We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Hailing from Vienna, this relatively new trio has refined their approach to a post-rock and ambient influenced sound that, unlike many of their contemporaries, focuses more on the live collaboration to develop their sound, and not as much on DSP processing and effects laden sound.
Spread across four long tracks, the trio has an intentional sense of isolation injected within the sound. Recorded over a week in the basement of member Florian Kindlinger’s parents’ house, and then edited in a small hut in the Austrian mountains, there is a sense of being alone amidst the lush ambience. The opening "This Is Your 4AM Wake-Up Call" begins with slow ringing reverse textures, a low rhythmic pulse and an odd clicking sound finally appear. The track builds in complexity, adding subtle layers of sound that, on their own seem rather sparse, but taken together, along with guitar and fragments of voice, sound like a deconstructed take on shoegaze ambient, complex yet beautiful and inviting.
Heavily effected string and sparse ambient sounds introduce "Augarten," and a distant kickdrum acts like a heartbeat in the extremely intimate recording. Compared to the opener, the heavily tremolo’ed strings that stretch for infinity stay the primary focus, with only the occasionally plucked string, or the sound of movement picked up by an ambient microphone. Because of this extremely simple structure, it’s more like being in the room as the tracks were being laid down as opposed to a polished studio (or live) recording.
"Bantu" brings back more of the processing and effects, with the metallic pings and rattles and subtle guitar pushing it into improvisation-land, with field recordings and wind chimes fleshing out the sound. As the track closes, a lush organ and digital textures push the volume up to full on power ambience: heavy and room-filling, but never oppressive or harsh. The closing "A Rest in Tension" lives up to its name: it mirrors the textures of the opening track, but keeps the dense heaviness of "Bantu" on and on, even above recordings of conversations and long, drawn-out sounds before ending on a sparse note of a clicking metronome and distant bells.
As previously stated, there’s a constant sense of isolation and intimacy here: even though field recordings occasionally put the sound in a wider context, there is still the feeling of being in a room with these guys as its being recorded, in an entirely different world. The shoegaze and ambient elements pervade, but never feel like a crutch to be leaned on. Too often bands will simply pile on the effects to create a lush, heavy feeling, but here it feels truly warm, and truly different.
As Imminent Starvation, Olivier Moreau famously trashed his mixing board after the completion of 1999’s Nord and gave the pieces out in a special collector’s edition. Now, after spending time with Synapscape and putting out a few 7” singles, he has returned with a new album that shows he hasn’t missed a step in his near decade hiatus.
I always considered Moreau’s work for the label as the definitive "Ant-Zen" sound: rapid fire overdriven analog drum machines, raw synths, mutilated samples and a general sense of post industrial malaise. Cask Strength doesn’t step too far away from this formula, because it’s still a grinding cacophony of noise and beats, and I don’t think any of his fans would have wanted to see drastic change. There does seem to be an increased sense of experimentation and concessions to the pathetically named IDM sound here though, proving it’s not all just 909s and fuzzboxes.
The influence is apparent from the opening "Seracs" with its polyrhythmic plastic beats that are completely chaotic, but obviously well sequenced, with deep raw synth line that’s a bad trip version of acid techno. The odd juxtaposition of a stuttering voice, which is reminiscent of how Autechre has treated vocals the few times snippets were present, and a rather unabashed synth pop melody is a unique one covering both the harsh aggressive sound, yet concedes a bit of beauty amidst the ugly.
"Teskede" is cut from a similar cloth, with hardcore rattling beats and synth leads that sound more like radio static than anything else, but with some more warm, gentle synth work buried under the grime. "Rubbs" also does this combination, but keeps the jagged rhythms more in check, and allowing the synths to be the track’s focus. Here it’s pretty clear that if one were to remove the rhythms, there would be a rather pretty ambient track hiding under them.
Songs like "Lorsc" keep the rapid rhythms, but lose a bit of the violence, with the rhythms dialed back to recall old school electro rather than power noise, and synth leads that resemble guitars more than waveforms, creating a more diverse sound. Moreau never lets the sound get too soft though, and for every delicate-ish moment there’s about three more over the top aggressive ones, like the low bit rate synths and drums on "Bock" that sound like being punched in the stomach more than anything else. The simplistic, but effective "Ila" is the longest track here, but is unabashed monotone thumping techno throughout, with only a bit of tweaked samples and loops for variety. If there’s ever a track for high speed aggressive city driving, this is it.
The long break between releases hasn’t slowed Imminent down at all, and his sound is still, at least to me, the Ant-Zen one. However, he’s not just rehashing his old material at all, but using that as a basis to create new variations on. While personally I’d have loved to hear some even more extreme divergences in sound, the music on Cask Strength is presented so well that it makes it unnecessary.
Triumphantly unfazed by the fact that it is no longer 1950, Francisco López has birthed a sprawling and ambitious double album of undiluted, unabashed musique concrète. Machines is industrial music in the purist sense, as López limited himself strictly to recordings taken from various pieces of mechanical equipment, then masterfully sculpted them into meticulously composed symphonies of clanking and whirring machinery.
Machines consists of four commissioned pieces recorded in various European cities over a span of three years. Each piece is devoted to a specific type of machinery, though López often utilizes recordings taken from more than one site. For example, “Fabrikas” is composed entirely of factory sounds recorded in Latvia, but the source material covers a chocolate factory, a beer factory, a vintage bicycle workshop, and a speaker workshop. Notably, López does not conspicuously treat the raw recordings in any way, so everything sounds like exactly what it is and there is no effort to add any “musical” elements at all. As such, the song titles are very literal and accurate: “Clocks” is essentially 32 minutes of ticking clocks and nothing else. That is not an inherently attractive premise for a piece of music, but Francisco’s deft layering of field recordings transforms it into something quite hypnotic.
Aside from López’s singular adherence to thematic and acousmatic purity, the most striking aspect of these recordings is their length. Machines clocks in at 2 ½ hours, which presents quite an endurance test for listeners. I attempted to make it through the entire thing a couple of times on my headphones, but never made it further than 20 minutes—it is simply too subtle and slowly evolving to hold my direct, undivided attention for the enormous amount of time required. However, when I have had this album on while doing something else, I have frequently found myself utterly engrossed and struck by the numerous moments in which the rumbling and humming coheres into something strangely beautiful. Of course, this is music as art, not music as entertainment, so listenability was presumably not a motivating factor in the assembling and sequencing of this release. Instead, Machines is a document that captures one of the world’s premier sound artists at the top of his game. The intricate webs of waxing and waning loops and subtle convergences of tempo are nothing short of ingenious.
Essentially, Machines is a fascinating high-wire act and a significant music event. There are very few musicians that I am aware of that could turn 45 minutes of field recordings of German elevators into something compelling and worthwhile (and probably none that would actually exert the effort to do so). While many of the environments sampled lend themselves to harsh sounds and heavy, crunching rhythms, there is ultimately very little dissonance in Francisco’s finished sound collages. The bulk of the material collected here is quite surprisingly warm and enveloping, particularly the hissing and humming laboratory and factory pieces that make up the second disc. Machines is certainly a stunning creative and technical achievement, but it also works quite effectively as an epic mechanized lullaby.
I get the sense that this Swedish group is clearly competent at what they do, having mastered the basic conceits of their chosen form. While their sound at times does seems to rely on rote formulae more than necessary, there are many moments where their potential shines.
The list of singer-songwriters as raw as Emma Louise "Scout" Niblett is very short. Names like P.J. Harvey and Patti Smith come to mind when thinking of her and, in some ways, both of them are more suitable reference points than the grunge bands Scout has named-checked as her influences. On The Calcination of Scout Niblett she sounds as severe as she ever has and starker, too. But, if Scout began her career under the wings of Nirvana and Sonic Youth, she's long since graduated to something more original, less obvious, and much, much more ominous.
When "Just Do It!" begins I'm immediately reminded of Neil Young, but not because Scout is gravitating towards her folk influences these days. Her attitude and sound is too introspective for punk rock, too heavy for folk, and too atmospheric for grunge, but she undeniably draws from all of these influences and has a fondness, like Young, for fluctuating between all of them, sometimes in the same song. The album begins with a gnarly and fuzzed-out melodic hook, but it quickly goes quiet as Niblett sings "And the voices said just do it / And I think I will" in a cocky, almost angry snarl. What exactly she intends to do is left a little ambiguous, but I get the sense it is meant as a threat, perhaps to herself. With her trademarked big drum sound and loud-quiet dynamic in hand, Scout embarks on a quest to set herself on fire in a ritual act of purification. But, in accomplishing this end she does almost nothing to her sound that we haven't already heard. In fact, portions of The Calcination are a little too familiar. So, let me get this out of the way right away: Scout's walking over a lot of the same ground she covered on 2007's This Fool Can Die Now. She's toying with her approach a little bit and bringing back elements from Kidnapped by Neptune and I Am, but all three of those records have so much in common that there's little point in debating the minituae that distinguishes them stylistically. Scout's stubborn determination to stay basically the same is a little frustrating, but as other writers have pointed out she sounds so good that changing anything might be equally frustrating, maybe even detrimental.
That said, The Calcination is much darker than This Fool Can Die Now and a little more satisfying for it. It is easily her most foreboding record. If Scout hasn't changed her sound much, she's made up for it a little by letting her teeth show more than usual. There's no semi-sweet or awkward duets and no video of Scout singing into a hair brush or prancing about on the beach with a skeleton-clad Will Oldham. Instead, Scout delivers a cover lit by the welding torch she is holding, a booklet filled photographs of stones, and lyrics like "Welcome to my self-made sweat box / this is where I take it all off / Sweat / I've got to sweat it out / Cook / I'll cook those monsters out / Because I ain't getting out of here / until my, until my soul appears." There are no playful or cute interludes anywhere on the record, so there's none of the relief that songs like "Dinosaur Egg" or "Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death" provided. Distilled or calcinated or completely stripped down, Scout is more aggressive and serious and probably a little more troubled, too. Her guitars loom and stab where they once danced and rocked out and her drums snap and pound where they were sometimes played like a toy. Whatever has happened to Scout since we last heard from her, it has added a substantial amount of menace to her words and playing. She's become more concise and that's made her more aggressive and fearsome.
The album ends with "Meet and Greet," which sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a showdown in some anachronistic western. A dissonant, casually played melody and some light, atmospheric percussion make up most of the song, together sounding like a thunderstorm on the horizon. Scout sings in a challenging voice throughout it, intimating that some kind of resolution might be on the horizon, too. But, whatever she means when she sings "Jupiter, father of gods, I summon you to me / When are you gonna learn to play that thing?" it sounds more like a provocation than an invitation or a prayer. Scout doesn't ultimatey provide a resolution for all the tension she generates on The Calcination. All we get at the end of "Meet and Greet" is a volcanic splash of distorted guitar and a rumbling, sustained tone. While she has always written heavy, honest, and intimidating music, Scout has never sounded as bleak and frightful as she does here.
MERZBOW returns to COLD SPRING in blistering form - a sizzling new album length VINYL only limited edition (lime green, ltd x 400 copies) presented in an old-school 'bootleg' style cover and sealed with a sticker. LP regular edition is available only through Cargo Distribution
The special extra limited edition version of the LP comes with bonus 7" (ltd x 150 copies) of exclusive tracks and is only available from COLD SPRING MAIL ORDER. This title will be deleted upon selling out, and the tracks are never to be issued on CD! A one time opportunity to own a true MERZBOW collectors piece! ACT FAST! LP with LTD 7" is available ONLY through Cold Spring Mailorder
Tracks: A1. graft#1 | B1. graft#2
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Limited edition Picture disc from SKITLIV, the project of former MAYHEM front man MANIAC.
With a line up that includes SHINING’s NIKLAS KVARFORTH, SKITLIV is a disturbed, and disturbing, blackened doom journey through the mind of this legendary Black Metal vocalist who was one of the original exponents of the genre, and is one of its most recognisable figures.
This picture disc is made extra special not only by the inclusion of “Who Will Deliver Us From Gold and Planets” by CURRENT 93 - an introductory collage destruct that was created at the request of Maniac and is dedicated to him, but also because the artwork that is used for the side containing this track is part of one of Tibet’s own paintings.
Ltd x 777 copies. No repress.
Tracks: A1. Current 93 - 'Who Will Deliver us From Gold & Planets?' | A2. Slow Pain Coming (Cold Spring Mix) | B1. A Valley Below (Demo Version)
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BRAND NEW BAND FROM FORMER MAYHEM FRONTMAN FEATURING MEMBERS OF GALLHAMMER, SKITLIV AND NURSE WITH WOUND
Former MAYHEM front man MANIAC, whose band SKITLIV has proved to be a surprising departure from the Black Metal genre for which he was best known for over 20 years, has formed a side-project with fiancé Vivian Slaughter, bass player/vocalist with the Japanese all-girl band GALLHAMMER, SKITLIV's guitarist Ingvar Magnusson and experimentalist Andrew Liles (NURSE WITH WOUND). Unlike SKITLIV, which is a noise/doom amalgam, with Maniacs vocals still firmly rooted in Black Metal, SEHNSUCHT is in the noise / darkwave / ambient genre, with any vestiges of Black Metal pared away.
Tracks: 1. Sult | 2. Cunt Queen | 3. South Of Cincinnati | 4. Wüste | 5. Tarn Of Guilt | 6. Good Morning Great Moloch | 7. Stadt Der Engerl Der Vernichtung | 8. Tokyo Daymare | 9. Hanging In English Garden | 10. Ten
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Artist: Wicked King Wicker Title: God Is Busy... Save Yourself Catalogue No: CSR125CD Barcode: 8 2356648952 8 Format: CD in jewelcase Genre: Doom Metal / Harsh Noise Shipping: Now
Wicked King Wicker is pure doom. Their brand of guttural expression strips away the rock n roll base and leaves nothing for the listener than the caustic reality of the darkest side of life. It is heavy, barbaric and void of hope. Wicked King Wicker has taken the power of doom metal and added noise to mix to make its point - a point that While their style is not for everyone, the number of people being turned on by their nihilism is growing fast. There are lots of labels that can apply to their music, and other bands with a similar approach to theirs, but the bottom line is Wicked King Wicker is unique, and their extreme doom stands alone as the heaviest, most brutal doom imaginable and it may take you places you don’t want to go.
“God Is Busy… Save Yourself” is WKW's 6th album, and their first released outside of the U.S.
WKW has been celebrated by loyal listeners around the world, as well as in the mainstream music press such as Terrorizer magazine, which gave the band’s first two albums 8.5 ratings.
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Artist: Iron Fist Of The Sun Title: Behavioural Decline Catalogue No: CSR114CD Barcode: 8 2356648962 7 Format: CD in jewelcase Genre: Power Electronics / Black Noise Shipping: Now
Personal obsessions skewed by drug use, codes of behaviour observed by a misanthropic mind. Bitter and cold. Nihilistic and scornful. Elitist and Pure. Behavioural Decline documents the rise of treachery and the fall of honour. Power electronics that sonically takes inspiration from electro-acoustics and ideology akin to black metal / black noise. 'Concert For Evening Battle' was recorded live at Radio Black Forest's festival of electro-acoustic music 22/8/2009, Birmingham, England. A deeply personal Recording.
Tracks: 1. Introduction To A Joyless New Start | 2. First Movement Of A Shallow Man | 3. Smile Like Sword | 4. Didn't Stop Me Trying | 5. The Power Of New Septembers | 6. Bluetack | 7. God's New Gravity | 8. Concert For Evening Battle
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Artist: NDE Title: Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Catalogue No: CSR110CD Barcode: 8 2356648922 1 Format: CD in jewelcase Genre: Martial Industrial / Black Metal / Death Industrial Shipping: Now
Debut from this Belgian duo. Like the dark solitary figure which adorns the cover, NDE are shrouded in mystery and desolation. The music speaks loudly and across the centuries. A unique smelting of malevolent, noisy Black Metal, pounding, anthemic martial drums and wretched Death Industrial in eight acts.
No website. No myspace. No contact details.
Tracks: 1. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part I | 2. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part II | 3. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part III | 4. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part IV | 5. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part V | 6. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part VI | 7. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part VII | 8. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part VIII
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