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- A Silver Mt. Zion - Iron Bridge to Thunder Bay
- HangedUp - Review from the Ground
- Le Fly Pan Am - Tres Tres 'Avant'
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Ectopic Ents is proud to announce the release of the long awaited new studio album by Foetus, entitled HIDE.
HIDE features ten new compositions by JG Thirlwell, who describes it as a “neo-symphonic avant-psychedelic concept album informed by the culture of fear”. Kicking off with a nine minute operatic opus featuring the guest vocal talents of opera singer Abby Fischer, HIDE is an immersive album infused with strands of progressive and contemporary classical, as well as Thirlwell’s twisting cinematic journeys, bombast and sombre interludes.
Thirlwell produced the album and performs most of the music. Also guesting on the album are long time collaborator Steven Bernstein on trumpet and Leyna Marika Papach from Thirlwell’s Manorexia ensemble on violin. In addition Elliot Hoffman of Carbomb plays drums on a track, and there are appearances from Ed Pastorini, Jeff Davidson and Christian Gibbs (Lucinda Blackbear).
Initial quantities of HIDE will come with a free 5" x 5" sticker of the album front cover, signed by JG Thirlwell.
Currently we are selling the album on CD only.
Go to The Foetus Shoppe to hear previews and order.
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New release from aranos is a live recording of a concert in Prague in April 2010.
through firehouse warsover tree formsI did fend off bird feet.Like blessed studio memberin daily been-gin companyincluding all thieves of cavalshooting crackssee also: http://web.me.com/aranos/aranos.org/archarcha.html
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On his sixth solo album for Touch, Jeck continues his perfection of using the record player as an instrument (not as a DJ) to create a long-form piece that has no sense of gimmick or cliché, but instead is a hazy, but warm and inviting piece of captivating music that is unlike the work of anyone else. Originally intended for live performance, this studio reconstruction is amazing on its own.
Having never seen performances nor read intimate details of his compositional technique, I’m fascinated by exactly how Jeck coaxes the sounds he does out of his rudimentary instrumentation.On this album, the requisite record players were used, along with the infamous Casio SK1 keyboard, mini-disc recorders, and a bass guitar with only a few effects.How this becomes the gauzy atmospheric music that is presented here, I don’t know, and I think I’ll be happy not knowing as long as the music keeps coming.
A recurring motif throughout the seven "main" songs here is a lo-fi melodic undercurrent that is absolutely immersed in reverb, giving a feeling that’s not unlike the Cocteau Twins or My Bloody Valentine but without sounding like either one of them.In these massive and heavy, but warm waves of sound, occasionally a bit of music is allowed to pass through.Percussion is hinted at on "Pilot/Dark Blue Night" but never fully appears until the closing "The Pilot (Among Our Shoals)" where it takes the form of snappy snare drum loops, with what resembles time-stretched harp plucks and violin notes as accompaniment.
As aforementioned, sometimes the musical source material shines through to the surface, such as on "Twentyninth," where the big reverberated sounds and cascading guitar tones could be a careful study and dissection of 1980s hair metal, reduced to its most base elements and rebuilt into something entirely different and far more compelling."Thirtieth/Pilot Reprise" continues this, focusing on hidden melodies and Jeck's overdriven bass guitar playing with a guitar-like squall and a thin, brittle closing section.
Other pieces are less discernable, such as the dramatic swells of indecipherable sound of "Dark Rehearsal," which are preceded by some subtle, delicate melodies."Pilot Reprise/The All of Water" is a chaotic pastiche of layered sound, immediately surging heavily and then continuing on with the same intensity, the sharp waves of sound battle one another over the dramatically drifting undercurrent.
For the album's coda, two remixes of tracks from Suite:Live in Liverpool are included, sounding noticeably different than the preceding album, but just as strong on their own.Mostly eschewing the hazy ambience of the other tracks, "All That's Allowed (Remix)" shapes shimmering passages of crystal sound into swirling melodies, keeping a very clean, sharp feel over a dynamic undercurrent."Chime, Chime (Re-Rung)" focuses on beautifully tactile static bursts covering a bell ringing alongside twinkling wind chimes with the occasional bit of squealing feedback. There is a different sort of audio grime that appears, and the whole song is more loop/sample focused than the other ones, which felt like they had more of an organic drift to them.
Philip Jeck's work continues to sound like no one else's, in the best possible way.Regardless of the instruments used, he constructs beautiful, tactile sound that spreads out and engulfs its surroundings, demanding full attention.Few albums I have heard this year are as immersive and captivating as this one.
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Originally released as a C90 and here spread across two LPs (and four tracks), Space Finale has a definitively analog quality to the sound, both in format and in the soft, obscure nature of the textures of each piece. While a very strong work, there are a few moments that hold it back from being as brilliant as it could be.
Side one of the first LP opens the album very effectively.Wobbly melodic tones cascade around, like the sound of a 1970s educational film strip, the woozy pitch fluctuations occasionally pushing it into darker, horror movie soundtrack territory.This is only amplified with the addition of a low bass rumble a bit into the piece, adding a sense of menace with the undulating rhythms.Eventually this gives way to a hollow industrial collage, with slight hints of feedback and the occasional fragment of an untreated field recording making itself known.The sound lightens with a heavily reverberated ring that gives way to a soft, melodic outro.
The flip side is a bit less sinister and more melancholic, keeping the unidentifiable churning thumps and thuds, but focusing on buried melodies that are extremely somber.No clear instrumentation is at play here, but the shimmering notes sound like the music of an ancient civilization that has just been excavated, crafted with instruments unlike any in use today.The two sides of this LP are very different from each other, yet feel unified in their approach.
The material on the second record isn't quite as enchanting, however.It opens with sparse, chiming sounds that are eventually transmogrified into dense, bass heavy layers of noise.The murky reverberated textures eventually part to reveal what resembles plucked string instruments uncovered from a ton of audio grime.However, the transition into humming machinery sounds feels like it could be lifted off any so-called dark ambient album, as it lacks any identifying quality.While its evolution into heavier, more overdriven textures that eventually dissolve into raw noise helps the situation, it still sticks out as a sore spot on an otherwise well crafted side.
It's on the fourth side of the set that things feel as if they're falling apart.The hollow, echo-ey textures and occasional radar blip sound like the most generic of experimental ambient music.The opening field recording elements and the melodic bells and incidental sounds that close the track are strong, but everything between them is just dull.It almost seems as if Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa lost their creative drive at the end and instead fell prey to using filler to pad out the album.With this excised this would have been a very powerful hour long work, but stretched to 90 minutes, it has some dull spots.
When Space Finale is "on," it's very good, emphasizing the analog textures and sounds used to create this very atmospheric work. However, the dull spots that occur in the second half really caused my attention to drift away from the record and onto other activities, which is never a good thing.It's a strong, but flawed album.
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Pat Maherr is best known for his dark ambient detournements of Wagner cassettes as Indignant Senility, but his Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting project is probably as far from dwarves and valkyries as it is possible to get. In fact, the only common ground between his two guises is that something is being unrecognizably mangled and that there are probably some tapes involved. The "somethings" in this case are: a bunch of hip-hop songs, DJ Screw's legacy, and the whole mixtape tradition. Maherr has mischievously stripped 13 unnamed hip hop jams of everything fun and vibrant and turned them into the soundtrack for a slow-motion house party of the damned (which, of course, is perversely fun in its own right).
Bubblethug is an album that makes an immediate impact.I was passingly familiar with DJ Screw's codeine-fueled chopped-and-screwed aesthetic before I heard this album, but that did not quite prepare me for what Maherr has done.DJ Screw merely made songs sound a little drugged and eerie—Pat has gone so far down into the rabbit hole with slowed tempos and pitch-shifting that it is almost impossible to imagine what these hapless songs sounded like before they were "remixed."All that is left is a glacial beat being buffeted by impossibly slow, deep, and incomprehensible vocals that bubble, shudder, stretch, crackle, and quaver nightmarishly.
The overall effect lies somewhere between "sounds like a tape that has gone through a washing machine and possibly a fire" and "demonic possession."The songs all sound fairly similar to one another due to the nature of the project, but Bubblethug works best when Maherr takes on songs with strong hooks, like he does in the sixth song.When an actual vocal melody is ruined, the effect can be quite spectral and disquieting—it sounds a lot like my stereo is haunted.Most of the time, however, Pat just opts for straight-up rap vocals and the results vary a bit.Often, they are just disorienting and a little creepy, but sometimes they can get pretty phantasmagoric or even outright disturbing…like the vocalist is desperately trying to communicate something important to me while they are being dragged underwater.Maherr also makes an amusing and effective stab at the genre's trash-talking convention, as the seventh song actually allows an understandable line to slip through the maelstrom: "everybody's thinkin' they twisted."They are not twisted.Not like Pat.
The only catch is that Maherr did not fare quite as well at maintaining my attention as he did at grabbing it.After the initial impact of the audacious wrongness of this album subsided a bit, it started to yield rapidly diminishing returns.The reason for this is that Maherr simply did too effective of a job in his destruction of the source material—very few hooks survive and nearly all lyrical content is obliterated. Bubblethug is almost an hour of slooooooow hip hop beats and garbled, ruined voices and little else, which becomes grueling after a while.On rare occasions, like on the excellent opening song, enough of ravaged original melody and beat survive to carry the song, but too often Maherr relies solely on mindfuckery.Taken in small doses, this is a thoroughly ingenious and entertaining effort, but Pat needs to find something else to fill the inherent void if this project to going to have much long-term potential.That grievance aside, Bubblethug is still striking and deranged enough to wind up being an influential work.
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