White Dwarf Spiral – 999

 
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.
 
White Dwarf Spiral is Antonio Gallucci joined by a “mysterious cast of international noisers.” This should’ve been the soundtrack to Predator. Distant lush space psych jungle drones n beats filled with piercing paranoia & clanging chaos. Faded drums pound & resonate while sweaty gorillas fell trees. The tension rises and falls, the jungle turns inside out, and buzzing insects sting your neck. It’s a planet that harbors sounds vaguely familiar but altogether alien. I can totally imagine “999” playing just after that scene where they all converge after the Predator kills Blain and they empty their ammo in the forest, hitting nothing but leaves. Totally awesome creepy as fuck pulsing noise, with album art by Justin Wright aka Expo ’70. You can’t go wrong.

Gerritt Wittmer – Side A (excerpt)

 
Gerritt Wittmer is that crazy motherfucker who I saw play with Paul Knowles at the Black Pus / Sissy Spacek show. He also runs the incredible Misanthropic Agenda label. He’s made some insano harsh noise records and his performance with Knowles was intense to say the least, but his new album Vessel is an exercise in restraint & tension, with LOTS of silence.

I’ve read that the only sounds contained on this record are from Wittmer’s mouth. Digitally altered occasionally, but still everything is supposedly sourced from his voice & breathing. The A side starts out with some bumbling around, like you’re carrying a mic while looking through a dark attic for a flashlight. Then, nothing. Wait, no, there’s someone here. Hiding in the corner. Definitely, some creepy murderer is doing his best to control his breathing and it’s not working. You can totally hear him. WTF. Why is there someone hiding in your attic? FUCK. It’s pitch black, you can’t see a goddamn thing, and you have no way to defend yourself. So you do what’s only right & natural. You start making creepy mouth noises back at him.

Duck squawk? Duck squawk. Constipated straining? Constipated straining. Silent cat yowls? Silent cat yowls. This guy becomes your mirror. Everything you do, right back at you. Then you start goin CRAZY together. A fucking choir of anti-harmonic dying frogs, ghosts with porcupines in their throats, demonic tea kettles, rewound mouse farts. If anybody walked in on you right now they’d shit their pants in terror and call an exorcist.

The B side is a bit more subdued, but also a bit shorter. No cacophony, no release & eruption from silent tension. It’s ALL tension. Waiting, uncertainty, disgusting sloppy slurps and punctured dog lungs. The long voids of nothing seem interminable, the only clue that time is passing is the vinyl crackle. If you focus all of your attention, the abyss becomes an actual thing, an entity all its own. Pulsing, breathing, but still motionless.

Wittmer is doing some crazy shit on Vessel. I’m not sure if he’s experimenting, or if he’s using this cathartically, or just further refining his obviously fine/performance sound art. Whatever he’s doing, it works. It feels like you’re holding your breathe the entire length the record. Muscle ache is an immediate & inevitable byproduct of listening to it. Maybe pop some pain killers beforehand.

Dan Crall – The Incredible Blue

 
Wow. I don’t even know where to start with this one. The fact that it’s fucking AWESOME? Or maybe that it’s ridiculously non-musical? Or that Dan Crall is just a regular dude, without a “band website” or anything like that. He runs a pedicab business. That’s his website. No Myspace, no Bandcamp. He’s got a little Last.FM bio and an outdated photo album on the Install site. That’s it. He’s just a totally normal fucking dude. He just happens to make crazy ass field recording records like Non Formula Equinox.

This is primarily made up of field recordings, with little droney aspects & straight up music peppered throughout. I love this because it’s how I imagine I would make field recordings. 90% of what Crall records are sounds you hear every day (or would if you lived in Oregon). Squeaky tools, leaky hoses, kids screaming at carnivals, hammering & hollering, roaring fires, galloping horses, radio splatter, carousels, factory machines, barn house husbandry, and lots of people. Dusty voices talking about everything from the spiritual & physical cleansing of sweat lodges to depressing monologues about the economy & loneliness. Some of the sounds are warped, twisted, & beaten into an unrecognizable pulp, but a lot of them remain unaltered. No digital processing, just straight up sounds the way they’d be heard in the wild, taken totally out of context and jumbled up in Crall’s brilliant sequencing. They may be entirely non-musical elsewhere, but compiled & put on a platter for you on Equinox, you’re able to hear the world the way Dan Crall does.

There is music on this record though, just not a hell of a lot of it, and most of it is hidden among the field recordings. Some didgeridoo weirdness, rewound mandolin, deep resonant cellos, murky underwater drones. These are the starting off points for those having a difficult time getting into this record. You can focus on the more familiar musical facets, while experiencing the surrounding bizarreness and easing yourself into the stripped down sounds like on “The Ballad Of Eugene Boyd.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a record that took advantage of all available 80 minutes. Non Formula Equinox is 1 hour and 18 minutes, which is one long fucking record when it doesn’t have much music on it. It’s definitely not the easiest thing to listen to, but it’s SO goddamn rewarding when you actually get through it and have the epiphany. The realization that all of the source material is primarily background noise in the real world. If you put this record on and don’t give it 100% of your attention, your brain will automatically block it out just like it does with the rest of the shit you hear all day long. Just because it’s made of the everyday ambient audio, doesn’t mean you should treat it as such. You need to try extra hard with this one.

The real enjoyment of this record comes from following Crall on his journey & exploration of the isolated Western United States. You’ll hear strange stories and even stranger sounds, mostly bleak & dreary, but totally fucking fascinating. And if you get bored (and shame on you if you do), you can play the guessing game, what the sources of the sounds are, which of them are pure, which have been altered, are there any instruments playing right now? How much layering did he do or is this all actually happening simultaneously? However you listen to it, though, just make sure you actually listen. Fucking CHECK THIS OUT. You’ll be a better person for it.

Ophibre – St. Asphalt (Patron Saint Of Army Ants) (excerpt)

 
Ophibre is never one to fuck around. He means business, always taking his drone to the next level. Never content to sit in one place for too long, he spits out records like St. Asphalt here, a brutal assault rife with hidden bliss, right alongside minimal space hiss & bubbles like on his last full length, Phase Plane Cake Decorator. This little limited Kendra Steiner Edition 3″ CD-R is a stout 19 minutes of everything I love about this guy.

The whole thing is an impenetrable wall of harsh grit. It goes from start to finish without so much as an “Oh you can chill out for a sec while you catch you breath (pussy).” Everything is swirling in an infinitely layered dense cluster, static brushing up against sharp electronic shards, underworld grumbling & thunderous howling, wind whipping through black holes, glacial stars throbbing and threatening to implode, twisters of sand & glass tearing through your ear canals.

It’s an insane amount of sounds. Each one on their own would be totally unbearable but throw them in an Ophibre blender and you end up with an unbelievably beautiful dronescape. But it’s not like there are beautiful melodies or soothing synths melting underneath. I have no idea how he did it. Either he just made a ridiculously fucking accessible noise record or I’m becoming immune to & dulled by constant noise.

St. Asphalt is endlessly listenable, noise for the noise haters, bliss for the bliss lovers. The most pleasing & enjoyable stream of coarse chaos I’ve heard in a long while. Wholly worthwhile for pretty much everyone.

Szymon Kaliski – Or Delicate

 
Goddamn, I wish I heard Out Of Forgetting last year. Not just for my Top 10 list or anything, I just mean it’s been out since July and it’s a fucking tragedy that a half year has gone by while this drone magnifique sat on the sidelines waiting to be devoured by me. That is 6 months of my life wasted.

Szymon Kaliski is an incredible soundcrafter from Poland. I normally shy away from the name dropping comparison thing, but Kaliski totally deserves this one. He takes pieces from all the greats, lots of vintage Jeckian crackle, subtle glitches like Hecker, some Basinski melancholy, and Deupree style processed minimalism, all while not sounding too much like any one of them.

The textures & tones on this record are unbelievably deep, frozen blue drones stacked with fluttering glitched piano like best place buy cialis online uk flurries in the drift, the most delicate static slowly sifting through ice cracks, smooth white sheets of bliss warped with warmth, dusty resonance topped in timeless grit. The sounds are pure, they’re beautiful, and everything about them is a subtle affirmation of what contemporary drone is all about. This is what the rest should be striving for.

Out Of Forgetting is only a half hour long, but that means it’s not bloated with excess or 20 minute meditation exercises. Kaliski didn’t overdo it, but he also didn’t wimp out and drop an EP, he trimmed out the fat and made every second count, resulting in a record of precisely the proper length. If he never released another album, he would still make it into my all time list of top droners. Forgetting is unwaveringly unforgettable (sorry) and absolutely stunning.

Radere – A Season In Decline (excerpt)

Radere, aka Carl Ritger, is a pretty awesome droner (and active Soundclouder). He’s put only put out a handful of records, 2 of which are on Full Spectrum. His debut, A Process In The Weather Of The Heart released in early 2010, was outstandingly beautiful & minimal. Now, in the same year, he drops another intensely killer record on FS, this time taking things to the more extreme side of drone, getting downright rowdy.

A Season In Decline is a single 40+ minute track that’s unbelievably tender. It starts out with some snow crunching underfoot and lots of hiss, setting the mood for the wintery soundscape. The footsteps fade and are replaced by a subtle resonant guitar, floating around with the remnant flurries. Chilly & delicate, there’s hints of more organic recordings, all over a foundation of the hushed wind of nighttime snowfall.

Not one to blow his load all at once, Radere takes his time getting to the massive static beast on the latter half of the record. He waltzes through some moonlit forests, admiring the naked cheap prices for cialis tree branches weighing down with snow, content in introspective meditation. But FUCK, the chaos that unfolds afterwards, it’s like the whole time he was preparing to battle a demon snow dragon. 20 minutes of unnerving whirlwinds, clanging icicles, psych drenched howls from the underworld, walls of solid shoegazing bliss, heavenly textures glimmering in sheets of ice, the sun breaking through the brutal cold, all wrapped in a blanket of dense static warmth. Clearly, the battle is won. The snow dragon is defeated by the power of pure beauty.

The wonder of this piece is how smoothly it transforms from a sweet & lonely silent night into a wall of euphoric destruction. Of course it’s easy to tell the difference between the first 20 seconds and the last when you listen to them side by side, but over the course of the album, the change is so discrete. Definitely a winter wizard at work here. Radere may be somewhat of a newcomer, but damn if he doesn’t have the chops to take this shit to the next level.

Nils Quak – Quand Meme (excerpt)

 
Not sure I’ve written about too many German based sound artists on AGB, so I guess it’s kinda good that Nils Quak came my way (even if I’m a juvenile and his name makes me laugh). Think I might need some more cultured drone here and now seems like a fine time to start.

This Once Silver Sky is some glacial ambience, frozen to the core with an acute awareness of all the cracks & whips of creaking ice and slowly swirling water. A deep muffled rumble expands, like a distant submarine motor kicking out sonar that’s long since faded in the abyss. Shifting icebergs roam the empty seas, occasionally bumping into each other resulting in glitching spikes & splashes. The dead wind perks up every now and then, a hidden digital whisper that coats everything with a beautiful texture. Then the sadness washes in, some emotional tones that drip somber, mixed with heavily obscured field recordings and a mini grandeur of subtle electronic static.

It’s a single half hour track where the layers continually build & reshape and the end is an entirely different beast from the beginning, with a dozen steps of doomed ambient drone glitch bliss along the way. It’s a sentimental rollercoaster, using all sorts of processed found sounds, grainy electronics, and smoothed out tones to get the job done. Nils Quak has made a ridiculously beautiful & highly compelling piece of music. Truly awesome stuff.