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Barn Owl's penchant for subdued guitar music has always been a reliable standard for me. Lost In The Glare and Ancestral Star were easy to dissect, but welcoming and pleasantly sparse with a primal aesthetic that worked as an easy entry point into drone. In contrast, V is a totally different creation. Drawing inspiration from dub and dark ambient music, V is a fresh achievement for Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti, shifting tone artfully and refining their style. It superbly bridges a gap between two common but oddly disconnected subgroups of music.
The album opens with "Void Redux," one minor miracle among several in the album. By using the kind of funereal ambiance in conjunction with their own brand of haunted drone, it immediately made it clear that this was a new kind of Barn Owl. If past albums were like surveying a desert landscape and coming across an ancient pyramid, V is the moment they actually enter the tomb. "The Long Shadow" borrows influence from shoegaze and pours drapes of noise over a guitar melody that in the past would probably be left to linger. Similarly, in "Blood Echo," I can hear guitar notes but never clearly; they're wrestling with layers of synth and warped percussion and failing slowly, being constantly consumed by some bigger and more menacing source. "The Opulent Decline," the album's seventeen minute grand finale, is practically an interring of Barn Owl's own style, serving as a fantastic corrosion of noise and harmony that caterwauls along, never quite peaking and never really slowing down. Each song is driven by that same restlessness, begging for replay once its brief time is up.
It is important to note that this is still very much a Barn Owl album and most people who are not well-acquainted with the group probably won't view these changes as dramatically as I have described them. There is a clear augmenting of their core sound with different timbres (synthesizers) and the slightest touches of dub techno and sampled percussion. Apart from that, it's still a duo making mournful guitar drone at heart. But to keep an aesthetic in check while reconstructing how to use the instruments they have takes a lot of skill. To do it so comprehensively is what makes this such a pleasant surprise.
Barn Owl albums have, in the past, always struck me as partially mired in some ideas that never quite clicked. That's not to say I don't love their past work, but I always got an odd sense of asymmetry about it. From guitar effects to the eastern-influenced sonics on each piece, it was all very isolated. Whether that was an intentional experience or a form that the group fell into, I can't say; part of me feels that drone with a heavy emphasis on guitar always engenders a theme of "loneliness." But V captures that feeling wholly, and adds a few details that fill gaps I didn't think to acknowledge. The result is something greater than the sum of its parts.
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I have not been paying much attention to Wolf Eyes for the last several years, but I was inclined to give this album a chance after repeatedly hearing all about how it is both a bold change of direction and a major statement on the state of noise in 2013.  After listening to it a few times, I guess it is arguably both, but it is definitely not some kind of epoch-defining revelation, nor is it a particularly great album (though it certainly has some great moments).  Rather it is merely an uneven, intermittently inspired effort that displays a new penchant for ruined-sounding ultra-minimalism, but offers only a few fully realized, successful examples of it amidst too much filler.
I have to hand it to Wolf Eyes: they certainly subverted my expectations a bit with the opening "Choking Flies," as I expected the future of noise to sound a hell of a lot noisier, or at least more ferocious.  Instead, "Flies" sounds a lot like decayed and deconstructed rock that has been stripped to its barest skeleton, then uglified.  More specifically, it sounds like Nate Young remixed a Girls Against Boys album by removing the guitars, then left the tapes out in the sun to melt together with a Throbbing Gristle album. As dubious as that may sound, the result is still distinctly, wonderfully "Wolf Eyes," as the ugly throbbing bass swells, out-of-sync dual-tracked vocals, hollow thump, clattering electronics, and ugly drifting notes combine to form a masterfully wrong and ill-intentioned whole.  If that momentum had sustained, No Answer: Lower Floors could have been quite a stellar album.
Unfortunately, it did not, as the remaining five songs are a mixed bag both stylistically and quality-wise.  "Born Liar," for example, is a thudding guitar and horn squall that sounds like it could have been made up and recorded on the spot.  That is followed by a very brief interlude of mangled speech and bleeping ("No Answer"), then a piece ("Chattering Lead") that is essentially a meandering, less successful variation on the "Choking Flies" formula, all of which illustrates what is so exasperating about this album: the first two-thirds are over before I even realize what happened and the only truly significant piece is the first one.
Thankfully, the trio get things back on track again with the epic "Confessions of the Informer," which is both the album's most aggressively minimal piece and its clear highlight.  It is built upon a little more than a slow-motion, repeating throb and stuttering snatches of vocals, coupled with queasy squeals from John Olsen self-made horns and guitar feedback from new member James Baljo...and that is about it.  That proves to be more than enough though–while not much overt evolution occurs over the course of its 12 minutes, it is so mesmerizingly ravaged, limping, and haunted that it could have gone on for twice as long and still been just as great (or better).  I suspect it sounds a lot like wandering nervously through a ruined space station must feel: alone and paranoid in an endless corridor of jagged metal, flickering lights, and eerie creaks and moans.  That is a great niche to stake out.
Naturally, after having delivered something so wonderful, the band felt that the only proper way to close the album was to give their ugliest, most contrarian impulses free-reign, as "Warning Sign" basically feels like a 7-minute locked-groove of grinding, unlistenable, air-raid-siren-style pain.  I suppose that is both amusing and fitting, but another good song would have been nice too.  As it stands, I guess I will have to settle for just two great songs and four not-so-great ones, which probably eliminates this as a strong contender for noise album of the year (even if "Confessions" is admittedly brilliant).  Of course, delivering a perfectly sequenced, uniformly great statement of intent would run counter to Wolf Eyes' whole messy aesthetic of spontaneity, entropy, and primitivism, so I cannot complain much–I knew very much what I was getting into and I got it.  I am very pleased to see that Wolf Eyes are just as capable of greatness and innovation as ever, even if their more frustrating characteristics remain just as evident.
 
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To this day, I am utterly baffled as to how The Haxan Cloak managed to become relatively popular at all–it all seems suspiciously Faustian.  Granted, Brian Krlic's profile has certainly benefited from his getting lumped in with the Raime/Demdike Stare pantheon of glacial, black-hearted "dance" artists, but his debut album was still essentially a collection of bleakly dissonant string dirges inspired by death, something that does not generally offer much in the way of mass appeal (or individual appeal for me, for that matter).  Excavation, however, is intermittently amazing, as Krlic's incredible evolution and inspired addition of deep sub-bass have transformed his previously oppressively sad vision into quite a heavy and frightening one.
While I did not have especially high expectations going into this album, the first minute of opener "Consumed" was so crushingly awesome that I had to immediately start the song over to hear it again.  At under two minutes, "Consumed" is little more than an introduction, but its transition from ominous, gloomy thrum to massive, evil sub-bass is one of the heaviest things I have ever heard: it sounds like a slow-motion earthquake tearing the ground apart to loose some long-buried and forgotten horror upon the world.  Needless to say, that makes for a tough act to follow, but Krlic gamely does his best, as the remainder of Excavation sounds like a fully formed and gloriously ruined aural dystopia, roiling with nightmarishly decayed, warped, slowed, and pitch-shifted motifs galore.  All of which is right up my alley, of course.
Aside from the atypically warm closing piece ("The Drop"), Krlic does not bother much with melody at all, nor does he bring back much of the organic instrumentation that was so integral to his past work.  In most cases, that would be a step backwards, but Brian succeeds so beautifully at texture, mood, and pulse that Excavation somehow thrives in their absence: most of the elements that I would normally want in a song just simply do not belong here.
In fact, space, emptiness, and a total lack of graspable melody are absolutely integral to maintaining this suite's mystique and looming sense of dread.  Most of Excavation sounds like a dubstep party in hell (ideal location) that is only audible through weirdly time-stretched, muted, and hallucinatory snatches.  While the throbbing, subterranean bass is relatively omnipresent, virtually every other element sounds like it is fighting to break through a barrier of some kind, which is an impressive production feat.  It is not easy to sound simultaneously massive and visceral and spectrally detached, but the best moments of Excavation deliver exactly that.
My sole critique is that Brian's compositional talents are not quite on the same level as his impressive abilities in all other respects.  For example, aside from the bookends, there are not many characteristics that distinguish these pieces from one another.  Also, taken on a song-by-song basis, a few pieces seem overlong or one-dimensional.  Given the nature of the material, however (haunted ambiance and sustained simmering horror), such shortcomings are not nearly as significant as they might be otherwise.  They are definitely enough to prevent Excavation from being a full-on masterpiece, but not enough to stop it from being a great album that definitively catapults Krlic into the upper echelon of dance music's shadowy underground.
 
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While I certainly would not complain if the endless tide of synthesizer albums were to suddenly stop completely, that does not mean that an occasional good one does not turn up every now and then.  This one, the solo debut from Jimy SeiTang (Rhyton/Psychic Ills) comes very close to being one of those albums, offering up a handful of thick, buzzing, and obsessively repeating soundscapes that sound like a mixture of John Carpenter and Krautrock.  Unfortunately, most of them either end too quickly or evolve too little to completely suck me in, but the closing piece reminded me very favorably of Popul Vuh's brilliant Aguirre soundtrack (minus all the hippy noodling), which is a high compliment indeed.
This release is a bit of a dramatic departure for SeiTang, as the bulk of his previous work has been very much in the free-form psych-rock vein: these six pieces could not possibly be less "rock," nor do they betray any clear improvisational origins.  Instead, SeiTang builds his songs from dense, throbbing, hypnotically repeating sequencer motifs with minimal added coloration.  Within those narrow constraints, however, Jimy covers fairly wide territory.  The driving, retro-futurist "Drift," for example, would not be at all out of place accompanying the opening credits of Escape From New York, while most of the other pieces are pastorally Kosmische-inspired in nature.  Jimy saves some surprises for the end of the album though, as he veers far away from his previous moods with the queasily dissonant "Athanor Ascension" and the aforementioned album highlight: the eerily melancholic ambiance of "Fade into Bolivian," which makes very effective use of artfully buried field recordings.
While that that aberrant, drone-based piece undeniably steals the show, it is probably the least distinctively "Stygian Stride" piece on the album (though Jimy's faux Carpenter excursion is a close second).  That is Stygian Stride's fundamental flaw: SeiTang is never able to fully capitalize upon what he does best, which is create very enjoyable and immense-sounding sequencer loops.  In that regard, "Taiga" is his greatest success, as its fat, insistently pulsing groove could have been the perfect foundation for an amazing long-form work.  Unfortunately, time and time again, Jimy seems content to just conjure up a great loop and allow it to repeat for several minutes with only the subtlest development before fading away.  As a result, this album is riddled with exasperating missed opportunities.  Or, more charitably, it is riddled with great promise.  At the very least, Stygian Stride still boasts one great piece, shows glimpses of vision, and sounds absolutely wonderful, but SeiTang definitely needs to go a bit deeper if he wants to create something truly substantial.
 
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Intervalo is the result of a collaboration between Seattle pianist Kelly Wyse and Vancouver's loscil. Culminating from two live performances in 2012, first at Seattle's Substrata Festival and later at Decibel Festival, these recordings were made in Seattle to capture the collaboration. This collection features reworked versions of familiar loscil compositions such as "Endless Falls" and "Hastings Sunrise" alongside unique versions of rarer compositions such as "Rye Fields" and "City Hospital."
More information is available here.
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A massive ensemble of New Mexico-based artists, DCS features no less than ten bassists amongst other multi-instrumentalists. At first blush I expected an unidentifiable cacophony of noise, which would not necessarily be a bad thing, but this self titled album is much more varied and open than I believed it would be. Across three long and distinct pieces, there is much dissonance, but also subtlety to be heard.
"I Wish They Could All Be Jemez Pueblo Gurlsss" (despite the morose project name, there is obviously humor here), is what most resembles what I expected from the line up.Initially waves of noise that blow across like desert winds, the resonating bass strings making themselves known.The orchestra of low end rumbles open wide up, surging in and out not necessarily in unison, but making their own idiosyncratic rhythms.
Jagged cymbals cut in leading into a marching band drum throb, volume levels pushed into overdrive and adding an extra layer of dissonance.It becomes a pleasantly messy, ramshackle combination of drums and feedback that locks into a rhythm, but then is allowed to float around on its own inertia.It makes for a structurally simple composition, but its monolithic brutality is what shines.
The second composition, "The Ballad of Sandoval County," is significantly different.Also leading off with a slow spaciousness, complete with distant wind chimes and muffled ambience, there begins an emphasis on amplifier noise and tightly clipped strings.The build is slow and deliberate, with the first ten minutes being surprisingly arid for such a sprawling project.Even when bowed strings and a more traditionally musical twang appear, it is only briefly before it hides again.
The shorter (as in ten minute) "Beso De Ese" embraces noise rather than space and ambience.Sputtering, scratchy distortion and amplifier detritus come together in a morass of sound, without any sort of instrumentation being identifiable.Overall it is more disjointed and loose.Feedback swells are cut and shaped to resemble rhythms before everything blows up in an overdriven wall of power electronics noise.
As a whole, this album is an oddity to say the least; with such a large ensemble making music that is more nuanced than abusive, and more inviting than abrasive.When everyone decides to let loose and explode sonically, it is a satisfying, bombastic mess.When things call for a lighter touch, the dry, oppressive heat of the desert is conjured beautifully via wonderfully indistinct sounds and passages.
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After a 12 year hiatus, Mark van Hoen has unexpectedly returned with a new Locust album.  In fact, I do not think that Mark himself even expected it: he enlisted his friend Louis Sherman to join him for a live performance on WFMU and discovered during their rehearsals that they sounded both 1.) great and 2.) an awful lot like Locust.  As Van Hoen remains the driving force and has a very distinctive aesthetic, the resultant material still shares a lot of common ground with last year's excellent solo album (The Revenant Diary), but You'll Be Safe Forever is floating and melancholic rather than then tense and haunted.
While the return of Locust is certainly a noteworthy event, this is not quite the bold statement that densely paranoid The Revenant Diary was, nor is it meant to be.  Rather, You'll Be Safe Forever seems like a one-off fluke that felt right and deserved to be released.Much of the album's material is based upon both recent improvisations and unused recordings that Van Hoen had from the last half-decade or so.  Despite that, the end result feels like a very coherent album–the only real clue to its somewhat humble origins is that only a handful of songs boast strong hooks.  Thankfully, the less hooky remainder (like "The Washer Woman") sound far more like the soundtrack to an arty, stylized thriller than anything resembling lazy or sub par song-craft.  While he certainly has a quizzical devotion to big, fat '90s-sounding break-beats, I get the impression that Mark is too much of a perfectionist to let anything remotely clumsy, half-baked, or weak see the light of day with his name attached to it.
I definitely prefer the more hook-heavy pieces though.  The album's clear highlight is "Strobes," as Sherman's synth swells are adrenalized by a heavy, relentless groove and Van Hoen conjures up a great hook from a chopped and stuttering female vocal snippet.  The duo never quite manage to get everything so wonderfully right at the same time again, but that does not stop them from producing a handful of other excellent pieces.  For example, the opening "Fall For Me" takes an auto-tuned pop hook and slows it down to a dreamily pulsing, slow-motion haze.  Even better is eerie and subtly hallucinatory "Do Not Fear," in which a sensuous female voice repeatedly urges me to join her while drifting synths cohere into dissonant, sinister harmonies and a slow, heavy groove holds it all together.
For better or worse, that piece exemplifies Van Hoen's recent aesthetic: a precarious balance between booming break-beats and surreal uneasiness.  It seems like an approach that should not work at all, as such beats cannot help but undercut whatever dark, more sophisticated mood the rest of the song seems to be going for.  However, those same unrelenting beats also seem to prevent Mark from ever becoming meandering and indulgent.  When he misses, the result is enjoyable, but mildly perplexing and anachronistic.  When he hits, he somehow makes existential horror and paranoia seem catchy and accessible, which is a neat trick that few others can pull off.  Also, on the rare occasions when the duo dispense with beats entirely ("Corporal Genesis"), the results can be sublimely haunting.
It is telling that the sole significant critique that I can level is also kind of a perverse compliment: Van Hoen seems almost entirely indifferent to all of the dance trends that came and went in Locust's wake.  He is definitely aware of them–he just does not care.  As a result, You'll Be Safe Forever sounds endearingly like a lost classic from the '90s, but one that has been aggressively remastered to make the most of modern recording software.  Some of the more trip-hop/"Portishead" grooves (the shuffling and eerie "Flower Lady," for example) will no doubt make it difficult for this album to connect with as large an audience as it deserves, which I can understand. There is a reason that Mark loves break-beats so much though: they can be very propulsive and satisfying, which provide a perfect counterbalance to his blurrier, more brooding side. The craftsmanship, complexity, and masterfully fractured hooks on display make it well-worth the effort to indulge Locust's quirks.  This is a strong return.
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Back in 2010, Tarentel's Cantu-Ledesma blindsided me with an absolutely wonderful dream-pop/drone solo opus (Love is a Stream) that I have grown to love more with each passing year.  Since then, however, he has been keeping a curiously low profile, quietly releasing only a handful of tapes, splits, singles, and a Dutch LP.  I wish I had been paying more attention though, as this latest self-released digital EP shows that he has been both creatively fertile and steadily evolving the whole time.  I guess I have some catching up to do.
Devotion's aesthetic shares a great deal of common ground with Love is a Stream, as the two releases are both built upon warm oceans of synths and processed guitars.  The difference, however, is that that immersive, blissed-out base is merely the foundation for Devotion, as Jefre rends his beautifully crafted idyll with gnarled blooms of white noise.  In theory, that seems like it would probably be a bad idea, but it proves to be a rather brilliant and inspired one in practice: Cantu-Ledesma's work was already great, now it has even more gravitas, contrast, and distinctiveness.
The secret, naturally, lies in the execution: rather than being jarringly intrusive, Jefre's slashes of stuttering static make his rapturous dreamworld seem deliciously precarious and ephemeral, like catching fleeting snatches of something wonderful on a radio that quickly disappears in a blizzard of interference.  Many artists have released albums of rippling drone nirvana, but Jefre has perfected that formula by making that heaven seem unattainable and viewable only in unpredictable glimpses.
The EP's two strongest pieces are the longer, more layered ones ("The Light Years" and "Roam the Milky Way"), which take very different roads to similar places.  "The Light Years" is built primarily from a warm, slow-moving synth motif that is barely audible amidst the roiling static and chaos that surrounds it, while "Roam the Milky Way" tones down the entropy a bit to allow some angelic female vocal cooing and a descending melody to peak through the omnipresent sizzle and decay.  The remaining two pieces provide a nice dynamic counterbalance, as their simple, repeating chorus-heavy guitar motifs are a fragile oasis that heightens the power of the more dense moments around them.  All four pieces are excellent in their own right, but the heavier drone pieces feel like this release's raison d'être: "Difficult Loves" and "Hand Written Letter" are just well-placed and effective come-downs.
The sole downside to Devotion is that it is far too short to fully drown in, as it only lasts about 20 minutes.  On one hand, that is fine: Cantu-Ledesma has delivered a uniformly wonderful, perfectly sequenced EP with no filler or wrong moves to be found.  On the other hand, this is the kind of music that I want to be completely immersed in, so it is a bit frustrating that it all ends so quickly.  Solely because of that exasperating brevity, I would advise anyone new to Cantu-Ledesma's solo work to seek out Love or Visiting This World first, but Devotion is otherwise both spectacular and essential.
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Artist: Merzbow Vs Nordvargr
Title: Partikel III
Catalogue No: CSR180CD
Barcode: 5060174955372
Format: CD in matt digipak
Genre: Noise / Electronica
Shipping: 23rd May
The third and final part of the Partikel trilogy is finally here! Another beautifully constructed collaboration from the two noise giants – Japanoise King Masami Akita (aka Merzbow) and Swedish Overlord Henrik Nordvargr Björkk (MZ.412, Folkstorm, Toroidh). The styles on ‘Partikel III’ range from total noise barrages, to intelligent electronics, to subtle dark ambient pieces. Essential! Presented in a luxurious matt laminate digipak.
Tracks: 1. Heterotic String Hybrid / 2. Lorentz Covariance / 3. Submaton Color Pt. 1 / 4. Submaton Color Pt. 2)
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Nad Spiro will make a rare live appearance in
London and play tracks from her acclaimed "Atomic Spy" album on Geometrik Records:
Club Integral presents "THE GEOMETRY OF FEAR"
Featuring : Nad Spiro - Static Memories - Cloudier Skies - Ragnaagrok
plus DJ Jules Webbcore and video projections from Rucksack Cinema. £5/£3
Friday 19th April 2013- 8.30 pm
@ The Grosvenor 17 Sydney Road, Stockwell, London
http://clubintegral.wordpress.com/
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Haynes is a multimedia artist who works in many different mediums and formats, but a consistent sense of rust and decay carries through them all. Recent audio works Sever and The Decline Effect exemplify this perfectly each, built upon layers of found sounds and field recordings, processed and disintegrated into textures and sounds that are enticing, yet alien. For his debut on Editions Mego, he follows the same successful format, using the sounds of desert winds, laser cooling systems, and thin wires as the source, resulting in a work that sounds entirely alien.
The first sound that stood out upon the beginning of this album is the harsher, more forceful one captured on "Oscar," melding what could be a dying organ’s tones and violent static outbursts that cut like a knife.These blasts occur erratically throughout, amidst an unsettling bed of crackling walkie-talkie static and ghostly apparitions lurking in the distance.
"X-Ray" Immediately leads off with the hollow, tactile electro-acoustic textures Haynes excels at, adding a metallic rattling and what sounds like a flanged jet engine blast enshrouding it all.For the bulk of its near 14 minute duration though, it stays at a lower level of intensity, like an ambient field recording that cannot be placed in time or space, with clattering dissonance bleeding in to be jarring here and there.
The side-long "November" encompasses both of these sonic extremes, with percussive junk sounds rattling atop disturbing swells and drops in sound.While the cacophony drones away, a low, almost imperceptible melody seems to rise up, eventually everything else is removed to just emphasize this somber tone.Slowly, the noise returns, in a spacious, arid way that closes the piece on the sound of a rusty howl and delicate reverberations, sounding natural yet completely unidentifiable.
The Wires Cracked is a fitting title for this work of decaying metal and erratic electricity.Haynes work has more of a collage, less composed structure, but each segment flows naturally into one another, making for a record that stands up to the fascinating textures and physical worlds of sound that bears his distinct mark. It fits in beautifully next to Sever and The Decline Effect, two of my favorite records of this type of sound art.
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