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Hau is the debut of Japanese duo Tomoyoshi Date and Chihei Hatakeyama, who call themselves Opitope. Chehei released his solo debut album last year on the Kranky label, which I have yet to hear. Hau's music was created using acoustic and electric guitars, bass, piano, vibraphone and electronics. Though the natural instruments are processed and augmented with electronics, the sound of the album is not at all pixellated. There is a naturalist approach to the album which is at once subtle and remarkably complex.
The simple but elegant artwork is little preparation for the hell that breaks loose on Gyo-Kai Elegy. The knowledge that Mikawa is the founder of brutal noiselegends Incapacitants all the more.
This is the second full length from the fabulous Efterklang & it finds them making their trademark sound denser, more epic and grand . I guess best way to try & describe the band to the newbie is a very distinctive & one off mix of ; post- rock, electronica and classical music with often very theatrical leanings and multi-layered/ dramatic banks of male & female vocals.
This is a highly enjoyable reissue of solo work from the late 1970’s by one of the main demented minds by behind noise godfathers Smegma. Mixing together weird collages of voice samples and old adverts, avant jazz wonderings, noise discharge & surprising musical moments.
Japans LSD March sixth album starts off fairly bare, stripped down & emotional with electric guitar folkly wanderings and tinkling musical box along with sad Japanese male singing, but over the five tracks the instrumental layers build up & the songs become stranger, more quirky.
This highly enjoyable and varied double disk compilation of Dark English folk and beyond is named after one of the oldest know English folk songs John Barleycorn which was first written down in 1588. The 32 tracks enclosed mix both traditional, quirky and the avant-garde song craft, using traditional themes, melodies and instruments along side more modern elements to build their own tributes to England’s dark nature and it’s distinctive seasonal changers.
The bizarrely named Wijlen Wij (Dutch/Flemish for 'us, passed away', MB) offer up an self titled debut album that's rather distinctive, often epic & atmospheric take on doom/slowed black metal craft mixing in dark monk chant’s, metal-lized medieval vibe, church organ grimness and slowed dark melodic synth swamps of sound to lose yourself in.
Submerged is Phaenon (one Szymon Tankiewicz) opening shot of deep, heavy, and expansive dark ambience that as the title suggests is akin to being submerged into an vast underground space or falling down an endless tunnel.
Kit is a noisy post-punk band from California. Broken Voyage is a spazz fest from beginning to end, which reminds me of a several other bands. The stepping off point is probably the Melt Banana because of the aggressive, overdriven music and the screamed, high pitched, distorted female vox. It's also kind of wacky, reminding me of an amped up Deerhoof. There are quirky changes in direction, mid-song, reminiscent of the latter. Kit do not share the Who-like drum fills, or the fairy tale lyrics of Deerhoof, so though indebted, they're not completely ripping off their sound. There are also songs which remind me a bit of the GO! Team, because their cheerleader chants are echoed on occasion throughout Broken Voyage. Unlike the Go! Team, Kit aren't relentlessly upbeat, which could be considered either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you ask.
Greek guitarist Socos has been working in various bands since 1989 including Fykia and Orama as well as a collaboration with art-pop artist Christos Alexopoulos. On Hyperhythmique analogue he operates alone on his acoustic guitar.
Alien Glyph Morphology takes the listener into a strange and hypnotic sound world built around looped and detailed rhythmic/drone patterns, that go from world music influenced, to tribal, to glitch electronics, to trapped electro jazz rhythms & beyond. The beat patterns woven and drifted over by electronic ambient hazes, edgy piano struck cords, eerier and aged jazzy tones and collages of chanted voices.
Asher’s The Depths, the Colours, the objects & the silence stands as one of the more stripped-down and eerier releases of the often already minimalist ambient label Mystery Sea. The three tracks here are built around edgy field recordings, slow haunted harmonic synth unfold and a real feeling of disquiet and abandonment.
Norbert Möslang is a visual artist and musician from Switzerland & Header_Change finds him creating shifting, sinister,alien atonal sound sheens from fellow Swiss video artist Silvie Defraoui stills.
Swims are a duo from Sacramento, California consisting of Paul Slack on Bass and Mark Rocha on drums. This six song EP is their debut, released on French label Distile, not to be confused with American label Destijl Records.
Kasha Iz Topora is musically & audio interruption/ soundtrack for a bizarre Old Russian fairytale that details the exploits of a man with an axe, who can make porridge fly. Built from synth washers, seemly steam powered electroncia, bizarre sampled rhythmic and noise elements, sampled Russian & classical string work, folk traces and darker trip-hop beat moments.
In a wooden cabin in Canada, Pau Torres (from Barcelona, formerly in Le Diablo Marichi) constructed an intrigueing 55 minutes of music with a broad range of soundsources.
Mist on the window brings together 10 tracks recorded over a 2 year period by Japanese sound artist Ken Ikeda, using his own self-constructed instrument made with rubber bands and nails, & some slight electronic elements to create a touching, alien and beautiful collection of soundworlds.
This four disk fold out digi-pak set brings together over four hours of mainly live unreleased material by Japanese noise/ improvised/ psychedelic death trip Freak-out collective C.C.C.C (Cosmic Coincidence Control Center) dating from the early 90’s
In Rainbows is getting a huge amount of press due to the fact that the band have decided to let the audience set the price to download the album, prior to its release in stores. A pricey deluxe edition box is available as well.
Group’s take on audio discomfort and 4am fear is a mix of; improvised textures, weird glicthy ambient dread, noise rumbles and strange/disorientating source recordings, dark jazz often harmonic tones, drone textures & sudden rhythmic edges. All really stir up one nightmarish hour of audio discourse that drops you in some very atmospheric, strange and fear inducing places.
This half reissue/ half new material double disk set from the mighty Circle shows two sides to this highly prolific band. Disk one original released in Vinyl format last year finds them creating two vocally layered long tracks, with as the cover suggest cowboy and Indian influence. Disk two is a live disk showing them in a more cut down, less sprawling song format jump in and out of many musical genre's beds along the way.
Carved image of emptiness is lo-fi and a offten a little shaky mix of pounding Ministry like beat craft, looped fuzzed evil sounding guitar riffs, lo-grade glitch electronics, horror soundtrack and the odd avant edge popping up here and there.
These two new releases by Nathan Michael under the Half Makeshift banner feature more droney melancholy like than on his debut Aphotic Leech, but each with a small difference.
Dubious is the second EP on Ukranian imprint Nexsound by Sara Lundén, but with different companions. This time Kyrre Björkås (Det är jag som är döden) and Andreas Mjös (or Mjøs, in Norway, Jaga Jazzist) join in to put Lundén's vocals in a different context.