The more one scratches the surface of Australian sound art, the more gems emerge from the search. We've uncovered a handful of artists whose work has slipped under the radar. Tim Catlin's drone guitar work is one example, Eamon Sprod's treated field recordings under the moniker Tarab would be another; we can now count Lawrence English amongst this bunch. Where those two aforementioned artists have connections to the RMIT program in Melbourne, English hails several hundred miles up the coast in Brisbane. There, he has produced a handful of processed soundfields on his Room40 imprint; and for his Transit album released on Cajid, English offers a concoction of electric minimalism pieced togethe from sources provided by a number of exceptional guest stars including DJ Olive, Robin Rimbaud, Philip Samartzis, and a handful of lesser known artists. Despite the diversity of voices on Transit, English is firmly in command of the album, digitally smearing each of his guests' source material into a spectral ambience dappled with field recordings and textural events. It's not too far off from Loren Chasse's Of recordings if it weren't for the noticable digital sheen; and at times, English hits on a similar bleak isolationism found in Thomas Koner's work. A mighty fine record.
Unlike most of the recent reissues of classic albums, Brian Eno's aren't graced / padded with extra bells'n'whistles (outtakes, demo versions and the like) nor are there swollen booklets of liner notes, photos, glowing praise, etc. No, you get the albums as they were originally released -- albeit remastered and packaged in simple digipaks with plain clear plastic slipcovers -- and frankly, with albums as timeless and remarkable as these, that's enough! Each is an inspired and inspiring work, remaining vital and compelling even thirty years later. Needless to say, each is fully deserving of an honored place in any record collection.
"My baby's on fiyaaaaaaa!"... so good. Eno's first solo album after leaving Roxy Music finds him in 'proto-everything' territory, pre-dating art-pop, punk and indie rock with his Dada-esque lyrics and a fresh 'non-musician' approach (those are his words, although a bit misleading -- it's not like he was a gardener before he walked into the studio!) to avant garde songs. Glammy, brooding, and exploratory. This, along with his mood-masterpiece Another Green World, comprise the essential bits of pre-ambient Eno.
Unlike most of the recent reissues of classic albums, Brian Eno's aren't graced / padded with extra bells'n'whistles (outtakes, demo versions and the like) nor are there swollen booklets of liner notes, photos, glowing praise, etc. No, you get the albums as they were originally released -- albeit remastered and packaged in simple digipaks with plain clear plastic slipcovers -- and frankly, with albums as timeless and remarkable as these, that's enough! Each is an inspired and inspiring work, remaining vital and compelling even thirty years later. Needless to say, each is fully deserving of an honored place in any record collection.
One of Eno's best songs kicks off TTM(BS), the ubiquitous and lovely "Burning Airlines Gives You So Much More", with a gorgeous post-Beatles melody and snaky harmonized guitar (an Eno trademark, often played by Robert Fripp on these releases). From there on out, TTM(BS) expands upon -- but doesn't often better -- the ideas that began with Here Come The Warm Jets. Slightly more introspective. It's also less sneering. Of course, Bauhaus resonated with Eno's idea of absurdist / glam / experimental pop, later covering this album's sixth song "Third Uncle". Really, this often sounds like Chairs Missing era Wire in spots, and we all know that's a good thing!
At his marine outpost on the western shore of Humboldt County, California, Brian Pyle (aka Ensemble Economique, as well as a member of the Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings) is in a prime location to dial into the ether for radiowaves across the Pacific. With the nearest communities of Eureka and Arcata far less irradiated with electro-magnetic interference which makes shortwave radio listening down right impossible in urban areas, and with Pyle's proximity to the Pacific Ocean (it's a couple hundred yards from his back door) acting as a massive antenna, he's able to listen to transmissions that seem to come from Russia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, China, and numerous other locales. Along with the baffling radio phenomena of utility signals and numbers stations, Pyle found himself captivated by the sounds of 'interval signals'. These are the specific sounds, phrases, or melodies that announce the end or beginning of a particular program. Often very simple, so as to work within the limitations of shortwave, these signals can sound very eerie and truncated when broadcast halfway around the world. Pyle first incorporated these sounds into a performance back in 2011 for 23five's now-defunct Activating The Medium festival, and those echoing phrases have become a staple in Pyle's live sets. So this entire album dedicated to interval signals, finds Pyle lacing these sounds with insistently dark, piano solos and bleak field recordings of abandoned spaces pounded by monsoonal winds and rains. Interval Signals is a very solitary, impressionist work, showing a sense of spaciousness found more in the likes of Basinski and Coleclough than in most of Pyle's previous work. Still very cinematic in scope, but its an entirely different movie for Pyle this time. A Pixelvision version of Last Year At Marienbad? Yeah, it's that cool.
Drugs. Hallucinations. Isolation. Death. Some pretty classic / heavy-as-fuck metaphors run through the work of Brian Pyle, the mad genius of Manilla Beach up in Humboldt County, California. He's been at it for a long time now, first knocking on our door with his homespun variations of floorcore psychedelia with the seemingly inactive collective Starving Weirdos; then, there was the fraternal act of nature jamming drones through RV Paintings; and Ensemble Economique is Pyle all by his lonesome, where he's proven deft at density of sound laced with a nocturnal pop streak that could even warrant some Demdike witchy references. Pyle's hypnotic structures are deceptively simple and proven emotively effective - a lilting layer of blown-out guitar drones cycling through elegiac melodies, another layer of electronic sequences, oceanic driftings, chanted vocalizations, rasps of bowed metals, maudlin church organ explorations, or thumming dial-tone samples, with crumbled film samples of what could be some Russian / French / Hong Kong noir film of some woman frantically whispering about some crime that may or may not have happened. The individual tracks glide into a purposeful, cinematic song cycle narrative that begins with the thoroughly gloomy, portentous opening track "If You Need Help" that is a real downer of an acid trip spent staring at a ghost ship sinking in the depths of the Pacific with sand, sea foam, and black rain kicking you in the face to make the sense of hopelessness all the more real. Pyle links the two sides of the album with "Ksenia" - a track split in half of percolating acidic electronic sequences girding those female vocal samples and guitar drones. By the end of the album, his delirious slow-motion take on '80s bombast lifts the album's weightiness with two drone-pop ballads of marching rhythms and radioluminescent hypno-melodies. Another mighty fine album from Brian Pyle!
Love the cover on this one! An homage to those Sisters Of Mercy singles on Merciful Release back in the mid '80s, in particular the bleakest Sisters release The Reptile House EP. That's about as Goth as you get for a reference, and the druggist mania from Ensemble Economique touches on the existential void and the spatialized darkness that the Sisters Of Mercy crooned on that EP. Yet, EE bends the Goth into an unhinged, fractal-spinning universe that plays equal parts to ritualized psychedelia, autodidactic electronica, misremembered '80s pop hits, and drone-splattered horror scores. This 'Ensemble', as many of you will know, is the solo work of the Northern California mad-genius Brian Pyle, who's mostly been recording and touring solo in recent years but has an extensive back catalogue through the epic collective The Starving Weirdos and the animist hypnogogia of RV Paintings. Here on The Fever Logic LP, Pyle layers disheveled heaps of melodic synth loops on top of reverb-soaked drum tracks, with his pleading vocals and occasional strums on the guitar breaking into the mix. While the production is very much in keeping with Pyle's everything-at-once approach, the atmosphere he crafts dwells in that realm of the pharmaceutical miserablism that the Sisters Of Mercy brought to that aforementioned Reptile House EP as well as those Cure style introspective interludes that dot Faith and Seventeen Seconds. When we were playing this in the shop, an astute customer commented that this was like a goth version of Broadcast! Well said!
Ultra limited cassette from Ensemble Economique, aka Brian Pyle, 1/2 of Humboldt avant abstractionists Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings. We've long loved the SW's sprawling rhythmic dronescapery, and on his own, Pyle explores similar sonic territory, but Pyle's approach sans partners seems to be more dense and dark, caustic and abrasive, the rhythmic element balancing the atmospheric elements, like here on the title track, which spreads out over all of the first side. A thick, swirling low end thrum oozes and undulates, it's a hazy blurred rumble, over which Pyle layers heaving shards of crunch, thick throbs, deep bell-like tones, rhythmic machine gun stutters, all of which pile up and overlap, creating a soft cacophony of clatter and crunch, chug and churn, a strangely haunting, and sorta noisy, almost industrial creepscape, that sounds like some weird hybrid of Wolf Eyes, Philip Jeck and Umberto performed by some strange robotic minimalist chamber ensemble. A swirling, heady, and darkly psychedelic barrage of loops and rhythms, layers and textures, mesmerizing and intense.
The flipside is another permutation of Pyle's abstract beat laden drones, another thick swirling morass of sitar-like buzz and sci-fi synth squelch, this time the beats buried, little flurries of stutter and shuffle, squalls of glitchy tangle, more coloring the proceedings than driving them. The last track is a tense soundtracky stretch of layered buzz, haunting melody, a sprawl of pulsing high end over deep ominous rumbles, like the music from the scariest moment in some lost Italian giallo, stretched out into minutes instead of seconds, all tension, no release, brooding and intense, haunting and mesmerizing, fantastic stuff.
LIMITED TO 120 COPIES! We only have a handful direct from Mr. Pyle himself when he was in town, and it's very likely that these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
Here's one of those few instances in which I would have to scold Drone Records for their adamant adherence to releasing this sort of music on 7"s. The debut recording of Entrelacs -- a collaborative effort between dronologist Michael Northamï and field recordist Yannick Dauby -- is too good for just a 7". The parallel between Entrelacs and Organum are so profound as to bring back to me all of my frustration with Organum's insistence upon releasing just 3 minutes of the most sublime chorales of screeching metals when those sounds want to extend toward infinity like LaMonte Young or Phil Niblock. Entrelacs presents a similarly dynamic sound, that is so perfectly self-contained with its timbral massings from long-stringed instruments and clamorous details of various rocks and leaves. Perhaps no media can really contain these sounds, and I would be making a similar critique even if this were released on CD. This highly recommended single is limited to 300 copies, with this first edition pressed on clear vinyl. VERY FEW OF THESE IN STOCK!!
Working with contact microphones and field recordings, Richard Francis -- the New Zealander now living in Japan who has claimed the moniker Eso Steel -- emerges as an interesting member of the lowercase aesthetic, somewhere between the sonic intensity of Francisco Lopez (that is when Lopez hasn't consigned himself to arenas of silence) and the empathic resonances of Loren Chasse or Steve Roden. All of his recordings are based upon his late night excursions through Tokyo, where he is left alone to record the sound artifacts of a giant city that has fallen asleep. Pulsing loops of electrical hums, timestretched drones, and peripheral buzzings build into kinetic motifs of gritty distortions, that nevertheless maintain an overall hypnotic sensibility.
Armed with a couple of microphones and a DAT recorder, New Zealand ex-pat Richard Francis can be found scouring the late night desolate streets of Tokyo, captured various textural striations and quiet electrical hums while the rest of the city sleeps. Working under his moniker Eso Steel, Francis transforms his field recordings into a bristling catalogue of experimental minimalism
Can't really tell you much about Etat Brut, other than the limited information provided by Sub Rosa. EB were an obscure industrial duo from Belgium operating between 1978 and 1983, with connections to the transgressive collective Club Moral and the Cabs-inspired Pseudo Code. Supposedly, both of the individuals in Etat Brut were named Phillipe and went on to become science teachers after leaving all of this junk, noise, and squalid rhythm behind. But that's all the information we could dig up, which is a bit disappointing, as we'd love to know more about these guys, we imagine Club Moral must have published something about the group in their Force Mental zine. Anyway, for those keen on the more brutal / guttural / abject side of industrial culture (e.g. TG's Second Annual Report, Factrix' Sheintot, or SPK's Leichenshrei), this is a very compelling document of primitive sound-demolition with an equally primitive approach to deconstructing music into its rawest elements - noise, rhythm, screams, more noise, and plenty of aggro / provocateur antics. The post-punk monochord basslines and drum machine anti-groove of "Homme Nus" is a compellingly bleak track of Frankensteinian proportions, where "Crash" conveys a dehumanized atmosphere through grim blorping electronics, musique concrete techniques, and cut-up dialogue that could very well allude to JG Ballard if only we understood French. Crumbling tape machinations, rhythms looped from shortwave radio beacons, fucked-up noise, and guttural vocalizations fill in the blanks, very prescient of what Atelecine is attempting to recreate nowadays and holding up very well against the better known projects we listed earlier.
The cd comes with two bonus tracks not found on the vinyl, btw.
A radiant hue echoes out of a violent explosion at the onset of Brittle, a cassette only job from the darkened mind of Grant Evans. Over the years, he has explored, traced, and mined the furthest corners of the underground, emerging as a well-heeled polyglot of ruptured noise, cosmic electronics, dour drone construction, and even some dabblings in the black arts to keep a future Jack Parsons allusion in the cards, if rocket fuel comes into the mix at some time or other. Evans along with his wife Rachel had run the beloved cassette imprint Hooker Vision and the two had collaborated under the banner of Quiet Evenings, as an avenue for their most pastoral, hushed, and meditative sounds. The smattering of cassettes that have lead up to Brittle have been a menacing brood of crushed noise and textural onslaught, with Brittle tempering the antagonism and the angst just a bit. That said, Evans' tactics to confront and assault remain at the beginning of both lengthy tracks to the tape. Out of these chunks of noise, Evans coaxes pools of levitating yet organic drone, rich with industrial murk, labyrinthian contours, death rattle vibrato, and nocturnal unease. The spectral harmonics of Organum's acoustic noise accretion meld into Pedestrian Deposit's raw expressionism into what Evans has now masterfully constructed here on the somnolent and spellbinding Brittle. If lead could sparkle like it does here on this recording, who needs alchemy?
Grant and Rachel Evans have closed down their longstanding cassette label Hooker Vision, and rechristened their cottage industry as Adversary, which will only be selling super limited editions of their own works. We have to go on record to state our sadness about the retirement of Hooker Vision - as that not only was one of the best label names of all time, but it was also one of the best curated cassette imprint we've encountered. Oh well, at least they're doing Adversary, with two new tapes from each of the Evanses for us to enjoy.
The sounds on Reflection come out of the smoldering, electro-acoustic noise works which Hooker Vision and the occult / blackened imprint Vaald have released in recent years. A sense of murky basement malaise and sweltering dread certainly carries over on to this new cassette from Grant Evans, though Evans attenuates these teethgnashing dislocations of texture and psychic abrasion into a dourly meditative blur of pulse-wave echolalia that falls between the classic late period works of Maurizio Bianchi (e.g. The Plain Truth and Armageddon) and the resonant tape-loop hypnosis that oozes from the bleariest of Rapoon's immense back catalog. A few of the frequencies and harmonics bare a passing resemblance to what Rachel has just released on her tape Cradle Songs (reviewed nearby), making us wonder if Grant had constructed some of his tape loops from overdriven room recordings of what Rachel may have been recording. One hell of a great tape from Grant Evans. Super limited too!
To look at the personnel line-up of Evil Madness, you probably wouldn't know what to expect. There's the melancholy composer Johann Johannsson with a number of acclaimed cinematic records on 4AD. There's the bleak-minded drone specialist BJ Nilsen and his long-time collaborators Stillupsteypa. And there's another Icelander dude named Petur Eyvindsson, who has some oddball releases under the name DJ Musician. Given that, the punchy discotheque grooves of Evil Madness are way out of left-field and totally great. Italo disco, minimal wave / EMB, anthemic Detroit techno circa 1988, John Carpenter's paranoiac synth arpeggiations, lots of analogue synth worship, and pre-fab electronic beats all come together underneath the stoic yet tongue-in-cheek banner of Evil Madness. We suspect that Sigtryggur from Stilluppsteypa has quite a lot to do with this one, given the electro-breaks that would occasionally slap in the face of his seriously minded crackled dronemuzik; no matter who's responsible, both sides of Super Great Love are brilliantly hedonistic mash-ups of vintage synth stabs, stupidly good anthemic electronic melodies, and plenty cybernetic Moroder sequences, spiralling upon techno, disco, and electro rhythms. Super Great Love is actually the fourth record by Evil Madness, with their other releases coming out through the poorly distributed 12 Tonar label and the dada-fetish imprint Ultra Eczema, so this album on Editions Mego should garner a broader audience for Evil Madness (they'll be releasing a cd version eventually too). Fans of Majeure, Umberto, K-X-P, and the Oneohtrix Point Never sideproject Games would be well served to check this out!
Exit In Grey's impressionist driftscaping continues to broadcast darkly beautiful, animistic apparitions from the taiga of Mother Russia. As we've mentioned before, Exit In Grey is the work of one Sergey [S] Suhkov who sometimes works under this moniker with an enigmatic character granted with the name (S), though it seems that (S) has parted ways with [S] for reasons unknown. The mystery to the authorship of Exit In Grey is by design as their may be many forces, elements, dimensions, psychic energies, and parapsycological reverberations that are communing with Exit In Grey to achieve the emotionally resonant dronemuzik found in their ongoing body of work. Perception slowly unfolds over two lengthy tracks, each clocking in around 27 minutes flush with ghostly loops, harmonic wash and analogue drone girding the ebb and flow of various cycles from guitar chords delicately generating melancholy melodies all bathed in reverb, tangles of forest-born sound objects which might as well hail from the overgrown ruins at Chernobyl, oceanic field recordings of ominous tidal churn, and shortwave receptions of hiss, electric hum, crackle, and disembodied voice. The slow pacing of Exit In Grey's poetic electronics reminds us of that Motion Sickness Of Time Travel series of Moon Ballades. Yeah, beautiful stuff.
The second album in as many weeks from the Russian industrial-impressionist Exit In Grey. At this album's core is a duality of gloomy exasperation and despair on one hand and a universal, meditative sense of calm on the other. Both of these emotional states co-habitate in a slow crawl of suspended drone construction and dappled shortwave radio reception from detuned military transmissions as well as the ethereal crackle of a VLF receiver. The initial gasps from Shadows Of Stillness spill from a claustrophobic synth tone, whose desolate, chemical transmission is accentuated with low-frequency rumblings and bone-creaking textures that wouldn't be out of place on a Sleep Research Facility or Lustmord recording. About halfway through "Speaking With Silence" the nocturnal mood lifts with a golden set of melodic ambient phrases akin to Popul Vuh's classic psychedelic instrumentals and a chipper satellite beacon signaling back to earth that all is well up in the heavens and we need not worry so much about our plight down here on this rock. The album's finale reprises this radiant shimmer as if all of the sounds were the sunblinding reflections of a midnight sun cast upon the placid waters of the Arctic Ocean north of St. Petersberg. Cold yet beautiful.
A mighty fine introduction to the work of Barcelona's Exoteric Continent via the ever savvy Hospital Productions. Arnau Sala (aka Exoteric Continent) is a structuralist exploring primitive electronic rhythms and noises, bridging the gaps between ascetic techno, musique concrete, and the industrially slanted aspects of minimal wave. He's recently issued cassettes on the eccentric techno label Opal Tapes and the noise imprint Second Sleep, which is mostly known for the harsh power electronics and the more extreme tangents of experimental musics. Blackened synths and crumbling drones flirt with the carcinogenic electronics that MB first produced way back on Symphony For A Genocide, which coincidentally got a reissue by Hospital in the not too distant past. Sala procures and re-engineers this keening uneasiness of sound through his asymmetrical patterning that will snap into focus with whipcrack punctuations of almost witch-house snares, crude sequences, and deep techno thumps. You'll find shadowy acid squelches which reflect favorably on a Plasticman tip circa Closer, as well as the sort of out-of-phased layerings that brought Mika Vainio into the spotlight, and plenty of dour industrial-hypno-trax aligned with the more Unitarian / non-denominational facets of Vatican Shadows. Totally fantastic stuff.
Much has been made about the Dual 7"+ cd set that Fabulous Diamonds released a few years back through Nervous Jerk, a small Australian imprint which had the good fortune of also releasing an Animal Collective single. Dual did make an appearance here at Aquarius, although it arrived rather mysteriously (perhaps from the band, perhaps not) and vanished after just a single play of the disc on a busy Saturday afternoon. Yes, that's always a good sign when we don't have to ballyhoo the merits of a record, and the strength of the tunes speak for themselves. Woozy hypnosis from organ, sax, drums, monotone female vocals, and lots of delay patterning is what we can remember from back in 2007. The arrival of Fabulous Diamonds' II (whoops, somehow we missed their self-titled Siltbreeze LP in '08) jogged that memory to the forefront of our collective mind, and we're happy that at least we got hear those early tracks at least once. BUT, damn if Fabulous Diamonds haven't made a stellar album here with II.
This Melbourne duo - Nisa Venerosa (drums, voice) and Jarrod Zlatic (organ, effects) - channels a quasi-mystical hybrid of post-Terry Riley time-lag accumulation and the proto-electronica riffs of the Silver Apples through deliriously simple means. Venerosa lays down a slinky percussive groove without much in the way of variation what so ever, much like finest of motorik krautrock drummers (e.g. Jaki Liebezeit, Zappi Diermaier, etc.), and pairs it with Zlatic's spellbinding layers of interwoven phases, loops and moire patterns snatched from his arpeggiating mantras on organ and synthesizer. Venerosa's stoned lullabies are well suited in their simplicity and echoplex ooze to the Diamonds' hypnotic arrangements. On this album, three short tracks about three and half minutes each are bracketed by two lengthy hypno-zoner jams. Those untitled shorts are great on their own, with curiously catchy phrases of repetitive pop minimalism, but Fabulous Diamonds are clearly at their best when sprawling their rhythms and sounds over longer durations, when Zlatic's organs, electronics, and loops have plenty of time for a lunar trajectory around the dark side and back. Anyone with a passing fancy for the likes of Stereolab, Can, Pocahaunted, Aavikko, Shogun Kunitoki, and of course The Silver Apples would be well served with these Fabulous Diamonds. Excellent!
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S e r g e y [S] is a tireless Russian dronemuzik composer who records under the monikers Exit In Grey and Five Elements Music (amongst many others), and whose back catalog resembles that of Aidan Baker in terms of scale and quality. A while ago, you could randomly grab any given Aidan Baker disc and rest assured that he'd deliver an impeccable album of billowing ambience rippling with emotional impressionism and melodic subtlety. The same can be said for pretty much anything that Sergey [S] touches, with the bulk of his releases short-run albums self-produced in his motherland, with only a few albums seeing European release. We listed a couple of things that Sergey put out through Mystery Sea, that Belgian proprietor of night-ocean drones, both of which were very impressive; and everything we've managed to scrounge up has been amazing.
Dust Storm - a collaborative project with the enigmatic Fanum (who seems to be the work of another Russian character named Ascet) - does not sway our esteemed opinion of Sergey [S]. The three tracks brilliantly embrace the analogy of dense sound amorphousness with the harsh/soft, soothing/terrifying duality from a looming sand storm. The suspended tones from Sergey and Ascet spiral slowly into sad, fugue-like melodies that are cloaked in the slow-motion miasma as if melding the cold, deep-sea waters and the boiling methane spewing thermal vents. The shortwave radio textures of the album's finale bring more of the psychological disruption found on early John Duncan works, but much of Dust Storm recalls the best of Troum / Maeror Tri. Not sure how limited this album is, but stuff from Russia arrives at a snail's pace, so if we run out, it might take us a while to restock...
Acid Mothers Temple. Makoto Kawabata. Bearded gurus shooting energy beams from their eyes. Drifting, droning, eerie psych-scapes. Enough? Naked Japanese hippy women. Can I stop there? I think you've already come in and bought this cd. It's a compact disc reissue of the out of print Father Moo LP from a few years back, perhaps you remember it, or at least the Father Yod-inspired cover pic. I'm sure it goes for $$$$ on eBay now based on the sleeve alone. Anyway, the Acid Mothers Temple fanatics at UK label Swordfish have brought it back, now as a handy cd, for those that missed getting the vinyl when it was available (or who collect all configurations -- actually, this was once a limited edition cd-r, before it was even an LP, so you've gotta look for that too if you don't have it, good luck!). As the many, many Acid Mothers Temple projects and off-shoots go, this one is primo stuff. Lovely female vocal moans (courtesy of Cotton Casino, presumably), electronic drones, keyboard melodies, some sparse, far-off percussion, all very pretty and mysterious, blissful, but kinda dark. No wild Makoto guitar action here, just three tracks (the longest, a half-hour) of otherworldly, almost religious trance-muzz. And that's just fine. We too bow before Father Moo.
The iconoclastic 20th Century composer Morton Feldman had been quite vocal in his disdain of traditional opera, making his historic collaborations throughout the '80s with author Samuel Beckett all the more idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, as the two
"Turfan Fragments" was a composition dating seven years earlier, relating to a collection of 9th Century Chinese calligraphic fragments housed in Berlin's Preussicher Kulturbesitz. Compared to the lugubrious pace of "For Samuel Beckett," "Turfan Fragments" cycles much faster through the rotations of atonal leitmotifs and gradaually shifted chord progressions, sounding much more nervous than its preceeding composition on this disc. Yet, both pieces (performed here by Petr Kotik and the S.E.M. Emsemble) are exceptional and highly recommended examples of Feldman's third and final chapter of his impressive catalogue.
Which came first Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz? If one is to merely look at the discographies of the twin kings of digitally tricked out guitar sculpting, the chronological answer is obvious: Christian Fennesz. But in the four years that have transpired between his brilliant album Venice and the 2008 opus Black Sea, Fennesz must have seen a younger protege in Tim Hecker coming up in the rear view mirror with his own dramatic sound for smeared guitar whose beauty is similarly rendered through error. Not only does Black Sea feel like a response to Tim Hecker's work, it also stands as Fennesz' most fully realized album, perhaps even more so than the sunburst explosion of meta-pop on Endless Summer.
Fennesz works best in the cold, with ice, snow, and frost dusting the strings of his guitar and seeping into the circuitry of his computer; and the cold landscape is exactly where he situates himself on Black Sea. Not surprisingly, Touch's Jon Wozencroft perfectly matches a photograph of an abandoned train track set onto a barren wintry landscape, looking a hell of lot like the photographs that Anselm Keifer uses as a background over which he dumps tar, paint, cement, lead, ash, and whatnot into his alchemical paintings.
Black Sea opens with the fizzling crunch of digital errata getting mangled even further by digital means, with Fennesz sculpting a sea swell of a half melody in the distance. Considering the contemplative and cold nature of the rest of the album, this track is a bit discordant; but Fennesz isn't going for the Menche / Merzbow attack, just something of a wake-up call. But gradually, even this first burst of noise quells in a plaintive round of finger picking on the guitar, out of which a beautiful cloud of vaporized drone begins to amass and a subharmonic throb of distortion settles in. These sounds become the template for the rest of the album, all wrapped in gray, muted timbres. When noise bursts through Fennesz' circuits, the attack almost immediately blurs into clustered loops, drones, and sympathetic noises to smooth the edges into a shimmered glisten of remarkable beauty that exhibits a cold, overcast, and gray soundsmear, certainly on par with the sleepytime shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine. After an exceptional collaborative track with Rosy Parlane of lunar landscape ambience riddled with dust before opening into a hymnal melody, Black Sea comes to an end with one of Fennesz' best tracks ever in "Saffron Revolution," with its soaring vapor trail of tone-bent guitar drone and a majestic crescendo of sustained, soft focus distortion. A truly marvellous piece of work.
Over the past couple of years, it has become apparent that there are two modes of production for the esteemed Austrian electro-glitch artist Christian Fennesz. On one hand, there are the studio driven productions where he focuses on the digital decomposition of various guitar signatures (exemplified within the "Plays" single whose beautiful cover of The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" was originally commissioned for the ill-fated "Painted Black" compilation -- due soon on tUMULt), and on the other, there's the live improvisation techniques he brings to any number of European free-jazz / new music ensembles (i.e. MIMEO, FennO'Berg, Polweschel, Golden Tone, Orchestra 33 1/3, etc.). While his technical prowess and expressive immediacy can be quite graceful on those electro-improv recordings, Fennesz excels in the studio.
"Field Recordings 1995:2002" -- which is NOT a collection of Chris Watson-esque field recordings -- picks up some of the studio driven scraps that had been released on compilations, special projects, and film soundtracks during the past 7 years. Of particular note, "Field Recordings 1995:2002" features all of the cuts from his amazing "Instrument" debut EP released on Mego in 1995. Even before such incredibly powerful programs as SuperCollider and Max/MSP had been as widely available as they are now, Fennesz has always been interested the atomization and disintegration of digital recordings at their most basic level. While all of these tracks from "Instrument" still sound great by today's standards, there is a strong connection with the sampledelica guitar trickery of '90s UK post-rock of Seefeel, Main, and Disco Inferno as hyperactive, time-stretched kaleidoscopes of post-MBV distortion and skittering electronica rhythms. The other tracks include reworkings of the soundtrack composed for "Blue Moon," remixes Fennesz did for Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephan Mathieu, and compilation tracks from "Decay" (Ash International), "RKKCD13" (Reckankreuzungklankewerkzeuge), "Clicks and Cuts 2" (Mille Plateaux) and "Krev X" (Ash International) -- that last contribution being a digitally fuzzed-out cover of America's "A Horse With No Name."
While many 'loose-end' collections run the risk of being full of cast-away tracks from the proper albums, Fennesz' "Field Recording" is as good as any of his previous albums, and shouldn't be missed!
Austrian electronic glitch-guitar superstar Christian Fennesz does his thing in Australia, and this live limited edition cd (not cd-r, unlike other similarly plainly-packaged releases on Touch) is the documentation. "Live at Revolver" picks up where Fennesz' masterful "+47É 56' 37"" left off with rich buzzing tonalities forming melancholic almost-melodies topped with sporadic events of domestic clatter. A requiem for a microwave oven, perhaps? Nonetheless this may be for fans only, as it's not quite 17 minutes long! Still, this is recommended, as those 16 minutes and 34 seconds are quite good.
THIS AQ RECORD OF THE WEEK FROM A DECADE AGO, NOW ON VINYL FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME!!
Christian Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer firmly established him as one of the electronic avant-garde's greats with his delirious balance of hotwired digital glitches and a nostalgic revisitation of summery pop sensibilities. The assimilation of overloaded digital filtering technologies and guitar driven song fragments has continued to be Fennesz' strongest asset through his celebrated arrangements for David Sylvian's Blemish album, and has even earned him a curious forthcoming collaboration with Sparklehorse! Venice is his fourth studio album and clearly stands as his best work to date. According to Asphodel's Naut Humon, Venice was almost a doomed project, as Fennesz' hard drive crashed less than a month before he needed to deliver the record to Touch. With about a quarter of the album salvageable, he scrambled to reassemble the album from memory. While it's hard to say if this time constraint benefited or detracted from his process, the album itself is stunningly good. Just as Endless Summer channelled the acid fried spirit of Brian Wilson, Venice also finds itself an album with a muse: Kevin Shields. There have always been short-circuited elements of My Bloody Valentine shot from Fennesz' tricked out guitar sound; but Venice pushes Fennesz affection for shoegazer's bucolic atmospheres and sublime melodies to the forefront with marvelous results. Each song appears to be nerve-rattlingly familiar; yet just as Endless Summer invoked Brian Wilson without ever resorting to self-conscious quotation, each of his tracks glides along the same oceanic currents authored by Slowdive, AR Kane, Ride, Loveliescrushing, and The Cocteau Twins. Again, no direct references can be heard in Venice; rather Fennesz taps directly into the hopelessly romantic sentimentality of shoegazer music and replicates it perfectly behind a light dusting of digital pixels.
The one track which gives us pause on Venice is the single collaboration with David Sylvian. While this track on its own works as good if not better than anything on their aforementioned Blemish album, it sticks out like sore thumb against the sublimely textured ambience which dominates the remainder of the record. Here on the double lp redux of Venice, Fennesz had the sense to lead the second lp with that track, thus remedying much of the disconnect found with the cd listening experience. Venice stood as one of the finest electronic albums of 2001; and it's still an excellent album a decade later, now fleshed out in its 10th Anniversary vinyl edition with two short bonus tracks of pastoral, pixelated blur, "The Future Will Be Different" and "Tree", presumably recorded at the same time.
Andrew Chalk recorded as Ferial Confine for a few years in the mid '80s. At that time, all of those recordings were cassette only releases, mostly self-released / private editions of just a couple of copies with the exception of the Meiosis cassette put out by Broken Flag. That cassette and the Full Use Of Nothing LP, which Fusetron reissued from one of those private edition tapes, found Chalk embracing an acoustic teethgnashing through metallic noise junk. It was no wonder that The New Blockaders and Organum would seek him out as a future collaborator. But there were only hints on those two recordings of what would later become what Chalk would be best known for: the majestic, sublime, and beautiful drone.
Chalk's 1986 album Crescent, which was released under his own name, has long been viewed as the bridge between the Ferial Confine aesthetic of blistered noise and the softened timbral complexities of later work including that of Mirror. That said, nobody had heard First, Second And Third Drop. Also recorded in 1986, this Ferial Confine album truly is the missing link between the two polarities of the Chalk aesthetic, as the scraping metallic skree is present but often tuned in sympathy to bowed gongs and long-thin wire drones. Blossoming reverberation consumes some of these tracks, which sound even better than the classic Organum sound of that time period. It goes without saying that this album is incredible. Well, Andrew Chalk made it, of course. But the historical nature of this record makes it even all the more interesting. Oh yeah, it's also painfully limited; and already sold out at the label.
This is the long lost recording of Andrew Chalk's 1985 album Meiosis, which was originally issued as a cassette on the seminal UK noise imprint Broken Flag. For those of you (and we know there are many of you out there) who are enamored by the impressionistic pools of dreamtime sound that make up most of Chalk's more well known albums, the Ferial Confine aesthetic is a considerable departure. But for those of you who can also sink your teeth into a delicious chunk of noise (and yes there are plenty of you out there too!), this album will hit that teeth-gnashing sweet spot. In the mid '80s, Chalk was not only involved with the Broken Flag circle, but also with Organum and The New Blockaders; and parts of this albums parallels much of the TNB / Organum strategies for densely aggregated, metal-compacted noise junk. Unlike the power electronics sound of Ramleh / Whitehouse, this shared aesthetic sounds like recordings of sheared metal plates being sped up and having the high-pitched frequencies of those scabrous grinds amplified into frenetic transmissions of aggravated tactility. It's almost a more listenable, more psychedelic, more acoustically based form of the aggro-minimalism of the Harsh Wall Noise format which was proposed a couple years back. While this aforementioned sound is the dominant strategy for the first three tracks on Meiosis (following suit from the first Ferial Confine album The Full Use Of Nothing), the middle tracks predict the more contemplative, dark drones that Chalk would produce on his late '80s albums Crescent and East Of The Sun. Here, deep rumbling electronics ripple through delay patterns alongside the resonant acoustic frequencies of suspended pieces of metal and even some field recordings of bird songs. Certainly not the pastoral impressionism of his current output, but very much looking forward to what he would be doing nowadays through a more industrially minded and jackbooted lens. By the end of the album, the searing feedback-blistered frequencies return, albeit with a weirdly psychedelic series of electronic glissandos buried beneath that's akin to early noise-junk Merzbow jamming with Daphne Oram. Very cool. If anything, Meiosis is a fantastic archive from the British underground; and given the collectability (and bootlegs) of the Broken Flag cassettes, this is necessary reissue. Hand fabricated by Andrew Chalk in a tip-on style sleeve with an obi that sports the title in Japanese.
This marks the second reissue of these recordings from Andrew Chalk's early noise-junk project Ferial Confine. The Full Use Of Nothing was originally a cassette self-released back in 1985 and was most likely one of the recordings that piqued the interest of Broken Flag to eventually release some of Chalk's more gnarled constructions. While the Ferial Confine records are definitely noise albums, there is a thread which ties these into the drone-centric work for which he's best known, in the gradual evolution of the compositions that shift from one set of demolished sounds into another. The process seems to find Chalk beginning with metal-bashed percussion recorded at very slow speeds on a 4-track then bounced to a different track at very high speeds with swarming synth / reverb saturated dronescraping draped beneath the volatile squeaking and dissonant klanking aktionism. One can hear some of the early Merzbow and / or Yeast Culture noise-junk recordings and most certainly the frenzied clamour of The New Blockaders (who had in fact worked with Chalk around this same time period), but it's that phasing, slippery drone miasma suspended as a backdrop to all of the tactile noise that gives this a very Andrew Chalk feel. Even working with noise, Andrew Chalk proved himself much better than many of his contemporaries! The cd reissue of The Full Use Of Nothing is the first in a triology of Ferial Confine recordings which will include the Broken Flag cassette Meiosis (1985) and a second pressing of the First, Second, And Third Drop (1986, unreleased until a cd version came out in 2008).
Self-deprecatingly qualified by Ferrari as a "poor man's concrete music," Presque Rien is a brilliant piece of Spartan tape music that Ferrari began in 1967 with four variations on the Presque Rien theme composed over the next three decades. The first version was originally released in 1970 through Deutsche Grammophon, the next found its way through INA-GRM on vinyl in 1980, the third (composed in 1989) ended up on a cd compendium of the first three Presque Rien suites released through INA-GRM in 1995, and now the fouth chapter (completed in 1998) sees the light of day with the other three version thanks to the Editions Mego subsidized Recollection GRM project. Thus, this complete version makes a hell of lot more sense than the previous INA-GRM version which tacked on a densely claustrophobic and politically charged collage track at the beginning of the disc, setting an entirely different context for how Presque Rein was heard. Each of the four suites operates in a very spacious framework with long passages of placid sounds from nature being ruptured by short aggressive bursts of tape noise, proto-industrial machinations, and psychologically charged fragments of sound. Like Robert Ashley's ultra creepy "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon", Ferrari intertwines fragments of various whispered narratives with the steady buzzings of choral cicadas, as if each narration were that of a voyeur spying upon the intimacy of nature. It's easy to hear the influence that Ferrari's masterpiece had on a young Steven Stapleton and a pre-pop Jim O'Rourke, as well as pretty much every field recordist / phonographer that picked up a digital recorder... but Ferrari started this way back in 1967. The new 2lp was cut to perfection by D&M at 45rpm. Normally, we'd be all over playing this at the wrong speed, but this is an album really does sound way better at the correct speed. There, it's brilliant.
Simply superb. The Field could release the same damn album over and over again, and we'd be completely content, so perfect is his signature style of minimal techno. Cupid's Head is his fourth album in six years, a relatively slow pace of output for such top shelf work; so with each album comes the opportunity to savor what Alex Willmer is up to. From Here We Go Sublime was the debut album that introduced the template for all of Willmer's other albums; and like Wolfgang Voigt's pinnacle of minimal techno - the four Gas records - Willmer's success is through the presentation of inventive variations on a theme. His begins with a sparkling arrangement of delicately arpeggiating pixel points and micro-samples, which might have been lifted from soft-rock ballads of the early '80s; and with the skill of a crafty plastic surgeon, he deftly eviscerates an ugly source material and renders it exquisite and wholly refined. All of his taut melodic phrase and clipped gasps of romantic exhortation latch perfectly onto the archetypal Kompakt monophunk techno pulse. The minimalism of Cupid's Head is not one of stasis, as there are rather broad gestures of emotional dynamism even within the framework of a constant beat. "Black Sea" begins with a classic set of The Field's pink-n-pastel electronic colorations, but slips oh so gradually into a more nocturnal set of jet-blacks and engorged reds that really would be the perfect transitory track between Ulrich Schnauss and Surgeon. These long-view structures look backward to how Arthur Russell produced with some of his slowly developed strings that slowly resolved a melody over a 10 minute New York house track. Radiant, glassine, and downright rapturous.
The Field's 2007 album From Here We Go Sublime caught many people by surprise, and we were happy to find ourselves included in that crowd of Field supporters. This was a minimal techno record playing the part of a pop album, through sleights of hand that extracted the sappiest moments of the '80s without appearing the part of the ironist. In pixel-painted blurs of entrancing melodies and soothing ambient warmth, The Field offered nostalgia without having a damn Lionel Richie song stuck in your head. Yup, one of the more memorable samples from From Here We Go Sublime was a wistful guitar lead from Richie's "Hello." In a lot of ways, The Field reached a pinnacle for Kompakt's Pop Ambient strategies, easily surpassing perhaps the album that started it all: Gas' Pop.
Jump two years down the line and several trips around the world, The Field returns with a second album that shouldn't disappoint those who were held rapt by the debut. Yesterday and Today has much of the restrained crescendos of velvety hypnosis grafted onto the steel girds of German engineered techno. Yes, we do know that The Field's Axel Willner is from Sweden, but the heart and soul of the motorik pulse is firmly rooted in Germany. Neu!, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Basic Channel, and of course, Kompakt are the obvious references in the formal structures of The Field, with his source material being those misty-eyed remembrances of music's past. If there are specific samples to be recognized in Yesterday and Today, they are not overt and obvious; but the sentiment is still the same. Nice.
The vinyl version includes a cd of the album as well!
No frills bootleg 1970 UK folk-psych reissue, featuring a young David Toop (currently a musician and writer, of "Oceans of Sound" fame, among other things), who not only plays on this disc but did the cover as well. Supposed to be really nightmarish and weird, but we didn't quite "get it". Definitely nothing like the Comus or Cromagnon we were hoping for! However, it does have a spirit of mellow melancholy that some might enjoy.
If Adult. scored "Hedwig And The Angry Inch" or... if I Am Spoonbender went Broadway. If the cast from Fame played electro. Glammy and slick with many cool parts and sounds but unfortunately weak arrangements undermine Fischerspooner's drive for #1. And well, I really could do without the diva singer too. The second track on the album is a cover of Wire's "The 15th", and quite a great
Five Or Six were a shortlived UK post-punk band from the early '80s with a revolving door of members, the most well known of which included Ashley Wells who later went to form Spring Hill Jack and David Knight who continues to work with Karl Blake in Shockheaded Peters. While Five Or Six never got into the avant-jazz electronica of Spring Hill Jack or the monstrous art-pop of Shockheaded Peters, the band was intent on pushing beyond the three chord punk attack. Given a dour demeanor and a penchant for moody atmospherics, their small catalogue of albums and singles rightly earned favorable comparisons to Joy Division and 154-era Wire. Tracks such as "Another Reason" and "The Trial" are grounded upon low-slung basslines grooved against percussive dirges, bleak electronic drones, and spindly guitar leads. This compilation is certainly the best place to start with the Five Or Six catalogue, as their albums could be hit and miss. David Knight admitted that the group somewhat cancelled out many of the strengths of the many members, leaving only a handful of great tracks. Fortunately, all of that great material is found here. So if the early 4AD / Factory Records post-punk dirge is your thing, this will certainly float your boat.
This is one of those albums that's neither new, nor even a recent reissue, but that we here at Aquarius decided, heck, let's list, it deserves it! (While this disc already appears on our website, it was never actually *listed* in any of our newsletters.) So while many might already know this album backwards and forwards, it has most certainly slipped through the cracks for too many others out there. Being a Japan-only import can't help. Allan wisely reordered some copies recently (when a customer special ordered it for themselves on-line) and Byram, unwittingly playing it in the store, found himself getting progressively more obsessed with the album (and the band)! It wasn't long before Jim and Marcy were also finding themselves hooked. Now almost any day you come into the store, you'll hear the Flower Travellin' Band blaring.
This is an album (and a band) that are not celebrated nearly enough -- possibly out of misguided notions of their being another bad psych knock-off among the many crowding the record racks in the early seventies. But Japan's Flower Travellin' Band were no mere cheesy imitators of occidental rock 'n roll, they were in actual fact a full-fledged, pioneering tour de force of psychedelic progressive hard rock, equalling the krautrock heavies of the era. FTB can be compared favorably to Amon Duul's better efforts with their experimental meandering (think Yeti), and the best trancey spaceouts from Can. Yet there's never a sense that FTB lose track of their compositions no matter how far out they take a track. Perhaps because even more than these experimental Krautrockers, FTB's heavy (fucking ominously heavy) sound points to a major Sabbath, Purple, and Crimson influence. Released in 1971, Satori is the band's second and arguably best album (all but the first album Anywhere have now been reissued by Warner Japan). From the first screech/howl at the beginning of track one -- "Satori Part I" (the tracks on the album are all "Satori", parts I-V) -- from vocalist Joe, who inhabits a zone somewhere between Can's Damo Suzuki and Deep Purple's Ian Gillan, the album gets straight down to business. Joe's scream is followed by a foreboding bass, guitar and drum dirge that's straight up collision between Cream and Black Sabbath in which no one survives. It's got so much more teeth than either, it's not even funny, predating punk by a good many years. "Satori Part II" however is quintessential FTB Over a pounding tribal drumbeat, alternating between a buzzing sitar-esque guitar drone and a melody line that curls ripples and lilts like a plume of burning incense smoke, guitarist Hideki Ishima lays out one of the creepiest, coolest guitar leads ever. If that ain't enough, vocalist Joe's singing is like that of Axl Rose being channelled by the Sun City Girls! Even if the rest of the album were total shit -- which it ain't -- the cost of this cd would still be well worth it for this song alone! "Part III" -- an instrumental -- picks up where II leaves off but slows the tempo down to a deathly pace, which makes it even heavier. This is the Sabbath influence on FTB writ large. Replete with an improv freakout before returning to the original riff and building into a frenzied crescendo. Needless to say, if you weren't bobbing your head at the beginning of the song, you will be by its end. "Part IV" could be considered FTB's "blues" number, with Joe picking up the harmonica instead of singing. But instead of churning out the expected twelve bar formula, FTB truncate the form and construct a minimalist jam around a short riff instead. "Part V" shows yet another facet of FTB's seemingly infinite potential with Hideki (?) playing some kick ass, spooky koto-like guitar overdubbed on top of some heavy psych. Damn! They could have done ten fucking albums around this schtick alone and probably never lost our interest... sigh... but this (and the other two that are also available, look for reviews in future) will have to suffice for now. Absolutely, fucking recommended!!!!
MPEG Download: "Satori Part II" [/audio/flowersatori2.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Satori Part II" [/audio/flowersatori2.m3u]
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
At its best, techno is an effortless sound with the technician merely setting up parameters for drum machines, basslines, and melodic patterns that get subtle tweaks, filters, and modulations applied to them to keep everything from being static, locked grooves. Chain Reaction has been at the vanguarde of techno productions with a post-dub sound that modernizes the delayed tape hiss which eerily floated through Lee "Scratch" Perry's '70s production work. The process of creating the Chain Reaction sound was of course a digital one, giving a cold metallic patina to the ghostly patterns which hovered above a classic Detroit techno groove. The sound of Chain Reaction had been pioneered by artists like Monolake, Porter Ricks, and Vainquer -- all German artists who have since left the label for other pursuits. While not populated by Germans, Chain Reaction has still attracted artists whose agenda is to continue in the Chain Reaction sound. They may not be German, but they certainly sound it.
Fluxion's "Vibrant Forms II" stands out from the recent croppings of Chain Reaction with a set of grooves that could easily hail from Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt series that has been coupled with the cold shimmer of the Chain Reaction sound. Like Gas' "Konigforst," I could listen to this all day and never get sick of it.
When Third Eye Foundation first experimented with fusing drum & bass beats with guitar dissonance, it stood as the awkward realization of what one might imagine My Bloody Valentine's (as yet undocumented) drum & bass sound to be...
While Third Eye Foundation's sound has since developed into gritty drum & bass dirges, fellow Bristol space rockers Flying Saucer Attack have also taken up the drum & bass / bliss rock challenge, with a rather groovy yet wholly blissed-out result. While half the tracks from "Mirror" are injected with the hyperactive speed of jungle breaks, their breathy Nick Drake style pastoral folk songs are remain, and of course "Mirror" is still laden with sleepy guitar fuzz. Complete with colorful, psychedelic cover and gatefold art by Savage Pencil.
Another fantastic Miasmah release, this one from FNS, aka Fredrik Ness Sandoval, who besides playing in a whole bunch of Norwegian bands we've never heard of, has collaborated with members of Acid Mothers Temple, 1/3 Octave Band, the Cranes, Zeni Geva, and Marble Sheep, but here on his solo debut, Sandoval crafts a gorgeous expanse of minimal psychedelic folk, that reminds us both of local dronefolk duo Barn Owl, but also space kraut astral travelers Expo 70.
Imagine folk music transformed into druggy drifty dreamy space ragas, and you'll be getting close, acoustic guitars unfurl gorgeous trancelike stretches of almost Appalachia like strum, while all around, effects swirl, other guitars are layered and woven into the original guitar, creating fantastical stretches of psychedelic drift, of abstract dronekraut minimalism, all infused with a subtle pathos, even the sunshiniest of the tracks here, brood with a somber undercurrent. The record opener sets the stage perfectly, an acoustic guitars strums a melancholy chord progression, while another guitar churns and chugs, a rhythmic counterpoint to the woozy drift of the acoustic, this undulating space raga is laced with tinkling chimes, swooping backwards effects, all wreathed in a sort of otherworldly shimmer, and allowed to loop and repeat and mesmerize, growing subtly more intense and loud, but never fully letting loose, instead, eventually shedding all the extra guitars and strange production, leaving just the warm strummed acoustic, and little streaks of backwards swoop. We say it a lot, but Sandoval could have stretched that out to 40 or 50 minutes and we'd STILL be raving about it. And that applies to all the tracks here.
"Sappelur" is a smoldering blackened dirge, roiling clouds of processed buzz, muted feedback, lots of layered tones and lush chordal blur, a lovely blown out psychedelic haze that just throbs and pulses and drifts, right into "Wooden Leg", which returns to the folk of the album opener, but unlike that track, the progression here is much more subtle, it's nearly 2 or 3 minutes before a strange drone begins to surface, along with gorgeous angelic female vocals, soon male vocals join in as well, not singing so much as sort of crooning along, the result is a darker, more menacing take on classic seventies British acid folk.
"I Think She's Asleep" is more abstract, a gorgeous shimmery dreamscape, all layered tones, and pulled apart melodies, haunting and otherwordly, hushed and lovely, very reminiscent of folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX. "Dream" is surprisingly less dreamy, sounding instead like some strange sonic ritual, spidery guitars wrapped around twisted damaged electronics, while the vocals transform the sound into something almost liturgical, lots of reverb and echo, as if it were being performed in some massive black cathedral, the effects swirling and swooping, and pushing the sound into the realms of spacekrautdrone for sure.
Finally, the record closes with the epic 12 minute "Flaggermusvingers Vift I Dimmet", which again begins as a slowly unfurling lush sprawl of melancholy Appalachia, all minor key and mournful, while just below the surface, some thick blackened buzzing is birthed, and as the track progresses, it grows more and more caustic, roiling and churning, eventually nearly swallowing the Appalachia whole, transforming the sound into some washed out doomgaze, all woozy and swirly, the low end swells laced with tangled psychedelic melodies, before dropping out completely, leaving just a soft focus cloud of distant reverbed shimmer, a distant cosmic vibration, that seems to gradually fade, like the stars disappearing behind the clouds.
Dark and dreamy and druggy and so so gorgeous... For fans of Expo 70, Svarte Greiner, Barn Owl, Jacaszek, Nadja, Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Fear Falls Burning and other purveyors of doomfolk, krautdrone, spacefolk and all sorts of abstract minimal guitarscapery...
The mysterious Norwegian outfit Fosen provides little to no context for us to describe their music, leaving it much harder to position this set of dronescapes against the next batch. It appears that Fosen's source material is acoustic in nature, possibly being flutes and bells; the group then renders each sound dronological with considerable care via basic loopings, sonar depth reverb, and vast pitchshifting manipulations. The first track entertains a looping passage from a breathy flute stretched into a wonderfully hypnogogic drone that favorably compares with Biosphere's more minimal ambience or the Hafler Trio's fluttering drones. Other tracks flicker with feedback oscillations and attack-modified bell tones, some pitter and clank like some mutant tape construction derived from water dripping in a cavernous warehouse. Altogether, Fosen offers a very evocative if equally mysterious album.
We first heard of the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project on :zoviet*france:'s fantastic podcast A Duck In Tree, and we were certainly baffled to discover that this enigmatic project from the outskirts of Chicago has been in existence since the early '80s. A cassette here or there might have materialized throughout the years, but it seems that the bulk of the output was just secreted away until some of this stuff started showing up on their website, revealing a dreamy, narcotic ethos of post-industrial tape-loopery. Think Phillip Jeck. Think Terry Riley. And most of all, think :zoviet*france:! The etymology behind the name Fossil Aerosol Mining Project harkens to the act of rummaging through abandoned warehouses, whose crumbled surfaces were dappled with graffiti. The remnant waste from all that graffiti was the never-ending supply of crushed and spent spraypaint aerosol cans. So, the punk-scavenger miscreants who would find themselves sifting through the rubbish of those abandoned warehouses in search of a motherlode of 16mm film or reel-to-reel tape machines would undoubtably come across countless, discarded cans. Quite a poetic allusion for this tape-heavy Mining Project.
The quotations of bird song and the pleasant ambient wash of the initial 30 seconds snap into something quite foreign with a series of radio communication bursts and snippets of slow-motion monologues from Ronald Reagan, whose soothing, patronizing declarations would raise the hackles of many critical thinkers and agit-prop artists during his presidency. Nowadays, it's something of a distant, sonorous ghost, something that we're supposed to dread but can't quite figure out why. The Fossil Aerosol Mining Project cycles through a myriad of sympathetic loops, each of which harbors its own patter of delay, lending to a complex web of crumbling sound furthered along by backward tapes of textural scrabblings and iridescent drones. This network of eerie, diaphanous sounds and hypnotizingly soft-focus rhythms which may have their origins in a thoroughly forgotten fragment of a song, whose content was wholly lost to the magnetic erasures, dubbing-upon-dubbing-upon-dubbing, and / or the bacterial decay which flecked away the ferric oxide leaving behind an entirely different set of chemical stains. What's left is just a shadow of whatever emotion might have been imprinted onto the tape. It's a beautiful coagulation of sound, the musical equivalent of a Joseph Cornell box... either that or the recapitulation of the classic :zoviet*france: albums (e.g. Look Into Me, Assault & Mirrage, Just An Illusion, etc.). One of the best albums of 2014.
We've long cited the metaphor of sonic exhumation in describing the proponents of a ruined sound design. How often have we likened a marvelous hauntological recording to sound as if it were lifted from the bottom of a bog, still dripping with bunker fuel and vegetal rot as the author feeds this (fictionally) exhumed tape through the reel-to-reel in order to captured the woozy, decayed sounds transformed through time and chemical decomposition. In the art of the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, we have EXACTLY that process. Well, not the swamp-rot seepage per se, but the accumulation of time-ravaged material from abandoned drive-in movie theaters using the scratched, crumpled, and torn bits of the optical soundtrack from 16mm film. This semi-anonymous outfit has been scouring the forgotten sites of the American rust belt for such material over the past three decades, but only recently have they received any notoriety for their work. After a couple of high-profile collaborations with the like-minded :zoviet*france:, Fossil Aerosol delivers this complete masterpiece in The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 for their first solo piece of vinyl. Fossil Aerosol snatches bits of dialogue and overly maudlin orchestration from that source material, alongside the various dropouts, abraded noise, and tactile grit; and all of this gets tossed into an overlapping network of tape loops, complete with squiggled machinations, dub accumulation, and uncanny hypnosis. The process of building each track emerges through negation and erasure as much as it is in the accretion of layered sound upon sound. What remains are the ghosts from the process, not only sonically but also allegorically pointing very specifically back to the unearthed 16mm film. The presentation for all this disintegration, rupture, bleachings, shatterings, debris, and lagged delay follows the ley lines of the American psyche - entangled notions of grandeur, ignobility, spectacle, spirituality, and insecurity. Fossil Aerosol take on the part of detached archeologists for the American wasteland, with their aestheticized miasma and dislocation imparting nuanced readings into America's forgotten recent past. Demdike Stare and The Caretaker may have the entire history of the British empire to excavate for their sounds, but Fossil Aerosol's hauntings are so much more eerie given the proximity in time and space. Without a doubt, this is one of THEE best experimental / drone-on records of 2015.
The first 200 copies of The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 come with a piece of scavenged 16mm film mounted to the cover!!
Sound artists like Matt Shoemaker, Loren Chasse, and Steve Roden are some of the very few who are successful in turning found objects and field recordings into thoroughly engaging compositions that don't rely upon the flashiness of techniques to make their work successful. Add New Zealand's Richard Francis to that gaggle as well. It's been a while since any solo work has been available from Francis, who has previously recorded under the moniker Eso Steel; and more recently, he's been entertaining many a collaboration with his fellow NZ noiseniks such as Campbell Kneale and Michael Morley.
On Together Alone, Together Apart, Francis turns to the miniscule events of daily life whose peculiar sounds capture his imagination. It could be a crackle from rain falling or the distant surf of the Pacific Ocean or a creaking electric radiator or the hissing static from television snow. It's these small sounds which Francis has recorded and stretched into relatively longer compositions. These rattling, crackling streams of softened white noise move in a synchronous fashion, much like the way that a huge flock of starlings can gracefully circle in the sky without bumping into each other, all moving organically in three dimensions. Think Loren Chasse, as if he were reworking any of Bernhard Gunter's compositions, making them rougher, in line with Chasse's Hedge Of Nerves disc. Headphones are certainly recommended for this album, as the last track is awfully quiet... at least, it is when there's a record store full of people. Very well done!
Ben Frost records are scary. And beautiful. They're the stuff of dreams. And nightmares. They're like soundtracks for films that can never be made, the music conjuring up images that can only exist in the imagination. It's musical magic, or sonic alchemy, whatever it is, it's something few have mastered, and even those that have, barely approach the mysterious mastery of Ben Frost, whose previous record, By The Throat, remains one of the most terrifying documents of electronic sound art we have ever heard, weaving the sounds of snarling wolves into thick swells of corrosive bass buzz, and brilliantly bleak, yet impossibly lush sound design, and balancing that sonic grimness, with glimmers of hushed beauty, in a way that makes the sound both mellifluous and malevolent in equal measure.
Aurora is another stunning sonic missive, and one that immediately conjures up yet another lost world, one that lurks in our collective imagination, but that has begun to bleed through, into our every day world. The shadows seem deeper and darker. The grey skies shout through with streaks of blood red, the nights interminable, the days, scorched expanses of endless time. All of this represented by strange sprawls of layered electronic drones, of gristled pulsations, of strange staticky rhythms, and mysterious buried melodies, the sounds this time around brittle and jagged, the loveliness sharp edged and flecked with rust and dried blood, the rhythms that surface are hauntological, reminding us of the dubbed out avant mesmer of groups like Demdike Stare, but here those rhythms seem to gradually splinter and fray, wreathed in thick swirls of soft noise, sculpted into weeping melodies, and darkly decaying textures, all hiding some glowing inner warmth, suffusing these sounds with an organic quality, that transforms a series of sounds into something alive, a crackling energy that is barely contained on the record, one can almost imagine the sound as colored sparks leaping from the speakers, bursting from the headphones, a cascade of brilliant sonic flares, raining down from above.
Lurching robotic percussion is shaped into strange skeletal shapes, lumbering behemoths trading through fields of groaning, creaking chordal thrum, pelted with prismatic streaks of sound, a beastly groove, that builds to a thick swath of soaring epic psychedelic electronic majesty, like a meaner, moodier, more metal M83, a brilliant blacknoise blur, that blots out the stars, painting the sky in shade and shadow, eventually morphing into burnished stretches of grey ambience, laced with dubby skitter, all of which blossom further into a flurry of blissed out electro flares, which fade into crackling seas of gristle and hum, undulating imperceptibly beneath hazy layers of grumblingly distorted shimmer and grinding sheets of druggy thrum. A heaving landscape of tense cinematic atmosphere, smeared fields of tangled melody, wildly colliding synth streaks, and jumbled beats and rhythms, all wound up into a tightly coiled swirl, flurry of frenzied electrons, gradually crumbling into the ether, leaving just a barely there cloud of sonic static discharge, until finally, nothing. And emptiness.
Simply stunning.
Calling this an industrial record certainly does this record no justice... Although Fuckhead's overblown testosterone laden angst is clearly presented through digital technology, thankfully none of the dated Front 242 or Rammstein references appear. Instead dense hyperactive sampling and digital noise processing dominate the album. Certainly an odd choice for digital electronica saboteurs Mego to release, but nonetheless an brutal and beguiling album. Recommended.
Following the digital obfuscation of public domain recordings found on his "Frequency Lib" album, Stephan Mathieu presents his "Edits" series, dramatic remixes of his contemporaries' work under the Full Swing moniker. Originally, these edits of Laub, Kit Clayton, Antenne, Autopoesies, Raumgestaltung Eins, Ekkehard Ehlers, Monolake, Yo La Tengo (!), and Akira Rabelais were released as a series of 10" on Kit Clayton's Orthlorng Musork label, and now have been collected conveniently on one CD. What is immediately striking about this album is how strong and how unique Mathieu's signature sound is becoming. While the archetypal application of laptop DSP synthesis ends up tainted by antiseptic, clinical, or cold tones, Mathieu manages to wrap all of his digital pixelations in a dreamy, warmly crackling, and wholly inviting atmosphere, not unlike the beloved Aphex Twin album "Selected Ambient Works Vol II."
For the Laub remix, Mathieu centers his recontextualization around one of Laub's lilting synth melodies, which slowly loops through flickering wisps of static, hushed drones, and occasional vocal interjections from Antye Greie-Fuchs, whose Bjorkish voice collapses pixel by pixel. For both Monolake and Kit Clayton, Mathieu re-arranges the original Chain Reaction pulse into deep low end fluctuations, amidst fractilized clatter. The work of Raungestaltung Eins has been stripped down to the root frequencies, sounding like a downpitched morse code transmission, with hyper-pointillistic surface noise crackle and time-stretched drones. Of all of the remixes, the Akira Rabelais reworking of a Carte piano study is the least deconstructed, by overdubbing subtle modulations of Rabelais shimmer and vibrato into a beautifully spun web of spindly tonalities.
While Mathieu's work may hint at the discourses of ownership in a digital landscape since he has chosen to develop his sound almost exclusively through pre-existing work, his music ranks way up at the top the increasingly prolific laptop community alongside Fennesz, Carsten Nicolai, and Stilluppsteypa. "Edits" will undoubtedly rank as one of the best electronic record of 2002.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
