Of all of the Mirror records that have come out over the past three or four years, "Eye Of The Storm" has so far been the cream of the crop for the impressionistic drone duo of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann. Originally released as an incredibly limited and incredibly expensive lp (even by Mirror standards) complete with an individually printed etching smeared with watercolors, "Eye Of The Storm" has thankfully been reissued on CD by Heemann's Streamline label, although with much more economical packaging. The sounds on this album immediately manifest a sublime sense of calm and tranquility, underpinned by subtly unnerving, haunting evocations that keep this album far from the realm of New Age drivel. Environmental sounds of wind, surf, and maybe even distant highways comprise the bulk of the source material, although Chalk and Heemann have multi-tracked and down-pitched these elements as to blur all of the edges and muffle the references. The duo couples these environmental passages with a quiet and slow chorus of bells, gongs, and singing bowls which flutter and quiver with an elegantly restrainted use of electronics. Perhaps because of the source material in question, "Eye Of The Storm" sparks a physicality of meteorological phenomenon, especially the cold & humid foggy air of a sleepy coastal town, yet it is eerily unwelcoming. Absolutely one of my (Jim's) favorite records of all time.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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The breathtakingly beautiful collaborations between Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann as Mirror have resulted in three superb deep listening / tonal drift records in a little under a year, with "Eye of The Storm" for Streamline, "Ringstones" for Some Fine Legacy, and this for Die Stadt. While their production techniques revolve around blurring the sonic edges of arcane source material (highway field recordings, bowed metals, and tape machine backmasking), Mirror allows more of the source material to speak on its own with extended notes from orchestral warm-ups. They have layered hazy passages for lengthy french horns, warm strings, and a handful of their own mysterious drones within a slow building composition. If you've fallen for Chalk's work in the past, this album will certainly impress you also. Stunning work.
In November 2000, Mirror travelled to the US for a handful of shows in Austin, Chicago, and maybe a few other places in between (unfortunately not San Francisco). While cd-r bootlegs of those shows have been circulating, "I Paint For Love Of Color" is the second official documentation of that US tour, the first being the "Island" 2LP on Die Stadt. Mirror, of course, is the
With a pressing of 1000 copies, Mirror's "Islands" may stay in print a little bit longer than all of the previous outings from this magnificent drone ensemble. Beginning as a duo of hermetic Andrew Chalk and part-time Nurse With Wound collaborator Christoph Heemann, Mirror has officially expanded into a trio with the addition of Andreas Martin -- Heemann's former partner in the
"Islands" finds Mirror returning to the guitar with much more successful results. Sprawling across four sides of translucent blue vinyl, "Islands" seemlessly melts both studio sessions and live recordings from a series of recent shows in Austin, Texas. Like all of Mirror's albums, "Islands" appears as a fragment of a much larger composition which extends well beyond the temporal constraints of any given media. Complex ever shifting drones and mercurial tonalities belie the instrumentation being solely guitars, as field recordings of rainstorms and shadowy metallic striations emerge within Mirror's thick ambient wash. Of course, it's recommended. But don't expect this to last, despite the larger pressing.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Mirror is the collaborative work of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann (whose production talent has recently been employed by Nurse With Wound). Through the gradual introduction of delicate hazy drones which provide little external references, Mirror's audio alchemy is apt to delude the listener about the length of these two beautiful and hypnotic recordings. We had thought that this might be the more affordable version of the first Mirror album (which ran around $55.00 due to the individually printed etchings as on the artwork), but it's an entirely new album. As with each Andrew Chalk release that has presented itself to us, this is highly recommended!
Except in unabashedly biased reviews from this store, Christoph Heeman continues to get the bulk of the credit for the successes of Mirror; but again, we must reiterate that Mirror is a collaboration with Andrew Chalk. His sustained bowing drones have previously been heard in his work with Jonathan Coleclough on Sumac, some of the more tranquil compositions by Organum, and a few hard-to-find solo albums; and his aesthetic of a whispered minimalism that has the ability to stop time is front and center on Still Valley, even though occasional Mirror-man Jim O'Rourke contributes to this LP only release. There's actually very little to talk about, as backwards masked drones (from what may be long-stringed instruments, bowed cymbals, or even just guitars) linger along the horizon like a mirage, flickering with a formless consistency. Absolutely gorgeous.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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During the last year, Mirror has quietly released 6 albums - several of them incredibly limited art editions, wrapped in etchings, hand drawings, or monoprints. "Visiting Star" is one of those art editions (hence the price) with a lengthy strip of delicate paper hand patinaed with coppers, blues, and silvers and then wrapped around a standard black album cover. The color choice is one that matches the overall tonal quality that Mirror has been mastering during their brief but incredibly prolific career. Once simply the duo of AQ-favorite Andrew Chalk and recent Nurse With Wound collaborator Christoph Heemann, Mirror has recently expanded its membership to include Andreas Martin (who worked with Heemann in the '80s dadaist collage ensemble H.N.A.S.). While the first document of the new Mirror lineup faltered a bit, Mirror has returned to form with 'Visiting Star' -- mostly by recognizing that what Mirror does best is allow for Chalk's aesthetic of reflective metallic tones to float through space with all of their sublime glory intact. Here, Mirror's working process reveals itself a bit more, as eBowed guitars drift lazily alongside gently bowed gongs and bells. Absolute beauty.
Joining the international ranks of the new wave / electro revivalism are Germany's Miss Kittin & The Hacker, alongside Fisherspooner, Adult., and I Am Spoonbender. The foul-mouthed Miss Kittin fronts this duo as the Teutonic ice diva complete with
It was a lot easier to fuck with the mainstream media back in the '80s. Negativland certainly had the most success thanks to the hoax that surrounded the cancellation of their 1988 tour as the band were under scrutiny by Federal agent Dick Jordan for their connection to a murders that took place in Minnesota by a presumed fan. While the crime was true, the idiocy and lackluster fact finding from the national media made Negativland an underground sensation, all of which was exposed on their 1989 album Helter Stupid. The NYC anarcho-industrial outfit Missing Foundation had their fun with CBS in 1988 who ran a ludicrously unchecked expose on the band, aligning their political declarations of classist warfare with Satanism and accusing them of being the root of most every problem in New York (drugs, blight, graffiti, vandalism, and of course those rampant Satanists who were lurking at every corner). Such is a commonplace error in discussing transgressive art - that the work at hand causes social diseases and not as the artist often intends for the work to be a mirror of the conditions that led to social collapse and malaise. It made for a sensational media event for Missing Foundation, whose relative high profile for a noise-junk industrial noise band led them to a publishing deal with Restless in 1990.
Missing Foundation's second outing 1933 was the album that set the stage for that CBS interview. It was released originally on vinyl in 1988 by the gritty scum-noise-punk label Purge/Sound League (later reissued in a campaign by Restless as well), and those Missing Foundation slabs of wax ironically became very collectible records. Where the debut smashed everything to bits and scattered the remnants of noise and rhythm to tape, 1933 was considerably more militant in the junkyard bashing, which provided much more comparisons to Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept. The infernally smoldering guitars are still present, but lockstep effectively with the bashed rhythms. "Martyr Of The City" and "Turmoil" entertain an aggro-hardcore / mosh-pit sound to the chugging guitar riffs, explosive drums, and the bullhorn vocals from Peter Missing. It can be very hypnotic, but it's also utterly nihilistic. Elsewhere, the sounds collapse into oil-stained and bum-trash strewn recordings of guttural distortion, indeterminate scraping, and throat mangled yelps that could be the sordid, psychic field recordings of New York's social malaise that festered in the late '80s. The Lower-East side of Manhattan will probably never sound like this ever again.
Aeolian harps are relatively simple devices made from of a couple planks of wood and a taut wire, which are placed in relation to a wind source to transform the speed, force, and directionality of the air itself into an extended drone. David Kenny's Aeolian
As of spring 2007, the nomadic lifestyle of Michael Northam may land the American born sound artist in New Delhi where he might manage a media arts facility or he might take up the humble calling of a gardener in the south of France, where he could find plenty of inspiration for his ecologically tinged compositions. The excitement, fear, and instability of not really knowing where housing might come from has been the existence for Mr. Northam for many years now, and he's always managed to build an impressively cohesive body of work through composition, performance, and exhibition. The Automnal 2003 disc was originally a self-published CD-R which Northam gave to his friends and colleagues as a testament to the benefits, joys, trials, and failures to his chosen lifestyle. During the 24 months between August 2001 and the autumn of 2003, Northam picked up and moved his studio 13 times across Europe and North America; and the three extended tracks on Automnal represent three particular places along that journey. The first track opens with a glassy drone of sustained string vibration which sound remarkably like the more pastoral tones of Phill Niblock. Aquatic rumblings and fluttering patterns emerge as complementary elements to the Northam's droning infinitude that aptly fits Northam's geographical subject, a glacier on the Switzerland / France border. The second track is my (Jim's) favorite piece that Northam has created to date. With a gaping low-end drone beautifully stacked with what seem to be choral harmonics built from the environmental recordings of crickets near a stream, Northam offers a breaktaking, nocturnal piece of activated ambience much like Zoviet France's Shadow Thief Of The Sun or Gas' Konigsforst minus the motorik rhythm, of course. For the finale of Automnal 2003, Northam presents a sinewy vibrational hypnosis that's quite similar in frequency to the first track, yet he manages to dislocate the bleary ambience with a subcutaneous stream of crackle and static. A wonderful record!
This 3" CD from the always impressive sound artist mnortham (nee Michael Northam) was conceived as a tribute to his father who was a race car driver from 1949 until 1965. In those days, Northam's father strapped himself into what was quite literally a rocket of a car, as it was little more than a aerodynamic cylindrical frame, a beast of an engine, four wheels, and barely enough room to cram in the driver. While the sound artist Northam didn't have any archival recordings of the race car driver Northam as source material, mnortham did venture to the Terre Haute Raceway back in the summer of 2005. From the field recordings of that event, mnortham concocts a surprisingly elegant collage of cyclical tumblings and aerating sonic masses reflecting the centripetal forces of the human body when put under such rigorous conditions. As volatile and aggressive as the soundfield of raceways can be (one can look no further than the Santa Pod collection of racetrack recordings released by Ash International a few years back), mnortham has wholly avoided the Merzbowian noise precepts. While cacophonous in the truest sense of the word, Go is a certainly not a noise composition instead adhering to the signature aggregate sound of compounding and compacting layers of sound into a vulcanized, elliptical drone mass aiming for the elation from speed and acceleration over the testosterone implied by the roar of an engine. Very well done.
MNortham (who has previously been sighted on the fantastic Ora album Anagram and in recent collaboration with Francisco Lopez) and JGrzinich are sound artists investigating the properties of various organic acoustic forms, making use of long wire devices, found
A few years back, Darren Tate dissolved his Ora project (which centered around Tate's collaborations with Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Colin Potter, and MNortham), and considered quitting making music altogether. Fortunately, the draw back to the droning manipulations of field recordings grew to strong for Tate to remain inactive; thus, he began the Monos recordings, which
Over the past few years, Darren Tate has been wandering into some wildly weird electronics, broadening the scope of his aesthetic beyond the seminal recordings he made with Andrew Chalk (amongst others) as Ora, and more recently through Monos. For the most part, Monos has been a collaborative project between Tate and Nurse With Wound engineer extrordinaire Colin Potter, but at other times, we're pretty sure that Tate is the only one behind the wheel. For Above The Sky, the Monos line-up includes Tate, Potter, and fellow British dronescraper Paul Bradley; and this record is a top notch, vintage sounding Monos disc for sure.
The extended pieces found on this album were culled from the one and only live Monos gig in 2006, the handful of recordings from that gig were processed, recreated, forgotten about, rediscovered, and processed again throughout various starts and stops over the next four years. The resulting album is surprisingly coherent, presenting itself as a sinewy mass of undulating drones dappled with various textures, shadowy events, field recordings, subtle instrumentation, and then some. The ghostly ambience that introduces this album is sublimely beautiful, like the druggy drones of Nurse With Wound (e.g. Soliloquy For Lilith) or the permafrost laden expanses of Thomas Koner or even a darker version of Leyland Kirby's much-lauded hauntological ambience. Distant sound elements of scraped metal echo to the foreground, as the latent sounds from some occluded ritual in some forgotten place. Shimmering acoustic clouds of resonance peel away into field recordings of numerous birds flitting about. Later on, semi-melodic phrases hover near the event horizon dominated by ominous electrical vibrations and dilated drone fields. Seriously, this is fantastic stuff!
The first 135 copies of Above The Sky feature a full extra disc worth of material that easily complements that found on the album proper. Needless to say, these won't last long!
Colin Potter and Darren Tate have been working together for well over a decade, as Tate and fellow minimalist Andrew Chalk (under the moniker Ora) began bringing field recordings, bells, gongs, and long stringed instruments down to Colin's IC Studios back in the mid '80s. Along with his uncannily sympathetic ear in engineering their ephemeral dronescapes, Potter also began to supply his own sodden ambient passages and obtuse sounds to Ora's sustained timbres. About six years ago, Chalk fully engulfed himself in the exceptional Mirror collaboration with Christoph Heemann; and Tate renamed his and Potter's collaboration Monos. Where Ora focused on the reconstitution of natural sounds, Monos hedges itself toward the electronic end of the dronology spectrum occasionally harboring a sci-fi paranoiac aesthetic (e.g. Nightfall Sunshine). Landscapes finds Tate and Potter working with Paul Bradley who has developed into an exceptional composer under Potter's tutelege, and it's easily the darkest, most all-consuming record that Monos has released to date. While the source material is thoroughly obscured through Potter's production work, it has a very similar feel to the continuous tidal currents of Troum's twin guitar hypnosis. The trio manifests a constant magnetic pulse from their devices (to be safe if they are not using guitars) whose billowing intensity fortunately does not completely cover all of the subtle, quite textures which exist just below the surface. Desolate, magnificent, and recommended.
Outside of his 'proper' cd productions (one on Anomalous, and one pending on Die Stadt), the congenial yet humble Darren Tate has released a handful of CD-Rs of his amazing drone / field recording constructions that follow in the traditions of the numerous Ora CD-Rs he published through his former Gnome imprint. In spite of the most paltry amount of information (just the name of the project, and not even the title!), it is quite clear that Tate is working again with long time collaborator Colin Potter, as his exceptional ear and studio crammed with gear help extract the vibrant sonorities from Tate's field recordings. Each of the three tracks on "Places" open with field recordings of crackled branches, bird calls, the burbling brooks, and the muffled activity of a heavy log getting pulled through. Out of these, Tate and Potter develop a thick droning mass, stretching samples into wheezing hiss, synthetic ebbings, and deep droning. In conjunction with the recordings of more natural activities , Monos' drone work doesn't lend for an easy listening experience. This is actually the second pressing of this album, and again as a miniscule edition of 50.
OOOHHH!!! NOW ON VINYL FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OVER THREE DECADES!!!
Konrad Becker released only a couple of albums in the early '80s under his moniker Monoton. The modest editions of his recordings relegated him to inevitable obscurity back then, but thankfully through the magic of reissue technology more folks now have had a chance to enjoy his genius work, a hyper-bleak precursor of electronica, that bridged the kosmische sounds of Cluster and Conrad Schnitzler with the more contemporary sounds of Pan Sonic and Coh to come.
We're sure that there are more than a few modern music nerds out there who hang on every word printed in The Wire, so the reissue of anything by Monoton will no doubt thrill those avid Wire readers. Of course, not everyone keeps one eye on The Wire; so allow us to reiterate what that fine British music magazine penned about this album in 1996, The Wire did a cover story entitled "100 Records that set the world on fire (when no one was listening)," and which featured plenty of favorites already heralded in their pages (Derek Bailey, Faust, Fushitsusha, Nurse With Wound, Bernhard Gunter, etc.) as well as a handful of brilliant records which apparently nobody else had ever heard. Monoton's 2nd album, Monotoprodukt 07, from 1982, found its way onto that list of 100 seminal albums, despite the fact that barely anyone actually owned copies of this self-released album of Germanic proto-electronica. Wire scribe Biba Kopf was one of those lucky few, and certainly said it better than we could have: "[This album] is so alive with the pulses that triggered many electronicas to come, from techno through trance to Mego's creeping static, you could make a case for Konrad Becker's guruhood. Yet for all its prescient washed out tones, threadbare textures and minimalist rigour, it has the edge on much that followed. Adopting an imperious art stance towards mainstreams and margins alike, Becker cast a cold analytic eye over electronica's urfathers, picking up on Suicide's jittertronic urgency, if not their melodrama, and DAF's throbbing sequencers, but with the sex threat removed, which he patched into his own crackling circuits, hissing vistas and tumbling beatstreams."
Lo and behold, the good people at Oral in Canada were kind enough to reissue Monotonprodukt 07 first on cd back in 2003 (long since out of print) and now at last on vinyl, complete with a beefed-up re-mastered sound complements of the best in the business, Rashad Becker (no relation?), making for a very cool and highly recommended listen! We concur with The Wire about this album's importance. This really is one of aQ's experimental electronica essentials.
We're sure that there are more than a few modern music nerds out there who hang on every word printed in The Wire, so the inevitable reissue of anything by Monoton will no doubt thrill those avid Wire readers. Of course, not everyone keeps one eye on the Wire; so allow us to reiterate what that fine British rag had penned about Monoton nearly a decade ago. The Wire had published a list, entitled "100 Records that set the world on fire (when no one was listening)," which included plenty of Wire favorites (Derek Bailey, Faust, Fushitsusha, Nurse With Wound, Bernhard Gunter, etc.) as well as a handful of brilliant records which apparently nobody else had ever heard. Monoton's Monotoprodukt 07 found its way onto that list of 100 seminal albums, despite the fact that barely anyone actually owned copies of this self-released album of Germanic proto-electronica. Wire scribe Biba Kopf was one of those lucky few and certainly said it better than we could have that this album "is so alive with the pulses that triggered many electronicas to come, from techno through trance to Mego's creeping static, you could make a case for Konrad Becker's guruhood. Yet for all its prescient washed out tones, threadbare textures and minimalist rigour, it has the edge on much that followed. Adopting an imperious art stance towards mainstreams and margins alike, Becker cast a cold analytic eye over electronica's urfathers, picking up on Suicide's jittertronic urgency, if not their melodrama, and DAF's throbbing sequencers, but with the sex threat removed, which he patched into his own crackling circuits, hissing vistas and tumbling beatstreams."
Lo and behold, the good people at Oral in Canada (who also happen to be the same folks who curate the Mutek electronic music festival) were kind enough to reissue Monotonprodukt 07, complete with a beefed-up re-mastered sound, making for a very cool and highly recommended listen!
One of the early filmworks from Mario Bava (best known for his horror flicks), Danger: Diabolik is a spectacular, unusual and campy romp of a movie. From 1967, it's an Italian comic book come to life complete with wonderfully mad leaps of logic, a bevy of
I have become completely obsessed with Chris Morris. He makes me sad. Sad that we don't have anyone nearly as funny in the United States.
He's been a staple of British radio / television for years now. And it seems like since day one, he's been trying to get himself blackballed. Or killed. His BBC program The Day Today, was a Today Show parody. Complete with a washed up, neurotic weatherman (the also amazing Steve Coogan), a narcissistic and completely cruel host (Morris), and a gorgeous and ice cold business reporting babe that spoke in complete gibberish. After The Day Today was cancelled, came Brass Eye, one of the funniest shows I have ever seen. This time a parody of evening news programs like 48 Hours or 60 Minutes, taking things even further. The goal of this show seemed to be to publically humiliate trusted government officials and public figures (quite successfully we should add) and contributed to Brass Eye's rather brief run. Then came Blue Jam, a totally surreal and unstructured radio show. featuring bizarre (and often offensive) free association / high (low) concept skits over music from a who's who of modern electronica / trip hop (Later turned into an even more unstructured television program called Jam. loosely adapted from the radio show). The Blue Jam cd is basically the best bits from the Blue Jam radio show, featuring Chris Morris and a few other folks, eating and killing and arguing and shitting off their limbs (?) over music from Labradford, Propellerheads, Amon Tobin, Funki Porcini, Herbaliser, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Fila Brazillia, 9lazy9, Clifford Gilberto, Jimi Tenor, and more. Until we can get Brass Eye over here, Chris Morris comes to you only via Blue Jam, quite possibly the funniest headphone mindfuck ever.
A precocious one, that BJ Nilsen! Morthound (sometimes spelled Morthond on a couple of releases) was Nilsen's project when he was just a teenager, producing some of the more abstract convulsions of dark ambient and collaged electronics that appeared on the seminal Swedish industrial label Cold Meat Industries. This anthology collects the four Morthound / Morthond records recorded from 1991-1994 before Nilsen dropped the moniker in favor of Hazard, through which he matriculated onto Ash International / Touch Music shortly there after. Nilsen appends most of the discs of Mortology with various tracks from the CMI compilations and rounds out the entire collection with a whole disc of unreleased material. Death Time was Nilsen's first outing - a cassette from 1991 on CMI imprint Sound Source - and speaks much beyond the years of a 15 year old kid in Sweden going down to the library to check out sound effects and wildlife recordings to run through his Akai sampler and into a four-track. Along with those source materials, Nilsen also relied heavily on his shortwave radio, whose detuned transmissions and numbers station broadcasts he liberally cut-up into eerie collages full of shadow, drone, and dread. This Crying Age (also from 1991) was the first widely available Morthound cd, with a deep soundtrackish sensibility that recalled more of the early soundtrack work of Graeme Revell / SPK especially the Zamia Lehmanni album with its esoteric / occult mysteriousness through hypnotic, metal klang loops, emotionally somber rumblings, and wispily opiated flute melodies which sporadically graced the dark electronics. In the liner notes, Nilsen explained that he has never wanted to stick within one particular aesthetic, and Spindrift (1992) was very much a departure for Nilsen with this foray into legitimate psychedelic pop, with "Stairhead" being something of a hypno-drone-pop track of glistening guitars and summery organs with much more in common with Ultra Vivid Scene or A.R. Kane than Brighter Death Now! This track is a bit of anomaly as much of the rest of Spindrift is fleshed out with baroque, synthetically orchestral pieces full of John Carpenter / Halloween arpeggiations, David Lynchian themes within the creepy / maudlin scores, and plenty of saddened atmosphere. The final album recorded as Morthound was The Goddess Who Could Make The Ugly World Beautiful (a quote from Taxi Driver, fyi!), finding Nilsen shifting closer to the sound he would soon perfect under the moniker Hazard with stealth-bomber drones and arctic field recordings, but not before unleashing a handful of tracks inspired in equal parts by early Coil and contemporary In Slaughter Natives with a baroque pagan bombast through thrashy guitar riffs and muscular drum programming. The disc of unreleased Morthound material is uniformly bleak, spacious, and eerily abstract. Again, the material here points closer to the Hazard tracks that soon followed; and actually stands as some of the best material that Nilsen recorded during this time period. We have very limited stock on this boxset!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not long for this world, Ballade For A Cold Moon is the third in a monthly series from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. All of the previous editions (as well as the one that came out right after this one) sold out almost immediately. We were able to snag a few of this one; and we'll try to get the future editions as she releases them. That said, Cold Moon is a longform dreamtime transmission of analogue synth worship hitting all the right sweet spots: Tangerine Dream's Zeit, Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, and some fine style J.D. Emmanuel for good measure; but all those liquid melodies that drip from the sustained tones and watery ambience are pure Motion Sickness! Can this lady do no wrong? Limited to 50 copies with hand-printed artwork and wrapped in twine.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The sixth in the year-long series from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel dedicated to the North American naming tradition of the full moons. The snow moon is ascribed to February full moon, and her rumination on this particular moon is wintery without being gloomy. There's a crystallization of sound through her kosmische synth sequences, trilling melodies, moon-muzik spells, and ethereal vocalizations that captures the snowblinding radiance of the sun casting its rays through the icicles that hang from her Georgian farmhouse. We've got only a handful of these with no chance of a restock. Limited to 50 copies.
Motion Sickness Of Time Travel is the spellbinding synth and voice project of Georgia's Rachel Evans. Up until late 2010, she had released a bunch of tiny edition cassettes and cd-rs through her Hooker Vision imprint, after which her work caught the attention of Digitalis, who released the highly acclaimed album Seeping Through The Veil Of The Unconscious. So acclaimed in fact, that all of three pressings of that album went out of print before we had a chance to wax poetic about the record on our list. It's easy to hear why Motion Sickness Of Time Travel would cause such a stir, as there's something to the easy quip that Rachel Evans is a synth version of Grouper. Evans deconstructs an ethereal pop down to hypnotic looping synth structures and her own whispering voice, all the edges are blurred and softened to a heavenly, glowing gaseousness. Her synth applications typically build from glistening arpeggios and sustained church organ tones, giving many of her arrangements a levitating, Kosmische touch considerably more vaporous in her psychedelic visions than the likes of Emeralds and Oneohtrix in her Cluster fixation. Yet, tracks like the aptly named "Day Glow" eagerly appropriate tone-bent melodies and acid-squelchiness from post-rave ambient engineers (think back to Future Sound Of London), suspended amongst the reverb glide of her breathy vocals. Then there's the oceanic and mysterious drone-waltz found on the lysergically titled "The Walls Were Dripping With Stars" which flickers with backmasked vocalizations and intermittently dubbed out whisperings. Luminaries & Synastry is a real gem; and if past performance is indicative of anything, this album will not be around terribly long. The lp comes with a cd of all the material found on the vinyl, plus a couple of a extra tracks.
Rachel Evans brings her humid, oozing synth explorations to Spectrum Spools, which has become quite the launching pad for a wide array of outsider electronics as curated through the judicious ear of Emeralds' John Elliott. The name of Evans' project is lifted from William S. Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine; and with her decentering, liminal drift of half-formed / half-dissolved constructions, she finds herself peering between the kudzu-encrusted fields of her native Lagrange, Georgia and the imagined soundscapes of a primordial Gondwanaland (time-travel for her seems to go backwards in time, not forwards). After close to a couple dozen releases (mostly in the micro-edition format), she's either gotten the doseage right on the Dramamine, or she's acclimated to the queasy side effects of jumping between time and space, as this eponymous record isn't nearly as woozy and narcotized as her previous work. "The Dream" starts out quite dark, with backward-masked slashes that parallel the thickets of razored noise from Current 93's early collage work; but she quickly escapes from these bad vibes into a lengthy daydream of shimmering ambience laced with bright, effervescent sequences and some rather Vangelis-like triumphant synth stabs. "The Center" spins around a latticework of crystalline sequences that blur into massive, oceanic pools of rippling sound, with her voice looped and smeared into an ethereal bliss. "Summer Of The Cat's Eye" is a mellow impressionist piece of synth jamminess akin to Tangerine Dream's wanderings across the keyboard. "One Perfect Moment" is very reverential of John Elliott's work in Emeralds and all of his solo projects, with a sequenced glissando streaming beneath the slow unfurling of bittersweet tonal chords and Evans' pleading vocal delivery. Easily, the most arresting track she's recorded to date, rounding out another fantastic album from Evans' Motion Sickness Of Time Travel.
Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp are the men behind these Mountains. The two met in Chicago in 1999 and now live in Brooklyn; yet despite their urban living, Mountains long for the great outdoors. The big sky of Montana. The thunderclouds of the Arizona high desert. The forests of upstate New York. In their effortless blur of elliptically strummed acoustic guitars and elegantly sculpted ambience, Mountains celebrate the natural world, as leaves, rain, dirt, and snow all seem to speak through their beautifully monochromatic compositions.
Choral happens to be Mountains third full album and their first for Thrill Jockey. It also stands as their best album to date and even surpasses the almost universally beloved Field Rituals solo album by Holtkamp on Type. The brightly rendered guitar which gilded Holtkamp's solo record features prominently in the mix for Choral, but it has been tempered with gaseous effects and post-shoegazing processes that swaddle the guitar chords with equally rich drones and electrified mist. Melodica, analog synth, piano, hand bells, something that sounds like a hurdy gurdy, even more guitar, and found object scrabbing a la Jewelled Antler make their way through the soft focus blur of the digital treatments, which give evidence for comparisons in equal measure to Fennesz and Cluster. As the shimmering tones of finger-picked guitars trickle out of the slow pulsing drone of the title track, Mountains conjure images of the bright orange sunlight saturating wind-blown leaves at sunset. Halos of light burst around each glistening layer of sound, but there is a bittersweet aura to many of the melodies that slip beyond their transcendent ambience, as if the summer sun they portray in their songs is soon to be lost to the blustery winds of Autumn and the cold nights of Winter. The maudlin atmospheres continue on the insistent acoustic guitar chords of "Telescope," a near perfect bliss-out instrumental, on through the broken-hearted bells and deep tonal flutter of "Melodica."
If there's any justice, this will be universally hailed as one of the best records of 2009. And for vinyl freeks: the lp version of Choral enjoys two additional tracks not found on the cd!
Murmer is the work of the lowercase / microsound newcomer Patrick McGinley, who has coaxed an impressive orchestration out of the transient, yet distinctly urban sounds of his native London. McGinley specifically cites the air vent on a 73 bus, the esclator at the Pimlico tube station, and the air vent of a Austin Mini, as well as datastreams, feedback, a malfunctioning gas heater, and other elements of any city's general din. Through a number of digital filterings, he polishes the rough source material into looped samples of lustrous tones. While not exactly a generative system of sound construction, Murmer strives to set up situations in which a number of slightly misaligned loops of complementary sounds, then step back to let those loops weave and phase amongst themselves.
While the tones that Murmer uses seem very much informed by the work of Richard Chartier, this album, with all of its complex interweavings, is much more conducive to metaphor, and to these ears has the feel of the 'classic' futurism of Jules Verne with guilded machines whiring in near synchronicity to achieve time travel. All in all, this makes for an excellent debut, if only a CD-R pressing. Fortunately, it's been very nicely packaged!
Proprietor of the Framework radio show on Resonance FM for many years now, Patrick McGinley has implored his listeners to "open your ears and listen" to the world at large, presenting an impeccable series dedicated to field recordings and its use in composition. So, it goes with out saying that the field recording and the found object are commonplace within McGinley's own sound art constructions which he records under the moniker Murmer (and not Murmur, mind you!). Given his predilection for wandering throughout the European countryside for all that it has to offer (not just limited to environmental sound), his recorded output has been somewhat limited. We Share A Shadow is his first proper solo album in almost three years, although his collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough did stand out as one of the dronemusik highlights of 2006. Consisting of two very long pieces, We Share A Shadow is a notably restrained album whose dark beauty reveals itself with a slow and deliberate pace. The first untitled piece opens with sheets of cold rain scuffing the smooth arcs of bowed metals, whose Feldman-like swell and collapse recalls the late period work of Bernhard Gunter. As the rain gently fades, a composite drone emerges out of those rasps and vibrations from the bowed metals and intensifies through dissonant timbres subtly agitating the shimmer and filigree of the gilted drone. Throughout, windswept debris ricochets across the stereo field casting an ominous cloud onto the sustained tones. The second piece is an even darker affair with a motor grinding against a piece of metal in the distance while a somber, almost doomscape piano plods in the foreground. With plenty of low frequency rumbles and spectral activity lingering in the background, this piece is almost like KTL remixing Xenakis at 16 RPM. Needless to say, this is an incredible album.
Gorgeously packaged in hand water-colored / letterpressed sleeves, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
In looking at his discography alone, Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) might not seem to be such a prolific artist; although he's certainly dedicated his entire existence to the pursuit of the field recording, its use in composition, and avant-garde sound practices in general. Each week, McGinley produces the ever enlightening Framework radio series dedicated to those very topics, starting out of Resonance FM in London with syndication now reaching several dozen adventurous radio stations across the globe. He's also active in curating a quarterly series of small cd-r editions of sound ecology, phonography, and field recording based sound art; and he also is an active participant in the Estonian avant-garde, as he's currently planted himself in the university city of Tartu. What Are The Roots That Clutch is his first full album in nearly seven years. Has it really been that long? That said, McGinley did work on a brilliant collaborative project with John Grzinich and Yannick Dauby, and he released a 3"cd-r for Taalem, both of which came out earlier this year in 2012. McGinley quips that he put the recordings aside to this record for well over a year, which may account in part for the delay; but ultimately, all of the recordings from Murmer are timeless. What Are The Roots That Clutch is no exception.
The field recordings that McGinley collects hedge towards disturbances in any given sound ecology, as found in the abrasive textures from a busted exhaust vent comingling with the Aeolian harmonics from the sustained gusts streaming down from the North Sea. McGinley does include two relatively unaltered field recordings (probably some minor filtering, but that's all) within the thoroughly abstracted and droned out compositions. One of these features a very eerie fundamental harmonic drone, obviously being activated by the wind and coupled with a glistening rattle and an unfurled flapping. The three elements here make for a surprisingly musical, if totally alien sounding piece that's akin to the Alan Lamb wire recordings. The album's 17 minute centerpiece is a slow building blur of industrial resonance and densely layered aquatic filigree that melts into chunks of clattering ice (it could be wood or glass... but ice is just so much more poetic to consider given the context); but the album's finale is where McGinley really gives us something to sink our teeth into. A comparatively harsh stutter of electrical abrasion builds up to a crescendo through water-tank rumblings and fire and / or water textures. At the peak, McGinley snaps to a downright psychedelic raga of back-masked belltones, harmonium drones, and percussive clatter that all comes together in a minimalist chorale on par with anything that Angus Maclise mustered in his dervishes and mantras.
As great as McGinley's last record was, What Are The Roots That Clutch might be even better. Handsomely packaged in letterpress artwork whose ochre-yellow hue matches the color of an Estonian farm house he's quite fond of. Limited to 400 copies.
We've ballyhooed Brendan Murray's exceptional, yet perennially overlooked drone & din work in the past; but nothing could have prepared us for Commonwealth. Damn, this guy is good. No, wait; he's fucking great! After a handful of cd-r productions, a Twonicorn cassette, and a fine cd release on Intransitive of processed shimmer, shifting frequencies, and some low-end girth rumblings for our obligatory SUNNO))) reference, Brendan Murray has produced his best work to date with Commonwealth. Compositionally, it's incredibly simple: a drone goes up, and it goes down. It lasts a little under 50 minutes. But buried with this single minded composition, there are thick spun rumbles, reflective vibrations, sympathetic sub-harmonics, and rich tonal frequencies. Out of the constant tectonic whir that introduces Commonwealth, shimmering clusters sound like a battery of reed organs or hurdy-gurdies, slowly modulating into heavier, deeper drones. We've been told that the source material for these sounds is guitar, although you'd be hard pressed to hear anything guitar-shaped anywhere on the disc. It's far more like the hallowed minimalist sound of Charlemangne Palestine and LaMonte Young. Dare we say, it's better? Yes, Murray's drone hums like a perfectly tuned machine, with multiple pistons purring in a steady progress along Commonwealth's compositional arc. When Murray shifts the focus of the album downward, which begins not even halfway through the piece, the descent is noticeable; but it actually becomes Murray's most fertile work within Commonwealth. Here, low rhythmic thrumbs crawl beneath the surface of the slowly collapsing drone, precluding its inevitable terminus. Perfect trance-enducing dronemuzik. Fans of Aidan Baker, Andrew Chalk, and Phill Niblock should definitely take note!
Brendan Murray, we salute you! You get the reason why there should be a cassette resurrgence - the 90 minute tape! So many noise / drone / floorcore tapes have been released in recent years as 8, 12, 15, 20 minute running times, and it's totally baffling. If you're gonna put out a cassette, let's have the full 90-minute experience as was the norm for any self-respecting mixtape in the '80s and '90s.
So, yes the Boston-based minimalist has cranked out a stunning, slow-crawl tape of suspended tone, that was originally commisioned as some sort of installation thing at Weird Records. The A-side is a brain-drain smear of brass instruments turned into a brash atonal undulation that sounds more like a symphony of junkyard car-horns rather than french horns or trumpets (the more likely culprits). As a result, Murray's piece becomes this glacial recapitulation of a Hermann Nitsch style sonic violence, whose speed is crushingly slow but impossible to avoid. There are also similarities to Murray's highly acclaimed Commonwealth album and its long-stare contest of inevitable decline. If you sit and listen for anything to change there's nothing noticable in the perpetual shimmer and consummate drone; but get up leave the room for a couple of minutes and something will be different - a slight variation in timbre, a repeating form either added or subtracted, a lumbering rhythm oozing from the depths, etc. The B side is not an exact replica of the first, promoting more compositional leaps and starts. In reality these shifts are quite subtle, but given the anesthetizing affect of the A side, any transition is gonna appear like a huge mountain range on a flat surface. Put this up there with LaMonte Young and Charlemange Palestine. Limited to 150 copies of professionally dupped cassettes.
It's always exciting to get a new disc of droning mystery from soundmaker Brendan Murray. We went pretty nuts for past releases, which is saying something as it takes a lot these days for a drone record to really get to us. And for a drone artist to consistantly hold our attention record after record. Of course we love drones, so as a sound, we're as likely to be entranced by a huge humming piece of machinery as a meticulously crafted chunk of ultra minimalist dronemusic (hmmm, what exactly does that say about us?), but we're of course partial to the artists who can deftly fashion drones into new and fascinating shapes, or who create music using drones as just one of many elements.
Which is precisely what makes Murray's music so special, just that, it's incredibly musical. He's perfctly capable of kicking up a Sunn 0)))-like wall of downtuned dirge, or fashion a skeletal bit of hushed murmur, but even then he infuses those all to common sounds with strange melodies, and abstract textures, transforms simple tones and chords into strange sprawling beasts, sounds become actual songs, with melodies and parts, distinct beginnings and ends, each song is a journey, through thick fields of warm hissy blur, caustic crumbling crunch, chiming crystalline shimmer, deep machine-like industrial whir, clangy and clattery abstract angular guitar flecked noise rock, very Dead C here and there, gorgeously murky and lo-fi, and weirdly looped sounding, intense wall of pink noise whir and billowing clouds of near static organ hum. Dark and dense and mysterious and intense, but always so so gorgeous.
While they last, we have the limited version, that comes with a bonus cd-r, featuring a 30 minute live performance recorded last year, a super intense, ultra heavy exploration of some seriously woofer destroying bassiness. Deep rumbling whirs, sprawling into massive reverbeating slabs of black hole low end. Wow.
During the two years between their first recordings in 1985 and the series of singles for Lazy records, My Bloody Valentine had blossomed from a second rate swamp-rock group into a charming Brit-Pop ensemble, poised to unleash their crushingly beautiful
Unlike the disappointing debut recordings of "This Is Your Bloody Valentine" which exists only for completists, "Ecstacy and Wine" is an excellent album that should definitely have a home next to your other My Bloody Valentine records!
As we recently listed My Bloody Valentine's hard to find collection "Ecstacy and Wine" as well as their masterpiece "Loveless," it's about time that we got "Isn't Anything" into the Aquarius Records archives.
I seem to remember an odd anecdote about the recording process of this album, that it was recorded somewhere in the outskirts of their native Dublin near a sheep farm and the band ended up crashing at the studio throughout the entire recording session. Yet, their sleep patterns were constantly interrupted by the incessant bleating of those sheep, and the collective insomnia contributed to the lethargy and torpor found within "Isn't Anything." Of course, I've been unable to verify this story with anything factual, but this album sure does sound sleepy, mostly sliding towards the realm of deep slumber, but occasionally hopped-up on punchy sleep-deprived nerves.
In the name of revisionist history, "Isn't Anything" stands as the transition album between the gilded jangle of "Ecstacy and Wine" and the radioluminescence of "Loveless." My Bloody Valentine had begun to bury much of their emulation of '60s psychedelic pop in Sonic Youth mack-truck riffage and intertwining guitar haze that upstages the Velvet Underground strum-as-drone. Tracks like "Feed Me With Your Kiss" and "Sueisfine" thickly blur the sad lullaby vocals from Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher through overblown bass distortion and strangely uptempo rhythms. Yet, My Bloody Valentine will instantly glide out of these into the shoegazing drone-pop of something like "Lose My Breath" with its tone bending extended chords and lack of pronounced rhythms. Only a couple of the songs on "Isn't Anything" are as memorable as those found on "Loveless," but there are plenty of swirling dreamy-pop songs that make this album a treat for shoegazing fans!
We just realised that this record, one of AQ unanimous all time favorites, never got listed on the website OR the AQ list. And while most of you may already have this, a few of you are in for a big surprise and a musical awakening. "Loveless" stands at the
That track along with the equally groovy-yet-dreamy "Glider" ep had been the basis for Simon Reynolds curious thesis that My Bloody Valentine had produced some of the earliest jungle tracks. More plausible was that MBV were one of the first rock bands to actively incorporate sampling into their production techniques. My Bloody Valentine had resampled their guitar feedback digitally to created strangely warbling layers of sound and allow for additional tools to build their bittersweet, melancholic melodies. "Loveless" may remain the final testament to the musical prowess of My Bloody Valentine, as Kevin Shields continues to state the claim that another album is in the works... well it's been in the works for over a decade and has no signs of ever being realized. Nevertheless, this album *still* sounds totally fresh and wholly superior to all of the bands that have attempted to revive the My Bloody Valentine sound (Lilys, Swirlies, Flying Saucer Attack, Third Eye Foundation, Fennesz, Chessie, etc, etc, etc).
Perhaps our opinion best stated by former Aquarian Marc Kate: "If you don't own it, I won't be mad, but you will certainly earn my pity." An earthshattering record. Period.
We didn't realize it when we first listed the Residual Echoes ep a short while back, but Elevation Records, the label that released that, and this here new Nadja ep, is co-run by professional hockey player�Boyd Devereaux, who plays for the�Toronto Maple Leafs. Wow. Story goes something like this: Hockey player into weird underground sounds, meets an ex-member of the Dirtbombs at a Dead Meadow gig. The Dirtbombs guy (let's call him Joe Greenwald) just so happened to also work for Warner Brothers. The two became fast friends and decided to start a label and voila! Elevation Records. Pretty cool. Well, we already told you all about the Residual Echoes ep (and if you missed that we still have a few in stock), so now let's talk about the new Nadja record...
A brand new 28 minute ep, from one of the originators of this new bred of blissful brutality, Canadian duo, Nadja, featuring AQ favorite, the crazy prolific Aidan Baker. While this ep starts off tranquil and drifty, it doesn't take long for things to get down to business, with a sudden onslaught of super corrosive downtuned sludge guitar and simple doomic plod. Now Nadja have always been heavy, but it's always been sort of shimmery and blown out, heavy in a drifting soft focus sort of way, but the opening track here sounds almost black metal, still with a sort of slow core pop heart, but wrapped in blackened buzz and super damaged crumbling distortion, seriously intense and ominous. Pretty amazing actually. The song fades out into a glimmering pool of distant buzz laced with dreamlike melodies, only to be clobbered by the second track, the most straight up riffy song Nadja has ever recorded wethinks, some wierd sort of slow motion stoner doom metal, but being Nadja, still wrapped in fuzzy sparkles and warm whir. All four tracks, minus brief interludes of whispery tranquility, are massive lumbering distorted dreamdoom beasts, that could definitely hold their own in a room full of hellboun heavies and devastating doomlords. While somehow managing to also sound pretty the whole damn time...
Quite the dreamdate here between two beloved Aquarius Records artists! Half of Naked Island is the one and only Brian Pyle - the Northern Californian denizen responsible for Ensemble Economique, Starving Weirdos, and RV Paintings; and the other half is the beguiling Felicia Atkinson - better known as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. The two have crafted freefloating abstractions that deftly walk the line between ephemeral songwriting and hallucinatory dronescaping in their respective projects; and this project maintains that aesthetic course with a few choice surprises thrown in the mix! The A-side features a narcoleptic Atkinson repeating whispered phrases in French amidst the coronas and nebulas of synth expansiveness before a muted techno thump begins to congeal all of the forms into a structured diffusion of propulsive rhythms cruising through their conjoined gaseousness. One could harken back to some of those early Pete Namlook recordings. We're knocking the cobwebs out of our brains to recall which one might be most fitting - perhaps From Within (with Richie Hawtin) or Fires Of Ork (with Biosphere). No matter. This is a great track that begs us to ask that these two continue this collaboration! The B-side girds on rhythm as well but is much more understated through the sampled breakbeat with washes of expansive synth, goth-y guitar drone, and oceanic drift slowly burying that rhythm under ripples of delay that may be the aggregate of Pyle's vocals. Very cool stuff. Also, we should note that the sleeve comes with a very cool lenticular artwork. Fucking trippy!
Way back in the 20th century, 1991 to be precise, media pranksters Negativland got themselves into a legal tussle with Island Records when they naively released a single on SST that covered U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and revealed
Way back in the 20th century, 1991 to be precise, media pranksters Negativland got themselves into a legal tussle with Island Records when they naively released a single on SST that covered U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and revealed Casey Kasem to be a foulmouthed ogre, all on the same track! Both SST and Negativland were subsequently sued into submission. Copies of the original U2 cd can still be had for anywhere from $75 to $100 US for the disc and bootlegged copies have been floating around ever since the track was pulled. Rather than go further into that whole can of carnuba wax I'll just refer those who are unfamiliar with this mother of all fair use lawsuits to Negativland's thorough and entertaining book "Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral 2", a 288 page document of the entire court case and Negativland's subsequent legal troubles with Greg Ginn and SST. Well now, here we are in a new millennium, on the ten year anniversary of the lawsuit where Seeland has already tested the legal waters with their re-issue of John Oswald's magnum opus "Plunderphonics" and so far the sharks aren't biting. Sensing that maybe the industry's lawyers have lost their taste for such passe copyright issues in favor of the much tastier Napster and the whole peer-to-peer fiasco, the label "Seelard" (hmmm...) has stepped in to see the return of this classic piece of copyright infringement. As a bonus to this risque reissue Seelard has included 9 extra tracks relating to the original single such as an excerpt from an Over The Edge (Negativland's Don Joyce's weekly radio show on KPFA) show from 1989 where the germination of the single began. One track is an edited version of the "Radio Edit" so that you *can* now safely play it on the radio -- all the nasty words have been covered up with a cornucopia of sound effects. The seven remaining tracks on this disc were taken from live performances by Negativland in 1990 (Knitting Factory, NYC) and 1993 (Great American Music Hall, SF) and cover Casey's "Long Distance Dedication" on up to material that wound up on the cd that accompanied Negativland's book (see above). There's an abundance of good material added to the fated single in these live performances including numerous tapes referring to "U2" that Don Joyce had picked up in the interim, plus some more serious audio forays detailing Francis Gary Powers' fateful flight over the USSR in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Diddley Shit!
Seth Nehil and John Grzinich have been collaborating in various sound ventures off and on for well over a decade, back when the two met in Austin, Texas. Gyre marks the conclusion of a body of field recordings and agitated environments that the two began working on while travelling throughout Eastern Europe and later manipulated into installation soundtracks, arriving at three lengthy tracks. A constant fluidity of gray sounds wraps around the opening track of Gyre, which gives the impression of being deep underwater investigating the nether regions; yet the tactile sounds of various rubbings and cracked details contrast the subaqueous references with earthen found sounds of soil, stone, wood, and metal. The second piece acts as a call and response to the acoustics of some crumbling Soviet warehouse, with wooden tappings echoing from various parts of the space, presumably from the two participants. Gradually, a thick rumble of low end thrumb reverberates through additional layers of chattering birds which serves to counter the 'industrial' sound debris. The creaking from a high tension wire sets the stage for the final piece on Gyre, with ringing metallic vibrations amassing into a beautiful aura of hallowed droning. On par with the likes of Murmer, Loren Chasse, Tarab, Eric La Casa, and Small Cruel Party, Gyre is an excellent album.
Strangely enough, we had never managed to get any of these records in stock when it originally came out in 2002 as the companion to the now out of print album Confluence, which had been released on the Intransitive label. Stria is one of many collaborative projects between these two impressive sound artists, straddling the realm of dronescape delirium and dislocated field recordings. Seth Nehil and John Grzinich first began working together in the humidity of Austin, Texas in the revolving door collective of Alial Straa, which also proved formative for Michael Northam and Olivia Block. But as all of these folks wandered to various corners of the globe (Grzinich in Estonia, Nehil to Portland, Block to Chicago, and who the hell knows where Northam currently calls home), the collaborations have become impressively focused projects, even as they take several years to complete. Like its companion piece, Stria centers upon the idea of resonance, spread across three longform pieces. The first of which collects various bowed tones from a huge ensemble of musicians and twists them all into a sinewy mass of slowburning drones and gradual progressions. The reference in the liner notes to Alvin Lucier makes complete sense in view of this impressive dronesmear crescendo on par with anything that Jonathan Coleclough or Organum had mustered. The second piece is more in keeping with Grzinich's recent work with clattering stone and found objects in concrete bunkers, as scrabbling sounds and tactile noises echo back and forth against murky atmospheres. The final piece returns to the drone work with motors agitating long thin wires with phase shifting oscillations and eerie turbulence rattling what otherwise would be some very pretty ambience, but instead becomes a sublime listening experience. An excellent piece of work all around.
Subcutaneous Memory is the debut recording for Nephila, the solo project of Shannon Kennedy - better known as the cellist / electronics sorceress from Pedestrian Deposit. Just as she brought a spooky sense of calm to balance the infernal noise manifest of Jon Borges' side of the Pedestrian Deposit equation, this is a super creepy tape made of and for the dark arts. The first side was all crafted on a zither, which she's plucked into haunting, slow-motion cycles of creepy melodies interspersed with atonal slashes and contact mic noises that look back to those apocalyptic collages from Current 93's early days. The second features haunting incantations looped from a "branch fiddle", wood, and voice, creating a hypnotic miasma of arboreal wooziness. Another fantastic tape from Monorail Trespassing, and we certainly hope to hear more from Nephila!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Armed with a DAT and sights on a Masters in Ethnomusicology Loren Nerell had every intention of documenting temple ceremonial music, but found himself captivated by the daily ambient / environmental sounds of bamboo forests, bus depots, and muslim calls to worship. All are collected here as well as sounds of a Gamelan maker's showroom, frogs, excerpts of wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppet plays), plus everyone's favorite, the lovable Kecak monkey chant of Bali and much more. Excellent.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Loren Nerell is the ethnomusicologist who compiled the exceptional field recording album "Indonesian Soundscapes" for Soleilmoon. "Lilin Dewa" is his outstanding studio production based on archaic Javanese and Balinese gamelan styles infused with dronologist electronics to add a dark mystery to the delicate percussive processions. It makes perfect sense that Brian Lustmord released this on his Side Effects label.
Seminal krautrockers Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger have at long last (after an uncomfortable decade-plus of legal wrangling) patched up whatever their differences were in order to allow their three classic '70s albums to be offical released on cd for the
For those of you not already Neu!-savvy, these are the guys responsible (along with Kraftwerk, with whom guitarist Rother and drummer Dinger once played -- that's how they met, before splitting to form Neu!) for the "motorik" beat, the propulsive, autobahn-friendly, proto-punk electronics hybrid that has influenced countless bands. From big fans Bowie and Eno back in the seventies to the hundreds of postrock/electronica acts that namecheck them now, Neu! are gods. Negativland not only got their name from a Neu! song off the first album, but even the name of their label, Seeland, comes from a track off of 75. Indeed, some bands have built their entire careers on, uh, paying homage to Neu! (Michael Rother, quoted in the most recent issue of MOJO: "I went to a Stereolab concert once. Suddenly I had the impression I was listening to myself -- very strange!")
Astralwerks has done a nice job with these reissues. No, there's no bonus tracks or extensive liner notes or anything "extra", but all the original artwork is included (not that we have an original Neu! lp handy to compare with, but anyway they look nice). We could have done without the stickers on the front with blurbs from famous fans, but that's discarded once you unwrap the cd so no big deal. We'd guess that Neu!'s first album will sell the most copies, as it's graced with the endorsement of Thom Yorke, whereas we hope that Neu! 75 won't suffer from the moronic blurb from John Frusciante.
In keeping with the generally fucked up saga of these records/reissues, we're already having trouble getting enough of these in stock (our suppliers getting one title, but not the others; very small quanities, that sort of bs), so act fast. Sorry for the high price, it *might* come down as the supply situation changes, but for right now it reflects what we have to pay for these. Argh. And the vinyl versions (YES! they're doing LP reissues) have been inexplicably delayed until the end of July! Double argh.
Neu! 1 (1971) is a stunning work of art, drifting back and forth between the stripped down minimal kraut-pop that they're most commonly associated with, to long, spacey and psychedelic forays with lapses into musique concrete like moments with lapping water, children and jackhammers. Their sound could be most closely compared to early Kraftwerk or Cluster. In fact, the track "Im Gluck" sounds an awful lot like both Kraftwerk's "Radioland" and, believe it or don't, the beginning preamble to Rush's "Xanadu." Whether these two had Neu! in mind when they worked these songs out remains to be proven, but it's nice to think of such dissimilar groups drawing from the same well.
Now in on LP!!! And it's about damn time! The first pressing of this glorious pop album was gone in such a flash we barely caught a glimpse of it, but now we've got the AQ ultra fave pop album in splendid vinyl abundance with lyric sheet to boot! So go on! Sing your lil' hearts out!
In case you somehow missed our gushing about the cd version (or your memory's a bit foggy), here's what we had to say:
Amazing pop maestro Carl Newman (Zumpano, Superconductor) heads the star-studded cast of what is, to AQ's collective ears, simply THE BEST POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2000. When was the last time the AQ staff and our wildly differing tastes happened to *unanimously* agree on a single album's brilliance? Maybe Neutral Milk's second record? The Soft Bulletin or Conet Project? Suffice to say that this happens very rarely, and that's how good this New Pornographers record is. "Mass Romantic" is absolutely shiningly great power pop, with influences as wide-ranging as Big Star, the Zombies, Eno, the Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, and Built to Spill.
Not since, well, the last Zumpano record (or Silver Sun's debut) has a pop record emerged that's this powerful, kickass, well-crafted and totally complex. Really. Each of the twelve tracks is a fully realised pop creation unto itself. Intelligent, infectious, and uplifting, with truly flawless arrangements (the key to pop greatness).
In a sparkling non-country spin, the wonderful Neko Case lends her vocal gusto to complete the soaring FOUR-PART vocals on such gems as "Letter From An Occupant" not to mention the title track. And the four other members of the New Pornographers are super talents in their own right: Daniel Bejar (the enigmatic figure behind the very Nilsson-influenced combo known as Destroyer), John Collins (bassist/engineer for the Nardwuar the Human Serviette-lead freakos the Evaporators, garage-pop stalwarts Smugglers, and the rock army known as Superconductor), Kurt Dahle (drummer for Canadian college popsters Limblifter), and indie filmmaker Blaine Thurier.
Recommended for everyone -- even if you only buy one pop or rock record this year, this should be it.
We were joking a couple days ago about Phill Niblock, or it could of been Tony Conrad (Or Angus Maclise or any of those folks) about how great it must be having over the course of your entire 30 or 40 year career to have played only 4 or 5 notes. Obviously it's not as simple as that. Niblock is one of the few modern composers that can hold your attention for an hour or more with the judicious use of a single note. Like Reich and Riley, Niblock harnesses the natural properties of sound letting the sound do much of the work, shifting slowly, beating intermittantly, always shimmering and occasionally throbbing as notes nestle close to each other, sometimes sliding into place perfectly, other times finding a strange resistance and audibly working to fit in, resulting in all these subtle shifts. This is glacial and static, warm and thick and totally mesmerising. Touch Food also seems, to me at least, to be Niblock's most melodically complex set of pieces. The melodies here manage to be fairly prominent, even though they are stretched to their limit and obfuscated by the thick wash of sound. This is heady, heavy stuff. Heavy enough in fact that all you dirge-istsâ who are into Earth and Sunn 0))) and stuff like that may find that Niblock is your gateway drug, opening up the door to Maclise, Flynt, Cale and beyond. And of course, fans of modern drone, Sunroof!, Birchville Cat Motel, Skullflower, Vibracathedral Orchestra should definitely pick this up! His best record since Four Full Flutes!
MPEG Download: "Sweet Potato" [/audio/niblocksweetpotato.mp3]
Phill Niblock is a minimalist contemporary of LaMonte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, and Tony Conrad, yet has been seemingly overlooked, minus a few avant rock footnotes from the likes of Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and Band of Susans. In the liner notes,
The first piece "Hurdy Hurry" is an extended drone, based on samples of Jim O'Rourke and his hurdy gurdy. Niblock begins the piece simply enough with a single sustained whir of the wooden machine, but thickens the mix with multi-tracked layers of more hurdy gurdy drones tuned to specific pitches. The result is a glistening audio kaleidoscope of rich ambers, oranges, and blood reds.
The two versions of "A Y U (aka As Yet Untitled)" are based upon a similar multi-tracked technique as before, but based upon recordings of baritone vocalist Thomas Buckner. These two tracks have a nasally warble to them, sounding similar to the circular breathing of Tuvan throat singers. While sonically similar, the first version is open and diffuse, and the second is lumbering and forceful.
As with all Touch releases, Jon Wozencroft offers his usual amazing design sensibility to an amazing piece of minimalist composition.
