August 27, 2016 at 7:18 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Braeyden Jae: Fog Mirror LP
The first vinyl release by Braeyden Jae following numerous tapes is just as cloudy, hazy, and sorta-reflective as its title suggests. Very heavy layers of static and crackle obscuring (or really enhancing) the melodic drones. Very blurry, very rough, very stormy, doesn’t give you a clear answer. “Obscured and Waiting” oddly enough ends up being one of the clearest songs here, letting its slow piano melody ring through. It mostly sticks to the same mood throughout, and it’s drenched and gloomy, maybe kind of confused, but it definitely holds my attention.
Braeyden Jae/Antlr’d: split tape
The split tape with Antlr’d is a bit different. Braeyden’s pieces are a bit more trippy and wobbly, but also more melodic, and with a little bit more of a propulsion to them. Still drenched in static, but there’s more light shining through (or sideways, or whatever). It’s gorgeous. Andtlr’d’s side is more lo-fi, with more tape hiss and more loop pedal trickery. The “Dream River Artifact” tracks seem to be a bit busier, even as they seem to stand in place and let effects wave around them. The second part is short and glitchy and playful, but sounds like it’s coming out of a toy instrument. The tracks titled “The Dark Between Stars” are much more still and contemplative, generally staring into the night sky with little movement.
August 27, 2016 at 4:10 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Monogamy: Semifloral 7″ EP
WCBN’s co-music director is moving to Chicago, but before he leaves he’s dropping off his first vinyl record. This is a fantastic slice of multi-tracked noise-pop, carrying on the spirit of Eric’s Trip and the Microphones/Mount Eerie for the current era of DIY music. Don plays almost everything himself, including a ripping sax solo, an incinerating guitar solo, and buzzy synths on the jammer “Twenty-Twenty”. “Low Morale” is a Casiotone For The Painfully Alone-esque chipper electro-pop anthem about being really depressed. “Finally Happy” is a devastating ethereal goth This Mortal Coil ballad/duet, and Don’s voice kind of sounds like Mark Hosler from Negativland here. Fred Thomas mastered this and recorded most of it, so of course it sounds fantastic. I’m not sure if this is officially out yet but it should be on his
Bandcamp eventually.
August 26, 2016 at 9:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Robert Lippok: Open Close Open 12″ EP
To Rococo Rot’s Robert Lippok originally released this CD EP on Raster-Noton in 2001, and now flau sub-label raum is giving it a long-awaited vinyl issue with a bonus track. In some ways, it sounds similar to what you’d expect an early ’00s clicks’n’cuts release to sound like; at times it seems to be suspended in mid-air while little bubbles and micro-dots form in place of typical percussion. “Close”, however, sounds like a lost Fenn O’Berg session, with cinematic strings surrounded by fluttering, chirping glitches. The bonus track exquisitely surrounds pianos with decaying waves of static, ending with what sounds like people playing at a beach. A nice hidden gem, good choice for a rediscovery.
August 21, 2016 at 10:56 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
v/a: 15 Year Anniversary Compilation
I just listened to the new
Breakcore Gives Me Wood comp, and while there’s some really fun stuff on it, a lot of it tends toward the more jokey mashup style of breakcore and too much of that (nearly 3 hours, to be exact) can be really tiring. A lot of it isn’t really different than what people were doing a decade ago. I still love it, by all means. But this new
Darkmatter Soundsystem comp is way more refreshing. I feel like these artists are pushing the limits more and doing much more forward-thinking things than just bashing out 400BPM gabber kicks and chopping up metal samples. Some of these tracks are more glitchy and IDM/industrial-ish, there’s some awesome acid-core (Minion!), and even the more straightforward drum’n’bass tracks still sound really fresh. Pink Abduction Ray’s tracks are hyper combinations of juke, grime, and hardcore. Poxxe goes for the gut (and the face, and the heart, and the lungs) with his 7-minute dismemberer “Black Ice”. A few tracks mix sad/pretty melodies with absolutely terrorizing beats. The WMX tracks are hard industrial techno that fit in with the whole L.I.E.S. outsider dance thing. Darkmatter will always be a name to be trusted, and this is an absolutely essential FREE download.
August 20, 2016 at 8:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment
Graham Repulski: Re-Arranged At Hotel Strange/Contaminated Man/Boy Lung 3 tape box
The Philadelphia-based electric worrier is back with a triple cassette box of blown-out fragmentary noise-freak-pop. As with everything he does, there’s an unmistakable Guided By Voices influence, but it goes beyond mere worship. Many of the tracks push the treble and static far into the red, often burying the vocals behind walls of impenetrable fuzz. Most of the tracks are incredibly short, sometimes barely even resembling an entire verse or chorus, and even if some of them just sound like brief half-thoughts caught on tape, they’re not all cut from the same cloth. There’s different levels of coherence, different combinations of tunefulness and noise, different states of development. Taken as a whole, though, it all flows into a strange, delicious mess. Deformed power-pop anthems sit beside backwards drum experiments and it all sounds bizarre and incredible. These 3 albums are basically all EP length and could probably fit on one tape just fine, but the fact that he separates them out into three distinct works shows that there’s more of a purpose to what he’s doing than just hemorrhaging out as many songs as possible. It’s hard to really determine a specific theme between each tape but they seem to have some sort of common thread.
Contaminated Man is easily one of the most out-there recordings Repulski’s ever released, filled with lots of short sound experiments (one track just seems to be a faucet dripping) along with the other-dimension pop hits. “Instrumental Scott Lucas” starts out fairly strummy before ending up a torrential storm of multi-tracked, sometimes reversed gliding riffs. “The Next Great Cake” ends the tape, starting out calmly before erupting into a dramatic, drunken sing-along.
Re-Arranged At Hotel Strange is a brief burst of shorted-out energy, with only one song (the ultra-catchy cardboard box thud “Dick Kicker”) exceeding 2 minutes.
Boy Lung has the highest track count (16) but almost all of them are around a minute or less. It has some more sentimental moments as well as some moments of true bugged-out weirdness, such as the tape collage “Radio Surgery Hour”. “Wolfington’s War Memorabilia, Pt. I” has some sort of heart-on-sleeve ’80s radio rock melody smothered in cruddy, bashed-out drumming. This is an immense collection of strange music/sounds, and easily one of Graham’s best to date.
August 20, 2016 at 7:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Arvo Zylo: Sequencer Works Volume Two tape
All of these tracks (each titled “FUCK * [#]”) were recorded in various closets or crawlspaces during the early 2000s using a memory-overloaded Yamaha sequencer. Completely off-the-wall lo-fi trashcore somewhat similar to what people like Davros and Unibomber were making on Amigas, but not quite focused on gabber kicks. Really messy and chaotic, and sometimes quite cartoonish, with sloppy sound effects and garish MIDI instrumentation. Some of it sounds like blindly stumbling around in a dungeon. It all sounds far too sporadic and un-quantized and queasy to have been made entirely on a sequencer, but it was often recorded directly to tape with the machine malfunctioning. Really creative chaos which absolutely nobody knew about at the time. On
Bandcamp.
August 20, 2016 at 5:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Algonquin Round Table Of Noise: Volume I tape
This was a free tape given away at some noise show at Far House, I can’t even remember who played the show. I don’t think any of the artists on this tape were playing, so I’m not sure how the tape got there. It took me a while to get around to listening, but it’s pretty decent. It’s somewhere between a collaboration and a compilation, side A is titled “Icarus” and side B is “Daedalus”, and each section is created by different artists. There’s some pauses in between sections, but it mostly flows pretty smoothly, so it feels like a complete work. There’s a lot of range here, a lot of it certainly fits under the category of “noise” but there’s some more suspenseful melodic droning along with the harsh noise wall, with plenty of frayed static, and some moments where vocals or instruments seem to bleed through. I can’t really decide which side I like better. Not familiar with any of the artists, but their names include Fault Worship, Absolute Hell, and Tu|pa. Available at
Bandcamp.
August 20, 2016 at 5:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Circles: Structures
Circles were a German band from the ’80s who put out 3 obscure albums which didn’t make much of an impact. This is a collection of unreleased material from the second half of the ’80s. It’s pretty spacey, there aren’t really drums or too much in the way of vocals. Guitar and synth drones, but it’s melodic and feels like the work of a band. “Target” has some chanting in the background, reminiscent of Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares. “Track II” is a shorter, brighter, guitar piece. “Frog Factory Magic” is a long, minimal piece for organ and some atmospheric guitars. “Digger” is probably the weirdest one, it’s god didgeridoos and free jazz horns and backwards sounds. “Slam” is a long, hypnotic piece with rattling percussion. “Nice Place” is more of a transcendent see-the-light drone. Not quite a lost classic, but it’s still pretty unique.
August 20, 2016 at 4:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
mediumPENIS: Days of Grace tape
Sounds really promising, doesn’t it? This one seems to have disappointment and inadequacy written all over it, from the artist name to the slowed down, bummed out beats and busted out home-recorded sounds cobbled together. The beats constantly sound like they would be pretty heavy and forceful if they didn’t seem to be played off an old tape recorder which should’ve gotten a fresh change of batteries a long time ago. “Thizz Could Be Your Lucky Year (Haunted Gauntlet Mix)” is noisier and has faster, glitchy beats which almost approach drum’n’bass, but under the beats there’s a seemingly unrelated layer of clanging and crashing. The entire B-side seems like a field recording of a day spent at home chopping up sounds on the computer and playing several tapes at slow speeds, while the news and porn are playing in the background. This one’s all about that bored, bizarre Midwestern life. If that makes any sense to you, it might be worth checking this out on
Bandcamp.
August 14, 2016 at 9:10 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment
Mirror Fears // Solypsis: split tape
Pretty recently, I saw Solypsis play a show in Ann Arbor with a few touring artists and Watabou. At first I had no clue it was actually the Solypsis I thought it was (the one who started Digital Vomit and co-founded Couch Fort Records, and has associations with V/Vm and Goulburn Poultry Fanciers Society) because he was mistakenly billed as Solypsis Solypsis. His set was hard noisy glitchy industrial techno, and it slayed. This tape features Solypsis and fellow Denver artist Mirror Fears remixing each others’ tracks, and it is also pretty remarkable. It has its distorted beat-heavy moments, and it’s somewhat glitchy/static-y, but it’s clearly not anything approaching noise or breakcore or gabber (usually). There’s captured sounds and isolated voices, there’s louder tracks with more technoid rhythms, and there’s a few calmer, drifty pieces. There’s moments of harsh wreckage, like “First Period Gangsta Diametrics”. “Barbarella’s Hyperactive Intestines” captures a bit of loopy ’90s Millsian techno and adds lots of frayed static and a few bursts of crashing drums. “Endless Fuschia Balloon” seems like an obvious Boards of Canada homage/parody title, but the track ends up merging a stoned, jazzy drum loop with some pretty unsettling sliding synths and it ends up being uneasier than expected. Not sure if the tape’s still available but the audio is on
Bandcamp.
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