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Fat Cat's reissue of the first two Animal Collective releases on one double-disc should not only come as a pleasant surprise to those who discovered the group with this year's excellent Here Comes The Indian, but should also raise the question why it took almost 4 years for the Brooklyn-based project to be courted by a large label. Created by and originally credited to only two Animal Collective members, Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished was self-released on Animal Records in 2000.
MIESES GEGONGE, "LIVE" Mieses Gegonge are something of a mystery, but they appear to be asister group to HNAS, having shared the credit for the first HNAS albumAbwassermusik. The material on this CD is culled from two liveperformances in 1985. The sound is very strange indeed: a twistedcombination of arrhythmic percussion together with horribly phased anddistorted vocals. The treated voices and drums are immediatelyreminiscent of the "psych-out" sections of classic Can constructionslike "Halleluwah" and "Aumgn." However, Mieses Gegonge is all psych-outwith no breaks for coherence. Bizarre chants and ululations quaver andripple across layers of randomly beaten skins and gongs, reverbed andwarped into oblivion. If anyone attending these performances wasn't onat least three hits of fine Dusseldorf acid, I feel sorry for them. Therecording is shitty and wracked with distortion, which adds interestingbursts of high-frequency noise that contribute to the lunacy. Imagine apost-lobotomy 23 Skidoo trying to cover The Master Musicians of Jajoukawith nothing but a saw and a zither and William Bennett playing oneroom over, and you might begin to approximate the experience of Live.It's a uniquely fucked sound that will appeal to jaded listenerslooking for a surreal thrill.
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DUKA BASS BAND, "FRAULEIN CASANOVA"Duka Bass Band appears to be a trio consisting of Lasse Laudrup, Martin B. Klaeren and Sven Nykvist. On Fraulein Casanova,they are joined on a few tracks by Christoph Heeman and Achim P. LiKhan of HNAS, and Heeman also produced the album. The Duka Bass Band'ssound is a fuzzy, primitive clamor of clueless post-jazz improvisationsthat meander aimlessly and appear to fly in several differentdirections at once. It has a certain amateurish quality and a creepysubterranean feel that appeals to me, although I couldn't say exactlywhy. In the exclusively German liner notes, Heeman muses "Fraulein Casanovais for me a jerking step forward into the natural alreadyness ofmusic." Perhaps this dodgy AltaVista translation should not be trusted,but it's as good an explanation as any for the oddly surreal freeplaying on display here. The opening track is the seven-minute"Zauberformeln," which means 'magical formulas.' It's an aptdescription for the mysterious forces that transform the sound ofdeficiently played clarinet, organs and drums into a strange alchemicalgold that is more than the sum of its components. There are momentsthroughout Fraulein Casanova that touch on elements of firemusic improvs, belabored Shaggs-style guitar, and in the case of thelast track (whose title loosely translates to "For God, 1000 Years IsLike a Day"), a ramshackle psych-folk jam not dissimilar from therecent work of Sunburned Hand of the Man. This is my personal favoriteof the six bootlegs, and I look forward to further recordings by thismysterious post-industrial jazz trio materializing at some future point.
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SPECK NUSSECK & DIE LEGENDAREN FETTBOYS, "DANCEMUSIC FUR DICKE BACKER"It's anyone's guess who the hell Speck Nusseck or The Legendary FatBoys are, or where they come from, or what masochistic weirdoencouraged them to record Dancemusic Fur Dicke Backer.The answers to these questions are not readily apparent, and they maynever become clear. The only thing we have to go on are the seven songscomprising Dancemusic, for which the word "annoying" seemswoefully inadequate. Plodding drum machine rhythms and randomly pluckedbass compete with vocals shouted into a megaphone backed by lamekeyboard effects which underscore the mess. I'm tempted to call thisoutsider music, but that would suggest that it is charmingly sincereand/or amateurish music that has worthwhile elements. Unfortunately,Speck Nusseck are neither charming nor sincere, and they are not worthanyone's time. They appear to be influenced by the edgy post-punk ofSection 25, the noisy effrontery of Throbbing Gristle and even themotorik beats of Neu!, but they are terribly unequal to the job ofpaying homage to their heroes. The best thing that can be said aboutthis album is that it is mercifully short, and would likely make anexcellent way to get rid of the last few people still hanging out inyour living room after the party is over.
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HNAS, "ICH KANNTE EINEN GUMMIBAUM"HNAS are invariably compared to Nurse With Wound, and more often thannot to the detriment of Heeman and company. It seems that they areforever doomed, relegated to an obscure footnote in the NWW story bywriters and critics, who seem unable to realize that HNAS use their ownunique strategies to portray their particular brand of audiosurrealism. HNAS does not revel in the exaggerated psychedelicgrotesqueries of Steven Stapleton's work — their tactics are sloppier,less calculated, and in many cases even stranger. The seminal krautrockband Faust is a much more analogous comparison. Heeman and Khan's pathwas paved by Faust's willfully messy LPs that cycled through disparatehalf-formed musical ideas and random piss-takes. Ich Kannte Einen Gummibaumis a good demonstration of their distinct sound. The first trackcreates a creeping quasi-rhythmic industrial atmosphere, recalling theearly work of Laibach, but Heeman's deliberately muddy production andmuffled sounds of voices, distant guitar solos and graveyard organs adda nebulous mystery belonging to HNAS alone. The second track, "Kill DenAchim" is culled from a live performance, and finds the band in agloriously anarchic phase. A woman screams violent provocations backedby oblivious, repetitive electric guitar licks and sheets of live noiseand distortion. On "Ich bin ja besser," a disco record is obscured bylayers of cacophonous whalesong. Track five loosely translates to "AWinter Without Skin Problems," in which a disintegrating chamberorchestra fights against encroaching electronic squalls. The last trackis an extended 25-minute construction combining silly-cum-sinistervocal mutations alongside nonsense percussion. The lunacy segues into alengthy section of concrete tape edits, combining impressionistic pianopieces with field recordings and samples drawn from German televisionand radio.
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HNAS, "THE UNCOLLECTED ULTRA RARE & UNRELEASED"Another in a trilogy of rare HNAS cassette titles issued by G. Gonge, The Uncollectedis an odds-and-sods anthology, collecting tracks from out-of-printcompilations and rare cassettes, as well as some previously unreleasedmaterial. As such it is an uneven and incoherent listen, but with aband as unorthodox as HNAS, that's hardly a problem. Most of the tracksare in the jagged cut-and-splice style recognizable from mid-80's HNASalbums. It feels a bit like an audio version of the absurdist photo andtext collages found in early punk zines. More than once these piecesdigress into the stoned chatter and laughter of a group of youngGermans, who I can only assume to be Christoph, Achim, and friends.Recording and including this unseemly screwing-about on their albumstakes the music out of the realm of the dryly conceptual oravant-garde, and into the "anything goes" realm of DIY homeexperimentalism. That said, there is also much that is musicallyimpressive among these songs, as in the noir queasiness of "DemPetermann zu Ehren," a dark piano dirge. "Was wir von Cassetten halten4" is a phased electronic piece with looped sing-song vocals recallsearly Current 93. "Wie ein Bock am Michekstag" is similar to the workPeople Like Us, juxtaposing dialogue samples from a "Learn to SpeakSwedish" tape with a kitschy exotica loop. The final song is a rare andlovely track by Duka Bass Band: more demented post-jazz with sinisterundertones.
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HNAS, "DIE DREHORGEL ALS FEUERSPRITZE"The first track of Die Drehorgel Als Feuerspritzewas recorded live in 1984, the title roughly translating to "TheParadoxes and Secret Sciences of the World." It's one of the bestpieces I've heard HNAS' prolific oevre, a murky sound sculpturecomprising long-form synth drones and gothic organ swells. The sticky,shapeless drones and burbling moogs converge into caverns filled withfloating stone obelisks that chisel strange patterns into thelistener's consciousness. The piece develops using an interior logic, adreamlike coherence that slowly asserts itself over the course of halfan hour. "Barenklammer" was recorded for an as-yet-unreleased HNASvideo, and contains some of the same source material as the firsttrack, quite reminiscent of the synthesizer arpeggiations andavant-rock noise that characterized Tangerine Dream's Electronic Meditationalbum. The third track pushes my PANIC buttons: a manipulative noisepiece that plays like Bernard Herrmann's string tribute to Whitehouse.The layered voices and random bass slaps of the last track evokes Crasscovering a Hildegaard von Bingen chant while tripping on mushrooms.This is a concentrated effort by HNAS, and its single-minded absurditymakes it the most consistent of the three HNAS CD-Rs reissued by G.Gonge. As more of these rare recordings come to light, perhaps HNAS canfinally crawl out of the long shadow cast by Nurse With Wound andreveal themselves to be every bit as unique, talented and vital.
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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.
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.
Chicago's Locrian have actually been a bit less prolific this year, really only releasing two brilliantly cohesive albums, Territories from earlier this year (originally on LP, now available on CD), and the upcoming double disc The Crystal World. Other than those, they've been relatively quiet, even with the addition of full time percussionist Steven Hess. On this split with New York's Century Plants, they continue their emphasis on abstracting the concept of "metal", with each band taking different approaches, but achieving a common goal.
As enjoyable as Robert Haigh's albums have been, they never seemed to capture that same aching beauty of his classic albums from the '80s (both under his own name and as Sema). This latest album changes all that. The delicate touch and fragile melodies, which defined his best work, are both present. Sombre without being dour, reflective without being depressing, this represents Haigh's finest work in years.
San Francisco's Barn Owl have always been underground music chameleons, shifting skillfully between ominous drone, distorted amplifier worship, and all the various places in between, but their first album for Thrill Jockey extends that schizophrenia a bit too far for my taste. Fortunately, while Ancestral Star may not be a completely coherent whole, it at least sounds quite good while it is missing the mark.
I loved Fire on Fire's The Orchard, so I was pretty disappointed to learn from a recent Michael Gira interview that they had dissolved. My despair turned out to be extremely short-lived though, as I've since discovered that Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin have been self-releasing a steady stream of slightly more feral and weird cassettes on their dontrusttheruin imprint ever since. Big Blood sometimes seems a little more sketchlike and rough than Fire on Fire, but the duo's backwoods brilliance remains intact and is generally enhanced by its underproduced and artfully artless nature.
What began apparently as an unplanned collaboration between Leslie Winer's text and spoken word with CM von Hausswolff's electronics in 2011 eventually evolved into this full fledged LP release, also Winer's first all original release in 25 years. The result, (1), is a release that heavily strikes a balance between the two predominant elements, without one ever overshadowing the other. Winer’s idiosyncratic voice and artistically obtuse writing and von Hausswolff's understated use of electronics blend together wonderfully for this record.
Now thankfully available digitally (lavish packaging means lavish overseas postage rates), Memorious Earth is the film soundtrack from Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson’s ambitious recent retrospective that involved a gallery show, a book of writings and photography, and (of course) a film.  While I have not seen the film (it was only included in the extremely limited "archive box"), the album works just fine without its intended visual component, doubling down on the long-form aesthetic of predecessor Diagrams for the Summoning of Wolves for a single 44-minute epic with considerably more success.  In fact, this is exactly the Richard Skelton album that the world needed: there are already plenty of wonderful distillations of his prickly, undulating brilliance around, but now there is a mesmerizing and slow-burning expansion as well.
This is an expanded reissue of a 2012 album that documented two 2009 live performances in which Nurse With Wound, Julia Kent, and Italy’s Blind Cave Salamander teamed up for an improbable variation/reinterpretation of NWW’s classic Soliloquy for Lilith album (an album that was largely the product of an unexpected and unrepeatable electromagnetic phenomenon).  The expansion in question is a third performance in an identical vein to the previous two.  Notably, however, that vein is not all that much like Soliloquy, which makes Cabbalism something separate and singular rather than just a mere live album.  In fact, it does not even sound much like NWW at all, which I suppose makes this a very successful collaboration.  While the third piece is not nearly divergent enough to warrant repurchasing the album for anyone who pounced on Cabbalism this first time around, the reissue is a very enticing package for those of us who unwisely slept on it.
Clocking in at a meager 20 minutes, these two tracks mix ambience, noise, and traditional instrumentation into a fog that is sparse, yet complex, and has moments of arid beauty as well as dark, sinister passages. More than a few times this young composer reminded me of some of Organum's best moments, which is a massive compliment.
While Jenks Miller has his hand in a multitude of Chapel Hill bands, his Tony Iommi meets Tony Conrad metal project Horseback has received the most notoriety as of late. However, on this collaboration with the relatively new drone composer Nicholas Szczpanik, there isn't a riff to be found. Instead the two weave together seamlessly expansive ranges of tonal and textural sound into an album that travels through the darkness and into the light multiple times.
Now somewhere in the realms of prog/psych/metal/whatever, at one point Norway's Motopsycho were among the crop of potential "next big things" in a post-Nirvana world, creating music that wasn't far removed from the "alternative" scene that would soon be exploited and plundered to give us the likes of Nickleback and the existence of "nu-metal". Even then, however, there was a streak of weirdness that the band would later tap into more deeply, and on the double CD/triple LP Timothy's Monster, the band perfectly balanced catchy rock with bizarre outbursts. Long a cult favorite, this set reproduces the original album in its entirety (the US and UK versions edited the longer pieces to make it fit on a single disc), with an unreleased "first draft" of the album, and a disc full of outtakes/B-sides. It’s a lot to digest, but even for the casual fan, it's a strong set.
This hypnotic listening experience is as pleasantly soporific and gently gritty as if Mazzy Star had been produced by Alex Chilton.