After a handful of excellent releases under her belt, Guthrie drops her first vinyl full length on Students Of Decay, and, surprise surprise, it’s fucking outstanding. Guthrie works in the realm of field recordings and processed instruments, most notably here with the French horn, violoncello, and contrabass. Brilliantly blurring the lines by twisting the natural world with the manmade one, I think I hear rushing air & squawking birds, but hardly confident enough to identify anything in particular. The mysterious origins are only the beginning though, while a spectral world floats between the bizarre sounds, fleeting moments of abstract turning concrete slip between your fingers, subtly blown out radio transmissions crackling & crumbling like an ancient stone wall, insects humming past your ears, decaying mournful horns looped to infinity, this is both sterile and full of life, a strange overlap of warmth & cold, Guthrie is adept at finding the perfect tone at the perfect moment and allows for both extended silence and lush minimal drone, absolutely wonderful stuff, definitely not to be missed, and SOD is only making 250 of these, so get while the gettin’s good.
/Background music/ Matthew Barlow – Breathing Space (from Sun Showers)
Eluvium – Memory Print Boutique (from Catalin)
Lubomyr Melnyk – Corrosions On The Surface Of Life (from Three Solo Pieces)
Kerridge – Scare Tactics (from A Fallen Empire)
Yong Yong – Cobraz (from Greatest It’s)
Black Swan – Eden (from Tone Poetry)
David Andree & Josh Mason – Winter To Spring, Further Than First Thought (from Call, Response)
Milieu – The Space Between (from Leaves Painted Purple)
Insect Ark – Long Arms (from Long Arms)
Rabbits Foot Williams – Boll Weevil (from The Rise & Fall Of Paramount Records, Volume 1 (1917-1927))
The Body – The Night Knows No Dawn (from I Shall Die Here)
Talk West – Dark White (from Black Coral Sprig)
Sunn O))) – Last One / Valentine’s Day (from La Reh 012)
Horseback – Piedmont Apocrypha (Three Lobed) No streaming track because Horseback is big enough now to get an exclusive full album stream before the record is released. Awesome for Horseback, less awesome for you at the moment, but way awesome for you when the full stream goes up in a few weeks.
Oh my fucking god this is where it’s at you guys. It’s like everything Jenks Miller has done as Horseback and otherwise (solo, Mount Moriah, etc) up until this point was specifically just to culminate in the glorious Piedmont Apocrypha. The minimal drone, the blackened psych, the ominous country folk, all of it stirred together in a cocktail of perfect occultish meditations and the harmony among the styles is unbelievable. While quite distinct from his last record (Half Blood), taking the black down a few notches and with way more clean vocals, the darkness and theme of endless change are still in full effect and bleeding through the entire record, starting with the opening line “I was born to lose, I won’t have this form forever” and winding through to the end of the burning 17 minute finale “Chanting Out The Low Shadow,” which itself is like Half Blood boiled down to a single flawless track. This record is both bold and nonchalant, it has no fuckin problem letting a couple tones hang in the air indefinitely, watching them waver & fade, or laying down a free form calming jangle fest, or tossing some field recordings in with wobbly psych guitars & droning organs, and then getting rowdy as fuck with reverb, feedback, and propulsive ritualistic fire summoning magick. Apocrypha comes from another realm, lead by shaman prophets and where a deep understanding of reality comes only through tantric psych & dancing-induced hypnoses. This is the motherfucking jam. Can’t tell you how fucking psyched I am about this record. It’s masterfully cohesive while capturing the range of styles Miller works in. If you remember how crazy I was/am about Half Blood, and then I say this is every bit as good as Half Blood, you’ll know I’m not shitting you and that this is everything you could want in another Horseback record.
David Andree & Josh Mason – Winter To Spring, Further Than First Thought (Own)
Andree & Josh Mason – Winter To Spring Further Than First Thought.mp3]
After Mason’s The Symbiont scored the number one spot in my Top Drone list last year, suffice it to say I was craving more of his delicate sound. This new record, a collaboration with David Andree, fills the void quite nicely. Andree & Mason worked long distance (from Minnesota & Florida, respectively), each recording a piece to tape in one take and sent to the other with the stipulation that they too must record their contributions in a single take, with the intent of closely simulating a live collaboration. The results are pure fucking magic. These two dudes work so perfectly together, it’s as if they’re the man with two heads, both individuals’ unique ideas being implemented by the same body. Call, Response is the calming restrained guitar drone that I loved so much on The Symbiont with the addition of Andree’s field recordings & tape manipulation which gives an already multi-faceted sound an even deeper quality, this is the most tender music you can think of, each tone & click acting as a breath of life, nothing existing but the natural silence found between floating specks of dust, the pluck of a guitar string as subtle & precise as the blink of an eye, textured rustling and elongated resonance doing everything it can to point the way towards enlightenment, spend an entire lifetime looking at every detail in this record and you’ll always discover more. I can’t imagine how much effort went in to making a record this understated and profound, but we reap the benefits, and the elegance of this masterful ambient is ours to enjoy. Only 300 pressed, so do not sleep on this.
/Background music/ Pinkcourtesyphone – Why Pretend – The Desire of Absence – Faulty Connections (from A Ravishment Of Mirror)
Have A Nice Life – Music Will Untune The Sky (from The Unnatural World)
Chester Hawkins – The Brood (from Semisolids)
Untitled – Untitled 10 (from Untitled 13)
Yoshi Wada – March 15 Part 2 (from Singing In Unison)
Ø – Takaisin (from Konstellaatio)
Cloud Becomes Your Hand – Bees Going Postal (from Rocks Or Cakes)
Half Makeshift – II (from Omen)
Hayden Pedigo – Mars Curiosity (from Seven Years Late)
Luciernaga – Maquinaria (from Collected Works: 2008-2013)
Blackhoods – Doomhound (from Sunk)
Helm – The Hollow Organ (from The Hollow Organ)
William Selman – Ignore The Loss Frame (from Chaîne Opératoire)
Mass Ornament – Honeyeater (from Saturn Eye)
Wizard Of – Skeleton II (from Face/Skeleton)
Yantis has been slowly digging his own niche in the weird ambient folk scene for a few years (see Box Elder, Cold Scholar), but this new one on Planted Tapes takes things to another level with the addition of warbly tape manipulation on top of his dusty reverbed guitars. Maybe the tape manipulation has always been there, but now it’s undeniable, and undeniably awesome. There’s a bit of a kitchen sink approach to instruments here, but the plucked strings (guitar and banjo), piano, tape work, & field recordings are the foundation, and he’s built a magnificent world of barely there ghosts and distant dreams, a room that you stumble through in the dark, grasping at shadows instead of the real thing, trying to confirm the existence of something concrete, and instead coming up empty, with the silence in between echoes warped until it’s only partially recognizable and the music you expect to hear is decayed, sharp & clear in one moment, falling apart at the next, delicate to begin with and turned to thread bare lace by the end, this is truly incredible heartfelt and emotional music that fills every fold of your headspace with a mysterious familiarity, an album that you won’t be able to shake and will obsess over until the tape itself degrades on its spools. I can’t recommend this enough. Only 100 made, $7 including postage, you can’t go wrong.
A few years ago, Nicholas Szczepanik put out a subscription series of 12 mini-CDs called Ante Algo Azul where he “experimented” on different styles & sounds. The first release from that series was Not Knowing (For Eliane Radigue). This new release on Desire Path takes the original 18:00 piece and expands & elaborates on it creating a full 53 minute record of the most perfect drone you’ll ever hear. The first part of “Not Knowing” is the same as the original (as far as I can tell), which is to say it’s a super minimal pulsing that sounds like a comatose heartbeat. And then shit gets fucking glorious, softly, slowly shifting gears to an angelic harmony that could tear down the walls between warring nations with everyone embracing their newfound family, swirling cascading strings that fill your heart with the joys & pains of life, strongly reminding me of Szczepanik’s magnum opus Please Stop Loving Me. The contrast on Not Knowing, gracefully moving back & forth between long form minimalism and refined euphoria, is something I haven’t heard Szczepanik do yet, and he’s already proved himself a fucking master. The highs are incredibly high, tearful & magnificent, glowing & intricate, and the lows are delicately hypnotic, with a precision in tonality that’s breathtaking. This is absolute fucking perfection. This has everything I ask for in a drone record, and more. As much as I love Please Stop Loving Me (#1 drone record of 2011 yo), I can easily say Not Knowing is hands down a more mature, accomplished, and impressive fucking record. I have a hard time imagining Szczepanik ever topping this.
Also, you might be thinking that since Not Knowing is one long track, what the fuck is Desire Path, the label who’s literally 7 for 7 on their releases and exclusively works with vinyl, doing releasing this? They started the Tangents series, where they’ll release CDs of long form music that can’t (shouldn’t) be on vinyl. And this is the debut release in that series, strictly limited to 500, but given the deluxe treatment as Desire Path always does.
Now it’s streaming, too! Not sure why I didn’t do that before. Stupidly thought no one would be interested, until some brave soul spoke up for the rest of you.
Also, I recently discovered Scott Tuma’s Not For Nobody. Incredible record. Goes quite well with Cody Yantis’ new one Resonant Memory, also incredible.
/Background music/ Mark Banning – A Sea Of Glass (from Journey To The Light)
Kim Gordon – Walks With Men (from Design Office With Kim Gordon)
Ancient Sky – Invisible Hand (from All Get Out)
Julie Byrne – Prism Song (from Rooms With Walls And Windows)
Atrocious Neighbour – Small Fingers Fell Out Of The Wall (from Secondary Efflorescence On The Dam Of The Robert Moses order cialis online india Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station)
Scott Tuma – Rakes (from Not For Nobody)
Cody Yantis – Brightness IV (from Resonant Memory)
Deleuzer – SideB3 (from Greatest Hits Vol. 1)
René Margraff – Rot Gelb (from Phasen)
Klozapin – White Noise (from Demo)
Thief – Nothing Lacking (from Greed single)
RP Collier – Cymvox (from RP Collier’s Soundcloud)
Ernest Gibson – All Of Us Together (from Island Records)
Nagual – Honey River Lacquer (from Nagual)
Bird People – Into The Ring Nebula (from Terma)
Haunted Disco – Dead Air (from Enter Through The Exit)
Anne Guthrie – Rough Above With Uneven Base (from Codiaeum Variegatum)
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – What We Loved Was Not Enough (from Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything)
There’s been quite a few charitable music-related things recently and I thought I’d share two of the more important (to me) ones.
First up, this 3 hour noise comp called When One Has Nothing Left Make Ceremonies Out Of The Air And Breathe Upon Them. It’s $15 and all proceeds go directly to Stephen Petrus, aka Murderous Vision, the Ohio artist whose home & possessions went up in flames earlier this month. The noise community pulled this shit together real quick, like in a matter of days, to help Stephen get back on his feet. The comp is fuckin killer, ranging from doomed industrial and harsh noise to monodrone and rhythmic dark ambient featuring artists like Hoor-Paar-Kraat, Zurvan, Robert Turman, and a collab between Xiphoid Dementia & Theologian. 28 songs, over 3 hours, and the chance to help a dude who’s down & out.
Then there’s Heligator Records, started up by Ryan Hall of Tome To The Weather Machine (a fantastic site if you’re unaware) who recently spent 2 years in Swaziland as a Peace Corps Volunteer who helped create a library and two pre-schools at the Malindza Refugee Camp. The library has over 1,000 books (including resources specifically for the teachers) and a computer, and it serves the refugees who come from all over Africa. Heligator Records is basically a digital singles only thing on Bandcamp. Each song only costs a dollar but they/I would encourage you to donate more because the money goes directly to the library for maintenance & upkeep, as well as some compensation for the two library volunteers. This is a fantastic thing Ryan has set up. Really fucking psyched about it. Oh, and all the music is rad as hell too so there’s that.
Insanely awesome debut release from Glottalstop aka the Petrels dude, basking in an unsettling tape manipulated tension. Woodsmoke is fucking fantastic, two side long pieces that are dark as hell, the A side is super minimal and the B side cranks the horror volume to 11, the whole thing sounds like a haunted mansion coming to life to chill yer bones, it has deep low end tape wobble drone tying itself in knots with ghostly cello skree, scratchy looped hypnosis, scrambled white static, voices that you’re damn certain must be coming from inside your head, and who knows what kind of electronic wizardry that taps you on the shoulder and quickly disappears, this is nightmarish in the most perfect way, ethereal and nauseating, sounds rising from the silent mist and being whisked away before you can fully hear them, roaring demons passing in & out through a wall of noise, Woodsmoke is about as eerie as you can fuckin get. And like most things Tartaruga, this is dressed to the nines with a screenprinted inner sleeve that runs across the label, a sewn & screenprinted jacket, and all housed in a PVC sleeve, extremely limited to 200. No reason to skip this one.
AGB Radio 2014/01/27
/Background music/ Bardo Pond – Sangh Seriatim (from Refulgo)
Horseback – Piedmont Apocrypha (from Piedmont Aocrypha)
Steve Roach – Refractions Of Remembering (from At The Edge Of Everything)
Ishqamatics – Universe Cubensis Continium (from Spacebound)
Jeremiah Cymerman – Rogyapa (from Sky Burial)
Teiji Ito – Moonplay (from Music For Maya)
B. Jasienski – Przejechali (read by Piotr Rypson) (from To Mor Row: Futurist Poetry)
Charles Cohen – Club Revival (from The Middle Distance)
Hakobune – If It Were To Fade (from If It Were To Fade)
Katie Gately – Pipes (from Pipes)
T.R.A.S.E. – Harmonium (from Tape Recorder And Synthesiser Ensemble)
Dhow – Act Of Grace (from Dhow)
Zwei Kreise – The Sorcerer (from Escape Velocity)
Jussi Lehtisalo – Viimeinen Kalja (from The Complete Solo Works)
Gushing Cloud – Turnflew (from Beat Wings In Vain)
Richard Dawson – A Parents Address To His Firstborn Son On The Day Of His Birth (from The Glass Trunk)
Craig Leon – She Wears A Hemispherical Skull Cap (from Nommos)
So I’m a little late on the pickup with this one, but only a little, and if this is the first you’re hearing of Insect Ark, fear not! you’re not alone, it was flying below the radar for a bit. This is the solo efforts of Dana Schechter (of Bee And Flower, The Angels Of Light) and from what I can tell, Long Arms is her first release that’s not a 7″, although it’s only a 10″ EP so there’s still no proper full length yet. But goddamn this 10″ already has me craving cheap cialis daily more. Long Arms is made from just a lapsteel, bass, synth, and a sampler, it’s a dark doom drone that’s heavy on the psych, sprawling moon howling jams that that’ll raise the dead, a shuffling jangle perfectly at home in the Wild West running under eerie stretched guitar & humming feedback, this is snarling, desolate, and fuckin evil, with menacing badassery written all over it. Listening to this while walking anywhere gives you instant swagger. And the packaging on this is super sexy, hand numbered, screen printed, fold up envelope style cardboard, and limited to 500, you really can’t go wrong with this.
A sort of northeastern supergroup if you will, comprised of Eric Hardiman (runs Tape Drift, records as Rambutan, in Century Plants, Burnt Hills, etc), Ray Hare (records as Fossils From The Sun, also in Century Plants, Burnt Hills, etc), Linda Aubry Bullock (solo strange sound creator, and A/V/multi/media experimenter extraordinaire as Orangecookie), and Mike Bullock (solo electroacoustic excellence, works with Linda together in music/video/performance as Rise Set Twilight, in video as Twin Stars, and the record label Shadowselves). I try not to do too much bio stuff in reviews but all these rad folks fuckin deserve it. Music wise, Hibernation is as weird as you’d expect from a lot like this, a sprawling post psych hallucination that gets the smeared heat haze treatment, stumbling in the scorched desert under the stars and being comforted by your inner demons, an echo mumbling something vague & disorienting as spacey droning electronics & muffled guitars twist together into a ghostly tranquility, swaying between beautiful dreams and fevered nightmares. Putting these 4 together is almost begging for disappointment, but they deliver the best fuckin debut you could ask for. A mere $7 is all it’ll take to get these fucked jams in your hands.
Second edition of the Label Spotlight on AGB Radio, this time showing off all of Holodeck’s totally bitchin catalog, heavy on the spacey synthy jams with plenty of weird shit tossed in for good measure. That Troller record is without a doubt one of my favorite things form the past few years. Still on pretty much constant rotation over here. Anyway, here’s to Holodeck’s spectacular 2 years with 20 releases. Way to fuckin go. Can’t wait to see what else they’ve got up their sleeves.
AGB Radio 2014/01/20
/Background music/ Interludes from Troller’s Troller
Smokey Emery – Tender Mercies (from Soundtracks For Invisibility Vol. 1: Youth Burnt While Travelling)
Thousand Foot Whale Claw – Fleshwave (from Lose In Those Dunes)
Troller – Best (from Troller)
Lumens – Sweet Voice (from Lumens)
Thousand Foot Whale Claw – Time Brothers (from Time Brothers)
Amasa Gana – Side A (excerpt) (from untitled record, HD006)
M. Geddes Gengras – Air Solo (from Beyond The Curtain)
Silent Land http://quotecorner.com/online-pharmacy.html time Machine – An Own To One’s Room (from I Am No Longer Alone With Myself And Can Only Artificially Recall The Scary And Beautiful Feeling Of Solitude EP)
S U R V I V E – cschz 02 (excerpt) (from HD009)
JU4N – Last Night In Cyberia (from Vaporware)
Sungod – Opiate Fields And The Blazing Glory (from Contackt)
Dylan C – Necropolis (from Samsara: Causes)
Dylan C – Left Behind (from Samsara: Conditions)
Thousand Foot Whale Claw – Veritas (from Dope Moons, Vol. 1)
Smokey Emery – The Lights Are Big And I’m Driving Home (from Soundtracks For Invisibility Vol. 2: You Take The High Road)
S U R V I V E – To Light Alone I Bow (from HDXV)
Good Stuff House – Untitled 6 (from Good Stuff House)
Marie Davidson – La Vallée d’Or (from Marie Davidson)
Sneaky Snake – Eventide 2 (from Eventide)
Sensum And Clunch – Strawberry Days (from Sensum And Clunch)
SSLEEPERHOLD – Dreamwaves II (from Ruleth)
I’m going to refrain from bragging about how much I love Have A Nice Life, but for the sake of this review you should know that a) I hate the term “fanboy” and b) I would without hesitation call myself a hardcore Have A Nice Life fanboy. Their debut Deathconsciousness is fucking untouchable, easily in my all time Top 10, if not my Top 5.
If this is the first you’ve heard of HANL (Dan Barrett & Tim Macuga), I’m so fucking psyched to share them with you. Think Nadja plus Joy Division then forget that and just listen to that sample up there. Fucking life changing. Honestly, some of the best sounds to ever grace this sweet doomed planet of ours. The gloom is infinite and I accept it wholly. This is the massive dejected pop you’ve always needed but could never find, with bombastic pulverizing percussion echoing in an empty warehouse, deafening catchy riffs, smooth black synths, and boundless reverbed ghost vocals singing about the closeness of death and the woe of Nothingness.
Compared to Deathconsciousness, The Unnatural World is cleaner, better produced, more consistent, and more mature (whatever the fuck that means). But it still sounds like a blown out lo-fi home recording, it’s just that the atmospheric tracks don’t sound like sound they’re being played by your buy cialis 20 mg neighbors next door. The beautifully suffocating “Music Will Untune The Sky” is a perfect example, instead penetrating your core and making you feel like you’re drowning in slow motion, watching the life dust float in sunlit water, waiting for your last breath to expire in your lungs. And while Dan & Tim might be in a healthier emotional state while making TUW than they were for DC (pure conjecture on my part), this is every bit as depressing & devastating as their first record.
I hold DC up on the highest fucking pedestal. I mean on its own DC closer “Earthmover” is the single most soul obliterating song I’ve ever heard, and TUW never reaches that level of apocalyptic dread. But compared to TUW, DC feels a lot like an experiment. This new record is HANL leveled up, everything that you love about DC has been refined, turning the genre-less madness into a motherfucking masterpiece. I had insanely high expectations for TUW and it’s hands down one of the best goddamn records I’ve ever heard. It might not overthrow DC in my all time Top 10 but that’s probably more for sentimental reasons than anything else. I know I’m an enthusiastic hyperbolic kinda guy but I say this without the slightest bit of exaggeration: TUW couldn’t possibly be any fucking better. It’s literally flawless.
