Loading
Requiems Der Natur is thick with smoke like psychedelic air, both drifting and heady with night spent waiting for the sunset to come up and bonfires in the woods and waking up on a beech unsure how you got there. This feels like a denser, less hectic Animal collective or maybe a more polished late night session Oliva tremor control.
Only a year since Sigur Ros released the massively successful Takk comes this little Gem of a release. A double disk set with only disk containing a four track EP, the other a DVD with three promotional videos.
Club Kama Aina breaths a wonderfully quirky, cutesy-electronic come organic air. Full to the brim with playful and tuneful tracks, that utilise strummed guitar work, keyboards, all manner of cheeky and clever rhythmic matter. All Making this one of this years sweet musically treats.
There is a lot of this stuff about at the moment, make no mistake about it. Whether you want to call it drone, ambient, minimalism, or whatever, there is a lot of it about. Kranky have made a big deal of Herbert’s non musician status, the music being constructed through layers of field recordings and processed on a desktop PC. All this is fine but what is the end product like?
Elephant calls has more than a slight eastern feeling about it. With it’s mixture of tabla textures and percussion by Ravi Padmanabha, joined by spidery, sawing and plucking acoustic guitar curtsey of New York noise maker and improviser Ed Chang. Though this does have noise element’s, it feels more focused on improvisation- more than anything. Leaving the listener with a collection of chaotic, but somehow spiritual charged tracks.
This is the American bands first release, though I’m sure the members names will be recognisable to many: Jason Crumer on electronics (FACEDOWNINSHIT, Amazing Grace), Matt Franco (Air Conditioning) on guitar, vocals & electronics and Lee Counts on metal. Not surprisingly with these names involved, this does raise one hell of a racket. Much like pouring battery acid in ones ears or falling down a staircase, though they managed to vary the pace from all out attacks- to bringing in more rhythmic and drone elements, moving towards tense ambient states.
I was excited for two reason about this. Firstly it was going to be released by Uk based label Very Friendly, who’s only other Merzbow release had been excellent Cycle from 2003.secondly the Packaging, I have to admit and say I’m somewhat of a geeky collector, when it comes to odd and different Packaging, and this sure is that. The cd comes in screen printed Hessian bag, which comes inside a nicely heavy cd sized marble box with a fossilised Ammonite engrave on the front, really impressive stuff.
Rafael Toral’s Space is mixture sci-fi sound effects, ala the first Star trek, electronic tones that rarely pick up much of a pace, and Journeys into an odd circuit board take on jazz and well space its self- literal lots of silence and slow build ups. Sound elements are allowed to hover and grow, or disappear off down a black hole, leaving the listener stranded for a few moments, until the next space cruiser comes along.
For the first half a minute of Devils cone and palm you feel like you could have dropped into the wrong record, as you greeted by strange spidery and wrong sounding funky guitar work. But this illusion doesn’t last for long ,as you first one side of your head is slammed against a wall of blazing noise and then the sound jump cuts and the other side of your head in throw against the wall. Welcome to the new sissy spacek torture work, were guitar music and structure are ripped apart and thrown back at you in an assault on all the sensors.
Driftwood weaves together tuneful electroinca with violin and cello music to a haunting, memorable and beautiful effect. Making enchanted and edgy beat-works to disappear off into. It never tries to be musically difficult, it just slides along smooth as silk, making wonderful chill out music, that will sooth away the days stressers and strains.
Altehes debut album comes across as an earthy mix of Acoustic Neurosis & tribal downbeat folk rippling with beautiful and dark forestall undertones. This is music of the elements and their spirits. Worn by wind, born from fire, buried and resrected in black forests. Striped down and barren, but often embellished and illuminated by cello and violin. It seems detached from our time and culture, this is music of a superstitious and deeply dark religious forest dweller's.
Laurence English is as far as I can determine and Australian sound artist who constructs wild imaginary landscapes of drone, electronics and a large array of field recordings.
Ohne Titel, 1916 is a emotional collection of fragile melodic patterns, played out on basic piano and keyboard with some very slight electronic treatment, there’s a real feeling of honest depth and great sorrow. Written after the death of his day old daughter Fanny, it puts across the feeling of emotional numbness and learning to coping with the passing of a loved one.
Radiorgasm is a reissue of sudden infants dada & suffocating take on noise, original released in ltd no 323 vinyl format. Here for the first time for all to go slowly mad to, taken direct from the original master tapes. All the hall marks of sudden infants sound is already fully formed: dizzy brain melting noise, odd environmental sounds and strange ambience, gurgling, chocking and other body sounds. And all manner of other strange stuff, that is grantee to really mess you head up and no doubt utter the odd dark chuckle.
Meditate/ Mutilate seems to pull off perfectly the mix between of seething industlised noise and more sinister creepy dark ambient tones. Even when your ears are been flayed by coarse electronics and sit down and sufer pain vocal over load, ripple underneath is a sickly stream of grim ambience. Like a maggot stenched water, trickling under a site of a vast over kill.
Who the heck is Michael Perilstein and what’s this all about?, I hear you ask, well Mr Perilstein makes bad cheesy sounding soundtracks for micro budget B movies like: Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Beavergate(!?) and The deadly spawn, etc. As well as releasing rather strange concept album, one which was released on the Residents label Ralph records. So really you know you’re in for an odd and different time from the outset.
Plexus II is a collection of slowly unfolding string patterns electronically looped together. Giving a great air of decaying splendour , much like a cobweb spun and dust deep , once grand mansion, a melancholy dream world of broken dreams and fading beauty .
Hot Wings comes across as a long lost album by a 70’s rock/ blues mixing together a feeling of The Free, Stepping Wolf, Thin Lizzy, with Jimi Hendrix funk-rock guitar edge. Even the production has really nice 70’s vibe: a wonderful, raw and under-produced quality.
Tone of Finland spreads across two disks a remixed version of Elliot Sharpe’s soundtrack for the 1991 documentary about gay artist and icon Tom of Finland, which appears on the second disk. On the first disk we get Reinterpretation and remixes of the original soundtrack by eight Finish electronic artists, including a track by Mika Vainio of Pan-sonic.
You’ve got to understand people in Finland, they are dangerous. They say they buy guns to go and hunt elks but what they really are after is my colleague, Mr. Monti. Let me make myself clearer: a year or so ago, the man was sent a couple of CD’s released by Onyxia, a Finnish label. He gladly welcomed the gift but never reviewed the damn things.
Feels like home is the fourth album by Toledo based singer songwriter Jessica Bailiff, her other three albums have also been released by Kranky.
This third collaboration between Wolf eyes and John Wiese starts off in surprisingly calm, but still disturbed waters. For at least the first half of the track you feel like you’ve been dropped on some strange always dusk planet, shapes and objects appear from out of the half light.
Kosmista Noisea is yet another exhilarating trip into electro buzzing, rhythmic and noise flecked future city scapes. It almost feel like you’ve plugged into some virtual reality consol for the ears. And if you shut your eyes you almost become one with the sleek, neo. And steel and glass city scapes.
Thousands of dead Gods is purely a buzzing static storm of noise, or a huge impregnable wall of pure head melting noise, that last for near on an hour then spits you out at the end. Apparently sourced from shark noises, by the end of this you’ll feel like you’ve been inside a vast shark’s digestive system, and then shot out the other end.