August 9, 2015 at 7:09 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Cocoon: While the Recording Engineer Sleeps
Recorded in 1985 and originally released in 1989, this album features German jazz legend Gunter Hampel along with Jürgen Gleue of 39 Clocks and The Phantom Payn, as well as a guest appearance by Thomas Keyserling, who appeared on early albums by Tangerine Dream and Amon Düül II. The press release says to file this under jazz, but even with the lineup’s jazz pedigree, I’d still call it psychedelic or Krautrock. It has its trippy psych-rock moments, especially bursts of guitar noise on a few tracks, but plenty of other tracks here have fluttering flutes and mellow vibraphones giving it a jazz feel, but it’s just an element to it. It still sounds like dark, loose experimental rock. The last track was, in fact, recorded while the engineer was dozing off. “The Ritual of the Boogie Transformation” features Hampel speaking in tongues and generally sounding crazy for 8 minutes. The following two tracks feature his lead vocals as well, and give the album an interesting rambling mood that it doesn’t have otherwise. This album’s okay, but somehow it seems kind of sterile, like a later Can album or something.
August 8, 2015 at 10:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Five Star Hotel: #HOTELSEASON
I already posted about Five Star Hotel’s
latest tape on
Decoder, but this kid is doing something so completely far-out and different than anyone else that I have to post about his other most recent release here. While the
Outlands tape has ten lengthier tracks which are a bit slower than some of his other stuff, this 17-track, 24-minute mixtape is a seriously intense headrush. There’s way more hip-hop samples here, and way more of a manic juke influence. A few tracks start to bleed into gabber and hardcore (I’m thinking Bloody Fist style), and “Snowblind” (by far the longest track at 4 minutes) is a bit closer to harsh noise. I have to admit the whole “trap” thing isn’t always something I can get into, Southern rap in general isn’t really my thing and taking those styles of beats and turning them into hedonistic fratboy/festival EDM is definitely not something I can appreciate. But this guy takes elements of trap, juke, gabber, Baltimore/Jersey club, and a huge shower of noise, and just turns them all into something else entirely. I’m astonished. I hope people outside of the Detroit area take notice of what this guy is doing because yow. And of course there is a ton of his music available for free download on
Bandcamp that I haven’t even delved into yet.
August 8, 2015 at 10:35 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Dura/Former Selves: Triangles/Among the Lilies split tape
Kevin Greenspon’s Bridgetown label is always worth checking out, and its seasonal batches of tapes always ensure that a huge pile of goods will be delivered on a timely basis. I haven’t explored the label’s extensive catalog as much as I should, but every time I hear something droney or noisey or shoegazey from them it’s always incredible. This tape starts out with a side from Dura, who I haven’t heard before, but it’s 20 minutes of lovely layered acoustic guitar. In some ways it starts out sounding like if Mark Kozelek started making layered instrumental soundscape recordings, but then it builds from there. There’s traces of wistful steel guitar melodies in there. And then there’s chimes in the last 5 or 6 minutes. Hard to find info on this project because of the name, and this tape isn’t on Discogs yet, but I’m very impressed. Second side is by Former Selves, who doesn’t really need an introduction, but in case he does, he has dozens of tapes, splits and CD-r’s on Hooker Vision, Constellation Tatsu, Rotifer Cassettes, Lillerne Tape Club, etc. This side is a bit more minimalist and slower moving, and maybe more conventionally “droney”, but it’s also clearer and more melodic. It’s like staring out at an amazing view of a sea rather than sitting in an incredible forest, with a nice breeze rustling past you. It’s just really lovely music for you to relax and clear out thoughts to. The way it builds is remarkable. And then that ending. Buy or stream it on
Bandcamp.
August 8, 2015 at 9:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Our Love Will Destroy The World: Carnivorous Rainbows LP
I can’t remember if I ever listened to Birchville Cat Motel, but this is the first time I’ve ever listened to Our Love Will Destroy The World, Campbell Kneale’s main project since 2009. It reminds me of Astral Social Club’s overwhelming psychedelic rhythmic noise constructions, but a bit more refined. Still harsh and trippy, but maybe not quite so overwhelming. “Fuzz Legion Majesty” has voodoo drumming behind fluttering feedback coils and violin, and it just gets more bizarre as it goes on. “Miniature Bambi Superland” has more layers of drums and electronics with… it might be best to not even know what’s going on here. It sounds like something a lot more disturbing than it probably was. “Hades Iron Horizon” ends the album with an 11-minute trembling hellscape. One of the most disturbingly surreal pieces of audio art I’ve heard in a while, and I’m very curious to know if the rest of his stuff is like this.
August 8, 2015 at 7:34 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Rand and Holland: s/t tape
This is a posthumous tape by an Australian folk/post-rock band who disassembled in 2011. Opening instrumental “Cobra” gradually layers slow-moving guitars and drums, and at its beginning, it strangely resembles a slowcore cover of Jaydee’s “Plastic Dreams” by Jozef Van Wissem, if that makes any sense. It progresses and moves into something else though, and while it threatens to get a bit heavier in the last 2 minutes, it stays pretty steady (and gorgeous) for its 7 minutes. “Walking the Plank” starts out by finding singer Brett Thompson waking from a morphine haze, saying that his head’s ok, but a few minutes later it gets bashed in with drums and keyboard. “The Plague” starts out sounding relatively jaunty, with an agreeable guitar riff and softly pounding drums, but then he sings about bringing out your dead. The second half of the song gets more abrasive and aggressive, ending up with some swarming violin attacks. It all unravels even more from there. “My Halo” is a really nice blanket of droning fuzz, but then halfway through it starts to get pitched down, melting into some sort of grotesque sound blob. The second side of the tape is taken up by “Old Crow”, which starts out as a fairly inconspicuous folk ballad, but after a few minutes of sparse guitar plucking and vocals, it gets enraptured into a full-band frenzy with uptempo drums and strings, and then it gets stuck into a pattern of slowly crashing and fading out and back in and then crashing again, and continually repeating for nearly 20 minutes, with each successive attack becoming slightly deadlier and more vicious, even as they don’t change all that much. There was nothing else this band could’ve possibly done after this than fall apart.
August 8, 2015 at 6:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Graham Repulski: Success Racist
Now based in Pennsylvania, prolific lo-fi songwriter Graham Repulski continues to release brilliant music at an astonishing rate. His short, hissy, abstract tunes are reminiscent of ’90s indie rock at its most simultaneously catchy and experimental, with 3 minute anthems like “Octopus Bribes” sitting alongside minute-long fragments which sound like they were recorded in a laundromat. His vocals generally sit behind the wall of guitar fuzz, and sometimes they’re double tracked. Song structures can build up into something monumental, or they can just wither away and dissolve. A few tracks have drum machines, others just have severely distorted drums, and others have none whatsoever. “James Run” has the most starkly emotional lyrics and melody, and of course it’s half-hidden behind guitars and barely makes it past two minutes before it gets smashed into the flanged-out psych-pop of “Planned Blackouts”. The album gets progressively catchier from there, culminating in the bludgeoning “In Waves” which commands “I want you to kill my mind.” Rok Lok Records will be releasing the album on tape, but Graham will be self-releasing the CD through his label Shorter Recordings; it’s available to stream and pre-order on his
Bandcamp page now.
August 8, 2015 at 6:00 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Derek Piotr: Bahar
With each successive release Derek Piotr puts out, the press release insists that he’s getting increasingly poppier and more accessible. There’s vocals, lyrics, and beats, and certainly less abstraction than his older releases, but this is still far too alien and strange to be played on commercial radio. Even someone like Holly Herndon, who does incredibly complex and futuristic avant-garde electronic music based around vocal manipulation, seems to have a bit more in the way of hooks (as well as energetic, danceable rhythms) than Piotr does. Having said that, this is curious glitching, sputtering machine music with 21st century Thom Yorke-style vocals and plenty of woodwind instruments. There’s some creative sample manipulation and skittering, delaying effects. 8-minute epic “Sunlight, Fruit Trees” does a pretty good job of exploring his vocal capabilities and arranging them onto rhythmic noise bursts. But there’s such a strange disconnect between his vocals and the sounds behind them. They line up in time, but something still seems detached emotionally. Having said that, even when the music seems to be constructed solely of relentlessly glitching and sputtering, as on “There Shall Be a New Earth”, it seems like there’s purpose and structure to it, it’s not strictly random noises. It’s also so minimal that there’s no way that any sounds on this album sound extraneous. Really puzzling music, to say the least.
August 5, 2015 at 11:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Robert Crouch: Organs
The three lengthy pieces on this album attempt to draw connections between organs of the body with the musical instrument known as the organ. The first track (“Somniloquy (an egg): A Choreography of Emancipation”) features recordings of Crouch playing a broken church organ, and it has such a strange crushed decaying sound to it. There’s also distant birds, conversation, and even other music faintly playing in the background, underneath the organ drone landscape and the crunching, deconstructing sound of the broken organ. It swells up towards the end, and as it fades away, there’s some sort of distant clapping rhythm. “The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.” is nearly a half hour long, and has a tense throbbing rumble throughout its first part, but this gradually clears out to more glacial, soothing drones, which are still in the distance buried amongst field recordings. “The Propaganda of History” is much shorter at only 10 minutes, and is built around an oblong loop of fireworks exploding, giving it another odd rhythm. This one also swells up with organ droning, becoming immersive and expansive.
August 5, 2015 at 9:56 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Andrew Tuttle: Slowcation tape
Formerly known as Anonymeye, Andrew Tuttle has been creating a unique brand of electro-acoustic folk music for years, with scads of albums and EPs to his name. This tape continues experimental avant-(Australian-)Americana, blending banjos and Fahey-style acoustic guitar with analog synths and drifting tape drone. MC Schmidt of Matmos plays acoustic guitar on “Post Meridiem Construction”, and the connection makes perfect sense, given some of their folk/acoustic/Americana experiments. This tape has such a warm, natural blend of earthy acoustic instruments and fluttering, exciting electronics. He’s just so good at this it’s astonishing. The second half of the tape focuses less on acoustic instruments, and the final track is a shimmering Laurie Spiegel-scape. Excellent tape.
August 5, 2015 at 7:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Infinity Frequencies: Into The Light tape
Vaporwave, I have to admit, is a genre that I don’t always get and honestly think there’s far too much of out there. Way too much of it just seems lazy and derivative and cheesy and like not a whole lot of effort was put into it. I’m sure a bunch of nerds will argue that that’s all exactly the point, in which case I would just rather listen to something real. Not all vaporwave (or whatever nebulous internet non-genre gets used to describe stuff like this) comes off this way to me though, some of it seems like it’s doing something different. Japanese producer Infinity Frequencies has released some recordings that have caught my attention. I feel like this artist is maybe a little closer to something like The Caretaker, but only slightly. There’s still plenty of slowed down elevator music type samples, and it’s all covered in VHS hiss, but it seems to have a little bit more of an ethereal sheen to it. Actually, as I listen to it more, it doesn’t really sound all that different from most vaporwave. I just happen to enjoy it more for some reason.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 