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Sweden's Bjorn Olsson (a member of The Soundtrack Of Our Lives) returns with yet another album of nostalgic soundtrack-sounding stuff that'll have you asking yourself "where have I heard this before"? Of course, that may be because, when you get through the whole album, you'll have heard many of the songs twice! (Yep, for the same obscure reason he did so on his last album "UPA", ol' Bjorn put the same songs twice on one disc, though the second time around they're definitely different mixes at least.)
Anyway, after hearing these tracks a couple times (that is, after one spin of the disc, heh) we found ourselves -- store employees and customers alike -- fairly whistling along, mostly because Olsson's catchy melodies are quite irresistible, but also partly 'cuz several of the best tracks here indeed feature whistling as the melodic lead (think Morricone's "Giu La Testa"). Yep again, as with his previous two albums Bjorn continues to emulate Ennio Morricone, to the point where he's nearly out Heroded Herod. Along with his knack for melody -- super catchy and incredibly reminiscent of specific tunes that will rest on the tip of your tongue -- Olsson's arrangements are increasingly more brilliant to boot. Like a spaghetti western that takes place in a sunny, pastoral meadow or something. A very lovely album, that at first we thought might be a bit too "Hallmark card" pretty, but really really grew on us. Windy's new favorite album, and Byram likes it too!
[Note: this is the 2003 album from Bjorn that we used to designate as "lobster" before we learned it was supposed be crawfish, when the REAL lobster came out in 2005. Gaaah.]
If we were told that this disc was actually unearthed from the once-lost archive of a curmudgeonly pair of outsider artists who lived on some sodden island in the Puget Sound during the mid '70s, we could definitely be excused for believing it, and thus being completely wrong about the true identities of Vague Johnson & Thompson Omake. With every sound swaddled in tape hiss and occasionally thrown out of orbit by an unruly tape machine, the curious happenings on Headiferous Untacbulum could have easily come from that era of unkempt post-hippie / proto-Industrial expressionism (e.g. Taj Mahal Travellers, Nihilist Spasm Band, Nurse With Wound, etc.). These tracks are grimy psychedelic adventures of free-folk-drone-noise wanderings for homebuilt instruments which rumble and churn against a static field of modular synthesis. Elsewhere, long form drones from dissonantly bowed strings swell into huge clouds of radiant drones. Then, there are the hammered plucks across acoustic guitars with plenty of nods to Fahey and Basho that also emerge behind a pall of spring reverb, and stone-encrusted field recordings crashing through the mix with unexpected results. Top it all off is the hand-dyed envelope with a crusty smear of wax holding the package together. Wouldn't be surprised to see something from these two on Foxy Digitalis or Root Strata one of these days.
All that said, it turns out that Omake and Johnson are the work of contemporary Seattle based musicians Matt Shoemaker and Dave Knott, working through Shoemaker's arsenal of electronics and Knott's invented instruments recorded through a beat-up tape recorder. A really great piece of way-out there sound-field generation and free-folk splutter; and of course, it's super limited to about 40 copies.
We've all got our old favorite records that maybe we haven't heard in a while, but it only takes a few bars of the lead-off track to immediately bring it all back and make us wanna dust 'em off again... This was the case when AQ pal and Cup's fellow I Am Spoonbender bandmate Dustin� recently placed a special order for Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark's 1983 album "Dazzle Ships"- �a seeming direct follow-up to Kraftwerk's 'Radioactivity'�- featuring shortwave radio broadcasts, chiming synth lines, speak-and-spells, and earnest, emotive vocals. Take tracks like the bouyant "Telegraph"- it's pure synth-pop goodness, combining an innocent exuberance with considerably more weighty, dark subject matter. An overlooked experimental electronic pop gem, this album is full of wonderful songs and sounds, courtesy of�core members Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey.�In a time when 'the '80s' are seemingly everywhere - and frequently in the most watered-down, cliche forms - it's nice to catch a few quality moments with a brilliant, good old friend. FYI: Jim thinks 'Organization' is way better, but this is definitely OMD's most exploratory moment.�
Omit is the longstanding project of New Zealand's finest electron technician Clinton Williams, who dropped out of high school close to two decades ago and holed himself up in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere New Zealand to wrangle with analogue synthesizers, 8-track tape decks, unruly drum machines, and a small army of effects pedals. There was a time in the '90s when Williams' output was ridiculously prolific, through countless cassettes in tiny editions and a handful of lathe-cut singles. His work caught the attention of the Dead C's Bruce Russell, who was so taken by Williams' work that he collaborated with the man as Dust/Omit and released a handful of discs through Russell's seminal Corpus Hermeticum imprint. Upon the release of the 1997 3cd boxset Quad, Williams' Omit project began to slow down tremendously. The quality of work had certainly continued, but the wealth of releases was considerably diminished. In 1999, there was Interior Desolation, brilliant with its squealing pigs adding to electronic claustrophobia. Then Anomalous released Rejector in 2002; and Helen Scarsdale had the honor of releasing the epochal darkness of Tracer (2005), and now the skeletal rhythmicist drones on Interceptor.
Working in isolation has lead Williams to develop a language which is entirely his own, yet exhibits a curious convergent evolution with many of the other greats in DIY electronics - most notably Chris Carter from his days in Throbbing Gristle, Mika Vainio and his early hyper-minimal phaseshifting experiments in post-techno, and the gaping proto-industrial paranoia of Klaus Schulze. His work is simultaneously ponderously huge and effortlessly simple, as his sounds hover along intertwining sweeps of synthetic ambience grafted to simple rhythmic structures. The saddest melodies in the world poke through Omit's cold and barren surfaces, accenting the isolationist tendencies already inherent in these sounds. Interceptor is a slight detour in the Omit aesthetic, and the detour was by design as Williams had ventured outside of his hometown of Blenheim in search of a job. But he also brought two suitcases of gear with him to continue his recording. The frustrations he felt in his failure to secure employment are matched in the bleak gestures found on Interceptor. Williams had stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom, which as with all of Omit's work are effortless in their compositional appearance. Anybody, and we mean ANYBODY, who has a passing interest in electronic music - contemporary, historic, surreal, arcane, Warp-ish, Kompakt-ish, or otherwise - has got to do themselves a favor and investing the time into Omit. The rewards are infinite from this under recognized, autodidactic genius.
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With dozens of self released tapes, a 3cd boxset, and a handful of collaborations with Dead C/A Handful of Dust guitarist Bruce Russell, this New Zealand reclusive misanthrope returns with more dark & claustrophobic dronescapes. Found sounds, homemade instruments, & barely perceptible rhythms are forced into Omit's mostly broken 8-track in the form of tape loops which shift and pulse ominously. Plus the recurrent motif of squealing pigs. An absolutely stunning record!!!
Through his DeepSkin imprint, the hermetic New Zealander Clinton Williams has released dozens of cassettes as Omit, housed in his obtuse artwork of bizzare post-Dali monsterisms and awkward geometric shapes. Due to the absence of Williams' artwork on this CD-R production of "Rejector," SySecular doesn't apppear to be the CD-R extention of the Deep Skin cassette catalogue. As Omit's work for haunted synth / loop constructions are incredibly well-executed and sublimely creepy, it's a shame that "Rejector" has only received CD-R status; regardless it's a more accessible format than the nearly-obsolete cassette. Omit's work has clear predecessors in '70s Kraut synthesists like Conrad Schnitzler, Kluster, and early Tangerine Dream; yet his apparently sinister intentions and sci-fi isolationism push his productions closer to the sounds of mid '80s Nurse With Wound (i.e. "Homotopy To Marie") and Zoviet France (i.e. "Mohnomische"). His work uses some amazingly simple techniques of counterpointed tape loops (crackling wood, creaking doors, down-pitched tape splice clicks, etc.) that warble in and out of phase with each other, while dark synth drones swell in and out of the mix to form slowly developed two or three note melodies. As with all of the Omit recordings, "Rejector" comes highly recommended! Super limited too, so don't dawdle.
Over the past few years, we have made quite a fuss over the free-noise / dronescraping scene out of New Zealand, as perenially great artists such as the Dead C, Birchville Cat Motel, Flies Inside The Sun, Surface Of The Earth, RST, Eso Steel, Seht, Peter Wright, and many others form a population that is proportionally way larger than countries many many times the size of New Zealand. Amongst all of those NZ artists we mentioned, there is another artist who gets name-checked from time to time: Omit. At one time back in the mid-90s, Clinton Williams -- the sole knob twiddler and tape-splicer behind Omit -- put all of today's hyper-prolific cd-r artists to shame with his own stream of releases through his own cassette and lathe-cut imprint Deep Skin. An artist whose paranoiac aesthetic was completely wrapped up in the bunker mentality of '70s analogue electronics, Omit never really made the logical transition by updating from cassette to cd-r, having only re-released a fraction of his old tapes on disc, the Rejector reissued on Anomalous, the Quad boxset released on Corpus Hermeticum and now the monumental double disc set Tracer, rescued from obsolescence by The Helen Scarsdale Agency.
While Williams calls the tiny farming comunity of Blenheim, New Zealand his home, there is very little in his work that latches upon the gristled noise and feral folk tunes heard in many of his fellow New Zealanders. Instead, his work sprawls from the sci-fi bleakness that ran through the post-psychedelic explorations of German electronics, most notably Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler, and Cluster. At the same time, Omit's kosmische homage stands as an eerie parallel to the Raster-Noton sound that ripples with Omit's millenial horror, albeit through the sterility of digital production. Comparisons have also been made to early '80s Cabaret Voltaire, but Omit is infinitely better in executing his ideas than CV ever were. It could be said that Mr. Williams is a man in the wrong time, in the wrong part of the world; and all things considered, Mr. Williams would probably like it that way. Perhaps the best way to make the world's most isolating music is to be thoroughly isolated oneself.
Following his previous work on Anomalous and Corpus Hermeticum, Tracer demonstrates a finely crafted execution in these bleak, isolationist recordings. The slow moving synth sweeps, creeping electric atmospheres, unnerving loops of mechanized clamour, and low-slung rhythmic austerity have all of the trappings of industrial culture strategies in using technology to critique technology's alienation over mankind; yet, Omit has never really stated what this is about, instead leaving hints that Omit is merely a reflection of Clinton Williams' soul expressed through blighted electronic hypnosis. Emotive expressionism isn't something you think of when it comes to Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle, but that's the ground where Williams has consistently tred. You would be hard pressed to find an electronic album as majestic, melancholy, and profoundly human as Tracer.
This one is a total mystery. Not sure where they're from (New Zealand we guess) or what their story is, other than the fact that it was released on Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel) Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, and that it is one seriously blown out punked up slab of garage-y scuzz and roll. Heavy and noisy, spastic and sludgy, when this was playing in the front of the store, Allan went up to see what black metal record was playing if that tells you anything. Filthy and crumbling ultra distorted guitars, boy girl vocals WAY down in the mix, riffs that go from paint peeling shred to gut churning rumble. Some ungodly hybrid of vintage Dead C, the Butthole Surfers, The Germs, Flipper, recent AQ faves the Violent Students, and recent Siltbreeze noisemakers Times New Viking. This is definitely punk as fuck, but wrapped in layer after layer of guitar grit and broken amp splatter, classic punk rock swallowed whole, chewed up and spit out in huge sludgy gobs of grrrrr and rrrroooaaar. Epic sludgescapes of pound and churn, showered with wild lightning bolts of squealing feedback. There seem to be pop songs in there somewhere, but don't even try to dig that deep, you'll just end up bruised and bloodied, or you'll lose a hand or an arm. Best to just lay back, close your eyes real tight, clamp your hands tight over your ears, let these noise rockers just back their ten ton punksludge steamroller right over you and pray you survive.
So, Gneiss Things made a small batch of discs for this Oneohtrix Point Never album back at the end of 2008, probably not anticipating that OPN would become something of a big deal via his cyborg meditation music. A Pact Between Strangers was the second recording for OPN, predated only by the Betrayed In The Octagon album, which first came out as a cassette on Deception Island and later got released on LP through No Fun. By now, most everything that Dan Lopatin has released as Oneohtrix Point Never has gone out of print; so Gneiss Things wisely decided to make another run down to Kinkos, run off some more color copies of the artwork, and press up another batch of discs. But it will inevitably be a small window of time in which we'll be offering these discs.
That said, A Pact Between Strangers is not all that dissimilar to the long sprawling sci-fi tracks of Betrayed In The Octagon with shimmering synth patterns gliding along those day-glo lazer tones without much use of the sequenced arpeggiations that Lopatin had featured so prominently on Zones Without People or the KGB Man material.
Limited as fuck, and just as recommended.
FINALLY ALSO AVAILABLE ON CD!! Here's what we said about the vinyl version a couple weeks back:
With the opening squall of electrical noise on his latest Oneohtrix Point Never album, Daniel Lopatin must have been paying homage to Mego's history of digital cacophony, with the likes of Kevin Drumm, Florian Hecker, and Zbigniew Karkowski all abusing binary code through their releases on the label. Of course, Lopatin's signature sound is a throwback to the bygone era of education films about the wonders of chemistry and the drama of the space program with their cheesy, blooping soundtracks, so an homage to Mego is not entirely out of character from a conceptual point of view. Beyond this assaulting track, the elastic surfaces and geometric patterns which have become the hallmark of Oneohtrix Point Never work their magic on Returnal. On the title track with its staccato synthesis, Lopatin tricks his voice out through a couple of pitchshifters, rendering it very much in line with what Karin Dreijer Andersson has done in The Knife and Fever Ray. This isn't the first time he's sung on a track, as he did entertain some robotic vocals on one of those KGB Man cassettes from 2009. He follows this with a series of tracks overlapping cathode-ray drones, algorithmic shapeshifting, and pools of synthetic android tears all of which revolve into curving compositions that split the difference between pastoral new age drool puddling and progressive electronics with a nod to atonal cybernetics. Like Emeralds, who have also signed to Editions Mego, Oneohtrix Point Never has been on quite a roll, and Returnal lives up to all the hype.
The long overdue reissue of the Rifts anthology, which was originally released on cd by No Fun in 2009 as a collection of the first three vinyl releases from Oneohtrix Point Never (Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), and now also sports a half dozen or so tracks from OPN's constant stream of cassette and cd-r releases, many of which never made their way to aQuarius. That was a double CD, which now gets expanded to FIVE pieces of vinyl, with even MORE unreleased material!
Here's a bit of a rehash of what we've said about those earlier records (and which would apply to the bonus material as well): Oneohtrix Point Never is a curious resuscitation of progressive electronics by Daniel Lopatin who so far has not strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. His vision is a conscious nostalgic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The seven tracks from Betrayed In The Octagon ripple with densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. A few tracks bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arpeggiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced).
Above a solar-powered electric hum, the tracks from Zones Without People interweave poly-synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arpeggiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lopatin gets to the title track of Zones Without People, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the rest of these tracks are duds. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters into cosmic arpeggiations and stargazing drones to amazing effect.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms to the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Here, Lopatin tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors.
Beautifully packaged in a stunning heavy box, with eye popping new artwork, each one hand numbered, and LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!
Russian Mind is the third piece of vinyl to be released in 2009 by Daniel Lopatin's ever-amazing Oneohtrix Point Never, following Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. All three of these LPs have recently been collected on the Rifts anthology, also released through No Fun, and this week's Record Of The Week!
The ideas of a forgotten future had been recently employed by Leyland Kirby on the driftscape trilogy Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was; but where Kirby pegged his lost future as somewhere in the early portion of the 20th century, reclaimed through downpitched and blurred 78s, Lopatin firmly pegs his lost future as the one perceived from the time period between 1975 and 1985. Given the title of this album, Lopatin's retro-garde zone-tripping looks back to the former Soviet Union. Such is also the case for some of Lopatin's appropriated video work, which features '80s Russian commercials with all sorts of a wonderfully corn-ball, lazer-clad video effects. Furthermore, he claims this album was "transcribed by the Material Eye Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 1, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia." Nope, there is no such institute at the Russian Academy, but it makes for a good piece of fictional context.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind, and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms in the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Russian Mind tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors. A marvelous record for sure.
It makes perfect sense that Daniel Lopatin is a fan of J.G. Ballard, the late author of dystopian environments plagued and / or graced with the dilemmas of the relationship between man and machine. Lopatin's previous entry as Oneohtrix Point Never was the Memory Vague dvd on Root Strata, recycling '80s computer animation from YouTube to serve as the visual data for his sci-fi soundtracks of analog synthesis; and there was no doubt about the peculiar Ballardian aura to that dvd which enjoyed a bittersweet optimism for the future of technology with its sensual grasp upon the 'new.' For this album - Zones Without People - Lopatin continues to delight us with his perfectly anachronistic use of synthesizers to capture the early '80s memories of early afterschool science specials, cheap sci-fi soundtracks, and the never-ending fascination with space. Lopatin is keenly aware that we don't have teleportation devices, jetpacks, or holidays on the moon; and an undercurrent of sadness does seem to bubble from below all of his compositions. In fact, Lopatin describes the strategies he employs for his poly-synths as "grid tears," imbuing a sense of melancholy through his rigid network of percolating tones and bleeps.
Above an solar-powered electric hum, the album opens with a series of interwoven synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arppegiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lapotin gets to the title track, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the flip side is a dud. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters as the second side's opening cut. Cosmic arpeggiations and star-gazing drones settle in the rest of this amazing record. Don't expect this to be around for long. We're not the only one's freaking out about Oneohtrix Point Never, and Zones Without People is limited to 400 copies.
Not much information to present about who Yui Onodera is. Nor is there anything in the way of a conceptual framework to guide one through this album beyond its sources from "environmental sound and pump organ." Not that it really matters anyway, as Suisei is a gorgeous album of darkly textured drones with parallels to Thomas Koner's isolationist compositions or Keith Berry's precious deconstructions. Wind, rain, and water all make themselves known in the collection of field recordings, as does the pump organ, which reveals itself in harmonic sustained tones with a spectral timbre (e.g. Niblock, Radigue, Chalk, etc.). During a particular enigmatic episode, wooden creaks and sodden groans duet with a motorized persistant soft-grind, giving the impression that some unscrupulous machine is quietly compacting sinews, meat, and bone. Strangely, it never sounds macabre or unsettlingly grotesque; rather, these crunching textures situate humbly next to a hypnotic wash of compressed static and melancholic shadowy drone, which sublimely shift into a slippery crescendo of grey massed sound. Very, very well done!
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Ora's rotating core of musicians has at times featured AQ favorites Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough, but here Ora's ringleader Darren Tate has employed Colin Potter's aeolian strings and the extensive field recordings of Michael Northam to marvelous results. The rich details of cold soil crackle, damp rocks dripping water, and wind rustling though decaying leaves situate within a thick tonal droning haziness. In spite of Coleclough's and Chalk's absence this is a remarkable album that matches its beautiful packaging (two pieces of clear vinyl obscuring close up photographs of a marsh).
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Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate formed Ora well over a decade ago and have released numerous self-released cassettes and limited cd-r editions of their mysterious ambience and delicate textures. In working with such prolific collaborators as Jonathan Coleclough, Lol Coxhill, Colin Potter, Daisuke Suzuki, and Michael Northam, Ora has masterfully collected a wunderkammer of drones. Each of Ora's mesmerisms possess an elegant antiquity that eeriely display a sense of history but have little context as to an origin or insight into the placement of one sound to another. Just as a 17th Century historical aesthetician would arrange heliotropes, alchemical machines, hermetic documents, and taxidemy specimens in a manner that emphasized the beauty of the object, Ora intuitively develops their slow building drones out of aqueous field recordings, undefined magnetic fluctuations, aeolian strings, and Chalk's resonant bells, gongs, and metal.
"Aureum" is a double LP collection of the rarities found on their self-released cassettes / cd-rs and showcases the three distinct facets of the Ora, which parallel the distinct personalities which went into the project, specifically Chalk, Tate, and studio wizard Colin Potter (whose ICR studio was the recording site for all of the Ora sessions). Tate's aesthetic favors the textures, especially crackly field recordings. Chalk prefers the extended metallic tone float of various resonnating objects, and Potter tends to blur everything into a sweeping haze. Absolutely beautiful.
Many moons ago, Darren Tate and Andrew Chalk found their way to Colin Potter's IC Studios, where the three initiated the humble yet eccentric drone project Ora, with occasional help from the likes of Jonathan Coleclough, Daisuke Suzuki, MNortham, and Lol
With Darren continuing on as Monos, Andrew working in Mirror, and Colin busy engineering / collaborating with Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Monos, and dozens of other projects, Ora has ceased to be, and "Final" is probably the last Ora document to be released. Culled mostly from the CD-Rs "Live," "Distances," and "New Movements In G," this anthology does also include a couple of unreleased tracks. As the more recent Monos and Mirror recordings reflect, Ora's specialty has been the construction of the opiated drone that implores a sort-of calmness but at the same time actively confronts the listener with its sound rather than floating to the back as aural wallpaper. Built from field recordings, bowed metals, and various electronics, Ora situates their drones within a wide spectrum of textures -- ranging from the sporadic use of angular blurts from Lol Coxhill's sax and accompanying dense scrapes like a huge boulder getting pushed across a concrete floor, to tiny fluctuations from flutes and sitars. "Final" stands as yet another exceptional record from this small aesthetic circle of UK drone artists.
The inscription for Ora's "Rosea" states that this music is "full of Elves and Gnomes" and those of you familiar with the little things in life that we here at Aquarius love, you know that gnomes and elves fit right in (last list's "Ancient Forest of Elves" anyone?). Although the notes on the back, provided by the ususally tight lipped recluses Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough, share none of the valuable insight into the music of gnome and elves that the inscription implied. Anyway, Ora is the textural drone collective that features Darren Tate, Lol Coxhill, Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound), as well as the aforementioned Chalk & Coleclough. This 94-95 record's loosely structured field recordings of geese and what Byram thinks sounds like someone rolling around on a couch with contact mics taped to their latex t-shirt coalesce into signature patterns of sound that fade in and out of delicate drones. Texturally, Ora has always been quite adventurous, and "Rosea" is no exception. Limited to 500 copies.
Despite his development as an artist within the heyday of the British post-industrial community of Nurse With Wound, Whitehouse, and The New Blockaders, David Jackman's musical beginnings date back much earlier to the nascent stages of British improv. In fact, Jackman's earliest recordings were made within Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra and a couple of late '60s projects spearheaded by Eddie Prevost of AMM; but it wasn't until much later that he actually released anything he conceptualized. Up until about five years ago, it was pretty safe to say that most everything Jackman touched turned to sonic gold. The signature Organum sound is an aggressively droning acoustic screech, typically created by bowing cymbols and multi-tracking the results with little or no processing. Nowadays, artists like Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sunroof, and Birchville Cat Motel owe their entire sound to Organum; and it's hard to find instances when the students have outclassed the teacher. The main problem with Organum and Jackman is his insistance upon very short programs... such as this 18 minute 3". It's fucking beautiful; but would it really damage Jackman's curmudgeonly mystique to actually compile a full 70 minute album?
Anyway, the four tracks found on Die Hennen Zahne date back to the early '80s, with the first cut "Die Kralle" pre-dating the earliest Organum work, when Jackman was multi-tracking metallic hammerings and primative sampled loops of scraping noise. The title track explodes with a constant tumble of crashing glass and Tibetan horn blurts. At merely four minutes long, Jackman's controlled fury is no match for those epic blasts of cacophony heard on Sub Rosa's amazing collection of Tibetan Buddhist rites, but it is nice to actually hear a rare influence intrude into the Organum repertoire. "Maus" is the centerpiece of the album, beautifully encapsulating everything that Jackman does so well. Bowed cymbols set in a complex polyphony of static reverberation and shimmering metallic vibrato. Excellent! The final track is a quieter bit of 'pipe fighting' between Jackman, Michael Prime, and Emma O'Bong, much like the Organum curiousity Vacant Lights. Even if it is a bit short, Die Hennen Zahne is well worth diving into.
Justifying the price of $13.98 for a seven inch with 8 minutes of music can be difficult. David Jackman continues to release tiny editions of his music in bite sized portions. Obviously, he's banking on the fact that both his solo work and his project Organum is fascinating enough to entice his loyal customer base to gobble up anything that he releases. "Die Letzte Musik Vor Dem Krieg" is the latest from Organum, a project that specializes in the timbres and drones from bowed and scraped metals. Jackman, who appears to be the only member of this permutation of Organum, has always been a master of this artform, collaging multiple layers of these sounds on top of each other to create a swarming minimalism that's almost always better than anything that Tony Conrad or LaMonte Young could muster. Jackman mixes things up a bit, by throwing in a couple of solemn piano notes on one track, and mournful Tibetan horns on the other. Being pressed at 45 rpm, this single sounds great at slower speeds, thus balancing out the dollars per minute ratio a bit more.
Be warned, we only have 5 copies of this, and these will be gone soon. Don't delay, or you may end up spending $25.00 on Ebay for a copy. And you know what, it's probably worth it!
It is quite plausible to propose that Organum is one of the many logical extentions of '60s minimalism. After all, Organum's David Jackman has maintained a longstanding friendship with AMM (whose Eddie Prevost joined Organum for a couple of records) and wrote
Sonically, this stands as maybe the finest work from Organum. The extended screech of bowed cymbals fits perfectly with non-verbal deep vocal chants and the hovering wisps of a flute to create a timeless and ancient sounding music. As soon as Organum sastisfactorily meets the requirements for the drone supreme with complex interlocking timbres from various tones and abrasions, Jackman orders everything to cease. The shortened program of these beautiful sounds appears as a let down at first, but Jackman's fleeting constructions say everything that needs to be said with all of economy of a three minute pop song. If you disagree, the digital format will work in your advantage as you can simply repeat this album indefinitely for extended listens. Regardless, this is highly recommended!!!
For the "Sphyx" sessions which evolved over a three year period from 1990 - 1993, David Jackman amassed an all-star line-up for his stellar drone ensemble Organum with a young Jim O'Rourke (freshly matriculated from Illusion of Safety), Christoph Heemann (HNAS, Mirror), Eddie Prevost (AMM), Dinah Jane Rowe, and post-production help from Robert Hampson (Main). The Organum templates for glittering cascades of scraped metal, bowed cymbals, and steel strung cellos with occasional flourishes from Jackman's shakuhachi (i.e. a Japanese flute) remain intact. While certainly attentive towards the shifts within the limited palette from coarse metals, Organum specializes in the density of those acoustic textures layering, swelling, and mutating upon themselves.
However, the extended track 'Aurora' prominently features Eddie Prevost skittering across the drum kit punctuating the glistening textural drone with a rhythmic patter often found on the mid-period AMM recordings. For the CD reissue of this long out of print LP, "Sphyx" features two bonus tracks recorded around the same time. Unfortunately, this too has a limited run, with only 700 copies of the digipack CD available. As with all of the Organum albums, this comes highly recommended!
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This isn't anything new, though we have picked up a bunch of this Organum record not only because it is fantastic but also to give further insight into the earliest drone work from AQ-favorite Andrew Chalk (who also has been quite active in Mirror and the recently defunct Ora). While Chalk kept his residency in Organum for only a few records, his presence added patience and delicacy to Organum's textural actions for bowed cymbals, motorized vibrations, and scraped metal. With his lengthy tonalities from sampled bells and field recordings of birds, Chalk made an excellent addition to Organum's collective which for "Submission" includes the curmugeonly ringleader David Jackman, Dinah Jane Rowe (no relation to AMM's Keith Rowe), and Nurse With Wound's Stephen Stapleton on the production knobs. This incarnation of Organum provides the most elegant ensemble that Jackman has been able to arrange - with his own breathy flutes and aerated wisps of sound bathed in a glistening reverberation and surrounded by the complex textures of the aforementioned scraped / bowed metals. "Submission" was originally released on vinyl for United Dairies in 1988 and in 1994 Illusion of Safety's Dan Burke reissued it on his Complacency label.
Legend has it that Organum recorded Vacant Lights in less than an hour, yet the cover art took Organum's frontman David Jackman over six months to complete. While Vacant Lights has finally been reissued after its original publication back in 1988, the artwork that Jackman toiled over is nowhere to be found. But we do get the music, a text-book definition of what Andee would describe as a pipe fight, in which the sonic pugilists arm themselves with chains, glass bottles, pipes, a chainlink fence, or any other object that you might find in an abandoned lot or junkyard. Then for the course of an hour (or however long is necessary), the participants drag, scrape, and toss those objects around, building the composition either after the fact or purely along improvisational lines. While contemporary improv ensembles occasionally tinker with the pipe fight strategy with little or no success, Organum's Vacant Lights excels simply because all four members (Jackman, Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton, Dinah Jane Rowe, and Peter McGhee) are so intent upon listening to each other. While the other three quietly rattle and clink their objects, Jackman stoically plays his Japanese flute which interweaves gently with the environmental sounds of trucks passing by. As the interplay between all of the elements is so subtle, Vacant Lights often appears as a quizzical field recording. It's nonetheless magnificent.
Disc two of this reissue campaign contains the Rara Avis single, which fits much more closely to the archetypal Organum sound of bowed metals, scraped gongs, and complex timbral dronings from acoustic sources. Die Stadt could have easily lumped all of this material onto one disc. Well it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to get the original on eBay.
FINALLY REISSUED!!! While it's always a pleasure to listen the classic recordings of Organum, I've resigned myself to the possibility that David Jackman has quietly ceased all of his current musical operations and has been merely reissuing much of the huge back catalogue of his solo work and Organum from the '80s (what no Monoplane?). "Volume One" was one of the first documents of the Jackman / Organum reissues, collecting material from "Rasa" (originally produced as a split with Nurse With Wound on United Dairies) and the L.A.Y.L.AH. anti-records "Tower of Silence" and "In Extemis." Like everything else Jackman released, "Volume One" quickly went out of print and began fetching hefty sums on eBay. Fortunately, this has come back into print (but probably not for long); so those without a disposable income can afford to hear the wonderful paradox that is Organum.
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 re-appear throughout Organum's recordings. 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. For those fans of Mirror, Andrew Chalk, Birchville Cat Motel, Oren Ambarchi, and other drone obssessed composers, Organum's recordings are required listening.
FINALLY REISSUED!!! Just like "Volume One," Robot Records has discarded David Jackman's mandala-like collages of medical clip-art as well as any pertinent information in favor of an all black package, with the tracklisting printed on the cd itself. Fronted by the curmudgeonly Jackman (who previously worked with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, Nurse With Wound, and members of AMM), Organum has been an unwavering vehicle to compose unsettling drones out of the dynamic timbres of metallic scrapings. As heard on the first track "Valley Of Worms" - a collaboration with The New Blockaders from the Organum album "In Extremis" Organum's sound is a monstrous howl of dissonant acoustic noises, chugging Kawasaki motorcycle engines (!!!), and abrasive textural overlayering; yet upon the following tracks "Horii" (originally released on L.A.Y.L.A.H. and featuring noted Organum graduate Andrew Chalk), and "Ich Reiste Weit Und Verweilte Fur Einigezeit In Tring" (an unreleased track from 1989), Jackman's symphonies of noise begin to harmonize into a eerily beautiful drone. Very highly recommended work that probably won't stay in print for much longer in spite of the repressing!
Originally released as a cassette in 1984, "Salute" is an early collaboration between David Jackman (Organum's mastermind) and the Rupenus brothers (who outside of the anti-art noise in the New Blockaders, are also known as Masshitshaddu, Metgumbnerbone, Bladder Flask, Mixed Band Philanthropist, and probably a few other projects of esoteric hermeticism). While these two entities have crossed paths on a number of occassions (most notably being their speaker damaging noise collaboration "Symphony in X"), "Salute" makes for quite a listenable album, albeit one full of nervous claustrophobia. The tense analogue vibrations that buzzes incessantly with a flanged clatter of scraping/creaking metal put "Salute" in close proximity to the high-end squeal of Whitehouse, but fortunately without the embarrassing vocals. Most everything that Jackman touches is certainly worth listening to, and this is no exception.
It's been far too long since Organum (or the ensemble's mastermind David Jackman for that matter) released a proper full album. Instead, we've encountered a steady stream of short program EPs and seven inch singles, which is becoming an unfortunate tease, as Organum's work, with their beautifully sustained drones, mesmeric timbral interplay, and transcendent minimalism really requires extended durations for the Organum aesthetic to articulate itself. I would imagine that Jackman wants the audience to work for those ecstatic epiphanies that are potentially present throughout his entire catalogue. If this is in fact true, then I must resign myself to the fact that Organum records are going to continue to shorten, condense, and shrink.
Tinnitus VU finds Jackman taking up the Organum moniker once again, but this time he's collaborating with the shamanistic percussionist Z'ev. As one could expect, Mr. Jackman is not an easy man to find; and, even a man as esteemed and talented as Z'ev had to put considerable efforts into contacting Jackman, much less arranging a studio session to record. When the two finally got together, they bowed gongs and prepared wire instruments, scraped large pieces of metal together, and dragged heavy wooden objects across the studio floor. Alongside these archetypal actions for the two artists, they also decided upon a series of gentle piano chords. When Z'ev got a hold of those recordings and began to render a number of digital treatments of the source material, this 18 minute EP began to blossom. The piano only serves as a punctuation to the timbral explorations which emerge at first as shimmering drones of densely layered metallic dissonance and later, as an ocean of tumultous rumbles. Even with the digital sheen that Z'ev grafts upon the Organum sound, Tinnitus VU is an immaculate document.
'60s Dutch rockers The Outsiders (not the reportedly inferior American band of the same name) produced an album -- "CQ" -- that's beloved by collectors and critics, but never really got the recognition that it deserved outside of that very narrow market.
Cool, our friends at Jackpot made a good choice here to do a vinyl reissue of this 1968 gem by sixties Dutch rockers The Outsiders, an album beloved by many collectors, critics, and us...
It's kind of a concept album describing multiple perspectives of an unrequited romance, with the father of the girl disapproving of the boy in the scenario. However, The Outsiders, being boys themselves, show considerable favor to the plight of the jilted boy in the story, which ends with that protagonist snapping in psychotic violence. Fortunately, The Outsiders spent just as much time composing an economical psych / garage / beat-punk score as they did on the story itself; thus, each track is a solid pop entry of jangly melodies and punchy basslines, occasionally repeating leitmotifs somewhat like the Leaves / Standells version of "Hey Joe" or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd. The concept album element also puts us in mind of SF Sorrow by the Pretty Things. And anyone into other Nederbeat bands like Q65 and The Motions ought to like this too. Certainly worth checking out!
Limited edition, deluxe gatefold vinyl-only reissue, with silver foil cover artwork as per the original, and liner notes from Mike Stax of Ugly Things, including a recent interview with The Outsiders' lead guitarist Ronnie Splinter.
Oh how we adore the Finnish label Fonal Records -- home to the likes of Kemialliset Ystavat, Islaja, Kiila and Es. And now, won't you please kindly welcome the newest addition to the Fonal roster, Paavoharju! We can say that that welcoming 'em is not such a difficult thing to do 'cause they sure do make some wonderful music! In fact, Cup (and Jim for that matter) has listened to it almost every day since its arrival. It's true!
Note: We don't want to deny anyone the pristine 'first listen' magic that we experienced. We can attest that it was a sheer delight packed with many surprises, and our fondness has only grown with each listen. So if you want your introductory spin to be 'pure', please be forewarned that this review contains what some might call spoilers... that means stop reading now!
In many ways Paavoharju can be likened to fellow enchanting Finnish artists Lau Nau and Fonal labelmates Islaja, but their finely detailed yet loosely strung music is considerably more melted and collaged and electronic. Listening to Yha Hamaraa is almost like eavesdropping on a dream... or having someone else's heartbreaking memories come back to hazily haunt you. Sounds, voices and melodies drift in and out of focus, occasionally overlapping and seeping into one another. Sometimes it seems like you're listening to a rickety old radio with the dial set between stations so that the sounds somehow magically fit together. Odd faintly familiar elements make their presence felt such as in the ninth song where the male vocal melody brought to mind a twisted folk (and of course very Finnish) version of "Stairway To Heaven". The swooping, trebly female vocals find their own special place between Indian film music singers and the Southeast Asian voices that surface on the similarly (un)structured Sublime Frequencies travelogue field recording compilations. And reference must be made to Bjork as well! Now after having read this far in our review, you might find the very first track with its swell of distorted static-y noise to be somewhat unexpected, disorienting even, but we encourage you to go with it (and with us). Allow the wash of sounds to transport you into Paavoharju's intoxicating world. Completely and utterly breathtaking.
A drop-dead gorgeous album of pure tone minimalism from two outstanding Danish composers. Jacob Kirkegaard is a familiar name around these parts, thanks to his impeccable recordings for Touch, channeling quite literally radioactive field recordings and even ear-piercing tones captured from inside his own ear; but Else Marie Pade is a figure who actually towers over her fellow countryman as she's been working with analog electronics and electroacoustic minimalism for close to 60 years. She was quite the bad-ass in her youth, fighting in the Resistance during World War II as an explosives expert (fuck, yeah!), ending up a prisoner of war from 1944 until the end of the war. During that time in the P.O.W. camp, she composed hymns to lift the spirits of the fellow prisoners. Upon release, she began studying piano; and by 1954, she quickly moved into the nascent realm of electronic music and musique concrete, becoming what many have cited as being the first Danish composer of both media. Her sensibility is one that is not dissimilar to that of Eliane Radigue in terms of long-form programs, although Pade seems more interested in tonal slippages akin to somebody like Roland Kayn. This collaborative work is a picture perfect example of what two great artists should create when given the chance to work together. The album is sourced both from Kirkegaard's 'otoacoustic' recordings (those aforementioned recordings of inner-ear frequencies) and from Pade's vault of analog electronic recordings. The six tracks of Svaevninger appear as portraits to cloud formations, an apt metaphor to the ephemeral slippages, crystalline phase-patterned hypnosis, and glassy-eyed suspended tone-floats these two produce. Think Chalk, Derbyshire, Oram, Niblock, Nilsen, Coleclough, and any number of the great electronic drone-artists / minimalists we've championed. A marvelous album!
Surveillance is the latest release from Evan Caminiti, one half of aQ beloved drone/doom duo Barn Owl. And displays Caminiti's gradual shift away from purely guitar based ambience, toward something more dark and dystopian, and beat driven, shedding much of the twang flecked duskiness, in favor of murky fragmented rhythms, and gristled textures. Barn Owl too has displayed a similarly dramatic sonic shift over the last few releases, introducing drum machines, and synths, and similarly Caminiti's partner in Barn Owl, Jon Porras, has expanded his solo sonic palette as well, occasionally shoegazey, but also dabbling in witchy electronics, most notably as DVVLLXNS. But Surveillance might be the closest either have come to crystallizing such a distinctive, and distinctively entrancing sound, one that channels seventies and eighties soundtrack music, abstract electronics, modern minimalism, minimal house music (a la Chain Reaction), and who knows what else, into something stunningly mesmerizing, hauntingly bleak, and strangely alien. Yet somehow, still quite beautiful.
Surveillance does play out like some sort of soundtrack, with a few moments touching on the Carpenter/Goblin sound that seems to be so prevalent these days, but those moments definitely don't smack of any sort of bandwagon jumping, instead existing as just one sonic element, deftly woven into a much more sprawling and epic whole, with most of the tracks blossoming into something altogether stranger, lurching, pulsing, revealing mysterious arrangements, unfurling constantly shifting textures, rhythmically mesmeric one second, a creeping tar pit ooze the next. "Event Boundary", sounds a bit like a futuristic Muslimgauze, a simple skeletal rhythm, drifting atop a whirring raga like buzz, and wreathed in soft melodic swirls, heady and heavenly hypnotic, gradually growing more and more sinister, the electronic buzz sounding almost like processed horn bleats, the strange tangle of electronics dense and tense, haunting and harrowing for sure. "Leningrad" is similarly bleak and barren, with another field of buried pulsations, beneath arcing fields of tones, and soft focus synth sweeps, not to mention some dubbed out beats, all in a softly psychedelic haze. "Flesh On Tape" is about as close to the current Carpenter craze as it gets, but even then, the sound is much more minimal and softly glitchy, the Chain Reaction influence in full effect, maybe Carpenter on Chain Reaction is good band math, and it sounds just as good as you think it would.
"Shadow Gamelan" sounds like it was plucked from some obscure seventies Euro-art film, not hard to imagine this on a soundtrack for a movie like Possession, softly squiggly guitars, disembodied buzz, lots of echo and dreamlike reverb, hazy and soft focus, but underpinned by a subtle sonic malevolence, while "Loft Life" sounds like something on Kompakt slowed way down, and wreathed in shadow, before finally, the record ends with "Stalker" (an homage to Tarkovsky maybe?), which is a gently noisy, swirling psychedelic shimmerscape of keening high end, buzzing swells, buried pulsations and strange hissy vocal emanations, a stunning sprawl of harrowing cinematic soundscapery that again, like much of Surveillance, seems to effortlessly blur the line between hushed haunting loveliness, and brooding, blackened sonic intensity.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on 180 gram vinyl.
Words of Ash, Walls of Smoke, Minds of Glass is the debut solo release by the Bay Area avant-rock denizen Gregory Hagan, whose languid violin and tempestuous guitar work was prominently featured in one of our favorite local outfits Common Eider King Eider. He's also active in the Thomas Carnacki performances / recordings as well as in the post-MX-80 project Grale. But as Pale Reverse, he sets down the strings in favor of analogue electronics and a four-track to build this elegantly creepy piece of nocturnal dronemuzik. A ghostly rumble introduces the 20 minute piece which slowly morphs into radiant, shivering oscillations of guilding tones suspended with hiss, mist, and fog. Subtle melodies flicker with beautifully singing overtones echoing throughout the electronics, eventually amassing into a holy crescendo of interlaced dronescapes snapping back to the industrial pall which opened the proceedings. At loud volumes, the tape detritus from multiple overdubs and erasures become all the more obvious and lend more than a few complimentary comparisons to William Basinski. But fans of the BJ Nilsen / Stilluppsteypa collaborations, the latter day works from The Hafler Trio, and even the Caretaker would be well served to check this out. Limited to 73 copies!
Sometime in 2002, the Finnish techno-minimalists Pan Sonic embarked on an incredible world tour which took them to some truly exotic locations including Singapore, Tijuana, and Easter Island. By the time they got back to Europe, Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio was exhausted to the point of having to cancel their travels through Eastern Europe and even into Africa. Despite the fatigue, Pan Sonic managed to find their way back in the studio where they produced Kesto, a monumental 4cd set of all new material.
The first two discs show that Pan Sonic are still at the top of their game. Here, they revisit many of the rhythmic assaults that Pan Sonic unleashed on their debut album Vakio with low slung electro-breaks alternating with metronomic techno grooves set in a volatile field of blistering electricity. Where Vakio's intensity came from a psychoacoustic interplay of ice-cold tonalities, Kesto's rhythmic facets explode through stomp box distortion dynamics applied to their analog synths. The first two discs romp for over 100 minutes of aggressive incendiary electronica that's absolutely spectacular.
The final two discs of Kesto present the more introspective sides of Pan Sonic. The third disc is not dissimilar to Vainio's exquisite solo albums on Touch, as Pan Sonic suspend magnetically charged fragment against a blackened field and documents their interactions. The last disc is the weakest of the bunch offering an hour long homage to Charlemagne Palestine where they come across as a little too constrained by Palestine's static minimalism. Other homages dot the earlier discs with much greater panache, including reverential nods to Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, Bruce Gilbert, Keiji Haino, and Alvin Lucier.
Kesto will undoutably stand out as one of the best electronica albums of 2004.
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Sure there's a novelty to a collaborative album recorded by the figureheads from two generations of uncompromising (and at times brutal) minimalism, but this is not your garden variety resuscitation of crotchety '60s minimalism by Jim O'Rourke. When Charlemagne Palestine and Pan Sonic set organs, oscillators, and random noise generators to constantly warble for over an hour, their intentions are far from benevolent. This album of uneasy listening was commissioned by the VRPO Radio in the Netherlands and is limited to 1000 copies. If you blink, you'll probably miss it.
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Rhodium 45 from the Table of the Elements. Paul Panhuysen is a sound-sculptor who has worked in the Fluxus / concept group The Maciunas Ensemble in producing some rather aesthetically stunning hybrids of trance-rock drones from conceptual frameworks that could easily give sterile results. His solo installations ('with' the Galvanos - semi-automated devices which have been programmed to subtly alter the elements of the installation) have generated dreamy golden colored drones from effects laden dot-matrix printers, Lucier-esque long stringed instruments, birds, and clocks. While this work could clearly fit along side the dronological investigations of Andrew Chalk or Arcane Device, Panhuysen maintains a decidedly academic view of these sounds with an underlying guilt over the 'rock' aspect to these sounds (mostly due to his use of electric guitars and 'rock' effects pedals). Hey, dude... rock is good. Your sound is good. What's the fucking problem? And better yet, what really is the fucking difference?
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"This past August, I was in Nashville on vacation listening to WRVU, the 'alternative' radio station affiliated with Vanderbilt University. For thirty minutes or so, they were playing this amazing avant-garage-drone track by 'The Legendary Dave Cloud'... needless to say, it was a friend of the DJ who had recorded this track on his 4-track earlier that day. Until I find any of his recordings (hopefully he has sent some demos to Drunken Fish or Majora, who should appreciate this hidden talent), there's this kick-ass album from Paris 1942, which includes Rick & Alan Bishop (of the Sun City Girls) and Moe Tucker! They only played together 4 times but had enough sense to record at least an album's worth of lo-fi improv garage-punk tracks. Highly Recommended!" - Jim, AQ staff guy who would love any info / demos on the aforementioned Dave Cloud.
One of the saddest records ever made. Prime krautrock (from Austria), circa 1972, what goths would have listened too had there been goths back then. Complete with full-blown psychedelic guitar freakouts, coupled with somber church-like organ and a vocalist
Hew it strew it do it too/Say it slay it just to do/Try to call yourself on the phone/Surely you are not at home/Sweep the swept floor once again/Stab yourself and feel the pain/Then stand and watch the speed/Clean your eyeballs wash your feet/Listen and repeat'. Or from "Stop These Lines": 'Morning peace dusty air/Clean your teeth comb your hair/Dressed in clothes you always wear/Go to work I won't be there/Lunchtime snackbar eating chips/Ketchup's running down your lips/Deadeyed waiters selling bibs/Which you have to fix with clips/Sitting waiting find an end/Meaningless with no comment/Is this life in your own hand/People are like grains of sand/Pick up streets and pull down skylines/Ravish women blast the mines/Burn the whiskies spill the wines/Find beginnings stop these lines'.
A most melancholic, wonderful record, and it's too bad that it's the sort of thing usually relegated to the prog/psych collectors corner (y'know, because of the distribution and press that this sort of reissue gets). More people (people without ponytails and huge record collections) should get to hear this. So, even though it's not a really new reissue at all, we ordered a bunch to turn people on to. It's an odd, but excellent, hidden treasure!
We've dug pretty much everything we've heard from this Wisconsin husband and wife duo, the lp on Night People, the split with Wet Hair, those records found the group unfurling thick slabs of murky dronepop, twisted psychedelic dub, blurred hypnotic riff heavy space drone, psychedelic space boogie, all wound into a roiling sonic stew, seriously warped and druggy and occasionally blown out and noisy, but on this new record, they've ditched much of the heaviness, a lot of the noisiness, and toned down much of the murky psychedelia and instead crafted something much poppier and dreamier. The first track is a bit misleading with this in mind, as it's a lysergic bit of distorted dubbed out riffage, with some programmed beats, buried under chiming melodies and a heaving bass buzz, kaleidoscopic and hazy and with the potential to explode into something much heavier and noisier, but instead it gives way to "All The Sun That Shines" which sort of lives up to its title, a dubby reggae flecked bit of woozy skitter, programmed beats, swirling effects, loads of reverb and delay, and hazy ethereal female vox, some spidery Morricone-esque guitar twang, and an almost calypso groove are woven into the proceedings too, the result though is indeed hazy and sunshiney and gloriously washed out.
"Amazing And Wonderful" is up next, and while featuring a similarly murky Skaters-esque rhythm, it ditches the dubbiness, and sets a sort of abstract post punk into a much more dreampoppy realm, all tinkling chimes, descending melodies, multi tracked vox, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of swirling reverby whir. "Bird Of Paradise Dub Version" is another abstract swirl of druggy space pop, the 'dub version' aspect embodied by the delayed drums and the softly swirling clouds of blurred effects and heavy heavy echo. And so it goes, the rest of the record unwinds similarly, an ever shifting collection of murky, lo-fi programmed-beat driven dub pop, muddy, and murky and warbly, plenty of buzzing low end, shimmery effects, hushed dreamlike vox, a little bit of synthy new wave here and there, some stripped down low slung trip hop every once in a while, and even some fragmented off kilter synth pop strangeness, but overall, way less damaged then their past outings, and more akin to a group like Pigeons, that same sort of downtempo electronic pop, albeit with a much more murky, warped and experimental bent. Which as far as we're concerned translates into really really cool!
Pedestrian Deposit have relentlessly toured the United States for as long as we can remember; if your hometown has some shithole warehouse space or a couple of dudes who host noise shows in their house, chances are that PD have been there. Given their constant touring in a car with a tape player, it makes perfect sense that the cassette would be the preferred media for PD; in fact, PD's Jon Borges has released a shitload of noise and drone tapes over the years through his Monorail Trespassing imprint. East Fork North Fork did in fact come out as a cassette earlier in 2010, only to disappear before anybody really got to get a hold of it; but the tape has been usurped by the cd for the reissue of this pretty fucking awesome record, with two new unreleased tracks as a nice bonus.
The days of Pedestrian Deposit abusing soundsystems with deleterious feedback and earscraping noise are pretty much gone. Nowadays, Borges is working with his partner Shannon Kennedy in constructed a frightening, haunting set of recordings for cello and electronics, thick with echoing drones and ghostly shadows that creep out of the woodwork. The amount of empty space on East Fork North Fork is notable, with Borges and Kennedy layering backish abrasions of rusted objects on contact microphones, distant pluckings of cello looped into seasick passages, heartbeat thumps coupled with subterranean scrapings, and hauntological half-melodies pushing to the foreground. Everything appears tuned as to announce the possibility of a huge surge of punishing noise, much like the atmosphere that Michael Gira built on Children Of God; and Pedestrian Deposit does allow for one such explosion on the album. But for the most part, it's the post-noise threat of audio holocaust that gives East Fork North Fork its sense of drama.
This is easily the best thing that Borges has released either through Pedestrian Deposit or through his solo Emaciator project.
The necessary reissue of a 2013 tour only cassette that Pedestrian Deposit produced for one of their marathon jaunts across the United States, finding every shithole alternative art-space and / or dive bar that would host their volatile take on electro-acoustic expressionism. In all of countless performances, Pedestrian Deposit work through all of the variations that would come through a particular set that might involve a tension-wire attached to PD's Shannon Kennedy as she plays the wire with a bow amidst comrade in arms Jon Borges extracting the most demonic of full-throated noise from his power electronics set-up of pedals and tone generators. In doing so, PD are an amazing proposition; but they are reluctant to encapsulate these ideas on record, as if the performative aspect is a truer reflection of their work than on record. That said, when PD does finalize a project as on the prepared cello, backmasked electronics, and volcanic rumbling masterpiece of Eleventh Hour (or their 2015 album The Architector) it is always a wonder to behold. As with every Pedestrian Deposit album, this comes with our highest recommendation!
Spring of 2010, the stalwart San Francisco sound arts organization 23five hosted their annual Activating The Medium festival, commissioning a handful of experimentalists, noise technicians, and field recordists to present work based on the theme of Ice. While G*Park's allegorical plunge into an ice cave and Cheryl Leonard's dripping icicles with Antarctic recordings and bowed penguin bones were thoroughly compelling, Pedestrian Deposit's performance was terrifyingly amazing. PD has transformed itself over the past decade or so from a harsh noise project into one of the most accomplished electo-acoustic outfits of our time, bringing languid cello tones and buzzing harmonics to a well-versed pedal-driven electronic arsenal of rumbles, drones, and noisy grit. A duo of Shannon Kennedy (cello, electronics) and Jon Borges (noise, electronics), Pedestrian Deposit tours constantly through the noise underground; and that time on the road has served them well in terms of delivering the goods. For their 23five commission, their set began in a familiar mode to those who've witnessed Pedestrian Deposit before, Kennedy crafting hypnotic patterns through loops on her cello while Borges hinted at something far more ominous through tectonic rumblings of feedback and black noise. Upon the dissolution of this spellbinding movement balancing noise and grace, Kennedy set her cello down and climbed into a wash basin which was positioned at the front of the stage. The basin was filled with ice water which she poured over her head in slow repetitive fashion, while a microphone captured the sounds of her chattering teeth and frigid gasps as she began a process of self-induced hypothermia. For what seemed like an eternity, Borges did nothing, allowing the raw human gasps from his partner to be the only sound they presented. Eventually, a glacial semi-melodic drone worthy of a BJ Nilsen or a Deathprod recording slowly emerged beneath Kennedy's shivering for a superb coda to such an abject piece of electro-acoustic theater. Kithless features the whole performance as the A side, and even without the physical presence of Kennedy dumping ice water on her goose-pimply skin, the recording is a powerful document and certainly stands on its own. The B side "Under A Veil Of Living Light" is a worthy companion to the live document with Borges building a crunched, tactile noise crescendo out of pools of sonorous hum and rasping buzzed cello. A magnificent accomplishment!
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Pesteg Dred was a very short-lived project, as the trio that revolved around Hall got together in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects. We've never heard of any of Hall's other projects; but if any were half as good as Pesteg Dred, they'd be worth the price of admission.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune); but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet. Death disco? You bet!
Dark Entries scores yet again with a really great re-discovery on Pested Dred.
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Both Pesteg Dred and SS-Say were very short-lived projects in the early '80s. Pesteg Dred was a trio that revolved around Hall in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one of his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune), but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet.
SS-Say released only one single in 1985, and that material rounds out the cd. Here, Hall is working again with Inge Shannon, for a more baroque, anthemic number wrought with Siouxsie-esque operatics and wah-wah guitar scratching above the catwalk disco rhythms. With its cocaine strung synths, "Care" is definitely the gem amongst the SS-Say tracks, which showcase much more polish as a Studio 54 / Batcave hybrid than Pesteg Dred, but with just as much post-punk bombast.
The Pesteg Dred material was reissued by Dark Entries on vinyl in 2010, and now it's available on cd for the first time with the SS-Say tracks that didn't appear on the lp reish.
Why the hell would you call your band Peterlicker? And even if you did give yourself such a terrible name, why would you keep it after you broke up over 20 years ago, especially when the band in question hardly even managed a couple of practices and maybe one gig? These are the important questions we ask here at aQuarius, and perhaps we can feel justified in asking these questions, since they themselves admit theirs is a stupid band name following the tradition of the Butthole Surfers and Throbbing Gristle.
So, with that discussion out of the way, here at last is the debut LP from Peterlicker, a monstrously good electro-doom-dirge-noise-rock quartet featuring Peter (Pita) Rehberg. While Pita's brain-drilling power electronics are a component of the crawling noise structures in Peterlicker, it's clearly not just his project. F. Hergovich is the vocalist in the band, whose ominous deepthroating vocalizations loom over the entire production, timestretched into undefinable gaping bellows and monstrous Lustmordian howls. C. Schachinger takes his cues from Swans' stalwart guitarist Norman Westberg, in his bent atonal screeches, gritty crackling of white-hot distortion, and dive-bomb arcs of noise that settle upon the ever crawling post-doom basslines of G. Weissegger. Pita and Weissegger fill in the gaps with plenty of crunched noises that buttress the grim arsenal of crusty noise. Imagine Godflesh, if Broadrick forgot to bring his drum machine to the studio, or Swans (circa Cop and Filth) with Gira even more amped up on amphetamines and taking his vocals on a really fucked godhead trip. Needless to say, Nicht is pretty fucking brilliant, regardless of what they chose to call the band.
Pharmakon is the nom de guerre for death-industrialist Margaret Chardiet, who has catapulted out of nowhere into the spotlight thanks to this high profile release on Sacred Bones. There's no way that Pitchfork would touch a Sudden Infant album of fucked-up, Dada noise or some of that infernal terror of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. What the hell would they do with Caroliner, for fuck's sake? But Pharmkon's first proper album of blood-curdled screams, dehumanized martial rhythms, and blistered noise did get a rather glowing (if off the mark) review from Pitchfork. The thing is that Abandon is a pretty damn good record, and it would only be nice if the media outlets that claim to have the fingers on the pulse of musical culture would dig just a little deeper beyond Wolf Eyes, Prurient, and now Pharmakon to showcase just what is festering in the noise underworld. Of course, that's never going to happen. Avid readers of this aQuarius recOrds newsletter will certainly know that even what we manage to get in is just the tip of the iceberg. But here stands Pharmakon's Abandon. Dragging chains and muffled whispers scrape through the elongated scream of the opening salvo of Abandon. Her vocals have the demonic rage of William Bennett's throatripping, although Chardiet is not one to enunciate her poetry with the clarity of Bennett. When she switches to a Diamanda Galas deep vibrato moan on "Pitted" to match the flatline death-throe drone and slow, metal bashed rhythms, Chardiet gets at what all of those solo Jarboe records *should* sound like, with those harrowing vocalizations accompanied by a lumbering crawl akin to those channelled by Brighter Death Now. "Crawling On Bruised Knees" could be a lost SPK track circa Information Overload Unit, perfectly encapsulating the sound of industrial dread and horror circa 1981. Like we said, this is a pretty damn good album. The cd has a 27 minute bonus track!!
Dave Phillips doesn't give us a lot to go on here, but all of the clues point to this being the most fucked-up break-up record ever. Sure, there's plenty of emo bands and sensitive singer-songwriters who pine over their broken hearts with oh-so earnest lyrics and anthemic crescendos; but if you were to break the heart of a twisted Swiss aktionist with a penchant for violent noise outbursts, industrial-doomscaping, and slaughterhouse ambience, you get an album far more wracked with the depths of abject loneliness. Like we said, we can't be sure that this is a break-up record, but Phillips does state the album was recorded as a "therapeutic process during a period dominated by severe disturbances of loss, mental abysses and despair." And he does dedicate this album to Thala, who may have been his girlfriend at one time, but certainly had appeared in several rather disturbing performances with Phillips. Those performances involved a mattress wired up with numerous contact microphones and the two engaging in rather violent sex, with the noises of the groaning mattress tossed back at the audience through explosive amplification.
Of course, Phillips is a member of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe of Swiss aktionists, alongside Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and G*Park. He was also the man responsible for that Dead Peni record released in 2008 on Blossoming Noise, and was the drummer for Fear Of God, which was like the Swiss equivalent to Napalm Death way back when. In all of those references, this album with all of its fragmented noises, nocturnal events, funereal dirges from an accordion, and fatalistic dronescaping falls more on the G*Park end of the spectrum, preferring mystery through abstraction rather than scatological expulsions of bloodcurdling skree. A few brief interludes of softened white noise dappled with various forest-dwelling field recordings opens the album, snapping to a halt with a 12 minute uncomfortable track that seems to recycle one of those sexually explicit performances. Phillips clips and cuts the moans of a woman rapt in sexual ecstasy, matching that with a male voice which has been pitch shifted way down to a demonic growl. Yes, this gets into the same problematic territory that you get with Brainbombs or Whitehouse, but given how Phillips treats the male protagonist in this exchange (and especially, if he is the man behind that voice), it's very clear that there is to be no sympathy for him. The despair to which this album speaks is of his own making. At the conclusion of this track, Phillips turns to his accordion which sways between two dour notes and a series of nocturnal recordings. Clusters of notes hammered at the very low end of the pianos keyboard are struck and extended into Lustmordian passages of bleak ambience, and there are further examples of Phillips' Aktionist pedigree with a scream session rhythmically locked to a series of meat-cleaving blows. There is nothing pretty about this album, and it is really quite a depressing opus when you come down to it. Break-up record or not, it's utterly powerful and absolutely not for the squeamish.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
With such a visual grasp on the surreal puppets of Jan Svankmajer, Piano Magic invokes the musical equal to a Victorian cabinet of curios - carefully arranged avant-pop songs filled with macabre nursery rhymes that shimmer & sparkle in spite of the dust, dimly lit spaces, and eerie moodiness. Quite similar to the early incarnations of His Name Is Alive or the later days of Tear Garden. Quite possibly Piano Magic's best, most focused work. Stunning!
