The depths of the ocean and the heights of the mountains. As poetic as these subject matters are for Blake Edwards, he seeks to describe the existential danger inherent in exploring such places. To ascend Mount Everest may be the most exhilarating experience in one's life, but the possibility of death is very, very real. The same can be said for plunging to the bottom of the sea. Manifesting such existential threats has been part and parcel of Edwards' project Vertonen. Recently, he's embodied a slipperiness between a tonal, electro-acoustic beauty and undercurrents of industrial violence lurking from within; and that holds true on this album as well. The coordinates of the first track refer to the location of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean; and appropriately enough, that track plummets through a series of aqueous, yet ominous electronic percolations coming to rest at a blackened pressurized hum, amounting to a great piece of bleak, industrial strength dronemuzik. A lurching heartbeat rhythm guides the first half of "HACE/26,250", whose title refers to the altitude at which the condition known as High Altitude Cerebral Adema begins to impact the human body negatively through the lack of oxygen getting to the vital organs and causing the collapse of brain activity. And thus, amidst this slow somatic rhythm, harsh sinewave electronics and squalls of tempestuous noise beckon from the nether regions behind a glacial pall of cold cold drone. Eventually, these actionist gestures dissolve alongside the heartbeat rhythm into a shimmering, snowblinding drift of minimalism, a portrait of a mountaineer gazing over the horizon from the top of the world while his or her body shuts down. Horrifyingly great.
Chicago's power acoustician Blake Edwards has been recording as Vertonen for years now, with plenty of caustic noise and atonal hums that draw parallels to the likes of John Duncan, CM Von Hausswolff, and Joe Colley (who has released a number of works through Edwards' own C.I.P. imprint). Yet, this album is easily the most subtle production for Edwards, and it's almost as it he's gone out of his way to burnish away almost every plausible signifier to this album, leaving behind a stately drone construction of phased vibrations and bellowing rumbles. All he provides from the outset is a statement that his source material was culled from a tape made in 1979. While he doesn't come outright and say who made the tape, if you were to ask him (we did), he would honestly say that the tape was from Jonestown; and the title itself comes from the People's Temple book of shortwave radio codes, which is code for "this is not a code." His obfuscation of the source material was intended not to shroud the material further in occluded transgression, but an attempt to remove the potent sensationalism around the Jonestown massacre all the while trying to articulate his own metaphors of horror, control, and fear through an act of negation. The slowly developing passages of flickering, long-stare drones is thick with a creeping sense of dread, even as Edwards makes plenty of compositional gestures to the likes of Eliane Radigue and Roland Kayn. It's as if Edwards has erased everything from that Jonestown tape, except for feelings of tranced-out exhaustion and sun-bleached humidity from the People's Temple members who had left everything behind in the US to embark upon a utopian project that had already turned ugly but soon was to become tragic. This is probably Vertonen's best work to date and certainly comes recommended.
Some folks may know Lisa McGee from Barn Owl side project, Higuma, or her vocal work on Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's Love Is A Stream, or perhaps even Portraits, the zen-minded supergroup of Bay Area improvisationalists. Truth is, McGee has been a muse behind a lot of great recordings in that circle so it's really nice to see her finally in the spotlight via her debut solo effort, Vestals. In some way McGee is channeling Rachel Brook from early nineties Bristol bands, Flying Saucer Attack and Movietone, in her ethereal noise-pop laden songs replete shimmering electric guitar, and featuring Trevor Montgomery's bass and partner Evan Caminiti's bowed guitarscapes. The atmosphere of desolate spaciousness and the smoldering shoegazed distortion that ripple through the Higuma recordings are certainly present; but in Vestals, McGee pushes the song-writing to the forefront with chiming hypno-drone-rock bliss akin to Roy Montgomery channelling the Velvets, which thrums and drones most prominently on the album's lengthy mantra "Of Ripples." But she can also shift into quite the chanteuse, as on the crushed-velvet noise-pop of "Forever Falling" and "In Waking Dreams" where McGee's voice carries the songs to stratospheric crescendos through a hook-laden bliss. A gorgeous debut that limited to a mere 300 copies!
The second album from this UK quintet is quite simply jubilant, an adjective not often used to define the circle of esoteric free-noise makers that spawned the Vibracathedal Orchestra, as well as Skullflower, Ramleh, and Ashtray Navigations. Vibracathedral Orchestra embark on the time honored journey of achieving the eternal drone supreme, hobbled together from fuzzed out guitar wash, acoustic guitar strum, long duration violin bowing, church organs and thankfully sporadic skree horns. "Versatile Arab Chord Chart" is well balanced between continual haziness and a variety of textural plucks and scratches, and ends up sounding quite reminiscient of Amon Duul's "Psychedelic Underground," No Neck Blues Band's improvisational hippiness, and Skullflower's lithium laced contemporary 'dream music' as initially envisioned by Cale, Young, etc. (these historical roots are available in a recording found elsewhere on this list).
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This is the CD reissue of the first Village Of Savoonga album (which was previously available only on vinyl through Hausmusik / Kollaps) and also features 5 extra tracks from hard-to-find singles and compilations. For those of you familiar with the brilliantly dark neo-krautrock on "Philip Schatz" and "Score," this early work from 1991-1994 may appear a little naive (with big ideas that haven't yet manifested into the grand statements of their later work.) These tracks have a Throbbing Gristle / Einsturzende Neubauten industrial flavor (grinding samples and banging metal percussion) topping off a Pavement-like jangliness. Yet for every track that plods with a heavyhandedness, there is a track that shines with a lot of great sonic ideas and fractured almost Faust-ian song snippets. This is a mixed bag, but there's enough good stuff on here to merit more than a few listens.
In the mid '70s, three disaffected Irish kids named Derek Rowen, Paul Hewson, and Fionan Hanvey devloped the idea of the Lypton Village, which was something of a clubhouse of likeminded miscreants. Within these friendly confines, the three encouraged each other's preternatural attraction to the absurd in renaming everything around them in accordance with a Dadaist logic. Rowen became Guggi, after the way that his faced looked while hiccupping, Hanvey transformed into the gender-bending dandy Gavin Friday, and Hewson emerged as Bono after the Bonavox hearing aid shop, which Guggi insisted he looked like.
While Bono obviously went onto world domination thanks to U2, Guggi and Gavin developed a far more bizarre form of artpunk through their band The Virgin Prunes. The origin of the band's name is a little vague, possibly being Irish slang for mastubation or somebody with a sexual hang-up. Either way, the band developed a reputation for being madmen as their transgressive performances and freakish attire came close to reincarnating Antonin Artaud's Theatre of the Absurd. In many ways, The Virgin Prunes were much more art than punk especially in their thematic inversions of religion, beauty, and language; but at the same time, their ability to provoke and threaten was unmatched, with the notable exception of Throbbing Gristle (another band named for jerking off).
A New Form Of Beauty was a very early conceptual project for the Prunes, originally conceived in seven chapters: a 7", a 10", a 12", a cassette, an installation, a book, and a movie. This double disc set comprises all of the audio works in that series; with the installation completed back in 1981 at a gallery in Dublin, and the book and film still unreleased. Despite their initial connection with Bono and company, The Virgin Prunes have very little in common with the musical sensibility of U2. In fact, their wildly imaginative and unorthodox style has very few accurate comparisons, although they had often been uncritically pegged a Goth band, I guess because they wore black eyeliner. Admittedly, A New Form Of Beauty is a gloomy and claustrophobic affair spun with a peculiar delirium. As on the propulsive "Come To Daddy," Gavin and Guggi twist their neo-babble duets into demented screams alongside air-raid siren guitars and metronomic rhythms; but on "Sad World," they dissolve a maudlin piano driven ballad into a oblique drone for the vocalists' empathic miserablism. Idiosyncratic and bloodied with scars, A New Form of Beauty revels in the poetry of abjection.
For many years, I (Jim) have treasured the few separate components that I've been able to find from this series, and I'm delighted that all of the audio components have been collected onto one disc. And yeah, it still sounds incredible after all these years...
In 1984, The Virgin Prunes' vocalist Gavin Friday made a guest appearance on Coil's debut album Scatology. His hair-raisingly cathartic vocals on "The Tenderness of Wolves" seethed with a lurid expressionism to what would have been a potentially puerile theme of vampirism. Friday was a perfect addition to Coil's early masterpiece of abjection and transgressive behaviour. A few years earlier, The Virgin Prunes were commissioned by the French label L'Invitation au Suicide to score an album "concerned with insanity and its connection to art and filth." No wonder Coil wanted to work with Mr. Friday! Originally published as a double 10" box set, the resultant commissioned album Heresie featured one disc of new studio material and one disc of live material, culled from a performance at the Rex Club in Paris from 1982. During the studio sessions for Heresie, the band never slept and even allowed much of the ensuing delirious babble to bracket the more structured musical offerings. Their self-induced hallucinatory state certainly produced some amazing results, as can be heard on the exhaustingly furious tracks "Rhetoric" and "Loved One" which sort of sound like the Pathological stable of Terminal Cheesecake, Skullflower, and God with overloaded bass and pummeling tribal percussion driving the maniacal vocals and spidery guitar lines. The seasick parady of a traditional Irish tune on "Down The Memory Lane" typifies the bizarre counterpoints that the Virgin Prunes had used throughout their career. The live material on Heresie shows just how amazing they were as performers, even though none of these songs are vastly different than those found on their studio counterpoints.
Although they produced numerous singles and elaborate art editions, The Virgin Prunes only released two proper studio albums; and If I Die, I Die... was their debut released in 1982 on Rough Trade. Adorned with torn Victorian ballroom dresses and smeared black eye shadow, the Virgin Prunes were often lumped into the British Goth scene, although their music was clearly in a world of its own. If there was a Virgin Prunes album that most closely aligns itself to Goth glam posturing, If I Die, I Die... would come the closest. This curiously baroque post-punk album centers upon the shrill interplay between the band's vocalists Gavin Friday and Guggi who come across as half-crazed, drunken Dadaists purposely undermining the traditions of the vocal duet. As idiosyncratic and unorthodox as these two often sound, their single-minded focus on emoting an aesthetic of pure delirium pulled everything together. It didn't hurt that the Virgin Prunes also had a knack for dark pop subversion, which was enhanced by the production courtesy of the Wire's Colin Newman. With brittle shards of guitar accentuating the Gavin / Guggi vocals and a plodding rhythm section, The Virgin Prunes don't immediately strike us as as having the chops to write post-punk pop songs; but tracks like "Walls Of Jericho" and "Baby Turns Blue" are undeniably catchy, if something of an acquired taste. Not to worry, there's plenty of classic Virgin Prunes dementia on If I Die, I Die... as on the viperous "Sweethome Under White Clouds" and the jagged antagonism of "Caucasian Walk." After If I Die, I Die... the band began to strain under their eccentricities and never managed to produce anything as truly great as this record.
Released on their own Baby imprint in 1985, Over The Rainbow was the last album that The Virgin Prunes released before the band broke up, as founding member Gavin Friday ventured out on his own, fellow vocalist Guggi took up a career in painting, and several other members held onto the Virgin Prunes legacy in renaming themselves The Prunes with little or no success. Over The Rainbow -- a compilation of rarities and unreleased tracks -- was a fitting epitaph for the band, demonstrating the multifaceted nature of the unusual post-punk sound the band explored during their eight year career. While most compilations of rarities and unreleased tracks come across as an incoherent mess of throwaway tracks, Over The Rainbow actually features some of their best material, which was often composed for very specific purposes outside of their eccentric album concepts. Nightmarish drone tracks like "Red Nettle" and "Jigsawmentallama" nestle against the acerbic art-punk blasts of "Twenty Tens" and "Greylight" which come across as oblique versions of The Fall or Teardrop Explodes with two delirous Irishmen ranting over the top.
This reissue from Mute digs a little deeper into the vaults to pull out a couple more unreleased tracks that weren't on the original Over The Rainbow (or the Artfuck compilation which was essentially the same as Over The Rainbow). Even if you're not a completist, Over The Rainbow is a great overview of this baffling band.
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Wolfgang Voigt's contribution to the 20' to 2000 series (subtitled "20 minuten gas im november") is a reference in title (as well as sound) to the three albums he recorded as Gas.
All three Gas records were unanimous AQ favorites and this newest release retains the autumnally bleak sound of those albums but still manaages to fit thematically into the hyper minimal 20'-2000 series. Complex grey drones slice in and out of a basic technotic architecture. On the first track the drones are hidden within a thick haze of backwards digital swooping, and on the second track they are framed by the minimalist throb of a drum kick. Even if you've not followed the exemplary 20' to 2000 series, this is an essential piece of electronica.
Early '70s krautrock stylings by way of Canada circa 2009, all the while channelling the visionary plainsongs from the 12th Century abbess Hildegarde Von Bingen! This Von Bingen began when two members of an East Coast psychedeliclatter project called Hildegard moved to Canada, met up with one of satellite members of Jackie O Motherfucker, and rebranded themselves. While the nature of the earlier band has escaped us, this Von Bingen has emerged fully formed, crawling out from the same primordial soup that spawned the likes of Amon Duul II, Hawkwind, Psychic Ills, Bardo Pond, and The Wooden Shjips. Yeah, they're pretty damn good!
A subdued yet motorik rhythm sets the stage for the opening track circled with interlocking guitars, electronics, and bass right out of the songbook of Faust IV, all of which are brought into relief with a sporadically used melodic jump out of the dronerock mentality. A paranoiac piece of incidental music links these grooves with droning lament for flute, giving way to a subterranean plod that almost sounds like a Throbbing Gristle piece remade a decade earlier as a transgressive piece of psychedelia laced with weird horns and Arabesque guitar leads. The flipside begins with an extended piece of cosmic ritualism through sustained mod synth drone and church organ tones twisting along side more of that wistful flute and gradually coalescing into a proto-Suicide pulsation of psychedelic electronics and downer melodies. The finale of the album centers upon a dazed guitar riff coming in and out of focus amidst the druggy atmosphere of synth drones, simple bouts of percussion, freeform flutes, and squeals of electricity. To say this is a trip is quite the understatement. Do not let this one pass you by!
Following the meticulous realizations of absurd propositions such as the ongoing "Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland" project and the attempts to communicate with the dead on "Operations of Spirit Communications," Swedish interdisciplinary artist C.M. Von Hausswolff presents "A Lecture On Disturbances In Architecture" as an open letter to architects and engineers, imploring that they consider how sound functions within urban space. This album which won an honorable mention at the 2002 Ars Electronica opens with a few remarks from the late maverick / crackpot architect Buckminster Fuller. His eccentric visions for a utopian society of geodesic domes and floating blimps parallel the subtext in Von Hausswolff's work that glorifies the saboteur as king. Aside from the introductory remarks from Fuller, Von Hausswolff's lecture is a non-verbal one, arguing its case through a series of modern-day mantras of urban life. Electric field discharges and rushing air from radiators have been filtered / amplified to achieve a din similar to Francisco Lopez' 'absolute concrete music.' Von Hausswolff contextualizes these sounds within a transition from the claustrophobic to the expansive / potentially transcendent spaces. In the end, "A Lecture On Disturbances In Architecture" is an incredible conceptual rebus, which insists upon leaving all of the loose ends untied.
As co-monarch (with Leif Elggren) of the Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland, C.M. von Hausswolff has issued an edict which abolishes death and has invited the dead to become citizens of their virtual state. In order to communicate with the dead, von Hausswolff
Many have commented on the power of female intuition; but has anyone commented on that of the other sex? Well, C.M. Von Hausswolff offers the first of two album pertaining to the subject of male intuition, and in his own dryly absurd / absurdly dry ethos of logic-leaping constructs and rudimentary electric constructions. While Hausswolff composed the album as a single piece, he's broken it into indexed chapters which incorporate spoken recordings from some of those men who have influenced his work as well as pieces dedicated to similar folk -- including Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder, the Dalai Lama, Alvin Lucier, Mika Vainio, Albert Hoffmann, paranormal investigator Friedrich Jurgenson, J.G. Thirlwell, and Brion Gyson. As Hausswolff runs the spoken elements through some shitty distortion boxes and / or speaker constructions, the language becomes garbled in a ruptured crackle perhaps with its message received through intuition? Behind these broken, disembodied voices, Hausswolff modulates a network of serpentine sinewaves, sonar bleeps, and field recordings from earth, air, and sea. Hausswolff's work has long dealt with the mysteries of human perception and the mythologies that we build around those perceptions (whether that be religion, metaphysics, or politics), always addressing absurdist questions with a blackened deadpan delivery. There may be no discernible answers for us to discover here, but the question is enough to be provocative; and as on his previous works, the question may be intriguing on a conceptual level, but the aesthetics themselves are a wonder to behold. Recommended.
Two amazing pieces of cerebral drone minimalism courtesy of the stalwart conceptual artist CM von Hausswolff. Analog tones abound on the first track, amounting to an immersive cocoon of bristling low frequencies that hits all the right Niblock / Radigue / Pade references of analog tone generated mesmerism. The second was presumably culled from "emission spectroscopy" conducted in a German cemetery located in Uruguay, resulting in peculiar percolation that settles into like-minded tonal immersion, with a brilliantly creepy undercurrent. Brilliant and austere!
The connection between the Swedish conceptual artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff (former member of The Hafler Trio and current co-monarch of The Kingdom of Elgaland / Vargaland) and the Raster-Noton label began in 1997, when von Hausswolff collaborated with Raster-Noton's Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto) and Frank Bretschneider (aka Komet). At that time, all of these artists shared a common
Aside from that previous collaboration, it's still a little hard to believe that Von Hausswolff would produce a record for Raster-Noton. Not surprisingly, "Strom" has very little in common with the Raster sound. Instead, he is continuing his documentation of electronic seances which he first began researching while in The Hafler Trio and more recently presented on his "Operation of Spirit Communication" record. Implementing telephone bugging / wire tapping microphones, Von Hausswolff captured these anomalies when recording the pure drones of electrical circuits and datafrequency hardlines. The point of such recordings was to uncover the sonic neologisms found by EVP researchers Raymond Cass and Friedrich Jurgenson. While "Strom" does not specifically feature any ghostly EVP languages, these thick low-frequency tones are striated with distant rhythmic statics, fluctuating glitches, and aerated electrical-field washes.
This is easily Jim's favorite record from Raster-Noton!
In case you hadn't heard, Von Sudenfed is the collaboration between Mark E. Smith and Mouse On Mars. Given that Smith had once quipped that The Fall could involve anybody's grandmother on bongos accompanying Smith and his cantankerous slurred vocals, it's a bit surprising that this isn't considered a Fall project. Nonetheless, Tromatic Reflexxions is clearly the best album that Mark E. Smith has been part of in years. The same goes for the Mouse On Mars side of the equation. We're not going to stray too far from the conventional wisdom regarding Tromatic Reflexxions, as we basically agree that it really does sound like LCD Soundsystem, even though Mark E. Smith wants nothing to do with any of those comparisons. Musically, the combo produces a smarty-pants concoction of post-everything rhythms with dubstep density, disco-punk punchiness, and electro grooviness all mashed up into an infectious squelch, which clearly resembles the LCD Soundsystem singles of a couple years back. Smith is just as cranky, irritable, and insufferable as he's ever been on any give Fall recording. Perhaps not surprisingly, Smith's presence in an electronica context offers an obvious comparison to James Murphy's smug delivery on the LCD Soundsystem recordings. Many of us here hadn't thought that this collaboration would work in the least, but more than a handful have been clearly won over. In all likelihood, Tromatic Reflexxions will stand out as one of the best art-rock / electronica albums of 2007. Well worth checking out.
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This is by no means a new record, but it seemed appropriate to let Jim share with you, his new found understanding of the absolute brilliance of the evil dwarf IT, and his ode to the dark side of 'the Force'. -A. + A.
Vondur's first (and much better) album is a more enigmatic black metal record than their second venture into conceptual absurdity, which was a crudely performed joke complete with wretched covers of Motley Crue, Judas Priest, and Elvis. Vondur is the duo of All and It - the chainmail donned / jaundice corpse painted midget who is also in Abruptum, War, and Opthalamia. Jagged drum machine blast beats, deeply buried in the mix Burzum-esque guitar fuzz, and All's sulfuric acid gargle for vocals make up the primitive almost anti-rock sound of Vondur. "Stridsyfirlysing" - with its "Star Wars" cover art - is a tribute to the dark side of the force, complete with lyrics mostly sung in Icelandic. All of the metaphors on the album seem to be pointing in entirely different directions, yet somehow "Stridsyfirlysing" works... well at least on the day when AQ's non-metaller Jim passed up Nurse With Wound's "Alice The Goon" for this.
In reality, this was recorded live at the Great Hall of New York Hall of Science in New York, November 8th 1987. But listening to it, you could easily imagine it being part of some mysterious & portentous religious ritual, enacted high on the slopes of some vast Himalayan mountain by horn-blowing, drum-beating Tibetan monks... these monks perhaps being part of an aktion under the direction of dramatic drone artist Hermann Nitsch. Seriously. Well it's not Nitsch, it's Yoshi Wada, and there were no monks involved, but we're sure it was an impressive performance to witness in its own right. Certainly to hear, which thanks to EM Records, we all now can.
This is the sequel to EM's previous reissue, some months ago, of Yoshi Wada's first album, Lament For The Rise And Fall Of Elephantine Crocodile. While that 1982 LP may have more rare record collector cachet, and be more historically significant chronologically speaking, we have to say that this one is at least as amazing. As we explained in our review of Lament, Wada is a Japanese visual artist and sound sculptor who relocated to New York in the '60s, where he aligned himself with the Fluxus conceptual art movement and definitely got deep into dronology. (He now lives in San Francisco, and for more information on his career, check out the June '08 issue of The Wire, #292, which features an interview with Wada conducted by AQ's own Jim Haynes.)
The Appointed Cloud, a composition/sound installation "designed specifically for the acoustics of the cobalt blue cathedral of the Great Hall", utilized a massive Wada-designed soundmaking assemblage controlled by a computer interface, this unusual "pipe organ" constructed from compressed-air powered pipes, a suspended 20 foot long sheet of metal, and a steam pipe gong. In addition, Wada and the other musicians involved play timpani, tam tam, sirens, and a trio of keening bagpipes. All this in the majestic, modernistic stained-glass setting of the Great Hall.
As alluded to above, this is somewhat suggestive of Buddhist ritual, and reminds us of Nitsch's large-scale symphonics as well. Rather than give a minute by minute play by play of this piece's hour-long duration, we'd encourage you to experience it for yourself. Experience the thundering drum vibrations, the percussive rattle, the quiet gentle tones and hushed rustle that erupt into dense bagpiping drone squeals and resonating rumble... it's grand and gorgeous.
Physically this cd reish is up to EM's usual high standards, packaged in a gatefold sleeve with color photos, a reduced reproduction of the piece's graphic score, liner notes by Wada as well as the original program notes, in both English and Japanese. Soundwise, it's also up there with that first Wada disc among our favorite stuff that EM has yet released -- in other words, highly recommended!! Even moreso for those especially dronologically and/or 20th century classically inclined.
While Joy Division and New Order had certainly been the bread and butter for Factory Records, a number of bands who recorded for the label applied alternative signatures to the classic Factory template of post-punk gloom. The Wake -- a Scottish group who gained a broader audience in the post-C-86 sounds of Sarah Records -- produced one of the forgotten gems for Factory in their first record "Harmony." On this album, The Wake intertwines brightly colored, Byrds-inspired guitar jangle from frontman Caesar and bouncy Peter Hookish basslines from Bobby Gillespie (who later went onto join the Jesus & Mary Chain and front Primal Scream). Much of the early '80s post-punk suffered from insufferably stiff percussion; but not so for The Wake, whose Steven Allen is remarkably spry and painterly in his application of metronomic beats - that alternately recalled the monochromatic funk of A Certain Ratio and the jazzed flutter of Durutti Column.
When originally released in 1982, "Harmony" was a brief songs; but has been flushed out on CD with some exceptional complementary tracks from a their first two singles on their own label Scan 45 ("On Our Honeymoon" and "Something Outside") plus 3 tracks from their BBC Peel Sessions.
All in all, a great find!
For all of the militaristic death-folk that we've championed in the past, we've actually never listed any Sol Invictus records. Well with the dissolution of World Serpant Distribution a couple years ago, the bulk of the Sol Invictus and Tony Wakeford catalogue has disappeared from our grasp. Way darker than Current 93 and expressing a Nietzchian / Odinic theatricality that occassionally is laughably over the top, Sol Invictus (as well as the bulk of Tony Wakeford's solo material) always maintains a furrowed-brow seriousness that extends into the portentious waters of death, European history, and the problems with modern society. Regardless of what you may think of Wakeford's occasionally provocative politics, Wakeford excels in his craft of songwriting, especially through his elliptical acoustic guitar finger picking which darkens melodies adapted from British folk.
The Wardrobe is a collaborative project that Wakeford has begun with Andrew Liles, who has grown in notoriety thanks to his work alongside Colin Potter and Steven Stapleton during the occasional Salt Marie Celeste performances from 2005. Entirely instrumental, Cups In The Cupboard is a creepy Victorian soundtrack, filled with sideways glancing half-melodies fragmented into eerie repetitions and oscillating forms. Sampled elements of whimsical bassoons and baroque strings become peculiar to the point of hinting at a lurking horror, best expressed through Wakeford's insistant and ominous guitar chords. Thanks to Liles' deft ability to transform commonplace sounds into uncanny, curious, and strange sounds, it's easy to make the comparison between The Wardrobe and another great Wakeford collaboration The Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish which found Tony working with Steven Stapleton.
Limited to 500 copies.
John Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber has long been hailed as one of the minor masterpieces of post-industrial sound art, yet it's one of those albums that has escaped my (Jim's) ears up until now, as it's been reissued both on CD through Cold Spring and on picture disc by Die Stadt. Back in 1990, this German born sound artist had traveled to Calcutta where he stumbled upon a gas chamber that had been closed down just a few years earlier. Watermann explains in the liner notes that the Indian government had numerous policies, both official and clandestine, aimed at population control; and the gas chamber was one method that had been employed for the expedient dispatch of those condemned to death. The Calcutta Gas Chamber was one that actually closed down for economic reasons (and not for human rights issues, I might add), and I'm not all that sure if the Indian government still uses such practices at this day and age. Needless to say, the experience of walking through this death factory had a huge impact upon Watermann. There had been some debate as to the validity of Watermann's claim that he had managed to get field recordings of the gas chamber itself (as he claims in the liner notes) or if he replicated what he heard from recordings he made from a power station in Australia. As Watermann died several years ago, the true nature of the recordings will remain something of a mystery. That said, Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber deserves its place as esoteric gem of the darkly avant-garde. His compositional style is a industrial take on musique concrete, as he roughly chops his field recordings of mechanical clatter, aerated hisses, and disembodied voices into a claustrophobic arena of turgid repetitions and blackened drones that reflect the automation of death haunting that space. Occasionally a thick drone of flanging ambience creeps forth from his mechanized collage; but even as these sounds reflect something like the nightmarish guitars of Maeror Tri, there is very little jubilation to found within these recordings. A powerful album that shudders at the potential for man to exact atrocities upon fellow man and the world at large.
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Curious that this disc is not on Touch, but the lack of the Jon Wozencroft design stamp does not detract from another impeccable recording from the world's premier field recordist - Chris Watson. A founding member of both Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, Watson turned his attention in sound to the natural world in the late '80s, having worked on countless documentaries for the BBC. We've long been taken by his ability to present and contextualize the humble field recording as a magnificent piece of art, much in the way that great photographers - say, Richard Misrach - can present all of the details of a landscape with no discernable tricked out production and make it sublime. Cima Verde is a document of the alpine landscape in Northern Italy, primarily focusing upon the diversity of bird life, although the rushed blur of the first track seems to be a collision of atmospheric events reminiscent of his work with BJ Nilsen. The blurting caws of ravens introduces us to avian life, made more ominous than mischievous by a thrumbing of wires agitated by the wind. Watson then spends a considerable amount of time with the grouse - first the gentle cooing of a black grouse and then the dramatic mating dances of the wood grouse (aka the capercaillie). This latter recording with its erratic flapping and odd growls is one that seems oddly familiar to us - perhaps we are just getting this confused with one of those Sitelle field recordings disc; but it sounds great nonetheless. Watson does include some water recordings - a very nice underwater recording of a stream and some cold cold rain; but the final recordings on Cima Verde return to the birds in two dawn choruses, one of which begins with the mellifluous song of a nightingale eventually overtaken by the rest of the riparian creatures, waking from their slumber in ecstatic chirping. Of course, it's amazingly recorded with details popping directly through Watson's microphones into our speakers. Very highly recommended!
Preeminent field recordist Christ Watson returns with a bit of a twist on El Tren Fantasma. Pretty much all of his work up to this point (outside of his contributions to Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio way back when) has been audio verite. Even such albums as Weather Report, which edit field recordings from the African savanna (for example) into a condensed journey, are pristine, realist documents codified through the exquisite, lush details in Watson's enviromental sounds such as that of a lion panting after a successful hunt. El Tren Fantasma is much more engineered, imagined, and processed than anything else in his solo career; and this fictionalized Watson is no less compelling, no less dramatic, and no less awesome.
El Tren Fantasma - The Ghost Train - traces a now-defunct passanger rail line which ran from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Veracruz on the Atlantic Coast. Watson had the opportunity to make this journey while working as a sound recordist for the BBC for their Great Railway Journeys. His compositions work with extracts from that excursion travelling across Mexico along with archival recordings whose origins are not specified. As he's stopping throughout the Chihuahuan Desert, Watson does capture the stunning chorales of chirping frogs, buzzing insects, and the blaring call of a California Quail (whose syllabic chortle is often mnemonically transcribed as "chi-CA-go" as if it were seeking a more temperate climate); but it the train's power and mass that provides so much of the impact for Watson's album. By the fourth track "El Divisidaro," Watson captures a series of loops of the train - with the bellowing horn pitched back and forth into a sustained symphonic tone and the clatter of the train's engine becoming an ersatz rhythm track, which in turn gets tricked out with some Martin Hannett styled, phasing delay work. It's easy to get lost in the majesty of this track, much like the expressive electronica that Wolfgang Voigt produced on Konigsforst as Gas. What a brilliantly simple transformation executed to perfection! "Mexico D.F." reprises this strategy with rhythmic churns building out of the grinding brakes and the roiling tumult of steam blasting through the train's pipes, becoming an almost militant thump on a lone drum. The train's horn drifts suitably in a cloud of reverberation at the end of the album, dissolving into the ghostlike apparition Watson intended it to be. As brillliant as this work is, we should also point out that Watson is not alone in composing such fictionalized scores purely through environmental sound. We would be remiss if we failed to point out the work of Australian composer Tarab, whose deft psychogeographical albums share the scope and execution with Watson's El Tren Fantasma. So great!
Oooh. We're super pleased to get this new Chris Watson field recordings album (see note below). He's one of our favorites in the realm of just going out in the world, shutting up, and listening. With really good equipment and recording skills, that is. In the past he's brought us up close and personal with a variety of African wildlife, as well as the fauna of his native England. Now with the perhaps too-obviously titled "Weather Report" he focuses on the bigger picture, not just animals but the places in which they reside, which means a lot of weather phenomena in the mix.
There's three long tracks, each providing an aural portrait of a location over time. Kinda like time-lapse film, but the action is not sped up here, just carefully edited together. They're all natural environments, not urban, the first ("Ol-Oloool-O") taking you on a virtual expedition into the wilds of Kenya's Masai Mara, one day in October 2002. The next, "The Lapaich" compresses four months of sound from a Scottish highland glen in the fall and winter. Lastly, "Vatnajokull" closely examines the slow flow of a glacier in Iceland, which sounds like drone piece from our experimental section. From animals, birds and insects to washes of wind and rain to quiet, creaking ice, this is all pretty darn magical. Newcomers to Watson's work should note that there's no processing of the sound to make it "experimental music", it's a straight-up documentary with no additions or interference (aside from the neccessary edits). Then again, I suppose it is "music" in the John Cage 4'33'' sense. And it's wonderful sound. Amazing, vibrantly real stuff that'll fire your imagination. If you've seen that amazing new documentary movie "Winged Migration" you've got a filmic analogy to the kind of thing Watson captures here.
NB. You know, it's a bit embarrassing, but we've never listed this man's releases in our database before, aside from the "Star Switch On" disc of remixes and his contribution to Hazard's "Wind".
Whoops! Dunno how that happened, 'cause we're all really big fans of his work. So, at least we can offer a timely review of this, his third proper release on Touch, and perhaps retroactively review his previous efforts "Outside The Circle Of Fire" and "Stepping Into The Dark" on a future list.
The title Discipline & Desire refers to Wax Idols' Hether Fortune's day-job (or rather night-job) as a dominatrix, before her tenure in the San Francisco garage-punk scene. In other words, fuck with her at your peril. Fortune's also to be found in the beloved distorto-punk-pop trio Blasted Canyons, whose two albums on Castle Face have long been favorites around these parts. With the first Wax Idols record on Hozac, Fortune didn't wander too far from what she was doing in Blasted Canyons with the short barked punk numbers; but on Discipline & Desire, she's painting her nails black and digging out the old Bauhaus t-shirts from back in the day, for a much darker, death-rock vibe. As such, she's continuing in a line of strong-willed, goth-inflected female fronted bands from San Francisco over the past couple of decades. Obviously, one can look all the way back to Romeo Void and The Avengers, but also more recently to Veronica Lipgloss, Subtonix, and The Vanishing. The songs are driven by Fortune's ice-queen demeanor through which she bellows impassioned tales of lust and fury on top of the buzzsaw drones and primitive rhythmic propulsion. Think X-Mal Deutschland, early Siouxsie, and Killing Joke's Night Time... and you're getting pretty close. Wax Idols also got some production assistance from Marc Burgess of The Chameleons, adding some true black-clad cred to the album. It's a record that's been on pretty heavy rotation here at aQuarius.
There's a weirdo theory in the realm of parapsychology (yes, the ultimate land of weirdo theories) that inanimate objects can absorb the psychic energy from the living, especially during that of extreme stress. This postulation is called the Stone Tape Theory, as stone (along with wood) is the most common media for this stored energy that can be replayed in the form of ghostly ectoplasm, disembodied knockings, and just bad vibes. While the peripatetic sound-artist Simon Whetham seems far too sensible a bloke to hold the Stone Tape Theory dear to his heart, we have to wonder if he was spooked at all during the recording sessions for From The Mouths Of Clay. The source material in question was a collection of prehistoric and contemporary South American burial urns. It's unclear if these urns were actually used for the intended purpose or if the remains had been removed during his recording sessions; but it's very clear that these objects can generate quite an ethereal tone. Whetham's tactile investigation of these objects divined a slippery, rasping drone within the ebb and flow of his subtle electronic augmentation (layering, pitchshifting, EQ, etc.). So pure are the harmonics that they have the feel of a glass harmonica - you know, the parlor trick of rubbing a wine glass with a wet finger. Whetham allows these tones to waft in elegant suspension, giving the impression that if they were the sounds from ghosts, then the spirits embrace an enlightened, transcendent, and celestial aloofness, avoiding the baseness of anything physical. At various times throughout the recordings, Whetham drags a contact microphone across the surface of those urns, amplifying prickly textures that scatter with an anarchnoid irregularity. It's an unnerving counterpoint of earthly abjection to offset the innervision luminosity and holy minimalism from Whetham's drones. Think Alan Lamb, Andrew Chalk, Eliane Radigue, Phill Niblock. Yeah, it's that good! Absolutely gorgeous work, and easily the best thing we've heard from Mr. Whetham.
There must be fluorescent paintings of ladybugs, dancing mushrooms, and the beaming smile of an anthropomorphized sun adorning the walls of Crystal Dorval's bedroom, where she's been dashing off charmingly, disheveled bliss-pop tunes as White Poppy, which eventually caught the sympathetic ears at Not Not Fun. If not, her bright psychedelia oozes with acid-kissed warmth would be well served by such confines. It's definitely a vivid, touchy-feely and eye-dilating psychotropic drug that is Dorval's choice and not really the opiated stupor her moniker alludes to. The swirling spaced-out pop songs that drift through her eponymous album are graced with titles like "Skygaze," "Dizzy," and "Joyride" all of which are nearly onomatopoetic in describing what you'll hear. Although it does have to be said, she pens a track called "Existential Angst" which is anything but. Oh well. On some of her tracks, she adopts the drugged out, loop-station hypnosis that wouldn't stray far from the orbit of Motion Sickness Of Time Travel's electronic miasma; but Dorval is at her best when she deconstructs the bittersweetness of girl-group, fuzztone pop into a deliriously catchy and happily acid-damaged version of the Cocteau Twins. Yup, hypnogogic pop at its finest, right up there with Peaking Lights, if you ask us.
Released on vinyl at the same time on Rural Isolation, we just got in a handful of copies from the eponymous album from the enigmatic JT Whitfield on cassette through Chondritic Sound! Here, we have another four tracks of industrial strength bad-vibes. The synthetic murk and tangled ectoplasm which Whitfield dubbed out on that the previous cassette continue here with the heavily thumped rhythms swapped for more of a ritualized, nocturnal set. At times, this has the feel of clandestine happenings by denizens of a subterranean community who have constructed dank hymns and electric chorales in the only cathedrals they ever knew - sewers, drain pipes, and cisterns. Much more akin to Lustmord's Heresy or Paradise Disowned, as a result, and excellent.
A few years back, Keith Fullerton Whitman wowed the students of the Harvard University Studio for Electro-Acoustic Composition with a few workshops that demonstrated his wizardry with the Max/MSP computing language. In exchange, he got access to the University's collection of antique synthesizers including the Buchla Music Box and Serge Modular Prototype with their massive banks of patch bays, knobs, and toggle switches. The images of these devices which grace the album artwork in taxonomic presentation immediate provide a cold, tonal air of paranoiac, bunker aesthetic that out of the early history of institutionally funded electronic music (i.e. Xenakis, Ussachevsky, Eliane Radigue, Arne Nordheim, etc.). Multiples far exceeds whatever expectations one might have when gazing upon the covers, as Whitman once again argues his case as one of the most gifted electronic musicians of the contemporary era. Each of the tracks honestly profess their source material as 'stereo music for acoustic, electric, and electronic instruments' including those aforementioned electronic devices from Harvard as well far more commonplace instruments such as a hi-hat cymbal, a drum kit, and acoustic and electric guitars. The album opens with glacial timbres that emerge from that hi-hat which Whitman transforms into a Mirror-like dronescape of murk, fog, and mystery. Next, the Serge Modular Synth buzzes with complex saw-blade waveforms of agitated electricity, phase pattern sweepings, and post-Dockstader pointilist spectroscopy. Harkening back to his early work with tape delay and guitar repetition, Whitman's work with a Yamaha Disklavier Prototype is sublime in its hypnotic prowess echoed with a lingering sense of melancholia. Whitman then shifts to a wonderful recreation of the vintage organ 'n' drum sound from Swedish icons Hansson and Karlsson, with baroque shifts in melody upon a simple drum propulsion. Altogether, Multiples showcases the many personalities of Mr. Whitman for a marvellous album!
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Of the aesthetic subset of guitarists-who-plug-into-their-laptops-to-drone, Keith Fullerton Whitman has certainly established himself at the top of the mountain above Rafael Toral and Oren Ambarchi, with only a handful of recordings including last year's "21:30 For Acoustic Guitar" cd-ep and this "Playthroughs" album. Like many of his fellow six-string code slingers, Whitman cites '60s Minimalism as the formal precedent and influence upon his guitarscapes (in particular Steve Reich's "Piano Phases" and Terry Riley's Time Lag Accumulator found on "You're No Good" and "Poppy Nogood"); yet Whitman elevates the references to Riley and Reich beyond the flourishes of intellectual ornamentation, through a superior compositional prowess with a restricted monochromatic palette and a sparing but effective use of digital glitch effects. Instead of dissolving the guitar into a mass of digitally corroded noise, Whitman carefully extracts specific tones and timbres from the guitar and stretches them out into Charlemagne Palestine like organ chords (how Keith turns a guitar into a church organ is beyond me, but it's spectacular!) or into beautifully aerosolized mists of suspended particles. Weightless, hypnotic, and ultimately majestic, "Playthroughs" is such a strong album that it is a little hard to believe that such droning ambience could come from the same individual who's responsible for the fractured drill 'n' bass of Hrvatski.
Right now I can almost hear the groans of the 60% of AQL readers that will think we are absolutely nuts in our enthusiasm for this recording. "First they try to convince me to buy a cd of some damn elephants banging on trash can lids and blowing on harmonicas
While we're not sure we would really want to do it, had we been asked Continuum Press to write one of their 33 1/3 mini books about a favorite album, we just might have to choose Wire's third album 154. Partially, this choice would be something of a compromise as we doubt that a book on Nurse With Wound's Homotopie To Marie would make for a saleable product. 154 stands in our minds as the epitome of what post-punk should be: a bold fusion of post-situationist / punk antagonism and legitimately experimental methodologies with an undercurrent of smarty-pop to keep the kids bouncing up and down.
I (Jim) actually came to Wire somewhat late in my record nerd existance, and I actually grew to admire the band through a reverse history of sorts, as I didn't really start enjoying the first three Wire albums (Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154) until other Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert projects entranced me with thier experiments in proto-electronica. This was especially true for the ghostly post-structuralism found on their Dome records. And those Lewis / Gilbert projects took their genetic code for shadow and gloom from elements of 154. An album that was made under personal duress, 154 drips of disintegration. In fact the band split apart for almost 7 years after the making of 154, pursuing a variety of projects -- traces of which are quite present in this album as Colin Newman's pop sarcasm continued through his solo records and the vast array of Lewis / Gilbert projects.
Recorded in 1979, 154 marks the band's third radical reinvention in three years. Wire's pacing has slowed to a lugubrious, Factory-esque crawl but lost none of their punk antagonism. The slower pacing better suited the baritone vocals of Graham Lewis, who had penned many of the lyrics that Colin Newman sang. In lesser hands, the patchwork of forboding atmospheric dirges and punchy power pop numbers would appear disjointed; but Wire's deft use of synthetic coloring, exquisite timing, and simply great songwriting smear the whole album into a wholly convincing masterpiece. "I Should Have Known Better" and "A Touching Display" represent a few of Graham Lewis' baritone marches through plodding drone and heavy basslines, which have more in common with the late '80s, proto-doom of Swans than of the snarl of the Buzzcocks. Newman's pop brilliance also shines on 154 through "The 15th," which sadly more people recognize from the tepid Fischerspooner cover than by this punk-pop gem. Of the first three Wire albums, 154 proudly stands as the most challenging and most rewarding. So good, we may have to buy it, yet again.
In 1978, being qualified as "the Pink Floyd of the New Wave" might have come across as something of an insult; and by today's artistic strategies of rampant revivalism such a pithy remark may ring true to many a listener. That statement was, in fact, the critique prescribed to Chairs Missing, Wire's second album, as the album decelerated the pogo punk minimalism found on their first album with an increasing use of experimental production. In hindsight, Chairs Missing is the perfect transition between the high-strung velocity of Pink Flag and the staggering gloominess of 154; yet most transition records have a clunkiness about them, like a lanky teenager not quite able to fit into his sunday best. But Chairs Missing is miles above the average transition album. To many a listener, Chairs Missing stands as the ultimate Wire album, with near perfect pop songs alternating between anthemic punk and eccentric production techniques (i.e. atonal synth drone, staccato guitar chops, overdubbed guitar distortion, etc.). Where Pink Flag kept many of the songs under a minute and half, Chairs Missing is downright baroque in its presentation of 3 minute tunes. The genius of Chairs Missing is how Colin Newman, Robert Gotobed, Bruce Gilbert, and Graham Lewis manage to steer through the diverse songwriting landscape, in how the album's opening track "Practice Makes Perfect" transitions from a delicate prance for jangled guitar into a precise expression of menace, in how "Outdoor Miner" creates the catchiest, Beatlesque chorus you'll never be able to sing back to yourself given the complexity of its rejoining, nonsensical syllables, in how jaggedly clean the guitars of Newman and Gilbert attack each other, in how Lewis' bass is fluid and effortless, in how this run-on sentence seems to have lost its way trying to fathom the complexity of Wire. If you believe that the length of Aquarius' reviews directly correlate to how good the record actually is, then we have failed as we would need to write a fucking a book about how stunning this album is. Yeah, Chairs Missing is incredible; and if you don't have it, you really should.
Okay, one thing to bitch about the reissue of Chairs Missing is that the cover is curiously bleached out of its color; the reissue also doesn't come with the (really great!) bonus tracks found on the EMI cd version of the album. Come on Wire, you released this album on your own label. At least you could give us all the bells and whistles found on other versions of this album! This is our only complaint, and a minor quibble for sure.
Really, what more can we say about Wire's Pink Flag that hasn't already been said? The album is so good, so burned in the retina of our brains (even though we still cannot for the life of us unscramble Graham Lewis' lyrics), so nearly perfect that it's sort of hard to write about. In a perfect world, whatever nonsense we may have to say about the record would be moot, as you should already own this record (along with Chairs Missing and 154, Wire's second and third albums respectively). But for those of you who may be enraptured by the recent flurry of post-punk revivalists who continue to make quite a stir, let the reissue campaign of the first three records introduce you to the band that Interpol, Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand, and Bloc Party only wish they could be.
Recorded in 1977, Pink Flag is an immaculately concise punk record, even as Wire recognized that punk was becoming a self-parody and willed themselves to develop through experimentation with structure, technology, and process. Pink Flag's 21 songs cover a mere 35 minutes, many of themclocking in around 90 seconds or "when they ran out of words" as bassist / vocalist Graham Lewis once quipped. Energetic and volatile, each of the songs on Pink Flag thrash through the repetoire of reductivist power-pop riffs as immediately catchy and aggressive as anything by the Damned, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols. But even on their first album, Wire demonstrated an uncanny ability with chord changes and melodic shifts that by '70s standards were much artier than their punk bretheren. Of course, in the aftermath of math-rock's acrobatic twists and turns, Wire's Pink Flag hardly sounds unpredictable... but if it weren't for Wire would we really have Laddio Bollocko? Probably not. The album's opening track "Reuters" is an anxious introduction to Wire's provocation with lead vocalist Colin Newman over-annunciating a polemic against government's abuse of propaganda (sound familiar?) on top of an increasingly agitated metronomic blast of bass, twin guitar, and drums. Elsewhere near perfect pop songs develop out of the angular punk slashing, as heard on "Ex Liontamers" and "Mannequin." Wire ends the album with the monotone anthem "12 X U" which many have declared their "Anarchy In The UK." With a motorik rhythm punctured by concise punk riff, the track simultaneously decries homophobia and censorship with the song's entire lyrics "I saw you in the mag kissing the man / 1 2 X U!" So yeah, Wire are a seminal band for a reason, and it all started with this album. If you don't have it, please do yourself a favor and buy this album. You won't regret it!
Oh yeah! We've been eagerly awaiting this ever since we heard Buried By Time And Dust was putting it out. A deluxe box set containing 180g vinyl reissues of this cult NWOBHM band's original two full-length albums, 1982's Death Penalty (featuring classics like "Free Country" and "No Stayer") and 1983's Friends Of Hell (equally cool, with such songs as "Love On Smack" and the under-rated "Music"). Part Sabbathy doom, part psychedelic punk, and part party metal. Initially best known for their risque album covers, featuring topless witches/wenches in tableaus that combined "historical reenactment" with Page Three Girl cheesecake, WfG's lasting legacy has more to do with their Sabbathy sound, they being one of the first (and few) bands in the '80s to so overtly worship Ozzy, Tony and Co., and establish the "doom metal" genre, along with Saint Vitus, Trouble, Pentagram, and Candlemass.
With this collector's set, you get not just the two lps, and nice box to keep 'em in, but also a huge 20 page booklet featuring unpublished outtakes from those infamous album cover photo sessions, plus full lyrics, liner notes from guitarist Phil Cope, newspaper clippings, and more previously unseen photos (live and promo shots), making this quite a treat for all true WfG fans.
Here's what AQ's Jim Haynes (not our usual metal reviewer!) had to say about these two albums when we first listed compact disc reissues some years ago...
Death Penalty is one of the lost metal albums from the early '80s, falling victim to its own indecisiveness, not that such is a bad thing. Never really staying "true" either to the glam metal of Hanoi Rocks, Fastway, and Motley Crue or to the shocking horror shows of Ozzy and Iron Maiden, Witchfinder General alternated between both worlds, with the first half of Death Penalty being rowdy party numbers about drinking beer and dropping acid. These songs followed standard blues based rock, but as Witchfinder General was pretty amped up on the aforementioned substances, they were quite a bit more distorted and quick tempoed. By the time Witchfinder General gets to their anthemic "Witchfinder General," this album takes an impressive turn down the dark path of mythologically laden proto-doom metal, loaded with super-heavy (for 1982) Sabbathy grooves and aggro lyrics mostly about killing witches. They also throw in some grave robbing, just to prove how evil they are. A confused classic... Witchfinder General's second album Friends Of Hell picks up right where Death Penalty left off, with an album split evenly between the party rock elements from the New Wave of British Metal back in 1983 and their undeniable influence from Sabbath. Just as bipolar (between comical and evil) as the first album, and just as great. One of Jim's (!) favorite metal bands, and that goes for most of the rest of us here at AQ too.
Not that probably if you're in the market for this, you need US to tell you that Witchfinder General is great. Though, we were shocked, shocked, to find out not long ago that one of our good friends and customers, who shall remain unnamed, had not only never heard any Witchfinder General but had never heard OF them, despite being a huge fan of Sabbath specifically and stoner, doom, black and other metal music in general! We were like WTF? How can you not know WfG??! What are you, -not- high?
The apocalypse has come to mean 'the end of the world' but its original Greek definition is that of 'revelation,' albeit a really fucking heavy revelation of how the world is going to end. The differences between the pop-cultural definition and the biblical definition are somewhat semantic, but it's apt to mention in regards to Chelsea Wolfe's second record which situates the title in the context of the Greek alphabet. It's pretty clear that the revelations that Chelsea Wolfe spills across her brilliant doom-folk album don't aspire to the allegories and mystical visions pronounced by David Tibet, rather she seems to be clamoring about the conditions leading up to the end of the world. With demonic possession, toxic wastelands, and haunted sexuality being so prevalent in her ghastly world view, it's no wonder she's bellowing that the end is near.
Wolfe's first record - The Grime And The Glow - was a home-recorded affair, whose tape murk added to the choking-on-smog atmosphere of the dour songs. The sparse arrangements aggressively strummed on acoustic guitar shot all of the attention back on Wolfe's beguiling voice which takes cues from PJ Harvey, but way darker and witchier. The songs did liken themselves to the early apocalyptic folk aesthetics of Sol Invictus and Current 93; and that's still the case for Apokalypsis, although she has fleshed out her sound with a full band, capable of delivering minimalist Goth ballads, swamp-rock menace, and harrowing bursts of distortion to match the mood of her songs. Wolfe twists the fairytail beginning of "Tracks (Tall Bodies)" into gritty depressive dirges, reflective of the goth sound of her native LA some two decades ago (e.g. Abecedarians, Kommunity FK, etc.). She also reprises two songs from The Grime And The Glow, including the infernal barnburner "Demons" and the antebellum blues number "Moses" which retains its minor-key mope and slavehouse misery. The stalking-in-the snow pace of "Pale On Pale" lurches at a pace even slower than that of True Widow, with Wolfe's mournful voice lifting above the churning, blackened guitars. There's a grit and a severity to Chelsea Wolfe that makes her a very compelling figure in contemporary music, almost like a musical reincarnation of The Process Church in neo-goth form. Very highly recommended.
Much better than Zola Jesus' recent rebranding of old songs with a string quartet, is Chelsea Wolfe's Pain Is Beauty. These two records have emerged at about the same time, at summer's end of 2013, and these two personalities seem to share the headlines of whatever glossy blogspottumblffeedtweeterbirdpitchfulking thing you might frequent. Yeah, the goth subcultures have long enabled their ice queens to emerge as fashion icons of a cold hedonism and sexually charged detachment, all the while looking fantastic in smeared coal-eyed make-up and frost-white skin. For now, it's these two ladies who are holding court in the land of the gloomy; but when it comes to delivering the art, Chelsea Wolfe has stepped up her game on Pain Is Beauty, easily bettering Zola Jesus' tepid stringed album and producing what is probably the best album of her young career. Her last album of acoustically driven songs - Unknown Rooms - showcased her songwriting chops and an elegant quivering falsetto that wrapped around her plaintive death-folk ballads. In fleshing out these songs with drums, bass, electronics, and yes some strings, Wolfe's songs all amass into a delicious album of moody witchiness and haughty debauchery, while retaining the magickal aura of her unhinged apocalyptic howl that manifested out of some arcane blood ritual. The use of electronics on the album is particularly striking, to the point where we have begun to hope for a full album with just purely electronic minimal wave arrangements. The opening number "Feral Love" is engineered upon a hammering blastbeat although the volume is dialed down beneath the infernal guitar noises and her bleak siren song. "The Warden" is another electronic track that hypnotically cycles through chorale vocals, a taut dulcimer riff, and sparkle-clad rhythms. Yeah, it's brighter than anything else she's done, but there's plenty of doomified plod, bad-ass villain vibes, and ravenously empty folk tunes that haunt the rest of the album. Time to break out the black nail polish again.
Reissued once again! Here's what we said the first time around:
Yeah, she covered a Burzum song before releasing this album, but there's a hell of lot more to Chelsea Wolfe than copping a few moves from Mr. Vikernes. This Los Angeles minstrel has quipped she writes "spiritual realm funeral songs," and that's a pretty apt description given the acoustic guitar dourness, doom-laden atmospheres, grimy production values, and witchy goth-folk vocals that come together as the perfect hybridization of Zola Jesus and PJ Harvey. Her arrangements are pretty stripped down with little more than acoustic and / or electric guitar occasionally fleshed out with a rhythm section. She puts an outsider folk spin on her songwriting, as if she were penning acoustic black metal songs channeled through the freak-folk mysticism of Topanga Canyon. This also has a lot of similarities to the apocalyptic folk stylings of Death In June / Sol Invictus / Current 93 circa 1992 although Chelsea Wolfe is far less precious with the song and is not afraid to let some blood spill as she violently scrapes her knuckles on the guitar strings. In so many ways, what she does is so much better than what Douglas P and Tony Wakeford could conjure through their cryptic folk songs. The haunting "Cousins Of The Antichrist" is one track that effortlessly exceeds the songwriting achievements of those aforementioned British esoteric musicians, with the urgency of the violent strum on her acoustic guitar stuck in minor chords buttressing the soaring vocals.
Similarly, "Deep Talks" works its blown out 4-track recording of her grab-every-string-on-the-guitar-and-pull method of playing along with her wordless vocal delivery that's as impressionistic as Grouper, but with Grouper's narcolepsy replaced by night terrors. "Moses" (a track which interestingly follows "Cousins Of The Antichrist") plays on stomping Southern spirituals but turned ashen and turgid in pace and demeanor. And the album's closing number "Widow" is a bleak, half-whispered song mired in morose atmospheres and just the right amount of narcotic smoke and exhumed-from-a-swamp 4 track production values, sounding a lot like the criminally underappreciated Corpses As Bedmates (whose sole album was reissued under an entirely different band name - Venus Handcuffs, probably worsening things for the band, but we digress). The short of it is that Chelsea Wolfe's The Grime And The Glow is fucking great, highly recommended!
Yeah, she covered a Burzum song before releasing this album, but there's a hell of lot more to Chelsea Wolfe than copping a few moves from Mr. Vikernes. This Los Angeles minstrel has quipped she writes "spiritual realm funeral songs," and that's a pretty apt description given the acoustic guitar dourness, doom-laden atmospheres, grimy production values, and witchy goth-folk vocals that come together as the perfect hybridization of Zola Jesus and PJ Harvey. Her arrangements are pretty stripped down with little more than acoustic and / or electric guitar occasionally fleshed out with a rhythm section. She puts an outsider folk spin on her songwriting, as if she were penning acoustic black metal songs channeled through the freak-folk mysticism of Topanga Canyon. This also has a lot of similarities to the apocalyptic folk stylings of Death In June / Sol Invictus / Current 93 circa 1992 although Chelsea Wolfe is far less precious with the song and is not afraid to let some blood spill as she violently scrapes her knuckles on the guitar strings. In so many ways, what she does is so much better than what Douglas P and Tony Wakeford could conjure through their cryptic folk songs. The haunting "Cousins Of The Antichrist" is one track that effortlessly exceeds the songwriting achievements of those aforementioned British esoteric musicians, with the urgency of the violent strum on her acoustic guitar stuck in minor chords buttressing the soaring vocals.
Similarly, "Deep Talks" works its blown out 4-track recording of her grab-every-string-on-the-guitar-and-pull method of playing along with her wordless vocal delivery that's as impressionistic as Grouper, but with Grouper's narcolepsy replaced by night terrors. "Moses" (a track which interestingly follows "Cousins Of The Antichrist") plays on stomping Southern spirituals but turned ashen and turgid in pace and demeanor. And the album's closing number "Widow" is a bleak, half-whispered song mired in morose atmospheres and just the right amount of narcotic smoke and exhumed-from-a-swamp 4 track production values, sounding a lot like the criminally underappreciated Corpses As Bedmates (whose sole album was reissued under an entirely different band name - Venus Handcuffs, probably worsening things for the band, but we digress). The short of it is that Chelsea Wolfe's The Grime And The Glow is fucking great and marks another killer release in the growing catalogue of witchy releases by Pendu Sound, following an lp from Sasha Grey's Atelecine and a single from witch house maven Mater Suspiria Vision. Highly Recommended!
The Wolfgang Press' 1983 debut Burden Of Mules is one of the most curious albums from the annals of '80s post-punk. Dark, clunky, and quixotic on occasion, Burden of Mules has very little in common with the stylized retro-chic propulsion which has been favored by the likes of Interpol, Ladytron, Adult and other contemporary darlings from the '80s revivalist camp; thus, it's a little weird that 4AD would choose to reissue this album. I (Jim) am not going to complain, as I've cherished this album for years. The band had originally formed many years before the release of Burden Of Mules, but other projects such as Mass (yes, another band called Mass!), In Camera, and Rema Rema required the attention of the Wolfgang Press trio (Michael Allen, Andrew Grey, and Mark Cox). Something of an aggregate of The Birthday Party, Public Image Limited, and Tom Waits, The Wolfgang Press crafted weird noir-funk tunes through the alienated, aggressiveness of post-punk. Unlike the spastic energy of James Chance across the pond, London's Wolfgang Press mired their lust for atavistic funk in surrealistically tinged, cacophonous gloom, typified on Burden of Mules. Later on The Wolfgang Press' grooves become more and more pronounced, culminating in the vastly underrated album Bird Wood Cage before they devolved into a cheeseball parody of themselves. Regardless, Burden Of Mules remains a diamond in the rough for The Wolfgang Press with a case in point being the opening track "Lisa The Passion" with its tribal percusssive hammering coddled with an angelic swath of droning melodies. Elsewhere on the "Prostitutes 1 & 2," Michael Allen slinks along his bass and utters a disaffected croon about his subject matter being "the spice of life," whilst a Swordfishtrombone percussive clatter is extracted from drum machines and metallic junk. The album hardly fits in with what had been codified as the 4AD sound espoused by The Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil; but it's a sarcastic, challenging, morose, and very well done record nonetheless.
Man, I wish I didn't know how this was done... because it takes all of the mystery out of the sounds and also that it appears to be the same trick that Steven Stapleton employed on the Nurse With Wound album "Thunder Perfect Mind."
Uber-conceptualist Achim Wollscheid broadcast a collage on Radio X in Frankfurt, Germany, using their three Denon DN C680 cd players. These can be operated at the same time and are equipped with scan/search data-wheels that allows one to start or stop a cd at any given point. When moved while playing a cd, the wheels send the disc into a locked groove, which can be shifted by constantly turning the wheel (about 60 shifts will scan one second of playing time). Essentially the cd players had been used to generate rapid fire pulsing clicks, which Wollscheid intuitively collaged to form a glistening digital elegance in "Shifts." Cool.
This is a gorgeously sublime drone record reminiscent of Maeror Tri/Troum or Organum at times. Lots of bowed guitars, bowed cymbals, random found sounds (markets, rain, church), and guitars all looped into thick velvety drones, with clanging percussion
Astralwerks is betting a considerable amount of money that the 'bootleg' phenomenon that raged during the summer of 2002 hasn't completely died out, as they have obviously invested a considerable amount of money for Richard X to license all of the samples that land on his debut album "Richard X Presents His X-Factor Vol. 1." The bootleg or 'mash-up' aesthetic was a seemingly simple one, as an artist would take the a capella track of some overplayed pop song and layer it on top of the instrumental track of an equally overplayed pop song. Done well, it's a wonderfully subversive play between appropriated texts. Done badly, it's clumsy ironic drivel. Given the overwhelming number of those bootlegs that were dreadful, this is an artform which demands much more panache than your average artschool ironist can muster. Hiding behind this enigmatic moniker as well as the semi-legit project the Sugarbabes, Richard X proved he was the best of the bootleggers, with his deadly perfect mash-up of "Being Boiled" by Human League and "No Scrubs" by TLC which gave the appearance that absolutely nothing was done to either track in order for the two melodies to come together.
With the crackdown from the RIAA on those evil pirates who download illegal music from the net (insert sarcastic facial gesture and eyerolling here), there is absolutely no way Richard X could get away with the schtick that got him his credibility. As a result "Richard X Presents His X-Factor Vol. 1" is something of a compromise record; however, it is a deranged pop masterpiece that is simultaneously a piss-take, a send-up, and a perfect homage to terminal fashion victims, electroclash trainspotters, and ravenous consumers of the mainstream entertainment industry. The album opens with a reprise of the "Being Boiled" mash-up; however, this time Richard commissioned the R&B group Liberty X for a rendition of the Chaka Khan classic "Ain't Nobody," and highlights include a very clever version of Burt Bacharach's "Walk On By" with Flying Lizards' vocalist Deborah Evans-Strickland offering the same deadpan vocal delivery she gave to the Lizards' new wave classic cover of "Money." Some of the references are a bit more obscure, delving into diva house territory with a pretty straight remake of Thelma Houston's "You Used To Hold Me So Tight." The one major dud on the album is the cornball crap track from electroclash dork Tiga, who breathily recites 'you better let me love you' at best sounding like a overly cologned playboy with only one sleazy pick up line, at worst like a date rapist. Overlook this one track, and you'll find that Richard X has done very well with the limitations set before him. It's certainly not the free world you might think it is.
Iannis Xenakis took up residence in the GRM studios in 1957 during the time when it was run by Pierre Schaefer. Over the next five years, Xenakis composed a handful of works, most of which have made their way onto this Editions Mego produced anthology, including "Concrete PH" (1958), "Orient-Occident" (1960), "Diamorphosis" (1957-1958), and "Bohor" (1962). Commissioned as the sound design for the 1958 Phillips Pavilion constructed by the acclaimed architect Le Corbussier, "Concrete PH" was sourced entirely from the sound of burning charcoal, with the crackling sounds being sped up and overdubbed via tape to enhance its brittle tactility in a dense cloud of tumbling sound. This simple piece of audio construction doesn't even reach 3 minutes in length, but is one of those early pieces of electronic music that has inspired countless adventurous musicians over the intervening six decades. Take your pick: Faust, Einsturzende Neubauten, Small Cruel Party, Scott Walker, etc. "Orient-Occident" is a recomposed extract from the soundtrack that Xenakis provided to UNESCO commissioned film by Enrico Fulchignoni. Here, Xenakis builds his piece through the sounds of bowed gongs, with aggregated crescendos of dense metallic reverberation which he intuitively balances with ambient rumblings and radiophonic sine-wave flutterings. Again, this is a very instructive piece of electronic music, not only an obvious precursor to Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie but also to Stockhausen's Mikrophonie which was begun a few years later in 1964. "Diamorphosis" is probably the closest that Xenakis ever came to producing a true musique concrete piece with its jagged start-stop assemblage and almost formalist, spider-web like passages whose loose interpretation of serialism serves him very well. "Bohor" was the last piece that Xenakis composed at GRM, and he dedicated the piece to Pierre Schaefer, who did not appreciate the piece whatsoever. Do keep in mind that Schaefer also didn't care of Eliane Radigue's work with feedback and minimalism, so the attack-softened clamorings from various tuned pieces of metal into a static amalgam is actually not that far from the maximalist / minimalist approach of Organum and the denser moments of early Andrew Chalk. Again some three decades before either were beginning their careers! Much of this work has been long out of print, even on CD, so kudos to Editions Mego for reintroducing these seminal recordings.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Attention all you avantgarde electronic music fans! Important reissue alert! Iannis Xenakis' "Persepolis" was originally commisioned in 1971 as large-scale sound installation for the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of the Arts in Iran. "Persepolis" -- Xenakis' longest electro-acoustic composition -- originally involved 8 channels of dense electro-acoustic material broadcast through the vast complex of the ruined Palaces of Persepolis along with a massive display of arclights, fireworks, and bonfires. Even without the visual explosiveness of the original performance (which we are amusingly told is somehow made up for by the presence of 16 page booklet in this release), "Persepolis" is a challenging and evocative piece of electro-acoustic music. Xenakis arranges slow tectonic rumbles and rough granular trebliness with extended passages of what could have been the bowed metal of Organum if Jackman et. al. were tumbling down a flight of stairs. In the liner notes, Xenakis explains that these complex noises correspond to the history of Iran as transcribed through a system of hermetic hieroglyphics. This history, as turbulent micromirror of the world's history, is elliptically described in a series of violent clashes and explosions. For this metaphor, Xenakis the Greek found himself in a bit of predicament as Alexander the Greek was responsible for the obliteration of the Palace of Persepolis where this performance was taking place. Regardless, "Persepolis" engages the visceral and the physical in a way that no other academic / musique concrete / electro-acoustic / minimalist piece has ever done before. It's frightening how powerful this piece of music is, even to one familiar with more recent massive electronic displays by MB, Merzbow, and Organum.
Situated somewhere near Cold Cave, Zola Jesus, and Blank Dogs, Xeno & Oaklander offer another fantastic distillation of dark-eyed synth-pop from a previous decade. A duo comprised of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride, Xeno & Oaklander eschew digital technologies in favor of analogue synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines, applying these instruments to the ghostly rhythmic electronics of minimal wave bands such as Absolute Body Control or Snowy Red. Less obtuse references would be early Human League, Xymox, and Depeche Mode; but no matter where you want to pin the influences, X&O are looking back to the European stylings of romantic electronica that dates somewhere between 1982 and 1986. Like Cold Cave, Xeno & Oaklander have made an appearance at the No Fun Festival in 2009, probably being one of the acts that some of the stalwart noiseniks must have hated because of their comparatively pretty songs.
There is something golden and polished to the mechanoid sequences and electrical rhythms on Sentinelle, which stands as the 'proper' debut album for Xeno & Oaklander after a cd-r micro-edition and some choice tracks on Wierd's [sic] first two collections of analogue electronic music. Throughout the album, sad electronic melodies are tightly bound around repetitive phrases and spry post-disco drum programming, with the vocals alternating between both McBride and Wendelbo (the latter singing in English and French). The album has the feel that it could be a stand in as a soundtrack to the silent film Metropolis, with its accompanying aesthetics of art-deco modernism tinged with noir shadows and gleaming bursts of reflected light. Despite the obvious allusions to the past, Xeno & Oaklander seem to have wedged themselves between all of their influences and mustered something that they can claim as their own. Very well done!
Xex was the experimental synthpop creation of three high-school misfits living in central New Jersey during the mid-'70s, having survived their teen years of suburban boredom with plenty of drugs and eye-opening excursions to New York. Liberated by the spirit of punk, this outfit - pseudonymously known as Waw Pierogi, Thumbalina Gugielmo, and Alex Zander (later joined by Jon-Boy Diode and David Anderson) - took up the task of infusing a smarty-pants cynicism to hyper-primitive arrangements on a small assortment of synths and drum machines. No guitars whatsoever, the sound of Xex is one of skewed melodicism and incessant repetition. This combined with a typically monotone vocal sensibility put Xex in the same synthpunk orbit as The Units and Crash Course In Science. It's a very American sound, to look back upon all of these records. In Europe, the new wave and synthpop was far more self-possessed, even amongst the DIY circles, but for a certain subset in the States, the nerds had become emboldened in punk to use science and math as a spasmodic, future-shock means for nihilist poetics and cathartic release - hence, Devo, Dark Day, Nervous Gender, the aforementioned Crash Course In Science, and Xex. With the exception of Primitive Calculators and Severed Heads in Australia, there's hardly a parallel anywhere else in the world to this synthpunk sound; and Xex were certainly exceptional at it.
Group Xex was the only record they released, although the band recorded a second album but never released it (unfortunately the tapes of that second album had deteriorated beyond repair). Self-released in 1980, the album was sold pretty much exclusively in Manhattan and North Jersey, with an edition of a 1000 copies disappearing quickly. The album did get a cd reish in 1995 after Tom Smith championed the record after discovering it in the vaults at WFMU. It's a very quizzical album of purposefully simple electronic tunes played upon whipcrack drum machines and minimally percolating synths matched by the alternatinge female and male vocals, which are always thin, reedy, and metallic. Thumbalina's girly vocals bounce through the motorik synthpop ditty "Fashion Hurts" whose singsonginess is immediately countered by the unwavering robotic monotone that Pierogi presents on the cybernetic "You Think", and the grim, paranoiac poetry on "SNGA" (which stands for Soviet Nerve Gas Attack).
Another great find from the always impressive Dark Entries label! Definitely for fans of Devo and the Units. Limited to 500 copies with a great looking new wave booklet with lyrics, a band history, and some amusing tidbits thrown in for good measure.
Japanese duo Xinlisupreme have been touted by their label Fat Cat as a mix of My Bloody Valentine, Jesus & Mary Chain, and Merzbow! Fat Cat has done well to preload our expectations with three advanced references to avant-rock history, but it has to be
