30 November 2006

Administrator

Albums and Singles

artist: The Bark Haze
title:untitled
catalog #: IMPREC128
format: lp
upc: 793447512822
release date: Feb 27, 2007

This limited edition lp was pressed in an edition of 500 with letterpressed covers done by Manifesto. These are completely different recordings than the Bark Haze compact disc also on Important Records.
The Bark Haze is primarily a guitar duo of GOWN (nom de plume of one Andrew
Macgregor) and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth etfuckingcetera). Auxiliary
members have been know to include Pete Nolan (Magik Markers, Virgin Eye
Blood Brothers, Cops et al). Their name came from a mis-hearing of the
radical early 70s R+B group the Bar-Kays and from that moment the concept of
mis-hearing and allegiance to presenting the mis-hearing as some open-ended
musical course became The Bark Haze's identity. So far all concerts have
taken place in Western Massachusetts and once in the confines of Cambridge,
MA's Twisted Village record emporium. They anxiously await their debut gig
in the UK at the Nightmare Before Christmas event curated by Moore. As the
heroic and potentially bonkers Carpenters refrained We've Only Just Begun.
Damn straight.

 

 

artist: The Bark Haze
title:untitled
catalog #: IMPREC127
format: cd
release date: Feb 27, 2007

This exclusive CD release is entirely different from the LP release on Important which is also untitled.

The Bark Haze is primarily a guitar duo of GOWN (nom de plume of one Andrew
Macgregor) and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth etfuckingcetera). Auxiliary
members have been know to include Pete Nolan (Magik Markers, Virgin Eye
Blood Brothers, Cops et al). Their name came from a mis-hearing of the
radical early 70s R+B group the Bar-Kays and from that moment the concept of
mis-hearing and allegiance to presenting the mis-hearing as some open-ended
musical course became The Bark Haze's identity. So far all concerts have
taken place in Western Massachusetts and once in the confines of Cambridge,
MA's Twisted Village record emporium. They anxiously await their debut gig
in the UK at the Nightmare Before Christmas event curated by Moore. As the
heroic and potentially bonkers Carpenters refrained We've Only Just Begun.
Damn straight.

 

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30 November 2006

Administrator

Albums and Singles

artist: Eleh
title: Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis Volume 1
catalog #: IMPREC125
format: LP
release date: Feb 27, 2007

Eleh was formed to specifically to pay tribute to early experimental minimalist pioneers especially La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros and Charlemagne Palestine. This record is pressed in a deluxe edition of 400 on audiophile quality 180 gram vinyl mastered and pressed at RTI with letterpressed jackets done by Manifesto Letterpress.
Eleh creates highly minimal and deeply spiritual pure analog drone music with emphasis on the physical ultra-low end. Incorporating tones as low as .05 hz (well below the range of human hearing) Eleh is as much of a physical experience as it is an audio one. To be heard and felt correctly the listener must be sitting with ears at speaker height at least 7 feet away. Noise cancelling headphone use is also recommended for the optimum listening experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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30 November 2006

Administrator

Albums and Singles

artist: Rameses III
title:Honey Rose
catalog #: IMPREC121
format: cd ep
upc:793447512624
release date: Feb 27, 2007

Rameses III are architects of the most beautiful swathes of blissful ambience whose releases have previously found homes on labels like Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Music Fellowship, Scarcelight, MYMWLY, Barl Fire and Type.

On “Honey Rose”, the group’s first release for Important, the South London trio build a bucolic soundtrack to Jon Spira’s mysterious short film “Suityman”. Whilst the influence of Bruce Langhorne, Boxhead Ensemble and much of the 4AD roster can be keenly felt on this six song EP, so too can the wondrous drone narratives that are such a feature of Rameses III’s previous works. More structured and melodious then much of their output, “Honey Rose” is the perfect place for a newcomer to begin exploring the music of one of the finest purveyors of ambient drone operating in music today.

 

 

 

 

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30 November 2006

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This fascinating record shadows an apparently murderous concept with more than enough themic ambiguity, musical invention and sly humor, to make repeat listens essential, if not exactly desirable.

 

Type

The silence is broken by "The Boat Was My Friend" flickering to life with a pronounced sonic electricity; as if hot stones were being dropped onto an overamplified guitar. Then waves of cello combine with furtive percussion to suggest trapped energy, almost untethered. A female voice wordlessly chants something akin to a lullaby, but the feeling is much less hush little baby than cradle will fall. There is little relief ahead as this entire record is steeped in unease. Some ancient force is getting loose and the likely results are to be both hidden and brutal.

The plucked bass notes of "Ocean out of wood" briefly conjure a brilliant and avant-swinging Nordic jazz.. er, ..odyssey, but this is a red herring as "My feet, over there" with it's grinding pace, inhuman ripping and excruciating stuttering sounds, evokes an appalling smothering of hope. In isolation this is a mighty piece, but is ill-placed and might even have been better as a separate 7 inch. Next, the truly unforgetable "Easy on the bones" is the sound of something desperately wrong. In the first series of Twin Peaks, a terror was conveyed by the needle stuck at the end of a record as the incarnation of Bob invades Laura Palmer's house. Svarte Greiner echoes that scene but takes the audio-horror a step further with a repetitive sawing sound as gentle as lapping waves. Waves in a sea of blood and bone fragment, that is.

Several tracks feature a pure, faint, female voice. This keeps a necessary sense of listenable normality to all the ghastly scraping, eerie rustling, startled bird calls, horrible footsteps, suspenseful door openings, and strangled surprises. We feel unease, but could we recognize the long-forgotten scent of human sacrifice, execution, and ship burials if we heard it?

Despite its overtly gothic organ, tinkling bells, synth, stuck needle and vinyl hiss, "The black dress" somehow works. Whether this is a Buffalo Bill sewing machine scenario, a tender necrophilial closeness, or a silly dark wedding, depends upon your imagination. It also features a similar sense of footsteps ripping through long grass that are a central feature of "An ordinary hike." "Ullsokk" is furtively squelchy with more of the pure chanting bringing to my mind either a nearby victim or Lady Macbeth figure, before "The dinner table" introduces a rhythm that Martin Hammett would have enjoyed working on, and maintains an emerging ceremonial atmosphere. Thankfully the ambiguity isn't shattered: Were those dinner bells calling cannibal spirits? Is there to be a sacrifice? Is this scary, or funny? That's a gorgeous voice. What's he building in there?

"Final sleep" sounds like a standard horror shovel scene, though the plane passing overhead smashes any ancient spiritual notions, while it also emphasizes the idea of the proximity of all this to normal life. Snoring sounds are drowned by an operatic peace and soothing swathes of which The Dead Texan would approve. Is that rain, a bottle being emptied, blood or piss?

As David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti ably demonstrate, horror can be brought into sharp relief when set against the beautiful and the bland. Like a shiny, pert blonde and blue-eyed Christian woman casually whispering "We should nuke Afghanistan". The Moors Murderers ( Ian Brady and Myra Hindley) made audio tapes of the torture and murder of their victims partly for, in particular, Brady's later arousal. Nevertheless, I imagine that "Knive" somehow isn't an ideal music for any fictional or factual serial killing psychotic fiends. Consider Fred West who, with his devoted wife by his side, prefered something bouncy and jolly to drown the screams. During his happy decades of abuse, torture, dismemberment and murder in the cellar of his terraced house at Cromwell Street in Gloucester, Fred loved to blast out "Yeh Yeh" by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and I bet he whistled that pop ditty the day he hanged himself in Winson Green prison. Utterly harmless, but horribly apt when cast against his crimes:

We'll play a melody and turn the lights down low / So that no-one can see / We gotta do that, we gotta do that / We gotta do that, we gotta do that / And there'll be no one else alive in all the world 'cept you and me / Yea, yea, yea, yea, yea / Yea, yea, yea, yea / Pretty baby I never knew such a thrill / Just thought I'd tell you, because I'm trembling still / But pretty baby, I want you all for my own / I think I'm ready to leave those others alone....

Despite a weird recognition factor perhaps brought on from too many Hammer Horror films, I prefer to think that the sounds on Knive which seem to depict the slow emergence of a brutal horror and a subsequent peace, couldn't possibly be what I imagine they are. What's more, how could I recogize that which I've never heard?  Either they must have been part of some dream,  an inherited genetic unconscious, or the snoring was tryptophan induced and the whole thing was some pro-turkey vegetarian art-terrorism. Just in time for Christmas.

samples:

• Final Sleep
• Easy on the Bones
• The Boat Was My Friend
  

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30 November 2006

Administrator

Albums and Singles

By my account, both at the time and retrospectively, List of Lights and Buoys was the best album of 2004.  This follow-up reprises that exquisite debut's delicate melancholia as minimal, often radical, re-interpretations of classic and, at times, even sacred material.  How well it accomplishes that is another story altogether.

Rune Grammofon

As before, Susanna Karolina Wallumrød's lovely voice quivers with an enthralling fragility through the peaks and valleys of obscenely eclectic track selections from such disparate artists as Kiss, Prince, and Scott Walker.  Morten Qvenvild takes more than just liberties with his sparse, subtly decorated arrangements, though some of these compositions come across as more surprising than others.  Joy Division's eternal "Love Will Tear Us Apart" has suffered in the feeble, fumbling hands of countless moody impersonators and descendants, with the Magical Orchestra's take slogging along predictably, as does Qvenvild's saggy, dreary stab at the equally overexposed Depeche Mode staple "Enjoy The Silence."  Conversely, AC/DC's fist-pumping rock n roll warning, "It's A Long Way To The Top" transmutates into the bitter lament of the road-weary, hardened soul, its once-anthemic lyrics made infinitely more harsh than the late Bon Scott would have envisioned.  Along those lines, Wallumrød magnificently reclaims Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" from the gooey depths of Shrek's CGI schmaltz, showcasing the highest heights of her vocal range over Qvenvild's ascetic organ tones.

Still, the strongest and most beautiful material on the duo's first Rune Grammofon record wasn't the creative covers of Leonard Bernstein and Dolly Parton songs, but rather heartbreaking originals like "Hello" and "Believer."  As such, Melody Mountain deflects lyrical honesty, behaving much like a depressed girlfriend on the other end of the telephone, singing other people's songs into the receiver for fear of speaking of her own pain and heartache.

samples:

• It's A Long Way To The Top
• Love Will Tear Us Apart
• Enjoy The Silence

 

 

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28 November 2006

Scott Mckeating

Albums and Singles

Although this Heatsick release starts out nice and normal, it doesn’t take that long before it gets taken over by the warped half of sole member Steven Warwick’s brain; melodic acoustic guitar work gets layered and then drowned.

Alcoholic Narcolepsy

This c30 release (in vampiric black and red) layers acoustic details on top of each other, all the while preparing the listener for the inevitable absorption into Heatsick world. These simply layered parts keep their backbone for a while, refusing to urn to liquid, landing in clockwork patterns of strums. The magic of this single piece is the way the mechanical mouse organ styled build of notes begins to take on a sort of halo. The chimes set in motion droney moving rings which in turn heralds circling whistles appear along with freer pitches around the song. This other world begins to try and steal the song’s focus creating an intentionally glorious coming together of two teased-out worlds.

When the second side picks up the hard to hold thread of “Pre-Cum Fog Ballet,” the guitar parts have been lost. The mazes of drones have guzzled this instrument down in murmuring hums, a disintegrating swarm of Möbius Strips. Listening to the second side of this cassette is like arriving at the fairground on expensive glue and having to choose which half-broken fairground attraction to ride on. The sounds spin just below the point of overwhelming, like a séance that only attracts pissed-up drunken spirits that all want to talking at the same time. The gap between side one and two feels like a part of this buckled metamorphosis has been lost, but that’s probably partially my fault for having equipment that requires me to get up to flip the tape. Despite the sometime insanity of the music, Heatsick’s explorations are never mentally wearing; god only knows what it’s doing to my ears though.

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28 November 2006

Scott Mckeating

Albums and Singles

This, possibly sperm influenced, off-milky white seven inch is the latest between album output from Massimo and Pierce of the Black Sun Productions collective. Sex Magik seems to play a lesser part in these two pieces, being noticeably shorter than their recent material on their last few long-players.

Danhuser

Eschewing the melancholy of the double disc The Impossibility of Silence release they have moved into an electronic semi-operatic mode.

Massimo’s voice is the main, and most enjoyable, ingredient here, steadied now into a sonorous, deep vocal. His warm cavernous wails at the climax of “Uncle Billy” merging with the very European sounding violin’s reaching string fingers to provide what must be a raging spectacle when performed live. The underwater pounding thump is overwhelmed by his vocal, the siren strings exacerbating the expressed loss. Apparently this Burroughs tribute track is the first fruit of a collaboration with Bahntier (who sound like post-industrialists from the little I’ve heard) and I look forward to hearng more. Both tracks here have Massimo filling the songs with a human heart, mollifying the sharpened edges of the music.

The addition of Roberto Budelo’s violin is an excellent counterpoint to the mutating precision of Pierce’s electronics. This more organic work following and filling the sound of the speeding clicking beats of “His Secret Secretions”. It’s worth also noting that this is probably the best bassline that the pair has created yet, a simple forward-moving piece that’s fixed to the beats. They’ve come a long way from the ghost boys. Their musical equivocation and ongoing evolution means that it’s difficult to predict where this duo will come from next.

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28 November 2006

Administrator

Albums and Singles

 

"Intitially we wanted to bring Xenakis and Techno together......well, in the end it sounded really different...."

With some irony Gina Hell from the female duo Rashim states what has led to their surprisingly fresh and unconventional debut.

'Suns.Shadows' is the result of a longtime cooperation with Yasmina Haddad as Rashim, a relationship which started with dee-jaying and works for video artists or fashion designers. The album delivers more than a handful of ideas for those who have been looking after analogue warmth and tricky rhythms. Snippets of acoustic guitars built up a steady pattern, a jazz kit merges with a drum-synth, or a repeated stroke on something like a cello could keep you tapping on your table while you listen to a piano chord or a vocal phrase. Rashim´s cosm is definitely eclectic regarding its source material ­ pop culture can meet an orchestral drum solo - but the music is always coherent in its results. Maybe this is because of the duo´s convincing and conscious handling with instruments, sounds and samples, but more likely it is their intuitive approach and the focus on rhythm, a basic and still vivid expression.
(mosz 2006)

1: lost
2: kunstkomplex
3: sheman
4: you're not past man, you are tradition
5: it's worth it
6: yes, xenakis
7: shines   
8: for the cat   
9: blueblackgold   
10: drawn   
11: total eclipse  

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26 November 2006

Albums and Singles

This lathe captures Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club and ex-Vibracathedral Orchestra) and Sticky Foster, both, A-Band alumni, somewhere in the world making sound together. Allegedly containing material that could be about ten years old, this release squeezes (what I think is possibly) four tracks onto a clear seven inch vinyl.

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26 November 2006

Administrator

Albums and Singles

It is nice to know that there are still people out there with very strange ideas, sufficiently demonstrated by this album, the second collaborative effort from Tony Wakeford and Andrew Liles.  However, in a world in which Nurse With Wound is working on a HipHop album, and David Tibet is both a professed Christian and a cabinet member of the OTO, perhaps the word "strange" needs to be redefined.

 
Tursa

For their second outing as The Wardrobe, Liles and Wakeford redefine the parameters of strangeness with an album that marries lovely, emotive, nostalgic instrumentals to the shudders and creaks of old Victoriana.  More often than not, the songs meander and drift through the cobwebby attics of old English country houses, the eerie and insistent presence of memory creating an uncanny atmosphere that fairly sparks with ghostly electricity.  Eerie electrical portals to other worlds are found amidst the creaking floorboards and old, out-of-tune pianos, dusty guitars and rusty accordions.  Without warning, atmospheric melodies are overtaken by the free play of the unconscious, eccentric intrusions from out of the ether, snatches of warped dialogue, wobbly old 78s or incongruous sound effects suites pop in and out with a refreshing absence of logic.

Whereas the title of Cups in Cupboard, the duo's first album, signified a measured appropriateness—cups in the cupboard, everything in its right place—the title of this sophomore album suggests incompleteness, lunacy and lame-brained-ness: "She's a few sandwiches short of a picnic, that one."  Apropos of this contrast in title, the new album is not as pleasing and tuneful as that first album, preferring instead to push out the boundaries of discomfort, finding ever newer ways to subtly dislocate the listener in time and space.  While the opening piano dirge "Wednesday" seems to start off in the same general ballpark as Cups, it soon descends into an eerie, droning netherworld, with a tinkling counter-melody that constantly threatens to derail the funereal proceedings.  Everything finally digresses into buzzing electric insectoid oblivion, a miasma of withering 19th century parlor music, like watching a Merchant Ivory film on acid.

Things only get wackier from this point with the whimsically ramshackle "Horse With One Leg" and the heavily intoxicated, messily percussive strains of "Another Drink?".  "Lucifer Before Sunrise" will be the most pleasurable track for old-school Nurse With Wound fans, a reworking of a track that originally appeared on Stapleton and Wakeford's sole collaboration The Revenge of the Selfish Shellfish.  This time, the deeply weird crypto-Satanic text is read aloud by Colin Potter's daughters (internal rhyme unintentional), as skeletal guitar figures are licked by crackling flames.  The Potter girls' spooky voices are twisted and mutated, scattered around the stereo channels, before being joined by Wakeford's morbid, gravelly vocals, so familiar from well-worn Sol Invictus records from the past two decades.  Everything you loved about the English underground esoteric music scene, all in the span of five minutes. 

Since Current 93 and Nurse With Wound have apparently decided to take permanent vacations from these kinds of fucked gothic sound experiments, it's nice to hear the flag still being carried by Liles and Wakeford.  A Sandwich Short is the perfect mix of disarming melodies and outre electronic textures, with lots of delightfully menacing moments of plain, old-fashioned sinister whimsy.

samples:

• Wednesday
• Lucifer Before Sunrise
• Lysergic Eiderdown

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