Over the past couple of years, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) has entrenched herself as a mystical queen for the free-folk crowd, channelling the disaffected sorrow of Nico as well as the transcendent visions of 12th Century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. On her previous recordings, Burke sewed together her albums from short vignettes of narcoleptic folk songs, typically in the form of monotone lullabies in which her resonant voice radiated through stoned-and-droned acoustic guitar strum and / or farfisa arrangements. So it's very rare to finds a Fursaxa song that clocks in at anything longer than 3 minutes, which curiously is ample time for her to hypnotise her audience with her utterly compelling songs. Amulet, thus, is a bit of a detour from the collections of shortened songs as she offers four extended pieces of sprawling drones built out of delay-pedal loops. On the first couple of tracks, it's Burke's voice that takes center stage, spiralling into a hypnotic set of oscillating patterns, mossy psychedelic chants harkening back to the dark ages. She accentuates these tracks with occasional interludes for flutes and hand bells. On one of the final tracks on Amulet, Burke sets forth on a slow-motion acoustic guitar renditition of a Glenn Branca symphony, aiming for nothing more than transcendent hypnotic monotone. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!
Well, it's about time! After a couple of cd-rs and vinyl-only editions, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) has finally released a proper cd for much greater distribuition of her immaculate, hallucinatory music. The Philadelphia based chanteuse has crafted a timeless sound that on one hand finds Burke easily situated alongside the best of the acid-folk revivalists (Devendra Banhart, Six Organs of Admittance, Islaja, etc.), yet on the other, she channels the visionary iconography of Hildegard von Bingen and the iconoclastic obliqueness of Nico in equal measure. On Lepidoptera, as with her previous recordings, Burke floats her primal voice over incredibly simple psychedelic songs of tranced-out organ drones and / or acoustic guitar monochord strum, peppered with echo-heavy flutes and bells. There really isn't that more to what Burke does as Fursaxa, but within her arcane lullabies and primieval psychedelia, she has the ability to emote a profound, dreamy sadness much in the same way that Marissa Nadler has done on her two albums, albeit under far more mystical and psychotropic influences. Truely amazing and utterly mesmerizing.
While I (Jim) have normally attempted to write reviews for Aquarius that are noticeably different from the reviews I've written for other outlets, I now state my failing in crafting some new syntax for this Fursaxa record, which I think is fantastic. So without further ado, here's what I wrote in The Wire #222.
"Tara Burke has earned major endorsement from Makoto Kawabata and Thurston Moore, who have been so impressed by the Philadelphian psych-out maven as to release a couple of recordings of her Fursaxa project on their respective labels. Following the 'Mandrake' CD-R on Kawabata's tiny imprint, this self-titled album published by Moore's Ecstatic Peace is an exceptional set of narcoleptic post-VU semi-rock haze. Working with a couple of her former comrades form the underappreciated Siltbreeze group Un, Burke has scored 19 sketches for monochord acoustic guitars, pedal treated Lowry organ and Farfisa loaded with a grainy texture of raw tape hiss and a general disregard for production cleanliness. She channels these stories like a Wiccan earth mother, with sounds emanating like disaffected recollections of various memories and previously hidden histories. She's not so much interested in telling us specific stories as evoking a psychic connectivity towards those past visions, which are beautifully nostalgic yet vaguely haunting. This album is as good as anything from the Jewelled Antler collective, No Neck Blues Band, and Jackie-O Motherfucker."
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Cottage-industry label boss Glenn Donaldson has been splitting his time between the avant-folk productions of Jewelled Antler and the distinctly noiser productions for his other label Pink Skulls, which he describes as being more "punk" than Jewelled Antler. Alongside the militant iconography of Teenage Panzerkorps, the belligerent hallucinations of Leafyard, and the boombox black metal of Dead Raven Choir, Donaldson's definition of punk is not the commonly accepted one. New Zealand's rock primitivists The Futurians add another facet to Donaldson's atypical vision for Pink Skulls. Hailing from the equally obscure, noise rock band Armpit, The Futurians are not a band that resolves any of their art rock songs, prefering to leave a jagged guitar line or a simple drum kit plod or a monomaniacal vocal chant as the only semblance of structure to scrabble through the post-Chome synth squiggles, bleary clattering sound, and general lo-fi ugliness. Think Gate's "Metric" with megaphone vocals delivered by a Lydia Lunch / Mark E. Smith hybrid, toss in The Troggs and Destroy All Monsters for even greater anti-rock references, and you'll come pretty close to The Futurians. For all of the 'fucked up' art rock bands that sound too calculated and too ironic for their own good, The Futurians with their semi-conscious narcolepsy through noise propulsion are a rare gem uncovered from a pile of shit. More please.
The Swiss aktionist collective Schimpfluch has been active since the mid-'80s, with its various members seeking out the transgressive, the ultra-violent, and the transcendent all at once, via a dystopian hybrid of noise, punk theatrics, and / or musique concrete. In doing so, these provocateurs follow what their Viennese progenitors had started in the '60s through performance, sculpture, and painting. It can't go unnoticed how much of the iconography that Sudden Infant of Schimpfluch incorporates from Gunter Brus, and how much the hellish comedies of Otto Muehl filter through the modern day work of Rudolf Eb.Er. G*Park (aka Marc Zeier) is the most enigmatic of all the Schimpfluch artists, with no obvious parallels to anyone before him, as he trades in the modern day techniques of musique concrete, although his work acquires a tension, a dynamism, and an existential blight that were never achieved by the likes of Xenakis, Schaefer, Ferrari, or Chion.
G*Park's epic double cd Sub from two years ago still proves to be an exhausting and exhilarating document into the denatured field recordings, cryptic collage, and subcutaneous electro-acoustics from Zeier, with Gour standing a continuation of those themes. Like on Sub, Zeier states the origins of his sound material - crows, pigs, flesh flies, wasps, wolves, frozen lakes, and some less obvious sounds from the Uwaga Squad and the Etang of Gour. Zeier locates mechanized bursts against a backdrop of very distant blackened noise, with all sorts of whipcrack slashes, wooden creaks, watery plops, corvid calls, and porcine squeals constructing a strange and hostile narrative of ritualized violence against an unknown subject. The genius of G*Park lies not in the sounds themselves (even as they are immaculately presented) but in the psychological voids left where Zeier eradicated everything through deathray, sterilizing cauterization, or fastidious vacuuming. A brilliantly done record from one of the very best technicians of the cruel theater of musique concrete.
It's unfortunate that we've not listed any G*Park recordings until now; but it's certainly better late than never. G*Park is the work of Marc Zeier who has been quietly generating some of the most evocative musique concrete / electro-acoustic whatnot / broken drones / softened noisejunk since the mid '80s. These recordings had mostly been on cassette back in the day, with a couple of discs appearing over the past decade thanks to Blossoming Noise and the defunkt Zabriskie Point label. He's also an auxiliary member of the aktionist Schimpfluch collective, although his work shares little of their scatological hyper-violence of smeared fish guts, vomit, and bloodletting. Yet, the G*Park recordings mirrors the sinister vibe of Schimplfuch through his delicately disfigured field recordings and tape-cut manipulation. Zeier presents a masterful collage of disjointed repetitions from handcranked mechanisms that rupture with bellowing drones and aqueous gurglings. Elsewhere, air raid sirens explode through the laser-whipsnap recoil of cellphone tension wires being struck, and the reverberation of prepared piano abuse slams against densely packed drones into thunderous punctures. These pieces are clinical studies of decay amplified from a microscopic order; and considering that Zeier's occupation is a plankton fisherman (seriously!), perhaps these are the birth pangs and death throes of those tiny creatures. A very highly recommended piece of sound art!
Back in 2010, G*Park performed in San Francisco for 23five's Activating The Medium festival, presenting the early sketches of his eviscerated musique concrete and disembodied field recordings, surging from vacuum-sucked voids through ice-cave drones into tumultously compacted rumblings whose frequencies were on the verge of tearing The Lab at the seams. It was an exhausting emptiness that G*Park constructed through all of his sounds, grimly alluding to a science-fictional apocalypse of an endless winter and relentless viral agents. For the next two years, G*Park (aka Marc Zeier) finessed the details of that work, tightening up the tension and further hollowing out the noises, resulting in Sub - easily the best release from his impeccable catalogue, and one of the finer outings from the Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Along with the likes of Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and Dave Phillips, G*Park hails from the Swiss collective Schimpfluch, which extends the ideas and concepts of the Viennese Aktionists (i.e. Nitsch, Brus, Schwarzkogler, Muehl, etc.) of aestheticized violence and abject transgression through the histories of punk, performance-art, industrial/noise, and DIY cassette culture. There is horror, dread, fear, and scorn in all of the work of Schimpfluch; and it manifests in many different ways. In Sudden Infant, you will find the Dada-prankster; in Phillips, you have the psycho-sexualized demon; in Eb.Er, you've got a scatological shaman, but in G*Park, you have the haunted existentialist. Easily the most introspective and mysterious of the lot, G*Park doesn't have the numerous world tours that the other members of Schimpfluch do, but his work is revered by those in the noise and sound-art communities as being a hidden gem of grizzled collage-based compositions. His work exists somewhere between the technical constructions of Luc Ferrari and the more vacant strategies of industrial culture (i.e. Thomas Koner, John Duncan, etc.); Sub is spacious album girded by darkly radiant drones and shadowy thrummings that ebb and flow as a strange subcutaneous current akin to blood streaming though veins or a toxic algae bloom fed by the strength of the sun; but that spaciousness is not one of calm pools of ambient bliss. No, this is a very tense album as he pricks, shatters, ruptures, and bleeds out those drones with agitated harsh snaps and slaps of acoustic debris - the suffocating last breath of oxygen extracted from a scuba regulator, the murderous caw of a crow, a whipcrack burst of unknown energy, a brutalist thud of a fist striking a ribcage, static errata from EMF detectors that may or may not be dialed into paranormal activities, or just the drippings of an ice cave whose entry way has just collapsed leaving you with no escape. An unsettlingly brilliant album.
No, I (Jim) was not working at Aquarius when the shop was cozily tucked away in Noe Valley about a decade ago; but as an avid customer at the 24th Street shop, what I recall was the small corner of the store dedicated to all things New Zealand. Of course, somethings change (like Aquarius' location), but somethings stay the same (the fascination with the sounds and noises from that antepodean island). When I would dig through the old New Zealand section, there would be plenty of colorful pop from Flying Nun records, any number of Graeme Jeffries projects, whatever Michael Morley was doing at the time, and perhaps my favorite of the lot, Alastair Galbraith. Morse was Galbraith's first full album, released back in the early '90s on Siltbreeze after he had been stomping around the New Zealand scene and producing a couple of recordings in the bands The Rip and Plagal Grind. Nevertheless, Morse has now been reissued once again; first a few years ago through Emperor Jones and now through Table Of The Elements, with both reissues coupled with the Gaudylight 7" and now with some extra bonus material dating back to The Rip and Plagal Grind days of celebratory punkadelic rock 'n' slop. On both Morse and Gaudylight, Galbraith offers a stunning array of home-recordings, fragmented folk songs and meandering shanties as if sung by a morose / non-wacky Syd Barrett. Galbraith is the the obvious precursor to everything that fellow New Zealander Antony Milton has done (Nether Dawn, AM, etc.) in terms of conjuring a warmly intimate atmosphere for songs that are undeniably dark in theme. Galbraith grounds his loosely composed songs on acoustic guitar strum, accelerating crank organ drones, and his lilting violin melodies -- all of which attain a mottled hiss through the 4-track production. Some of the songs on Morse were recorded with the full Plagal Grind line-up, and had those tracks been released today, Galbraith would inevitably garner the acid folk tag and would be gallivanting around the globe with Devendra and Vetiver. It just shows that beautiful music can come from anywhere in the world and from anytime.
While writing a recent review about his favorite group King Crimson (!), Vincent Gallo allowed himself the indulgence of a viperous tangential rant against Harmony Korine: "When a mini-dwarf rich kid from Nashville like Harmony Korine flies first class and moves to New York City's Soho in his 'plush safe' apartment, running around town quoting Godard with lines like, 'Fuck the bourgeois', it's insincere, it's calculated, it's unoriginal, and it's the worst thing in the world, 'trendy'. He already knows that he and his boring girlfriend Connecticut Chloe Sevigny are going to be on the cover of 'The Face'. He knows he'll get his run at The Angelica and be hip in Japan. But no one will ever make an important film because they saw 'Gummo' or 'Donkey Boy'." (http://www.vincentgallo.com/writing/KingCrimson.html) The irony of such a statement is that many of Gallo's critics have uttered very similar attacks against him. In a lot of ways, Gallo brings it upon himself with the public display of a blunt persona that is crass, misogynistic, and brutally ugly. Yet amidst these horrible aspects of humanity, Gallo's facade cracks with wondrous displays of romantic dreams that sing the praises of 'pretty girls,' Genet-like love stories borne out of abjection, and the ephemeral magic of his musical constructions. How much of this dichotomy falls under the category of artistic calculation and how much of it is a hyper-dramatization of Gallo's polarization of human characteristics -- both positive and negative.
Of course, Vincent Gallo doesn't give a fuck what you or I may think about his art, as he's already convinced that's he a genius. I (Jim) enjoyed the grim artistry of "Buffalo 66" but was initially skeptical of his music, as a passing fancy for dilettante who somehow managed to convince Warp Records to sign him. Yet, in setting my pre-conceptions aside and actually listening to his previously published "When" (a bit of a sleeper hit among several of us here at Aquarius) and now "Recordings Of Music For Film," Vincent Gallo is a musician whose talent is not easy to dismiss as a cultural fluke. Like "When," his film scores to "Buffalo 66," "The Way It Is," "Downtown 81" and "If You Feel Froggy, Jump" are delicate, bittersweet wisps of song fragments, with ghostly guitar strumming that recalls late '80s Jandek, Gallo's Chet Baker-like voice, passing flourishes from a clarinet or a melodica, and very little else. What is most impressive is the consistency between all of these recordings despite the 15 years between "Buffalo 66" and "The Way It Is," whose scores make up the majority of this album. Regardless, it ends up being beautiful, no matter what opinion you may hold about Vincent Gallo.
While it's probably true that the reason this album got released on hip UK electronica label Warp is that Vincent "Buffalo 66" Gallo is a famous guy, that doesn't mean it's a bad album. Some folks here at Aquarius wanted to assume that, but repeated
- RealAudio clip: When
- RealAudio clip: Was
The duo known as Games presented themselves as chillwave mutants on the Everything Is Working 7" which came and went a couple months back, but this long EP / short LP (depending on how you wanna look at these six tracks) proves that Games is an entity existing between a number of dichotomies: Now vs. Then, East vs. West, ironically uncool (thus making it cool) vs. unfashionably gauche, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise then that half of Games is the sci-fi trickster Daniel Lopatin, who's better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. There's plenty of the Lopatin infatuation with polygon melodies, allusions to Russian technocracy, and dreamtime slippages into the forgotten futures of the past; but Lopatin's partner, Joel Ford, brings a mash-up aesthetic of Italo-Disco sensuality, mid-'80s Fairlight sampling mimesis, and plenty of trashy Euro-pop tropes. Unlike Lopatin's Oneohtrix project which seeks to capture a sound which never existed in the '80s but is an extract of a bleary selective memory from all of the data that's been left behind, Games is far more concise in what it's referencing - the mid-'80s synthpop / tropes of bands like Animotion and Ministry. No, we don't mean the "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod" era of Ministry, but the period that Mr. Jourgensen seems to want to forget: the swooning romanticism of With Sympathy and the cross-pollinated electronica album Twitch. The track "Strawberry Sky" is a Top 10 single that should have been released in 1986, with a magnificently catchy vocal chorus delivered by Laurel Chartow atop faux-flute synth pads, darkly washed electronic arpeggiations, thumped drum machines, and a coked-up production sensibility. The auto-tuned vocal utterances that drive "Shadows In Bloom" compliment an acid flashback of an arrangement seemingly lifted from one of Bel Biv Devoe's skittered grooves. Couple that with all of the new wave synths, and it's a downright awesome track! The Gatekeeper Remix of "Strawberry Sky" steps up the Ministry / Twitch references with more of a cybernetic flare to the punchy EBM rhythms and American Anglophilia. Recommended.
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL, ONCE AGAIN!!!
The roots of Gang of Four can be traced back to 1976, but from opposite ends of the globe. In their native England during that year, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash dropped the bomb that was punk whose shockwaves can still be felt to this day through music, literature, art, politics, fashion, etc. In China also in 1976, a renegade faction of communists staged a leadership coup after the death of Mao Zedong, holding out for 10 days and calling themselves the Gang of Four. Back in England a year later, a punk band began as four art students from Leeds appropriated not only the name but also the insistance upon bold ideological stances from those Maoist revolutionaries. After achieving considerable success with their debut Damaged Goods EP on the remarkably prescient Fast Productions (who also signed The Mekons early on as well), Gang of Four landed a deal with EMI which resulted in Entertainment. This album - like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and the first three Wire albums - transformed punk with its ingenious marriage of intelligence, angst, politics, and aesthetics, and has not been improved upon since, despite the best efforts from a crowd of post-punk revivalists (i.e. The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, etc.).
Gang of Four were Andy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and Hugo Burnham; well at least for Entertainment and the two follow up records. Entertainment's politics have been at the center of most of the reviews you'll find praising this record, but those politics wouldn't have been heard had Gang of Four not been a fucking tight band, with Gill's rapid fire guitar arpeggios, Allen's agitated funk-punk basslines, and Burnham's explosive post-disco rhythms. Every thing that has been written about Gang of Four in the past is true, especially from those kind people at Pitchfork who sneered at the end of their review of Entertainment that "anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag." Truer words have not been spoken.
The roots of Gang of Four can be traced back to 1976, but from opposite ends of the globe. In their native England during that year, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash dropped the bomb that was punk whose shockwaves can still be felt to this day through music, literature, art, politics, fashion, etc. In China also in 1976, a renegade faction of communists staged a leadership coup after the death of Mao Zedong, holding out for 10 days and calling themselves the Gang of Four. Back in England a year later, a punk band began as four art students from Leeds appropriated not only the name but also the insistance upon bold ideological stances from those Maoist revolutionaries. After achieving considerable success with their debut Damaged Goods EP on the remarkably prescient Fast Productions (who also signed The Mekons early on as well), Gang of Four landed a deal with EMI which resulted in Entertainment. This album -- like Joy Divisions' Unknown Pleasures and the first three Wire albums -- transformed punk with its ingenious marriage of intelligence, angst, politics, and aesthetics, and has not been improved upon since, despite the best efforts from the current crowd of post-punk revivalists (i.e. The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, etc.).
Gang of Four were Andy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and Hugo Burnham; well at least for Entertainment and the two follow up records. Entertainment's politics have been at the center of most of the reviews you'll find praising this record, but those politics wouldn't have been heard had Gang of Four not been a fucking tight band, with Gill's rapid fire guitar arppeggios, Allen's agitated funk-punk basslines, and Burnham's explosive post-disco rhythms. Every thing that has been written about Gang of Four in the past is true, especially from those kind people at Pitchfork who sneered at the end of their review of Entertainment that "anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag." Truer words have not been spoken.
Many, many moons ago, we championed an album by the Argentine outliers Reynols, entitled Blank Tapes. It was an album of blank tapes. Yes. Blank Tapes. The tapes in question were of dubious origin found throughout various Buenos Aires markets with the floornoise of these tapes being amplified and augmented into a form of austere if surreal minimalism. Of course, there was the art-school complaint about this conceptual endgame: "why the fuck didn't Reynols release that on cassette?" One rather sensible answer is that the clarity of digital media along with the dislocation from the original completed the project; but another answer is provided by Richard Garet, who continues to impress with this album of destroyed tape that's been released on tape. Garet tersely explains the process out in the liner notes: "Some blank. Some erased. Some demagnetized. Etc." But like the Reynols album, Richard Garet's 60' Cassette transcends the source material with in psychologically compacted crucible of distressed materiality.
The interference from motors and magnets upon the tape heads and bits of outspun tape get accumulated amongst compressed hiss, tactile crunches, chainsawed drone, foghorn bellowing, pneumatic secretions, and Kirlian sibilance. Garet's additive and subtractive processes leave so much residue behind that Garet he can loop all of these smears, smudges, crackles, and crumbles back into the system of tape immolation, as a very lo-fi reinterpretation of Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room", capturing the accumulated grit of an internal mechanism instead of the architectural resonance. Aesthetically and compositionally, Garet has long been an underappreciated composer; and he's really delivered a top notch piece of work of corrosion and decay that perfectly matches format and the concepts at hand.
Oh, we love art made from glitches, errors, surface noise, smudges, corrosives, and just plain mistakes. Just look at how we've championed Caretaker, Phillip Jeck, William Basinksi, and Oval, and how many times we applaud something for sounding antiquated, garbbled, warbling, or just utterly fucked-up. Which brings us to New York based sound artist Richard Garet and his atypical electronic systems involving lo-tech circuits, radio transmitters, and dismembered speaker cones, we seem to have found yet another artist whose beautiful demolition deserves our attention.
Back in 2011, Garet presented an audio-visual live piece at SFMOMA, which involved a wildly stroboscopic, flickering projection that triggered jittery noises from his table top of toy walkie-talkies and bits of circuitry. With the potential for gnarled interference and ugly distortion that the cross-currents and bare wires might impart, Garet's performance was somehow instead jaw-droppingly elegant, drawing a taut line from minimalist drone & crackle through John Duncan's psychoacoustics and back to David Tudor's Rainforest excursions, but shifted just slightly towards a hauntological mesmerism with ghosts of melody seemingly buried within. Areal works in the same way as that piece; and dates back to a different installation Garet presented at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he flooded the space with fog and shot color-field projections into the space swirling together with the eeriely divine drones. The music on the disc in all likelihood is a distillation of the Issue Project Room extravaganza, heightening the drama and intensity of the sounds without having the benefit of a fog and light show. Garet cites radio as a source material for Areal, but damn if he doesn't get the device to sound like a Rhys Chatham guitar symphony, a field of chromatic density and shivering heaviness blossoming from supple tones and crunched noises. The album's lush atmospherics wax and wane with variable degrees of intensity, with ethereal drifts collapsing into scrabbled texture later to be engulfed in a harmonic cauldron of buzzing thrum. Garet reveals his hand at the end of the 50-minute composition with some unkempt radio interference that snaps to a sudden conclusion. You may hear bits of Tim Hecker and bits of Phill Niblock in Garet's work. Everything Garet has done up until this album has been very good; but with Areal, he's taken it to another level. Absolutely required dronemuzik listening!
There's a choice photograph on this album's innersleeve of a portable cassette player denuded of its plastic exterior, leaving behind an exposed array of circuit boards, gears, and miniature belts with a contact microphone shoved unceremoniously into these mechanics. Presumably, these mechanics still work or least they create some sort of flappity electro-acoustic spluttering that Richard Garet can use as source material in composition. This strategy of amplifying a malfunctioning object is one that Garet has investigated before on such records as the former Record of the Week, Areal, from early 2012, whereby he incorporated broken speaker cones, fizzing cross-wired circuits, and plenty of radio noise in that elegant album of cracked dronemuzik. Blank Tape Positive is more caustic due to all of the tape decks in various states of workability and non-workability. It was probably Wobbly who once waxed historical about a David Tudor performance in the mid to late '60s during which he made full use of a soldering iron in the middle of the performance to fix some piece of electronic gear that had failed. Garet's performances, installations (which recently included a high-profile exhibition at MOMA in New York!), and recordings engage a similar tension - conceptually, strategically, and aesthetically. Throughout this album, Garet tangles the electro-magnetic hisses from all of the circuitry with the plastic-gear clattering of the working tape deck parts all of which blooms into Kirlian drones of spectral proportions. The unstable forms on BlankTape Positive are not all that dissimilar to those strobe-light electro-acoustic pieces that Loren Chasse crafted so many years ago. Occasional warblings of varispeed start-n-stop expose the source material's more recognizable signatures; and Garet typically interjects these elements as he's abstracted everything else into a haunted Tim Hecker-like smear of rapturous drone. Garet's work has always impressed us, and this album is no exception. As with everything on Contour Editions, the album is packaged handsomely oversized sleeve with archival ink printing and a professionally duplicated disc. Limited to 150 copies.
Richard Garet is a multimedia artist who has been quite active in and around New York for many years now. Our only exposure to his work was by way of an excellent if under-appreciated collaboration with perennial AQ-favorite Brendan Murray entitled Of Distance, which came out earlier in 2009. Unfortunately, we missed out on a couple of Garet's earlier recordings on NonVisualRecordings and Winds Measure, but when And/OAR announced an album from Mr. Garet, we were quite intrigued. Given the strength of this recording, he's definitely making us reconsider going back and digging up those earlier records. This double disc set is a fantastic collection of hushed drone music, cracked silences, stacked tape hiss, controlled feedback, and stoic masses of gray noise.
The four extended pieces date from 2004-2009, and all exhibit a restrained aesthetic balancing an environmental stillness from various field recordings with the grandeur of minimalist strategies in composition. In many ways, it makes a lot of sense that Garet would be drawn to work with Brendan Murray, as both generate work that oozes with a hypnotic, wholly monochromatic sound design that could act as the soundtrack to a sandstorm as viewed from the otherside of the Sahara Desert or to missile tests that are supposed to be hidden from public view. Something ominous is at hand in Garet's work, and the mystery as to what exactly 'it' is works to his advantage. Amidst these accumulations of layered textures and slow gravitational orbits of sonic detritus, Garet alludes to the swells of oceanic currents, the nocturnal buzzing of amassed insects, and reverberant echoes bellow from the depths of some underground bunker. All of which falls somewhere near Joe Colley, Tarab, John Duncan, and Coelacanth. So yeah, we dig it. Limited to 300 copies.
The title of Richard Garet's exemplary piece of lowercase tonefloat and crackle refers specifically to what Jacques Derrida saw as a profound difference between the future that has been mapped out and a future that is unpredictable and can shatter the continuity of the present. L'avenir is defined in French as the latter of the two, with Garet describing this through oblique shifts of electronic drones suspended quietly upon a backdrop of hushed activity and near silence. The album opens with a slight crackling that sounds like a ill-tempered radio transmitting from somewhere outside, whose particulate pocks of activity quietly burst in the distance. From these, radioluminescent tones grow and collapse within a flickering glow of a haunted melody, just barely announcing itself through the overlapping of rarefied frequencies. After a noticeable crack from a short and sharp tactile event -- somewhere between a hammer, a creak, a sigh, and a jolt - Garet fleshes out the sinusoidal drones with what could be field recordings or maybe some low-voltage electronics, which elicit the nocturnal stillness of hidden motors creating their own chorus of phase-shifting hum. Some 30 minutes into the 49 minute piece, the relative placid mood which Garet has carefully crafted shifts towards a something comparatively menacing before everything dissolves into a quiet mass of radioactive snow.
Garet's methods are reductive in nature, stripping away everything that isn't essential; but there's also a subtle, but certainly noticeable flair for the dramatic that comes across L'avenir. Through his signals and gestures, Garet is easily on par with the finest work of Richard Chartier, Steve Roden, Keith Berry, and Bernard Gunter. L'avenir comes to us by way of Winds Measure Recordings, who has housed these professionally duplicated cd-r's in a very elegant oversized, and letterpressed folio. Limited to just 150 copies, and very recommended!
Richard Garet is on quite a roll with his latest two albums! Earlier in 2012, he presented us with the eerily beautiful album Areal (which we made a Record Of The Week!), and now there's the discordant blurs of Silver. Garet's work centers on the errata from deconstructed and cracked consumer electronics. In dismantling radios and speakers, Garet unleashes a Pandora's box of noise, static, chaos, and dissonances that he then meticulously sifts, culls, and abstracts to arrive at atonal frequencies, electro-magnetic cracklings, or attenuated broadcasts from the other side of the world which happened to be caught in his network of wires, photocells, and electronics. Though this process, Garet renders those ill-tempered noises as hollowed-out drones and vacant ambiences populated with desolate scrabbling textures. His is a deep and haunted sound, akin to the work of John Duncan, Mika Vainio, and Joe Colley; but where those three use noise as a metaphoric tool of psychic and psychological aggression, Garet prefers to sublimate his noise as if they were ghosts communing through an electromagnetic seance.
Silver glides through 4 movements, the first of which was originally part of 23five's radio broadcast series for their annual Activating The Medium festival from 2011. Here, the smoldering grit of dead-space static hovers amidst cathode ray tube drones and well-timed razor edit compositional techniques that look back to John Duncan's masterpiece River Of Flames. Garet's other three pieces follows suit with passages of intense sinewave purity that slowly dissolve into nebulae of smeared buzz and hiss, thoroughly obliterated from whatever source material he may have been using. Fantastic work that parallels those aforementioned artists as well as the more abstract work from Tim Hecker and William Basinski. Limited to 300 copies.
Here's a beautiful dvd-r from Richard Garet and Asher Thal-Nir. While Garet's greysmear minimalism has hypnotized us via his previous releases, it's his visual sensibility that provides the sublime, slow-motion drama here. Asher, too, is an exceptional understated composer whose signature lines of soft-focus static gird his musical accompaniment to Garet's film. There are only a few interlocking elements to the sounds and visuals for Melting Ground, with Garet providing a single tracking shot of a series of Alaskan glaciers viewed from above by way of helicopter; and Asher's piano interludes look back to the delicate compositions of Satie, hovering above that audio snow that he so often uses within his work. The treatment that Garet gives to his film is quite remarkable, as he really does an excellent job in simulating the antique patina of a hand-cranked camera whose imperfect motion creates a pulsing flicker with overexposed flashes of bleaching white and Rorschach blots of underexposed inky blacks. Coupled with a fine coat of fabricated film-dust, scratches, and debris, the film itself has the bruised visual corollary to so many of the sounds generated out of Phillip Jeck's vintage turntables. The pacing of the film is deliberately slow, panning across enormous mountains of crumpled earth jutting out of looming banks of suspended fog and vast patterned surfaces of ice. The effect is one of a found-piece of film, uncovered from somewhere deep within one of those glaciers as an artifact from a lost team of explorers. The elegiac timbre of Asher's composition supports a similar antiquity, given the early 20th century references he seems to be making. Even the softened static that grounds all of his clustered piano notes, seem to have been extracted from the surface noise of a wax cylinder from that same time period. There is a sense of wonder, awe, fear, and beauty to this piece, one that parallels Leif Elggren's minimalist abstraction Arranging for an Opening of a Teleport to Shangri-La, which appropriated Frank Capra's early film Lost Horizon into a smear of drone and slow-burning visuals. Melting Ground's magic lantern approach to the material gives it more of a haunted, excavated aesthetic, with all of it addressing an allusion to the perils of climate change, especially in its impact upon the glaciers which hold so much of the world's fresh water. Limited to a mere 150 copies, and nicely packaged in an oversized folio.
Dronesculptor extraordinaire Brendan Murray should need no introduction, after his slew of stunning releases through Students Of Decay, 23five, and Intransitive; but this collaboration gives us some insight into the work of NYC based composer / painter / photographer Richard Garet. The two began collaborating back in 2004 and worked throughout the intervening years on the two sprawling compositions that make up Of Distance, heavily processed out of field recordings, textured improvisation, occluded dronescaping, and shortwave radio.
Given the presence of shortwave radio static and detuned transmissions rippling through this fine exercise in tense minimalism, there is an obvious parallel between this album and the work of John Duncan. But it's not just those grey smears of disembodied voice and cracked ether that provide such a reference. Garet and Murray have built an album with its crucible of noise that vulcanizes sound into harmonically vibrant if psychologically dark accretions of fluctuating drone.
Broken into two long-form pieces, the album opens with slashes of metallic timbres that gradually give into a series of tactile cracklings, whereby the shortwave radio static and broadcast detritus filter through the mix. A low growling rumble intercedes as a structural girder, only to cast an ominous hue across the piece, which intensifies in its pierced tones, industrial grade electrical fields, and radioluminous hum. This is probably not a track for headphones given some of the upper registered frequencies, and they certainly cut through the ambient din of Valencia Street here at aQuarius quite easily! The second piece follows suit with an initial thrust of aerated white noise pocked with utility signal bleeps (these again are shortwave transmissions, nothing as overtly creepy as numbers stations, but far more common). As this chunk of sound collapses into a slow build of rarefied drones, Murray and Garet offer another evolving composition of tonal intensity, smeared with aggregate textures and extended harmonic exercises. Murray has never let us down before, and his work with Richard Garet does not disappoint!
Not sure where to even start with this one. Everyone here at aQ, heck almost everyone we know loves Gas, the blissed out minimal ambient techno project of Mr. Wolfgang Voigt. But don't let the word 'techno' scare you off, as the music of Gas can easily win over the most ardent techno-phobes. The techno element in the sound of Gas is only a tiny part of Voigt's magical soundworld, often just a shadow, a distant heartbeat like pulse, sometimes more pronounced, but usually just a murky throb or a rhythmic murmur, the music of Gas is Gauzy and shimmery, blurred and softly buzzy, it's like an even more dreamlike Oval, or perhaps Porter Ricks crossed with Labradford, or Tim Hecker recording a record for Chain Reaction. When we talk about Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, Gas is the template, that which we measure all other 'pop ambience' by. The sound is at once ethereal and intimate, haunting and mysterious, lush and expansive, the beatless tracks drift endlessly, each a divine blur of soft chordal whir and looped effervescence, the more beat heavy tracks, retain that same washed out otherworldliness, but manage to infuse them with a subtle, barely-there groove, sometimes adding gritty crackle, or subtle dubbed out delay, but always sounding light and airy, weightless and darkly blissful. We once described Gas as sounding like being adrift in a sea of electronics, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. And we're not sure if we could describe it better. But we'll try.
Nah Und Fern collects all four Gas albums, all of which have been out of print for ages: Gas, Zauberberg, Konigforst and Pop. And when we were first preparing to review this set, we were all ready to describe Gas' sonic arc, from the more overtly techno debut, to the much more ambient and ethereal final album. But on returning to the s/t debut, we discovered that the sound of Gas changed very little over the course of 4 albums, instead, each is like a movement in a massive symphony of gloriously murky minimalism.
The self titled debut deftly balances pure ambience with some of the most propulsive Gas tracks, including a 14 minute epic that seems to be assembled from a Chariots Of Fire loop, but in the hands of Voigt, it's transformed into something otherworldly. It is techno, but not for dancing, for many of us Gas serves the same purpose as dronemusic, sounds to lull you to sleep, to allow you to drift off, to disengage and let your mind float freely, led by your ears, entranced as they are by the beautiful shimmer and motorik soft focus propulsion of Gas.
As much as we love all of these records, the two middle records Zauberberg and Konigforst make up the heart of this Gas box. Both luminous and exuberant, yet subdued and melancholic. Sedate technotic pulses beneath wind swept drones, expansive orchestral sprawls burnished to an exquisite golden luster. Voigt's subtle dub techniques on these two discs coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, realizing a fantasy fusion of Wagner's teutonic vigor and a disembodied dancefloor drone.
The final disc, Pop, is in fact the poppiest, or so we always believed, but in context with the other three discs, we are once again surprised by how consistent the Gas sound remained, while still managing to subtly expand on the sound Voigt virtually created and perfected over the course of the first three full lengths. Much like the original cover art, Pop is the metaphorical sound of the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistency of Voigt's monophunk beats. Where the earlier works were dark haunts wherein deep fluid ambience topped the nonstop pulsating rhythms, Pop is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's surreal soundworld of hypnodub washes. The lost beat resurfaces finally on the last track which is a beautiful looped repetition of the previous ambient modulations, but subtly and gracefully merged with a muted, insistent underwater dancefloor throb. Breathtaking.
A modern minimalist electronic masterpiece, four stunning parts of one majestic whole, finally united into one magnum opus, spanning years, yet sounding to our ears, utterly timeless.
Each disc is packaged in a full color sleeve, along with four inserts, all adorned with blue and green tinted forestscapes, and all housed in a gorgeous matte finished cardboard box, also adorned with a similar image, and the letters G A S embossed across the top of the box.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Recording under the Gas moniker, 'Pop' is yet another exceptional album in the continuous stream of Wolfgang Voigt's techno structuralism. While he has recorded under a number of pseudonyms (Mike Ink, All, Studio 1, M:I:5, etc) to varying degrees of success, the Gas recordings have clearly been his strongest work. This is especially true when Voigt applies one of the odd (and few) metaphors to his work, as the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistancy of his monophunk beats. Where the trilogy of "Zauberberg," "Oktember", and "Konigforst" were dark haunts where deep fluid ambience tops the nonstop
pulsating rhythm, "Pop" is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's penchant for hypnodub washes. For those longing for the beat of Voigt, simply wait for the last track which is beautiful repetition of the previous ambient modulation, with his insistent techno. It's a trick he used on the 20' to 2000 series, and it's trick I hope he uses again. Breathtaking.
Originally released way back in 1994, and reissued again a few years back, Gate's The Dew Line always seemed to disappear before we could get enough copies to list. Which was a shame as it still ranks as one of our favorite discs. A mesmerizing noise-pop-drone jem from the Dead C's Michael Morley, an improbable mix of NZ noise whir and skree, minimal drifting drone and lilting indie pop. Think the Dead C at their very poppiest, crossed with Sentridoh at its most minimal and raw�
Gate's Golden record was one of our favorite 'noise' records ever, and we do hear a lot of that Golden noise in this chunk of damaged deconstructed pop. Long drawn out expanses of crumbling guitars, buried-in-the-mix sad boy vocals, all very raw and lo-fi, but strangely lush and heavy in that way only blownout bedroom recordings seem to sound. It's a little like Lou Barlow if he was raised on Throbbing Gristle and Suicide instead of indie rock. Guitar jangles transformed into thick sprawling atonal riffage, verse chorus verse transformed into verse verse verse, and the vocals adding a strange sweet sadness.
Dense clouds of electronic glitch and amp buzz, the riffs more textural than melodic, long stretches of shirring lo-fi organ, mournful and almost funereal, strange haunting minimal percussion, drifting alien FX, disembodied guitars unfurling crunchy textures and barely there melodies. Much of the tracks are vocal-less haunting guitarscapes, riffs and layers, looped and repetitive, extended into grinding washed out mantras. Cyclical and gorgeously hypnotic. Which makes the tracks with vocals sound all the more poppy. Especially "Have Not", which is essentially a single, super catchy, languid distorted guitar riff, looped and cyclical, minor key, sounding a bit like a slowed down drum-less Rein Sanction, with drawled Neil Young / Dinosaur Jr. style double tracked vocals, laid back, emotive, and hauntingly monotone. Nearly 13 minutes long, a single riff, a subtly changing vocal line, but it's just so mysterious, sad and perfect, the whole record could easily have been a 70 minute version of this track only and we would have been just as happy...
But then we would have missed out on the melancholy minimalism of "Needed All Words", a lonely vocal line, drifting above a glacial sea of organ drone and fractured effects, or the looped stuttering industrial buzzscape of the title track, or the divine washed out crumbling grind of "Triphammer", the final song, which manages to turn 3 minutes of abstract distorted riffage, into a chunk of dark moodiness.
Way recommended. This disc is old enough that for many of you, we're probably already preaching to the converted, but if you missed out on this, here's one more chance to sink deep into Morley's mysterious musical miserablism.
And be warned, while we finally managed to get a bunch of these, it took forever, so if or when we do run out, please be prepared to be patient, since it could take a while to get more.
Throughout the '80s and '90s, Michael Gendreau worked extensively in the East Bay avant-noise project Crawling With Tarts, often constructing surreal experiments with idiosyncratic pop-babble and tape collages of art-damaged noise. For Gendreau, the turntable became an ideal instrument for his explorations; and soon, he began working with the archaic technology of lathe cut, handcrafted vinyl. Often the results were bizarre, if sporadically successful recontextualizations of homemade instrumentation, radio noise, and anti-pop. Recently, it seems as though Gendreau has put Crawling With Tarts on an extended hiatus, due to his increasing attention into the field of vibrations diagnostics and consultation. This incredibly technical arena has lead him to researching the problems of acoustic noise vibrations upon highly sensitive pieces of optical equipment, which could present faulty analysis due to the tiny, but measurable effects of environmental noise (air condititioning ducts and heating vents in particular).
"55 Pas De La Ligne Au No. 3" finds Gendreau bridging his current activities of acoustic diagnostics with his once prolific avant-turntable collages. It appears that Gendreau has hooked up a number of accelerometers - technical devices used to detect, measure, and catalogue any number of vibrational frequencies - to a series of battered record players spinning his handmade vinyl. Gendreau's accelerometers are so sensitive, that they pick up, not only the interaction between the needle and the record in question, but also the muffled whir of the thick rubber band stretching between the motor and the turntable plate. The results found on "55 Pas De La Ligne Au No. 3" are astounding, with eerie mechanical drones, minute needle crackle, and the occasional, but always unnerving upsurge of quiet voices floating though the din like the EVP sounds from "The Ghost Orchid" of purported recordings from beyond the grave. This will probably become one of my (Jim's) favorite records of the year.
BEFORE YOUR READ THIS REVIEW, BE AWARE WE ONLY HAVE TWO COPIES. WE WILL NEVER GET MORE. BUT I REALLY LIKE IT AND WANTED TO GIVE MAILORDERS CUSTOMERS A CHANCE. SO FIRST TWO CUSTOMERS THAT ORDER IT GET IT. SORRY. AND ODDLY ENOUGH, I ALREADY HAVE A FEELING I
Anyway, album number 132 (or something close to that) from Japanese noise musician / sound artist / professional masturbator Juntaro Yamanouchi. Gerogerigegege (loosely translated as vomit, diarhhea, ha ha ha) has gone through all sorts of sonic incarnations, noisy splatter punk, bombastic japanoise, experimental musique concrete, with some of those incarnations featuring the added bonus of Juntaro's trademark live and mic-ed masturbating. On 'None Friendly' (actually recorded in 1987), he tackles THE DRONE and it's quite a listen. Deep and sonorous, lush and mesmerising. I was convinced it was a synthesizer until I noticed on the sleeve, that it specifically points out that there was 'No synthesizer used.' So what the sound source actually is remains a mystery. Maybe it -is- processed masturbating. I mean, I hope it is. But either way, this is a fantastic record. One extended buzzing and humming, slowly developing hypnotic drone. Really great.
Nowadays, Autechre invokes the Gescom moniker whenever the IDM duo wants to experiment outside of their well-defined Autechre sound as in their contribution the "Absolute Zero" compilation and their collage friendly MiniDisc only release. Yet during the
Skam has also sadly retained the annoying package that housed the vinyl with the re-issue of the cd, which is just a sleeve of plastic bubble wrap. Oh well, the music inside more than makes up for it. "Keynell 1" lumbers through chopped string samples, which form a surprisingly catchy piece of understated melody to match the steady tumble of a wooden eletro beat. While most Autechre / Gescom pieces contain signature elements that easily qualify them as being by Autechre or Gescom, "Keynell 1" holds remarkable similarities to fellow IDM forefather, Aphex Twin -- especially from the "On" ep or the Phillip Glass collaboration. "Keynell 2" is a return to the Autechre sound, with sputtering mechanical rhythms, cybernetic flanges, and subtle afterhour rave melodies that have been synchronized into an unlikely groove. The third track is one of the Mancunian duo's more minimalist pieces, with the infinite repetition of a filtered hip-hop beat laced with an elegant, yet melancholic synth melody. During the five years that have passed since Gescom released "Keynell," 'intelligent dance music' has run the risk of self-parody, in losing the intelligent element of its name by stupidly searching out overly complex rhythms (i.e. Richie Devine, Otto Von Schirach) or wallowing in the irony of being dorky (i.e. Cex). There was a time when IDM was a viable musical form, and "Keynell" is one that era's highlights.
Finally back in stock, one of the AQ-staff's all time favorite drone recordings! This came out in '95, but we thought we'd list it anyway, after ordering a batch directly from the label 'cause we like it so much. Electronic instrument inventor Q.R. Ghazala (you may remember him from the instrument-inventor compilation "Gravikords, Whirligigs...") presents his "first insect symphony", performed on his "Vox Insecta" -- a synthesizer than specializes in simulating insect voices! The beautiful instrument (depicted on the cover, it looks like some sort of Art Deco stenographer's machine) may or may not always sound like a swarm of insects, but it certainly produces some gorgeous drones... Dark stuff, with keening higher-end tones supported by bass-y undulations. Creepy and beautiful. For fans of Tony Conrad and Lustmord and that sort of thing. So totally recommended!
There's very little known about the British born artist Abigail Ghimp, other than that she died in 2012 of a heart attack at the age of 30. The recordings on this cassette are presumably the only remaining traces of her artistic career, as her belongings and artwork seemed to have vanished after her death. But when she was living in Belgium and working on a series of experimental films, she handed out a number of cassettes to colleagues and to some experimental labels around Belgium and Germany of the soundtracks to the unfinished films. One of these tapes ended up at garage sale of some dude who used to run a record shop only to be discovered by proprietor of Soft Corridor records, who was smitten by the mysterious looping collages of slow-motion chants, decontextualized tribal rhythms, and tape-delay aggregation worthy of comparisons to Robin Storey-era :zoviet*france:. In the quest to find the "Gail Ghimp" who had penned scant information on the hand-dubbed cassettes, Soft Corridor discovered that Abigail Rosa Ghimp had recently died. Keeping the recordings on a micro-edition cassette is a pretty perfect homage to this strangely poetic and morose tale. Ghimp's soundtracks are narcotized collages of Dada appropriation, some of which presumably came from the African recordings she grew up with in London. She snaps those samples into monochromatic patterns of chiming guitar, distantly dreamy chants, and eerie rhythms are as evocative and profound as those haunted turntable collages from Phillip Jeck or even those interstitial fragments that dot the Demdike Stare recordings. So very nice.
FINALLY, this long out of print, all time unanimous AQ favorite gets re-pressed and is available once again!
The Conet Project from beyond the grave!?! Perhaps that's a good way of describing this baffling, terrifying, occasionally laughable, but always compelling album. It's been out of print for a very long time, and we're pleased to see The Ghost Orchid haunting our shelves once again!
To recap, The Ghost Orchid documents instances of something called "Electronic Voice Phenomenon," the paranormal appearance of strange voices (which at times sing and speak in multiple languages) on magnetic tape when there shouldn't be any voices there at all... Respected parapsychologists have postulated that these voices are those of dead people (i.e. ghosts) or possibly of extraterrestrial origin! Unlike The Conet Project, which cross referenced the audio tracks with written information, The Ghost Orchid presents these recordings with the audio commentary of one of several researchers (Nadia Fowler, Raymond Cass, and Lief Elggren -- the Swedish performance/audio artist and a part time collaborator with the Hafler Trio), explaining the findings. These recordings are the findings of a number of parapsychologists including Dr. Konstantine Raudive, Friedrich Jurgenson, and Raymond Cass.
While there is something wholly terrifying about these recordings, there is an absurd question about these ghostly voices that we have to ask: Why are the majority of these recordings in Latvian? At any rate, The Ghost Orchid manages to be both spooky and silly, and is definitely a fascinating listen from a pure sound perspective regardless of how disturbing and/or amusing you might find the alleged sound source itself. For non sequitur pop culture reference, the sample "You are sleeping, you do not want to believe" which concludes The Smith's "The Rubber Ring" hails from an old recording made by Raudive and can be found in its entirety here. Brilliant!
At one time, the collaborative project between Michael Gira (Angels of Light / Swans) and Dan Matz (Windsor For The Derby) was called Ourselves, but the two had opted against that in favor of their names. While this may be a silly semantic decision, it
Goem is the post-techno production team comprised of three guys (Roel Meelkop, Peter Duimelinks, and Frans De Waard) known more for their contemporary musique concrete /drone work. For this record, Frans De Waard commissioned remixes of the material found on the "Reduktie" which embraced the hyperminimal clickery and tone generation of Mika Vainio's solo work as �. The remixologists have for the most part left a good chunk of the structure intact with a monophunk techno minimalism, but have rearranged / reconstructed / recycled the various bleeps and blips through the wonders of the laptop. Featured remixes are Stilluppsteypa, L.O.S.D., Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone, Jos Smolders, Starfish Pool, Surge, Radboud Mens, Institut Fuer Feinmotorik, and /Slo-Fi.
Kick ass packaging aside (well over 1200 holes punched into cardstock and etched jewel case, so be careful!), Goem's "Punik" is one of the more interesting releases in the current deluge of lowercase / post-techno albums. Using a Student Simulator (simply qualified as a device used in medical school, for what, we don't really know) and a broken Doctor Rhythm drum machine triggering Boucle synthesizers at Stockholm's EMS Studios, "Punik" percolates with electron squiggles and ping-pong motorik slabs of rhythm, that could be the sound equal to Bridget Riley's Op-Art modernism.
San Diego's Gogogo Airheart play their own version of late '70s style arty post-punk. From dabbling in dub realms to punching out frenetic, spasmatic, pop dislocation, Gogogo Airheart doesn't hide their affinity with The Pop Group, whose song "Trap" they in fact cover. There are also ample references to Wire's "Pink Flag" and even neo-Krautrock by way of The Fall, making for an excellent follow-up to GGGAH's great "Love My Life Hate My Friends" album. See them live. Buy their records. Gogogo Airheart kick ass.
Here's another brilliant cassette of obsessive, stark techno from the mysterious Los Angeles based Granite Mask. One could easily parallel the contents of this lengthy cassette to the interwoven rhythms and flanged noise of Vatican Shadow or the more punishing components of the whole Sandwell Disctrict ethos. Pulsing electronic murk, metallic synth melodies, harrowing industrially minded atmospheres, and sinister abstractions veer throughout these rhythmic structures of splintered breakbeats and hypnotic Chain Reaction like stomps. We have mentioned before that we would not be surprised if Granite Mask were to land a record or two on Blackest Ever Black, given the strength of their work; and that still holds true with the excellent Exit Strategies.
This very promising / wholly enigmatic Los Angeles dark-techno projects delivers a helluva good cassette of black-noise-dub, deep-space beacon pulse, nasty acid squigglings, industrial-strength murk, and creeping techno akin to Raime, Regis, and Vatican Shadow. If there's any justice, you'll be buying this or something from Granite Mask courtesy of Blackest Ever Black in the near future. It's that good!
We've only heard just a couple of recordings from Jonas Asher; but those we have heard - the UW Owl LP done with Jochen Hartmann and the split release under Asher's Grasslung moniker - have been outstanding pieces of analogue electronics that run the gamut from the glumly sublime to the dourly ominous. This super limited edition cassette from the local imprint Black Horizons slants more to the blackened electronic side of Asher's aesthetic. A turgid, low-end pulse marches through the first side of In Bad Fields, much like an even slower version of Wolf Eyes' cancerous rhythms. Sinewaves and speckles of electro-magentic static flicker through the lurching pulse. The second side fashions those bass rhythms into an unsettling roar whose surfaces get abraded through a similar undercurrent of static found on the first. Very dark stuff.
Given that Asher's Phaserprone label produced some of the finest letterpressed editions of artwork well suited in its iron hued colors and post-industrial iconography, Black Horizons had to come up with something special for Asher's first release outside of Phaserprone. The artwork is a nice silver-offset print job on a darkened metal-colored paper, and the whole cassette is encased in a hand-cut plastic slipcase. Watch out for the blackened nail hiding in the packaging, too. Really cool!
The tape is a C20 and is limited to 100 copies, or thereabouts!
Ostensibly, this is a 'new' album from Grim, but in keeping with the obscurant aspect of Jun Konagaya's industrial noise & outsider folkmuzik agenda, there's no real way of knowing if he made this in 1986 or 2013. As we mentioned in our review of the Grim anthology Folk Songs For An Obscure Race (found elsewhere on this week's list), Konagaya's aesthetic alternates between noise-laden abjection and weirdly compelling Japanese folk songs, delicately performed for voice and guitar. The subject matter of all the Grim material - noise or otherwise - is presumably war and death. It would be hard to imagine those metal-bashed dirges with their bloodcurdled vocals to encapsulate the poetics of cherry blossoms in the spring time; so we'll take Konagawa at his word that the folk tunes maintain that interest in the bleaker aspects of the human condition. On Love Song, those folk songs are Spartanly performed on a small organ with gritty recordings of some sort of political speech laid over the somewhat sweet melody. The subject matter of the speech is unclear given that it's delivered in Japanese, but it has the same feel of any given power electronics appropriation of Nazi imagery. But these instances are few and far between on Love Song, for the most part, Konagaya bashes out industrial rhythms on junked slabs of metal with accompanying blown out synth-noise drones and impossibly corroded chunks of distortion. If anybody remembers the anarcho-industrialist outfit Missing Foundation who jubliantly smashed everything around them in the late '80s, Grim's Love Song is similar, but all the more septic and mutated. Or if anybody is longing for the days when Neubauten was actually threatening, Grim is neccessary listening. This lp comes housed in an oversized box, each featuring a handmade etching from Konagawa. Very limited stock on this one!!!
The THIRD repress of this exquisite album on vinyl. If you missed it the last two times, don't expect this one to last any longer! The only difference is the black & white artwork, but the musical content is the same. Here's what we said way back when...
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with an entirely characteristic yet coy swell of effected elemental smear, crumbling delicately yet forcefully, until giving way to what is, to date, and here is the coy part, Liz Harris' most songwriterly and structured album. As opposed to the rich swaths of drone that up until now defined her sound, Harris has shifted from the abstract towards a more distinct and figurative sound. True to the title, the record unfolds like a sort of mysterious and morbid fairytale, innocent in its clear and elegant melodies, yet creepy and highly abstract in its more droney and sublime interludes. For the most part, her guitar playing is laid bare, removed from the dense fog of effects that typically occlude them. And what we discover is actually a pretty strummy record, with plenty of clean guitar articulation though certainly the aroma of her previous tech heavy approach remains in what is relatively speaking still pretty effected. At times she even reverts back to the gorgeous icey crunchy string attack of some previous efforts. With so much space liberated in the absence of drones, we also get to hear her stunning voice. Furthermore, the occasional audible lyric creeps to the surface, one standout fragment being "Love Is Enormous," a somewhat shockingly affirmative sentiment from an otherwise darkly mysterious and abstract persona. From start to finish Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill lulls you into its graceful murmurings and hypnotic thrumming. An exquisite addition to an already compelling discography. Recommended.
Grouper's Liz Harris seems to be settling in comfortably on the Kranky label, with the release so far of the two AIA lps on cd for the first time, the debut from Mirrorring (Harris's duo project with Jesy Fortino from Tiny Vipers), and this "new" release, The Man Who Died In His Boat, which has come out in conjunction with a lp and cd reissue of her 2008 record Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, an AQ favorite. The release/re-release of both records together is no coincidence as the tracks on The Man Who Died In His Boat were recorded during the same sessions as Dragging A Dead Deer, and the new record has a long lost twin feel that we haven't heard on subsequent Grouper records since then. While she still employs the waves of foggy reverb and layered far away voices, there is a reappearance of fully formed songs and a sheen of less-filtered clarity. Both records are informed by key childhood memories, this one by a discovery with her father of beached sailboat, and their speculation about the man who disappeared sailing it. The ocean roar, swelling waves of reverbed sound, and the far away sadness of acoustic sea shanties pour throughout the release creating a moving hypnotic spell which invariably holds us helpless in its grasp. Beautiful!
Currently, we only have the cd version, but the vinyl versions of both this and the reissue of Dragging A Dead Deer are supposedly alredy being repressed.
A mighty fine album of amplified textures, droning experiments, and sonorous acoustics by the American ex-pat John Grzinich, who quietly operates in the Estonian countryside. There, he searches out Soviet-era ruins which have long served as a very rich source material for the tactile events that lace his compositions for long-thin wire instruments and field recordings. While Grzinich laments the fact that Estonia is slowly cleaning up those crumbled sites and once architectural monuments that are now piles of rumble, there are still plenty of sounds to discover and investigate. As his work unfurls, a sense of mystery surrounds his process and the resulting sounds. It seems that it is the wind that drives his wire instruments, but these could be bowed or agitated by mechanical means as well. Regardless, the first lengthy track opens with slow rumbling waves that trace through a quiet passage of wooden creakings, before an ominous, electrically charged buzz slips into the mix. This hum is clinical and inhospitable, leaning towards allusions to abandoned hydro-electric dams or poorly guarded nuclear facilities. By the end of the track, watery recordings cycle forward and overtake the amassed acoustic drones before snapping to an abrupt conclusion. The second piece features an even richer wire-driven drone whose overtones and sub-harmonics glisten in spite of their leaden frequencies. The additional layers of a crackling, rustling, scraping, and other nocturnal bumps in the night parallel the compositional strategies employed by Small Cruel Party and Giancarlo Toniutti, who both allow for the simple interaction between disparate elements which orbit a gravitational drone. Some of the best work we've heard from Grzinich in a while! Limited stock on this one, as it's a Russian pressing. And by the way, it's an actual legitimate Russian pressing, not one of those "Russian" grey area editions.
Will there be a time when Stilluppsteypa will once again march out of the Icelandic tundra with a record all their own? It has been three years since Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson produced anything other than their collaborations with BJ Nilsen; but if things progress as they have through those two impeccable albums of glacial drone damage (Vikinga Brennivin and Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna) and a split LP only release, who the hell cares if they do anything by themselves? For the fourth time, the drunken cabal of Nilsen / Sigmarsson / Thorsson return to the mixing desk with their psychotropic drones laced with Haflerian absurdity; and here on Second Childhood, the three have recruited the upcoming avant-garde cellist Hildur Gudnadottir, who has previously worked with the likes of Mum, Pan Sonic, and Johann Johannsson.
With the opening growl of scratched cello hypnosis plunging into a deep void of low end vibrations, the notions of this collective Second Childhood being warm and fuzzy go out the window with plenty of references to the blackened sprawl generated by the likes of Corrupted, Black Boned Angel, or anything on Battlecruiser. As bleak as gaping minimalism is on most of Second Childhood, the atmospheres do lighten a bit with some narcotic ambient passages of heavily processed guitars and cello that come across like a meeting between Andrew Chalk and Colleen. Yet, as the album comes to a close, the mind-numbingly heavy drones return with the addition of pulsing post-Sahkho rhythms lurking in the background as if somebody next door was thumping out a minimal techno groove. Pretty much everything that BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa produce is well worth investigating, and this continues to be true for their ongoing collaborations. Brilliant.
Squelches and whirrs nestle in rolling hills of fuzzy dreamy drones as clicks and pops struggle for air beneath a downy blanket of suffocatingly gorgeous billowy clouds of synth wash. Sound good? It does.
It's German electronica artist Markus Guentner's debut cd for the Kompakt label. For those of you who don't know, the Kompakt label has developed an almost timeless aesthetic, not unlike the 'heroin house' sound of Chain Reaction. The Kompakt sound is an application of the often invoked but rarely successful working model of 'ambient techno'. A good example of this sort of thing that AQ-customers probably know about ('cause we sell so many of 'em) is the Wolfgang Voigt project Gas. His minimalist techno releases (in particular the Gas album "Konigsforst") are some of the few electronica albums that all Aquarians can agree on and strongly endorse.
In creating "In Moll," Markus Guentner has done more than his part to fill the void created by Voigt's unusual absence, with a disc that captures much of the feel we liked so much about the Gas records, a sort of dreamy melancholy that manages to be both wistful and hopeful, lonely and warm. Jeff thinks it has a real "change of seasons" vibe, that harkens, again, to Gas. And while the Gas comparison is surely accurate (if you haven't caught our drift already, let's state: fans of Gas should pick this up without a second thought!), Guenter does add his own flair to Voigt's signature sound though, creating a more varied and more dynamic soundscape than Voigt's pastoral hum and thump.
Byram once asked the rhetorical question, "What self-respecting composer doesn't have their oevre divided into three periods?" While Mr. Abbott was describing one of the many successes from the late period of Morton Feldman, Bernhard Gunter is a composer
Where albums like "Un Peu De Neige Salie," and "Details Agrandis" situated barely audible pin pricks of piercing sounds against fields of Promethean silences, that aforementioned trilogy finds Gunter increasing the volume to far more perceptible levels and filling lengthy spaces with fluid passages of gradually building / decaying tonalities. He has proudly exclaimed all of his influences (Xenakis, Rothko, Feldman, Nono, and Bill Viola) through his work, and these pieces clearly show how great an influence Feldman especially has been upon his electro-acoustic minimalism. Gunter has quite literally been extending the slow motion aesthetics of Morton Feldman out of the chamber ensemble and into the language of electronic abstraction.
Gunter still maintains that all of his compositions are the manipulation of everyday sounds, yet these processed elements hold richly complex sonorous qualities that are more in common with oboes, cellos, and church organs than radiator pipes or rustled cutlery.
The problems with the argument that Gunter has entered his second period are obvious: his changes aren't terribly radical in scope, and may merely give evidence to his aesthetic malleability, he hasn't made any grand existential changes in his life that could warrant a profound change in aesthetic; and, of course, Gunter hasn't made such a proclamation.
Regardless of this silly romp into semantics, Gunter has produced his best record to date in "Crossing The River (Night Music)." Thank you for your patience.
What it is exactly that constitutes "Krautrock" is definitely up for debate. It seems often largely construed to be the insistent, motorik pulses of Neu! and Can. But to limit the genre to just that would be a mistake. Bands like Guru Guru and Ash Ra Tempel were also present, bringing some of the heaviest psychedlia ever recorded. Hinten is the former band's second album, and a classic. Free range guitars grazing on open, organic jams. It is more evidently structured than their debut, UFO, while still retaining an improvisational feel that is as playful as it is crushingly acidic. This is one of both Allan and Cameron's favorites within the genre. Halfway between killer rock riffs and complete psychedelic blow-out. Essential, though an expensive Japanese import in its current incarnation.
Is there much more to say about The Hafler Trio that hasn't been said already by us or anyone else for that matter? Perhaps. Yet another month and another Hafler Trio album arrives, stretching our feeble efforts to describe the audio / visual / contexual productions of Mr. Andrew M. McKenzie, the sole member of the Hafler Trio with assistance from other like-minded techgnostics on occasion. For the month of Septembe 2005, the Hafler Trio album in question is If Take, Then Take which marks the first full length LP that McKenzie has engineered in over a decade -- this, of course in the wake of numerous multi-cd sets and 10"s galore. In describing this record, the C.I.P. label offered an exceptional introduction for If Take, Then Take: "Unanswered questions, unasked-for responses, stimulus and response exercises conducted and presented for the benefit of a select few. Hafler Trio has always asked more of the listener than many sound artists do, with questions and ideas that provoke and, like an open invitation, await response from those who are willing to tackle, often at length, the ideas presented. The audio cleanses the aural palette and refurbishes it nicely. The ideas in the booklet are available to those who wish additional illuminations, provocations, questions, and -- when the light is right -- answers, may add greater tricks to their own personal repertoire of knowledge. Please note: in this instance, knowledge may be considered fact, fiction, or entirely up for debate."
As to the musical program found within, McKenzie offers another breathtaking variation on the theme of hidden ambience, disrupted silences, and rich timbral minimalism. And as always, he prefers for us to not offer any sound samples. Also, as you might have imagined, this is ULTRA LIMITED!!! So it might take us a while to get more when we run out, and there's always a chance we won't be able to get more at all, so act fast!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
1996 was a particularly quiet year for the Hafler Trio; whereas in this day and age some nine years later, there's a major Hafler Trio release coming out almost every month or so. While the man behind the Hafler Trio -- Andrew M. McKenzie -- might like you to believe this or that about his slow down in activity during the mid '90s, his paucity of recordings was simply due to the fact that his job at the time kept from his art. How pleasantly mundane of the Gnostic sound sorcerer! Nonetheless, McKenzie did release Utterances of the Supreme Ventriloquist as a very expensive LP edition through Soleilmoon. While it doesn't belong to any of the great triologies (Kill The King / Mastery of Money / How To Reform Mankind) or serial works (The Golden Hammer series), this album fluidly introduces many of the pristine compositions of electric minimalism that grace his recent outpouring of work (How To Slice A Loaf of Bread, etc.), but also enjoys many of the discordant, psychoactive jolts and flourishes of those aforementioned earlier works. Glossalaliac ripples of feedback, terse repetitions of mechanoid rhythms, and immaculate drones meander through a whole host of psychologically tinged soundfields from frightening to holy to meditative to menacing. Beautifully packaged in the same style as the reissues found on Korm Plastics. And again, we cannot offer any MP3s for you to sample per the wishes of the Hafler Trio.
How To Reform Mankind marks yet another entry in the reissue campaign of The Hafler Trio's early research into sound and its effect upon the human psyche. It was the third in what now stands as the first of many untitled "triologies of three," standing as the final chapter to the series featuring Kill The King and Mastery of Money. Within the entire catalogue of the Hafler Trio, How To Reform Mankind (1994) represents one of the last records that Andrew McKenzie produced before drastically slowing down his activities in the middle and late '90s. In many ways, this album is also an exceptional culmination of the ideas that McKenzie propagated throughout the '80s, which reflect a considerably different perspective upon his work, his life, and the world in general. The early Hafler Trio albums revelled in the miscommunication, the recycling of information within new contexts, and a disorientation caused by the play between what is real and what might be real. In recent years, The Hafler Trio's idioms have suggested a revelation / obfuscation of truth in the grand traditions of ancient Gnosticism.
Psychoacoustics and the psychological impact of sound have both figured heavily into all of the Hafler Trio's work, and these areas of research are profoundly present on How To Reform Mankind. Subtle flutterings of shortwave data have been processed into rarified air; low volume, resonant frequencies colliding with the body for a chest-cavity massage; the clunky piano from McKenzie's Negentropy album returns as a post-serialist leitmotif; and desolate sonar plinks slam against metal walls to astounding effect. McKenzie's uncompromising drive for his art has made the Hafler Trio one of the greatest artistic endeavors of the last two decades; and How To Reform Mankind stands close to the top of his best recordings.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we cannot offer sound samples of the Hafler Trio's work. Oh well.
It's ridiculous. Yet, by know you should know if you need to own this or not. This is the second 3cd set from the Hafler Trio in the How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread series. The packaging is as elaborate and beautiful as the Fluxus art editions from the '60s, but be warned, this is incredibly fragile! Musically, fragments spiral into enigmatic drones and psychologically profound atmospheres. We only have a couple of these in stock, and considering that there's only 500 in print, there's little use in waxing poetic as found elsewhere on these Aquarius reviews. Buy it now or spend five or six times this already hefty pricetag on eBay in a couple of months.
As always, there can be no Hafler Trio MP3s. The aeons have cursed us once.
In the ever expanding catalog of the Hafler Trio, Kill The King may be the Hafler Trio's masterpiece. Originally released back in 1991 as a co-production between Staalplaat and Silent Records, Kill The King suffered the fate of many records pressed up at that time: digital bit-rot. In fact much of the Silent stock had to be destroyed; but thankfully Frans De Waard, who had been instrumental in the European half of the co-production, has now arranged for the reissue of this fantastic album on his Korm Plastics label.
Housed in the same oversized folio that came with the original, Andrew McKenzie -- currently the only member of the Trio, although Kill The King features some collaborative work with John Duncan and Zbigniew Karkowski -- wrapped this version in an extra vellum sleeve covered with his signature enigmatic texts. The sound program for Kill The King begins with a crackly, muffled recording of an unknown woman with a thick Northern European accent reciting a complex text in English. Her intentional monotone gives hints at the records theme: difficulties in communication; but as with all Hafler Trio narratives, they are not easily discerned. The voice is buried in hiss. Her accented monotone doesn't help matters, either. That said, this is a quintessential Hafler Trio strategy in setting the stage for the rest of the album. An influx of oxygenated drones usurps the voice and majestically claims the stereofield, resembling the same timbres of Jonathan Coleclough and Andrew Chalk's Sumac. Yet, the pacing of Kill The King is far more active than Sumac and thus more than the recent Halfer Trio productions, deftly shifting the stage to gravelly textures, data-crunched noises, dental drills, and cryptic voices run in reverse, all underpinned by various tones.
Kill The King is a difficult album to reduce to a few words, and with the band's no-mp3-samples policy, you can only take our word for it that this is one of his greatest works.
