The entire musical aesthetic of the storied Flying Nun label can be traced back to the first two singles. On the exuberant and triumphantly cheerful side, you've got The Clean's "Tally Ho!" with its uptempo jangle and sloppily melodic power pop chords; but on the other side, there was the gloomy drone-rock of The Pin Group who actually released the very first Flying Nun single "Ambivalence" back in 1981. According to the liner notes by The Dead C's Bruce Russell, the late '70s and early '80s spawned quite a lot of bands in New Zealand trying to cop the Velvet Underground's gritty rock minimalism, including The Pin Group, a trio featuring Roy Montgomery (yes, THAT Roy Montgomery!), Ross Humphries (who later played in Bailter Space and The Terminals), and Peter Stapleton (who seemed to be the only guy in New Zealand with a drum kit, as he played with everybody). "Ambivalence" certainly had a black-leather minimalism filtered through the Velvets, but with strangled basslines and dour vocals from Montgomery, The Pin Group also shared more than a few passing glances at Joy Division. By the time The Pin Group got to their second single "Coat," (released later in 1981) the Velvets jangle had been engulfed in a black-hole of nervous gloom that hints at Montgomery's drone-rock impressionism from the early '90s onward. That single sported a clever Andy Warhol ripoff by replacing the Velvet Underground banana with a pop-art sequence of Kiwis, but the B side to that single, "Jim", situates the band at their bleakest, with a puritanically dark punk sermon that foreshadowed the emotionally draining dynamics of Slint by about a decade.
Ambivalence marks the second anthology of The Pin Group's short but hugely influential career which lasted less than 12 months. Everything from the first anthology (an eponymous cd released on Siltbreeze back in 1997) is reprised on the vinyl of Ambivalence, including the two covers - the smartly chosen "Hurricane Fighter Plane" and the unwise "Low Rider." Don't let the latter spoil the majesty of the rest of the album, which also features a bonus cd of a live show from July 1981 with a couple of tracks that had been unreleased elsewhere. Recommended? You bet your ass!
While Three Mile Pilot and Heavy Vegetable have been long-time AQ favorites, it took us a little bit longer to fall under the spell of Pinback, the post-pop creation from Armistead Burwell Smith IV (from Three Mile Pilot) and Rob Crow (HV, Thingy). In fact, Pinback's epic second album "Blue Screen Life" almost slipped under our radar entirely. Pinback's charm can be found precisely in how understated their notions of grandiose pop can be. Perhaps the best comparisons to Pinback's sound especially in their atypical progressions of minor chords through ecstatic crescendos would be Built To Spill's "There's Nothing Wrong With Love" and "Perfect From Now On," with Pinback's additional flares found in Smith's technically-impressive skills at bass fingerpicking and the emo-tinged vocal harmonies from both Smith and Crow. "Offcell" is another excellent outing for Pinback, although like their other records the returns on this short 5 song EP grow stronger with repeated listenings. As before, Pinback does not offer the typical indie-rock songwriting fodder for chorus / bridge / verse; rather their ambitious songs present increasingly complex pop structures of catchy melodies intertwining with smoldering waves of guitar dissonance and their vocal counterpoints and harmonies. Teasingly short at 28 minutes long, "Offcell" certainly has whetted our appetite for the next full length, scheduled in 2004 through Touch and Go.
What's up with lame musicians and bullying lawyers being such big jerks lately? First, LaMonte Young freaks out about the "Dream Syndicate" record and demands sole authorship, and now a member of Black Dog, forces Warp to change the tracks on this retrospective of Plaid (whose members were also in Black Dog), because he 'worked' on a couple of tracks. So after much dumb litigation, "Trainer" sees the light of day and features a ton of Plaid's awesome early material, including a handful of singles, alter-ego cuts, compilation tracks, and everything from the impossible to find "Mbuki Mvuki" debut album. The majority of "Trainer" was done around the same time that odd tweakers like Aphex Twin and Autechre were fucking around with their electronic gear to expand what rave culture had to say and could say. Those in the know called this sound IDM (still one of the dumbest genres tags of all time). Although Black Dog / Plaid was catagorized as such, "Trainer" is much closer to the emotive Detroit Techno of Carl Craig with little of the algorithmic mindgames that has come to dominate the Skam and Schematic branch of electronica. Instead, Plaid revels in clouds of halcyon atmospherics, Plus 8 (Richie Hawtin's old techno label) technoticism, occasional bad-ass/noir electro, and purposefully clumsy tribalisms. I had forgotten how good all of this stuff really was.
After the early 90's incarnation as F.U.S.E. making some of the heaviest cybernetic techno stomps to come from Detroit, Richie Hawtin has continued to devolve techno along a trajectory of minimalism. The monochromatic pulsing beats appear more as the afterimage of techno than as some club floorfiller. Brilliant in its paradoxical expansive claustrophobia.
Here speaks J.S. Aurelius (aka Marshstepper, Destruction Unit, architect of Ascetic House, etc.). Numbers station transmissions and caustic utility signal bursts from shortwave radio abound in this very Vatican Shadow sounding cassette of frightening electronics, sermonizing vocals in megaphone barked monotone, stalker dub vibes, and the occasional industrial techno stomp. It has to be said that the numbers station recordings are lifted directly from the Conet Project, but it's unlikely that Aurelius will suffer the same legal troubles that Wilco got from Irdial. These sounds are always creepy no matter the context; and Aurelius does well to match the mood with his hypno-drone guitars, crawling synth drones, and whip-crack drum machinations.
Interpol were always a little sleazy. Their slicked back hair and skinny moustaches and black suits. That whole vibe. But hell, it suited them, and it didn't matter all that much cuz the songs were so fucking great. Even though officially the identity of Julian Plenti is a big secret, only the truly dense won't have figured out that this is in fact Paul Banks from Interpol. There is after all a picture of him on the cover, and his voice is pretty unmistakable, and the songwriting too, definitely reminiscent of Interpol. This was supposedly his "sexy" and "sleazy" record, by his sexy sleazy alter ego, but disregard all the pretentious bullshit, what this is, is a pretty bad ass dark pop record, laced with plenty of electronics, nods galore to classic Interpol, and some awesome songs. The last Interpol record was a bit of a let down for a lot of folks, so while this is not necessarily a return to form, and not really an Interpol record, it does for us, function as something to tide us over until Interpol get their shit together and come up with another record to rival Turn On The Bright Lights.
Opener "Only If You Run" is total Interpol right out of the gate, with some extra electronic flourishes, but a loping gloomy bass line, Banks's recognizable croon, a killer hook, some weird production, some chiming guitars and big drums, synths too, and a little bit of skittery programming. Track two, "Fun That We Have" is even better", some crunchy guitar, a moe menacing vibe, yet another very Interpol sounding melody, some glitchy electronics, some weird lyrics, and some lush production. "Games For Days" is another killer, muted electronic percussion, brittle guitar chug, dense dark minor key chorus, some big crunchy guitars and yes, yet another Interpol sounding vocal line. Don't hold it against him, Banks is a huge part of Interpol, so Interpol is of course a big part of him, and thus informs his songwriting, which as we mentioned before doesn't bother us one bit. We're digging this a LOT.
Markus Schmickler has enjoyed a long career of artistic reinventions, and his Pluramon project marks yet another with the highly acclaimed album Dreams Top Rock. Back in the early '90s, Schmickler began his musical career with a number of obscure electro-acoustic collaborations including Kontakta and Pol; but Schmickler's first major productions came with his first Pluramon record Pick Up Canyon, an album on which Schmickler worked with with Can's drummer extrordinaire Jaki Leibezeit. Outperforming much of the contemporary post-rock of the mid-90s (i.e. Tortoise, Stereolab, etc.), Pick Up Canyon brought an exceptional use of electronics to the always amazing clustered grooves of Leibezeit. Since then, Schmickler also released painterly electro-glitch collages as Wabi Sabi and an overlooked orchestral album that accurately reflected the ideas of such 20th Century avant-garde masters as Ligeti, Arvo Part, and Xenakis.
Schmickler's return to his Pluramon project finds him re-investing in the sublime beauty of shoegazer pop on Dreams Top Rock. As with Pick Up Canyon which hinged upon the percussive prowess of Jaki Leibezeit, Dreams Top Rock revolves around the ego of another. This time it's the David Lynch dream-girl Julee Cruise. Yes, there's plenty of My Bloody Valentine to go around; but to these ears, Dreams Top Rock is also a pastiche of A.R. Kane's very early singles dotted with melodies lifted from the Angelo Badalamenti songbook. Cruise's breathy vocalizations and hushed etherial whispers work incredibly well with Schmickler's adept reinterpretation of the shoegazer sound. Unlike Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine, Schmickler doesn't present himself as a brilliant songwriter. His songs are certainly better than most; but he tends to overwhelm the songs with his flawless production of that narcotized guitar sound.
Especially for anyone who bought the recent M83 record, Dreams Top Rock is an essential album. However, one non-music related complaint: Whose bright idea was it to put a sticker on the front of the digipak with the artist name and album title? I mean, sure, leave that info off the artwork, put a sticker on the cd case, or on the shrinkwrap. But if you decide to leave it off the artwork, then why would you put a sticker (that you can't peel off) directly on the cardboard of a digipack?! It makes no sense. GRRRR!!! ARGGHHH!!!
Easily the best thing we've heard from Suzy Poling's Pod Blotz, whose murky witch-house electronica has evolved into a bleak smear of layered synth-noise, sicktone, backmasked ectoplasm wormholes, and obliterated-by-reverb vocal spookiness all warbling on a variable axis to give an uneasy, almost death industrial feel to her tempered drum programing that has us thinking back to the Chris & Cosey collaborations with Konstructivist way back when. Melting into a puddle of bunker oil never sounded so good!
When working in such a restrictive environment as Chain Reactive microhouse, the success and failure of a piece of music usually comes down to the basics of writing good music in generating a punchy rhythm out of Reactor and filtering ghostly remnants of melody out of synthetic / metallic atmospheres. Microhouse pioneers like Vladislav Delay have faltered when trying to get too clever in their textural programming while forgetting that the core to heroin house is dance music. But like Plastikman and Gas before him, Toronto producer Sandro Perri (aka Polmo Polpo) understands where minimalist techno has succeeded with an unrelentingly throbbing, Kompakt-monophunk rhythms and slowly filtered aerated reverberations. The murky hiss and thick white noise common to the early Chain Reaction records are present in Polmo Polpo's exceptional debut "The Science Of Breath," but have been sculpted out of heavily digitized lap steel, cello, and slide guitar. Very nicely done!
Richard D. James is better known as The Aphex Twin, yet his first recording for Warp Records was under his Polygon Window moniker. At the time of this recording in 1992, Warp started the legendary Artificial Intelligence series (which is the origin for the dubious genre title Intelligent Dance Music) to encapsulate the mutant techno sounds of Autechre, Black Dog, F.U.S.E., B12, and
Finally, Warp has reissued "Surfing On Sinewaves" for the US (the UK pressings have still been in print, but unavailable for sale in North America due to that piece of paper with Wax Trax). Most clearly inspired by the claustrophobia of Chicago Acid House and Detroit Techno, James coaxed an arpeggiating barrage of metallic clangs and hammered rhythms out of his broken samplers and rewired drum machines. The alien melodies and warm dreamlike tonalities which dominated his epic "Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2" first found their way onto these records as ghost like afterimages surrounding the electronic rhythms. Even after nearly a decade, this album is still mindblowing.
While today's contemporary discourse of the glitch / click have their clear roots in the malfuctioning sounds of computers, Richard James' early pioneering productions spoke of technological errors occuring within his broken synthesizers and Midi plug-ins. If it weren't for records like "Surfing on Sinewaves," there would be no Kid 606, Lesser, or Hrvatski.
Ever since the release of that great Soul Jazz "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm" compilation on which The Pop Group appear, and also with the rise of current artists like San Francisco's Erase Errata whose work shares and reflects the spirit and energy of
Formed in 1978 by four young men from Bristol, The Pop Group unleashed itself from the frigid political environment of their native England and its narrowing punk scene. Lyrically and visually committed to leftist political ideals (much like their peers in Crass and some time later, The Ex), and sonically more "out" and dissonant than any other "punk" act of their time, The Pop Group abandoned the "no future" stereotypes for more serious and thought provoking ideas both ideological and musical.
Produced by veteran reggae/dub producer and musician Dennis Bovell, who was also responsible for "Cut" by The Slits, another post-punk outfit with whom The Pop Group happened to share an early single (the fabulous "Where There's A Will" backed by The Slits' "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm"), this explosive 1979 debut kicks off with "Thief Of Fire" in which short blasts of guitar noise fills in the gaps where an aggressive bass funk and a primitive percussive drive weave in and out of each other. From there on, the record just gets more and more angular, outrageous, and weird as it unfolds. "Snowgirl" features crackling guitarwork accompanied by macabre tinkling piano and the odd wail of vocalist Mark Stewart (who would go on to form Tackhead and become an integral part of the On-U Sound collective). And of course there's the "hit" single (and arguably their defining moment), "She Is Beyond Good And Evil", a must-hear (it's also on the "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm" comp).
The booklet has lyrics in English and Japanese as well as a nice collage of photos. Highly recommended! While we are sure to soon run out of this hard-to-get import, we've been assured we'll be able to get more of them within a few weeks, never fear.
Let it be known, that Tourroists! is a difficult record, and those with a stubborn lack of cultural objectivity will be wise to avoid this album. You have been warned!
Up until this album, Mark Gergis, the man behind Porest (as well as Mono Pause / Neung Phak), has been quietly mapping out his own course of ethnomusicology that hinges upon the complex layers of cultural perception between the US and the third world. Neung Phak stands as his Thai Pop ensemble, in which he exquisitely explores the particulars of SE Asian pop music complete with re-creations of radio dramas and the eccentric hybridizations of eastern and western idioms; he's also been responsible for some for some of the best collections from the Sublime Frequencies series (i.e. Choubi Choubi and Cambodian Cassette Archives). Porest is Gergis' media-manipulation project, and Tourrorists! will undoubtably go down as his most inflamatory and most provocative work. Tourrorists is a scathing political record that unabashedly takes on the themes of 9/11, Guantanamo, Arabic conspiracy theories about Israeli secret police (Mossad), and Christian missionaries. However, unlike the politically charged works of Negativland, Gergis refuses to center the album from a particular political or cultural institution (whether that be atheism, socialism, anarchism, etc.); instead, he challenges the listener to question his or her own politics and cultural perspective about any of the topics. Case in point, "Let's Roll" recontextualizes various media snippets from the 9/11 hearings as well as Jihadist rhetoric through computerized voices that emulate the inflection of an American woman, an American man, and an African-American man. There's something intrinsically disturbing about these dispassionate spoken texts, not to mention the wildly contradictory banter between these three characters. Similarly, Gergis collages a particularlly banal public service announcement into a matter of fact "Soilent Green is people!" declaration. Gergis also gives an English translation to the classic collaboration between Aaviko and Kabar on "Eye of the Leopard" originally sung by the only known escapee from Guantanamo. Alan Bishop from the Sun City Girls also makes a stunning cameo on the summery groove of "Hoyda." None of this speaks of the intricacy of Gergis' musical productions which run from mangled electronics, plenty post-SCG Syrian pop numbers, and canned bossanova rhythms; but, it's the ideological content that renders this album a pipe bomb. Tourrorists! is bound to piss you off or offend you in some way shape or form; and we mean that as a very high compliment.
Techno is a genre of self-quotation and unrepentant appropriation, always looking in the rearview mirror at what just happened to predict what will be the hot-shit trend on the dancefloor tomorrow. So to be able to trace an entire strain within techno's taxonomy to a specific record is quite rare. The 1996 album Biokinetics by Porter Ricks is one such record, setting the stage for pretty much every electronic artist who would flock to the banner of Chain Reaction through a stylized hypnotic, narcotizing techno haunted with deep atmospherics, dub murkiness, and subaquatic allusions. Porter Ricks was the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Koner, who pursued "techno as a nautical sound experience." By the time the first Porter Ricks single emerged in '96, Koner had already developed his signature isolationist approach to slow-motion sound-design blustering with arctic metaphors through the dronemuzik classics of Nunatak Gongamur (1990) and Permafrost (1993). So when Koner began exploring techno with Mellwig, the approach to techno was less about 64-bar measures and more about constructing an evolving atmosphere girded to quintessentially German techno engineering that could be taken for a sonic portrait of tidal flows, map coordinates, sonar blips, and the vastness of the deep blue sea.
Biokinetics opens with the magnificent "Port Gentil" whose steady techno pulse coalesces through overlapping patterns from muffled pulsations of white noise and distant locomotive rhythms, later topped by a radiant metallic drone. The somatic oscillations of "Biokinetics 1" hardly makes for a techno track at all despite the insistent rhythms, but the eerie heartpulse dub of "Biokinetics 2" takes an isolationist reproach to everything adding its own desolate pulse and some subterranean reverb. Granulated hiss and slippery drone shimmer blossom through the final tracks "Nautical Nuba" and "Nautical Zone" that look forward to what Wolfgang Voigt would produce on his seminal Gas albums Zauberberg and Konigsforst. It sounded awesome in 1996, and it sounds awesome today.
The vinyl is limited to 700 copies!
Portion Control were always an obscure proposition despite their longevity. This British trio started in the early '80s crafting a hyper minimal form of claustrophobic electronica that proved to be a huge influence on the work of Skinny Puppy and Depeche Mode; but their influence on these acts never trickled down to bring them greater acclaim over the duration of their career. During the '80s, they issued a handful inventively reductivist / muscular electronics girded by proto-techno rhythms and fleshed out through filtered and flanged electronics. The monotone barked vocals have been hyper compressed and shoved way in the back of the mix are pretty much the same technique that Nivek Ogre brought to Skinny Puppy a few years later. Portion Control were never intending on making poptunes of the shock-horror model or angsty youth model that those bands they influenced became so known for; instead, Portion Control's skeletal, hard rhythms thrusts immediately to the foreground with the metallic-flanged vocals, idiosyncratic / disjointed sequencing, and unidentifiable police scanner activity muffled at the background. When a melody comes along as on the strident "He Is Patriotic" or on the jittery death-dub of "Mass Disorder" or the proto-acid squelchiness of "Fiends", it can be quite a shocking juxtaposition given the calculated minimalism throughout the rest of this work. Imagine an even more stripped down DAF or Liaisons Dangereuses, with those Skinny Puppy vocals! The Portion Control back catalogue has gone through various reissue campaigns, including a ponderous 7lp boxset on Vinyl On Demand; and an even more comprehensive 5cd boxset, with I Staggered Mentally featured prominently on both sets. But here, we get another excellent reissue from Dark Entries, who give it a great remastering job, a booklet with tons of information, and a bonus track!
When I (Jim) last ran into Colin Potter it was at the Brainwaves Festival in the fall of 2006. Colin drearily apologized that his next album would be a collection of his earliest work released by the German label Vinyl On Demand. While the handful of cassettes I had of his mid-'80s work had been made up mostly of gritty postindustrial ambience and raw experiments with analogue synths, I would have never expected that Colin Potter -- nowadays the engineer extraordinaire for Nurse With Wound and collaborator with the best of British drone artists -- had a new wave bone in his body; but here it is. Not surprisingly for someone as talented as Mr. Potter, he managed to successfully work within the grim and angular synth-based structures that also resonated with Fad Gadget and Normal. A Skeleton / Cupboard Situation has been culled from a bunch of self-released cassettes made at IC Studios (yup, the same masthead he uses today!) that date from 1979 to 1983 and lovingly remastered by the fine people at Vinyl On Demand. Potter's synth-punk ethos centers upon tinny drum machine marches, plenty of grim synth repetitions, and short-fused guitars. While Potter occasionally gets a little spry and cheeky in his exuberance with the possibilities of electricity, the bulk of the album is coldly robotic and surprisingly catchy at times. In the liner notes, Potter again apologizes "unreservedly for 'singing' and promise it will never happen again, unless someone gives me a very good reason and / or a very large sum of money." Well, that's a bit self-deprecating, as his vocal style certainly fits the music with a staccato delivery and emotional detachment to match the cold synthetic tunes. I won't say that I'll be the guy who'll throw down a ton of money to hear Colin Potter sing again, but I sure as hell will be wearing out the grooves on this vinyl.
We discovered Colin Potter many years ago, through his heady production and sound design in Nurse With Wound, Ora, and Monos; yet like so many pioneering electronic musicians in the '80s, he released a slew of cassettes overflowing with various sonic experiments and audio excursions. Ancient History collects four of Potter's tapes charting his output from 1979 to 1989, including A Gain, Two Nights, and Recent History Volumes 1 & 2. Back in this time period, Potter was working in a post-kosmische aesthetic with a small arsenal of synths, step sequencers, drum machines, guitars, and effects. He had yet to incorporate the heavy-lidded drone and field recording component which he's been associated with as of late; but those tapes positioned his sound not too far from the Moebius / Schnitzler / Schulze axis of progressive electronics with a healthy dose of Chris Carter's DIY aesthetic tossed in for good measure.
A Gain was released in 1982 through his ICR imprint and is a culmination of work dating back to 1979. The opening number to this album is a bright hypnotic piece for glockenspiel and synthesizer, which builds upon elliptical phrases on those instruments with greater and greater density and kaleidoscopic fervor, snugly situated between Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air and Cluster's percolating motorik electron-pop. Elsewhere on A Gain, Potter pulls out the guitar to augment the synth blorp and drive with some fine Manuel Gottsching-esque explorations. Two Nights from 1981 is probably the cream of the crop here, not to belittle anything else on the set; but this is a great piece of futuristic electronics that is a must have for anyone keen on John Carpenter and Goblin soundtracks! The two original side long pieces both extend from the cosmic swoosh into dynamic kraut-disco jams with incremental sequences accelerating through drum machine, neon-lit synth cascades, and more heavily phased guitar solos. Potter adds a third lengthy bonus track of similar material to round out this fantastic disc.
The Recent History discs compile various Potter projects from 1986-1989, and find him in more of a darker, somber mood with ritualized ambience drifting about his more earthen sounding sequences and sodden acoustic guitar melodies. While there's much of the same instrumentation, Potter's production also becomes far more complex with more of the shadowy, occluded techniques that he would later master during his tenure in Nurse With Wound. As such, these tracks tend to parallel some of the work of Coil and O Yuki Conjugate, and even predates some of the melodic aspects of the ambient side of IDM that would emerge five or six years later.
This is quite different from the song-based minimal wave album of early Colin Potter material released on Vinyl On Demand; but certainly showcases just how great all of those early tapes of his were and how well they hold up today!
Fucking brilliant. Yeah, you should expect that these two high calibre sound sculptors would manage something great; and they do not disappoint. As for the obligatory introductions, Colin Potter may be best known from his ongoing contributions to Nurse With Wound over the past two decades, but has been privy to some of the finest in British dronescaping thanks to his work in Ora and Monos. The Hafler Trio is the creation of Andrew McKenzie, a sound research project which has been investigating the impact of sound upon the body, mind, and spirit through the lens of a byzantine gnosticism. A couple years back, Potter had the good fortune of witnessing the Hafler Trio's "How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread" performance in Preston, England; after the show, Potter and McKenzie struck up a conversation, whence McKenzie suggested that the two collaborate. Shortly thereafter, McKenzie sent Potter a collection of the source material from that very performance as the foundation for their collaboration. Potter stated his intentions clearly, that he wanted to preserve the shape of the material while pushing it into another space. It's an understatement to say that Potter merely achieved his intention; as A Pressed On Sandwich ranks as one of the best things that he's worked on, on par with his work with Steven Stapleton on the existential void of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. Yeah, it's that good! Of course, McKenzie ultimately stretched out his own material of monumental dronings over a whopping six discs on the twin set of triple cds also entitled "How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread;" so Potter's redux is a bit easier to digest, but certainly no less an album! You'll encounter the drone supreme here on A Pressed On Sandwich with electrified tonal vibrations, undulating phase patterns, and oceanic gasps of sublime expanses. The album starts off with a very cold, shivering feel but eventually transitions into a dynamic interplay of tones that simultaneously capturing the solemness of church organ droning (with all of the overtones of holy symbolism) and the unnerving purity of feedback (with all of the allusions of technology on the brink of collapse). We mentioned it before, and we'll mentioned it again: fucking brilliant.
As with all Hafler Trio releases, sorry no sound samples...
During the fall of 2004, I (Jim) had the privledge of travelling to Australia for a month or so. Well, I guess that technically makes it *spring* of 2004; anyway, I met a lot of great people who had some amazing record collections, including a bunch of Australian post-punk and new wave stuff that probably never made it outside of Melbourne or Sydney. Of everything that I heard, there were a few bands that stuck in my memory: the Laughing Clowns, Microfilm (which happened to be the first band of Lisa Gerrard who later went on to found Dead Can Dance), and then there was the Primitive Calculators which was by far the best thing I heard. After asking around about those recordings, it became clear that I was probably going to be out of luck or out of a ton of money. So, I simply filed those band names away in hopes of coming across them somewhere, sometime, somehow. You could imagine my surprise when I discovered a compilation from the Primitive Calculators in a box from one our distributors. It's sort of like Christmas when you get that cool gift that you forgot you asked for, instead of the ugly sweater or pair of wool socks from Grandma. Anyway, The Primitive Calculators were Melbourne's answer to the Screamers, although I'd be hard pressed to believe that they actually heard that legendary techno-punk ensemble. It was more likely that The Primitive Calculators came to their sound through Suicide and the No New York compilation, in particular DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Their intense, throbbing post-punk songs centered around the raw electricity of twin synthesizers and drum machines hammering out noxious arppegiations whilst the lead singer / guitarist Stuart Grant screamed, grunted, and scraped up and down his guitar in short, sharp blasts of epileptic energy. This CD documents their one and only LP, which was a live recording in which the audience appears to dwindle despite the fact that their set gets more and more intense, culminating in a ridiculous cover of Lloyd Williams' soul standard "Shout." Fortunately a bunch of their studio recordings round out the CD, giving their exceptional songs a much fuller sound. Even without the serendipitous experience of re-discovery, I'd still love this record!
During the fall of 2004, I (Jim) had the privledge of travelling to Australia for a month or so. Well, I guess that technically makes it *spring* of 2004; anyway, I met a lot of great people who had some amazing record collections, including a bunch of Australian post-punk and new wave stuff that probably never made it outside of Melbourne or Sydney. Of everything that I heard, there were a few bands that stuck in my memory: the Laughing Clowns, Microfilm (which happened to be the first band of Lisa Gerrard who later went on to found Dead Can Dance), and then there was the Primitive Calculators which was by far the best thing I heard. After asking around about those recordings, it became clear that I was probably going to be out of luck or out of a ton of money. So, I simply filed those band names away in hopes of coming across them somewhere, sometime, somehow. You could imagine my surprise when I discovered a compilation from the Primitive Calculators in a box from one our distributors. It's sort of like Christmas when you get that cool gift that you forgot you asked for, instead of the ugly sweater or pair of wool socks from Grandma. Anyway, The Primitive Calculators were Melbourne's answer to the Screamers, although I'd be hard pressed to believe that they actually heard that legendary techno-punk ensemble. It was more likely that The Primitive Calculators came to their sound through Suicide and the No New York compilation, in particular DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Their intense, throbbing post-punk songs centered around the raw electricity of twin synthesizers and drum machines hammering out noxious arppegiations whilst the lead singer / guitarist Stuart Grant screamed, grunted, and scraped up and down his guitar in short, sharp blasts of epileptic energy. This CD documents their one and only LP, which was a live recording in which the audience appears to dwindle despite the fact that their set gets more and more intense, culminating in a ridiculous cover of Lloyd Williams' soul standard "Shout." Fortunately a bunch of their studio recordings round out the CD, giving their exceptional songs a much fuller sound. Even without the serendipitous experience of re-discovery, I'd still love this record!
Before Dwayne Gottel re-engineered synth-pop to embrace a signature aesthetic of shock and horror in Skinny Puppy, he proved to be a thorny creative foil for the Huss brothers of Edmonton, Canada. Stephen and Darrin Huss met Dwayne in their late teens in high school, after the Huss brothers ditched early attempts at standard punk in favor of something akin to the darker elements of UK new wave (i.e. Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, OMD, etc.). In the naive and earnest diary entries found in the Xeroxed booklet (a very nice touch of punk memorabilia we might add), Darrin writes in the third person that it was Dwayne who first christened the band The Pinstripe Club after a British nudie bar. The band changed names and managed to gig around Edmonton with a notable opening slot for Moev, the Canadian synth-punk band who were always on the verge of something great throughout the '80s. The early '80s founds a lot of creative disagreements between the three members of Psyche, but they did manage to convince somebody to record them onto a 4 track. By the end of 1983, Gottel had split for good, heading to Vancouver, only to join up with Skinny Puppy a couple years later. The Huss brother continued on, exhibiting considerable promise early on. But the band proved to be much better in slicing up eyeballs than crooning to the pretty goth boys and girls; nonetheless, that's where Psyche ended up.
Re-Membering Dwayne is a collection of the 8 tracks that the band recorded back in 1983 with Gottel. The swarming synth noise, John Carpenter-esque / psychologically tense sequences, whipcrack electronic snares, and aggressive percolations which soon became the backbone to Skinny Puppy's first recordings and demos can be tracked back to these pieces. Gottel seems to have sung on at least one track - the very primitive synth-punk number "Screaming Fire" noted for its brusque, guttural vocals, with Darrin Huss taking up the vocal duties elsewhere vamping effectively like Marc Almond. Another remarkable find from Dark Entries, who present this collection, as always, with a great remastering job by George Horn!
Newly available on vinyl again, the 1983 second album from Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson's experimental collective Psychic TV after the demise of Throbbing Gristle remains one of our very favorite aural documents from the entire post-TG catalog. It almost reads as a companion piece to TG's 20 Jazz Funk Greats in that it invites unusually accessible chamber folk and pop tropes into their sound only to subversively twist them into something much more underlyingly sinister. Recorded using Zuccarelli Holophonic technology to create an atmospheric spatiality of near and faraway sounds (this is a headphones record if there ever was one!), the group was then able to record in some very unusual places like The Hellfire Club Caves (a notorious British site of aristocratic Satanic liturgies and hedonistic ritual) and take advantage of the systems 3D effect. The album's mixture of sweetness and light with ritual creep and foreboding is at once beautiful and deeply unsettling and on first listen it's hard to decipher what you are hearing and its mystery still beguiles 21 years later. We're invited in by the melancholy pastoral chamber pop of "The Orchids" with its vibraphone, guitar and oboe and Genesis' dueling vocals welcoming the morning light in innocent VU "Sunday Morning" fashion. But then the totality of the album swings from reverential to eldritchly mystical and from remotely animalistic to eerily brutal and back again mimicking the cycle of a day or a season as it moves between songs and strange far-off occultish musique concrete. There are lots of guest appearances both real and invoked. Monte Cazazza is heard reciting lyrics over the phone, and one can hear Jhonn Balance of Coil getting a tattoo. There is an angelic choirboy singing a Charles Manson song, and most notably on the track "White Nights", a sweet Christmas-y pop number is sung by Genesis (with doo-wop backing vocals, no less!) with lyrics creepily taken from Jim Jones final sermon at Jonestown. Throughout, bells intone, chants are muttered, a lot of acoustic exotic instruments are played with atmospheric intentions more than melodic ones. But the full power of the collective's brutal aural abilities culminates in the penultimate track - "In The Nursery" - which invokes fairytale symbolism and ritual and industrial soundscapes in a nightmarish blend of hellish terror. Essential listening!
Psychophysicist is a one off collaboration recorded back in 1994 between Andrew McKenzie (better known as the Hafler Trio) and Adi Newton (Clock DVA, The Anti Group Conspiracy). The two claim to be working under a Gurdjieffian approach to science and sound as a method towards metaphysical knowledge and gnostic understanding of the universe. That said, McKenzie has been known to exaggerate
Sonically speaking, both McKenzie and Newton are no slouches, although some of Clock DVA recordings are painfully dated within Industrial culture. The Psychophysicist collaboration brings together their mutual interests in psychoacoustics - the ability of sound to affect the mind and body in profound ways. Within the record, complex hypnotic sweeps of radio static are processed to resemble the tonal patterns of interlocking sinewaves, sounding much more like Hafler Trio than The Anti Group and much more than Clock DVA. Furthermore, close observers of the Hafler Trio's work will recognize elements from "Masturbatorium" and "Mastery of Money," as the recycling of sound elements within different contexts had become an increasingly important agenda for McKenzie throughout the mid-90s.
As the Hafler Trio albums - once overflowing experimental bins across the globe - are now becoming scarce, this would make an excellent introduction into McKenzie's work.
It's a piece of history that none of the current staff were old enough to remember, yet nostalgic fragments about the initial arrival of "Nevermind The Bollocks" at Aquarius Records back in 1977 occasionally emerge from conversations with our old school customers. By now it's probably as factual as any urban mythology; but as it makes for such a great story, I'm much more inclined to believe it than what may have really happened. With record distribution back in 1977 even less streamlined than it is today, Aquarius resorted to using an importer to ship copies of "Nevermind The Bollocks" from England. The import company in question did not have a direct route into San Francisco from London, and thus had to drive the boxes up from Los Angeles. This shipping detour gave Aquarius the opportunity to throw a big party in anticipation of the album's arrival, with attendants rumored to include Crime and the Residents (in full Eyeball costumes squeezing within the confines of Aquarius' then Castro Street location). To heighten the suspense, Aquarius had arranged with the driver of the truck to call up the store every 30 minutes or so to let everybody know his progress up the I-5: "Just passed Bakersfield." "Made it through Coalinga." "Yup, I'm in Tracy."
Yet, I feel the story could end with the truck crashing somewhere near Pleasanton, as I've never felt that The Sex Pistols' music lived up to their massive cultural cache and spectacular publicity stunts. John Lydon's uncomfortable fixed stare, sneered cultural heresies, and theatrical madness (which, in fact, was lifted from Richard Burton's performances as King Lear) always appeared to be destined for greater things than the Pistol's musically thuggish simplicity. Within The Sex Pistols, John Lydon had control over the Pistol's syntax, spewing threats against royalty and decent society at large; but there was little room (and even less ability) to explore the far more challenging proposition of igniting the sound of Lee Perry and Can with the powderkeg of punk. Internal politics and Malcolm McLaren aside, Rotten needed to form Public Image Limited.
Flanked by Keith Levene on guitar and Jah Wobble on bass, Lydon began PiL with two perfectly complementary musicians to pursue his aesthetic goals, as Levene's spindly shards of metallic guitar splatter acted as the textural counterpoint to the rhythmic centrality of Wobble's low-slung dub basslines. While this line-up inevitably imploded (and with it the success of Public Image Limited), the Lydon / Levene / Wobble core for PiL reached its creative apex during their second album, originally released back in 1979 as a 3LP housed in a metal film container. PiL's second, more economical pressing of the self-evidently titled "Metal Box" garnered an equally self-evident title "Second Edition." As a whole, this album hasn't easily been upstaged in its synthesis of dub production techniques, stealthy disco grooves, and punk antagonism bathed in Situationist critique. "Second Edition" opens with Wobble's huge rolling bass in "Albatross" which finds Lydon straining to sing with a swooping baritone to match the song's unwavering plod. Yet Lydon's viperous snarl returns for the rest of the album, which picks up the pace considerably in building their signature 'death disco' sound. All around "Second Edition" is an unnerving, complex album that was never the cultural force "Nevermind The Bollocks" was but is clearly the artistic masterpiece in Lydon's career and one of the quintessential post-punk albums.
As an aside, it was a huge curatorial mistake for Soul Jazz to leave Public Image Limited off of their "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm" compilation, as PiL fits into Soul Jazz's ideology for the project better than anybody else on the record. Thus, "Second Edition" is highly recommended (if not required) for anyone who was into that compilation.
NOW AVAILABLE AGAIN AS A REPRODUCTION OF THE ORIGINAL DELUXE 3LP METAL FILM CANISTER SET WHICH EARNED THE ALBUM'S NAME!!!
Here's what we wrote about this earlier:
It's a piece of history that none of the current staff were old enough to remember, yet nostalgic fragments about the initial arrival of Nevermind The Bollocks at Aquarius Records back in 1977 occasionally emerge from conversations with our old school customers. By now it's probably as factual as any urban mythology; but as it makes for such a great story, I'm much more inclined to believe it than what may have really happened. With record distribution back in 1977 even less streamlined than it is today, Aquarius resorted to using an importer to ship copies of Nevermind The Bollocks from England. The import company in question did not have a direct route into San Francisco from London, and thus had to drive the boxes up from Los Angeles. This shipping detour gave Aquarius the opportunity to throw a big party in anticipation of the album's arrival, with attendants rumored to include Crime and the Residents (in full Eyeball costumes squeezing within the confines of Aquarius' then Castro Street location). To heighten the suspense, Aquarius had arranged with the driver of the truck to call up the store every 30 minutes or so to let everybody know his progress up the I-5: "Just passed Bakersfield." "Made it through Coalinga." "Yup, I'm in Tracy."
Yet, I feel the story could end with the truck crashing somewhere near Pleasanton, as I've never felt that The Sex Pistols' music lived up to their massive cultural cache and spectacular publicity stunts. John Lydon's uncomfortable fixed stare, sneered cultural heresies, and theatrical madness (which, in fact, was lifted from Richard Burton's performances as King Lear) always appeared to be destined for greater things than the Pistol's musically thuggish simplicity. Within The Sex Pistols, John Lydon had control over the Pistol's syntax, spewing threats against royalty and decent society at large; but there was little room (and even less ability) to explore the far more challenging proposition of igniting the sound of Lee Perry and Can with the powderkeg of punk. Internal politics and Malcolm McLaren aside, Rotten needed to form Public Image Limited.
Flanked by Keith Levene on guitar and Jah Wobble on bass, Lydon began PiL with two perfectly complementary musicians to pursue his aesthetic goals, as Levene's spindly shards of metallic guitar splatter acted as the textural counterpoint to the rhythmic centrality of Wobble's low-slung dub basslines. While this line-up inevitably imploded (and with it the success of Public Image Limited), the Lydon / Levene / Wobble core for PiL reached its creative apex during their second album, originally released back in 1979 as a 3LP housed in a metal film container. PiL's second, more economical pressing of the self-evidently titled Metal Box garnered an equally self-evident title Second Edition. As a whole, this album hasn't easily been upstaged in its synthesis of dub production techniques, stealthy disco grooves, and punk antagonism bathed in Situationist critique. Second Edition opens with Wobble's huge rolling bass in Albatross which finds Lydon straining to sing with a swooping baritone to match the song's unwavering plod. Yet Lydon's viperous snarl returns for the rest of the album, which picks up the pace considerably in building their signature 'death disco' sound. All around Second Edition is an unnerving, complex album that was never the cultural force Nevermind The Bollocks was but is clearly the artistic masterpiece in Lydon's career and one of the quintessential post-punk albums.
"Hello! Hello? HELLO!" Bellows one John Lydon as if tapping on a microphone to check if it's on. Here, the former Sex Pistol began his career as the frontman and only constant in Public Image Limited, whose first two (and arguably, three) albums remain some of the most adventurous post-punk records ever produced. The reasons for the Sex Pistols demise were numerous and often contradictory depending on who's misremembered history you might want to consider, but Lydon (no longer Johnny Rotten) cited Sid Vicious' musical ineptitude on the bass as one such reason. That said, he pinned his hope for Public Image Limited's success on recruiting his old friend John Wardle to learn how to play the bass as they went. This gambit actually proved quite successful, as Wardle was a quick study, easily adapting basslines from dub and krautrock and christening himself with the stage name Jah Wobble. His deep and dubby basslines overlaid with Lydon's caterwauling vocals and squalid rants laid the foundation for the quintessential PiL sound, fleshed out by the spidery guitar of Keith Levene, whom Lydon nicked from The Clash. The first of countless PiL drummers was Jim Walker, who only appeared on this first album. PiL slowly introduces the more adventurous sounds over the course of the album, launching first into the incendiary bass-driven punk single "Public Image" which was a song that Lydon penned back with the Pistols. But through the uber-Spartan tracks in "Fodderstompf" and "Religion," PiL's trajectory towards death-disco and dub-punk was set. The full scope of Public Image Limited wouldn't be evident until the second album Metal Box, but so many of those ideas of dub techniques, atonal vocals, studio tricknology, and cross-pollination of styles are found on First Issue, which makes this an essential purchase.
Light In The Attic states that this edition is actually the first American version of this album, with all of the other editions hailing from overseas. The first disc is the proper album in its entirety, with the second disc sporting the rare b-side "Cowboy Song" and an hour-long BBC interview.
Fuck. Puce Mary. Her real name is Frederikke Hoffmeier, she's a striking Dane who hails from the post-punk / art collective Posh Isolation, which may be known best outside of Copenhagen through the retro charms of Lust For Youth and the punk snarl of Iceage. There are charms to the noise of Puce Mary, with those charms being nekromantically violent, libidinally impure, and just fucking sick. The historical thread of Puce Mary's work traces all the way back to the true crime litanies of Throbbing Gristle's "Very Friendly" and "Hamburger Lady" cast upon bleak arrangements of nauseating electronics. There's plenty of nods to the equally seminal works of SPK, Brighter Death Now, Whitehouse, Premature Ejaculation, and Wolf Eyes; but it has to be said that most every major figure and visionary author of power electronics is a dude. Puce Mary / Hoffmeier represents one of the few great female artists wholly operating within this insular aesthetic. As we noted before in earlier discussions on the work of Puce Mary, Pharmakon is an obvious contemporary with considerable presence; but Puce Mary's overall catalogue exhibits greater breadth and better ideas.
So here stands the epic album Persona, which counts as her second solo lp (alongside a wealth of hard to find cassette releases and a couple of collaborations). The militant, mono-rhythmic pound on "Courses" is raked with squalls of distant pierced tone and a sickening electronic blurt that sounds more like Cosey's coronet than anything electronic. The vocals are buried in demonoid distortion, tremolo, and flange - a conflation of effects that run through the death industrial ethos dating back to the early '80s. The recurrent vomiting and retching (presumably from Hoffmeier) on "The Viewer" dots the horror-synth sound design of sustained atonal church organ drones, Hellraiser squiggliness, and disembodied bone-saw whirr. The slow crawl of doomy timpani on "Pigs" looms with empty spaces by what could be poltergeist activity and the commanding voice of hers again buried in throat-ripping FX. There is a refinement to Puce Mary's work that's rare within the sewage-work of the id produced through industrial culture; but that refinement doesn't eschew the raw, existential negativity that boils through Persona. Death-industrial at its finest.
It's inevitable that Frederikke Hoffmeier (aka Puce Mary) is gonna get compared to Pharmakon, as the number of women producing the sour and sick tones of high caliber, industrial malaise is paltry at best. Pharmakon's mini-album Abandon was certainly a highlight for 2013 through her blighted electronics, bloodcurdling vocalizations, and the abject imagery of larvae crawling across her bare legs; but we did have to wonder if Pharmakon had more to offer than those four scalding tracks, wondering if she was just a flash in the pan, creating a visage that adopted the violence and terror of industrial culture as a marketing ploy of shock in order to rattle / titillate the nerves of the fainthearted.
Enter Puce Mary, whose output of noise-culture vulgarities easily outpaces that of Pharmakon, with an impressive slew of sadly impossible to find cassettes and lps (including a handful of releases on the Iceage related Danish imprint Posh Isolation). Her voice is at the center of The Great Panic, uttering desolate screams, longing sexualized moans, glossolalic ululations, and barked declarations that may or may not be understandable to her fellow Danes; and she buries all of this amids carpet-bombed detonations of crusty noise, mutant bass-synth pulsations, and atonal flurries, pushing her work as a distillation to the necrotic pall of Brighter Death Now, the hyperbolic tautologies of Whitehouse's delerium, and the scabrous distortion of Mauthausen Orchestra. Bad vibes guaranteed.
Down to just a handful here, we will run out fast, so we hope one of our distributors can eventually get us more copies of this, as we were originally thwarted by Posh Isolation who for some reason didn't want to sell us any. Boo.
Puce Mary is the Danish queen of power electronics, whose work we have championed over the years on cassette and the rare piece of vinyl all of which has gone out of print. The Spiral is a surgical album that applies the psychoacoustic investigations that John Duncan and Zbigniew Karkowski plumbed and fuse those to the industrial sermons barked by Consumer Electronics, Ramleh, and Whitehouse, honed through a craftsmanship for perversity and transgression. The pure, piercing electronics superimpose into scalding walls of glassine noise and psychic negation amidst thrashes of machined lumbering rhythm and Puce Mary's yelped vocals cast as self-hypnotized chants in monotone through piles of effects that may obfuscate the content but none of the existential horror. One of the early contenders for noise album of the year 2016.
Ultimate Hypocrisy is another cassette only release from Denmark's reigning queen of noise -- Puce Mary (aka Frederikke Hoffmeier). The tape is a bold statement of power electronics and noise tactics that eschew much of the overtly troubling imagery found throughout the genres, in favor of a more poetic adaptation of existential nihilism. It begins with an uneasy, marching churn of chirping electronics latched onto a grinding locomotive plod, all processed through crude machines and effects recalling the classic industrial murk of SPK, Anenzephalia, and Factrix. She follows this with a horrifying piece of sound poetry that would make the demented aktionist Otto Muehl proud, through an extended passage of psychosexual sobbings and moanings adjoined to a gloomy, creepy thrum of blackened emptiness. The unsettled spaciousness of this track emphasizes her vocal gasps and deep throated utterances that might have been lost had she taken a wall-of-noise approach. Elsewhere, Hoffmeier does belt it out in a staccato, militant delivery although the content is thoroughly obscured through heavily flanged effects and the complement of juggernaut metal-on-metal bashed rhythms. Razor-slashes of caustic noise, coarsely rendered oscillations, paranoid-as-fuck tension, and sick-sick-sick tones foul the air throughout the remainder of the tape. Of course, it's recommended!
It is a red letter day for us here at aQ, in that we finally actually get to write about and sell you a Pye Corner Audio release instead of lamenting the fact that our supplier for PCA recordings only sent us a fraction of what we had initially wanted - or is more often the case, that it sold out completely before we could get our hands on ANY. To be sure, over the past couple of years, a few of Pye Corner's releases have slipped in and out of the shop, leaving just an ectoplasmic stain of picture-perfect electronic retro-futurism on our collective minds; and it also seems fitting that Pye Corner Audio released an album of his hauntological disco on the Ghost Box label, which again we've never gotten enough of to list. But now, hurrah, we have this!! As the title specifies, this triple cd set collects the first four volumes of Pye Corner Audio's Black Mill Tapes, which were originally released on vinyl as a couple of double lp sets which are (as noted) long gone.
Pye Corner Audio is the work of audio wizard Martin Jenkins, who is one of the in-house engineers at Miloco Studios in London where he works alongside the likes of Alan Moulder, Flood, and Trevor Jackson - yeah, top flight producers for sure. It's obvious that the work of Pye Corner Audio did not develop in a bubble, as there are very clear ideas and a fully formed sound language that is very savvy in its references to Delia Derbyshire's sci-fi electronics, the autobahn precision of Kraftwerk's songwriting, John Carpenter's bold synth melodies, and the bad-ass swagger of Detroit techno. In a rare interview, Jenkins described the working methods of PCA as being quickly sketched-out variations onto quarter inch tape and even four-track cassettes with a couple of no-name Japanese monosynths and a drum machine. He continues that "I definitely embrace imperfection. In my days as an engineer, I spent so much time polishing performances and correcting mistakes that I realised it made for pretty sterile recordings. I also felt extremely liberated after coming to the realisation that there is no absolute final version of a song. There are just alternative interpretations. Once I stopped chasing that elusive perfection, things eased massively."
Through those monosynths and simple step sequencers, Jenkins builds a unique, forgotten sound of alien ambient passages made foggy through an almost Basinski-like approach to tape disintegration punctuated with crackingly good Italo-disco jams. These rhythms are where Pye Corner Audio really shines, presenting a whipcrack / leather-glove seduction that comes straight out of the Throbbing Gristle playbook for "Hot On The Heels Of Love", but if those four somehow had an imagined electronic music summit with John Carpenter at the other side of the table trying to score a soundtrack for Cronenberg with none of those super-egos getting in the way of each other. Yeah, this stuff is timeless. Just fucking timeless.
Iceland's synth-punk outfit Q4U issued their one and only album Q1 back in 1982, and now those recordings (along with a bunch of tracks from the same period) get a glorious makeover courtesy of the premiere, minimal wave reissue label Dark Entries. Inspired by the British punk scene, Q4U adopted an aggressively propulsive rhythm section and maniacally jagged guitars all fronted by the snarled vocals of Elinborg Halldorsdottir. She was definitely listening to her Siouxsie & The Banshees and X-Ray Spex records, slanting towards the detached gothic monotone that would also develop out of the under appreciated X Mal Deutschland. Had Hallsdordottir sung in English and not Icelandic, the band might have developed a much broader audience, but she was committed to speak to the political inequities of Iceland in her own language. While the band originally began as an archetypal punk four-piece, the drums were abandoned by the time they recorded Q1 in favor of a drum machine (christened Elisabeth II) and plenty of synths. These icy synth melodies and motorik rhythms were much better suited to the Teutonic belting from Halldorsdottir. The 'deluxe edition' of Q1 does feature a bunch of the tracks that featured their original drummer, with the band caught in a spirited if sloppy punk furor. By the time, the electronics entered the mix, Q4U was a sharpened, synth-punk machine. It's a shame the band called it quits by the end of 1983, but at least we have this lost gem! Highly recommended!
This was probably one of the last things we thought we would ever see - a Douglas Quin recording on vinyl! Back in 1998, Quin released one of our all-time favorite field recordings, a cd entitled Antarctica. You guessed it, that now-out-of-print disc featured recordings from various ecosystems around the South Pole and its outlying oceans. Typically armed with his hydrophones planted beneath the surface of the water, Quin picked up all of the clanks and creaks of ice floes, as well as the amazing sounds from Weddell seals whose glissando calls have all of the signatures of early electronic music. Since then, Quin has made numerous trips to both polar regions, including a prolonged stint alongside Werner Hertzog when he collected field recordings of those seals for use on Hertzog's Encounters At The End Of The World.
Fathom is a continuation of Quin's ongoing recordings from Antarctica, with some complementary recordings from the Arctic region as well. Because of those Weddell seals, the Antarctic side of this piece of vinyl is the better of the two. The intertwining chorales of zipping tones from the pinnipeds swimming amidst various chunks of ice are totally engrossing. Quin also manages to capture what sounds like a melting wall of ice, while it drops chunks of ice into the ocean below. Unfortunately, Quin doesn't tell us exactly what we are listening to, and given the unfamiliarity of many of these sounds, conjecture and imagination will serve the listener well. The Arctic side seems to be all ice recordings, although some of those squeaks and squiggles could be from fur seals, squealing beneath the surface of the water.
Absolutely gorgeous packaging with a two-pass letterpress job with one pass with inked plates and another pass providing a tactile emboss to the paper. Very highly recommended.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!
Mirroring Keith Fullerton Whitman on his stellar "Playthroughs" album, digital wizard Akira Rabelais has plugged an electric guitar into what he calls Argeiphontes Lyre, an alchemical piece of software of his own design, to produce his third exceptional album "...benediction, draw." Yet Whitman and Rabelais look toward different historical precedents in the construction of their albums, inevitably shifting the resultant sound. Where Whitman found inspiration in Terry Riley's time lag accumulators and Christoph Heeman's ambient slippages, Rabelais earnestly professes Erik Satie as his mentor, proclaiming that this album "in the best sense of a musique d'ameublement (Satie's famous aphorism for 'furniture music') shows itself as an acoustic state rather than a sonic wallpaper." True enough, Rabelais presents these digital abstractions as a fluttering series of sublimated half-melodies and tonal fluctuations that embrace the spirit of Satie's compositions. There is a jewel-like preciousness to this construction, as his digital transmutations open into cascading washes of variable glints, shimmerings, and flickers -- guitar passages that very rarely resemble anything like a guitar. This is a magical album from one of the truely unique proponents of digital synthesis. Very very nice.
Not just another member of the electronica community who programs code by day and is a Mille Plateaux superstar by night, Akira Rabelais has wonderfully romantic bone in his body that affects everything he does, including programming. If his cheerleaders are
The tongue-twistingly titled Spellewauerynsherde is another hauntingly beautiful record from the enigmatic electronic composer Akira Rabelais. As with his previous albums, Rabelais offers a labyrinth of elliptical allegories, subtle chance operations, and impressionistic romanticism as an accompaniment for his elegant sound constructions. Given the incredible amount of semantic engineering that went into this record, it is certainly possible that Rabelais deliberately arranged to have this album released at the same time as Bjork's Medula. You see, the source for Snellewauerynsherde is a collection of traditional Icelandic accapella songs recorded in the late 1960s or early 1970s on Ampex tapes and then forgotten about. The first few tracks of Snellewauerynsherde present the raw recordings Icelandic songs, sanitized of their tape hiss and debris. The content may remain foreign to our ears, but the songs' existential sadness transcends any language barriers. When he actually processes these sources, he extracts a mournful etherialism that he stretches into a gracefully solemn minimalism that falls between Steven Stapleton's production of Current 93's A Little Menstrual Night Music, Eliane Radigue's evocative timbral compositions, and Arvo Part's late period chorale pieces. Rabelais continues to distance himself from the clicks 'n' cuts electronica of his contemporaries and situate himself as an artist with a complex mythology, that given the right marketing climate, could be as important as Matthew Barney's.
Off the top of my head, I can think of the Monks, Glenn Branca, and Eliane Radigue as some of the musicians who've admitted that their unwitting discovering of feedback profoundly altered their ways of thinking about music. Similar to Eddie Shaw's epiphany about feedback in his biography about the Monks, Radigue's revelation about feedback might warrant religious proportions, given that her meditative compositions led her to become a disciple of Buddhism. It was in the mid-60s, when Radigue was a protege of musique concrete legend Pierre Henry, that Radigue first stumbled across electronic feedback in the studios of INA-GRM. Unfortunately, Henry (with his unwavering insistance on the Modernist superiority of musique concrete) did not share Radigue's enthusiasm and Radigue parted ways to build her own studio that centered around the technologies of the Moog and the Arp synthesizers.
Composed in 1972 and 1973 respectively (though these recordings were made several years later), "Geelriandre" and "Arthesis" represent some of the earliest work of Radigue's maturation as a minimalist. While neither of these pieces appear to use feedback, Radigue's subtle shifting drones within these pieces mirrors the fluttering complexity that a feedback loop (when carefully controlled) can achieve. "Geerlriandre" for prepared piano and Arp synthesizer ripples with a melancholia through a beautiful chorus of tightly oscillating electric drones occasionally punctuated by the sustained yet muffled resonance of the piano. "Arthesis," using the Moog, is a more ominous affair, whirling back and forth between low end frequencies amidst a glacial progression of bleak ambience.
This album isn't only good for historical documentation, but also is an exceptional precursor to the dronological pursuits of current artists like Jonathan Coleclough, Thomas Koner, and Andrew Chalk. Highly recommended.
A much needed reissue of two magnificent pieces of Holy Minimalism from Eliane Radigue! Much of Radigue's classic work from the late '60s and into the '80s had never been presented outside the context of live playback, due to the simple fact that vinyl couldn't handle more than 25 minutes to a side without serious loss of fidelity. So with the advent of cds, the vast archives of her reel-to-reel tapes of very-long form compositions and stasis-oriented dronemuzik began to see the light of day well after the work had been completed and shelved. Radigue had studied composition in the INA-GRM studios in the mid-'60s and was one of many artists who became enamored with the potential of feedback as a tool within composition. The long sinewy drones of a controlled feedback loop became a signature of her earliest works, with synthesizers gradually enveloping those sounds with their greater control and tonal palette.
Composed in 1972 and 1973 respectively (though these recordings were made several years later), "Geelriandre" and "Arthesis" represent some of the earliest work demonstrating Radigue's maturation as a minimalist. "Geerlriandre" - for prepared piano and Arp synthesizer, ripples with a melancholia through a beautiful chorus of tightly oscillating electric drones occasionally punctuated by the sustained yet muffled resonance of the piano, anticipating what Brian Eno would present many years later on Thursday Afternoon albeit with none of the romanticized impressionism. "Arthesis," using the Moog, is a more ominous affair, whirling back and forth between low end frequencies amidst a glacial progression of bleak ambience. This album isn't only good for historical documentation, but also is an exceptional precursor to the drone-tastic pursuits of current artists like Thomas Koner and Andrew Chalk.
Originally released about ten years ago on Giuseppe Ielasi's Fringes, and Ielasi wisely reclaimed these recordings for his new imprint Senufo. If you didn't get it the first time, you should certainly pick this one up now!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The men who stared at goats may or may not have been a work of fiction, as reported upon by journalist Jon Ronson, investigating the more fringe aspects of the American defense establishment. But leave it up to Russia to be the source for an even more fucked-up tale of parapsychological research into ESP as a potential addition to the arsenal of weapons of war and tools of espionage. The early Soviet psychological researcher Bernard Kazhinski posited the idea that the human nervous system might in fact influence (and be influenced by) radio signals and other forms of electro-magnetism, drafting a book on the matter back in 1923. His ideas had formed the basis to the research into the zombification of an enemy combatant by means of radio, with experiments being conducted on soldiers in the Soviet army, most of whom died as a result, with the exception of one - and he currently resides in a mental hospital. The validity of these claims is vague at best, but it sure as hell makes for a great story.
Enter Radioson - another project for the Russian psychonaut [S] who has recorded over the years as Five Elements Music and Exit In Grey, with this name coming from Kazhinski's "radio sleep." Where deep pools of nocturnal drone broadcast from those other projects, the cosmology of Radioson is distinctly conspiratorial and psychologically caustic. The recordings of Radioson are suitably grim and volatile yet hang from long-form compositional arcs that are emblematic of [S]'s other recordings. A languishing cosmic melody orbits the first of four lengthy track to this cassette, building a sci-fi desolation worthy of any classic '70s film of likeminded paranoia, conspiracy, and intrigue. Kirlian glows of psychic noise flare against the album's sustained analogue synth drones in the form of noxious radio transmissions, crusty static from accumulated tape hiss, and electro-static smolderings that might as well be the audio documentation of zombification experiments. The closing collage of numbers stations and shortwave jamming signals is an apt mimesis of the coded transmissions that would flood from those research laboratories, repleat with the dehumanized mechanization and the lethal hum of high-voltage wires. Another brilliant document from the mysterious [S].
"In The Devil's Kitchen." So translates the German title, the first that we've stocked from Daniel Lowenbruck, who both records as Raionbashi and runs the Tochnit-Aleph mail order service out of Berlin. He's also a long standing member of the Schimpfluch Gruppe whose provocative recordings and performances directly channel the Vienna Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwartzkogler. Where the Austrians were pushing their transgessive acts through art world channels, Schimpfluch has their origins in punk, industrial culture, and (at least for the case of Schimpfluch's Dave Phillips) metal taken to a Dada extreme laced with theatrical ultra-violence. So begin these deconstructed tapes and mangled silences.
Lowenbruck cites that the sources to his Devil's Kitchen include 'noises, instruments, body functions, and apostrophes.' The discernible sounds are a piano being struck by a hammer fist on the lower octave of the keys, a police whistle blowing out the condenser mic on a Walkman, and some downpitched vocal howls that come across as way more demonic than those wolf growlings on Ben Frost's album By The Throat. Between these recognizable elements, Lowenbruck cuts and pastes with monochromatic noises that puncture grey curtains of leaden hiss. Compositionally, certainly hits the mark with the guttural musique concrete from the Schimpfluch Gruppe, somewhere between the machined ruptures of Dave Phillips and the unsettled ambience crafted by the impeccable G*Park; or less self-referentially stated, somewhere between the sound poetry of Henri Chopin and the corroded tape work of Joe Colley. Limited to 500 copies and highly recommended!
When the fuck is Raionbashi going to release a proper album again? Daniel Lowenbruck (aka Raionbashi) has been releasing his work on various splits over the past couple of years following a 2006 lp on Hanson that nobody seems to have anymore. Even then, much of his output has been released in tiny editions, and this split on Senufo Edition is in an edition of 280 copies. Raionbashi operates within the transgressive art collective Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, and G*Park, all of which mine the nether regions of the id for intensely claustrophobic collages of grim noise and post-Viennese Aktionism. For this split, Lowenbruck slumps into an occult almost doom-laden piece of ritualist gong strikes that certainly look back to Coil's How To Destroy Angels, but Lowenbruck slowly ramps up a smoldering, hypnotic squallor of discordant strings and uneasy field recordings with snippets of muffled vocals which seem in the midst of an unknown criminal act. Brilliantly creepy.
Daniela Fromberg & Stefan Roigk are multimedia artists hailing from Berlin, although little can be found regarding their intentions beyond their mutually crappy websites that only sport pretty pictures of their un-contextualized installations. Whatever these people are up to, it's a damn effective piece of acousmatic collage work, reflective in classic sound collage techniques found on Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, through the various bumps in the night and funhouse sound effects turned horrific and nightmarish. Arcane, oblique, haunting, and captivating. Fromberg & Roigk are an excellent foil to Raionbashi's dark ritual, and certainly should muster something else in the near future. Regardless, this is an excellent album of foreboding musique concrete.
We don't know if there's anything like an official membership form or some sort of fucked-up ritual one has to endure before joining the inner circle of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, but this Swiss / German collective of malcontent noise makers and tape splicers might just increase their ranks through the diabolical collage work from Krube. Schimpfluch (whose members include Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, G*Park, Raionbashi, and Rudolf Eb.er) began in the early '90s as an aggressive / primitive hybrid between the Viennese Aktionism of Hermann Nitsch & Rudolf Schwartzkogler and the sharp collage techniques of the French musique concrete pioneers. Performance is often a critical component to the Schimpfluch aesthetic involving all sorts of transgressive theatrics, audience baiting tactics, and maybe a dead fish or two; but the recording output of Schimpfluch and associates has been exceptional throughout their history. Perhaps with all of those performative gestures hidden in the recording process, the resultant squeaks, bangs, grunts, and scrapes begin to disassociate from their origins and become all the more bizarre, more obscure, and more damaged.
This is definitely true for the work of Krube, the project of a German sound-artist by the name of Alexander Schneider. His techniques begin in snipping various sounds from who knows what. The label Hronir tells us its everyday objects, body openings, and non-definable machines; but by the time Schneider is done with his digital razor blade, what's a fart and what's a piston is not terribly discernible. These sound are quickly jettisoned in squadrons of battering sounds that collide with each other in clusters of events that splutter and bristle like a punk version of Pierre Henry's classic Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir.
Raionbashi's side long composition is comparatively sublime affair, more in keeping with the underappreciated G*Park sound of atonal ambience, creepy as hell field recordings, and generalized disturbances. Daniel Lowenbruck is Raionbashi, and a relatively recent addition to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, having run the exceptional Tochnit-Aleph label and the rumpsti pumsti shop in Berlin. His track begins with a bellowing piano chord which elongates into a desolate drone, marked with scurrying vermin like noises, backward scrapings, and indeterminate swells of grey noise. That same piano returns throughout the piece with an incremental build of anxious black energy seeping through every quiet gesture and gurgling rupture. Like the work of G*Park, the more you let yourself into the details of this piece, the more terrifying it becomes. Truly exceptional!
There's a whole lot of history and a whole lot of meaning loaded in that title. The simple translation from the French is just "put in center" and its earliest etymology refers to the repeating pattern in a coat of arms as a symbol of the aristocratic / familial traditions being passed on from one generation to another. With this repeating formal motif, the phrase has become a term in critical theory to define self-reflexive structural forms and the potential for an instability of meaning, structure, reality etc. through repetition upon repetition. The results are the deliberate mindfucks of the play within a play, the dream within a dream where the dreamer is unaware of dreaming, and the infinite replication of images like the one found on the cover of that first Guardian Alien album (woah, so trippy, dude!).
The application of this phrase to the work of Raison D'Etre points to a gnosticism of darkness that compounds upon itself within the depths of the human soul. That seems suitable to Raison D'Etre's, um raison d'etre, as this has been the long-standing project for Peter Andersson who has recorded for now two decades under this moniker, almost exclusively for the now-defunct Cold Meat Industries. For all of the torturous death-ambient and grinding industrialisms of that imprint, Andersson (not to be confused with the other Peter Andersson on CMI known also as Baby Lina Doll of Deutsch Nepal) offered up a ghastly beauty through his haunted ambience that seem to echo with the maudlin sense of loss from Tarkovsky's lesser known film Nostalgia which ends with a scene of snowstorm quietly precipitating on the innards of the desicated Gothic cathedral. All of the Raison D'Etre albums have dreamily wandered through medieval chants and extracts of Germanic hymnal music, but these albums speak more of Andersson's position on the absence of God rather than a glorification. Mise En Abyme channels these thoughts into cold sweeping passages of melacholy ambience and cinematic overtures which glide along a stately trajectory in and out of cold silences. Machined rhythms and fabricated noise disrupt the ghostly ephemera about half way through the album, but this counterpoint is hardly a distraction. Recommended for those enamored by the work of Deathprod and Svarte Greiner / Deaf Center!
Much has been written here about the recent work of Matthew Bower and his beautiful improv skree in Sunroof (paralleling the massive proliferation of likeminded acts Vibracathedral Orchestra and Birchville Cat Motel); but people often overlook the fact that he began making music in the early '80s as a part of the "Broken Flag" camp - a loose collective of British power electronics technicians and noise rockers, that recorded under the monikers Skullflower, Total, and Ramleh. While Bower was principally the 'figurehead' of the first two and fellow Broken Flag waver Gary Mundy took hold of Ramleh, most of the recording was done with a revolving door membership. Between Skullflower and Ramleh, the Broken Flag camp had produced a noxious arsenal of sludgy noise rock with grim guitar pyrotechnics, crashing upon pummelling rhythm sections, village-idiot basslines and thuggish percussive blasts. These days, the awe-inspiring Skullflower albums "Form Destroyer" and "Birthdeath" are virtually extinct (even, the CD compendium "Ruins" is impossible to find); but fortunately, the old Ramleh stuff is finally available again via this collection of singles. Hopefully this will help keep Broken Flag from dissappearing in the dustbins of musical history.
The formulas for Ramleh (and Skullflower for that matter) were incredibly simple: hammer out a basic rhythm as heavy and as loud as possible, then layer on the angriest and most dissonant blasts of post-Blue Cheer psychedelic freaks outs. Throughout the '80s, Ramleh and Skullflower were pigeonholed as a part of Industrial Culture -- due to their power electronics side projects and associations with Whitehouse; yet as "Too Many Miles" now indicates, this work has much more parallels with the explosive dirges of Neurosis or the incendiary stoner rock of Boris. Really fantastic stuff.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Robin Storey, founding member of :Zoviet*France: and sole proprietor of Rapoon, finds the source material for his mesmeric drone music in the tones emaneted from tablas, Egyptian reeds, digeridoos, and a plethora of ethnic instruments. From the dots of sound he pulls from the instruments, Storey (like his predecent work in :Z*F:) builds lulling compositions with hypnotic rhythmic patterns and rich textures of drifting sound. "Fires of the Borderlands" is one of his most somnambulant pieces and is quite good.
While the Essence Music press release doesn't make this proclamation, any self-respecting :zoviet*france: fan will be able to recognize the source material for Rapoon's From Shadow Sleep. Essentially this album is a remix of the source material taken from two of the finest :zoviet*france: recordings of all times -- the diptych centerpiece of "Ascend The Fall" and "Caught In The Square" found on the album Just An Illusion. That 1990 :zoviet*france: album was essentially a solo record by Robin Storey, who later split from :zoviet*france: rather acrimoniously and formed Rapoon, a project whose work has been fairly hit or miss.
True to the old adage: when Rapoon has been good, he's been very very good; but when he's been bad, he's horrid. From Shadows Sleep find Storey in top form, partially because the source material is so exquisite -- back from when he was dealing with convoluted tape loop machines, time-lag accumulators, and the best non-Dub use of delay pedals of all time. These aerated sounds tinged with metallic resonance cobble together swelling masses of hypnotic drift, underscored by a brooding atmosphere. Sonorous pings and aggregates of swirling tape hiss spackle Rapoon's mighty drone which ends up being both unsettling and transcendent at the same time. Given how many are dabbling in the fine art of grizzled dronescaping, the back catalogue of :zoviet*france: should be required listening. But given that nearly all of those recordings of alchemical ritualism are out of print (thanks to that unfortunate acrimony mentioned above), this Rapoon album is the next best thing. Very highly recommended.
You might guess from the band name, the pink record cover, and the fact that it's on the Blackest Ever Black label, that this would be some sort of dark post industrial minimal techno, or avant hauntological house music, but in fact this is full length number two from NYC metalpunks Raspberry Bulbs, featuring He Who Crushes Teeth from aQ faves Bone Awl, and really, while Raspberry Bulbs is often touted as whole different sort of sonic beast, their sound is definitely cut from the same cloth as the raw black buzz and pound of Bone Awl. If anything, it's the sound of Bone Awl given a punk rock makeover, injected with a healthy does of poppiness too. Simple and stripped down, thick buzzy basslines, crunchy distorto guitars, practice space sounding drum pound, and some heavily effected vocal bellows, all wound up into a tense sort of post punk that is really not that far removed from more polished / popular groups like Iceage, Holograms or Lust For Youth. Albeit way more fucked up and fractured, noisy, chaotic, urgent and intense.
Even with that black metal lineage, and the basic sonic similarities, it's still curious that Raspberry Bulbs appeal so much to metalheads, these guys would be way more at home on a bill with the above bands than any proper black metal outfits, and we're guessing anyone into those groups, or Grave Babies, Rank/Xerox and the like, heck even Interpol or Cold Cave, will flip for these guys too. Fuzzed out noise-rock garage-gloom post-punk that swaggers and slithers, pounds and howls, revealing its surprisingly catchy side throughout, hooks surfacing from the din and lodging firmly, the brooding buzz punctuated by spidery leads and some surprisingly melodic moments. Even the yowly echo drenched vocals end up sounding more punk rock howl than black metal vokill, turning the whole thing into a strange blackened post punk pop that we're digging a whole lot.
Emaciated. Fractious. Toxic. Violent. Raspberry Bulbs is the blackened punk outfit that Marco del Rio conceived after dissolving the cult black metal duo Bone Awl in 2010 or thereabouts. The raw-nerve energy of Raspberry Bulbs is a continuation of Bone Awl's brand of D-beat primitivism, but with some downright catchy riffs and pop-hook chops replacing the black metal. Over three albums, Raspberry Bulbs has perfected that formula - one that could be cranked out on a single worn-torn guitar and knuckle-busting drum kit. Even as Raspberry Bulbs has swollen from a sole venture for del Rio to a formidable five-piece, the riffs have a crust-punk urgency that's completely in the moment and full of wild-eyed rage.
Raspberry Bulb's 2013 album Deformed Worship caught many people off guard, coming out on the boutique publishing house of paranoiac electronica, Blackest Ever Black. Despite the aesthetic differences, the malaise and the claustrophobia and the tension of Black Rain, Cut Hands, and Raime find easy parallels in the jackbooted punk stomp of Raspberry Bulbs. It also makes a hell of a lot of sense that Dominic Fernow / Prurient released the first (and dare we say, slightly undercooked) first album from Raspberry Bulbs. So there's the connection for you. Privacy picks up right where Deformed Worship left off as an antisocial, bad-seed punk brother to Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain, starving the skeletal riffs into a acid batteries of ravenous angst and eschewing the goth miserablism in favor of a throat-ripped snarl. The guitars sound like they've been strung with razor wire and hot-wired into Crime's pawn shop amps. With the multiplicity of guitarists, Raspberry Bulbs just sounds louder, snottier, and meaner. Fucking awesome, we gotta say.
Sometimes we joke that a review really could be one line and describe the music perfectly and succinctly. If we were to try that with the latest from The Raveonettes it would read: If you like great pop you will love this record! But of course, where's the fun in that?? We've definitely never been accused for being at a loss for words when it comes to records we love, so here comes some total gushing!
Last year The Raveonettes revealed a much more raw and fuzzy side to their sound making one of the best Jesus & Mary Chain influenced records in a sea of falling-way-short wannabes. Under all of the fuzz and distortion, it was still clear that The Raveonettes are first and foremost great songwriters who know how to create the kind of hooks and melodies that stay stuck in your head for ages. With In And Out Of Control, the fuzz and feedback have been dialed back, but those golden pop chops are flexed with even greater potency as they take their love of girl groups, and that true knack for conjuring timeless cool pop, creating their own special sound, with such ease and confidence, a sizzling sultry shimmery pop that we can't get enough of. It's kind of puzzling to us why this band hasn't gotten even more popular, cuz in our book The Raveonettes have definitely reached a total apex in creating some of the best modern pop we've heard in ages!
Tom Recchion has been making weird and wonderful sounds since the 1970s as one of the leading figures in the Los Angeles Free Music Society. In a constant rotation of projects and bands, he cranked out ear-damaging skree, zonked tape collages, anti-musical comedies, and all sorts of other illogical strategies for making fucked-up sound. Compared to pretty much everything he's done previously, Proscenium - his first record in nearly seven years - is downright sensible; and one that fits neatly alongside all of the other releases from Elevator Bath, a label which specializes in rarified dronemuzik and oblique ambience (e.g. Keith Berry, Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed and even our own Jim Haynes). The album began as the musical accompaniment to Janie Geiser's play "Invisible Glass" itself an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, with Recchion attempting to craft a moody atmosphere that slowly creeps into the audience's unconsciousness. Strange melodies emerge through a shimmering hum at the onset of the record, sounding like an underwater version of Aphex Twins' Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Recchion smudges everything beyond recognition, although the thrumming of a piano does seem to peek from behind the veil of his aqueous mystery. Dense applications of reverb are common throughout, as is a strange echoing ripple that has a funhouse, helter-skelter vibe - probably the only commonality with anything from LAMFS! Whatever melodic phrases Recchion might have started out with have blurred into oceanic swells of nocturnal droning that by the end of side two morphs into an algae bloom of dread. The tracks on the seven inch are somewhat different from what's found on the lp, with a Dada-inspired splatter of haptic rhythms on one side; and a slow-crawling calliope slashed with sporadic gasps of noise on the other. While the seven inch follows Recchion anti-aesthetic through LAFMS, the ambient horror of the lp tracks are the true prize of the set. Think Basinski. Think Koner. Think Nurse With Wound. And, then you're getting close to where Recchion might be coming from.
