Over 30 years, Steven Stapleton has worked with countless musicians, miscreants, and madmen in the brilliantly surreal Nurse With Wound, and occasionally he's stepped beyond Nurse to engage in fully collaborative projects. His long-standing friendship with Current 93's David Tibet brings the most prolific non-Nurse collaborations (both with Current 93 and as Stapleton / Tibet pairings); but in 1992, a curious one-off project between Stapleton and Tony Wakeford (Sol Invictus, ex-Death In June) was released. The Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish is certainly not a Nurse With Wound record, but it's also not a Sol Invictus record. The album finds itself in one of those unique locations that really exists on its own, but also manages to perfectly hybridize the aesthetics of both artists.
It's unfortunate that we've not posted much on Tony Wakeford, and for those not aware of his work, here's the brief synopsis. After working with Douglas Pearce in the anarcho-punk trio Crisis and later forming Death In June, Tony Wakeford's personal aesthetic took up a very dark, occultish take on British folk, even darker and more malcontent than those apocalyptic recombinations of Current 93. His vocal style was never terribly polished, with his mumbling delivery and blue-collar brogue probably serving the punk snarl of Crisis better than the stoically minimal arrangements of Sol Invictus. While some of the Sol Invictus records could be pretty painful to listen to, a few are downright classics, Trees In Winter and Against The Modern World being the two strongest.
We seem to recall Stapleton quipping somewhere that he felt Tony Wakeford's music was too po-faced and that his collaborative project was his own way of subverting Wakeford's agenda. The two genuinely seemed to enjoy each other's company, as the liner notes from both artists can attest; but one has to wonder if the flipside was true as well that Wakeford felt Stapleton's collages were too silly from time to time.
The atmosphere of the album is somber from the onset, with slashing drones not dissimilar to the Nurse album Soliloquy For Lilith, but situated into a gentle melody surrounded by gasping noises and eventually giving way to melancholy piano chords bounce off of oscillating drones. These collages of semi-melodic drones continue until a frenzied noise burst gives way to a quick interlude of Perez Prado inspired mambo shimmy. This leads to the albums centerpiece: a song-based diptych of "Lucifer Before Sunrise" and "Walk The White Ghost" (a haunting remix of the former), both of which center upon an archetypal Wakeford song of grim folk tunes that Stapleton twists to their profound benefit. The album concludes with an dubbed collage of spectral noises juxtaposed with more of that mambo grooviness that could only come from Stapleton.
For the reissue of the Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish, there's a bonus disc with material unused from the original album, plus a series of remixes from irr. app. (ext.), Andrew Liles, and Brian Conniffe.
Very nice to have this record in stock again!
Tapes were always a fickle medium, with the mechanics of the tape liable to fail the more you played it. Similarly, dropouts were always a possibility if you mistakenly hit the record button when you meant to hit stop; and then there was the hiss which rounded off all of the higher frequencies and dulled rhythmic edges. Even if you got a professionally manufactured tape, the hiss was still there. Indeed, tape noise is a particular sound which has faded from the collective consciousness in almost all arenas, except maybe for right here at Aquarius. We've certainly championed more than a handful of brilliant tape-sourced albums, including the best being Reynols absurdistly self-evident Blank Tapes and the maudlin evocations of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. We can also add to the list Howard Stelzer's brilliantly deadened compositions of densely compacted tape hiss found on Bond Inlets.
Two long tracks roughly equal to what would fit onto a 60 minute tape, Bond Inlets is grounded in a gray noise smearing over all of the low-end thud rumbles and distant field recordings where motion and energy is only the faintest shadow of its former self. Stelzer works in layering piles and piles of this source material and then rips these layers apart along slip-strike faults, leaving decaying echo and gravel throated drones in its wake. While definitely intense in its slow-burning compositional dynamics, it's hard to qualify Bond Inlets as a proper noise album, as this isn't the punishing electrocution of Merzbow, Masonna, or Prurient. Dare we call this a 'mature' noise album? Don't worry, your parents will still hate it.
Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. This picturesque hamlet is situated on the south end of that remote island, but there's not really a whole lot going on in town. Well, probably not much until recently - we are extremely curious about the Museum of Old and New Art that opened there up not too long ago, a real head-scratcher with its radically adventurous programming (seriously, lo-fi black metal weirdo Striborg is scheduled to perform there sometime this year, under the shadows of works by such figures as Chris Olffi, Anselm Keifer, and plenty of decay-oriented Australian artists... and yes, The Stickmen played the 'Dark Mofo' festival at MONA in 2013). So, the creative kids from Hobart back in the '80s and '90s were much more likely to flee to the much larger metropolises of Melbourne or Sydney over in mainland Australia. The Stickmen were the rare band from Hobart who persevered in their hometown long enough to develop into an amazing antipodean amalgam of Flying Nun / Xpressway NZ fuzz-pop, post-Birthday Party scum rock, and dour American math-rock, but probably not that many people ever heard about them. In fact, WE had never heard of them, until this album showed up in the shop; and yeah, they are pretty goddamn great.
Their eponymous debut album originally came out in 1998 as a mutant, garage punk blast of sharp guitar riffs, driving rhythms, cheap-ass transistor radio vocals, and weird sounds transmitted from a turntablist who spun drones and noises on his decks. The photo on the inner-sleeve is worth a thousand words with the microphone taped to a broom (complete with bristles) and suspended from the ceiling via a thick piece of rope for the guitarist to sing into (or not), while one of the band members fiddles with a mess of pedals and reaches up to backspin a record. The sound broadcast from such a Rube Goldberg contraption is brilliantly intense, somewhere between the Swell Maps avant-punk melodies, The Oh Sees' jubilant mania, and the scientific aggression of Pitchblende. Tracks (like the emphatic "No!" or the belligerent "Wired Wrong") accelerate from a Tracy Pew swagger up to wah-wah freakout guitar explosions that wouldn't be out of place in a Comets On Fire jam, albeit much more punk and violent. It was around this time in The Stickmen's career that they played at the Risdon Medium Security Prison; and you gotta wonder if the energy these guys could muster should have started a riot... if it didn't happen, why the fuck not? A great, great find! We're all totally stoked on this!!
Fancy tip-on sleeve with super high gloss printing in a pretty limited edition. Download code? You bet!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Stilluppsteypa's powerbooking has found a new home on Ritornell, the experimental sub-label of Mille Plateaux. This Icelandic trio (now living in The Netherlands) shows that the digital glitch market is not cornered, nor mastered by, Oval, as multiple layers of clinical drones slash across terse rhythmic clicks and pops. While Oval's collages of skipping cds occasionally fuse into beautiful, "warm" sounding melodic structures, Stilluppsteypa has always maintained a precision in the structure and sound of their digital detritus that is always bleak and barren, always cool and controlled.
Who would have ever guessed that the first photo cover on the clinically sterile Ritornell label would have been this? A slickly produced cover photo of Stilluppsteypa donning faux-regal sparkling capes with huge stiff collars and one of the members (Sigmar?)
I would hazard a guess that the visual sensibility of Stilluppsteypa has been informed by the odd conceptual agendas of Leif Elggren who is responsible in part for the Kingdoms of Elgaland / Vargaland (amongst a number of other oddball projects). Both Elggren and Stilluppsteypa play with the notions of royalty, as an residual political emblem of inflated egotism as well as of self-deprecating absurdity.
With that entire diatribe on how good the cover is, it needs to be stated that artwork completely betrays the integrity of the music within. Stilluppsteypa has developed into one of the most adventurous staples of the electronica glitch community. "Stories Part Five" deviates slightly from what is expected from Stilluppsteypa with their multipled layers of electro-acoustic minutae exploding into clinical technotic escapades, rippling with deep unwavering basstones. Stilluppsteypa's forays into techno minimalism are not the smooth tendencies of microhouse, instead preferring to enhance the skeletal grooves with a psycho-acoustic tension.
Stilluppsteypa has reduced their ranks down to the duo of Siggtrygur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson as Heimir Bjorgulfsson has left to pursue his career as an electo-glitch superslueth in the Vacuum Boys. Yet the mission of these Icelandic transplants remains as convoluted as ever. Even the nature of this record is a bit of a puzzle; "The Immediate Past" may be a Stilluppsteypa retrospective drawing from their 10 years of recording, but also could be contemporary reworkings of older archival materials, or just their 10th year anniversary present to themselves. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that the tracks on this album haven't appeared (in these forms) on any of the earlier Stilluppsteypa recordings. Upon asking Siggtrygur about the album, the response was a vague declaration of everything being "pretty new stuff" followed by an inexplicable AAAARRRRRHGGGG, YEAH! HA! and something about robots. If you allow yourself to be seduced by Stilluppstyepa, you'll see the logic there. It's something I really can't explain, but it's beautiful.
Regardless, "The Immediate Past Is Of No Interest To Us" is another brilliant Stilluppsteypa album of damaged electronics framed by semiotic slippages. Where the drone and the glitch had been previous focal points for the Icelanders, Stilluppsteypa centers upon the rhythm. With breakbeats constantly atomized into their granular parts, bounced backwards and forewards, and filtered through densely packed filters, this isn't music to dance to; but like fellow obtuse pop technicians Matmos, Stilluppsteypa isn't exactly music to think about. Stilluppstepa operate in a funhouse where they happily pull the trapdoor levers to let everybody (including themselves) tumble down to the nether regions below. Really fantastic!
We may shooting ourselves in the foot by listing this record, as we only have a handful of the records and are not too sure about the possibility of restocking it. But what the hell, it's another great Stilluppsteypa album... so we'll list it, but if you want one act fast!
While certainly not by design, the Icelandic duo of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson have kept a relatively low profile as Stilluppsteypa during the past couple of years. Sigmarsson kept himself busy with his own solo projects of likeminded isolationist spectroscopy and grandiose electronic absurdities, but Stilluppsteypa have only managed two albums since 2002 including The Immediate Past Is Of No Interest To Us and this eponymous album from 2004 on the obscure Japanese label Atak. The simple fact that Thorsson has been living in Amsterdam and Sigmarsson has been continuing his studies in Hannover helps explain the slow working process of the two these days. Nevertheless, when they do manage to get together to fire off another raygun blast of high-voltage rhythms crossed with clinical dronescaping, it's always amazing.
On this album, Stilluppsteypa pick up where they left off with The Immediate Past and their 2001 masterpiece Stories Part Five. Mechanical whirlings and abrasively tense drones steadily build into giddy episodes for electo-bossanova beats and carnivalesque melodies. Where most of Stilluppsteypa's contemporaries would treat such source materials with fart jokes and a purile disregard for quality, Stilluppsteypa take a considerable amount of pride in scripting inventive electronica juxtapositions with remarkable technique and theatrical panache. In many ways, Sigmarsson and Thorsson are emerging as the equals of B.C. Gilbert and Graham Lewis in all of their extra-cirricular activities outside of Wire. Great stuff.
Six laptops, three Icelanders, and three Chicagoans embarked on a collaborative tour in October 2000 throughout the US (but alas, not making their way to San Francisco). While certainly familiar with each other's work, they hadn't any previously working
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
While Karlheinz would certainly object to one of his scores lovingly described as a pipe fight (the AQ-coined term for a bunch of guys randoming tossing large pipes in a reverb laden warehouse - see also No Neck Blues Band and Organum), the aural similarities between "Microphony" and a pipe fight are indisputable. Instead of choosing the palette of the industrial wasteland, Stockhausen has scored a piece in which six classically trained percussionists tinker with spaghetti forks, tea china settings, suction cups, and cardboard tubes on a gong. But somehow this manages to be downright stunning.
Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992.
Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting.
We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away.
For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!
Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992.
Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting.
We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away.
For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!
The Storm Bugs were the construction of Philip Sanderson and Steven Ball, who were two very active participants in the post-punk explosion of DIY productions in the late '70s and early '80s. Their gritty electronic aesthetic tended toward the industrial reappropriation of found materials and abused consumer electronics that harken back to Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. Sanderson and Ball had also formed the Snatch Tapes label, which had released a handful of David Jackman cassettes back in the day as well as some compilations of likeminded eccentric malcontents. So far, a handful of collections of Strom Bugs material has surfaced in recent years with Supplementary Benefit being the most recent. This anthologizes two singles released in 1980 and 1981, as well as an overview of their experiments with the VCS3, a unique British synthesizer whose patch bay could be configured into a series of complex feedback loops, which the Storm Bugs used to great effect. Expect abrasive arpeggiations, primitive technotic marches, and unhinged arrangements of broken turntablist damage, oblique dirges, and obliterated textures. Pretty tremendous stuff, and kudos again to Vinyl On Demand for reclaiming another set of recordings that surely would have quietly disappeared into the ether of history.
Before we had actually heard Andy Stott, we had a procession of folks come into the store and tell us how incredible his stuff was, and how we should definitely get whatever we could, and yet, with every 12" release, they disappeared before we could get any copies at all, and before we knew it they were gone. We did manage to hear bits and pieces, enough that when we discovered that two of the records were being reissued together as a double cd, we could barely wait, and once it arrived, well, pretty much everyone here has been playing it nonstop. UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life. The bonus tracks on Passed Me By, are much more active, the pulsing house-y "Stitch House" sounds like Stott covering The Field, still all fuzzy and washed out and Pop Ambient, but much more rhythmic, and less murky, while "Love Nothing" lets the rhythms come front and center, skittering and shuffling over a rubbery low end melody, and swirling synthy chordal swells, not to mention a deep dramatic croon. It almost sounds like a sketch for a future song that would find the various elements dipped in pitch, slowed down and blackened.
The second disc does dial back the murk a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
The bonus tracks on We Stay Together, in some ways mirror those on Passed Me By, in that they actually sound more like their opposite, "Work Gate" is super minimal and sketch-like, a little dubby and darkly Portishead-y, while "We Stay Together (Part Two)" begins life as a hushed blur, but gradually blossoms into another Field like chunk of looped techno mesmer.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave, and definite contender for Record Of the Year!
Packed in a super striking oversized gatefold sleeve, with a different cover for each album depending on which way you're holding it, both stunning black and white photos culled from the pages of National Geographic.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Affiliated with the Manchester electronica terrorist outfit V/VM (Jansky Noise has provided additional production on a few tracks), The Stranger has produced one of the best records to emerge from that school of circuit / brain frying. Released on the outsider West Coast label Phthalo, this cdr release (limited to 250) is an alchemic concoction of boiling and crashing swells of digitized drone and sporadic post-Autechre break-skitter. Recommended!
In addition to crafting utterly gorgeous breathtaking minimal pop ambience as Gas, Wolfgang Voigt was also responsible for some of the most influential minimal techno of the last twenty years, as Mike Ink, M:I:5 and a handful of other monickers. It's hard for us sometimes to describe techno music, and to define just what it is that makes us love one techno record and hate another, but this comp is wall to wall genius. Out of print since 2000, this comp is finally available again, collecting some of the best 12"s Voigt released in the nineties, as well as tacking on a handful of bonus tracks, every one a spare skeletal dubbed out groovescape of simple bubbly beats, minimal percussive thumps and beeps, everything tight and clipped, hypnotic and mesmerizing, futuristic dancefloor perfection, managing to swing, within fairly rigid arrangements. Pretty much every band on Kompakt, whether they know it or not, owe everything to this man, and these tracks right here.
Each track is named for a color, although it's unclear how those tracks reflect the colors they're named for, or if it's just a simple way of codifying the various grooves, either way, it does reflect the simple spare and minimal vibe of the sounds, the layout, the whole concept. It's hard to imagine people dancing to this, although we know they do, for us though, this is perfect chill out music, the beats bouncy but muted, the basslines barely there, usually just a streak or a brief thrum, the tracks hardly shift over the course of their 7-10 minutes, the timbre subtly changing, maybe another little skitter gets tossed into the mix, it hardly matters, as these songs start out pretty much perfect, and only get more perfect as they go on. Every track here could get locked into an endless loop, and we'd happily nod off, drift off, forever, letting the beats and austere ambience just wash over us.
Some of these tracks are almost 20 years old and still sound totally fresh, and even a bit futuristic, and the perfect soundtrack for some space age dinner party or some late night chill out sesh in a bad ass satellite bachelor pad slowly orbiting the Earth.
Sun City Girls fans rejoice, the vinyl reissue of their epic crowning acheivement "300,003 Crossdressers..." is upon us. Originally released in 1996 on double cd only, "Crossdressers" almost certainly surpassed "Torch of the Mystics" as the Sun City
The second volume in the ongoing series of singles compilations from legendary outfit the Sun City Girls was one of the many duds that frustrate so much of the die-hard SCG fanbase. It was especially frustrating given that the first volume - You're Never Alone With A Cigarette (which as of spring 2013 is sadly out of print) - was so fucking good, mostly due to the fact that much of that material was made up of tracks that were left off the group's masterpiece, Torch Of The Mystics. At one time, TOTM was slated to be a double lp set with the Girls working towards fleshing out the whole album with a bunch of similar sounding tracks. So when the album dropped just as a single slab of wax, all of the remnants ended up finding their way onto various singles back in the early '90s. As Volume One did feature many of those leftovers, Volume Three thankfully completes the task, with two of those discarded Torch tracks culled from the Three Fake Female Orgasms 7" (released on Majora in 1991) as well as all of the cuts from the Eye Mohini and Borungku Si Derita singles (both released through Majora in 1992 and 1993 respectively, the latter featuring a different version of "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" from Torch Of The Mystics, just to make things all the more confusing). There's also a different version of "Kickin The Dragon" from the other SCG masterpiece 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, as well as a live version of another Torch classic, "The Flower".
The title track here in particular is a classic Sun City Girls jam, with Richard Bishop's desert-blues inspired fingerpicking seamlessly shifting from Arabic flourishes to Southeast Asian folk-pop and the more commonplace No Depression styled Americana, all with brother Alan plaintively sounding out syllabically a maudlin melody that may or may not be complete nonsense or some polyglot of languages dialed in by the Girls' esoteric antenna to all sorts of wild and wonderful songs from around the world. "Gum Arabic" is a terse re-interpretation of heavy Turkish psychedelia which would certainly foreshadow Sublime Frequencies eventual reissue collection of Erkin Koray's works. "Abydos Carousel Tapsel" has a bad-ass south-of-the-border vibe which shifts into an unhinged jubliant psych-folk in "Borungku Si Derita" which strangely sounds a lot like Comus! With so much of the Sun City Girls catalogue terminally out of print, getting a hold of anything from the band is a cause for celebration; but getting an album as great as this, even a collection, maybe especially a collection, is all the more reason to rejoice. And for those uninitiated into the demented psych-punk weirdness of SCG, this is a really great place to start.
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
The vinyl of Funeral Mariachi is undoubtedly limited, but a cd is scheduled for release later in October, we're told.
Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls has been the curator of many of the finest Ennio Morricone collections, including the brilliant compilation on Ipecac Crime & Dissonance, despite the John Zorn written liner notes that seemed to suggest that Mike Patton had done the compiling. Needless to say, it makes a lot of sense for the Sun City Girls to find their way into the realm of the soundtrack, given Alan Bishop's love of Morricone; and Juggernaut is one of those Sun City Girls soundtracks. While this soundtrack was originally released on vinyl through Abduction back in 1994, the corresponding film by Mark Roman Bodnar and Kyrill Kazemirovitch Protsenko had never been officially released. That said, it did make an appearance at an Italian film festival in 1997; so, it probably is an actual film, and not some fiction propagated as a strange in-joke by the Sun City Girls. But then again...
Anyway, Juggernaut is a pretty good Sun City Girls album. The band had always been a difficult proposition, as they had thrown every idea (from the great notions of smashing Southeast Asian pop melodies with SoCal skate punk energy to the better-in-theory modes of junkyard gamelan via free jazz) at the audience and let them sort out the mess. Juggernaut follows suit, as an entirely instrumental album with the highlights giving nods to the classic SCG album Torch of the Mystics through lysergic guitar solos splattered across acid-punk jams that could easily ground the work of early Flaming Lips or Thinking Fellers, if those bands were way more fucked up. The semi-focused, stoned ritualism that makes up the rest of the album could have had some atmospheric purpose in the original film although they're not out of character for any given Sun City Girls album.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Second volume in SCG's "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series, The Dreamy Draw is a vast improvement over the first. Similar to Vol. 1, it's a semi-improvised live performance (this time Seattle in May of 1998), but this is executed with a greater degree of savvy, on the level that one would expect from a group as seasoned as the Sun City Girls (rather than the pedestrian stoned-in-college basement "jam session" of volume one.) The performances here are soaked with meandering piano playing pseudo-East Asian pentatonic ditties along with the various parts and pieces of gamelan that the Girls have picked up in their travels.
So, we already put this on our special all-Torch Of The Mystics in-between list last week, because we just couldn't wait to list it, and here it is again, a no-shit, straight to the top Record Of The Week. An absolute must-buy, a record that DESPERATELY needed to be reissued (along with almost all 10,000 other Sun City Girls records, certain crazy people would argue). So here it is on both cd and vinyl! And here's the expanded, in-depth review we promised...
So what to say about this fuckin' record? Originally recorded in 1988 during a time when the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher had been making much more overtly subversive work. 1987's Horse Cock Phepner (an album that could use this reissue treatment, by the way) experimented with drug-addled spoken word, hypno-percussive vulgarity-ridden tributes to Nancy Reagan, and Urinals-esque minimalist noise-punk. This makes sense given the Bishop brothers' musical upbringing in the early '80s Arizona punk and hardcore world. But the recordings sessions that would become Torch of the Mystics had such a different result. Like we mentioned last week, due in large part to the success of labels like Bishop's Sublime Frequencies, in making the SCG's third world influences more familiar to us, this record does get the "most accessible" label, maybe even more than it seemed originally. It's still fantastically out-there, but yeah, compared to other Sun City Girls output before and after this record, this is downright radio friendly.
It's hard to talk about records that are this fantastic, we don't really have words that can do it justice. Right from the first snare crack of opener "Blue Mamba", it's impossible not to get sucked into another world. The first notes of the bass line immediately floor us, then the whole band comes in, with droll vocals not even really saying coherent words over some sort of desert-scorched melody, part Sahara and part Sonoran. "Tarmac 23" is up next, a total outsider improvised psych freak-out, the guitar line an off-kilter loop, Gocher's drumming managing to keep the whole thing together. "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" and "Space Prophet Dogon" are, of course, the masterpieces of this record. "Esoterica" has a twisting and looping guitar line like something John Fahey would play if he studied under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar, and also owned a distortion pedal. "Space Prophet Dogon" is one of those instances that makes us all go full Andee and say "perhaps THEE greatest song EVER!" Seriously, without trying to sound too over-the-top hyperbolic, "Space Prophet Dogon" (later covered by the Grails) is one of those songs that should be played at funerals. A spiritual, otherworldly lick with its roots somewhere in Egypt or maybe a Moroccan hash cafe, but in true Sun City Girls fashion, twisted and warped to their liking. The longest song on the record (a scant 7 minutes) with the last 2 and a half completely improvised, and perhaps the most beautiful part, a bleary-eyed psych trip. This record would be totally worth it if it just played this song 11 times, trust us. But there's so much more! "Cafe Batik", "The Flower", "Papa Legba", and "Burial In The Sky" all follow in the footsteps of "Tarmac 23", improvised, warped, outsider-jazz-raga-middle eastern psych-folk numbers with Gocher's percussive mastery and Alan Bishop's sung/shouted vocals taking front row. "The Shining Path" could be a lost track off a Morricone soundtrack, a whistle-and-acoustic guitar number with that catchy and haunting melody line sung over it. "Radar 1941" is like the Ventures on thorazine, a slowed down, chewed up and spit-out attempt at surfy skronk. Like a foreshadowing of his solo career, "The Vinegar Stroke" is a classic Sir Richard Bishop piece, a masterfully played acoustic guitar track that feels like it's pulling inspiration from 5 different musical styles at once.
In short, (ha!) Torch Of The Mystics is an album that is from both everywhere and nowhere. It constantly plays with things you've maybe heard, but can't quite recall. It's at once high and low brow, mimicking some criminally underheard guitarist in the Sahal, or a drunkard trying to recite the Rigveda from memory. The babbling of Charles and Alan are in either some unknown foreign language or complete gibberish, perhaps playing with some sort of postmodern idea of Western cultural appropriation and our often naive and hamfisted takes on "world" music, or maybe they were just high and fucking around.
An utter masterpiece, a no-brainer must-have piece of every music collection.
It's a strange musical time lately, with pretty much every cool band we loved in the eighties and nineties reforming, many of them recording brand new albums, lots of them performing classic albums in their entirety, and while we're usually not all that psyched on the reunion thing, we have to say, we were pretty thrilled to get to see Slint, and some of us are going to see the Get Up Kids next week, and who could possibly complain about seeing the Butthole Surfers or Killdozer or Jesus Lizard? Sure, they were better back in the day, the energy is different, back then they were young and hungry and had something to prove, now they're moms and dads with jobs and many are probably doing it for the money, considering they're probably gonna make more reuniting for a few months now than they ever did in years of recording and touring.
Plus there's a whole new generation of music fanatics, who missed out on arguably some of the best music ever, many of whom love bands who wouldn't even exist if it weren't for all those bands that came before.
One reunion that folks have been clamoring for since mere moments after breaking up, is for emo legends Sunny Day Real Estate, and while it only took a decade, it looks like the band will in fact finally reunite, and tour, and yeah, we'll probably all be there, freaking out when they play the hits, and speaking of the hits, maybe more exciting than the reunion, is the deluxe reissue of SDRE's first two albums, Diary, and LP2, both absolute classics, redefining the template for modern day indie rock / emo, and like Slint, SDRE were most definitely a band that launched a million other bands. Odds are most folks have these discs already, but if for some reason you don't holy shit are you in for a treat. Heavy, mathy, emotional, catchy, totally rocking, and just absolutely incredible.
Diary, originally released back in 1994, is another one of those records that is so front loaded, you could be forgiven for owning this record and nor making it to the end. Even now, we have to fight the urge to play the first few tracks over and over and over. But fight on, cuz the second half is just as kick ass.
"Seven" and "In Circles" are probably SDRE's best known songs and for good reason, two of THEE most perfect indie rock jams ever. The guitars lines are tangled melodic, the riffs crunchy, the drums complex and pounding, the arrangements complex, with plenty of starts and stops, little bursts of manic chug, streaks of chiming shimmer, the vocals so anguished and passionate, high and reedy, but still a little rough and ragged, keening and on the verge of breaking, slipping from whisper to howl and back again, really, if you've never heard these guys, just listen to the sound samples, and if you're not immediately smitten / obsessed, then heck, we're not sure what else to do for you.
"In Circles" is the prettier half of the opening one-two punch, with that immediately recognizable looped guitar intro, before slipping into some shimmery stripped down almost slowcore, but with a fantastically soaring, epic, majestic, hands in the air, heartbreak chorus, which ranks up there as one of those all time goosebumps, hair on the back of your neck, tearjerker, air guitar, indie rock musical moments, and a testament to its power is that it has that affect EVERY time, and still does 15 years later.
So after listening to those two songs 20 or 30 times, force yourself to continue on, you won't be disappointed. "Song About An Angel" is another slow brooding drift, that has one of the coolest stop start staccato bridges ever, as catchy as any other song's chorus. "47" had it been pushed forward a little in the playing order, might have been part of that irresistible replay opening salvo, with an incredible main melody, and verses that somehow manage to be even catchier than the catchy chorus. And don't let all this poppiness and catchiness ward off you heavy music folks, all that pop is tangled up and intertwined with some serious heaviness, plenty of heft and crunch, some incredible guitar playing, wild mathy, almost metallic drumming, and again, all wound up into highly unconventional song structures.
We could go on and on and on, the rest of the record is just as awesome, there are a handful of brooding slow burners, but even those are peppered with some seriously emo blowouts, not a bad one in the bunch, it's not hard to see why we all freaked out about this band when this record first appeared, and none of its power or emotion or energy has been blunted by the passing of time. Not in the least.
The reissue features two bonus tracks, from the awesome and long gone Thief, Steal Me A Peach 7", which predated Diary by about a year, and if anything is even heavier and more dense, the perfect sort of bonus track, melding seamlessly with the album proper (and one thing we notice listening to the 7"s tracks is how much SDRE sometimes sounded like a WAY heavier, way more rocking Decemberists!). New fancy gatefold digipak packaging, with that iconic Fisher Price Little People parody artwork, featuring those conical people shaped toys, set in depressing environments, like in a kitchen with the toast burning, amidst a not so happy family, a couple sleeping far apart in their bed, in surgery, at the scene of a car accident, etc. Also includes all new liner notes and interviews with the various band members.
One complaint about the cd packaging though, the digipak comes in a slipcover, which is always cool, but the slipcover has the record title, band name, and some random text about bonus tracks and the producer, stuff that should obviously have been on a sticker but is printed over that super cool artwork, and unfortunately, you can't toss the slipcover, cuz it's the ONLY place where the track listing is printed, thankfully, the lp version does not make the same mistake...
Another super limited vinyl only missive, broadcast as always from some dark sonic underworld, courtesy of the man known as Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin to his mother), following the equally haunting and mysterious Man Beard Dress lp from the end of last year.
As we've mentioned before, this is doom. But not doom as you know it. Not heavy and crushing and downtuned and distorted, instead, spectral and ghostlike, abstract and ambient, doom in vibe, intention, spirit, as much as in sound. It's not about riffs or beats, it's about mood and space and soul, and taking a cold hard look through the cracks into the crumbling wasteland that lies inside all of us.
The opening track deviates from SG's usual M.O., taking the soft blackened shimmers and distant foghorn like drones, and adding a layer of grit, a swirling skree reminiscent of Skullflower or Sunroof! Like rattling chains, or bits of rusty metal falling from decaying structures, this extra element turns acoustic doom into something far more harrowing, a soundtrack to the descent, of slick stone walls and flickering grey lights, of black clouds obscuring burning skies, everything fading to nothing as the music lowers us deeper and deeper into the abyss.
The second track is a bit less harsh, more spacious and sprawling, skeletal, soft swells of moaning minimalism drift through a wide open expanse of far away throbs, and muted pulses, ghostly voices lurk beneath the surface, the slow motion sound of decay and despair, pretty, but ominous, and sinister, and beautifully bleak.
The flipside begins with another soundscape of space and soft sound, like a super abstract ambient Wolf Eyes, bits of feedback are streaked through hushed black whispers, creaking industrial whir wraps itself around desiccated barely there melodies, the sound of wandering through an empty and dead city, smashed windows like black eyes looking down from above, splintered doors like gaping mouths, the sky unleashing a cleansing rain of soft hiss, doing very little to combat the emptiness and loneliness evoked by Svarte Greiner's delicate doomic drift.
And finally, the record fades to black with the doomiest (and weirdly enough, prettiest) track of the bunch, a soft focus smear of effected black guitar shimmer, blurred into a throbbing dronescape, rife with fragmented melody and soft edged buzz, a strange and warm, almost ebullient sonic center, glowing faintly beneath the roiling lowend, a smoldering, crumbling, shadowy,and quite lovely doomdrone coda...
Beautiful full color covers, pressed on thick vinyl, and once again, WAY LIMITED!!!
For all of the acclaim that we have given to Michael Gira's recent project Angels of Light, nothing that he has done of late has come close to the majesty, power, nihilism, and abjection of Children of God from his now defunct outfit Swans. Arguably, Children Of God is the best Swans record. Period. For a band that has so many great albums -- Filth and The Great Annihilator being just two -- this is saying something.
In many ways, Children Of God is a transitory album, marking the termination of the no wave marches that dominated the early recordings and announcing the centrality of Gira's songwriting prowess which continues on into the recent Angels of Light project. The miltant stomps, barked vocals, and expertly mangled buzzsaw guitars remain intact from those early recordings; but Gira and co. make those sounds even more ugly by juxtaposing them with the fragile beauty of a oboe solo, or a acoustic guitar introduction, or simply the majestic presence of Gira's now refined baritone. While fellow vocalist Jarboe had contributed to previous albums, the empathic dynamism of her voice really shines on Children of God, at times seductively cooing and at others emanating bloodcurdling screams. Lyrically, Children of God is a far more complex affair, extending the mythologies of power beyond grim tales of work as humiliation and all relationship roles cast to the extremities of either master or slave. Love enters the fray for Gira, or perhaps it is sexual dependence disguised as love? Or is it addiction disguised as religion? Gira, who once reveled in his position of terminal abjection, now damns himself to the ecstasies of the flesh and curses of his own megalomania.
World of Skin, found on disc two of this reissue, developed as the quiet alter-ego of Gira and Jarboe. While the later World of Skin albums were virtually identical in sound to the contemporary Swans body of work, the first World of Skin recordings (which at least on one occasion was condensed down simply to Skin) contrasted considerably to those of Swans at that time. The two World of Skin recordings on this disc are the two albums Blood, Women, Roses and Shame, Humility, Revenge. Drenched in nihilist atmospheres of infinite reverb, these songs are very spartan in their arrangements for acoustic guitar and majestic synthetic tones, spotlighting the bleak tales of the themes described in those titles above.
Both of these albums have been reissued before in various guises and have gone through prolonged periods of being out of print. Hopefully, Gira will keep both of these amazing albums in print from now on. They're so absolutely necessary, I might have to buy it again...
Throughout their tumultuous career marked by numerous extended tours across North America and Europe, Swans had always been a monstrously good live band. Often fueled by vodka and amphetamines, Swans' frontman Michael Gira never gave the impression that a Swans live show was a mere perfunctory gig in support of an album. His theatrical persona was to be massive cathartic experience, in which his expressions of abjection were to infect the rest of the audience through his commanding baritone bark and the musical hammer that made up the rest of Swans. In essence, to bear witness to Swans performing live was to have ones soul drained.
The inevitable translations from these performances onto the recorded media have always suffered from the obvious lack of Swans physical presence; but were more than adequate in providing documentation for how they sounded live. "Feels Good Now" was a semi-legitimate bootleg released back in 1987 of the Swans European tour. It had been 'authorized' by the band, but I'm pretty sure that it was just released anonymously by Gira. Nevertheless, this features a good chunk of the material from Swans' "Children Of God" album, which, if you're asking me, is easily Swans' best recording, filled with an oppressive atmosphere from militant rhythms, staccato guitar stabs, and call-and-response vocal incantations from Gira and Jarboe. While that album has gone in and out print a number of times (as I write this, it's out of print), "Feel Good Now" wouldn't be recommended as a substition for "Children Of God." But if you're already familiar with that album, this is an excellent addendum.
An aptly named album for a time and a place and a band. Swans' first full album came out in 1983 from the gritty underbelly of New York City, before Guiliani has kicked out all the freaks, criminals, and artists. The sound of Swans engorged the primal violence and psychological dread that had been first broadcast under the banner of No Wave a few years earlier. Led by the tyrannical Michael Gira, who probably only learned how to crack a smile some 15 years after the inception of Swans, barked and grunted lyrics which might be easier read as agitprop slogans, decrying the perceived imbalances of power through sex, money, depravity, and (later) religion. He controlled and commanded his band to perform pummeling excesses of rhythmic brutality with lurching basslines and atonal splashes of guitar shards forming the barest sense of what could pass for a melody. At the time of Filth, Gira had two thugs - Roli Mosimann and Jonathan Kane - behind drum kits, augmenting their panzer-korps marches with bloodyknuckled sheets of metal and pipe fights tossed into that engine at unpredictable moments and angles. For all of the furious muscularity and self-inflicted violence of Filth, Swans could color their claustrophobic slabs of sound with empathizing spells of existential misery. "Power For Power" is probably the best example of this, with guitarist Normal Westberg (the longest standing member of Swans aside from Gira) chopping the melody that could very be knocking on the door of The Stooges' raga-dirge "We Will Fall". It should also be noted that John Gossard swiped the title "Weakling" for his cult black metal band, and like Gira, used the term not to self-identify but as a damning epithet. The song itself is a depressive trudge of basslines alternating with dissonant guitars and shoved along by a strangely spry rhythm from one of the drummers, while Gira (taking on the role of the weakling) insists that all of the shit around him isn't real.
Filth still stands as one of the great achievements of an already highly acclaimed band. It's never been an easy listen, and never will be. Newly remastered and comes with a poster!
This double cd is a documentation of the very earliest abject thud-rock from the Swans. Along with the first full studio album, "Filth," this features a whole slew of early live material, with their bleak tape squeals accompanying their trademarked atavistic pummel. It should be noted that this is the third time "Filth" has been issued, and the second for "Body To Body," with 24 minutes of unreleased live material not found anywhere else.
My co-worker Byram once asked the rhetorical question of Morton Feldman, "what self-respecting composer doesn't have their ouevre divided into three periods?" Maybe this is a reasonable question (albeit a bit silly), yet the same division of aesthetics
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
The second disc of the limited edition deluxe set is totally... fucking... awesome. This revisits Gira's capacity for relentlessly punishing dronerock, which had been clearly missing during his Angels Of Light period over the past decade. But this disc seamlessly emerges out of the slowburning crescendos from the aforementioned Soundtracks For The Blind and the amphetamine riddled noise mantra Number One Of Three that Gira produced as The Body Lovers. In many ways, this *could* be Number Two Of Three, as the Body Lovers project was supposed to be a trilogy of deconstructed Swans guitar swarm, chorales of car horns, and brute atonal fury. A single track spanning 46 minutes, Swans present a series of powerdrone movements with bass and rhythm guitar locked into militant marches that guide an scathing crosshatching of atonal guitars and electronics. The infernal nature of these sounds brings the scores of Hermann Nitsch's aktions to mind, and even some of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies at their most punishing.
This double disc set is quite limited, we've sold a whole bunch already and are down to only about 10 copies, and then that'll be it (though the regular single disc version is in stock, and that one's on sale for the next 2 weeks). If you're ordering this deluxe one, and we run out, let us know if it's okay to send you the normal standard version...
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
And no, the vinyl sadly does not include the music from the extra disc found in the limited deluxe cd set.
My co-worker Byram once asked the rhetorical question of Morton Feldman, "what self-respecting composer doesn't have their ouevre divided into three periods?" Maybe this is a reasonable question (albeit a bit silly), yet the same division of aesthetics ceratinly applies to Swans. Their first period centered around the butality of the "Cop" and "Filth" albums and had been described as "a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography" with aggressively barked vocals from Michael Gira directing a muscular thud of clinically precise assaults, neither punk nor metal, but an abject creature of its own making. "Children of God" and the World of Skin side project marked the middle period with Swans, shedding some of their purposeful ugliness in favor of expansive dirges that matched a more complex mythological content, with a sublime and throroughly ashen beauty. "The Great Annihilator" from 1995 stands at the pinnacle of that final period for the Swans. The militant goose step rhythms remain as punishing as ever, but have been subjected to the all-encompassing swarm of buzz-saw guitar, bass, and keyboard drones. Yet amidst these dense orchestrations, the interlocking vocals of Gira (with his commanding baritone) and Jarboe (with her lilting theatricality) adeptly counter the jagged fury of the multiple guitar arsenals. A handful of bands from black metal circles (especially Katatonia and Beyond Dawn) have drawn heavily from this period of Swans, with considerable success; but the original is quite a masterful work. Finally reissued, with a bonus live cut.
Swans, Version 2.0 continues with The Seer, and how could it not be monstrous, epic, and utterly all-consuming? When Michael Gira reactivated the Swans several years ago, he did so with the intent of constantly touring the band, who furiously and methodically pounded through every set with Gira devilishly commanding to his band "More, you fuckers, MORE!!!" The songs which dominated the universally acclaimed 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky became grotesquely engorged during the live sets, with each track telescoping in length and straining with each note, each rhythmic smash made more intense than the previous one. The shows were exhausting from the perspective of the audience, and Gira's marathon-length sprint must have been hell on the band, but unlike previous incarnations of Swans, it was obvious that Michael Gira was full of joy in orchestrating all of this controlled havoc.
So, we come to The Seer - an album devised as a template malleable to the pressures of the Swans live performances. How these songs will sound at the end of the Swans 2012 tour, who the hell knows? Even outside the context of the forecasted mutation, The Seer is a beast of an album. The opening number "Lunacy" is a brightly charged march through dissonant guitar monochords and militaristic snares, before giving over to a wild-eyed chorale featuring the vocal talents of Mimi and Alan Sparhawk of Low. With Gira in charge, the emotional fragility that's emblematic of Low becomes lupine in its collective howl. "Mother Of The World" reprises the jackbooted rhythms found on the first Swans records, with a jagged guitar chord scraping bloodily against the unrelenting groove. The title track itself is a 32 minute piece that lesser bands would have used as an entire album with its massive crescendos of drone-rock pummel crashing down to a doomic plod and extended passages of slumped distortion, as something of a breather before ripping into another frenzy of gleeful obliteration.
Disc two opens with the much ballyhooed appearance of Karen O on the brief, lilting number "Song For A Warrior." It's more of an intermission for the band to shake out their arms and ears before Gira launches into another lengthy percussive workout, which is exactly what he does on "Avatar" - lockstep grooves for drums and bells rise up through a drone-rock ascent of guitars, bass, and vocals uttering languid melodies throughout before Gira commands the drummers into an furious crescendo of control, power, and noise. "A Piece Of The Sky" slowly unfurls through a shimmering drone density with plenty of Ligetti references but is probably also a thoughtful homage to Gira's amphetamine driven deconstruction on the brilliant Body Lovers cd from 1998, with a temperate Swans lurching forward into a near symphonic ballad. The finale "The Apostate" is a 24-minute vehicle for the screeching drones of lapsteel player Kristof Hahn, emitting divebombing raids across the throttled basslines, yelped vocals, and of course those interlocked rhythms.
We've got the limited 2cd combo which comes with a bonus dvd of live material from the last tour, during which Swans worked through variations of tracks that made their way on to this album, including "Avatar," "The Apostate", and "The Seer", with two gems from Children Of God and a few from My Father Will Guide Me...
And yeah, The Seer is just as good as everybody has been saying.
Swans are one of the few bands whose live recordings should be paid attention to; and in their lengthy career, a smattering of semi-authorized bootlegs and Gira-sanctioned live recordings trickled in and out of print, including the epic Feel Good Now 2lp documenting their Eastern European tour for Children Of God, the Swans Are Dead recordings from the final tour with Jarboe on board, and the charmingly titled album Public Castration Is A Good Idea. After the Swans Are Dead album was released, Michael Gira called it quits for a while; but his thirst for heavy pummelling percussion and discordant slabs of guitar noise proved greater than his desire to write beautifully plaintive country numbers. Swans reformed in 2011 with a magnificent fury evidenced on the album My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky; and Gira issued the marching orders shortly thereafter for Swans to head out on the road, a crew that included his original guitarist Normal Westberg. The tour was as relentless as Swans' music, with Gira and company crossing the globe in support of the album.
To support the record to follow My Father Will Guide Me, Gira issued a limited edition set of live recordings from that tour exclusively through the Young God Records website. That edition sold out so quickly that he issued a second pressing in a handsome double digipack with a much greater distribution. While the recording quality is exceptional, what's truly impressive is the brutal precision that Gira directs his band to pursue through the entire Swans catalogue. On this recording, there's also a great distribution of older material alongside most all of the cuts from My Father Will Guide Me. The highlights include the surging drone-rock groove of "Apostate" with Gira barking above his natural baritone and the Nietzchean commands that Gira bellows during the doom-thud of "Sex God Sex." The prettiest and most restrained number is "Your Property" originally written back in 1984 for the seminal album Cop, which would never be mistaken for being pretty or restrained. The difference in listening to Gira now as opposed to Gira some 15 years ago is that he had a huge chip on his shoulder needing to prove to the world that he was worth something. Now, he's fully confident in his abilities and in the choices he's made for his artistic career. He knows that Swans are awe-inspiring and terrifyingly great. So should you.
Here's one of those mysteriously dark, mysteriously packaged, and mysteriously produced records that we love here at aQ. It's hard to say really who is doing what on this album, which may be considered a collaboration, may be a split, may be a set of remixes, or somewhere in between. SYNB is the work of Matt Brinkmann who had a couple of releases on Load a while back as Mr. Brinkmann, of fuzzed clunk and bass, but more recently has acquired notoriety as a member of the Paper Rad comic 'n' video collective. HSDOM is the work of Jochen Hartmann, half of the mighty (if under-appreciated) UW Owl, whose deadtech rhythms and blackened noise conjure the best that SPK or Factrix had managed in their most feral and brutal period. Phaserprone states that this release features SYNB reworking HSDOM materials and HSDOM reworking SYNB's recording Black/Gold Chip, although there is very little to indicate which tracks are done by or to whom. No matter how you look at it, this album seems to follow more of the UW Owl monstrousness, and it fucking rules!
After a grim introduction of close-looped feedback pushed through subharmonic distortion pedals for a thicket of skinscraping noise, convulsive rhythms tread through a perpetually exploding minefield of analog synths and circuit bent chaos. Ash, soot, toxic rain, nuclear fallout, brimstone, and any other suitably apocalyptic residue seems to hang on every blast of electricity, whether that be the abject white noise turned black or the jacked-up beats overdriven with distortion and hotwired fuzz. Within these entirely instrumental tracks, SYNB and HSDOM offer an alternative course for where Wolf Eyes could have dramatically improved their strategies of making hellish robotic electronica.
Nicely packaged in a letterpressed cover in an edition of 200 copies.
What a gorgeous album! Taiga Remains is the former drone-out-of-noise project of Alex Cobb, with Works For Cassette being the final sonic statement under that moniker. He's hardly calling it a day, as he is continuing to record under his own name and is also responsible curating the impeccable Students Of Decay label with well over 100 releases of top-shelf neo-psychedelia bathed in reverb, drugs, or both. His own recordings emerge from this same curatorial vision for beautiful, blissful, drone-on delirium. He blew us away with a disc on Root Strata a couple years back, but THIS one is THEE album!!! With a swooning guitar half-melody slipping out of focus from the beginning of Works For Cassette, we knew this would be a gem, immediately fixating itself in a staring contest with those long-form sprawls of Andrew Chalk or the glassy-drone hypnosis occasionally produced by Tim Hecker. We know that Chalk is wide-eyed through his own magical realm of English dreariness and Hecker's ambitions would mount matchsticks between his eyelids in his pursuit of greatness; but Cobb never blinks. His darkly kosmische gaze extends beyond that metaphysical staring context and peers up the the coast of California beyond the green flash of a disappearing sunset to the west and toward the distant aurora borealis twinkling at the north in sheets of irradiated greens and yellows. So speaks from the mind's eye of Alex Cobb.
Golden tones of metallic buzz swaddled in radiant timbres and ghostly reverberations. Majestic blurrings from time-dilated meditations on the minutiae of existence exploded to the scope of the infinite. Sublime, oceanic roilings where the division of land, air, and sea is so diffused that a bathysphere is required for any means of transportation. Blissed-out pleasure-seekers, psychonauts, dronologists, daydreamers, inner-mind pioneers, and psychic malcontents seeking something to soothe the soul; here's a perfect album for you. Works For Cassette is an epic, cinematic feat of dronescaping; and one of the finest that we've come across.
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Blackest Rainbow has been pretty damn consistent in their survey of the pharmacologically tainted realm of dronemusik, releasing great albums from Aidan Baker, Barn Owl, Elm, Tom Carter, Jazzfinger, more recently that Bong / Quttinirpaaq split, and certainly this incredible split between Taiga Remains and RV Paintings. The former is the work of Alex Cobb, who also runs the equally great label Students Of Decay; and the latter is a side project of the Starving Weirdos. Both sides of the LP dwell heavily upon reverb saturation grafted onto acoustic dronings from various sources - probably guitar, certainly some bells, maybe a long-stringed instrument. Such is a typical strategy for RV Paintings, but is somewhat novel for Taiga Remains, whose driftscape sensibility tends more towards the smooth surface arcing for tone and harmony. If Blackest Rainbow hadn't etched the names of each artist into the surface of the wax, you'd have a 50 percent chance of guessing who was doing each side. Perhaps Cobb was deliberately trying to coax more of a RV Paintings sound from his gear and vice versa. The major difference in these two sides only becomes apparent when RV Paintings begins to gently tap across sheet metal, gongs, and a drum kit a la Eddie Prevost from AMM. The drone is still the central feature, and the percussive serves to levitate and propel the drone forward. Really great stuff to be found here, and limited to a mere 400 copies.
FINALLY BACK IN STOCK. THE ULTIMATE DRONE RECORD.
We love this record so much. The Taj Majal Travellers are so utterly mind blowing. This is a double cd reissue of this legendary Japanese psych ensemble's second lp which has been unavailable for several years now, but when we did have it in stock, if anyone asked about drones, this is the record we would always suggest. One of the most hallowed artifacts of the psych-rock collector scum scene (originals on vinyl could set you back more than $1000!), this album is an epic higher key improvised drone extravaganza, all performed live on beaches and deserted hills in Sweden, India, Iran and England. Slow, complex, irregular throbbing waves of sound, broadcast through distant loudspeakers and recaptured and reincorporated. Feedback, time-space lag, horns, echo machines, and primitive handmade electronic devices all contribute to the ever shifting clouds of sound. So unbearably awesome. And this is not electronic music, or studio based carefully constructed drone music, this is massive and organic, dreamy and natural, waves of sound drifting through sun and sky, rain and fog, trees and electrical wires, the shape of the earth, the temperature, the wind, all affecting the sound, changing the timbre ever so slightly, band members spaced out over hundreds of yards, improvising on an impossible grand scale, the earth as their stage, nature as their recording studio, a deliriously abstract sound world of subtle drones and drifting ambience. Imagine some long hairded seventies Japanese psych rock combo, but filtered through the Jewelled Antler Collective, jamming with Chris Watson, set up on sandy dunes, grassy knolls, forest glades, each not necessarily -playing- their instruments, but instead coaxing sounds from within the instruments, setting those sounds free and sending them skyward, watching it drift downwind, where a bandmate snatches the sounds and coaxes complimentary sounds from his instrument, sending a sonic respone, until these messages, these sounds weave into and around each other, the sky full of warm warbly mysterious sound. Psychedelic for sure, but more a sort of eyes closed, mind open dream drift drone psychedelia. ONE OF OUR ALL TIME FAVORITE RECORDS!!
- MPEG stream: 1
- MPEG stream: 2
Too long has passed since we've heard anything new from Tarab - the solo project of Australian sound artist Eamon Sprod. His process involves the recontextualization of field recordings into dense collages of acoustic noise, natural disruptions, violent crackling, and grandiose crescendos of activity bracketed by periods of a unsettled calm. In listening to each of his records, we can easily see how much time and attention he puts into these increasingly complex compositions; so it's no wonder it can take two to three years for a new album to emerge. Sprod collected all of the sounds for Shards Of Splinters while on a month-long residency at MoKS in Estonia. He purposefully chose to go to Estonia in the middle of a very cold, very bleak Baltic winter, in stark contrast to the fire-season and sweltering temperatures he would have found at the same time in his native Australia. As with his small back catalogue, Shards Of Splinters navigates along the boundary between the natural and the industrial - where factories had been left to collapse and to be consumed by vegetation, where tin sheds were torn asunder by hurricane force winds, where rusted pipes eerily resonate chorale drones from unseen cisterns deep under the surface of the earth. Many a field recordist and sound ecologist uses this boundary space to collect a beguiling array of recordings, but Sprod focuses almost entirely on mapping an apocalyptic poetry through his profoundly broken sounds. The unforgiving cold of the Estonian winter threads his recordings of slushing ice, crumbled concrete, and scraped metal that he deftly arranges into ruptures and disturbances that churn through tactile squeaks and metallic vibrations. There is a violence front and center in Sprod's work as if he's forecast the globe itself waking from hibernation to exterminate humanity once and for all. Aesthetically, Shards Of Splinters finds common ground with Eric La Casa or the more narrative work of Chris Watson; but conceptually, Sprod takes a much darker approach akin to Small Cruel Party or G*Park, that gives his recordings a magnificent depth. Brilliant.
Vacant store fronts, abandoned buildings, and empty lots are increasingly harder to find in San Francisco these days. Even the former wastelands well to the east of our Mission location are filling in with all manner of development, from modern office spaces to sleek steel & glass apartments. Complaints of gentrification can hardly be made when such buildings are constructed on purportedly mitigated toxic sludge or the settled landfill of crumbled highways from the '89 earthquake. These dead zones in the urban landscape nevertheless are thriving ecosystems of feral plants and animals that can exist sprouting through broken asphalt and plumping themselves on the scraps of whatever can be pulled from nearby garbage cans. Few would pine over the loss of such spaces, and the Australian sound artist Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) is one who would actively explore vacant lots instead of ignoring them. Over the years, Sprod has released a small catalog of brilliant, if understated albums that reflect these dead spaces in the urban landscape, often with apocalyptic foreshadowings through his compositions. He patiently builds this work through layers of sparsely processed field recordings and found object manipulation often recorded directly in such environments - empty warehouses, military bunkers, dry sewer ducts and the like. For Strata, Sprod has documented something of a concrete island on the outskirts of Melbourne, bordered by train tracks, highways, and drainage ditches. In collecting his recordings, he would dig and claw through the broken concrete, construction refuse, bum trash, and aggregated debris, amassing a whole array of crumbled textures and noises that would also echo with the distant din of cars and trains roaring by, many miles away. What is always impressive about Sprod's albums is the incredible clarity of detail which pops into focus, as the bright frequencies of found metal debris take the shape of obsidian shards with possible diabolically mystical qualities. The compositions coalesce into churning swarms of texture that snap into expansive rumbles paralleling the desolation of Thomas Koner's polar treks, giving way to doppler-effected field recordings of trains with the grinding of brakes and the pulsing thunder of the engines. It's that rich attention to detail that warrants comparisons to Chris Watson's impeccable phonography, but the compositional approach strikes a balance between the psychological implications of Luc Ferrari and those damn-near perfect collages by Small Cruel Party. As with all of Tarab's work, this is very highly recommended! Limited to just 200 copies!
Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) is a name you don't come across everyday; and I (Jim) swear that I've heard something by this Australian sound artist somewhere along the way. While I could be remembering a track on some obscure Australian compilation, I am probably mistaken as Surfacedrift is his debut recording. Given the high quality of this record, I should have been listening to Sprod's work for many years along with all of those Hazard, Francisco Lopez, and Loren Chasse records that I constantly return to. This unfortunate lapse of memory could also be the result of wandering through Sprod's psychogeographic soundfields. Surfacedrift is a disorienting album, which implodes the perspectives of sound by amplifying the miniscule and softening the impact from environmental recordings. Sprod massages richly textured passages from crumpled leaves, spilled water, and tumbling rocks; he couples these haptic events with field recordings. As everything is so seemless, it's hard to tell if Sprod had actually recorded these rock garden symphonies out of doors (a la Blithe Sons), or if there's a fair amount of production work synthesizing the field recordings with the performative elements. An very impressive debut to say the least!
With a huge clamorous slash of metal grinding against metal, Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) introduces the aptly titled album Take All The Ships From The Harbour, And Sail Them Straight Into Hell. This Australian sound artist has in the past already deeply impressed us with his incredible albums of field recordings interspliced with found object manipulation. In previous recordings, Tarab has exhibited sleights of hand in turning the sounds of the dry scrub lands outside of Melbourne into watery, sinewy compositions with haunted ambience lurking throughout. Here, Tarab activates the resonance of abandoned spaces (including a handful of recordings made at Angel Island with all of its crumbling beauty housed here in the San Francisco Bay); and the watery details, which emerged as illusion before, are pronounced in an ominous rumble of surf, rain, and wind rattling the undercarriage of this album. An album of extreme dynamics, Take All The Ships evolves quite effortlessly from that opening metallic klang through a series of softened white noises culled from oceanic sources and cutting into a quiet passage of vacant spaces with sand and pebbles pushed slowly across the stereo's surface. Through these events, Tarab presents his album with a cinematic grandeur and an orchestral pacing, despite the fact that all of the sounds are derived from those field recordings and found objects. Aside from a few choice backwards masked tracks and the timbral emphasis of EQ, there's no apparent electronic manipulation in his sympathetic layering of sound. The details have all of the presence of the best sound ecologists (e.g. Chris Watson, Douglas Quin, Eric La Casa, etc.), and have been enhanced through the unveiling drama of Tarab's compositions. This is best noted in the album's concluding 15 minutes which gradually build out of a concoction of insect chorales, piles of tumbling sand, and corroded metal handrail being coaxed to emit a gong-like resonant drone. A series of ramped accumulations of sound are cut away to reveal a thicker set of reverberant drones and humid ambience which swell and grow more in keeping with those minimalists we love so much (Chalk, Coleclough, Svarte Greiner, Xela, Peter Wright, etc.). As infernal as the opening of the album is and as prophetic as the title is, this coda to Take All The Ships is uncannily beautiful, almost hallowed, and certainly imbued with melancholy. A damn great record!
It would be a stretch, even for us habitual hyperbolists, to proclaim Tasmania as the next eccentric origin for unusual music to join the ranks of Finland, New Zealand, and Iceland. But there have been two cultural exports from Tasmania which have blown our collective minds: those being the black metal misanthrope Striborg and the elemental sound ecologist Tarab (aka Eamon Sprod). No, there is nothing really connecting the two other than the fact that they originated from the tiny Australian island; and even now, Sprod has migrated across the channel to Melbourne, but the case could be made that the compacted Tasmanian environments of bleached deserts, scraped coastlines, and tempestuous rain forests still tug at Sprod's heart. These landscapes which Sprod documents, agitates, and amplifies, sound as if they herald the end of the world, which may speak to a communal Tasmanian bleakness shared with Mr. Striborg. This allusion might be validated through the few interviews conducted with Sprod that highlight his nihilist traits; and maybe in that, there is some black metal oozing in Sprod's veins.
Anyway, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is only the second full album as Tarab, yet in his small discography of manipulated field recordings and agitated objects, he's proven himself a masterful sound artist, on par with all time Aquarius favorites Chris Watson, Toshiya Tsunoda, Matt Shoemaker, and Loren Chasse. But even in comparison to those esteemed artists, Tarab's work is considerably darker, as you might imagine with that end of the world reference posited earlier. Field recordings are central to the Tarab sound, augmented by the complementary sounds of Sprod tossing leaves, rust, dirt, and shattered glass, all of which get mulched into seamless compositions swollen with expansive low end drones and electrocuted vibrations. As on his first album Surfacedrift, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away navigates barren landscapes between the industrial wasteland and the wilderness of the outback, with jolts of shattered glass and heavy rains breaking up the tactile sounds and sympathetic frequencies that make this album so incredible. Very highly recommended!
Tarentel's 2004 album We Move Through Weather found the San Francisco's sonic journeymen balancing their penchant for moody atmospheres and a new found spirit of improvisation, which hurtled them somewhere near Jackie-O Motherfucker meets This Heat territory. In constructing that record, Tarentel had to sift through hours and hours of recordings in order to pare down to a mere 72 minutes. Well, they could have done a Supersilent or Necks and released a massive 3 or 4 cd set of material; but instead they chose to wait and release two EPs (which both clock in well above 30 minutes each) of material that was not included on the We Move Through Weather album.
The companion to Paper White, Big Black Square is a 43 minute sprawling epic recorded at the very end of the We Move Through Weather sessions. Opening with a lengthy passage of humid drones from amplifier buzz, aqueous flutterings, organ tones, and somnambulant field recordings, Big Black Square lumbers into action after some 20 minutes as drummer Jim Redd slowly transforms an indifferent textural clatter across his drum kit into a complex elliptical groove. Multi-instrumentalists Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grodinski flesh out the skeletal rhythms with a spindly duel between their two guitars crumpled through tons of effects both high and low tech, making for a beautiful, dark, and evocative EP.
CD finally back in stock! The debut album from San Francisco's Tarentel is a majestic affair as multiple guitars churn through slow epic songs that build slow yet catchy melodies out of a deep space sonic miasma. Follow this with super-nova explosions of radioluminescent guitar / bass / drum crash that does very well to replicate the q...u...i...e...t L!!!O!!!U!!!D!!! dynamism of the likes of Mogwai via Morricone, or Godspeed You Black Emperor without the warm strings. Sure, Tarentel may in fact be wearing their influences proudly on their sleeves. But, unlike so many 'post-rock' bands who think you have to badly rip-off Tortoise to be artful, Tarentel's admission of their their influences is anything but detrimental. A solid, quite excellent album.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
SORRY.
"Lur" is another cd-r release for the exceptional German drone ensemble Tarkatak -- who have a number of tiny editioned releases. With perhaps only using tape speed modulation and a few effects (mostly reverb), Tarkatak beautifully processes a series of heavy bell tones into dark shimmering ambience on par with Andrew Chalk's amazing "East Of The Sun" album. "Lur" comes packaged with a sewn blue hessian bag (a similar idea to :Zoviet France:'s early album entitled "Hessian") which tends to fray easily, so please be careful when handling it.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
SORRY.
The German drone outfit Tarkatak has been a little too low profile for their own good, with a handful of super limited edition releases that have sadly been pressed as cd-rs. Fortunately Jef Cantu of Tarentel plans on releasing a Tarkatak album on his newly christened dronological label Blessed / Cursed, which could very likely get Tarkatak the attention which they deserve. But until that day comes, we'll try and keep as many of the tiny editions of Tarkatak records as we can. "Skok" is a fairly recent release, though the recordings date back to winter of 96 / 97. Tarkatak keeps things very quiet with some beautiful deep drones punctuated by subaquatic washes. The tonal palette is remarkably similar to Zoviet France's "Digilogue." Excellent work!!!
Most doom metal can be pretty easily classified, categorized or pigeonholed, whether it be stoner doom, funereal doom, sludge, epic doom, doom-folk, death-doom, psych-doom, dooooooooom or whatever other variant folks have cooked up. While plenty of bands do manage to transcend their classification, rare is the doomy beast that defies categorization all together, which is most definitely the case with Northwest duo Taurus, made up of Stevie Floyd (from psychedelic avant doom duo Dark Castle) and Ashley Spungin (of late great mystical metallic garage rockers Purple Rhinestone Eagle). Together they have conjured up a sound we could describe as impressionistic doom, or maybe abstract doom. Right from the outset, the various doomic elements, the usual sonic tropes are recast, filtered through the lives and experiences of these two woman, the result super dynamic, ultra heavy, extremely atmospheric, darkly ritualistic, hauntingly psychedelic, the opening track's main riff sounds like slo-mo Voivod played by Greg Ginn, all woozy and warbly, over churning drum pound, and laced with both deep witchy crooned vox, and more harsh vokills, all wound in a dizzying atonal sonic spiral that's harrowingly hypnotic and utterly mesmeric. But before that even happens, there's a gorgeously terrifying intro assembled from looped riffy churn, pounding percussive bombast, weird sample voices, and more howled shrieked vokills, a tense, and intense push and pull. The sound soon settles into something a bit more traditionally metallic, but only just, the vibe more like slowed down black metal than doom. It's like Deathspell Omega at 16rpm, barring the brief squalls of frenzied blackened freakout, but again, like that first track, the sound is warped and avant, even choice of notes, melody, rhythm, all seem obtuse and OTHER, which gives the whole record a sense of OTHERness, an outsider quality, that infuses even the most orthodox of moments with twisted pathos and deep emotion.
After those two relatively brief tracks, Taurus unfurl an epic psychedelic sprawl with "Set Forth On The Path Of The Infinite", setting the stage with swooping backwards melodies, simple ukulele (!) melody, reverbed samples, dense throbs of crumbling low end, a slow build bit of black ambience that sounds more like some lost arthouse soundtrack, and even when the drums come in, instead of exploding into a metallic onslaught, the track lopes and lumbers. And again, in swoop the guitars, and they're strange and alien, the melodies difficult, obtuse, accompanied by feral vocal howls, the song bursting into action in fits and starts, the sound ebbs and flows, eventually switching gears completely, with soaring angelic vox, over a backdrop of thick drum pound, and a slowly melting tangle of guitar keen and moan, before finishing off with another bit of haunting folkiness.
The tracks here are less riffscapes, and more a sort of ever shifting landscape of doom-ed sound, the riffs that do surface, are often indistinct, not so much riffs, as loose tangles of notes and chords that seem ghostly, and gauzy, occasionally indeed coalescing into proper riffage, but just as often drifting apart into something less distinct, more blurred and smeary, those sounds oozing and bleeding into each other, what in the hands of a more traditional doom outfit, would be more riffy and song-like all howl and pound, here becomes something ethereal and darkly psychedelic, abstract and ephemeral, and yeah, it's still heavy, but that heaviness is only loosely tethered, instead it's allowed to drift and dissipate, like on the other epic track here, "Increase Aloneness", which layers choral vocals over some roiling organ, a sort of blackened disembodied prog, by way of Arvo Part perhaps, here the build is slow, and distinctly non-metallic, samples only adding to the creepiness, to the twisted emotion, until finally, a MASSIVE riff comes cascading in, and the song is transformed into a churning, chugging behemoth, but that riff occasionally flickers and blinks out, leaving just Spungeon's double kick drum bombast, and that swirling psychedelic organ, building tension until the riff returns and so it goes, back and forth, light and shadow, love and hate, a tense/intense blackened majesty, an impossibly epic culmination of it's various constituent parts. The final track features Wrest from Leviathan adding vocals (he plays in a new group with Floyd called Devout), and we were expecting straight up some straight up black buzz brutality, but instead Wrest's croak drifts wraithlike atop a swirling morass of whirring organ, loose almost jazzy drumming, surrounded by dense billows of mysterious murk, and lush, decaying layers of drone and thrum, a sinister sprawl of grim psychedelic ambience, and textured cinematic moodiness, a Cold Meat Industry style sonic brood building to a bleak coda, suffocating and soul shearing, all by way of something infinitely more black and unknowable. No/Thing is harrowing and heavy, dense and demonic, but also spiritual and personal, intimate and introspective, and fucking fantastic.
We have both the lp version and the cd version, and for a very limited time, we also have just a tiny handful of the super limited, ultra deluxe BOXset version of No/Thing, which includes the colored vinyl version of of the lp, the cd version as well, a large silkscreened back patch / tapestry, a double sided lyric sheet / mandala, all housed in a hand screen printed, stained and shellacked wooden box, each one hand numbered and limited to 100 copies, and again, we only have a two or three...
