Repackaged, remastered and reissued with a 13 minute bonus track, this mighty release from Kevin Drumm sees the dark of night again. The five pieces are more varied and exciting than I believed noise could be; this is no lazy DIY noise made with a handful of effects pedals plugged into each other. Drumm has molded this immense sound into such an imposing form that I do not think even an army of Merzbows could stand up to.
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Sonically seduced by the infinitely reverberating, rapturous depths of this record, I no longer care that Sasu Ripatti essentially mines the same creative space with every Vladislav Delay release. The fact remains that under this moniker he makes perpetually gorgeous, imperfectly fractured ambience, setting the mood for transformation and reflection on a quiet night alone.
Fans have come to expect, and hopefully understand, that this is what a Vladislav Delay album will always sound like. Unlike contemporary Stefan Betke, who pulled a colossal bait-and-switch that many of us sensitive souls still lick our wounds over, Ripatti has kept his bond even as he attempted to bring new ideas to life within the familiar territory of his abstract dubs. The same trick, however, failed to work with his far poppier Luomo project, having reached some kind of ideological limit or perceptual dead-end with last year's tragic and anticlimactic Paper Tigers. By contrast, Whistleblower is an evolving repetition, a gradually yet naturally escalating cycle of real pensive soul-searching music.
Save for the radio-static flecked "Lumi," this album continues the epic tradition that characterizes much of his discography, including 2001's stunning and uninterrupted Anima and 2005's The Four Quarters, many songs nearly reaching and even exceeding the 10 minute mark. As on these cited records, Ripatti takes full advantage of freeing himself of time constraints, exploring his sentient soundscapes in psychedelic fashion on the gloopy title track. Another such example, "Wanted To (Kill)" throbs with an unexpectedly tribal mystique, its percussive pulses alternating between the ritualistic and the funky, rippling through an intricately woven template of damaged sonic goods and soothing textures. "Stop Talking" steps up the chaos level with lo-fi samples aggressively splattered throughout, whipping up an atmospheric uncertainty of shock and awe at its peak that somehow becomes suppressed just long enough to make it to the next track. The disjointed downtempo jam "He Lived Deeply" is replete with discarded drum patterns circa mid-nineties Bristol, adding a slightly more stable rhythmic dimension to an otherwise amorphic work.
An achievement in this landmark 10th year of publicly consumable work from Vladislav Delay, Whistleblower plays out as if salvaged from the recorded remains of some abandoned space station's now-decrepit soundsystem. While that could be applied to any number of his releases, in this case the description fits better than ever, leaving me to wonder what else Ripatti is bound to find deep out there in the cosmos within.
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Describing Redeye feels largely like a grand exercise in futility that doesn’t even offer the simple satisfaction of burned calories. I could sweat over the material here in exhaustive detail for some time, only to find that, at the end of it all, my words make less sense than the record I aimed to explain. Take any given track and a panoply of genres and subgenres are bound to graze the skull, from the electro-symphonic video game orchestras of "Bobfoc" to the folktronica-infused drill n bass of "The Only Way." "Derbyshire Dark" spends much of its first half teasing with dreamy floating electronics before kicking into high gear with a straightforward 4/4 power noise rhythm. Of course, Baker refuses to offer up the satisfaction of a hedonistic dance track, and quickly removes the beat from circulation, ultimately replacing it with a head-nodding groove that he can hardly stand to let breathe for very long. This apparent impatience, coupled with the aforementioned kitchen sink approach, makes it hard to enjoy the best moments of this CD without being suddenly deprived of satisfaction in what eventually starts to seem like some cruel post-Pavlovian game.
Redeye smells of the carefree disregard of a Rephlex record, though in fairness nowhere near as pretentious and preposterous in execution. One gets the impression that Baker is more likely down-to-earth than up his own ass, something than cannot be said for many in Richard D. James' unreliable stable. I suspect that anyone who has listened to an album at any point in their life will enjoy at least two minutes of this CD. Still, despite my cited complaints, those with ridiculously eclectic tastes or an untreated case of A.D.D. may find the album just what their iPod Shuffle demands.
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Repackaged, remastered and reissued with a 13 minute bonus track, this mighty release from Kevin Drumm sees the dark of night again. The five pieces are more varied and exciting than I believed noise could be; this is no lazy DIY noise made with a handful of effects pedals plugged into each other. Drumm has molded this immense sound into such an imposing form that I do not think even an army of Merzbows could stand up to.
Mego Editions
Sheer Hellish Miasma begins with the deceptively titled of "Impotent Hummer;" deceptive as there is nothing impotent about this piece nor the rest of the album. Drumm's use of noise is precise and domineering, the sound pushes the listener to where Drumm wants them. He refuses to allow the noise to break down into chaos. Instead he finds a spot in the noise and nurtures it into a gigantic worm-like pulse. "Impotent Hummer" is based on a pounding metallic rhythm which constantly feels like it is going to break apart as other layers are poured into the track like coarse gravel. It is an impressive start and remarkably it gets even better from here.
This album works especially well thanks to Drumm's control of the sounds being produced. While most noise artists throw caution to the wind and just let everything feedback wildly, Drumm instead tries to harness the energy he is unleashing and aim it directly at whoever is brave enough to listen. The tidal drones of "Hitting the Pavement" feel like they could break all around me if it were not for Drumm reining them in. If the power was allowed to swell up and spill out then I imagine the piece would become quite boring in a short space of time. "Hitting the Pavement" instead sounds even more massive than any din left to its own accord.
As captivatingly heavy as this album is, it still exacts a heavy toll on me; I am exhausted by the time it finishes. Thankfully Mr. Drumm is a nice man and lets his audience down gently with the relatively sleepy piece "Cloudy," which soothes the ears after an hour of hard labor. Sheer Hellish Miasma is not hellish by a long shot, it is one of the most finely crafted albums of the last decade. On the surface it is pure noise but delving into its depths reveals far more than the average bedroom knob twiddler. I am delighted that Mego have reissued it as I would probably never have encountered it otherwise.
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Their fourth album sees Grails continuing to go from strength to strength. Even after last year's excellent Black Tar Prophecies collection I am completely gobsmacked at how far Grails have come on in such a short space of time. The title of the album is particularly apt as the group have shed all unnecessary fat from their sound. There is not a misplaced note or tone on this album, this definitely sounds like Grails have sold their souls at the crossroads in exchange for untold amounts of talent.
The playing on Burning Off Impurities is impressive but without any showiness. Each of the four members plays their part with restraint, letting it rip when it suits the piece and keeping silent when required. The Middle Eastern atmospheres that have crept into their work in recent years are as sublime as ever. "Silk Rd" finds Grails mixing western and eastern influences seamlessly to create the album's centrepiece and what I feel is best piece of music from their entire career. As soon as it finishes I want to dive right back into it again but self-restraint (just about) kicks in and I move on to the rest of the album which is just as deserving of my ears as "Silk Rd."
What sticks out about Burning Off Impurities is the sheer amount of styles and influences that Grails have effortlessly adopted. "Drawn Curtains" is brimming with the same melancholy (and a very similar violin) that Dirty Three have built their whole career out of. "Outer Banks" covers a huge range of different Krautrock influences, although the Faust inspiration shines through like a beacon, no doubt due to one-time Faust member Steven Wray Lobdell sharing in the production work. All the music is captured beautifully—the mix is just right and there is a good balance between the different aspects of the compositions. It never sounds like an instrument is dominating the piece, it all sounds very natural but still retaining enough punch to stop my attention from wandering.
I am still amazed at Grails' speedy transformation from a bunch of guys I could take or leave to a group that I eagerly anticipate more music by. Their upward trajectory is showing no signs of levelling off so as much as I am enjoying this release, I await to see where they go from here. There is so much packed into this disc however, that even if I have to wait a few years I do not think I will be burned out with Burning Off Impurities.
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Inspired by Popol Vuh and originally released in a tiny pressing of 550 on vinyl from the inimitable Acid Mothers Temple front man. Licensed from A Silent Place. Included on this cd reissue are the bonus tracks from the even more limited 7" included with 100 copies of the original LP.
Guitarist, violinist, performer on numerous traditional instruments, composer and leader of the Acid Mothers Temple, Kawabata Makoto expresses in this solo performance all his mantric cosmical vocations and spins them into space sonorities. He took inspiration from the Popol Vuh album of the seventies Hosianna Mantra, during his visit to A Silent Place headquarters in late Winter 2006. In a sunny Sunday noon spent in the country-side, eating and drinking Apulian specialities and listening to some great experimental records, Makoto and his Italian friends Pierpaolo and Pasquale, took the decision to start this cooperation. A few days later, back in Japan, Makoto recorded the Hosanna Mantra album at the Acid Mothers Temple between March 12th and 13th, using electric guitar, bouzouki and sitar. The result is this new fantastic sound coming from the cosmos. A simple gem of crystalline beauty.
"Music, for me, is neither something that I create, nor a form of self-expression. All kinds of sounds exist everywhere around us, and my performances solely consist of picking up these sounds, like a radio tuner, and playing them so that people can hear them. However, maybe because my reception is somewhat off, I am unable to perfectly reproduce these sounds. That is why I spend my days rehearsing. Where do these sounds come from? Who is sending them out? That is not something for me to know, and neither is there any way that I could find out. I simply believe that they come from the 'cosmos'. (Maybe other people would call God the source). Since I was a small child I have been prone to hearing ringing sounds in my ears and other sound phantasms. At the time, I believed that these were messages aimed directly at me from a UFO, and so I would gaze up at the sky. But once I started playing music myself, I came to feel that these noises were a kind of pure sound. And I promised myself that one day I would be able to play those sounds myself. It is only recently that I have begun to feel that I have been able to come close to reproducing these sounds in my solo guitar work, and in my INUI project. However, in June of 1999, I finally discovered my own 'cosmos' and I experienced an instant of total union with it!! That 'cosmos' is still tiny in size - although any cosmos can, by its very nature, be infinitely huge or infinitely small. The energy and vibrations contained within that it far exceeded my imagination in scope and beauty. I can only describe the miraculous instant when my 'cosmos' accepted my consciousness as MAGIC.”
-Kawabata Makoto
The release date is May 22nd, 2007.
Cover art and tracklisting are as follows:
1. Hosanna Mantra 1
2. Hosanna Mantra 2
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Brand new full length album from the Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO featuring their recent addition, female vocalist Kitagawa Hao. Recorded over a period of four months at The Acid Mothers Temple this is a very clean sounding and polished AMT. Frontman Kawabata Makoto admitted, only half joking, that this has the "cleanest sound in AMT history!"
More controlled than many of their speaker destroying fuzz blasted speed guru jams, Crystal Rainbow Pyramid is focused on mystic ambient passages leading into Kawabata's head-heavy echo-riffs. Crystal Rainbow Pyramid is clearly one of the new classic AMT recordings. Prepare to have your mind blown slowly with evolving heavyweight jams and climactic peaks of exquisit ecstacy. Artwork by Seldon Hunt.
The release date is May 22nd, 2007
Cover art and tracklisting are as follows:
1. Pussy Head Man From Outer Space
2. Crystal Rainbow Pyramid
3. Electric Psilocybin Flashback
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Part-Monster, Piano Magic's seventh "proper" album (excluding compilations), easily lives up to its title. Though Piano Magic are generally tarred with the brushes of "ambient," "coldwave" or even "ghost-rock," Part-Monster has it's fill of all-out, near brutal, dynamic intensity. Indeed, anyone who's witnessed PM live over the past 2 years or so will testify that the shadowy introspection of their records is camouflage for a beast of many teeth. Bringing in Guy Fixsen, of the group, Laika, as producer, clearly marked the band's intention for a rawer, more powerful sound. (Fixsen has taken the production and/or engineer chair for such luminaries as The Pixies, Moonshake, The Breeders, Joy Zipper, Stereolab, Lush and most notably for My Bloody Valentine's Loveless.)
That's not to say that Piano Magic have entirely turned the amps up to 11. Part-Monster gracefully manages to balance this cathartic noise with romantic paeans to their favourite subject (the more cruel, tragic side of their home city, London) and most notably tips a hat to perhaps the most graceful of its outcasts, Joseph Carey Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man.
In this, the 10th year of their existence, Piano Magic can look back on a varied and accomplished discography most bands wouldn't manage in a lifetime of trying. Records for 4AD, Darla, Morr Music, Important and many more, mark their way, as well as the soundtrack to Bigas Luna's Son De Mar movie (2001) and performances at some of the biggest festivals in Europe (Benicassim, Primavera, BAM).
Though based in London, Piano Magic is a living model of the Entente Cordiale - 3 of it's 5 members are French (6, if you include regular chanteuse, Angele). Even so, since it's conception, in 1996, the group has drunk heavily from the glass of British musical inspiration - most notably, The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, as well as the selective 80's output of 4AD, Factory and Rough Trade Records. Though they operate somewhat beneath the radar in a fashion-obsessed Britain, Piano Magic have amassed a huge, devout following in Europe and regularly tour the likes of France, Spain, Italy to sold-out halls.
Though the group is their main obsession, singer Glen Johnson also maintains a solo project of left-field electronica under the guise of Textile Ranch, whose album Bird Heart In Wool was released on Very Friendly in 2005. Along with keyboard player Cedric Pin, his Future Conditional project will release their debut album, We Don't Just Disappear on LTM Recordings this April - a label most notable for the re-issue of many Factory Records' "classic" albums.
The release date is May 22nd, 2007.
Cover art and tracklisting are as follows:
2. The Last Engineer
3. Saints Preserve Us
4. Cities & Factories
5. Great Escapes
6. Soldier Song
7. Halfway Through
8. The King Cannot Be Found
9. Incurable
10. Part Monster
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Spicchiology? is the sophomore release from the supergroup XXL, comprising all members of Xiu Xiu and Larsen. Recorded in late 2006 in Torino Italy, Spicchiology? is the result of a profoundly creative friendship translated into music and spanning the globe. ALSO: Place your orders fast--the first one-thousand copies will include a bonus disc taken from the rehersal sessions!
"It is hard as an American, if of a somewhat borish, middle class suburban, albeit freakishly desperate artistically inclined background, to really present without being excessivly prosaic as to what it could mean to have, for the second time in ones life, two weeks to spend in a sublime foreign city with the only premeditated task at hand being, with good friends, to make a record about sadness and violence and history. Well prosacism cannot be denied, it was, by God, in Italy. Blood Oranges, the wrapper of being spicchio. The concerted study of being Spicchiology?. As I type this I am watching an Italian film about terrosism in Italy in the late 1970s. I did not know anything about this time until the men of Larsen told Caralee and me about it over wine. Now in America it is all that Washington says: "terror." But they already knew and were ready to push past and through it again, holding our historyless hands. Everyday before recording we walked by a tower that in the 1300s the town executioner occupied and the bones of the people he was paid with taxes to behead were buried around it. The Oakland police department? Please! Warehouse shows? Barf! The souls of unbaptised infants live in the black painted and burned cathedral-cum-gallery where one of the three XXL guitarists curates art music shows. Not to say that Europe knows all but it has hurt itself for 2000 years and in America we have only just begun. If the last XXL record was romanitc and fun, this one is broken and superior. Look at yourself! Your matress is embarassed that you give it a job. The farfisa is a real one, not a sampler. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA !!!”
-James Stewart of XXL (and Xiu Xiu)
February 2007
Release date: May 22nd, 2007
Cover art and tracklisting are as follows:
1. So Easy, So Cheap
2. Daydrinking
3. Little Mouse of the Favelas
4. The Green Count Tapes
5. Last in the Society
6. Nothing About Dwarves
7. Tale of Brother Cakes and Sugar Dust
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Merge Records is thrilled to announce the release of Andorra the new album from Caribou on August 21st, 2007. The album will be released in Europe on August 20th (City Slang).
Andorra is the 4th full length from Dan Snaith recording under his Caribou moniker (formerly Manitoba - but that's a whole 'nother story). Andorra has more of a full band feel than some of Caribou's earlier studio efforts. It's still just Dan in the studio creating his singular magic, but the extensive touring that Caribou did for their last album, The Milk of Human Kindness, definitely left its mark on the arrangements. The sound is more expansive and more blissfully psychedelic than ever.
Dan seems pleased with the results: "I'm super-happy with the way the album has turned out. I've put seemingly endless hours into it over the last year or so getting everything exactly as I wanted it and have never been this madly excited about my music. I can't wait for you all to hear it and hope you'll like it too."
We have no doubt that you will.
"The sound Snaith debuted with on Up in Flames and developed with The Milk of Human Kindness is easy to describe in terms of other bands, blending Mercury Rev, Neu!, Brian Wilson, and a few others in specific proportions. It's most certainly a formula, but then, so is E=MC2" --Pitchfork Media [9.0 rating]
"Sounds like the work of someone given one month to live" -- Urb
Andorra Tracklist:
1. Melody Day
2. Sandy
3. After Hours
4. She's the One *
5. Desiree
6. Eli
7. Sundialing
8. Irene
9. Niobe
"She's The One" features and was co-written by the Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan
Merge will be releasing a CDEP of "Melody Day", the first single from Andorra, on July 10th. More details to follow shortly.
Look for Caribou on tour in North America in October and November 2007. Complete tour dates and routing coming soon!
Stay tuned for more updates and details.
www.mergerecords.com
www.caribou.fm
www.myspace.com/cariboumanitoba
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