BJ Nilsen was a precocious youth, having recorded for the acclaimed Cold Meat Industries with his project Morthound back when he was only a teenager. By the time he was 21, he began working under the name Hazard. While the first Hazard album Lech was a bit of a clumsy attempt at tape loop trickery and elliptical dark ambience, his second album North earned him a well-deserved spot on the Ash International / Touch roster with his shivering gray drones and shadowy, X-Files paranoia. After having recorded 5 albums as Hazard, Nilsen may have dropped the pseudonym for good, although his minimalist signature mastery over electricity and ether remains firmly intact. Like the bulk of his Hazard recordings, Nilsen composed Fade To White from field recordings coupled with some acoustic and electric instruments; and his edits and digital processing thoroughly abstracts all of the original sounds into gliding dronescapes that are at once imposingly monolithic yet always intriguing and welcoming. Aside from a crunchy passage of sodden leaves being mulched underfoot at the beginning of the record, most of the source material for Fade To White is thoroughly abstracted within his majestic crescendos for slow-burning tonal interplay and subtle psychoacoustics. Really fantastic!
It could be a coin toss as to who's our favorite recording artist on Touch. Christian Fennesz, Phillip Jeck, and Chris Watson are all impeccable musicians working for the legendary label; but BJ Nilsen is the one artist who may be lurking beneath the radar a bit and has NEVER failed to deliver a great record. His work has always been focused on the drone, beginning back in his earlier sample heavy orchestrations as Morthound through Cold Meat Industries and onto his recordings as Hazard through the Touch imprint Ash International. Throughout his career, he's often tapped into the psychic and physical cold of his native Swedish landscape. That was definitely the case for his North album as Hazard and the three alcoholically bent records made in collaboration with Stilluppsteypa for Helen Scarsdale; and it's certainly true for The Invisible City.
A shimmering glow from an aggregate of rasping frequencies opens the album, sounding almost like a chorus of poorly grounded street lights offering their sustained, post-Ligeti plainsong to vacant streets on some cold wintery morning in Oslo. After some exploratory field recordings of bees and sympathetic atmospherics, Nilsen snaps into a frozen blur of softened distortion (e.g. Machinefabriek, Fennesz, and Lawrence English) laced with half-melodic phrases and shortwave transmissions echoing like distant ghosts on "Virtual Resistance." It's a signature move for Nilsen, and it's one that he's masterfully executed. Another great Nilsen strategy: his phased loops with theatrically brooding ambience and tactile field recordings, reappears on that same track which morphs into a shadowy post-apocalyptic smear somewhere between Deathprod and Barn Owl. Digital errata suspended in darkened rooms, barren windswept tones, and haunted field recordings dominate The Invisible City, which stands as another monumental achievement for BJ Nilsen.
Benny Nilsen is a man perfectly content living in the northern regions of Europe, having grown up in Sweden and living no further south than Berlin. For while the long nights of winter can gnaw at one's soul, the long days of summer are something to look forward to. If his collaborative albums with Stilluppsteypa were the existentially grim albums of drunken wintry behavior, then The Short Night is his portrait of the summer time dreaminess of sunflecked, arctic nights. Having been such champions of Nilsen's work back when he was recording as Hazard for Ash International, we find it a little strange that so many people have qualified The Short Night as 'dark.' True, if you were to compare this album to the lilting work of Colleen or even to fellow label mate Biosphere, The Short Night would appear quite dark; but in the context of Nilsen's entire discography, The Short Night is a dramatically colorful piece of work. Sure, Nilsen's sustained low frequencies and a few moments of growling noise do have their devilish undertones; but throughout the album, Nilsen punctures these impressionist clouds with elegant electronic chorales of ethereal melodies that are surprisingly beautiful for BJ Nilsen. There is a melancholy to Nilsen's work, but melancholy isn't always synonymous with dark, as is the case here. In many ways, Nilsen has found himself trekking into the territories previously ventured by Fennesz and Machinefabriek, creating a transcendent sound through the tension between shoegazing / drone-based driftwork and subtle discordant agitation. This record is highly, highly recommended!
This out of print cassette, now available on vinyl!
At the end of the 'alcohol trilogy' that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa released via Helen Scarsdale, the dark isolationist rumble which dominated the previous two and half records was shattered by a robotic sequence of bleeping analog synth tones which spiralled deep into the void of the arctic night sky. Such a dramatic juxtaposition is not uncommon within the realm of Stilluppsteypa, but less so for Mr. Nilsen. And those Derbyshire / Dockstader / Oneohtrix like tones found on Passing Out (the finale mentioned above) is clearly the jumping off point for Space Finale - an epic 90 minute double lp of analog synthesis, captured, spliced, and cut, all on a Revox 2-channel tape machine. Amidst the vintage synth blips and sustained tones, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa offer another narrative composition that moves from the vacant space station overrun by some unknown alien virus into the lair of the mad scientist who meanders dabbles on his Wurlizter (or some kind of organ, if it's not an actual Wurlizter) in minor key melancholy when not toiling away on an abomination that will somehow destroy the world. Shadowy ambience, fuzzed out tape hiss aggregation, weird dropouts and glitches on the tape that would make Leif Elggren proud, and much much more.
As mentioned above, Space Finale originally came out as a limited edition cassette earlier in 2010, but it was pretty clear that Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa intended this to be a 2lp, as both sides of the cassette were neatly broken into two suites a piece, perfectly suited for vinyl! This too is limited - just 500 - and highly recommend, as with all from this ongoing collaborative project.
Collaborations in the experimental scene come and go, so it's so great to see one that has some longevity. This is album number seven from BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa, and the fourth released by the discerning Helen Scarsdale Agency label. Since this trio (Benny plus Sigtryggur and Helgi of Stilluppsteypa) unleashed their drunken drone trilogy through the aforementioned Agency, they've been venturing into all sorts of delirious bouts of murky psychedelic collages and imagined soundtracks. There were the weird ruminations upon a found cassette, turned into a mondo filmscore on Man From Deep River; and then the sci-fi opus of synth meanderings found on Space Finale. Now what may be the best to emerge since that earlier alcohol-inspired trilogy is this, the mercurial and hauntological album Big Shadow Montana. Two long-form pieces make up the album, with the A side standing as a hallucinatory foreshadowing of what is to come on the flip. Here, ghostly drones broadcast directly out of the haunted ballroom from The Shining, flickering with half-received transmissions, bumps in the night, and any number of other worldly sounds. Bits of structure emerge in this slow-motion churning of drone, shadow, and filigree coming across somewhere between the fucked up collages that seem to bring all of the Teenage Filmstars records to a close and the subterranean drone-rock sensibility of German Oak. When the record flips, a cosmic stream of vintage synths slump toward oblivion paralleling what has been done by Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never (both of whom have released work alongside this trio on Editions Mego), but before this can venture any further down the rabbit hole of Schnitzler and Schulze references, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa slip into a faux-exotica guise with cheap Casiotone melodies swaying to and fro through old Les Baxter and Martin Denny records. It's a signature move for Stilluppsteypa, if anyone remembers how they mustered a similar strategy on The Best Possible Yet back in 1997. But the maudlin organ harmonies and percolating tone-bloop oscillations are much more confident here, emerging perfectly out of the drone fog like those organ-led numbers on that Deathprod boxset, only to slip into a twin engine thrum of inner-space expansion. In listening back to the second side of the album, it's clear that the first is a lengthy dub of the second, recast and recontextualized as a percussive ghost. Totally captivating through and through, and with a damn trippy cover sporting a vibrantly hypnotic, candy-colored mandala. Yup, it does have a download card. Yup, it is limited. Yup, it is highly recommended.
For a country whose entire population is only half that of San Francisco, Iceland has an exceptionally prolific arts community. One could easily look to the big Icelandic names in pop music (i.e. Bjork and Sigur Ros); but there's also slightly lesser known (but even more adventurous) music from the likes of Johann Johannson, Apparat Organ Quartet, and the entire output of the Kitchen Motors institution. But our personal favorite from Iceland remains Stilluppsteypa, whose dada drunkenness and black humor has developed arctic undercurrents to their increasingly bleak drone-based work. On Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna, the Stilluppsteypa duo of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson have hooked up once again with the Swedish sound artist BJ Nilsen, perhaps best known for his triumphant elemental drone work as Hazard released through Touch. Sigmarsson sums up the communal idea behind this album as a "love for drones, Scandinavia, and alcohol." Of course, he then proceeds to type a polysyllabic onomatopoetic bunch of drunken text that makes our extend-o-spelling of doom seem trite by comparison.
The previous collaboration Vikinga Brennivin was an homage to the Icelandic firewater of the same name; yet it held a clarity and singlemindedness rarely attributed to alcoholic excess. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna has that same contradictory dualism of conceptually relating to being fucked up without totally losing a grip on reality. Or perhaps these three Scandinavians have gotten so loaded that they drifted into a parallel universe of liquid physics and amorphous gravity. Needless to say, Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna is another masterful album of alchemical drone, that's even darker and more morose than its predecessor. Sonar pulses and crackles of wood break up the jet-black atmospheres of frozen electronic drones, resonant frequencies, and hallucinatory echoes rippling way out on the outer regions of the event horizon for this sonic black hole. At times falling close to the constant spiralling of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste, and times recalling the best isolationism of Thomas Koner, and yet at others surpassing the blackened ambience of Nordvargr. Somber, magnificent, and exquisitely constructed!
The first three records from BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa were a trilogy dedicated to alcohol, and wintery drones, as semi-fictions about getting really drunk sometime in December and nearly passing out in a snowbank while gazing up at the northern lights. Goda Nott is something of an extension of these ideas, except maybe for the alcohol part. Sometime in the winter of 2011 / 2012, this trio found themselves snowed in at Stilluppsteypa's Icelandic studio with no food or water; and no way of getting out until the snow began to melt away. While they did sleep as much as they could to pass the time, they also busied themselves with recording the sounds of the snow, ice, and wind, attempting to monitor what - if any - activity may exist beyond their frozen enclave. The possibility of any existence beyond their own became uncertain, where any rustling of the snow could be a footstep or a resonant tone could be a snowplow. Through their indeterminant amount of time in that studio, they smeared these field recordings into rumbling drones and static tones that mirrored the onset of their collective madness, made audible in the crazy sounding whistling that one of them fastens to the blustery isolationism of the first side of Goda Nott. The second side is even more desolate than the first, rivaling Kevin Drumm's Imperial Distortion for the most empty, most gasping, most claustrophobic slab of audio bleakness we've ever heard. This is a radical turn away from the melancholy kosmiche electronica of their previous two albums Space Finale and Big Shadow Montana; but they are also rendering something wholly new to the bad-ass dronescaping they mastered early on. So fucking good.
Man From Deep River is another fantastic album in the ongoing Viking drone collaboration between BJ Nilsen, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, and Helgi Thorsson. Where their trilogy for Helen Scarsdale spoke the trials and tribulations of alcoholism through heavy minimalism, this one has a Mondo feel. The album is based upon a found tape from 1975, which served as the guide to their excursions; but even beyond this piece of audio verite, they frame the album as if it were the harrowing sound design for some fucked-up Italian pseudo documentary on any number of unsavory topics. The opening field recording of African mbira players and wood percussionists is tame enough, setting the stage for a narrative beyond their Scandinavian tundra. As these recordings degrade through incrementally increasing reverb, the signature Nilsen / Sigmarsson drone sound oozes forward amidst the chattering of European finches. Things quickly blacken with a Dracula haunting of carnivalesque organ chords played with heavy hands and minor keys. As all of this happens within the first 10 minutes, the album instantly has a very different feel than the alcohol trilogy's isolationism.
Deadly serious, flatlined tones emanate beyond this point, coupled with those same bird recordings which have now been deformed into mutating coos and slow-motion clucks as if refracted through a fun house mirror. Bits of spoken dialogue also creep forward presumably from that aforementioned found cassette, but swimming in deeper than deep reverberation and intermingling with warbling carnivalesque overtures spawned from the almighty drone. After a rasping collage of electrified field recordings, Man From Deep River concludes through a series of spectral arcs of modulating sound radiate the night sky like the northern lights filtered through auditory hallucinogenics. Only during these brief concluding moments do Nilsen & Stilluppstyepa allow for a sense of beauty to emerge from an otherwise terminally unsettling, if blackly psychedelic album.
Heavy.
Black.
Drone.
That's the shorthand of what happens on Passing Out, the finale to a trilogy proposed by Benny Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa on the virtues and vices of alcohol blurred into a sinister ambience. But of course, we cannot leave well enough alone; and the longhand version is necessary to position this album at the top of the heap of heavy, black, drone albums that we continue to clamor about. Yes, Passing Out is a fucking brilliant album; and if you were blown away by the previous two entries in this trilogy -- Vikinga Brennivin and Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna -- then you're pretty much obligated to pick this album up as well.
Much like Nilsen's old project Hazard and the previous two collaborative records, the album starts in shadow and stealth with an ominous drone backing windswept industrial field recordings. Ten minutes in, this desolate cold snaps with a blinding shimmer of sustained sound. These are ostensibly lighter tones, but given a malevolent twist. Another agitation of activity fires with some sort of tactile crackling that dissolves into a gaping Lustmord meets Popul Vuh passage with a soft rhythm from some slow motion maracas. Benny tells us that these stoned maracca shakes are courtesy of Oren Ambarchi. He also tells us that Leif Elggren also makes a vocal appearance somewhere on the album; but there's nothing that sounds like the sly narration on The Ghost Orchid here. Soon after, a cyclical growl of spectral guitars recall what Robert Hampson used to be able to sculpt through the guitar on his once mighty project Main; and all of this gives way to ring-modulated percolations with disembodied melodies scratched from old 78s that sound like a transistor radio slowly drowning in a giant metal tank filled with water. Deep resonant vibrations abound, with some creepy breathing in your ear whisperings that may be those Leif Elggren vocals that Benny was talking about. Gradually, all of these deep drones and shadowy overtures glide into a slumbering descent. But the Icelandic weirdoes in Stilluppsteypa couldn't just let the album drift away without their absurdism forcing through the door, as they blurt with a clinical repetition of blooping electronics smashed and grabbed from Raymond Scott circa Manhattan Research. It's an unsettling climax to the album, but one that works brilliantly through Stilluppsteypa's expert use of electro-acoustic black humor. But it's drone that dominates the album, as angelic wash and devilish rumble collude to end this magnificent album. Oblivion never sounded so good.
Passing Out is beautifully packaged with letterpressed and silkscreened artwork. Very nice.
At the end of the 'alcohol trilogy' that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa released via Helen Scarsdale, the dark isolationist rumble which dominated the previous two and half records was shattered by a robotic sequence of bleeping analog synth tones which spiralled deep into the void of the arctic night sky. Such a dramatic juxtaposition is not uncommon within the realm of Stilluppsteypa, but less so for Mr. Nilsen. And those Derbyshire / Dockstader / Oneohtrix like tones found on Passing Out (the finale mentioned above) is clearly the jumping off point for Space Finale - an epic 90 minute cassette of analog synthesis, captured, spliced, and cut, all on a Revox 2-channel tape machine. Amidst the vintage synth blips and sustained tones, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa offer another narrative composition that moves from the vacant space station overrun by some unknown alien virus into the lair of the mad scientist who meanders dabbles on his Wurlizter (or some kind of organ, if it's not an actual Wurlizter) in minor key melancholy when not toiling away on an abomination that will somehow destroy the world. Shadowy ambience, fuzzed out tape hiss aggregation, weird dropouts and glitches on the tape that would make Leif Elggren proud, and much much more. With so many cassette releases being issued as 10-15 minute programs, it's very welcome to come across a full 90 minute tape! Limited to 200 copies!!! We got 20 and they're going fast...
The cold winter nights stuck above the Arctic Circle have become the perfect climate for extended bouts of intoxication for many a Scandinavian. As a result, the capacity for the Icelandic duo Stilluppsteypa to consume alcohol is the stuff of legend. Alcohol has soaked into every fiber of their being; but its manifestation in their music (and their personalities for that matter) is closer to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde allegory, as a raging alcoholic squirms just beneath the surface of a stoic Scandinavian temperment. Of course, where these two personalities come into conflict is where the art of Stilluppsteypa is realized. A schizoid tension runs throughout Stilluppsteypa's impressive catalogue of terminal drones, sputtered rhythms, and atomic fractures; and often this tension is dished out with a smug dollop of black humour and Dadaist absurdity. So, it's hardly unusual to come across Stilluppsteypa celebrating Vikinga Brennivin, the stringent Icelandic alcohol that has undoubtably killed some of their collective brain cells. Yet it was the stoic BJ Nilsen -- the Swedish electron wrangler whose best known for his work as Hazard -- who invited Stilluppsteypa to collaborate on Vikinga Brennivin. Their resultant collaboration is an existentialist allegory in which the three drunkenly stumble out in a Scandinavian winter night and spiral toward the inevitable point in which they blackout. Lest this be construed as a derelict piece of method acting, the craft that Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa brought to Vikinga Brennivin is impeccable, as the extended dronescapes breath with the majesty of distant fog horns and sparkle with the delicate light of countless stars cast down from the black heavens onto the frozen tundra below. Frightening and barren, yet hauntingly compelling, Vikinga Brennivin is an isolationist masterpiece.
We've got a handful of the first edition of Vikinga Brennivin which come housed in a jewel case with beautiful aged-copper inserts (as in actual metal, not copper ink) with white silk-screened printing. There's only 300 of the first edition, and the label has sold out of it! We'll let you know when the second edition will be released sometime in April 2005.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The cold winter nights stuck above the Arctic Circle have become the perfect climate for extended bouts of intoxication for many a Scandinavian. As a result, the capacity for the Icelandic duo Stilluppsteypa to consume alcohol is the stuff of legend. Alcohol has soaked into every fiber of their being; but its manifestation in their music (and their personalities for that matter) is closer to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde allegory, as a raging alcoholic squirms just beneath the surface of a stoic Scandinavian temperment. Of course, where these two personalities come into conflict is where the art of Stilluppsteypa is realized. A schizoid tension runs throughout Stilluppsteypa's impressive catalogue of terminal drones, sputtered rhythms, and atomic fractures; and often this tension is dished out with a smug dollop of black humour and Dadaist absurdity. So, it's hardly unusual to come across Stilluppsteypa celebrating Vikinga Brennivin, the stringent Icelandic alcohol that has undoubtably killed some of their collective brain cells. Yet it was the stoic BJ Nilsen -- the Swedish electron wrangler whose best known for his work as Hazard -- who invited Stilluppsteypa to collaborate on Vikinga Brennivin. Their resultant collaboration is an existentialist allegory in which the three drunkenly stumble out in a Scandinavian winter night and spiral toward the inevitable point in which they blackout. Lest this be construed as a derelict piece of method acting, the craft that Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa brought to Vikinga Brennivin is impeccable, as the extended dronescapes breath with the majesty of distant fog horns and sparkle with the delicate light of countless stars cast down from the black heavens onto the frozen tundra below. Frightening and barren, yet hauntingly compelling, Vikinga Brennivin is an isolationist masterpiece.
We've got a handful of the first edition of Vikinga Brennivin which come housed in a jewel case with beautiful aged-copper inserts (as in actual metal, not copper ink) with white silk-screened printing. There's only 300 of the first edition, and the label has sold out of it! We'll let you know when the second edition will be released sometime in April 2005.
Ah, the plight of the supergroup touring the world with fits of drunkenness, wanton groupies, the drudgery of long travel days, and of course a couple of good gigs between. Such is the fictional landscape mapped out by the dada-punk sound artists BJ Nilsen, Sigtryggur Sigmarsson & Helgi Thorsson (aka Stilluppsteypa), and Anla Courtis. Nilsen & Stillupsteypa have been working together for many many years now, alternating releases between Editions Mego and The Helen Scarsdale Agency, proving to be a rare commodity in the realm of avant-electronics that a collaborative project can develop beyond the one-night stand of hedonistic improvisation followed by bouts of slumped file-sharing. No, their wintery psychedelic collages of existential madness, sheering drone, VHS horror sound design, and Haflerian confusion have developed into one hell of an expressionist vocabulary. In bringing the tireless traveller and exemplary paratactilist in his own right Anla Coutis into the fold, the notion of these four embarking on some stupid-ass world tour akin to the Travelling Wilburys seemed apt. So, they ran with it in the same lysergic madness that Leif Elggren musters in his ludicrously brilliant artforms. The languid drones of the opening number "Aurora Australis" (named for the southern hemisphere polar-light phenomenon) suspends cryptic field recordings and nocturnal creaks upon corona-glow drones that ebb and flow with a psychological tension that Lynch & Splet mastered on the Eraserhead soundtrack, but here pocked with frightening gasps for air and violent jabs of noise. Side B's title "Fish Is God" seems like the punchline to a surrealist's knock knock joke; and if that may be an apt analogy, these four take that credo of absurdity rather seriously. Rolling out oceanic swells of rippling tone that rise up its tidal crescendo only to have its motion cut out with a dramatic tug to silence before an unsettling chunk of guttural vocalizations of an one-man orgy fitted to scabs of fragmented white noise. It's hard to really tell what Courtis may be up to in these procedures, as the album is very much a continuation of those amazing records that Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa have crafted over the years. Brilliant stuff.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oh shit. It appears that the Cortical Foundation will be reissuing the complete Hermann Nitsch's "Harmoniumwerk," which totals 40 volumes. Released four volumes at a time, this looks like it may end up being 10 double cds! While Hermann Nitsch is known mostly as the Vienna Aktionist who specialized in perfomances of ritualized bloodletting, his musical accompaniments to his performances have often revealed an incredibly developed aesthetic of dynamic dissonance balanced against subtle droning passages. The "Harmoniumwerk" series stands out from all of the Nitsch recordings, as not being made in conjunction with his performative productions. Nitsch describes this work, "In 1968, I got a harmonium as a wedding present from my wife. From then on, I sat at the harmonium and played almost exclusively long notes that never wanted to end. I tried to listen into the infinite structure of the stars, into the unimaginable spaces searching for sound. The joy of beautiful colors, of (almost intoxicating) combinations of sound was most important but at the same time it was carried by the almost presumptuous task to conjure, to sing of, and measure the extent of cosmic space. The course of the stars were to be put to sound."
The Hermann Nitsch "Harmoniumwerk" certainly rivals (and often surpasses) the magnificient tonal quality of such '60s drone suprematists as Charlemagne Palestine and LaMonte Young.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oh shit. It appears that the Cortical Foundation will be reissuing the complete Hermann Nitsch's "Harmoniumwerk," which totals 40 volumes. Released four volumes at a time, this looks like it may end up being 10 double cds! While Hermann Nitsch is known mostly as the Vienna Aktionist who specialized in perfomances of ritualized bloodletting, his musical accompaniments to his performances have often revealed an incredibly developed aesthetic of dynamic dissonance balanced against subtle droning passages. The "Harmoniumwerk" series stands out from all of the Nitsch recordings, as not being made in conjunction with his performative productions. Nitsch describes this work, "In 1968, I got a harmonium as a wedding present from my wife. From then on, I sat at the harmonium and played almost exclusively long notes that never wanted to end. I tried to listen into the infinite structure of the stars, into the unimaginable spaces searching for sound. The joy of beautiful colors, of (almost intoxicating) combinations of sound was most important but at the same time it was carried by the almost presumptuous task to conjure, to sing of, and measure the extent of cosmic space. The course of the stars were to be put to sound."
This is the second double cd in the 40 volume series of Hermann Nitsch's "Harmoniumwerk."
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oh shit. It appears that the Cortical Foundation will be reissuing the complete Hermann Nitsch's "Harmoniumwerk," which totals 40 volumes. Released four volumes at a time, this looks like it may end up being 10 double cds! While Hermann Nitsch is known mostly as the Vienna Aktionist who specialized in perfomances of ritualized bloodletting, his musical accompaniments to his performances have often revealed an incredibly developed aesthetic of dynamic dissonance balanced against subtle droning passages. The "Harmoniumwerk" series stands out from all of the Nitsch recordings, as not being made in conjunction with his performative productions. Nitsch describes this work, "In 1968, I got a harmonium as a wedding present from my wife. From then on, I sat at the harmonium and played almost exclusively long notes that never wanted to end. I tried to listen into the infinite structure of the stars, into the unimaginable spaces searching for sound. The joy of beautiful colors, of (almost intoxicating) combinations of sound was most important but at the same time it was carried by the almost presumptuous task to conjure, to sing of, and measure the extent of cosmic space. The course of the stars were to be put to sound."
This is the third double cd in the 40 volume series of Hermann Nitsch's "Harmoniumwerk."
These days noise pop bands are a dime a dozen. And we could count the number of shoegaze bands popping up on one hand, if that hand had about thousands fingers, and to be fair, it's a sound we love, and so in many cases, we can be less than discerning, we just love hearing those thick coruscating guitars, the soaring melodies, the lush walls of sound, spaced out and dreamy and fuzzy and buzzy and blissy. So what is it exactly that makes a band stand out from the pack? Songs, sure, you can't be a pop band of any stripe without songs. But it's more than that. Something ineffable. Songs sure, and the sound, of course, but just as importantly there are a handful of intangibles that all have to fall into place perfectly. Or at least perfectly IMperfectly. And more often than not, it's not something that can be created consciously. All a band can really do, is to follow their hearts, create the sound they hear in their heads, and try their best to realize that sound, to render that sound in all the glorious shades and colors and textures it needs to become more than just music, to transcend and become something magical, something special.
And that happens more than one might think, or expect, enough monkeys with typewriters as the saying goes, or in this case enough punk rock kids with guitars and a 4 track. Most recently it was the amazing record by Bay Area outfit Weekend, whose record captured everything we love about this sound, and now there's this, the debut full length from female fronted shoegaze noisepoppers No Joy, which moniker be damned, is about the most gloriously joyful record we've heard in ages.
In some ways, No Joy's Ghost Blonde is the perfect compliment to that Weekend record, a distinctly feminine variation of the same formula, the overall sound is more dreampoppy and hazy, the vocals ethereal and ephemeral and is the perfect counterpoint to the bands thick wall of sound, infusing clean guitar jangle, a distinctly nineties indie rock vibe, all wound into a pretty perfect chunk of pure pop JOY.
If you're anything like us, it should only take about the first 60 seconds of album opener "Mediumship" thick crunchy jangle guitar wrapped in a field of wild tangled feedback, the vocals drifty and pretty, and then when the song kicks in, we're totally transported, crunchy, fuzzy, hooky, heavy, shoegazey-y, plenty of ooooh's and aaaaah's, the sort of song you never want to end, and that you'll find yourself playing over and over and over. Which pretty much applies to every track here.
There are definitely some broodier moments, and some abstract psychedelic ambient drift, even some slightly atonal Sonic Youth inspired guitar tangle, but those elements are smoothly woven into the group's hazy, softly noisy, girl groupish, crunchy, jangly shoegazey dream pop bliss.
Definite contender for pop record of the year, and a record which will no doubt send lots of folks scrambling to redo their prematurely finished year end lists! Rightfully so!
You would be right to be skeptical of Nocturnal Emissions, as the long standing project has released a handful of duds amidst a catalogue of mediocre records. HOWEVER, the one exception is Drowning In A Sea Of Bliss, which is not only the best Nocturnal Emissions record, but also one of the most brutal, abrasive pieces of industrial electronics ever, alongside the best that SPK and TG produced back in the day and certainly providing a template for the caustic electro-shock treatments of Wolf Eyes, Prurient, UW Owl, and the like.
Drowning In A Sea Of Bliss originally came out on lp in 1983 through Nocturnal Emissions' own Sterile Records and was later reissued by Touch, first on cassette and then on cd in the early '90s. At the time, Nocturnal Emissions was the British duo of Nigel Ayers and Caroline K, the former of whom has helmed the project since the late '80s on his own veering into soft-focus ambient and questionable electronica. Nocturnal Emissions was always much better when Ayers had his foil in Caroline K, although the division of labor was always a bit murky. This album had been envisioned as a vinyl release. with two distinct sides - one being a series of audio collages of overblown noise, distorted media cut-ups, tape loops, and primitive electronics, and the second girded to a series of minimal-wave rhythms with plenty of noise bursts and dead-eyed tonalities. For better or for worse, the two cd reissues of the album have not broken up the album into individual tracks (which are listed in the liner notes), but instead present each side of the lp as a single continuous track. We had hoped that Klanggalerie would remedy this, but alas, the problem remains. That said, this minor quibble doesn't detract from the brutal power of this album, with the first half being what Cabaret Voltaire should have done with all of their Burroughs' inspired cut-ups. Here, maniacal loops of analog distortion and piercing screams corrode into sharply rendered bursts of noise and plenty of deconstructed samples from military commercials and news clippings. The second half is no less blackened, but is far more clinical with the primitive electronic rhythms actually getting sort of groovy from time to time, even as shards of searing noise burst forth. Think early Coil or Fad Gadget. Fucking incredible is what this is.
If there's one Nocturnal Emissions record you should get, this is the one.
After their caustic debut, "The Towers are Burning" (also on tUMULt), a record that explored an especially pummeling and punishing kind of ambience, Oakland based audio terrorists Noisegate abandoned the violent and corrosive clamor that peppered their first full length, and instead, created a dark and barren dronescape of ominous, slowly shifting deep resonance. Whirring and thunderous low end rumble underpins shimmering textures of glistening darkness and hazy tonal reverberations, grey and austere. "Suspended Animation" is a breathtaking arrangement of hum and buzz and chime. Stark and spatial, warm and mesmeric; feedback, voices, guitars, and bells are dismantled, reduced to tones and timbre, flowing like a murmering black river; bubbling up from a lost spring. A maudlin elegy, hypnotic and somber, funereal yet effulgent.
Reminiscient of the isolationist experiments and drone investigations of Lustmord, Organum, Zoviet France, Andrew Chalk, and Jonathan Coleclough.
Nord began in 1979 as a minimal electronics / drone-on industrial project for Hiroshi Oikawa and Katayama Satoshi. They only recorded one album together -- their eponymous 1981 release on the Pinakotheca imprint - before they parted ways, but each of them used the moniker Nord for their own projects. Satoshi's Nord involved a handful of Japanese noise musicians including Hiroshi Hasegawa from Astro and C.C.C.C., with a smattering of recordings being released over the decades; but it's Oikawa's Nord that has become a holy grail to those seeking one of the most obscure releases of the Japanese noise underground from the '80s. He released two LPs on his imprint L.S.D. Records, as well as a couple of cassette releases. NG Tapes was one of those cassette releases, only made available as a bonus tape with a select number of copies of Nord's LSD album, itself an edition of just 200 copies. For all of its mystery and mythology, LSD was a dodgy record, in part due to the Surrealistic Pillow citation at the beginning on one side of the record; but the follow-up Ego Trip with its mind-erasing irradiation of post-Schnitzler / post-Monoton / pre-Thought Broadcast minimalist arpeggiation and dour electronics is a watershed album no matter how you slice it. NG Tapes may in fact be even better than Ego Trip, making this reissue all the more necessary.
NG Tapes centers upon three long-form tracks of ominous, synth pulsations that capture radio-tunings, blankstare guitar drone/noise, and some disembodied vocal monotone within a psychic black-hole vortex of emotional emptiness. Oikawa girds these longer tracks with some short numbers of noise-junk tactility, scuzzed-out distortion, low impact power-electronics, and primitive rhythm-box programming. Presumably these shorter numbers reflect the aesthetic of the aforementioned Pinakotheca album though that one doesn't seem to be in the cards ever for a reissue. Hypnotic. Narcotic. Desolate. There's the sound of NG Tapes in a nutshell. A one-time only reissue, nicely repackaged in a tip-on sleeve and an obi to replicate the original tape's design.
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The September release in the 20' to 2000 series of experimental/minimalist/electronica is from Noto. What has been so surprising of this series is the exceptional quality... I mean is there going to be a dud in the lot? Not yet! Carsten Nicolai - aka Noto and label boss for Noton/Rastermusic - presents perhaps his best best work of minimalist clicks and electronic pops emerging rather unassumingly at first, but later structuring themselves against slow moving rhythmic bass pulses.
If you're a regular AQ customer you already know that we're all huge fans of Village of Savoonga, the darkest and most dramatically experimental of the many musical outfits hailing from the loose collective of musicians based in Bavaria, Germany. Another group from this incredibly fertile scene, The Notwist started out as a punk band but have gotten better and more different with each release (reflecting the Acher brothers' growing musical smarts and proficiency), culminating in this nice rock album. But not just any indie rock, this music is wistful, lyrical, softly flowing music that's *extremely* well executed, no filler, and brings in all kinds of non-rock elements -- in sort of the same way that the Beta Band does -- *casually*, not making a big deal out of it. Cos electronic keyboards and programming and stuff (courtesy Martin Gretschmann of the solo electronic act Console) are merely one facet of The Notwist's sound, which also includes very catchy minor key hooks, attractively textural cracklings and wooden clop clops, plucked strings (cello?), machine made gurgles and squishies, even out-of-place (-but-not-really) breakbeats that actually work.
In addition to the guy from Console, The Notwist personnel includes the abovementioned Acher brothers Micha (Village of Savoonga, Tied+Tickled Trio) and Markus (VoS, T+TT, Lali Puna).
Highly recommended! This is a grower.
Novatron is the latest project from Anthony Di Franco (former noisemaker for Skullflower/Ax and no relation to Ani). Black electronics, heavy doses of malevolent feedback drone and sporadic chugs of grinding guitar & hammering electronic beats make for a particularly bleak album. If you liked Noisegate or Neurosis' most droning moments, this album is for you!
Although there is no track listing or general information on this record, "Automating Volume 1" is a collection of recordings that Steven Stapleton made for compilations between 1981 and 1986. The album starts out on a really wacky note with "Duelling Banjos" (from the United Dairies compilation "Hoisting The Black Flag" released in 1981.) An uptight drum machine relentlessly chuggs
The remainder of "Automating Vol. 1" revolves around Stapleton's fascination with Robert Ashley's compositions in one form or another. "I Was No Longer His Dominant", taken from the 1982 United Dairies release "An Afflicted Man's Musica Box" is a creepy homage to Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon". While both the remaining two tracks, "Ciconia" (from the 1982 Slektion comp "Masse Menche") and "Automating (Again)" (from the 1984 Frux comp "Born Out of Dreams" -- exclusive to the cd re-issue) are themselves influenced greatly by Ashley's "Automatic Writin." A coincidence in the title? I think not! The aforementioned Ashley piece is an unsettling meditation on muffled conversations and muted electronics which mysteriously express a psychosexual overtone. Stapleton's homages to Ashley are a fortunately less academic sounding and pack more of a punch.
Certainly, this work stands with "Homotopy For Marie" and "150 Murderous Passions" as the records to document Stapleton's formative years.
Now, a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
Automating Volume 1 is a collection of recordings that Steven Stapleton made for compilations between 1981 and 1986. The album starts out on a really wacky note with "Duelling Banjos" (from the United Dairies compilation "Hoisting The Black Flag" released in 1981.) An uptight drum machine relentlessly chuggs alongside whimsical farts and blurts of archetypal NWW sounds (as heard on "Alas The Madonna Does Not Function" and "A Missing Sense"). The second track, "Stick That Chick & Feel My Steel Through Your Last Meal" (from the 1986 Laylah compilation "The Fight Is On"), is a Fluxus-esque composition of creaky noise making, with spurts of groans, more fart sounds, party favors, zithers and percussion objects (a lot of the material found on "Homotopy To Marie" can be found here). The third track, "Nana Or A Thing of Uncommon Nonsense", is another silly track (featured on the 1983 X-tract compilation Elephant Table Album), starting out with a tasteless racial joke and then sputtering through a random collage of bongos and football chants (plus, a lot of the polka loops on the Sylvie & Babs lp are used on this.) The album then turns to Stapleton's dark side with his very creepy submission to the Come Organisation album Fur Ilse Koch (1982) on which a little German girl pleads for her father accompanied by an ever intensifying psychoacoustically irritating high frequency drone. What may in fact be more disturbing than this track is to hear my co-worker Byram muttering the little girl's words as syntatical anomalies in his already idiosyncratic vocabulary.
The remainder of Automating Vol. 1 revolves around Stapleton's fascination with Robert Ashley's compositions in one form or another. "I Was No Longer His Dominant", taken from the 1982 United Dairies release An Afflicted Man's Musica Box is a creepy homage to Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon". The aforementioned Ashley piece is an unsettling meditation on muffled conversations and muted electronics which mysteriously express a psychosexual overtone. Stapleton's homages to Ashley are a fortunately less academic sounding and pack more of a punch.
Certainly, this work stands with Homotopy For Marie and 150 Murderous Passions as the records to document Stapleton's formative years.
Drunk With The Old Man Of The Mountains is a curious way to start reissuing all of the Nurse With Wound records again; but hey Nurse With Wound is not an outfit that adheres to the logic of market forces. As of the early months of 2005, only a handful of Nurse With Wound's amazing catalogue of psychic automatism and Dadaist strategies remain in print. Fortunately, the Canadian label Jhana (with help from Revolver Distribution) has begun the painstaking but necessary process of reissuing all of the albums that Nurse With Wound's former distributor World Serpent handled so poorly.
Originally released in 1987 as a very limited edition of 100 copies with original paintings by Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton, Drunk With The Old Man enjoyed a second vinyl pressing in 2004 with reproductions of some of Stapleton's paintings gracing the cover. Essentially, Drunk With The Old Man was one of the many Nurse With Wound compilations that pulled extremely rare tracks of NWW compilation appearances, singles, and even tracks from his proper albums. "Mourning Smile" (1985) opens Drunk With The Old Man and while having been later published as a bonus track for the CD of Spiral Insana, this track is one of two pieces that debuted on this album. A quintessential NWW collage, "Mourning Smile" crawls through eerie drones and ragtime piano ditties, broken up by comically majestic church organ swells. "Swamp Rat" (1987) was from a split 12" with Current 93 called Faith's Favourites and later appeared on the Sugar Fish Drink compilation. Stapleton sets forth a primitive rhythmic thud through which he laces reverberations from vocal chorales, distant guitar squiggliness, and a constant giggling, punctuated by Stapleton himself muttering the title of the track. "Sheela-Na-Gig" (1984) is the other track to debut on this compilation, although it later appeared on Large Ladies With Cake in the Oven. Here, female shrieks and cackles (possibly from Stapleton's then partner Diana Rogerson) have been pitchshifted into an electronically mangled version of Diamanda Galas. "Astral Dustbin Dirge" is from the classic album Homotopie For Marie (1983), splattered with cut-ups of a man snoring and a woman orgasming amidst hyperbolic post-Pierre Henry musique concrete techniques. And finally, "Shattering Man Falling" from Live At Bar Maldoror album (1984) is evidence of the very short spell in which Nurse With Wound performed live. While the Bar Maldoror was something of a fictional space, the resulting recordings (which in all likelihood had been treated by Stapleton after the fact) are chaotic improvisations with found objects and whirring tape manipulations.
Hopefully, Jhana will continue marching through the NWW catalogue, and Drunk With The Old Man should stand as a fantastic introduction to Steven Stapleton's twisted art.
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"Homotopy For Marie" is nothing new to Aquarius, nor has it received a remastered make-over like it's predecessor "Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table..." Yet, of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and I like a bunch of them!), this is my favorite. Perhaps because this makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within "Homotopy For Marie," Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularties of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as I could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
"Homotopy For Marie" is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is
an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. Stapleton's use of the vocal sample is at it's best here with two characters (a shy little girl and a confident woman) intermitantly reciting ambiguous phrases "When I woke up I didn't know where I was" answered by "Don't be naive, darling!". The rest of the album is a clutter of non-decript distortion,feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
"Homotopy For Marie" is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece.
FINALLY REISSUED!!! Of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and we like a bunch of them!), this is our favorite. Perhaps because this makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within Homotopy To Marie, Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularies of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as I could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
Homotopy To Marie is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. Stapleton's use of the vocal sample is at it's best here with two characters (a shy little girl and a confident woman) intermittently reciting ambiguous phrases "When I woke up I didn't know where I was" answered by "Don't be naive, darling!". The rest of the album is a clutter of non-descript distortion, feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
Homotopy To Marie is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece.
Steve Stapleton has always viewed Insect And Individual Silenced as a monumental failure. So much so, that he had resisted every attempt by friends, colleagues, and other labels to convince him to reissue this album. Yet, obviously with this elaborately packaged reissue, he's finally been convinced to the contrary. Insect And Individual Silenced emerged as the fourth Nurse With Wound album back in 1980, and found Steve Stapleton out on his own as the principal soundmaker for the ensemble. Yet he had convinced Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Trevor Reidy to join him in the studio, just to see what would happen. According to the liner-notes, the studio sessions found Thirlwell fucking around with his amplifier, cable buzz, and the jack-plugs; Reidy brought in a drum kit, which he skitters across on one of the three lengthy cuts on the album; and Stapleton had his arsenal of junk, toys, and tapes. Through the aid of drugs and alcohol, Stapleton mixed and mastered the album; and quickly sent it off to get it pressed. When the albums arrived, he admits being horrified by the results, qualifying it as "a dismal failure, a dreadful pressing, and an appallingly carefree mix -- in fact a seriously misguided project altogether." So he vowed to never reissue the album by burning the masters.
Yet some 25 years later, a confluence of events forced Steve to reconsider his position. First came a package from Matt Waldron of irr. app. (ext.) with reconditioned artwork for the original album; then came word that Robot Records' mastermind Kevin Spencer had painstakingly constructed a digital master from the original vinyl simply because he had loved the album so much. So when Steve finally returned to the work, he now admits being "pleasantly surprised." And here we are, finally the reissue of Insect And Individual Silenced!
Insect is an album guided by the slice of a razor, as tape edits had to be done by hand. Stapleton's collage techniques have always been deft in their erratic disruptions and maniacal detours, and Insect is no exception. The first track "Alvin's Funeral" is a wonderful and wild ride through demented sounds all going in multiple directions at once, which make it easy to get lost in this maze of distortion, sound effects, and splattered guitar noise. There's an urban gamelan of springs and bowls with the varispeed being fucked with as the tape drags across the recording heads; there's the screeched sound of metal dragged against the floor, overblowing what the magnetic tape could handle (ah, what a lovely sound compared to the ugliness of digital peaking!); there's a sampled scream from Disney's Haunted Mansion LP; and then some surprisingly sublime moments where a collaged section of distant female vocals duet with a string of shells being shaken. But the jump cuts and quick edits of dynamic volumes between the quiet and loud that keep this moving at a frantic pace. The second piece seems to have much more of that aforementioned studio session present with skittering drums and seering white hot guitar noise grating against the ears. The final number is a precursor to the screeching metal collages of Organum, albeit far more feral and atonal.
It's obvious that what Steve Stapleton may view as his own personal failure is greater than most everything that's come afterward from any of the post-Industrial soundscapers.
BACK IN PRINT!!!!
Steve Stapleton has always viewed Insect And Individual Silenced as a monumental failure. So much so, that he had resisted every attempt by friends, colleagues, and other labels to convince him to reissue this album. Yet, with this reissue, he's finally been convinced to the contrary. Insect And Individual Silenced emerged as the fourth Nurse With Wound album back in 1980, and found Steve Stapleton out on his own as the principal soundmaker for the ensemble. Yet he had convinced Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Trevor Reidy to join him in the studio, just to see what would happen. According to the liner-notes, the studio sessions found Thirlwell fucking around with his amplifier, cable buzz, and the jack-plugs; Reidy brought in a drum kit, which he skitters across on one of the three original cuts on the album; and Stapleton had his arsenal of junk, toys, and tapes. Through the aid of drugs and alcohol, Stapleton mixed and mastered the album; and quickly sent it off to get it pressed. When the albums arrived, he admits being horrified by the results, qualifying it as "a dismal failure, a dreadful pressing, and an appallingly carefree mix -- in fact a seriously misguided project altogether." So he vowed to never reissue the album by burning the masters.
Yet some 25 years later, a confluence of events forced Steve to reconsider his position, and as Steve finally returned to the work, he now admits being "pleasantly surprised." That said, Insect was reissued through Raash Records in 2007, with that label dissolving amidst unseemly rumors; and now the album gets a proper reissue through Stapleton's United Dairies, complete with a lengthy bonus track that was commissioned for a unpublished 'suitcase edition' through Raash.
Insect is an album guided by the slice of a razor, as tape edits had to be done by hand. Stapleton's collage techniques have always been deft in their erratic disruptions and maniacal detours, and Insect is no exception. The first track "Alvin's Funeral" is a wonderful and wild ride through demented sounds all going in multiple directions at once, which make it easy to get lost in this maze of distortion, sound effects, and splattered guitar noise. There's an urban gamelan of springs and bowls with the varispeed being fucked with as the tape drags across the recording heads; there's the screeched sound of metal dragged against the floor, overblowing what the magnetic tape could handle (ah, what a lovely sound compared to the ugliness of digital peaking!); there's a sampled scream from Disney's Haunted Mansion LP; and then some surprisingly sublime moments where a collaged section of distant female vocals duet with a string of shells being shaken. But the jump cuts and quick edits of dynamic volumes between the quiet and loud that keep this moving at a frantic pace. The second piece seems to have much more of that aforementioned studio session present with skittering drums and searing white hot guitar noise grating against the ears. The third track is a precursor to the screeching metal collages of Organum, albeit far more feral and atonal. This brings us to the the bonus track "Tooth, Teeth, Milk, Teeth, Skin" which is very much a contemporary collage of eerie female vocals looped into a mesmerizing ambience blown apart by harsh, musique concrete jump-cuts.
It's obvious that what Steve Stapleton may view as his own personal failure is greater than most everything that's come afterward from any of the post-Industrial soundscapers.
Rat Tapes One may be the first in a series of outtakes and unreleased material from the vast back catalogue of Nurse With Wound. If the quality and diversity of material found on the first volume is indicative of what's to come, then we are going to be in for some serious treats for the next many years! Rat Tapes One also marks the return of United Dairies, the label run by NWW's Steven Stapleton, after years of inactivity, as other labels had been releasing Stapleton's records. What ultimately makes this album so fascinating is the range of production strategies and alchemical variations differentiating these recordings from those that actually made it on the various NWW records. Take for example, the opening number, a cover of Patty Water's "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" originally found on She And Me Fall Together In Free Death where the drone guitar has faded into the distance behind a series of dark funereal bells (probably the same used on the Angry Eeletric Finger sessions) and Stapleton's voice twisted into a helium saturated cartoon of the original. Proving that the 1992 seminal album Thunder Perfect Mind was a true labor of love, Stapleton presents at least four different outtakes of the xylophonic percussion matched with the digital scrubbing sound that became the signature of that album. Even for the die-hard NWW fans here, some of the material is hard to place, especially where the sounds for the fucked-up drum 'n' bass number (seriously!) came from. While Rat Tapes One was originally sold at the 2006 NWW shows here in San Francisco for the fans hungry for more material, Rat Tapes One also makes an exceptional introduction into the surrealist tinged, psych-damaged collages that Stapleton has made as NWW for well over two decades now.
Slowly. Very slowly, the entire Nurse With Wound back catalogue is getting the reissue treatment; and in the absurdist spirit of Nurse With Wound, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which these titles are making an appearance. Originally, Rock 'N' Roll Station appeared back in 1994, as an homage to one of Steven Stapleton's heroes Jac Berrocal, the French avant-jazz musician with a occasional taste for obtuse pop. The title track on this Nurse With Wound album is in fact a cover of Berrocal's most well known song, although by now, more people probably know of the song through Stapleton's remake rather than the other way around. Similar to the way that Stapleton / Thirlwell reconstructed Brainticket's lysergic funk and how Stapleton remade Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, the NWW version of Rock 'N' Roll station is pretty faithful to the original, even if the original was pretty weird to begin with. There's a steady metronomic pulse (which Beta-Lactam have qualified as 'proto-hip-hop,' c'mon... it's a drum machine replicating the same drum pattern that Berrocal scripted back in the '70s) grounding warbled tones and Stapleton's repeating monologue about the infinite possibilities to be found within a Rock 'N' Roll Station, even if he is still "waiting for Michael." All of the other tracks on Rock 'N' Roll Station are essentially variations on the theme of the title track with a similarly laid-back rhythm acting as a foundation upon which Stapleton splatters the stereo field with distorted squigglings, gurgling vocalizations, looping snippets from Perez Prado's mambos, fingernails on the chalk board scrapes, and ghastly drones extracted from the ether. The pronounced use of rhythm on Rock 'N' Roll Station has rubbed some of the die-hard NWW fans the wrong way, but when has Nurse With Wound ever been easy to digest, even when it just might be one of the grooviest and most ecstatic albums he's ever produced? Oh yeah, there's a 'bonus' track (the "1.35 pm Remix") on this version of Rock 'N' Roll Station which was originally released as part of the Second Pirate Sessions of reworkings of the material from Rock 'N' Roll Station. Recommended!
Before I get into any critique of this, I have to say that Salt Marie Celeste is easily the best Nurse With Wound record in years!
Throughout the 25 years of Nurse With Wound recordings, Steven Stapleton has actively pursued audio manifestations of Surrealism, often hypothesizing on what Surrealists like Andre Breton or Tristan Tzara might do if they had access to contemporary recording technology but still maintaining their bastardizations of Victorian aesthetics. Recently on recordings like Man with the Woman Face or Alice the Goon, NWW embraced obtuse free associations to build dense sound puzzles of dead-end jokes, absurd parataxis, and general confusion. However, Salt Marie Celeste is far simpler an application of Surrealism, as Stapleton renders NWW a vehicle for psychological horror. For this album, Stapleton and studio wizard Colin Potter (who has been the only other collaborator with NWW for the past couple of releases) have drawn from Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic" for inspiration; however, NWW never dwells in the lulling pathos which characterizes Bryars' composition. Instead, Salt Marie Celeste is a relentless album which imagines the tidal currents around the Titanic's demise as an inhumanly cold force steadily bringing the doomed ship to the bottom of the ocean. Through a series of looping mechanisms, Stapleton and Potter build a massive orchestration of fluctuations which swell and dissipate with an unnerving regularity. The central element to the compostition is an ominous wave of electronic sound which constantly tumbles forward. Fans of NWW will recognize this from the super limited edition Music from the Horse Hospital 2cd, yet done much more effectively here. Wooden creaks and moans emerge from this gravity well of sound, before breaking up and disappearing amidst the tidal wave of intensity. For the references to the Titanic (or at least in Bryars' composition), Salt Marie Celeste conjures suffocating and bleak images of ghost ships mysteriously appearing on the horizon.
Regardless, this is clearly one of Nurse With Wound's best and should not be missed!
There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.
"The record is fucking amazing," or so says Nurse With Wound protagonist Steven Stapleton. So fucking amazing in fact that he's issued "Soliloquy For Lilith" in a handful of different editions. Originally released as a triple vinyl set in 1988 (though references have been made to a mysterious additional 12" released in 1989), "Soliloquy For Lilith" got the CD reissue back in 1993, standing as one of the pinnacles within the Nurse With Wound pantheon of surreal records. Now 10 years after the first CD pressing (which was a double CD), Stapleton has issued this masterpiece as a triple disc to mirror of the triple vinyl edition, and he's produced two extra tracks of contemporary material that perfectly complement the original tracks.
The iconography of Lilith is a rich and often divergent set of references, beginning with an ancient story (possibly of ancient Babylonian origin, but merged into Jewish mysticism) of Lilith being the first woman (predating Eve's birth from Adam's rib) who chose not to live in the Garden of Eden. While contemporary feminists have taken Lilith as a role model of independence from masculine authorship (i.e. Lilith Fair), Lilith has often been associated with supernatural tendencies with Qabalist scholars qualifying her as a demoness instead of human, manifesting herself as the 'hidden' second moon that circles the Earth. For his "Soliloquy For Lilith," Stapleton opts for the archaic readings of Lilith, or perhaps a far more personal one as Lilith is the name of his daughter. This is Nurse With Wound's mellowest album as a brooding contemplation of Lilith as an archetypal source for unknown magicks. Here, extended mantras flutter through an ambience created by the closed loop of various effects pedals and flangers, cycling through the built-in harmonics from those electronic elements as tidal rhythms and hums. The resulting album rivals any of the ambient records of Brian Eno and Klaus Schultz, adding a decidedly menacing feel to the ambient blueprint.
Yes, we certainly agree that this record is fucking amazing.
A frightening record. Even by the standards set by the darkened mind of Steven Stapleton, the Surveillance Lounge is a terrifying album in fact. This set of recordings began through a 2007 commission by the F.W. Murnau Foundation to provide a live soundtrack for the 1922 Murnau film Der Brennende Acker ("The Burning Soil"). A silent film that was thought to be lost until 1978, it tells a tale of a man who grew up in the rural life but cut himself from that existence through greed, lust, and ambition, rife with moral and psychological dilemmas. Nurse With Wound is no stranger to the art of the homage, having constructed the ultra-minimalist masterpiece A Missing Sense under the influence of Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing and the two Echoe Poem discs drew inspiration from the French New Wave film Last Year At Marienbad. The sessions, which gave us The Surveillance Lounge, came out of the initial material used for that soundtrack and were completed during the ensuing years. The bulk of those sessions actually had been encapsulated in a super limited edition box-set called The Memory Surface, which may be out of print by now, if not impossible to track down. That said, the Surveillance Lounge represents the best of this material, which was produced by Stapleton and Andrew Liles with vocal support from David Tibet, Freek Kinkelaar, and a host of others.
Moaning vocals and creepy whisperings set a darkened hue for the Surveillance Lounge, which also adopts a chilling set of piano notes that seem to allude to another soundtrack, Coil's rejected score to Hellraiser. Soon afterwards, a textured smearing of sand, earth, and rock conjoin to a deep wooden creaking that ominously lurch forward in a similar manner to the epochal NWW album Salt Marie Celeste. The use of vocal snippets - in French, in German, from David Tibet, of children wailing - are signature moves from Stapleton, and are used in some of the best collage material that Stapleton has generated since Homotopy To Marie. Vocal and textural elements always seem to collapse into darkened shadows, only to find Stapleton and Liles forcing another scream of noise, voice, and electronics to the foreground with jarring effect. For the central track "The Golden Age Of Telekinesis," NWW slowly build a shuffling rhythm out of the shards of broken glass that intensifies through the development of a screeching noise buttressed by the rapid-fire glossolalia of what sounds like an auctioneer. Expect to find a dynamic chasm between the relative quiet of the early moments of this track to the ear-splitting crescendo of a tape machine whirling out of control. As the album draws near to a close, NWW explode land mines of noise, scorched earth, and Tibet's screams in barren soundscapes of disembodied voices and shadowy drones. By contrast the album ends on a note of soft-hued easy listening muzak with its politely swaggering guitar, which is creepy given the context of its cancerous segue. Like we said, frightening! This might be a good entree to NWW for those of you who normally only by black metal or ultradoom albums...
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Now, a limited time, we have this classic recording on cassette! It is a little unfortunate that we've never reviewed this album, although it has graced the aQuarius shelves from time to time. 150 Murderous Passions sometimes designates the name of the 'band' and sometimes, it's the name of the album penned by Steven Stapleton (aka Nurse With Wound) and William Bennett (aka Whitehouse) in 1981. Regardless of how anybody wants to qualify the album, there are two distinct variations on these recordings, with both producers offering up their own take on the original source material. Bennett scoffed that the version Stapleton produced lacks the in-the-red intensity he envisioned for the album; and to be blunt, Bennett is totally fucking wrong. Stapleton (who published his through his own United Dairies, with Bennett's getting a Come Productions make-over) definitely offers the superior version, with Bennett -- despite all of his infamy in the late 70s and early '80s -- really not coming into his own until some five or six years afterwards. Yes, power electronics do require some finesse. But that's not to say this is a walk in the park for a Nurse With Wound album; there's plenty of atonal metal screeches, echolocation rhythmic patterns of klanging noise, stabs of feedback, and unholy screams which get collaged into a very claustrophobic, demented composition. Anyway, all of the other versions of these recordings are totally out of print, with their future reissue probability being a big question mark. So, if you don't have this awesome album already, get the tape. Now.
Early in 2004, Steven Stapleton offered a taste of the Angry Eelectric Finger project in the form of a CD released through World Serpent on his United Dairies imprint. The intent was to offer a precursor to a massive 3LP / 3CD set in which Stapleton had commissioned reworkings of unpublished Nurse With Wound material from irr. app. (ext.), Cyclobe, and Jim O'Rourke. As World Serpent went out of business some six months after releasing this teaser to the Angry Eelectric Finger project (without paying Stapleton a dime for two years worth of royalties!!!), the 3LP / 3CD set fell into limbo.
Fortunately, Beta-Lactam has picked up the slack where World Serpent failed miserably, and released the Angry Eelectric Finger project in its entirety.
The Nurse With Wound source material for all of the Angry Eelectric Finger project includes interlocking varispeed warbles, prepared piano recordings, ominously seasick rhythms, and a variety of metallic crashes and slashing cymbals. Stapleton also gave the remixing artists recordings made with members of Krautrock icons Xhol Caravan as well as with David Tibet on "apocalyptic guitar." For the most part, this template of sounds is similar to the spacious, bleakness of his early Surrealist masterpiece Homotopy For Marie, although each of the remixing artists takes the material in a unique way reflecting both their own artistry as well as Stapleton's genius.
Cyclobe's alchemy upon the source material is clearly the most extreme of the three reworkings, as very little of the Stapleton and Xhol source material emerges intact on this album. Comprised of former Coil member Stephen Thrower along with Ossian Brown, Cyclobe (not Cylob) has often paralleled the golden, decadent timbre's of Coil sidereal dronescaping. With sparse and eerie ambience ghosting throughout the stereofield, Cyclobe's contribution to the Angry Eelectric Finger is probably the best we've heard from them.
Early in 2004, Steven Stapleton offered a taste of the Angry Eelectric Finger project in the form of a CD published through World Serpent on his United Dairies imprint. The intent was to offer a precursor to a massive 3LP / 3CD set in which Stapleton had commissioned reworkings of unpublished Nurse With Wound material from irr. app. (ext.), Cyclobe, and Jim O'Rourke. As World Serpent went out of business some six months after releasing this teaser to the Angry Eelectric Finger project (without paying Stapleton a dime for two years worth of royalties!!!), the 3LP / 3CD set fell into limbo.
Fortunately, Beta-Lactam has picked up the slack where World Serpent failed miserably, and released the Angry Eelectric Finger project in its entirety.
The Nurse With Wound source material for all of the Angry Eelectric Finger project includes interlocking varispeed warbles, prepared piano recordings, ominously seasick rhythms, and a variety of metallic crashes and slashing cymbals. Stapleton also gave the remixing artists recordings made with members of Krautrock icons Xhol Caravan as well as with David Tibet on "apocalyptic guitar." For the most part, this template of sounds is similar to the spacious, bleakness of his early Surrealist masterpiece Homotopy For Marie, although each of the remixing artists takes the material in a unique way reflecting both their own artistry as well as Stapleton's genius.
For my money, the irr. app. (ext.) is the best of the three. Much like the stunning NWW album Salt Marie Celeste, Waldron's album rumbles as a sustained droning mantra; this time, it's from a muffled funereal bell while broken springs, distant mechanical engines, and washboard scrapes bounce throughout the stereofield as an aggregate of sonic detritus suspended against a black hole of sound.
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Given the subtitle Spitch' Cock One, this first release in the Angry Eelectric Finger series of reworked Nurse With Wound material may or may not have anything in common with a forthcoming release also entitled Angry Eelectric Finger, which might be a triple disc set. Regardless of the ambigous status of any future releases, for this one Nurse With Wound's mad scientist Steven Stapleton solicited Cyclobe, irr. app. (ext), and Jim O'Rourke to rework what we've been told was "an entire album of material." Presumably these are not remixes of older NWW tracks, but something of a parlour game with new material.
Stapleton himself produces the first track, interlocking varispeed warbles of some prepared piano recordings. Eventually, these settle into something of a seasick rhythm that is accompanied by a variety of metallic crashes and slashing cymbals, most of which are being played backwards. In the end, it sounds somewhat like a revisitation of the ideas found on Homotopie for Marie.
Cyclobe, a World Serpent staple comprised of two former Coil members, offer a bunch of ominous synth tones that do better than the recent batch of Coil recordings but don't extend much beyond that.
irr. app. (ext.) is AQ's beloved Matt Waldron, who contributes the best track on the album with an incredibly bleak take on the NWW vision of surrealism. Much like the stunning NWW album Salt Marie Celeste, Waldron's track rumbles with a sustained droning mantra; this time, it's from a muffled funereal bell while broken springs, distant mechanical engines, and washboard scrapes bounce throughout the stereofield as an aggregate of sonic detritus suspended against a black hole of sound.
Jim O'Rourke offers a soft kaleidoscope of DSP-impacted organ drones upon which he sprinkles tiny bells and some of the same mechanical springiness that Waldron also used. Obviously this is a teaser for that supposed upcoming triple disc set which is rumored to also feature Xhol Caravan; but considering the possibility that some of this material may not be there, it's advisable that you consider picking it up. Either way, this is fantastic.
Originally released as a split LP, then later reissued on separate anthologies of each project, this is the cassette version of the classic Nurse With Wound / Organum split from 1986.
The Nurse With Wound side is "A Missing Sense" which is a brilliant homage to the ultra-quiet /proto-lowercase composition "Automating Writing" by Robert Ashley, which is a very subtle composition of cut-up vocals and gasps with distant rumblings all of which flutter just at the event horizon at the edge of perceptibility. Stapleton's construction was originally designed as a private tape to which he could drop acid to, as everything in his huge record collection was far too shattering for his lysergic states. "A Missing Sense" like Automatic Writing is very quiet, with small vocalizations and sexualized gasps punctuating the muffled incidental sounds of what could very well be somebody vacuuming their carpet upstairs. Very subtle for sure, but there's plenty of room to take in the absolute strangeness of Stapleton's visionary work.
Here's what we had to say about Organum's "Rasa" which was featured on the now out of print Volume One collection released through Robot Records: The timeless, acoustic drones that make up the music of Organum could have been made for the beginning of the world or for its final breath; yet Jackman has always avoided assigning any specific metaphors to his work. Instead, this is music that attempts to exist purely within its own context, unconcerned with anything beyond its self-defined borders. Grinding motorcycle engines, steel strung instruments, bowed metal, and Japanese flutes are the instruments that continuously reappear throughout Organum. However grim, Industrial, grating, dissonant, or punishing Organum could be with such instrumentations, Jackman always manages to arrange his work to emphasize the dynamic and often beautiful tonalities of those sounds.
If you're looking for the smarty-pants Mayo Thompson meets Van Dyke Parks meta-pop of albums like Insignificance or Halfway To A Threeway, you will not find it on Tamper. This album dates back to 1991, when a young Jim O'Rourke was emerging as a tremendously talented avant-garde composer bridging minimalist strategies with post-industrial intensity. At the time of this release, O'Rourke's name was always linked to his work in Chicago's stalwart ensemble Illusion Of Safety. His involvement with IOS lasted for a couple of years, having worked on two of the best Illusion Of Safety albums, Probe and Water Seeks Its Own Level. Throughout his chameleon-like career, O'Rourke has always worn his influences on his sleeve. Tamper is no exception, hedging itself between the electro-acoustics of Luc Ferrari, the grand minimalism of Phill Niblock, and the techgnosis of The Hafler Trio. The three long form pieces are exquisite exercises in synthesizing electronics with long-form tonal clusters from acoustic instruments, where the goal is a dynamic compaction of frequency and timber into a unsettling drone very much like those sounds from Niblock and the Hafler Trio. Even after almost 20 years, Tamper still sounds very impressive, making us wonder if O'Rourke would ever return to style. The only downside, the record's been repackaged with some stupid squiggly artwork.
Plastic Palace Alice? Let's hear it for Scott Walker, first of all; but the mad genius of baroque pop has nothing in common with the long-form stupor and granular synthesis that these stalwarts of the avant-garde produced way back in 1991. At that time, O'Rourke was a recent graduate of music school with a head full of knowledge about vangarde composition, the whole Luc Ferrari back catalogue, and an standing invitation to perform / record within Chicago's preeminent postindustrial ensemble Illusion Of Safety; and Heemann was in the process of dissolving his seminal dada-montage project H.N.A.S. The two began a correspondence that led to him travelling to Germany where they jumped into a heady collaboration in Heemann's studio. Why none of these recordings have yet to see the light of day is anybody's guess, but here's what may be the first in a series of archival recordings produced by O'Rourke and Heemann.
A buzzsaw drone gradually introduces the first of three long-form pieces of stratified minimalism. As the piece grows and blossoms, an uneasy set of harmonic overtones dominates the stage, holding a firm grasp on the psychoacoustic properties that an epic Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock piece can achieve. The track collapses through a weird gurgling of electronics only to swell back again with a chorus of LaMonte Young inspired drone-vocalization rasped through electronics and / or coupled with sympathetic drones from a guitar, only to mutate into a spasmodic explosion of electronic granularity and sine-tone modulation. Really amazing stuff, for sure! The second track, picks up with what we'll assume to be O'Rourke's buzzing guitar drones giving way to a devilish montage of vocalized growling, suffocating gaspings for air, and other grim sound poetics that look forward simultaneously to the lupine babbling of Sudden Infant and the tortured incidental black-metal ambience of Spektr. The profound spookiness of the second track dissolves into the pools of shimmered tone and radiant beauty of the third, as something of a harbinger of where Heemann would direct the Mirror project with Andrew Chalk almost a decade later. So nice!
Again, we have to wonder why the hell did it take so long for these recordings to come out? They are simply too good to have been sitting dormant on some shelf!
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San Francisco's electronica maverick O.S.T. has unfortunately not been doing as well career-wise as he deserves, as several records which were originally intended for release Plug Research and Reflective got shelved by the labels. Not too smart on their part, as all are great. And thankfully, at least this one got a proper release at last. On the Pthalo label, Chris Douglas (aka O.S.T. as well as Rook Vallard) presents his third album as O.S.T. "Death Notice," which despite its morose title is his most delicate record. It's a collection of poetic vignettes of delicate electronica melodies. While the palette used is similar to O.S.T.'s previous abrasive work, there is an interest not so much in the caustic but the beautiful, resulting in an album not unlike Coil's rejected "Hellraiser" soundtracks or Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2". Recommended!
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This cd-r from the maverick Phthalo label showcases San Francisco's O.S.T. at his most punishing. Recorded live at the rotating if sporadic Static club, O.S.T.'s arsenal of distorto-Aphex-crunch beats smash against agressive melodic chords, all wrangled through his banks of effects. A very nasty piece of electronica.
NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! This is one hell of a great album of wastoid electronics thumping with bad-ass techno and mired in noise fetish miserablism. Gloomy metallic synth chords ooze into leaden marches of frightening intensity thanks to the relentless drum machine pound and big-muff overdrive that crunches all of the electronics into a blinding rage. The sporadic use of throat-mulching vocal delivery is one that owes considerable debt to Godflesh, furthering along all of any and all references to crushing nihilism. Such is the case for the eponymous lead track "The Beginning" and "Dirt & Humbug" whose dark techno workouts thunder with roiling noise of obliterated surfaces compounded with teeth chattering tremolo patterns. Then there are tracks such as "Death Sieve" and "Dead Finks Don't Listen" offer a suitably ominously droned-out design for blackened ambience and industrialized abstractions that serve to augment all of this barking punk drama for Wagnerian portent. Remarkable in more ways than one.
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Awesome. Simply awesome. Subtitled "A Sound Wave Replication Dissertation On Alien Simian Technology in 13 Chapters", Old Man Gloom's album is a schizophonic album with ultra-heavy post-hardcore/grinding metal in the tradition of Cave-In or Cavity interspersed with deep dronological investigations that could have easily been an Organum or Jonathan Coleclough record. Hydrahead couldn't make this fit with the rest of their catalogue, but released it on their Tortuga subsidiary. Drones, metal, and monkeys... everything that Andee could ask for in an album.
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Awesome. Simply awesome. Subtitled "A Sound Wave Replication Dissertation On Alien Simian Technology in 13 Chapters", Old Man Gloom's album is a schizophonic album with ultra-heavy post-hardcore/grinding metal in the tradition of Cave-In or Cavity interspersed with deep dronological investigations that could have easily been an Organum or Jonathan Coleclough record. Hydrahead couldn't make this fit with the rest of their catalogue, but released it on their Tortuga subsidiary. Drones, metal, and monkeys... everything that Andee could ask for in an album.
From a label whose catalog includes the reissues of Os Mutantes' first three albums and the Monks early demos, an album like Bjorn Olsson's "Instrumental Music" might well have been some lost psychedelic classic. When in reality, this is a contemporary recording from the former guitarist of the Swedish punk band Union Carbide Productions and current member of Spain. "Instrumental Music" is a beautiful recording for shimmering, pulsing sixties' organs, spelling out simple filmic signatures, like the spaced-out/stoner synths of Spaceman 3 attempting to achieve Morricone's grandiosity with Pink Floyd's "Umma Gumma" in their narcoticized short term memory. Definitely inspired by Bo Hansson's great "Lord Of The Rings" album as well. Recommended!
