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Curiously, this visionary and otherwordly collaboration between Fursaxa's Tara Burke and Espers' Helena Espvall was only released this year despite being recorded roughly seven years ago. That is quite a shame, as Tourmaline might have had an enthusiastic reception if it had come out during freak folk's brief day in the sun. Then again, maybe not, as this album goes even farther out than Burke's already deeply outré solo records. In any case, Tourmaline is a wonderful album, as it feels a lot like like experiencing a series of unsettling supernatural events in the darkest depths of a thick forest at night. If I did not know anything about the album's provenance, I would have guessed that it was a lost private press obscurity by an artist that either went mad, wandered into the desert, or vanished under mysterious circumstances soon after the recording was complete (i.e. exactly the sort of thing that I am drawn to like a moth).
The opening piece, "Catharus," deceptively borrows its name from a species of thrush despite being totally unlike any earthly birdsong that I am aware of.Instead, "Catharus" is built upon a swirling mass of eerie whistles that feels unnervingly like a haunting chorus of frogs intent on some sort of occult and potentially malevolent business.That surreal and shifting atmosphere is the most intriguing part of the song, but Burke and Espvall weave some ghostly intertwined Siren-esque vocals over the top to beckon me further into the album.Actual instruments make their first appearance on the following "Spirea of Ulmaria," which is essentially a gnarled and tormented-sounding violin (or cello) solo prone to occasional sharp harmonics and flurries of demonic chromaticism.It still feels deeply unreal and unsettling though, as it takes place over a backdrop that seems like some kind of wood flute being used to mimic warbling and fluttering calls of night birds.The "bird calls" have a very strange and hollow texture though, which subtly furthers the feeling that something is not right.The lengthy "Mabon" closes out the first side of the album and it is the first of Tourmaline's two legitimately mesmerizing centerpieces.It opens as a roiling and distorted drone piece that churns and swells like a My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze roar, but Espvall's cello soon takes the piece in an even more viscerally snarling, howling, and cathartic direction.There are some chant-like vocals too, which lend the piece a suitably ritualistic atmosphere, but the real appeal of the piece lies in how Anahita transform drone into something far more physical, wild, and possessed-sounding.Espvall's strings sound completely psychotic at times and it is absolutely wonderful.The final moments are especially beautiful, as actual notes are abandoned for an eerie cascade of metallic harmonics.
Anahita's dark spell continues to beguile with the similarly lengthy "Nascent Wings" that kicks off the album's second half.Unexpectedly, it is more of a vocal-centric piece than anything previously found on Tourmaline, but the underlying music is no less inventive and disturbed-sounding.For one, Espvall's cello is especially menacingly this time around, unpredictably swooping and seething behind the moaning and howling vocals.There are also some brief flourishes of spacey, lysergic electronics that beautifully add to the sense that reality has become hopelessly blurred and I am now getting a full-on glimpse of a flickering and vibrant spirit world of faeries, nymphs, and ghosts.I was especially struck by how seamlessly "Nascent Wings" can shift from nightmarish to heavenly, elevating dreamlike unreality into something even more complex, layered, and mercurial.The closing epic "A Tapestry to Weave" is yet another drone piece in structure, but one with a haze of ghostly voices swirling around vaporously.There are also some faint bells, adding to the already convincing illusion that I have stumbled upon a coven or a black mass while lost in the woods at night.As usual, however, Burke and Espvall have a striking set piece of sorts lurking up their collective sleeve, as "Tapestry" unexpectedly transforms into a rather lovely, melodic, and bittersweet cello performance at the midpoint, tenderly moaning and churning amidst a bleary haze of half-spectral/half-angelic vocals.
If Tourmaline were a somewhat more conventional album, I would probably grumble a bit about how it would have been better if it were less amorphous and improvisatory sounding, but Anahita's illusion is perfect from the first notes to the last.If someone told me that Burke and Espvall were not actually psych musicians from Philadelphia, but were actually twins who were raised in a remote tundra by a pack of wolves and a kindly warlock, I would probably accept it as a fairly credible claim.In fact, I keep wanting to describe this album as "Lovecraftian," as it so perfectly distills the feel of an enchanted wood that all of the villagers avoid because ancient witches and druids are always trying to reawaken slumbering arcane gods and forest spirits.Such a comparison, while colorful, is a disservice though, as Tourmaline is more sophisticated, sensuous, and darkly passionate than Lovecraft's works of pure imagination (also, there would have been no women in Lovecraft's version). Regardless, this album feels like the veil of reality just suddenly dissolved and plunged me in the middle of a dark fairy tale tinged with supernatural horror.As such, it is quite a remarkable and otherworldly achievement (I am not at all fond of reality).Admittedly, it is hard to imagine an album as bizarre and challenging as this one connecting with very many people, but that is not Anahita's fault–people just need to have better taste.Hopefully, Tourmaline will find its way to those of us receptive to its timeless "forest necromancy" aesthetic, as it will likely make a deep impression on anyone drawn to the immersive, temporally dislocated visions of fellow fringe-dwellers like Natural Snow Buildings (or Burke's own work as Fursaxa).
 
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It's perhaps coincidence that Rob Hayler’s most recent tape release has coincided with the recent disassembly, and retiring, of his legendarily No Audience Underground Midwich alias. A single piece, assembled from source material from fellow UK Noise / drone player Ian Watson, Metronome is a blurred cut and mix of smudged digital / analogue tin and tape wreckage.
 
Passing over the questions of ownership, design, purpose and who-did-what-with-what-intent, this duo's collaboration has a familiarly discordant and heavy sense of Nurse With Wound throughout—but without the mischievous sense of exploration. Multiple manipulated mantelpiece clocks bob and float under washes of digital scrub, Watson’s coppery sources cast into and submerged in and out of a layer of burning acid wash. The spine of the piece is a selection of lopsided loops that could have once been patterns, but whatever they once were they've now been anvil coaxed out of shape like hobnail wearing bent-backed and chained wraiths. The atmosphere is negative one, the cold of clang and clamor giving Metronome a digital brittleness. Hayler's woozy orbit sets the sound's heads dipping in and out of the aforementioned scald, the metronome swept from its clock like tick into a lapping of ugly tidal washes.
As a shorter soundscape, Metronome may have had scope for a possible bleak beauty but at nearly 44 minutes long this is stretched a little too far. Without enough variation, and too many familiar aural phrases welded from a relatively narrow palette, the final third of Metronome can feel more of a climb than a journey.
samples:
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The master of twisted noise is adding a new album to his incredible discography. Following his monumental album The Gag File on Dais, Switches is the next chapter in the evolution of Dilloway's sound. Created on piano and tape Switches is a spiraling journey into the rugged mind and soul of one of the most influential figures in radical modern music.
More information can be found here.
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"Once encountered, the exquisite, low-key charms of Craig Tattersall, Andrew Johnson, and Nicola Hodgkinson's band, Remote Viewer, leave an impression that lingers long after their records stop playing.
A decade since departing with I Can't Believe It's Not Better (2008), Other Ideas recalls their lower case sound as you've never heard it, presenting ten previously unreleased songs drawn from minidiscs "before the last functioning MD player in Prestwich gave up the ghost," and pressed it to vinyl.
Perhaps the greatest champions of drizzly, Lancastrian mood music ever known, Remote Viewer formed as a splinter group from Leeds-based Hood with their eponymous 1999 debut, taking the opportunity to pursue a fragile, downbeat strain of electronic song-craft and experimentation that quietly held steady against the grain of much electronica during that era.
Over the course of four albums and four EPs, they addressed ambient pop music's barest essentials with a succinct blend of miserablism and refined, adroit technicality that they could safely call their own, and more or less sprang a whole scene of copycats in their wake. Us. In Happier Times is the Remote Viewer's typically ambiguous title for this collection; ten grainy and richly evocative pieces of haptic scrabble and jaded gestures as inviting as a warm brew and a two-bar heater on a piss wet night. It's the sound of glacial English valleys after-hours, finding them animating ambient embers and wilting pop hooks with clipped, Teutonic glitches, and subby pulses. The results form a curious and emotionally intelligent adjunct to then-contemporary dance or pop music, a sound best received on punctured sofas in small coffee shops and living rooms, one which will forever be reminiscent of wet mornings back at the turn of the century.
With the flickering fizz of "Tonight It Feels Like Spain," you hear all three members in intimate dialogue, opening a session that variously takes in SND-like garage minimalism and what sounds like Muslimgauze fever-dreaming in two-step on "Complaining Of Feeling Unwell," or a pre-echo of autonomic D&B in the Arovane-esque nerve pinch of "The Sound Of Old Helmshore," whereas "This Old Face Dates Me" is like a prickly Arran to the suave, cashmere gentility of To Rococo Rot, and the crackling group harmonies of lullaby closer "When It Was Over" forms possibly the loveliest finale to any record you'll find in 2017."
-via Forced Exposure
US Release date: December 15, 2017
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San Francisco, CA – Gearing up for the release of its first full length album in over seven years, (they released a tour-only EP last year) seminal electronic band MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO (MBM) is ready for the release of IMPOSSIBLE STAR on January 19, 2018 via Flexidisc distributed by Virtual Label. The album will be available for preorder through iTunes (http://apple.co/2hR3DYb), Google (http://bit.ly/2hZ3vpy) and Bandcamp (http://bit.ly/2xj1uLi).
Often using politics and cultural events as a starting point, MBM mastermind Jack Dangers connects the current climate to the creative direction of Impossible Star. "I suppose it would be similar to an MC Escher optical illusion which spirals around and around and never seems to end, which can be used as a metaphor of many current events and other pertinent things right now," he says.
Minimal, textural and cinematic in scope, Impossible Star follows the music innovator deeper into more experimental territory. From the thick and discordant soundscape of “One” to the cut-and-paste pastiche of “Bass Playa” to the downtempo of “T.M.I.”, Impossible Star is a layered exploration of sounds and rhythms.
"MBM has always gone in many different directions," Jack explains. "'I Am Surrounded' and 'T.M.I.' represent the paranoid xenophobic 'so-called' fake news cycle we are living in. But seriously at this point, I really wouldn't know what to say. We've entered a world of surrealism which is uncharted territory for me… or maybe it's territory we've been through before in the '30s? What do I know… Further explorations are in the pipeline!
With tour dates being planned for next year, MBM will be performing one show on this side of 2018 at Cold Waves LA – Day 2 on Saturday, November 11 at The Regent Theater in Los Angeles (headlining with Revolting Cocks and MC900 FT JESUS). Those familiar with MBM's mind-blowing live performances are fully aware that the visual component combines a sonic electronic assault with their stunning and often political video mash-ups. The visual “battles” waged between mastermind Jack Dangers and MBM partner-in-crime Ben Stokes will undoubtedly be uproariously provocative and incredibly timely with video samples culled from news reports and found footage.
MBM's consistent musical invention has led to all forms of electronic musical experimentation over its 30 year history, from jungle to techno to industrial to dubstep to jazz fusion. Its long string of influential futuristic classics includes such groundbreaking tracks as "God O.D.", "Strap Down", "Psyche Out", "Helter Skelter", "Radio Babylon", "Edge of No Control" to "It's The Music". The single, "Prime Audio Soup"(from the album Actual Sounds and Voices) was featured in the sci-fi fantasy blockbuster The Matrix and on its platinum-selling soundtrack.
An acknowledged and celebrated innovator in the electronic music scene (his remix of Tower of Power's "What Is Funk?" was nominated for a Grammy in 2006), Jack Dangers continues to stretch sonic boundaries and influence new generations of sound activists. As a premiere remixer, producer and sound designer, he has played a seminal role in defining tomorrows' music today. Past production/remixing projects include: Public Enemy, David Bowie, Orbital, Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne, Bush, Depeche Mode, and Tower of Power.
Looking ahead to 2018 and the release of Impossible Star, Jack is cautious at best for what's in store. "Well, I am afraid at this point it looks like it's going to be fear… more fear… I got the fear… happy new year! <mis·in·for·ma·tion> is all we are gonna get now."
Impossible Star will be released on January 19, 2018 via Flexidisc with distribution by Virtual Label.
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On-U sound are proud to present the re-release of Dub Syndicate's first five albums: The Pounding System, One Way System, North Of The River Thames (with Doctor Pablo), Tunes From The Missing Channel, and an album of all previously unreleased dubs, Displaced Masters.
All formats are available for purchase here!
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Last Chance to buy tickets for Sherwood at the Controls, at the Jazz Cafe.
On-U sound return to the Jazz Cafe on Saturday the 18th November, with an ace lineup of the legendary Little Axe, and DJ Rob Da Bank.Tickets are selling fast so don't miss your chance to grab one for what's sure to be a great party.
All tickets and info can be found here.
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Norway’s Benjamin Finger plunges the listener into a pulsing, sparkling disorienting world in For Those About To Love.
Part collage, part dream; by turns joyful, sombre, heartfelt and playful this album is a layered and diverse journey into the mysteries of the heart.
Out November 20, 2017 on Flaming Pines.
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The self-titled single from the upcoming Post Self album.
Post Self will be released on Avalanche Recordings on November 17th, 2017.
More information will eventually appear here.
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Cassette produced in an edition of 150 by Dauw (Ghent, BE) with dried flower, hand-assembled package, and an original Polaroid taken by Thomas Meluch.
Recorded at La Berceuse (Seattle, WA) in 2017 with guitar, bass, voice and magnetic tape; field recordings from Iceland, France and the United States.
More information can be found here.
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Home Age is the first proper Eleh full length since 2012's Homage To The Pointed Waveforms. Packaged in a deluxe gold on black heavy duty letterpress jacket made by Studio On Fire in Minneapolis. Edition of 500. Also available simultaneously is a new split LP between Eleh & Christina Kubisch.
These three new pieces seek to expose the inherent musicality of pure electrical currents via high resolution Serge STS synthesizers. Like early Eleh work, Home Age is inward looking and deliberate but also slowly emotional and revealing as if peering blurry eyed through a window. Melody, harmony and counterpoint are suggested but not revealed.
More information can be found here.
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