April 5, 2014 at 10:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bobby Draino: Brain Drain 12″ EP
Ever since discovering Bobby Draino’s
Soundcloud a while back, I’ve been fiending to have some of his music on vinyl. Of course leave it to 100% Silk to make this a reality. Definitely some of the best lo-fi grimy house I’ve heard in an era full of this type of stuff. Ridiculous levels of hiss and distortion, acid synths and beats that snap and sizzle, and just a general sense that it was all made on shitty equipment with a fuck-it-all attitude. This is the type of noise-scene techno that would probably scare away actual clubgoers, at least if they’re expecting any type of smooth, accessible house music, which 100% Silk does sometimes and release, and are quite good at. But this is music to blast late at night at a warehouse with a shitty makeshift soundsystem. So much rudimentary echo and delay and pitchshifting… ahh, it’s just so great.
April 5, 2014 at 10:08 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
SSLEEPERHOLD: Ruleth
Completely overdue review, very sorry about that, but I saw this guy twice at SXSW and he was clearly one of the highlights of the entire week. I grabbed a copy of this LP after receiving a promo download a while ago and I’ve just been listening to it nonstop. My friend said his performances were “next-level, and I never use that term.” As with most artists on Holodeck, he sets up a mountain of bulky analogue synths, and just knocks it out of the park with slow-to-midtempo beats and horror-movie atmospheres. I love how this album has such a buzzy, lo-fi quality to it; there’s even a track with a false start. It clearly sounds hand-assembled and labored. Big, brutal industrial beats, but with oddly charming, beautiful melodies, and human levels of hiss and distortion. It always sounds like there’s some hidden voices trapped underneath the noise and beats, some teeth gnashing and tension brewing. It’s dark and gloomy, and maybe a bit angry, but it practices restraint and doesn’t blow up or become too punishing. It’s fantastic and magnificent and you need it in your life. It’s been re-pressed on vinyl, too, and there’s always the cassette and digital versions available at, where else,
Bandcamp.
April 5, 2014 at 9:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Robert Alberg: Night Wind
Brand new hit CD single from our favorite Washington-based folk troubadour, who is the son of a multi-millionaire, and was found making a deadly toxic substance called ricin in his home, but without any intentions to harm anyone. He seems to have improved his musicianship somewhat, and is attending music courses at a community college. He’s sent us a bunch of CD-r’s, most of which wouldn’t actually play. This one just contains a single song (length: 2:50) and is typical of his style. Really shrill, nasal vocals with lyrics about ocean water and night wind. The guitar is a bit less harsh on this one, and the guitar and vocals aren’t hard-panned, so he’s learning a little bit about recording, but his voice still clips a bit. Basically, this is the classic definition of outsider music. No typical rhythm or song structure, he just rambles on for a few minutes and stops just shy of 3 minutes, and then the CD’s over. Play this a ton and feel the night wind blowing around you on the ocean water!
April 5, 2014 at 9:34 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Pinkcourtesyphone: A Ravishment Of Mirror
Newest full-length from sound artist Richard Chartier’s noir-ish drone project. This album is full of slow, bell-like loops, ghostly footsteps, foggy hiss, sunken melodies, and just a general dark, rainy, mysterious atmosphere. Like The Caretaker’s best work, it’s sad, fragile, beautiful, and haunting. 25 minute opener “Why Pretend / The Desire Of Absence / Faulty Connections” goes through long stretches of moody droning before finally landing on a slow, sleepwalking rhythm for the last few minutes. “Pixels… Sometimes… Broke Your Heart (For A.)” is another exploration of cavernous spaces and distant sounds, with gentle whispers and soft, faraway bursts. “Falling Star (For P. Entwistle)” has some soft, muted, trudging beats, which sound like the ghosts of hip-hop or drum’n’bass tracks, along with thick, swirling ambience and piano melodies, and more dusky whispering. “62,000 Valentines (For T. Hunter)” is more misty, foggy slow-moving ambience, feeling like a stroll through an inactive city on a late afternoon during a weekend, where no buildings are open and nobody’s around because the weather is dismal and there’s nothing going on… which makes it a perfect scenario for a destination-free walk filled with solemn, singular reflection on life.
April 5, 2014 at 8:32 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Porya Hatami: Shallow
Newest album from an Iranian artist who has several albums out on labels that I’m not familiar with. Drifty field recording ambient with wispy flickering melodies, similar to some of Nobukazu Takemura’s works but without the frenetic glitchiness. Not completely soft and polished, there’s a little bit of a machine-generated roughness at points, but it’s still blissed-out enough to relax to. “Fen” starts with wind/water-type sounds, which continue throughout most of the song’s first half, and about 2/3 of the way through, there’s gentle music box notes panning through the speakers. “After the Rain” is the most concise (just shy of 10 minutes) and melody-rich track here, with more close-miked music box tinkling and more fluttery, microscopic melodic flourished along with its sublime ambient melody. “White Forest” is another rolling ambient piece with a soft melody and a subtle loop which fades away after a few minutes and lets the piece breathe a bit more. There’s a few hints of static and whispering wind, but the overall mood is calm and breezy. The digital wind swells up a bit during the last couple minutes, and there’s some more plinky electronic music box-like notes, but the last couple minutes get increasingly sparser and less active until it’s just silence and the album is over.
April 5, 2014 at 3:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
David Kanaga: Dyad (Original Game Soundtrack)
Oneohtrix Point Never’s label Software branches out into the world of video game soundtracks with the music from this
ultra-trippy PS3 game. I haven’t played the game, but the visuals are extremely flashy and mind-altering, and the music perfectly matches this. The 29 tracks here average around 2 minutes, and are mostly hyperkinetic, and build upon maximalist styles of dance music such as jungle and juke. No room for build up and release, just hyped-up sugary ecstasy with over-excited synths, but still with chiming melodies. Perfectly enjoyable as a standalone album, but I’m sure it elevates the game into something truly exciting. I noticed at least one track (“Chargers”) that has airhorns, and a bunch have Amen breaks. No vocals other than the occasional looped, clipped vocal sample. The last 2 tracks (which both have “Mush” in the title) explore more ambient territory, with “Start Mush” in particular sounding like a rainforest-dwelling version of Autechre.
April 5, 2014 at 3:18 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Rafter: It’s Reggae
Following in the tradition of We Like Cats, here is another lo-fi dub reggae record by an artist normally associated with indie rock. This is the kind of album that kind of benefits from paying as little attention to context as possible; the back cover of the promo CD has a note written to reggae is if it were a person, with Rafter stating to reggae that it wants to learn from it and be more positive. I dunno, it seems kind of silly to me. Musically, it’s a pretty straightforward dub reggae record, with horns, panned drums/percussion, echoing pianos, snatches of vocals diced and delayed in the mix, etc. “Kusterica Vs Marcovic” is more uptempo, kind of a Balkan ska dub. “Christina 1981” has a bit of a far East meets synth-funk feel. “Translation Success” is another uptempo ska-ish song, with spacey synths. Other than that, pretty much what you’d expect it to sound like. Decent dub record, nothing more or less. Cool Scientist-inspired cover artwork.
April 3, 2014 at 12:01 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Yann Novak: Snowfall
Another long-form drone from the owner of the now re-instated Dragon’s Eye Recordings. A 60-minute drone titled “Snowfall” seems like it would just write itself, but this doesn’t sound like what you’d expect. Rather, it’s closer to a rocketship gliding through space. Not the explosive take-off part, but the smooth ride once it gets into orbit. Really calm and static-filled, but with progression and evolution. Eventually the journey reveals some microtonal elements and hidden melodies, and there’s a much brighter tone in the last 15 minutes, although it spends the last few slowly dimming and fading to stardust.
March 31, 2014 at 4:19 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Space Lady: The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits
Best record I bought in Austin, hands down. I’d been waiting to hear more Space Lady material ever since two of her tracks appeared on the
Songs In The Key Of Z compilations, which of course were my major introduction to the world of outsider music, in conjunction with Irwin Chusid’s book of the same title. If you haven’t read that book or listened to those compilations, The Space Lady is a street performer who performs ethereal Casio covers of pop songs to passers-by, wearing a helmet with wings and a blinking red light. She was active throughout the ’80s and ’90s, retired the act around 2000, but recently started playing again around Colorado and New Mexico due to popular demand. Most of the tracks here are covers of ’70s and ’80s pop/classic rock tunes, most notably her version of Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom”, which is far more haunting and timeless than the dated-sounding original. Even though I would be perfectly content with never hearing “Fly Like An Eagle” or “Born To Be Wild” again, her simple, spacey, echo-drenched reinterpretations take the familiar songs somewhere else entirely. She even manages the impossible feat of turning an ELO song into something I actually really enjoy, with a truly chilling version of “Domine, Libra Nos/Showdown”. And there’s also a few original tunes, written by her then-partner Joel Dunsany, which generally seem to be about her act, performing simple electronic pop songs (“Synthesize Me” says it all). Definitely bridges the gap between Bruce Haack and more recent naive Casio-pop experimenters such as Dan Deacon. I bought this on vinyl, which includes a download card of the entire album as well as the bonus tracks from the CD version, which includes covers of The Doors, Elvis and “Radar Love”. And for more Space Lady, there’s a
free digital EP on Comfort Stand.
March 31, 2014 at 12:16 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Picaflor: Magician
Supremely trippy mind-expanding techno, which drifts out into other genres, and into surrealist dream-like sound collage. Plenty of strange sounds in the mix; “Aramaic Owls of the Eternally Infinite Rainforest” starts with echoing cat growls, and ends with owls, rain, and mystic speech. “White Sage Black Mountain/White Mountain Black Sage” starts with water dripping, and goes into a kind of action-soundtrack-on-a-budget electronic rhythm. “A Whistle in the Mind’s Kaleidescopic Sky” gets into Demdike Stare hauntology darkness territory, with slow pounding beats and desert animal calls, but then it goes into another action sequence-y groove, but midtempo and with bongo-like drums. “El Jardín Misterioso del Curandero Viejo” starts out really disturbing, with a slow quiet intro for the first minute, then sounds of a baby crying, a female orgasm, a heartbeat, and a heart monitor which eventually flatlines. Very creepy juxtaposition. Then there’s some screaming (maybe from a rollercoaster, or maybe from something terrible happening, it’s hard to tell), some very ominous synths, and eventually whooshing, whispering, bird chirps, shaking/rattling, chanting in Spanish, mystic flutes, coughing and spitting, and strange laughter. And it’s still not over, there’s Hebrew chanting, Arabic singing, rushing water, bells tolling, and high-pitched chattering voices. “The Divine Psiamese Twins of Psilent Inner Psiberia” is a strange midtempo journey with slightly tipsy synth-trumpets, pianos, bass, and canned applause around the 5.5 minute mark. After 9 minutes, the music hushes down, with the sounds of children playing and an indoor conversation between a man and a woman, before a triumphant, skygazing ending for the last few minutes. “Into the Heliotropium of Heaven’s Hallucinatory Heart Hologram” starts with a voice saying that “we are all going to die”, which echoes (panning left and right through the speakers and gradually getting quieter), and then a sad, cinematic post-rock instrumental emerges, although there’s enough simple, MIDI-ish electronics and quirky sounds to confuse it with anything that sounds like Mogwai. At about 8 minutes it fades out and sounds like the song’s over, but then there’s come police siren-like sounds in the background, after which the MIDI-post-rock returns. The song ends with more siren sounds, mystic chanting, and rushing water. “An Opal Squid in the Temple of the Ivory Monkfish” starts out sounding like it’s going to be a dark soundtrack-like piece, but eventually lightens up with cuckoo sounds, and a wondrous, piano-heavy electronic beat, and fireworks! There’s also more bird calls, more amped-up action scene music, more cosmic chanting, and more quiet piano interludes. It ends with a new age voice proclaiming “let us all unite”. Free download at
Bandcamp.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 