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This EP pretty much picks up exactly where last year's fine Man With Potential left off, once again combining furiously thumping house beats with stuttering, skittering noise.  It is more of a tease than a substantial effort though, as it is basically just an amusing dalliance with the 12" single format, consisting of two versions of the title piece and a superior B-side.  Neither quite stands with the best songs on Potential and there is no evidence of a significant stylistic evolution, but Pro Style is an enjoyable distraction to tide me over while I await Swanson's next major work.
The opening version of "Pro Style" begins with roughly a minute of grinding mechanized noise, brooding synths, and host of distinctly Swanson-esque buzzes, bleeps, and stutters before the beat kicks in.  My hostility towards four-on-the-floor house beats has already been documented and that has not changed, so the unrelenting, unchanging thump is a bit of a sticking point for me.  Even so, I eventually warmed to the piece somewhat, as the combination of the minimal, deep bass groove and the absurdly maximalist wrongness surrounding it is damn endearing.  I especially enjoyed the impressive invasiveness of the crunching, metallic noises that appear in the middle–it feels like being at a rave in the midst of an active, functioning junkyard (albeit one that also seems to be embroiled in a ferocious laser battle).  The "VIP" version that follows is essentially more of the same, but longer, uglier, and crunchier.  Which is, of course, even better.
The lengthier "Do You Like Students?" is a bit more closely aligned to my taste though, as Swanson thankfully tones down his rib-cage rattling bass drum a bit.  Also, it scores something of a perverse, improbable hook in its eerie, two-note synth pattern.  It also boasts a somewhat more ambitious and musical synth bass line, which makes it feel more like an actual song once the beat kicks in (rather than an assault by percussion).  The sounds in the periphery, for the most part, remain consistent with those in "Pro Style," although the various bleeps, stutters, and clatters are buried a bit deeper in the mix.  It may not sound like much of a divergence, but cumulatively, it makes a big difference: "Do You Like Students?" sounds like a perfectly likable bit of retro-dance pop that has been remixed by an insane person and has gone badly off the rails.  That distinction makes it significantly more enjoyable than something that is basically a noise piece with a house beat added.
While the music itself is solid, the real appeal of Pro Style lies in its simultaneously kitschy and reverent format.  This is presumably as close to "fun" as a Pete Swanson release can get, so it is hard to be too critical–this is not meant as any sort of grand statement.  Unfortunately, I am congenitally dissatisfied, so I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that Swanson did not embrace the potential of the 12" dance single more fully.  For example, I bet a dub version of "Do You Like Students?" could be spectacular.  Also, it probably would have been extremely cool (or memorably, hilariously awful) to enlist an influential but forgotten techno or dub producer to rework "Pro Style" rather than presenting two somewhat similar versions.  So many missed opportunities.  Alas.  Perhaps Pete might just be getting started with this format though–it works well for him, as this is exactly the right amount of harsh noise-damaged techno I can enjoy in one dose.  I will keep my fingers crossed.  In any case, Pro Style is very likable (if minor) effort.
 
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It has been a full decade since Drumm's last solo album on Mego (2002's massive and career-defining Sheer Hellish Miasma) and quite a bit has changed in the noise world since then.  While more modest in scope this time around (Relief is a 37-minute EP), Kevin's latest effort shows that an impressive evolution has occurred over those ten years, as he hits the perfect balance between his characteristic howling noise and his infrequently surfacing ambient side.  That comes as no surprise to me at all, but I was pleasantly taken aback by the sheer ferocity of Relief's noisy side.  Drumm is clearly not mellowing with age.
This EP has one extremely significant and immediately apparent characteristic that dwarfs all of its others, in that it is apologetically, spectacularly monolithic.  I can randomly skip to any one-second fragment of Relief and it will sound almost exactly the same any other fragment.  In fact, the only significant variance comes at the very end, and even that is pretty minor (the piece slowly fades out).  Otherwise, the piece is essentially a non-stop roar of roiling entropy from the second it starts until the very end.  That one-dimensionality only exists in a large-scale sense though, as Relief is far from dull: while the piece's bleak and floating synth motif remains a relatively static backbone, the underlying noise is apocalyptically explosive and immense.  There is a very good reason why Kevin is widely considered one of the world's greatest active noise artists, as his layers and layers of squalling static and white noise basically sound like the world is collapsing.
Drumm's ear-shredding avalanche sounds extremely clear and crisp and is both crushingly dense and bludgeoningly immediate.  If I had a grievance with this effort (which I do not), it would probably be that the melodic component does not evolve as the piece progresses, or maybe that the piece does not actually progress at all.  Instead, it more or less feels like being thrown into Drumm's scorching cacophony midstream and staying there until he feels like fading out.  However, the sheer enormity, violence, and microcosmic vibrancy of it all easily makes me forget about its compositional shortcomings and the forlorn melody is merely there to act as foil for that face-melting eruption, which it does beautifully.  Not so beautifully that Relief could be mistaken for anything other than a harsh noise album, of course, but the contrast it provides enhances the viciousness of the piece while simultaneously making it pretty listenable (by noise standards, anyway).  In lesser hands, such a sustained, unrelenting eruption would undoubtedly become quite wearisome at some point, but in Drumm's, it is a bracing, virtuosic tour de force.
(one caveat: It is not entirely rational that this is being released on vinyl, given that it is a single piece with no pauses or breaks of any kind.  I like vinyl as much as anyone, but sometimes that medium just does not make sense and this is definitely one of those times.)
 
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The constantly collapsing particles of 'Rats/Cats/Bats" sometimes cement to form loops that slowly melt and restructure. "An End to a Means" is a gritty crush of almost industrial noise and the result of the stress and strain of gears against gears. The crawling force of D/A A/D's immoveable object vs. unstoppable crawling force is an insistent punch and crumple. The grim bass of "Untitled" is ripped apart by sharp steel and then beaten to death by spades, the melodic stalled groove seeming in pain as it moves. There's a pretty heavy Wolf Eyes vibe across “(die) Hipster Scum," huge bass pulses that never launch into an assault but plough the song along. There are great sloughs of slow thrashing that leave the material rough and scavenged through maltreatment.
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Included on Deadverse Massive Vol. 1 are a handful of remixes, selections from their work with other artists, a couple of previously unreleased pieces, and the entire Streets All Amped EP originally released on vinyl by Ad Noiseam. Known mostly for their heavy as lead hip hop that goes over well with metal crowds, Dälek spend a considerable amount of time on other weird projects where their approach to cutting up and layering sound can air itself out. Although I'm always most impressed when the beats are hard and the lyrics are cutting through, when I hear pieces like "Music for ASM" or "3:46," I get a better idea of how the Dälek sound actually comes to life. This disc finally brings some of Dälek's more challenging and esoteric work together with some underappreciated gems.
Although I don't care for the collaboration with Velma on "Rouge," there are moments when the Deadverse production takes over and the track shines despite the vocal. Their remix of Techno Animal's "Megaton," (the first Dälek work I remember hearing) elevates the original and is thankfully included here as the ancient 12" is getting hard to find. The disc closes out with the four songs from Streets All Amped, which are all classic Dälek, mixing straight ahead lyrics with dusty grooves and layers of grime. Dälek are easily one of the most pioneering acts to come out of the hip hop world in years. For those unfamiliar with the accolades that the band gets overseas for playing in the experimental/noise sandbox, this disc is a welcome primer.
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Yeh approached his source material with a desire to be transparent, even literal, and to avoid straightforward narrative. The literal is there in the deceptively matter-of-fact track titles — “Drone”,“Voice”, “Shrinkwrap from Solo Saxophone CD”, “Two Guitars” — but knowing which sound source is buried beneath these tones does little to remove 1975‘s sense of enveloping mystery. This is sensual abstract music with a light touch, a confident minimalism that only reveals its unsettling depth, sharp corners, and playful malevolence with repeat listens.
For fans of Eliane Radigue, Hecker, Pita, or Kevin Drumm.
Born in Taiwan, and now based in Brooklyn NY, C. Spencer Yeh is the one constant of the “band”Burning Star Core, whose other members have included Mike Shiflet and Trevor Tremaine & Robert Beatty of Hair Police. He has collaborated with a staggeringly diverse range of artists, including John Wiese, Tony Conrad, New Humans w/ Vito Aconcci, Aaron Dilloway, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker, Yellow Swans, Greg Kelley, Paul Flaherty, Don Deitrich (of Borbetomagus), and Chris Corsano (to name just a few)."
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Unofficial, hand-made second volume of Marissa's favorite covers.
01 Winter Lady [Leonard Cohen cover]
02 Learning to Fly [Tom Petty cover]
03 Birds [Neil Young cover]
04 Farewell Angelina [Bob Dylan cover]
05 You Don't Miss Your Water [William Bell cover]
06 The River [Bruce Springsteen cover]
07 Motel Blues [Loudon Wainwright III cover]
08 Distortions [Clinic cover]
09 Sara [Bob Dylan cover]
10 The Book of Love [The Magnetic Fields cover]
11 Avalanche [Leonard Cohen cover]
12 All My Trials [Traditional]
13 I'll Be Here in the Morning [Townes Van Zandt cover]
More info here.
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Bablicon are a Chicago-based trio of curiously monikerd multi-instrumentalists: 'Blue Hawaii', Marta Tennae and 'the diminisher'. This is their 3rd album, apparently conceived as a double album, tracks 1-6 under the "The Cat That Was a Dog" title and tracks 7-15 under "a Flat Inside the Fog". Most songs are rooted in piano composition, which all 3 members play, but vary widely in style and additional tone coloration: voices, various basses and saxes, electronics and all sorts of percussion and other odds and ends like theremin, melodica, 'friendly bird tinkles' and 'electric ghetto duck'.
It's an avante-everything sort of music that takes in jazz, rock, symphonic and experimental, where playful melodies are as common as just plain weird melodies. The vocabulary that comes to mind when listening to these pieces - quirky, odd, surreal, beautiful, noisy, etc. - is much the same as that for the work of their Misra labelmates Volcano the Bear. Regarding some of the more compelling numbers: "Travelling" builds up a gypsy like dance of piano, upright bass and horns; "Mary" psychedelically grooves an organ, theremin and cymbal assault; "Arcdurvish" manipulates sax a la Terry Riley with electronics and percussive knickknacks; and the finale "An Odd Pear" eventually delivers the most outright attack of sound then settles down into a pretty (normal) jazz coda. "The Cat.." is definitely for the more adventurous listeners out there like you and me.
 
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Don't let the unpronouncable band name or low-tech cover put you off,this here's one of the best space-rock drone-pop records of the year.The five member group of D&D players includes Adam from Yume Bitsuand three members of Landing. It's patient, emotional, climactic andintense. Don't expect quietness however, as the barrage of guitarsenvelopes you like a cloud of the most potent marijuana smokeimaginable. You can get a contact high from this smoke however withoutdirect contact with the bong. Get comfortable on the livingroom couchin your rattiest flannel with a comfortable old blanket, turn the musicup really loud, stare up at the ceiling and daze for a few minutes.Minutes turn to hours, nightfall comes early and the lights go down allthroughout the house. Staring through glazed eyes the LED on your clockshows a time you can't figure which is AM or PM. Suddenly visions ofwalking through 4-foot drifts of neopolitan shaving cream enter yourhead. A plaid talking yak leads the way under the orange sky of anIndonesian sunset. Bubbles form and fail to burst, you stumble on LauraDern action figures and fall through a stitch in an oriental rug. Youwake with your mouth open, completely clothed, drool on the pillow andtwo fuzzy cats on your belly. The phone rang. Goddamnit.
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Stichting Mixer is a 2-year-old foundation for minimal electronic/acoustic music, it's goal "to start and stimulate initiatives which encourage the encounter between sound and other media". Its recorded output, from knowns and unknowns alike, is released through the Mixer label. This disc is the first release on CD, limited to 500 copies.Battery Operated, apparently the duo of TomKz and Wade Walker, "chase" (i.e. DAT record) sound signals in 8 architectural non places, those modern structures of repetition such as airports, rail stations, hotels and shopping centers. Thus, they use the spaces themselves to construct soundtracks for them. The 8 tracks are roughly 5 to 6 minutes apiece and the digipack offers only the abstruse clue of a greyscale texture for each location. All sorts of unidentifiable sound tidbits are churned up and around, molded into quasi-rhythmic patterns and ambient-ish soundscapes. Tracks 3 and 8 are the real standouts though, simply because they're the most musically dynamic. The former in particular perfectly segues between cluttered and calm moments. Good stuff. Future Mixer releases I'll be keeping an ear out for include a split LP by Pimmon and K?n and a double 7" by Kaffe Matthews.
 
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The title of the seventh cut, "Hassle Free Harmony", serves as anexcellent summation of the album in its entirety. Marc Bianchi returnsunder his HSH moniker with 'Manic Expressive', a release that iselegant, yet mellow and uncomplicated. From the three-minute stringarrangement of the opening track to the sweet and wispy vocals on "TheRinging in My Ears", the album blends an extensive assortment ofmusical sources, both organic and electronic. Melodically, the songsare aural decoupage: it's as if Bianchi gives the listener a sonicslide show, displaying bits and pieces of his favorite tunes by otherartists ("Dear Prudence" immediately springs to mind). The result,however, does not give the impression that these outside sources havebeen plundered, but rather form a charming homage. The juxtaposition ofan orchestral ebb and flow with subtle mechanical beats, hypnoticambient atmospherics and glistening guitar is handled with dexterity.Even when the otherwise humble songs surge with drama, Bianchi neverallows them to run amok. The orchestra pit warm-up that opens the firsttrack signals what is to come: the artistic and stylistic developmentof HSH since the previous effort, 'Home Is Where You Hang Yourself'.Break out the electric blankets; 'Manic Expressive' is perfectlistening for curling up in a warm bed on a snowy morning.
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