporaries in Lustmord, Brighter Death Now, and Raison D'Etre. It's an album dripping with cavernous reverberations, lumbering synth pulsations of keening low-end oscillations and dead-eyed drones. Throughout, Corbelli plunks slow-motion rhythms in deep resonant pools of echo and reverb, buttressed by liturgical chants, sepulchral ambient passages, subterranean atmospheres, and snippets of horror movie dialogue. Corbelli's compositions and strategies are simple yet thoroughly effective in crafting this hypnotic yet terrifying album of gothic darkness. We did stock a few of the Urashima lp reissues in the recent past; but with all of those sold out, we're now very pleased to have the full Kranium catalog available in this triple cassette boxset, if only for a limited time. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!
Marco Corbelli is best known for his work as Atrax Morgue, an obsessive project of power electronics and death-industrial tactics that continued on the unseemly traditions of horrifying Italian noise. His first recordings date back to 1992, beginning a flood of Atrax Morgue recordings, as well as an array of side-projects and limited editions feverishly produced for his Slaughter Productions imprint, which was also the home to many a likeminded artists (Megatera, Sshe Retina Stimulants, Mauthausen Orchestra, Richard Ramirez, etc.), but in 2007, Corbelli ended his life.
Kranium was a short-lived project for Corbelli from 1993 to 1995, with all three Kranium cassettes originally self-published through Slaughter Productions. These recordings took a more restrained approach to Corbelli's obsessive aesthetics for sexual depravity, psychological disturbances, and ultra-violence. The Brighter Edge Of Death was the second of the Kranium recordings, paralleling the dark ambient pursuits of contemporaries in Lustmord, Brighter Death Now, and Raison D'Etre. It's an album dripping with cavernous reverberations, lumbering synth pulsations of keening low-end oscillations and dead-eyed drones. Throughout the album, Corbelli plunks slow-motion rhythms in deep resonant pools of echo and reverb, buttressed by liturgical chants, sepulchral ambient passages, subterranean atmospheres, and snippets of horror movie dialogue. Corbelli's compositions and strategies are simple yet thoroughly effective in crafting this hypnotic yet terrifying album of gothic darkness. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! We were ONLY able to get enough stock of this particular title, given that Urashima only pressed up 99 copies of album of which we snatched up the final copies.
With this release, S-S Records brings us a reissue of two 12"s by German band Krysmopompas. The plastic sleeve has a sticker referencing "neue Deutsche welle and krautrock with Wire-like minimalism." Well said, although we're not going to make it quite so reductive. Bands like Der KFC, Abwarts, and Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle definitely deserve mention, and maybe even a little Art Brut minus the slappy irony. Although, these guys' sense of melody is much more restrained than the latter, with simplistic structures rooted in repetition and sparse application. That's pretty much where the German new wave thing comes in. Anyway, the early '80s can be a little confusing given that there were so many newly emerging and intermingling genres, (even though Krysmopompas are actually contemporary) but if we had to try and explain a little more then we'd say that this is somewhere between post-punk and punk influenced new (or cold) wave. But closer to the punk side of things. And there's not really much synth. We read somewhere that they were "post-post," and while we're not entirely sure what that means, it kinda makes sense. Things could always be a little weirder and we wouldn't complain, but this fits very nicely next to compilations like IVG, BIPP, B9 Belgian Cold Wave, or even Des Jeunes Gens Modernes. If, like us, you can get into that, then this is for you! Maybe it helps shed light on things pointing out that S-S Records was also responsible for putting out music by A-Frames and Monoshock, two more excellent, crazy post-punk-what-the-fuck bands.
Heaving, psychonaut droning from this Russian project, Kshatriy. The name of Sergey Uak-Kib's project is actually Sanskrit, as a now deracinated caste of warriors from ancient India. Uak-Kib posits something of a balance between the spiritual and the physical in the beliefs for this class of enlightened fighters. The holistic fortitude found in that statement seems to be furthered in the glowingly psychedelic artwork that has graced some of Kshatriy's other recordings. So much for first impressions, as this is fucking bleak. Anenzephalia bleak. Thomas Koner bleak. Lustmord bleak. Thrumming drones of Vulcan intensity and Promethean scale gird the entire album of Slepok Soznaniya. The thunderous cracks that introduce "Lights" are cataclysmic in nature, tumbling from deep space and smashing into the Siberian forest, unleashing shockwaves across the curved surface of Russian's landmass and creating elegantly harmonic ripples across the swampy taiga. Iron wheels grind on long-train tracks which lead to destinations unknown on the "Hymn To Kali," which is more of a dirge than a hymn through the slow, militant pound and evolving reverberant chord shifts for an ashen, musical negativity. The almost self-evidently named "Space Travel" surfs the solar winds with echoes of distant pulsars and glowing nebula clouds flickering through the endless expanses of nothingness.
We were awestruck by the work that Kshatriy produced for the 2014 Drone-Mind / Mind-Drone III compilation; and so we're delving into his catalogue. Slepok Soznaniya was originally released in 2009 on the bracingly good Russian imprint Muzyka Voln. Not all that much in the way of distribution west of the former Iron Curtain; so this one makes for a new favorite in the radiant black dronemusik camp.
There's a deep cosmology at work in the recordings of Sergey Uak-Kib, the Russian dronescapist who uses the Sanskrit for 'warrior', Kshatriy, as his nom de plume. This album, his second, is equally as spectral and bleak in its content as his 2009 debut Slepok Soznaniya; and it stands as a harbinger to the end of the Kali-Yuga - the final stage in the four-part cycle for the material world, as mapped out in the various Hindu scriptures. Uak-Kib identifies this prediction through the ongoing "technocratic lack of spirituality and moral decay" - ignominious traits that unfortunately shape the future for much of the world's population. Yet, he also maintains a considerable optimism that the cycle of life will also produce an "attainment of human awareness of the Unity." Transforming Galaxy is about a literal as one could get with the processional unveiling of this album's ambient tapestries, beginning with the darkest passages and gradually lightening the chromatics without diffusing the overall potency of these radiant droneworks. Isolationist undercurrents of black ice floes accrete with teeth-clenching sawtooth electronics at the front of the end record, ominously giving way to stormy drone recordings strafed with the unnerving choruses of ravens; and steadily, the ambience slips away from these endtimes allusions and towards full-bodied swirling miasma of cosmic synth drones. Altogether, it's very much on par with the last recordings made by Maeror Tri of industrial impressionism and hypnogogic echo.
As the title no doubt led you to believe, this is in fact the fifth release in the ongoing collaboration between Stephen O'Malley (SUNNO))), Khanate, etc.) and Peter Rehberg (Pita), and like IV before it, V was realized as a stand alone record, unlike the first three releases, which were all conceived and composed to accompany art installations. And again, like IV, the sound does not seem to be dramatically effected by this shift, although there does in fact seem to be a bit of a shift from IV to V, with V seeming, to our ears at least, to be a bit more academic, with an ear toward twentieth century classic and modern minimalism, further evidence which may be found in the two tracks here "Phill 1" and "Phill 2", which we presume are an homage to the master dronelord Phill Niblock, but of course done in their own inimitable style, with "Phill 1" opening up a thick gaseous dronescape, that is pocked with glitch and skitter, woven into the fabric of the tracks woozy undulations, and softly moaning choral shimmer. Where on past records much of the sound was barely there, and required close listening, "Phill 1" is much more immediately rewarding, lush and lustrous, thick and warm, and layered, the sort of minimalism that would probably still appeal to fans of O'Malley's SUNNO))) project. The track is definitely active, with plenty going on beneath the surface, and in the spaces surrounding the drone, be they thick slabs of blurred buzz, shards of computer glitch, and all manner of sonic detritus.
"Phill 2" finds O'Malley and Rehberg teaming up with the Prague Philharmonic, where they are joined by Johann Johannsson, who helps with the orchestration, the track transformed into something haunting and symphonic, yet still dark and droney, the sound even more rich, and somewhat cacophonous, a glorious noisy ur-drone, that definitely casts the orchestra as something much more chaotic and abstract that they are perhaps used to, the results are stunning.
In between these tracks, O'Malley and Rehberg do explore more minimal soundscapes, "Study A" features long tones, deep buzzes and sine wave like high end shimmers, stretched out into near static layered mesmer, allowing the two tones two subtly interact, and create all manner of overtones, gradually building in intensity, and at times sounding down right cinematic and psychedelic. "Tony" is another thick minimal dronescape, this one focused around a distorted stretch of slow shifting buzz, surrounded by warm melodic tones, and strange echo drenched percussion, the main drone ever shifting, creating a gorgeous slow motion melody, the background sounds lush and lustrous, maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from KTL yet. And finally, the record finishes off with the 20+ minute "Last Spring: A Prequel", which introduces text, a haunting spoken word, draped over a hissy shimmer, the breath urgent in the microphone, the vibe dark and claustrophobic, the music itself more like old KTL, ultra minimal, high end hiss, minimal static hum, bits of glitch laced throughout, the track all about the dramatically delivered vocals, which grow more and more agitated, more heavily effected, the music subtly following suit, like some strange abstract play, with some of the creepiest sound design ever, courtesy of KTL.
Housed in a super striking 6 panel digipak, with original artwork by Mark Fell. Meanwhile the vinyl comes in an equally colorful gatefold sleeve.
In the late 18th Century, Benjamin Franklin invented the Glass Harmonica as a musical instrument with the idea of improving upon the parlour trick of rubbing the rim of a wine glass with a wet finger to produce a constant drone. Franklin heard a pristine beauty resulting from from this action but immediately recognized the limitations if one wanted to play more than one or two wine glasses at once. For his Glass Harmonica, Franklin cut off the stems of several dozen wine glasses and drilled holes directly in the center of the glasses. He then mounted these augmented glasses along a horizontal rotating spindle, so that the player of the Glass Harmonica could effectively be rubbing the rims of several glasses at once and create harmonies and chords out of those pure tones. The Glass Harmonica was quite a novelty instrument for plenty of composers of the day; but it fell out of favor with the discerning public (possibly because some of the players had actually fainted from the frequencies they were creating with the Glass Harmonica).
In recent years, there's been a resurgance of interest in the glass harmonica amongst avant-garde composers, including Simon Wickham-Smith, Manu Holterbach, and Christina. As one of Germany's most reknowned sound artists, Kubisch typically operates in the realm of installation with almost all of her previous recordings being documents of those installations; thus, Armonica is a rare documentation of Kubisch's compositional sensibility. In using the glass harmonica as the source material for this album, she constructs a beautiful polyphony of never-ending timbres, resulting in an exquisite piece of haunted minimalism on par with the likes of Phill Niblock, Andrew Chalk, and Eliane Radigue. Highly recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"Two & Two" is the collaborative effort between German sound artist Christina Kubisch and Italian experimentalist Fabrizio Plessi. Basing their four pieces on the four prime elements - earth, fire, air, and water - Kubisch and Plessi each played a single instrument / object with a perpetual repetitive motion. The two had amplified the objects in a specific manner, to extract more unusual characteristics than sounds usually associated with voice, metronome, steel drum, ventilators and water jet. The resulting continuous sound streams have a beautiful organic quality not far from David Jackman's stunning arsenal of bowed metal in Organum. This is the original late 70s pressing from the Cramps Records offshoot.
A few months back we were able to pick up a few copies of the original Cramps '70s vinyl of this album, but now the hardworking Ampersand label has reissued it on CD. Two & Two is the collaborative effort between German sound artist Christina Kubisch and
- RealAudio clip: Air
- RealAudio clip: Earth
- RealAudio clip: Fire
We're so excited to finally be holding this long in the works release in our grubby little paws. A long term collaboration between Loren Chasse and Ray Guillette, When I Lift I Can Feel My Sunburn Singing was originally intended to be released as a picture disc on tUMULt, but through a series of strange circumstances, the picture disc series was put on hold indefinitely, and the L/R record just sort of languished on a dusty shelf somewhere, which was an absolute shame as this is a beautiful piece of work. Thankfully, the folks at Paha Porvari tracked this record down and decided to give it a proper release. While we sort of wish they had pressed this as a real cd, the cd-r format's transitive nature is perfectly suited to the record's sound and theme.
Culled from a series of field recordings collected at the site of a ruined factory in South San Francisco way back in 1996, When I Lift I Can Feel My Sunburn Singing is the document of several live performances in 1997 and 1998 assembled from those sounds.
L/R explore a world of thick washed out drones, swirling seas of whir, gorgeously shimmery expanses of sun dappled sound, all peppered with crackle and glitch, cavernous windblown soundscapes, haunting metallic chimes and muted percussive events, jagged shards of sound, recontextualized into haunting rhythmic grooves, a constantly shifting soundworld of mystery and magic, alternately jagged and caustic, soothing and dreamlike. Incredible stuff!
Gorgeously packaged in an oversized black on black cardstock sleeve, inside lots of beautiful full color inserts, drawings and etchings and paintings reproduced on super nice paper, as well as two delicate vellum inserts with liner notes and credits.
The fifth studio album from Labradford finds the band incorporating instrumentations of dulcimer, string section, and tape loops alongside their atmospherics for guitar, bass, and piano. Labradford may have beaten Andee (in his first solo project after A Minor Forest, Pee, and Tic War) to the punch with a blatant appropriation of George Winston / Shadowfax / Windham Hill onto a record for Kranky.
Beautiful, none the less.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This record is one of the most amazing we have ever heard, and of course, it's been practically impossible to get back in stock. But now we have it, and you should buy it. It's pummelling and heavy and beautiful. Not sure how long we'll have this in stock.
An ex-Dazzling Killmen (Blake Fleming) takes his penchant for angular discordance a step further, forgoing the ferocious heaviosity of his former outfit, and instead, explores lengthy semi-improvisational psychedelic freakouts and repetetive hypno-krautrock instrumentals ala Circle. Post rock jamscapes littered with shrieking and droning Albert Ayler-ish sax, jabs of no wave guitar, an overwhelming over-saturated super-distorted production and absolutely crushing drumming. Totally essential.
From their very earliest audio documents and live performances, the Slovenian avant-industrial ensemble Laibach had developed an incredibly focused mythology around themselves as a provocative force acting upon the extremes of art and politics. Working particularly with the aesthetics of totalitarianism (which as a political institution had long been hammered into the psyche of the Slovenian people from the left, right, East, and West), Laibach reconstituted any number of myths which invoked both fear and fascination in their audience. They wrote manifestos calling for a depersonalization through their music; they cross-pollinated Stalinist and Nazi imagery (alongside occultish symbolism and increasingly absurdist pop-cultural references); and they qualified their concerts as presentations of "systematic psycho-physical terror as a principle of social organization." In 1985 when Laibach ventured out upon their Occupied Europe Tour, they were a truly scary band with nobody really knowing how to analyze what they were doing. Was it an ugly resurgence of fascism? Was it psychological warfare conducted in the public arena? Was it a post-modern strategy reconnecting signifiers of hollowed ideologies? It was probably all of those things and more.
In the live recordings from that tour that made their way onto Neu Konservatiw, Laibach's sound was a punishing collision of martial rhythms and megaphone vocal broadcasts, exhibiting none of the black humour found later in their Beatles covers or their take on Jesus Christ Superstar. With the insistent plod of the multiple drums and monochord bass thumps, Laibach paralleled the abject stomp that the Swans were producing at that time, even though both projects had vastly different artistic intentions. As their studio albums in the mid-'80s were mostly sample based and had a clipped rigidity that make some of their songs a little clumsy, the live setting forced Laibach to strip their music to the most essential stabs of anthemic bombast; and on Neu Konservatiw, Laibach pull it off with an executioner's cold stoicism. Forcefully blunt and uncompromisingly brilliant.
If one were to take the logic of appropriative artists like Warhol or Rauschenberg, to the extremities of absurdity and dehumanization through the procress of mechanical reproduction, you would have Laibach. Perhaps the most misunderstood post-modern project to infiltrate pop culture, Laibach has often been associated with the proliferation of totalitarianism and Nazi culture, simply because they used those higly charged symbols and images and projected them back into the mass culture. However, Laibach's intent is to reinvest not just those symbols, but any symbol of authority and power, with the question of why is this symbol important to our culture. In many ways, Laibach was continuing in the same paths of inquiry found in their British compatriots Throbbing Gristle and The Hafler Trio; however, Laibach never cracked a smile, an attitude exemplified in their triumphant reinterpretations of the Beatles "Let It Be" as a series of miliaristic dirges and patriotic medleys.
"Rekapitulacija 1980 + 1984" was their first album, released as a double LP set with a beautiful series of reproduced woodcuts, offering portraits of the noble spirit from the agrarian worker married to the industrial landscapes, mirroring the same totalitarian artforms that had been thrust upon their native Slovenia during the Nazi occupation and later behind the Iron Curtain, when Yugoslavia was a Communist country. Despite this being their earliest set of recordings, Laibach's skill in the studio is tremendous, as heard in their epic piece 'Ti, Ki Izzivas' transforming Bernhard Hermann's soundtrack for "Psycho" into a punishing uber-motif coupled with a relentless drum machine pound and discordant organ blasts. Other tracks such as 'Brat Moj' or 'Smrt Za Smrt' are brooding no wave constructions, taking the best and most haunting elements of early Swans and early Cabaret Voltaire and fusing them into a skeletal anti-groove laced with growling vocals and commanding basslines.
But Laibach themselves have said it best in their early masterpiece 'Perspektive' : "By darkening the consumers' mind, it drives them into a state of humble contrition and total obedience and self-sacrifice, by destroying every track of individuality, it melts the individuals into a mass and a mass into a humble collective body... Our basic inspiration (ideals which are not ideals through their form but the material of Laibach manipulation itself) remains an industrial production, the art of the third Reich, totalitarianism, taylorism, bruitism, disco... The disco rhythm as a regular repetition, is the purest / the most radical form of the militantly organized rhythmicity of technicist production, and as such the most appropriate means of media manipulation." To hear this recited in the style of a Russian propagandist over a ominous thud of drum machines and triumphant Wagnerian horns, one can't help but laugh at the absurdity of such a statement; however, the logic quickly sinks in that Laibach are 100% correct. A brilliant album.
Perhaps the greatest and most challenging pieces of conceptual art disguised as a pop album. Truly awesome.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally, we've managed to restock Alan Lamb's Night Passage, one of the most evocative and sonically engaging dronescaping records that has ever passed through these doors. This Australian composer's sole source material is the sound of wind blowing against telephone wires. In recording the raw material, Lamb simply attaches contact microphones to telephone poles, sits back, and lets the weather blow through the wires how it sees fit. The resultant drones are sublimely rich in their metallic timbres and amazingly complex reverberations, that is not all that far off from Harry Bertoia's sound sculptures. I (Jim) actually had a very hard time believing that they were what Lamb said they were: unprocessed wire music. That is until one cold, blustery summer afternoon on the craggy coastline near Point Reyes north of San Francisco, I heard those exact same sounds from the wind raking across the telephone wires that extended out to a distant lighthouse. These sounds were eeriely beautiful, yet unsettling as they vibrated the air with such ubiquity that their origin was impossible to pinpoint.
For Night Passage, Lamb's recordings originate with the Faraway Wind Organ, a half mile of abandoned telegraph wires in the outback of Western Australia. Unfortunately, this network of wires has collapsed due to lightning and termites, making Lamb's recordings a very rare documentation of an amazing naturally occuring sonic phenomenon.
Also included with this double disc package is the Demixed album, in which Thomas Koner, Lustmord, Ryoji Ikeda, and Bernhard Gunter were given Lamb's raw recordings to treat and compose with. Where Lamb's compositional sensibility privledges the intrinsic qualities of his recordings with just crossfades and equilization, these four blurred the source material that reflected their own signature sounds. Koner leans to expansive gaping drones; Lustmord collapses everything within a bleak catacomb of oppressive ambience; Ikeda ruptures the sound into a subtle piece of minimalism; and Gunter stretches the boundaries of perception. This is one of the best all around remix albums, completing what is otherwise an already impeccable document.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Alan Lamb is a biologist who entered the realm of music after discovering the complex choral harmonics of the telephone wires that span his native Australia. Lamb's allegiance to both biology and the spectral sounds of the frequencies of a long thin wire reacting to natural events isn't that odd as Lamb himself explains, "that these principles (in wire frequencies) have much in common conceptually with those underlying the generation of coherent patterns in biological systems... and it is probably not too far fetched to suggest that wire music is an aural embodiment of some of the most fundamental dynamic laws of the universe."
"Primal Image / Beauty" is the culmination of 7 years of field recordings, during which Lamb discovered the best meterological situations for certain timbres, the best wires that emanated these harmonics, and good microphones to capture the sounds (for this phenomenon is externally ampified by the wires under the right circumstances). Even in listening to the incredible textural dronework from Organum or Xenakis, it is pretty awe-inspiring that this is simply the sound of the wind resonating a wire.
For those who live around the Bay Area, this phenomenon can be heard on occasion at Point Reyes, especially when the wind is coming straight down the coast from the north and strikes the wires which run east-west along the barren peninsula.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
When one of our friends told us about this little cd containing an experimental piece using the sounds of a Zamboni, we got very very excited. A Zamboni! (That's that unusual machine that resurfaces the ice in hockey rinks.) Upon hearing it, we were even more thrilled, 'cause it's an amazing 20 minute drone work! And practically everyone who works here has bought one by now...
This cute 3" cd, released through Metamkine's esteemed 'Cinema Pour L'Oreille' series of electro-acoustics and musique concrete, contains one track, "Mantra", which opens with a trio of motors starting up and emitting a gentle purr. As these engines warm up and shift through various perfunctory cycles, a wide spectrum of metallic vibrations slowly spins through the stereo field. While it would be nice to believe that these movements coincide with a Zamboni circling a really nice binaural microphone, it's more likely that Laporte exercised his artistic license with a judicious use of crossfading and stereo panning upon his field recordings. As the disc draws near its end, it sounds as if a screw or bolt is loosened by the vibrations and two pieces of metal begin a clamorous bell-ringing arrhythmia. When these motors finally are shut down, those pieces of metal still resonate for a beautifully sustained coda.
Back to the Zamboni issue: we'd been told by 'reliable' informants (Loren Chasse who heard about it from Ferarra Pan who heard it on Scot Jenerik's radio show) that the source material for Jean-Francois Laporte's "Mantra" was a Zamboni. As the liner-notes (all in French mind you) indicate that Laporte incorporated the sound of an air compressor from an ice-skating rink, it didn't rule out the possibility that indeed that air compressor could belong to a Zamboni, but it didn't actually say anything about Zambonis. (Are they even called Zambonis in France, anyway?) As you can tell, we Aquarians like the Zamboni and would really like to believe that the Zamboni was responsible for this album. Thus, we contacted the label, who merely sent us an English translation of the original liner notes, which again stated the source material to be an air compressor. Thus, we are left to ponder the quandary: is it or is it not a Zamboni?
Putting this grand existential question aside and the true origin of the source material out of sight for the moment, what's true is that Laporte has indeed sculpted one of the most compelling drone compositions that we've encountered in quite some time. For loyal readers of these lists, that's no idle comment as artists like Oragnum, Jonathan Coleclough, Mirror, John Duncan, and Francisco Lopez still rank highly for us in the pantheon of dronescapers. Not only as working model but also as a something of belief system, Jean-Francoise Laporte applies the ideals of the mantra to the urban landscape. To him, the hypnotic audio elements of refrigerators, motorcycle engines, and in this case the Zamboni / air compressor rise above their mundane properties to become something that can be meditated upon and hold transcendent properties.
A very, very nice recording, Zamboni or not. Even if you don't normally buy all the weird, droney experimental stuff we recommend, you might want to take a chance and try this out. After all, it's only 20 minutes out of your day and eight bucks. And, maybe it's a Zamboni!
Those artists, musicians, misanthropes, and just plain weirdos who not only exist musically on the fringes but have planted their entire existence on the edge have long been the greatest inspirations of Aquarius Records. For proof, you could scroll through oddball recordings that have earned the honor of Aquarius Record Of The Week. There was the Finnish sound artist Terje Isungset who crafted not just one album, but two from untreated percussive instruments entirely made of ice. Hans Edler thrilled us with his 1970s transformation from teen idol into short-circuited electronic composer. The protracted ululations of the profoundly cracked Elizabeth Clare Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant were as transcendent as anything that Lamonte Young had to offer, yet also had that creepy cult of personality vibe to boot. And who could forget Kathy McGinty? But one of the earliest recordings that truly made our collective jaw drop was the 3" cd from French-Canadian composer Jean-Francois Laporte called Mantra. Here was a mighty fine 20 minute composition of delicious vibrations, rattles, mechanical hum, and industrial drones that came with a particularly alluring back story: the source material to Mantra was a Zamboni -- the unusual machine only found at hockey rinks responsible for resurfacing its ice.
The one catch to Laporte's Zamboni sourced masterpiece was that we could never verify that a Zamboni was the actual source material. We heard from 'reliable sources' that Mantra is the sound of a Zamboni; and we wanted so desperately to believe that this was the case, just because the Zamboni is such an amazing and eccentric beast of industrial engineering. Before this turns into a dialectic on epistemology, we here at Aquarius discovered that we had been duped by a couple of mischievous DJs on KPFA without the knowledge or consent of Jean-Francois Laporte. It turns out that Laporte used nothing but a common air-compressor in composing Mantra. This factual unveiling should not in any way take away from the splendor of that piece. Here's what we had to say about Mantra many moons ago:
"Mantra opens with a trio of motors starting up and emitting a gentle purr. As these engines warm up and shift through various perfunctory cycles, a wide spectrum of metallic vibrations slowly spins through the stereo field. After a marvelous set of transitions between drones, there is the rattling sound as if a screw or bolt had been loosened by the vibrations, with two pieces of metal beginning a clamorous bell-ringing arrhythmia. When these motors finally are shut down, those pieces of metal still resonate for a beautifully sustained coda."
That 3" cd came out almost a decade ago, became a classic, and went out of print. Thankfully, 23five Incorporated has rescued Mantra from the dustbin by issuing the first major compendium of Laporte's work in the form of Soundmatters. While we've already sung the praises of Mantra, the remainder of Soundmatters is well worth investigating on its own. The opening track "Electro-Prana" is a pristine set of field recordings of a wind that ripped through Montreal, when the city was silenced by a winter time blackout. It's a pure, chilling sound of whistling wind overtaking the urban landscape. The next piece is the only digitally rendered composition on Soundmatters, yet Laporte brings his intuitive expressionism to a series of spiraling drones that easily rival those of your favorite minimalist (e.g. Niblock, Chalk, Hafler Trio, Xenakis, etc.). For those of you who have had the pleasure of experiencing Laporte's live concerts, the third piece will certainly be familiar. He's built an instrument with a series of car horns and elongated trumpet bells attached to an air compressor with each of the valves controlled by foot pedals. This instrument can generate infinitely sustainable, blaring drones from each of the horns; and Laporte craftily layers these sounds for incredible, dynamic results. Well, for this recording, Laporte lugged this instrument into the hull of a giant cargo ship and recorded this composition using the massive reverb of that space and the results are simply jaw-dropping. Imagine the most Nordic bellow from a Wagner symphony stretched out into its melancholic, raw sound and allowed to decay in space and time. Wow!
Following this is the aforementioned Mantra; and then Soundmatters' final piece which explores a quiet, yet thoroughly rich harmonic tapestry produced by a quartet of saxophones that could be Laporte's imagined summit between Evan Parker and Morton Feldman with rasping breaths of sound breaking across a silent event horizon with the ghostly energy of subatomic particles flickering and dissolving in a cloud chamber before amassing into a delirious swarm of Tony Conrad-esque acoustic dissonance. It's all utterly magnificent and one of finest collections of 'serious' composition that we've come across.
The story of how this record came to be is almost impossible to believe, yet Michael Gira (Angels of Light / Swans) seems like a reliable enough source that it could in fact be true. Beginning sometime last year, Gira started receiving a series of arcane
The one qualm with the album is on how the record ends. It has been a longstanding belief of mine that Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation" should have ended with the graceful haze of "Hyperstation" and done away with the unnecessary exclamation of "Eliminator, Jr." Similarly, Larsen ends "Rever" badly, as a beautifully repetitive groove simply cuts out, making you wonder if California is returning to the days of rolling blackouts. If only every record had one thing wrong with it instead of eighty-eleven problems, and in spite of that one misgiving, this is one of the best records we have heard in quite a while.
Holy Fuck! Six cassettes of Le Syndicat? Fuck! FUCK!! FUCK!!!! This is a serious head-cleaner of brutalist / bruitist / rhythmicist / industrial noise, collecting some of the best work from this seminal French outfit and recreating the original artwork of the old tapes within a super swank hand-stenciled box. Le Syndicat followed in the wake of what Throbbing Gristle had done in England, in creating a unique visual iconography to complement the churning mechanoid bursts of noise within. It seems that the divisions of labor was split between two of the principles in Le Syndicat with Ruelgo taking up the sound design and Zorin handling the graphic output. While Zorin eventually departed from Le Syndicat's sound constructions, he continued to offer his visual skills which have long placed him as a more transgressively themed Neville Brody with both adhering to a futurist / postmodern take on art deco. The rhythm and noise for Le Syndicat evolved through process mingling tape-loops, overblown drum machine programming, shortwave radio experiments, short-circuited consumer electronics, and eventually rudimentary sampler technology. Through these simple means, Le Syndicat's industrial orchestrations lead them to a sound that blurred the lines between the feral power of Whitehouse, the bombast of Laibach, and the grim rhythmic component of MB's early catalog. The six cassettes housed within this collection include Phase Segments/Boucles (1982), Tot Mortar (1983), Audiostatik Repress (1983), Vagynaestetatis (1985), Staying Alive (1985), and L'Arme De Force (1986). All of these cassettes were originally released through Le Syndicat's eponymous in house label, with the exception of Staying Alive which Masami Akita released through his ZSF Produkt. The aforementioned Maurizio Bianchi reference is most apt on the first cassette of this set - Phase Segments / Boucles with the skeletal rhythms and gain-saturated noise oscillation paralleling those early Sacher Pelz tapes by Bianchi. While these experiments are both intriguing and of archival importance as some of the first published works, Le Syndicat fully hits the mark from Tot Mortar onward with an integrated noise/rhythm/scream/shortwave/orgasm/tapemachination excess that come to define the quintessential Le Syndicat sound. All of the cassettes were remastered, bringing out even more clarity to the grime, distortion, and exhaustive noise. It is limited to 250 copies, but don't expect these to be around for long! FUCKING AWESOME!!!
The mid-'80s were very productive for Le Syndicat, the French industrial noise outfit that formed in 1982 with the noble intention to make the most noise possible. The bulk of the tracks from Timespace Losses has been culled from various cassette compilations Le Syndicat contributed to during that time period, with the final track on the album being a rare live recording. These works defined their earlier noise bruitism before iron-fisted rhythms locked down Le Syndicat's latter-day panzerbeat aesthetics. Overblown screams and garbled vocalizations dissolved amidst the acrid feedback, mottled distortion and blackened noise which seeped out of Le Syndicat's repurposed consumer electronics (e.g. shortwave radios, televisions, walkmen, etc.), inspired by the mediated chaos of SPK, Merzbow, Ramleh, Whitehouse, Controlled Bleeding, and other early practitioners of power electronics. Not surprisingly, Le Syndicat managed to land their work on tape compilations released by Broken Flag, ZSF Produkt (run by Masami Akita back in the day), Placebo, and Beast 666. This collection splatters itself as a very primitive, nasty set of recordings. Conet Project fans should take note that the Swedish Rhapsody numbers station is featured heavily in the very John Duncan like collage of shortwave transmissions from the Le Syndicat live track concluding the album. Recommended for all of you noise freaks out there!
The Legendary Pink Dots is an unusual crypto-pop collective whose expressive sonic adventures blur the well-demarcated subcultures of '60s psychedelia and '80s doom 'n' gloom. Stained Glass Soma Fountain, a collection of LPD rarities from the early '80s. Primitive keyboards and drum machines playfully march through baroque fusions of New Wave and psychedelia, hinting perhaps at the underappreciated pop of Brian Eno.
Ahhhh ouuuuiii... Le nouveau super rockin' release from our French-Canadian friends Les Georges Leningrad. Poney, Bobo and Mingo (a trio now after losing one member through interpersonal conflict) deliver astounding electronoisepop compositions on Sur Les Traces De Black Eskimo. Groovy beats and spastic outbursts are prominent characters in the song craft they call petrochemical rock. Why they are obsessed with 'black eskimo', je ne sais pas. Mais, je t'aime, Les Georges. If you have the chance to see them live, they generously offer an award-winning show, featuring self-made costumes and an arresting stage presence. Their artwork is all done by the band members themselves and est la superbe. Check it!
It's hard not to jump right into discussing the packaging that Invisible Birds has crafted for this opus by the peripatetic Japanese experimentalist Lethe (aka Kuwayama Kiyoharu), but that will have to wait for later on in the review as it's the incredible, occluded sounds that Lethe generates that are of true import here.
For many years now, Kuwayama had been recording the resonance of various abandoned spaces, first around his native Japan and more recently from sites far far away. He seeks out an old warehouse, airplane hanger, the hull of a ship, or any massive slab of architecture shaped by concrete and/or steel which happens to have an open door (or broken window) and a choice amount of natural reverb and resonance. There he collects whatever he can find within the space to use as source material to resonate those industrial spaces: slabs of metal, empty water tanks, sodden wood, broken glass, small bones, and the flotsam that had collected on the floors after years of neglect. Out of these found objects, Kuwayama has an uncanny knack for producing natural, acoustic drones which hold a haunted aesthetic amplified through the cavernous reverb of those crumbled cathedrals to industry. Given the seemingly surreptitious nature of Kuwayama's wanderings, these recordings are swaddled in the darkness of night with only candles or a bonfire somewhere in the far corner of the building as his illumination. It has to be said that Kuwayama does overlay and edit all of his recordings into composition, following liked minded artists such as Tarab, Eric La Casa, or John Grzinich.
Catastrophe Point 7 begins with this process at a site deliciously referred to as Arsenic in Lausanne, Switzerland. Well, it turns out that Arsenic is a contemporary theater space in current use, and despite his non-feral residence, Kuwayama offers an incredible assortment of acoustic drones, noises, and textures. Bellowing tones emanate from a variety of long plumbing pipes, replicating the circular breathing strategies of Yoshi Wada; and around these leaden flutterings, he scrapes uneasy textures and builds clattering crescendos. The point about Arsenic not being a totally disused space comes to the forefront about halfway through Catastrophe Point 7 as he rolls a piano into the empty theater space and sets forth a melancholy series of clustered piano tones, much like his one time collaborator Jonathan Coleclough produced on his signature album Period.
Catastrophe Point 8 was recorded in an abandoned space. This time, it's a former power station in Scotland. A mournful acoustic drone, perhaps from a similar set of plumbing pipes heard in the Swiss recordings opens this disc, with small crumblings of wood, glass, and concrete positioned close to the microphone. Set in spatialized contrast to these closely miced sounds, Kuwayama captures various clanks, thumps, and other bumps in the night all decaying in the prolonged reverb of that power station. It's a much more Spartan affair than the first disc, but just as effective in its haunted sensibility. Highly recommended listening!
And yes, the packaging. The discs themselves are housed in a beautifully printed letterpress folio, with a lengthy booklet written by fellow industrial shadow-master Giancarlo Toniutti. For this small art-edition, Invisible Birds has housed the two discs in an archival, embossed box with another booklet of photographs from Kuwayama and a snippet of 8mm film. The art edition is beautifully done and well worth the expense. Needless to say, they made just 100 of the art edition!
One of two concurrently released albums from Wire's eccentric bassist / vocalist Edvard Graham Lewis. Even through the lens of Wire's situationist post-punk and avant-pop eccentricities, the solo and side projects for Lewis were almost always well beyond the scope of Wire's amorphous signature. Dome was an early investigation into proto-electronica and disjointed industrial bricolage, and then there was the contorted romanticism of '80s balladeering through the under-appreciated He Said moniker.
Where the companion album All Under is the more abstract and (slightly more) unconventional, All Over finds Lewis returning to his capacity for penning some brilliantly weird avant-pop numbers. The overall feel of the album is sunk in a liquid narcosis that runs parallel to the blurring miasma of shoegazing; but Lewis doesn't drown his work in reverb. It's a great trick to build something hypnotizing though a skeletal synth & guitar pop context. "We've Lost Your Mind" girds a motorik click track of Oval-like glitching with a minor-chord jangle that harkens back to A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck era Wire if it were recorded today. "The Start Of Next Week" is a fabulous piece of dark techno that could fit somewhere near Silent Servant or Surgeon. The dubbed-out tropical ditty "Quick Skin" pools Lewis' vocals into layers of overlapping delay patterns with a tinny rhumba and chicken-scratch guitars channelling the spirit of Brian Eno's Another Green World, albeit with a darker color palette. Other tracks do push the abstraction with a few tracks sounding similar to what :zoviet*france: would make if given the challenge to make a 'pop' record circa 1988. Like All Under, this is brilliant.
One of two concurrently released albums from Wire's eccentric bassist / vocalist Edvard Graham Lewis. Even through the lens of Wire's situationist post-punk and avant-pop eccentricities, the solo and side projects for Lewis were almost always well beyond the scope of Wire's amorphous signature. Dome was an early investigation into proto-electronica and disjointed industrial bricolage, and then there was the contorted romanticism of '80s balladeering through the under-appreciated He Said moniker.
There were also plenty of one-off collaborations with various Swedes throughout the '90s (H-A-L-O, He Said Omala, Hox, etc.) and one hell of a great collaboration with John Duncan.
That Duncan / Lewis album immediately jumped to mind when we first put on All Under, a compendium of soundtrack work and ephemera recorded at various times over the past 13 years. The eerily paranoiac blips of phasing shortwave radio broadcasts fire across the first two tracks of All Under, both of which are variations on work composed for a multi-channel video piece by Gunilla Leander. These electrical flurries, flecked with irradiated ash and attenuated glitches, are shaped from the droning data-streaming into mercurial melodic ambience that wouldn't be out of place on Aphex Twin's dreamtime masterpiece Selected Ambient Works Volume II. "The Eel Wheeled" again reflects similarities to that Duncan collaborative record, with Lewis slowly reciting one of his bizarre assemblages (which also form the basis for Wire's lyrics, even those sung by Colin Newman). His Burroughs / Gibson / Dick inspired sci-fi fragmentation with his baritone voice elegantly sitting amidst his discordant collage, projecting an ominous sound of a crumbling society being sucked into its virtual self. The finale is another soundtrack piece "No Show Godot," draping wisps of arctic noise onto a soft rhythmic chatter as Lewis slowly unveils a blossoming radiant drone that terminates at the unveiling of a long-form drone-pop number for ritualized pulse, blurs of fourth-world vocal exoticism, Sub-Saharan cinematic nods, and Lewis commanding a subdued industrial mantra akin to an opiated version of Muslimgauze. Like All Over, this is brilliant.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
An intense, very bad acid-trip courtesy of the Los Angeles retro-viral project LFA. These death factory rhythms, bone-rot squelched sequences, and whip cracks on sheet of metal rattle as if the engine that drives whole goddamn thing is gonna self-immolate, fly apart, or just seize up from exhaustion. These creepy mutations better those constructed by Wolf Eyes and give the early Sterile Records output from Nocturnal Emissions a run for their money.
Another great reissue from the Hit Thing label! Joining the Georges Montalba pipe organ cd on their catalog is this mysterious European minimal industrial album from the very early '80s.
Liaisons Dangereuses were primarily two individuals, Beate Bartel (who in later years went on to form Malaria!) and Chris Haas (a founding member of DAF). They were accompanied on vocals by Krishna Goineau who sang in French, German and Spanish (a few customers have mistaken his flamboyant delivery for that of Falco). Very much akin to Einsturzende Neubauten, The Normal, Suicide and DAF. Edgy, dark and throbbing, the programmed nailgun-like beats are punctuated by Goineau's impassioned singing/speaking, some high pitched female backing vocals, squidgy electronic belches, an occasional saxophone run, and much metallic clanks and thuds. It was all mixed at Conny Plank's studio. The one track here that may be familiar is their dance 'hit' "Los Ninos Del Parque", however L.D.'s impact goes beyond this one song. Indeed they were/are highly regarded and very influential in techno, house and yes, electroclash circles. Fans of present-day electro, EBM, post punk and no wave should definitely check this out as it's the real deal - solidly kicking ass on many of the current crop. This album sits quite perfectly next to the Teutonik Disaster compilation that we recently reviewed as fine historical documents of the early '80s European sounds. May leave you reeling.
Jesse Sanes presents Liebestod as his fully realized Power Electronics project, one that parallels his role as frontman for the nihilist hardcore outfit Hoax. A violent intensity and spilt blood carry over in both projects, even as the vehicles are radically different. It must be noted that Sanes has collaborated with Puce Mary as Fejhed and JH1.FS3, whose two recordings mine a controlled malevolence through synth noise and heavily processed voice. Such is also the strategy for Liebestod, through which Sanes hangs an electric dread upon the voltage controlled blurts, junkyard metal-bashing, and scalding flames of white noise. Leibestod's psychological / conceptual position on Beta Male seems outside the typical poetics of sexual control and/or extremist political chest-thumping, scribing instead an existential crisis with Sanes standing at odds with everything and everybody, including himself. It makes for a brilliant if disturbing album, one that mirrors a similar plight found in Maurizio Bianchi's first fruits in the '80s applied through a brooding regimentation akin to Anenzephalia. As such, this album gets our highest recommendation, settling next to Puce Mary's The Spiral as one of the best noise albums of 2016.
The Swedish composer Mats Lindstrom is the studio director for the storied EMS studios in Stockholm, whose mission for the advancement of electro-acoustic music and sound art began way back in 1964. BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, Brian Lustmord, and Stephen O'Malley all passed through the studios in their respective careers, alongside a plethora of more composerly types who we're not all that familiar with. While the connection was never made all that clear, it was probably during O'Malley's residency at EMS when he first met Lindstrom and became familiar with his work, which is now anthologized for the first time on O'Malley's imprint Ideologic Organ. Lindstrom's aesthetic harkens back to the classic era of musique concrete and post-serialist electronic composition from the '60s (e.g. Pierre Schaefer, Xenakis, Nordheim, etc.), playing with the metaphors of his sounds much more than the semantic detachment that usually embodies such acousmatic practices. Take for example the title track, which must refer to the Russian fighter jet, as the track was commissioned for an aviation museum in St. Petersburg and races forward and backward with jet engine roars, possibly simulated, possibly recorded, all of which is surgically cut with mechanical clank and industrial hum. The two IBM tracks clatter away with the anachronistic sounds of typewriters, rigorously collaged with bizzaro scrapes, gratings, and atonal tactile events more in keeping with the irr. app. (ext.) / Nurse With Wound realm of sonic fuckery. The finale is a demonic tape-piece of continuously ascending violin notes that could practically be a brilliant reworking of the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T soundtrack in the style of Penderecki. Excellent stuff!
One of the rare contemporary bands to be released on the ever exceptional Dark Entries label, typically known for reissues of classic and / or obscure minimal wave and post-punk electronics from the late '70s to mid '80s. But this is an album that's firmly grafted to the aesthetic that Dark Entries has honed through their fine curatorial ear; so much so that if we were told that Linea Aspera were some rare Sheffield band from 1981 featuring an undiscovered Anne Clark on vocals, we wouldn't be surprised one bit. The sequenced electronics, drum machines, and minimalist melodies are ice cold in their production thanks to the engineering prowess of Ryan Ambridge, who taps into the darker synth wrangling of Chris & Cosey, Psyche, Soft Cell, Human League, and even the Eurythmics in an experimental mood. That Eurythmics reference is furthered along by the full-throated vocals of Allison Lewis, whose poetics of despair and sexual miserablism are couched in the industrialist appropriation of neuroscience and various medical pathologies. There's a considerable amount of dark tension between the cold electronics and Lewis' vocals that really makes this record quite special and worthy of being included in the hallowed Dark Entries pantheon. To be completely honest, this is really what Xeno & Oaklander *want* to sound like if either of those Anglophiles could really rise above their well crafted electronic starkness. Kudos, once again to Dark Entries for introducing us to another great minimal wave find!
