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The second full length album from Mr. Schnauss acts as an amazing springtime soundtrack, as all the trees are budding and the grass is turning a vivid green (with the exception of "Blumenthal," which can easily be music for an ice skating couple illuminated by Christmas lights).
"A Letter From Home" and the opener, "Gone Forever" almost act like bridges between the similar thoughts and sounds from the last album, with guitar work heavily influenced by Cocteau Twins and shuffling hip hop-inspired beats. Other songs like "On My Own," "Clear Day," and "In All the Wrong Places" are considerably faster paced than most of the existing Schnauss repertoire, and the results are warmly welcomed. Those familiar with the two tracks on Blue Skied an' Clear shouldn't be surprised that Judith Beck has donated her vocals to a number of songs this time around. Adding vocals is a perfectly natural progressive move that a number of instrumental artists find themselves doing, but there are times when the voice seems like a crutch when there's a lack of a strong enough lead instrument or sound. Fortunately, Schnauss's drum programming skills and arsenal of sound effects are far more advanced here than on the stunning 2001 release, Far Away Trains Passing By, but on the vocal tracks I often feel there is a sort of an emptiness where a lead instrument could or should sometimes be. Loops and side melodies may act as nice decorations but push the parsley aside, I want some meat. Lucky sods in the UK have the opportunity to have Mr. Schnauss play (or even stay) with them. Check the CCO website for venues and dates. 
samples:
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With a warning on the disc advising of potential damage to certain audio systems (headphone use not advisable), the self-titled second release from Chicago avant-rock quartet Sterling lets loose a hybrid of compositions that could be the bastard child of jazz, classical and metal, conceived during a Dario Argento flick.
Driven by syncopated, jazzy drumming that gets heavy-handed when called for, weaving, distorted bass and twin guitars that have that fat hollow-body tone, the disc's eight untitled, angular compositions evoke a soundtrack sensibility for something somber left to the imagination. The liberal use of tastefully played piano, at times drawing from the lower register, adds that extra dimension that not only enhances the building tension, but also heightens the anxiety that goes along with it. Although some of the tracks can be lengthy, the interesting and explorative compositions move seamlessly throughout sections with at times a pregnant pause which gives way for an explosive return to the earlier motif that kicked the whole thing off (insert pronged rawk hand sign here). The rough moments of overdrive occurring in the production department characterize the aforementioned warning, while at the same time becoming an almost integral part of the existing track. If the band's hometown is said to be the birthplace of post-rock, Sterling have taken their imaginative musical vision into an area of post-mortem rock. Beware. 
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- Michael Patrick Brady
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Do you want to know how they keep starting fires? The Electric Sixfirst gained attention with their single, "Danger! High Voltage," whichlaid down the blueprint for their dance garage style and penchant forabsurd lyrics ("Fire in the disco / Fire in the Taco Bell!"), deliveredwith conviction by singer Dick Valentine and (alleged guest) JackWhite. Their sound was a strange brew of disco beats, surf squalls, andAndrew W.K. party riffing. While that single was immensely enjoyable,its novel, what-the-hell-is-this attraction hinted that the ElectricSix might find it hard to keep it up over the course of an entire LP.On Fire,the Detroit residents look to hold you in their grasp with songs thatdescribe their favorite pastimes, which include fire, the night,dancing, nuclear war, women, bars, and synthesizers. Often, theirbacchanalian single mindedness leads to redundancy, as on the track"Gay Bar," which commands that together we should "start a nuclear war/ at the gay bar," being immediately followed by the song "Nuclear War(On the Dance Floor)." Regardless, the former track is prettyconvincing, coming off as the hard rock party anthem of the not todistant future (it has already spawned one of those dancing cat onlineflash videos). Electric Six manages to top "Danger!" in unusual,unbalanced brilliance with "I'm the Bomb." Maybe I'm just a sucker fora song about, what else, dancing and women, which uses the word"gerrymandering." "Three, two, one, I'm the bomb," declares the chorus,"and I'm ready to go off on your shit." They're sublimely cocky, with aflair for the dramatic and a powerful desire to be looked at. I mean,they yell "Solo!" before they start a guitar solo at least twice.That's how much they want you to pay attention to them. Still, evenwith those occasional sparks, 'Fire' contains songs like "ElectricDemons In Love," "Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother)," and "She's White"which all smear together in a blur of generic lack of inspiration.Their original themes never vary much, and the frequent overlap tendsto make for a tedious listen, in total. Fire doesn't do much todispel the label of novelty that "Danger!" found attached to it, andthat's what makes the moments of quirk so fun.
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Feedback as primary means of making live music seems to date from 1964. That was the year that Max Neuhaus debuted his Fontana Mix - Feed (see Brain v06i19) and when Robert Ashley brought fourth his tape, voice and feedback creation The Wolfman.Room feedback occurs when the sound from the loudspeakers in aperformance space reflect off walls and ceiling back to the microphone,as opposed to following more direct paths. In essence, the room itselfis set up to work as a cavity oscillator. The fun part is that whenthis happens the sound has the appearance of coming from differentpoints all over the room depending on exactly which reflections orwhich modes of oscillation dominate. Ashley's design for The Wolfmanuses a vocalist in front of the microphone singing gently into themicrophone and using his mouth to modulate the room feedback. There isalso a tape track, a full spectrum deluge of tape manipulated foundsounds, fed into the mix to provoke more variation in the feedback.Just how this works in a performance we will have to imagine since theperceptual effects of being inside the cavity oscillator are completelylost in a mere stereo recording. But what we get on the CD isnonetheless a full scale onslaught of highly dynamic noise that fullyholds the attention for its entire 18 minutes. It has a gritty rawenergy that any 90s noise artist would be very proud of but the humanvoice component takes it beyond the realm of mere electronics. The CDhas three other early Ashley tape compositions from 1957 to 1964 and ofthese The Bottleman from 1960 has captivated me. It wasoriginally the soundtrack to a film by George Manupelli featuring a mancollecting bottles in various desolate and dilapidated scenes of urbandecay. The music is quiet, very slow and has the same kind of insanedark ambience found in the soundtrack to Eraserhead. It is a tapemanipulation piece based on contact microphone feedback, found soundsand voice and, as with The Wolfman, it is the vocal componentthat adds the deepest tensions. Despite never having seen the film, theimage of a deranged person wandering around landscapes of discardedlife collecting bottles is easily imaged with the music being thesoundtrack in the near insane bottleman's mind. Fully deserving its 43plus minutes on the CD it is really very effective.
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Remember that link of the week with the Oscar Meyer Weiner songanswering machine lady talking? Well, Mark Gunderson, aka The EvolutionControl Committee opens his current full-length masterpiece with thatvery same woman speaking along to the "Star Spangled Banner" as the"Star Spangled Bologna." Only a few years before people like Kid 606and Dsico were marrying Missy Elliott with Joy Division, the ECCcombined two flavors in perhaps one of the most groundbreaking (yetoverlooked) 7" singles of the 1990s, The Whipped Cream Mixes,where Public Enemy raps were matched with the music of Herb Alpbert& the Tijuana Brass. But the ECC aren's just mash-ups and cut-ups,as the Committee (much like Seeland label bosses, Negartivland)provides a healthy amount of gimmicky cheese, twisting and mutatingwords and songs into sounding like what they want to hear. While thisdisc compiles some of the finer moments of the ECC in the last fewyears since, it does also provide some brand new material forunderground superstar potential. "I Want A Cookie" jumps out first as avery aggressive self-help sounding woman gives empowerment advice overhorn-blaring hip 1960s-retro spy chase music. The classic "Rocked ByRape" is also included with Dan Rather's cut up samples over the ECC'sown AC/DC rip off riffs. The rhythmic usage is clever while the outputis absolutely hilarious, with examples like "Dramatic Alien Torture" /"Cancer Death Threat Fleeing for Their Lives" / "Voodoo Bizarre LoveTriangle," it's hard to keep up and impossible to tune out whenplaying. Four years after this song first surfaced, it has not lost itscharm, however it would have been nice to have a new revisit with allof Dan's quotes from the 2000 US Election Night overnight fiasco!(Search for some of those quotes online some time.) There are someother memorable moments like "Sex Re-Education," the cut-up 1950s-erasex education speech from a dad to his son, but at 29 tracks, therereally is a ton of forgettable filler.
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With the release of their second full-length album, 2001's Scary World Theory, Lali Puna have not only secured their place as not just another Notwist "side project," but have become one of my favorite groups. It's tough to arrange a schedule when your time is divided amongst a number of other bands, as Marcus Acher (1/2 of the core duo) knows very well. In the time between releases, the group has taken the opportunity to leak out an unsurfaced song and its apparent dub counterpart.
"Left Handed" might not have fit in with the languid sounds of Scary World Theory with its punchy rhythms and distorted tonally aggressive guitars, but it is strong enough to stand as a fantastic single track. For the "dub" version, the group took a route that I whole-heartedly support: making something that sounds almost completely different. It's entirely instrumental, a completely different speed, with dub-inspired rhythms, effects, and only a minute few elements carried over from the original. The three-tracker is rounded out with a song -not- originally by the Human League, but ended up on a Human League covers record back in 2000. "Together In Electric Dreams" was the theme to the forgettable '80s film Electric Dreams (originally by Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder) and Lali Puna's reinterpretation strays a healthy amount from the original, omitting a wealth of vocals and utilizing the band's almost signature sound of gliding synths, electronic beats, and clean guitar work. While it's always nice to get two new songs from a fave band, I'm actually rather disappointed in the fact that this would have been a great opportunity to include some old 7" tracks, namely the two remixes from the Nin-Com-Pop single and the two songs from the The Safe Side single which has eluded me for years. 
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This is one of the finer noise albums and one that challenges other noise performers to up the ante. While the method in which this record was created is interesting, the actual sounds and rhythms that compose the album are its most attractive elements by far. Yasunao Tone was created by taking various Chinese poems and converting the characters into wave forms via a character recognition program.Asphodel
At first, some of the sounds are extremely disorienting. On "Wounded Man'yo 2/2000," rhythmic howls of mechanical distortion rule but are suddenly replaced by shimmering, static snaps. Drills march foward aggressively and haphazardly until an army of ping-pong balls with heavy metal brains ricochet about and make room for the stuttering prophets and spaceships that follow; each moment of sound is interesting and a story in and of itself. "Wounded Man'yo #36-7," offers a experience similar to the first track, but with a slightly different emphasis. Sounds are given more time to breathe and play out their existence and certain passages have a decidedly more subdued feel to them. Although the first two tracks are not radically different from one another, both offer different experiences and do not feel dull or repetitive next to eachother. The massive and diverse thirty-plus minute closer, "Wounded Soutai Man'yo," is a combination of thick, wall-of-sound sludge attacks, the rhythmic skipping of its predecessors, and brief bouts of silence. Though it is perhaps a bit long, it would be difficult for me to say that anything on this album had me impatiently waiting for its end. By the time the sound draws its own curtain, I feel as if I've experienced something unique. All noise records should be as captivating as this.
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For the second installation in his Audio Tour Diary series, Dave Pajopresents three more stripped-down tunes, warmly recorded in Chicago,Bloomington and Los Angeles over the past months. The Papa M arranged "Blackis the Color," showcases his tasteful acoustic guitar picking style withdistant swoops of synthesizer for a reworking that makes the tune his own.The airy tone of his laid back vocals are jolted on the way out with astern, spoken delivery of the song's title. From his association withStereolab, the piano and strings-complimented "Mary Was the Kind," paystribute to a dear, departed friend Mary Hansen. The strumming guitar progressionsand catchy lyrics and melody on the traditional sounding "World's GreatestSin" are evident of just how inside the southern folk songwriting style Pajocan get, both musical and lyrically. A hint of accordion-type tones make itall the more convincing. Nested in the last few minutes of the track is anbeautifully uplifting multi-tracked guitar and strings incidentalcomposition which is just perfect as is. It should be interesting to see ifPajo works any of the tunes from his on-the-road sessions into his next fulllength disc, or if this will be the only recorded performances as they havea certain charm of being slightly undressed.
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- Steve Smith
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On the lowest level, this disc is a dense stream of fascinating soundsthat highlight the interaction between these innovative improvisers.The cacophony of buzzing and whirring is not unlike Müller and VoiceCrack's other project, Poire_Z, and Ambarchi's processed guitarcombines very well with their "cracked everyday electronics"aesthetic—almost anti-technology in its espousing of the commonplace.There's a lot to listen for on this disc and it all seems like itbelongs, from sine waves to sci-fi tones remeniscent of the sounds inthe new Matrix film (but not of the college freshman philosophizing,thankfully). Attempts to put this music on in the background seemfutile as it's just too attention-demanding. A few minutes in, it'shard to ignore the storm of sound threatening to tear the room apart.Even when it's a foreboding wall of mechanical noise, this music feelshuman in its production and arrangement, remeniscent more of thepotential for directly conveying emotion with non-traditionalinstrumentation than of sterile machine music. The disc opens with hightones and some of Müller's "selected percussion" playing a slow,metronomic beat, and the percussive rhythms throughout this CD areprobably more overt (relatively speaking) than some of his other work.The piece is pretty nonlinear, which is nice as it's not a blatant"build toward something and come back" formula. It ends with somehypnotic, quiet drones which continue into the second track, wherethey're joined by some clicking rhythms, buzzing, and slowly modulatedoscillations as the music gets a little frenetic. "Grounding Oysters"is static for most of its duration, exploring the subtle interactionbetween a range of sounds; and "Oystered" ends the disc with more hightones and rhythms. This CD definitely fits well in the canon of theseplayers. While I really enjoy it, I'm not sure if there's much todistinguish it from their other work. But the subtle elements that eachmember of this collaboration provides make it a fine listen for fans ofthis type of sound.
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On the lowest level, this disc is a dense stream of fascinating soundsthat highlight the interaction between these innovative improvisers.The cacophony of buzzing and whirring is not unlike Müller and VoiceCrack's other project, Poire_Z, and Ambarchi's processed guitarcombines very well with their "cracked everyday electronics"aesthetic—almost anti-technology in its espousing of the commonplace.There's a lot to listen for on this disc and it all seems like itbelongs, from sine waves to sci-fi tones remeniscent of the sounds inthe new Matrix film (but not of the college freshman philosophizing,thankfully). Attempts to put this music on in the background seemfutile as it's just too attention-demanding. A few minutes in, it'shard to ignore the storm of sound threatening to tear the room apart.Even when it's a foreboding wall of mechanical noise, this music feelshuman in its production and arrangement, remeniscent more of thepotential for directly conveying emotion with non-traditionalinstrumentation than of sterile machine music. The disc opens with hightones and some of Müller's "selected percussion" playing a slow,metronomic beat, and the percussive rhythms throughout this CD areprobably more overt (relatively speaking) than some of his other work.The piece is pretty nonlinear, which is nice as it's not a blatant"build toward something and come back" formula. It ends with somehypnotic, quiet drones which continue into the second track, wherethey're joined by some clicking rhythms, buzzing, and slowly modulatedoscillations as the music gets a little frenetic. "Grounding Oysters"is static for most of its duration, exploring the subtle interactionbetween a range of sounds; and "Oystered" ends the disc with more hightones and rhythms. This CD definitely fits well in the canon of theseplayers. While I really enjoy it, I'm not sure if there's much todistinguish it from their other work. But the subtle elements that eachmember of this collaboration provides make it a fine listen for fans ofthis type of sound.
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Listening to the anachronistic, neo-pagan German folk music ofWaldteufel, one would never suspect that it is the work of twoAmericans from Portland, Oregon. Normally, I would immediately dismissthis sort of pseudo-European posturing as laughable, but Waldteufelmanage to neatly sidestep all of the usual pitfalls that turn this kindof cultural co-opting into a joke. Surprisingly, Heimliches Deutschland(Hidden Germany), is an embarassment of riches: a sincere andbeautifully executed set of German "volkische" songs extolling Northernmyths, traditions and mysteries. Waldteufel is the duo of Annabel Leeand Markus Wolff, formerly a percussionist for post-industrialagitators Crash Worship. Wolff sings and beats hand drums, while Leerounds out the sound with violin, viola and accordion. There are somesubtle synthesizer flourishes and limited studio effects that help totransport the listener to the Wald Schwarzer (Black Forest) circa 1895.One can almost hear the crackling of the bonfire and the smell of wildboar roasting on the spit as Waldteufel play their revelatory paganhymns. Other Deutsch-obsessed industrial folksters like Death in Juneand Der Blutharsch would be far too cynical to produce music thisserious, subtle and lovely. Anyone who knows anything about late 19thcentury German history knows that it was a time of cultural rennaisanceand the birth of the "volkische" movement: a movement towards theabandonment of Christianity and an embrace of the ideals and purity ofthe Aryan tradition. This mythical heritage encompassed occultreligious practices, language, politics, and even music. It was thismovement that paved the way for the Thule and other undergroundright-wing groups that eventually brought Hitler and Nazis to power.Although Waldteufel hover dangerously close to this area, their musicis untainted by politics or historical revisionism. Markus Wolff writesmost of the tracks himself, but a few of the songs are new arrangementsof German folk songs from this golden age period. In "Neun Welten All"(The Nine Worlds), Wolff beats out a hand rhythm while his richbaritone is overdubbed with whispers, deep vocal drones, viola andflute. It's all a little messy and underproduced, a conscious aestheticchoice which lends credibility to this material. "Lichtkreuzweihe"(Consecration of the Luminous Cross) is such a deeply heroic ode toWotan's cross, I feel as if I'm there in a candle-lit Masonic lodge,where Runic magicians make communal music for nobody but themselves.The longest track, "Wotans Wilde Jagd" (Wotan's Wild Hunt), is also themost infectious. It begins with a sythesized horn fanfare that isimmediately reminiscent of Wendy Carlos' Mozart renditions for hersoundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Multi-tracked vocals begin, with ahearty, catchy refrain worthy of a biergarten sing-along. The hauntingfinal track "Nachhall," (Reprise) is the strangest of all, aneffects-heavy revisit of "The Nine Worlds" that chops up and dubs outthe vocals and adds layers of reverb and echo. This is a fittinglyspectral end to what must be the most unique and unexpected "retro"albums to come along in quite some time.
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