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If an hour-long track of analog beats and drifting electronics sounds a bit heavy-handed, fear not. This is as light and warm as it gets, with Alexey's instrumentation guiding the way between miniatures, each of which explores a new incantation of the musician's sound. Some of them are pure rave drift, with little ticking beats tickling the underbellies of vast stretches of electronic tone; others take a more spaced out stance, pointing their eye out toward the nebulae and watching it drift apart while marbles crash underfoot. Each one drifts in and out as effortlessly as the next, some lasting longer but none exceeding their desired timetable.
As with so many of the smaller run labels today, Stunned's limited pressings have allowed the album maximum conceptual freedom. These could easily be broken into tracks (of which their would be many) and sequenced as sketches, but the coagulation of the ideas into a single long take means gives the whole a much more weighty feeling removed from the brevity of the numbers individually. Rapid fire drum machine numbers with laser beam stutters rest alongside brooding drone nod-offs, but the necessity of experiencing one before the other provides real shape to the output.
With so many ideas packed into it though, it's a wonder the album maintains the cohesion it does. This never sounds divided, no matter how many areas are drawn from, and even the stoned out white hum of one part, whose only accompaniment is aimless squiggling above, feels as if it is arriving from the same voice as the strictly beat oriented tracks. Much of the material sounds more like early synthesizer experiments, with single staccato runs going ad infinitum, but these give a retro sterility that efectively clears the air for lush drone pieces that sound as if they could go be drawn out for, well, the entire album.
To some extent, the disc's most valuable asset is its ability to sound entirely removed from any context; it appears as a truly outsider work despite the clear reference points of its practitioner, which include everyone from Gordon Mumma to Asmus Tietchens to Aphex Twin. Still, it seems Alexey's most important influences lie far below the public radar, lying under the Russian streets in continual drift.
This is what keeps the music as exciting as it does. It is wisely constructed but also one step removed from that which it initially appears as: an infinitely rich take on synthesizer music that reveals more with every listen. Each detail is as unexpected and inconspicuous as the next, giving it a life far beyond many more consciously connected to these areas of musical output.
samples:
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An Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music to me is a modern equivalent of Brian Eno’s No New York, an insider’s view of hermetic geographical scene. While it covers a much longer time period than Eno’s compilation, it is still a snapshot of a living, breathing China that is lost in the western media’s portrayal of the massive country. Having quickly exhausted the few artists I recognized, the rest of the box set is a good education. With over 40 artists featured, this kind of peek into the Chinese underground would be otherwise impossible. What is noticeable the whole way through is how high the quality of the performances is on the four discs.
Out of the more well known artists included, the pieces included are largely representative of their work. Two of the contributions that feature Dickson Dee are the kind of lush, ambient sounds that would normally be found on a release on Touch Records. His long career peppered with international collaborations make for a cosmopolitan approach to electronic music. As per usual, Torturing Nurse push all the levels into the red; their punishing noise reminiscent of Japanoise artists. That both Dee and Torturing Nurse sound so like experimental music from outside of China may be due to their geography, Hong Kong and Shanghai (their respective bases) both having stronger ties with the outer world than other areas of China.
On the flip side of this coin, there are other well known Chinese artists who have taken note of international styles but have subverted them to their own needs. Li Jianhong seems to have forged a pure guitar technique that is as shocking the first time as my first encounters with Derek Bailey and Keiji Haino. Both his solo performances and his work with Huangjin as D!O!D!O!D! are a riot of guitar, noise and adrenaline. On a similar note, Shenggy, vocalist and rhythm maker with White, combines what she learned during her stint as a musician in Beijing with her later move to Europe to develop a distinctive style of her own. Unlike the staid elegance of her work in White, “Junggy’s Decay” sees Shenggy go for the jugular, furious and feral. Both Jianhong and Shenggy merge different musical lineages into something new and beautiful. It is not just a case of east meets west or some other trite notion, it is the same sort of reinvention seen during '70s Germany; a co-opting of outside sources in order to reinvent the wheel.
They are not alone in this reinvention. The other artists on this anthology cannot be lesser known because of the quality of their work as most of them show a flair for invention and inspiration. Alice Hui-Sheng Chang’s vocal experiments are out there on their own, playing not only with her own voice but the space in which she finds herself both physically and mentally. Elsewhere, “Dream a Little Dream” by Beijing’s Nara is a slowly evolving piece of gentle techno-infused electronic music, the daintiness of the rhythm and melodies giving the music a natural grace. This grace is present throughout the set, surprising me because of my previous exposure to the more extreme side of Chinese experimental music. Even when the music is violent, there is a balance underlying it that is a world away from the reckless abandon of other harsh noise artists. Ying Fan’s “L2255 mix” comes close to chaos but Fan shows a restraint which tempers the extreme sounds.
Although the anthology only looks at music made in the last 17 years, there is a mix of old and new guards in the selection of artists. As well as all the young upstarts, Wu Quan and Nelson Hiu (Dancing Stone) both represent the approaches of the older generation of experimental artists. Quan’s “Weather Forest” and Hiu’s “Two” represent two other sides of this expansive experimental movement in Chinese music, the former a journey through a land made of vibrant electronic sound whereas the latter incorporates singing and dizzying flute playing to startling effect. That these two older (but not old) artists contribute such thrilling pieces shows that this sort of experimentation in music is not a new trend but one that has been germinating for years.
Sub Rosa have surpassed themselves in bringing this music out into the light and the inclusion of short biographies and discographies in the sleeve notes are very much appreciated. The inclusion of an essay by Yan Jun and Zbigniew Karkowski provides both an insider’s and an informed outsider’s view of this scene, giving further life to the project. Finally, Dickson Dee has done a sterling job in weaving together all the disparate strands of all these artists into one taut rope; a compilation based on geography rather than genre has never sounded so coherent.
samples:
- Nara, "Dream a Little Dream"
- Jedung Kying, "Dabao"
- Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, "There She Is, Standing and Walking on her Own"
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The cut-and-paste randomness is most evident in the opening piece, "Roma A. D. 2727." While the title sounds like it could be a very bad sci fi movie from the 1970s, the sound is a variety of sweeping digital lines of static, shrill sine waves that morph into sputtering white noise, and the occasionally regal orchestral sweep of synthetic sound. Sometimes roaring and harsh, and other times it drops to near pure silence, it shambles without any particular flow, for better or worse. It doesn’t have a sense of tight composition, but instead feels like random pastiches slapped together.
"Silencés Traverses Des Mondes Et Des Anges" has a more consistent structure to it, beginning with bird squawks, noise, and rain, like a post-apocalyptic soundscape. These sounds subtly segue into gentle stuttering waves of white noise. Occasionally these blast into more forceful territory, and occasionally matched with what sounds like an actual or synthetic didgeridoo, before dropping out to silence and then miniscule found sounds.
Dedicated to John Duncan, "Hautaa Hevosen Pää" ("Bury a Horse’s Head") is a more rhythmic composition, beginning with icy ambience and static laced scrapes, there are buried melodies and reverberated textures that are more overt throughout. The psychedelic low frequency pulses and phased static buzzes give it a much different sound quality than those that preceded it. "In A Frosted Lake" is a very descriptive title: being the most reserved of the tracks, its subtlety causes it to slip into the background when listening, but its glacial sound are never fully ignorable.
"Ylimääräisen Antenni Lämpötilan Mittaus 4080 MHz: SSÄ" ("A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Ml/S"), besides sounding like an electronic engineer's doctoral dissertation, features ultrasonic hums and buzzes with chiming distant loops far off in the distance. At the very end small bursts of what could be popular music appear, though so heavily filtered and effected to render them unidentifiable.
"Swedenborgia" and "Hengityttajä" ("The Breather") are the most aggressive of the pieces. The former opens with field recording sounds but adds in power drill like bass tones and warm, fuzzy static.The volume drifts into harsh territories at times, and the end features what may be an actual real live cymbal, or a digitally modeled equivalent. The latter demonstrates a lot of quiet metallic rattling and pinging before massive static squalls and reverb buried crashes max out the intensity of the sound.
While demonstrating Vainio’s love for clinically sparse digital textures, I think it is somewhat of a weaker album than his work with Pan Sonic, where the staunch minimalism is wrapped around sparse beats rather than here, where it is presented anomalously. It is a good album for sure, but it doesn’t have the same unique or individualist sound that it could have otherwise.
samples:
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Likely the most notable change in the way the album is restructured isn't so much in the source material, which serves as the carrot and leads Altz on the entire journey throughout, but in the incessant beats that run through the album, turning it into a grooving trance-like album with horn lines and jazz percussion steering the melodic content. "Crystaliquid Sky" begins with the tinkling of thumb piano, looping itself over clattering bells before absorbing into its fold a driving beat that will drive the remainder of the track, slipping in and out and carrying the work out of the studio and into the streets, reconfiguring an oddly metered bass clarinet line into an abstracted New Orleans swing line before diving into free sax skronk and canvases of rhythm.
Usually this sort of thing has limited appeal, laying the one trick—in this case, a beat—over the existing stuff but Altz has a way of keeping it interesting throughout, never just layering his material on top but turning Young's work inside-out and finding beats within the items already present. "Magenta Loops" takes an alarmingly Kenny G-esque sax solo and lays a bass heavy jungle groove beneath, giving it a light and spaced out euphoria. "Velvet Dreamin'" opens with treatings of the bass clarinet and rolling drums, staying as abstracted as the original without losing the feel of Altz's previous work on the album, taking on a loungey distortion for most of its length.
The least dance floor-worthy track is in the brief "Fly Times," but rather than disrupt the flow of the disc it actually serves as a welcome respite, finding languid horn lines and fluttering sax writhing beneath a thick electronic haze, a kind of cleansing of the palette before "Stillness (D'n'B Version)," a work done in conjunction with DJ Kensei lays on sci-fi feel on thick, representing the most electronically based piece here and one fairly well removed from the roots of the original. Still, the material makes its way in, but not in the same careful balance displayed on the rest of the disc.
The closing "Funks" also draws on a futuristically tilted beat, but it is better able to engrain Young's work in, giving it a richness. The moments where Altz takes over with his own material are somewhat weak, displaying a lack of direction, but the balance is better weighted than on the previous track. The track actually serves as a fine microcosm of the album as a whole, at its best representing the potential of blending such disparate stylistic elements and at its worst revealing the potential pitfalls of one artist working with another's material. When proper admiration of the material is given, it turns into a convening of minds; when it isn't it turns into a hacking up of something for seemingly egoistic means. Altz typically does a fine job of showing his love for Young's original, and it is those frequent moments that make the album an exciting alternative take.
samples:
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Past & Present
This album did not make much of an impact on me the first few times that I heard it, aside from the instantly gratifying highlights of Anna Black’s Nina Simone-esque cover of timeless suicide anthem “Gloomy Sunday” and Mary McCaslin’s bleak interpretation of The Supremes' “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” As I listened to it more and more, however, I began to notice the lyrics and it began dawning on me just how warped and unique many of these songs are: most of these ladies had some seriously heavy shit that they wanted to convey (albeit often in a drug-, J.R.R. Tolkien-, or God-damaged way). Admittedly, ambition far overreaches talent in some cases, but it certainly makes for a singularly compelling listen. The earnestness required to compose a song about a “candle that burns through the darkness and ignorance of man” or an imaginary dialogue with Satan is a rare commodity these days.
Women Blue is packed full of ear-catching moments, but one of the more noteworthy ones is Michele’s bizarrely hostile torch song “Blind as You Are,” which features spacey electronic flourishes beneath its coldly brutal musings (“You can die, blind as you are. No one will care.”) and urges listeners to “break down the Babylonian wall.” Of course, there are also a number of songs that are just plain good in a relatively straightforward way, particularly Kathy McCord’s powerful “I Will Never Be Alone Again” and Rosalie Sorrels’ dark and twangy “In The Quiet Country of Your Eyes.” Also, I don’t usually get very exited about liner notes, but I found many of the artist’s stories intriguing (Michele was rumored to be an actual broomstick-riding witch, for example) and useful in providing context. I sure wish there was a lyric sheet though.
The two artists that definitively cement Women Blue’s essentiality for me are Amanda Trees and Dayle Stanley. Both veer quite decisively into the realm of outsider art and, unsurprisingly, both women are shrouded in mystery. Stanley was active in the Boston folk scene in the early '60s, but disappeared after releasing two well-regarded albums. Her “Cry The Mountains White” is notable for several reasons: for one, she belts it out like she is auditioning for a high school talent show; secondly, she often yodels in a bizarre, underwater-sounding way; and finally, her lyrics are deeply odd and seem to combine Lord of the Rings-esque mythology with details of her own life (“If I could go, I’d follow you to the hateful mountains white, Steven.”). Trees (about whom virtually nothing is known) is a bit more understated, fragile, and conventionally melodic in her delivery, but her lyrics are exponentially weirder still: “Queen Wilhelmina” tackles snow, scarves, horse-drawn spaceships, ghosts, gardens, Wall Street, and disillusionment with her friends all within a roughly four minute span. It isn’t quite stream-of-consciousness, either; it actually seems like Trees believes there to be a perfectly plausible narrative arc linking everything together. Both women seem far too effortlessly surreal and uncommercial to have ever made it into a recording studio or convinced anyone to release their albums, but I am certainly happy that they did.
Woman Blue is a truly impressive curatorial achievement, as Past & Present has plucked a uniformly compelling batch of songs from the deepest depths of obscurity and rarity (I tried to track down an Amanda Trees album and could only find one available in the entire world...in Greece.). More importantly, however, these eclectic songstresses each had their own unique vision and sang with a great deal of conviction. This is serious art, not failed pop music. No one featured on this album got here simply because they wrote a pleasant melody or had a nice voice, these women were swinging for the fences (so to speak). Anyone interested in folk music will find a lot to like here, but the truly revelatory moments are reserved for those in search of inspired eccentricity and general soul-baring weirdness.
samples:
- Kathy McCord – I Will Never Be Alone Again
- Anna Black – Gloomy Sunday
- Amanda Trees – Queen Wilhelmina
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The supposed sound of the future has been created since man's first encounters with the heavens and stars. From ancient civilizations to modern times, jacks of all trades have been plying their craft in hopes of capturing the essence of space. Somewhere in the Mid-20th Century, our infatuation with space exploration, the idea of unidentified objects, and the secrets of the cosmos began infiltrating all walks of life. Pop culture began to engulf the idea of space with the creation of hokey trinkets, pointless cross-promotions, and a campiness that by today's standards seems misguided. Whether it was Mel Torme singing about the moon and stars or The Jetsons creating a generation longing for flying, folding cars and housekeeping robots, the universe became the butt of a colossal joke.
After man landed on the moon and pride turned to nostalgia, a sea of musicians began to transform the swinging ideas of lounge acts and studio executives into darker expanses, viewing space their ebon-tinged prism only few dared to view. The synthesizer became the otherworldly tool to accomplish such feats but it quickly became another rotting piece of technology gone to waste by lazy dreamers. So imagine the surprise when the synth began making its long-awaited comeback in the bedrooms of musicians intrigued by Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel. These new creations weren't just looking to capture the grandiose feel of their 1970s influences but were also tapping into that 1950s fantasy of the future. Modern technology has allowed us to take those visions of our elder kin and breathe renewed life into them, which exactly why Oneohtrix Point Never's Zones Without People is a rousing success.
Zones Without People is the spastic cousin of Clint Mansell's soundtrack to the recent sci-fi film, Moon. Where Mansell built spatial melodies around isolation, Lopatin's synth-and-bleep collage bridges the emptiness of space with the fertile imagination of the science geek in all of us. Zones Without People is the sound of haywire robots ("Learning to Control Myself"), malfunctioning spacecrafts ("Format and Journey North"), and shooting stars ("Hyperdawn") all wrapped within the universe's infinite expansion. Rather than separate his 8-bit sound effects and his lush synth drones, Lopatin marries the two in perfect harmony. The mechanisms we've associated with space exploration thanks to countless films and documentaries are funneled through Lopatin's rich textures, producing the quintessential sci-fi album for anyone who adores how previous generations interpreted the music of the planets.
Daniel Lopatin does not shy away from the sounds of high school science films nor is he afraid of creating music with boundaries, which is why Zones Without People will continually amaze. Lopatin's latest puts a whole new spin on the cliché, "It's a grower"—as just in space, Zones Without People is ever-growing with the reverberations of one big bang.
samples:
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Dissected Humanity was a serviceable if forgettable album; to my ears Anatomia made the kind of death metal that has been done to, well, death since it was perfected in the early '90s. Their worship of classic death metal is more than obvious from the moment I opened the package containing Human Lust. This tape looks exactly like a holy relic from the golden age of death metal with its Xeroxed cover, gory Lovecraftian artwork and a polite thank you note from the band to the purchaser.
Over the course of the three songs on the cassette, Anatomia shroud their old school violence in more darkness. Elements of Eyehategod and Obituary echo down the chasm that Anatomia have created. As with Dissected Humanity, this is not paradigm shifting reinvention but Human Lust is an awesome and thrilling release.
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Artist: All Hail The Transcending Ghost
Title: All Hail The Transcending Ghost
Catalogue No: CSR122CD
Barcode: 8 2356648912 2
Format: CD in jewelcase
Genre: Dark Ambient / Guitar Drone
Shipping: Now
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Cold Spring are proud to announce the debut album from All Hail The Transcending Ghost - a joint collaboration between Henrik Nordvargr Björkk (MZ.412, Toroidh, Folkstorm etc) and Tim Bertilsson (Switchblade, Fear Falls Burning). Together the Swedish legends have created arguably one of the most haunting drone-dark-ambient-industrial works in recent years, invoking the spirits of old Nordvargr, meets the sludge-doom vibe of Tim's hellish guitar. This has to be the most unsettling work from Nordvargr, as the man himself states: "truly the most scary music I have ever recorded". An icy chill down your spine... a cold hand on your shoulder... you are never alone in the darkness.
Tracks: 1. Intornator | 2. Untitled | 3. Untitled | 4. Untitled | 5. Untitled | 6. Untitled | 7. We Break The Seals Of Scattered Hopes
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Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh expand upon the stratagem they began on their first self-titled album, by recording a mixture of pieces they wrote themselves, and those of a repertoire drawn from sources as diverse as late renaissance classical and the Cuban folk music of Silvio Rodriguez. The result of their efforts is a work of impressive unity, the cover versions and traditional music they play blending seamlessly with their own songwriting. The virtuosic performances are made all the more gripping by being bathed in a psychedelic infusion of electronics that ranges between subtly glowing minutiae to expansive over arching effects.
The album opens with a version of the medieval Salterello, here called “Little Blue Dragon,” a piece of merry exuberance. These initials sounds of festivity and celebration carry over throughout the course of the album, even its darker moments; and it is here that one of the key players, Haruo Kondo, first shows off his skill as a specialist in ancient musical instruments. The sounds of old world woodwinds like the crumhorn and rauschpfeife, along with the drones of the hurdy gurdy perambulate their way throughout the album. The driving force of the drums, played by Batoh’s fellow member in Ghost, Junzo Tateiwa, carry over from the Salterello into the powerfully tribal title track. He beats on the frame drum like a shaman, with the steady syncopations that can easily put anyone into a light trance. Wind like textures flutter through an electronic breeze. The song pauses briefly for a burst of high frequency electronics that cause my head to buzz pleasantly, as if the sound is emerging from inside my skull. A strummed chord on an acoustic guitar helps to keep the beat while buzzing wind instruments and cello dance in curving melodious spirals. The pressure inside “Overloaded Ark” keeps building up, eventually spinning into a controlled yet spastic frenzy.
Helena’s talent, not only as a cellist, but as a vocalist is fully displayed on this album. She confidently sings beautifully in several different languages: Spanish, French, and Japanese. In “Sueno Con Serpientes” (originally by Rodriguez) her voice is silken, pure, and heartfelt. I may not understand a word of it, but she is able to carry a feeling of deep emotion that resonates across any barriers of language. This song also remains faithful to the original, while at the same time embellishing it, updating it, adding more reverb and electronic innuendo to sounds that were only implied and hinted at in the first, perhaps not being technically feasible at the time. On “Until Tomorrow,” one of the originals, she sings in emotive cries, the same ancient non-language she used so well in her work with Anahita. Batoh’s voice joins Helena’s in thick whispers, swishes, and swoops. His guitar playing on this song is liquid, like a mountain stream tumbling over rocks. If it were poetry it would be lyrical.
The album ends with a loving rendition of “Sham No Umi,” a song from Batoh’s back catalogue. Here once again, Helena’s vocals shine, with Batoh’s buried slightly underneath. It is one of those songs I start over and over again after completing. The guitar playing is hypnotic and lilting, joyfully lighthearted and technically complex: in other words, exceptional. A shimmering piano played by Kazuo Ogino underscores the guitar adding weight and emphasis. A few minutes in and the trill of a synth marks the point where all gravity is left behind. This song stays stuck in my head for days on end, bringing me much happiness. And it’s just one great tune among many that make Overloaded Ark one of the finest records to have come out this year.
samples:
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Final started as a noise band by a teenage Justin Broadrick, and was then revived in the mid 1990s as a dark ambient/isolationist project, and is responsible for some of the short-lived genre's best works. Now, in its third phase, Broadrick has combined elements of both previous forms into a newer, evolved sound.
"Right Signal" begins with dirty crunchy bass noise that sounds pulled off of any possible noise record, but paired with melodic ambient synth that ranges from dramatic prog-rock flourishes to dark, horror movie dirges. Synthetic horn fanfares are presented alongside distorted electronic passages with a slow building tension throughout. "Wrong Signal" is initially pure power electronics swell with guitar feedback and noise winding through. Through its 15 minute duration, mournful synths eventually come into focus, calling to mind some of the melancholy moments of 2 but in a far less minimal context.
"Stop at Red" keeps up the darkness by focusing on sparse, treated guitar over a stripped down bed of electronics, eventually being dominated by squealing feedback and raw noise, though the deep, gliding bass sounds never go away. The track ends with the multi-tracked voice of Broadrick (I am assuming) that could be a lost Jesu vocal track. The original material ends with "Green," mixing mostly plaintive guitar playing from Broadrick with more ambient sounds. The guitar has the dreary post-punk sound that a lot of the more recent Jesu work has incorporated, so it is perhaps the closest sounding thing to that project here.
The alternate mix of "Right Signal" pulls some of the harsh electronic elements away while simultaneously adding more film score elements to give it an even more dramatic sound than prior. The shortened alternate edit of "Wrong Signal" filters the noise down to a hushed static, allowing depressive synths to be the focal point.
"Stop at Red" reappears in a stripped down capacity that maintains the darkness of the original, but keeps the rougher elements more at bay. The remix of "Green" mostly treats and cuts up the original guitar, putting it behind the electronic stuff, and is one of the only cases on here where the alternate version is a bit more raw than the original one. The alternate mixes as a whole are pretty different takes on the material, to the point where one can hear the linkage between the two takes, but either would make a strong stand-alone album. Having them both together is just a great thing.
I have consistently considered Final’s 2 and the Urge/Fail 7" among the best dark electronic music I have ever heard some decade-plus since their first release, and that has not changed. Reading All The Right Signals Wrong, however, is one of the definite high moments in the Final discography that successfully incorporates the harsh, noisier stuff alongside the lush ambient moments that characterized the 1990s incarnation of the project. It takes the classically dark, morose power noise of early Maurizio Bianchi, but with a sense of brooding melody which that genre has never been focused on. It is also perhaps the most multifaceted work he has done under this name, and the alternate mixes exclusive to this CD are varied enough to make a more complete release.
samples:
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