Hour 1
3:02 AM Illusion Of Safety ~ Quell ~ Sedation & Quell 10″ ~ C.I.P./Complacency
3:11 AM M. Geddes Gengras ~ side A ~ Santam Rasa tape ~ Healing Power Records
3:34 AM Ron Of Japan ~ untitled ~ clear 7″ ~ Hanson Records
3:41 AM The Big Ship ~ Bowshock At The Heliosphere ~ Split tape ~ Hausu Mountain
3:55 AM Kevin Greenspon ~ Glass Prison ~ Common Objects ~ Family Time Records Hour 2
4:00 AM Illusion Of Safety ~ Always Somewhere Else ~ Sweet Dreams 10″ ~ Substantia Innominata
4:10 AM Moth Cock ~ Call Merk ~ Bremmy tape ~ Hausu Mountain
4:18 AM PAS Musique ~ Something Indescribable ~ Abandoned Bird Egg ~ Alrealon Musique
4:22 AM Robert Alberg ~ Sunset Mine ~ Acoustically ~ self-released
4:26 AM Olekranon ~ Fayad ~ Danaus ~ Inam Records
4:31 AM Sensate Focus ~ X ~ Sensate Focus 3.333333 ~ Sensate Focus
4:44 AM Funkstorung ~ Awkw ~ Breakart ~ Musik Aus Strom
4:51 AM Tigerboy ~ With Attitude? ~ 7″ ~ V/Vm Test Records
4:55 AM Shapednoise ~ Until Human Voices Wake Us ~ Until Human Voices Wake Us ~ Opal Tapes Hour 3
5:01 AM Kassen ~ B2 ~ Coaster ~ Creme Organization
5:09 AM Ken Jackson ~ Lottery Blues ~ My Magazine ~ self-released
5:12 AM Henry & Hazel Slaughter ~ A5 ~ Endless Power Cycle ~ Fedora Corpse
5:15 AM Stave ~ Minus3 ~ Reform ~ Flingco Sound System
5:21 AM Nagamatzu ~ Muslin ~ Shatter Days ~ Dark Entries
5:25 AM Dark Day ~ The Exterminations (4 Thru 6) ~ Hands In The Dark ~ Dark Entries
5:29 AM Kaito ~ Beautiful Day ~ 12″ ~ Kompakt
5:36 AM Algebra Suicide ~ Little Dead Bodies ~ Feminine Squared ~ Dark Entries
5:40 AM Psyclones ~ Tribulation ~ Different Thinking People ~ Permanent Records
5:43 AM Psyclones ~ Chant ~ Psyclones ~ Subterranean Records
5:47 AM German Army ~ Pulling Lashes ~ German Army ~ Skrot Up
5:53 AM Occultation ~ All Hallows Fire ~ Grave Command: All Hallowed Hymns ~ Unseen Forces
5:58 AM Julia Holter ~ He’s Running Through My Eyes ~ Loud City Song ~ Domino
You might be able to tell that I buy a hell of a lot of NNF/100% Silk releases, simply because most of them are incredible. This one’s been a favorite as of late, just really classy late-night house. Lots of pretty, melodic synth-strings, some flutes during “Theme From Tony’s Party”, and perfectly placed vocal snippets. “Airplane Mode” has probably the biggest late-’80s Detroit vibe to it, particularly the drum machine and synth bassline, but the cloppy electronic bongos and chilled out chords take it somewhere else. “Baby Dre” is a slower-tempo number which could be a Soul II Soul instrumental, except it has seagulls and waves in the background, and a somewhat unexpected synth melody which shows up during a breakdown, and sounds a bit different from the rest of the track but fits very well. This record feels like it could run the risk of being too swanky and smoothed-out, but it just works so well and it just feels good listening to it.
naboamusic has been pretty quiet so far this year, but there’s been a few releases that I just downloaded that I need to listen to more and post about. But here’s one they sneaked out towards the end of last year that shouldn’t be ignored. Another mysterious artist that I couldn’t tell you anything about, but plenty of frazzled chopped-up beats and menacing yet playful melodies. Sounds like some clarinet sounds in “Gzngztrzm”. After a few tracks of splintered glitchcore, you think “Jungular” is going to be a massive jungle rinser, but it ends up being a 6-minute glacial piano drone. “Blisster” starts outs like it’s rising out of bed, but then turns into severely frantic, stepping-on-itself glitch-spazzery, end then ends after barely a minute. “Crystalline Space Entity” is the most bass-heavy, d’n’b-influenced breakcore track here, but still with a cracked lo-fi cheapcore aesthetic.
A few years ago, I reviewed El Fog’s second album Rebuilding Vibes for Foxy Digitalis. This was a fantastic album of minimal glitch-dub, utilizing vibraphone as the primary instrument, and totally reconstructing the possibilities of what that instrument can create. Now flau has made the project’s original album available again, along with some bonus remixes. The album seems a bit more easily categorized as downtempo dubby minimal techno, with a crackly 4/4 beat thumping away on many tracks, but also a homespun layer of distortion along with the vibraphone, sort of resembling a more jazz-influenced version of Pole’s early works. Of course, it’s hard not to compare this work to Jan Jelinek circa Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, and sure enough, Jelinek contributes a remix here, combining two of the album’s tracks for a beat-free track with very minimal, subtle glitching and gliding. There’s also a great track called “Deep Sea And Stars” which was previously only available on a compilation, and a very minimal remix El Fog did for NQ, which just seems to consist of a low pulse and some very faint crackling sounds.
Masayoshi Fujita: Stories
Masayoshi Fujita has released a few albums under his own name in collaboration with Jan Jelinek, on Jelinek’s Faitiche label, but Stories is his solo debut. Instead of electronics, this is a minimalist neo-classical album for vibraphone and strings. Really lovely, melodic/rhythmic gamelan-like music that fans of minimalist composers will dig. “Deers” is really driving and straightforward, “Snow Storm” is covered in a cloud of reverb but it does have a clearly discernable melody/rhythm. The track entitled “Cloud” is appropriately more droning, slow and atmospheric. “The Story Of Forest” is where the strings come in, slowly and tenderly along with the melodic vibraphone. “Story Of Waterfall I. & II.” is a longer, more abstract vibraphone piece with varying dynamics. “Swan And Morning Dews” is more slow, atmospheric vibraphone with a hint of strings. “River” is probably the most upfront, vibrant mix of vibraphone and strings, plus some sort of fuzzy percussion sound, either some sort of digital processing or maybe prepared vibraphone? “Memories Of The Wind” is another slow, quiet vibraphone piece. The whole album is extremely beautiful, dreamy, and full of wonder.
So way at the beginning of the year, Hausu Mountain sent me some tapes and I never got around to reviewing them, even though I was really into the Moth Cock tape (which I finally just reviewed). A few weeks ago I went to Chicago to see Negativland and surprisingly enough, there was a Hausu Mountain merch table. Good Willsmith was the opening band at the show, and they’re associated with this label. So I ended up buying some more tapes (which I hopefully won’t take 8 months to review) and listened to the older tapes to finally get around to reviewing them. The Big Ship tape that I got isn’t their proper album, but a tape containing a solo side each by the two members of the group. Doug Kaplan’s is “The Suboceanic Mantle”, an electrified drone with fiery waves gradually flaring up, creating some sort of ghastly effects chorus. Aeron Small’s “Bowshock At The Heliosphere” is much more calm and peaceful, building ethereal guitar loops cocooned in tape fuzz. There’s a few human imperfections that are kept in (knocking sounds, etc.) and it just sounds completely relaxing and warm.
The Big Ship: A Circle Is Forever
The band’s proper albumA Circle Is Forever isn’t solo improvisations, but group compositions, with other musicians contributing. The album combines gentle folk-pop, utilizing plucked acoustic instruments, to more experimental textures, with field recordings, backwards sounds and voices, and analog synths. “Goose & Abel” is grounded in a continuous acoustic guitar solo, but around this you hear city sounds, bird calls, typing, rushing water, and watery, fluttery, garbled synth textures. “The Silver Standard” is a slow, electrified comedown jam, and “Old Film Negative” is a bit reminiscent of the somewhat more emo-leaning side of ’90s post-rock. “A Circle Is Forever” ends the album with a bright, sunny Krautrock-inspired jam, with a steady rhythm, gauzy synths, and free jazz saxophone.
Extended 3-hour edition; I did the second 90 minutes. Crush Collision 9/5-6/13
11:34 PM Arthur Russell ~ In The Light Of The Miracle
11:45 PM Gareth Clarke ~ Eved
11:49 PM Prostitutes ~ Jungle Wine
11:51 PM Nommo Ogo ~ The Ancient Ones (Exillon Remix)
11:58 PM Coyote Clean Up ~ Zebra Go Seek
12:02 AM Omar-S ~ Motor-City-Jackpot
12:08 AM Lil Kenny & The $hebangs ~ Straight To Your Head (Tale Of Us Remix)
12:13 AM Magic Panda ~ Distant Places
12:17 AM Volta Cab ~ Jamelia
12:21 AM Nights ~ Output
12:26 AM Bobby Browser ~ As Far As I Know
12:29 AM Shams ~ Only If There Is Nothing
12:32 AM Carl Taylor ~ Lost Memories
12:38 AM Chillax ~ Dawn
12:42 AM Photodementia ~ Letech
12:45 AM Floorplan ~ Never Grow Old
12:51 AM Inner City ~ Good Life (Contepella Breakbeat Remix)
12:55 AM Andy Stott ~ Anytime Soon
I’ll probably never get to the bottom of the ridiculous ever-growing pile of tapes that has been sitting on my desk ever since Foxy Digitalis went kaput, but I would be seriously remiss if I didn’t pay some special attention to this brainmangler. All the info this tape provides is that one person plays trumpet and electronics and the other plays clarinet and that it was recorded live. That might leave a bit up to the imagination, but what you actually hear is beyond anything you could’ve imagined. This is simply bizarre, alien circus music that doesn’t sound like something that was thought up by humans. Sure, there’s traces of clarinet and trumpet, but they get twisted and perverted into something really grotesque and silly and strange, and it keeps folding in on itself and getting stranger and more confounding. The first side is a near-18-minute piece called “D. Kiss” which somehow arrives at these chomped-up music box sounds and haunted acid-clown funhouse mirror jazz, then somehow riding a bliss-wave on a warped polka-dot surfboard. On the other side, “Call Merk” goes for a more rhythmic Black Dice approach, but with lots of buzzing and honking. Both parts of “Lil Elk” are squishy and drippy and make you feel like you’ve taken a shower in some thick gloopy blue substance that you’re not sure if you want to know what it’s made of. This is just simply a tape you have to hear to believe, and it’s a free download over at Bandcamp.
Somehow I didn’t get around to posting about this before, but I’ve been in awe of this album for a while. Total pastiche of early ’90s house music, the beats, the samples, the melodies, the artwork, it’s totally something that could’ve come out in 1991 and would have been easily forgotten about 3 years later. One song even has both the “yeah! woo!” loop and the slide whistles from that Deee-Lite song. And yet somehow it just sounds really fresh and well-produced. Just straight up fun dance music. Plus the “H” on the album cover looks like a house. This album’s too much, really.
Collaboration EP between Ital and Hieroglyphic Being. I don’t own any other records by either artist, but I like what I’ve heard, especially “Ital’s Theme”, which I immediately thought sounded like it could’ve been on an early µ-Ziq release, so it only made sense that he started releasing albums on Planet Mu. The tracks on this 12″ don’t seem to build and progress in the same way as a lot of the other Ital tracks I’ve heard, it seems more like it’s a bunch of jam sessions edited down, especially in the way the A side fades out after 13 minutes. The B-side is a little more concise, and “Zero Hour” (the standout track) has DBX-esque vocals, and a minimal beat with plenty of spacey echo. And then the record ends with “Running Out Of Time”, a standstill ambient track which feels like being caught in a threshold.
There are many bands called Lazy, so just to clarify, this is the debut LP by a Kansas City garage punk band, following a 7″ last year which contains 3 songs that are also on this album. It’s on Moniker Records, the label founded by Robert Cole Manis, who brought Death’s …For The Whole World To See to Drag City. Moniker Records also released the Stacian album, which was one of my favorites of last year. Anyway, this is X-ish garage punk with male/female vocals, pretty upbeat and melodic, a little sloppy but pretty fun. Not quite as slacker-y as the name would imply. “Grave” throws in some Misfits horror-punk. “Silence In Crisis” starts with a shadowy dialogue sample saying “I think punk rock is stronger than it ever was”, before diving headfirst into a choppy, punchy drumbeat. “Bring It Up” is the only long song here at nearly 5 minutes, and starts with a really slowly building intro, the drums don’t come in until about 1:20. Also, “Psychic Jelly” ends half a minute before the track actually ends (the last 30 seconds are silent). Other than that, short and sweet, over in 22 minutes, so overall won’t take up too much of your time.
![[tlr]: Homunculus](https://theanswerisinthebeat.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tlr.jpeg)
The Answer Is In The Beat 