Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
Cultural Amnesia would have certainly disappeared entirely, but one of the band's earliest supporters was an 18 year old kid named Geoff Rushton, who later changed his name to John Balance when he formed Coil in 1983 (the same year that Cultural Amnesia ceased activities). Cultural Amnesia managed three cassettes, some compilation tracks, and a half-finished album during that time period, with one of those cassettes being released through Rushton's Hearsay And Heresy label. In all likelihood, Coil completists had come across these cassettes and brought them to light over two decades later. Vinyl On Demand was responsible for one of the anthologies of Cultural Amnesia material, but the better collection was Enormous Savages first released on vinyl by Anna Logue in 2006. This cd version through Klanggalerie flushes out the comp with five tracks recorded in recent years, now that they've gotten back together.
Had it not been for their early demise, this was a band that could have followed in the footsteps of Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, Dome, and Cabaret Voltaire circa 1981, as a blank austerity followed through the eccentric darkness grafted onto post-punk songs bristling with inventive if cheap electronics. Choppy sparkplug guitars influenced by Keith Levene's work on PiL's Metal Box punctuate the synthetic melodies, drum machinations, and motorik electronics. Lyrically, these are abject tales of blood, scars, alienation, and British misery, with some of the lyrics penned by Rushton himself. Those painfully eloquent songs are prescient of what Rushton was to bring to Coil's early work on Scatology, but they serve Cultural Amnesia very well on their own. The band had reformed in 2000, and offered 5 new tracks, which actually seem to pick up right where they left off, moving more towards the Pop Group's muscular grooves and fidgety funk, with the same Spartan tape recording which dominated their early work. A very welcome document from Britain's cassette culture.
We would have to be forgiven for missing out on The Cultural Decay from a couple years back. After all, there are eighty-gazillion lost and recently rediscovered post-punk, minimal-wave, and art-rock obscurities from all around the world; but this short-lived Belgian post-punk group from the early 80s is something special and fortunately, Sacred Bones did take notice and should be commended for finally making this available.
From 1980 to 1982, The Cultural Decay only played a handful of gigs, all in Belgium; and they released two singles, one of which was produced by the Revolting Cocks founder Luc Van Acker. From the onset, it's pretty clear that Joy Division was the favorite band of The Cultural Decay, as the guitar and bass interplay of jagged rhythmic guitar chops coupled with loping low-end bass melodies mirrors that of Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. To be fair, this Belgian band did not have Ian Curtis as a front-man; and they relied more on a snarled monotone delivery similar to those found in the Buzzcocks and Crisis. For those who know fellow Belgian post-punkers Siglo XX, the sound of The Cultural Decay will be very familiar and arguably better! The songs are all darkly tinged post-punk tunes clouded by a dour atmosphere that the band urgently pushes against. Given that this collection features the two studio produced singles and a bunch of 4-track demos, the production quality is a bit uneven; but hey, that's DIY for you! It certainly doesn't detract from the songs themselves, which just get a little rough around the edges.
FYI, The Cultural Decay ran a small label themselves, and were the the original home of that incredible AA single that we reviewed not that long ago. Recommended, for sure!
PS: The cd (not here yet, unfortunately) features FIVE extra tracks not on the lp!
Seventeen Seconds from 1980. Faith from 1981. Pornography from 1982. These three Cure albums marked a steady descent from jet-black detachment into one of the most violently claustrophobic visions of all pop music. It was a trilogy of records that The Cure have always hoped to reproduce, and with the exception of their masterful Disintegration, this was a goal never attained. You may recall that several months back, Rhino Records reissued the first Cure album, Three Imaginary Boys, with plenty of demo material and live tracks from the same period to the acclaim of Cure fans around the world. Well, Rhino have done it again in reissuing this trilogy of goth-pop landmarks, again with bonus material of live cuts, studio outtakes, alternate versions, and rare cuts.
If for whatever reason you are waffling about which one of these reissues to get (which you shouldn't be!), the one to get is Faith. This is not because Faith is the best of the three records (that's too close to call), but because of Robert Smith wisely included the soundtrack to "Carnage Visors" as one of the rare tracks on this double CD set. "Carnage Visors" was an animated film produced by Ric Gallup as the opening act for the Faith tour back in 1981. 27 minutes long and entirely instrumental, it's a lugubious piece grounded by an elliptical, moody kaleidoscope of Simon Gallup's basslines, accentuated by a simple drum machine and chiming guitars from Robert Smith. If Rothko had extended their swansong "Roads Become Rivers" into a half an hour composition, it would be pretty close to the majesty of "Carnage Visors", which had first appeared as the b-side to the cassette version of Faith back in the '80s, and hasn't seen the light of day appart from unauthorized bootlegs. Lest you think that this is the only reason to get the double disc set, the original set of tracks of Faith is an exceptional manifestation of manic depression with the undeniably bubbly pop jangle of "Primary" set against the appropriately titled "The Drowning Man" and the equally somber "All Cats Are Grey."
Isn't it always about a girl? Unless boys are your thing, and then the rhetorical question would be 'isn't it always about a boy?' Well, for me (Jim) it was girls; and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was the soundtrack to many a teenage romance. In hindsight, these relationships were all doomed from the start; but at the time, youthful idealism and the magnetic bond between two social outcasts was more than enough reason to think that any of these love affairs would last forever. Of course, the original cassette of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me that was played over and over and over again in balmy nights during Tennessee summers is long gone, replaced by an equally well worn piece of vinyl. While the claustrophobic oppression of Pornography and the wintery sparseness of Faith marked The Cure's prior dourness, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was their breakout album as a kaleidoscope of emotional instability, just the perfect recipe for a couple of arty misfit teenagers. There are schmaltzy love ballads. There are tempestuous firestorms of churning guitar psychedelia. There are mope rock epics. And there are two bona fide Top 10 hits on the album.
Listening to the album now as I'm well into my 30s, I find myself occasionally embarrassed... not entirely because of what Robert Smith is crooning about, but because of the memories that the album conjures up from the past. I'll spare you the details of my teenage relationships (for both of our sakes), but as for remastered and repackaged reissue of Kiss Me, it holds up pretty well. To be completely honest, I probably don't need to hear "Why Can't I Be You?" and "Just Like Heaven" again; but The Cure has crafted plenty of mood-altering gems on this album darkly lysergic tracks such as "The Kiss" and "The Snakepit" interpersed with more goth-pop delirium as on "Hot Hot Hot" or "Catch." As on the previous Cure reissues, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me comes with a CD of bonus material. Unfortunately, there aren't too many great tracks to behold from the live material and demo versions... Really what the hell happened to all of the b-sides to the singles? That quibble aside, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is now available again; and it's probably one of those albums that you already know whether you need it (again) or not.
Seventeen Seconds from 1980. Faith from 1981. Pornography from 1982. These three Cure albums marked a steady descent from jet-black detachment into one of the most violently claustrophobic visions of all pop music. It was a trilogy of records that The Cure have always hoped to reproduce, and with the exception of their masterful Disintegration, this was a goal never attained. You may recall that several months back, Rhino Records reissued the first Cure album, Three Imaginary Boys, with plenty of demo material and live tracks from the same period to the acclaim of Cure fans around the world. Well, Rhino have done it again in reissuing this trilogy of goth-pop landmarks, again with bonus material of live cuts, studio outtakes, alternate versions, and rare cuts.
Where Seventeen Seconds and Faith are clearly born of the same sensibility with grey, rainy production spaciously drizzled throughout archetypal mope rock tracks, Pornography is a considerably different beast. Smoldering with intensity and claustrophobic to a fault, Pornography is easily the darkest album that The Cure has ever produced. From the doomy opener "One Hundred Years" to the title track with cascading drum machine marches and relentless blasts of guitar noise, Robert Smith unleashes an anger in his self-loathing that doesn't manifest itself anywhere else in his signature gloomy romanticism.
Seventeen Seconds from 1980. Faith from 1981. Pornography from 1982. These three Cure albums marked a steady descent from jet-black detachment into one of the most violently claustrophobic visions of all pop music. It was a trilogy of records that The Cure have always hoped to reproduce, and with the exception of their masterful Disintegration, this was a goal never attained. You may recall that several months back, Rhino Records reissued the first Cure album, Three Imaginary Boys, with plenty of demo material and live tracks from the same period to the acclaim of Cure fans around the world. Well, Rhino have done it again in reissuing this trilogy of goth-pop landmarks, again with bonus material of live cuts, studio outtakes, alternate versions, and rare cuts.
Seventeen Seconds began the creative partnership between Robert Smith and bassist Simon Gallup which is essentially the foundation for all of the great work from The Cure. Where the previous bassist Michael Dempsey gave The Cure a spry, punchy sound that fit more in line with contemporaries like The Jam, Gallup's lumbering basslines presented themselves as a counterpoint to Smith's manic-depressive jangle. While much needs to be said for Smith's unmistakable whining voice, hurricane-shock hair, and smeared eyeliner in defining Goth rock, there is a clear reason why The Cure has been the salvation to millions of dour kids everywhere: Smith and Gallup came up with some damn great songs. "A Forest" has long been a favorite for anyone who at one time or another sported a little black lipstick, and one cannot overlook the minimalist pop bleakness of tracks like "Play For Today," "Three," and the title track. Of the rarities on Seventeen Seconds, the most intriguing tracks come from the side project Cult Hero, which produced more punky-pop tracks similar to those heard on Three Imaginary Boys. Along with this, you'll find plenty of live tracks and a couple of studio demo tracks.
Well, it's about fuckin' time (psst, you know it's a special occasion if it makes Cup swear)! The Cure's Three Imaginary Boys debut album has finally been reissued, just in time to cleanse our ears of the disappointment of their latest album. In comparison to their recent studio-concocted big 'raw' sound, T.I.B. needed no high-tech bells and whistles to effectively convey its gritty immediacy. Yes, it's occasionally clunky and often imperfect, but it's a great snapshot of the band back in its 1979 unpolished adolescence with their bare bones electric guitar, bass, drums and vocals (pre-synthesizer) set-up. In contrast to their playing chops, their songwriting chops were already pretty darn solid. Actually this is the very first time the album has been released in the U.S., and thus begins Rhino Records' resurrection of The Cure's long-yearned-for catalog of seminal albums. Hurrah! If this remastered and expanded edition is any indication, we're in for some pretty great rarities-type surprises. It comes with a big ol' booklet and a 'bonus' disc filled with twenty surprisingly punky demos, outtakes, live tracks and such from back in their formative years -- including a demo version of what is undisputably one of their best pop songs "Boys Don't Cry". Many of the recordings are really really lo-fi and murky, but Robert Smith and Co.'s magic shines through. Cure fans rejoice!
"In a foreign town, in a foreign land, reaping time has come." Thus spake David Tibet on the 2nd album from his heretically-minded project Current 93. Those words became commonplace within the Current 93 pantheon of poetic allusions toward Tibet's horrifying visions of the end of the world. While his tireless research and spiritual development has found Tibet nowadays with a self-constructed theology that includes elements of Christian doctrine, Coptic Gnosticism, Crowley's magick, Buddhist transcendentalism, and far more esoteric subjects, the apocalyptic visions for Tibet in 1985 were centered firmly between dual, conflicting personalities: Christ and Crowley. These two play out in the Current 93 drama built not upon the taut acoustic folk as found on Tibet's more well known constructions, but through a darkly hallucinatory collage of monastic chanting looped against thudding percussive blows that are less structural and more of a protracted stomp of corporeal punishment. Tibet has always relied upon musical accompaniments for his visionary work, and Dogs Blood Rising is no different as Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound deftly shapes the slashing feedback and growling utterances into a hellish orchestration for Tibet's bellowing not only for the Antichrist but also for the weeping Christ who suffers till the end of time in his own theological reasoning. As commonplace as Tibet's voice is on all of the Current 93 albums, he has recruited a number of guest vocalists, including Steve Ignorant of Crass and Diana Rogerson, serving to de-center the album further. The five disquieting collages of Dogs Blood Rising are totally the stuff of nightmares, long standing as one of the pinnacles of industrial culture. Now back in print on vinyl with reproductions of the original fliers from the first edition of the album, but probably not for long!
Run by the former Deerhoof bassist Rob Fisk, the Free Porcupine Society has specialized in packaging all of their releases in msyterious paper sleeves that he's hand decorated with random paint streaks splattered across silkscreened illustrations of clunky anthropomorphic figures. Musically, the label defines their releases as "no wave hermit folk" and "eco-terrorist hobbit rock," with releases by Tom Carter, Scorces, Xiu Xiu, Badgerlore, and others. So at least when it comes to the music, a reissue of the pagan-folk classic Earth Covers Earth by Current 93 is a logical one. But when it comes to the meticulously construsted imagery of Current 93, the craft-cornered artwork of the Free Porcupine Society is a slightly mismatched pairing. That said, Fisk has certainly adjusted the idosyncratic design style of the FPS in repackaging the original artwork -- with its homage to the Incredible String Band as the cover photo and a plethora of drawings from Current 93's David Tibet. And considering that this is the first time that Earth Covers Earth has been in print for many years, vinyl or otherwise; this is a very welcome reissue.
Originally released in 1988, Earth Covers Earth was the second album in which Tibet ventured down the path of "apocalyptic folk", after numerous records of frightening hallucinations and occultish chants. Languid and mournful, Earth Covers Earth taps into the eccentricities and shadows that haunt the traditions of British folk music, best typified in the work of Shirley Collins and the soundtrack to the Wicker Man. Tibet's own fascination with Christian Gnosticism (at the time, a fascination just in its infancy) and his ability to surround himself with very talented musicians provided an exceptional framework for this Earth Covers Earth, which ranks as one of the most well developed albums of Current 93's death-folk facade. Tony Wakeford (Sol Invictus) and Douglas P (Death In June) provided the melancholic acoustic guitar strum, while Rose MacDowell occasionally delivers her creepy sing-song vocals alongside the ubiqitous Tibet waxing poetic about the existential collapse around him. There are reasons why Current 93 has such an iconic status, and Earth Covers Earth is one of them.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ah, to be scared by Current 93 is a very good thing. The last time Tibet and co. put aside their trademarked renaissance faire folk was with their first collaboration with Lovecraftian horror novelist Thomas Ligotti. "I Have A Special Plan..." is the second collaboration between C93 and Ligotti to spine tingling results. Tibet recites a story written by Ligotti just for this release with Stapleton and Christoph Heemann providing the creepy droning and mutations on Tibet's voice. The only fault is the length, a short 22 minutes.
Current 93's epic Inmost Light Trilogy had originally been issued back in the mid-'90s as three separate releases, with the two short program discs Where The Long Shadows Fall and The Stars Are Marching Sadly Home bracketing the full length album All The Pretty Little Horses. But through a tragic turn of events that has been recounted here and many other places, the distribution company that released those discs went out of business, rendering this (and pretty much the entire Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Coil, and Sol Invictus back catalogues) out of print. Fortunately, a hearty few have lovingly reissued much of that material, Jnana being one of those labels; and it's Jnana who has thoughtfully reissued what David Tibet exclaimed as his "Hallucinatory Patripassianist Song" as a triple cd set.
Where The Long Shadows Fall opens with a stately loop of a beautifully sad / eternally holy female choral melody, obviously taken from an old piece of vinyl as the crackle and hiss of the surface noise provides a familiar antiquated patina. Additional baroque vocal melodies intertwine with a chiming 12-string acoustic guitar strum which slowly progresses with the plod of a heavy doom track, minus the downtuned distortion; and then of course, there's David Tibet reciting his trademarked revelations surrounding his heretical beliefs about Christ, Satan, and the end of the world as we know it. Where The Long Shadows Fall is an open ended piece, built upon illusion and impression. For the elegantly mangled nursery rhymes that Current 93 is known for, look to the second disc All The Pretty Little Horses. Here, David Tibet conducts business mostly as a duet with the acoustic guitar of Michael Cashmore, who has done more to define Tibet's apocalyptic take on British folk than any other guitarist (including Ben Chasny, Tony Wakeford, Douglas P, etc.). These tunes are sparsely arranged with occasional flourishes of electronic manipulation and baroque instrumentation. Along with Cashmore, other noteworthy guest appearance include Nick Cave and Shirley Collins.
The final disc The Stars Are Marching Sadly Home is one of the darker recordings that Current 93 has made since Tibet abandoned the dirge collages of tape loops and cackling voice which dominated his very first recordings. That same vocal loop which opens Where The Long Shadows Fall is the backbone to this atmospheric work, although it has been shrouded in reverb and pushed into the background of whispering drones and shadowy sounds. Tibet's voice growls with the aid of plenty of timestretched tricks that perfectly augment Tibet's already creepy voice.
If you didn't have the opportunity to pick these up when they originally came out, you really should now, and spend some time with these recordings as they have clearly aged well over the past decade and stand amongst the best of the Current 93 recordings.
Nature Unveiled was Current 93's debut, with the subtitle "Antichrist Revealed." As much as C93 has evolved since 1984 when David Tibet began this project, Current 93 emerged fully formed with much of the conceptual groundwork laid out for an entire lifetime of Tibet's research into occult mysticism and heretical Christianity. This album was conceived from beginning to end as a nightmare, with all of the exaggerated sounds collaged in harsh relief against a doomscape of the blackest of sounds. Tibet employed a handful of musicians with ties to Industrial Culture -- Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound (who has gone on to aid and abed Tibet on most of the C93 records), John Murphy (once of SPK and Lustmord's ensemble), and even Annie Anxiety of Crass. But even the most abstracted sounds of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV often related or at least exposed some sort of relationship to technology, whilst Current 93 was all about creating a bleak soundtrack collaged from monastic chants, monstrous growls, and bellowing clusters of low end rumble, all coated with brimstone, sulfur, and ash. Throughout the album, David Tibet moans and spits repetitive chants that "Maldoror is dead," with no chance for hope and no escape. Perhaps even more so today with so many blackened ambient projects and feral noise technicians about, Nature Unveiled is an ever impressive document and a chilling visionary masterpiece.
United Jnana has reissued Nature Unveiled in one of its earliest forms, complete with the original liner notes, a small poster, and the bonus split 7" between Current 93 and Nurse With Wound. This probably won't be around for very long, so don't dally on this one!
The 1991 companion release to a Nurse With Wound album of the same name, "Thunder Perfect Mind" is a stately album of C93's bleak reinterpretations of occultish '60s UK folk. Joined by The Bevis Frond's Nick Soloman on a few tracks along with other guests including Shirley Collins, this rather sorrowful sounding album from Current 93 has a definitively psychedelic overtone to it. One of the recommended Current 93 releases, now newly reissued and remastered in a fancy double cd digipack format -- the extra disc consisting of different live/studio versions of songs from the album proper.
After over a decade of crafting a persona as the Gnostic court minstrel, David Tibet made a welcome return to the 'culture of nightmares' that ran through the first Current 93 records with the 1997 collabortive album / book with horror novelist Thomas Ligotti. The title itself comes from a recurring theme that Tibet brought to those early Current 93 recordings and also made their way into some Death In June albums. Cross-referencing various forms of apocalyptic literature, that unknown foreign town is the inception place for the apocalypse, with Tibet announcing the prophetic statement that "reaping time has come." While most apocalyptic literature (including the often misunderstood Book of Revelation) offers a vision of existential hope to a world shrouded in despair, Tibet's apocalyptic language concentrates on the descriptive details of how the world might end, instead of why the world is falling apart. Furthermore, these details dwell with the subjective viewpoint of a protagonist inflicted by madness, feverish hallucinations, wholly encompassing fear, and the awe-inspiring nature of terror; thus, the objective truth about the coming of the end of the world is left unanswered.
Thomas Ligotti, admittedly one of Tibet's favorite writers, has built an entire career on awakening the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft through ghastly tales of ancient demonic forces and hidden archons plotting against the rest of the world. For their collaboration "In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land," the two divided the labor evenly amongst their stonger talents with Ligotti providing a novella and Tibet's Current 93 producing the atmospheric soundtrack. Ligotti's contribution is easily the best that I've encountered of his work, favoring a Victorian sensibility of horror based not so much on the supernatural, but on the quiet whisperings of insanity. Current 93's soundtrack is a perfect fit with Ligotti's text, centered mostly upon the luminous bleak drones constructed by Current 93's line up of Tibet, Christoph Heemann, and Steven Stapleton. As a whole, the Current 93 soundtrack casts a gloomy tone, punctuated occasionally by razor-like slashes of treated noise and vocal interjections from various characters in the Ligotti text, read by Tibet, Andria Degens, and Shirley Collins. The return of Current 93's dark collage work previously found on Tibet's early masterpieces "Dogs Blood Rising" and "Nature Unveilled" is technically more refined than those rough hewn recordings, and are just as effective.
Originally, "In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land" was published as a hardbound book with an accompanying cd. This, the second edition, has been condensed down to a smaller CD-sized book. Other than that, there are no changes to what is easily one of the highlights to both artists' careers.
Of all the dark, drone-y, druggy synthiness that's been popping up lately (and believe us, it's a LOT), this lp from mysterious Los Angeles duo D.A. is most definitely our favorite. A heady collection of dark and dreary, lush and spaced out sci-fi synth creep that tapes into classic Goblin soundtrack music, the best John Carpenter scores, and mixes in plenty of modern lysergic lo-fi experimentation, conjuring up some of the most tense and dramatic and hypnotic sounds we've heard in ages.
Like some strange mix of Zombi and Expo '70, but with a hint of new age-y drift that makes these songs sound like they could only be the music from some lost eighties film, only the visuals could never hope to match this haunting otherworldly music.
Looped synths are looped into slow shifting swells, pulsing over a bed of softly swirling minor key tension, alien tones, blurred buzz and dense shimmery drones, shot through with moody melodies, laced with super spare abstract percussion and everything wrapped in a gauzy warmth, total kraut drone new age soundtrack bliss.
The second side changes gear toward the end, evolving into a sound akin to Godspeed meets Zombi meets SUNNO))), a thick thick buzz wrapped around twisted looped melodies and all sorts of simulated haunted forest sound effects, growing ever more harrowing, ominous and dramatic, and surprisingly, yet subtly heavy.
The flipside is much more minimal and abstract than the A side, but no less intense and mysterious. Reverbed piano is sent drifting into blackness, tons and tons of space, softly wheezing organs, deep muted tones, that distinctly eighties sounding bass pulse, long thick swirls of softly distorted synth buzz, tinkling high end tones, all of that gives way to another thick, and surprisingly heavy space synth drone, a starlit slow motion swirl, abstract, super space-y, dark and emotional, tense and INtense, it still boggles the mind that filmmakers aren't constantly on the lookout for groups like this, whose cinematic soundtrack ambience is way more compelling and original and ruling than 90 percent of the music that actually ends up in movies. But who needs the movies, best to just throw this on, close your eyes, and let these sounds ooze into your consciousness, creating a fantastical and unreal world all for you, populated with far out sights, worthy of these far out sounds.
Incredible hand silk screened, ultra thick card stock sleeves, LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Ah-ha! The first D.A.F. record! And boy, was it quite a surprise to hear this one. D.A.F. began in 1978 as a post-krautrock outfit from Dusseldorf, with Robert Gorl, Kurt "Pyrolator" Dahlke, Wolfgang Spelmans, Michael Kemner, and Gabi Delgado originally calling themselves You; but with another German band snatching up the name and releasing the mighty fine album Electric Day in the same year, they decided upon Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft as the new name. A couple of band members were not all too pleased with Gabi Delgado's vocals and lyrics, and he was promptly sacked after their first attempt in the studio. Delgado returned to the band a year later when a few of his detractors left, and he became the iconic frontman for the stripped down D.A.F. with Robert Gorl. That incarnation of D.A.F. spawned an aggressive synth-punk sound that dominated the more abrasive side of new wave throughout the '80s; but this instrumental, motorik album is an entirely different beast. While electronics do make some interesting punctuations to the D.A.F. sound, they were fundamentally a damaged art-rock band with a rhythm section well versed in the classic Can, Neu!, and early Kraftwerk records from earlier in the decade, but they also exploded with slashing guitars, pummelling basslines, and an aggressive angularity that responded to the American contemporaries like DNA and Pere Ubu. Could this influence from American degenerate art-rock be an explanation for the name of the band? In any case, threads of this first D.A.F. record certainly look forward to the likes of Sonic Youth and Circle. The album is a collection of 22 untitled extracts from what seemed to be an exhausting recording session of constantly accelerating rhythmic marches with jagged-toothed guitar riffs that get pretty heavy and churning at times (even reminding us of instru-metallers Gore!), with plenty of interludes of amplifier feedback and spark-plug noise bursts. Part krautrock, part no-wave and new-wave, all rad. Not what we would have expected from their first album, but this is totally an excellent record!
Hands In The Dark was the first single for Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day, originally released in 1979 on the Lust/Unlust sublabel Strike It From The Records. At that time, Crutchfield had recently parted ways with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori, with whom he had founded the legendary no wave trio DNA; and he envisioned Dark Day as being something of an inversion of the gender paradigm by employing women to play drums and guitar while he relegated himself to the synths. His idea didn't entirely work out exactly how he wanted throughout the entire history of Dark Day; but he was able to recruit Nina Canal (who later went on to found UT) and Nancy Arlen (from Mars... the no wave band, not the planet) for the earliest incarnation of the band whose line-up only managed this one single. The lead track is a quintessential no wave song with Canal's hard-plucked guitar tones and Arlen's weirdo percussive march of sporadic rhythmic splutters on the snare syncopated with the steady kick drum pulse; but all of this serves as a backdrop to the creepy synth and vocal melodies from Crutchfield. It was this melody that inspired the Chromatics to re-invent the song as a sultry, faux italian-disco number; and we'll give credit where credit is due, stating that both versions are totally rad. "Invisible Man" - the B side on the original single is found on the A side here, and follows the savant drum-pulse, bloody fingered guitar work, and Crutchfield's serpentine voice & synth arrangements. On this pressing from the esteemed Dark Entries, the flipside features the side to the Trapped 12" which had 6 short excerpts of reworked synth lines from the Exterminating Angel lp. So, with this release, Dark Entries has issued everything that was done by Dark Day in the early '80s. As with the other Dark Day albums, this is a necessary reissue!
So cool! And cold wavey. A wonderfully produced piece of vinyl to replace those crappy downloads which have been bouncing around the internet for the past five or six years. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutchfield, who first worked with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks with whom to work. The second (and last) Dark Day record was recorded in 1982, with Crutchfield going into the studio with a bunch of cheap electronics and toy synthesizers with Bill Sack to flesh out the accompaniments on similar instruments. Their interlocking arpeggiations are punctuated with blooping electronics that are equal parts Trio and Kraftwerk with an underlying dread to the spiralling songs that detoured from Kraftwerk's utopian vision of man-machine hybrids and down a paranoid vision of man being at the mercy of his machines, no matter how innocent their intent. Dark Day's songs are insistent and catchy despite their utterly simple structures. "Metal Benders" and "Danger / Dance" are probably the closest thing to being 'hits' on the album as weird / anti-romantic variations of Young Marble Giants with whip crack rhythms and spectral pre-X-Files electronic whistling melodies. Coming out of the NYC No Wave scene helped craft Dark Day into a something other than neo-Romantic post-punk outfit with electronics. This was a wholly unique band, who never got the attention that many of their contemporaries. Kudos to Dark Entries once again on a splendid reissue!
Synth punk at its best! Here is the long overdue reissue of Dark Day's homage to the Luis Bunuel film of the same name. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutchfield who first worked with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks to work with.
On Exterminating Angel (originally released in 1980 on the Lust/Unlust imprint Infidelity), Crutchfield recruited Phil Kline and Barry Friar to flesh out the Dark Day sound. At the time, Kline was an emerging composer who had worked with Glenn Branca and at least here, he styles himself after Mark Ribot or Arto Lindsay with his expressive shards and bends of guitar melody; and Friar follows the tom-heavy patter that Nancy Arlen brought to Dark Day on the "Hands In The Dark" single. But Dark Day is truly Crutchfield's vision, with his heavily syncopated synth chords, elliptical repetitions, and spiral staircase ascensions in lieu of the traditional verse-chorus song. Crutchfield preferred to keep a very restrictive use of synth tones and filters, all the while crafting a very claustrophobic, horror-laden atmosphere. The inventiveness of his minimalist melodies and twisted lullaby-like structures are all the more impressive, perhaps only matched by Young Marble Giants or Suicide. Motorik yet stumbling, Dark Day's songs are stark and bold in their poetry about freaks, suffocating anxiety, and the toxic life of contemporary society circa 1980. "Trapped" was a strange song to be the single for the album, as it's an epic, spiralling number with those ominous synths and siren-like blurts from a distant saxophone. Many of the other songs on the album were short and condensed, jabbing the grimly simple melodies deep into the ear-canal and then moving on. Like "Trapped" the album's finale - "No, Never, Nothing" - is another lengthy track, appropriating a Moroder like disco-syncopation to a sinister, nihilistic collage of texts taken from a children's book about raising unusual pets such as squirrels and chimpanzees. The more the song spins through it's punchy chords the creepier it becomes.
Exterminating Angel is the high-point of Crutchfield's recorded works, and stands also as one of lost gems of the No Wave era. This should have been released long ago, so we have to commend Dark Entries once again for their reissue campaign.
If anything, the Estonian countryside is quiet. The clockwork schedule of the network of rural buses and the cackle of a black swan racing high above the trees is about all that you'll hear. I (Jim) had the pleasure of experiencing this Estonian quietude a few years back, and I have to say that Yannick Dauby's collection of field recordings is way more active than any i actually encountered. Estonia is known for its avian diversity, although when I was there during the brief transition from summer into winter (literally, three weeks!), the birds had all flown south... so Dauby must have been there in later spring or summertime as he does capture a number of chittering sounds from those birds passing through from Russia and Finland to Southern Europe and North Africa (or vice versa). Between these avian recordings, Dauby documents another common denizen of the Estonian countryside - the giant chunks of metal dumped unceremoniously by the Soviet agricultural industry. Even without much wind, these abandoned grain silos and oil tanks resonate with thick rumblings and subtle overtones, which Dauby dutifully records with contact microphones. These thrumming drones recall the Alan Lamb wire recordings as much as they do Thomas Koner's deep gong recordings.
Disc one of this two disc set features Dauby's "songs for birds and metal" while the second features reworkings of Dauby's source material by John Grzinich and Murmer (aka Patrick McGingley), both of whom have exceptional catalogues of electro-organic compositions based often on phonography. Grzinich's two lengthy pieces are quieter and more subtle, focusing on the patter of dripping water and melting ice with flickering drones and harmonics forming arctic halos around those aquatic textures. The two Murmer tracks intensify things comparatively against Grzinich's lowercase work, with thick drones amassed around what sounds like somebody trekking through the deep snow. Those Coleclough / Koner drones manifest ominous black clouds and unsettled vibes, not heard elsewhere on the album and turning that Estonian quiet into something haunting. All in all, a magnificent piece of manipulated field recording and sound ecology.
AN AQUARIUS EXCLUSIVE!!!
Yeah, Bernard Sumner may have claimed the computer as the ultimate punk instrument; but not everybody in 1982 could afford a computer to program samples while sipping cocktails at the Hacienda. Tape - now THAT is a punk as fuck tool. It was everywhere; it was cheap (not so much anymore, mind you); and the tools to edit tape could be as simple as a razor blade and a tape recorder. Andre De Saint-Obin was of this DIY mindset, a musician making the most out of the least, utilizing that aforementioned punkest form of technology. This Dutch fellow was home-taping for only a few short years in the early '80s, releasing a couple of singles and a cassette... and then he just disappeared. An impressionable Frans De Waard (the man behind Korm Plastics, Plinkity Plonk, Vital Weekly, and too many bands to mention) was smitten by that De Saint-Obin cassette back in the day, and years later, he embarked on a quest to seek out De Saint-Obin in hopes of reissuing the album. We'll skip forward through the bits about interminable internet searches and dropped conversations due to artist idiosyncrasy and flighty weirdo behavior; for here we have the glorious fruits of De Waard's labor of love - a minor masterpiece of Dutch post-punk / minimal-wave eccentricity: Sound On Sound by Andre De Saint-Obin.
The title refers to means-of-production, De Saint-Obin didn't have a multitrack recorder, but rather he could overdub tracks onto a single piece of tape in the tradition of Les Paul and the earliest of sound engineers. Yup, in mono! Built up from the bottom up, starting with drum machine, then bass, the guitar, and finally voice, each of Andre De Saint-Obin's songs required considerable foresight and architectural planning. The process was a destructive one, so if he fucked up on one of the last layers, he would have to start all over again. The fact that these songs are so fractured, so lysergic, so dystopian speaks to the cracked vision of De Saint-Obin. The opening number (eponymously titled "Introduction") is an instrumental cut with swollen basslines plucked with the swaggering panache of a Peter Hook or a Simon Gallup, punched with spark-plug guitar jitteriness and mechanoid electronic rhythms. It's pretty damn close to being a perfect piece of gloom pop, but fixed to a woozy DIY axis instead of a baroque goth polish. The spasmodic anti-funk number "Dance Till I Die" sports jagged guitar fuzz and exasperated vocals above a backbeat of machined click and churlish basslines, lending to visions of Pere Ubu or James Chance in a fit of epileptic delirium. The manic-depressive bounciness of "Hey You" sways toward sexual frustration, and "I Got Plopmusic" veers towards the truly bizarre in the vein of Fad Gadget or any of those synth-punk ditties that Colin Potter put to tape around the same time.
The accompanying cd, in addition to the record proper, features 5 bonus tracks, including the predatorily creepy yet captivatingly catchy "Stay Tonight" and the much sought after "Everytime We Say Goodbye" originally released on one of Alain Neffe's Insane Music compilations. Sound On Sound finds company with a few contemporaries in the head-scratching Factory Records ensemble Crawling Chaos and Pete Shelley's aptly named Strange Men In Sheds With Spanners; but was very much a precursor to what the Blank Dogs and Ariel Pink attempted several decades later.
We should note that aQuarius is the ONLY shop in North America that you can get one of these, and get one you should!!! Fuck yeah!!!
It's a bit hard to believe that it's been just over 20 years since New Zealand's Dead C first unleashed their unique brand of 'noise rock' on our unsuspecting ears, but 'tis true, and while the band have gone through many sonic permutations over their two decades, their sound somehow has always remained distinctly their own. There have been long stretches of inactivity too, with the various members pursuing their own projects, Gate, A Handful Of Dust, etc. but they always seemed to find their way back. A new record, and a recent US tour, has upped the band's profile of late, but what better time to look back, at their first two proper full lengths, available on vinyl in the US for the first time, with all sorts of extras.
While the Dead C are generally considered to be a 'noise rock band', to many THEE 'noise rock' band, it's easy to forget that at their heart, they are a pop band. With songs, and verses and choruses and crooned vocals, and strummed acoustic guitars, and all of that stuff. Never was that more apparent than on their first two records, Eusa Kills and Dr 503, which found the band sort of straddling two worlds of sound, the prevailing 'New Zealand' sound, a sort of lo-fi bedroom pop, and their own peculiar trajectory, a loose ramshackle assemblage of guitarnoise, fractured FX, noisy ambience, and a general clang and clatter. A pretty heady mix for sure, which probably had more conservative listeners reeling, but had the rest of us clamoring for more.
Dr 503, was their first proper full length (3rd actual, depending on who's keeping track), and opens up with what many consider the penultimate Dead C track "Max Harris", and if a single song could indeed be a microcosm for the Dead C sound, it's probably "Max Harris". Woozy rhythms, stumbling off kilter rhythms, the middle part sounds like a lo-fi This Heat crossed with Geronimo, all abstract distorted crunch, and muted squalls of tribal drumming, streaks of clipped effects, murky processed vocals, slivers of feedback, even a mere seconds-long acoustic guitar outro. The record veers and careens all over the place, spoken word over splattery percussion and clipped minimal strum, thick doomy dirges of heavily reverbed guitar, gloomy Joy Division basslines, and hushed muttered vocals, skipping phonographs draped over stripped down slowcore, Sebadoh style lo-fi bedroom folk, primitive tape experiments, pounding almost garage-y jams that transform into spare Jandekian sprawls, but all held together by some nearly impossible to define Dead C aesthetic.
The record finishes off with a devastating one-two punch, the 9 minute Dead C classic sort-of-ballad "Polio", which begins all folky and strummy, gradually the guitars warp and warble, the drums stumble in, and the song just sort of drifts and skitters, the guitars weirdly effected, the vocals heartfelt and buried way down in the mix, the drums almost Can-like in their motorik simplicity, there are some moments of chaos, but for the most part "Polio" is dark and dreamy and murky and softly buzzy, a little jangly, and sort of pretty. And then it's on to the 13+ minute "Max Harris 2" which does seem to contain some sonic elements of the original, but the sound here is repetitive and clangorous, the guitars buzz and whir, the riffs angular and jagged, the sound washed out and lo-fi, the vocals another buried mumble, until the song shifts gear part way through, and it's just a single guitar, plucking out that same main riff, accompanied by super spare percussion, and wreathed in tape hiss, after a sudden burst of crash and crunch, the track jams on and on and on, becoming slowly unhinged, the sounds slowly detuning, everything getting more and more warped and warbly before stuttering to a halt.
This reissue tacks on the Sun Stabbed ep (originally released as a 7"), from right around the same time, which is pretty impossible to find at all, on vinyl or otherwise. Offering up more of the same, a handful of gorgeous and confusional tracks offering up still more of the Dead C's unique clash of classic New Zealand songsmithery and noise drenched, abstract, sonic deconstruction.
Absolutely and utterly essential listening. Gorgeously repackaged in a super heavy gatefold sleeve, reproducing much of the original art, and pressed on super thick vinyl. And as you might have guessed, VERY VERY LIMITED!
It's a bit hard to believe that it's been just over 20 years since New Zealand's Dead C first unleashed their unique brand of 'noise rock' on our unsuspecting ears, but 'tis true, and while the band have gone through many sonic permutations over their two decades, their sound somehow has always remained distinctly their own. There have been long stretches of inactivity too, with the various members pursuing their own projects, Gate, A Handful Of Dust, etc. but they always seemed to find their way back. A new record, and a recent US tour, has upped the band's profile of late, but what better time to look back, at their first two proper full lengths, available on vinyl in the US for the first time, with all sorts of extras.
While the Dead C are generally considered to be a 'noise rock band', to many THEE 'noise rock' band, it's easy to forget that at their heart, they are a pop band. With songs, and verses and choruses and crooned vocals, and strummed acoustic guitars, and all of that stuff. Never was that more apparent than on their first two records, Eusa Kills and Dr 503, which found the band sort of straddling two worlds of sound, the prevailing 'New Zealand' sound, a sort of lo-fi bedroom pop, and their own peculiar trajectory, a loose ramshackle assemblage of guitarnoise, fractured FX, noisy ambience, and a general clang and clatter. A pretty heady mix for sure, which probably had more conservative listeners reeling, but had the rest of us clamoring for more.
Eusa Kills originally came out in 1989, and makes it the Dead C's fourth proper full length (maybe 6th, hard to tell with the band's convoluted discography) and finds the band in full on song mode, with a somewhat improved production, which definitely suits them. Years later, the band would release a single called The Dead C. Vs. Sebadoh, the title a joke obviously, but even 5 years early, when Eusa Kills came out, the band did in fact sound quite a bit like Sebadoh at moments, dark and brooding, sort of rocking, melodic but a bit off kilter, especially on record opener "Scarey Nest", which is a dead ringer for some lost Sebadoh B-side, with a killer main hook, simple solid drumming, wistful sort of sad boy vocals, the guitars alternatingly jangly and corrosive. After a 43 second Butthole Surfers style abstract drum / guitar crunch jam with distorted vocals and a lumbering tempo, the band slip right back into more dark jangle, a minor key guitar unfurling, a shuffling military snare, more weary crooned vocals, it is easy to see why lots of folks refer to Eusa Kills as the Dead C's 'songs' record. Most of the tracks are 2 or 3 minutes, poppy and jangly, the whole record clocking in at a lean 36 minutes, the exceptions being the 6 minute "Phantom Power" which begins as an extended abstract jam, all simple solid drumming and jagged guitar, but then the vocals drift in all ghostlike and the sound is transformed into something much poppier, and the 7 minute "Maggot", which is probably the heaviest of the bunch, with its grinding guitars, it's lurching drum part, and the super distorted Buttholes style processed vox, but even then, there's a definite pop sensibility at work, although a bit obscured. The rest of the shorter tracks tend toward the pop-ish, whether it be pounding noise drenched indie rock, moaning slow motion Jandek style sprawl or the gorgeously languid hushed folky jangle that finishes off the disc.
Also included is the Helen Said This 12" originally released around the same time. Not quite as songy as Eusa Kills, but enough that the two fit together perfectly, an extension of Eusa's twisted jangle, muddled pop smithery, warm wooziness, and occasional cracked heaviness.
Totally recommended, and essential for all fans of fucked up music. And heck, even fans of not-so-fucked up music. This just might be the Dead C record you can handle. Gorgeously repackaged in a super heavy gatefold sleeve, reproducing much of the original art, and pressed on super thick vinyl. And as you might have guessed, VERY VERY LIMITED!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The Dead C is the stalwart collective of free noise / avant rockers from New Zealand comprised of Bruce Russell (member of A Handful of Dust and boss of the Corpus Hermeticum label), Michael Morley (aka Gate), and Robbie Yeats, beloved of Bananafish readers and Siltbreeze junkies everywhere. We thought that perhaps their day had passed but, think again, they've gone and created a superb new album! This new, long awaited release is a sprawling double cd that finds them in the least-rock space they have ever occupied. Recorded over the past 5 years, this album is saturated in a langurous humidity produced by guitar feedback scrapes, ring modulation, and the buzzing din of improperly balanced amplifiers.
Disc One is the noisier of the two, dominated by the epic 33 minute "SpeederBot" which passes from militant percussive stabs into twin tremolo guitar feedback, similar to the controlled chaos found on their masterful "Harsh '70s Reality" album. But Disc Two is where this eponymous Dead C release really shines. Sort of like an analogue version of Main, or like a Raster record coming in badly on a shortwave radio, full of erratic hissing and eerie static. The trio striates the slow motion hypnodrone of sampled guitar feedback (yup, the lo-fi mirror version of My Bloody Valentine) with creaky little events. It's apparent that all of the recent drones from New Zealanders like Lovely Midget, RST, and Surface of the Earth have definitely made huge impact on the Dead C. They've picked up the gauntlet and, after a few years in their lonely NZ laboratory, have again come up with something that can be only called Dead C music (more so than it can be called rock or anything else). Adventurous, idiosyncratic, fantastic.
This is as recommended as it limited (to 500 copies and may not see a repress, sorry). Buy now or cry later!! (as we like to say.)
Perhaps more so than the revolving door project This Mortal Coil, there was no other band in the '80s that embodied the 4AD sound more so than Dead Can Dance. Their labored, heavily orchestrated songs hinged upon a dark, neo-romantic reading of medieval leitmotifs and Renaissance melody with plenty of Celtic flourishes tossed in for good measure. Firmly linked to the Dead Can Dance sound were the voices of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry - the former epitomizing an ethereal swoon counterpointed by the latter's exacting baritone. Their first album found the two Australian transplants living in London and showcasing much more of their Australian post-punk roots than on later albums. Gerrard had recorded a couple of singles with her unfortunately forgotten band Microfilm, and Perry had a stint in a band called The Scavengers.
Joy Division and 154-era Wire were the springboard for much of Dead Can Dance's ideas on this album through the bass-driven post-punk songs dappled with spectral guitar work and primitive electronic underpinnings. If it weren't for the instantly recognizable twin vocals from Gerrard and Perry (the latter of whom carries the bulk of this album), Dead Can Dance's debut could be mistaken for anything that would have come out on Factory at that time. Hints of their more well-known orchestrated sound appear on this album in the form of some hammered dulcimers and tribal percussion spiralling around their songs. Altogether, it holds up surprisingly well.
On this reissue, 4AD has repackaged the album in a cardboard gatefold with a nicely cleaned up / remastered version of the album, which had always suffered from a murky sound. However, they left off the Garden Of Earthly Delights EP, which had been included on previous cd versions of this album. Whoops!
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! This recent Record Of The Week now on lp, lp AND 7" to be exact, as it was too much music to fit on a single lp. Fancy packaging, thick vinyl, very swank, and of course very limited!
For years now, the cryptically (and coolly) monickered Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words has been quietly and consistently releasing some of the most haunting and beautiful minimal dronemusic we've heard, a blend of soft skittery glitch, brooding guitar loops, deeeeeep drone, dreamy drift, and experimental post-everything soundscaping, that is as good if not better than anything produced by the legion of overhyped sound makers constantly fawned over by the public and press alike. We've only managed to review two DLSODW releases so far, both sadly out of print now, but the release of this new one, quite possibly his best, seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally throw our weight behind Dead Letters, and hopefully open some ears to these mysterious and wondrous sounds, and reveal to the hordes of dronelords and free music freeks just what they've been missing.
Dead Letters is the work of Swedish musician Thomas Ekelund, and over the years, his music has drifted from extreme near silent ultra minimalism, to warm whirring dronescapes to muted crunch and clatter to shimmering underwater ambience, but on Lost In Reflections, all of those elements are present, in lesser amounts, the perfect distillation of a lifetime of sounds, here presented more as background then the main event, that main event here being the guitar. Each of the six tracks, however distorted or refracted or fragmented or obfuscated, seems to be borne of the guitar, with Ekelund working his mysterious alchemy and transforming those buzzing steel strings into wholly new shapes.
The opener, "This Room Seems Empty Without You" held us spellbound from the very first few seconds, a bit of reverby guitar, moody and minor key, very post rock, slow core and abstract, the notes hovering in a dark expanse of overtones and deep low end shimmer, the guitar unfurling gradually, subtly processed, peppered with a strange percussive glitch, that gives the music a sort of downtempo vibe, still droney and abstract and free, but with a little Portishead or Bowery Electric mixed in. The glitches coalesce into an almost-rhythm, the end result is some strange minimal instrumental downtuned Galaxie 500 mixed with the brooding barely there drift of Bohren, and a sort of late night lugubrious skitter.
The next track, "Lost & Losing", takes a whole 'nother tack, beginning with bits of scrape and creak, amp buzz, muted harmonics, a subtly percussive textural soundscape, quietly and slowly surrounded by a gorgeously hazy sea of sun spots and solar flares, taking the shoegaze-y shimmer of Nadja and Jesu and dialing it way back, until it's a glimmering sheet of prismatic buzz, all the while those strange sounds from the song's beginning continuing to weave a buried barely there rhythm, everything locked into deep woozy bleary eyed swells.
We have the tendency to go song by song, describing the sound of each, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it's not just the sound, it's the mood and the vibe and the feel and the deft and delicate arrangement of those sounds. And Ekelund is a master, taking simple strummed guitars, and wrapping them in a gauzy patina of blur buzz, locking the original riff into a loop, and then gently adding bit of melody, bits of texture, turning something simple into something complex and gorgeous, there are hints of Earth all over Lost In Reflections as well, a particularly abstract bit of fuzzy drift, will suddenly part to reveal a dark elegiac guitar line, slowed way down, creating some sort of underwater blues, while elsewhere, the twang and pluck of the guitar strings is wreathed in sonic sunlight, the sounds allowed to overlap and tangle up, the notes and melodies all wound up, spinning slowly and spitting out sparks, bits of glitch and high end tones, streaks of feedback, until those sounds are smeared into one long undulating stretch, and over the top a string of chiming notes are hung like Christmas lights on a tree, the, guitar often disappearing completely, leaving just a bit of twang to hover and then fade away.
The final track is a monster, nearly 20 minutes, imagine Nadja, Merzbow and Tim Hecker covering Arvo Part, and you might be close. This is some sort of soft noise, blindingly effulgent upper register ur-drone chorale, the streaks and shards of guitars sound like voices, the distortion thick, the effects crumbling and swirling, a glancing listen reveals a wall of sound, but headphones are like a diving bell, allowing us to sink into this roiling sonic sea, that seems to stretch out forever, bottomless and endless, part way through, the song changes shape, that which constituted the whole of the sound up until that point is relegated to a background for these new sounds, a sweeping, loping epic bit of post rock, still washed out and woozy, but with a simple propulsive rhythm, and a gorgeously melodic chiming central riff, darkly fervent and slightly ominous and hauntingly epic, the swirling sounds around those new elements growing more frenetic, thickening, while the song just grows and grows, sprawls and expands, as if any second the heavens will open and the song will become the sonic manifestation of the rapture. So totally intense and powerful and moving and majestic, and simply breathtaking.
Around 2008, Thomas Ekelund ceased activities as Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, rechristening his activities as the work of Trepanerinsgritualen. While Ekelund's belicose theatrics and ritualized bloodletting comes through in his current practices, Dead Letters was a subtle operation of spooky electronics, occult provocation, and wintery orchestration, leading to very favorable comparisons to Deathprod and Deaf Center. No Words was originally a cassette-only release through Ekelund's When Skies Are Grey imprint, later fleshed out via Locrian's in-house label Land Of Decay with a bonus track on the B-side of their cassette version. Thi news 2016 reissue follows the Land Of Decay program, remastered beautifully for vinyl. The A-side contains the two originals from No Words, a slow smolder of dark ambient techniques amassing and coalescing sound into a darkly majestic crescendo akin to those epic brooding numbers that Machinefabriek championed about a decade ago, complete with lilting Slint-y guitars and black-hole noise. The B-side follows a similar strategy incorporating swollen guitar, buzzing drone, and ominous basslines, more akin to Tim Hecker if he were to dabble in the timbres of black metal.
We first caught Dead Luke's name on an older Zola Jesus album, back when it was all about the murk, grit and lo-fi griminess of her sound. Wisconsin was home to both artists at the time; but she soon left for Hollywood on a meteoric rise for goth-diva fame, and Dead Luke stayed behind inoculating himself from Midwestern boredom with his spring-reverb saturated, outsider psychedelia. With a name like Dead Luke, you might half expect a suitably depressive lo-fi goth thing (especially with a couple of singles on Sacred Bones along with that former connection to Zola Jesus); but Dead Luke's downer vibe is the result of being a stoner rather than an occultist, with his awesomely lazy psychedelic numbers that channel 13 Floor Elevators through the heavily sedated period of Spacemen 3. Contemporarily speaking, this album plants itself right between the rockabilly minimalism of Dirty Beaches and the shambolic retro-blast of Thee Oh Sees. Dead Luke tangles those archetypal blues chords and strutting basslines with overblown fuzz, lo-fi crunch, and swampy spring-reverb excess, with his songs always devolving out of the verse / chorus structure of the song and into a hypnotic groove rippling with melodic yet droned-out organs, as a nod to the Perfect Prescription era bleariness from Spacemen 3. He even does an old Bo Diddley number in "I'm A Man," albeit all mumbled and narcotized. "Paranoia Is A Flower Of The Mind" must be an ode to the side effects of altered states, even as the song is a sprawling, ramshackle number of drugged out American psychedelia. Yeah, it's that good. No download code, though.
We've long loved Paul St Hilaire, aka Tikiman, THEE voice of minimal dub geniuses Rhythm And Sound, his gorgeous, otherworldly croon adding some serious soul to R&S' darkly digital world of gristly dubbed out, slow skitter creep, and really, if there was ever one of those 'could sing the phonebook' voices, it's St Hilaire's. Years back, St Hilaire performed with Deadbeat, aka Scott Monteith, another aQ fave, a dub scientist in Berlin by way of Canada, whose sound was and is equal parts Rhythm & Sound skeletal dig-dub, and Pole style click and pop minimalism. Over the years, Monteith and St Hilaire stayed in touch, even playing the occasional show, but this is the first proper recording the two have made together, and it's a total stunner. And as you might imagine from the above, it's pretty much just what you'd expect, a sprawling collection of gorgeous super spare electro dub, a lot like Pole crossed with Rhythm & Sound. But that sound is stretched way out, some of the tracks here almost house-y, some very Kompakt sounding, but regardless of the sonic influence or inspiration, Monteith and St Hilaire make the sound totally their own, conjuring up some spiritual musical magic that makes The Infinity Dub Sessions totally divine. Especially the first track, which is worth the $18 price tag all on its own. Maybe the most perfect, and perfectly mysterious and moody modern dub track we've heard, all woozy, thick bass rumbles, wreathed in static, deep mesmeric swells, laced with dubbed out upstroke chordal thrum, as well as the occasional dubstep style bass wobble, little bits of glitch and squelch scattered throughout, super minimal melodies drifting like bongsmoke in the background, even instrumental, this would be totally hypnotic and irresistibly mesmerizing, but add St. Hilaire's gorgeous croon, and it becomes something even more transcendent.
Nothing else is quite as dark and bass heavy, but all the tracks are tranced out, softly swirly and psychedelic, the sound simultaneously minimal and skeletal, but also deeply lush and layered, ranging from the super percussive churn of "Dopa", with some seriously twisted, echo drenched vox, to the more reggae sounding "What The Heck Them Expect", St Hilaire's vocals the focal point, the background music a dark, languorous groove. "Working Everyday" is a dubby, dreamy sprawl, all soft focus and prismatic, billowy chords drifting atop a lazily propulsive rhythm, while "Rock Of Creation" is a hazy techno-dub ballad, a field of gristly and crackle the framework for shimmery synths and hushed melodies, St Hilaire crooning seductively amidst ethereal clouds of sound. The final three tracks have a huge Kompakt vibe, but imagine if Kompakt was headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, with The Infinity Dub Sessions a chronicle of St Hilaire and Monteith's mobile sound system, the streets of Jamaica sonically transformed into some otherworldy dream-dub dancehall.
Death & Vanilla should hardly be a secret anymore, as the Swedish retro-futurist outfit has catapulted their low-key releases on Hands In The Dark to the seminal British independent imprint Fire Records. Those earlier albums were on the shortlist of those albums we'd play in the shop on busy Saturday afternoons, knowing that we'd capture the imagination of our enlightened customers here at aQuarius. In years past, others on that list might have also been Os Mutantes, Neutral Milk Hotel, Boards Of Canada, shit even the Conet Project, and yes The Beta Band (which we had known to tickle the ear well BEFORE it was the punchline in High Fidelity). Seductive retro-art-pop of sci-fi dreaminess and bachelor pad slinkiness, that's the stuff of Death & Vanilla. Their soft-as-snow production has all of the feel of an all analog recording by the Silver Apples or the United States of America, with the ghostly vocals of Marleen Nilsson rippling through the echoplex and spring reverb before settling onto the tactile magnetic tape drawing magical daylight out of the arctic dark nights. To Where The Wild Things Are doesn't seem to have anything to do with the beloved Maurice Sendak book of a very similar name. Given how much control and precision they exact over their references, what else might the title refer to? The interwoven melodies and harmonies for Nilsson's voice, those analogue synths, and the bell-tone tremolo guitars latch onto a deluge of impeccably written drifting waltzes, motorik Kraut rhythms, and jaunty beat-pop grooves. We're not alone in seeing the obvious connection between Death & Vanilla and lamentably late Broadcast; and the Swedes are clearly channeling the ghosts of Broadcast in their studio sessions as seance, but there's much that Death & Vanilla brings to the table that's their own. One of the most charming pop records of 2015.
Here's the much needed reissue of Death And Vanilla's first ep, which was originally released in a tiny edition of just 100 copies a couple years back; and truth be told, this reissue will suffer the same fate, as the vinyl has also sold out amazingly fast. Death And Vanilla are a low-profile Swedish duo that triangulate themselves in the forgotten futures of Duophonic era Stereolab, the Focus Group's curiosity shoppe of library music electronics, and Broadcast's avant-pop anachronisms. Given how well D&V manage to operate in this context, it is a bit surprising that a Thrill Jockey or a Matador hasn't banged on their door. But for us, it's all fine and good for the duo to remain in their perch above the largest cemetery in their hometown of Malmo, continuing to produce a Spartan catalogue of spellbinding, sublime albums. Like all of those more contemporary references, Death & Vanilla's impeccable taste in pop music telescopes back to the late '60s with French new wave films, sultry Cinecitta psyche pop, Italian horror grandiosity, and the tried and true motorik rhythms of Neu! The arrangements are baroquely set with fuzzed out / vibrato guitars, slinky basslines, theramin, moog, glockenspiels, vibraphones, and harpsichords, with vocalist Marleen Nilsson breathily crooning like an opiated but just as dreamy Brigitte Bardot. Brilliant stuff this Death & Vanilla; and this expanded version of the original ep features three exquisite bonus tracks, including one based on the work of Daphne Oram and sporting an unsettling extracted piece of dialog from the film Marathon Man. Oh, you know which one.
Death And Vanilla are a Swedish haunted-pop duo who have found themselves caught in the vortex of retro-futurism circa 1969. On the one hand, they've got a good grip on the baroque psychedelia of the United States Of America, Free Design, and even some of the more woolly tracks that Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg produced; and on the other, they're keen on the whole library music phenomenon augmenting their songs with plenty of sparkling synths, crackling radiophonic samples, EVP recordings (yup, that is Raymond Cass, we hear!), and tripped-out-to-space production tricks that would be right out of the Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire playbooks. There's even a track on this album called "Library Goblin"! If you might think all of this seems like the same strategy that Broadcast employed on their highly acclaimed collaborations with The Focus Group back in 2009-2010, you'd be pretty spot on. Even the unnamed female vocalist for Death And Vanilla sounds an awful lot like Broadcast's Trish Keenan, with her breathy delivery and unexpected melodies which soar above the monochromatic lullaby of many of the songs. As sacrosanct as it may seem, Death And Vanilla may be better songwriters than Broadcast; their cinematic pop gem "Cul-De-Sac" should be in the running for poptune of 2012 for sure with its complex interweave of harpsichord, vibraphone, fuzzed guitar, strutting basslines, and shuffling rhythms all driven by the vocal harmonies, which transitions rather deftly into the far more experimental avant-pop number "Sombambulists" which drifts aptly towards a dreamy headspace of loping basslines and percolating synths all bathed in sound-dissolving reverb. The filmic references also abound on tracks like "The Unseeing Eye" and the aforementioned "Library Goblin" as sublimely revisionist '60s pop numbers with bubbly vibraphones and seductive vocals amidst electronic filigree and charming synth blorp, before disintegrating into an otherworldly interlude of ethereal radio noise and cosmic vibrations. As such, it's a pretty irresistible album for any fan of Broadcast, Ghost Box, and Stereolab. The lp has already gone through a couple of pressings, but hopefully, we'll be able to keep this one in stock for a while. It's totally worth it!
AVAILABLE AGAIN ON VINYL FOR A LIMITED TIME.
An all time AQ perfect pop favorite! Here's our brief yet concise review from way back in the 20th century before these guys had gotten HUGE:
At the risk of slipping into hyperbole, which we try avoid at all costs (snicker...), this is hands down, one of the best (and possibly most overlooked - we almost missed it ourselves, gasp!) indie rock records ever. Landing somewhere between 'There's Nothing Wrong With Love' and 'Perfect From Now On', Death Cab craft a Built-to-Spill-ian universe, full of lazy sad pop, intricate compositions, jangly melodies, shifting structures, odd time signatures, and haunting cellos. This record has been an unbelievable hit in the store. It's pretty much never ever been played without at least one person buying it, sometimes 2 or 3!
Right off the bat, I'm not sure whether this video from Death Squad is more of a stupid spectacle like MTV's "Jackass," or an Industrial production worthy of comparisons to autopsy-film era SPK, or as a very sad piece of confrontationist art that purposefully seeks to terrify its audience. The simple fact that Death Squad -- the former moniker of San Francisco's Michael 9 --
The first portion of this video is a live documentation of a performance Death Squad gave at The Lab back in 1999 called "Intent." After starting off with a backing tape of� blasting screeches and power electronics / death industrial noise accompanied by two video projections of medical footage, war atrocities, and putrefaction, Michael switches on lamp revealing that he is at a desk, with a small box of razors, a syringe, a gun, and a box of bullets. The assumption is that the needle is for heroin, and Michael taps his arm and shoots up. As the backing noise increases in intensity with higher frequencies, he picks up the razors and begins slicing his forearms. Michael then proceeds to load the gun, knocks the desk over, and menacingly stalks through the space, screaming and pointing the loaded gun at members of the audience. At this point, the documentation of the performance gets rather vague, as you can't really see Michael acting out his agressions on the audience. Yet, there are plenty of people quickly leaving the space, and the video also contains several written confessionals from members of the audience decrying this performance. The second video is almost tame in comparison, situated much more within the aforementioned SPK agenda of exposing society's "cathedral of death" as public spectacle in which catharsis is actively pursued, but never actualized.
Michael 9 seems to truly believe that there are *no* absolutes in culture and society, thus there is no one that can wield a moral judgement, claiming that his performances are not art. If Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh can qualify their shared life from 1983-1984 in which they were physically bound together by a rope, as art, then shouldn't Michael 9 be able expose his nightmares in a public venue? As art? I can't honestly say whether I approve or disapprove of this work, which left me quite uncomfortable and disturbed, even in witnessing it through the safety of a television. And I can't say if I would have shit my pants had I personally witnessed Death Squad's "Intent" performance at The Lab. But it's quite possible. Proceed with caution.
Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Previously the only work by Deathprod we stocked here at Aquarius was the split cd with Biosphere on Rune Grammofon in which the two artists reworked fellow Norwegian Arne Nordheim's electronic compositions. Having enjoyed that disc very much, we were pretty excited about the mysterious looking matte black four CD box by Deathprod that arrived at our laboratory recently. If the black box was evocative enough to pique our interest, the music the music contained within surely did not betray our hopes. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delay and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound -- such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence -- into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. The tracks on these four discs were recorded between 1991 and 2000, and while some of the material was released by Sten on cassette through his own label (also titled Deathprod), much of it is previously unreleased or was super limited in number. Two tracks in particular, a six minute narration from American born Oslo resident Matt Burt and a couple tracks of an organ, vibes and drum trio not unlike Sagor & Swing stick out in this four disc set. More typical are tracks which blossom out from a single cell of an idea: one chord, or one blast of noise. At times Deathprod sounds almost like an attempt at recreating Thomas Koner's soundscapes using the audio palette of Mauricio Bianchi. On Imaginary Songs From Tristan da Cunha, Sten went so far as to record tracks on a Nagra deck, transfer them to wax cylinders and then transfer them once more to digital media. The result are authenticly old and decaying tracks which are hauntingly beautiful as well. Other tracks feature deteriorating blasts of what sounds almost like a fog horn progressively decaying into grinding metal; throbbing drones and eerie female chorus -- a la Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna" from 2001 -- building with layers of feedbacky washes of sound. The four tracks that make up Sten's most recent album on the set -- Morals And Dogma -- are possibly his best works yet: icey, bleak soundscapes of drones. Any of the tracks here would make an excellent soundtrack. On "Dead People's Things", the most sorrowful of melodies is played on a theremin over a foundation of delicate, scratchy bowing of violin and a deep bass throbbing drone. "Orgone Donor" consists of a slowly shifting chordal drone of whispy violins, harmonium and saw, with each instrument leading and then resolving the chord in turn.
We would have made Demdike Stare's sprawling quadruple vinyl 12"s epic Elemental our Record Of The Week had it not been for a few things. One, the four records were released over the course of several months, two, the combined cost of all those records ended up being nearly $100, and three, we knew it was eventually gonna come out on cd. So now that the cd version is here, we can finally make this twisted hauntological epic our Record Of The Week, which is great news for everybody, EXCEPT maybe crazy completists, who will be dismayed (or perhaps perversely thrilled) to discover, that not only does the double cd version tack on a bunch of extra tracks (nearly 33 minutes worth!!), but it also features alternate versions of some of the tracks from the 12"s. So it's really up to the folks who already shelled out for all four 12" if they want to buy it all over again, but for everybody else, we can't recommend this highly enough. More on the bonus tracks at the end, but let's talk about Elemental proper first...
Elemental was probably one of the most anticipated records around here recently, the sprawling epic from hauntological duo Demdike Stare, a four part songsuite, Chrysanthe, Violetta, Rose and Iris, the duo's new sound seriously dark, much more industrial sounding, the vibe blackened, the sounds layered and way more dense.
Chrysanthe opens with "Mephisto's Lament", which is all foghorn buzz, deep whirring drones, keening high end melodic fragments, murky buried rhythms, peppered with creepy synth squelches, and when the song gets rolling, it's almost like a hauntological SUNNO))), the same sort of roiling downtuned heaviness, but here stretched into something a bit more sinister and abstract, almost like the soundtrack for some subterranean factory, all rumble and clang, all shadows and very little light. "Kommunion" is up next, a lush looped slow build, all repeated piano motifs wreathed in chanted vocals, and all blurred into fuzzy soft focus swells, the sound suddenly expanding into a blisteringly blown out in-the-red buzz, a swoonsome melody hidden in there somewhere, the sound slipping from caustic and crunchy to blurred and murky, before switching gears completely, lacing a sprawl of staticky hiss to a skeletal trip hop pulse, extra percussion provided by found sounds, clatter and crunch, atonal piano, all woven into a strange almost Art Of Noise sounding beat. Then comes "Unction", a super creepy stretch of undulating lowend, demarcated by a strange sonar ping rhythm, one that is quickly augmented by a twisted effected croaking frog skitter, and another beat seemingly assembled from the sounds of workman scraping and dragging, a crunchy noisy lurching groove, that is soon overtaken by another cloud of reverberating pianos, which finishes off the side with a coda of swirling minimal washed out thrum.
The second part, Violetta, begins with "Mnemosyne", a blissed out sun dappled bit of witch house-y skitter, all hazy and gauzy and dreamlike, until a sudden burst of clattery noisy rhythmic crunch changes everything, and then assembles itself into a strange lumbering cacophonous beat, the sound eventually underpinned by some Eastern style folk music, which drifts briefly, before that clattery beat crashes back in, now accompanied by that Eastern melody, sounding like a weirdly stuttery bit of gypsy electro. Which leads directly into "In The Wake Of Chronos", which opens with some distant mysterious melodies, some sprinkler like textures, some super minimal skeletal skitter, and some seriously deep bass thrum, the minimal drift soon peppered with short sharp bursts of metallic crunch, clipped bits of hiss and skree sculpted into a sort-of-beat, also soon joined by tinkling melodies, wreathed in echo, the sound gradually expanding, and becoming more and more lush, that beat drifting off, leaving the various other sounds to shimmer and hover ethereally over a blackened backdrop of blurred hum. And finally, Violetta finishes off with the title track, a soft cacophony of pounded piano, the chords allowed to ring out and slowly fade, all subtly warped, an ominous sort of avant classical doom, laced with little sonic squiggles, and wreathed in clouds of hiss and static, soon those little squiggles transform into beats, a wild chaotic looped rhythm, which is strangely at odds with that funereal piano, still pounding away in the background, a twisted bit of hauntological IDM, the piano subtly replaced by a hazy sprawl of synth simmer, which is left to fade out once the beat drops off, a thick swirling final movement, washed out and woozy.
Part three is Rose, and begins with a churning industrial chug, grinding through a woozy washed out haze, wreathed in a distant ethereal vocal drift, looped and mesmerizing, the sound is most definitely epic and cinematic, the sound laced with bits of clatter and crunch, and than BAM, the track is transformed into a gorgeous stretch of Middle Eastern string laden groove, all wrapped around that opening industrial rhythm, sounding like a more dense, more psychedelic Muslimgauze! The second track is more murky and dubbed out and spacey, anchored by a muted slo-mo house beat, buried in the murk, the beats wreathed in soft metallic billows, the surrounding sounds swirling dreamily, hazy melodic streaks and blurred background shimmers, clouds of tripped out drift, through which that industrial flecked rhythm soldiers druggily on.
The third track begins as a gauzy, ethereal thrum, that seems to hover wraithlike, before suddenly in drops an impossibly dense and heavy ribcage rattling bass pulse, accompanied by cool spare tabla like rhythms, that Muslimgauze vibe is definitely huge here too, a keening high end sine wave tone flutters over fragmented chunks of dubstep bass wobble, all drifting in the sonic ether.
Finally comes part four, Iris, which might be the grimmest and darkest of the bunch. Opening with buzzing cellos, and swirling blackened drones, which are soon joined by a plodding doomy rhythm, laced with streaks of prismatic feedback and hauntingly melodic harmonies, all the whole in the background, textures and layers softly swirl and undulate, the result is definitely creepy and cinematic, but also a bit blackened and industrial. The second track dials it down even further, unfurling a hushed, blurred thrum, a wash of hazy shimmer, a dubbed out murk laced with mysterious industrial percolations, reverbed clatter, and strange squelches, like a field recording of an old abandoned office building with all the air conditioners and printers and computers whirring away, a creepy disembodied hum which is soon enveloped by crunchy caustic high end, keening shards of buzz and skree, growing ever more dense and noisy. Next up some surfacing sonar pings, over a skittery, skeletal beat, shuffling through clouds of effects swirl, droned out bass warble, and more of that unidentified background shimmer, the sound is cavernous and hypnotic, the background sounds gradually solidifying into sheets of chordal whir, all wreathed in a cowl of soft buzzy sonic gauze, all the while that rhythm churns relentlessly, and that bass thrum stretches out into a strangely undulating low end drone.
Obviously, that should be more than enough to sell you on it, but folks who are after the bonus tracks will not be dissappointed, more than a half hour's worth minutes of extra music, six tracks, the first of which, "New Use For Old Circuits", opens up the set with a blast of psychedelic noise, before oozing into something much more liquid and murky, a sort of subaquatic space dub, a little bit like Chain Reaction style 'heroin house', but instead of hearing the music through a wall, we're hearing it through the thin steel walls of a submarine, stranded in the inky blackness of the deepest sea. "Shade" is a short stretch of gauzey high end shimmer, a haze of blurred melody and buried plink plonk piano, while "10th Floor Stairwell" is a fantastic chunk of thrumming low end pulsations, a minimal blackened drone that slwoly blossoms into something more tonally colorful, eventually becoming a sort of blackbuzz raga. "Metamorphosis" takes a field recording of voices and wraps it in soft swirls of static and tape hiss, soon introducing more of that impossible low end, the voices locked in a chant-like loop, while that skull rattling bass tone, pulses ominously, eventually introducing some throbbing 4 on the floor house music, but all murky and muddy, as if blasting in an upstairs apartment, just the rhythm oozing though the walls, a darkly propuslive slab of late night housemusic murk. "All This Is Ours (Sunrise)", unfurls soft swells of new age synth shimmer, a crystalline drift that soon sinks into a thick layed morass of crumbling bass-synth squelch and gradually intensifying distorted crackle, before finishing off in a squall of soft noise and sc-fi FX swirl, and finally, "We Have Already Died", strings some tribal skeletal skitter into a looped almost Muslimgauze sounding groove, all draped over an ominous sprawl of post industrial hum and layered swirls of blurred ghost-grey ambience.
Packaged much like the last Demdike Stare, in an oversized six panel digi-sleeve, with original Andy Votel artwork, mirroring the artwork from the original quadruple gatefold sleeve that housed all four 12"s...
Finally, Demdike Stare's dark and dizzying, murky and mysterious hauntological black dub triptych, previously available via three separate slabs of vinyl, is now available on cd, gathered up into a single, nicely packaged triple disc set. And loaded with bonus tracks (nearly 40 minutes extra all told), which makes this pretty much a shoe-in for Record Of The Week...
Demdike Stare are one of the few bands who seem to be a unanimous aQ favorite, everyone here LOVES these guys, and judging on how many of the various lps we've sold, everyone out there does too. Which makes sense, when you consider, DS basically create a kind of black metal dubstep, or as we (and others) like to describe it, a blackened dub record on Chain Reaction. Either one should give you an idea of the sort of dark sonic energy these guys conjure up. Thick claustrophobic atmospheres, skeletal rhythms, thick throbbing bass, skittering dubbed out beats, disembodied voices, stuttering minimal sort-of-dubstep, looped and processed African folk music (??), swirling glitched out electronics, deeeep pulsing dronemusic, reverb drenched post-rock-via-techno skitter, all woven into a swirling organic mass of dub flecked blacktronica, dark and sinister and dubby, and weirdly house-y, sprawling and epic and creepy and so totally sweeping and cinematic.
The first disc, Forest Of Evil, was originally two sidelong tracks, the first starts out all deep shimmer, with a softly melodic buzz, spidery acoustic guitars, long stretches of billowy black ambience, bits of shuffly jazzy drift, peppered with thick shards of buzzy fractured dub bass and Kompakt style skitter, giving way to glistening late night techno, whirling pop ambient, and blissed out ethereal dronemusic, while the second is darkly dramatic, epic and majestic, like some lost Italian soundtrack, big drums, orchestral and ominous, looped samples, blurred melodic smears over deep pulsing bass, whirling clouds of cymbal shimmer, insectoid FX buzz, jumbled atonal melodies (hints of Bernard Herrmann), the vibe tense and haunting, with some dubstep bass buzz, that slowly dissolves into a Caretaker like outro, all layered strings wreathed in hiss and crackle, hazy and druggy and divine. The bonus track "Quiet Sky" conjures up just what the title implies, a quiet sky, but a dark, bruised midnight sky, flecked with stars, soft swirls of metallic shimmer like gauzy clouds, the song gradually developing a strange minimal hiccuppy rhythm, underpinning the deep melancholic swells, a strange almost industrial tinged bit of pop ambience.
The second disc, Liberation Through Hearing, is thematically related to the Book Of The Dead, and focuses on the space between death and rebirth. Rendered in greys and blacks, in buzz and rumble, beginning with some woozy late night Portishead style downtempo trip hop, low slung looped skitter and swell, lush swirls of cinematic strings, ghostly choirs, a softly lurching rhythmic stutter, a deep cavernous throb, sounding like a ghostly stripped down dubstep. Which gives way to heaving expanses of black tidal thrum, muted scrapings, all wound into hypnotic pulses of dark energy, laced with distant chiming melodies, a haunting, gauzey faded memory in sound, drawn from radios with dying batteries and gradually slowing turntables, a soft focus symphony of creaks and rumbles and blurred low end shimmer. The first half finishes with a swoonsome smear of looped ambience, like a field recording of an after hours nightclub captured in a temporal loop, warm and druggy and fuzzy, strangely hypnotic and rhythmic, totally trancelike, a creeped out wasteland soundscape, mysterious and chilling, which is eventually augmented by thick slabs of corrosive low end, and heavily reverbed industrial clatter, which eventually emerges into a strange sea of crackle and hum, of warbly rhythms, chiming bells and distorted crunch, sounding a bit like Jeck spinning Pole record, abstract and spaced out and hauntingly lovely.
The second half opens with thick streaks of ghostly mesmer, all washed out and slowly decaying, underpinned by thick swaths of dubstep style bass wobble, but muted and smoothed into soft smears of undulating blackness. Subtle skitter surfaces, as do distant voices, the sound getting more and more dubby, a bit like a Caretaker record on Chain Reaction, that sort of hazy abstract drift, but anchored to barely there beats, the buzz building to an intense coda, all the while wrapped in throbbing woofer punishing low end.
Some super stripped down rhythms are laid over a swirling ghostly backdrop of fragmented melodies and a buried house music thump, tangled and blurred strings wrap the proceedings in a veil of softened reverb and subtle echo, the almost Eastern sounding pulse and swell reminding us a bit of the late great Muslimgauze.
Finally, the record collapses into some sort of melancholic sonic reverie, a hushed ambient outro, a tranquil sea of soft swirling swells, clouds of echo and reverb, a dreamy darkness, a blackened bit of blurpop minimalism, laced with muted streaks of fuzz and hiss, but all gradually sinking into Demdike Stare's endless trancelike billowing blackness.
The bonus tracks on this one (3 of them, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes) continue the record's surreal sonic journey, spidery rhythms, and chiming melodies are looped and layered over a simple pulsing propulsive groove, the whole thing slightly warped and warbled, as if recorded onto an old piece of tape, and played back on some dusty old ramshackle tape player, ghostly, but surprisingly playful at first, before slipping into some seriously creepy, deeeeeep droning rumbles, wreathed in shimmering solar winds, softly billowing sheets of hiss and static, eventually shedding all of that, leaving just a thick morass of softly undulating low end, shot through with a slo-mo house music pulse, only to have the hiss and whir return, this time relegated to the background, until the track finishes surprisingly with what sounds like a bit of African style funkiness, before disappearing in a brief cloud of swirling hushed buzz.
Finally, the third disc, Voices Of Dust, unveils the Tryptych's final movement, opening with "Black Sun", a short stretch of some super minimal electronic dronemusic, all layered overtones and strange sonic shadings, which gives way to the chopped and looped and stuttery vocal driven "Hashshashin Chant" which takes tribal drums and traditional folk music vocals, and twists them all up, and tangles those elements with strange percussion, industrial buzz, the whole thing a dizzying chunk of hypno-electronic collaged psychedelic mashup weirdness, before slipping into the much murkier and minimal "Repository Of Light", which unfurls like some sort of Hawkwind-meets-Pole spaced out digi-dub drift. And so it goes, the sound flitting between impossibly realized miniature sound worlds, cinematic electronic ambience, ominously pulsing low end rumble, hazy glitchy dubbed out Jeckian smears, super blown out electronic big beat bombast, almost industrial sounding avant big band abstraction, roiling corrosive soft noise, bellowing foghorn-like melodies, warped and woozy scratchy old lp warblescapes and beyond.
The bonus tracks are the perfect, hazy, ghostly coda, the first, a warm, whispery bit of keening abstract melody and thick pulsing thrum, all very washed out and space-y and dreamlike, a constantly vibrating living thing, a throbbing organic expanse of minimal space drone psychedelic ambience, until finally, the whole disc is laid to rest with 9 minutes of heaving, glacial, metallic creep and creak, wreathed in record crackle, the final sounds unfurl like some old dusty Tim Hecker 45 spinning at 16rpm, mournful moaning melodies, buried rhythmic thumps, shimmery sitar like buzz, all hazy and smeared and lysergic and mysteriously murky, the perfect slipping-into-darkness, leaving-this-world-behind finale...
Gorgeously evocative, creepy and cinematic, abstract and otherworldly, druggy and dreamy, fantastically haunting and utterly spine tinglingly stunning. And thus, absolutely recommended.
Packaged in a super swank, oversized, hardcover book style digipak.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The packaging of the anti-static shielding bag is certainly appropriate to house the electron modulations of Taylor Deupree's "Polr" album. Released right on the heels of an album for the Mille Plateaux subsidiary Ritornell, this actually marks a big step in the development of Deupree's nano-technist productions. His post-techno rhythmic structures and delicately phased crystalline fluctuatations (dare we call them melodies?) slowly rise out of black box empty spaces much in the same way as Mika Vainio's solo work (especially the � "Metri" album). Very good!
I (Jim) once had a mighty long list of records that I had been looking for. Or rather, it was a loosely organized jumble of folded papers where I noted what I should be digging for whenever I ventured into good record stores (i.e. Aquarius, before I started working here). One of the many things that I just could never find was the first Dial record, which I think I read about in Nick Cain's seminal Opprobrium magazine. I can't even remember what the review said, but in it Cain hit upon just the right key words to keep me looking for the record. Many moons later, an brand new album by Dial turned up here at Aquarius (although not the one I was looking for), and I can certainly see why I would have wanted to hear what this band sounded like. Dial is a collaborative effort between Jacqui Ham (formerly of Ut) and Rob Smith, with a few other NYC noise-rock types joining in. Ut came out of New York's No Wave scene, proposing an angular, post-punk jitter with guitars, squawked vocals, and drums all laboring into relatively cohesive rhythmic tunes. While Ut were never a really gritty or brutal band by No Wave standards, Dial are. Their claustrophobic drone-rock is a dense aggregate of snarling guitar scrape, electric pulsations, and a plethora of lo-fi distortion. In the No Wave spectrum, Dial come much closer to narcotic murk of Mars or a much grittier sounding Suicide. At their most cohesive, Dial make all of the Dead C references too as the drums hit propulsive slop-punk grooves only to trip down the stairs in free-noise fashion. All of these are very good things, and make 168K a very recommended album. If only I could track down the earlier ones... In due time.
This thoroughly bizarre album from the obscure Russian duo Die Blutleuchte becomes even stranger once you realise it was released on the Finnish electronic label Sahko, which is known for the pristine techno minimalism of Mika Vainio's earliest monikers (Philus and ù�in particular). Conceptually, "Rus" -- Dis Blutleuschte's first and only album -- is a fictional soundtrack to specific moments in Russian military history, starting back in the 15th century with the invasion of Mongolian tribes into Russia and moving onto Peter The Great's war on Finland, both World Wars, the abduction of political dissidents to Siberia, and the development of contemporary Russia through the philosophies of Glasnost. Perhaps to those with an understanding of the Russian language, this might appear overly didactic and obvious with all of the vocal samples which appear in various patinas of distortion and megaphone production; however since we here at Aquarius do not possess such skills, "Rus" appears as an impressive abstraction of history as a collision between grandiose technologies and indigenous folk languages. For example, there would be the juxtaposition of sampled recordings of the clattering of horse drawn carts over cobblestoned roads (pointing to apocalyptic horsemen for one reference, Mongolian invaders for another) with obtusely morose folk songs for guitar, flute, and drums, not unlike the Dead Raven Choir with an oblique sense of timing and emotional bleakness. While the folk songs remain more or less consistent, the references to industry and technology take on more militant references with blasts of megaphone shrieks and harsh mechanical noise. Die Blutleuchte might warrant references in this synthesis of technology and folk to Laibach, Blood Axis, or Moon Lay Hidden Behind The Clouds; however, "Rus" is far weirder than any of those references. A very surprising record!
MPEG Download: "Track 09" [/audio/dieblutleuschte09.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Track 09" [/audio/dieblutleuschte09.m3u]
Holy shit! This is a frightfully good piece of dark minimalism on par with Roland Kayn, Eliane Radigue, and the late period works from The Hafler Trio.
Dimmer is the collaborative project between Bay Area experimentalist Thomas Dimuzio and LAFMS icon Joseph Hammer, who have toured together on a semi-regular basis up and down the West Coast for the past decade or so. The two previous Dimmer albums were collected and edited from the numerous live gigs, documenting the real-time electronic synthesis from Dimuzio coupled with Hammer's tape loop manipulations. As impressive as Dimmer has been live and on those edited live recordings, we were completely floored by Ascent - their first collaborative venture into the studio. Restricting their sources to vintage analogue gear, Dimuzio and Hammer generate swarms of harmonic drones that they in turn filter through the abstracting tools of choice. For Dimuzio, it's his gear-junkie arsenal of digital samplers and sequencers; for Hammer, it's the humble tape deck. On the first couple of tracks, Dimmer issues deep cosmic tones with strange / strangulated fibrillations from Hammer's tape tricks that elongate, expand, and collapse in accordance with a grand, if slightly sinister vision of miniaturized symphonies for the birth and death of the universe. Gasping drones billowing with toxic fumes stream rapidly out of blackened voids with Dimuzio and Hammer making prolonged descents into near-silence, before rocketing forward with another grandiose swell of ever darkening compaction of processed synth tones. Where the album begins in the shimmeringly majesty of a Klaus Schulze composition, it ends much closer to something monstrous and cavernous like Lustmord. This is easily the best we've heard from either of these two stalwarts of the California avant-garde! Limited to 300 copies.
Wow! Given the acrimonious break-up of Disco Inferno after their aesthetically fraught album Technicolour in 1996, we're a little shocked, yet totally stoked to see anything from Disco Inferno back in print, let along the rare EPs reissued here. This London trio formed in 1989, releasing three albums and seven eps that amounted to a brilliant mish-mash of sample-based technology, post-punk intensity, and a profoundly British mope that hangs throughout their catalogue. The first recorded forays by Disco Inferno found the group wearing their influences proudly on sonic sleeves - Joy Division, Wire, Durutti Column, and The Smiths - with the band twisting those influences into a narcotized torpour through an elliptical rhythm section that grounded the suitably delay-riddled, arppegiations and repititions from guitarist / vocalist Ian Crause. The band quickly took to MIDI technology, often sampling Crause's own guitar and alchemically rendering those into percolating satellites of effervsecent sound that orbit the song with peculiar trajectories and angles. Over time, the sampling became more and more of the focus in the band, appropriating sounds outside of their studio and fracturing all of those sounds into a more and more bizarrely splintered electronica that mutated into something grotesquely baroque, all the while hanging onto the core principles of the pop-art melody. This emphasis on sampling was an obsession for Crause after reading what David Stubbs and Simon Reynolds were championing in NME, as those two fixated on a technological thread that ran through My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, and The Young Gods. Crause was single-minded in his pursuit of figuring out how technology could be seemlessly integrated into the context of a British art-rock band, in frantic anticipation of what anybody might be doing elsewhere in the world. As such, Disco Inferno and Robert Hampson's post-Loop project Main were at the vangarde of ostensible pop bands disintegrating themselves before their audiences' eyes and ears. Where Hampson did achive escape velocity from rock's heavy gravitational pull with little to show for it after Motion Pool, Disco Inferno's internal disputes over where that technology needed to go caused so much strife as to destroy the band, with none of the members doing anything memorable since.
The 5 EPs featured here showcase that transition from an artful post-punk project conjuring the ghost of Martin Hannett into a complicated electronica ensemble that predicted how Christian Fennesz would deconstruct the spirit of The Beach Boys, but without the benefit of granulating laptop tricknology. We mentioned above that the band released seven EPs, the first two of which were compiled with their first album on the anthology entitled In Debt. The first EP in this anthology is "Summer's Last Sound" from 1992 and features two tracks that sparkle with harsichord-like patterns from the sampedelica, pulled back down to the ground by the thickly strummed bass from Paul Willmot, not to mention Crause's wistful, unpretentious vocal delivery of his deeply sad lyrics. "A Rock To Cling To" from 1993 finds the band in more of a traditional rock mode with guitars, bass, and drums, whose repetitive groove is offset by soaring bursts of sampled vocals that stretch like vapor trails glowing in moonlight. The B-side to that EP, "The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea", introduces a sample that would become common place in the ever-abstracting repetoire of Disco Inferno, that of shattering glass whose tinkling fragments of sound lock into an elegant Terry Riley patterning of minimalist rhythms. "The Last Dance" (also from 1993) features two versions of the title track, where Ian Crause has penned a damn good song that could have fit neatly in with the Johnny Marr songbook of The Smiths, but with jittery electronics and melancholy appropriations of schoolyard song puncturing Crause's crisp guitar lines. The B-side of "D.I. Go Pop" (the name of their second record, which didn't feature this track, oddly enough) is a manic affair of tape-revving guitar noise, threatening to unravel and unhinge as a spastic dervish. "Scattered Showers" is the other B-side, a beautifully poetic abstraction of British melancholy through sampled motorcycle engines forming the patterned tension beneath Crause's rain-drenched guitar strum. This EP and the next, "Second Language" from 1994, stand as the best material in Disco Inferno's short-circuited career. The title track of the latter single finds the band recycling Crause's sparkling Vini Reilly guitar into enchanting, hypnotic echoes out of which Crause concludes the track with a triumphant Brit-rock riff obviously alluding to the comtemporary bombast of Oasis. "At The End Of The Line" follows the aforementioned "Scattered Showers" as Disco Inferno's penchant for beautiful miserablism cast through refracted guitar lines into shoegaze bliss. The final single "It's A Kids World" finds the band at odds with itself, creating a jubilant kaleidoscope out of the drum crash from Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" with Umbrellas of Cherbourg-esque flute trills of baroque pop guiding this atypically uptempo number. The B-side "A Night On The Tiles" is a Felini-esque collage of vaudevillian records, screaming girls, and smashed glass coming across more like a diabolical Nurse With Wound track than anything else found in their catalogue. Whew!
If you've just so much as glanced in the direction of Stereolab, Notwist, Fennesz, My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, and/or Animal Collective, you really owe it to yourself to check out Disco Inferno. They really are that good! We can only hope that D.I. Go Pop and In Debt (both of which are long out of print) will see the light of day once again, given the inevitible interest that will come from this anthology from one of the pioneers of avant-rock.
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!! Limited edition double vinyl, to be precise, with three "newly discovered songs exclusive to this lp". Plus two live encores from the band's final CBGB's appearance. Here's our review of the earlier released cd version:
It's been a quarter century overdue. But finally, all of the good DNA material has finally been gathered in a single collection. There may have been Japanese bootlegs floating around, and there was that terrible live record that came out on Avant about a decade ago. But DNA on DNA is the definitive collection; and its release will probably squeeze more than a few of those seminal No New York compilations LPs onto the eBay market.
DNA, of course, was the No Wave band that Arto Lindsay assembled with the help of percussionist Iuke Mori and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield, both of whom were self-professed non-musicians at the time. A mere 9 months after the birth of DNA, Crutchfield left and was replaced by former Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright. The two line-ups of DNA manifested vastly different sounds. For the first line-up, Lindsay coupled his autistic guitar cacophony with aggressive barks and snarls of thoroughly fragmented lyrics which in turn were propelled by Crutchfield's double fisted pummel on his keyboards and More's equally Frankensteinian percussive lurches. The early DNA sort of sounded like an unholy coupling of Damo Suzuki, Sonny Sharrock, and Captain Beefheart attempting to compress all of their ideas into a two minute punk context. Recent bands like the Numbers have attempted to replicate the DNA ethos, but have devolved into ironists sneering at the audience instead of capturing DNA's frightening abstract expressionism and psychic alienation.
The second DNA line-up with Tim Wright on bass embraced a far more painterly approach. Rather than replicating the antifunk cubic sounds of Crutchfield's Moog, Wright produced calligraphic bass lines with a sinewy pelvic grind that infused a bizarre sensuality to the tortured sounds of Lindsay's guitar 'n' vocal shrieks. No net loss/gain there.
While Mars clearly had their highlights, they quietly imploded, Lydia Lunch dropped the shock treatment of Teenage Jesus in lieu of the cartoonish noir of Queen of Siam and Eight Eyed Spy and James Chance went onto parody himself as James White, DNA were consistently the best of the No Wave bands; and it's about damn time that this document came out. Clearly there are a lot of contemporary bands who should be shamed into calling it quits with the release of DNA on DNA, and there should be many more people who should be blown away by just how good DNA were.
PHTHALO 12. Oh wow. I have no idea what/who this is, nor do I care. Neither do I care that this was pressed as a cd-r. Dntel has made one of the catchiest IDM-based electronica records in the last long while, bringing pop hooks full of tinkling little melodies to the digital swoop and skitter of deconstructed Amen breaks, spasmodic algorithms, and powerbooking electrocrunch. Fans of Lesser, Reload (remember them?), and Aphex Twin shouldn't pass this up. I'm serious.
Dntel's "Something Always Goes Wrong" had a noble beginning back in 1994 when it was slated to be released on some Japanese boutique techno label as a concept record about "our hero and his arduous journey." (?) The presence of swords, damsels, and an evil king keep this concept album outside of the realm of Sci-Fi -- the genre of choice for techno boffins doing concept albums. This is a blantantly romantic piece of electronic abstraction which nuzzles itself right in between early '90s legends of electronica in Reload, Biosphere, and chill-out king, The Orb. The outsider electronica label Phthalo resurrected this album and added two remixes (from Seq and Languis respectively) and two new tracks. Fans of Boards of Canada who haven't heard much of Reload or Biosphere should certainly check Dntel out. Easily the most accessible record to emerge from the damaged minds of Phthalo!
After producing three seminal art-punk records from 1977 to 1980 that moved in rapid trajectory away from the short-sharp economy of Pink Flag to the tongue-twisting surfaces of 154, Wire dissolved for the first time. Call it a hiatus, call it an acrimonious break-up, call it a fuck-you to the major label that signed them; but regardless of what may or may have transpired in 1980, there were just too many ideas in those four blokes to be contained in the trappings of a four-piece punk band. Given what came immediately after 154, it's pretty clear where all of those radical shifts came from - Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert. Sure, Colin Newman produced a pretty decent solo record in A-Z, but in all of the projects that Lewis & Gilbert produced, there was a torrent of amazing material that included Duet Emmo, Cupol, P'O, and what proved to the best of the lot - Dome.
In quick succession, Dome produced four albums between 1980 and 1982, all of which now are just referred to by their numerical order, although Dome 4 was originally released under the title Will You Speak This World. As much as these records were explorations of deconstructing the punk song into drone, atonality, minimal synth abrasion, and polyglot perversity, Lewis & Gilbert would also tease with hints at what Wire had previously manifested. This audience baiting was also demonstrated on Wire's live lp Document & Eyewitness which condensed the classic Wire songs "12xU" down to 15 second fragment that never launched into that pogo-punk beat. As such, Dome would build songs out of repetitive guitar & bass patterns that would parallel one of the exuberant numbers like "Outdoor Miner" or "Mannequin" but the song would then detour into ellipsis with alien drones and discordant counterpoints. "Here We Go" from Dome 1 was a prime example of this punk-tease, furthered by tracks like the wild-eyed delirium of Lewis' ranting on "Cancel Your Order" also from Dome 1. The much ballyhooed highlight from that first record is the sublime track "Cruel When Complete" sung by Angela Conway, who coos breathily over an elegant if very cold electronic pattern with quintessential minimal wave detachment. Dome 2 continues along the convoluted art-punk abstraction through the two part "Red Tent" framed by plenty of abstracted electronic fragments and rhythmic work-outs that parallel what This Heat was doing at the same time.
Dome 3 found the duo hitting their stride, where the synthetic rhythms and loops play a central role in the arrangements accompanied by weird percussion, distorted vocals, feverish minimalism, abstractionist drones, and industrial overtures. All of the tracks are given names more fitting to Kurt Schwitters "Ursonate" such as "Ar-Gu," "Roos-An," and "An-An-An-D-D-D," providing more of a connection to Dada than to punk. Through these synthetic noises, Dome find them the perfect bridge between Throbbing Gristle and Zoviet France. Dome 4 stretches out the fragmentary brilliance of Dome 3 into longer, more thoughtfully composed pieces such as the archaic sounding folk-hymnal "To Speak" where Lewis' baritone intertwines with a languid violin and lots of cathedral reverberations.
Jump some 8 years to when Wire had reformed to produce a couple of fantastic art-pop records, when Dome also reconvened with the aid of late-80s technology: samplers and MIDI sequencing (as opposed to the tape loop and primitive synth work of the early recordings); and they recorded an album entitled Yclept which didn't get released for another decade. Here, the machined rhythms, repetitive noise collages, and loping basslines rejoin the realm of the song, albeit fractured somewhere between Aphex Twin, Greater Than One, and SPK, with Lewis crooning as he would occasionally do in Wire and on his under-appreciated He Said solo projects.
These 5 lps come packaged in large box filled with photographs, posters, and liner notes plus the requisite download coupon and inexplicably a box of matches. Don't set yourself on fire, please.
By the standards set by 2008 trends in experimental and avant-garde music, Roger Doyle's The Ninth Set is profoundly uncool. There's nothing to connect this electro-acoustic body of work to the drone-metal hybrids or to the forest dwelling psychedelic splatter of Finnish weirdness or even to the long-form trance induction from the high minimalists. Nope, this is a composition of dramatic plasticity, sculpted with the isolationist bunker mentality embraced by Pierre Schaeffer or Michel Chion. Perhaps that's the reason Doyle's work strikes a chord with us right now, precisely because it's so antithetical to the current streams of the avant garde (or at least the streams that pass through Aquarius).
Doyle is a composer who has enjoyed a considerable amount of notoriety from both the establishment as well as from the underground elite. He's been granted a number of high profile awards from academic types, but at the same time, he also released an album under the moniker Operating Theatre that United Dairies released back in 1981. So it doesn't come as a surprise that high praise has been granted to Doyle from all over the map; but even so, this is actually our first encounter with the man's work. At the moment, we can't say how it compares to that United Dairies record or to Oizzo No (which many have claimed to be a masterpiece, despite it's terrible title). Through the five lengthy pieces of The Ninth Set, Roger Doyle cycles through rumbling episodes of recontextualized tumult and industrial heft, with every sound recorded and presented with impeccable digital clarity. At times, his work mangles Ligetti-esque vocal chorale through timestretching DSP tricks and thick digitally swabbed crescendos of grey noise; at others plucked cords, wires, and strings congregate into an unsettled mass with opaque rumblings and seasick swells. Throughout each movement, there's plenty of pregnant interludes of relative quiet with punctations of rapidly approaching noise that halt at its peak with a razor cut to silence. Uncool, it may be; but The Ninth Set is a brilliant record.
Sometimes it's hard to believe that certain records just go out of print. I mean who would let the Conet Project go out of print, or Souled American, or the Incredible String Band. It's even weirder when the record is not old or obscure. Then it's usually some bureaucratic red tape or major label bullshit that keeps people from hearing some great record. Such is the case with the second, ultimate release from San Diego's Drive Like Jehu, originally released on Interscope in 1994. A record Allan and Andee and Jim and Sadie and Windy and quite possibly the rest of the AQ staff would rank as one of the best rock records ever! Easily as good/important as Slint's Spiderland. For those who don't know, Drive Like Jehu was fronted by John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt (who has now reissued Yank Crime on his own Swami label) and featured vocalist Rick Farr (his rock name, he's also known as Eric Froberg) who later went on with Reis to play in the Hot Snakes. Drive Like Jehu also just happened to have one of the tightest rhythm sections EVER. E V E R! Yank Crime is a tightly wound record of 'post rock' (before post rock meant watered down instrumental indie rock bullshit) with head nodding, repetitive grooves, propulsive, ultra concise drumming, and some of the most inventive guitar playing we've ever heard. All topped off with Farr's distinctive high pitched vocals (familiar to all you folks who dig the Hot Snakes) The songs are looooong and hypnotic but never boring. The band locks into totally intense, static grooves, that can go on for minutes before exploding into mayhemic bursts of controlled fury. So goddamn good. Anyone who likes the Hot Snakes MUST own this record. Drive Like Jehu is like a hyper charged, heavier, more intense and complex, MUCH BETTER Hot Snakes. Anyone who likes Feuhler or Don Cab or Slint or Engine Kid or almost any post rock will discover what all those other comers had been shooting for. This is IT. Trust us. An automatic AQ "record of the week" selection as soon as we heard it was finally being re-released -- with three bonus tracks to boot! ("Bullet Train To Vegas" and "Hand Over Fist" from their Merge label 7", and the original version of "Sinews" from a Cargo/Headhunter compilation.) So even if you have the original you might want to get this reissue for those.
In recent years, Chicago's Kevin Drumm has unleashed an impressive cacophony through a handful of recordings of gnarled distortion and tempestuous noise. Having collaborated with the black-clad noisemonger Prurient and the power electronic technician Lasse Marhaug, having released an album for Hanson Records, and having composed a kick-ass disc called Sheer Hellish Miasma should be enough to let you know what the man is capable of. But listen closely to each of those albums, you'll find hints of glinted melody and a subtle beauty just below the surface of the chainsaw buzz. Here on Imperial Distortion, Drumm focuses entirely upon the contemplative and introspective gestures in the form of the huge longform drones similarly embraced by Eliane Radigue, Andrew Chalk, BJ Nilsen, etc. Gone are the attack, the aggression, and the noise; but the dark, the doom, and the hellishness are what remains in these icy drones. His strategy is pure hypnosis through slippery layers of elongated electronic drones and bell-tone like resonance. On first listening to disc one, the subterranean gong clatter soaked in reverberation could easily tear themselves apart into digital chaos, but Drumm molds the gritty klank into an ominous dronedirge. This softening of potentially destructive sounds becomes Drumm's modus operandi throughout the first disc, with each modulation toward excess pregnant with malcontent energy reigned in for a severely dark moodscaping. On disc two, Drumm sets up soft transmissions from controlled feedback undulate with a slow moving rhythmic pulse, which gradually doubles upon itself into a topographical drone with the all of the same-but-different patterns of wind swept sand. Here, Drumm most recalls the unnerving minimalism through refined feedback manipulation that Nurse With Wound concocted on Soliloquy For Lilith. By the end of the record, the shadow and disease which could be read into some of the tracks on the first disc dissolve into a shimmering ambience that's just damn pretty.
Let it be known, Imperial Distortion will be one of the best drone records of 2008.
