Cane Swords – Big Disaster

 
The very first release from Rubber City Noise, a bizarre tape of hypno synth noise by Cane Swords, aka Curt Brown & Karl Vorndran. These two dudes created spacey nightmares with a traditional smorgasbord of electronics, plus some hacked shit like a circuit bent Buddha Machine, handmade phaser, RCN Hello Kitty Ring Mod, and the requisite infinite blue light.

Big Warmup In The Mouth Of Eternity is a fucking journey and a half. Layers upon layers of static & space dust, glitches & anti-matter. They build dense clouds of electro mist, raining ice crystals down through murky tumble drones, bubbling swamps of gamma rays, pulsars of technoise in a blazin hot swarm. It’s pure fucking chaos without relying on an ear-rupturing brain fuck. They wobble down a line of immersive bliss and sloppy malarkey, keeping you totally locked in, scanning for the brief moments of enlightenment.

Pillaging from the maelstroms in mid-century electronics and sci-fi soundtracks, Cane Swords take the current smear of synths and throw their own blend of insanity into the mix. Big Warmup is goddamn fantastic, an hour long disarray of non-abrasive synth noise that spits in your face and tells you to chill the fuck out. Honestly can’t wait to see what both this new label & band have coming up. RCN is gonna be a label to keep your hawkeye on, that’s for damn sure, because they’re packaging is sweet as hell and they do free downloads of most of their releases, INCLUDING THIS ONE, so fucking GRAB. IT.

Chica X – I Know What I’m Doin!

 
I always get simultaneously inspired and downtrodden when someone like Chica X comes along. Xiola Tapia is only 11 years old and is already making bizarre electro hip hop jams. She put out a full length & a split (with Hewhocorrupts) by the time she was 8. It makes me ashamed to be 15 years older than this girl and not having accomplished anything even half as cool. But this isn’t just about me being a mopey bastard. This is about Chica X.

A little tape lasting less than 10 minutes comes out next week on Hewhocorrupts Inc and it’s innnsaaaane. Chica X makes some minimal beats with a deep love for the crazy, lots of wacky scratching, buzzing blats, thunder bass, looped police sirens, and a relentless danceability. And while the drum beats & synths keep shit interesting, the music gets overshadowed by Chica’s amazing lyrics. A lot of it isn’t too thematically radical, songs about money, dancing, partying on the weekend, etc, but then there’s the nuggets of brilliance that, when heard coming from a pre-teen girl, is just fuckin unreal. Like on “Da Bank (1, 2, Step)” where she calls out “I got a lotta guts to get up on stage. Suck it up punk, you ain’t never gettin laid. I’m just learnin how to flow.”

Then there’s the lyrics that could ONLY come from a pre-teen girl and that’s what makes me want to listen to this again and again. I could hear her rapping “I’m on my Malibu bike and I’m feelin kinda happy” or “To the library, and step on it!” over weirdo electro hip-hop pop beats all fucking day. I’m pretty sure Chica’s going places and I can’t wait to see what kind of glittering wisdom she boils up in the next few years. But for now, just gonna “Dance with Chica tonight.”

Caddywhompus – The Weight

 
I went certifiably insane for the last/debut Caddywhompus record, Remainder. Seriously, there are few records over a year old that still get that much playtime from me. Then two months ago, courtesy of Chinquapin & Community Records, they dropped a new single called “Age Of Wild Spirits” and it was killer. Got me totally stoked for the upcoming The Weight, which, just like Remainder is free of charge, meaning you should go download that shit STAT (or better yet, drop some $$$ on it and hold it IRL). Then when The Weight came around, I discovered it only has 4 songs, one of which we’d already heard. Mega-bummer. BUT WAIT this is Caddy-fuckin-whompus and The Weight is still one of the best mathy noise-pop albums to come out this year so fucking HOORAY.

I don’t really want to recycle the same comparisons from before, but they’re still quite approriate. There’s Zach Hill drum love affairs, Dodos style vocals, the blistering nastiness of Oxes, and fuckit throw in some Deerhoof because what’s a noise-pop review without mention of them. But what makes Caddywhompus BETTER than all of those bands is their absolutely brilliant songwriting, every song being a straightup earworm, and having the best fucking mix of abrasion & bliss. Every song has me simultaneously air drumming & guitaring while flailing uncontrollably during the massive breakdowns, where they’re able to maintain a beautiful pop charm right alongside the thrashing & squawking.

I’m pretty sure The Weight is a step in a slightly more refined Caddywhompus sound, but I honestly can’t tell you what that step is because I’m too fucking distracted by the unmatched awesomeness being laid down. Plus I’m wayyy too busy listening to this to bother to go back and compare it to Remainder. When The Weight is playing, everything else becomes second rate, including previous Caddywhompus records.

I wish there was something, anything I could do to make Caddywhompus stand out even more. They deserve the highest praise and arena sized audiences freaking out to their totally fucking killer anthems. It blows my mind that I’m trying to hype this band because that means they don’t already have it. WTF is wrong with all of you? It is now your duty to tell every goddamn friend of yours about Caddywhompus and make sure they all own a copy of Remainder and The Weight.

Edasi – Freddy Krueger Death Chant (excerpt)

 
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convey how totally fucking twisted Freddy Krueger Death Chant is. Edasi’s lineup is constantly shifting, but the core is a single dude from Estonia who has a deeeep hatred for Freddy Krueger stemming from Krueger’s “stupid” clothes, “lame jokes and that unconvincing evil laugh.” Inspired by voodoo rituals in Interview With A Vampire, Edasi made this record because he was hooked on “the idea of channeling your hateful resistance through the evil demonic music.”

Freddy Krueger Death Chant is a 75 minute track with the most fucked sounds and Edasi chanting in a caustic bubbling haunted whisper “Freddy Krueger, Freddy Krueger, burn in helllll” over and over again, with the occasional “Freddy fucking Kruger, Freddy fucking Krueger…” If the hypnotic lyrics weren’t enough, the music is INSANE, defying any and all levels of sub-genre. It’s black and relentless as fuck, a mess of skull fucking psych-noise, a gritty guitar blowing out spite, a drum beat that has no beat, high-end feedback skree, scratched & plucked acid strings, and a dozen layers of unrecognizable warped decay.

And it just keeps going. This is the longest 75 minute album I’ve ever listened to and definitely one of the most grating. I imagine he did this in real time without any looping, just jammed pure black psych for over an hour, then shot up with wolf blood and went into a trance attempting to conjure Satan and permanently send Krueger to hell with his death chant. I’m pretty sure there’s only one intended listener for this piece of filth, and it’s not you or me. Edasi says in his mission statement “it’s supposed to go on and on until the listener’s (hypothetically Freddy) senses are destroyed and his will and focus are lost.” It’s like witnessing a possessed beast holding a terrifyingly kvlt private seance, one we definitely shouldn’t be seeing but now that we’re here, there’s no fucking way we’re leaving.

P.S. New badass label alert! KV&GR is a small label devoted to bringing “the most underground and avant garde black metal, doom, dark ambient, drone, noise, kvlt and grim audio terrorism.” They put out some CRAZY releases. I also picked up a doomed black metal record with a knife and fucking power saw listed as instruments. They’re all limited and seem to go quick so keep a keen eye on that shit.

André Foisy – Untitled (excerpt)

 
KILLER SPLIT CITY. Almost TOO much awesome running through this tape. High Aura’d, Boston’s “up and coming” guitar droner John Kolodij, who probably got a lot of worshippers when they saw him opening for Barn Owl on tour last year, teams up with André Foisy, one half of the Locrian duo, who somehow manages to singlehandedly retain all the brilliance of Locrian.

Kolodij takes the A side with “Dusk Latitudes,” a 20+ drift through hazey space/time curves. His Americana stylings don’t show up immediately, instead doing some heavy breathing with the strings & pulses, layin the foundation for the resonant steel slides to come. It’s a foreboding piece, the unnerving tones that ring in your head the moments between the challenge to an old fashioned gun slinging duel and the duel itself. And then at about 7:45, the fucking chaos reigns down, blood pounding through your ears and clouding your eyes, heavy scary shit, a wall of reverb that only lasts as long as the gunfight, and the remainder is you lying full of holes in the bloody dust, surrounded by thick layers of warm drones, buy cheap generic cialis online looking up at the enlightening sky, thinking about the sincere & beautiful. Truly fantastic stuff right here.

Foisy’s untitled piece is an amazingly perfect companion to “Dusk Latitudes,” the blackened psych string drones that saturate the afterlife. Not overly bleak in the beginning, it weaves a grey SotL/KBD type classical, with distant thunder and a deep sobriety, building patiently upon layers of tension, each minute that passes increasing the sense of gorgeous dread, eventually bringing in somber monk-like vocals that are buried in the gloom. The elegance of this is that it escalates to pillars of dense, grandiose, and terrifying noise drone but you don’t notice until it’s toppling over you with tortured screaming, a fury of electronics, and buzzing riffage that pours out of your speakers, black, painful, and loud as fuck.

I definitely didn’t imagine that High Aura’d & André Foisy would make a solid gold split together, but holy fuck this tape is unbelievable. Stunned always does great work but they totally outdid themselves with this one. Just fucking incredible stuff from both of these guys. Now is it too much to ask for a collaboration?

Scuba Death – Dripsweat

 
It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed anything from Semata, one of Boston’s top notch cool shit purveyors, even though they’ve put out some seriously fantastic albums. So why did I choose to review a record that’s technically a reissue? Because Demon Seed barely saw the light of day with it’s 40 tape run on YDLMIER (not that Semata’s 200 LP run is that much better), because it sounds disgustingly great on vinyl, and because it’s fucking INSANE.

Scuba Death is apparently a “mystery artist.” That’s a topic I don’t really want to get in to, I’ll save it for another post, but lets just say I don’t dig the whole “mystery” thing. An alias is fine, but especially in a place like Boston, it just seems a little ridiculous to put out an album and purposefully keep the identity secret. But whatever. It adds to the intrigue, I suppose. So let your imagination run wild with who Scuba Death actually is, I’ll take bets.

Demon Seed is a short, potent dose of grimy & grim electronics. 45 RPM, one song per side, you get almost 20 minutes of no nonsense destructive filth that sounds like your stereo is recovering from a trip to the acid sauna. Nothing about this record sounds “right,” it literally sounds like they fucked everything up, sent you a broken piece of wax, and your needle is caught in a steel wool loop. The electronics are beyond repair, failed industrial static that grates from lo-fi smoke drone to power surge blowouts to contact feedback glitch to panned jet engine horror. I hate the idea of stealing other people’s descriptions but Brad Rose fuckin nailed it on Twitter when he said “i have to keep double checking to make sure my turntable isn’t on fire or something.”

So, yeah, this is some unusually bizarro noise, but it’s also bleak as fuck. It sounds like it came from an acrid tomb, sealed away for a thousand sunless years, encrusted with dense layers of dust, past decay, and embracing all things deathly. This is black noise stemming from crumbling electronics and it fucking DESTROYS.

Scuba Death could be literally anyone and I wouldn’t care. It doesn’t matter. Demon Seed is a fucking beast and it’s a goddamn miracle that Semata sought to spread the noise. So what have we learned from all of this? 1: Your copy of Demon Seed is not defective. 2: Keep an eye on YDLMIER.

Kamil Kowalczyk – Plasma

 
Kamil Kowalczyk isn’t really a name… yet. He’s put out some work on the Zenapolae net label under a few different monikers including Machine Thoughts and Maszyna_02, but this is Kowalczyk’s first release under his newly formed label. His physical debut, Aurora, is some looong minimal space drone that’s a fantastic way to get noticed.

This is some seriously minimal stretched out hypno ambience, with the first of two tracks clocking in at over a half hour. “Model II” is space, being trapped in the nearly empty nothing. All that you have is the slow hum of your life support as you float past bubbling arpeggios & muffled stardust. Hidden mechanical surges and clicks disturbing your cryogenic trance as the hum shifts gears. Very little going on, a glacial electronic flow with all the right subtleties. The second track, “Plasma,” is only slightly less longer at 25 minutes, but it picks up the pace a little bit. Instead of meandering in the ether, you’ve been sucked into the orbit of a haunted sunless planet. A bass pulse from beyond, unnerving highs setting the scene for impending terror. Still minimal as fuck, but plenty of weird shit going on, layers of buzzing & throbbing, a static slow-mo bad dream.

Aurora is all about the space drone. This is probably the one record that most embodies the genre. It’s a massive planar slumber, no destination, just infinite drift in sci-fi silence. Really hoping Kowalczyk keeps up with the long form ’cause this record is fuckin sweet. Everyone take heed.