Category Archives: REVIEW

Titled like a prescription drug, ‘OLSB Music No.1’ is my first encounter with Bre’r (Darren Fisher), an Oakland musician of Anticon association who produces therapeutic, Kranky-style drones.  Affecting even the same font on offset of the most recent Tim Hecker release, and beyond the Stars of the Lid title, Fisher captures well the overcast and glassy swell of early Growing, pairing long tones and brilliant flutter.  Deep, E-bowed buzz rattles tintinabular clatter like wind chimes on the bluster, halted only briefly by the pure tonality of “Big Fashion”, itself a vortex leading out of the soundtrack work Kranky responds to, and into the modern synthesizer work liquidating such houses of drone.   With impressionistic half-thoughts for titles (“Old Marriage”, “Fitness Beacon”, “Same Choir”), and enough variation and development in each track to make this C30 an album rather than formal “pieces”, he’s really gotten a pitch-perfect account of that fading, peaceable kingdom.  Labeled tapes come in glossy j-card, 100 copies.  Recommended.

((Cave)) Recordings C30
$5
HERE

The second long-player from Niao (not to be confused with Ne-Yo or Nyan Cat, this is the duo of George Glikerdas and Gordon Spencer-Blaetz), ‘Prayer’ is a modest collection of seven tracks, thoroughly instrumental in spite of the lyric-less chants which lead each song.  Evoking the dead of summer, or perhaps an eternal summer, the LP defies its winter release and lends a convenient excuse to why this review comes so late [in truth, I had lost the disc behind a shelf].  With Afro-beat timbres just shy of Afro-beat grooves, and very far from Afro-beat declaration, the pair achieve a frequently mesmerizing minimalism akin to Terry Riley’s high-fidelity middle works, marked by a constant, rainbow road arpeggio across the album.  But far from an endless tapestry of drone, or an ADD cop-out to “chillwave” or some other such horseshit, the compartmental songification of each track affirms, implicitly, that this is in fact good old New Wave: the wild incantations of “Sway” recall the neophyte jubilee of The Creatures, like the punk’s revelation of his own (literal and figurative) voice in an earnest scat; with synthesized leads (no guitars), the stoned rhythm of “Aman Aman” moderates its tight sequencings by plodded percussion, measured by the long kerplunk of the crash cymbal (total misnomer in this case), recalling the shallow-water spirituals of Sun Araw; the title track has a gravity and propulsion like latter Talk Talk, Glikerdas even mouthing the dramatic vowels of Mark Hollis, only the lack of effects belie the scale and close proximity of this bedroom music.  The misfit between certain evocative titles and wordless delivery open a cozy nook of reflection in this otherwise “trippy” composition, best exemplified by “Computer Keyboard Oil”, which contrasts a motile percussion (guest drummer Austin Julian) and bleary keyboard which apparently have never met, like a mash-up of James Ferraro from now and three years ago.  Rousing, subtle, the key is what is not said.

Sailing Records LP/CD
$12/10
HERE

Nearly a year between appearances, Edmonton’s Michael Toepfer returns with another Potier. tape.  Titled ‘Ductile’, this relatively-brief cassette demonstrates well the live performance of Noise, not only through the intense energy peaks of Toepfer’s last endeavor, but with the additional dynamics of practice – the setup, the fondling, the ambiguity; here complimented by additional materials like wood and metals sniffed-out by contact mics.  The punchy angles are still there, repeating the arrhythmic outburst of frustration which is the driving force of Harsh Noise, but the finer-tunings around the edges have allowed in a more qualified contrast across each side (the “duct” of the title: pores, vents and gills), no matter the levels, indicating a more meditative and efficient performance overall.  Edition of 50 copies.

Ramshackle Day Parade C16
$6
HERE 

Like a capsule from a very recent era, the collection ‘Iridial’ captures so much symbolic of the CDr boom circa 2007– and ironically from a project that’s never before appeared on CDr.  That is, Vales, the youthful project of 2AM Tapes proprietor Dave Doyen, is here not archived but (self-) monumentalized with a four-disc collection of drones, hand-painted discs in an over-sized clamshell.  Pegged directly to the analog synthesizer manufactured by Casper Electronics, each disc-long track exploits the inner space of the bedroom composer and the organic induction/deduction dialectic of the analog consumer format.  To put the sound in quick relief, these are standard drones (that is not to say substandard, or redundant – which would take a whole treatise on “drone” as a form) which err to the bright, granular, wall-to-wall, and melodramatic practitioners from Emaciator, Taiga Remains, Daniel Menche, and the like.  Each disc contains a number of significant transitions, making each a listening experience more engaged than not – more to the front of the mind’s ear than the back, so to speak – and without being reduced to a demo collection for the Drone Lab technology, exhibit their own identities as discs: yes, there are the gaps and peaks to disc two’s noise which distinguishes it from the throbbing abandon-ship of disc three – more like a Pulse Emitter adventure than the abstracts of disc one’s wall sound – and still then unique from the tenacious aggregate drone of four, which recalls the monoliths found lurking around Basses Frequencies.

Yet despite all this (and despite the fact that it is this sound which truly matters in the end), what bares the most conversation is the medium which Doyen and his contemporaries have chosen for presentation: seeking to transport these long-forms, it’s less certain that he’s seeking to wall them in with the 5” circumference of the CDr; if there wasn’t such a smart distinction between the pieces, it would be ridiculous to even claim an edge to one, let alone how to add a 2^nd, 3^rd, or 4^th cut.  The distinction between that bygone era of CDrs and now is the imposition, pragmatic to a fault, of the cloud server and applications such as Bandcamp for supporting what are surely thousands of like-minded drone technicians (as sourced to something like youarenowlisteningto___), not to mention the back-catalogs uploaded (some say “stockpiled”) by the minute.  There is a challenge in here somewhere, which fashions the eternal music of a drone and volunteers it for a 78 minute or less life-course (we are also post-CD changer).  What are we listening to, and what are we listening for?  Is it really not what we’re looking at?  Or what we’re giving each other?  And like any true challenge, there’s a good chance we won’t win this one no matter how good it sounds in the end.  Total running time is just shy of 3 hours, though some copies come with a bonus disc of re-released material from the tapes ‘Sun Sick’ and ‘Fever Monument’.  Edition of 48 copies.

self-released4CDr
$14
HERE

‘Within’ is a friendly appearance on Land of Decay by Utech regulars Ithi, who easily fill that guitar-voice-doom/melodic-drone niche with Locrian, Plotkin, Owwl.  The duo of Shawn Convey and Luke Krnkr play a music their own size, fielding epic sounds without too much affect or overblown sentiments.  The tracks are cool – not cold – and agnostic, not aloof.  The opener “Go Forth and Die” is a cold wave variation on that perennial theme, sparking a light-touch evacuation throb with monotone throat singing, but charged with a cresting loop of a bright metal lick familiar to the noble abstracts of Horseback – the piece melting into their “cover” of Nico’s “Roses in the Snow”, a difficult quotation only satisfied when the tidal sound suddenly runs ashore.  This would have been a jewel in the Phaserprone catalog were it active again.  On the reverse, “NoWHere” is a side-long, low-industrial drone cum doom send-up.  Like the rough-hewn pattern which fills the panels of the j-card, this vaguely geometric plane is more cellular, disrupted, familiar to the tapes of the quietly-defunct Peasant Magik.   100 copies on legit, imprinted tapes and sleeves.

Krnkr’s regular gig is half (sometimes quarter) of Servile Sect, who with regular coauthor Nhate Clmnt (what’re you gonna do?) have been releasing a steady-stream of genre-bending black ambient LPs and cassettes for several years now.  If it’s any credential of their consistency, the band seem to tack an album on from the beginning of their career for each they record anew, such as when Ecstatic Peace! reissued their 2007 long-player ‘Stratospheric Passenger’, or now with LoD’s ‘Demos 2005/2006’.  Side A of the C30 is consumed whole by “Manifesting Starships To Destroy The Vatican”,  with dense plumes of distortion and whisps of high-altitude vocals filling the channels in classic doom fashion, yet in the end parting to reveal the slightest twinkle of stars and sky behind – a rather unique development connoting delicacy and optimism.  On the reverse, the blend “Nouranihar/Kings Of Saturn” reminds us of the “demo” status of these recordings: hastier in production, anxious in tempo, and vacillating from segment to segment, these are seeds of ideas, jotted fast and furious in single-take riffs and unfiltered electronics.  The presence of the latter adds a dimension of personal worry familiar to the narratives of David Reed’s Envenomist or the portraits of Hive Mind, made from alien technologies, malfunction and quantum-physical perceptual static.  In their imagery, the band’s invocation of cosmic matters is, while not exactly a problem, not exactly intuitive to the earth-bound paganism of their Metal forerunners.  The co-release of older outings with new provide easy evidence for how the group developed their niche from these diverse sources.  100 copies on green cassettes with full-color inserts.

Land of Decay cassette
$5
HERE

New Belgian label and musical collective Hare Akedod dropped their second and latest release: a compilation C50 of esoterica from twelve unique projects shoring-up a signature sound from analog electronics, eastern song structures, and digital treatments, blended well with a general weird/outsider ethic.  Each track is worth a mention, and when rearranged form a complete European lineage from bare, avant-folk recordings, into the electrification and drone of cosmic rock, and back around to the maximal/minimalism of late electronica: starting with the early highlight “Miles D Blues” from Hellvete, a guitar and voice track reminiscent of solo Six Organs of Admittance, with a more overt eastern influence, this meditation becomes outwardly-directed with the new folkways of Brl’-Âab – an anachronistic mix of analog and electronic instruments, with modern and traditional styles, inspired no doubt by the Sir Richard Bishop and a little homework into the modal repetition in Arabic music.  Consigning this power then to the instruments, strings and kettle drums in the primitive spiritual by Razen, weirdo noises from Vom Grill, lo-fi guitar babble from Urpf Lanze, we land on “USF1” – a sizzling piece of No Wave by False Friend, reminiscent the recent work by Mattress with a little more glitch filling the gap where the vocalist once stood.  This cool is externalized in the vanity of Jan Mathé’s “Gallup,” an automotive synth melodrama like an excerpt from the excerpted Drive soundtrack, ratching to the intense neo-Kraut of Kosmiche Keuterboeren which spews from blown gasket like a Hototogisu track polished to a soft chrome edge.  Vibing-out on “Birth Day”, the intro track from Milan W is a light, and lightly-weird synthesis in curved air – a little too odd for something like Sacred Phrases, too mellow for Spectrum Spools – and a fine primer for the huge contribution by DSRlines, a truly original mix of Alva Noto-style micro electronics and cosmic drones, amounting to an understated fugue of tremendous perceptual depth and total engagement.  Finally, according to my retelling, comes Forklong Daruplat’s simple galloping guitar “fragment,” which reframes this simple aesthetic ornament over into an acoustical challenge to the stereo field previously deconstructed – and returns us to the communal harmony of the guitarsmith in Hellvete.  The ambient void of the closing track from the self-titled Hare Akedod collective is a vast live capture, resonant with strings, buzzing with electronics, and haunted by wailing voices – like a recording made outside the booths from which each of these contributions were simultaneously crafted.  Limited to 100 copies in over-sized cases, now sold out at the source.  Highly recommended.

Hare Akedod cassette
sold out
HERE

‘Restrict|Suppress|Censor’ is a three-way Noise split between Poland’s Sleep Sessions (David Kowalski) and Australians Arefyu (Michael Ellingford) and agit8 (MD Bailey).  Comparisons are ready across the disc to Japanese wall noise, but more accurately, those Americans under the influence (Bastard Noise, Menche, Wiese himself), as well as Australians of the Extreme scene more close to home.  Complementing the frenetic, mechanistic, cut-up style of the like-minded artists involved, the disc’s glossy, commercial production is a nonlinear blast of language and texture which sufficiently obscures authorship; the precious space allotted to each artist is used to thank one another, and the label repeatedly – an act of glad-handing which taken positively is a collective abdication of ownership in the true spirit of collaboration.  For this reason, attributions will not be made, and the granular barrage of this disc must speak for itself.  The first chunk of tracks follow a most aggressive pasting technique, splicing broadcast materials – pop music, speeches – between pitch-bent frequencies and hard loops in gabber anti-rhythm.  Given the brief length of these 1-3 minute tracks, the aggregate effect is easier to spot, and makes these little sketches (“Mute But Armed”, “Adroit”, “Cunning Duplicity”) something more expository.  Moving on to what appears to be the first of the “Kokoda Trails” trilogy (again, this sleeve is a fucking runestone), longer piano/string/drone samples offset the erratic contours of the blister-and-scratch laid overtop; where the former tracks suggest intense composition, these echo the movement and two-handedness of live performance.  By the final third of the disc, all sweetness and light – once the human element, then the symphonic sounds – has dropped out, and a confluence of the edit-heavy first block blends into the sustained attacks and recursion of the middle segments.  Pooling with blood into the final, 10 minute piece, the whole affair seems to (literally, sonically) materialize as it slows, revealing the manual sweeps, blows, and scrapes that the artist filters and affects in accelerated time.  In many ways a lot of classic Noise in a relatively new bottle, the disc has multiple options to offer the initiated despite its own prohibitions.

Now….This! CDr
$5(AU)
HERE

Another Andre Foisy project named after another non-genre horror film, Kwaidan is the result of adding a third and losing a decade, where Foisy joins Mike Weis and Neil Jendon, projecting the ethereal and organic in contrast to the speculative and synthetic of the recently-reviewed Eolomea tape (where Foisy partners with David Reed).  Working to enclose rather than expand the sonic space, the single track of ‘Impala’ is dynamic yet cohesive, crowded like entrails by the insertion of the extra man into the performative cavity; whether referencing the sedan or the animal, it’s the same difference of organic solidarity and essence (though I guess the former implies room for passengers, these are better likened to parasites in the gut of this platonic ideal form).  What stands out across the session is the discrete pebbling of Weis’ percussion – not all that different from his regular contributions as a member of Zelienople, but in this context it becomes the grain of old-growth dance and literature, the fog (ironically, given the ghostly theme) of electronic effects lifted; similarly, guitars are amplified clean, wistful as Roy Montgomery or Steven R. Smith or Loren Connors, making little allegories from the struggle inherent in every guitar chord.  Synthesizers are cinematic, dressing environments more mental than physical, but brutally earnest, apropos of nothing fantastic (again, at least, in comparison to the epic ascension of Eolomea) but compelling as an exceptional instance.  The overall effect is not far from a Godspeed track less the conductor-pundit’s heavy hand.  100 copies on yellow cassettes.  An auspicious first release for this new label.

Accidental Guest
$6
HERE

Eolomea, the black metal Patty Waters, made a self-titled tape capturing a similar horror film of the prolific Black Swan releases – not to mention the sound of his filmy surface – set in icy tones and melodramatic intensity.  The duo is David Reed on synthesizers and Andre Foisy on guitar.  The open space of these rhythmless compositions allows Foisy to play with form as he continues the heavy effects (mostly air, but sometimes earth) of his Locrian day job.  This brings out the Reed of Luasa Raelon more than Envenomist, trading dull pulses for singing organ tones, generating fantasy mise-en-scene that is inherently hostile to the default human worlds of rock music.  The two modes persist in a subtle patchwork (best heard through headphones) across the three tracks, which, despite evocative titles – “Sootfall and Fallout”, “Ordovician”, and “Seven Before the Throne” – appear a series of variations on Foisy’s guitar themes, which at their best appear heavily, if hastily, erased.  C40 with repeating programs, 100 copies.

Brave Mysteries cassette
$7
HERE

Baldruin, Germany’s Johannes Schebler, conjures ‘Nachtfalter’ through baroque psychedelics and dark ambient material.  Beginning the tape with “Irrweg” and what may very well be a phrasing-quotation from a later Coil LP, the tracks follow in quick secession with an arboreal paganism and wry, literary sensibility.  The Sturm und Drang continues with similar titling (anything can appear a grimoire when written in German with the right font), compiling sounds from flutes, bells and various percussion, antiquated strings, and well-disguised electronics.  The difference, however, singling out the exceptional Baldruin from neighbors like Hoor Paar Kraat and Clay Ruby is the deliberate condensation of these sounds into gnarled structures of compositional organization, not without voice both literally and figuratively.  High points such as “Spiegelung,” “Schürfwunde,” and “Wildwuchs” stand shoulders to the best instrumentals of Current 93, evoking the same garden fantasies of pleasure and horror, but mostly an even-keeled wistfulness for both.  Avant-folkways are similar forged to noir guitarsmiths like Jon Porras, Steven R. Smith, Ben Nash, and Evan Miller, both for instrumental dexterity and deliberation of vision.  A C30 with 12 tracks, the tasteful length of these pieces ensures no idea runs afoul of a conclusion, and the tape object emanates potential by smuggling its own secrets. 100 copies on clear tapes with fancy glossy J-cards.  Highly recommended.

Brave Mysteries cassette
$7
HERE