- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
A celebration of the highly regarded Kompakt label's hundredth release,this decadent and incestuous affair spans two lengthy discs featuringtheir stable of artists remixing one another. Playing out like theaural equivalent of a hip party that you geeks never get invited to,the listener travels regularly between the main dancefloor and chilloutroom inside some strange yet enthralling post-rave environment.Electronic music pioneers The Orb, represented here as Dr. AlexPaterson and Thomas Fehlmann presumably, open the first disc with agentle reminder to Kompakt's stable of hungry young ambient producers:you'll never be as good at this as we are. In their dense rework of UlfLohmann's "Because Before," flowing soundscapes and hidden rhythmsengage the ears, spending the final minute and a half with a subtlydubby feel. Tackling Reinhard Voigt's "Zu Dicht Dran," DJ Koze emergesvictorious with an irresistable floorfiller with buzzing synth leads,dirty effects, and a hard steady techno beat. Following in that style,Sascha Funke's bleepy and, yes, funky version of Thomas Fehlmann's"Radeln" (known by fans of Kompakt's Totalseries) presents a radical and clubby take on the original's quiethead-nodding grooves. Moving along, Joachim Spieth's near-industrialremix of M. Mayer's "17&4" contrasts greatly with Japanese producerKaito's melodic approach to the synthpop stylings of current scenesterfavorite Superpitcher. The CD closes with the Dettinger remix of CloserMusik's "One Two Three No Gravity", an overflowing cinematic cup ofgorgeous pads, gentle guitar plucking, and bizarrely emotive yetmeaningless vocal snippets. Disc Two features the guiltiest pleasure ofthe entire collection, a severely and dare-I-say embarassinglyAuto-Tuned sing-song remix of Freiland called "Frei/Hot Love" done byJustus Kohncke featuring Meloboy. The track's grating quality ismatched only by its unfortune catchiness, leaving it destined for thesetlists of merciless and quirky DJs alike. Fortunately, Jurgen Paapeand former Force Tracks' mainstays SCSI 9 and bring some order back tothe dancefloor with their versions of Schaeben & Voss' "The WorldIs Crazy" and Lawrence's "Teaser" respectively. Jonas Bering, whoselast album made my Top 10 list in 2003, offers a pleasant reworking ofDettinger's "Intershop" that clicks along dreamily, albeitrepetitively, while Ulf Lohmann's entrancing take on the same track isfar more minimal and droning. Hannes Teichmann wraps things up on aneerie note by remixing Markus Guenter's "In Moll," filling the speakerswith over seven minutes of gurgling noises, degrading sounds, and acorroded somewhat buried melody. In summation, this double-disccompilation is REQUIRED LISTENING for anyone out there who considersthemselves a fan of techno, house, or ambient music today. If The Orbthinks Kompakt is cool, then you should too.
- Ulf Lohmann - Because Before (remix by The Orb)
- Schaeben and Voss - The World is Crazy
- Reinhard Voigt - Zu Dicht Dran (DJ Koze remix)
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Those albums had a somewhat immature approach characterized by overamped, echo-plexed riffs that combined into a fuzzy, undifferentiated storm of guitar noise, with kraut-inspired rhythms and MC5-ish vocal utterances. Their amorphous noise was often compelling, but perhaps shared too much in common with contemporaries like Acid Mothers Temple, pushing the reverbed-into-oblivion psych-rock sound to the absolute limits of taste. With Blue Cathedral, the band emerges as a tight, dynamic rock unit that fearlessly rivals the best of Hawkwind, MC5 and the rest of their musical forbears. Tracks like "The Bee and the Cracking Egg" rock so hard and so relentlessly that any other band is going to have to work awfully hard to convince me that Blue Cathedral isn't the rock album of the year. Lead guitarist and vocalist Ethan Miller pulls white-hot squalls out of his instrument, by turns rhythmic and melodic, or fuzzed-out, jagged and dissonant. His strangulated, throat-stripped vocals sound uncannily like a combination of Gary Burger of the Monks and Robert Calvert. Ben Flashman's bass and Utrillo Kushner's drums form a rhythm section of undeniable power and ferocity, reigning in the chaotic sprawl of guitar distortion. Noel Harmonson strikes a perfect balance between bombast and majesty, working the echoplex and playing keyboards, contributing that all-important galactic dimension to the band's rock proceedings. Guest second guitarist Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), who also appeared on Field Recordings, contributes a level of acoustic complexity to Miller's debris-spewing riffage. All of this talent would be useless if the songs were weak, but Comets on Fire have worked out a brilliant set of monolithic tracks and brief interludes that never want for focus or intensity, and end long before they've worn out their welcome. "The Bee and the Cracking Egg" doesn't waste a moment in unveiling the combo in full interstellar overdrive, relentlessly pummeling forward on their own demented momentum. "Pussy Foot the Duke" is the album's most beautiful track, with Harmonson deftly underscoring the propulsive rhythms with piano and farfisa organ, Miller and Chasny juxtaposing acoustic and electric guitar to stunningly melodic effect. On "Whisky River" and "Antlers of the Midnight Sun" (love that song title), just to cinch the Hawkwind comparison, guest Tim Daly contributes some unhinged saxophone skronk to the planet-crushing rock. Ending with the dark, drug-damaged psychedelic dirge of "Blue Tomb," Blue Cathedral is an album of undeniable strength and focus.
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Even the thought of a two-track, solo guitar release from this AcidMothers Temple founder may have more than a few people reaching for the"wank" button; however, this disc shows a side of Kawabata that usuallyisn't lucky enough to escape the sludge and heavy syrup psych hisgroup's been churning out since the mid-90's. Here are two 30+ minuteimprovs, one acoustic and one electric, both packed with enough reverband delay to make Kawabata's bandmates proud, but both also miles awayfrom the elastic freakouts and deliberate bombast that characterizeAMT. Created just after a trip to Sardinia, where Kawabata claims tohave undergone a spiritual awakening, these pieces are exactly the kindof weightless, shimmering psychedelia that I wish he'd startintegrating within the AMT repertoire. They immediately suggest thosemoments of rural bliss, of remote escape, water and sky, attempted byso many acid-led seekers but realized only by a happy, unsuspectingfew. The first begins in the guitarist's room where simple noteclusters fall into walls of their own reverb and thin blankets of amphum, as if shaken from larger projections of themselves. From here theacoustic begins to climb slow, billowing figures, cyclical and frail,recalling the quieter sides of the already quiet Richard Youngs, JimO'Rourke, and even late-period Fahey whose own love affair with thereverb box seems almost conservative by comparison. Kawabata divideshis single guitar's sound into three separate systems, binding spindlythree-note fragments to columns of their own piling, delayed resonance,rising as if the ruins of some ancient holy space left to loss andvegetation. By the end of this first track, the guitarist seems contentto let even these magical images go, whipping a particularlymelancholic chord progression into a disintegrating ascent, its layersof playback, multiple reverb, and delay assembling a massive shimmeringwaveform, light as breath and coming on without the exhaustion thataccompanies so many AMT climaxes. Rather, Kawabata creates anopen-ended devotional, a piece that truly feels rooted in moments oftranscendence but whose subtlety of flow and improvised constructionkeep it from the force-feeding often associated with his work. For thedisc's title track, he essentially extends the peaking drone from thefirst acoustic piece, this time with an electric guitar and a similararsenal of simple delay and reverb effects. The shift to electricallows for a shimmering structure even more crystalline andotherworldly, mounted by piles of clear feedback that lead ahead-cleaning 45 min. blast along horizons, a droning journey thatbottoms out at the edge of some ancient sun-bleached lake, infinitelycalm. Those looking for proof that Kawabata is capable of curbing thedrug-damaged big riffage for at least a few hours, or those curiousabout how this tireless electric warrior might approach an acousticguitar need look no further than O Si Amos,where even past prejudices bend to the guitarist's reverent approachand the new potential for spiritual therapy latent in his work.
- ses aintro 'e mene finzas si ses in s'atter'ala e su mundu (04:00-05:00)
- ses aintro 'e mene finzas si ses in s'atter'ala e su mundu (21:00-22:00)
- o si amos a sighire a essere duas umbras
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Olympic Hopefuls is the brainchild of Erik Applewick and DarrenJackson, who have been in various Minneapolic rock outfits, but neverquite like this. Their debut album is ten tracks of power indie popwith grand designs and great hooks, recorded with full polish andstudio tricks galore, like synthesizers that are only there for part ofa verse, looped samples, and plenty of effects. This is the rareoccasion where that sort of production style actually enhances thesesongs, as they are ripe for this kind of treatment. Sure the songsmight have done well with straightforward rock in a room recording andmixing, but they're so quirky that the xylophones and repeating backupvocals just bring out the more odd sections of the lyrics. The openingtrack, "Imaginary," about a love that no one sees but that is trulythere to the beholder, might come off as creepy in other hands, but theHopefuls make it a sad story of misunderstanding, all the while rockingacross a triumph of love almighty. These are very simple concepts witha new twist, usually, or plaintive confessions of open wounds, butthere's no pretense or artifice, just earnest fun and rock and roll."Drain the Sea" is about a somewhat forbidden love with true feeling,and with lyrics like "your dad says my head is filled with rocks andsand" you almost feel sorry for the protagonist, reaching out to him.But he doesn't want pity, as he's willing to take measures, as laterlyrics approach near threats like "they'd better mind their ownbusiness before they interfere." It's a song like this that is thetypical representation of these songs, slick tricks and bright toneswith just an undertone of madness. So is the essence of the OlympicHopefuls: dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with the innerworkings of the mind. It w! orks extremely well, as this album is oneof the best I've heard in a while.
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Only one thing, with slight variations, really happens for the hour after this CD starts playing: a bass guitar riff... a massive, filthy, loping beast of a groove that's immensely heavy without being in any way 'metal', or even terribly aggressive. The riff is not complicated, but it is loud (as evidenced by the album's unrelenting near-bootleg-quality tape saturation distortion). The riff has no funk, no drive, it isn't headed anywhere; the guitar barely glides along with it, and the drums do not embellish it.Last Visible Dog
Sloppy repetition is the game here, and no frills, lyrics or showmanship get in its stubborn way. But lest you think that this is some slowcore sleepytime, let me be clear: Pharaoh Overlord, a trio from the (apparantly) fertile psych-rock scene of Finland, play rock n' roll as it's been written by Fushitsusha, the Stooges, Les Rallizes Denudes, and Black Sabbath. Thuggish, brutal, straight to the point, but also as minimal as one can get while still acting like a rock band. The songs are stripped down so bare that they are almost identical, changing in speed and length but remaining in roughly the same key and retaining the same non-structure. It's a miracle that this music works as well as it does, as it could easily have slipped off into dull-as-dirt potsmoke self-gratification (see Acid Mothers Temple). Instead, somehow, amazingly, Battle of the Axehammer is invigorating and alive. This was obviously a live concert that must have been excruciatingly loud in the room while it was happening. Alas, it doesn't seem that more than six people were in this particular room, as after the black hole of every tune ends (again, there are no verses, bridges, or breakdowns, or any apparent internal logic... the songs mysteriously decide by themselves that enough time has passed) and air is let back in, a pitiful number of hands are audibly brought together, and a few people shout their approval. Unless there were more people attending than can be heard on the CD, and everyone else was rendered too stupified to move. 
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Originally released in 2001 on the Canadian Three Gut Records, theConstantines' debut album is now available via Sub Pop to Americanaudiences. That's not to say that those of us south of the borderaren't already familiar with The Constantines following the success of Shine A Light,one of the best albums of 2003. While The Constantines have often beencompared to the likes of Fugazi, they manage to equally channel thespirit of everyone from Bruce Springsteen to the Replacements. BryWeber's vocals are the band's trademark, carrying the torch forcrooners such as Tom Waits and the above-mentioned Springsteen. Theband's mission is simple, as Webb screams on "Arizona," the album'sopening track: "We want the death of rock n' roll." The irony is thatThe Constantines are more rock n' roll than most other bands in theindie pantheon, and that's their strong point. Anchored by DougMacGregor's confident drumming and Dallas Wehrle's pulsating basslines,the songs on this album maintain an overall energy and aesthetic thatgives the album a seamless quality. While the music is the drivingforce behind the album, Weber's lyrics are perhaps its highlight.Allusions to Isadora Duncan, Danny Rapp, and the Italian Futuristsillustrate an intellectual side not often found in indie rock. Theoverall mood and atmosphere of the album is summed up on the finaltrack, where in "Little Instruments" Weber sings "Mercy little rocker,bleeding guitars / Went out chasing landmarks, fell asleep at the bar /We got an amplifier." They indeed have amplifiers, and let's bethankful for that.
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Edited down from hours of raw tapes of radio broadcasts recorded from 1989 to 1996 from New Dehli to Bengal to Calcutta and every point between, Radio India is the newest addition to Sublime Frequencies' growing library of ethnic radio collage. It's a massive two-disc set of low-fidelity radio transmissions that encompass Indian classical ragas, Bollywood pop music, psychedelic rock, lush orchestrals, folk music, electronic dance music and a variety of Indian divas. The patter of on-air DJs, commercials and radio dramas have all been left intact, along with a generous helping of hiss, distortion, sound dropouts and vinyl pops and skips.
 
This compilation immediately distinguishes itself from the endless parade of Nonesuch Explorer and Smithsonian Ethnic Folkways collections of Indian music by capturing Indian music as Indian people hear it — unmediated by Western anthropologists and archivists. This isn't a collection comprised of rehearsed, self-conscious musicians performing the music of their traditional heritage in a studio at the behest of Western producers who may or may not be paying them. Rather, because of the de-emphasis on "tradition" and "heritage," much of the music on Radio India is a delightful cultural crossbreed — combining traditional Indian instrumentation with newer studio techniques and effects, freely borrowing from Western pop music, Broadway songs, European classical and baroque styles and Arabic orchestral traditions. It's a jumbled mass of sounds and influences that forms a tangible continuum of sound, the Eternal Dream of the album's subtitle. Hypnotic bedrocks of rhythmic tabla form a backdrop for dramatic swoops and curls of viola and chenai. Though it has certainly been observed before, I never fail to be amazed by the intrinsically psychedelic nature of Indian music; the expressive, reverberating character of instruments such as the sitar and sarongi, the effortless and natural swarms of incense-billowing sound. It's a tradition defined by trance and transcendentalism, by improvisation and de-intellectualization, by drones and repetition. Indian spirituality is defined by limitless concepts like Krishna and Kali, rather than the restrictive paternalistic concepts of Western spirituality. Indian music's structure is defined by open-ended, improvisatory interplay between musicians, rather than the rigid, virtuosic displays of Western musicians. It is precisely these differences that make this music so intoxicating to our ears, and Radio India allowed me to live inside this vast museum of sound for over two hours. 
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
By far the most surprising and unorthodox of SF's newest releases is Broken Hearted Dragonflies,a series of unprocessed field recordings of cicadas and dragonfliesfrom the Southeast Asian lowlands, again captured by producer andrecordist Tucker Martine. It's been very appropriately subtitled Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia,as the ear-piercing high-frequency drones of these insects suggestartificially-rendered, conceptual electronics made by some heretoforeunknown Western minimalist. The spine-chilling, synthetic swoops anddithers of sound are amazingly textural and complex, making it hard tobelieve that these sounds are presented untreated, just as they wererecorded. As a test, I played this for a friend without revealing thesource of the recordings. He immediately began to make all sorts ofassociations, from Alvin Lucier to Ryoji Ikeda to Whitehouse. When Irevealed the actual origin of these synthetic alien tones, his reactionwas shock and disbelief, followed by a jubilation and fascination thatsuch noises exist in nature. Listening to these four extended tracks —given titles like "Particle Swarm Intelligence" and "Brood X" thathighlight their other-worldliness — provoke some very deep thoughtsabout the possibility of hidden patterns in nature. The liner notes bymodern cultural provocateur Peter Lamborn Wilson (AKA Hakim Bey)outline these provocative questions. If this album was the work of ahuman being, we certainly would not hesitate to call it art. However,because these performances come from swarms of supposedly behavorial,mechanical, unselfconscious insects, it belongs to some other realm.The title of the album comes from a Burmese legend about a species ofdragonfly who court their mates with choruses of high-pitched screams.Those that don't succeed in mating eventually scream so loud theirhearts explode and they drop dead. It's an appropriately morbid imagefor this collection of unrelentingly piercing, shrill tones. Listeningon headphones at top volume is enough to send my pulse racing, puttingmy heart in serious danger of spontaneously combusting. Broken Hearted Dragonfliesputs nature back on the map as the source of the most complex,frightening and fascinatingly textural noises in the field of dronemusic. I hope my ears will stop ringing soon.
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
A series of crisply recorded audio snapshots from producer Tucker Martine's travels through the West African countryside in the fall of 1998, Bush Taxi Mali is probably the most disarmingly beautiful of the five new entries to the Sublime Frequencies discography. Capturing singers and instrumentalists in several small villages in the heart of Mali, Martine's impressive recordings recreate a rich, brilliantly rendered portrait of the Mande and Dogon people comprised of guileless performances from guitar and Fulani flute players, choruses of children and stunning vocal performances.Sublime Frequencies
Interspersed are sounds captured from Bamako radio broadcasts, outdoor markets, street sounds, Bambaran wedding celebrations and the sounds of a village going to sleep under a clear night sky. In short, Martine provides a richly abstract documentary of his journey through these enchantingly exotic lands, through musical traditions at once foreign and hauntingly familiar to Western ears. On many vocal tracks, the blues-tinged accompaniment is performed on an instrument called the ngoni, the African ancestor of the banjo, made from fishing wires stretched over a drum body. On "Fouta Djallon," Martine captures a performance on the Fulani flute with accompanying drums, a hypnotic performance that resembles an uncomplicated version of the Moroccan pan pipes of Jajouka. Several tracks capture the beautiful vocal dynamics of female singer Jalimusa Amanita Diabate, from the prominent Diabate family of Malian musicians. Her vocal performances are singularly sad and pregnant with emotion, gloriously unsophisticated but remarkably articulate. On "Rihlah," she leans against the stone gateway to the village of Kela and effortlessly belts out a vocal lament that weaves a countermelody to the skillfully played ngonis. "O Mansa Musa" captures Sidiki Kouyate, playing an exquisite solo on acoustic guitar, a complex tune that draws a straight line from Mali's traditional musical heritage to the African-American folk and blues of the early 20th century.
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
This summer brings five new releases from Sublime Frequencies, arelatively young label that has already gained a reputation as one ofthe most unique sources of ethnic esoterica. Owned and operated byRichard and Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls, Sublime Frequencies hasalready released a clutch of superlative radio collages, fieldrecordings, compilations and video travelogues that have carved out aunique aesthetic that could be loosely termed extra-geographicalpsychedelia. Although their releases are invariably instructive on avariety of ethnic and cultural musical styles, they seem to functionbetter as a kind of World Noise; unfocused and messy, lacking structureand neat categorizations, a dizzying assortment of low-fidelity exoticathat transcends racial and national identities. The first of the newestgrouping of releases is a unique compilation culled from over 150 agingcassettes at the Asian branch of the Oakland public library. Thoughthis collection is subtitled Khmer Folk and Pop,the emphasis is clearly on the Pop side of things, with the majority ofthe tracks utilizing Western instrumentation and combining 60's dancemusic and psychedelic rock with indigenous Khmer styles. Those who haveheard Southeast Asian pop before will know that it can be insufferablyprecious and cutesy, and the music on this CD is no exception.Infantile female and male vocals tackle a variety of cloying pop tunes,with unexceptional keyboards and programmed rhythms, and the occasionalraunchy guitar solo. However, the range of the material chosen for thiscollection is quite remarkable, clearly having been chosen with care torepresent as many different styles as possible, with forays into rockinstrumentals, haunting ballads, garage-psych, dance music, synth-heavynew wave and easy listening jazz. Compiler Mark Gergis has avoided theinclusion of more recent Cambodian popular music, which tends toconsist of tiresome MIDI and karaoke variations on classic Khmer pop ofthe kind represented here. In contrast, most of the tracks here utilizereal instrumentalists and many also evidence unorthodox productiontechniques, such as the dislocated spring echoes of the unknown artiston track 19. Sadly Khmer pop music reached its apex of success in 1970,soon to be undermined by the ensuing civil war and the brutal Angkaregime. Under the tyrant Pol Pot, thousands of Khmer's musicians,artists, teachers and intellectuals were viewed as enemies of therevolution, and a staggering 90% were executed at the S-21interrogation center. Many of the post-1970 tracks on this compilationwere recorded by escapees throughout the Cambodian diaspora — fromThailand to Long Beach to Rhode Island. It's hard to imagine, listeningto the blissful innocence of tracks like "Don't Let My GirlfriendTickle Me," that at one time, merely performing this music was groundsfor arrest and execution.
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Low has amassed an incredible body of work in the eleven years sincetheir inception, this is more than likely due to the fact that Lowrespect their job as musicians more seriously than nearly every rockband in history, working seemingly overtime, writing music andconstantly touring. What started out as a few 7" singles andcompilation releases has exploded into a three-disc set of music plus afourth disc: a double-sided DVD with some home made documentaries andall their music videos! For a fan, this collection is a gift, packagedin what even looks like a pleasant, compact gift box. Unwrapping eachaudio pesent contained within is like Christmas for an easily excitablechild, featuring numerous recordings never commercially released,single a-sides and b-sides, compilation tracks, demos, and weird bitsand pieces the band never intended to go on any records. It might soundlike a mess to somebody just scratching the surface, yet, between someof the not-so-ready for our record bits are some of their mostincredible, and some of their most popular live songs. Early, scratchyrecordings of songs like "Lullaby," "Prisoner," and their cover ofWire's "Heartbeat" and the painful cover of Journey's "Open Arms" areprobably not going to find any new fans, but their popular livemainstay "Venus," covers of George Harrison's "Long, Long, Long," andSoul Coughing's "Blue Eyed Devil," along with vinyl LP bonus/raresingle tracks like "Tomorrow One," and "Don't Carry It All," couldeasily be some of what would make up a Greatest Hitsrecord. Each of the three CDs come painfully close to the 80 minutemark, the second even includes some live randomness of Low performingtheir songs in Misfits style, and while the documentaries are homegrown, they're entertaining and personal insights to the band and kidand their travels. Perhaps sometimes it's a bit too close and personal,but then again, anybody who know's Low's music knows they're prettyclose (or at least are good at giving that impression) to begin with.
Read More