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Imagine you're stranded on a rooftop in the middle of a city with cloudy skies above and nowhere to go. Cars buzz past on their way to nowhere in particular and as the day slowly passes, their exhaust fumes fill the air. Time goes by but you know it's an illusion. The world is moving but you're still waiting, watching. This is the feeling imparted by this follow up to Symptoms' rather more varied and up beat self titled debut.Danish sonic explorer Klaus Amitzboll has augmented his one guitar one computer set up with interspersed traffic sounds and this time lets the music unfurl slowly in a suite of deep bass moods coloured predominantly grey. Where Symptoms' first album often relied on a beat backbone is a much more stripped down and atmospheric affair, and consequently the guitar source seems more apparant. Mixed with help from his brother Fred Amitzboll of the excellent machine rock trio Silo, this is otherwise one man's paen to the deadening effect of city living. Two guitar lines, one distorted and one clean, unfurl and cut through a fog of familar doppler shifts of engines forming the forlornly reflective 'Asphalt Mirror'. Eventually a refracting bass line emerges but is soon replaced by held keyboard drone chords. The guitar lines seem to get attenuated and flap ever more morosely in the breeze. The recurring engines seem to suggest a dwarfing, as if the music is being consumed by the city that it's soundtracking, and merging with it. A couple of tracks a are little more than short linking pieces, cars blurring past skeletal loop shadows. 'Stale Air on a City Morning' could be compared to Swim records benefactors Immersion, but where Immersion's 'Low Impact' was warm, Symptoms hum with an ominous and forlorn atmosphere. A momentum builds up gradually but the journey just seems to lead back to the place it started. 'Mute Noise of Longing' is a minimal ambient keyboard sequence, and the following 'Burning to be Gone' captures a similar mood with intertwined processed guitar lines ringing like windchimes. Slowly a piano melody plays out amongst the ever moving cars. Distortion levels rise as the coda plays out, and the pollution keeps on choking until it rips a 'Crack in the Sky' towards which wistful whistles rise. This album might only be 46 minutes long, but it could almost be a soundtrack to a stop motion film of a city over ten or twenty years, as buildings rise up and crumble and shift, changes that are barely perceptible from day to day. Sleevenotes: "When you understand how things are, you lose yourself quietly standing, fading into the quiet of all things dead."
 
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- Alberto De Campo - Imaon
- Phoenecia - Non-Specific Acoustic Stimulation
- Atau Tanaka & Eric Wenger - Bondage
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Not equally glorified with the current avant-garde stamp yet, Staubgoldspreads a sympathetically unobtrusive "home made for home listening"attitude without wasting energy on label conformity.If individualism is their goal, they're on the way.
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- Gunter Adler & Felix Kubin - Kiebitzreihe I
- Reuber - Ruhig Blut B
- Sack feat. Joseph Suchy - Urlauber
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...And the winner for the WORST album covers of the year goes to,.... QUANGO! Who have also came close to winning for most pointless compilations but were beat out by Mille-Plateaux, whose Clicks + Cuts volume 746 is a 23-CD compilation of bald Europeans exchanging emails.There was a time, I'm guessing around ten years ago, when Quango was a little beat-oriented offshoot from Island's Mango imprint. At the time, the label was daring enough (or appeared as such) to have sought out some pretty fine unique international electronic dance music. Now with the label resurfaced under new management, the only things to pop up are dust-collectors like this, a disc which features insanely boring 4/4 beats, tacky samples and predictable repetitions ad nauseum. The guilty parties this time around include Bochum Welt, Pub (with an Arovane remix), Move D, John Beltram, Blueshift and others I've never heard of nor want to hear until they figure out their gear a little better. Honestly, sometimes I think music's just way too easy to produce and manufacture.
 
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The most noticable musical difference is about four seconds missingfrom the opening chopped up sampling bit, but those sounds do getrepeated over a few cycles however,... Enough of the nitpicking!
The recordings contained were completed in 1990, pulled from over twoyears of studio work, which is quite noticable. Back then, electronicmusicians didn't have anywhere near as much software, Coil had to domuch of this by hand. This is observed right from the opening secondswhere a cut-up mishmosh of samples were tossed into a bucket and tapedback together. Over the course of an hour, the group pummels thelistener with whacked-out stereo separation, mind-bending low-endfrequencies and ghostly voices which move in three dimensions aroundthe room -without- the aid of a 5-point surround system! It'sgenre-defying, electronic based with dabbles of jazz, techno, withflamenco guitars and orchestral arrangements. Guests on this recordinclude vocal contributions from Little Annie Anxiety Bandez, MarcAlmond and Rose McDowell, as well as Charles Hayward on drums, and MikeMcEvoy's trippy 'ecstatic keyboards' on "The Snow". While songs like"Windowpane" and "Love's Secret Domain" are instantaneously catchyfavorites, tracks like "Further Back and Faster" are so amazingly aheadof their time in terms of sound and structure. The multiple layers,samples and sections must have taken many late nights in the studio,the result is a mindfuck which has taken many listens to truly get.People accuse this record of being a techno record, but in actuality,"The Snow" is really the only fast-paced techno dancefloor anthem, andnot a bad one indeed with incredible playing, sampling and subliminalvocal manipulations. The record is multi-climactic, and builds a coupletimes before the end, with the calm and disturbing "Titan Arch"featuring Marc Almond's guest vocals over a chilly throb, "Chaostrophy"where an orchestra fights for center stage with a barrage of whitenoise, the explosive flamenco guitars of "Lorca Not Orca" into thefinale, the title track, snaking lines from William Blake and RoyOrbison.
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Little Annie, aka Annie Anxiety Bandez, is best known to me for her neurotic stream of conscious performance on "Thing's Happen" from Coil's 1991 masterpiece Love's Secret Domain. But, her extended discography stretches back to the mid '80s with several solo singles and albums including collaborations with Penny Rimbaud of Crass, On-U Sound, The Wolfgang Press, Current 93 and COH. She also paints (see cover) and participates in poetry readings in the NYC area. This 3 track disc pairs her words and voice with Joseph Budenholzer of Backworld and one Larry 'Super Model' T.
Streamline
The title track comes in two flavors: smoky original and spacious remix by Christoph Heemann (HNAS, Mirror, Mimir). A slow and slinky piano, brushed snare and bass guitar set the jazzy groove for Annie's seductive vocal. She wryly complains "liaisons of leisure / that once gave me pleasure / don't give me no pleasure no more" and, later, lovingly purrs "I want to run my hand / against the grain / to watch the sparks that fly / like ladyfingers / filet mignon / above the nighttime sky". Clever and sexy. "Lullaby" is just that as Annie comforts a lover back from an unspecified war, assisted by pretty vibe keys, synth strings, intertwined guitars and the gentlest possible rhythm. Heemann's nearly 10 minute remix does what he does best by framing the song in an expansive haze. For five minutes the original track is barely audible, submerged in a soft ambient texture. Then the song begins again, still hazy and broadened, but with the vocals distinctly clear. The effect is staggering, simply by making the song more ethereal. "Diamonds.." is fantastic - single of the year so far, tied with Antony and the Johnsons "I Fell in Love With a Dead Boy". Annie's autobiography "Life's a Cabaret Then You Die" will be released this year and a new album is forthcoming on David Tibet's Durtro label.
 
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