For hardcore Morse Code nerds only. This LP is straight up basic Morse Code. No instructions, no talking. Just the relentless beeps of the Code. I think they go through the alphabet in the beginning and then spell out some words towards the ends. But who knows. I don’t speak Morse Code.
This sounds like a lo-fi fire alarm with dying batteries throwing a dance party, or somebody hooked up to an EKG whose heart pumps minimal weirdo techno. It’s definitely not the easiest thing to listen to straight through but if you can handle it, fuckin go for it. Or chop it up and make some rad beats with it if that’s your thing.
Also, look at the fucking cover art. Pretty awesome.
In addition to running Ripples Recordings, Ennio Mazzon is an Italy based sound sculptor who usually works with eletro-acoustics & field recordings. His new record on Triple Bath, however, is his first that’s strictly electronic, and the first of his that I’ve heard. So no comparisons, just me raving about how he doesn’t need any analog acoustic sounds because Azure Allochiria is totally fucking awesome.
This is some minimal stuff but it has a hundred and one layers. Pretty quiet, delicately textured like digital lace. If you play this at a normal volume, (1) you’ll miss out on 80% of it because it flies under the radar and (2) you’ll forget you ever put on a record and you’ll just think there’s an EBS test running somewhere you can’t find. So play this fucker loud and you’ll be in for a treat, with all of the vertigo high pitches, stuttering anti-patterns, and garbled dog whistles.
There’s a magic beauty to Allochiria that transports you to a midnight garden. Lots of insect sounds, chirping, static hammering, clicking, everything twinkling & glitching with a Tron-like blue glow surrounding it. It makes me think of a much more controlled version of the sound speakers/amps make when plugging them in. An elaborate ambient alien Morse code that seeps through The Matrix. Seemingly cold & unwelcoming to the uninitiated, but in reality it’s a warm embrace of next-level electro-harmony.
Not knowing what sort of field recordings Mazzon has done in the past, it’s still pretty obvious that that’s where he’s coming from. So much of this record sounds like it could be from the analog world, melting icicles & trickling water, buzzing cicadas, throaty bird songs, yet all blatantly electronic. But regardless, THIS IS IT. Azure Allochiria is an hour long gorgeous minimal texture fest and it’s all I need. Way to fucking go.
Since I’ve started grad school at Simmons, things have been a little different on AGB. There are things I anticipated, such as posting being less frequent, going to WAY less shows, and the concert calendar getting the cold shoulder. But I also noticed that I’ve been posting about less Boston related stuff. :(
What I recently realized is that I might be able to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. What I plan on doing is posting shorter blurbs that are more news/event related to the Boston area, which will hopefully take up less of my time, get me back to talking about local awesomeness, and keep AGB nice & plump. Like last night, for example, John Twells (Xela, Type Records) and Ian Lawrence (Barge Recordings) DJed some killer weird tunes at River Gods in Cambridge. Tyler The Creator spinning in the same set as Outer Space. FUN STUFF. There’s no reason I couldn’t have pointed that out to you ahead of time instead of… now.
So if you live in the Boston area, this is good news for you. If you’re far away and couldn’t care less about who’s DJing where, and when Non-Event hosts a fundraiser with DJs Rob Forman, Angela Sawyer, & Ning Nong, visuals from Orangecookie & Fielderblank, food, raffles, and a silent auction this Saturday at Goethe-Institut from 7-10, FEAR NOT! I also hope to be reviewing more Boston based records as part of my re-localizing plan. Which you will totally care about. Promise.
Robocopodenieve makes music out of Buenos Aires full of beautiful ambient loops that glitch out in glorious ways. The video for “Siamellizas” has a pair of vintage girls connected at the hair who have a lonely life in the woods where they make failed attempts at having tea parties with each other. So sad. The track can be found on their split tape with Los Sueños on the newly formed & totally awesome Argentinian tape label, Spit On BPM.
This. Is hilarious. The A side has an old geezer, who occasionally doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, having a conversation with a young farm owner from Vermont, Charles Dana, about all of the animals wandering around the farm. The dialog is SO awkward. The old guy asks the most obvious questions and says things like, “Well, I see you have a cat here” and “What’s that thing out in the barn there bawling like a lamb?” (answer: goat). He’s basically the worst person to just shoot the shit with. And the farmer sounds like he’d rather die than explain what the animals are up to.
Of course, while this whole conversation is going on, there’s all sorts of animal sounds. So not only are two guys uncomfortably chatting about farm life but they’re surrounded by peeping chicks, cows, horses, pigs, turkeys, and some other guy calling the sheep & cows from the fields. They went for the ultimate in realism over here. It’s like you’re actually ON A FARM. Except they clearly recorded all of the animals separately and tried to string it together with a single conversation afterwards. “Oh, look what’s here. Pigs!” Yeah, good segue there buddy.
The B side is the exact same as the A side, except it’s just the animals. The interview is gone and you’re left with a strange array of farm sounds. In other words, way less entertaining. Clearly the meat of this album is listening to these two dudes talking about the automatic milking of cows and the problems of raccoons.
Droll Yankees looks like an amazing label. They put out a bunch of records like this, all with great album art, but about all sorts of things. Grave diggers, tug boats, bird songs, all aspected of New England life they tried to document. Some guy got kind of obsessed with the label for a bit and did a fair amount of research and independent cataloging, picking up as many copies as he could find. Definitely a worthwhile little page he has set up. Hope it helps me find some more Droll Yankees records.
Josh Lay is the head Husk hero, putting out crazy blackened everything, and back in 2008 he recorded some jams with Teeth Collection aka Matthew Reis, which never saw the light of day until now. Thank God Husk & Factotum finally got their heads on straight and got this slab on noise out to the masses. Absolutely necessary.
The LP has 2 side long pieces and it comes with a CD-R of material previously available on a Factotum double cassette, 4 tracks, 2 extras recorded from the same session and 2 solo pieces. So when you drop $$$ on this, you get over an hour and a half’s worth of darkness.
The A side is a sprawling ghost of decay, the souls of machinists lurking in empty factories, bringing equipment rusted solid back from the grave. Grit covers every nook & cranny, belt sanders and hollow pipes echo down hallways, floors covered in peeling paint chips. I have no idea what the source of the sounds actually are, but it sounds like the building itself is dying, held up by nothing more than rotten boards, everything a disgusting haunted mess, saturated in bleak & black.
Flipped over, you’re treated to a very similar lesson in industrial spookiness, although this time they take the minimal drone route. If the A side was sprawling, this is a gauzy lead blanket stretched flat, covering Death Valley under the night sky. It hardly moves at all, just rustles in the breeze, screeching & throbbing like playing a saw with acid nails while phantom buffalos dance in underground silos. There’s an ebb & flow, a blackened drone rearing its head, grieving over mechanical ambience, drifting through space, without a home.
I’ll leave the CD as a surprise, although I’ll just say it’s a bit more rowdy than the LP. These are some harrowing sounds, certainly not an album to share with your loved ones. Totally fucking killer, though. This was made to spin on wax, so do yourself a favor and let your turntable take part in this gloriously grim experience.
Y’all know who Nicholas Szczepanik is, right? Only one of the greatest new-droners working today. He put out a couple of straight up amazing fulllengths and that collaboration with Jenks Miller. He’s right up there with Kyle Bobby Dunn and Ophibre. AKA watch out for this dude ’cause he’s fucking going places. Here’s the proof.
Szczepanik is doing a subcription series!!! It’s called Ante Algo Azul and it’ll consist of 12 3″ CDs, each with one piece of music, each housed in beautifully handcrafted packaging, and, of course, limited to 100 copies. The best thing is, you don’t need to pony up all $125 right out of the gate, you can do a payment plan (4 x $31.25). HELL YES. The first, titled Not Knowing (For Elian Radigue), just got sent out. If you’ve been paying attention, then you’d know Szczepanik released this track a couple months back on Soundcloud as a “work in progress” sort of thing. Well he finished it up (you can still stream the entirety of it) and made it the inaugural AAA.
“Not Knowing” is an 18 minute slow moving static monster, heaving & throbbing with glacial bass for the first half. It’s hypnotic but a bit menacing, dark pulses breathing at you from the abyss, relentless. A sleeping monolith that eventually opens its dreams to you, showing you the cascading choirs of beauty that surround it while it sleeps, gorgeous harmonies that rise & fade, never lasting as long as needed to totally envelope you, to relish in that glorious warmth. It runs up to you with open arms only to get scared of some unknown and hide behind shadowy rocks, inching closer & closer to a full embrace that never quite comes.
Clearly, this is some amazing fucking stuff. I love it just as much as anything else Szczepanik’s made. And the packaging is wonderful, a stamped envelope (each stamp is different) sealed with a thumbprint and a photograph inside (more pics & updates here). I absolutely can’t WAIT to see how the next 11 turn out. And it’s not too late for you to join in. Plenty of copies still left.
The ever busy dudes in Eternal Tapestry put together a video for “Galactic Derelict” off their new album, Beyond the 4th Door, out in March on Thrill Jockey. Lots of noodlin & groovin heavy space psych set to straaange old sci-fi buy cialis in las vegas movies, the video having just as many layers as the music. The best part is when the caped space adventurer is flying through space and he checks his watch because, y’know, he’s gonna be late to Neptune.
Chris Rehm has gotta be one of my favorite dudes workin right now. His solo work on the Salivary Stones tape was a slab of pink drone bliss and the mathy noise pop album he did with his pal Sean Hart as Caddywhompus remains to this day one of the catchiest & most listened to records in rotation. So clearly Rehm’s a fuckin champ. PLUS, he runs Chinquapin Records out of New Orleans and all of the music he makes is available for free downloading. Including Worries, Etc.
Worries is Rehm’s seventh solo release in 4 years and right off the bat, you can tell it’s more developed and intricate than his last tape. Instead of just straight up drone noise, there’s all sorts of extra stuff going on. The muffled industrial machine beats from before take a higher priority now, chugging away making some Usputuspud-like disco drone. Now there’s strummed http://www.health-canada-pharmacy.com acoustics with depressed vocals echoing “I just want you to give a fuck” and pulsing space dust shooting through the heart of frozen moons. One of my favorite tracks is “Blinders” which starts outs with mumbling ghosts hiding behind curtains of xylophone kaleidoscope static and then blurs into bombastic Fuck Buttons noise bliss. So fucking cool.
The individual songs on Worries, Etc. are perfectly unique, each one sounding a bit different than the last, but all flowing seamlessly into the next. This could have been one half hour long track and I wouldn’t have batted an eye.
This is a beautiful record, tender, harsh, euphoric, and occasionally danceable. If you’ve yet to experience life through Rehm’s ears, now’s the fucking time. But if you’re already a fan, Worries is essential, it’s filled with more elaborate sounds fused with the noise pop elements from Caddywhompus. Seriously, what more could you ask for? Oh right, IT’S FREE.
What’s the world coming to when it takes a guy like me 3 years to review a release on Experimedia? Shameful, I know. Well, it’s time for that to change because this label is consistently killing it with the most awesome freshness in cool shit. And Charles-Eric Charrier is the first in hopefully many more, because this dude has got something special goin on.
Charrier is one half of MAN along with Rasim Biyikli, and he’s done a thousand and one collaborations with every cool cat around. Silver has him taking a beautiful blend of psych & free jazz, creating a hypnotic and constantly morphing spiral of jams. The opening track is prime Western groove material, with dusty percussion that skitters like tumbleweeds and meandering guitars set in slow riffs getting their buzz & grit on under wide open blue skies.
The second piece is more evil, a possessed hermit whipping out his busted vintage synths & radio transmitters, making swampy electro drones and garbled alien space blasts, all while some mad genius in the back swaggers on the drum kit. A fucking journey and a half, going places I didn’t know existed with mournful trumpets and stuttering guitars, back and forth unsettling tension and smoothed out relaxing tones.
And that’s just the A side, from there it goes in all directions jazzier, noisier, etc, etc. It gets more frantic, numerous staggered layers of piano, acoustic guitar, electronics, and hidden percussion, slowed down single bass strings resonating with fluttering Americana, lush cymbals & dry shakers, hollow toms chugging down the railroad, steel plucking in the heat of the night, blistering battles of scratching stars & bats terrorizing the valley, the kind of jazziness that’s right up my alley aka not too heavy on the jazz.
Silver is definitely a winner on all accounts. Charrier’s got some twisted vision of contemporary free jazz that I’ve yet to see elsewhere and I’m all for it because this record is fuckin HOT. Some seriously top notch shit, obviously it should’ve been called Gold.
There’s been a bit too many pleasantries lately as I ran through those Peasant Magik tapes, so it’s time to switch gears and drop this bomb of a tape on Land Of Decay. Sun Splitter put out this album a while ago on a super limited CD-R. Obviously it’s long gone, but the finest folks at Land Of Decay did what anyone in their right mind would do when they heard II, decided it needed to see the light of day again.
Just like their Locrian brethren, Sun Splitter are a metal hydra, many different heads all connected to one beast. They play some insanely heavy black doom psych that just fucking SLAYS. This shit is extreme in every way. The blackest, the bleakeast, the sludgiest, the riffiest. SO MANY RIFFS. Monster riffs pounding your bones, pure fucking evil riffs coming straight from the depths of the underworld. Blast beats that only feel at home when they’re destroying mountains. The hounds of hell growling filthy vocals while the song lurches and stumbles. It’s 100% monster, baked in the black sun of Satan’s desert and given the power to demolish everything in its path with aural chaos. Once it gets in a groove and that killer solo sets in, you’re fucking done for.
Everything about II is the fucking BEST. It’s got a blackened doom heart pumping dusty buzzing sun psych. Sun Splitter somehow manage to sway back and forth between a dozen genres & sub-genres in one song, all while keeping it cohesive, singleminded, and brutal as fuck. I don’t think there’s any medium capable of handling the onslaught of devastation they bring, but a limited tape is as good as anything else I suppose. Just make sure if Sun Splitter ever makes it out of Chicago, you make it your #1 priority to have your face melted at one of their shows.
Note: I got a massive batch of 15 tapes from Peasant Magik. I debated on either giving a few of them the regular full blown review treatment or doing the burst shot quick & dirty reviews to get through as many as possible. I chose the latter. So this is one in a slew of short portraits of some of the newest Peasant Magik releases.
Excessive umlauts aside, husband/wife duo Jüppala Kääpiö are super awesome, bringing the freaky folk drone thing to crazy new heights. 2 tracks are home recorded and 1 is a live piece from a 2010 show in Switzerland, it’s amazing how many layers just two people can make. Transcendental psych drones weave & tumble, creating fluttering tapestries conjured out of instruments I’ve probably never heard of from countries I can’t pronounce. Forest chimes jangle over scratchy strings and sun dappled streams flow through magic shaman villages where the chanting mantras & rituals run wild. Lots of folky elements but not too earthy for my tastes. Plenty of pleasing harmonies to keep your euphoria going strong.
Note: I got a massive batch of 15 tapes from Peasant Magik. I debated on either giving a few of them the regular full blown review treatment or doing the burst shot quick & dirty reviews to get through as many as possible. I chose the latter. So this is one in a slew of short portraits of some of the newest Peasant Magik releases.
As soon as this tape starts up, you’re lost in the fuzz. ROCKIN fuzz. It’s full of high-energy bite-sized punkgaze with obscured boy/girl vocals and even more obscured pop riffs. There’s epic melodies and a slight cosmic feeling that sounds a lot like if Hum made a shoegaze record. I’m sure if Hum did that it would be 100 times better than everything else in the world (including Pet Milk) but this is still a cool enough imagination primer. Either way though, Pet Milk is definitely going for that old school C86 vibe in a truly awesome way. Also, they cover MBV’s “Paint A Rainbow” and they do a pretty decent job.
Note: I got a massive batch of 15 tapes from Peasant Magik. I debated on either giving a few of them the regular full blown review treatment or doing the burst shot quick & dirty reviews to get through as many as possible. I chose the latter. So this is one in a slew of short portraits of some of the newest Peasant Magik releases.
This is celestial drone from the high heavens. Cotton delicacies floating amid mountaintops, puffs of clouds drip enlightenment, this is what goes through monks’ minds as they meditate on pure universal peace. It’s the kind of New Age waterfall ambience that you hope a thousand hopes is what’s on that hideous 25 cent thrift store tape. Quiet yet wholly immersive, ripples form underneath euphoric synths soaring through galaxies evolved into stardust. Put this on and sleep forever with dreams of absolute bliss.
Note: I got a massive batch of 15 tapes from Peasant Magik. I debated on either giving a few of them the regular full blown review treatment or doing the burst shot quick & dirty reviews to get through as many as possible. I chose the latter. So this is one in a slew of short portraits of some of the newest Peasant Magik releases.
Padna is Nat Hawkins, also a maker as Christian Science Minotaur and the dude who runs Little Fury Things. Love this guy ’cause I see his name and think of pandas. :) Seriously beautiful processed smoothly glitched drone, especially the side long “Delaware Intro.” Moves slowly, stretches and wraps over itself like taffy. The meat of the tape is mostly blissy stars sparkling in the daytime sky, trickling water running down sheets of satin and rumble synths chugging on the midnight train. Some vocals peek in halfway through the B side and seem way out of place at first but sound damn good after you get settled. He even slides into a plucked guitar & harmonica groove that sounds like a slightly folkier Windy & Carl. It’s not quite perfection, but it’s what perfection looks like in a sunny summer field.
