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Birth Defect’s five tracks wraps it’s listener in greyed, singeing and suffocating barbwire curls of noise drones and sour feed-back trails. With each track pulling you futher and further down into a grim, festering and boiling sick drone hole.
Aidan Baker is one busy individual. In just the last year, he's released a prodigious number of recordings, both on his own, as well as collaborations. Nadja, up until now, have operated as a duo, but for this release, they've added Jakob Thiesen (so I have read, though he's not credited on the sleeve) on drums. Leah Buckareff handles bass and vocals, and Baker takes on guitars, vocals, strings, woodwinds and drum programming. The new wrinkle for Desire in Uneasiness is clearly the "real drums".
Lawrence English is known as an ambient sound artist as well as the proprietor of the Room40 label. Kiri No Oto translates roughly from Japanese to English as "sound of fog", which is absolutely an appropriate title for this release. It starts off with Organs Lost at Sea, a brilliant, relatively intense drone piece. The organ tones sound stacked atop each other, in the Phill Niblock vein, and they're either distorted in post-production, or just mixed so far into the red that a blurry effect is attained. The next track, Soft Fuse is a mellow ambient piece, which includes little micro-tonal elements if listened to closely. White Spray starts off, again, in an ambient vein, but at about a minute and a half in, it becomes a dense and noisy, shifting soundscape. It's an abstract piece which generates tension, pulling you forward, much like an undertow into the next track. Waves Sheer Light is the sound below the waves. These sounds come at you from every direction, with hidden melodies and speaker-phasing ambience undulating in seemingly limitless combinations. And so it goes.
The Language of the Dards summons up a wonderful sonic world that’s both stoned and intense, Mystical and deranged. With the three lengthy tracks been built around a mix of strummed acoustic guitar, mantra like vocalising and semi harmonic rants, Nepalese Oboe and field recordings.
Fade away But not ending is made of two half an hour long tracks of seething, psychedelic and shifting noisescapes that utilizes electronics, guitar, sampled and mashed music elements. Often bringing to mind CCCC work at their more focused and varied.
Chinoiseries is a quirky and very oriental/Asian tinged instrumental hip-hop album that’s built around samples from 30 records brought by Onra on a trip to Vietnam. It’s an interesting and risky concept to use such a limited sample focus, but for the most part this remains enjoyable and rewarding.
The fact that the imprint is called Rump Recordings leads to suspect that Rumpistol is the band of the label owner Jens Berents Christiansen, and indeed such is the case. The project started in 2003 and Dynamo is the third album.
Whether this can be traced back to self-professed misanthropy in the genre or just a sign of the times, Underjordiska is yet one many one-man black metal 'bands'.
Peter Garland is American post minimalist composer with a fascination for American Indian and Mexican musical/rhythmic elements, & he's been making poignant, rhythmic, ritual, alien and dramatic sounding music since the early 70’s. Three Strange Angels is highly consistent, varied and rewarding collection that brings together work from the 70’s through to the early 90’s.
Cites & Girls is a entertaining and creative collaboration between Canadian spoken word artist Myra Davies and German electronic artist Gudrun Gut who is also the head of the female focused experimental label Monika Enterprise.
Thou make a brand of gut rumbling doom/sludge with a distinctive American tinged flavour to it, adding in elements of bastardized country rock, grunge, dramatic/ atmospheric American rock and blues. Peasant is this five pieces second album.
Songs For The Broken Hearted sits wonderful between shimmering slow-core with smudged /haunted vocals and ambient guitar /synth scapes. With the album as a whole working as a wonderful sonic distillation of emotional sadness and break down in the autumnal seasons.
Antony Milton is a musician from New Zealand known for creating sometimes noisy experimental music, and for his excellent PseudoArcana label. The End of This Short Road was released a couple of years ago, and it deserves a fresh look. Most interesting is the fact that most of the album was recorded in 2000, and was kept in storage for several years. Milton didn't believe the music represented enough of a challenge to the listener, as he had become enamoured with more avant garde, free music. Regardless of Milton's thoughts on the matter, it seems he simply let the dust gather on a more than worthy collection of tunes and experiments. It is a bit derivative of the late eighties/early nineties Xpressway label scene. But with plenty of distance between that era and now, it merely makes for a refreshing reminder of how great some of that music was.
This is an highly welcome and long overdue reissue of this long out of print ahead of it’s time sneering early synth/ avant-grade/ bizarre Broadway musical masterpiece with music by Moog and electronics genius Mort Garson and text’s written by Jacques Wilson.
This new Slice of the ever expanding AMT cake find’s the band in a rather mellow, laid back and spacey mood, with the album more cursing and hovering than fire-up, rocking & brain melting
Hush Harbours mine a mixture of America 70’s country rock with psychedelic folk touches and slight grungy edger’s. With the lead singer Keith Wood voice sounding like Neil young after a bad night or a stoned and wavering Michael Nesmith
As if they knew it the day after I bought a new recordplayer this LP was delivered at my door. Excellent timing, but putting the needle into these doomfilled grooves almost seemed a bad idea, as it made me fear for my stylus.
Mit Ohne is a collection of shadowy vibe heavy electronic tone manipulations by Zurich based electronic and installation artists Ralph Steinbrüchel that were original conceived for a installation piece using 3rd animation of Yves Netzhammer.
Quest for blood are the perfect blending of extreme metal with authentic Asian music utilizing your standard guitar, drums and keyboards of a metal band with flute and traditional Asian instrumentation. And unlike a lot of bands that try to blend extreme and traditional forms Quest for blood balance both disciplines perfectly with each giving Equal sonic air to breath.
Shots at infinity 1 offers up 3 lengthy and highly enjoyable electric guitar works out that are rich with harmonic and atmospheric grace mixing in rock, blues, country and ambient texturing.
Blank for your own message is a very hypnotic, often droning eastern tinged spiritual mix of; electronics, subtle beats, sampled world music and ethic percussion, field recording textures and ambience.
Villainaire is my first exposure to the Dead Science, a Seattle threesome, who are often cited in relation to the experimental, and highly emotional Xiu Xiu. Don't let that fool you though; the Dead Science are not so easily pigeon-holed. Firstly, the music is mainly lush, densely layered rock music, with sweeping, orchestral overtones. Aside from the band's core unit there are no less than twelve additional musicians, who provide everything from harp, strings, brass, synth and backing vocals. The songs are, just as singer/guitarist Sam Mickens has said himself, "pop songs". As one might imagine, he allows for a wide margin of leeway in relation to the standard definition of the term "pop".
I've listened to Blue many times, in an effort to connect with it, because it seems like I should like it a lot. It's a very pleasant album. The music is impeccably put together. The instrumentation, including acoustic guitar, and string quartet, is more than competently applied. There's electronic glitch-work too, and although this type of production is getting to be rather old hat, it's done with care and precision. There are human voices, children and adult, interspersed here and there, which blend nicely with the largely acoustic music. There's a mellow pop, by way of nursery rhyme song in the middle of Blue as well, a pastoral respite within an album which itself is a respite from a fast paced world. Indeed the common factor in relation to the album is that it's as calm as a ripple-less lake in summertime. Which of course is not a bad thing in and of itself.
After the striped down, sluggish and crawling doomed jazz tones of Bohren & Der Club of Gore last album Geisterfaust, their new album Dolores see’s them going to the other end of spectrum with some of their most tuneful, short ‘n’ sharp and even brightest sounding tracks of their Career.