We have loved this band since we were in high school, when we first picked up a copy of the Red Temple Spirits' first record. That album - Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon - became something we've returned to over and over again. Then, it was a more adventurous, post-apocalyptic, and lysergically tainted take on the British post-punk / goth-pop albums of our youth. You know, Love & Rockets, Siouxsie, The Smiths, The Cure. But later, upon discovering the Syd Barrett fronted Pink Floyd records, Twink's Think Pink, and the Outsiders' CQ, Red Temple Spirits seemed less to fit in with their contemporaries and more of a feral updated expression of psychedelic awakening of those bands from the '70s. The basslines from Red Temple Spirits may have been lifted wholesale from Steven Severin of Siouxsie & The Banshees, and the guitars could hit the jagged, sparkplug bursts of Gang Of Four or even Crime (but for the most part, they paralleled the dark-eyed jangle of the Abecedarians); but the arrangements were far more convoluted - at times shambolic and rambling, and at others ritualistically intense.
The band emerged out of the LA goth-punk scene in 1987, when bassist Dino Paredes departed Psi-Com, which was fronted by none other than Perry Farrell (who would go on to form Jane's Addiction) only to find another amazing frontman in the form of William Faircloth. This British ex-pat was equal parts doomsayer and acid casualty, eagerly waxing poetic about the latter through the lens of the former. Many of these visionary tales mapped out a basic philosophy of universalist gnosticism - "The Light Of Christ" addresses a common gnostic precept that an inner wisdom is trapped within the human condition and can be tapped through meditation, invocation, rigorous study, whatnot, but not before passing through allusions to Buddhism and animism. Vocally, Faircloth sounds a hell of a lot like Black Francis / Frank Black trying to do a Syd Barrett impersonation - a demonic, tonal yelp with a faint trace of a British lisp.
The band produced two albums, the aforementioned Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon (1988) and the nearly impossible to find If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa, I Wouldn't Stay A Minute More (1989). The bulk of copies of the latter all seemed to end up in Greece for whatever reason, and given the prices for the album online, must have been single handedly supporting the Greek economy. The debut is an astonishing double album that sprawls from languid dirges to frenetic punk-pop songs all lead in dramatic fashion by Faircloth.
We have loved this band since we were in high school, when we first picked up a copy of the Red Temple Spirits' first record. That album - Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon - became something we've returned to over and over again. Then, it was a more adventurous, post-apocalyptic, and lysergically tainted take on the British post-punk / goth-pop albums of our youth. You know, Love & Rockets, Siouxsie, The Smiths, The Cure. But later, upon discovering the Syd Barrett fronted Pink Floyd records, Twink's Think Pink, and the Outsiders' CQ, Red Temple Spirits seemed less to fit in with their contemporaries and more of a feral updated expression of psychedelic awakening of those bands from the '70s. The basslines from Red Temple Spirits may have been lifted wholesale from Steven Severin of Siouxsie & The Banshees, and the guitars could hit the jagged, sparkplug bursts of Gang Of Four or even Crime (but for the most part, they paralleled the dark-eyed jangle of the Abecedarians); but the arrangements were far more convoluted - at times shambolic and rambling, and at others ritualistically intense.
The band emerged out of the LA goth-punk scene in 1987, when bassist Dino Paredes departed Psi-Com, which was fronted by none other than Perry Farrell (who would go on to form Jane's Addiction) only to find another amazing frontman in the form of William Faircloth. This British ex-pat was equal parts doomsayer and acid casualty, eagerly waxing poetic about the latter through the lens of the former. Many of these visionary tales mapped out a basic philosophy of universalist gnosticism - "The Light Of Christ" addresses a common gnostic precept that an inner wisdom is trapped within the human condition and can be tapped through meditation, invocation, rigorous study, whatnot, but not before passing through allusions to Buddhism and animism. Vocally, Faircloth sounds a hell of a lot like Black Francis / Frank Black trying to do a Syd Barrett impersonation - a demonic, tonal yelp with a faint trace of a British lisp.
The band produced two albums, the aforementioned Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon (1988) and the nearly impossible to find If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa, I Wouldn't Stay A Minute More (1989). The bulk of copies of the latter all seemed to end up in Greece for whatever reason, and given the prices for the album online, must have been single handedly supporting the Greek economy. The second album attempts to tighten up some of the more unhinged aspects, with a few more conventional psych-rock songs but when they hit the cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls To The Heart Of The Sun," it really is a twisted acid trip launched beyond Earth's orbit, through pounding tribal rhythms, Keith Levene-esque guitar scratchiness, and Faircloth's belted vocals.
We have loved this band since we were in high school, when we first picked up a copy of the Red Temple Spirits' first record. That album - Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon - became something we've returned to over and over again. Then, it was a more adventurous, post-apocalyptic, and lysergically tainted take on the British post-punk / goth-pop albums of my youth. You know, Love & Rockets, Siouxsie, The Smiths, The Cure. But later, upon discovering the Syd Barrett fronted Pink Floyd records, Twink's Think Pink, and the Outsiders' CQ, Red Temple Spirits seemed less to fit in with their contemporaries and more of a feral updated expression of psychedelic awakening of those bands from the '70s. The basslines from Red Temple Spirits may have been lifted wholesale from Steven Severin of Siouxsie & The Banshees, and the guitars could hit the jagged, sparkplug bursts of Gang Of Four or even Crime (but for the most part, they paralleled the dark-eyed jangle of the Abecedarians); but the arrangements were far more convoluted - at times shambolic and rambling, and at others ritualistically intense.
The band emerged out of the LA goth-punk scene in 1987, when bassist Dino Paredes departed Psi-Com, which was fronted by none other than Perry Farrell (who would go on to form Jane's Addiction) only to find another amazing frontman in the form of William Faircloth. This British ex-pat was equal parts doomsayer and acid casualty, eagerly waxing poetic about the latter through the lens of the former. Many of these visionary tales mapped out a basic philosophy of universalist gnosticism - "The Light Of Christ" addresses a common gnostic precept that an inner wisdom is trapped within the human condition and can be tapped through meditation, invocation, rigorous study, whatnot, but not before passing through allusions to Buddhism and animism. Vocally, Faircloth sounds a hell of a lot like Black Francis / Frank Black trying to do a Syd Barrett impersonation - a demonic, tonal yelp with a faint trace of a British lisp.
The band produced two albums, the aforementioned Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon (1988) and the nearly impossible to find If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa, I Wouldn't Stay A Minute More (1989). The bulk of copies of the latter all seemed to end up in Greece for whatever reason, and given the prices for the album online, must have been single handedly supporting the Greek economy. The debut is an astonishing album that sprawls from languid dirges to frenetic punk-pop songs all lead in dramatic fashion by Faircloth. The second album attempts to tighten up some of the more unhinged aspects, with a few more conventional psych-rock songs but when they hit the cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls To The Heart Of The Sun," it really is a twisted acid trip launched beyond Earth's orbit, through pounding tribal rhythms, Keith Levene-esque guitar scratchiness, and Faircloth's belted vocals. Both of those albums are present in their entirety here, along with some choice bonus tracks (including a really tripped out version of 13th Floor Elevators' "Rollercoaster") as well as a third disc of demos.
This 3cd set also marks the reinvention/reactivation/resurfacing of Bruce Licher's Independent Project Records, complete with the amazing letterpress folios he was creating back in the '90s. Faircloth was actually one of Licher's press technicians after Red Temple Spirits broke up, and Red Temple Spirits and Licher's Savage Republic were certainly coming from the same headspace. The major difference being that Red Temple Spirits was actually a way better band, if criminally under-appreciated. Very highly recommended!
Rick Reed isn't really doing himself any favors by calling this anthology of his electronic compositions 'Celestial Mudpie', but if you have the opportunity to sit down with the man for a drink (and you really should!), the title suits his personality perfectly. A Texas gentleman with a bawdy side to match his ever charming demeanor, Rick Reed does not exude the bookish reclusiveness one might attribute to an avid consumer and composer of delirious if occasionally claustrophobic smears of analogue electronics fashioned after the likes of Klaus Schulze, Arcane Device, and Conrad Schnitzler. It's a little strange that Reed has been off the radar here at Aquarius for all these years, as he's released a handful of recordings through Ecstatic Peace, Elevator Bath, and Beta-Lactam Ring. He's also developed a close working relationship with the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, having scored several soundtracks. As relative newcomers to his work, we were flabbergasted at how good Reed has been over the years thanks to this fantastic compendium of works that date back from the past 2 decades. His primary instruments are Moog, sine-wave generator, and shortwave radio which must go through innumerable analogue treatments and filters before entering the domain of the digital workstation. Rarified atmospherics and spectral transmissions dominate his compositions which can start as hypnotizing electronic meditations on the music of the spheres before accelerating to a dramatic crescendo of blistered vibration, gaping drones, and some Broken Flag teeth gnashing menace found on the earlier works. He's included both tracks from a recent picture disc LP released on Elevator Bath (for those not inclined to vinyl), as well as several of those excerpted soundtracks for Ken Jacobs, plus some works dating back as far as 1986. Each of the three discs come with a hand-painted piece of artwork of densely sprayed paint, that somehow does not reek of petrochemicals. Kudos to Reed for not stinking up the joint. And kudos to Reed for such impressive work.
Somehow, we missed this one when it came out a few years back; but with Rick Reed's recent self-release from his archives dating back some 25 years, we figured you might also be as intrigued as we are in some of the other work that didn't make it onto Reed's massive and brilliant compendium Celestial Mudpie reviewed here a couple lists back. Reed hails from Texas, where he has been tinkering around with Moogs, shortwave radio, tone generators, and field recordings to construct his weighty drones. The title track on Dark Skies At Noon is an alternate version to a soundtrack that Reed composed for Ken Jacobs' film Seeing Is Believing. Jacobs, who has worked with Reed on numerous occasions over the past decade, had also used this same score for his Mountaineer Spinning film as well. The piece itself is grounded upon an industrial strength hum, the kind you would expect to hear in a nuclear power plant or some giant particle accelerator. Pierced tones, scabrous noises, and pure frequencies that have set up some unsettling standing waves here in the weirdo architecture of Aquarius all elegantly wax and wane across the surface of Reed's droning subtrata. Seeming infinite in slow-boiling currents of electricity and strangely psychedelic at times, somewhat like a cross between Emeralds and Troum. The second piece is a collaboration with former AMM member Keith Rowe, dialing in his shortwave to gather bits of static and garbled transmissions set against Reed's crawling set of analogue electronic drones. For all of Rowe's dynamic interplay of texture and noise, this is clearly a piece driven by Reed's sensibility. The finale to the album is the aptly named "Ghosts Of Energy" with its tone-bending vibrations, eerie wails of Forbidden Planet-esque electronics, and moire-patterns of sound grafted from dissonant frequencies. Altogether, this makes for an excellent collection! Elevator Bath tells us this is limited to just a hair over 300 copies.
In recent weeks, we've ballyhooed the career of Rick Reed, the Austin based composer of grimly psychedelic electronics; and now we've gotten a hold of a few copies of the picture disc he produced for Elevator Bath. Both of these track appeared on Reed's Celestial Mudpie anthology, just so you don't end up buying the same two great pieces of lazer-tone emissions... unless of course, you want to. As we've mentioned before, primary instruments are Moog, sine-wave generator, and shortwave radio which must go through innumerable analogue treatments and filters before entering the domain of the digital workstation. Rarified atmospherics and spectral transmissions dominate his compositions which can start as hypnotizing electronic meditations on the music of the spheres before accelerating to a dramatic crescendo of blistered vibration and gasping drones. Both "Dreamz" and "Blue Polz" find Reed at his best, somewhere between Emeralds steamrollered into a tectonic rumble, that Omit / K-Group collaboration of rasping analogue synths achieving LaMonte Young mantra status, and the classic ambient psyche-drone smear of Conrad Schnitzler and Cluster. Nice!
The Way Things Go is a very impressive electro-static drone anthology documenting a bunch of barely released material from the Texas gear junkie Rick Reed. This is a man who's been tinkering with vintage synths, shortwave radio, and sinewave generators for well over 25 years, woak from the classic progressive electronic sound of the likes of Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, through the nihilism of the post-industrialists (e.g. MB, Arcane Device, John Duncan, etc.), and into post-noise constructs of liquid psychedelia from Emeralds and all of their satellite projects. In so many ways, this could have found a nice home on John Elliott's Spectrum Spools imprint, but Reed stays with the ever impressive Elevator Bath.
There is some overlap between this collection and the self-published Celestial Mudpie album that Reed issued a couple years back. In particular, there's Reed's very evocative and chilling soundtrack to the Ken Jacobs film Capitalism: Child Labor that is an intense piece of tonal vibration, slipping from Andromeda Strain styled pulses upon rotating layers of a atonal hums, arching drones, and nervous lines of analogue static. Another high profile soundtrack is "Hidden Voices Pt 1." which was composed for the Hermann Nitsch gallery exhibit "The Orgies Mysetries Theater" in Houston back in 2005. This track contains the bloodcurdling atonality that Nitsch composes for his own aktions, but Reed twists the stratified dissonance with deep space blorp, shards of Birchville-esque distortion, and shortwave SSB detunings. The whole album follows suit with muffed static cracklings amidst radioactive clouds of analogue fired tone float, sulking at times into a melancholy atmosphere but always immensely complex. Very highly recommended stuff, and yes this does come with a download card. Nice.
Depending on how you look at it, this record is either the best, or the funniest record we've heard in a while. A pretty successful pastiche of the highly illogical musical tastes of adolescence; post-Hardcore grind, shiny-faced emo pop, and gangsta rap (brilliantly exploited, with a Ween-like irreverance; the opening 'skit' makes Reggie the victim of a driveby shooting). Plus bizarre but totally appealing '80s new wave love songs, faux-Crass faux-Euro polito-punk songs (the hilarious 'Dwarf Invasion'), and pure disco grooves MC'ed by a hillbilly calling for some weird linedance that could only have origins in Fresno. Totally absurd but, man, it works. I'm the first one around here to immediately dismiss a joke record, but this is no joke. The pop songs are first rate, hooks and kick ass melodies. The metal is metal! Grinding and pounding, thanks in no small part to members of Coalesce being the core of Reggie. But some of the disc's best moments come with the effortless mix of the two, crunching brutality mixed up with Weezer-worthy radio fare. God knows how it works but it does. Humor + honest to gosh pop hooks + crazy surprises may be the formula. Yup, a unanimous AQ staff favourite.
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The metaphysical world created by Reynols spins on a different axis than the world that the rest of us know. Guided by self-negating guru Miguel Tomasin (who has Down's Syndrome) and actualized by Anla Courtis and Robeto Conzalo, Reynols has previously slowed their world down to a nervous crawl to investigate the Kirlian glow of tape hiss, on their ultra-minimalist masterpiece "Blank Tapes" (which found a perfect home on Bernhard Gunter's Trente Oiseaux label). "-------" finds the Reynolsian globe spinning backward in time with this blast of atavistic noise rock, reminiscent of the earliest work of the Swans, Virgin Prunes, or Skullflower. Reynols' desire to invoke the tumultousness of rock is not anger, fear, or a sadistic need to control, rather it is the ecstacy of pounding: the ability of rock to channel the most primal connections between the body and sound. Musically, "-------" moves though Miguel's skittering mondo beats and the slashing guitar noise of Anla and Robeto, who develop primitive two or three note melodies out of the screeching cacaphony.
Miguel's whimsical, incessant, and non-linear banter runs throughout these noise rock slabs of sound, making all together a strangely magical experience.
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Reynols is an Argentinian trio that certainly doesn't do much to fit within the user-friendly conventions of stablized musical aesthetics. The focal point in Reynols is Miguel Tomasin, the lead singer / oracle of the group who suffers from Down's Syndrone; yet despite his affliction, Tomasin brings a festive quirkiness and deeply poetic insight to the process of creating music for Reynols. After conjuring a myriad of unusual ideas and mystical pronouncements, Tomasin works with the classically trained engineers Alan Courtis and Roberto Conlazo to realize his transcendental neologisms within a sonic context. Miguel wants to release an album of blank tapes, and Reynols manufactures such an album that despite the absurd source material is a breathtaking piece of dronology... or Miguel wants to compose a symphony for 10,000 chickens, and behold Reynols goes to a farm, records a bunch of chickens and produces an eerie David Lynchian drone.
For "Barbatrulos," Miguel and company have situated themselves as a minimalist heroin rock band, but their sound is far abstracted from the canons of romantic abjection like the Velvet Underground or Spaceman 3. Rather, their fuzzed-out dinscrape dirges are infused with something inexplicably affirmative. I makes no bones about the fact that I don't understand them, but Reynols is one of the few bands that makes me very happy.
Allan asked our friendly Forced Exposure rep (known to some as Hrvatski, Keith to others) what seemed to be a reasonable question: "So is that Reynols cd any good?" Keith's deadpan response, "It's blank tapes." Allan, phrasing the question a little differently, "Well, what does it sound like?" Again the response over the phone, "It's really just blank tapes." A silence persisted from Allan who was baffled and trying to formulate the next question. Keith then responded, "Look we got a lot of these things, so take as many as you want!" making his pronouncement of the ridiculousness of this record as well as his desire to get rid of them.
But let's face it: Reynols isn't one guy. It's a band with three people, recording the sound of blank tapes. They are from Argentina. They previously made a recording of 10,000 chickens. And you know what, you can actually hear these blank tapes, with more going on then the average Trente Oiseaux record (i.e. Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden, and Francisco Lopez). Furthermore, it's really great.
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With over 50 records under their belt (300 if you count all the ones that "don't exist"), Reynols has more to do with executing a concept than maintaining an aesthetic continuity, with previous wonders of aural conceptualism like "Blank Tapes" (a minimalist hour of blank tapes released on Trente Oiseaux). Fronted by Miguel Tomasin, the lead singer who claims he doesn't sing, and flanked by the sonic arsenal of Alan Courtis and Roberto Conlazo, Reynols presents an art-damaged rock album in "Polos Mosco." The songs from the album are structurally simple but dominated by an excess of vibrato reverb which warbles harmoniously with the garage-rock-meets-Sonic-Youth guitar attack as well as Tomasin's incantations. While AQ's Spanish is downright non-existent, it's probably safe to say that Tomasin is about as comprehensible as Jandek. With all of the oddball mythologies, Reynols may in fact turn out to be the Sun City Girls of the new millenium. Plus Allan and Andee think he sounds like Space Ghost's Brak!!
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Within the Reynolsian post-rational pantheon, Pauline Oliveros holds the unique position of being the band's astral godmother. Oliveros has been in close contact with the Argentinian avant rockers since 1994 and only recently has their collaboration been documented, first as a super limited tape release, and now as this cd which is somewhat of a reworked version of that cassette release. Following the brilliant single-source-material manipulations found on "Blank Tapes" and "10,000 Chicken Symphony," Reynols reinterprets and recomposes recordings from Oliveros for just intonation accordion and voice. Reynols -- unlike most remix artists -- takes great care to add something that is distinctively of themselves without diluting the beautiful complexities of Oliveros' signature style. "Pauline Oliveros In The Arms Of Reynols" is a massive recording of the glacial swells of Oliveros' accordion which are matched with Reynols magically dark production -- adding distant (and somewhat threatening) bird choruses and glistening guitar distortion washes to the mix. This extended dronological investigation is broken near the end of the record by Reynols' Miguel Tomasin expounding his ideas about life and this recording. Even if our Spanish were better, his playful neologisms still would probably be beyond us, as our metal grasp of his idiosyncratic mythologies is somewhat limited. Nevertheless, this is an amazing document.
My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Slowdive's Soulvaki, Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See - there are just some records that stand especially tall in the pantheon of shoegaze's finest moments. Ride's album Nowhere belongs right there too, as one of our all time favorites, a truly perfect album from start to finish, that has most definitely stood the test of time. While Ride made some other cool records, they never were able to duplicate the genius of Nowhere. A record that soars and floats with such emotional honesty as well as that dazed 'n glazed vibe that has made it one of those records we've turned at so many different times in our lives. It came out in 1990 and really served as a perfect extension of what folks in the '80s like The Jesus & Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Durutti Column, Loop, and The Cure were doing, infusing that sound with an even deeper emotional quality as well as lots of psychedelic undertones, creating music that soared and floated with dreamy ease and driving force.
No matter how hyperbolic we get, we simply can't even get close to describing how much this record means to so many of us. We've turned to it in moments of despair, we've cranked it with windows down on endless drives with crushes and close friends, we've shacked up alone in our bedrooms with this playing during intense moments of loneliness, we've lain in beds with the ones we love lingering in ecstasy as it plays. It's a record that has and will continue to be such a constant source of pleasure for our ears and minds, hearts and souls.
Long out of print, we are SO stoked that Rhino has stepped up to reissue this classic on vinyl now! YOU NEED THIS! (There's also supposedly a special deluxe double cd edition on Rhino that includes a whole mess of bonus tracks, we haven't been able to get our hands on that yet, however.)
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The unanimous AQ staff favorite of the week. Disc one is totally stuck in our cd player...it's only about 20 minutes long, but it may as well be infinite, 'cause we just keep playing it over and over. Appropriate, because, as with much of the late '60s work of American minimalist composer Terry Riley's work, repetition (with subtle changes) is the modus operandi here. The original source song "You're No Good", a pop-latin-boogaloo number released by Harvey Averne in 1968 (he's not credited in the liner notes to this, strangely) is a great tune in its own right. But soon after the original song's release. Terry Riley got his hands on it and created what oughta become one of his all time classic tracks. Riley used pedal-driven tape-loops and the Moog to take the infectious "You're No Good" chorus to extreme, abstract, mesmerizing lengths. It's looped over and under itself, at first sounding completely normal and then imperceptibly gets weirder and weirder until it's so odd that the customers in the store start looking concerned and asking if the cd player is skipping. It stutters wonderfully! Sometimes the left and right channels are playing different parts of the song simultaneously, to eerily beautiful effect.
That the original song is so insanely catchy and hook-filled (it's a "Dancing in the Streets"-style pop number) definitely contributes to the accessibility and fun of the piece. Disco minimalism? Hell yeah. Apparently it was commissioned as theme song for what must have been a very avant-garde Philly dance club, the operator of which was a Terry Riley fan present at the concert documented on disc one... Brilliant.
By the way, the original Averne song can be found on the compilation Dusty Fingers Vol. 2, and we've added a clip of the original below for you to compare.
Disc 2 of this archival set is live material from one of Terry's Poppy Nogood All Night Concerts held in Philadelphia in the fall of 1967. The lovely drones produced by his soprano sax and "time-lag accumulator" must have kept the attendees happy and hypnotized in their sleeping bags 'til dawn, and now we can experience a cd's worth of it now at whatever time of day or night we choose. Nice.
The gloomy post-punk monochromaticism of Ritual Howls has its antecedents - the ominous decadence of the Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Sisters Of Mercy, meshed with the low-slung swagger of the Lynch / Badalamenti incidental musics from Lost Highway or Wild At Heart. Yes, those are very welcome things for the black-clad denizens of the world; and Ritual Howls makes good in their application of these references. Turkish Leather follows a handful of suitably sub-underground cassettes, including several on the cult industrial-noise publishing house Nostivelo. On those cassettes, Ritual Howls thrived in the catacomb murk of overblown production with a single microphone picking up a thunderously loud session a la Les Rallizes Denudes. Here on Turkish Leather, Ritual Howls did find themselves in a studio, which allows them plenty of room to breath in all of the asbestos, nuclear fallout, or swamp gas, depending on what post-apocalyptic scenario you'd want to locate Ritual Howls. Of course, their home town of Detroit all serves them well in that regard, though there's very much a southwestern tremolo-laden twanginess that echoes through these propellant goth-punk tunes. Had these lads been from Los Angeles gigging at the Scream in the '80s, they would have been right at home.
Pretty provocative name huh? These problematically monikered nineties Bay Area improvised noise makers, in fact, boasted a pretty surprising and stellar pedigree, the duo included Kelvin Pittman now of Portland Bike Ensemble, and Kyp Malone, of fellow SF noiseniks Iran and now of... TV On The Radio!!? Huh? Yep, long before Malone was playing huge festivals and helping send Pitchfork into conniptions, and releasing solo records, and impressing the indie rock throngs with his impossible and impressive facial hair, he was in fact one half of Rocket Science, a raucous, blasting, psychedelic combo, who spit out a wild fusion of free jazz and free noise, and this was their only record, released on Vulgar Tango way back when, along with the debut Iran lp reviewed elsewhere on this week's list. The Vulgar Tango dude discovered a stash of records (both Iran and Rocket Science) that had been hidden away for close to a decade, and decided to let us have them!
So yeah, we always sort of wondered why in all the articles about TV On The Radio, they never ONCE mentioned Kyp's time in RSATNLF, although we can sort of guess. Which is too bad, cuz these guys ruled. Nothing at all like TV On The Radio of course, or Iran really (except for some of the noisiness), Rocket Science took guitars and bells and drums and some 'singing' and wound 'em all up into a super charged take on that SST jazz sound, filtered through a warped SF noiserock filter. Sometimes surprisingly melodic and tranquil, but more often than not, fierce and free and heavy and loud, skittery percussion, tangled grinding guitar gnarl, some serious psychedelic crunch, lots of feedback, all woozy and warped, chaotic and off kilter, brief squalls of splattery atonal skronk, give way to warbly drone psych squiggles, which gives way to drum-kit-down-the-stairs cacophony, which then gives way to some almost metal chug and thud, which always seems to blossom into a crumbling mass of swirling sound and amp damaging free-rock delirium. Gloriously ramshackle and seriously challenging, an extremely noisy and loud look back at one of our favorite unsung outfits that helped define the SF underground in the early 2000s...
With the first track on this anthology being a recording of wind from a 1935 sound effects record, AQ beloved sound artist Steve Roden makes a very literal introduction to I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces. Released by Dust-To-Digital, this beautifully constructed hardback book filled with images both from and ephemeral to Roden's collection of 78s, as well as two discs worth of sounds from that antique vinyl. Yeah, the idea is pretty much the same as what the Climax Golden Twins presented via Dust-To-Digital on their also-awesome Victrola Favorites anthology a few years back; but Roden's collection trends more to the mid-part of the 20th Century and is focused on Americana (including a couple of Hawaiian tracks made before the islands were granted statehood). Following that crackled recording of the wailing wind from that sound effects record, is the unmistakable voice of John Jacob Niles, the 'mountain tenor' whose spooky falsetto and maudlin melodic wanderings predated Devendra Banhart by a good 60 years... Afterwards, there's plenty of bluesmen, blueswomen, gospel belters, Appalachian balladeers, and barbershop crooners, many of which seem quite world-weary in singing their tales of lust, money, and liquor (or the lack thereof). Some of the names are familiar to us (e.g. Clara Smith, Roy Smeck, Sol Hoopii), but there are plenty of anonymous recordings from home-cut discs as well. The arrangements for many of the songs tend to be very sparse, just voice and guitar is pretty much all you get on every track; and the album is dotted with tracks from antique sound effects records of birds, ice, and even "night noises!" For those of you aware of Roden's own compositions of understated field recordings, quiet ruminations on found objects, and soft looping techniques, this shouldn't be a big surprise.
The vintage photos inside this 184 page book are completely lovely, with all of their rumpled edges, ruddy patinas, and cracked surfaces, with some far more poignant - such as the shot of a bunch of violas suspended outside in the sun perhaps to allow a coat of shellac to dry. There's the silhouette of G.J. Jessup decked out in his one-man drum and bugle corps regalia, and the glum looking fellow with the unkempt mustache leaning against his Funnygraph contraption (sadly, there's no corresponding recording for either photograph). Pages and pages of interesting images to provoke curiosity and evoke reverie. Altogether, Roden has compiled over 150 photos and 51 tracks for this stunning document of sonic obsession from Dust-To-Digital! Hard to imagine NOT wanting this.
Steve Roden is the man who coined the term 'lowercase sound' to describe his own strategies in constructing a delicate minimalism out of very quiet sounds, subtle melodic phrases, and subtle looping structures. While many sound artists operate under the lowercase banner, Roden alongside Bernhard Gunter have long remained at the vangarde of this aesthetic and conceptual art form. With Gunter moving further and further down the path of improvisation, Roden's intuitive constructions of gossamer electrons are still as modest as ever, but have clearly developed into one of the strongest artistic statements in modern electronics.
Airforms was commissioned for an installation at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004. Inspired by the spray concrete architectural forms of Wallace Neff who in turn drew inspiration from nautilus shells, Roden designed an installtion of concrete sprayed balloons as an homage to the Neff houses. While these objects -- which sort of looked like a Dr. Seuss variation on Eva Hess sculptures -- were not used to construct the accompanying musical score, they succeeded in communicating an empathic delicacy and sadness along with the music. For the CD release of Airforms, Roden reconstructed the sound elements for stereo listening. As beautiful as it is modest, the Airforms CD ripples with a slow procession of of abstracted pipe organ loops periodically scratched with distant crackle.
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Steve Roden has self-released several 20 minute 3"cds on which he plucked, bowed, and rubbed a singular object with sporadic use of electronic manipulation. The chair that Steve uses on this recording was designed by Harry Bertoia (who made metal furniture as well as his sound sculptures). While the chair itself wasn't intended to make the gossamer tonalities that can be coaxed from Bertoia's sculptures, Roden intentionally mimics Bertoia's sounds and adds his own penchant for discreet melodic passages. Excellent stuff!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Each sound from this series of 3"cds is the result of manipulation of a singular object with occasional electronic trickery. Steve Roden has taken a metal ribbed bubble lamp built in 1952 to fashion 20 action packed minutes of stethoscopic deep rumbles, polyrhythmic plucks, and subtle drone exploration. [/cat/experimental153.html]
Here's a 2003 release that we've never stocked before, from one of our favorite sound artists. Steve Roden built this album originally as the sound design for an installation back in 2000, with all of the sounds sourced from three musical instruments found in a Chinatown giftshop, including a toy wooden flute, an aluminum wind chime, and a paper accordion. Where so many musicians would take these instruments and render their sounds cute, cheeky, or ironic, Roden has always been an artist with a profound sensitivity for his source material; and he deftly extracts harmonically rich and emotionally resonant hues and tones from all of those instruments. The first piece, sourced from the wooden flute, elegantly weaves sustained wisping tones out of a deep, almost sinewave-sounding thrum of down-pitched low-end rumbling. The looping hypnosis of this track harkens to the pre-digital smears of flutes that Zoviet France created on such albums as Shouting At The Ground or Shadow Thief Of The Sun - in other words, haunting, sublime, and gorgeous. The second track is adopted from the aluminum wind chimes, collects an aggregate of variably pitched sounds of those chimes, with deep resonance, metallic textural scrapes, and chittery clicks coming into the mix. The pacing of this track is quintessentially Roden, deliberate and hypnotic, becoming all the more engrossing the further one engages with the track. The final composition is for the paper accordion, whose spare notes evolve into a beautiful elegy of lilting tones that overlap and loop with each other, upon sets of miniature abrasions and a thick set of low-drones, which must have been designed to simulate those on the first track. Like much of Roden's work, this is a lovely piece of introspective minimalism, slowly germinating into a beautiful ambience.
Scores for sound installations often have a way of not really translating when heard outside of the installation. Steve Roden is one of the few sound artists who has perfected the balancing act of creating a sublime sonic experience through his installation work which also translates equally as well on disc. Transmissions (Voices Of Objects And Skies) was originally commissioned by the Fresno Art Museum, and found Roden creating a metonymic environment that bridged childhood wonder with the rough technologies of tin-can telephones and daydreams of space travel and NASA. The installation itself was an 8 channel sound piece spread over 64 speakers which were all mounted within tin cans and suspended from the ceiling alongside countless other tin cans that housed low wattage colored light bulbs, creating a fantastic chandelier of muted light that was perfect for the delicate compositions. Roden states in the liner notes that the source material for the album was recordings of satellites by amateur astronomers from the 1960s through the 1980s; and through Roden's impeccable reductivist filtering and manipulation, he arrives at a slow-motion collage of electronic bleeps which might have more in common with a distantly flickering flute than anything electric in origin. Nevertheless, Roden turns these sounds into looping lullabies and subtle declinations of sound. It's one of the best pieces we've heard from Roden and is certainly recommended!
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Steve Roden's "View" consists of four 'possible landscapes' as drone studies into the resonant frequencies of glass.
He collected a handful of samples from a window (sometimes closed, sometimes open - thus allowing the thick haze of city ambience to rush through) and revealed that the glass held beautiful tones distantly resembling slow moving flute passages or chimming bells rising out of miasmic washes. "View" ends up being similar in execution to the audible work of Francisco Lopez or more minimal Andrew Chalk pieces. This was initially presented as a sound installation at the jennjoygallery here in San Francisco, with the samples culled from the window overlooking Market Street.
Now, here's one hell of a good collaboration! These are two incredible abstractionists of the song in their own right, both known for their protracted dronesmear pocked with eerie melodies and ghost-echo structures. Rosenqvist is the man behind the Jasper TX project with tons of incredible records of blackened murk, nocturnal ambience, and the tactile grit of antiquity, while Scott may be best known as the former drummer of Slowdive, although he's released a couple of stunning shoegaze instrumental records over the past couple of years. This album is ostensibly a soundtrack to a short film directed by Juriaan Booij. The film itself is just about 20 minutes long, but the soundtrack is nearly twice that in length. There seemed to have been a number of complications with production that caused innumerable delays for Booij, but this worked to the advantage of Rosenqvist (the original choice of Booij) as he was able to take his time with the concept that the filmmaker had presented to him and in turn consult his confidante Simon Scott about a possible collaboration. Without much of a deadline or even the indication that the film would be completed (in fact, it was and has screened at various film festivals around the globe), Rosenqvist and Scott composed an incredible album of luminous sound that glows through an endless bank of sonic fog.
A rasped buzz emerges from an oceanic current of tonal guitar swell as the intro to Conformists. A collage of cracked ether, electrical static, and crunched surface noises from what could be from old 78s amass into a small crescendo of noise that collapses just as gracefully as it emerges. Out of this, Scott and Rosenqvist follow up with gasping set of radiator drones which swirl around cavernous swells, all dark, metallic, and ominous. A more enveloping, less threatening drone develops next, with somber flickers of a melody buried somewhere in the mix only to succumb to another passage of prolonged shadow and desolation. It's all very haunting and very evocative.
The flipside takes up a beautiful set of twin guitar drones with subtle half-melodies barely flickering within their mutual undulations, gradually overtaken by a soft buzz of distant distortion and bass-heavy thrum, transitioning toward the glacial centerpiece of this side of the record, a track called "Monuments." Here, a slow electrical pulse repeats ad infinitum, almost like an old ringback tone on a telephone with nobody on the other end picking up, laden with glacial bursts oversaturated chiming guitar noise that flood the soundfield like high-beam headlights cutting through a wintery darkness. The album descends and fades away into another beautiful crushed velvet drone. Epic!
Once a trio of bassists gently interweaving painterly melodies, Rothko is now under the sole governance of Mark Beazley, as the other two members Jon Meade and Crawford Blair have left to pursue other projects (Lomax and Geiger Counter, respectively). The new Rothko is not dissimilar to the Rothko which produced such masterful albums as "A Negative For Francis" or "In The Pulse Of An Artery;" though Beazley does flush out the two missing bassists with a baroque application of additional instruments. Guitars, bells, vocals, drums, field recordings, trumpets, and keyboards make themselves known as the supporting cast to the Rothko sound which continues to promote the richness of basslines that spiral through somber melodic repetitions and cascading washes of sustained drones. The vocals from Caroline Ross recall the Celtic siren calls from Enya, and thus renders the possibility of Rothko delving into the drivel of New Age. Fortunately, her presence only on the opening track is an aberration to the rest of Beazley's otherwise exceptional re-incarnation of Rothko. The LP is missing two tracks featured on the CD.
Latest disc of dronemusic from aQ customer and master dronelord Andrew Moon, his first for Utech, and definitely one of his heaviest.
From the opening few seconds, this is some seriously distorter metallic static heaviness, a massive crumbling wall of slow moving fuzz guitar, gorgeously layered so it's not just some guitar-against-the-amp bullshit, no, this is some serious minimal dronemusic, just instead of tones, or sinewaves, Moon has opted for BIG amps and slow glacial chords. The sound pulses and throbs like it was alive, and it sort of is really, with all manner of metallic buzz and grinding shards of feedback drifting beneath and within the humid cloud of warm whirring thickness. Moon is a master of maximizing minimalism, and this track is the perfect example, both understated and pretty, but thick and corrosive and heavy enough that some dronedirgedoom obsessive could get really into it. And it's the sort of sound we can never get enough of, and one that could have stretched the length of the cd and we would have been perfectly pleased.
But there's more to Moon and Tomorrow's Void than just heavy buzz, the second track is much murkier affair, moaning deep tones gradually spread out and grow more and more melodic, even as feedback adds another layer to the proceedings. But 10 minutes later and the guitars come growling back, unfurling an avalanche of crumbling fuzz and blown out minimal anti-metal.
There are 3 or 4 tracks over the remainder of the record that dip into much more muted minimal dronescaping, some offering streaks of high end with their rumbling whirring drift, but the majority of the record is spent with distortion pedals on, filling rooms and speakers and headphones with billowing clouds of warm buzz and ever expanding slow motion guitadrones, each one in its own way powerful and dark, but to our ears trancelike and dreamy, the exact sort of heaviness that has us entranced and drifting off to the other side.
Not long ago, we discovered that one of our loyal AQ customers just so happened to be the man behind one of our favorite groups, RST, and who released two mind blowing discs, R136a which came out on Ecstatic Peace! and this one, Warm Planes, released on Corpus Hermeticum. After discussing a mutual love of all things Skullflower and Terminal Cheesecake, Mr. RST informed us that he had some new actions planned for the near future and just so happened to have a stash of this WAY out of print disc, which he want to be available again, in anticipation of some upcoming new material. We obviously jumped at the chance and grabbed a whole mess of these, just in case some of you somehow missed out on this the first time around. Whereas the Ecstatic Peace! disc was a dense assemblage of claustrophobic humid distortion, Warm Planes is much more of a drone based disc, downright dreamy at times, an amazing collection of dynamic tectonic guitar-drone rumble, very prescient considering the current love of all things doomdronedirge. And holy shit does this stuff hold up. Dense and thick and viscous, these tracks move at a crawl, slowly and completely engulfing everything it their path, filling your ears with a murky black buzz. Some of the tracks dial back the grrrrr a bit, offering up soft ripples of muted feedback, and shimmering swells of amp buzz, while others are expansive sheets of crystalline shimmer, but the majority, are thick and snarling beasts, steel strings reverberating through big black speakers, and wrapping us up in thick tendrils of guitar growl.
A doomdirgedrone classic, before there even was such a thing. Fans of SUNNO))), Fear Falls Burning, Vulture Club, Earth, you got some catching up to do. Start here...
Two brothers from Humboldt County are RV Paintings - one is Brian Pyle, whose name should probably strike a chord as one of the principals in Starving Weirdos and recently has been generating some impressive work under his solo Ensemble Economique moniker; the other is Jon Pyle, who occasionally makes a guest appearance in the Weirdos but also operates in Nudge with Honey Owens, Paul Dickow, and Brian Foote. For all of the method acting from the brothers Pyle in getting stoned and jamming, they have been remarkably consistent and consistently good in all of their ruminations, with RV Paintings probably the best that they've mustered. The RV Paintings debut on Root Strata is three years out but is still a timeless, gorgeous dronesmear of bowed metals and elongated guitar; this was followed by a well-suited split with Taiga Remains on Blackest Rainbow, and now, they've got this stunner on Helen Scarsdale.
RV Paintings speak about, to, and from their own immediate surroundings: the moss, mushrooms, and mycelium of the awe-inspiring redwood forests, the heavy fog that hangs at the coast and from their bongs, and the weightiness of the Pacific Ocean just off to the west. The title Samoa Highway gives the impression that the two brothers were on their own trip during a cold, wintery day, gazing off to the southwest and pondering the warmer climate of American Samoa. But no, the Samoa Highway is located in Humboldt County, connecting Eureka with the small community of Samoa on the other side of the bay which was thought to resemble that of Pago Pago in the mid-19th Century. It's also the bridge that would get you to the Arcata/Eureka Airport.
So, the album begins with field recordings of airplanes lifting off on the jawdropping track "Millions," as sitar-like harmonics and ghostly, levitating drones emanate from the distance. It's a perfectly narcotized smear of echo and drift, hanging in space as the remnants of a particularly lucid dream or the foggy headspace from an afternoon of smoking pot and staring at the sun. This is a track that could spiral onward forever. So nice! Samoa Highway continues with "Mirrors" driven by melancholy looped melody from a cello that dissolves into a flurry of shimmered guitar fuzz, whose shoegazed mantra has been submerged under centuries of felled trees and lichens. Cyclical patterns of samples from dark yet pastoral orchestral passages rounds out the album. If it weren't for the delicate freeform clamor of the drumkit, tracks such as this wouldn't be that far removed from the 'pop ambient' cuts by Gas. Citations of Taj Mahal Travellers, Organum, Grouper, Barn Owl, and The Caretaker certainly hit the mark. Music for airports? More like Music for California airports! Fuck yeah!
And a download coupon is tucked within the sleeve as well!
If you never heard of this obscure eighties female fronted world-pop outfit, get in line. An unlikely mix of Teutonic new wave and dubby balearic dance pop created in Bremen, Germany, Saada Bonaire only released one single in their lifetime. Now Captured Tracks, through its new imprint Fantasy Memory, has brought to us the complete recordings of this short-lived outfit, and it's pretty amazing, especially if you are into lost post-punk disco rarities as much as we are. Created by Bremen DJ Ralf Behrendt in 1982, and recorded in Kraftwerk's studio by legendary dub-punk producer Dennis Bovell (The Pop Group, The Slits) featuring an array of jazz and world musicians hired from the local immigrant center, Saada Bonaire was fronted by Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfield, whose sultry but blase delivery make their sound a sort of hybrid between the domineering dance music of Gina X and Grace Jones and the breezy dub of Brenda Ray. The aforementioned single "You Can Be More As You Are" is an infectious post-disco club classic, that probably had a lot more traction in southern Europe than in the west. Their music, with its exotic flourishes and dreamy tropical rhythms, seems tailor-made for warmer climates, and we can easily see these tracks being played in sunrise dance sets after a long night of clubbing. Definitely a band that should have been a lot bigger than they were, their lack of success the fault of EMI's A&R man who notoriously went over budget with the acts he developed. After going over 5x the budget for Tina Turner's Private Dancer, EMI pulled the plug on Saada Bonnaire and they were rarely heard from since. This anthology covers everything the band recorded between 1982 and 1985, but still remains surprisingly modern sounding for being 30 years old.
"Sacher Pelz offered up burnt offerings, and finally they began to say to the other: 'The true MB is the giver of acts of vengeance to us," quoting Maurizio Bianchi from the obtusely apocalyptic liner notes to his 4 CD box of his earliest material as
Stephan Kraus' well researched website on the history of Bianchi (which can be located at Brainwashed) indicated that much of the original source material from these cassettes was taken from Bianchi's abused Kraftwerk vinyl, then vastly recontextualized into monotonous loops, completely devoid of anything sounding like Kraftwerk. I guess it could be the music of Kraftwerk, but if "Autobahn" had been exhumed from a lengthy burial in a murky swamp.
"Cainus" is Bianchi's very first outing, finding him enthralled by the looping technology of a varispeed tape machine. An entirely decentralized affair, this recording takes those post-mortem tones from his beaten Kraftwerk albums and warbles arrhythmically through several repetitions then shifts into a different loop. "Venus" is similar in the arrhythmia of looping textures, but finds Bianchi experimenting with the varispeed and with an additional synthesizer bleeding through the turgid noise. Even within these recordings which are decidedly primitive, Bianchi makes it very clear that the monotony and dullness of his records are an intentional pursuit for his music, as exorcisms of the existential frustrations of life. "Cease To Exist" progresses more into the sinister dense collage work that precedes his masterpieces as MB, "Endometrio" and "Carcinosi." The final Sacher Pelz recording "Velours" is the most advanced of the four with the loops showing a much broader spectrum from clarity to abstraction, with some of his samples coming directly from Neu! "2" (an interesting choice as that album was a remix of Neu!'s earliest recordings!), but most distorted into a bass-heavy muddle of Merzbow proportions.
It must be stated that while this Sacher-Pelz boxset is an fascinating document of Bianchi's earliest work, this box isn't nearly as good as the truly depressing but totally overwhelming MB recordings.
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Sand's first album Golem is an utter classic of ur-folk krautrock recorded back in 1974 with the nascent technology known as Artificial Head Stereo Sound, meant to the expand beyond the quadrophonic. The recording gear was being lugged around by Klaus Schulze who was the man responsible for capturing Sand's album. They were a peculiar band for the whole Kraut scene, as they were drummerless - or mostly so, as a Yahowah 13-ish hippie boogie is tapped out on the album's finale "Sarah". But for the remaining four-fifths of the album, it's just bass, guitar, synth, and voice. The openness of their arrangements served the Artificial Head recording very well (with the results best rendered on headphones, very trippy); but all of these cool tricks would be worthless had Sand's Golem not already been lumbering, lugubrious monster of an album. The sprawling tracks roll in and out of slowly plucked / strummed guitar - like Manuel Gottsching or Gunter Schickert if played at 16rpm. It's sparklingly gloomy avant-folk, with spooky vibes from the synth and horror-laden lyrics uttered by the weirdly mannered vocalist Johannes Vester, whose take on a Cockney slur via Bavaria is most certainly an unconventional approach. It's no wonder that this album was one album that David Tibet obsessed over upon discovering it in Steven Stapleton's record collection. So much so that Tibet not only reissued the album, but reprised Sand's "When The May Rain Comes" on the iconic Current 93 album Thunder Perfect Mind. Probably the closest neighbors to Sand would be the aQ-endorsed strum-und-drang of German Oak or the weeping fortune telling of Paternoster. Required. Required. Required.
A wonderful piece of history precedes the reissue of this recording by the British pioneer of DIY electronics and cassette culture, Philip Sanderson. Having manufactured a number of cassette-only releases from 1978 - 1981 through his label Snatch Tapes, Sanderson devised the rather cynical ploy of recording under the moniker Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey to see if labels like Rough Trade, Cherry Red, or Fast Product might take the bait of women artists producing abstract electronic music. It's the same dodgy yet brilliant ploy recently used by San Francisco's Ziegenbock Kopf to market themselves as gay leatherboys. Unlike ZK, Sanderson got so far as to get a Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey track on the intriguing Cherry Red compilation entitled "Perspectives and Distortions" alongside The Virgin Prunes, Eyeless In Gaza, The Lemon Kittens, and Robert Fripp. The charade was up when Cherry Red made an offer to Claire and Susan to release an album and wanted to meet the two. Upon learning of the ruse, Cherry Red decide to pull out of the deal instead of continuing the masquerade. It's a shame that it had to come to that as Sanderson had produced a really amazing record of low-tech Cluster-inspired electronic bubblings, although Cherry Red's reaction is an understandable one. Regardless, Sanderson shrugged it off, issued the recordings as "Reprint" through Snatch in 1980, and thankfully 23 years later re-released it on CD through Anomalous Records.
The album begins convincingly enough in regards to the Claire and Susan mythology as Sanderson has employed the vocal talents of a woman simply identified as Nancy in an ethereal collage of her voice cycling through a mantra of tape delay effects. Yet that is the only reference to anything distinctly feminine on the record, as Sanderson completes the record with variations and repetitions of clattering electronics corroding into grimy noise and smeary tape hiss, not unlike Chris Carter's productions for Throbbing Gristle and less structured than Sanderson's work as the Storm Bugs. Sanderson's liner notes describe the record as "academic rigour married to an inverted pop art aesthetic. For whereas pop art incorporated the cheap intoxications of consumer culture into the supposed lofty rooms of high art, here was an attempt to incorporate the form of high art into the low brutality of DIY electronics." Well stated! It's probably not for everybody, but with the proliferation of CD-R labels doing the exact same thing 20 years later, "Reprint" is a historical gem.
From the dark minds of Sandwell District comes this impressive mix of motorik techno, bleak disco, and heroin house. Sandwell District is both the name of a label which collects some of the finer specimens of electronica (i.e. Silent Servant, Rrose, Surgeon, Regis, Function, etc.) and the name of the project for Karl O'Connor (Regis, British Murder Boys, etc.) and David Sumner (Function). It's pretty much just a semantic difference when it comes to this mix, as many of the artists that have contributed to the label are featured on this mix. Sandwell District envision themselves (both label and project) as a logical outgrowth of the British industrial culture (e.g. Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire), with ominous chords and controlling rhythms bounding through their body of work. We've long heard that O'Connor likes to toss in some of the more extreme proponents of early industrial noise in his DJ sets; and we do get a brief taste of Boyd Rice & Frank Tovey - whose metallic flanges are driven by a thumping 909 kick. Not exactly the infernal chaos of Whitehouse, but still a nice touch. Most all of the mix comes from various cuts and mixes from the past 12-18 months with recognizable selections from Raime, Vatican Shadow, Ike Yard, Function, and Surgeon - all of which enjoy skeletal structures of muscular rhythms, black atmospherics, and nary a melodic chord in sight. The closest thing to a melody could be found in the Chain Reactive stabs of metallic synths that glide in sync with the ride cymbal swagger of Mary Velo's "Detune" and the mid '90s acid trax from Plastikman's "Plasticine." Nice work, Sandwell District, nice work.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another new Alchemy title that we've imported from Japan, this one kind of an all-star Japanoise fest featuring noise guitarist Jojo (Alchemy boss and Hijokaidan mastermind), vocalist Miki Sawaguchi (of dubious "Big Boobs" fame), Masami Akita (aka Merzbow) on Macintosh computer, and Masahiko Ohno of noisicians Solmania playing one of his self-built electric guitar monsters (he's also responsible for the lovely graphic design, as he is for most all equally-keen looking Alchemy releases). Naoko Otani plays live drums. Three tracks, one "remix" (I think that's Merzbow's role with his Macintosh), one studio, one live. All pretty great, ranging from rumbling foghorn soundcapes with delicate female spoken vocals, to churning noise accompanied by Yoko Ono-inspired shrieking.
A while ago Janek Schaefer himself described a record by my band Coelacanth as "soulless" so I am happy to return the favor in my review of Schaefer's latest album "Pulled Under," but of course for an album that is admittedly based upon a novel by JG Ballard, soullessness, vacancy, and desolation is just what he's going for.
Janek Schaeffer works primarily within the scope of experimental turntablism, building his own twin and triple armed varispeed turntables. That said, it's rare to actually hear anything within his compositions that really reflect his tricked out gear, with no scratching at all and very little recognizable appropriations of pre-existing recordings. Instead, Schaefer runs this source material through a considerable amount of digital filters, often maximizing the sounds latent bass reflex and smoothing out the high end. Augmented with equally manipulated field recordings, Schaeffer's "Pulled Under" transforms itself into a cold piece of sonic abstraction, rippling with desolate sonar blips, washes of unknown textures, and refractions of deep, dark drones. Sure, it's soulless, but it's a great soulless.
The Austrian noise artist Helmut Schafer died in 2007, leaving behind only a handful of recordings despite his constant travels to music / art festival around the world, including appearances at ARS Electronica and Documenta back in 1997. His work dealt mostly with psychoacoustic principles of intense frequencies at intense volumes, as such he found a sympathetic ear in Zbigniew Karkowski - who became a longtime friend and often collaborator. Yet, beginning around 2003 he came across some dismantled church organ pipes and began experimenting with alternative ways of activating the tones and timbres of those pipes, including a contraption of hairdryers that pushed small currents through the pipes to generate hushed, muffled tones. In building compositions through this system of organ pipes, he radically shifted away from the searing noise and towards a very quiet, contemplative electro-acoustic sound, involving violin, electronics, percussion, and ample pockets of empty space. Thought Provoking III is Schafer's final recording dating back to 2006 when he employed percussionist Will Guthrie and violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner to perform the piece in a Vienna church. In fact, Guthrie stitched this recording together from the rehearsal sessions and the performance itself, attempting to keep true to Schafer's wishes. The proceedings are solemn excursions in electro-acoustic mark-making built around those bellowing hums from Schafer's organ pipes amidst intermittent percussive flourishes, subtle gong overtones, sustained violin trills, and fizzling electronics. The non-repetitive clustered events sound akin to anyone from the Miasmah roster taking up the task of remaking late period Morton Feldman. For the final track of the album, Zbigniew Karkowksi took up remixing elements of Thought Provoking III into a piece reflective of Schafer's more volatile compositions. While full of the frigid vibration and electric toxicity, Karkowski shows considerable restraint in his remix, and constructing a poignant tribute to his lost friend.
YES! We're big fans of lesser-known krautrock guitarist Gunter Schickert (who also did production work with Klaus Schulze, like, for Japan's Far East Family Band). As soon as we heard that his Uberfallig album was getting a new reissue, we knew it was going to have to be a Record Of The Week. We've been in love with this record forever, referencing it and Schickert plenty of times in other reviews when we want to cite something incredibly atmospheric and minimalistically trance inducing from deep in the krautrock zone. There was a previous cd edition of this we stocked years ago, but that's been out of print for ages. Now Germany's industrious Bureau B label have stepped in and added this rare late-krautrock masterpiece to their ongoing, essential series of reissues of essential kraut / kosmishe albums. And it's on both digipak cd *and* vinyl now as well!
Uberfallig was Schickert's second album, originally issued in 1979 on the Sky label, the follow up to his 1975 Brain debut Samtvogel. It's hard to believe somebody this good didn't record more, or with other people, but we're only aware of a couple later recordings that have ever surfaced. Here on Uberfallig, Schickert's exceptionally hypnotic space-echo guitar work, similar to Manuel Gottsching of Ashra, is matched by fascinating rhythmic pulsations, at times recalling prime Can-like velocities or the circular bubbliness of aQ faves AR & Machines, and some Pink Floyd Meddle era pastoral psych vibes as well. And it's mostly just Schickert (guitar, voice) and a few friends (drums and vocals) plus nature sounds, deftly deployed.
Opener "Puls" is worth the price of admission alone. It does indeed pulse, for nearly 16 epic minutes, building from calmly rhythmic beginnings to pure hypno-guitar bliss, mixed with subtle, splashy, sploshy field recordings - evoking the idea of Schickert and his drummer colleague Charles M. Heuer wading upstream in the wilds somewhere as their music plays. That begins the recurrent watery theme found on this album, an ever present liquid watery ambience, the sounds of wind and rain and surf and babbling brooks woven in among the "actual" instruments. The cover image of an intense looking Schickert suggests this too, his visage overlaid with what looks like the play of light on the surface of water.
The second cut, "In Der Zeit", is a shorter, folkier number, with more surf-sounds and bird calls and a gentle, hushed female vocal, accompanying Schickert's pleasant, repeating acoustic guitar motif. So nice.
Track three, "Apricot Brandy II", as some may guess from the name, is a sequel to the first track on Schickert's debut Samtvogel (wish we still had a reissue of that - maybe Bureau B will do something about that, too). Again with a watery intro, then the nervous ticking of drumsticks, heralding a quietly unfurling, slightly sinister and suspenseful 12 and a half minute, gently percolating proto-post-rock trip. We're hearing some Can circa Tago Mago, and Tortoise and Circle, too, especially with the murmuring vocals chanting "Apricot Brandy" amidst other drones and moans. It's all druggy and delicate, moody and mesmeric. Quite the tour de force, coming to a close with strange samples and lovely crackling.
If that wasn't enough, the album ends with even more haunting mesmer, the aptly titled, the 8+ minute long "Wanderer", slow and spooky at first, with more of that tick-tock drumming and watery splashes. It's got a twilight sound to it, so beautiful and mysterious and mesmeric, like this whole amazing, organic, echo-laden album.
Includes, along with credits and lyrics, new 2012 liner notes from Schickert's contemporary Asmus Tietchens, in both English and German, and also an interesting note from Schickert, explaining that some of this music was used on the soundtrack to a film about the gay community in New York called Brooklyn 11238, which we'd never have guessed...
While we'll state that this is reissue definitely something crucial for fans of Agitation Free, AR & Machines, Moebius & Rodelius, Michael Rother, You, Ashra, and latter-day krautrockers Village Of Savoonga, we should also make clear that this is NOT just for krautrock collector nerds - even if you've NEVER heard a krautrock record before, we'd still recommend this one, obscure as it is. It's that good.
An album that launched thousands of better known records, Ballet Statique is Conrad Schniztler's masterpiece. Schnitzler, of course, was a maverick in the Krautrock community, having been an original member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, and later developing an expressive language of tape collage and electronic synthesis which expanded upon his early studies with Joseph Beuys. His most influential works, however, came out in the late '70s following an almost serialist body of work based on the poetics of various colors through electronic sound, eventually leading to Ballet Statique. It was originally released with the title 'Con' back in 1978 through the Barclay funded Egg Records, Ballet Statique is a skeletal distillation of progressive electronics into a bleak hypnosis of rotating melodies, atonal slashes of synthetic noise, and proto-techno rhythmic propulsion. While this album has been reissued a few times since it's original release, the current infatuation with late '70s electronics - especially through the psychedelic and minimal-wave sensibilities - make this reissue especially timely. "Electric Garden" is one of those elegantly simple pieces of electronica with an abstracted, almost random melody guiding Schnitzler's rigid step sequence cast in a cosmic shower of delay ripples with bent electro-shock noises sliding up and down against his motorik drum machine. From a track like this, one can see where Aphex Twin would have been able to make such a profound break from rave culture with these head-spinning sequences. "Metall 1" is all space-dust and comet debris hung weightlessly through Schnitzler's ominous undulations of bright synthetic shimmers and lurching rumbles of metallic low-end, clearly the inspiration for pretty much everything that John Elliott of Emeralds has ever touched. The deep-space sonor pulses of "Black Nails" reprise the tone-bent noises Schnitzler produced on "Electric Garden," looking forward to the robotic bleakness of Monoton, Dome, and Omit. It's pretty shocking how good this record is, and how timeless it sounds, even with the current strain of '70s revivalism. So highly recommended, it's actually embarrassing that we've not written about this record sooner.
First, before we get into the review, we should mention that this double lp is housed in an oversized French paper hand silk-screened jacket. While it's a beautiful package, the combination of its oversized shape and the delicacy of the material means it's prone to damage in shipping, and of course all the copies we have received arrived a bit bent up. The label has no replacement covers so this is all we're going to get. We've taken a couple dollars off the price to compensate a bit, but those who are more fastidious about the shape of their vinyl sleeves, might want to steer clear of this, as we won't be able to replace them. Sorry about that!
But WOW!, this is a beautiful double lp live set from 1972 by the late experimental kosmiche composer, Conrad Schnitzler. Salvaged from decaying tapes of a performance for an art exhibition, the sounds on this are like a multifaceted sci-fi ballet. The coordination of individual electronic sounds operating in harmonic tandem of each other showcases a brilliant array of synthesis and restraint, while at the same time emanating a warm centrally vibrant core. For some reason in some of our minds we always have this impression that Conrad Schnitzler was the most abstract and cold of the German musicians of this period, but lately with each new reissue that becomes available, that impression is proven wrong time and time again. This is a gorgeous set, as essential as any of his key recordings from this era. And as usual, crazy limited, ONLY 1000 COPIES and at this point almost gone so act fast!
Basic Channel -- the Berlin-based techno label run by Mortiz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus from 1993 - 1995 -- released only 9 singles and 1 retrospective cd; yet, the impact that Basic Channel had upon the global techno and electronica communities has been tremendous. It's probably safe to say that any self-respecting techno DJ has a couple of the Basic Channel 12"s thoroughly smeared with grimy fingerprints from years of use. Jerome Maunsell in describing Basic Channel for The Wire rightly qualified it as "the Holy Grail of Techno." The sound of Basic Channel ripples with precedents from Lee Perry's schizoid rewiring of tape through his delay pedals to the cocaine-induced mania / paranoia of late 80's Acid House to the skeletal vacancy of Detroit Techno; however, Basic Channel (like its contemporary descendent Chain Reaction) has an unmistakeable signature. Monochromatic, metallic synth stabs cascade through rhythmically precise delay patterns alongside the unrelenting force of a very simple 909 four on the floor techno stomp - often just a huge basskick and an off-beat ride cymbal or hi-hat.
For this album, Chain Reactionists Scion (Pete Kuschnereit aka Substance and Rene Loewe aka Vainqueur) were given free access to the Basic Channel back catalogue to create a continuous mixed cd with the help of Ableton's 'live' audio software. The results do not stray far from the original sound, even though multiple Basic Channel tracks have been woven into various sections of the album. And even almost a decade after their original inception, these cuts still sound amazing and fresh!
With his first release under the auspices of the Touch label (via their Ash International subsidiary), after others on Miasmah and Immune, Simon Scott offers up yet another exquisite album, once again treading far beyond the shadow of Slowdive. Yes, Scott is the drummer from that beloved shoegazing / noise-pop ensemble; but there's nary a rhythm to be found on Insomni, which graces us with radioluminscent guitar drones, data-crunched sheets of noise, abstracted field recordings, and a number of languid ellipsis on the acoustic guitar. All of this comes together for a damn near perfect album that is right at home alongside so many of the other greats on Touch and Ash International (like Fennesz, BJ Nilsen, Lawrence English, Phill Niblock, Oren Ambarchi, Chris Watson, etc.). The album operates somewhat like a diptych with the first half of the album re-coding dilated shoegazing drones into effervescent explosions of digitalia girded with sublimely somber harmonics and loping melodies. Many of the environmental sounds address the album's title of insomnia, with Scott capturing those household drones and electrical hums that can dig into the brain as an unwelcome sonic earworm, late at night when one is trying to sleep but cannot. Scott amplifies and expands these sounds and coaxes something transcendent out of them amidst his soft-focused explosions of guitars and whatnot. The second half of the album is dominated by his beautiful acoustic guitar explorations that certainly pay homage to someone like Robbie Basho or Peter Walker, with these crystalline figures chiming into elegant fugues and languid passages equally melodic as they are hypnotic. Undoubtedly, Insomni is the best solo recording we've heard from Simon Scott yet!
Ah, Miasmah! After the likes of Elegi, Jacazek, and Kreng, we're pretty much automatically interested in any new release on Norway's Miasmah label. Like this one. Add in some bits of trivia, like that Scott was once the drummer for shoegazers Slowdive, and that this disc features a guest cameo from another Miasmah artist we love, Jasper TX, and we're already pretty intrigued. We also weren't at all surprised, but certainly pleased, by the gentle swells of ambient sonics that seep sleepily from the speakers when one hits play. The first two tracks, "Introduction Of Cambridge" and "Under Crumbling Skies", are blissfully replete with quiet hum and shimmering textures, forming into and out of drifting diaphanous melodies, blurry and melancholic. Some sparse, slowed down drum skitter adds a touch of Bohren to the proceedings in the first track, while the second employs a glorious chorus of angelic drones, that graces one's ears again and again throughout the disc.
Then, suddenly upping the volume, the third track "Flood Inn" seemingly enters into a subterranean realm full of soft fuzzy distortion. Quasi-industrially rhythmic, with a distant tolling bell heard amidst the crackle, this is ambience of the heavier (but not harsh) variety, almost like something from a Nadja or Jesu album.
Having given warning of a more sinister side, the disc continues on, with seven tracks more, being a beautiful blend of dreaminess, drone and distortion. There are almost pop songs hidden here, with buried rhythms and barely-there vocals (in one instance contributed by 12K's Sanae Yamasaki, aka Moskitoo), electronic treatments rendering the sound sources (guitar, sitar, violin, cello, flute, field recordings, voice, ???) all one lush, hushed, beautifully bleary, gorgeous warm bath of song-like drone...
It's a moodier, shoegazier take on Pop Ambient perhaps, certainly something that fans of Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Final, Jasper TX, and of course those other Miasmah wonders should check out!
It was the chilling fury that Liz Mahoney brought to Screature's recent gig opening for Lydia Lunch here in San Francisco in the summer of 2015 that caused us to really stand up and take notice of the band. Let's be clear though, Screature's post-punk propulsion and unsmiling drone rock never achieved the searing misanthropy of Lydia Lunch's four decades of hellish show-womanship. Yup, that something for Screature to strive for! But that's nothing to diminish how good this band is, and how great their records continue to be.
Four Columns is their second album, and there's no sign of a sophomore slump here. This follows the perpetual car-crash of black denim goth that Screature delivered on their eponymous debut. Mahoney's full-bodied voice bellows with all of the operatic falsetto of Diamanda Galas and Siouxsie (especially on her notoriously bar-clearing rendition of "The Lord's Prayer"), while the band behind her rips through the songs with a serrated, pneumatic pulse of jagged guitar riffs akin to Killing Joke and early Christian Death, with thumping backbeats that keep the clock ticking rather quick-like while alternating between disco-punk grooviness and VU-primitivism, and bass-synth lines that give this a psychoid Martin Rev feel to the whole album. Modern day, death-rock par excellence!
We got some flak for being honest with our disappointment for the recent turn that Zola Jesus took away from the more feral approach of her earlier recordings on Sacred Bones and towards a more polished approach for her Mute records. Part of the criticism on our part has been that she's really never worked with a guitarist, instead going with electronics and sometimes live drums even during her earliest recordings. But if she WERE to have fronted an emaciated goth-punk quartet on a Christian Death / Rubella Ballet tip, it might have sounded as good Screature - a totally amazing deathrock outfit from Sacramento. This is their first album, from 2013, which originally was a self-released affair only to now get a small repress via Sacramento's punk-HQ, SS Records, produced by one of the dudes from A Frames. The biggest WTF? about this band might be that their debut show was opening for Death Grips. No pressure there. But with the full-bodied voice from Liz Mahoney at the foreground, Screature has nothing to worry about in terms of their confidence to belt, scream, yelp, and howl. She's got an amazing side kick in guitarist Chris Orr, who is Rik Agnew to her Rozz Williams (that being the infernal guitar / voice axis to the first Christian Death line-up). The rhythm section is pretty back-to-basics with duotone bass-synth hammerings courtesy Sarah Scherer and Dum Dum backbeats from Miranda Vera. These driving Siouxsie / X-Mal inspired songs are certainly driven by Mahoney's presence with the scalpel slicing / suburban gloom colored by Orr's guitar; and they make for one hell of a great record - yup, the one that Zola Jesus should have been making years ago.
By the way, this is their first album, but SS has also just released a brand new Screature as well, Four Columns, on both vinyl and cd, that we also have in stock and will doubtless be reviewing (and raving about) soon, too.
A thoroughly anomymous proposition located somewhere in Los Angeles, Secam Kino mines the suitably obscure corners of industrial culture and synth-punk nihilism, picking over the choicer bits from such non-household names as Happiest Tapes On Earth, Trance Port Tapes, Cause & Effect, or any jackbooted label promoting dourly industrial electronics circa 1985. The templates for this sound were generated by the likes of SPK and TG, although many of the bands on those labels (and by extention, Secam Kino) have dropped any overtones to a rock/pop structure. No lyrics, no melodies. Just rhythm, noise, disease, and abjection. The tracks can roar with the fluttering wow of varispeed tapedecks lurching toward oblivion with densely packed tricklings from subterranean catacombs, and others lace simple drum-machine through cable-buzzed dischord, horror-score step sequences, and found tape dialogue of a psychosexual nature. The whole thing has the feel of the paranoiac tension of a nuclear command outpost devoid of inter-personnel communication and fraught with military prescribed amphetamines and sleepless delirium. While it sounds very little like Thought Broadcast, Secam Kino taps into a similar fetishization of a very particular sound long since lost to the annals of history. Super limited pressing with silkscreened covers and spray painted cassette shells, as with all of the Chondritic Sound tapes.
Of all of the Factory Records gloom merchants, Section 25 has never really garnered much critical success, yet they won over enough allies (notably Joy Division's Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner) that they were able to last as a self-sustaining project well into the late-80s when they called it quits. Formed in Blackpool by brothers Larry and Vincent Cassidy in 1979, Section 25 was marked by skeletal instrumentation with various emotive patinas that began as post-punk grimness and steadily lightened to a glowing prototype of acid-house (complete with 303 percolations!). "Always Now" -- the group's debut recording released on Factory in 1981 -- falls under the latter camp of lead-colored, death-disco grooves propelled by a spry, if monochromatic rhythm section and jagged swatches of guitar drone. While many of the Factory bands (Crispy Ambulance, Names, Tunnelvision, The Wake, etc.) had been slagged as Joy Division clones, Section 25 admitted their allegiance to Public Image Limited's zenith, "Metal Box" (aka "Second Edition"), even though much of the material from their first EPs were recorded months before Lydon and crew went into the studio. The differences between PiL and SXXV (a nifty shorthand mentioned in their biography by James Nice) are of course noticeable; with Lydon still striving for Situationist revolt through great art and the Cassidy brothers attempting to emote the bleakness of Northern England by hollowing sound as a illusory shadow of music. In essence, Section 25's "Always Now" was an isolationist model for living. It was effective in its bleakness and brilliant in its poetry.
While the Soul Jazz compilation "In The Beginning, There Was Rhythm" offered a solid introduction into the groove-oriented punk of the late '70s / early '80s, its flaws were in its omissions. Fortunately, LTM has kept "Always Now" in print on CD (with tons of extra singles including the Ian Curtis-produced 'Girls Don't Count'), so history may in fact be kind to a band that deserved much better.
"Kenotaphion" is one of the most unusual collections of archival recordings to pass through the Aquarius doors, as British artist Jonty Semper has culled through the archives at BBC, British Movietone, and ITN Reuters for recordings of the 2 minutes of
Semper was not content to simply collect the solemn silences bracketed by the chiming of Big Ben and the crack of the rifles, he interspersed them with snippets of narration uttered by the BBC commentators, often poetic, yet certainly sentimental thoughts spoken in the finest of Queen's English. Disc one features the oldest recordings (1929 - 1965) and ripples with tons of surface noise, yet as the microphone technology improved through the later recordings (1967 - 2000) the quiet din of London trying to be silent makes itself known. A strangely alluring record.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Raster's conceptualism of electronic, almost utopian purity has some interesting theoretical leanings, but the cold minimalism of Raster/Noton succeeds more often than not through the novelty of subtle melodies and interesting rhythmic patterns. While most of the critical acclaim for Raster / Noton is deserved, they are undoubtably purveyors of The New; and Senking's "Trial" is no different.
With techno and dub each getting the digital deconstruction in the respective work of Thomas Brinkmann and Pole, Senking's work has been emerging as the reductivist reclamation of electro, sounding much like a clinical atomization of Andrea Parker or Depth Charge. Senking's deep grooves of thudding sub-bass plod boldly through the Raster / Noton signature sound of skittering digital errata. Certainly recommended to the already converted... and definitely a good start for any one interested in such things.
Severed Heads never really fit comfortably with any particular convention of the post-punk aesthetics; and when the project quietly disappeared in 2008, their demise was announced without much in the way of fanfare. Essentially a solo project of Australian electronic musician Tom Ellard, Severed Heads began in Sydney back in 1979 with Ellard experimenting with tape loops, DIY electronic kits, and rudimentary noise making devices all finding something of a commonality through lurching rhythms within this primordial soup of sound-making. Eventually, samplers and drum machines made their way into the Severed Heads repertoire, the group's best years from 1983 to 1988 or thereabouts, thanks to their avant-garde smarts throwing a monkey-wrench into synth-punk conventions. City Slab Horror (1985) was the second album that Severed Heads produced for Ink Records (and later reissued through Nettwerk). A deliberately imperfect record, City Slab Horror seeks to work against the latticework of rhythmic structures and melodic fluidity, with samples firing at irregular intervals and atonal pitches running rampant throughout the record. Exposing the rigidity of the mechanized form was one of the common strategems for synth-punk practitioners, with Fad Gadget and The Flying Lizards doing similarly disjointed avant-pop projects. While Severed Heads would eventually streamline into a sensible synth-pop project, City Slab Horror showcased how engaging Ellard could be in his wanderings through mad scientist archetypes, comic book horrorscaping, hiccupping sequencing, and inelegantly playful tunes.
