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Siamese Soul is the latest dispatch from the indefatigable Mark Gergis’ life of obsessive culture-scavenging and tireless travel. Compiled from a mountain of forgotten cassettes and records acquired throughout journeys across rural Thailand, this album is less kooky than Thai Pop Spectacular and covers a wider variety of artists than Shadow Music, though placing a firm emphasis on both funkiness and soulfulness. The omnipresent horns and funky bass lines will be quite familiar to Western ears, but they are transformed into something wholly bizarre (and oft-excellent) by unusual instrumentation, odd melodies, Eastern percussion, and a host of seriously intense vocalists.
While the entire album is strong from start to finish, I was most struck by the two contributions from Ubon Pattana with Surin Paksiri. Very little information is given about them (one is a Sarawan Dance and the other is a story about a tribewoman), but both feature sleepy hypnotic rhythms, hazy, drugged-out instrumentation, and captivating and impassioned vocals from Angkana Khunchai. I was also quite fond of Kwan Jai & Kwan Jit Sriprajan’s “E-Saew Tam Punha Huajai” (Advice Column For Love Troubles”), which features some rather cathartic and stunning vocals that seem totally disproportionate to its subject matter (it is purportedly a teasing song about a woman who loves three generations of men). Incidentally, this compilation would still be noteworthy for sheer baffling eclecticism of subject matter even if the accompanying music was not so striking: while the fifteen songs are largely about relationships, they also cover a hunter’s karmic comeuppance, the superiority of breast milk to alcohol, frogs, and the unconditional love one receives from one’s bong. The song about frogs even features some disorienting field recordings of the titular amphibians that (inadvertently?) transform a relatively straightforward funk jam into something approaching outsider psychedelia.
Naturally, the punky smash-and-grab nature of this compilation precludes any sort of rigorous or informative liner notes, though there are quite a few charming period photos included. Gergis and co-compiler Alan Bishop are (quite obviously) not from Thailand and I suspect that finding background information on these artists would be a daunting endeavor for even a native. Fortunately, the duo’s lack of academic discipline or Thai fluency is more than compensated for by their enthusiasm and excellent taste. Siamese Soul is a raw, fun, and enigmatic party of an album and there is literally no one else that would have found and disseminated these songs.
Samples:
- Daw Bandon, “Bong Ja Bong”
- Ubon Pattana with Surin Paksiri, “Lum Sao Phutai Rum Pan”
- Teun-Jai Boon Praraksa, “Ha Fang Kheng Kan”
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Bloodlust!/Fatal Beliefs/Malsonus
Of the three releases from Nightmares this year, their 7" EP is the shortest and, for that reason, most forgiving recording. Their brevity is about all that makes these two songs tolerable. Both are filled with scores of sickly synthesizer tones and hissing noise, which together induce a claustrophobic tension and a nauseating sense of vertigo. Enjoyable only to the extent that discomfort can be, "Floating Above the Tracks" and "We Were Melded Together" do not allow for silence nor relief. Though there are spaces between the sounds and the band avoids creating an onslaught of pure noise, not one second goes that isn't tattooed by menace. Whether atonal pockets of sound are bubbling up in the background or long, obvious screeches of phased metallic noise are ripping through the foreground, I always feel pressed beneath the weight of Nightmares' unremitting electronics. The density they achieve isn't the result of stereo-filling distortion, but the accomplishment of psychological dread and volume. On the one hand, much of what is oppressing about each song can be found in how one reacts to the band's abstractions.
Whether or not I was intended to hear people screaming or to imagine the extent of infinite space while listening, I do hear and imagine those things and both cause some exciting reactions. I'm never quite scared by what I hear, but what's implied is enough to keep me on guard, always guessing what might be around the next corner. On the other hand, both songs exhibit the kind of spaciousness I'd typically associate with ambient music. The songs aren't so congested that I can't hear events when they happen. All the dissonant tones that pop up and wobble through the songs are thus able to flex their muscle to the fullest extent. Because of this sharp production and clarity I can make sense of what's happening both in the noise and inbetween its various instantiations. But, every moment is perverse and unfamiliar and haunted by an eternal horizon. Canaday, Reed, and Solotroff convincingly portray a threat out there somewhere, just beyond where you and I can see, but they never reveal it. So when the needle reaches the end of the record and the music stops, I'm almost a little too happy to put the record back in its sleeve. I don't want to know what might happen were the record to keep going.
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The first disc, No Man’s Land, is a rustic, spacious set of songs that mostly feature only voice and acoustic guitar, though roughly half of the tracks are introduced by a passage of field recordings to give a greater sense of the bucolic isolation that the music conveys figuratively. Both "In a Garden Barely Looked At" and "The Brunt of Every Winter" focus on simple acoustic guitar and Hubbard’s gentle, yet strong vocals, with subtle synthetic accompaniment and double tracked harmonious vocals at times. These two feature almost literal field recording elements, the former birds and rain, while chilling, howling wind introduces the latter.
Both "Kate” and “Sons of the Hounds" strip the formula down even more, leaving out the field recordings to simply leave the intimate guitar and vocals, like being in the room during the performance rather than just listening to a digital replication of it. The closing "The Old Ones Go First" foreshadows what waits on the other disc with its industrial field recording sounds, fragments of communication and voices out of reach undercutting the guitar and vocals.
The second set of tracks, Into The Dog-Dayed Night doesn’t completely change the sound but instead puts layers of digital treatment and effects on top: Hubbard’s voice and guitar are mostly still present, but accompanied by a multitude of synthetic sounds and collages. "In the Long Afternoon" really just adds some erratic piano playing, but reverberated in such a way that it sounds like the entire piece is being played loudly from deep inside a cave. The title track also maintains the same core sound, but glossed over with a thin reverb that makes the song sound like its coming from some nearby, but unspecified source.
"Day Break" has far more in the way of electronic elements, with delicate electronic piano and bitcrushed digital sounds creating a brittle collage of synthetic sounds, which on the surface sound completely disparate but work beautifully when synchronized. "Old Cat" is even more electronic, with a rhythm that sounds like a Casio keyboard sequence played off an old cassette that’s been left to rot for years. The rhythms of "Highways in the Deathlight" are matched with frail textures that match the skittering delayed clicks beautifully. The closing "The Cold Stark North East" drops much of the digital sound to focus on voice and piano, setting the sonic palette to go back to the first disc in an endless cycle.
While the two discs that make up this release are quite different on the surface, at their core they are both variations on the same themes of isolation, memories, and escape. The more acoustic based tracks have that same sense of intimacy that artists such as Jessica Bailiff have conjured before, but Caethua maintains a singular identity all her own. Credit should also be given to the Preservation label for its beautiful presentation: each disc is in a sleeve with a mini lyric sheet, all of which is bound into a multi-layered booklet which, though fragile, is beautiful.
samples:
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Phoenix Records
The presentation of this reissue intentionally retains all of the originals mystery: none of the musicians are credited (and may remain unknown to this day), and the full color reproduction of the original LP insert is a simple white/pink gradient painting. The disc is structured like the original vinyl LP as well, with two side-long tracks that are untitled.
The first side is essentially a collection of four tracks combined into one, with noticeable stop/start points. Although eschewing the drums for the most part, the side opens with junky percussive sounds and a twangy, meowing cat guitar line that eventually joins multitracked chanting vocals and an apocalyptic harmonica solo. While on the surface this sounds rather unhinged, it is in fact the most traditionalist segment of this entire album.
The music then morphs into noiser territory, with treated tape-loops and vocals being shouted from an intercom somewhere in the room. At this point, the music, accented with the shrill horn solo and pitch bent guitar, seems like a band who took Can's "Aumgn" and "Peking-O" as their raison d’etre. The remaining segments focus on the backwards loops and bleak soundscape elements, alternating between ritualistic and raw, aggressive vocals.
The second side is a more consistent dynamic throughout. The initial sound collages, grimy bass thump and anemic horns give it more than just a passing resemblance to the earliest recordings of Cabaret Voltaire, and occasional awkward stabs of funk solidify this even more. Eventually the music crosses into more conventional rock sounds, but with a distinctly Eastern feel, but it soon dissolves back into freeform vocals and backward tape loops, closing with the abstraction it began with.
Hearing this album some 30ish years since its initial release, it is still a baffling, head-scratching disc. It isn’t difficult to hear the influences of their German forefathers, nor is it difficult to see how the likes of Fushitsusha were born of this chaos. While the various practitioners of so-called "experimental" music that have come and gone since this first was released have made it a bit less left-field than when it was first released, it has lost none of its impact.
samples:
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Michael Hurley's second release for the Gnomonsong label is a creaky and charmingly relaxed collection of covers, Hurley classics, and new material. Michael’s choice to collaborate with Ida and their friends seemed a bit odd to me at first, as his oft-wacky and sloppy aesthetic is quite dissimilar to Ida’s somber introspection. Unexpectedly, however, there is quite a bit of chemistry between them: Hurley’s songs benefit quite a bit by being backed by such a group of skilled musicians and Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell’s penchant for all things slow and sad often brings an unexpected emotional depth to Snock’s eccentric lyricism. Also, it is extremely endearing to hear the Ida gang loosen-up, embrace their inner hillbillies, and kick out some swinging countrified jams (they even hoot like owls during “Hoot Owls”).
The strongest songs, appropriately enough, are the gems culled from Hurley’s own back catalogue. The shuffling, forlorn “Wildegeeses” is the album’s clear highlight, as yodeling, whistling, and melancholy female backing vocals, harmonium, and steel guitar beautifully enhance Michael’s heartbroken vocals. Also, the slowed-down pace and haunting viola/violin work from Hurley and Jean Cook transform 1977’s “Hog of the Forsaken” into something darker and more powerful than the original. Of course, that darkness is the exception rather than the rule (this being Michael Hurley album after all), so there is also a great deal of irreverence and absurdity, such as the scat faux-trumpet solos (yes, plural) in Fats Domino’s “Valley of Tears,” the cheeky ‘50s homage “Going Steady,” or the rollicking cover of the Ames Brothers’ howlingly inane “Rag Mop.” Fortunately, Hurley’s sometimes cloying wackiness is much more palatable than usual with Ida’s able backing and the more mindless moments are well-balanced by more substantial fare (particularly the traditional Irish medley “Loch Lomond/Molly Malone”).
While there is no new material here that is as strong as the highlights from 2007’s sparse Ancestral Swamp, Ida Con Snock does not make any pretensions of being a bold artistic statement: this session is essentially just a bunch of like-minded musicians getting together to play some songs that they love, but the enthusiasm, unpolished charm, and informal back porch vibe of it all is difficult to resist. Rather than mellowing or fading into irrelevance, Hurley seems to only get more and more charismatic with age.
Samples:
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Ossian Brown's first book “Haunted Air” is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK on the 28th October. Focussing on Ossian's phantasmagorical collection of early Hallowe'en photography, America c. 1875 - 1955, his unique and extraordinary book comes with an introduction by David Lynch and an afterword by Geoff Cox. “Haunted Air” is available for pre-order from the Random House website.
“The roots of Hallowe’en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls’ Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging ‘soul cakes’ in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay.
From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily on fresh lore, consuming half-remembered tales of its own shadowy origins and rituals, Hallowee’en was reborn in America. The pumpkin supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival’s intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared into the faces of the living and the living, ghoulishly masked and clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back.”
The photographs in Haunted Air provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementoes of the treasured, now unrecognisable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers.”
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Diane Cluck - Oh Vanille / Ova Nil
180g audiophile vinyl
Diane's first release on 12" vinyl November 2010 ( reissue )
Oh Vanille / Ova Nil has been reissued on 180g audiophile vinyl, pressed by 3 Syllables Records in Cardiff, Wales. The album has been mastered by the legendary Ray Staff at Air Studios in London and includes two unreleased bonus tracks.
The record is packaged in double weight card stock with embossed titles and a full color, double weight inner sleeve with song lyrics.
The records are in stock and are now shipping.
1. all i bring you is love
2. half a million miles from home
3. telepathic desert
4. easy to be around
5. the turnaround road
6. sandy ree
7. bones and born again
8. petite roses
9. held together (let go if you will)
10. yr million sweetnesses
11. wild deer at dawn
12. EZ demo*
13. gedifra*
*previously unreleased
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Both bands are known for epic monstrosities, so it comes as no surprise that 2/3 of the songs here hover around 10 minutes, but fans who are looking for massive dynamic shifts might feel a little let down. The EP is a technical success: while I was expecting some soup of distortion, the stellar production actually allows for each participant to be truly heard. On the first song, "Low Tide," for example, it slowly evolves over time, with Craig's crooning vocals against the ever powerful bass riff, straight up rock drums, and guitar. Drums and guitar give way to the distorted beats while the bass guitar lingers, ominous, like a heavy pendulum. The power is in the restraint here. We're expecting somebody to break, somebody to burst, but it's possibly a competition between both entities to see who can hold out longest.
"Delial," is once again driven by the killer bass riff, it reaches a peak early but isn't completely overblown with the layered screams, and nicely doesn't let the hum of the guitar pedal trail on and on like a tired cliche. "Stolen" opens like a pleasant Aereogramme ballad with Craig's echoed vocals buried almost entirely in the distance under a marching drum, beats and bass part for a gorgeous mid section with a thump and clap that brings me back to one of my favorite OMD songs (and possibly one of my favorite songs ever), "The Romance of the Telescope." Its vastness is more oceanic than Oceanic, and as it ends with the unexpected sounds of birds at low tide (strangely enough it's not the song titled "Low Tide"), at 10 minutes it feels like it stopped without trailing off needlessly.
What makes this a high-ranking In the Fishtank is that unlike past experiences, it doesn't sound like two bands just fucking around and releasing whatever came out. This has been my problem with things like the ones from Sonic Youth and even Tortoise. It's short, yes, and I would prefer something a bit longer and with a bit more variety, but these excellent 24 minutes sound very nicely following Aereogramme's Seclusion EP, issued over here earlier this year, coincidentally with cover art by Aaron Turner.
samples:
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Despite being a duo, Hototogisu have always had the vibe of a recluse within their music. There’s always been a distance and privacy in their sound since Matthew Bower (Skullflower / Sunroof!) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards / Zaimph) first teamed up a few records into Hototogisu’s discography. Within the morass of sounds there’s always been a huge human element, but it’s never been a consciously communicative voice. Hototogisu have always been unique in the field of drone rock, pushing competition into either straight up plagiarism or shunting them into reinvention.
This is music deeply seated in ritual and purging, a great human heaving of ideas and emotions, but never rooted in structure or the obvious. This Brooklyn / Leeds team-up are charging white horses through crowds of their peers, taking heads nonchalantly as they go. Even their sleeves add to the band’s mythology, from the cult metal logo and alchemically crafted artwork, there’s a focus on the darkly gothic, without the bullshit accoutrements. This cover features a big cat skull gripping a steel ball in front of shards of broken glass, a bizarre but oddly elegant image.
Their back catalogue is in good company with this LP, an astoundingly deep sounding record with minimal electronics and a lot of guitar action. Chimärendämmerung takes the guitar from its obvious forefront position and splits it open like a patient mid-operation. Using its tactility and historical connections to emotional peaks this pair wreck what a guitar is supposed to be for. While the song still squirms, they ride it between ceremonial blasts of drone and lost-in-the-wilderness sandstorm prayers. Bower and Bassett don’t just blow minds for a living; they do it on their weekends too. With Chimärendämmerung they avoid both the piebald wacky instrumentation and shambolic anything-goes of many acts that seem to have been pulled into their wake. There is a very substantial something made here from screaming feedback and patterns from other unidentifiable instruments. This is most clearly heard on the second untitled piece as it layers up a melody under nineteen minutes of high-energy feathered drone. This leaves cataracts of ravaged almost solos sitting happily alongside a snaking echoing alleyway whistle. Everything here sounds organic and alive; this is an album that demands immersion. Within Hototogisu’s flattened tones and squalls of scrap metal there’s an unsettling world underneath, whispering beneath the mess. Even still Hototogisu manage to summon up a cacophony of bell-like waterfalls of noise, but one that’s tempered with hope.
The record’s human heart comes through Bassett and Bower’s obsessive input, the constructed conflict between their instruments and white lightning sheets of energy and. For all the darkness associated with the drones of the band, they never slip into dredging the sounds of senescence and death. Hototogisu skilfully use a dab of metal’s grandeur and mood without all the pomposity (Hello there, Sunn O))))), pitching it into a rootless maelstrom. The three central pieces on the LP are shifting series of explosions of noises book ended by two shorter tracks (all untitled); the programming has each track brickwalling into the next with no gaps. The song’s layers of rise and fall hum and loops of melody work better upon close inspection. The record’s higher tones seem to congregate on the later parts of the record, the buzzing of a thousand corpse flies failing to obscure the scraping viola saws for too long. The prima facie view of something as deceptively rich as Bower/Bassett’s work is often one of a mere onslaught of noise. This pair didn’t build their reps from just sitting back and blasting people rigid in their seats, although they undoubtedly could.
Taking a wider look back at the Hototogisu back catalogue, this is as easily digestible a peak as they’ve ever reached. Bassett and Bower have settled, if you can use that word in association with something so deeply driven, into a majestic furrow of sound. Every sound seems handmade and purposefully placed with this duo, even in the molten heat of the thickest barricades of barbed feedback.
samples:
 
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Kill Rock Stars
While early recordings were more nowave then they were power pop, albums like Reveille and Apple’O foundthe band stringing the two together, as though it were the most naturalthing in the world, while Milk Man altered the approach, utilizingkeyboards and atmospheric samples. Obviously, it didn’t sound like popmusic to most, but behind the skronky guitars and absurdist tales ofwarped childhoods and bent sexuality, there were great songs. Though it would havebeen enough for them to rest on their achievements of past releases, itseems pretty clear that the band have released their strongestcollection of songs yet.
At 20 tracks, TheRunner’s Four can seem a bit overwhelming, and while the first half ofthe album is seemingly devoted to the band’s more accessible material,the second half is just as rewarding. “Chatterboxes” opens the album with a suitably menacing guitar line andSatomi Matsuzaki’s airy vocals. It’s an understated opener for an albumthat is bursting at the seams with angular guitars and sublime pophooks. More indicative of the album as a whole is “Running Thoughts,” ajazzy number carried by drummer Greg Saunier’s crashing rhythm andslinking guitar that seemingly ebbs and flows through its nearly fourminute duration with hardly any effort. “Spirit Ditties of No Tone” isnear psychedelic in its execution, with Matsuzaki spouting offabsurdist couplets over the acid drenched guitars of John Dieterich andChris Cohen. Throughout The Runner’s Four, Deerhoof’s strong sense ofsurreal storytelling remains intact, such as on the lost pirates’ tale“Odyssey.” Elsewhere, “Lemon & Little Lemon,” bubbling keyboardgives way to brushed percussions and soft vocals.
With The Runner’s Four, Deerhoofseem poised to gain a whole new legion of fans.
samples:
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