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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With each new release, Anthony Mangicapra’s Hoor-Paar-Kraat becomes more distinctive and adventurous. I have enjoyed previous releases, some feeling more finished than others, but In Eros Veritas is probably the stand-out of the lot. Here many of the elements and approaches that work particularly well in other pieces come together like lesser metals mixed to form an alloy, creating a far stronger album.
Like early Nurse With Wound, there is a huge emphasis on strange sounds devoid of any real context. I know I have likened Mangicapra’s music to NWW before and I do not wish to pigeon-hole him as a tribute act but the ambient noises, squeaks and mysterious sounding cymbals of “Est Queadam Fiere Voluptas” could have been remnants from Steven Stapleton’s cutting room floor circa Homotopy to Marie. The Latin titles do not help with orientation (my Latin is restricted solely to anatomical terms and animal names), instead making the whole album feel like some dusty old recording taken from a strange library in a city that does not exist now and may never have existed.
Mangicapra seems to relish the details of ordinary sounds. The creaking door of “Materiam Superabat Opus” is opened and closed at a variety of speeds and intensities, changing the character of the sound completely, going from a spooky haunted house groan to an everyday back-door scraping. As the door is creaked for longer and longer, it starts to lose all its door-like qualities, becoming a crack in time itself. More musical sounds appear during the gritty “Acta Est Fabula, Plaudite!” Beneath the rasping metallic din, a low pitched rhythm that sounds like a bowed bass can be heard. It is mesmerising in its menace, sounding like some of the less riff-centred works from Sunn O))).
In Eros Veritas has been released both as a limited edition LP and a slightly longer and far more limited edition CD. Having only the CD release in front of me, I cannot comment on the presentation of the LP but the handmade sleeve of the CD is a tastefully designed card sleeve in the same style as previous Hoor-Paar-Kraat albums. A drawing of an Edwardian couple walking away opens to reveal the track listing, the credits and Mangicapra’s now familiar fingerprint (how many non-detectives become familiar with fingerprints like this?). As usual, it all seems to fit with the music contained on the disc. I do not know how or why but it all makes some form of sense.
I can find no fault with In Eros Veritas. Some of Mangicapra’s other releases have the odd duff track but here there is no unwanted surplus. Each piece sounds as strong as the one that precedes or follows it, all adding up to a magnificent album.
With a title like this, it would take some level of ineptitude not to guess what this album sounds like. The only fear from such a title is that it will either be campy hipster metal or that it cannot possibly be awesome enough to live up to such a lofty title. Previous releases from Lair of the Minotaur rule out the former worry instantly, and only seconds of listening prove the latter completely unfounded.
With a title like this, it would take some level of ineptitude not to guess what this album sounds like. The only fear from such a title is that it will either be campy hipster metal or that it cannot possibly be awesome enough to live up to such a lofty title. Previous releases from Lair of the Minotaur rule out the former worry instantly, and only seconds of listening prove the latter completely unfounded.
This is the sort of album Slayer should have made after Seasons in the Abyss, something with actual muscle, tendons and blood; something with a bit of fire in its belly. I can imagine Kerry King sitting down listening to this wondering why he did not come up with these riffs and solos himself. Lair of the Minotaur’s debt to classic thrash metal has always been more than obvious but on War Metal Battle Master they have honed their trade to a fine blade of razor sharp metal. Indeed, the sounds are incorporated during the intro to the title track, the clash of steel and the sound of medieval warfare providing a perfect backdrop for the musical assault that the group mount on the listener.
The album continues relentlessly with songs like “When the Ice Giants Slayed All” and “Assassins of the Cursed Mist,” sounding like runaway combine harvesters, mincing everything in their path. All the musical elements sound perfect, the drumming sounds like thunder and the bass sounds like rumblings from hell. The vocals are superb; Steven Rathbone’s roar is getting more feral with each album and his clean delivery sounding like a Spartan general giving commands on the battlefield. Everything comes together to resemble the soundtrack of an army conquering the world. It is immense.
Aside from Celtic Frost’s short lived comeback, there was nothing thrash related remotely worth speaking about aside from Lair of the Minotaur. For better and for worse, this is still the case. While I’d love a proper thrash revival, I’m glad that the market is not saturated with weak imitations of metal at its most glorious. War Metal Battle Master may sound like a ridiculous character title from a roleplaying game, but it is a beast of an album that keeps my faith in real metal alive and fighting.
Matthew Bower's reappearance as Skullflower a couple years back has already yielded a slew of releases that, while retaining his love of all things noisy and guitar based, has shown frequent stylistic shifts. This, the first installment of Utech's "URSK" series (after concluding the excellent "Arc" series ) is nearly an hour of full on feedback and guitar shriek that, for all its harshness is immensely listenable and demands to be listened to VERY loudly.
The opening “Your Cities, Your Tombs” starts off with a bang, being an extremely thick wall of feedback and distortion that really sets the tone for the album. In the way many rock bands close their shows with extended sessions of noise and feedback, Skullflower starts with it. The consistent noise roar of guitar definitely stays throughout like that slightly obnoxious friend that, regardless of their behavior, are still fun to keep around.
The more “rock” Skullflower, is not here. The sound has much more in common with the dissonance of Tribulation than the more rock tinged Exquisite Fucking Boredom or Orange Canyon Mind. In some of the harshest moments, namely “Moses Conjured A Blood Niagara” and “Eve’s Dream,” the work isn’t that far removed from harsh noise practitioners in its thick, dense squeal. Unlike the more abstract acts of that genre, there is always a sense of control and careful arrangement, and it is mostly obvious that a guitar is complacent in at least part of the racket.
Some concessions to Skullflower’s more structured past come up on “Frozen Spectres” and the closing “Divinus Deus,” both of which have a buried rhythmic elements and a bit more of a space rock feel to them, the former’s more obvious guitar strums and sustained notes that aren’t too far removed from Spacemen 3’s “Suicide.” While by no means gentle or calm pastiches in the storm of feedback, they do have a somewhat more musical tone compared to the rest of the disc.
The most obvious parallel to draw here is that to the classic Metal Machine Music, since that was also a behemoth of a work built around guitars distorting and feeding back in ways Les Paul and Leo Fender never anticipated. While that was Lou Reed’s 60 minute “fuck you” to the record label, this is Matthew Bower’s art, and it is much more enjoyable with that intent behind it.
This is one of those discs that simply can’t be enjoyed in tightly controlled or low volume situations. Like one of my personal favorite unsung moments in the 1990’s UK noise rock genre, it’s like Bodychoke’s “The Red Sea.” The volume needs to be loud, speakers need to be large, and there should be a moderate amount of ringing in the ears when it’s all over.
On this four track, half hour-ish EP, Kieran Hebden has created something that is for all intents and purposes, techno. We in the field of music criticism hate such simplistic descriptions, and especially one such as that with some unintentionally pejorative connotations, but this is something that could easily get asses shaking at the disco or wherever the kids go to dance these days. But, for all its 4/4 thumping, it is also an amazingly complex piece of programming and composition that is just as well suited for deep, headphone-centric analysis.
The bleepy repetitive synth sequence that opens “Ringer” would, with its simple but catchy hook that seems to go on and on, be the perfect thing for someone who just took some E to fall in love with if it was blaring out of an overamped club PA. Listening to the same thing through a pair of headphones, I hear a complex world of subtleties and nuances that could easily slip by without listening attentively, but for those who care, the micro-melodies and tones are fascinating.
Both “Ribbons” and “Swimmer” are a bit more beat focused alongside the bleeps and beeps of synths, and the drum machine programming is every bit as complex, with the rhythms shifting and changing throughout. The closer “Wing Body Wing” goes more for full on rhythms, while the preceding tracks lent a greater attention to melody. The vast palette of percussion drawn upon for this track is almost dizzying, with its techno thump counterbalanced by synthetic tribal polyrhythms and complex breaks.
Rarely is this kind of music satisfying on both the physical and intellectual level: people rarely listen closely to the work from the multitude of boring DJs who make “club” music, nor does anyone really pop ‘n’ lock to Autechre on a Saturday night. This EP, however, could appeal to both demographics in ways that most others couldn’t.
HNIA have the ability to weave music out of the wispiest of substances, with every note issuing from their music seeming veritably to shine with the brightest of lights. This four-track EP is no exception, with delicacy and sparkling coruscations tumbling deliciously and lazily from the speakers, and scattershot glints pinging off in all directions.
The first time I heard them was nigh on two decades ago now on their debut Livonia album on 4AD, which I must have played until it wore out, so many times did it visit my turntable. Back then I was struck by the melodic and experimental originality that Warren Defever and cohorts displayed, imbuing their music with a diamantine brilliance and liquid sensuality that augured well for the band’s future; indeed this was consequently borne out, HNIA becoming one of this notable and influential English label’s biggest-selling acts. All these years later, when perhaps many a lesser band would have comfortably settled back into formulaic security and banality, HNIA still invents new ways to delight and startle us, simultaneously retaining that sensuality and liquidity that initially brought them to the attention of the record buying public.
There’s a filmy insubstantiality about HNIA’s music, despite the traditional instrumentality of piano, guitar, double bass, and bells (along with the more unusual, such as the shruit box), that effectively encapsulates longing (and nostalgia even), as if what’s there can only be seen in the corner of the eye, and should one look at it head-on, that very insubstantiality will immediately dissipate and leave nothing but gossamer threads floating away on the breeze. Add in Andy FM’s softly dream-like vocals, a voice whose qualities could only be supported by the liquidity and sensuality of music such as this, and a voice that could just as easily be broken by anything stronger than the lightest of whispering winds, and the impression of a long-ago time and place that’s never to be found again is complete. Yet for all that gauziness and delicacy, the music is lit up with a brightness bordering on the dazzling, albeit shot through perhaps with a sense of melancholy and poignancy that injects a sense of the bittersweet.
The first three songs (“I Can See a Lot of Light in You” [a reworking of Sufjan Steven’s “The Dress Looks Nice on You”]), “Come Out of the Wilderness,” and “There’s Something Between Us and He’s Changing My Words”) are the essential core of the EP, and are heavily pregnant with nostalgia and longing, if not a sense of regret and sorrow. There’s an overarching sense of unrequited love, replete with unresolved feelings and unfulfilled emotions, furthermore that progress-halting brick walls and fences have been met with. There is hope, but tinged with a great deal of sadness; these songs are laved in the salt tears of forlorn hope and inevitably find their home and solace deep in the heart.
The one disappointment on here is the last track, “Send Me a Dragonfly,” a long, meandering 14-minute instrumental that, in spite of its coruscating piano lines and glittering bells and chimes, ultimately seems to be a tad on the self-indulgent and self-reverential side, and consequently seems to go nowhere. After those first three uplifting songs, somehow the thread seems to have snapped and unravelled, leaving the feelings engendered by those initial songs very much frayed around the edges and ragged. Perhaps it should have been reined in and snipped off at half its length; better still, it could have been left off altogether.
HNIA have proven themselves consummate at distilling the essence of intangible emotion, and creating from that essence works which both illuminate, and that are capable of deeply wounding the listener. Love can be a messy affair at the best of times, even when going smoothly; unrequited and unreturned feelings can inflict the deepest cuts of all. It requires a special kind of artist to create music that can delineate the rawness without mawkishness and simultaneously with complete authenticity; on that count, at least for those first three songs, HNIA do it admirably.
This recording is something of a rarity: the sound artist Yoshi Wada, ex of New York but now living and working out of San Francisco, very rarely commits his works onto any kind of commercial platform. The Appointed Cloud is a recording of a live performance from way back in 1987, of an installation created in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science. It displays all the hallmarks of Wada's abiding interest in accidental tonalities through the use of drones, a home-made 80-pipe organ, bagpipes, a siren, and percussion of various species.
There are two prime elements here to consider; the human and the electronic. The former is provided by Wada himself on bagpipes, with help from Bob Drombowski & Wayne Hankin (both also on bagpipes), and percussive contributions from Michael Pugliese. Set against that is the electronic in the shape of a computer program, created by David Rayna (and remember this was a time when the ubiquity of electronics in music was still in the future), whose aim is to automate the entire installation, effectively creating a background on which Wada and cohorts could paint their tonal colors and textures. For me, what is at the heart of this recording is that tension created by the coming together of chaos and order in unplanned harmony or otherwise; and what results are complex harmonic interplays between frequencies and sounds, and also between those two primary controlling elements.
Comprising of a single 60 minute track, which is at times quietly meditative, as I often find the nature of drone work to be, and at others searingly dissonant. This is by turns a reflection on the nature of harmony and at others a deconstruction of the same. Intervals of drone and sub-sonic tones work their way stealthily into the brain, giving rise to the illusion that they are a separate part altogether and have their origin elsewhere; these passages seem introspective and inward-looking, like gentle waves lapping the shoreline of some lonely beach somewhere. Once in a while however, a thunderous percussive tsunami breaks shatteringly upon those same sands, breaking apart the grains of sound and reforming them into new structures, and creating new textures. The chaotic ululation of the three bagpipes adds a repetitive fractal quality, enabling one to dive into the music to explore the microtonal sonic landscape and find it reiterating itself constantly, itself echoing the cyclical and chiaroscopic nature of the work on the macroscopic level.
Chiaroscuro plays a major part in this work: not just in terms of its light and heavy elements but also in the contrasting emotional and psychic impact. There are passages of low hums and sub-sonic tones that are decidedly restful and balanced, punctuated by those monolithic and brooding stabs of percussion, collaborating in crescendo to create a sense of disequilibrium; so to do the multiple layers of shrill swirling bagpipe howls, together combining to produce a multitude of drone textures, ranging from soothing and eastern eastern-flavored skirls, and through to grating atonality, the whole bolstered by the occasional background intercession from the massed pipes of the home-made organ. At times there is an almost Philip Glass-like feel to it, compositionally and structurally, strongly reminiscent of his Koyaanisqaatsi era work. Above all, this surely is a highly dramatic presentation, containing both clear blue sky and lightning-charged thunderclouds, albeit a presentation of a species slightly lessened by the fact that the visual facet of the performance is absent, thus depriving it, in my view, of an essential element; this is, however, a minor quibble, as even without the benefit of the visual it still stands out as tumultuous and glowering as any emotionally-charged opera.
I am wary of live recordings at the best of times; this is an exception. It is well recorded, possesses a great deal of ambience, and even projects something of the ‘spirit’ of the Great Hall in which it was recorded, the quality of the Hall’s wonderful acoustics coming through more than amply. Moreover, and more importantly I feel, is that thankfully this is a timeless work, a piece which could have been composed, performed, and committed to tape this year quite as easily as it was on in 1987. Apart from its rarity as a recorded example of Wada’s work, The Appointed Cloud has another rarity value attached to it: it genuinely made me wish I had borne witness to its performance. For me, this is the ultimate seal of approval of any document pertaining to a live performance and in that sense then its credentials are absolutely unquestionable.
Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have abandoned their usual working methods for their new album. Gone are closely mic'd, digitally processed samples of non-musical objects, and along with them the heavily conceptual processes that have often made the liner notes of past Matmos albums as much fun as the music itself. In their place: synthesizers, synthesizers and more synthesizers.
When Matmos first announced that they would be making an "all synthesizer" album, it seemed like a drastic sea change for a group known for taking full advantage of digital technology to sample, process and sequence bits of audio. Instead of contact mics and laptops, Matmos would be set adrift in the world of analog synths, working without a net, trying to produce music by turns conceptual and whimsical with primitive technologies: voltage controlled oscillators, envelope generators, low frequency oscillators and ring modulators linked together by a maze of patchcords, sequenced and synced using outmoded CV technology, recorded directly to tape with absolutely no subsequent digital processing. Well, it turns out that this was all an elaborate fantasy on my part, a misconception born of my own annoying purist tendencies. In fact, Matmos have not gone "all analog" at all, and Supreme Balloon utilizes a wide array of digital synthesizers, software synths, MAX/MSP patches, MIDI synchronization and computer-based sequencing. The only real overriding concept on the album is "direct music," sound synthesis captured through the wire, rather than through the air. This means no microphones, but everything else in their arsenal is fair game.
I must admit to being disappointed by discovering that the concept wasn't quite as puritan as I had imagined. This certainly isn't Matmos' fault, but their "all synthesizer" album does have the disadvantage of being released at a time when the American and British underground music scene has become obsessed with analog synthesis, DIY home-built modular electronics, circuit bending and primitive recording methods. Many small indie labels have recently popped up with rosters consisting largely of classicist electronic music produced by vintage synthesizers. The music being made by these artists ranges from techno to noise to coldwave/industrial to 1960s Moog novelty throwbacks, but all of it shares in common a distaste for laptops and prefab, mass-marketed Korg synths and Roland grooveboxes, with their too-familiar presets and limited ranges of sound. There can be no doubt that there is something of a conservative streak in this movement; a backlash against the wide availability of pirated software that promises to instantly transform any suburban hipster into the second coming of J. Dilla or Autechre. Conservative though it may be, much of the music is fascinating, and the ascetic stance of its artists lends it a quality that stands out in the digital age. Matmos don't seem to care about any of this, and indeed Supreme Balloon is pretty much a Matmos album with one extra ground rule. As such, the concept feels a bit slight, and if the album itself contains many isolated moments of brilliance, it nevertheless does not share the delightful conceptual complexity that make albums like The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast and A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure so memorable, and amenable to analysis.
I am aware that all of the above is simply baggage I am bringing to the album. How does the music sound on its own terms? The answer is manifold. Supreme Balloon pays homage, at times, to the early gurus of electronic music, both in its popular and academic forms. This necessarily involves various reference points such as Wendy Carlos, Delia Derbyshire, Perry and Kingsley, Pierre Schaeffer and the INA-GRM group, Terry Riley, White Noise, Tomita, Klaus Schulze and Cluster. In this sense, the album is just as populated with "personalities" as The Rose Has Teeth. Without recourse to objects or texts, the references are more subtle, but still present. This results in an album that feels at times like a constellation of reference points, especially tracks such as "Les Folies Francaises" and the title track, the former a performance of a French baroque piece using a Switched-On Bach-style patch on a Korg MS2000, and the latter a side-long tribute very much in the kosmische vein, Tangerine Dream by way of Thighpaulsandra. But this is not the whole story: this album is not just a tribute to electronic musicians past. The album also shares with Matmos' previous work a penchant for whimsy and humor, and a predilection for infectious, simple melodies in the midst of crowded compositions that rarely forsake the "groove" for very long. A song like "Exciter Lamp" is a case in point; a weird collection of alien synth patches, jarring tones and oddball sequences that do not fail to coalesce into the crunchy, melodic, bottom-heavy techno for which Matmos have become known.
There are also some great guest players on Supreme Balloon, including the Arkestra's Marshal Allen on "Mister Mouth," playing the EVI, sort of an electronic version of a claviola. Matmos take full advantage of digital technology to chop up Allen's solo and process it into funky, resonant techno. The track is accomplished, but I can't help but feel like something is lost in translation amidst all this processing. And what is lost is any trace of the stochastic. One of the things that makes hand-played (or mouth-played) analog synths interesting is their potential for randomness, unreliability, unpredictable jumps in pitch and odd bits of noise and interference. By smoothing off the rough edges and treating the sounds like just another object to sample and process, I feel as if Matmos missed a chance.
Again, though, these complaints find me going "outside the text" a bit, looking for something that might have been, rather than what is there, which is frequently brilliant. My favorite track on the album proper is the title track, a beautiful, longform synth excursion that unfolds in a leisurely way, gathering together hyperelliptic surfaces and resonant emanations to create areas of tension and resolution, turbulence and placidity. The use of some offbeat musical gadgets—an electronic tabla machine and the Flame MIDI Talking Synth among them—satisfies the gearhead in me, while adding outre textures that Matmos can truly call their own. It's an awesome journey that pays homage to Cluster and Tangerine Dream, without ever being overly reverent. The Latin-inflected "Rainbow Flag" opens the album on a kitschy note, in which easy listening potential is complicated by clusters of high-pitched bleeps. It's not quite the flamboyant gay pride parade suggested by the track's title, but it's close enough, a joyous assemblage of campy musical references, from theremin-heavy sci-fi soundtracks to the unmistakable sounds of the Stylophone, probably the cheapest instrument used by Matmos in the making of the album. "Cloudhopper" ends the album on an ambient note, a spacey circulation of events that sounds perhaps closest to what my original, purist fantasies had imagined for the album.
Supreme Balloon is unique in having five bonus tracks amid its various formats; four on the iTunes and double-LP versions, and one on the Japanese CD version. The quality of these tracks is average to amazing. "Staircase," which appeared first on the Peace (for mom) compilation, sounds like an electronic version of Lubomyr Melnyk's minimalistic piano arpeggiations, interesting but slight. The best of the bonus tracks is definitely "Hashish Master," featuring the incomparable Terry Riley on ARP 2600. The dark, druggy tones of the track bring it close in mood to the Coil of Astral Disaster, intense repetitions and decadent, Dionysian undercurrents. In my view, this track should have been included on the album proper, even if it might have broken up the lighter, kitschier vibe of the rest of the album. "Orban" is an admirable tribute to acid techno, containing plenty of eyeball-vibrating MDMA smacks, playing with the stereo channels in an engaging way, even in the absence of any sort of central hook to hold onto. The album artwork deserves a special mention, with its postmodern combination of 1889 World's Fair French Pavilion aesthetics, with a colorful, fractalized landscape seemingly generated by topological algorithms.
Taken together with its bonus tracks, Supreme Balloon is an admirable tangent for Matmos, full of stunning synthscapes and groovy complexity. Though it often seems to be working at cross purposes with itself, staging a sometimes uncomfortable conversation between the asceticism of classic electronic musics and the Matmosian maximalist sample-and-process strategies, there are enough winning moments to more than recommend it. I predict that this album will inspire some accusations of dilletantism to be directed towards the duo, as their dip into the often rarefied realm of direct music delights in its own impiousness, but I suspect that Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt won't spend much time worrying about such things.
Limited edition of 300 copies in a heavy stock screen printed jacket. Numbered.
A Zamuro is a dark South American vulture of great size. Zamuro is also a solo composition piece for portable synth and analog filter. Side A on this LP is a live realization of this piece recorded at the Compound in San Francisco in 2006 (Mastered by Lasse Marhaug). Carlos composed and performed this piece live on several tours in the US/Europe/Japan all trough out 2006 and 2007, if you saw him live in those two years this is the piece he performed.
This was the most complete version of it that made it to tape. Side B is a studio piece recorded live on a much larger modular synth, based around the same theme, but with structural and tonal variations not in the original composition. This is pure psychedelic electronic music. Cover illustration by Megan Ellis. Screen printed at Monoroid
This delightful vinyl single celebrates the occasion of the inauguration of The Embassy of The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland in Mexico City on 30 August, 2002. It is a perfect demonstration that few things are more serious than well-spun yarns and few things unravel as amusingly as seriousness.
Amongst many other things, Elgaland-Vargaland has a constitution, a hymn, a coat of arms, a national dish, secret police, embassies, and worldwide Ministers for a wide variety of subjects including Astral Projection, Reinstatement of Obsolete Technology, Change, Nostalgia, Frequencies, Shopping, Bloody Marys, Words (all words ever uttered, written or stated in any form in the past, now or in the future) and Magic, Agriculture, Digital Food, Nothing, Lamination, Shagging, and the rather splendid Ministry for Missing Persons (with no name listed since "The Minister has gone missing, having closed the Ministry - permanently..." ).
The single is in a numbered limited edition of 500 in a lovely and radiant sleeve. The music within is balanced betwixt spirit and dignity in a way that perhaps only a mariachi band could have achieved. KREV seeks world unification one individual at a time. On 27th of May 1992 at 12 noon GMT, the state of Elgaland-Vargaland was proclaimed by its founders (of Elgaland) Leif Elggren and (of Vargaland) CM von Hausswolff. This after Konungarikena Elgaland-Vargaland decided that from the 14th of March 1992, to annex and occupy the following territories:
"i – All border frontier areas between all countries on earth, and all areas (up to a width of 10 nautical miles) existing outside all countries’ territorial waters. We designate these territories our physical territory.
ii – Mental and perceptive territories such as: the Hypnagogue State (civil), the Escapistic Territory (civil), and the Virtual Room (digital)."
You can't argue with that.
May is traditionally a big month for this state. Accordingly there has been a burst of regal activity with the opening of The Institute of Pataphysics in Santander and the announcement that Elgaland-Vargaland will, on May 27th 2008, inaugurate the new embassy in Zurich, Switzerland, on the site of Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, CH-8001 Zürich. Then, a day later, Elgaland-Vargaland will annex the Bodensee (Lake Constance) between Switzerland, Austria and Germany "in order to give the nation's mental territories, such as the hypnagoguic state, a necessary physicality." Disappointingly no KREV passports have been issued since 2005 but hopefully mine will now be forthcoming.