The 2008 opus Imperial Distortion took a lot of people by surprise, as that album signaled an abrupt shift in Kevin Drumm's aesthetic trajectory. For many years, Drumm had been embracing a full tilt noise agenda on such self-evident albums as Sheer Hellish Miasma; but with Imperial Distortion, he steered into the cold waters of an impeccable, glacial doom-ambient sound. That album was much more in line with the disgorged ambience, bleak isolationism, and perfected minimalism of Eliane Radigue, Thomas Koner, and Andrew Chalk. Imperial Horizon is the suitable follow-up to that earlier album, and it clearly shows that Drumm's success on Distortion was no fluke.
While coming from the same train of thought, Imperial Horizon isn't a mere redux of Imperial Distortion. Drumm opens the album with a brighter, silvery set of sinewaves, looped feedback, or maybe just a refined set of synth patches. Gradually, the layers of sound separate to allow for a subtle two note melody to push out of the background. Deeper subterranean tones eventually overtake those silvery tones at the beginning, with another complementary pairing of harmonic notes an octave or so lower than before. This compositional rotation of drone, revelation of melody, and collapse into drone continues over very long stretches, several times throughout the duration of the piece. In the brighter tones on Imperial Horizon, this album sparkles and shines like the glistens of frost and ice from a wintery sun, as opposed to the nuclear fall-out deposits from Imperial Distortion's far bleaker aspirations. Nevertheless, Imperial Horizon is a stunning piece of dronescaping.
For those of you out there who embrace Drumm's screaming noise recordings too, don't despair. He's still working quite diligently in this vein as well. Check out the electro-terminus cacophony of his recent album Impish Tyrant!
'Tis the season of fuzzed out greatness! We gotta say we love the recent movement of way lo-fi and blown out garage pop being pumped out by the likes of Wavves, Crystal Stilts, Blank Dogs, Vivian Girls, etc. Now we can add Dum Dum Girls to that rad list of bands, as this 12" has become permanently affixed to our turntable. With pop chops that rival the great Pains Of Being Pure At Heart but with a much more fuzzed out and dirty disposition this is totally hitting the spot! Like someone locked The Aislers Set in a garage and ruined all their equipment and thus they were forced to record on the shittiest gear possible but ended up with the most amazing results. We're also reminded of a much underrated Slumberland band of the past, Black Tambourine. With such a keen sense of melody underneath the fuzz, and a seriously in-the-red production also brings to mind some of the more raw and rocking moments of Yo La Tengo. As the musical world around us seems to get more slick and savvy it's kind of nice to be reminded that sometimes sounds that are raw and primitive and rudimentary are the ones capable of making the biggest impact.
2003 has been a very busy year for John Duncan, having released 5 full albums along with creating two rather impressive sound installations in Sweden and his current base of operations Italy. Many of these projects have simply been the culmination of projects that began quite some time ago; and fortunately, Mr. Duncan has steered clear of many of the failings of hyper-prolific artists who simply fall back upon signature styles. As always, Duncan seeks out new challenges for himself and nakedly asserts them upon his audience, whether they want it or not.
Da Sich Die Machtgier... began as a collaborative project between Duncan and Asmus Tietchens. To begin, Tietchens sent Duncan recordings of Tietchens reading texts from E.M. Cioran, the early 20th century skeptic whose quotes are featured on almost all of the Tietchens back catalogue releases. In turn, Duncan processed those recordings, sent them back to Tietchens, and awaited further instructions. Instead of receiving another round of recordings to work with, Duncan received a note from Tietchens that his initial recordings were sufficiently complete and that Tietchens would refuse any credit for his contribution. To this day, Duncan still disagrees with Tietchens about the credit issue, but went ahead and released the results as is.
An unnervingly digital construction, Da Sich Die Machtgier... relies heavily on the maniacal hammering of the DSP / timestretching filters. For the first half of the album, these agitated, rapid-fire noises approximate Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and strongly reference the process of a thoroughly disembodied voice as the content to the work. However, the caustic abstraction completely dissolves in the album's epic, 30 minute finale. Much closer to the subtle power of Phantom Broadcast and Infrasound - Tidal, this track smears Tietchens voice into an electronic windstorm, sweeping with an elegant majesty.
As with Duncan's entire body of work, Da Sich Die Machtgier... is a very strong release.
Sonic provocateur John Duncan has said he prefers the use of shortwave radio signals over any musical instrument in his pursuit into the pure physicality of noise. "Fresh," however, finds Duncan stepping back from that proclamation, as this album documents his collaboration with Zeitkratzer, a German avant-garde ensemble that specializes in the translation of electronic and noise compositions into scores for classical instrumentation. Under the guidance of Reinhold Friedl, Zeitkratzer's refreshing attitude is that "the opening to multi-disciplinarity isn't new any more, but artistic normality." In addition to this disc with Duncan, they've also worked with Merzbow, Zbigniew Karkowski, Phill Niblock, Christina Kubisch, and most recently Lou Reed in reworking his pioneering '70s noise opus "Metal Machine Music", if you can believe that!
"Fresh" features two Duncan compositions, "Nav-Flex" and "Trinity", as performed by Zeitratzer. Initially released as a collaboration with Francisco Lopez, "Nav-Flex" -- which happens to be one of my (Jim's) favorite Duncan pieces -- translates very nicely from original composition for shortwave, datastreams, and voice. Opening with a very loud, discordant blast of horns, strings, piano, percussion and electronics, Zeitkratzer vigilantly maintains Duncan's course of action by quickly fading the notes to a near silence that nervously persists for several minutes. The rumblings of those interwoven orchestral tones re-appear as a resurgent mirror reflection of that first incarnation of sound on the record and maintain a plateau-level of sustained, droning tones which accurately mimic the sounds that Duncan originally recorded. Zeitkratzer's version of "Trinity," on the other hand, sounds remarkably different than the original Duncan piece, a caustic composition that investigated the electric buzzings of shortwave radio static. It does follow Duncan's pattern of varying shortwave-like fluctuations, but the tonal colors of the two "Trinities" exhibit a much greater distance between the original and the orchestrated version than with "Nav-Flex." It's interesting to wonder how Duncan/Zeitkratzer scored these pieces (perhaps as a graphical score a la Cornelius Cardew?), but whatever the method, the results are nonetheless amazing.
In 1998, the American expatriot sound artist John Duncan made contact with Australian sound archivist Densil Cabrera, in hopes of arranging a project based on oceanic, seismic, and atmospheric measurements. While his resume points towards an academic background in electroacoustics and sound installation, Cabera presented these recordings to Duncan as raw scientific data, having translated three centuries (yes, centuries!) of the tidal spectra published by the Australian National Tide Tables into a far more digestible recording that compressed one year of data down to one second. Further recordings transposed barometric pressure recordings from two Australian air force bases and others used seismometers to produce images from a number of earthquakes and nuclear tests. In researching how he wanted to proceed with these recordings, Duncan was also hoping to form an impression of Densil's personality. However, during the five years it took for this collaboration to be completed, Duncan came to the realisation that he knew nothing more about Densil then when he started. Thus, he applied this detachment of scientific rigor to the production of Densil's recordings. "Infrasound - Tidal" emerges as a stark album of subtle tonal shifts, mostly low rattling frequencies that transition into gray static flutterings, resulting in an album not unlike the best of Francisco Lopez' "Belle Confusion" series. Like all of Duncan's recordings, "Infrasound - Tidal" seeks wisdom and knowledge through the process of sound construction and metaphoric conceptualization. While he may not have found what he wanted, Duncan wonderfully took what was given to him and realized a fantastic atmosphere of stark desolation.
MPEG Download: "Infrasound - Tidal (excerpt 1)" [/audio/duncaninfrasound1.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Infrasound - Tidal (excerpt 1)" [/audio/duncaninfrasound1.m3u]
MPEG Download: "Infrasound - Tidal (excerpt 2)" [/audio/duncaninfrasound2.mp3]
BACK IN STOCK, AT A LOWER PRICE!!! In the early '80s, John Duncan moved from Los Angeles to Tokyo where he began a number of very interesting works with grandiose agendas of destabilization and transgression. One facet of his Toyko period was his pirate radio station using the frequency of NHK 1 after that station signed off at night. But perhaps the most infamous work was the pornography that Duncan produced under the pseudonym John See. Part of the intention of the John See series was for this work to be used by the viewer as source material for any video collage work; of course, Duncan was also going for sexual titillation as well. During that time Duncan shot five films for the adult film company Kuki - Doll, Fallen Angel, Inka, Aidayuki Passion, and Power Love. There are some distinctly unconventional aspects to these films, as Duncan often layered multiple images and early video effects during the build up to the money shot. But most of the sex and the "scripting" around those sex scenes tended to be pretty standard fare. What's most bizarre about Duncan's porn is the soundtrack that he uses. Instead of the funk grooves and wah-wah guitar workouts, he recontextualizes the ecstatic gasps and moans from his own footage alongside sterile drones culled from shortwave. If anything his use of sound is the most provocative element to the John See films.
In 1994, Duncan returned to the John See series, remastering several of the scores as well as remixing others in new compositions (which fit into his original idea that this work should be recycled for the viewer's use). The John See Soundtracks is a quintessential document of Duncan's early styles which ruptured violently with shortwave static and sexual outbursts in direct contrast to the cauldron of somatic fluctuations and electrical drones.
When John Duncan sent us this collaboration with the members of Pan Sonic, he warned us that the first two tracks would be a little hard to take on headphones. Oh yes, that warning should be heeded by all, headphones or not; especially if you're expecting the electric seduction of Duncan's Phantom Broadcast. But don't let the warning scare you off; as this is an incredible fusion of caustic electronics, shortwave radio signal manipulation, and the hammering arpeggiations which have become a trademark of the Finnish techno minimalists. So Nine Suggestions begins with some 15 minutes of white-knuckle noise tightly composed from siren squall electronics, volatile data streams from shortwave utility signals, and plenty of sawtoothed abrasiveness. In this introduction, Nine Suggestions harkens to the Pan Sonic masterpiece 4CD box set Kesto, which expressed plenty of noxious intensity in its rhythmic overload. Even as the album calms considerably in the expanse of the album, Kesto still stands the most accurate comparison as that album shifts from aggression and explosion to contemplation and eerieness. In the shadowy half-melodies, tectonic rumblings, nocturnal drones, dental drill vibrations, submariner sonar pings, and delicate modulation of electronic tones found within the latter two-thirds of Nine Suggestions, Duncan, Vainio, and Vaisanen have created something that really is as one would expect from these high-calliber artists. Highly recommended!
While attending Cal Arts in the mid '70s, John Duncan discovered the transient frequencies of shortwave, and made it his tool of choice in transferring his knowledge about the psychological implications for specific colors to the realm of sound construction. Instead of merely rehasing the Marshall McLuhan's 'medium is the message' tropes, Duncan's use of the shortwave is marked by his ability to transform the sound device into an externalization of profound (and sometimes disturbing) psychological states. Throughout his impressive back catalogue of recordings, the textural grit and grim electrical tonality of shortwave has repeatedly surfaced in any number of contexts, whether that be the poisonous aggression of "River Of Flames" or the architectural hauntings of "Palace of Mind." The same can be said for this album, as Duncan used nothing but a single shortwave transmission augmented by minimal amount of processing in composing the 47 minutes found within "Phantom Broadcast." Instead of the darkened references mentioned earlier, Duncan has extracted a sublimely powerful and uniquely transcendent series of sounds from what is just a utility signal containing something banal like air traffic controller data but could be something sort of shadowy like a RTTY radioteletype (a fairly sophisticated form of encryption; although not impossible to crack like Numbers Stations). These electrical sounds -- originally noxious striations of aural code -- have been smeared into quasi-harmonic, gaseous states and articulated as gasping reverberating drones. Right from the beginning of the album, these sounds do appear as from shortwave but as an epic piece of '60s Minimalism or Ligeti choral and caralon composition. Such references do not disappear over the "Phantom Broadcast" composition as organic cycles and fluctuations move throughout. It's simply breathtaking and beautiful.
While there were a number of great albums in 2002, Duncan's "Phantom Broadcast" is firmly planted at the top of my (Jim's) list for record of the year.
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"Tap Internal" firmly addresses a question that has been tangential to a number of John Duncan's previous releases: "What is the sound of energy?" Starting with the basic scientific method of breaking down a substance to reveal its structure, the character of its parts, and the taxonomic position it holds in relation to other elements like it, Duncan researches sound by crumbling it into its subatomic particles. "Tap Internal" is an ambitious project that mirrors the raw energy of white-hot VLF cracklings, shortwave radio buzz, and tectonic-plate rumbles. While Duncan's experiments have a willful cruelty to them, his static laden pulsations and incendiary ambient environments aren't merely theatrics of aural confrontation. The metaphoric hammer that Duncan takes to his sound sources softens in the presence of sublime yet beautiful moments of mesmerizing drones. In the process of obliteration, Duncan may have stumbled onto bigger more metaphysical questions that he may not be willing to answer quite yet, like "What is the sound of Duncan's soul?"
The sound constructs of John Duncan almost exist as a residue of his own personal research into esoteric realms of knowledge, existential bouts of continuous questioning, and transgressive acts against himself and society at large. Here was a man who claimed to have sex with a corpse as a performance piece entitled Blind Date, whereby he planted his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. That event presumably took place nearly 30 years ago, when Duncan was emerging as an artist in Los Angeles alongside Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley. Blind Date has become a piece of infamy that blossomed beyond his already highly transgressive context, but he's always been an artist who is very deft at framing particular works through the process and through the context of said piece. The Nazca Transmissions is one such piece.
A few years back, Duncan received an email from a German archaeologist working at the site of the Nazca Lines in Peru. These are the massive drawings carved into an arid plateau some 2000 years ago by the ancient Nazca people. Some of these figures are representation, some are not, and some get as large of 200 yards in size, all posing the question: who was supposed to be seeing these figures, and to what end? Now, this archaeologist claimed to have been able to record sounds from those line drawings; and he presented the raw material to Duncan, having been familiar with his transmutational pieces of digital data and shortwave. Duncan was suitably perplexed and intrigued by the sounds that were presented to him, proceeding to work on a series of compositions through that material. Unfortunately, this archaeologist ceased all communications, leading Duncan to wonder if it was all a big hoax.
Eerie ringings pocked with scrabbled textures almost like clipped VLF recordings open the album set against a gaping chasm of quietness. While Duncan's penchant for abrasive noise and jarring juxtaposition is well documented, you won't find that here. By the end of the side, the textures take on an unsettled rhythm that almost resembles human speech garbled through the process. Very compelling, very unsettled. The second side begins with an interlocking series of modulated and muffled Shepherd Tones, these are the audio equivalent of a barber's pole with the tones giving the appearance of being in constant ascension or descension. It's a common artifact found throughout the shortwave bands, harkening back to one of his preferred sound sources; and Duncan puts them to excellent use amidst a sea of low end rumblings. Soon after, pierced tones push to the foreground as those low end rumblings mutate into grotesquely deformed growlings only to fade against a hushed coda of grey noise. This is limited to less than 300 copies, and it remains to be seen if we'll be able to get more than the handful we have now. Recommended no matter how you look at it.
Before we get into the amazing sounds that John Duncan and C.M. von Hausswolff have created for this album (which we have to say is pretty fucking incredible), we have to drool over the artwork. Sure, it's always nice to get one of those hand-made packages, loving assembled by the musician from scraps of wallpaper or gesso smeared across heavy card stock; where the investment is paid through blood and sweat. But at the same time, it can sometimes be pretty fascinating to go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, to see what happens when money is no object, and thus nearly any vision can be realised. The recent Tool record is one example (reviewed elsewhere on this list) with its incredible built in lenses and stereoscopic booklet. And then there's Our Telluric Conversation, which employs a seriously and gloriously reckless design sensibility. Unfotunately, jpeg reproductions of this cd's cover will never translate how amazingly cool the packaging is. The white O-card / slipcover which wraps around the CD and the accompanying 40-page booklet is printed on a rubberized paper dotted with braille, making it strangely tactile, and thus not a little unsettling just to touch the album! Which is appropriate considering the musical content...
John Duncan and Carl Michael von Hausswolff have made an dark and unsettling album in Our Telluric Conversation, the second collaboration between these two AQ-favorite sound artists, opening with ominous bleeping, sort of sounding like sonar or a life support system barely keeping someone alive. An electronic turbulance gradually swarms around these mechanized pulses and explodes in a torrent of furious magneto noise, sounding very similar to the recent Duncan collaboration with Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisainen. Abruptly, the track comes to a halt as the whispering voice of Hausswolff begins reciting a presumably fictional tale in which the protagonist has been infected with maggots and tries to rid his body of the parasites by communing with lizards and snakes through a combination of occult rituals. Hausswolff's whisper is all that one hears, with his lips closely pressed up to the microphone making saliva, lips smacking, and teeth gnashing all audible. Upon the conclusion of Hausswolff's spoken excerpt, the two proceed with a long-form construction for brilliantly shimmered drones and flickering sinewaves that's as good as anything by Phill Niblock, Mirror, or The Hafler Trio. Our Telluric Conversation concludes with another extended composition that bridges the signature aesthetics of the two artists, with a deadened monotone of processed 60-cycle hums (that's Hausswolff) and a seductive processing of shortwave static (that's Duncan). By themselves, Duncan and Hausswolff have crafted amazing records; but together, these two have really tapped into something eerie, psychologically instable, and sublimely beautiful. Highly recommended!
The bulk of John Duncan's exceptional catalogue of sonic provocation and sublime post-minimalism has been collaborations. CM Von Hausswolff, Francisco Lopez, Bernhard Gunter, Asmus Tietchens, Peter Fleur, Max Springer, Giuliana Stefani, and Elliott Sharp have all worked with Duncan in recent years; yet at the same time, each of those collaborations exhibits the inescapable gravitational pull of Duncan's conceptual and aesthetic agendas. This collaboration with Edvard Graham Lewis is no exception. Lewis, of course, is the legendary bassist / vocalist from Wire and has often ventured into the netherworlds of the avant-garde with fellow Wireman Bruce Gilbert in various guises. Like Duncan, Lewis is quite comfortable with the role of collaborator.
The human voice has been the springboard for a number of Duncan's records including the recent collaborations with Tietchens and Sharp. Not surprising, the most obvious contributions that Lewis makes on Presence are a few choice spoken word bits highlighting his elegantly sinister baritone voice (which in my opinion is more interesting than Colin Newman's). Broken into variable streams of timestretched anxiety during the album's introduction, Lewis' voice slips away beyond recognizablility, falling into an abyss of shortwave hum and crackle that have long been the divining rod for Duncan's epistomological inquistions. The centerpiece of the album is a 30 minute piece fusing those same gray timbers of shortwave with monochromatic vocal compositions, presumably birthed from Lewis' lips and later manipulated by Duncan. Even if Lewis did have a greater hand in the mix, Presence sounds much like Duncan's masterpieces Phantom Broadcast and Palace of Mind, which is not a bad thing at all. The album ends with Lewis' unmistakable voice offering a naked piece of advice:"Take a step forward and tell the truth." As narcotizing as the album becomes, this whispered text booms out of the speakers as a startling conclusion to this excellent album.
Once in a while, Aquarius has definitely put forth opinions that some folks didn't like. It goes without saying that those negative reactions seem to always be in response to a negative review of some band someone loves and is very sensitive about. Fair enough. We've gotten crap for a Butthole surfers review as well as our continuing indifference to house music. Well, brace yourself for another one, maybe no surprise: we have no desire to suffer through another Elliott Sharp album. Even though the Downtown New York veteran wanker has teamed up with one of our favorite sound reseachers John Duncan, we were skeptical to say the least, simply because the presence of Mr. Sharp could potentially ruin this album.
Yeah, this album could have been a total disaster. But it's not... not at all. In fact, Tongue is a fantastic document of mulched shortwave and vocalizations, and will probably be one of the better sound art recordings to come out in 2004. Either we've always only heard the really terrible Elliott Sharp records or John Duncan is wholly responsible for the album's success. Either way, Tongue is really a superb piece of work. Duncan has long praised the human voice as the most powerful instrument that he's encountered, even above his beloved shortwave which has been central to almost all of his compositions. Here, Duncan and Sharp manipulate sustained vocalizations from both artists as well as quiet gurglings of saliva coagulating within the cavities of their respective mouths. While these sounds acquire a delicate tactility that recalls the likes of Steve Roden and Toshiya Tsunoda, Duncan's shortwave interrupts and ruptures the quiet passages of this record with caustic static, twin blade flutterings, and electrocuted drones. Much could be said about the dislocation of the voice by a transmitter / receiver machine, but we'll leave that for the post-structuralist, academic types. That said, Duncan's recent work has shifted toward monumental compositions of minimalism (e.g. Phantom Broadcast, Stun Shelter, Keening Towers, etc.); but with Tongue, his work privleges the fragment (perhaps in deference to Sharp), making this an album closer to his previous masterpieces Tap Internal and River In Flames. Another recommended John Duncan record, and perhaps the first and only Elliott Sharp album we'll endorse wholeheartedly.
Hmm. These experimental ambient drone electronics guys sure keep themselves -- and each other -- busy. Elsewhere on this list you'll find another double cd that sees Lopez teaming up with Zbignew Karkowski. And there's also a Karkowski/Xopher Davidson disc too. Etc. But if they can't get enough of the drones, well, that's 'cause neither can you, right? So check this out... Both
- RealAudio clip: Flex
- RealAudio clip: Gate
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Palace Of Mind is the 2000 recording collaboration between John Duncan and Giuliana Stefani. Mr. Duncan has long been one of AQ's favorite experimentalists, having started things out back in the '70s LA performance art community only to quit the US to pursue his own intense psychological research into sound, projection, installation, photography, and the like. Stefani is a mathematician by training and became acquainted with Duncan through a collaborative project they began in Amsterdam in 1996. For this album, the two sifted through digital treatments of shortwave transmissions, wire-tapped data streams, and voice. In turn, they work the album into labyrinthine composition that can hold any number of potent metaphors: the neural synapses of the human brain, the schematics of a computer, or simply an architectural set of overlapping resonant spaces. Rareified tones set with motoric vibrations transition through the fluttering of (or rather the lack there of, as this sounds like the empty spaces between the bands marked by a mechanoid oily hiss) and onto slashing digital drone. Here, one can think to Duncan's exceptional field recordings made at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in the early '90s. Within the movement from an irritable data-stream purity to the gossamer haze of shortwave distortion to gaping drones of treated vocal vibrato, Duncan and Stefani have set a trajectory deep into the heart of their sonic architecture, with each 'room' saturated with an anxiousness for what may be on the other side of the door. You won't find Duncan firing a gun at your head (seriously, he did that as performance piece called Scare back in the late '70s, using blanks mind you), but Palace Of Mind revels in an interlocking network of chambers that resonate and breathe with a profound beauty. Highly recommended!
"Palace of Mind" -- released on his own imprint All Questions -- is a collaborative effort between longstanding experimentalist John Duncan and Italian mathematician Giuliana Stefani. In this work, he returns to the architectural metaphors that he previously explored on 1996's "The Crackling", a documentation of the aural properties found within SLAC, Stanford University's titanic particle linear accelerator. "Palace of Mind" follows a labyrinthine architectural schematic which parallels not only the minute circuitry of the computer but also the rhizomatic synaptic connections of the brain. With the movement from an irritable data-stream purity to the gossamer haze of shortwave distortion to gaping drones of treated vocal vibrato, Duncan and Stefani have set a trajectory deep into the heart of their sonic architecture. Each room is saturated with an anxiousness for what may be on the other side of the door. It is not Duncan firing a gun at your head, but an interlocking network of chambers that resonate and breathe with a profound beauty. Dare it be said that John Duncan has created something holy? Certainly, this is Duncan's best work to date!
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Making full use of the unintentionally dynamic acoustic phenomenon occurring within the Stanford Linear Accelerator, John Duncan and Max Springer have collaborated on this haunting collage of semi-processed field recordings made within the monolithic structure 2 miles long and several stories high. For those unfamiliar with Duncan's extraordinary shortwave experiments, this is a excellent introduction to one of the best dronologists / sound artists of the past two decades! From the liner notes: "The accelerator is full of contradictions: structures built to dwarf and outlast their creators, designed to generate subatomic events that take place in a time scale that is impossible to imagine, using forces that are hostile or lethal to human life, yet are entirely human-created. A 'city of the dead' that seems to have an existence of its own with or without its operators. For this work, the electon is understood as a metaphor for the process of life: isolated, compelled by a system that uses the electron's own energy to force it into a path that leads at a constantly increasing pace to certain destruction -- to a point of certain change, of complete resolution and the beginning of a new process."
Earlier in 2003, long time colleagues John Duncan and C.M. von Hausswolff collaborated on an installation at the Nicola Fornello Gallery in Prato, Italy. Judging from the massive 50 page, full color book that accompanies the cd of "Stun Shelter," the two artists presented individual installations whose sound elements bled together within the space to form the collaborative aspect of their work. Duncan revisted the pornographic "John See" films he produced in Japan during the mid-80s. That series accurately followed the strict Japanese rules about the visual representation of sexuality, in which no penetration or pubic hair can be shown. As for the soundtrack to those films, Duncan combined distant shrill orgasms from the actresses and his own claustrophobic, breathy vocalizations, slowly uttering optimistic phrases in Japanese. Despite their content, Duncan's renderings of language take on an aura of mechanical monstrosity. Hausswolff's installation was equally disturbing, having designed a haute couture bar and lounge for the sole purpose of huffing glue and paint thinner. The Hausswolff soundtrack featured several tone generators droning toward infinity. The amalgamation between the Duncan and Hausswolff soundtracks works incredibly well, offering a backbone to Duncan's vocalizations and contextually specific details to Hausswolff's numbing minimalism.
With Duncan having a whole slew of releases that have just come out at the end of 2003, "Stun Shelter" is easily the best of the lot, and certainly ranks as one of his best records alongside "Phantom Broadcast." At the same time, this album (especially with its highly informative book) encapsulates many of the ideas and themes (i.e. the transgressions of cultural norms, the never-ending inquisitions of power structures, the experiential realizations as existential proofs, etc.) that makes Duncan and Hausswolff such amazing artists. One of the best experimental records of 2003, though pricey.
When John Duncan sent us this collaboration with the members of Pan Sonic, he warned us that the first two tracks would be a little hard to take on headphones. Oh yes, that warning should be heeded by all, headphones or not; especially if you're expecting the electric seduction of Duncan's Phantom Broadcast. But don't let the warning scare you off; as this is an incredible fusion of caustic electronics, shortwave radio signal manipulation, and the hammering arpeggiations which have become a trademark of the Finnish techno minimalists. So Nine Suggestions begins with some 15 minutes of white-knuckle noise tightly composed from siren squall electronics, volatile data streams from shortwave utility signals, and plenty of sawtoothed abrasiveness. In this introduction, Nine Suggestions harkens to the Pan Sonic masterpiece 4CD box set Kesto, which expressed plenty of noxious intensity in its rhythmic overload. Even as the album calms considerably in the expanse of the album, Kesto still stands the most accurate comparison as that album shifts from aggression and explosion to contemplation and eerieness. In the shadowy half-melodies, tectonic rumblings, nocturnal drones, dental drill vibrations, submariner sonar pings, and delicate modulation of electronic tones found within the latter two-thirds of Nine Suggestions, Duncan, Vainio, and Vaisanen have created something that really is as one would expect from these high-calliber artists. Highly recommended!
The Scattering is a collaborative release from the exemplary John Duncan and the little known sound artist Peter Fleur, who had a few minor league successes as L.O.S.D. with Radboud Mens. Here, the two artists collaborate on one long track and offer solo works to round out the album, always using data files and shortwave as the source material. Each of the tracks have been severely manipulated with loads of DSP effects, feedback accumulation, and resampling techniques to form plastic drones rippling with a dramatic psychic tension. As on Duncan's previous album Da Sich Die Machtgier..., the dominant sounds are the dissonant fillibration from densely packed samples that have all been timestretched towards oblivion. The collabortive piece builds dramatically through those cracked drones with a mechnized bass pulse ominously crawling below. Fleur's solo work splits itself between a Francisco Lopez-esque low end rumble and a cascade of digitized textures amassing into frigid wall of noise. The final track is a signature John Duncan piece, where he amplifies the unsettling nature of shortwave's liminal spaces between the active broadcast frequencies. Shortwave has long been a favorite medium for Duncan, not only for its aesthetic qualities but its allegorical properties of psychological unrest, hidden communications, information wars, etc. In this piece for The Scattering, Duncan contextualizes shortwave static as a parallel to somatic fluctuations, where the sounds breathe, ebb, and contract in response to a subconscious intellect. Very very nice.
Really fucking spooky! Of course, we wouldn't expect much less from John Duncan, whose sound research specifically seeks out the most intense of psychological states. As the most infamous case, Duncan's Blind Date performance piece tells of his presumed experience with necrophilia as a masochistic ritual for depositing his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. While the audio documentation of Blind Date is cold and precise in what it says, Duncan neither confirms nor denies any of the details beyond what is told in that recording. It could have been a fabrication; but he plants the idea that he *might* have broken the most significant taboo of human civilization. Since then, Duncan's psychological research through sound, visual art, and performance has become far more sophisticated in approach and content. For example, there's his convoluted Pynchonesque album Our Telluric Conversation with CM von Hausswolff, and there's the masterful recapitulation of the sounds from the Stanford Linear Accelerator into The Crackling - a cavernous, sublime electric chorale which magnify the smallest of particles into massive discordant drones.
There Must Be A Way Across This River was a performance / installation that Duncan presented inside a refrigerated basement at a performance hall in Bologna, where he presented a slow-developing soundtrack of arctic drones layered with darkly vibrating shortwave patterns, whispered declarations from Duncan himself, and these strange violent bursts of electronic noise. While he never stated this to be the case, we wonder if he demanded that the audience be naked, as he has done for a handful of his other claustrophobic, black-box performances. That might have been even too cruel for Duncan! The sounds of There Must Be A Way Across This River are relatively subtle for Duncan's catalogue of work, but they are darkly evocative, eerie, bleak, and ominously threatening. Another very strong piece in his ever impressive body of work.
The flip side of the record is a strange collaboration between Duncan, Z'ev, and the EVP hunter Michael Esposito. Originally, Esposito, Duncan, and the medium Heidi Harman set out to make recordings in Duncan's childhood home outside of Chicago. Despite making arrangements with one of the occupants at the house, they were refused access, all the while Esposito was recording their conversations. During those recordings, 18 EVP invocations occurred, one of which addresses Duncan by name - an allegation that Harman confirmed through her own psychic contact. These 18 invocations were then given over to Z'ev who manipulated them into a suitably frightening set of interwoven drones and spectral undulations. If that particular EVP citation of Duncan's name is on these recordings, Z'ev has thoroughly eradicated the syntax into a slippery, ectoplasmic sound. It's one of the best things we've heard from Z'ev outside his kinetic percussive assaults, and rounds out a terrifyingly great piece of wax!
Good things most definitely come to those who wait! Those with good memories may recall that I (Jim) had trumpeted about a Sophie Durand & Manu Holterbach album as being one of finest sound art pieces of 2005 alongside the ephemerally beautiful Keith Berry disc The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish. Unfortunately, the label that had released the Durand / Holterbach collaboration had disappeared before any copies could make their way from the label's base of operations in Switzerland. Fortunately, the virtues of vigilance and patience held true, and Aquarius Records can now offer this magnificent recording to our discerning listeners.
The instrument behind what is hopefully the first installment to the Verres Enharmoniques series is a device that modifies the parlor trick of rubbing a wet finger across the rim of a wineglass to produce a continuous harmonic frequency. While the glass harmonica applied this same principle to a series of tuned glass bowls to produce several octaves of those harmonics, Manu Holterbach's invention hooks up four modified wine glasses to four foot pedals which control the water level within the glasses. Thus as water is pumped into the glass or drains out, the harmonic notes ascend and descent correspondingly. Holterbach and his partner Sophie Durand have performed with this instrument for several years now, with renowned sound artist mnortham making the bold claim that their performance was the loudest that he's ever experienced. Considering that their performances are unamplified, mnortham's claim is all the more astounding, but not impossible given that the purity of the frequencies from vibrating glass can rattle inside the human head. In rattling around the human head, these frequencies give the impression of high volumes without the sound pressure of a mountain of Marshall stacks. Durand and Holterbach apply these sounds as deep drones in subtle minimalist compositions with undulating movements and periodic phase patterns that have all of the majesty of LaMonte Young or Phill Niblock.
Sure the record is brilliant, but here's the other selling point: it's out of print and we only got a handful.
There are those certain records for all of us that just change things when they enter your world. For a few of us here, this 1981 album by Durutti Column is one of those records. An album that showed that music could be sparse and majestic at the same time. D.I.Y., yet and grandiose in how it evokes emotion, memory, longing and desire. The work of Vini Reilly, Durutti Column emerged out of Factory Records yet their sound was something completely of its own world. Merging impeccable guitar playing with subtle drum machines, soft vocals and a golden warmth that makes this one of those albums that makes you melt everytime you put it on.
Pastoral and blissful, LC is filled with both perfect restraint and full on flowing beauty. You can hear how traces of the more blissed out side of Krautrock influenced him, merging that with the stripped down emotional quality of British folk and placing it into a very modern moment. While not an obscure band by any measure, we are still blown away though by how many people who would love Durutti Column have never heard them. And with the reissue of their first two lp's we hope that so many of those folks finally do. We could go on and on listing folks whose music we love and who have undoubtedly been influenced by Durutti Column, and this record in particular: Felt, Fuqugi, Danny Paul Grody, Colleen, James Blackshaw, Ducktails, Fennesz, Manuel, A.R. Kane, My Bloody Valentine, and on and on. One of our favorite records of all time, so if you didn't have this before, now's the time!
Drone Records -- run by Stefan Knappe of Troum and Maeror Tri -- exclusively produces seven inches mostly by emerging artists who specialize in expressive drone work (hence the label name). While there is something to be said for Drone's dedication to unknown artists, the work that comes from the ongoing series tends to be some of the best work from each of the artists' respective
EA is a Polish artist who only has a couple of cd-r releases under his belt, but has succeeded in developing a very nice amorphous version of late '80s Zoviet France, albeit without Robin Storey's trademarked looping structures. "11'00" is a delicate strain of manipulated feedback that complements a battery of distant gongs, extended guitar tones, and reverberated textural scrapings. Nice.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
First of all, be warned, these took nearly six months to show up from Sweden; and we will most likely not be restocking these when we sell out of this batch, or if we do, it could very well take ANOTHER six months. But back in the late summer of 2011, we caught wind of what seemed like a really fascinating piece of damaged, witchy pop narcotic from the Swedish sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne (aka Ectoplasm Girls). Shortly, there after, The Wire raved about the album; and then we simply waited for the box to show... Fortunately for a lucky few of you, that box did indeed finally arrive!
The Byrne sisters could very well be ghosts from the mid-80s cassette culture of DIY electronics, industrial antipathy, and corrosive psychedelia. As half-formed / half-forgotten songs of deconstructed piano, looped abstractions, and bad vibes, the Ectoplasm Girls arrangements aren't too dissimilar from those that Zola Jesus primitively sketched on her earliest recordings. Like Zola Jesus, voice is also key to the hauntological pop that the Ectoplasm Girls create, although they take it in an entirely different direction. At times, they adopt a baby-faced atonal lunacy with shrill lullabies above their murky tunes, abstracted rhythms, and macabre electronics; and at others, they utter mantras in dull monotone as if these strangely seductive passages were culled from their own exorcisms. "Sexodrome" takes all the right cues from Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, with vocal fragments orbiting a skeletal rhythmic plod that's all gotta reference Cronenberg in some way shape or form. It's too creepy not to! A blast of hurricane noise launches "If Your Mother Asks" which surges forward through driving techno stomp akin to TG's ceaseless march "Discipline" and complementary slashes of noise and vocal gaspings.
If we thought we could get more, we might expound more on the subject of the Ectoplasm Girls; but as it stands, we've got less than a dozen. So, delay now and perhaps delay forever.
Back in stock, back in print. One of our favorite No Neck Blues Band side projects, Egypt Is The Magick Number features Adam Mortimer and Dave Shuford both from NNBB but in a more tranced-out continuation of the way way out psyche improv damage of their No Neck mothership. Massive doses of delay, slow floating sheets of white hot psych guitar, shuffling minimal percussion, all dosed with acid, rolled in a hemp and lit afire. The first track is a 30 minute mother, easy to imagine two guys locked in a dark room with a hookah, a broken guitar with one string and a suitacse full of delay pedals. Super tripped out, wide eyed outer space drug drones. The other three tracks are similarly high flying, low crawling excursions into weird acoustic guitar-strum jams, the clattering of pots, and meandering twangy vocals. It's equal parts Sun City Girls, Jandek, and Yahowah. Which obviously means fucking great!
A vinyl reissue of one of the best Einsturzende Neubauten recordings! Halber Mensch ('half man' in German) originally came out in 1985, at the height of the apex of punk self-immolation, pure German expressionism, and industrial theatricality. The infernal vocal chorale of the title track is about as intense as a vocal piece could ever be, without resorting to pure guttural howling. Here is it a searing repetition of an atonal plainsong, buttressed by the always unique snarl of frontman Blixa Bargeld. The repurposed metals from junkyards and constructions site which have become synonymous with Neubauten immediately appear afterwards on their anthemic single "Yu-Gung (Fuetter Mein Ego)," whose insistent rhythm works almost Gamelan-like as the principal melody to this amazing tune. It should also be pointed out that Pussy Galore, who were already heavily indebted to EN, covered this on their Sugar Shit Sharp ep! later As a grand climax to the album, Neubauten again returns to hellish imagery through the symphony of bowed metals on "Der Tod Ist Ein Dandy," where these cacophonic scrapes amass into a dramatic arc of acoustic noise that easily parallels those same constructions that David Jackman built through Organum. This is one of those seminal records that should always be in print, and one of those records that you should already have. But if not, you shouldn't pass this up!
Do you like early Einsturzende Neubauten (Kollaps, Strategies Against Architecture)? Yeah? Great; then you don't want to miss Kalte Sterne, the new collection of Einsturzende Neubauten's early 7"s, surrounded by many previously unreleased recordings. Most of these were impossible to find the first time around, and represent the beginning of the brilliant German group's (literally) metallic, Dadaist anti-music. Thirteen tracks of scraping atonal genius by the group arguably most responsible for connecting the ideas of 20th century avant-garde composers and '-isms' with the underground art-rock audience. Kalte Sterne reveals a dub sense not readily apparent on the first full length albums, as well as surprisingly well formed looks at their trademark post-Faust, homemade musique concrete. Early Einsturzende Neubauten is iconclastic, ubiquitous and absolutely unique. If you've ever wished for more early-style Einsturzende Neubauten, before they mellowed considerably and became more like 'regular music', here it is. Kalte Sterne is 'noise' in the truest and best sense, for every adventurous ear.
Kollaps. The first album from Einsturzende Neubauten, released back in 1981, found the band as a trio with the wild-throated frontman Blixa Bargeld buttressed by the anarcho-rhythmicists N.U. Unruh and F.M. Einheit. The band photo of Neubauten on Kollaps is quite telling, as a it parodies Pink Floyd's grand collection of instruments that emblazoned the back cover of Ummagumma. Instead of the marching band sized collection of drums and mallets, there's an assortment of hammers, pipes, a couple of drills, a cheap looking synth, an ax (yeah, there is a guitar, but there's also an ax!), and sheet metal twisted in the shape of drumheads. These are the instruments that Neubauten uses in the hyper-primitive, industrial-punk tracks found on Kollaps. Neubauten's amplified junkyard was a clearly a bold statement of DIY primitivism, this trio was not without their structural prowess, crafting anthemic blasts out of their rhythmic churns, bristling with sparkplug noise and rabid distortion. "Tanz Debil" is curiously catchy in its amplified shopping cart bashing which Unruh & Einheit hammer out to accompany the demon-then-zombie vocal delivery from Blixa Bargeld. The title track is a 8 minute monochord mantra, and the band actually pulls off an instrumental cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'Aime." Very rough around the edges, but there is a serious-minded, infernal poetry of pain, anger, and rage focused through these scrap metal arrangements. It's great to have this in stock, as Kollaps is a tremendous record.
A brilliant reissue from the seminal German industrial ensemble Einsturzende Neubauten. This album represented the first full realization of the Neubauten project, with F.M. Einheit and Marc Chung (both hailing from the underappreciated post-punk ensemble Abwarts) joining the trio of Blixa Bargeld, Alexander Hacke, and N.U. Unruh. The O.T. from the title of this record references Oswald Tschirtner, a resident of psychiatric hospital for artists, where the patient created these compulsive drawings out of the unkempt visions in his head. Such is the way the Neubauten seeks to employ sound on this record: cracked, naive, and dangerous. Found objects, stolen radio transmissions, repurposed machinery, and lots of metal bashing appear in this album, inspired as much by musique concrete juxtaposition as by punk fury. The desolate drone-centric piece "Armenia" and the propulsive "Vandium I-Ching" represent two of the extremes found on this ever-impressive album.
We were introduced to the work of Ekin Fil via a super limited cassette released on Root Strata a couple years back. Now, Students Of Decay have released the first proper album from EF, and it's a jawdroppingly gorgeous piece of slumbering drone-pop. Ekin Fil is the solo work of Turkish songstress Ekin Uzeltuzenci, who quietly waltzes behind reverberant blurs and nocturnal driftscapes. There are songs that slip in and out of existence amidst the foggy production surrounding her voice and acoustic guitar; and if you maybe think this sounds an awful lot like the work of Liz Harris, you wouldn't be that far off. Uzeltuzenci has described her work is a means of escape from the mania of her native Istanbul; and it's not just a therapeutic salve of cathartic torpor for her, she invites the audience to follow along in these dreamy, droney pieces. Like that cassette on Root Strata, this eponymous lp is quite an enchanting journey. She hypnotically strums her way through dour avant-folk songs whose melodies are entirely enshrouded in gauzy shadows, ghostly ectoplasm, and cavernous echo. No sharp edges whatsoever, but some of her songs can delve much further into the spooky than Grouper ever has. For example, there's the rocket-engine roar which girds her gasping track "Sea Holly" and the chords of "On Vanity" recall the desolate, acoustic balladeering that Bauhaus would sprinkle throughout their glam-goth bombast. Certainly for fans of Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, The Slaves, Vestals, and of course Grouper! Yup, download card included.
It should be stated that Sacramento's Electro Group has nothing in common with electro the genre - so look elsewhere for Miami jeep bass-bin rattlin' beats. Instead, this Electro Group hails from Sacramento and picks up where such contemporary US noise-pop / shoegazing bands as The Lilys and The Aisler's Set left off with their lovable reclamation of the early '90s Creation sound. While each track off of "A New Pacifica" -- their debut album -- is drenched in a thick early My Bloody Valentine distortion, it is primarily the rolling basslines which provide nearly all of the melodies for the Electro Group, thus keeping them sounding much heavier than your average shoegazing trio. Released on the Omnibus label, who was repsonsible for that fantastic Mates of State album, and, like that record, this isn't something you should pass up.
"Vainly Clutching At Phantom Limbs" is a reissue of a super limited edition lp, with the "Winterhawk" ep tacked on for good measure. When this was recorded in 1994, Elf Power's sound had not yet developed into the tropes of Elephant 6 avant-psych-pop, instead they dabbled in gritty lo-fi straight-forwardness of the kind that made all of those early Sebadoh / Sentridoh singles sound so brilliant in their crappiness. That said, the best track on this album is a cover of "Drug Store" by, yes, the Dwarves!
With every Elf Power release the band grows in leaps and bounds, gleefully becoming more psychedelic and less sweetly pop. This is a good thing! Developing their own, original spin on the tried and true Elephant 6 sound (the underground pop collective typified by Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, and Apples in Stereo) has resulted in "Winter is Coming", which is filled with delightfully ambitious psychedelic rock with a few nods here and there to their toothy pop roots. Very well executed and stunningly melodic. Highly recommended!
It has been a while since we've experienced the wonderfully absurdist cataclysm that is Leif Elggren. He who has crowned himself co-king of Elgaland-Vargaland. He who has claimed every yellow and black piece of striped automotive signage as his own paintings. Leif Elggren. Das Baank is an incendiary piece of acoustic noise that hits more on a Matthew Bower / Stephen O'Malley aesthetic of scalded distortion, that sound more like a power sander than analog electronics, even as that's the likely source material. He couples this with backwards recordings of monastic chants, stretched and dragged out to haunted drones. All of this is aimed as something of an exorcism of the corruption from the usury that is a central tenent of the capitalist system. The liner notes go to great length to showcase the historical denigration of usury as morally incompatible with Christian and Muslim teachings, highlighting the irony that religion is often couched with conservative agendas to promote the extremes of capitalist exploitation for the benefit of a few. Sonically, it's one of the most compelling pieces of sound demolition we've heard from Elggren in quite a long time. Brilliant stuff.
It's a great to see that Ash International re-issued the "Ung" album from the Swedish conceptual art trio of Leif Elggren (co-founder of the Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland with CM von Hausswolff), Per Jonsson, and Kent Tankred. Originally "Ung" was released on vinyl by the oddball label Radium 226.5 -- which released scuzz rock from Union Carbide Productions and the Black Snakes, as well as expressive drone work from Phauss and Zbigniew Karkowski (sounds like Andee's tUMULt Laboratories, eh?). Featuring amplified ovens which oozed with spilt porridge, 27 girls dressed in white, and sledge hammers, "Ung" is an evocative acoustic drone record brigding the more conceptual tone float of Stockhausen's "Microphonie" and the visceral metallic screech of Organum. Very good.
Swedish conceptualists Leif Elggren and Thomas Liljenberg have published "Experiments With Dreams," a book which collects a number of outlandish letters to politicians, film stars, and business leaders, positing absurdist questions and claiming that the
"Two Thin Eating One Fat" appears to be a much more personal documentation of Elggren's and Liljenberg's dream communication, as they have recorded themselves quietly mumbling meandering narratives which are marked by strange political rhetoric and the repeated phrase "let me in." Thick metallic drones, distant pounding drums, and rhythmic exercises with a piezo buzzer accompany and at times interrupt the ongoing spoken murmur. While all of these recordings found on "Two Thin Eating One Fat" were originally produced for various collaborative installations and performances, there is remarkable consistency to this collection which articulates the absurdist intellect behind this artistic pairing.
San Francisco's The Mallard called it quits recently; they being something of a weirdo outlier of drone-rock + fuzz-pop on the beloved Castle Face label. That said, they were long one of our personal favorites on Castle Face, given their charmingly stoned take on The Pin Group or Bailter Space, or hell even Stereolab for that matter. Thankfully, this was not the end of the creative spirit for those who left the band. The Mallard's frontwoman Greer McGettrick has re-christened herself Eline Cout, delivering her first set of recordings in a micro-edition slab of vinyl on Pretty Penny Records. While there are hints of The Mallard's lo-fi dreamy droniness are found throughout the Eline Cout tracks, this is starkly mechanical album of analog synth crunch, noise-pulse rhythms, and murky industrial strategies circa 1982. McGettrick quips on the back of the record that this is "to be listened to loudly in one room, while working on a monotonous task in another." Thirteen untitled tracks of quasi-instrumental tracks for chiming monotone guitars, bass-throb, primitive synths, and drums with strange / strangled tape-splice interjections of stolen voices, found sounds, and other utterances that may be confused as lyrics. While there is a certain adherence to structure, McGettrick is stripping away all of the melody from what she brought to The Mallard, engaged in a similar punk deconstructionist adventure that Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert began in their Dome recordings. Match that with the squalid noise-junk dourness of Maria Zerfall (seriously, look her up!) and the tumbled-rock percussion of Mars, and there's something close to Eline Cout.
Super limited pressing of 100 copies with each album sporting a unique woodcut print of a 10x10 inch square grid, with one square taken away during each pass through the printing press, amounting to different grid configuration cover art for each piece of vinyl. And, each record includes the wooden square removed for the printing of that particular cover, in a little baggie. We've only got a handful of these! A very cool record all around!
In the early days of 1980, Severed Heads was a proper group, with principle engineer Tom Ellard accompanied at various times by Richard Fielding and Garry Bradbury. So when Ellard sporadically recorded his own solo work during this time period, he released it under his own name. By 1983 or so, Severed Heads was wholly under his control. That said, the Tom Ellard solo works do not fall far from the creative / aesthetic tree of Severed Heads - agitprop electronics, tape-loop errata, skewed post-punk detours, and the occasionally beautiful electro-pop melody tossed in for good measure. Eighties Cheesecake was a cassette of Ellard's that came right on the heels of a short-lived publishing venture called Dogfood Production System, which kicked out four lps from the eccentric community of bleak Aussie post-punk in 1981 but was unable to pay back the $5000 loan, thus forcing him to discontinue that venture. So, he (and Severed Heads) went back to dubbing cassettes through his cottage industry Terse Tapes. Jump forward some 30 years, and an older, more cynical Ellard discovered somebody selling the Eighties Cheesecake cassette online "for a stupid amount of money." His immediate reaction was to crank out an unlimited cdr edition of the cassette.
Part out of the desire to confuse / frustrate the populace, part out of necessity to trim down the amount of material to fit onto vinyl, Ellard's recapitulation of Eighties Cheesecake contains only some of the material from that aforementioned cassette, with ancillary tracks from another cassette entitled Snappy Carrion, and previously abandoned tracks that got surgically stitched back together. No matter how you slice it, the Dark Entries release of Eighties Cheesecake is a corker or an album. These are punchy, taut electro-tracks with scabs of culture jamming samples, cheeky attitudes, and hyperbolic anxiety. Some of the tracks found on this version were later included in the Vinyl On Demand boxset of early Severed Heads experiments; though what Dark Entries released is entirely of the industrial pop vernacular. It's notable that Ellard dots the album with the iconic TB303, the bass-sequencer that was a failure for Roland for its intended use but later became the signature instrument for acid house and Detroit techno. For all of the acclaim that was put on the instrument throughout the years, Ellard seeths that "it was the worst piece of shit" in the liner notes. Piss and vinegar aside, Eighties Cheesecake makes for an exquisite revisitation!
As Third Eye Foundation, Matt Elliott was one of the pillars of the Bristol post-rock sound, producing a volatile concoction of drum and bass breaks suffocating under the weight of space-rock dissonance and apocalyptic references. It's been reported that Elliott was disbanding Third Eye Foundation and stepping away from music for good. Thankfully, those reports have turned out to be false and he's begun what we can only hope will be a long and fruitful 'solo' career. On "The Mess We Made," Elliott turns the corner on the rhythmic aspect of his work, instead building outward from melancholic piano melodies that fall between drunken-sailor waltzes, the paranoiac isolationism of David Shire's soundtrack to "The Conversation," and the more deconstructed renderings of Radiohead's "Kid A" or "Amnesiac." Using these morosely fragile melodies as the foundation for his music, Elliott saturates his music with theatrical orchestrations of french horns, accordions, lilting Spanish guitar lines, and windswept ambience. He furthers the creepy melodrama on "The Mess We Made" with an unusual production technique that warbles some of the sounds into an antiquated vibrato as if transmitted through a haunted Victrola from the 1930s. The title track to the album stands out with a two minute interlude of drum & bass, as Elliott tosses in a caustic Amen workout into the baroque cobwebs that dominate the remainder of this album. A very welcome return for Mr. Elliott!
MPEG Download: "The Mess We Made" [/audio/mattelliottmesswemade.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "The Mess We Made" [/audio/mattelliottmesswemade.m3u]
Second solo record from our very own Jon Porras, half of dronefolk duo Barn Owl, after his first disc on Digitalis, Bxogonoas, sold out in a matter of days. This one is crazy limited too, so if you want one, better be quick.
Woven Into Light is more of the glorious same, a druggy, bleary eyed hybrid of slow shimmery free folk and deep minimal dronemusick, taking later period Earth somewhere much dreamier and darker. Muted twang and deep smoldering shimmer, all stretched out in diaphanous sheets across heavy clouded moonlit skies. Spidery tendrils of skeletal guitar spread out like branches on leafless trees, but rather than sounding wintry, Porras wreathes his guitars in soft billows of warm whir, gauzy and lightly blurred, where other bands might turn these downtuned tones into something doomy, Porras lets them drift wraithlike, the sound windswept and barren, the sound of flickering lights above the never ending expanse of desert.
Occasionally, the guitars wind into thick sinewy streaks of coruscating buzz, spitting sparks but still wreathed in a halo or reverb and delay, soft whispery strum transformed into squalls of muted psychguitar and slow shifting almost symphonic buzz. The sound touches on some familiar territory, Sunroof!, Fear Falls Burning, Earth, Nadja, Birchville Cat Motel, and the like, there's some hints of Morricone, Scenic, but Elm most definitely occupies it's own magical mysterious sonic space.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES. and if past releases are any indication, these will sell out quick, and there's a good chance this might be the last copies we ever see...
Finally, we have enough stock on these to list!!! Jean-Claude Eloy is a little known French electro-acoustic composer, who nonetheless has a very impressive back catalog of material which is now seeing the light of day again. We first came across Eloy's work through Keith Fullerton Whitman's Creel Pone cd-r imprint of hyper-obscure experimental wonkiness and what-the-fuck electronics; Shanti was one of those Creel Pone discs, ripped from the double vinyl originally issued in 1979, with this properly replicated cd being mastered from the original tapes. Splattered analog drones and electronic resonance abound in these constantly unfolding, shifting, sloping, devolving, and blossoming compositions that marry the pioneering techniques from musique concrete disruption with the cycle-based patterning of the most rigorous applications of late '60s / early '70s electronic music, coupled with subaquatic spookiness and mind-expansive mesmerism. Think Delia Derbyshire, Arne Nordheim, Roland Kayn, and the intense minimalist works of Stockhausen, who had actually invited Eloy to the WRD studios where he composed much of Shanti from 1972 to 1973. An excellent and necessary reissue!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
SORRY.
With the datapanic in year zero amounting to next to nothing (just a lot of government money spent), the countdown series by Raster / Noton to the year 2000 may seem a little anticlimatic... especially since the last disc arrived in the middle of January 2000. Fortunately, the musical content of the finale completes the brilliant and nearly perfect series on a rather bleak note. Coil's contribution to the countdown series is recorded under their Elph moniker, whose 1994 release "Worship The Glitch" was the metaphoric precursor to this series as well as such digital fuckery by Oval, Pan Sonic, Ryoji Ikeda, etc... Coil's menace, which was oddly lacking on the "Musick To Listen To In The Dark", returns as creepy lunar drones shift into an oppressive digital dirge and followed by a recombination of contemporary digital skitter with 1960's concrete / academic bleeping.
So in the latest issue of the Wire, David Keenan was on to something with his cultural study of what he's calling 'hypnogogic pop' to define connections between the likes of Emeralds, The Skaters, Ariel Pink, Zola Jesus, Pocahaunted, and others. He argues that these bands draw from a fictional reading of the late '70s and early '80s, that extracts an aura of that time period without a direct revisionism of any particular style. It would be a stretch to qualify Emaciator as 'pop' but certainly on this brilliant cassette self-released on Monorail Trespassing, Emaciator does fit within the hypnogogic definition of a half-awake / half-dreaming and half-remembering / half-forgetting sensibility. The psychic birthing place for this album would have been sometime in the late '70s and would stand as Jon Borges fictional historicism of what braintuning cassettes should have sounded like instead of insipid new age wishy-washy-ness. Sure, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Harmonia had generated a like-minded ambience through mellotron and guitar; and minimalists like Roland Kayn, Yoshi Wada, and LaMonte Young deconstructed composition into an unrepentant drone; but the psychedelia of the former rarely melded with the rigor of the latter. And here is where Emaciator fills in the historical gap, producing these two linear shots of deep cosmic dronemusik. The first side gradually builds out of analogue synthesis with swelling pulses of low end frequencies bristling against a meandering melody which hovers like a mirage in the distance. The second side is even more meditative, with a steady arc of sound which emerges like an arctic sunrise in wintertime, peeking over the blackened horizon only to sink back as a sunset. Emaciator's work seems to be smoothing out more and more, leaving an increasing gap between this work and the noise alter-ego Pedestrian Deposit. Both are great projects and should be checked out! Appease is a limited edition 22 minute cassette in an edition of 125 copies. These will not last.
Emaciator is the work of LA floorcore miserablist Jon Borges, who previously spat out gnarled cassettes galore as Pedestrian Deposit and Monorail Trespassing; and as Emaciator he's got a couple releases on Students Of Decay and Not Not Fun. But damn, this is the one for sure as Borges channels the psychic wasteland of Southern California through these four sides of vinyl for dour drones laced with ghostly melodies and grimly rendered distortion. The first side could be the logical extension of the shortened program that Emeralds gave us on Solar Bridge with an earthmoving hum emanating throughout the track amidst the linear movement of radioscopic static and a mournful loop of descending melodies. Throughout the track, these elements intertwine, build, fade, collapse, resurface, and self-immolate all at once. Quite stunning. Side B radiates with a fluorescent glow of simmering white noise softened just enough to take the edge off while uneasy rippled of low end frequencies push to the surface. The third side gets far more toxic in the blistering analog synth tones pushed through distortion boxes, but Borges still manages to push forward one of his urgent yet depressive phasing tones through the heavy wall of static. Very much on par with the classic Broken Flag sound. The fourth is a reprise of the first side (get it, the title is Reflection), with that looping melody at first appearing like a Basinski piece of hypnogogia, but gradually Borges suffocates that loop through at atomizing cascade of distortion. One of the most exhilarating if tragic pieces of noise+drone we've heard in quite a long time. Limited to a mere 300 copies!
Nearly every week, there seems to be another crop of Emeralds related works. The format does not matter to the band - cassette, vinyl, cd, and hell, we bet they'd release an 8-track if they could - and the three Emerald dudes are not averse to venturing into side projects and other collaborations. Hence, the growth of the band between what could be qualified as their major productions has been huge. On the 2008 release of Solar Bridge, Emeralds slumped upon synths and guitar pedals in the construction of two mighty fine arcs of cosmic zone-out. Through the next couple of larger releases (What Happened and their self-titled album), Emeralds honed their craft of interlocking arpeggiations from the multiple analogue synths matched with motorik guitar excursions. They alluded to forgotten futures that were forecast by the likes of Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, Heldon, and Omit. With all of Emeralds' explorations and variations on these specific themes, it was inevitable that the band would only be improving, and that certainly shows on the 2010 release of Does It Look Like I'm Here.
The biggest change that you'll notice between this album and everything that came before is the crystallization of the Emeralds sound into brief 4 to 5 minute chunks. It's hard to call these pieces 'pop songs,' but Emeralds are working with a greater economy than ever before. So much of what they had done seems to be the result of hanging out, turning on the tape machine, and seeing what happens... with amazing results. But, the shorter program speaks of the band working out particular compositions and tightening up the dynamics between the instruments. Don't worry, there will inevitably be another awesome Outer Space cassette or a Mark McGuire cd-r of the long-sprawling zoner-jams in the very near future! (In fact, likely on this very same list!)
Warm bubbling synths and kaleidoscopic guitar chiming melts into a bittersweet mid-tempo number with a thread of end-of-summer melancholy running counter to all of the glistening synth tones on the album opener "Candy Shoppe." The track "Double Helix" is aptly named for its tight spiralling of bright percolations and overlapping sequences. "Genetic" embraces a baroque almost harpsichord set of synth tones, with soaring-into-the-heavens ambience, and an elegant display of glowing guitar workouts. Lovely, lovely stuff.
In their brief career beginning in 2006, the Ohio based trio Emeralds has associated themselves with the grit and rust-stained noise that has erupted in the mid-western underground, often sharing the stage with Aaron Dilloway, C Spencer Yeh, and Hive Mind. Their two major releases have come by way of Dilloway's Hanson Records and No Fun Productions, which typically rank as releasing some of the most aggressive and brutal pieces of noise of the contemporary era. While live performances have reportedly embraced the noise community's full-force fury of maximum volume, Emeralds instead favors a sound that harkens back to the era of Cluster, Manuel Gottsching, Fripp & Eno, and Klaus Schulze.
Last year's Solar Bridge was a spectacular lazer blast of cosmic droning and inner-space meditation; but with that album clocking in less than 30 minutes, we were left wanting more. Fortunately, more is what Emeralds bring on What Happened. Collected from their seemingly non-stop sessions of improvisations for guitar, Moog, and Korg plus ample effects boxes, these 5 tracks spiral and snake around the same deep-space psychedelia found on Solar Bridge, pushing their sound beyond the two extended crescendos which populated that album. Monochord guitars pulse hypnotically against the overlapping tapestries of the sawtooth hum and modulating tones from the analogue synths. Throughout What Happened, Emeralds shift in mood from alien percolations of '60s sci-fi sound design to graceful swells of tonefloat majesty to purely physical vibrations which rip through the nervous system and strike numbly at the bone. There is beauty to be found here, but also a sublime unease that haunts these recordings. Yup, this one comes highly recommended!
Drifting backwards in time from the post-noise excursions into placid meditations for guitar and synth, Emeralds have become one of the favorites here at Aquarius; and for very good reason, everything they touch seems to turn to gold. Solar Bridge was a such a tease of an introduction for us, and probably was the same for many out there entering into the swirling concoctions of electronic drone; but it has been the two albums What Happened and Allegory of Allergies that really laid the foundation for their impending greatness. Not only do they have a strong grasp on the minimalist theatrics of the drone, but also Emeralds enjoys a selective memory of what made progressive electronics and progressive rock in the late '70s and early '80s great. The pastoral colorfields of Cluster, the alienated ethos of Heldon, and the insistent arpeggiations of Achim Reichel and Ash Ra Tempel all figure heavily into Emeralds sound.
This vinyl-only, eponymous record seems to percolate and bubble with electronics, at times veering into the same Omni Magazine territory that Oneothrix Point Never has been mustering for the past year. It may not be a surprise that OPN and Emerald's guitarist Mark McGuire have collaborated in a project called Skyramps, which is as good as you might imagine. The three tracks on the first side wrangle squiggling rhythms, bleepity squelches, and bending sustained tones generated by Emeralds' two synth jockeys John Elliott and Steve Hauschildt, while McGuire dishes out his best Manuel Gottsching impression. The second side is one of the epochal, long form constructs that slows everything on the first side down to an elegant pace with watery field recordings laced throughout. Pretty fucking awesome. And no doubt somewhat limited...
Kiri No Oto is the first album that Lawrence English has released for the venerable Touch Music. This after a number of releases through his own Room 40 imprint, which bridged environmental recordings and somber electronics with sublime results; but there's been little to indicate that he would generate something as stellar as Kiri No Oto. The Japanese title loosely translates as 'the sound of fog' or 'the sound of mist.' Both are applicable to the extended blur that this Australian sound-artist generates, with its miasma of soft-focus distortion arching into long-form compositions of minimalism. The album doesn't exactly erupt, as the sounds are more soothing in their softened textures; but English cuts into one of his grey-mass drones with little fanfare. English slowly glides his 'sound of fog' down to a muffled static, then brings up tectonic rumblings and kicks the overdrive in on his distortion box (or more likely, some patch on ye olde laptop) for one of those digital distorto-drones that Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz have been sculpting over the past few years. And yes, we'll throw in an obligatory My Bloody Valentine reference, well because there are plenty of parts here which have the blissed out wash of the ambient interludes on Loveless. Given that similar dynamics appeared on one of the last great Touch albums - BJ Nilsen's The Short Night - it made us wonder if these gestures toward static-laden, shoegazing noise bursts dappling the almighty drone were a coincidence for Touch, or if Touch were handing out particular Max/MSP patches to accommodate this sound. It's probably the former; but the similarities to many of the other Touch artists is too great not to comment. As with all of the Touch releases, Jon Wozencroft delivers his perfect design with an overcast sea-side photograph to match the depth, mystery, serenity, and subtle darkness of this very impressive album.
Peregrine falcons are impressive birds of prey that can be found in almost every ecosystem, known for their extreme speeds in flight sometimes reaching over 200 miles per hour. Being quite adaptable, they are often found in urban areas where the pigeons are plentiful; and it can be quite spectacular to see these birds streaking through the skyscrapers of San Francisco reducing the pigeon population one at time with a precision that's the envy of any military campaign. The Australian ambient-laced sound artist Lawrence English came to his appreciation of the Peregrine by way of a book of the same title by J.A. Baker who obsessively mapped the daily activities of a pair of peregrines in England with a purported magical lyricism in his writings. English's ornithological portrait is all about flight and soaring - it's unclear whether English took after Baker by seeking out these birds on his own or if English's work is solely articulated through the lens of Baker's prose. But, English has long been able to express a poetic simplicity through the fog of sound; and he's proved once again how deft he can be. Smeared synth drones and grey-tone ambience streams through each of English's tracks, with subtle melodic interludes of low-end bass tones girding the compositions, coming across as something between Popul Vuh and Tim Hecker. A beautiful record for sure, and one that captures a sublime element of the majesty of the nimble falcon. Limited to 500 copies and comes with a download card.
