The Mayfair Set sound exactly how you would imagine a band made up of members of Blank Dogs and Dum Dum Girls would sound, AWESOME!
Equal parts gloomy retro cold wave and that reverbed sixties girl group sound, two great tastes for sure, the sound washed out and murky, the boy vocals buried beneath angular jangle guitar and simple drumming, the female vox all shimmery in the background on some tracks, way up front in the others, with the boy vox drifting off in the distance, brooding moody verses and soaring choruses, gothy cold wave basslines, lilting and sing songy jangle gives way to driving woozy gloom pop, the guitar lines are spidery and skeletal, the distorted drumming skitters and stumbles, locking into simple propulsive rhythms, holding things together, white the dueling girl / boy vocals drive most of these songs, surrounded by shimmering clouds of glitchy effects, warm whirring keyboards, the sound warm and washed out and dreamy, another one of those records that gets played like crazy every single day. No better recommendation than that! And the fact that's members of Blank Dogs and Dum Dum Girls...
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Looking back at the manic output of Maurizio Bianchi (MB) with dozens of private edition LPs and cassettes from 1979 - 1984, it is arguable that his catalogue of 'pre-apocalyptic' industrialisms is an aural diary of psychological distress on par with someone like Jandek. Bianchi's work reveals the existential crisis of a frustrated nihilist whose explorations of cultural, religious, and semiotic collapse brought him closer to God.
In 1984, Maurizio Bianchi released his last album and dropped out of sight. From what little contact he kept with his musical past, a myth circulated that he became a Jehovah's Witness, which appeared to be an absurd fate for this practitioner of negativity. However, this myth revealed itself as fact when he resurfaced in 1998 to release two ephemeral yet wholly uninteresting new age records filled with gilded spiritual imagery. At this time, Bianchi began remastering his earliest work and reissuing these albums through Alga Marghan. "Archeo MB 2" is the second set of reissues from the MB archives, collected as a 5cd set with the albums "Das Testament," "Endometrio," "Carcinosi," and "The Plain Truth," and "Armaghedon." Where the first set is a violent display of neurotic vibrations and deadly electronics, the second is relatively dreamy, albeit retaining the sonic qualities of erratic vertigo and shadowy hallucinations. His suffocating experiments with primitive synths, delay pedals, turntables, and tape machines collapsed in on themselves with an electrocuted obliteration of sound. Out of the ashes of such early albums as "Symphony for a Genocide" and "Neuro Habitat," Bianchi allowed for a structuralism with tentative rhythms and melodies to rise out of the blackened grit on the work found in "Archeo MB 2." Each of the albums found on this box set are available individually; however, the box set features extra artwork (including a really dorky photograph of Bianchi in a red sweater), and a handful of Bianchi's cryptic music critiques. Of all of the dronescapes, noise attacks, and electronic warbles that Aquarius has lavished with critical hyperbole, MB remains at the top of the list in terms of innovation and actualization of metaphor and intent.
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"The end of parabolic absurdity..." is the final quote from the encyclopaedic set of MB (Maurizio Bianchi) reissues. "Armaghedon" was the soundtrack to a film produced / directed by Bianchi. Although Bianchi released this as one of his private edition LPs, "Armaghedon" found limited distribution; furthermore, the majority of the pressings were destroyed for "obscure reasons," leaving only about 100 copies in existance.
In Bianchi's take on the final epistomological battle of good and evil, the remnant material world is very cold place shivering beneath a thick ever growing chunk of ice with only slivers of heavenly light penetrating the frigid mass. In this metaphoric environment, Bianchi's electronics warble within the multiple delay attacks that dominate his preceeding albums, but with a coloring that resembles a glistening blue / green rather than the coal blacks / greys that came before. "Armaghedon" is also the only album to feature Bianchi's voice and could draw connections to the eerier drone work of Angus MacLise.
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If there is one MB record to own, it's "Carcinosi" - the synthesis of the divebomb synth squallor found on his early work like "Symphony for a Genocide" and the frigid drone exasperation of his finale "Armaghedon." Originally released in 1983 as a private edition of 400 copies, "Carcinosi" is part two of his dyptic of "bionic music" along side "Endometrio." The metaphors of cancer mutating within a technologized body parallel a text in which Bianchi refer to this work as a warning of another Auschwitz. Bianchi's "Carcinosi" masterfully actualizes his grim metaphors with a mesmeric carousel of dark fractures of muted noise and disorienting synthetic pulsations smothered in a heavily satuated wall of delay.
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MB (Maurizio Bianchi) originally released "Das Testament" as a private edition of 300 copies in 1983. Bianchi starts off this album with cold black chops of tape splices and gritty electronic squeals that discharge in a mass of delay. These bleak bursts of noise retain the raw negative energy of MB's first recordings, but gradually an accumulated drone engulfs the primitive musique conrete techniques with an oppressive numbness. Bianchi also included an 30 minute excerpt from his first and only MB concert. With his own abstract verbage, Bianchi describes this album as "knowledge culminating in a deconsecration of germinative interrelation - to remember reddish scientific thaw. External cyclotron frequency is washing the minaturization of wavemeter pestilence." Scientific thaw and wavemeter pestilence, indeed!
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"Endometrio" was originally issued as a private edition of 400 copies in 1983 and presents what MB (Maurizio Bianchi) qualified as "bionic music" which shifted MB further from the contemporary industrial bruitism of SPK and Whitehouse. Though primitive electronics and tape synthesis, MB sets up a metaphoric arena for biological warfare on a microscopic level upon which "Endometrio" bares witness to millions of death rattles from bacteria massacred by viral panzer divisions. To anthropomorphize the basic life of these single-celled bodies is to elicit horrific apocalyptic metaphors, which he elaborated as "volatility of thalassochemistry removal to dishevel the faculty of reason's aggravation." Doom & gloom aside, this is the pinnacle of MB's obsessive mastery of electronic de-composition.
The fifth the series of re-issues of the long out-of-print MB records that appeared with considerable regularity in the early 80s, before MB (aka Maurizio Bianchi) dropped out of the nightmare culture along with Nurse With Wound, Whitehouse, and Coil to become a monk (really!). "Mectpyo Bacterium" is MB's most solid arrangement as his 'protonic' electronic synthesis of shivering noise, decomposing Frankensteinian rhythms, and oppressive drones coalesce into an effectively bleak funeral dirge. Recommended power electronics!
Since around 2004, the Italian industrial composer Maurizio Bianchi has unleashed an impossible stream of recordings, often in collaboration with electronics musicians all over the world but unfortunately with spotty results. There are plenty of reasons why any label and / or artist would jump at the chance to release and / or record something, anything by Mr. Bianchi; and this 10cd boxset of his seminal recordings from the early '80s defines them all. This actually marks the second reissue campaign for these recordings, some of which originally appeared on Sterile Records and Broken Flag; but many of which had been self-published on Bianchi's own imprint. Bianchi - who simply recorded at the time as MB - had infamously been released through William Bennett's Come Organisation, who had recontextualized Bianchi's recordings of grim mechanoid drones with Nazi speeches spliced on top and changed his nom de plume to Leibstandarte SS MB... all without Bianchi's consent. Numerous cassettes, plenty of compilation appearances, and 10 lps marked this very prolific period in the early '80s for Bianchi, whereby he issued forth brutal, hallucinatory blasts of electronic noise and grinding rhythms of hand-cut tape noise and overblown synthetic distortion. These were the blackened, nihilist version of Conrad Schnitzler, Cluster, and Klaus Schulze as filtered through the industrial ethos of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse.
But by 1984, Bianchi just stopped. There were innumerable rumors about his departure from the music community. Some said, he had become a monk. Some said, he was crippled in an accident. But the truth of the matter was that he dedicated himself to his faith as a Jehovah's Witness. His distance only heightened the mythology about this artist and increased the cultural cache of those early recordings. Hence, the necessity for this boxset.
Here, you will find those ten LPs - Symphony For A Genocide, Menses, Neuro Habitat / Moerter Under Uns, Regel, Mectpyo Bakterium, Das Testament, Endometrio, Carcinosi, The Plain Truth, and Armagheddon - each released with plenty of bonus tracks from any number of those various compilation tracks. And for those of you who had picked up the two 5lp anthologies of MB's work on Vinyl On Demand, we don't think there's any overlap between this box set and those collections.
The first records are violent display of neurotic vibrations and deadly electronics, the second is relatively dreamy, albeit retaining the sonic qualities of erratic vertigo and shadowy hallucinations. His suffocating experiments with primitive synths, delay pedals, turntables, and tape machines collapsed in on themselves with an electrocuted obliteration of sound. Out of the ashes of such early albums as Symphony for a Genocide and Neuro Habitat, Bianchi allowed for a structuralism with tentative rhythms and melodies to rise out of the blackened grit on the work found on Endometrio and The Plain Truth. Each of the albums found on this box set are available individually; however, the box set features additional artwork, plenty of bonus tracks not on the original lps (but still the same from the first reissue campaign), and a handful of Bianchi's cryptic music critiques. Of all of the dronescapes, noise attacks, and electronic warbles that Aquarius has lavished with critical hyperbole, MB remains at the top of the list in terms of innovation and actualization of metaphor and intent.
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In the liner notes, a smug Maurizio Bianchi (aka MB) included a quote from Genesis P-Orridge who described MB's early 80's industrial noise records as 'boring, meaningless, pathetic'. I'd agree with MB in claiming that Gen was jealous, as MB was able to construct brutal hallucinatory recordings of electronic noise that offer metaphors of microscopic anyeurisms which collapse the body from within. Bleak chilling drones that are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler's most neurotic, Nurse With Wound's most droning, and Whitehouse's least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with a more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he joined a monastary.
Some of my favourite 'noise' records that have been gratefully reissued, thus sparing me from shelling out the $120.00 that I've seen the vinyl editions of these records going for!
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The third in the series of cd re-issues of MB's (aka Maurizio Bianchi) long out of print albums. MB's sound of endless harsh hypnosis bridges the electronic noodling of Kluster or Conrad Schnitzler with the doom 'n' gloom aesthetics of early 80's industrial culture. In 1982, MB described this album as "the innatural and crude report about the molecular misfortunes of a life close to the bounds ('Neuro Habitat') or the revealed asynchronism of the organized murder ('Morder Unter Uns'). Behind the bloody glass window of decomposing dynamics... it's the setting of the friable pre-apocalyptic fossilization, the supreme lapidation of meanness which creates myth." For such a dense metaphor, MB aptly describes how chilling this album is. Recommended as with all of the 80s MB recordings.
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In the liner notes, a smug Maurizio Bianchi (aka MB) included a quote from Genesis P-Orridge who described MB's early 80's industrial noise records as 'boring, meaningless, pathetic'. I'd agree with MB in claiming that Gen was jealous, as MB was able to construct brutal hallucinatory recordings of electronic noise that offer metaphors of microscopic anyeurisms which collapse the body from within. Bleak chilling drones that are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler's most neurotic, Nurse With Wound's most droning, and Whitehouse's least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with a more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he joined a monastary.
Some of my favourite 'noise' records that have been gratefully reissued, thus sparing me from shelling out the $120.00 that I've seen the vinyl editions of these records going for!
Symphony For A Genocide was the first lp produced by MB / Maurizio Bianchi in 1981 on Sterile Records. Still to this day it is is a landmark of industrial brutality, garnering our praise of "these bleak chilling drones [are] reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler at his most neurotic, Nurse With Wound at their most droning, and Whitehouse at their least annoying." A few years later, Bianchi returned to the source material for that album to construct what became SFAG 81, released on cassette through Broken Flag in 1983. In this radical statement of self-annihilation, Bianchi pushed all of the references of his hallucinatory electronics and existential vacancy to an extreme reductionism. The rhythmic undercarriage of the source material had been replaced by a black hole void with only X-ray emissions of echo and synthetic dissonance escaping the gravitational pull deep into despair. SFAG 81 was composed during the time that we feel to be his strongest period of composition, when he produced the cancerous electronic albums Endometrio and Carsinosi, and began work on the final recordings of his early catalog The Plain Truth and Armaghedon. One of Bianchi's greatest works, available on vinyl for the first time!
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In the liner notes, a smug Maurizio Bianchi (aka MB) included a quote from Genesis P-Orridge who described MB's early 80's industrial noise records as 'boring, meaningless, pathetic'. I'd agree with MB in claiming that Gen was jealous, as MB was able to construct brutal hallucinatory recordings of electronic noise that offer metaphors of microscopic anyeurisms which collapse the body from within. Bleak chilling drones that are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler's most neurotic, Nurse With Wound's most droning, and Whitehouse's least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with a more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he joined a monastary.
Some of my favourite 'noise' records that have been gratefully reissued, thus sparing me from shelling out the $120.00 that I've seen the vinyl editions of these records going for!
The entire MB back catalogue is a daunting encyclopedia of industrial noise, bleak abstraction, and internalized struggles with abjection and salvation. Bianchi has been known to recycle titles for considerably different compositions, with Symphony For A Genocide being truncated for a different work called SFAG. The same goes for Technology, as this was the name of a double cassette originally released in 1981 with several bootlegs to follow until an official 2cd set was made available through At War With False Noise in 2009. Technology X is an entirely different composition, although much of the same electronic gear was obviously used in both sets of recordings (and throughout all of the MB recordings in the early '80s for that matter). Similarly, the track titles are slightly different ("Techno-X" vs. "Techno" and "Logy-X" vs. "Logy"); at the same time, the tracks on Technology X are considerably more caustic than those tracks on the original Technology.
Bianchi has long been an obsessive composer and documentarian of his work, which emerged in birth pangs of Industrial Culture in 1980 through the first of many self-released cassettes. His neurotic drones, turgid noises, and bleak electronics recognized influences from the Kraut-electron-magicians of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream; but Bianchi was far more interested in revealing his own theories on the disintegration of the human mind, body, and soul through the encroachment of technological and informational warfare. Technology X, like the aforementioned SFAG album, is a very bleak undertaking of abstracted blorping electronics distorted and mangled through a number of effects giving the impression of a scorched battlefield rumbling with numerous panzer divisions, raked machine-gun fire, and various experimental weapons decimating whoever might be unfortunate enough not to have died in the first wave of dive-bombs and ballistic missiles. His compositions are known for their many turns and twists, moving from mind-wiping lazer shots to engine-revving accelerations of noise and into weirdly militant musical moments of atonal stabs on his synthesizer. It's altogether an exhilarating and claustrophobic recording; and one that's limited to a little over 200 copies. The cassette also comes with an MB / Technology X button!
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Originally released in 1983 on Broken Flag (the malignant UK label which spawned Skullflower and Ramleh), "The Plain Truth" distances itself considerably from MB's preceeding electroshock bricolages, coming closest to the "Forbidden Planet" aesthetic of poetically bleak electronics. If one were to ask me to bet on when Maurzio Bianchi (MB) came to God, I'd put $100 on this record. Aside from the giveaway inscription "This record is dedicated to all the redeemed people," "The Plain Truth" has dropped the decomposition metaphors of sound / body from Bianchi's arsenal of sound and has left behind a swirling miasma of cosmic synth drones that one might find in Conrad Schnitzler's most mindwarping psychedelectronics. Regardless of the status of Bianchi's belief at the time of this recording, "The Plain Truth" is a fabulous piece of kaleidoscopic darkness.
Weltanschauung was first released by William Bennett's Come Organisation in 1982, with Bennett changing MB's nom de plume to Leibstandarte SS MB. These recordings have long been controversial, given that one of the tracks overlayed Third Reich speeches on top of Bianchi's wall of noise, although both Bennett and Bianchi denied responsibility for having done so. Bianchi's frigid electronic orchestrations drip with sinister echoes of bone-chilling vibrations, throbbing rhythms, deranged anti-melodies, and horrifying atmospheres. For this reissue on Rotorelief, Bianchi has replaced the offending track from the Come Organisation original with the thoroughly grim track "Plutometrio" recorded during the same sessions, sans the Nazi speechifying. Such additions were unnecessary in the first place (whoever was to blame), and Weltanschauung is much better off without them.
The mythology of Maurizio Bianchi / MB has been well documented here at Aquarius; as we have long been spellbound by many of his classic industrial productions. He began experimenting with electronics, noise, and 'tape decomposition' in the late '70s, recording at a feverish pace over a five year period. He released a handful of records on Sterile, Broken Flag, and Come Organisation, with a few albums being self-financed private pressings. All of these albums quickly went out of print, not only due to the quality of the recordings, but because of his mysterious disappearance from the music scene, spawning a number of implausible legends. In the late '90s, the Italian avant-garde label Alga Marghen embarked on a reissue campaign of MB's classic albums. Those 10 discs, too, went out print leading to yet another campaign of Bianchi's earliest work. Carcinosi was one of those 10 Alga Marghen albums, and has now gotten the reissue treatment from Menstrual Recordings.
If there is one MB record to own, it's Carcinosi - the existentially bleak synthesis of the divebomb synth squalor found on his early work like Symphony for a Genocide and the frigid drone exasperation of his finale Armaghedon. Originally released in 1983 as a private edition of 400 copies, Carcinosi is part two of his dyptic of 'bionic music' alongside Endometrio. The metaphors of cancer mutating within a technologized body parallel a text in which Bianchi refers to this work as a warning of another Auschwitz. Bianchi's Carcinosi masterfully actualizes his grim metaphors with a mesmeric carousel of dark fractures, muted noise and disorienting synthetic pulsations smothered in a heavily saturated wall of delay. Again just 400 copies of this are around, with an exact reproduction of the original artwork with the album itself pressed on clear vinyl.
Maurizio Bianchi is one the pioneers of Italian Industrial music, transforming the psychedelic electronics of the likes of Conrad Schniztler, Cluster, Eno, Neu!, etc. into a chilling, dark theater of cancerous sounds that had become the template for the countless dark ambient / industrialists who followed. His story is a peculiar one, as he was incessantly productive throughout the late '70s and early '80s until he unexpectedly stopped in 1984. This musical cessation served to heighten the mystique around the man, as rumors and falsehoods swirled around his legacy, followed by numerous bootleg tapes and LPs of his rarities. Mectpyo Bakterium was an album originally released on lp back in 1982 on the Mnemonists' imprint DYS out of Colorado, and then later in 1998 on cd through the Alga Marghen reissue campaign of his major records. And here is the first repress of the vinyl which goes for a very pretty penny on the collector's market.
Mectpyo Bakterium is a bleak piece of electronic expressionism, with shivering tones and slashing bursts of clinical noise meandering through minefields of grim atmospheres. As it was originally released on LP, the two main tracks of this album are each side-long excursions that mutate and fold on top of themselves, beginning at very dark, very grim launching points and ending up in an entirely different mindframe, having rotated through dour melodies, squalid noises, funeral drum machine marches, and further bleak electronics. It makes sense for this to be a worthy contemporary of TG, Cabaret Voltaire, and Whitehouse! This officially sanctioned lp is limited to 275 copies in a nearly exact reproduction of the original.
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Produced at tail end of 1981 and self-released in the beginning of the following year, Menses marked the second proper piece of vinyl for MB following his highly acclaimed album Symphony For A Genocide on Sterile. At this time, Bianchi was in the throes of a manic production schedule, producing close to 30 records from 1979 to 1984 with the dozen or so slabs of vinyl representing some of the most visionary examples of power-electronics and hyper-minimal industrialized torpor from that period. Here on Menses, factory floor rhythms are cobbled together from primitive drum machines marching through a set of martial, if tinny beats and pangs, setting the foundation to Menses' side-long track "Yra." Keeping the whole structure of the piece "decomposed" and / or wholly variable, Bianchi laces this black-tunnel-vision-quest with dive-bomb electronic squalls descending onto his horror-laden spectral drones. It's wholly in keeping with Bianchi's unrepentant obsession with the psychic / psychological collapse of the self through the symbolism of sexual deviance, totalitarian force, technological advances, and the horrors of genocide. The flipside "Scent" is even more unhinged, settling on frequencies of sharp abrasiveness manifested in another time and another place through Whitehouse's Wasp synths. The rhythm box underbelly is done away with in favor of a vertiginous network of crushed muscle tissue and misfiring nerve endings, all of which is cycling through a corroded tape-delay machine of sorts. This marks the fourth pressing of this on vinyl, and in keeping with the previous iterations, it's incredibly limited. Something around 200 copies or so. Do note that some of the sleeves had their corners bent upon arrival from Italy.
Hospital Recordings has just reissued the first proper M.B. album, which first came out on Sterile Records in 1981 and then again on CD on Alga Marghen in the mid '90s. They've redone the design, making it look more stripped down, lo-fi and punk rock with gritty scans of the Alga Marghen artwork and old school cut and paste liner notes (that unfortunately seem to be missing some of the original notes), but don't let the makeover fool you, this is still some of the most abject and brilliantly bleak dronemusic ever.
Symphony For A Genocide wasn't the first recording for the Italian Industrialist, as he did have some earlier recordings as Sacher-Pelz and the infamous Leibstandarte SS MB albums (on which Whitehouse's William Bennett dubbed various Nazi speeches on top of Bianchi's music without Bianchi's permission). Bianchi's work does come out of a transgressive mindset; but one that is uniformly misanthropic, nihilistic, and utterly black. On this album, MB construct brutal, hallucinatory blasts of electronic noise and grinding rhythms of hand-cut tape noise and overblown synthetic distortion. These, bleak chilling drones are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler at his most neurotic, Nurse With Wound at their most droning, and Whitehouse at their least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he declared himself a Jehovah's Witness and ceased making music until recently when he finally returned to the blackened ambience of old.
It should also be noted that the recordings of Symphony For A Genocide are drastically different from another set of recordings called SFAG (Symphony For A Genocide), which has also gotten the reissue treatment twice, adding extra confusion into the mix.
Teban Slide Art collects a body of work from the industrial pioneer Maurizio Bianchi that has long been a point of controversy in the history of noise music. At the very beginning of his career, Bianchi had 'signed' a contract with Whitehouse's William Bennett for the release of two albums on Bennett's Come Organisation label. There were rumors that Bennett and Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound drafted a completely daft contract that assumed all of the rights to Bianchi's work, which Bianchi signed. Here is where the story splits, as Bianchi claimed that he never consented to the additional overlay of Third Reich speeches found on these recordings, nor to rechristening of his nom de plume from MB to Leibstandarte SS MB; where Bennett asserts that the albums were released as Bianchi intended, and his latent religious conversion a few years later around 1984 sparked his discontent. Regardless of which of these stories is the actual truth, those early Leibstandarte SS MB albums quickly became the stuff of legend and myth, with very few ever actually hearing any of those recordings. What prompted Bianchi to agree to reissue these recordings is also a bit of mystery, but here they are - Triumph Of The Will and Weltanschauung (the two Come Organisation albums) and Lebensraum (an unreleased album that was unofficially issued as a cassette by Murder Release). The cancerous sounds that Bianchi produced are sinister echoes of bone-chilling vibrations, throbbing rhythms, deranged anti-melodies, and horrifying atmospheres that drip through Bianchi's frigid electronics which are not too far from the material he produced on albums like Menses and Neuro Habitat around the same time. Not all of the tracks are laced with Nazi speeches, but when they are, the mastering pushes Bianchi's cold synth-noise into the background. All this said, it is impossible to escape the context of those speeches; but the intent of lacing these two becomes unclear. Is this the simulacrum approach to the modern society as being so corrupt that the crimes of the Third Reich are still within the capacity of the human condition? Or was this something akin to a very British form of black humor (especially if this was in fact Bennett adding the speeches later) in poking fun at all of the 'transgressive' references that punk and industrial culture were appropriating? The verdict is still out. Limited to 413 copies.
In 1984, Maurizio Bianchi called it quits for the first time, as the pioneer of Italian Industrial music had found himself and his work at odds with his spiritual beliefs, opting for communion with the divine instead of wallowing in the abjection of humanity. Some 15 years later, he started making music again in a flurry of collaborations and micro-edition releases only to stop rather suddenly in 2009. Bianchi's final official album of the first (and undeniably best) phase was the self-released Armaghedon - a soundtrack to an unfinished film that would have been really interesting to have seen. Unfortunately, Bianchi destroyed more than half of the pressing of Armaghedon, with the film probably suffering the same fate. Telemediggo would have been the follow-up to Armaghedon, and is a continuation of the free-floating almost psychedelic dronework that shows a considerable amount of maturity of Bianchi's compositional prowess. Gone are the almost meandering attempts at Frankensteinian synth-melody and gone are the panzer division rhythms found on albums like Symphony For A Genocide and Menses. Instead, the gasping environments from Bianchi's final period could be considered placid in comparison to his more suffocating works, as if he's allowing for slivers of light to seep through the vast darkness. A heavy piece of refined minimalism! We should note that we've listed this on cd (accompanied with a bonus cd-r entitled Bacterhabitat of unfinished material from 1983 or thereabouts), but this is first time these recordings have been on vinyl. Super limited pressing of just 100 copies. Restocks are unlikely.
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Following the release of the Teban Slide Art collection of Maurizio Bianchi material that dates back to early 1981 of the infamous Leibstandarte SS MB recordings released on William Bennett's Come Organisation, we find ourselves at the end of 1984 with Telemediggo. Bianchi's final official album was the self-released Armaghedon - a soundtrack to an unfinished film that would have been really interesting to have seen. Unfortunately, Bianchi destroyed more than half of the pressing of Armaghedon, with the film probably suffering the same fate. All of this was spurned by his religious conversion, becoming a Jehovah's Witness, causing him to eschew many of the ties he made with the industrial / experimental community for well over a decade. Telemediggo would have been the follow-up to Armaghedon, and is a continuation of the free-floating almost psychedelic dronework that shows a considerable amount of maturity of Bianchi's compositional prowess. Gone are the almost meandering attempts at melody and gone are the panzer division rhythms found on albums like Symphony For A Genocide. Instead, the gasping environments from Bianchi's final period could be considered placid in comparison to his more suffocating works, as if he's allowing for slivers of light to seep through the vast darkness. Don't worry, Telemediggo is a heavy piece of refined minimalism! There were a handful of private issue cassettes of this album that made the rounds, eventually getting bootlegged under the title "Extreme Man 2" in 1990. Another bootleg made the rounds of some sketches that Bianchi was working on, and that had the title "Extreme Man 1." This cassette is reprised as the second disc here, rechristened as Baterhabitat. For some reason, this second disc is a professionally duplicated cd-r, where the disc of Telemediggo is a properly replicated cd. Hmm. These recordings are considerably rougher than Telemediggo and do expose some of Bianchi's process, as he began to layer sympathetic synth sounds that he describes as a "mixture of bacteriological wall of noise." He indicates that the recordings date back to 1982, but seem to have been left unfinished. Packaged in a really cool metal box that solves the problem of those Chain Reaction metal boxes with a soft-felt case that holds both discs. Limited to 208 copies.
You ever have that problem where you're in an internet sex chat room, and you make a date with some pervy girl for a phone sex session, and then when you call her up it's actually some jerk with a sampler loaded with a sexy female voice telling you things
A few of the callers figure it out, and then it gets even more pathetic as they continue to masturbate, being such geeks that they're turned on by the technical details of the joke (one guy asks, excitedly, about if the sampler is triggered by keyboard or mouse). But most of the guys are so clueless and horny that they're completely unfazed by Kathy's bizarre comments ("I think you might be racist", "I want to have your retarded babies", "I've got a pickle in my ass") and limited vocabulary (she says "Yesssss!" the same way every time), or her deafeningly noisy, Merzbow-level obviously-looped screams of orgasmic ecstasy. We could go on, but we don't want to reveal too much. Just get this, it's the best crank call disc we've heard in a long time. You'll be playing it for everyone you know, except maybe your mom. Absurdly funny.
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From the same label that brought us the truly disturbing Conet Project comes Stephen P. McGreevy's VLF recordings. With a knowledge of basic radio telescopics, a few choice geographical / atmospheric anomalies, and a good ear, McGreevy records the earth's electromagnetic signature generated through such phenomenon as the Alaskan Northern Lights. Delicate whistles streak over loud crackles, that bring to mind Id Battery's fascination with recorded fire, or John Duncan's shortwave radio experiments. Word of caution, one of our faithful customers complained that this created rather deleterious psychosomatic effects.
How long would last if your roommate screamed his dreams out loud every night? Would you have the foresight to capture these disturbances on tape? Lucky for us back in the 1960's Dion McGregor's roommate stuck it out long enough to provide us with this aural document of one man's nocturnal pain and pleasure. Dion's dreams range from queeny dress up parties to drooling descriptions of large breasted women and cunnilingus contests. Equally disturbing as it is riveting.
Everybody's favorite sleeptalker is back and we're really fucking excited! Dreams Again, the previous release on Tzadik, is one of our most loved and consistently selling "spoken word" CDs, and with reason. Most of us who talk in our sleep tend to say maybe a couple words or phrases at best, often mumbled so quietly that it's hard to even catch the words they're saying -- if you even happen to be awake and close enough to hear it. Well imagine someone that regularly, throughout his entire life, recited entire dreams in a clear voice. And imagine every one of those dreams being the most ridiculous and surreal dreams imaginable. That's Dion McGregor. The story goes that in 1961 Dion McGregor -- a born again freeloader, chronic couch-surfer and quasi-successful song writer -- was discovered to be a verbose sleeptalker by the friend whose house he was currently crashing at. The friend, a director of porn films, attempted to jot down the dreams, but McGregor's speech was just too fast. With some mild coercion (free rent must have been involved) a mutual friend and song writer, Michael Barr, agreed to allow McGregor to sleep at his apartment in return for being allowed to record his dreams. Barr set up a microphone at the head of Dion's bed and for seven years recorded everything he could. Apparently Dion's vocalizations tended to begin just before waking in the morning, so there was a bit of predictability they could count on. Playing the tapes to the right people at the right time eventually resulted in an LP released on Decca in 1964 entitled the Dream World of Dion McGregor (and in 1999 Tzadik released a cd of additional material also recorded by Barr). While there must be enough tapes of McGregor's ramblings to cover several more volumes (Barr claims to have recorded upwards of 500 dreams), we'll have to settle for these 80 more minutes for the time being. Listening to these bizarre tales it's hard to believe that these are coming from a man who's genuinely asleep. The way McGregor recites them sounds almost conversational, describing the events he's undergoing. At the same time Mcgregor is both the director of his dreams: telling us to all get ready for the scavenger hunt (reciting off a myriad of strange objects that must be located), but also a participant: confessing to us that he'll never be able to locate said objects in such short time. And, it must be added, he almost invariably ends each transmission with horrified screaming. No matter how mild or whimsical a dream may be when it starts, it always seems to end in either tragedy or just plain shrieking madness. But the theory that McGregor made up and performed these monologues, fully conscious, is even harder to imagine. He would have had to have been quite a writer and a performer to achieve such results, and to allow it to remain archived in obscuity for eternity. No matter, even if these were faked they still add up to an impressive collection of the most fucked up, hilarious and down right amazing monologues this side of Kenneth Patchen. An absolute must for all lovers of the more disturbing aspects of the human psyche!
Yes, it's another solo album from Emeralds' guitarist Mark McGuire, and yes, it's totally awesome. Off In The Distance was originally a cassette that came out briefly back in 2008, but had been so beloved by the dudes who put out the tape that vinyl became a necessity. And it's a perfect format for McGuire's kosmische zoner jams, with all his continued allusions to Ash Ra Tempel, Gunter Schickert, Michael Rother, Popul Vuh, and Achim Reichel that stretch into grand movements of psychedelic melancholy. Slow-motion, aquatic bubblings of analog synths percolate upon an undulating bed of guitar drones muffling the growls from a distortion box. All the while, McGuire layers his signature elliptical guitar arpeggiated melodies that snap into locked grooves only to mutate effortlessly into doubles and triples of themselves, resulting in the passages of spaceship lift-off on a exploratory mission towards the heart of glowing nebulae. Towards the end of the first side, McGuire transitions into a particularly maudlin riff of intertwined and overlaid guitars, making some of us here think back to that incredible Dreamies album of symphonic psychedelic mope. Off In The Distance strikes that balance found in so much of the Emeralds / McGuire axis of music making, that of the inner-cosmonaut in pursuit of transcendence and/or tranquilization on one hand, and on the other, he channels something profoundly sad as McGuire's aware that such pursuits can only be fleeting at best. Undoubtedly beautiful stuff from McGuire. Limited to 500 copies.
There are those who might have doubts about an ACOUSTIC guitar record from cosmic zoner Mark McGuire, who has been honing his Achim Reichel / Gunter Schickert guitar arpeggiations in the soon to be legendary trio Emeralds. You might say to yourself, when has Emeralds ever used an acoustic guitar? Can he really play without tons of tripped out effects? Is he good enough without a battery of synths supporting him? Any and all doubts should be dispelled in listening to this record. Yeah, this is really pretty special. McGuire offers five lengthy pieces of psychedelic folk via an acoustic guitar, probably buttressed by a loop station on a few passages during these pieces. The brightly rendered guitar chiming from McGuire's acoustic guitar noticeably detours from the rounded tonal arcs of Emeralds psych-drone workouts; but the rhythmic locomotive aspects from some of the later Emeralds recordings are prominent throughout this album. The nearly sidelong "Burning Leaves" centers upon a rich and warmly clad elliptical strum that spins in a duet around some lovely melodic notes dotting about. As hypnotic as the piece is, it's also downright playful. Other tracks like "At First Sight" and especially "Second Thoughts" have much more of a downer, maudlin vibe that spills through the almost raga hypnosis of McGuire's fingerpicking. Great stuff that would certainly appeal to fans of James Blackshaw, Six Organs, and maybe even Vini Riley. Dare it be said, but had this been released sometime in 1970, this would probably have landed on Takoma!
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Of the seemingly hundreds and hundreds of Record Store Day releases, we figured that probably most folks were gonna be dying for that Flaming Lips collaborative double lp (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), but we found ourselves being way more excited about the Medicine box, a massive 5 lp set collecting the first two albums (as well as an ep and TONS of extras) from this legendary L.A. shoegaze / dreampop outift. One of the few American bands to be on the Creation label, Medicine spent the early nineties crafting some of the most glorious and gloriously blissed out experimental psychedelic shoegaze pop EVER. Their sound simultaneously heavy and tripped out, experimental and impossibly catchy, the guitars thick and lush and layered, soaring and so gloriously melodic, like a soft focus My Bloody Valentine, the vocals ethereal and washed out, definitely of the same era as Smashing Pumpkins, but where the Pumpkins had their sights set on arenas and mainstream acceptance, Medicine seemed to spurn such things, taking perfectly perfect pop songs, and pulling them apart, stretching out two minute gems into six minute psychedelic blowouts, their music as much about texture and arrangements, experimentation and exploration as songcraft. But excelling at both in a way few have since. Hearing this stuff now, it sounds as fresh as ever, and groups like M83, A Place To Bury Strangers, Alcest, Health, Serena-Maneesh, Jesu, Phoenix, and all the rest, most definitely owe Medicine royalties big time. And heck if that list looks like your record collection, and for some reason you DON'T have these Medicine records, now's the time to right that wrong.
We could go through both 1992's Shot Forth Self Living and 1993's The Buried Life, and describe our favorite tracks, but we'd most likely end up describing every single track. Even now, we don't hear a weak track in the bunch, and what sounds cool and strange and experimental now, must have sounded revolutionary and downright insane in the early nineties, especially for a major label band, and it just may have been what kept Medicine from achieving Pumpkins like fame, although we like to think it was cuz they just didn't give a fuck, and refused to play the game, and instead concerned themselves with making some of the weirdest, coolest, most tripped out pop music they could conjure up. Which is exactly what they did.
This boxset contains super deluxe double lp versions of both Shot Forth Self Living and The Buried Life, each record expanded with tones of bonus tracks, B-sides and demos, also included is the Sounds Of Medicine EP from 1994, here with two live bonus tracks not included on the original, there's also a pin and a photo, as well as a live 90 minute cassette called Always Starting To Stop, a collection of live recordings captured between 1992-1994 at various shows in the US and the UK, all housed in a super swank printed black and red box. This was a Record Store Day release, and was thus EXTREMELY limited, and is in fact already out of print. We have just FOUR copies of this box remaining, and once those are gone, they are gone for good!
Shot Forth Self Living was the 1992 debut from this legendary LA shoegaze / dreampop outfit, and was recently included in a massive, super limited 5lp boxset collecting Medicine's first two albums (as well as an ep and TONS of extras) that came out for Record Store Day 2012, but has now also thankfully been released on its own, as a deluxe double cd, with a whole mess of bonus tracks and rarities.
One of the few American bands to be on the Creation label, Medicine spent the early nineties crafting some of the most glorious and gloriously blissed out experimental psychedelic shoegaze pop EVER. Their sound simultaneously heavy and tripped out, experimental and impossibly catchy, the guitars thick and lush and layered, soaring and so gloriously melodic, like a soft focus My Bloody Valentine, the vocals ethereal and washed out, definitely of the same era as Smashing Pumpkins, but where the Pumpkins had their sights set on arenas and mainstream acceptance, Medicine seemed to spurn such things, taking perfectly perfect pop songs, and pulling them apart, stretching out two minute gems into six minute psychedelic blowouts, their music as much about texture and arrangements, experimentation and exploration as songcraft. But excelling at both in a way few have since. Fans of experimental pop groups like Teenage Filmstars, Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Bark Psychosis and the like will definitely fall in love, if they weren't already. Hearing this stuff now, it sounds as fresh as ever, and groups like M83, A Place To Bury Strangers, Alcest, Health, Serena-Maneesh, Jesu, Phoenix, and all the rest, most definitely owe Medicine royalties big time. And heck if that list looks like your record collection, and for some reason you DON'T have these Medicine records, now's the time to right that wrong.
We could go through both 1992's Shot Forth Self Living and 1993's The Buried Life, and describe our favorite tracks, but we'd most likely end up describing every single track. Even now, we don't hear a weak track in the bunch, and what sounds cool and strange and experimental now, must have sounded revolutionary and downright insane in the early nineties, especially for a major label band, and it just may have been what kept Medicine from achieving Pumpkins like fame, although we like to think it was cuz they just didn't give a fuck, and refused to play the game, and instead concerned themselves with making some of the weirdest, coolest, most tripped out pop music they could conjure up. Which is exactly what they did.
The Swiss electro-acoustic tactician Francisco Meirino has proven a deft hand in cajoling caustic jolts of static and searing chunks of noises from electro-magnetic sources, growing leaps and bounds from his earliest recordings as Phroq to the intensely dynamic output he's been steadily releasing under his own name over the past couple of years. This album's title refers to the UPIC system developed by Xenakis as a means of drawing on a digitizing tablet which provides vector coordinates to a program controlling particular sound sources, which for Meirino's purposes include snow falling, bones cracking, magnetic field disturbances, and insect noises. As interesting as Xenakis' UPIC system is, it's reassuring that Meirino treats the device as just another tool in his arsenal to direct his own aesthetic and not let the tool itself speak any louder than necessary. Radioactive streams of static electricity and piercing sinewaves ground the scattered tactile events which at times sound more like resonant gongs and small scraps of metal whose trailing decay undulates in rippling patterns that parallel Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie. Throughout the 37 minute piece, Meirino returns to the densely phased, atonal concoctions of sinewaves and static that accelerate and deflate out of pockets of agitated acoustically sourced sources. Where those cracking bones are in the mix is anybody's guess, as he adheres a sharply toxic aura to all of his sounds. Like Dave Phillips and G*Park, he's at the vanguard of contemporary Swiss electro-acoustic malevolence. Limited to 350 copies.
EVP research is commonplace within the catalog of Firework Editions, a Swedish label run in part by the conceptual artist Leif Elggren. One of Elggren's more infamous projects is the Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland which occupies a liminal political space between the boundaries of countries; but within the magisterial constitution, Elgaland-Vargaland annexes the psychic realm of dreams and even goes so far as to abolish death. With this proclamation, the kingdom offers citizenship to ghosts, spirits, and apparitions; and seeks communion with such entities through EVP - Electronic Voice Phenomenon - whereby voices of unknown origin mysteriously appear on the electronic mediums of tape, radio, and digital recorders. EVP researchers like Chicago's Michael Esposito claim these voices to originate from spirits beyond the grave; and there's quite of lot of late night entertainment coming from their spooky if questionable paranormal research. Esposito seems to hold more of a metaphysical and poetic agenda in his work, by reaching out to the sound art community as a crucible for his admittedly unnerving recordings. He's collaborated with the aforementioned Elggren, fellow Elgaland-Vargaland cohort CM von Hausswolff, John Duncan, FM Einheint, and now Francisco Meirino.
Esposito's role in this collaboration with the electro-acoustic artist Francisco Meirino is that of a taxonomist, with Meirino doing most of the heavy lifting on the album. Meirino made a series of field recordings in a former school of anatomy in his native Switzerland; and upon hearing something odd in the recordings, he passed everything onto Esposito, who in turn discovered over 30 incidents of EVP in Meirino's original recordings. Those discovered events became the inspiration and source material for Meirino's composition which blisters with static bursts of noise, caustic flares of electricity, and hissing fields of magnetic disturbances. Amidst these jarring events (which come together as a something not dissimilar to the Hafler Trio, Joe Colley, or G*Park), Meirino cycles through the EVP material in repetitive phrases. It's still not all that easy to hear what Esposito claims to be in these recordings, but the mechanoid repetitions lend to a very cold and disembodied aesthetic which couples perfectly with Meirino's splinterings of electro-acoustic sound. Esposito may have been the inspiration for the album; but it's Meirino who makes it all sound so damn good.
Further down the rabbit hole goes Dan Melchior! Slow Down Tiger is the latest sonic adventure of continuously deconstructed pop for the occasional collaborator with the beloved chanteuse Holly Golightly. That said, for those looking to his lo-fi garage pop quirks, Melchior does have an album on Castle Face due out in the summer of 2014; but we gotta say that he can continue to produce these long-form weirdo collages for as long as he wants! "Tongues" rolls out with an eerie, hypnotic sitar-n-electronics loop that grounds a series of media samples / spoken word snippets from a variety of sources. The fine people down at the Starlight Furniture Company (you should really see their storefront on Mission Street in San Francisco, they really DO sell furniture! really cheap stuff, too!) have mapped out many of the sources including BBC broadcasts about poll tax riots in the UK less than three decades ago, as well as Russian and Chilean poets, obscure film clips, and some cultural lamp-lighters who shine their philosophies of curmudgeonliness and traditional lore on those who care to listen. As Melchior cuts the power on the tape loop machine, a ghostly guitar drift trickles through the shadows, dripping in equal parts with maudlin syrupiness, inky depression, and overdriven spring reverb. The vocal readymades continues to dot this landscape of guitar dronescape as dreamy allusions to those Delia Derbyshire dream-reciting experiments from the early '60s or the delightfully subversive tract of daytime soap collaged by Daniel Steven Crafts some 30 years ago. The flipside "Hospital Poem" is a desolate piece of lo-fi minimalism for chord organ and electronics, evolving into a heartbreaking, loner meditation that in all likelihood takes up the theme of Melchior's wife's cancer and her ongoing struggle with the disease. Great. Great. Great.
Daniel Menche's "Crawling Towards The Sun" catches the reclusive noise artist in transition from the intense furnace-burn of albums like "Screaming Caress" to something much closer to a soft focus haziness to his drone work. Out of his earlier abject, pseudo-holocaust references, Menche has attained a majestic darkness to his sounds putting Menche on par with the latest work from such contemporaries as Lustmord and the Hafler Trio.
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The infernal sounds of low end rumbling, creaking pipes, and the variable noise of heat induced stress on metal continue to emanate from Daniel Menche's smoldering electroacoustic albums, yet here on "Field Of Skin," the source material is not from the furnace, and actually was culled from a Menche amplifying the sounds of his own body. With both sonic references to intense heat and to the flesh, Menche conjures some ghastly metaphors on this highly effective low end noise / drone album.
A few years back, Daniel Menche recordings occupied a brutalist space, where tortured wheezes of somatic activities adjoined harsh textures of rough stones upon strained glass in the production of thick slabs of smoldering noise. Yet, Menche has recently emerged from an extended sabbatical, to showcase the softening of his craggy, bleak attitudes with an equally powerful sound that
With the two preceding recordings "Crawling Toward The Sun" and "October's Larynx," the ultra-physicality of Portland based sound artist Daniel Menche noticeably waned in favor of a more Zen approach in meditative awe of the drone supreme. "The Face Of Vehemence" is something of a return to those more physical sounds with an emphasis on densely textured noises passing through the stereo field. For this album, Menche took as an inspiration "Sun and Steel" -- a book by Japanese writer Yukio Mishma, whose partially autobiographical tales are noted by a preoccupation with the body, its beauty, and its degeneration. The themes of a majestic beauty and a putrescent abjection have always run through the work of Menche, typically swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other. "The Face Of Vehemence" is a rare example for the artist working with both extremes at the same time mostly by exposing an overwhelming beauty with the archetypes of noise. Menche opens this album with a sustained discordant cluster of notes from a harmonium, conjuring a similar transcendent abrasion found in those epic Hermann Nitsch "Harmoniumwerk" albums. Throughout the album, Menche mars his thick drones with processed field recordings, whereby bristling electricity transmits from a chorus of crickets and grumbling frogs pronounce menacing bellowings. The manifestations of the sublime should always strive for grand metaphors, and "The Face Of Vehemence" succeeds in rendering those metaphors undeniably audible.
Kiyoshi Mizutani began his career working in Merzbow (when Merzbow wasn't just Masami Akita alone). After parting ways with Akita in the late '80s or so, Mizutani released a number of solo recordings, most recently focusing on field recordings. His first foray in his search for natural sounds was the less than perfect Bird Songs, but since then Mizutani has blossomed into an exceptional contextualist of found sounds. Garden is his collaboration with Portland noise veteran Daniel Menche, who has been struggling for several years now to calm his work, but can't quite seem to shake his preternatural talents for explosive noise. On this recording, Menche handled all of the low frequencies, while Mizutani was responsible for all of the high frequencies. The source material was a finely captured field recording of Japanese locusts and crickets, presumably from the Mizutani archives. The slow organic chorus of those insects starts out with a very hypnotic, natural introduction; but Mizutani offers small clues to his manipulation by first repeating the choral phrases which would never be so precise in a natural setting, and later by filtering out everything but the timbral roots. Mizutani's gradual shift from these environmental sounds to almost mechanical ones is particularly unsettling, especially in communion with Menche's ominous bass plod which slowly emerges over the course of this recording. Within this metamorphosis of sound, Mizutani and Menche rewrite insect languages as metallic, inorganic, and alien ones where apocalyptic implications abound. Really gorgeous. Released on Randy Yau's immaculately designed Auscultare label.
Ohmigod. The Merzbox. It's finally here. For real. The ultimate artifact of Japanese noise music. 50 cds. Yes 50 cds! A weighty book. A metal medallion. A t-shirt (xl). A silkscreened poster. Stickers. All housed in a softpack case that's a little smaller than your average briefcase.
We've left the book intact in its hermetic (shrinkwrapped) seal, but unzipped (literally) the container which holds the cds. We'll trust that noble publication The Wire with their analysis of the book as an exceptionally researched and interesting document. I (AQ's Jim) intend on embarking on what could be a stupid project. Each day I work, I will subject myself (and AQ's beloved customers) to one of the Merzbox's discs -- that is, until we sell the stock we have (only 2!), or I decide I really need to own it, or I go insane, or some combination of all of the above.
For those of you not familiar with Merzbow (not that you're going to be too likely to purchase this if you're not!), this is the noise project led by Japan's Masami Akita working at times with Reiko A (who I believe is his wife) and a few other cohorts. If you recall your art history, Kurt Schwitters began a project in the 1930s of constructed the Merzbau -- a house which was shaped, dissolved, and built out of junk. Akita's project of a similar name take the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum that has warranted this 50 cd collection.
Disc One starts off with cable buzz that could explode at any moment but doesn't. With everything from Merzbow that I've heard being so abrasive, mind-erasing, and abusive, I was pleased to see that it didn't explode. Rather, Merzbow takes a direction you'd more expect from Sun City Girls or the No Neck Blues Band with what sounds like banjo pluckery and tin cup percussive rhythms.
Disc Two. Remember the guy from Police Academy who vocally emulated R2-D2, airplanes, and coffee machines? Well, Merzbow does that too, as this disc is a complex display of various squiggles that probably don't have the comedic definitions that I got from it. Buried underneath the varied knob twiddled squeals and high-end vibrations is a noxious rumble, making this one quite a bit noisier than the last.
Disc Three. This is the problem with this set (aside from the price), I dropped in, by mistake, Disc Forty-Seven, thinking it was Disc Three. 47 sounded really groovy, sorta like Alec Empire's drum machines getting some terminal abuse. But I'm on Disc Three, which is much quieter affair, with a looping sample of distorted flute (?) in the background, with Akita scraping two pieces of metal together with restraint (!). Then there's a kazoo and amplifier piece which sounded a lot like Gerogerigegege (the noise band fronted by a masturbating 50 year old accountant). They make me laugh a lot. Regardless, it scares me how much I like this piece.
And there's 47 more discs to explore! One man's world of noise/music. The Merzbox, ridiculous yes, but incredible also. Itself a work of (conceptual) art, lovely (and mind boggling) to behold. Buy now, or cry later -- needless to say, as we only have 2, and it's a limited edition, as if you doubted that!
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What a mouthful! Metgumbnerbone was an obscure post-industrial / drone-improv project that centered around the collaboration between Richard & Philip Rupenus (better known as The New Blockaders, and often Organum partners), John Mylotte, and Sean Breadin (who with Richard Rupenus formed the oblique ritual project Masstishaddhu). From what little information is available about the group, Metgumbnerbone only had a couple releases back in the mid '80s with "Ligeliahorn" being the only recording to get beyond the short run productions of cassette culture with a vinyl release on the now defunct A Mission records. As with all of the Metgumbnerbone recordings, "Ligeliahorn" was recorded entirely in the subterranean (and potentially hazardous) confines of an abandoned factory in Newcastle, England. The collective used the ductwork of the factory and whatever else was laying around as readymade percussive and wind instruments, creating sustained rythmic clatter and acoustic dronescrapes which fluctated into recognizable cyclical patterns and out towards sparse pipe fights. Metgumbnerbone's junkyard sound was always much colder, more sedate, and more funereal than the massive apocalyptic pummel of Einsturzende Neubauten or San Francisco's Scot Jenerik, despite their similarity in instrumentation.
This cd-r redux of "Ligeliahorn" was remastered from an original demo cassette of the album, as Breadin and Myotte had lost the masters for the vinyl. In reconstructing the album, Breadin and Myotte had done away with the post-production tape speed tricks which were occasionally employed on the original LP. Somewhere down the line, Breadin will be publishing a retrospective of all of the Metgumbnerbone recordings. For me (Jim), Metgumbnerbone has been a ensemble whose recordings have become fetish objects from the most obtuse regions of Industrial Culture (like those really stupid Vagina Dentata Organ records, which I've obsessively collected). While I am pleased as punch that these recordings are available, my critical objectivity about them is admittedly lacking... I obviously recommened it, but would encourage you to check out the sound samples first.
Phil Elvrum -- the ever so shy Microphones ringleader who has also appeared in Old Tyme Relijun and D+ -- will probably never be so bold as to express his songs with all of the heartwrenching, off-key scream of a great emo vocalist, although his songs ooze with the post-adolescent grand bummer that is so common in the emo. His quivering voice holds nothing more than a few muttered
All of the Mircrophones albums have a great sound, there is always that little critical voice that wishes he would bring to the production table a set of really great songs. Elvrum is way too talented to waste his production and arrangement abilities on being just an indie-dork. This is a pretty good record, but if he continues to improve his songwriting ability - let this be a prophecy - Elvrum will write the next "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea."
We haven't gotten any of these in yet, but figured some of our weirdo music / obscure art-vinyl obsessives might want one of these, especially folks into the whole Trunk Records scene of strange lost audio from yesteryear. These are EXTREMELY expensive, but exquisitely handmade, so this is in fact a pre-order, cuz we'll only be getting as many copies as we get orders for, so if you want one, and order one, we'll charge you for it now, and ship it in a couple weeks when it comes in, either on its own, or with whatever order you have pending at the time.
So here's the skinny. The Trunk Records label is definitely a good reference point, as this record really does seem like it could just as easily have ended up on Trunk. Mary Millington was the most famous pornstar in 1970's Britain, appeared in all the most famous adult magazines, even had some film roles in proper non-pornographic films. Around the mid to late seventies, Millington began to record 'porn audios' which were included with many magazines at the time, which were, as you might imagine, Millington simply talking dirty, playful and casual and conversational, telling sexy stories, being nasty, stories about peeing on her suitor, and being peed on ("Lovely Little Tinkle"), giving blowjobs ("The Longest Tongue In The World"), and giving underwater wanks ("Come Play With Me"), laced with little aside ("Ooooh, it's hot!", "I've got pubic hair in my mouth!"), and all set to groovy, soft focus psychedelic jams, all remastered from the original tapes and some of the flexi-discs included with the above mentioned magazines.
If you were a fan of the Flexi-Sex release on Trunk, which collected some of Johnny Trunk's favorite sexy flexis, you'll have an idea of just what you're in for, sexy, goofy, funny, playful, weird, total outsider audio from a lost era.
And as mentioned above, the packaging is super super deluxe, pressed on 140 gram 10" opaque blue vinyl, housed in fancy gatefold sleeves using recycled card stock and conservation glue, hand pulled screenprint artwork by Walden Press on the front and back, as well as a saucy full length image of Millington inside, on 1970's style newsprint.
EXTREMELY LIMITED!!! We can probably only get a handful, so (pre)order now if you want one!
Well, if you've wondered where in the world has Robert Millis been for the past year, the answer is India, as the avant-everything guitarist from the Climax Golden Twins somehow cajoled his way into getting a Fulbright Fellowship to spend a year conducting ethnomusicological research on the subcontinent. Truth be told, our man Millis stained his fingers on curry and cigarettes while thumbing through old '78s for a year. Not a bad gig, if you can get it! But his working vacation was a productive one too, as a spate of new releases are on the immediate horizon of his sidereal collages for prismatic drone, raga mysticism, and polyglot psychedelic narcosis. Millis declares this cassette to be a re-imagined construct of solo material and Climax Golden Twin tracks of old; but even for CGT / Millis completists like we are, it's hard to pick out much of anything that is obviously tied to a gem like the Imperial Household Orchestra, Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds, or those asskicking AFCGT records. Millis stitches together disembodied drones, skittering satellite transmissions, and swampy field recordings that on the A side of this tape could be some unearthed Steven Stapleton / Chris Watson collaboration. Until that improbable event happens, we'll happily settle for Millis' tape. The flipside is all slippery minimalism through purring overtones and sensually rippling glissandos hitting all the right sweets spots of La Monte Young transcendentalism, before Millis introduces some found recordings of Jonestown-esque ritualized vocal incantations that turn the vibe from pleasantly opiated to seriously creepy. Fucking great stuff that's limited to something like 200 copies.
Polyglot might be just the right word to describe what Robert Millis and his Climax Golden Twins have been up to for the past two decades or so. An album might be a ramshackle collage of blisterfuck noise-rock, another might be a graceful set of murder ballads, and yet another might hypnotize the listener through an alpha-state minimalism. And then, there's Millis' acclaimed collections of olde-timey '78s and raw field recordings of indigenous folk songs, much of which has been released through those tasty labels Sublime Frequencies and Dust-To-Digital. The solo work from Millis tends more toward the dronemuzik and hallucinatory collage axis of CGT's multi-headed agenda, although he has been known to strum out a sadsack blues number that might straddle the worlds of Alan Bishop and Roscoe Holcomb; but here on the impeccable new album Relief, Millis tunes in and drops out with a blearily psychedelic album of forgotten sounds, ghostly fragments, and Pacific Ocean drones. The album begins with a comedic outburst from one of Millis' 78s with a helpful direction to "hear the secret sentence played out on the talking typewriter" followed by a jaunty clatter of a manual typewriter all wrapped in scratchy-vinyl, crackling goodness. Immediately, the album delves into a swarming tone-float of harmonic overtones pecked with trilling glissandos. The source for this sound has got to be a plung - a Bangladeshi mouth-organ used specifically by the Murung peoples living deep in the rainforest, as this sound is uniquely atonal and wrigglingly eerie in its wavering notes. Millis furthers this wooziness by rarifying these sounds into the holy minimalism conjured by LaMonte Young, Angus Maclise, and company. After swimming here in these golden pools for a good five or six minutes, Millis drops the needle on a dramatic orchestral swell that would be the envy of the Caretaker's sunken ballroom recordings. A couple of hip-swaying recombinations of temple music rhythms and Les Baxter exotica glide in and out of Millis' glassy-eyed shimmeriness and post-Eno piano constellations. The album's finale is an impressionistic driftscape of languid, temple bell & gong tones stretched into a gorgeous, expansive cloud of lush harmonics giving way to a metronomic wooden rhythm that leads to a set of solitary piano notes suspended over Mariana trench diving-bell ambience. Limited to 400 copies, and comes with the requisite download code. So fucking good.
Robert Millis is a man of many talents: a Climax Golden Twin, a collector '78s resulting in the impeccable Victrola Favorites book & compilation, purveyor of searing avant-scum-noise-rock in AFCGT, a world traveller in search of esoterica for Sublime Frequencies, a field recordist of frogs, birds, blue jeans salesmen, etc. etc. etc. Despite his many activities, Millis' recorded output has almost entirely been by way of collaboration, making this self-released gem of a solo album all the more special. This is closer related to the collage work that Millis has contributed to the Climax Golden Twins, bridging all of those aforementioned interests in a polyglot of psychedelic drone smear pocked with snippets of conversation, poetic extracts from his collection of '78s, and a judicious amount of vinyl crackling. An album such as this would easily be confused for the hermetic revelations that Philip Jeck extracts from his rough shod vinyl and turntables; but Millis seems to counterpoint the crackle and the clean with more drama than Jeck, almost positing the crackle like a punchline in a joke that breaks through one of Millis' blissed out shimmers constructed from loops and drones from guitar, bells, and glass harmonica, where haunted melodies from times long gone whisper through the mix. But at another instance, Millis leaps geographically from a field recording of loosely played Thai temple music into a shortwave burst of noise seamlessly mixed through a cloud of insects and back into one of his sleepy drones. The logic of the album may seem absurd from afar; but the internal logic is peculiarly sensible, as if Millis were tapping into some stream of consciousness that subcutaneously connects all of these intermingling sounds. Limited to something like 50 copies, but maybe we'll be able to get more... maybe not. Very highly recommended no matter how you slice it.
It seems like field recordings from southeast Asia have become one of the most popular emergent genres here at Aquarius Records. And while we're not sure if just 'cause you took a trip and recorded stuff you should really get your name on record (like you're some sort of hoity-toity 'sound artist'), we still appreciate the efforts of such recordists as Loren Nerell, the Bishop brothers, and now Robert Millis. The truth is, ambient sound from some street in Thailand or Indonesia can be a lot more fascinating than yet another disc of computerized feedback or lowercase glitch! Never a substitute for going places yourself and using your ears (and other senses) but certainly a valid listening option at home. So no complaints, we'll continue to sing the praises of quality releases in the 'field recordings' genre like those on the Sublime Frequencies label. And certainly if you liked the recent Princess Nicotine disc on Sublime Freq, you'll probably also want to check out Leaf Music Drunks Distant Drums. Actually Millis (a member of American experimentalists Climax Golden Twins) had some involvement in the production of the Sublime Frequencies' dvd release Nat Pwe: Burma's Carnival Of Spirit Soul, and portions of this release were recorded on the same 'expedition'. Listening to this artfully edited distillation of the hours and hours of recordings that this disc represents, you'll be able to tell that Millis obviously spent a lot of time on the ground in SE Asia, ears alert for interesting sonics (musical and otherwise). It'll transport you into an environment that includes the following and more: "improvisation performed by an elephant mahout using only a leaf, ethereal temple orchestras, blind street musicians, insect choruses, stagecoach rides, singing cabbies, drunken spirit orchestras performing Leo Sayer songs..." Byram was especially taken with the track that sounds like a guy sobbing through a bullhorn! A great listen thats very well mixed, segueing nicely, and at a nice pace, from track to track.
For those who remember the Suck.com parody of the descriptions found on Aquarius Records' tags, Suck.com had rewritten our description of a Helen Mirra 10" to read "Lush, enigmatic, forgiving, like a less neurotic Cat Power." Actually that description aptly pegged that Helen Mirra record (which we didn't really like all that much) way better than we did originally. However, it doesn't really apply to Mirra's first CD "Field Geometry" - which is a minimalist Americana meditation sounding a lot like a super slowed down John Fahey backed by the constant rustle of a seamstress weaving. Spartanly beautiful and mysteriously evolving. Completely recommended.
This installment from the prolific Mirror catalogue finds Mirror's core protagonists Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heeman working with the avant-rock darling Jim O'Rourke, who has kept himself busy by joining Sonic Youth. His presence will certainly bring this understated drone project to a bigger audience, and hopefully more attention to the reclusive, yet brilliant Chalk, whose solo work as well as his work with Organum, Ora, and Jonathan Coleclough remain all-time favorites here at Aquarius. The recordings found here were culled from a Mirror performance at the Lagerhaus in Bremen, Germany just a few months back in April 2002. The instrumentation appears to be organ, drone guitar, bowed metal, and some unidentified resonant clatter hovering at the event horizon much like the miniature sounds that Keith Rowe has produced for the recent AMM recordings. Through the glassine drone tricks that Chalk and Heeman have perfected in previous Mirror recordings, all of these sounds seamlessly meld into a tranquil piece of evocative ambience. Sporadically, a tremolo flutter emerges, probably indicative of some laptop trickery from O'Rourke. Do not fear, O'Rourke has left his Max / MSP patches turned off and thoughtfully ensured that his contribution was complementary to the Mirror sound. "Die Spiegelmanufaktur" is the least ominous Mirror recording, conjuring images of the colorful spectacle of calm sunrises, but fortunately, Mirror veer far from the artistic suicide of New Age drivel. This is another beautiful recording for Mirror.
While in a few months a slightly different mix of this performance will be published on CD, "Die Spiegelmanufaktur" is now available as a picture disc feature Chalk's artwork and is strictly limited to 400 copies!
