Category Archives: REVIEW

After a long hiatus from their Number None collaboration, Chicago’s Chris Miller and Jeremy Bushnell return with ‘Strategies Against Agriculture’.  The ironic play on the Einstürzende Neubauten title is not pure comedy when considered on the spectrum amidst Wolves in the Throneroom’s primitivist screed against GMO wheat, ‘Malevolent Grain,’ and the Jared Diamond quote inside the fold of the J-card; nor is the tone of the side-long tape, a blending of their former cyber-hardcore aesthetic with the usurpation of Locrian’s black metal sensibilities, occultist visions, and over-driven sound fields.  “Vile Gnarl,” the introduction and case-in-point, swarms with guitar feedback, and races with bands of lowered-frequency groan under the weight of this dense accumulation.  The compositions remain familiar to the classic Null setup: canvas stretched tight of longform drone-noise; the motoric churn of “ID-vision” condensates like a Daniel Menche symphony without ever breaking the fever; the simultaneous deathtone/firestorm “Viagra/Lunesta” achieves a binaural tension, stretching the listener between alchemy-induced modes of staying up; “KKKamera”, whatever the reference, clinches the loathsome locks dreaded through these four tracks, moaning rhythmically, amid industrial churn and the golden silt of sharply-pitched oscillations.  An understated and contiguous comeback.  On pro-pressed tapes with glossy, full-color insert.  100 copies.

Land of Decay cassette
$6.5
HERE

Having long-since articulated the sound and vision for his Sacred Phrases label, Adam returns to the performative space of Dry Valleys.  The multi-part “Energetic Shifts 1-3” displays the austerity, temperance, and base appeal which his many minimal cassette packages offer.  A cameral arrangement of synthesizer in rose-colored lights, the first phase gleams and slightly glares in a precious melody and bare harmony, constructing a deeper synth world than most competitors can seem to conjure, and after a heavy breath, liquidating into something fainter though equally static, permanent, and desiring for a listener’s feeling patronage.  This trilogy can be contrasted to the four-handed programming on “Lattices of Light” by Afterlife (Franklin Teagle of Anathema Tapes and Ryan McGill of Bones of Seabirds): intense sequencing of point/counterpoint over a shimmering fabric of aquamarines, fades to a cavernous flow snaked by electric serpents, and sputtering circuits.  Exhibiting the height of narrative for this label, the boat ride is linear and full of delights, even if we’re no wiser for the wear.

Another exemplar in impressionism, framing, and anonymity, the sole release by Black Velvet Stereo called ‘Metal Rain Machine’ runs the scope of Sacred Phrases and spills over even, into the metabolic terrain of ‘Drive’-based nostalgia from Cliff Martinez and Symmetry.   “Fire Forest”, “Red Stone”, “Cold Mountains” summarize well the swift overviews of side one, a twilight tear through burning California hills artificially-darkened by smoke.  Organic synthesized cloth-ing and conspicuously synthesizer-qua-synthesizer form a nice contrast of droning vibes and environment, and authoritative leads which zag like neon pin-stripping for its own sake.  The reverse features a separate mise-en-scene, more optimistic and meteorological, with high-frequency tones in light spectrums, like the post-draught recovery of the cliff-side chaparral: tweeting, budding and buzzing, the tones stay close to the soggy ground, releasing air effervescently and clipping tendrils of vapor in their infancy.  Admittedly, the tone shifts midway, with “The Wind”, a sort of reprise of side A’s nihil and race, now rendered in cool streaks and metallic curbs with unending sight-lines.

Sacred Phrases cassette
$7.5
HERE

‘Abohm’ is an immense collection of 35 vignettes over 70 minutes, furthering the utterly unique sound of John Swana’s EVI (electronic valve instrument)- and trumpet-heavy slogans, as microscopic and atomized as the title unit.  Somewhere between Coil’s ‘Themes from Hellraiser’ and the IDM-jazz of Ui, Swana’s gems are Blade Runner sonatas for automatons, haunted by AI like the entirely electronic score from ‘Paprika’, with a precocious DIY evoking the animated slackerdom of Aeon Flux and the Muzak of Duckman.  Swaying, scaling ringtones over sequined beats; twisted arpeggios, MIDI-breakbeats, synthesized Theremins, and clipped-not-glitched horn solos; squirrely voices and phantom jingles; a mythical retroactive sci-fi through and through.  Edition of 100 hand-numbered tapes, with art by James Ulmer.

Galtta cassette
$7
HERE

One of the most exciting Rock-like substances to crystallize in the autumn of Stunned Records was Excavacations, the pair of Nicholas Longworth and Chad Parsons (proprietors of The Offices of Moore & Moore), who with Warm Climate seemed poised to embed a truly-new form of guitar Rock music.  This CD compilation combines dubbings from their four previous cassettes, plus four new tracks – a wild pastiche-music inseparable from the Phil French collages which fit their earliest releases hand-in-glove, now morphed by his later camo-blob assemblage, emphasizing the reverse, or amorphous qualities of these scantily-bound sounds.  ‘Object Permanence,’ I just happened to learn today on an unrelated outing, is also the psychological concept that things exist even when we don’t sense them (that is, the conceptual quality of noumenon, which, oddly, I did know the meaning of); the title is fitting, perfect really, for such a delicate existence as the band has had, lying in tapes of feint circulation, now made impervious by curation.  In fine company on the label of Winter Drones – and for some specific qualities, Grouper, Mudboy, and Hexlove – these tracks are a sophisticated and singular mix of catchy hooks and poured-over effects, channeling at once the painfully-earnest, Midwest indie rock of Minus Story and Okkervil River (esp. “Sine 3”, “No County”, “Stalk the House”), and the rich ambience of PanAmerican, Zelienople, and/or Benoit Pioulard (…“Porter”, “Yonsish”, “Haru”); with equal-rights drumming and radio’d vocal tracks, they stroke my biases with a thousand young-San Diegan guitar lines (think A Day Called Zero, Swivelneck, or Chune).  Given the milieu of their once label-houses, these former qualities were always the ones to stand out in relief, though the heights – the true, dazzling heights of synthesis – come in the novel form of “Grape Ape Tobledrone” and “Silver Salver” – oompa bass, circular rhythm and searing lead melody, two-tone vocals – like a hundred feet down the path left untaken in the shaggy haste of first-generation Animal Collective and Raccoo-oo-oon; or in the case of “Gished”, the squandered vision of early Smashing Pumpkins toward a new Bop aesthetic.  CD in a digipak.  If it isn’t clear by now, highest recommendation.

Weird Forest CD
$10
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Pumice has a new album after a relative “lapse” of four years.  ‘Puny,’ as are the albums of Stefan Neville more generally, is a perfect example of how low-fidelity music makes a hit in spite of itself, the gentleperson’s respite from that community college called “song-writing.”  As comfortable with the skeleton of composition as early Smog, unfiltered at the surface as The Dead C, and deeply-ethereal as (recent split-mate) Grouper, Neville saves guitar music by demystifying it, ala Iran and Vini Reilly: starting strong with “Hey Crap Crab”, the blear is so totalizing as to nearly careen the Kiwi babble into his palindromic riff, inadvertently tintinabular and pump-activated.  At times sophisticated as the British definition of “weird”, “Ready to Rot” sounds like a recent Clinic session-outtake moaned through a sewer tunnel; recalling the latest Detective Instinct, “Coeliacs Bring a Plate” assumes the same twee stature and hothouse disjointment of Jad Fair; the twelve-minute shanty “Trophy” is an organ song deconstructed and spiritual as the music of Plinth and the like from Ireland’s Rusted Rail.  The instrumentality sinks in subtly as the disc continues, like “Covered in Spiders” arrives just in time for an Indian summer mixtape, side-by-side the ecstatic peace of Anvil Salute and napful bliss of Padang Food Tigers.  In ellipsis, Neville concludes the disc with the 10 minute “Cuachag Nan Craobh”, a traditional tune reinterpreted with a full stoner outfit playing their own blazing anthem on stretched tapes, acidic distortion, tubular traps, and an organ’s drone.  Four years well-worth the wait.  And happy 50th to the formidable Soft Abuse!  Recommended.

Soft Abuse CD/CS/LP
$10/8/15
HERE

Portland musician Jeremy Long records essential minimalism under the title Brown, while baring plain continuities with his membership in Tecumseh; but where that band represents the earthen element in trying to ford the chasm between minimal and maximal, Brown’s debut ‘Lepidoptera’ makes a micro-tonal sound of pure air, barely holding the light that gives it color.  Glassy, non-figurative drones – essentially the same eternal sound refracted from the days of Morton Feldman – yet now referring by its appropriation to the cosmos in ‘Challenger’ by Burning Star Core or Nurse With Wound’s expansive ‘Space Music’, the side-long pairing “Cocoon” and “Lepidoptera” contrast like water into water, two vague precipitating stains in the soundfield.  Though technically side B (but reversed in the etching – the only thing to mark each side), these two tracks are the unstained ginger to cleanse the ear before the rough grain of the flipside, “Last Instar”: consuming the whole side with one sustained chord, the track vibrates with an intense power which hastily numbs then swallows smaller intonations, the constitutive threads often apparent like strands of saffron in the contours of this brown stream.  More vital, it soon becomes clear this macro figure is not in fact “floating in space” of some modernist ether, but rather writhes in some indeterminate vessel – the bounds of which are suggested in sonar, when the chord strikes a wall or echoes further down the chamber of this unknown architecture.  In like company with the brutal holism of Nicholas Szczepanik.  Screened sleeve and insert, limited to 200.  Recommended.

The split release ‘A Confederassy of Burnt Bridges’ leaves little to write home about, and in the best sense of “no news is good news”: a classic jammer for noise heads, Andrew Coltrane brings a standard pair of his live recordings, crashing with deconstructed brick and mortar – and in this vinyl presentation (and despite the original cassette capture), every pore is visible, every screaming conflict of contrast.  “Choked By Lust” is a high-volume/ slow-motion mattress exploding, made with fabric of coarse wool, stuffing of yawning steel, and the utterances of, ah, unconventional female pleasure.  “Neverending Hatred” stews in these sounds further, much appearing backwards and coupled by the pathetic whine of frustration, like trying to glue said mattress back together as though it were a clean-edged Black Vase, and not in fact a lot of foam and coil.  Bob Bellerue’s “Busted Landscapes” is equally a typical display of thoughtful pacing and lead-footed accelerations, like he’s picking out from a wide selection of sonic swatches, big and small, and then simply smashing them into the grid of the linear recording.  Twitters of feedback, groaning arches of staccato vibration, flutters of stutters, and a recurrent narration, all filtered through a soot of ungrounded electronics.  A bugle’s cry is the only, tenuous marker of this antebellum scene.  Sleeved in plain labels and white sleeves with a handsome, pasted-on butt-collage by Bellerue.  125 copies.

Anarchymoon LP
$10
HERE

Sheffield, UK’s Songs of Green Pheasant strips it down from Duncan Sumpner’s Fat Cat days to a suitably lean presentation fitting the one-man band in order to amplify his multi-part bedside symphonies.  ‘Soft Wounds’ offers the chamber melancholy of Pernice Brothers and Kingsbury Manx, but even less vocally ego-centric, where Sumpner plays eight songs layering (in order of taste to the tongue): acoustic guitar, lightly-tempered vocals, electric bass, piano, trumpets, and violin.   Accents of electric guitar ring out like phantoms for “Deaf Sarah.”  Discrete percussive elements interject silences in “Self Portrait with a Dog”, making movement like in the gapped joints of a marionette.  “For People” is a tasteful baroque interlude of horns and piano like the cut-screen for some 70s BBC production.  The main export of the disc is the nearly ten-minute “Flesheaters” and its coda “Sad Flowers”: paying-off on the lush overtures of the opening track, these penultimate tunes are the modern equivalence of the Beach Boys for whatever east coast glum Sheffielders are likely to attend (surely the stuff of Morrissey songs) – down-beat and harmonized vocals, discontinuous chords, mellow drums more foot than hand; never far from city centre, violins and a female accompanist sing the track out like a eulogy in a JG Ballard underpass, where the baudy-bleat of electronics melt upward like streamers from this macabre scene.  Though in like company at this summer home of Rusted Rail for the overall sound and fury, Sumpner’s work is of a song-writing grade higher than experienced before on the label, and the arigato sleeve with paste-on labels fit him like a burlap sack, threatening to crumble-away at any moment.  Such conventions as sleeves and inserts are tokens in the light of such brilliance.  Very recommended.

Rusted Rail CD
€10
HERE

Today we got two from Stuart Chalmers, a British newcomer with a name destined for greatness (when wrapped so posh around such spools of wreckage).  ‘Myths and Beasts’ is a concrète Anglicized fantasy evoking “Labyrinth”, “Pandora”, and the “Nocturnal World” of scuttling creatures, lapsed tongues, and dusky murk: this live-captured non-music made of tapes, synths, pedals, broken keyboards is ugly, but surprisingly legible – even side B, a mirror image of A, given the intermixing of indeterminate smears on both sides obscuring the “proper” direction – through excessive cuts adding extra contour to these rich source sounds.  Sprites, ogres, witches, woodsmen – they’re all there, acted out in smartly-applied and quickly-obscured sonic bouquets.  In two dimensions the effect is two-dimensional, like a collaged castle scene made from People magazines.  The product is subdued (though not without its climaxes), and literary, in a playbook sort of way; very tapely, and very listenable.  Tapes come labeled in printed paper, packed in glossy full-color inserts.  Recommended.

The Lows and the Highs cassette
£4
HERE

‘Blunders’ is an aptly-titled split with Robert Ridley-Shackleton, who erases his signal in a series of missteps: with a scanning repetition and radio squelch, the equipment lies “on”, erratically-erased by shores of ashy feedback scorch; the drama piques when the author signs-on, but, failing to see the red light ablaze, gapes open-mouthed at something off camera; at last, clarity like a magnet passed over the tape, the only “success” an abnegation.  For his side of things, Chalmers runs through a number of less-cochlear sounds mostly stripped from tape then wedged into a tarried mantle of cheaply-synthesized fuzz.  The sounds are culinary, cartoonish; textures and tones leaving you quizzically pinched as you try and recall the sources, the whole thing like a spring-loaded nude descending a flight of stairs.   On stamped tapes with glossy, color inserts.

Hissing Frames cassette
£5
HERE

One in a series of releases related to UC Davis’ KDVS radio station released by Sacramento’s Weird Forest, this split exemplifies all the diverse weirdness that one can get up to with the right admixture of ecological association and isolation.  Dotting the beeline trajectory from UC San Diego to Mills College, Oakland like an i (with all the division that dotting implies), John Brumley’s Sagan Genesis is neither pre-married by theoretical dogma nor fucked-off for the semester, demonstrating care and craftsmanship to the multi-part feel-good “Mollusk in Water”, equal parts well-tempered synthesizer and obscenely-plundered phonics.  The side-long track moves in stages of high-definition science-filmicisms, reversed midway like live-action made animation: first enchanting the documentary of an underwater scene – deep, impressionistic rumble and micro-tectonic shift – then documenting the enchanted other world with Growing-sized bass plumes, impossible baubles, and molecular trinkets.  The side remains on high through loftier planes, less inner- to outer-space than outer- to inner-activity as we’re drugged into this dreaded new age.  In stark contrast, Julia Litmer-Cleper’s Waxy Tomb is an ample audiograph of student union Noise: also a single track comprised of several entries, “Take One, Try All (Hormone Pills)” pulls down the crepe streamers of patrimony and wall noise to insert beat/mute space and a lady’s short-hairs.  Submerged in long lapses of murky electronic rumble and watery vocals, the disaffection blocking much of this side bleeds new red when cut with a granular sequence of synthesizered swatches or full-bodied orbs of finger-tapped claps.  At (the most successful) times just her beats, these trackettes span the post-sexual industrial throb of ‘Irreversible’ to the post-industrial sex of Liars to the irreversible sexual posts of a liar playing Blixa Bargeld at a land-grant university.  Limited to 60 copies on imprinted tapes with a bright sleeve of collaged images.  Recommended.

Weird Forest cassette
$5
HERE

An inexplicable compilation until one translates the title and realizes just how dependent Jeroen has been on CDrs to transport his Apophallation  project; ‘Verzameling Van Audio’ then becomes incredibly simple, as this sampler of supposedly-secondary sources is both an introduction to the Dutchman’s junior stately harsh noise and a treat for those who like a short-but-sweet blast that only a hachet-job mix only cassette can offer.  Six cuts of sharp, frantic Merzbowners and Marhugs, most sounding live if not incredibly stepped-on (and willfully abused in the final dub), stapled with the blunt sentiment of a half-drooled fuck you dusting his tracks like discursive ticker tape.  And it’s wrapped in a Xerox of a babe.  Done and done.  Now just try and buy the thing.

Psychotronica cassette
HERE