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Jim Haynes is a San Francisco-based musician who has made a name for himself through work in the duo Coelacanth and in his travels as a solo sound-artist. The rich SF scene has no doubt provided Haynes with many opportunities to expand his listener-ship, and recently he has ventured eastward with an installation called Magnetic North appearing in Nashville and San Jose. This disc, the first release from The Helen Scarsdale Agency and limited to 300 copies, contains the audio portion of the installation, culled from performances of the last two years. The most striking quality of the music herein can inadequately be described as its organic nature.
Haynes has produced four lengthy tracks, each composed entirely of beautiful drones, but drones with a distinctly homespun feel. Contained bell tones and gentle, metallic overtones leak into otherwise hollow, spacious drones that recall the oceanic spaces of Coelacanth's music. At times the listener feels outside, or underground, in a large breathing space, or in the same land that produced Walter Marchetti's cavernous recordings. Haynes has a way, however, of bringing his listener back to reality, back to the tool shed so to speak, as he introduces subtle incidental sounds into the mix. Evocative, even representative of everyday things that clatter, scrape, and squeak, the sound sources remain obscured, the sounds themselves never harsh or even disorienting. Not having seen the Magnetic North installation, I can only guess that it deals with issues of space and the unique transparencies between large and small environments. Haynes' music is accessible in a way that suggests his installation provides a womb-like atmosphere, comfortably merged with wider, harrowing spaces in an examination of the consistencies between the two. His music has neither the stoicism of Marchetti nor the bombast of drone guru Phil Niblock, but feels just right for Haynes' purposes. Though his work with Coelacanth may see him drifting to the outer limits, here Haynes keeps the windswept barrens just outside the door.
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Since their creation in 2005, The Skull Defekts have taken their base of classic rock with massive guitar riffing, and infused it with their interest in circular composition, drone, tribal music, Indian ragas, '60s minimalism, and experimental music from numerous ages. The band's lineage is nearly unparalled amongst their peers with members having served time in Union Carbide Productions, Kid Commando, Alvars Orkester, Satan Power, Oceans of Silver & Blood, Anti Cimex, Cortex, Trapdoor Fucking Exit, 8 Days of Nothing, and countless others. Their collaborations are no less notable with members working with Pan Sonic and Mats Gustafsson. Peer Amid, their third "rock" album, finds the band augmenting their line-up with a new fifth member, Lungfish vocalist Daniel Higgs.
Recorded at The Dustward Studio in Stockholm by Stefan Brainstrum, Peer Amid is their strongest effort to date. The arena-sized riffs of "No More Always" seep with an undeniable swagger, briefly catapulting the bands cyclic riffs into a frenzy. The intensity of "Gospel of the Skull" is driven by a tension created by the push and pull of Higgs vocals and mostly restrained guitar. Some may be familiar with this song as it was performed with a full symphony orchestra as part of the Gothenburg String Theory series that also featured the likes of Jose Gonzalez and El Perro Del Mar. The guitar lines of "Fragrant Nimbus" would make an apt soundtrack for a retro action movie on their own. When coupled with the foreboding words of Daniel Higgs, things rapidly move in another direction, fraying and shattering as his warnings become more explicit. The combination of Higgs' lyrics and singular vocals are the perfect foil for The Skull Defekts myriad of talents. Peer Amid is a rock record, made by musicians who have always reveled in exploration, and made for a head that can accommodate the 360 degree turn.
The Skull Defekts are:
Henrik Rylander (Drums // Electronics), Joachim Nordwall (Guitar // Vocals // Analog Synths), Jean-Louis Huhta (Percussion // Effects // Electronics), Daniel Fagerstroem (Guitar // Vocals // Electronics), and Daniel Higgs (Vocals // Various Instruments).
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Artist: Machinefabriek
Title: Vloed
Catalogue No: CSR138CD
Barcode: 8 2356649932 9
Format: Digipak
Genre: Drone / Guitar Ambient
Shipping: 29th November
'Vloed' is a collection of (slightly edited) live performances, recorded between 2006 and 2008 in Amsterdam and Den Haag.
"All performances find Machinefabriek in fine form, offering up thick billows of warm guitar shimmer, fluttery staticky ambience, and at one point some uncharacteristically heavy super distorted metallic guitar, but here, it's not so much metal as simply a mighty drone, thick and throbbing and super intense. There are long stretches of near silence and super minimal high end drone, glimmering slow building crescendos, squalls of distorted choral buzz, warm whirring metallic reverberations, shimmery and dense black dronemusik, all the stuff we love about Machinefabriek" (Aquarius).
Beautifully remastered with a 20-minute bonus track, 'Vloed' captures the immersive live experience of a Machinefabriek concert.
Presented in a stunning matt digipak with modified artwork.
Tracks: 1. Allengskens (18:03) | 2. Drifjgzand (13:16) | 3. Vrijhaven (21:12) | 4. Vloed (22:08)
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Artist: Various Artists
Title: We Bring You A King With A Head Of Gold
Catalogue No: CSR100CD
Barcode: 8 2356649942 8
Format: Jewelcase
Genre: Traditional Folk, Dark Folk, Ballads
Shipping: 29th November
The follow-up to our award winning Folk compilation "John Barleycorn Reborn" from 2007. 34 tracks and 146 minutes of music from the best of current British Folk artists.
The raw green of spring is burnished through midsummer into the baked golden crust of August, the headlong vigour of new growth slowing, ripening into a sagging, fecund fullness. Crows wheel low over a cornfield, inkblots spilt on the wide blue sky, their ragged cries cracking the drowsy haze of high summer. Cornstalks rustle and whisper secretively, heads nodding sagely in the light breeze, spread resplendent over the land like the bushy sun-bleached beard of Barleycorn himself, basking in the afternoon heat. The image fades, dispersing into the ripples of Mimir’s black mirror, and now the harvest appears as the radiant blonde braids of gentle Sif, Norse goddess of the corn, ever-faithful wife of Thor, patroness of fidelity, of promises kept. Again the mirror ripples, and now the corn forms the mane of a magnificent horse, surging over the earth, alive with energy, bearing the memory of innumerable harvests past and the promise of harvests yet to come, past and future radiating out in all directions from this perfect, poised moment of completion. It’s time to reap. (Simon Collins)
Tracks: Disc 1: 1. Barron Brady - 'Earthen Key' | 2. Laienda - 'Little Drummer Boy / Anvil' | 3. The Rowen Amber Mill - 'Blood And Bones (Ciderdelica Mix)' | 4. Tony Wakeford - 'The Devil' | 5. Kate Harrison - 'England' | 6. Drohne - 'The Hooden Horse / An-Dro' | 7. Corncrow - 'The Cutty Wren' | 8. Sproatly Smith - 'I Shall Leave You There' | 9. Tinkerscuss - 'Black Sarah' | 10. Cerunnos Rising - 'Hear It With My Heart' | 11. Mama - 'The Fool Of Spring' | 12. Magicfolk - 'Green Man' | 13. Wyrdstone - 'Lost At Ty Canol' | 14. Emil Brynge - 'Devon Dream' | 15. Kim Thompsett - 'Lords And Ladies' | 16. Dragon Spirit - 'Always Be Ours' | 17. Philip Butler And Natasha Tranter - 'Jack The Mommet' | 18. Touch The Earth - 'Ancient Landscapes'
Disc 2: 1. Relig Oran - 'Ye Mariners All' | 2. Autumn Grieve - 'Within Hollows' | 3. Ian McKone - 'Searching For Lambs' | 4. John Parker - 'Manningham Blues' | 5. Rattlebag - 'The Tyburn Sisters' | 6. The Fates - 'The Song Of The Fates' | 7. The Hare And The Moon - 'The Three Ravens' | 8. The Kittiwakes - 'Lynx' | 9. Venereum Arvum - 'Robin Sick And Weary' | 10. Telling The Bees - 'Fithfath' | 11. Richard Masters - 'The Wind Knows' | 12. Demdyke - 'Mother Carey's Chicks' | 13. Beneath The Oak - 'Oh Earthly Man' | 14. Sedayne : Sundog - 'A Wee Brown Cow' | 15. Ruby Throat - 'Swan And The Minotaur (Troubled Man)' | 16. Jennifer Crook - 'Ribbons Of Green / The Dream Waltz (Live)'
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On this single track album, Tommi Keränen, who is also one half of the infamous Norwegian noise duo Testicle Hazard, throws down a bit over a half hour of heavily dynamic electronic noise that destroys speakers with the best of them, but with a level of complexity and variation that many other noise artists seem to ignore.
Immediately the track launches into heavy, raw buzzsaw tones and layers of phased sound constructed atop of it.While it starts out loud and messy, it continues to build even further until the foundation can barely sustain all of the noise that it supports.There are brilliant balances struck throughout:piercing, pure sine waves with short blips of unidentifiable sonic trash; monolithic concrete slabs of noise with rapidly undulating and changing passages.
While the static noise tends to be a dominant feature throughout, it never becomes overbearing, with a constantly cycling crowd of hyperkinetic squelches, overdriven crunches and buzzing passages to balance out the pure feedback.There’s also a healthy selection of bent and mangled pure tones in there to counterbalance the mess.
The biggest change is apparently about 13 minutes in, where the track is pulled apart into some sporadic tones that sound like spastic techno breakdown moments, along with spots of ultra high frequency high pitched frequencies that are reminiscent of the interstitial bits between songs on those extremely early Whitehouse albums.This is only a brief respite, if you could even call it that, before it goes full bore into rising and falling noise tones for the remainder of the album.
Keränen has succeeded in crafting an album that retains the best qualities of the harsh noise scene (and its many subcategories) without really demonstrating any of the annoyances.There isn’t a sense that the recording is extremely loud in order to just be "extreme," but it retains the cojones one would expect from a noise album.The dynamic selection of sounds and changes in structure keep it varied, and there’s enough variation in here to possibly even pique the interest of non harsh noise fans.Those who covet their Alchemy Records collections and Macronympha tapes will still be all over this too though, so it has hardcore cred as well.
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With its hushed synthesis of traditional instrumentation and lightly processed field recordings, Monocoastal follows along recent trends of Seaworthy & Matt Rösner and Taylor Deupree's works on the 12k label. They're carving out a niche that is alien, but familiar, and is as complex as it is sparse, weaving the recognizable with the unknown.
From the carefully treated textures on the disc to the washed out Polaroid photo on the cover, this album is one of taking the familiar and using it to build something entirely new.A recurring motif of the disc is one of water and the coast, unsurprising given that it was Fischer’s movements up and down the west coast of the USA that inspired it."Wave Atlas" marries water droplets that echo forever with hazy, warm melodies."Monocoastal (Part 1)" is all weathered, gentle tones that seem to come from every direction, mixed with subtle birdsongs.The sound becomes more complex when what resembles a shimmering layer of accordion and glassy ringing bells are added, but it stays fully restrained.
"Wind and Wake" has an underlying bed of sound that constantly rises and falls like the undulations of the sea, with a looming melody that enshrouds like a fog, surrounding the entire song with a delicate digital accompaniment."Cascadia Obscura" also mixes some seemingly recognizable sounds with unknown ones, where wind chimes and vibrating tension lines set the stage, only to have the piece closed with sharp strummed guitar notes or the scraping of scissors.
That obscurity when it comes to the sources of a sound is what makes this album so captivating.Fischer's careful use of found sounds and field recordings coupled with a very light touch when it comes to processing goes a long way.The sounds are left pure enough to seem natural, but twisted in such a way as to resemble something entirely different, but never to a point of pure abstraction. This, coupled with a careful use of low fidelity elements give a rustic, yet alien quality to the sound.
In the latter moments of the album the tone begins to change, with "Shape To Shore" adding lower register, almost bass guitar like notes that lean more towards the melancholy side of emotion, and the stuttering, glitchy elements of "Between Narrow and Small" add a bit of discord and chaos, while still retaining the haunting beauty of the rest of the tracks.
Like other recent works on the label, Marcus Fischer is showing an extreme skill in creating sounds that seem to have their source in the natural world, but ones that are nearly impossible to identify.The delicate, decaying beauty of these textures and tones should not be missed.
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