A lost gem of private '60s psychedelia, Dave Bixby's debut solo effort is a lonely affair to be sure. With only acoustic guitar in hand, the songwriter penned this album in about a month in reaction to a year of drug abuse. Having filled his head with plenty of acid, the songs here serve as an intimate portrait of an unhinged victim of counterculture.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Every word, rhythm, and melody that seeps from David Longstreth's brain reeks of insincerity and pompousness. The most recent fruit of his ego, Bitte Orca, has come to be pornography for writers and aimless hipsters hungry for something "eccentric" and "unusual" over which they may pant. In truth, it's a dull and transparent mish-mash of pop styles seasoned with empty gestures and overwrought arrangements.
Too often overshadowed by the shrine that is Nuggets, this compilation, along with its companion Testament volume, has nevertheless earned significant cult status among garage aficianados, and rightly so. Comprising a plethora of rare singles from the era, the album is a near necessity for those even tangentially interested in this material.
A reissue of one of the earlier releases on the Intransitive label, this masterwork has loss none of its dark luster in the past decade. It is a dark trip up river into a heart of darkness, with Marchetti as the local shaman and guide, alongside a broken radio that picks up random frequencies across the world and sacred magnetic tapes, presenting music across the world as a form of cultural transcendence.
Culled from a slew of self-released lathe cut LPs and CD-Rs, the first pressing of this disc far outnumbers the sum total of the original material here, the largest of which was an acetate LP of 27 copies. To call this compilation bizarre does a disservice to the word, but the personal world documented on cassette from this husband and wife duo fit in perfectly with the absurdist likes of Sudden Infant or the Schimpfluch-Commune community and deserves a wider outlet than just the personal, handmade releases.
A recent discovery to listeners in this country perhaps, Omar Souleyman has nevertheless been a staple of, in the words of the press release, "Syrian street-level folk-pop" for years now. This collection unearths some of his strongest moments put to tape, compiled and lovingly assembled by the always on point Sublime Frequencies imprint. The result is a non-stop collection of the singer's signature grooves, which stand tall beside this shore's often paltry pop offerings.
The latest release from Berlin-based sound designer and producer Ben Lukas Boysen is an ambitious two disc opus. On the first disc, he once again works with precision more than melody and space more than structure but on the second disc, his remixers take Hecq's original in a dozen different directions.
As fitting a split as could be, this album joins two of rock's most experimental experimentalists in a meeting of minds that, as any split should do, provides new insights into the output of both artists, creating a fitting relationship between these two diverging takes on weird.
This mail order only edition of Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles’ The Surveillance Lounge is superb. In addition, there are two extra CDs of drastically different versions of the album. Creaking and groaning their way across an audio backdrop that brings to mind the boggling landscapes of Yves Tanguy, the three discs cover the same unnerving mental states as classic Nurse With Wound albums like Homotopy to Marie and Insect and Individual Silenced. It is the first Nurse release since Salt Marie Celeste that has spooked me in any significant way and it is a welcome return to weirder moods after the lighter side of Nurse With Wound that has been explored with their recent live and studio output.
For those who have found the more recent work of Sutcliffe Jugend and Kevin Tomkins to be too soft or restrained, the other member of SJ has put together a solo disc that’ll satisfy the need for angry and harsh power electronics. While there is a lot in common with the mid/late 1990s Sutcliffe Jugend, there is a bit more room for innovation, and even some tracks that work in rhythms and sounds more inspired by early electronic music rather than serial murder.
