Ultra limited new lp from guitarist and composer Duane Pitre, a collection of recordings featuring Pitre's bowed harmonic-guitar ensemble, six guitarists, bowing the strings of unconventionally strung guitars, all in 'just intonation', the sounds these players and instruments produce, free of any effects or post- or pre- production fiddling, all the strange overtones, and rhythmic variations, strange melodies and mysterious textures, are utterly divine, extended raga like drones, lush and layered, all the results of the natural interplay between the various notes and tones, and the acoustic properties of the space. All of which are considerable, considering the beauty and otherworldliness of these sounds, quite reminiscent of folks like Phill Niblock, Angus MacLise, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, but with its own particular magic, the very Eastern sounding raga vibe is undeniable on some of the tracks, but others are far more abstract, unfurling alternating tones, letting the notes ring out, just the tail ends woven into each other, creating a gorgeous expanse of warm, but spare melody, until the notes grow gradually closer together and finally settle into one another. Some of the tracks sound choral, almost liturgical, while others sounds like an orchestra tuning up stretched into swirling near static drones, the final nearly 12 minute track being perhaps the most beautiful of the bunch, a symphony of metallic buzz, rising and falling swells, buried melodies, the sound slow shifting, but ever changing, dense, and dark, but somehow lush and lovely and glimmering, sun dappled and so serene...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, includes a download coupon as well.
From the depths of the Impulse label's more "psychsploitaton" side of jazz comes this exotic East-meets-West rarity from 1968. And if you dug Gabor Szabo's Jazz Raga, any of the John Berberian electric oud albums, the Indo-jazz of Joe Harriott, or the even more authentically "Indo" Indo-jazz of T.K. Ramamoorthy recently reissued by EM, this will be right up your alley.
You might have second thoughts seeing the buttoned-down suit and tie wearing bass player Plummer seemingly taking the piss out of the sitar jazz craze of the mid-to-late Sixties, but this record's musical qualities far outweigh any trendy novelty or gimmicks. The opening track, "Journey to The East", is a groovy pop number with spoken singing (the only track with vocals) but the flute, tabla and sitar interplay is pretty far out. Things get further out on the sinewy free jazz of "Arc 294" and the quiet intensity of "Antares". Even covers like "The Look of Love" and The Byrds' "Lady Friend" have charms beyond what those songs normally have to offer. A cultish obscurity for years, it's awesome to see this one-off album reissued again!
The Finnish avant-classical duo of pianist Eva Polgar and visual artist Sandor Valy are back with a brilliant postmodern musical reimagining of one of the oldest surviving pieces of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This is the duo's third collaboration together and unlike the first two, The Bruegel Variations and The Mondrian Variations, where the scores were defined by visual elements found in the paintings of Breugel and Mondrian respectively, Gilgamesh was conceptualized in a completely different way. The Epic of Gilgamesh was an epic poem from Mesopotamia dating back to the 18th century BC, and chronicles the mythic life and adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk and his companion Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to distract Gilgamesh from oppressing his people. Together they fight monstrous mountain guardians, giant bulls, battle jealous Ishtar, and in the end after Enkidu's violent death, the story chronicles Gilgamesh's desperate search for Immortality and the meaning of life beyond death. The epic was originally discovered carved on twelve stone tablets, and here lovingly reproduced as 12 QRC codes (when scanned, each brings up part of the poem), the duo of Polgar and Valy have created a 12 part musical piece that doesn't seek to illustrate the text as much as to compartmentalize the story into the moods of its integrated characters and the ancient civilization they inhabited. Valy began creating key melody lines for each part which Polgar would elaborate on then give back to him and slowly, through an exchange of female and male composed tropes echoing the back and forth male and female interchanges of Gilgamesh and Ishtar, the piece came to fruition. Gilgamesh finds in itself a companion to their earlier work, in the duo's penchant for minimalist composition and complex rhythmic structures, this time adding instrumentation of clarinets and violins, zithers, kettle drums and chaotic horns to the fray, channeling not only Philip Glass, but John Zorn at times as well. Epic indeed!
Using visual artworks as a means of musical composition often sounds better in theory than in practice. Take the recent book and cd of Baudouin de Jaer's solo violin interpretations of the musical motifs in Adolf Wolfli's cosmological drawings where the audible results were less dazzling than the images would suggest. But not so in this latest experiment from conceptual composers Eve Polgar and Sandor Valy who turn the nonrepresentational paintings of Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian into beautifully vibrant minimalist scores. Mondrian, who started out as a representational painter, became increasingly interested in a process of reduction from nature into essential forms that soon evolved away from any overt natural reference. Most famous for his painting of bold black lines on white grounds and geometric forms in primary colors, and their perhaps musically influenced titles (Broadway Boogie Woogie!), it's not hard to see a correlation of sound and vision in his work.
There is an interesting booklet that comes in the slipcase with this, detailing the process of how the pieces were composed to which paintings, where we also learned that this is not the first time the composers have worked in this manner. They previously worked out scores based on paintings by Breugel and there are cool pictures of how they designed scores based on how the orientation of the heads of peasants in Breugel's paintings followed a kind of musical order. Would like to see how that turned out musically, but getting back to the Mondrian Variations, the music starts out with repetitive solo piano figures that have a simple but idiosyncratic repetitive quality with sudden pauses that seem to follow a precise structure. With each composition, we're introduced to something new sonically through computer programs and samplers: an organ, pitched string modulations, then some minimal percussive rhythms until the pieces grow more epic in scope with choral like sounds, vocal counting of the odd tempos and blocks of interweaving rhythms. Of course, the musical corollary of this is Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but the music feels somehow different as if Polgar and Valy were reaching the same place through a completely different approach. Regardless of the process, the music is engaging and a delight to listen to. An extraordinary release on Circle's Ektro label that comes highly recommended! Please note: these cds have cardboard slipcases that arrived in somewhat less than pristine condition due to shipping, so persnickety collector types be warned. And, like most Ektro titles, these aren't limited but might take a longer time to restock, once we're out, since they come all the way from Finland.
The Poppy Family have long been a favorite around here, as a cult '60s folk-pop group with psych-ish leanings, and it's good to finally see a top-notch collection of singles and album tracks at an affordable price. Fronted by husband and wife Terry and Susan Jacks and hailing from Canada, their signature sound was notably marked by the use of tablas and sitars that gave their songs a groovy but restless and searching edge, relevant to the flower-powered countercultural shifts at the time in the late sixties and early seventies. Like Shocking Blue, Bobbie Gentry mixed with Coven, or The Carrie Nations (the doomed fictional band in Russ Meyer's Beyond The Valley of The Dolls), The Poppy Family played a slightly druggy folk-pop filtered through the lens of a southern gothic sensibility. Songs like "Where Evil Grows", "Shadows On My Wall", "There's No Blood in Bone", and their biggest single, "Which Way You Goin', Billy? were laden with references to death, suicidal heartbreak and the supernatural.
They only recorded two albums, but sudden band line-up changes, and hectic touring issues forced the couple to go their separate ways. Terry Jacks subsequently scored the biggest hit of his career with "Seasons In The Sun", while Susan continued down her own career path in a more country crossover vein. A Good Thing Lost is an apt title for a band that for a moment could have had it all. These songs still sound so great!
Recommended for fans of any of the groups mentioned above, crate-digger psych breaks and incredible sixties studio production!!!
It seems a bit strange to spend very much time writing about the new Portishead. Since by now, odds are you're probably sick to death of hearing about it. Sure we all loved Portishead back in the day, they were one of those rare 'electronic' bands whose appeal knew no boundaries, metalheads, moms, indie kids, the sound of Portishead was dark and sexy and mysterious, sinister and ominous, dark and rife with crackle and buzz. Perfect drugged out late night bliss out music, their strange way of creating sound and composing music, recording their own samples on to vinyl and then spinning and scratching those samples to create new textures, made for a totally unique sound.
So what does a band do after taking almost a decade off? Do they return with a record that sounds just like the last one, which is probably what most folks want, or do they return radically altered? With a sound bold and brash, reinventing the sound they themselves invented in the first place.
On first listen, Third definitely sounds like the latter, but with repeated listening, the record slowly and subtly begins to slip toward the former. Which most definitely speaks to the magic of Portishead, and the new record, which at once embraces the old sound, while turning it into something new. More than past outings, Third is dirty, out of tune, atonal, noisy, chaotic, urgent, sure past records had all that crackle and buzz and fuzz, but those elements were carefully placed, and kept well within line. Third sounds much more, well, loose for lack of a better word, like actual musicians, feeling each other out, maybe even improvising. Less like a studio concoction and more like a real live band. And the sound suits them. And makes for a record at once warm and familiar, but also alien, sort of 'rocking' and rife with WTF? moments.
Take the opener, "Silence", which begins with some sort of radio broadcast, which gives way to a killer loping breakbeat, immediately the fastest tempo Portishead have ever explored, strings swoop in, the sound raw and urgent, almost like the chase scene from some spy movie, gorgeous distorted chiming guitar harmonics ring out, until finally the track slows down, and slithers sexily, the vocals a sexy sultry croon, but it's not long before the track kicks back into the haunting and tense, string laden cinematic jam that opened the track.
Then there's "Hunter", which begins like classic Portishead, all smokey and late night sounding, soft muted reverbed guitars, a lush gauzy production, the vocals ethereal and ghostly, but even here, a few seconds in, the song is interrupted by a super distorted crumbling guitar chord that halts things in their tracks, before fading out, and allowing the song to resume. The a few minutes later, a strange noodly synth freakoutsurfaces, again derailing the song's slow motion groove, but It just sounds perfect. It doesn't at all sound like random weirdness for random weirdness' sake. The first time is jarring, the second time, you find yourself waiting for those parts, even humming along as if they were as crucial to the song as the main melody or the vocals, and the thing is, they are.
Near the end lurks the single, "Machine Gun", with its very machine gun like rhythm, herky jerky, stuttery and not at all fluid, reminiscent of Art Of Noise, the vocals sweetly soaring over this jagged rhythmscape below, which only really varies part way through when the original machine gun drums are replaced by BIGGER, more distorted drums, and wrapped in strange moaning horns (or maybe synths), only to shift once again moments later becoming more electronic, the beats awash in strange FX and metallic buzz. It's so unlikely, that it makes perfect sense as the first single. If you can embrace that strange rhythm, that relentless and very un-Portishead like sound, then the rest of the record will make perfect sense, unfolding in front of you, revealing both the warm familiar sounds missed, and the new, bizarre sonic elements never even imagined
All over the record, the band confounds and confuses, gloriously, the brooding whispery "Small" shifts gears partway through and transforms into a fuzzy organ drenched krautjam, "Deep Water" is a straight up old timey folk song, the vocals and strings soaked in fuzzy ambience (and reminding us a bit of vocalist Gibbons' post Portishead project Rustin Man), "We Carry On" is a sort of atonal Stereolab style jam, relentless percussion, thick swaths of synth, very repetitive and hypnotic, "The Rip" is part whispery folky flutter, part synthy electro buzz, every track here offers some sort of surprise, whether it's the song itself, or some little sonic strangeness lurking within, but never is the song or the sound sacrificed, each track is perfect in its own beautifully twisted way, catchy but never obviously so, groovy, but often convoluted and fractured, it's a difficult record to explain for sure, which is perhaps why so much ink has been spilled, and while we may be sick of reading about it, we sure are finding it nearly impossible to imagine ever getting sick of listening to it, which is precisely why it's one of our Records Of The Week.
Deeeeeeep spiritually-charged drones from this supergroup of Bay Area heavy experimentalists. You are going to want to just hammer the "Add To Cart" button when we list all the members involved: folks from Barn Owl, Date Palms, Tarentel, En, Higuma and The Alps! The Root Strata All-Stars, basically, though this is on Important. Three tracks, the first, "D" is a side long affair, delving into the most harmonically aligned keys of the western scale utilizing both electric and acoustic instruments including violin, harmonium, tamboura, koto, sine wave oscillator, bass clarinet, tapes, shruti box and electric guitar in rich layered tones and frequencies. Side 2 begins with the all vocal meditation, "Sa" reminding us of David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir's cathedral amplified minimalist hymns before unleashing the deepest and heaviest track here, "Gong", which focuses on the shifting and shimmering metallic reverberations of the titular instrument. A beautifully honed study of harmony and frequency within a wonderfully attuned collective and collaborative spirit.
Housed in a hand screened heavy stock foldover jacket. LIMITED TO 500 copies, so act fast!
SF synth punks Pow! are back with a new full length on Castle Face and the sound is even more amped up yet darker than their debut. The songs are even more driving and garage-y, the vocals snottier and more lyrically pointed and the analog synths more retro-futuristically colder, and swirling, but with enough glitter on their grime to add a brilliant shine to the production without taking away any of their raw power. Yet, this is much more nihilistic than druggy this time around as to be expected from a band who with each release seem to be checking the pulse of our ever changing San Francisco for signs of life. When their debut, the cheekily titled Hi Tech Boom, came out it was announced at the same time Castle Face head John Dwyer of The Oh Sees would be leaving San Francisco for LA seemingly for good, and Pow's music seemed to reflect a mocking attitude to the influx of tech-money elitism into The Mission's once booming open DIY spirit. Not much since has changed here culture-wise except for an increasingly dire feeling that it's going to get worse before it gets better, so the songs on Fight Fire bathe in an air of cold fury unravelling into distorted hypnotic grooves and icy industrial-ish soundscapes. Fans of Total Control, The Mallard, Mind Spiders and People's Temple will find lots to love here!
BBC radio DJ and avid record collector Gilles Peterson has never steered us wrong, especially when it comes to rare jazz and Brazilian music, and this one is a gem. Recorded in 1958, it is one of the rarest Brazilian releases, one that became a touchstone for the evolution of Brazilian music in the sixties from samba and bossa to tropicalia. So rare that Peterson didn't have a copy and was approached by a seller offering it for a staggering $4700, prompting Peterson to put an ad out in Record Collector urging someone to reissue it. Johnny Trunk saw the ad, got in contact with Tim Maia's nephew Ed Motta, who is a record collector and musician who had the lp in his collection, and got to work transferring Motta's copy digitally and remastering it, so we finally have a chance to listen to it, and it's quite fantastic.
A part of a global touring show called Brasiliana by Polish producer Miecio Askanasy and arranged by Jose Prates, the cast members cut a couple of records and this is one of them. Its lush orchestration of exotic rhythms, haunting choral passages and old world musical theater charm at turns evoking the soundtrack work of Ennio Morricone and Allesandro Allesandroni, the exoticism of Les Baxter and Yma Sumac and even the choral African mass of Missa Luba by the Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, make for a captivating and hypnotic listen. But one song in particular, "Nana Imboro", turns out to be the inspiration for Jorge Ben's "Mas Que Nada", one of the most popular Brazilian songs ever made. At times, mournful, mysterious, reverent and ecstatic. Highly recommended!
This is some great spacey rock! Something so confident and seamless about these songs and their delivery. There is this great ability to be spaced out and rock out all at once. Like they are channeling the legacy of Spacemen 3, Psychic Ills have made one of the most striking and satisfying guitar centered records of this young year. We love how they take from both the forefathers of psych as well as the seductive and slightly drugged out sounds of post-punk luminaries like Joy Division and Psycho Candy era Jesus & Mary Chain. The record has not one lull or weak moment. Songs flow right into each other. Whether they are swaying back and forth with a late night ease or turning up and blasting out bleached out melodies; they get it right with every twist and turn the record offers. We would love to see them tour with The Gris Gris as they both take a slightly different approach to psychedelic rock but share a level of excellence that's pretty hard to come by. Highly recommended!
Newly available on vinyl again, the 1983 second album from Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson's experimental collective Psychic TV after the demise of Throbbing Gristle remains one of our very favorite aural documents from the entire post-TG catalog. It almost reads as a companion piece to TG's 20 Jazz Funk Greats in that it invites unusually accessible chamber folk and pop tropes into their sound only to subversively twist them into something much more underlyingly sinister. Recorded using Zuccarelli Holophonic technology to create an atmospheric spatiality of near and faraway sounds (this is a headphones record if there ever was one!), the group was then able to record in some very unusual places like The Hellfire Club Caves (a notorious British site of aristocratic Satanic liturgies and hedonistic ritual) and take advantage of the systems 3D effect. The album's mixture of sweetness and light with ritual creep and foreboding is at once beautiful and deeply unsettling and on first listen it's hard to decipher what you are hearing and its mystery still beguiles 21 years later. We're invited in by the melancholy pastoral chamber pop of "The Orchids" with its vibraphone, guitar and oboe and Genesis' dueling vocals welcoming the morning light in innocent VU "Sunday Morning" fashion. But then the totality of the album swings from reverential to eldritchly mystical and from remotely animalistic to eerily brutal and back again mimicking the cycle of a day or a season as it moves between songs and strange far-off occultish musique concrete. There are lots of guest appearances both real and invoked. Monte Cazazza is heard reciting lyrics over the phone, and one can hear Jhonn Balance of Coil getting a tattoo. There is an angelic choirboy singing a Charles Manson song, and most notably on the track "White Nights", a sweet Christmas-y pop number is sung by Genesis (with doo-wop backing vocals, no less!) with lyrics creepily taken from Jim Jones final sermon at Jonestown. Throughout, bells intone, chants are muttered, a lot of acoustic exotic instruments are played with atmospheric intentions more than melodic ones. But the full power of the collective's brutal aural abilities culminates in the penultimate track - "In The Nursery" - which invokes fairytale symbolism and ritual and industrial soundscapes in a nightmarish blend of hellish terror. Essential listening!
Along with the Sleep Over split, we managed to pick up a few copies of Pure Ecstasy's latest tape which shows off the bands more experimental side, a side we haven't seen as much on their pop singles. The bands slow motion grooves are in tact, but the overall effect is more collage-like, chopped in a blender style. Sometimes veering into hazy dub experimentations a la Sun Araw, or lo-fi distortion squalls, murmured voices, and pretty ambiance. Two ten minute sides. Super limited!
Welcome to dream pop heaven! The boys of Austin, TX trio Pure Ecstasy come together with their all-female equivalent Sleep Over (featuring Stephanie from Silver Pines) on this exquisite split single. We managed to get some of the last copies while they were both here on tour, so don't miss out on this one as once they're gone, they're gone!
The Pure Ecstasy track "Dream Over" is like Galaxie 500 on cough syrup, a super slow and hazy lament, waking up to the painful realization that your love is gone for good. The rhythm plods along with melancholic Beach Boys harmonies and distorted guitar swells panging with heartbreak and regret. These guys nail that sound so perfectly.
This is the first time we've heard all female trio, Sleep Over and hopefully it won't be the last. Two girl harmonies with organ, guitar, bass and drum machine, their track "Your World Is Night" is a blurry wash of woozy organ pop, hazy and pretty like Kate Bush on downers. So gooood!
We don't want to talk it up too much, because we only have a few of these. Amazing!
We missed out on Pure X's second album Crawling Up the Stairs, but the band has taken on some major shifts in sound since 2011's Pleasure. Angel finds the band less brooding and more summery, really delving into the sounds that made seventies soft-rock such a guilty pleasure, but at least Pure X has the musicianship and production to really deliver the goods. Opener, "Starlight", could easily have been a lost track by America or even, Seals and Croft, but Pure X redeems the sound by really focusing on the breezy effervescent pop hooks and falsetto vocal harmonies and steering clear of the cokey yacht rock indulgence. The songs continue in this infectious vein, crafting beautiful pop confections from the nostalgic ashes of Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys in their best moments, putting their own unique atmospheric ambiance and song craft on them. Summer Breeze indeed!
After a long string of now out of print 7" singles, cassettes, 12" eps, and a name change from what was Pure Ecstasy, The Austin, TX trio Pure X finally deliver their debut full length, aptly titled Pleasure. In previous reviews we recommended all the hip boutique labels such as Woodsist, Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, Mexican Summer that were signing all the real good lo-fi murk-pop bands to sign these guys quick. But true to their nature, the band stayed loyal and stuck with the local Austin labels Light Lodge and Acephale who released their previous singles as well as releases by connected bands in their circle, Silver Pines, Sleep Over and Survive. That was a smart move, because instead of feeling pressure to polish their songs with better recording equipment or add more complicated arrangements, the band was really able to stretch out their already established dreamy and hazy pop sound. Pleasure does see some of the songs from their 7"s, such as "Dream Over", "Voices", and "Easy", re-recorded, but not necessarily all that different, perhaps with a new layer of hazy feedback and slo-mo guitar fuzz, as these songs were all recorded live with no overdubs. A bold move for sure, but Pure X has long nailed their economic sound into something so wonderfully self-sufficient and unique. And besides those 7"s are so far out of print, that most folks are lucky to get any versions of these songs at all. Imagine Friends-era Beach Boys way slowed down to a molasses pace with crashing lo-fi waves of shoe-gaze guitar strums, buttery rhythms and space walking basslines with sleepy but impassioned vocals. Pleasure is a beautifully dirty dream-pop heaven! Highly Recommended! Vinyl to follow next month, fyi.
If you happened to miss out on their super limited tour tape, from a few months back, Pure Ecstasy have returned with a beautifully remastered vinyl version (the tape split into two ten minute tracks, one on each side), and with it a new name: Pure X. Guess there was already another group that shared the name and so they took the high road and modified theirs. Reminds a little bit of the detergent though...
Anyway, Chain Reflection shows off the bands more experimental side, a side we haven't seen as much on their pop singles. The bands slow motion grooves are intact, but the overall effect is more collage-like, chopped in a blender style. Sometimes veering into foggy dub experimentations a la Sun Araw, or lo-fi distortion squalls, murmured voices, and pretty ambiance. It reminds us of all the reprises they put at the end of their singles, that sublime moment that fades out too soon. Here though, those moments are stretched way out and turn in on themselves into something much more tripped out and elusive, but still allowing us to laze in their bright and sunny haze.
These come on translucent smokey vinyl in a layered hand-drawn mylar package.
Super beautiful and super limited! Don't sleep on this one this time around!
Indian-born singer Asha Puthli has had a crazy life. Raised with European and Indian classical traditions in Bombay, she always had a penchant for western popular music and started vocally improvising with Indian Jazz bands, which got her attention in western jazz circles. After making it over to the US on a Martha Graham dance scholarship, she was sought out by record executives and found random vocal session work. She cut a few tracks with Ornette Coleman on his Science Fiction lp and sang nearly naked for Peter Iver's Blue's Band. While she wasn't huge in America, she found an audience in Europe. Her bold sexuality and stunning vocal performances made her gravitate towards glam and in 1973 CBS released this solo debut produced by Del Newman who oversaw Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Making fresh use of songwriters of the day, John Lennon, Bill Withers, and especially J.J. Cale, Puthli's debut is a beautiful array of glittery soul and spacious rare groove. Her vocal range can navigate high peaks as well as the deepest valleys, especially in the opener, "Right Down Here", which is pretty much worth the price of admission alone. A startling funky take on the J.J. Cale classic, we first heard this years ago on a mysterious mixtape made by local soul record collector shop, The Groove Merchant (we also discovered Betty Davis on that same tape), and it's been one of our favorites ever since. She went on to make other incredible records, especially The Devil is Loose, which is a proto-space-disco masterpiece. But her debut is less disco, although not any less unusual or unique. Sensual, soulful and kind of strange!
First we've heard from this particular group called Pyramids in quite some time (though we did wait for the cassette version to appear before reviewing it - the cd and lp formats of this actually came out earlier this year, which we're also now belatedly listing). Pyramids' self-titled record on Hydra Head garnered a lengthy (and quite favorable review) from us back in 2008 for its avant-black weirdness. On A Northern Meadow, Pyramids once again confound anyone thinking they've settled into a sound. The presence of Colin Marston (Gorguts, Krallice, Dysrhythmia) and Vindsval of Blut Aus Nord, and the fact that this release is (with the exception of the cassette) on Profound Lore might give you an idea of what you're dealing with here, but that idea is probably wrong! Shoegaze dreaminess, strange vocals that alternate between straightforward reverbed-out cleans and strange black metal wails, and bizarre drum machine rhythms (provided by Vindsval, obviously) are all blended to something that resembles Blut Aus Nord without the black metal ferocity.
Yes!! One of Creation Records best and most mystifying bands finally gets the anthology treatment (Thanks Rev-ola!). Releasing only two records (Off To Heaven from 1987 and Mother Watch Me Burn, from 1989), and two singles (all compiled here), no other band on the Creation roster has been subject to such wild conspiracy theories, extreme denial, rumor and hearsay that have, uh, revolved around this group. And those seeking answers will definitely not find them here.
I (Scott) remember back in my high school days hanging out in the only British Import record store in Orange County (Hyde Park Records in North Irvine) and my friend picking up Off to Heaven with its cryptic liner notes about a late night telephone call and cab-ride to the studio, finding smashed instruments, pink swastikas on the wall and the smell of a bonfire full of clothing, guitars, recording tape and a note "We are invisible...we cannot see you". According to legend, the tapes of the band arrived out of the blue at Creation, with rumors of members (never identified) being seen in various parts of the world in inebriated states of mental recklessness, acid burnout, and inappropriate undress. Needless to say, My friend and I were intrigued. We took the record home and our young minds were blown. Fuzzy, and darkly druggy sixties-sounding psych pop with Phil Spectorish arrangements, jangly guitars, alternating male and female vocals, burning farfisas, backwards tape collages, noisy feedback, and of course tambourines! Yet the songs were performed in a manner that was beyond pastiche or merely a re-tread of the early eighties paisley underground sound. Ever hear of the story of the La's obsessively recording using machines with "sixties dust", to get that distinct vintage sound? Well, RVP sound like they injected that dust deep into their veins, ripped off the drum break from Tomorrow Never Knows, turned their amps all the way up then lit them on fire, walked into the sea, never to emerge. This is the band Brian Jonestown Massacre wish they were.
Of course I wore through my dubbed cassette, and not many I have talked to since had ever heard of them. Rumors have since circulated that Revolving Paint Dream was actually a secret side project of Andrew Innes from Primal Scream, and maybe members of the Pastels as well as Creation Label head, Alan McGee. But even Nicole Garcia who wrote the liner notes for this anthology was unable to get a straight answer on exactly who Revolving Paint Dream were. After affable interviews from all the major players of Creation Records for a French Radio Programme, she received nothing but closed doors and cease and desist letters from mysterious lawyers when she tried to follow up on questions about this enigmatic group. Were McGee and Innes still sticking to their elaborate hoax? Or was Garcia just playing along? Was it a hoax at all? Perhaps some mysteries are better unsolved. At least we have the music. Absolutely Recommended!!!
The recent vinyl reissue of this totally essential Terry Riley album has given us the opportunity to finally review a record that holds a special place in many of our hearts. A Rainbow In Curved Air is pretty much the ultimate in hypnotizing cosmic bliss out. Two long tracks in which Riley used electric organ, harpsichord, rockischord, dumbec, saxophone and tambourine, to create a sound in which his minimalist background served as a launching pad for him to really reach the outer limits of sound, a sound that is about as perfect as a soundtrack to sunrise we could ever imagine.
A Rainbow In Curved Sky was originally released in 1969, it was the first album Riley made for Columbia records and it's still so baffling and amazing to think there was a time when major labels would release such brilliant, noncommercial transcendent music like this. After doing some digging around we realized that one of the main reasons that Riley amazingly ended up on Columbia was because fellow electronic pioneer David Behrman had landed a job at the label, so he brought Riley into the land of Columbia and produced this amazing album.
Forty years after it's genesis, these are still sounds that make us stop in our tracks and suck us in, allowing us to get lost in the most amazing sonic daydreams one could imagine. A Rainbow In Curved Air has proven to be a model for several generations of cosmic music makers. It's safe to say that without this record there wouldn't be folks like Arp, Growing, Emeralds, White Rainbow, etc. Beyond recommended and totally essential!
The Terry Riley reissue campaign is in full effect and this week we were delighted to see his little heard seventies soundtracks, Les Yeux Fermes (Eyes Closed) from 1972 and Lifespan from 1974 arrive in our store (well, maybe Scott wasn't so delighted after shelling out $30 dollars for Lifespan on vinyl, just a couple of weeks ago). Le Yeux Fermes is comprised of two nearly twenty-minute pieces that are reminiscent of his early work on Reed Streams. The first is "Journey From A Death of a Friend" involving multiple organ and piano lines in counterpoint and the second is a more involved piece with delayed saxophone and organ counterpoints called "Happy Endings". The selections for Lifespan are six shorter pieces, which are a bit more diverse and melody oriented in their structures. "G Song" begins with an organ fugue repetition before the sax melody gives the piece more of a soundtrack theme, while "M.I.C.E.", short for Music In Curved Entrances, begins with a sustained organ and tabla drone before the melodic organ progressions kick into gear leading into the raga drones of "Slow Melody in Bhairavi" and the chanting Tangerine Dream-ish, "In The Summer". "The Oldtimer "is the most playful with an almost carnivalesque organ vamp, while "Delay" is just that, a slow burning organ drone with building and repeating organ lines that coalesce in a sea of pensive harmonics. We're surprised Riley hasn't done more soundtrack work. Listening to this makes us want to see the movies, especially Lifespan, which stars Klaus Kinski as a biochemist on a frantic search for the fountain of youth!
An absolutely stellar reissue of Terry Riley's debut album from 1966, Reed Streams.
Containing two long pieces, "Untitled Organ" and "Dorian Reeds", we see the initial foundations of Riley's spiritualized minimalism that would culminate in the wide releases of A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C a few years later. "Untitled Organ" is a series of four- and eight-note patterns exchanged and interchanged in idiosyncratic modulations inevitably creating a third complex pattern. The effect is rigorous, repetitious and astounding for its lack of delay effects. "Dorian Reeds" makes use of more undulating and circular pulsations but this time is aided with tape echo to create a more time-altering effect. But the real treat of this reissue is the bonus track from 1970 of "In C (mantra)" performed by L'Infonie, a ragtag group of French-Canadian free players directed by Walter Boudreau. What L'Infonie adds to this piece is the use of propulsive percussion jettisoning this classic piece of conceptual music into a grooving krautrock tribal spree. Highly Recommended!!!!!!
Perhaps best known for the seventies R&B hit and wedding song mainstay, "Loving You" (as well as being the mother of former SNL comedienne, Maya Rudolph), the late great Minnie Riperton was also the angelic voice behind one of Chicago's most underrated psych-soul groups, The Rotary Connection. Come To My Garden was Riperton's first solo outing after the break-up of that group, yet plays like the band's final effort. Released on Cadet records, a subsidiary of Chess, and arranged by the mighty Charles Stepney with The Ramsey Lewis Trio and Maurice White from Earth Wind and Fire as the back-up group, Come To My Garden is one of the most beautifully majestic chamber-soul records we've ever heard. Sampled heavily by the likes of Jurassic 5, Tribe Called Quest, The Orb, and 4hero amongst many others, there are plenty of amazing orchestral breaks of harps and strings and kettle drums plus of course, Riperton's jaw-dropping five octave vocal range. While the vibe is definitely vernal and heavenly, this is not the syrupy Minnie Riperton you find in most thrift store record bins. This is a solid classic from beginning to end. So tragic that this is so little known. Perhaps the finest hour from someone who was cut down before she got the chance to really flourish. Highly Recommended!!!!
One of two amazing vinyl-only reissues on the brand new Medical Records label (the other is Record Of The Week Deutsche Wertarbeit). This one, a holy grail of sorts for all the cult disco seekers, a sexy, exuberant and at times wonderfully sleazy hybrid of Italo-disco, French electro, and Minimal Wave weirdness by the one and only Alexander Robotnick (aka Maurizio Dami).
Ce N'est Q'un Debut was released in 1984 after his first single, "Problemes D'amour" became a mega-cult hit in New York underground dance club circles a year earlier. The extended version of that track was prominently featured on the Strut label's Disco Not Disco 2 a few years back, and it fits right in with Giorgio Moroder, Bernard Fevre, Arthur Russell and other Mutant Disco aficionados as a defining dance staple of the era. This mini-lp features 6 killer tracks including the Moroderesque, "Dance Boy Dance", another popular cult single that was probably heard more in gay bathhouses than in mainstream discos due to its lurid minimal rhythms and suggestive whispered singing. Sooo good! Sweaty summer dancing begins here! Don't let this one slip away!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each 180 gram colored vinyl and hand-numbered. We're not sure how long we'll have these, so don't wait too long. Highest Recommendation!
One of our favorite 2014 RSD releases was this incredible collection of Alexander Robotnick rareties by the always reliable Medical Records, and thankfully we've still got a few left...
Robotnick was an early purveyor of Italo-disco and electro, crafting some of the most infectious dance grooves of the early eighties. Sexy, exuberant and at times wonderfully sleazy, Robotnick's productions mixed the best of disco, electro and euro-minimal wave into a hybrid of sublime movement and groove. Opening with the extended single, "I Wanna Believe" released under the moniker of Gina & The Flexix in 1985, we're taken on a freaky journey through the nightclubs of Europe, basking in the glowing energy of the dancefloor as well as loitering in their darkest corners where anything could happen. So good! Mutant disco freaks, the line starts here!
Wow! Yet another amazing re-issue from this exciting new reissue label Sunbeam. We haven't been this excited about a rediscovered psych-folk classic since Red Hash by Gary Higgins. Nobody knew what to expect from the cover photo of Rodier, (looking a lot like Geddy Lee) staring out at us from a hazy meadow with the strange enigmatic title: Upon Velveatur. But by the second song, we had immediately snatched up the only two copies. So we knew we had to get more and share this with the rest of you. Upon Velveatur is a dreamy French-Canadian psych-folk pop suite that varies from hushed mystical songs lushly orchestrated with strings and theremin to more rock-oriented numbers featuring stinging electric guitar. Lazy comparisons to Nick Drake are inevitable, and if we must go there, Upon Velveatur is closest to Bryter Later in terms of feel and production value. But Rodier can also sound like John Lennon with Cream as the band, Fleetwood Mac on backing vocals,and produced by Roger Nichols and his Small Circle of Friends all on one song! We get the feeling that maybe some folks like Neil Halstead were onto the sounds of Rodier as we were listening to some Mojave 3 and could totally hear Rodier's voice and stylings being transmitted by Mr. Halstead. Featuring bonus singles from an earlier psych folk project, Rodier-Gauthier, and liner notes from the man himself. Totally Recommended!
Pop quiz! Quick: who's the "street poet" singer with no first name*, son of Mexican immigrants, born and raised in Detroit Michigan, whose debut album from 1970 sounded like a fuzz-soul-psych version of Bob Dylan and/or Donovan, and was an underground hit in South Africa of all places?? Duh, Rodriguez of course. It's about time his inexplicably obscure Cold Fact got the deluxe reissue treatment it deserves. Seriously, after listening to this for the first time, you'll feel like you just heard a bona fide '60s classic, and be amazed you had never heard these songs before. They ought to be all over "oldies" rock radio. It's ridiculous like that. Songs like "Sugar Man" and "I Wonder" seem like they should be fixtures of the baby boomer memory lane hit parade. It's so very of its era, "This Is Not A Song, It's An Outburst: Or, The Establishment Blues" is certainly a sixties song title, isn't it? Likewise "Rich Folks Hoax", "Hate Street Dialogue", and "Crucify Your Mind"... But, maybe he was just a little too freaky and right on, and (crucially) never got the right sort of record label support to become well known to the Woodstock Nation, though this album had some rather random, surprising success so far off in the Southern Hemisphere, in South Africa and Australia and New Zealand, which Rodriguez himself was unaware of for many years!
If left to his own devices, perhaps Rodriguez would have come off sounding a bit too much like Dylan. But Cold Fact was a "Theo-Coff" production, from the badass Motor City team of Mike Theodore and funk guitarist Dennis Coffey, and they helped accentuate the more underground and urban aspects of Rodriguez's sound. With his hip, Dylanesque poetry set amidst lush orchestration and gritty grooves, Rodriguez's Cold Fact is a super catchy, tripped out slice of street-level, soulful psychedelia, full of drug references and radical political critique. We alluded to "fuzz" above, but on the track "Only Good For Conversation" we mean FUZZ. That track's a stone(d) cold classic when it comes to heavy duty fuzz guitar crunch.
This reish comes in a nice digipack, with cover embossing and a big ol' cd booklet stuffed with text (liner notes, lyrics) and photos. One of the several cd booklet essays explains in part Rodriguez's unexpected appeal in South Africa - apparently, in that repressive society, it was due to the edgy, uncensored nature of his lyrics. "I Wonder", for instance, with its lines about "I wonder how many times you had sex / And I wonder do you know who'll be next" was considered so risque that if you were a teenager and wanted to be cool, you HAD to have this record. Apparently, many folks in South Africa thought of Rodriguez as being a star up there with the Beatles, and when they didn't hear more from him, all sorts of wild rumors spread that he'd died, been accidentally electrocuted, OD'd, or even committed suicide on stage! When, in fact, he simply had no idea how "big" he was in South Africa, and his recording career had stalled out elsewhere after his sophomore album, 1971's Coming From Reality (also soon to be reissued). Turns out he's still alive and well, today, and has actually gone to South African to pay arena (?!) shows in recent years.
In fact, when we've had album in the store before, it was only available on cd as an expensive import - from South Africa! So we're, again, super stoked that Light In The Attic put the effort in to do this long overdue, definitive domestic reissue.
*actually, his first name was Sixto, but he usually just went by Rodriguez.
The pastoral half of Cluster explores his penchant for French romanticism in this dazzling suite of spacious baroque minimalism from 1979. Produced with the assistance of Peter Baumann, Roedelius broadens his focus as a traditional composer and displays ample musicianship with an eclectic array of instrumentation: flutes cellos, pianos and harpsichords, steering away from the abstracting qualities of the sequencers and processors normally employed in his main group. There's a carnivalesque playfulness to the tracks here, suggesting carousels and waltzes, penny arcades, and street performers, but with a refined restraint that evades schmaltz. Like the perfect accompaniment to a Resnais film, each piece is a delightful handmade miniature strung together in a labyrinthian web. Liner notes by longtime friend Asmus Tietchens with six bonus tracks ONLY on the cd version, including three new songs, and three remixes from the album. Beautiful!
Along with the beautiful compilation of seventies recordings from Roedelius' Selbstportrait series (Diary Of The Unforgotten), we also have this lovely reissue of his 1981 recording Lustwandel. This was Roedelius' third solo record between the chamber baroque miniatures of 1979's Jardin Au Fou and the airy open-ended pastoralism of Wenn Der Sudwind Weht, recorded the same year as this. The music on Lustwandel is a perfect segue between the two approaches, comprised largely of solo piano works with subtle textural nuances of ambient atmospherics and classical inflected melodies, that occasionally transition into works for strings as well as harpsichord. But there are also some strange turns here and there into a warm angularity of soft martial rhythms and ballet moods, as well as some medieval sounding short pieces with pipes and hand percussion. It's a slowly sauntering set that takes its time to move from parlor to forest in an almost pageant like procession. Quite Beautiful!
Roedelius's fourth solo record from 1981 has obvious connections to his first record, Durch Die Wuste as evidenced from the similar album covers involving feet and water. But while his first record was a head-first dive into exploring the palatable possibilities of mixing acoustic and electronic instruments, Wenn Der Sudwind Weht is all about the tranquil relaxed after-glow, drying off in the afternoon sun. Limiting the instruments to just organ, synthesizers and piano, Sudwind is surprisingly rich and layered and arguably the most stunning of his solo records, reminding us of the pastoralism of Popol Vuh and early Deuter, but never succumbing to new age music's typical lack of focus. In fact it's the most focused Roedelius record of the last couple that have been reissued. While the Cluster-Harmonia catalog with all its off-shoots and solo projects can be quite unwieldy especially in the middle of its currently aggressive reissue campaign, but this may be the most essential Roedelius reissue of the bunch. Highest recommendation!
Durch Die Wuste was the first solo outing by Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster/Harmonia fame, and originally came out in 1978 on the always impeccable Sky label. Melding his tastes for classical composition, spaced out ambience, and electronic rock possibilities, this album found Roedelius simmering in warm rolling waves that just invite you to get lost and daydream in their subtly hypnotic pull. What's most amazing and compelling about this album is how organic it all sounds. Years before folks were really getting a grasp of how to intertwine traditional instrumentation with electronics, Roedelius was doing it masterfully. We're also so taken by the divine percussive quality that rises to the surfaces on lots of the album, especially the record's last two songs where Roedelius manages to play the drums himself and creates an amazing orbital groove that we could listen to forever. Durch Die Wuste manages to combine both his more dark and outsider tendencies with his ability to create the ultimate in shimmering cosmic bliss. We can't believe that some of us had never heard this record before, we are so beyond happy that it's been reissued as this stands up against any of Cluster's breathtaking moments. Highly recommended! Oh and for those of you who need/prefer to have this on cd it will be reissued in that format in August!
While some of us here really love early Biff Rose records, we realize he's a very acquired taste. His jokey piano-bar delivery, quirky early musical theater-style arrangements, and Kermit the Frog-like voice (he also kind of sounds like Wayne Coyne from Flaming Lips) usually don't warm up to most people's ears right away. He definitely comes out of the same school of pop eccentrics as Mose Allison, Loudon Wainwright III, Randy Newman, The Neon Philharmonic, and Van Dyke Parks. But the thing is, when you have him on shuffle on your iPod, he'll always be that burst of warm surprise that makes you scramble for your iPod to figure out what the heck is playing. The ever-reliable The Omni Recording Corporation label has reissued this 1970 eponymous release. Not psych-folk as the label implies (or as we tend to think of it it), but the mood is much darker and somber than on any of Rose's previous records. Full of lush Van Dyke Parks-style orchestral arrangements and songs about heartbreak (he recorded this during a messy divorce), it contains our most favorite Biff Rose song, "The Captain", a haunting ode to epic loss with swirling strings and far off sleigh bells. This could easily be a touchstone for Joanna Newsom's Ys, as the mood and arrangements are similar, evoking an antique and quaint musical soundworld to touch on larger human themes of sadness and self-renewal.
If you're curious about Biff Rose, or like any of the aforementioned people above, this or Children of Light are the best ones to start with. So bittersweet!
Litanies is the debut from SF garage gloom poppers Royal Baths, who have crafted a gorgeously hazy and murky bit of rhythmic hypnopop, equally indebted to the Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, and of course the current crop of retro reverb junkies that have been spilling from garages all over the Bay Area.
Gauzy and druggy, looped and mesmerizing, the drums simple and motorik, a distinctly Mo Tucker like pound, the sound reverby and cavernous, as if they recorded in an old cistern, the vocals a lazy melodic drawl, but often supported by gorgeous Beach Boys like harmonies, and the guitars, chiming and jangly one minute, howling and distorted the next, slipping from muted chug, to buzzing drone, to grinding crunch, often in the same song. All of that wrapped around crazy hooks, irresistible melodies, and some seriously kick ass songs.
"After Death" is definitely a contender for song of the year, spidery echo drenched guitars hover over a primitive rhythmic thud, the vocals sweetly melancholic, gorgeous boy/girl harmonies, plenty of sixties pop vocal "Bop Bob Baaaa"s, some cool strangely angular riffage, an explosive bridge that crunches and pounds, the whole thing so deliriously druggy and impossibly catchy. And that's only one of a clutch of killer jams, "Nikki Don't" is the Velvets by way of the Beach Boys, a murky low slung slither, but infused with plenty of unlikely sunshininess. "Needle And Thread" is total Loop / Spacemen 3 style buzzdrone murk pop, washed out and woozily dreamlike, with warbly basslines and some seriously fierce fuzz guitar. "Sitting In My Room" is like Wooden Ship on tranquilizers, hypnotic and psychedelic, but so gloriously wasted sounding.
Easily one of our new favorite records, and new favorite bands, druggy droney garagerock krautpop, like a SF garage rock mix tape (Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, the Mantles, Sic Alps) that's been chopped and screwed, the Fuzztones via the Velvets, the Beach Boys filtered through plenty of Loop, Spacemen 3 covering the Lyres, however you slice it, this totally rules!
Finally released on vinyl, Another Thought was the first posthumous collection of unreleased tracks by the great Arthur Russell. Released in 1994, shortly after he passed away and years before his wide-ranging musical genius would be recognized by a larger audience, it contains tracks spanning over a 10 year period, some in demo form documenting early versions of songs he was preparing for his next release after World of Echo. Yet of all the many Russell collections that have subsequently come out, Another Thought has the reputation of being the most difficult to digest. Long in length and minimal in economy (most of the tracks are just voice and cello, with the occasional addition of other instruments like bongos and horns), it is certainly the most intimate and unadorned of all of Russell's work. Which is why the vinyl release does this collection a great service by giving the songs ample space to breathe over four long sides. There is an incredible amount of nuance and grace in every one of these tracks, and for being so close to death, Russell remains unhurried in his approach. And unhurried is the way it should be listened to. Incredibly gorgeous, passionate and devastating.
The curious case of Arthur Russell continues with a new posthumous collection of previously unreleased versions of archival material recorded in the early eighties, but sounding as modern as ever. Like Love is Overtaking Me and Calling Out of Context, Corn was material that was being prepared for release at the time of its making, but for reasons unknown was scrapped. Russell was infamous for never being able to finish anything (he only released one proper album, World of Echo, in his lifetime, and many of his most popular dance tracks had multiple versions and often had to be finished by other producers such as Walter Gibbons and Francis Kevorkian), and it wasn't until after his death from AIDS in 1992 at the age of 40, that the world got to hear the full breadth of his musical genius. Flirting with modern classical, folk, disco and rock sometimes all in the same track but oftentimes exploring one genre expansively at great length, Corn mostly explores electro-pop, with a little bit of everything in between. With voice, drum rhythms and distorted cello, the music is neither quite aimed for the dancefloor like The World of Arthur Russell collection, nor is it as spare and oceanic as World of Echo or Another Thought. Instead, it strikes a highly listenable middle ground that takes a few of his better known tracks such as "Let's Go Swimming" and "This Is How We Walk On The Moon" into quite different pop-dance territory than on previous collections. And we don't recall the distorted cello having been such a sonic force on previous collections either, culminating in the eight minute abstract noisescape "Ocean Movie" that concludes this collection. While we originally thought this wouldn't be the collection we'd recommend for the uninitiated, we have been consistently selling copies every time we have played it in the store to folks who have no idea who Arthur Russell was, and we ourselves and been loving this release more and more each time we listen. Recommended!
Yesss! Everyone knows we love pretty much all sides of the late Arthur Russell. But as much as we love his avant composer and country pop tangents, we always keep coming back to his left-field disco productions of the late seventies/early eighties which is what introduced him to us in the first place. On this excellent compilation, we get 10 mixes from Russell's legendary Sleeping Bag Record imprint, and luckily it's not all a rehash of what's been featured on other Arthur Russell compilations. Using lots of different monikers, we get cuts from Bonzo Goes To Washington (Featuring Bootsy Collins), Felix, Dinosaur L, Indian Ocean, Sounds of JHS 126, and Clandestine (w/ Ned Sublette). With a penchant for odd sounds, strange vocal inflections, and long late-night dancefloor stability, Russell imbued his mixes with off kilter breaks and enough subtle rhythmic details that keep you invested in the groove without them ever becoming monotonous. Highlights include the Ronald Reagan cut up fuckery of Bonzo goes to Washington and the underwater hip-hop of Sounds of JHS 126's "Chill Pill" with its slightly staggered hard panned dual vocals creating a kind of Terry Riley "You're No Good" effect. But the star track is Walter Gibbon's 12 minute plus mix of Dinosaur L's "Go Bang!". We were a bit wary when we saw this wasn't the Francois Kevorkian mix, because in our minds that track is just about untouchable, it's so damn awesome. But Gibbons breaks down the original slowly stripping it to its essence and making a whole new song out of it that isn't so much mutant disco as it is early house. Yet he still manages to keep its oddities in tact: the shrill organ drones that last a little too long, the changes every 24 measures, Lola Blank's flat delivery (here cut up and reformed into new shapes). So awesome and Soooo Recommended!!!!!!
Finally reissued on vinyl!!
Twenty-two years after his death, the music of Arthur Russell is more alive than ever. Mostly known as a left-field disco producer and classically trained cellist, Russell was also an accomplished avant-garde composer, as evidenced here. Listed by us recently on limited cassette, and once reissued on cd in 2006 as part of the Audika collection First Thought Best Thought that documented his orchestral work with luminaries of the New York Downtown Scene (Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson and Peter Gordon) following his stint as musical director at The Kitchen in New York, Tower Of Meaning was originally released on Philip Glass's new music label, Chatham Square in 1983.
A suite of seven movements performed by an ensemble of horn players and conducted by Julius Eastman (whom like Russell, was a gay modern classical iconoclast), Tower Of Meaning has a slow epic funereal vibe reminiscent of Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of The Titanic, or indeed like a Philip Glass piece in slow motion. While not quite as emotionally devastating as the Bryars piece, the horns in Tower Of Meaning play out long plaintive tones simultaneously resulting in unusual intonations and harmonics as the tones overlap creating modalities of clustering chords that aurally seem to both march forward and float upward without ever quite resolving itself, the "meaning" in the title forever remaining elusive and out of reach.
The Bryars connection is a bit ironic however, because Tower Of Meaning was originally intended as incidental music to accompany a staging of Robert Wilson's Medea, but creative squabbling between the two forced Russell out and Gavin Bryars took over the project. The resultant recording is only a fraction of Russell's score which included voices and other instrumentation as well. Embittered by the experience, it was sadly Russell's final orchestral effort.
Twenty-two years after his death, the music of Arthur Russell is more alive than ever. In fact in addition to this tape, and the Love Is Overtaking Me repress also listed this week, we have the new Red Hot + Arthur Russell Master Mix tribute lp in stock, just ask! Mostly known as a left-field disco producer and classically trained cellist, Russell was also an accomplished avant-garde composer, as evidenced here. Once reissued on cd in 2006 as part of the Audika collection First Thought Best Thought that documented his orchestral work with luminaries of the New York Downtown Scene (Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson and Peter Gordon) following his stint as musical director at The Kitchen in New York, Tower of Meaning was originally released on Philip Glass's new music label, Chatham Square in 1983.
A suite of 7 movements performed by an ensemble of horn players and conducted by Julius Eastman, Tower of Meaning has a slow epic funereal vibe reminiscent of Gavin Bryar's The Sinking of The Titanic, or indeed like a Philip Glass piece in slow motion. While not quite as emotionally devastating as the Bryars piece, the horns in Tower of Meaning play out long plaintive tones simultaneously resulting in unusual intonations and harmonics as the tones overlap creating modalities of clustering chords that aurally seem to both march forward and float upward without ever quite resolving itself, the "meaning" in the title forever remaining elusive and out of reach.
The Bryars connection is a bit ironic however, because Towers of Meaning was originally intended as incidental music to accompany a staging of Robert Wilson's Medea, but creative squabbling between the two forced Russell out and Gavin Bryar's took over the project. The resultant recording is only a fraction of Russell's score which included voices and other instrumentation as well. Embittered by the experience, it was Russell's final orchestral effort. Limited to 100 copies.
Another excellent reissue of the work of French experimental / pop musician Thierry Müller (who we know from the reissues of his pre-Ruth albums under the Ilitch moniker, one of which we recently reviewed). Fast becoming a unanimous staff favorite, Ruth's
Remastered with three lengthy bonus cuts from 1982 and 1984 that teeter on more experimental ground, like Müller's celebrated work as Ilitch, which was more of a dark, droney, experimental prog guitar / synth project.
One of our favorite tracks from The Numero Group's excellent Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies From The Canyon compilation was "Cricket" by Collie Ryan. A hippie devotee of Theosophy, Ryan recorded three lovely private press records in the early seventies that featured her stunning artwork and songs that subtly touched on mystical and Native American themes. Her high-pitch bird-like vocals, sheathed in reverb, and complex guitar arrangements fall heavier on the Linda Perhacs side of the Joni Mitchell coin than say, someone like Judee Sill, who also dealt with mystical themes but was more tied to a commercially viable singer-songwriter scene. The Hour is Now is a vinyl-only "best of" of sorts that combines tracks from all three records (yet mysteriously no "Cricket"...) and will save the less diehard fans from shelling out a couple of hundred dollars for the originals. The analog mastering was even supervised by none other than by J. D. Emmanuel! Beautiful stuff!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
RECORD STORE DAY 2015!!
A fantastic RSD follow-up ep to last year's stellar compilation of lost early eighties post-disco recordings from this Teutonic dubwave funk duo, who only commercially released one single during their stalled career. This ep focuses exclusively on covers from very unlikely sources: James Brown, J.J. Cale, Frank Sinatra, The Stranglers, and Gary Pucket and The Union Gap. It goes without saying that the covers tread quite far away from the original versions though they maintain somewhat of the originator's spirit. J.J. Cale proves once again the nexus for cooled out roots funk (check out Asha Putli's cover of Cale's "Right Down Here" to see what we mean) with the aptly titled, "Funky Way". But the ladies' take on James Brown's "This is A Man's Man's World" skews the raw power behind the soul ballad of the original and twists it into a snarkingly dry and icy dub shuffle. So great. Limited RSD stock.
If you never heard of this obscure eighties female fronted world-pop outfit, get in line. An unlikely mix of Teutonic new wave and dubby balearic dance pop created in Bremen, Germany, Saada Bonaire only released one single in their lifetime. Now Captured Tracks, through its new imprint Fantasy Memory, has brought to us the complete recordings of this short-lived outfit, and it's pretty amazing, especially if you are into lost post-punk disco rarities as much as we are. Created by Bremen DJ Ralf Behrendt in 1982, and recorded in Kraftwerk's studio by legendary dub-punk producer Dennis Bovell (The Pop Group, The Slits) featuring an array of jazz and world musicians hired from the local immigrant center, Saada Bonaire was fronted by Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfield, whose sultry but blase delivery make their sound a sort of hybrid between the domineering dance music of Gina X and Grace Jones and the breezy dub of Brenda Ray. The aforementioned single "You Can Be More As You Are" is an infectious post-disco club classic, that probably had a lot more traction in southern Europe than in the west. Their music, with its exotic flourishes and dreamy tropical rhythms, seems tailor-made for warmer climates, and we can easily see these tracks being played in sunrise dance sets after a long night of clubbing. Definitely a band that should have been a lot bigger than they were, their lack of success the fault of EMI's A&R man who notoriously went over budget with the acts he developed. After going over 5x the budget for Tina Turner's Private Dancer, EMI pulled the plug on Saada Bonnaire and they were rarely heard from since. This anthology covers everything the band recorded between 1982 and 1985, but still remains surprisingly modern sounding for being 30 years old.
We didn't realize this was still available until someone happened to order one the other day. And being so easy to get, we had to get more to share with everyone.
Easily one of our favorite folk rock records from the day, probably our favorite Buffy Sainte-Marie album ever, Illuminations is truly strange and beautiful. A heady brew of gothic folk elements, Native American invocations and bewitching electronic effects and magical drones. Her vocals sometimes soft and saintly, othertimes heavy, rocking and intense. Originally released in 1969 on the awesome Vanguard label, no other Buffy Sainte-Marie record is quite like this one, with songs that are poetically beautiful dealing with themes of love and injustice through esoteric supernatural imagery of vampires, angels, mystical rites and creation myths, and with music that is equally beguiling. From the first spiraling electric vocal warbles that open "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot", the Cluster like drones on "The Angel", the witchy folk-funk of "He's A Keeper of The Fire" to the final track, "Poppies" that presages Grouper by nearly forty years. Fantastic!
Before we get into our usual wordy meandering, hyperbolic gushing and tangential ruminating, we oughta come right out and say it first thing, this record is fucking incredible. One of the coolest weirdest records we've heard in ages. Twisted and blown out, weirdly melodic and groovy, dense and washed out and otherworldly and fucking bizarre, equal parts blissed out hypnogogic shoegazey drift, lurching, chopped and screwed style Southern crunk, majestic choral dreaminess, blurred beat heavy collaged electronica, and sample heavy blown out synthbuzz epicness. In some alternate universe alien world, THIS is the music that comes blasting out of booming systems in tricked out lowriders, some sort of glorious, blindingly blissy club music that fuses stuttery stumbly beats, to crumbling distorted low end, and thick swaths of synths so blown out the whole record sounds like it might collapse, mix in soaring operatic vocal samples, low slung bass buzz, jittery drum skitter, and mush mouthed slowed down 'rapping', smear and blur it all into one glorious, warped and warbly cough syrup fever dream epic, and that's basically Salem's King Night.
By now, most folks have at lest heard of 'witch house' a new 'genre' that Salem seem to represent, willingly or not, it's hard to say, but alongside other groups like oOoOO, witch house has received the sort of blog hype (and mainstream press) that immediately turns us off, and made us want to hate it, but so far, everything we've heard, we've dug, big time, but nothing has kicked out ass as much as this Salem record. It's so weird, and twisted and bizarre, it's sort of hard to believe that THIS is the record people are talking about, it makes sense that we'd love it, and that it would be an aQuarius Record Of The Week, but the New York Times? John Q. Public? Fuck it, like we always say, we'd way rather here stuff like this on the radio anyway. But regardless of the hype, or the backlash, or any of the nonmusical stuff, it all boils down to how ingenious and utterly OUT THERE this is. Just check out the title track, some weird garbled voices, some skittery drum machine, some ravey synths, choral voices, and then BAM, the song explodes, the bass a throbbing slab of rumbling crunch, the drum machine weirdly awkward, but the perfect compliment to the tangled melodies, and those soaring distorted operatic voices, the track a total epic, building and building, like the score for some insane alien sci-fi slow motion dancefloor martial arts battle, you can almost visualize fishtanks exploding into galaxies of exploding glass shards, while bodies fly threw the clouds of glistening sparkle, everything seemingly floating weightless. So good. We could listen to this track FOREVER (and pretty much have since we got it). But then comes "Asia" with its fat stuttery beat, and girlish vocals buried beneath a miasma of crumbling distorted crunch, and woozy synth melodies and confusional drum programming, sounding a bit like some over the top M83 jam gone haywire, or maybe some lost Cocteau Twins B-side remixed by Alec Empire and Black Moth Super Rainbow, everything fuzzy and washed out and gauzy, murky and dark, but still suffused with a weird sort of sunshininess. "Frost" is more of the same, even prettier and blissier, taking Sigur Ros and dipping it in a vat of gristly distortion and Carpenter sci-fi synths, and then stretching it out into a billowing sheet of diaphanous dream pop.
It's not until "Sick" that we get a glimpse of Salem's other side, their chopped and screwed, sippin' sizurp, alien slow motion shoegaze hip hop side, the music remains essentially the same, maybe not quite as dense, still swirls of female vocals, a strange otherworldly chorale, but over the top of this sonic cotton candy , a 'rapper' delivers his mutated pitch shifted flow, mouthful of marbles, finger on the record slowing it do a crawl, creating a weirdly dreamy draggy druggy hip hop / dream pop hybrid. And the rest of the record seems to drift lazily between those two sounds, "Release Da Boar" finds Salem offering up another cloud of dopesmoke dreaminess, fuzz drenched dirge pop bliss, which gives way to "Trapdoor", another slow motion, DJ Screw style cough syrup remix, laid over a warm warped and warbly bit of lysergic ambience and buzzing rave synth swirl. "Hound" is like the title track redux, so thick and crumblingly distorted, but so blown out and beautiful, "Tair" is a gloriously weird spaced out, handclapped chunk of shoegaze rap, and "Killer" sounds like Joy Division or Interpol run through a million distortion pedals, and set to a Casio keyboard drum machine beat, only to shrug off some of the crunch and warble, leaving a gorgeous stretch of plaintive low slung doom pop, that hints at the poppiness that lurks beneath the surface on King Night, only to finish the record in a squall of synth buzz, mumbled vox and drum machine chaos.
Wow. What else can we say. This sounded so good in the store, and even better in headphones, but it wasn't until we got in the car, and cranked this as loud as it would go, that it finally sunk in, and suddenly, we were bouncing up and down in a tricked out lowrider on some alien planet in some alternate universe, our booming system BOOMING, getting totally lost in these twisted and gorgeously damaged sounds. WAY WAY recommended.
We have a trifecta of free jazz "twofers" this week from way deep down in the Impulse catalog. Check out the reviews elsewhere on the list for Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. While the Coltrane features two of our favorite titles from her, the Ayler and Sanders releases are from albums we're less familiar with, or at least hadn't reviewed before, but have been psyched to (re-)discover. While perhaps not the best place to be introduced to these artists, these records reward those seekers of the overlooked deep cuts without the hefty collector/import price!
Village of The Pharoahs is from 1974, and while that may be a late year for most cosmically-minded free jazz (most jazz at the time was hurtling towards fusion), this record does not disappoint. Fans of classic Sanders records like Thembi and Karma will find lots to love in the opening three part title suite. Sitars, piano, clattering percussion, and chanting vocals evoke a majestic marching groove rife with drama as soon as Sanders comes in with his elliptical eastern horn phrases, culminating later in a hypnotic three part tribal chant breakdown. Deeper spiritual vocalising permeates the short track, "Myth" as well, before building onto the long-form piano-led meditation "Mansion Worlds". The final two tracks, "Memories of Lee Morgan" and "Went Like It Came" venture more into Blute Note territory as he eulogizes the late trumpeter with a wistful pastoral piece that also includes flute and piano, then ends the album with a kind of rollicking skronky blues bop with a soulful female vocalist.
That last track would probably read as a bit out of place on the album proper, but paired up with 1972's Wisdom Through Music, that kind of hard stylistic change-up is a perfect segue into one of Sander's more diverse outings. Opening with the energetic "High Life", Sanders channels the exuberant vibe of percussive African horn music followed by the celebratory and soulful "Love Is Everywhere". The title track that follows brings us back into cosmic mode with harp trills, tampura, and majestic waves of droning reeds, followed by the lyrical string excursion of "The Golden Lamp" and the final long-form vocal incantation, "Selflessness". Quite Stunning!
Savant is an apt name for a band that is not actually a band, but a project with many blind contributors and collaborators playing unfamiliar instruments with minimally open instruction, recorded remotely without prior knowledge of how their parts would be used, and passing tapes amongst each other, years before the practice of electronic musicians sending each other Logic files over the internet became common. What binded the project together was the alchemic vision and studio wizardry of reclusive Seattle ambient auteur, Kerry (K.) Leimer, who released Savant's lone record, T h e N e o R e a l i s t ( A t R i s k ) in 1 9 8 3. RVNG's Artificial Dance reissue ccollects that record with their d e b u t 1 2" a n d a g r i p o f c o m p i l a t i o n a n d u n r e l e a s e d t r a c k s.
You may remember our earlier review of the RVNG's anthology of Leimer's lesser known ambient works, A Period of Review (1975-1983), which displayed an outsider affinity with the generative and open compositional tape works of Cage, Stockhausen and Eno. Leimer's Savant project at first glance may seem like a devout following into the Fourth World tape experimentation and global intrigue of Possible Musics and My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, or David Byrne's soundtrack for Twyla Tharp's dance piece, The Catherine Wheel, but its construction is much stranger and obtuse. Employing a move towards rhythm and texture in transportive and evolving phases, the way these cobbled bits of varying studio perfomance are pieced together so seamlessly to create their own visionary world is its own extraordinary accomplishment. One that connects to the methodical ethnographical productions of Wally Badarou, Finis Africae and Haruomi Hosono and clears a path to later developments of digidub and trip hop a decade later. We can't emphasize enough how good this sounds right now. Recommended!
The second cosmic synth-drone-rock missive from Scantily Clad, a duo of instrumental improvisers split between Northern and Southern California. We loved their first cd-r, an amalgam of lo-fi synth styles from soft lullabies to abrasive noise that showed a lot of promise. Well, that promise is made good on their follow-up, a richer, more focused, and self-assured outing than before. The sonic intensity is beefed up, the songs more composed, the instrumentation more varied, the dreaminess heightened ( especially on tracks like Vanilla, Baby"), and the nosier parts (like what sounds like chipmunks speaking in tongues on "Deep Witch") are even weirder. But it all fits together very well as a fully-realized piece of heavy instrumental spaciness. Even the packaging is cooler, with their clipart collages of mandalas and symbolic animals housed in a sturdy transparent plastic case. Fans of groups like Emeralds and Carlton Melton will find lots to dig here!
5 is the magic number for this central California duo of stoner over-driven electronica, looped samples and big noisy drum breaks. The oddly monikered Scantily Clad not only celebrate their fifth cd-r release, but it contains 23 tracks (2+3=5), limited to 55 copies and priced to move at $5.55! That's a lot of high fives! But seriously, we have loved this duo since their first cd-r, their sound a home-brewed collaged confection of dirty over-driven electronics and big beats with a humorous Lynchian sensibility for melody, song titles and packaging, each one a hand-assembled venture of surrealist clip art collage and scrappy recycled cd cases from what must have been from those free AOL trial cds they used to mail out in the nineties.
On their fifth release, the sound is more sample-based and dreamier then ever before. Each track is a miniature world of vintage electronic soundscapery with often a mysterious jazz soundtrack vibe deconstructed, cut and repasted that reminds of something like Madlib or J Dilla remixing Dymaxion or Quintron, or a less self-aware Tipsy. Way eccentric and off-kilter, but also shimmery and narcotic, with occasional clipped vocal snippets peering through the stony layers of hazy sound, twangy strings, cascading harps and drum breaks. Super unique and very likely our favorite release from them so far. Again, LIMITED to 55 copies. Grab one while you can!
NOW ON VINYL!!!!!!!!!!
We can't think of any album in recent history that was more set up to fail than this one.
A "love her or hate her" actress with dubious musical abilities performing mostly Tom Waits covers (with the exception of one original, "Song for Jo"). Even in the highly capable hands of David Sitek from TV On The Radio manning the production (and providing a healthy dose of indie cred), they must have realized this was a high risk venture. Which means we think most people will never bother to give this a listen, which is too bad, because if you didn't know it was Scarlett Johansson and you didn't know these were Tom Waits covers, it's actually a pretty good ethereal pop album. One could easily mistake this for a record by Beach House or even Mazzy Star. There's been much worse music put out by actresses than this (ahem, She and Him), that got away with so much less scrutiny. Perhaps this is the problem, it's setup to be a vanity project when it really isn't (Johansson's vocals are just as much of an instrument in Sitek's production as the swirling music boxes and atmospheres), leaving the actress to bear much of the blame for its failure. Perhaps if it was released under a band name that just happened to have Johansson on vocals or whatever, under any other circumstances this would be a hit. Oddly, David Bowie makes a guest appearance.
Years ago we fell in love with Gunter Schickert's Uberfalling, a 1980 late-krautrock guitarscape epic. The cd reissue of that is now sadly out of print, but we've recently been turned onto Schickert's first lp from 1974, Samtvogel, which at last has been reissued on vinyl courtesy of the Spanish Import label Wah Wah, who have also recently reissued Heldon, Vainica Doble, Inner Space and other international psych gems. Sure, they're a bit expensive, but everything we've heard from the label has been amazing, so they're pretty much worth it.
Especially this one, a three track epic of cavernous space guitar extrapolations and buried lysergic vocal incantations that sounds like an alternate soundtrack to Fantastic Planet. The first track, "Apricot Brandy" gently introduce us into Schickert's sound world, a spacy lyrical repetitive commune riff with murmured vocals and spindly multi-layered guitar percolations that gently float in an echo-y atmospheric chamber. The second track, "Kriegmaschinen, Fahrt Zur Holle" is nearly 17 minutes of space-echo, belltones and strange echo effects that slowly build into more intense repetitive and multi-layered motifs, sometimes urgent and cinematic, and other moments more billowy and sinuous, reminding us of Achim Reichel and Manuel Gottsching, and even obscure krautrock band Temple. The final twenty-one minute track, "Wald", brings the intensity to the fore, with a buzzing guitarscape that sounds like John Carpenter, but soon gives way to a more lilting spacey bubbling and exploratory improvisation before the intense riffs return and interject and subside in strange surges, finally dissipating in little clouds of helium. A beautiful piece of outsider kosmiche! Highly Recommended!
