Noiseweek

Signs of life

2010-02-13T09:48:00.000-08:00

Well, ok...so it's been 2.5 years since out last post, but we seem to be on the road back to becoming an active blog again. Still gonna be a little while before anything gets posted here, but for now, you can follow Noiseweek on Twitter for release and show updates and other random noise news...and read our rundown of Noise & other experimental sounds in the 2000's...and keep an eye out here, some actual writing and music to come soon...thanks!

SORRY...

2007-10-18T14:54:00.002-07:00

Sorry everyone - life has gotten away from us here at Noiseweek HQ, but we're just about to coax it out from under the couch with some warm milk, and will be back next week with multiple noises and polysyllabic blabbery about same...thanks for yr patience!

EDIT: Ok, sorry, obviously this has turned into a reaaaaally long week...but we're planning to re-up before the end of January and get regular again after that - thanks for your patience, and while you're waiting, why not check out our book, which should be ready to ship next week...

POCAHAUNTED / ROBEDOOR

2007-09-23T23:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry we flaked out last week, but luckily we've got this week something that should make up for the temporary absence...so, you'd think after two decades of writing and reading about music, I'd have written and read enough premature ravings over records that faded after the initial spike of novel enticement, to realize I shouldn't freak over a release I just got. But then, you could also argue that, having seen this kinda reaction so often outta me and others, maybe I've developed a radar for records that sound great both right away and long after...

Anyway, regardless of whatever's actually true in all the above useless over-thought, I can't imagine that my infatuation with one particular record I just got yesterday is gonna subside anytime soon. The release in question is a double-CD split between two of L.A.'s finest drone/noise outfits, Pocahaunted and Robedoor, slyly titled Hunted Gathering and birthed by the tirelessly awesome Digitalis folks. That "finest" adjective is a bit presumptuous - this is the first I've heard of either - but they both have solid discographies spread across a bunch of exclt labels, and besides, there could be 100 similar groups in L.A. and I still would bet that none have generated anything better than what these two super-creative duos have achieved here, easily one of my favorite releases of any stripe this year.

Other than discographies, there's not a ton of other info out there about these two - all I can tell is that Pocahaunted is Bethany and Amanda, Robedoor is Alex and Britt, and two of the four are married and involved in the excellent Not Not Fun label. Other than that, all you really need to know is locked in the beautiful tones and daunting noises of the eight massive tracks on Hunted Gathering. Generally speaking, Pocahaunted trades in more ethereal seances, while Robedoor are more given to monolithic mega-drones, but both seem capable of either and a lot more. What they have most in common is a wide-open sense of space and time, and a beautiful ability to let their music grow and expand to ideal fruition. Which is why the format of Hunted Gathering works so well: alternating 10-minute-or-so tracks from each group and leading up until a capping 13-minute collaboration, it gives enough room to each to spread out their long tones and swelling ideas without restricting either's ability to get lots of great sonic shots in.

I'm starting to veer into starry-eyed platitudes here, so how about some specifics: Pocahaunted's slow, gentle, yet biting stuff is super hypnotic, and the best example is "Warmest Knives." Though it's raw, echoey, and even kinda dark, this aching cut has a soaring lilt that somehow conjures in my brain what might happen if some of the Dead C.'s meandering guitar chords got lost in the ethereal luggage of both Charalambides (in terms of sky-seeking meditation) and Bardo Pond (in terms of smoke-cloud haze and, especially, Isobel's knack for melting flute strains into psych guitar blasts).

Robedoor don't remind me of quite as many people, though their gravelly drones do call to mind Double Leopards (as does the nice packaging of this gatefolded double CD, which when I first opened it made me think of the packaging of Leps' classic Halve Maen on Eclipse), and even the darkened metal strains of the Earth/Sunn0)))/Southern Lord contingent. Perhaps they'll remind you of someone else, but I'll bet it's someone else awesome. Because Robedoor's thick soundscapes are so full of fine aural silt to sift through - at least that's true of their very highest stuff, like my fave track here, "Razed Terrain," which builds cavernous reverberations and ground-shaking detonations out of hums, howls, moans, and thick sonic wind.

So to make up for last week's emptiness, here are both of the aforementioned tracks...hopefully they'll rattle your cranial components they way they have mine...

mp3's:
POCAHAUNTED - "Warmest Knives" from Hunted Gathering
ROBEDOOR - "Razed Terrain" from Hunted Gathering

AETHR MYTH'D

2007-09-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

Gotta be a little brief this week, my apologies...so one of the more underrated labels (or maybe more like underexposed - it's not like people who know the label don't rate it highly) around nowadays is the always awesome Spirit of Orr. I don't have a ton of their releases, but the ones I do have really rule, and their roster is pretty impeccable: Temple of Bon Matin, Ashtray Navigations, Axolotl, etc. I also really dig one of the entries in their "Blueberry Honey" CD-R series - a nice collection of oddities from Massachusetts mind-melders Believers called Forgotten Tracks - and I was lucky enough to be gifted with the fifth and newest episode of this series, The Night Outside by Aethr Myth'd. I've only had it a coupla days, but it's filled up pretty much all of my non-US Open time this weekend...

The band's basic story, from what I can glean, is that they were kind of formed as an alternate version of the Other Method (note the name similarities), with Paul Labrecque of that group (and also Sunburned) joined by Ron Schneiderman (at least for this CD...I've seen them listed elsewhere as Labrecque and Valerie Beth Webber, or Labrecque and Bram Devens, so apparently the parts rotate). Having never heard the Other Method I can't say what the stylistic deviation from the mothership is, but A Night Outside does remind me of Thuja in its organic noise feel, Pelt in its backwoods-y take on Theater of Eternal Music-style drone, and Jazzfinger (who've also been on Spirit of Orr) in the echoing lo-fi envelope that surrounds the band's humming meditations. A pretty stellar set of referents, to be sure...

All of which means that this is a fascinating set of windy drones, slow-growing noise, and eerie folk fragments that manages to be truly hypnotic - at least in the sense that every time I try to jump back to a particular track, the next thing I now I'm four or five tracks down the road before I've realized that we're not in the same town anymore. Makes it kinda hard to pick a fave to post - they're pieces of a puzzle that's easier to see when it's all put together - but I am particularly enamored of the second track, a rolling journey of squawking noises, crowing cacophony, and barely-there percussiveness, all weaved together with tantalizing passages of faded restraint. It's the kinda thing that makes me wanna lay down in a moon-lit forest and keep squinting and blinking in hopes of someday making out what I won't ever be able to see...or better yet have a dream in which I'm doing the same, and this is the soundtrack.

mp3:
~~AETHR MYTH'D - (track two) from A Night Outside~~

DIAL

2007-09-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

Anyone familiar with one of the godfather genres to current Noise, No Wave (and hey, if you're not familiar and want to be, you can pre-order my book on the subject, due out this winter- yes, I really did write a book about No Wave - more on that soon) is surely a fan of the hypnotic tones of pioneering group Ut. Their music throughout the 80's was a pretty unique hybrid of No Wave dissonance and gut-punching rock that continues to be unfairly overlooked, despite Mute's recent reissues of Griller and In Gut's House (someone needs to pick up that ball and bring us new editions of Ut EP, Early Live Life, Conviction, etc etc etc).

One of Ut's pilot lights, Jacqui Ham, continued on after that group's demise with the equally mind-blowing Dial. I had stupidly slept on their output until Jacqui was kind enough to educate me with their new disc, 168k. I was so blown away by the amazing combo of primitive rock, noise, trash-punk, and whatever else you wanna call it on this disc, that I immediately ordered the other two Dial missives, 1996's Infraction and 2000's Distance Runner. Both are thorough forays into wide-open guitar clatter, snarling vocal intensity, heavy rhythmic sputtering, and so much more. I hear at times the dense plod of the Dead C. and/or Gate, the shattering distortion of Sightings, the quicksand lurch of Mouthus, and the pure abstractions of Ham's No Wave brethren, particularly the searing stomp of Mars and the harrowed howl of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. But mostly I hear an amazingly singular take on rock that's been imploded/exploded/fractured into noise, and my jaw is just permanently dropped by how devoted Jacqui still is to making uncompromising music. She's pretty much my hero.

Anyway, as great as those first two Dial records are, I think 168k is a big step up, an unerring set of eight demolishing tunes that cover all kinds of rough sonic terrain without ever dipping into predictability, tedium, or even a single dull moment, to be honest. Ham and R. Smith's punishing guitar work meshes into knots of aural barbed wire, and Lou Ciccotelli's raw, crunching drum sound wraps the whole thing up into a thorny ball of fire. (I apologize for getting so hyperbolic - big shock coming from me, right? - but I implore you to trust me this time; I really think 168k is gonna hold up as one of the year's best, easily).

Jacqui has been kind enough to let me post a track from 168k to whet yr appetite. "Soda Wars" (linked below) is a great example of Dial's sonic mastery: opening with a rolling/truncated Robbie Yeats-worth beat, it grinds two layers of cracking guitar into a lava-cascade of fire-colored noise, nearly swallowing Ham's stomach-hitting howl, which manages to sound painfully desperate and dauntingly authoritative at the same time. If you dig this, I really beg you to get the whole thing. It'll be out soon and available through some distros, and I'll update here when they in fact have it for sale, but until then you can contact me via noiseweek-at-comcast-dot-net and I can hook you up with how to get it immediately.

(on an unrelated note, for all DC-area noiseniks who don't already know - Sonic Circuits is coming up this week - lots of amazing shit happening, hope to see you there!)

mp3:
~~DIAL - "Soda Wars" from 168k~~

VIOLENCE JAZZ

2007-08-26T19:39:00.000-07:00

Received a massive package of stuff this week from the gracious, hyper-industrious Brooklyn label Tigerasylum. Haven't made it through it all yet, but my general impression is that Mr. Schranz has unearthed a lot of choice free-improv splatter, roughly akin to what Mr. Kriney of Color Sounds has also dutifully excavated. In fact, there's some personnel overlap there, as both Herr Kriney and La Otracina guitarist Ninni Morgia are part of the rock-solid Quivers ensemble, and Mr. Morgia also participates in both the salty splatter of The Right Moves (along with Storm&Stress/Talibam! drum-annhilator Kevin Shea) and the sprinting trio Trauma Unit. So, clearly there's some thick spice in the underground water reserves up in NY lately, and Tigerasylum is admirably swimming in it.

Despite the general Brooklyn-centric thrust of the Tigerasylum roster, so far I find myself gravitating most to a CD-R called Protection, by a Boston trio called Violence Jazz. Now, before I explain why, please indulge for a few moments my juvenile aversion to bad band names. For some reason I'm just really picky about what band names sound good to me (I think it's fair to say I don't let that pickyness affect what I think of the music), so given that rather unfair outlook, it's probably best if I stop discussing band names here...but, c'mon, Violence Jazz? Could we be a little more on the nose, for a double-sax wielding group given to noisy extrapolations on jazz-based improv? Also, using a genre in your band name? That almost never works, especially when the only other word is a super-cliched descriptor. Might as well call yourselves Blues Hammer, for god's sake...

Luckily, Violence Jazz's choice of what to play and how to play it is a lot sharper than their choice of name. Their forward-crashing improv is as raging and adrenaline-addicted as anything else on the Tigerasylum roster, but they're also fond of bigger noise and drone touches that pushes their stuff into weird, murky, unpredictable arenas. A couple of tracks here are even strictly atmospheric, kinda nightmarishly so, while others combine high-level jazz cacophony with hammering rhythm, dense guitar and electronics din, storm-like clouds of drone, and a few other things, too. I think the second of the six untitled tracks on Protection does all of the above best, carrying a blinding improv opening into a hypnotically plodding beat and back again. It also includes a weird little break with some kind of phone-conversation sample that I can't say I'm in love with, but I certainly didn't see it coming. And that's the attraction of Violence Jazz - it sounds like they're pretty devoted to finding sounds no one is expecting to hear.

mp3:
~~VIOLENCE JAZZ - (track two) from Protection~~

RELIGIOUS KNIVES

2007-08-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

Been a little behind in my noise-gathering duties lately, but a big thanks to those of you who are sending stuff, and I promise to get on some of those soon as well as accelerating my seeking habits...for now, I'm gonna blab a little about someone you probably already know, Religious Knives. Anyone vaguely familiar w/me or this blog is probably sick of me spewing about Mouthus and Double Leopards, but hey, I'm not gonna pretend that I don't eternally love em both, cause I do. So naturally I pretty much loved Religious Knives (Nate of Mouthus w/Mike & Maya of Double Leopards) before I'd even heard them, and definitely did once I had. The tangent the group took the first few times I saw them - kind of droney/dreamy but structured and even rock-ish music - was definitely intriguing and tough to pin down, and their first few recs that I heard - an excellent 3-track CD-R called RK4, and this year's No Fun debut Remains - kept that mystery going, with most of their songs resisting definition through murky atmospheres and a kind of floating, beat-less forward motion.

Cut to a coupla days ago, when I got to see the Knives again for the first time since January's Winter Ends Destruction fest held in the waning months of Tonic. They've been playing a decent amount lately including a European tour, and judging by the absolutely hypnotic set they played this time, have become a bit of a rock (or even prog-rock) monster. The addition of a bassist (whose name escapes me, sorry) gives their stuff a kind of chugging locomotion, and the way they accent simple patterns with Mike and Maya's radiant guitar, warming keys, and ghostly moans is really stunning. Parts are pretty Kraut-y in a Can sense, but what I really dig is how these guys maintain their noise-sculpture sensibility in the context of structured rock. Every song, as repetitive and patterned as they got, had a core drone and attention to sonic texture that I doubt would be there if these guys weren't already experts at manipulating and massaging pure abstraction.

Mike was nice enough to bequeath me a tour CD-R before the show, a split with the Knives' Euro tour-mates Airport War. Both of the Knives' contributions are still a little airier than what I saw them play this week, but "Everything Happens Twice" definitely captures some of the vibe of their current sound, moreso than anything on Remains. Nate's beat is more prominent, the bass has definitely got the repeto-groove down solid, and Mike's guitar and the spectre-like vox in the second half are right on target. I'm now way more stoked for the band's next release, whatever/whenever - and, oddly, kinda way more into the previous ones now, as you can hear the seeds of this new sound germinating there - so prepare yourself for more sycophantic fawning whenever that next rec should emerge.

mp3:
~~RELIGIOUS KNIVES - "Everything Happens Twice" from Religious Knives /Airport War split tour CD-R~~

DP / DAVE PHILLIPS

2007-08-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

Made a rather hectic sojourn to heat-infested NYC last weekend - hence the lack of substantial posting last week - and finally got to hit the fabulous Hospital Productions underground lair. Surely you know all there is to know by now about Dom Prurient's amazing noise/metal store, but if you haven't been there, I can attest it's all it's wacked up to be. Unfortunately I stopped by on a day wherein not only was Dom not working so I couldn't chat him up, but I only had $20 on me. So I decided to pick something totally random that I didn't know anything about, and the best candidate was a CD with an oversized, full-color cover that read simply "field recordings," with a logo next to it that I later surmised represented the letters "d" and "p". I could tell from the inside info that the CD literally had field recordings on it, and that it was on the excellent young label Little Enjoyer, but that was all I could glean.

There's still not a ton to glean now that I've scrubbed the web - even Little Enjoyer's own site doesn't mention the release - but I did finally figure out from the CD's fine print that these recordings were made by Dave Phillips (i.e. DP), Fear of God mastermind and core brain-cell in the massive grey organism known as Schimpfluch-Gruppe. I don't know much about Dave and his previous pursuits, but I do know he's a commited noisemaker, so I think my mysterious purchase was well-divined.

As far as what's actually on the CD, it's pretty recognizably field recordings - lots of whirring wind, humming insects, gurgling frogs, rolling water, etc - but Phillips has a clear knack for capturing stuff that has the repetition and texture of the best, uh, intelligently-designed noise. Listening on the train back from NYC I initially settled into these pieces as a kind of 3-D audio closet to store my head in for the trip, but as I wrapped back around to the beginning I started to hear weird structures and even semi-themes in Phillips' collection of random, undirected sound. Of course even the numbest brain can find shapes and colors in almost any field recordings, but the best kind produce so many patterns you almost can't keep track. Such an effect only comes from discriminating editing and an ear/head/spirit for catching the right stuff at the right time. These traits, DP has.

Anyway, I'm not gonna claim that this disc is some kinda revolution in field recordings or even a singular noise disc, but it certainly deserves a place on yr shelf if yer into this kind of randomized screech...since everything on here's pretty short, I'll give ya two tastes of DP's collection style, one that he describes as a "noon heat serenade" filled with happy piercings, and one made of bullfrogs "who somehow dig themselves under the earth's outer layer," and proceed to croak in super-fascinating loops. Enjoy...

mp3's:
~~DP - Noon Heat Serenade and Bullfrogs, from Field Recordings~~

SORRY...

2007-08-10T01:10:00.000-07:00

...but the week got away from us again. we'll be back by Monday with something you'll like, we promise...thanks for yr patience...

SPIRIT OF THE POSITIVE WIND

2007-07-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

Got a nice three-CD-R-pack from the Mouthus-run Our Mouth label a while back and have been stupidly ignoring it, but finally cracked them all open (digitally speaking) this week and none disappoint. There's Big Whiskey's Semi-Brown Music, a nice pair of muffled, rattling psych/noise excursions; Lexie Mountain's Blood Shed in the Course of Things, two really excellent 18-minute collages of fractured speech, vocal garbling, and cramped noise falling in the same geo-musical region as some of Carly Ptak's solo stuff; and, the most mouth-watering of the three, a self-titled EP by Spirit of the Positive Wind, the quartet of Mouthus-men Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson, Karl Bauer (aka Axolotl), and Magik Marker/GHQ'er Pete Nolan.

Now I'm not gonna pretend that the two tracks here are some magic amalgam of these four's best moments - it would be both ridiculous to claim and unfair to expect - but I can say that I'm not totally willing to rule out the possibility quite yet. Cause both pieces have really snuck up on me this weekend - when I checked em out early in the week, they sounded rather unremarkably good, like something you'd really dig if you saw these four jamming on it in a practice space, but that you'd not really think much about afterwards - an elusive, moment-in-time sort of thing. But today I'm surprised to hear stuff I didn't hear before; both pieces actually sound quite different from what I remembered just a few days ago, especially the 16-minute second track "West Wind," which earlier felt like a collective, passive loop sort of along the lines of Mick Jagger's Moog soundtrack to Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother, but now suddenly feels a lot more active. It even feels like a more subdued, beat-driven version of something from Double Leopards' great, under-appreciated Circa 1999-2001. I'm not saying it's ever gonna be some kinda epic that I return to annually, but there's a lot more happening in it than I first gave it credit for, which for me always means something...

That track's a little too long to post, but luckily the first cut, "East Wind," is almost as good. This is more like what you'd expect from the participants - lots of winding, whistling guitar noise accompanied by little semi-patters of blipping noise and chiming loops. The trebly, gravelly edge of the guitar stuff for some reason paints an image in the back of my brain of a drum-less Blue Humans, or a more stoned version of the great static noise on the Bill Orcutt solo album. Those are both strained comparisons tho - more feelings than actually literal resemblences - and anyway what's more important/cool is that the track doesn't immediately sound like Mouthus, Axolotl, or Magik Markers. It simply sounds like four fertile-minded noise-improvisers making sure not to waste the time they got to spend together, which more than justifies Our Mouth's documentation of said experience (and, hopefully, promotion of repeat occurrences...)

mp3:
~~SPIRIT OF THE POSITIVE WIND - "East Wind" from Spirit of the Positive Wind~~

VALERIO COSI

2007-07-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

Huge apologies for last week's unexplained absence; won't happen again. Been wrapping my head lately around this new album–the first I've heard–by Italian multi-instrumental improviser Valerio Cosi, on the always intriguing Ruby Red label. It's called, kinda blandly, Freedom Meditation Music Vol. III, and it seems to be rooted in pretty open, spacious free jazz. In fact, on a couple tracks that's all it is, but a bunch of others are these weird amalgams of jazz and noise, and sometimes it's not even amalgams, just straight hard cuts from a snappy bit of horn/drum swing to a blinding storm of intense howl. The best stuff is a little smoother than that, melting bits of semi-modality into flattened stretches of drone. But even those spots have this weird kind of incongruity, an odd sense that these things just shouldn't be put together, that I really dig. Maybe it's not so much shouldn't as usually aren't, which is kinda refreshing - even my fave recs of late don't offer anything so intriguingly off...

I think this partially comes from the fact that Cosi made this rec by cutting and pasting together different recordings, so naturally there's gonna be some noticeable juxtapositions and strange turns of sonic phrase. But lots of people do that, so who knows...Maybe it's just not that weird–it is, after all, just jazz mixed with noise–and instead I could just be losing my mind. But after having witnessed about 1000 free jazz shows and probably as many noise ones, I can't say I remember seeing/hearing/caring about anything that sounded quite like this. I've certainly never heard anyone called jazz get noisy in quite this way–even my favorite all-out free jazz terrors keep their noise in the context of acoustic improv, rather than electric bombast (please give me some counterexamples, cause–besides Hat City Intuitive, who do things in a way similar to Cosi but don't sound a bit like him–I can't think of any, and I think that's gotta be more due to my mushy mind than any reality going on here...)

Anyway, while I retreat to my rubber room, I'm gonna leave ya with two examples of Cosi's brilliance, since I owe ya from last week. These are two of the most extreme cases of his jazz/noise yin/yang (the opening track, "Little Hymns to the African Story: i) Chumbani Mule," is more of a true seamless hybrid), with "I Wanna Be Black" (not a Lou Reed cover) offering bouncy jazz interrupted by a car crash, and the even more absurd "You Can't Pretend to Be Someone" chopping Lounge Lizard Heaven into electronic Hades and then some kind of sample-skipping Limbo. Enjoy, and I'll be back with my full brain next week...

mp3's:
~~VALERIO COSI - "I Wanna Be Black" & "You Can't Pretend to Be Someone" from Freedom Meditation Music Vol. III~~

BRENDAN MURRAY

2007-07-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

From our how-the-fuck-did-we-miss-this files: the fine folks at Intransitive have bequeathed us a couple of CDs this week that we're embarrassed not to have already found on our own, as they've been out almost six months now, and certainly weren't hiding. One is a stellar collab from label head Howard Stelzer and NZ destructo-unit Seht, and the other is a really mind-boggling collection of noise/drone/waves/ear-massages/ear-rapes from sound-god Brendan Murray. I call him that strictly on the basis of Wonders Never Cease, cause it's really a pretty much perfect slab of audio manipulation - at least if, like me, you like hard-edged noise but are also a sucker for droning ambience, electronic drift, waves of organ-like waft, and anything else that touches the same kind of lobe-buttons as the power harmonics of Rhys Chatham or Tony Conrad, the hypnotic soothe of the Kranky roster, the melodic noise of Fennesz or Tim Hecker, all wrapped in a noise edge that keeps it from floating into the clouds or fading off into the horizon.

Now that all my overused adjectives and references are out of the way, how about some facts: Murray is a Boston-based drone generator who's been spewing out well-considered noise since about 1998, and releasing it since 2001. Wonders Never Cease is about his 9th or so record, and it was made out of live stuff he recorded at shows in New York and New England. Generally I think the re-working of live material is a much better idea than the putting it out flatly as-is, and this record will from now one be my exhibit #1. Murray keeps enough of the live ambience and impulsiveness in to give his pieces a kinda 3-D reality without the dryness of over-thought, yet does enough reworking and manipulating to make real compositions out of what might have otherwise been uneven peak/valley exercises. Not that I don't love valleys, but Wonders Never Cease manages to make everything peak and still let it all breathe and develop and actually exist, which is why it's blown me away each of the 15 or so times I've listened to it in the past 2 days.

Clearly my brain has lost its ability to do anything but drool in front of this great record, so I implore you to rid yourself of my ramblings and check out "Hymn Two" (linked below), a nice little stretch of chunky, teeth-breaking noise that slowly melts into a windy blast of cold sonic air...then audit some other excerpts on his myspace page...and then order all of Brendan's stuff immediately...

mp3:
~~BRENDAN MURRAY - "Hymn Two" from Wonders Never Cease~~

(VxPxC)

2007-07-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not super familiar with the work and history of L.A. trio (VxPxC) - there's certainly a lot of info out there, particularly a great Dusted overview and the band's own detail-rich site - so instead of digesting all that and regurgitating it here, I can just tell you that I really dug their one-track, 52-minute live contribution to Digitalis's Bottled Smoke series (there's a new one on Digitalis too that looks like a must-have), and I even more dig (nice grammar) their new six-song CD-r Lizard in the Spring, on my pal Eric's promising new Upstate NY label Tape Drift.

On my first coupla listens this rec sounded kind of sun-baked and beatific, despite the hazy production that immediately gives everything a kind of eerie, dark-cave feel...but lately I've started to realize that (VxPxC) are a lot more sinister than I initially gave em credit for. Maybe insidious is a better descriptor - these songs tend to creep up on you. They're patient and even relaxed on the surface, but burning and grinding down below, with an impressively pointed aggression that really digs into your cranium like a bug laying eggs in your ear while you sleep. Even a track like "Sidewalk Melter," with its seemingly laconic vibraphone clinking, has a cutting undertow that eventually turns into a truly haunting dissonance, much the same way that the hymnal organ drone on "In Day's Light" morphs into a buzzing saw, and the nearly song-like strumming on "Praying for the Regurgitation" slowly collapses into a woozy, nightmarish warp.

Of course, there's other stuff on Lizard in the Spring that's just flat-out menacing, my favorite being the horror-show lurch "Summergirls" (linked below), whose murky hypnosis I can't quite put my finger on. There's parts that are pretty and parts that feel random and almost inhuman, but from about half way through all the way to the end (VxPxC) constructs a vertigo-inducing stretch of aural imbalance and disorientation that must be what nausea would sound like if it felt good. The title slays me too - something about this dense, dark, dripping bit of heavy atmosphere seems paradoxically summer-ish, like waves of humidity rising from the blacktop and camping out between your ears.

mp3:
~~(VxPxC) - "Summergirls" from Lizard in the Spring~~

NEW DRUNKS

2007-06-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

Our Cold 100 chart got electro-shocked back into health this week with a deluge of prime noise arriving via both physical and electronic means. I'd love to (and eventually will) excrete some words about the first three great psych/blurt releases on my buddy Eric's brand new Tape Drift label, or the excellent free-download live thing by Richmond behemoth Caustic Castle, or the seven-year-old drum and guitar damage of W!77!N6 (aka Willing), since all of those offer nicely varied takes on noise, drone, improv-rock, and all the oceans of gray that lie in between. But for some reason I found myself in the mood for some all-out, unrelenting capital-N Noise, and while the second track on Tape Drift's Century Plants CD certainly qualifies, the best candidate turns out to be the unexpected aural vomit of New Drunks, courtesy of a new New Jersey label with the fine hick-baiting name of Fuckallyall.

The nine tracks on Minus are all relatively standard noise fare, and I mean that as a compliment - all the blasts, scrapes, crashes, and annihlating aural assaults are nicely familiar, and consistently interesting even when they're not something you haven't heard before, which is true most of the time. Brian Wayne (the one guy behind New Drunks) was just a teenaged Alabama recluse when he concocted these multi-dubbed splatterings in the early 90's, recording only, uh, "acoustic" instruments (like forks, spoons, blenders, and fans) and then mixing the resulting tapes into overloaded infinity, without the aid of any effects or pedals. So I'd say you could forgive Brian for aping his heroes (Merzbow, Masonna, etc) since he was so young, except there's nothing here that needs forgiving - if you like constant sonic abrasion, the kind that shifts and darts like a hyperactive chimp yet has the unrelenting volume and dedication of a lumbering elephant, then I defy you to find anything to complain about on Minus.

I'd pick out some favorite tracks but really, they're all eerily on the same exact level of quality, filled with deep layers of crunching attack, impulsive semi-rhythmic blasts, distorted beyond-the-red audio maximization, and the kind of piled-high noise stacks that induce aural hallucinations. I've picked out "Meth Mouth" simply because it beats most of the others (by about 1%) in terms of uninterrupted, unleavened noise, and at five and a half minutes is just about the perfect length (I try not to bias myself against arbitrary stuff like track-lengths, but I'm just a sucker for short, succinct cuts of noise, something John Wiese is a particular master of, and something that New Drunks will hopefully continue to dole out more frequently now that Mr. Wayne is 15 years the wiser...)

mp3:
~~NEW DRUNKS - "Meth Mouth" from Minus~~

PETER B

2007-06-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

Apologies once again for the delay this week...and for a quick entry, but something's better than nothing, right? That philosophy certainly seems to apply to Peter Blasser (aka Peter B), a guy I know very little about but have been hearing about for years thanks to my various pals who are drooling afficionados of his homemade bent-circuit synths/oscillators/whatever you call them. I have no clue exactly how Peter makes his stuff or how one uses it, but I have definitely heard a lot of amazing noise come out of his unique implements when manipulated by high-level improvisers, and now thanks to Resipiscent I've gotten to hear what amazing noise comes out when the man himself is at the, uh, "controls."

Luteus is a 13-track album (plus excellent booklet w/photos of some of Mr. B's gadetry) that's oddly diverse - I expected wall-to-wall noise, but there are actual compositions here interspersed among the more abstract inventions, some of which even have repeated parts and vocals and all that kind of song type stuff. I'm not really sure what I think of those pieces - a couple, like "I'm your owl, what is your mystery" are pretty cool repetitive melodies in a way roughly reminiscent of the Books, weirdly enough - but I'll reserve judgement for now, cause the noise on Luteus is pretty great regardless. Most of it comes on tracks titled "Sin Satin S'Sudio," which according to the liner notes "is one of Nodemesnes' ancient ritual ceremonies etc. concerned with umbilical connection between temple-themed Din Datin Dudero random analog brain and T.T. Trano hierarchy ambrazier." I have less idea what that means than I do how to play one of Peter B's instruments, but I do understand that all the SSS tracks on here are filled with non-predictable sonic action that spurts, belches, growls, and annihilates all over the place.

The cool thing is how every track in this subset of pieces is so wide-ranging and exploratory - all of them have blasts of all-out noise and meditative sections of hum, often butted right up against each other. There's one called "Davie C. Jam" that really tosses noises up against the wall like balloons full of paint, slowly splattering each sound on top of the other (and has an ending oddly evocative of Mick Jagger's Invocation of My Demon Brother moog piece, which I'm a sucker for), but I'm finding myself more partial to "NON-ACTION #VII" (linked below), a really well-constructed path of warpy noise and firing din that sounds different every time I play it.

mp3:
~~PETER B - "Sin Satin S'Sudio: NON-ACTION #VII" from Luteus~~

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (JUNE EDITION)

2007-06-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

Lately it seems I've been dropping Raymond Scott comparisons all over the place - I've done it here two times in the past few months, and I'm pretty sure I've tagged it on at least one Carlos Giffoni record somewhere - so I figured maybe I could get it out of my system by making a retro post on the man himself. If you've heard of Mr. S, chances are it's either through his stellar absurdo-jazz / cartoon-score work, or through his three volumes of legendarily bizarre, proto-techno family-help records known as Soothing Sounds For Baby. That's all excellent stuff, for sure, but it's meant that he generally is thought of as a kind of geeky electronics guy who managed to come up with some wacky sounds as a residue of his technological experiments (this is a guess - it's not like I've taken a survey or anything...)

Anyway whether or not that's true, I think it's safe to say that very few people think of R.S.'s work as noise. And I think it's kinda crucial to realize how prescient his stuff was in terms of treating every sound as worth exploring regardless of how "musical" it might be, and, even more importantly, in terms of how fun and funny noise can be. When I hear blurps and farts in Jessica Rylan's stuff or wheezes and honks in Giffoni's, well, I laugh, and I think a lot of non-believers in noise assume it's all supposed to be serious or scary or intimidating, which just couldn't be more wrong. Maybe I'm not really making my point too well - all I'm saying is that Raymond Scott's noise was both excitingly experimental and totally hilarious, and I think it makes him a pretty important touchstone for those of us who think the best noise has a lot of fucking moods, happiness and humor and absurdity and surrealness firmly among them.

Lots of the Scott stuff available is not really noisy enough to make that case, but luckily a few years back the fine archivists at Basta offered a glimpse into Scott's noisier tendencies by unearthing the many shades of sonic experimentalism he stirred up in his Manhattan Research, Inc. labs. If you haven't heard this stuff, I think you really need to - I bet it'll steer you to what I'm not so eloquently talking about above, if you don't agree already. I've posted 3 quick clips below, all excellent examples of Scott's ability to find humor and freedom in experimental noise - instead of always trying to harness melodies or punch lines out of his gadgetry, Scott sometimes let the transistors guide him, and the results were noisy, funny, and pretty much always spellbinding. I've purposely picked the ones that sound most like today's noise just to show how much of a prophet the guy was, but check out the whole thing and you'll find stuff that combines noise, structure, melody, and fucking advertising in a way that still really blows me away.

mp3s:
~~RAYMOND SCOTT - "Auto-Lite (Sta-Ful)," "Gmgm 1a," and "Take Me to Your Violin Teacher," all from Manhattan Research Inc.~~

SIGNAL QUINTET

2007-06-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

OK, so I know my concept of what constitutes a "week" is starting to drift a bit, but I'll realign my compass soon, I promise. At least this time around I have a semi-substantial amount to say about a daunting Euro-improv all-star ensemble known as the Signal Quintet. I'd read about Jason Kahn's graphical score "Timelines" a while back, and how he had put this five-piece together specifically for it, and then how they'd decided to stay together and do other stuff because, well, shit - the lineup is really too good to be stopped: Kahn, Tomas Korber, Gunter Muller, Christian Weber, and my particular fave, one-time Voice Crack genius Norbert Moslang. I'd read, but I hadn't heard, and luckily the kind folks (actually, Mr. Kahn, I believe) at Swiss label Cut sent us a copy, part of a two-fer package with Sean Meehan's latest (a nice duo effort with Ellen Fullman that I suggest you order, as long as yer ordering this one, right?)

The disc is called Yamaguchi, and it contains three exclt improv-noise environments recorded in Japan during a tour there last year. Now, not to be regionally prejudiced or anything, but since this is quite distinctly a European affair, one might - if one were as lazy and unfair as me - expect it to have a certain, uh, "reserve" often found in the improvised noise of that fine assemblage of countries. And the pieces here do have points that could be called "restrained" or even "mellow" (they also have points of fiery all-out noise most Americans would be lucky to match), but the catch is that even Signal Quintet's quietest moments have a tension, creepiness and just plain scarily thick atmosphere that makes the whole record seem as sinister as any all-out screech fest.

Now that all my stupid biases and even stupider surprises at said biases being overturned are outta the way, here's what Yamaguchi has: rumbling low tones, scratchy surfaces, pregnant negative spaces, thick slabs of dissonance, crunching distortions, and lots of other sounds one might not expect from percussion, synths, guitar, electronics, and good ol' contrabass. Each piece manages to sound both like an aggressive aural confrontation and a lulling, picture-less mood-film, often at the same time. I think the first of the rec's three untitled pieces mixes those semi-warring/semi-brotherly factions best, and is also the best at building its sounds into arcs that are natural and stunningly organic, as if the participants were following some kind of unspoken treasure map to get to an bottomless chest of sparkling sonic rewards. (My metaphors still need help - send any spare ones to the address on the right).

mp3:
~~SIGNAL QUINTET - (track one) from Yamaguchi~~

SEE IF THERE'S ANYTHING GOING ON...

2007-05-29T23:30:00.000-07:00

OK, we're not actually despairing here at Noiseweek, and not even lost anymore...just busy as hell and way too tired to post another half-assed entry. Instead, we're gonna take a week to recharge and promise to bring you something you'll like (and maybe will not even have heard of before) by next week...we can at least tell you that we made an official company appearance at a recent installment of the great Sightings tour that is still going on and that you must attend. The band is rejuvinated as hell and I have to say this is the best I've ever seen em...running all over the stage, w/Mr. Morgan's vocals way more out front and a combo of guitar screech, boweling bass rumble, and skull-slapping drumming that's really unparalleled right now (it didn't hurt that Mr. Axolotl opened with two short, sweet pieces of lightly-dusted drone). So for now, why not enjoy a Sightings out-take that didn't make it onto Fun From None (and buy a copy of that new Sightings DVD-R if you see em), and we'll see ya next week....

JESSICA RYLAN

2007-05-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Noiseweek Company Retreat has been extended indefinitely due to us not knowing how the hell to get out of wherever we are. We're compass-less, and the only thing we can tell about exactly where we might be is that there are trees here, and noise doesn't grow on them. Hence we have to beam out some digital smoke signals to make another quick post, and have had to search through our knapsacks and portable toilets to find something to spew about...we were gonna add some blather to the Air Conditioning fandom we've been hinting at lately, but that rec's been out a while, and all your friends already know about it, right? All your friends know about Jessica Rylan too - we've even blabbed about her before - but they may not know about Interior Designs, which has been out a few weeks at least, but somewhat ignored, maybe due to the incessant Important Records avalanche that seems to bury its own releases like fallen skiers who haven't even had time to stand up before other skiers land on top of them (sorry for that weak metaphor, we're tired).

Anyway, I've had minor quibbles with Jessica's records here and there (like the singing on the Ultra Eczema Can't LP), but for the most part I'm a true believer, and I'll happily defend each second of Interior Designs as the kind of Kool Aid everyone with an ounce of noise interest should be constantly chugging. Pretty much everything Jessica does well is done well here - the Raymond Scott-ish absurdist sound-effect belching (opener "Extroardinary" hits that Scott combo of surreal humor and well-considered science perfectly), the morse-code-ish / transmission-esque sort of Ham-radio art, filled with transistor squiggles and oscillator-speak ("Phantasia"), and the obligatory unexpected wild card (in this case, a really fascinating title-track that drops a trudging drum machine beat under a slightly-untuned acoustic chord strum/meditation that's kinda Jandekian and even D. Bailey-esque at times). Oh, and also the static-y loop/drone/wave thing, here done to near-perfection on "Timeless" (linked below), which uses a tactile cycle of gravelly noises to build a standing wave of sifting hum. Especially dig the way the climactic sound is both powerful and mellow, like the soothing cut of a butcher's knife through one's temporal lobes (we'll work on the metaphor issue once we're outta these woods, we promise...)

mp3:
~~JESSICA RYLAN: "Timeless" from Interior Designs~~

ZODIACS

2007-05-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

The Noiseweek staff is on an annual company retreat this week and though we remembered to water the plants, turn off the lights, and leave a copy of our Bible playing at max volume on the turntable, no one bothered to actually take care of this week's post. So we hafta do a quick one from the road, w/out even the ability to provide our loyals a full mp3 (will rectify that upon return to the HQ)...but luckily there are already some online samples up from a rec that's been tearing our ears out lately, namely the beautifully self-indulgent, unashamedly derivative lo-fi wah-damage of Zodiacs. Presumably a spinoff from Zodiac Mountain, this is a trio of relatively well-known alias-addicts sporting yet another set of wacky pseudonyms (I'll spare you the hilarity here, just check their Holy Mountain page for details), and cranking out aimeless overloaded psych-noise in the collapsed vein of, well, way too much stuff to list, but my tastes in the category run to HM gods Davis Redford Triad and the most poorly recorded Marble Sheep epics, and the Zodiacs hold up on that scale pretty well.

This type of stuff is pretty simple - guitar wank full of effects, backed either by nothing or a loping semi-bluesy, uh, "beat" - and, most essentially, recorded in a manner such that everything sounds like a big pile of distortion quicksand sure to suck even the smallest iota of clarity down into its man-eating muck. I'm a sucker for anything committed to tape in such a manner, but it especially works well for guitar wank, which only really clicks if it's folding in on itself, each note/sound/whatever being muffled and overlapping and catching communal fire like a California forest. Zodiacs have this all down perfectly - of the four tracks on Gone, two are more solemn, vaguely mellow meditations that still breath smoke and static, but two others - "Born Free" and "Get Off/Come Together" (the latter being covers maybe? I don't really wanna pay that much attention - close focus defeats the purpose of noise like this) - are pure fireballs of unfettered, unembarrassed pedal pushing - big red skies of rock/noise pud-pulling that reach the highs of that one great Marble Sheep record that rarely sits more than five feet from my stereo. All in all, Gone is a prime example of the kind of gunky dreck that, were it the literal mudpit that it sounds like, I'd happily drive a brand new car right into and accept it as my best possible grave.

mp3 (samples - see bottom right of page - full mp3 to come!):
ZODIACS - Gone

ALLIGATOR CRYSTAL MOTH

2007-05-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

Dunno if I've been craving order, or just that I've been listening to the first few Glenn Branca Symphonies repeatedly, but lately I've gravitated toward improvised noise that includes some semblance of acoustic drum beats and/or identifiable percussive rumble. Obviously that's a pretty vague description that can apply to tons of stuff, but it's the best way I can describe the thread that seems to bind some of my fave recent recs together, from the bombastic drum blasts on Mike Tamuburo's Ghosts of Marumbey to the rolling waves of beat on No Quarter's Burning Star Core slab I talked about last week to the crashing slobber on the dauntingly excellent Air Conditioning disc to even the splatter on the surprisingly aggressive Sunburned (no Hand of the Man anymore, for some reason) CD. Not that I don't still love a beat-less mess of abstract noise, but something about a drum pounding up through a pile of wreckage like a reanimating Terminator is really hitting my cranial sweet spot lately.

Now, by no means does everything on the perpelexingly-titled Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, the Bottled Smoke entry by Alligator Crystal Moth, qualify as noise with a beat. In fact not much of it is "noise" in the strict sense at all, but rather hippified free-jams - really good hippified free-jams, but still, closer to the drum-circle rattlings of Sunburned back when they did have the HOTM trailing behind them, or maybe a less droney Pelt, or maybe even an abstracted version of Tower Recordings, than pure noise - good company to be in, no doubt. But, you know, it has lots of flutes and rattles and acoustic detunings and distant half-vocals and wisps of electric wah etc. And more power to it.

One track in the middle, though, aims directly for my brain-bullseye, and sticks an arrow right through that mental apple. The beautifully-titled "Climactic Waste" is dense, cavernous noise that employs of all kinds of insistent, bluntly bold percussion - hard doses of rhythmic cacophony behind its gauzey curtains of distortion of feedback drone. I'm particularly enamored of a section about 2:45 in, where the bassy wind of the noise gathers into a gale and the percussion rises up to ride the wave; the first time through it had me imaging an alternate-universe version of A Handful of Dust with Robbie Yeats drumming. Overall, it's an oddly mellow piece for how noisy it is, with tons of stuff going on but nothing feeling rushed or frantic, a neat middle point between raging agression and back-on-the-ground cloud-staring.

I'm kinda perplexed by how all this sound could be coming from a duo, but that confusion is lessened by the presence of Digitalis overlord Brad Rose (erecting sonic mountains here with Michael Donnelly), who's done enough different stuff that no sound he makes should surprise me or anyone else. If you haven't sent any cash his way lately...well, you can't buy this from him since it's part of a now-sold-out subscription series, but you can still buy a ticket to the festival this series is supporting, and/or snag the Foxglove CD-R these two behemoths made a while ago...so, do so...

mp3:
~~ALLIGATOR CRYSTAL MOTH - "Climactic Waste" from Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia~~

BURNING STAR CORE

2007-04-28T22:01:00.000-07:00

OK, so the vague Noiseweek mission is to find and spread noise that not every noisenik in the world has heard...but the higher directive is to, uh, "celebrate" great noise regardless of exposure level. And, well, I imagine there could be some odd individual out there who's found this blog but not found Burning Star Core (shit, I've even already written some about BXC, so it's kinda impossible), so this post is for that imaginary, paradoxical soul. Or maybe you've heard of BXC but you just haven't had time to be buried in C. Spencer Yeh's bottomless pit of brain-crushing sound - it happens. If so, there hasn't really been a better time to drop what you're doing and commit, as two super high-level BXC releases are in current circulation: the mostly Yeh-alone Blood Lightning 2007 (only the last track is full-band-ed) and the full-band-ed Operator Dead...Post Abandoned (full band meaning Sir Spence, Mike Shiflet, and Hair Cops Robert Beatty and Trevor Tremaine).

It might be oversimplistic to say these two recs represent BXC's current yin-yang, but it's kinda true: Blood Lightning 2007 lays out Spencer's one-man bag of tricks nicely - his weird, hypnotic array of violin rapings, mouth distentions, percussive slicings, electronic wallings, and general sense of semi-serious/semi-absurd/semi-wacky (that's right, 3 halves) sonic fuckery. I think I've said this about other people before, and if so I apologize, but in this mode BXC is kinda like the Raymond Scott of noise, more interested in trying out whatever sounds he can find (even if they seem superficially goofy or cheesy) rather than hiding everything behind some macho noise wall (not that he can't do that too, to exclt effect when he chooses). I think "Deaf Mute Spinning Resonator" is a nice example of this - the ping-ponging shit in the second half is so simultaneously hilarious and moving it makes me want to cry rainbow-colored tears.

Operator Dead...Post Abandoned, on the other fist, is the bigger, fractured-rock /noise-jam version of BXC, which slays just as mightily but leaves much different-looking scars. I think the key to the blood-spilling in this config is Tremaine's drumming, a combo of proto-free-jazz roll, trash-can/car-crash blather, and upside-down rock pound, which allows his three comrades to freely spray all over his sturdy canvas like monkeys throwing shit at zoo-cage glass. The result here is more psych-rock sounding than I mighta guessed, but the sense of sheer abandon puts it more in the league of the excellent Death Unit album, or, more historically, the Grey/Licht version of the Blue Humans and the searing ramble of the too-forgotten Lhasa Cement Plant. "The Emergency Networks Are Taking Over" is a little too unique to hang influences on though - the helium-injected soar it builds from eyes-closed, head-down playing is so organic and serendipitous it could only have happened once.

mp3:
~~BURNING STAR CORE - "Deaf Mute Spinning Resonator" from Blood Lightning 2007; "The Emergency Networks Are Taking Over" from Operator Dead...Post Abandoned~~

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (APRIL EDITION)

2007-04-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

Hoped to do a true retro entry this week but lack of time is precluding it...so since there's some great new shit out lately from people I've blabbed about here in the past, here are some quick check-in's on previous Noiseweek heroes, which is kinda "retro," right?...

THE CUTEST PUPPY IN THE WORLD - Apotrope 2CD (New American Folk Hero)
I think this is the first long-form type thing from this duo since last year's Finfolk, and as much as I loved that one, this sprawling double disc is a huge improvement, a real massive hunk of unfettered sound explorations. Six tracks, three of them over a half-hour long, and all filled with an impressive array of moods and sounds - everything from ambience to noise to rattling improv to mechanical clanking to silence. Finfolk had some impressive variety too, but I think Apotrope flies higher because the variety is more organic and natural - everything bleeds, melts, and pours into everything else, making it a rare record that justifies long, uncut tracks. This stuff would really suffer if chopped up into smaller vignettes, because the transitions are even more fascinating than the excellent sounds those transisitons serve.

FRANCISCO MEIRINO & TIM OLIVE - Eagle Keys (Even Stilte)
Since I last spewed about Tim Olive, he's put together the great Supernatural Hot Rug And Not Used (and a great self-titled album) with Nisikawa Buhnsho, which I implore you to seek out if you haven't. This is his new project with computer/acoustics artist Francisco Meirino (aka "Phroq"?), and it's the standard kind of high-level, attentive improv that Olive has trademarked. Lots of minimal, reductionist bites of noise - rattling static, small whines, crunching blips - mixed with solid columns of heavy sound. As with SHRANU, I'm not sure who's doing what here, but I am sure that Olive knows how to coax smart shit out of his equipment and his colleagues, and Eagle Keys is perhaps the best example of one of his most unique talents - the ability to mix and match sounds so that nothing ever sticks around too long, but no contrivances or artificial shifts ever emerge.

POOR SCHOOL - Voor Niets In Zijn (Cut Hands)
I'm not sure what more I can say about my Montana free-rock heroes Poor School - I've splurted about them enough here and elsewhere that I might make the few people who will listen sick of hearing it all. My guess is that we'll all have to get used to it, though, cause whenever their proposed Ecstatic Peace release finally emerges, I gotta think it'll be hard for lots of other people not to be as droolingly smitten as me. The limited (edition of 61?) Voor Niets In Zijn is another great exhibit of these guys' ability to mix riffs with shattered rock rhythms and penchants for dissonance, blare, and outright noise, without ever abandoning the loping swing that glues it all together. This is pretty similar to the slightly greater Holy Master, but for some reason I smell more Japanese influence here, as in Fushitsusha, White Heaven, or even a stoned version of High Rise. Either way I bet these guys have reams of this stuff sitting around in their smoke-layered basements and I can't wait until it's all sent skyward for the rest of us to inhale.

(Since all of these recs feature too-long-to-post tracks and not that many of em (hence posting full tracks would be like giving half of each record away), I've made a clunky Noiseweek mix of excerpts from the three with 5 sec of silence between each - now go buy em all)...

mp3:
~~THE CUTEST PUPPY IN THE WORLD / FRANCISCO MEIRINO & TIM OLIVE / POOR SCHOOL - (mix of excerpts)~~

EMIL BEAULIEAU

2007-04-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

In the fog of my time away, I accumulated many great recs that have sat in sad piles, begging to be cracked open and played. Last week I finally heeded the cries of some Ecstatic Peace vinyl - mammoth sides from X.o.4, New Blockaders / Moore / O'Rourke, and Lambsbread - and they're all stunners, but the winner is Emil Beaulieau's Moonlight in Vermont. It's been so long since I checked in on Mr. B or anything RRR-related that I inexplicably thought his identity as RRR prez Ron Lessard was still a secret (was it ever?), but since about 200 sites mentioning it pop up via Google in seconds, I guess not. So, Emil=Ron, and also Emil=a noise lifer who's done enough amazing work on record and in his live, pink-shirt-and-tie guise to earn his own self-appointed mantle of "America's Greatest Noise." His sheer longevity would be enough to enshrine him, but the work has always been top shelf too.

Such is the case with Moonlight In Vermont, which I'd love to say ranks among his best stuff if I could legitimately claim to have a decent handle on his catalogue. But KFW sez so, and I don't think you want to argue with that. Apparently this album has floated around as a CD-R since 2004, and was slated to get a Hanson matrix number at some point, but instead it's Emil's Ecstatic Peace debut, complete with one-of-a-kind Emil-made covers - you can see 272 of them here. Mine (see image above) is an excellent magik-markered defacing of an album of John F. Kennedy speeches (see orignal to the right). Individual covers are always a great idea, but even cooler w/this rec because Emil certainly put as much care and craft into Moonlight in Vermont's array of sounds and sequences as he did into each of the 300 covers.

There's nothing world-changingly new about what Emil's doing here, but that's kinda what makes it great - it's just pure, workman-like noise, way less concerned with being different than being thick, detailed, textured, interesting, and basically unbeatable. Each of the eight tracks pulls a subset of sounds from Emil's array of searing strikes, depth-charge bombings, sandpaper tears, high-end screeches, and more, then lines them up into shapes and patterns that sometimes attack, sometimes drift, sometimes bounce, sometimes even swell. If you wanna get classical about it, there's both a Non tint to Emil's rhythmic cutting, and a Merzbow smell to the burning tone of the noise, but I also hear some of what Carlos Giffoni's been doing lately, at least in terms of arrangement and sequencing. It's the way both CG and EB structure their noises into vaguely song-like skeletons without getting montonous or predictable, and still hang onto the essential abrasion and urgency of their noises. Those are pretty standard comparisons, but hopefully that's less about my lack of imagination than it is about Emil's ability to make great shit out of pretty familiar sounds.

The track below is a good, succinct example: traces of feedback and distortion spin around each other in smoky rings, until a surreal sub-beat emerges through the natural waves of Emil's brain-shaking discharges. I especially dig how this track (and others on the rec) can start to sound like a locked groove, an infinite loop of the same simple noise, yet just pay a little more attention and you can hear Emil's subtle variances and organic modifications adding density and color without calling attention to themselves, like an image photocopied over and over until its repetitive shapes slowly blur into abstraction.

mp3:
~~EMIL BEAULIEAU - (side one, track four) from Moonlight in Vermont~~

16 BITCH PILE UP

2007-04-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

Got a thick package of new PacRec stuff this week, and amongst all the saliva-inducing titles (see the Cold 100 to yr right), the thing I least expected to dig was the first non-CDr CD from 16 Bitch Pile Up. I'm not sure why my expectations were low - my only previous exposure had been their set at 2005's Noise Against Fascism, and they weren't even that bad, just a bit bland compared to head-flipping sets from Double Leopards, Flaherty/Corsano, Monotract, etc. There's only so many hours in my waning days, though, so I stupidly let that one show keep me from checking them out further (which kinda took effort, considering there are over 30 releases listed in the discography included in this CD).

Anyway, maybe I'm not so surprised that Bury Me Deep is good, as much as I'm surprised how varied-ly good it is. There's a really smacking range of sounds, volume levels, moods, environments, and so on in the nine tracks here, so much so that I keep getting taken aback each time I skip around. When I saw them 16 Bitch Pile Up were a 5-piece, and now I guess they're a trio, but the beauty is you can't really tell how many minds, instruments, edits, re-mixes, or whatever went into this - everything has a dense and careful craft that coulda come from any amount of brains, as long as they were all large.

Now that I jostle my memory stick a bit, I remember thinking that live they sounded more like a project than a band, but on record that turns out to be a plus. There's a cool sense of lab-like experimentation happening here, the kind of hypnotically-reserved calm that comes from allowing sounds to mix, mutate, simmer, and ferment. Sometimes the result is heavy drone, sometimes it's random clatter, sometimes it's repetitive minimalism - only one time (the deadly "Into the Air") is it harsh noise, and the rainbow of sonics that precedes that makes the impending assault insanely apt.

What makes Bury Me Deep doubly impressive is that it actually tells a story. Lay out the song titles in a row and you get a simple kiddie-horror tale, but the songs themselves have some narrative going on too. Some pedestrian parallels are clear - "Something Poked Up" has a Tell-Tale Heart-like pulse, etc - but on a deeper level, the noises, atmospheres, and sonic constructions here are laid out in arcs that rise and fall, with changes and momentums that turn like well-conceived plot points.

The best example of that deep craft is "The Brown Soil" (linked below), a slow-burning stretch of popping electronics and moaning drone that wouldn't feel completely out of place on a Fennesz record or even a Kranky compilation - the difference being that 16 Bitch Pile Up adds an underlying, insistent sense of menace. Their noise may rise and drift like clouds, but we're talking dark clouds crackling with bruised lightning, like black blood squirting from corpse veins. It makes the ketchup-laden crime-scene photos in the packaging all the more appropriate - fake blood on the outside, real human brain drippings on the inside.

mp3:
~~16 BITCH PILE UP - "The Brown Soil" from Bury Me Deep~~

POG

2007-04-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to adrenaline provided by last week's No Fun Winter Ends Destruction at the sadly death-bedded Tonic (as well as some nice enouragement from several in attendance, thanks), Noiseweek is officially attempting re-animation. The biggest challenge at our bunkered, cereal-strewn HQ is clearing time to seek out not-so-known noise, so please keep/start sending stuff and we'll do our best to make this a weekly (or at least bi-monthly) concern again. Many thanks to everyone who asked.

Our return was also inspired by a gift from the tireless Albany stronghold known as FlippedOut Records. We had already been enjoying the last Burnt Hills missive (watch for tons more where that came from via Qbico, Ruby Red, Lotus Sound, etc), so we were pretty stoked to rip open the first sonic stab by Pog, a.k.a. Paula of Burnt Hills. Mitote is 66 minutes of muffled, hiss-laden scare-sonics, the kind my brain seems pre-wired to soak up. I'm just a sucker for anything unclear, and Pog's ghostly rattlings, creep-infested clangings, and nightmarish drippings are all prime murk. The closest referent I can conjure is the Handful of Dust stuff that involves strings of any manner, but even those cloudy classics are clearer than Pog's haze-locked mix; everything here is so cloaked in sonic distance that it's weirdly anyonymous, as if the sounds were stuck in some limbo, lost to drift through the air like fog hanging over their maker's grave. I seriously have felt some of these tracks pass through me like spectres, which probably says more about my current need for medication than about Pog, but I'm coherent enough to know that Mitote should freeze anyone susceptible to the pleasures of mental paralysis.

My favorite example of Pog's nerve-stiffening is "Remember" (linked below). It takes a wispy, vaguely-backwards loop of violin-bending (reminiscent of Axolotl or even Tony Conrad if one of his shorter tracks was hacked up and rearranged), and rides it out into a warped horizon of softening focus and increasing blur. Like a lot of Mitote, it uses a simple idea to create a complex atmosphere, providing a ripe context for your own aural hallucinations. Those less inclined to paint their own nightmares might see nothing, but that's kinda the genius of Pog - her stuff is sneaky enough to slip past the guards into the synapses of those of us whose receptors crave it.

mp3:
~~POG - "Remember" from Mitote~~

NOT HERE

2006-12-11T05:44:00.000-08:00

With major apologies to everyone kind enough to stop by here regularly, Noiseweek once again finds itself obliged to temporarily close its doors. As always, please frequent all the links to the right, and we hope to return for a year-end wrapup if not sooner. 99% of the Noise Empire is in England right now anyway, so here's hoping that everything there is going as mind-blowingly as imagines...one last special thanks to those who've sent their Noise here, it's greatly appreciated and will be duly noted once operations are back online...see you soon.

PETER WRIGHT

2006-12-03T16:14:00.000-08:00

I'd like to call myself a big fan of Peter Wright, the New Zealand-native mega-droner now living in London, but I've only heard one of his releases, the consistently excellent Pariahs Sing Om. Still, that massive release does contain three sonically huge CDs, and the fact that I've returned to its 3-plus hours numerous times since acquiring it back in March certainly makes me a fanatic of some sort. The wide variety of drones, echoes, reverberations, and awe-inspiring sonic sculptures on this epic just never seem to stop, and if Wright never makes another record again, this record alone means his career will still dwarf those of many of us mortals.

If I had to come up with a complaint about Pariahs Sing Om - and it's really more a daydream than a complaint - it would be that I keep getting the sense that Wright could go all-out noise without any loss of subtelty or charisma. He comes close a lot of times, but never quite completely gets there. I actually think that restraint is part of Pariahs Sing Om's eternal charm, but my theory is still proven right by the first track on a tour-only double CD called Folk Songs and Blackness, which I bought from Peter last night before his great set at every D.C. noisenik's second home, 611 Florida. (Peter and his fellow drone traveler Anthony Milton, whose set was also stellar, had a drool-worthy smattering of stuff for sale, but collectors will be proud to hear that my meager wallet scrapings went straight for the one thing there that said "edition of 50.")

The rest of this set is pretty excellent so far too, but the track in question, "Folk Song for Obsession," is an immediate stunner. Wright wastes little time getting to a deep, dark howl, pouncing on an engine-like roar that builds into a distorted nightmare. A lot of Wright's work mixes found sounds and recorded ambiences into his guitar-based drones, but I dig how this one has no immediately recognizable traces of such objects, yet still is bulging with outdoor-like atmosphere - kinda sounds like an airport inside a cave, or a thunderstorm in which all the world's electric wires are crackling and rumbling in kind. I also dig how Wright lets the anomalies in his recording - the crushed overloads and subtle glitches - create their own music. I wouldn't want Wright to ever abandon the wide tonal range he's established up to now, but more stuff like this would be a great move, as his ability to massage liquid textures out of solid sounds make him more than up to the task.

mp3:
~~PETER WRIGHT - "Folk Song for Obsession" from Folk Songs and Blackness~~

AUFGEHOBEN

2006-11-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

The always-reliable Holy Mountain (now based in Portland after a buncha years in S.F.) is not exactly a noise label, but one of the many great things about their impeccable selection of psych-rock, stoner-rock, and sun-baked-folk is that it almost always comes with an outer lining of noise. My favorite recent example is Residual Echoes, whose jammy psych frequently pushes into destructive red levels, but historically speaking, no one on HM has made rock outta noise and vice versa like the god-like Steven Wray Lobdell and his Davis Redford Triad. So many of the tripped-out, long-chorded DRT CDs blur the cracked line between rock and noise, to the point where Lobdell's best moments split the difference perfectly between Hendrix and Haino. He's been a bit dormant of late but I'm sure he's still out there grinding away, at least in his mind; hopefully he'll do so in mine too soon enough...

All of this has little to do with British improv outfit Aufgehoben, except for the crucial fact that their fourth record, Messidor, is their first for Holy Mountain, and as such represents the label's farthest swing toward the noise banks of the rock-noise river. Not that Aufgehoben don't display a lot of rock elements, at least in abstract: crunchy distortion detonations that sometimes resemble guitar riffs, shimmering high-end sheens that sometimes sound like distended cymbals, pounding time-cutters that often sound like imploding drums. But, whether it's due to sheer volume, logic-testing recording techniques, or the way these guys rework their own improvised recordings before committing them to final tape, the noise side of noise-improv-rock is well-attended on these seven super-forceful tracks, and the result is pretty cranium-reshaping. I can't quite get my finger on what makes this so mammoth-sounding - the band has this massive crunch and skeleton-shaking, air-depressing sonic footprint that feels like it's pushing hard against your chest, kind of like what I imagined when I heard Peter Brotzmann had a guitar-playing son (not that Caspar isn't great himself, but his stuff doesn't quite have the force of Aufgehoben's clanging dissonance).

Anyway, I'll spare you the rest of my internal fumbling to figure out what makes Messidor so inhumanly strong, and just tell you that it is. I especially the dig the way it has a slight Euro free-improv feel too; the drums especially are semi-jazz-ish in their loose, rolling quality, but the scorching noise makes them sound like they're on fire, kind of simultaneously metallic and digital (not far from the guitar-drum battles of Ascension, but with more crunch). Mostly I'm floored by the way Aufgehoben can both unleash and contain their sound - there's certainly no holding back here, yet everything is totally viewable and unblurred, as if the extreme distortion actually clarifies the pummel, kind of the way that Sightings' insistence on pushing the limits of their recording equipment paradoxically shapes and defines their noise instead of squashing it. HM's press kit mentions New Directions Unit, Throbbing Gristle, and This Heat, and while I can't argue with any of those, I love the way Messidor feels grimier and more basement-worthy than those hautier precedents. Sure, a Wire writer and a well-established improv type are involved, but still this album sounds like it'd fit better on American Tapes than Emanem.

There's lots of great stuff to choose from here (and a few sampled on the band's own page), but if I can have only one, I'll take the album-ender, "Ends of Er": a great example of Aufgehoben's ability to make silence sound loud and loudness sound subtle. About halfway through is the noise sweet spot, but every section here offers some sonic liquid nitrogen to dip your head firmly into.

mp3:
~~AUFGEHOBEN - "Ends of Er" from Messidor~~

LOY FANKBONNER

2006-11-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

The circumstances I referred to last week are still extenuatin' along, but I've found enough time to do a quick blab about Mexo-American sound-soldier Loy Fankbonner, whose excellent El Pabellon is the first release on the promising new NYC label Azul Discografica, in which apparently Mr. F has some financial interest in (the label's second release is a rather tossed-off Mattin album, which can be forgiven just based on his great past work, and either way I'm still pretty psyched about a future Azul installment from California drone-twisters Starving Weirdos). El Pabellon is made soley out of the sounds that have come wafting through Fankbonner's Manhattan apartment window (which he then heavily processes, edits, and rearranges) - the embedded reporters at perennial web fave Bagatellen can give you the full scoop, but I just want to do a quick rundown of my favorite piece, "vecindario" (linked below).

It's hard to fathom exactly how Fankbonner went from sticking a mic in his window to ending up with this rattling piece of randomized percussion - most of the tracks on the album feel pretty documentary and/or outdoor-ish, but this one is a purely musical creation, and a pretty hypnotic one at that. The key is Fankbonner's timing - the twisted ebb and flow of his clicks, stomps, and crackles sometimes hews to patterns, other times deliberately dodges its own metronome, and most of the time lands in a hypnotic sweet spot in between. Early on some of the whirring sheen he lays on top of all the rattling is a little inconsequential, but eventually it builds into something thicker, and from about the six-minute mark everything starts to slice through the air like poisoned blades. Listeing to this in the car late last night during a creeping chill, it felt like each aural event was cutting an immediate hole through my gut, each note tucked into an enevelope of grating edge that's like a dentist's drill stuck in your ear. Hearing it again now, it doesn't have quite the same visceral effect, which only makes the piece more attractive - it slays you to whatever degree your current ear status allows it, which means it's truly part of the atmosphere. As with the rest of this excellent set of molecular compositions, Fankbonner has flipped a sneakily circuar trick, turning the air outside his apartment into the air pouring in and out of your ears.

mp3:
LOY FANKBONNER - "vecindario" from El Pabellon

TEMPORARILY CLOSED

2006-11-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

Due to extenuating circumstances, Noiseweek is closed this week. We hope to return next week, and thank every Noiseweek fan for their patience, interest, and dedication to killing the world's ears with Noise. During our hiatus, we highly recommend visits to Noiseblog, Siltblog, and Outerspace Gamelan, as well as donating your well-earned patronage to Fusetron, Eclipse, Volcanic Tongue, Aquarius, Squidco, and the rest of the fine establishments listed to the right. See you soon.

FUN FROM NONE

2006-11-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

So maybe it's a bit pointless to write about something that everyone who reads this knows about and will seek out regardless of my blather...but I'm just too psyched about the Fun From None: Live from the No Fun Fest 2004 & 2005 DVD (a two-disc set with a disc dedicated to each year) not to drool about it here. We can all agree that Carlos Giffoni's No Fun Fest has been an unmeasurably immense stimulant in all things noise over the past few years. I was only able to attend the first one, which was just about perfect (my only complaint would be too much moshing for my achingly old frame to endure, but I'm not gonna stand in the way of any adrenalized/testoterized youth so into noise - considering all the horrid stuff that their peers are into, I can forgive them for shoving me if it means they might become noise lifers).

As burned into my brain as all the great sets there is the image of Chris Habib stalking around the stage, aiming his jealousy-inducing Panasonic AG-DVX100 at every act. I've always been curious to see what Chris would make of his shooting, especially once I got an DVX100 of my own and realized how limited it is in rock-club low-light (still an amazing cam though) - whether he'd get overly gimmicky or just leave in all the whip pans and disorienting bounces as he changed positions, etc. The answer is that he solved all those problems really fucking well. Each 10 or so minute segment uses simple solutions, like freeze frames, modest digital effects, and off-sync editing, to basically remember, rather than replicate, the performances. I especially dig how Habib didn't fuck much with the color, instead letting the off-key, faded-pastel look of the high-gain mode persist, a nice reverse-psych counterpart to the music. If I had to find something to criticize, I'd say I'm not totally enamored of the drably b&w Hair Police segment, which I think plays a little too dramatic, but then I thought that of their set too (which sounded amazing regardless). But otherwise, Habib has nailed every segment.

My faves are the Nautical Almanac section, which captures their groping, awkward-pause-loving live set really well; the Wolf Eyes segment, which is pretty straight up and similar to the band's own Covered in Bugs DVD; the To Live and Shave in L.A. section, for which Habib's strobing slideshow perfectly captures Tom Smith's striated exhales, which even in person seem like stop-motion freeze frames; and, the Giffoni-Nyoukis duo, which is kind of a mini-miracle - I wouldn't have guessed Habib could truly capture the power of that great set, but exclt editing and a stark visual effect which makes Giffoni and Nyoukis bleed electronically into fuzzy white do the trick.

I haven't even made it to the 2005 disc yet - too much great stuff to watch and re-watch on Disc One. I can say that the titles and transitions are amazing (glitchy rotation of faded-xerox looking slates), and the bonus mp3's and iPod videos of every segment are also quite choice. Habib talks in his liner notes about wishing he could include more groups (no Sightings, Pita, Burning Star Core, Massimo, Fe-Mail, etc - just not enough room), and I wish he could've too, but there's enough in this package to spend a lifetime sitting still and staring at.

mp3:
~~CARLOS GIFFONI & DYLAN NYOUKIS from Fun From None~~

ANTENNACLE

2006-10-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

This is Noiseweek's first anniversary, so it's break time - no retro entry this month, and just a quick entry this week concerning Antennacle, a cross-country, mail/internet-working noise trio that includes Eric Wood from the Bastard groups (Man is the Bastard, Bastard Noise, etc.). The band's concept is to deal with sound as part of physical spaces, local or spread out, which I'm not sure I get but I'm definitely intrigued by, so I ordered their three-track Murmur Suite EP from Kitty Play back in March, and after a delightful series of excuse-laden e-mails, finally got it this week (Mr. Play made up for it by sending me a ton of stuff, so no hard feelings, though I'd recommend allowing yourself a six-month lead time and a big sense of humor when ordering from him). I haven't fully digested it all and have to admit I'm not immediately hot on Parts One and Three (both are a little too subdued and kind of inactively repetitive, but I'm guessing I might warm to their cold, stoic approach eventually), but I'm definitely sold on Part Two. Here Antennacle's chilly, quiet drones and filtered beds of hiss morph and evolve much more eventfully, gaining jagged edges and abrasive textures as they slowly multiply and ascend. The solid tonal parts remind me of Mikroknytes (second week in a row!) and the harsher sections aren't too far from Tony Conrad's ear-blastings on Fantastic Glissando, while the clicks and robotic choppiness, especially in the eerie, barren ending stretch, lends the track an Oval-esque inhumanness. I hope Antennacle sticks around - I have no idea if they'll get better/wider/deeper/etc, but I'm definitely interested in finding out if they do...

mp3:
~~ANTENNACLE - Part 2 from Murmur Suite~~

804 NOISE / BIRDS IN THE MEADOW

2006-10-22T14:35:00.000-07:00

The soldiers at 804Noise have been keeping Richmond and other parts of non-D.C.-touching Virginia sonically healthy for a while now, and I finally got to check out an edition of their massive annual fest last Sunday. Advanced age has limited my band-viewing tolerance to about six or so before I exhibit temporary narcolespsy and/or arthritis, so I didn't get to the shiny Art Works until about the halfway point of the day's daunting 12-hour slate. Initially distracted by records and handshakes, I'm not really sure who I half-saw at first, though I know I got a satisfying taste of Stephen Vitiello's slices of distortion and weighty tones. The rest of what happened before dinner break is a small, happy blur.

The stretch run that followed, though, was blindingly vivid -- six straight sets of great, eye-focusing noise. Baltimore's acoustic-noise quartet Trockeneis (whose stellar album is free to download at Ehse's site, btw) was total hypnosis - two guys bowing at cymbals and other percussion pieces, Audrey Chen doing mind-bending vocal/facial calisthenics that completely avoided cliche, and Catherine Pancake making piercing, powerful drones with cymbals, bowls, a hot plate, and a chunk of dry ice. The way the four scientists in this group meshed and melted was brain-teasing - a few times I thought Audrey was getting drowned out until I realized that the scraping drone was coming from her lungs, and the same who's-doing-what feeling was true for each sound-maker at some point along the way.

The exact order from there escapes me, but I think Prurient was next. Dom's upcoming Load record is a slight surprise - some melodic and even ambient stuff to go with the harsh noises and metal-hero screams - but this was mostly a patented mix of brutally intense pedal mayhem and muscular vocal workouts. Not much different from what I've seen him do before, but maybe my eyes and ears were just wider open this time - there was an intensity and urgency about Dom's singing and the way it pushed and pulled at the surrounding noise that really ripped me apart. Somehow in that lonely, folding-chair-scattered art space it felt like he was playing to an arena of thousands of screaming kids - which I'm kinda willing to bet might happen some day. Paging Mr. Wilkes-Krier...

Carlos Giffoni, not too far removed from duetting with Merzbow in Japan, played a virtuousic set of bed-of-nails noise, his sounds wizzing through the air like arrows. I love how Carlos's stuff is both oddly serious and absurdly comic, and this time some of the humor came from an unspoken squabble over the P.A. volume; Carlos's deciding final blow of turning the faders way back up provided an instant climax to his taut, dense set. ChefKirk did a welcomely mellow set of laptop (I think? my mind is mush) drone and noise that both provided a nice breather and was sneakliy idea-heavy. Skipping forward, Harm Stryker and Projexorcism closed things with blurring, shattered-glass noise and flying film projection (all from behind a huge pair of bed sheets) that both kept me awake and lulled me into something between sleep and not-sleep.

The best thing besides Trockeneies and Prurient happened right before - a mind-twisting set from Birds in the Meadow, the electro-acoustic noise project of Martin McCavitt. I didn't realize until later this week that this was man responsible for a great disc of Zither improvisations earlier this year on Sockets, and my pal Mark also informed me (I may be remembering this wrong tho) that Martin is also a jazz and/or classical pianist? Anyway, he's clearly a trove of wide-ranging talent and ideas, and his 804 set was awesome - pointillist noises climaxing into solid columns of rubbery drone, accompanied by a snare drum played by some sort of robotic device that slaps the snare in various patterns either randomly or in pre-written chunks, or...shit I don't know, it was cool whatever it/he was doing. The set reminded me of the random improv of Tim Olive / Supernatural Hot Rug and Not Used and the sparser moments of early Mikroknytes, but the incessant string of snare shots set it apart. The Birds track linked below (taken from the free festival 2CD-R which might still be available, ask and see) is on par with his set - snapping snare, tactile small sounds gelling into bigger ones, and a unique sense of timing that perhaps only a Zither improviser and jazz/classical pianist knows how to make...

mp3:
~~BIRDS IN THE MEADOW - "Workingman's Solenoid" from 804Noise Richmond Experimental & Noise Festival 2006~~

BURNING STAR CORE & LAMBSBREAD

2006-10-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

Here are two more noise killers whose trail of aural corpses I'm way behind on. I had hardly heard anything by Burning Star Core before I got my head torn off at the first No Fun Fest by him/them (that show featured main man C. Spencer Yeh ripping his violin and shaking his head and mouth around a mic while backed by some Hair Police, I think). Since then I've been drowned in a couple great BXC discs, but there are still a ton I want/need/am pathetic for not having. I'm even more of a zero with Lambsbread - been hearing about Zac Davis and his Ohio cabal a ton the past few years, but so far no actual audio experience has been logged...chalk it up to 24 hours being way too short of a day...

Time to rectify, and I can't imagine there's a much better intro/update to these guys than this CD-R on Lambsbread's in-house label Maim & Disfigure, lovingly titled Live in St. Louis. It's pretty quick - 2 tracks, 22 minutes - but feels longer in all the right ways. The first track is a 16-minute piece that arises slowly, with Yeh sawing some high violin tones while the Lambsbread stable add squalling feedback, lonely bass plucks, and achingly deadened guitar strokes. Things slowly ascend from there, with washing drums injected eventually, and a blistering battle of sharp guitar jangles and hole-tearing violin that often sounds like a misty bootleg of the V.U. playing a stretched-out version of "European Son." I dig how this track's pulse is unchartable yet undeniable - it seems to incrementally speed up, yet it never really gets "fast" - just increasingly urgent and thick, like a snowball rolling so far down a mountain it eventually swallows it. Whatever it's doing, it's definitely one of the best long group improv tracks I've heard all year, in a league with the Text of Light box and that insanely great Pengo disc from a few weeks back.

Since that track is 3/4ths of the disc, it would be theivery to post it, so instead here's the brief epilogue - a louder, more hectic rip through puncturing violin rage, overloading guitar blasts, and devastating drum anarchy. There's so much happening on this track that the digital audio space can't quite handle it, which only adds to the hypnotic sheen, vaguely like an iced-over pond under which the fish are frantically swimming for some way out. It all adds up to one of those somewhat rare times where two great bands can combine into something even greater (I think - time to get cracking on the rest of their discographies and prove myself wrong...)

mp3:
~~BURNING STAR CORE & LAMBSBREAD - (track one) from Live in St. Louis~~

TONE GHOSTING

2006-10-07T18:35:00.000-07:00

It's hard to summarize all the great stuff my pal Jeff Bagato has done for the D.C. avant, noise, and jazz scenes, but suffice to say that his ongoing Electric Possible concert series is a heroic beacon in an otherwise foggy musical region, and his support of tons of other local and national stuff is beyond compare. Jeff also happens to be a musical wizard in his own right, and a few years back - I'm guessing around 1999 or 2000? - he came up with the geniusly simple idea to buy some cheap hacksaws from a dollar store, grab some thriftstore vinyl, stick a mic under the LPs and start sawing away. The result of this vital experiment, conducted under the moniker DJ Panic, was/is pretty mind-blowing. The range of sounds Jeff gets out of his simple set-up (see image to the right), which he usually attacks while sitting down with his head pointed down as if trying to start a fire in the woods with sticks, is really wide and insanely unpredictable. My favorite thing to do when he plays is randomly close my eyes and try to forget where Jeff's sounds are coming from -- something made very easy by his weirdo collection of blurps, cuts, squeaks, and whines that often evoke a violin, a synth, a pedal, or an animal much more than a turntable.

A little while ago Jeff invented a new version of this m.o., which he dubbed Tone Ghosting, though he still goes by the name DJ Panic in things like his avant-noise trio Spaceships Panic Orbit. Tone Ghosting is basically an extension of the DJ Panic approach, now expanded to include effects, loops, dubs, vocals, and other patented audio secrets. The latest Tone Ghosting release, an hour-long "EP" called Castle Changes and subsidized by another DC stalwart, Sockets CDR, is a pretty comprehensive display of the various ideas Jeff is currently exploring. Here we get 9 versions of a single piece called "Castle Changes," starting with a 15-minute, all-over-the-map "Popular III Human Nation Dub" and whittling down to a final 3-minute "Castle Basic" which seems to be just the DJ Panic scratch-line that the piece is based around. Along the way Jeff creates versions that layer and double the scratch-line into weird echoes and ghosts; remixes with little shards of beat and pulse; a "Vox Pop Mix" with an insidiously catchy lyric sung by Jeff in a Mr. Skull-style bellow; and even an a capella version with the lyrics sung alone.

The core of all these fascinating iterations is the sneaky, vicious DJ Panic vinyl destruction - no matter what direction it gets pulled, the powerful scratch-line remains the beating heart of each piece, slicing through the air so virulently that even Jeff's frequent pauses seem to vibrate and echo with his static, bubbling noise. My favorite example is the "Spastic Rev Remix" (linked below), which offers the EP's most spacey, goofy noises right alongside its most violent. I also love the way Jeff uses volume and pace on this one to create little moments of structure and momentum - the timing of some of his pull-backs and push-forwards are just perfect, like an endless string of set-ups and punch lines. Maybe that's the best way to think of Castle Changes' internal clock, like the absurdist jokes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, divining surreal humor from endless loops and infinite possibilities.

mp3:
~~TONE GHOSTING - "Castle Changes (Spastic Rev Remix)" from Castle Changes~~

RED SQUIRREL

2006-09-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

Recently got two discs in the mail from the cave-dwellers at Seattle's Debacle Records, and have to admit that my first-look, knee-jerk expectations were not super high. The bands in question bore the rather bland names Red Squirrel and Physical Demon, and while the latter's offering had a pretty cool title (Anklyosaur Generator) and nicely diseased cover art, the former's entry quickly threw up red flags. With a title like Magic Acorn, a cover torn from a illustrated kid's version of the Canterbury Tales, and semi-cutesy song titles like "Animals Having a Picnic," "Mouse Hoe Down,"and "I Pet A Llama"...well, I think you can excuse me for not expecting a masterpiece. I didn't necessarily think it would be bad, though, and on that count I was right - but it's still a lot better than I ever could've guessed.

I'm at a bit of a loss with Red Squirrel (which turns out to be the solo transmissions of Seattleite Jason Young) in terms of how exactly to describe the transfixing, suprisingly rangy sound going on. So I'll just fall back on comparisons: I hear the winding, scraping improv of A Handful of Dust on "Animals Having a Picnic" (linked below) and "Forest Gathering," the closeted, sun-seeking rumbles of Angus MacLise and NNCK on "If The Ocean Was Made of Wood Not Water" and "It's A Fever" (available on the label myspace page), and especially the grimy drones of Jazzfinger on "Infidels Taste Sour" and others -- plus hints of Mouthus, Black Dice, Labradford, Richard Youngs, etc. In other words, not bad at all.

But I mostly hear a guy who knows how to be patient with a sound, knows when it's time to move on, and most importantly, knows how to turn just a few sounds - a windy drone, a muffled beat, a chopping sample, a cycling phase - into a whole lot more than just a few sounds. Right now that's my favorite thing about Magic Acorn (which turns out to be actually a pretty good title after all): most of the time you can divide out the individual sounds being used on every track pretty quickly, but you still can't figure how they form one geometrically larger, aurally cloudier nucleus that far exceeds the aggregate size of its individual atoms.

Since this is a first-timer from an unknown (to me), I'm digging around for some kinda major flaw, but nothing's turning up. There is a somewhat overdone nature theme that gets too literal at times - "Animals On Swings" actually sounds like a bunch of animals, perhaps even on swings - and a few tunes try the same move twice, but shit, it usually works twice. Otherwise, there's no nits to pick here - just lots of thick, well-cooked sound that's worth knifing your way through more than a few times.

mp3:
~~RED SQUIRREL - "Animals Having a Picnic" from Magic Acorn~~

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (SEPTEMBER EDITION)

2006-09-24T01:04:00.000-07:00

RAFAEL TORAL - Chasing Sonic Booms (Ecstatic Peace, 1997)
I'm suprised Rafael Toral's name isn't currently more prominent in...well, in any musical circles, but especially noise and improv. I still hear about him from time to time, and he's clearly still pretty active, but I don't know, it just feels like he should be talked about more. Part of it might be that he tends to get lumped in with the Branca/Chatham school of symphonic/classical dissonance, or even the Eno/Kranky wing of ambient drift, and while he can certainly hold his own with those camps, his stuff is way more diverse than that, and often pretty annhilatingly noisy. This collection of mid-90's collabs and live stuff is perhaps the best example - all kinds of far-out, sky-seeking sounds on this one, from the spacey insanity of "Sky Rocket" (with Jane Henry on tearing violin), to the air-piercing screech of the radio performance "X-1," which would easily fit on, say, a Chondritic Sound release, to the fuzzy, detonating rip of "Super Sabre" (linked below), taken from one of Toral's first solo live gigs. I think he's a perfect candidate for inclusion in a future No Fun Fest - Carlos has done a heroic job of incorporating the old guard into that amazing festival, and like Smegma, Borbetomagus, To Live and Shave in L.A., etc, Toral is an essential noisemaker who needs to be heard by anyone who hasn't.

HAPPY FLOWERS - Flowers on 45: The Homestead Singles (Homestead, 1992)
In retrospect I realize that Happy Flowers, the Charlottesville duo of Mr. Anus and Mr. Horribly Charred Infant, were just a one-joke punk band, their incompetent hardcore rants from the perspective of a brain-damaged child falling somwhere between Pussy Galore's primitivism, Half Jap's naivete, the goofy stupidity of Black Flag's "TV Party," the juvenility of their desendents Old Skull, and, uh, the commercial appeal of the Garbage Pail Kids? I mean, I even knew it at the time, but in 1990-91-ish, I hadn't heard a ton of noise yet, especially not any that was punk/rock-based, so Happy Flowers' blatantly anti-audience extremity and weird devotion to one dumb, abrasive joke was actually somewhat of a mind-opener. I can't be the only one for whom their drooling, fuck-off fuzz was one of many gateways into All Things Noise. I don't find myself returning to them much - the joke just gets too painful too quick - but if I do, Flowers on 45, a collection of 4 or so singles, live stuff, oddities, etc, is the one I hit. A bunch of it is just retarded punk, but then a lot of it also has some pretty interesting thick guitar noise under the flat ranting, and the cover versions are all priceless. I kinda wish Happy Flowers had done an all-covers record, as their doofus humor and head-beating simplicity works better when applied to something already known, kinda the same way that Shockabilly's sometimes too-clever avant-garde absurdity seemed to get extra juice when the band applied it to rock classics. Such is true of the Echo and the Bunnymen travesty linked below, which has almost nothing to do with the original, but somehow spurs the Mr.'s into uniquely twisted noise that still clicks my brain-cells 15 years later.

BILL ORCUTT - "Solo CD" (Untitled) (Audible Hiss, 1996)
In the last few years, Harry Pussy has been touted a lot as a source for the recent wave of noise, and I can't really argue. I don't think there's any band out there right now that really sounds like them, except perhaps Sightings from time to time, but I can't imagine that anyone who's heard them hasn't been at least a little influenced - their jolting brand of virally unique power is pretty unavoidable. I still remember getting the first HP 7" in the mail and thinking it was a joke based on the name and the goofy woman-holding-a-frog pic on the cover, and then having my skull ring for days after hearing it. On record and especially live, Adris Hoyos' manic drumming and wired screams were focal points, but Bill Orcutt's slicing guitar to me was even more insanely jaw-dropping - a totally unique blare that makes his one solo album as much of a keeper as any HP rec. Just so much crashing, skin-tearing noise on here, and the cool thing is that it's not just all full-speed - there are even some passages of airy, free-improv like slow-clatter, yet it still all has Orcutt's patented urgently crazy feel. Overall, a numbingly accomplished classic which still incurs immediate spine-shiver...I'm not sure what Bill's up to nowadays (last I heard he was in California, I think?), but I'm still holding out hope for a sequel...

mp3:
RAFAEL TORAL - "Super Sabre" from Chasing Sonic Booms
HAPPY FLOWERS - "Bring on the Dancing Horses" from Flowers on 45
BILL ORCUTT - "Live 71" from "Solo CD" (Untitled)

DYER LOWRY

2006-09-17T18:55:00.000-07:00

This week we are excited to welcome our first-ever guest contributor to Noiseweek. He prefers not to reveal his name, but we can say he is a former tennis pro from a West African country whose biggest career highlight was defeating #4 seed Guillermo Vilas at the Wimbeldon Chamionships in the early 1980's en route to a 4th round showing. We asked him to give us his impressions of the mysterious Noise musician and former junior Tennis prospect Dyer Lowry.

I first met Dyer Lowry at an ATP tour stop in Indianapolis in the summer of 1985. I had been asked to make a 30-minute apperaance at the "clock-your-serve" booth on the tournament grounds, and was just about to depart for my locker when a thin young teenager stepped up to hit a few balls. His speed was nothing special - somewhere in the 80-mph range - but his perfectly repeated motion was mesmerizing. I had never seen such precise accuracy in a physical motion - I could almost make out small squiggly lines between each serve, as if a video tape was being rewound and played repeatedly. The effect was so mesmerizing that I temporarily forgot that I had to play Pat Cash in just an hour.

I approached the young man and inquired as to his tennis experience. He claimed to have had moderate succes in regional junior tournaments, but that his interest in the game had waned - he only found pleasure in the repetitive motions, not the results that followed. To him the pendulum-swing of the ball, its rhythmic bounce and swooping arc, held hallucinatory powers - the longer the rally, the more he could see the fuzz on the ball loosen, the marks on the court gel into patterns, the imaginary lines of each shot intertwine and tangle. Eventually I tired of his philosophizing and departed for my match (a straight set defeat with only two breaks of serve), but I sensed I wouldn't soon forget him.

Over the ensuing decades I have received sporadic communications from Dyer. The only concrete information I have gleaned is that he gave up tennis and has become seduced by the world of underground Noise. Ironically, this information would likely have eluded me had I not coincidentally become a Noise afficionado in the intervening years. My taste tends toward the 90's absurdist noise of the Japanese and American undergrounds as championed by the likes of Bananafish magazine, but I have also labored to keep up with European electronic noise, which it sounds like Dyer is immersed in based on his murky descriptions of his continuing pursuits.

My suspicions were recently confirmed via a 5-song Dyer CD-r entitled Earth Coat Dirge, released through 'this_label.' There are certainly European influences in the warm drones and pulsing noises of Dyer's thoughtful music - I now finally understand what he meant when he wrote that he was "eating Fennesz" - but I'm struck by how well Dyer has reprocessed his influences, to the point where his echoing dissonances, reddened pulsations, and stair-climbing drama all feel less and less like homages to Pita, Oval, and This Heat, and more and more like mossy branches sprouting from the trees that grew from those fine artists' seeds. On "Full Wood (Cool Earth)" he massages a simple drone into a fuzzy storm of bristling howl, while the decaying "Number Five" transforms a cycling organ into a kind of 3-D kaleidoscope of sound. My favorite track, "An Answer" (linked below - ed.) is perhaps Dyer's greatest and simplest triumph: a rippling bit of noise nurtured until it flowers into the kind of towering weapon his serve could certainly have been, had he given it the same kind of devoted attention.

But there's nothing to be gained by contemplating those untraveled roads, especially when I am so warmed by what Dyer has become. I still don't know where he is or if there's more of this hypnotic music in him, but I do know that Earth Coat Dirge has already been granted a permanent place on my mantle next to my 1979 Junior US Open medallion.

mp3:
~~DYER LOWRY - "An Answer" from Earth Coat Dirge~~

THE CLEAR SPOTS

2006-09-10T20:07:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about noise is that even though the best is often made with non-traditional sounds, instruments, and processes, great noise can also be coaxed out of standard implements like guitar riffs and drum beats. Just ask Bardo Pond, Marble Sheep, Sonic Youth, Sun City Girls, Pussy Galore/Royal Trux, the Dead C., etc etc etc - pile up some chords until they blur into noise, or break them in half so oozing feedback pours out; stumble through some lopsided rhtyhms or puncture the air with epileptic beats; rip your lungs into the red or drool into the mic until it shorts, and you can make stuff that still kinda sounds like rock into really fucking great noise.

The Clear Spots know this as well as their forefathers listed above, and their three albums so far are all nice examples of how rock's better when it's busted, bloody, and spilling. The band is Kevin Moist (who used to do the great Deep Water zine and now has tons of good stuff going on at his Deep Water Acres webzine/label) along with a bunch of guys with the last name Bugaj, and they make hypnotic 4-track concoctions at a farmhouse in PA, rolling blurred-edge riffs and shambling drums into a warm knife that never fails to pass smoothly through the butter of my cerebral cortex.

Electricity for All is the band's most sprawling set yet, two CD-R's of engaging shuffles down the mossy lanes of aural imprecision. I'm particularly enamored of the lumbering drift of "Fun With Your New Head, Part 2," the quick feedback snack "The Man From the Atom," the overlapping stew of one-off riffs and fuzzy noodlings on "Darkness Dawn," and the bumbling gropes and half-ideas on "Chain Drive," which like a lot of the tracks above sounds like a prime outtake (e.g. "Melody Laughter" or "Booker T") from an early VU session.

Be warned that if you're a pure noisenik, you might not love the Clear Spots. More than a few of their improv adventures come across as space rock, psych, and even wanky prog, and even their farthest out stuff derives its nutrition from rock's basic food groups. But I'll happily defend all their stuff - even the lightest is full of interesting sounds and textures, and besides, fuck noise purity anyway. There's lots of epiphanies, catastrophes, and lobotomies to be found in every type of sound, and the Clear Spots have a place in that sprawling, sun-staring canon.

mp3:
~~THE CLEAR SPOTS - "Chain Drive" from Electricity for All~~

1996 / PORTABLE NOISE KREMATOR

2006-09-03T01:20:00.000-07:00

Noiseweek HQ is being physically reassigned, so gotta be quick this time...A few weeks back I busted on a Monotract review seen on the Belgian Mangenerated noiseblog, and to his eternal credit, the author (I think his name is Wim?) not only took it super well, but sent me some of his own noise, and shit - it's really fucking good. From what I can tell both the CD-R's he sent are by Wim all alone - one under his current moniker, Portable Noise Kremator, and another of stuff he made in 1996, so that's what he's calling it. Both are fiery displays of abrasive distortion and damaged electronic overload that teem with overflowing thought and effort.

The PNK disc is called Three-Headed Sickbed, and consists of five thorough tracks of eerie, reverberant growl. Lack of time and the fact that you can listen to samples of all five tracks at the Mangenerated site makes detailed description both unfeasible and unnecessary, but I will say that I really dig how PNK's core sound is so familiarly elusive - at times it sounds like stellar guitar noise, say Sonic Death-style feedback mixed with the majestic howl of Rudolph Grey, other times it sounds like partially-electronic industrial clatter in the vaunted vein of Non, PBK, or even Hive Mind. All those comparisons are just starting points though - Three-Headed Sickbed is ultimately more than a sum of its precedents.

1996 isn't wildly different than PNK - the tracks are shorter, and there's more reliance on samples, loops and rhythms, but overall the effect is the same: idea-heavy, interest-capturing noise filled with detailed, granular sound. Wim cites Reich, Crass, and Smell & Quim as influences on this one, and I can see them all, especially Reich - some of these tracks sound like dark-basement interpolations of his best phase loops. Sometimes the repetitions outlive their inspiration, and a few of the over-beat drum machine things are slightly monotonous, but shit, this was made 10 years ago - the fact that any of it, much less so much of it, holds up this well is kinda miraculous. My favorite pieces are the most noised-out ones, like the clamourous collection of skull drilling linked below, but there's more than enough hot drool spilling here to make it your duty to become one of the planet's 40 lucky owners of 1996. Go forth.

mp3:
~~1996 - (track five) from 1996~~

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (AUGUST EDITION)

2006-08-26T23:48:00.000-07:00

Dove deep into my dirt-gathering 7" collection for some retro candidates this week, and found quite a few - my place is still hazy with all the dust-fog this excavation created, as are my ears...

RALPH HAXTON - "Nathicana" / "Ernesticide" 7" (Gyttja, 1993?)
I never quite got the story with Ralph Haxton, despite knowing some of the people "involved"...but I guess that was the point, with Haxton as inscrutable Pynchon/Jandek-like enigma, only with less tangible legacy to dig through for clues. So depending on who you know/what you believe/how much you care, Haxton was either the man the rhBand was created as an homage too, or he was just another pseudonym for the guys who became rhBand. Either way, the rhBand stuff was mostly excellent improv noise, and so is this - at least "Nathicana," a stretch of multi-level screech and abrasive distortion that's both textured and impenetrable (I also think my weathered needle didn't react so kindly to these aged grooves). "Ernesticide" is less interesting, a repetitive bit of edited noise and industrial clang that's vaguely like Wolf Eyes without any density or layers. I can't imagine returning to this again even now that I have it digitized - it's pretty non-committal, caught between not enough dedication to a single idea and not enough different ideas to hold repeat interest - but it didn't make me unhappy, and at least it got me pulling out my rhBand CDs...

VARIOUS - Japan Bashing Volume Three: Stamp Out Noise 2x7" (Public Bath, 1991)
Jesus, what an all-star cast: Hijo Kaidan, Solmania, Hanatarash, and Masonna - the Mount Rushmore of Japanese hyper-destructive maniac noise. I know that even in 1991 all of these acts had a bunch of stuff out, but this is one of my first encounters w/any of them that I can remember, and thus it holds a special busted blood vessel in my withering heart, as does the label, Wisconsin(!?)-based Public Bath, which was run by an amazing married and/or divorced couple named David and Betsy, and which churned out tons of great Japanese splatter before burning out so quickly its end somehow predates the internet (just try googling it). Nothing but absolute killer sound-destruction here: Solmania's windy feedback from a brutally-raped guitar; Hijo Kaidan's unbearable firestorm of high-pitched, gut-slicing wail, from a show at which "all the audience were (sic) dead by the end"; Hanatarash's (aka Eye's) goofy crush of warped beat, reggae riff sample, and cycling din (recorded on used tapes - you can still hear the original taped-over sounds); and best of all, Masonna's ferocious (and awfully-titled, see below) air-ripping symphony of power electronics and esophagus-shredding shriek. So many of contempo noise's extremities owe debt to these four (all of whom I think are still going in some capacity), but to me no one has quite matched the combination of dense sound construction and psychotic emotional / physical / mental dumping that prime 80's/90's Japanese noise was drenched in. Maybe it's just a case of first love, but for me this kinda shit will always be the ultimate cracked, mud-caked measuring stick...

DON DIETRICH - "Chinese Root Letter" / "Tabluae Sex" (Ecstatic Peace, 1995)
Speaking of unmatched - 11 years has definitely not subtracted an iota of the power from this, Don Dietrich's lone effort outside of the confines of the skull-reshaping Borbetomagus and his other journeys with fellow massive heroes Jim Sauter and Donald Miller. I'm still so blown away by how unique this sounds - really can't think of a parallel in terms of the sheer insane tone and incomprehensibly alien texture and...uh...I don't know, it's just one of the few records I've ever heard that actually occupies a portion of the sonic spectrum completely by itself. Doubly head-fucking when you consider it was made with a freaking sax, an instrument not only limited in noise-capacity compared to electronic-based tools, but one whose farthest-out sounds should've been exhausted by freaking 1995. You're probably thinking, how can this be such a surprise if you've ever even listened to one second of annhilating Borbetomagus blare - and believe me, I've listened to a lot more than that, yet I still find this blindingly unprecedented. Sure, there's recognizable sounds here, but there are also moments (say about 3 minutes in, for example) where I just can't imagine my speakers have ever responded this way to anything else. Maybe Dietrich's pulverizing insanity has just made me woozy, but if so it's a shot I'm gonna administer myself on a regular basis, and I dare you not to do the same once you've had yr first taste.

mp3s:
DON DIETRICH - "Chinese Root Letter"
MASONNA - "hot licks from a cunning linguist"

BEN REYNOLDS

2006-08-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

First off, a quick note of caution about the new Poor School CD-R, Dream for Mat - it's unbelievably awesome. I've blabbed about them enough already so I won't go into detail, but suffice to say that if you liked their others, or if you like vintage live Marble Sheep and the Run Down Sun's Children mixed with the rockier strains of the Dead C. and/or Valentines from Matahari-era Sun City Girls, I implore you to send the best $7 you ever spent to the Killer Tree compound...

Moving on...the prolific, brilliant Last Visible Dog label has just spewed forth another load of stellar releases, led by a massive live 3-CD set of walk-in drones by Birchville Cat Motel, rattling homemade Finnishisms from Keijo and morphing blare from his Free Players ensemble, eerie woods-noise from Eastern Fox Squirrels, and more. What's carved the deepest divots in my brain, though, is Book of Beyond, a resilient slab of spaced-out drones and whining noises from Glasgwegian sound-warrior Ben Reynolds. "Best"-known as a frequent participant in Phil Todd's tall-standing Ashtray Navigations, Reynolds has been pretty prolific on his own (he just had something on Digitalis a little bit ago, which I need badly), and a lot of his stuff has vascillated between and/or swirled together Fahey-inspired acoustic traveling and idea-heavy noise, but here he seems to have gone fully over to that second side, with 48 minutes worth of unerringly excellent results.

Some might dispute that unerring-ness claim, considering that Book of Beyond at times uses stock space sounds - whirring lasers, short-wave blips, ring-modulated oscillations - that can suggest a 60's planetarium score. Dive a little deeper, though, and you'll see/hear Reynolds wraps his galactic cliches inside so much probing, unique-sounding noise, drone, racket, and din that those previously-familiar moves are basically reinvented by their context. Besides, I'm doing him a disservice by focusing that much on the space angle - most of Book of Beyond is simply busy, inventive clouds of unheard noise, with the space stuff merely a nice bit of extra fodder for Reynold's sharp, demolishing blender.

Said blender spits out a transifixing array of fertile, constantly-growing noise: check "Remedy for the Sirs," whose combo of power electronics and free improv (thanks to inspired added clatter from Alex Nielsen) evokes HCI battling HoD, then melts into a windy tunnel of high drone; "In Yeek Stars", whose metallic, whistling chirps sound both like an gamelan-ish drone symphony and a beat-less version of early Excepter moan-fests; "We Three Theatre," which recalls the Neil Young Arc approach applied to the pre-concert tune-ups of 1000 orchestras; "Done Soggy (Constellation)," a mass of sparkling cycles and trashed percussion that reminds me of Bobby Beausoleil's Lucifer Rising peformed inside of an old car engine; and more. In fact, so much fucking more that I'm not even gonna post any of the above, but rather Book of Beyond's darkest, lowest track, "Heavy Mask," a solid chunk of rumbling noise and improv clutter that's been playing ping-pong in my brain all week.

mp3:
~~BEN REYNOLDS - "Heavy Mask" from Book of Beyond~~

ESKIMO KING / AFTERNOON PENIS

2006-08-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me is probably sick of hearing me talk about Mouthus. Ever since I bought their s/t album at Kim's a few years ago (strictly because it was on Psych-o-Path) and was immediately demolished by its hypnotic noises, metallic fogs, fractured beats, and uncannily clear-yet-murky mixes, I've been blathering non-stop about the masterful duo of Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson. I've written something about almost every one of their releases somewhere, incl. the very first Noiseweek entry - so you'd think I too might eventually tire of talking about them. And I suppose I will someday - if they ever put anything bad out. Don't count on that - the amount of great Mouthus missives on various imprints (Important, Ecstatic Peace, Troubleman, etc) seems to be growing exponentially, and the band's in-house label Our Mouth has kicked into full gear - so get used to it or get lost (or both), I guess.

Best of the recent Our Mouth stuff is the first Sullivan and Nelson solo CD-R's. Sullivan's comes under the name Eskimo King, and Tooth-Shaped Migration is five thick, detailed chunks of sound spread over a quick 17 minutes. What I dig most about Sullivan is his wide-open outlook on what sounds are worth making. Mouthus may concoct a lot of deep, textured noise, but they also use acoustic guitar loops, dirgey metal-like stomps, polyrhtyhmic meditations, busted rock riffs, and tons more. Each track here is pretty different: "My 2nd Magnet" has the loping moan of Luxurious Bags or even a slo-mo Sebadoh or Tall Dwarfs; "Pinewood Derby" stretches out guitar chords and vocal syllables like vintage Dead C.; "Bear to Bear" is like early Sonic Youth filtered through a muffler; and "Ran From Ice" plants distant bombs behind a beatific acoustic line in a way that doesn't sound like anything else I can think of. My favorite piece is the simplest: "Take It to the Bus Line" (linked below) chips away at a wall of super-textured noise until its inner core of guitar, mouth harp (I think), and droning voice are left waving in the wind. My only complaint about Tooth-Shaped Migration is that I want more - some of these tracks sound like excerpts from longer symphonies - but restraint is just another of Sullivan's myriad strengths.

Afternoon Penis is the delightful name of Nelson's solo endeavors, which are as cerebrally-enthralling and gut-divining as Sullivan's. I'm pretty sure the title of his two-track CD-R Up All Night is meant literally, as Nelson often kills nocturnal hours in the practice space Mouthus shares with Double Leopards, prodding and massaging his hybridized acoustic/electric/etc kit until the sounds in his head and the room are indistinguishable. The result is two sides of the noise coin: "Calling SF" is a repetitive, commited stretch of echoing rattle and haunting drone that evokes a broken assembly line grinding itself into oblivion, while "Love Among the Stacks" is less cloudy, winding through lonely overlapping percussion and tribal whistle-and-tom duets before crawling into a tomb of noisy howl. It all evokes Mouthus' darker leanings on The Long Salt yet feels somewhat independent of the duo's staggering body of work as well as Sullivan's Eskimo King sketches - proof again this pair's vault of ideas will provide me with a reason to yak for a long time.

mp3:
ESKIMO KING - "Take It To the Bus Line" from Tooth-Shaped Migration
AFTERNOON PENIS - "Love Among the Stacks" from Up All Night

OF (plus PENGO)

2006-08-06T20:05:00.000-07:00

Bit of a dilemma this week: lately, either through purchase or bequeathment, a hailstorm of great stuff has hurtled through the Noiseweek mailbox (besides the Cold 100 to the right, I'm also frantically digesting Mouthus and Panopticon Eyelids stuff on Our Mouth, tons of My Cat is An Alien slabs, the Maggoted collab on JYRK, all the new Three Lobed subscription missives, etc etc etc...). This deluge has made it hard to pick what to write about, not to mention the fact that the best thing I heard this week (if not this year) is an un-mp3-postable two-track live CD-R from Pengo entitled Cosmology of the Broken Saints on the Hippie Overdose label. Each track is super-long, plus I'd feel weird offering half of a release for free - and an excerpt would just be wrong, since my fave, "Seven Sparrows," is such a wholistic work of sound construction that it must ONLY EVER be listened to from start to finish. It starts with incredibly textured noise-drone, builds into a dilating climax of howl, then falls back into reflecting guitar chimes that evoke the Velvet Underground circa "Black Angel's Death Song" or "Hey Mr. Rain"... only to climb into another Green Monster-sized wall of storming noise. Maybe it's just my particular cortex, but every portion of this piece digs into my brain and stirs up cells that usually spend the day/week/year dormant. I beg you to find a copy - Fusetron, Volcanic Tongue, and Carbon all seem to still be holding.

Luckily there's lot of stuff this week that's almost as good - and the almost-est is a dense slab of solo stuff from Thuja/Jewelled Antler pioneer Loren Chasse, under his current nom-de-fume Of. The excellently-titled Awful Cloud is on Yellow Swans' JYRK label, and it's four head-busting pieces of noise, drone, ambience, field recordings, primitive beat, dark atmosphere, and everything else this highly-accomplished sound-maker has long proven himself capable of. I'm no Thuja expert but have loved everything I've heard (and also think their whole nature aspect gets a bit overblown in their press, since they do a LOT more than that)...and Pine Cone Temples was one of the best records/albums/objects/etc of 2005, two discs of thoughtful aural mayhem that drew on a few influences, but still had a thick, idea-heavy aura that felt blindingly unique.

The Awful Cloud doesn't offer quite that heavy a drift (and was made all with conventional instruments - no rocks or sticks here), but it's pretty fucking close. The four tracks here are all very different, but what I like most is not the overall diversity, but how in each piece Chasse fully commits to a small range of sounds, rather than trying to make each into a look-what-I-can-do roller coaster...yet in doing so he actually divines a wider range of texture, tone, and nuance than he might've otherwise. Which is just to say the guy can find more in a single cloud of sound than most can in a year's worth of passing fronts.

The concept of what's "best" here is kinda nonsensical - I pretty much equally dig the way the four-minute "Psychotic Episode" recreates internal implosion through reddened guitar attacks that ring so hard they catch fire, the way the 17-minute "Human Absence" forges a sonic black hole with echoing tones that multiply and negate each other, and the way the closing, 11-minute "Cumulus Deceased" offers both optimistic relief through rising tones, and bittersweet denouement through stoic refusal to ever reach the mountaintop it seems to futilely seek like a droning Sisyphus. Still, it's hard to beat the opening "Uglich Bell," a cluttered web of crashing drums, ear-plugging metallics, and growling din that seems to ripple through the rest of the album long after its last bit of screech has finally decayed. That might be the best way to describe The Awful Cloud: every track seems to reflect into the other, like an undending series of cast stones causing an infinite loop of watery ripples.

mp3:
~~OF - "The Uglich Bell" from The Awful Cloud~~

MONOTRACT

2006-07-28T01:42:00.000-07:00

Spent the last few days in the company of two fine recs from last week's Cold 100, Axolotl's Way Blank and Monotract's Xprmntl Lvrs (I hope that's pronounced "Experimental Livers," or at least "Experimental Lavers"), and I've been wavering on which to write about...Way Blank is a fantastic set of super-busy drones and noise-scapes from a guy who's been cranking out nothing but hits lately, and it'll probably cut deeper into my skin in the long run, but for now Xprmntl Lvrs has found shelter in a greater amount of my pores.

I'm curious to hear reactions to the semi-rock and sometimes even fully-structured stuff on here - I'm guessing that anyone seeking 100% noise will call foul (someone already has, but since he/she is clearly unfamiliar w/the band and his/her writing reads like an interoffice memo, that doesn't come close to counting). I'm not exactly a Monotract expert - seen 'em twice and only own Live in Japan and Red Tape 1999, having missed out on the potentially more essential Pagu and Blaggout. But at my second viewing (in DC during Noise Against Fascism) they were pretty rock-damaged, with Carlos on lots of guitar, Nancy on a bunch of bass, and Roger on quite a bit of drums. Which makes Xprmntl Lvrs no shock, despite the band's noisier past and Carlos' more abstract solo leanings - besides, these three seem to rarely do anything twice, so "expectation" is kind of a meaningless term w/them, unless we're talking strictly quality and not style.

If we are, then expect away, cause Xprmntl Lvrs can take it. Split about equally between clanking, fractured rock and drilling sound experiments, it's basically devoid of clunkers. What's more, Monotract actually commit to rock swagger when they travel into that territory, rather than pulling back or half-assing around a groove, yet somehow even the "catchiest" (cough) stuff fits like a bone into the sockets of the more abrasive numbers. Basically, Monotract are confident enough in their inherently noisy nature not to be scared that a beat or riff is gonna smooth things over - and they're right.

So, as tempting as it is to split the album up into "rock" and "non-rock", it'd be inaccurate - everything here does both, just to different degress. The first couple tracks, "These Are Hard Days I Can't Forget" and "Projectus" are slanted trash-can stomps that veer closest to Sightings ca. Arrived In Gold, and from there things get murkier: "Paper Bag" buries Nancy's rants under grinding distortion and video-game beeps, "Halloween" is a symphony of hard-cut electronic drilling not far from Carlos's aggressive oscillations on Welcome Home, and "Bushwick Blues" uses lapping drums and proto-SY guitar chiming to sound like a rock band shoved into a blender.

The only track that actually divides the rock and noise is "Meurte Y Detruccion" (linked below), and paradoxically it's the best. The first half's hypnotic electro pulse and ghostly vocals conjure an imported Excepter, while the second half produces a 3D tunnel in which the varying depth and distances of tactile distortions becomes a fascinating game of aural chess. It's another unique concoction from a group who doubtless has scores more in them - let's hope Ecstatic Peace signed them to at least a double-digit deal...

mp3:
~~MONOTRACT - "Meurte Y Detruccion" from Xprmntl Lvrs~~

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (JULY EDITION)

2006-07-24T01:20:00.000-07:00

Been listening to a lot of Angus MacLise lately in anticipation of the Bastet release of Ira Cohen's film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, whose soundtrack is a divine racket by Maclise's Joyous Lake group. The DVD showed up this week, so seems like a good time for an all-MacLise edition of Retro Noise Monthly.

MacLise's history has been told a ton (a great example is here), so no need to duplicate...as for the DVD, it's a totally esssential package, with a beautiful transfer of Cohen's pre-Cremaster, Anger-minus-Satanism proto-psych kaleidoscope (an excerpt is viewable here), plus outtakes, miscellany, and Cohen commentary. The visuals are stunning but almost get blurred by MacLise's skull-busting soundtrack, heavy with multiphonic percussion and the scratchy drones of Tony Conrad and Henry Flynt. I'll pass for now on the "alternate" soundtracks by Sunburned Hand of the Man and Acid Mothers Temple - they're probably fine, but subtracting MacLise's sounds from the pictures is just too unseemly, even if Cohen did approve the idea.

There have been a decent amount of MacLise boots and ltd-ed releases in the past decade, but only four widely available CDs, all of which are must-haves. They're too wide-ranging to assess on an analytic level here (especially since none of them are truly "albums" in the authorial sense, as Angus was dead long before they were compiled). So instead I'm offering a quick rundown. (And since I've spent the weekend alternately listening to these and watching a ESPNClassic marathon of the 2005 WSOP, each release gets a rating of two pocket cards - you decide which ones to put the most chips on...)

Two things always strike me when I listen to MacLise. First, it's easy to quicky peg his stuff as hippy-jam/drum-circle improv, and I admit that some of it actually deserves that tag, but there's so much more happening, even in his hand-drum-based stuff. The guy was clearly obsessed with texture, detail, and sound-as-sound, and anything he used to get there was just a means, not an end.

Second, MacLise's stuff is so uncannily prescient, and sounds like so much that's happened since, it's hard to believe it didn't influence all things considered noise, drone, or improvisational, despite the fact that almost no one heard his stuff before 1999. Thus I like to think of MacLise's work as the subconscious of modern noise - as if it's always been running in the nether brain-regions of every noisemaker since, whether or not they know it.

Keep going for a rough MacLise consumer guide...
The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (Quakebasket/Siltbreeze, 1999)
The first fruit of Tim Barnes' fortuitous friendship with Ira Cohen was this stellar disc - 40 minutes of the Invasion soundtrack (a live version recorded at a St. Mark's screening, with a different group than appears on the DVD soundtrack), a wondrous cloud of cycling drone and overlapping-typewriter beats. The other stuff is pretty right too: a one-minute shortwave radio collage, a five-minute chunk of flute-drum din from the "Universal Mutant Repertory Company," and the legendary, beautifully overmodulated "Blastitude" featuring some absolutely terrifying machine-gun percussion and spine-shaking shrieks. Only clunker is the chimey "Humming in the Night Skull," which is oddly saccharine. Still, a masterful package (with nifty Cohen liner notes) worth a rating of: Ace-King suited in Diamonds.

Brain Damage in Oklahoma City (Quakebasket/Siltbreeze, 2000)
Another Barnes/Cohen special, this time w/help and notes from Tony Conrad. Immediately announces its aggressive glory with "Another Druid's Nest," a 41-second screech-a-thon from the mouth of Angus's "maximum cembalum." The centerpiece is two segments of the "Dreamweapon Benefit," a 1968 Cinemathique recording of a seance-worthy wheeze-fest from Angus, wife Hetty, Conrad, Flynt, and Jackson MacLow. The glory of that hailstorm (whose detonating peak sounds like No Neck if they were the first band on PSF) might make the rest of Brain Damage seem like addenda, but they're not: a hand-breaking six-minute drum solo and a concrete tape-cut "Loft Collage" are just the high points of the rest of an unerring collection. Rating: Pocket Queens.

The Cloud Doctrine (Sub Rosa, 2002)
The only release of the four not masterminded by Tim Barnes, and, oddly, the one that's most "archival" in nature - there's not really any theme here, but lots of items of extreme historical interest. The biggest being four tracks from a kind of pre-Velvet Underground lineup of MacLise, Conrad, and John Cale. Those pieces are definitely all stunners, especially the uber-hypnotic "Trance #2," which could basically be the blueprint for every interesting drone/percussion piece ever made. Lots of other archival juice here: Maclise's near-folky score to Ron Rice's film Chumlum, a bunch of electronics pieces including the stunning 3-part "Tunnel Music," a couple poetry readings, and a way-ahead "Tambura Drone" which sounds like Pelt must've sampled it at some point. The variety here is pretty stunning and the packaging detail is miles-thick, so The Cloud Doctrine is clearly essential - but it's the only release of these four that really feels like an odds'n'ends collection, never quite hitting the across-the-board groove of the others. More a credit to Tim Barnes than a knock against Sub Rosa, but either way it knocks this down slightly to a rating of: King-Queen of Hearts.

Astral Collapse (Quakebasket/Locust Media, 2003)
Easily the farthest out MacLise release of the four here, and probably the best. We hear Angus explaining the global inspirations behind his tape manipulation process at the beginning, and from there Astral Collapse is pure sonic exploration and fiery idea mayhem. "Beelzebub" is a haunting stretch of bongos and prepared tape that sounds like Hell's zoo; "Cloud Watching" is an Angus-Hetty duo of distortion and drone that could fit snugly on a Handful of Dust album; and best of all is "Dracula" (linked below), a whining bit of pure noise that 3 decades of similar experiements hasn't nearly dampened. Anyone who likes most/all of what this blog covers should go directly to Astral Collapse with their first Angus-intended dollars. Rating: Pocket Aces.

mp3:
~~Angus Maclise - "Dracula" from Astral Collapse~~

THE CHERRY POINT

2006-07-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

In the last few years Phil Blankenship's devotion to extreme noise has been kinda staggering. His Troniks and PacRec labels have scored numerous direct lobe-hits (my fave is John Wiese's Teenage Hallucination), the most massive being the California Noise 20-band/10-LP box. The Cherry Point, Blankenship's alter noise ego, has been just as hectic, ripping out CDs, LPs, splits, and collabs with Wiese, Yellow Swans, Howard Stelzer, etc. Lots of those have been genuine factory-made releases, the kind that take money and planning and actual hassle. As much as I love CD-R's, the underground would be ~~wormfood~~ a bit incomplete (thanks to anonymous #1 for the re-think...) if not for labels that see noise as worthy of pressing plants and shrink-wrap machines. So Mr. B's a hero on a lot of fronts.

Unfortunately, this kind of high activity-level inevitably evokes the simplistic "it can't all be good" dig (just ask Keiji Haino, Anthony Braxton, or William Shakespeare). And I really don't know, because I haven't heard it all, but I'd happily bet that everything Blankenship-related object has something worthwhile in its festering core, because what I have heard is really fucking "good."

Two discs this year have particularly bent my femurs - first, Night of the Bloody Tapes, a compilation of tape stuff meant to conjure the demons embedded in gore-outs like Mardi Gras Massacre and Shriek of the Mutilated. A noble pursuit for sure, and Blankenship succeeds by pouring aural blood in your ears until all you can hear is your insides, as if your guts were a conch shell stiched to the side of your head. All four untitled tracks here may invite and even justify knee-jerk complaints, i.e. I could sit next to a jack hammer and get the same experience. Well of course you could, and a lot of us would if there were jack hammers everywhere - since there aren't, monsyllabic noise like Night of the Bloody Tapes needs to be kept around just in case.

If that doesn't knot your cochlea, The Cherry Point does other stuff too, which is why the new Black Witchery is my favorite slab so far. Three tracks culled from 3-inch CDs, each about 20 minutes long. Not exactly a departure from Bloody Tapes - it's still monolithic noise meant strictly for ear-assault - but there's a dark hypnotism here that produces suprisingly varied experiences over multiple listens. "Virgin Witch" is a warmup, as crackling static and rumbling echoes slowly curdle into a sprint. "Devil's Witch" starts with a rare single sound and builds a contoured map of trebly noise and windy atmosphere. But the real bell-ringer is "Season Of The Witch" (excerpt below), a kind of royal noise sampler, with nearly every kind of destructive sound - abrasive blasts, repetitive blips, cracked electronics, distant bombs, howling echoes, etc - deployed.

I also wouldn't cry if you snatched Limbs of the Fawn, a lovingly black-packaged Misanthropic Agenda CD from the Blankenship-Wiese duo LHD. Not exactly sure what distinguishes LHD from the Blankenship-Wiese duo of White Gold, but that's not important - what does matter is the 36-minute brain tumor here filled with crunchy treble and ear-pinning static. It's basically an extended version of an aural car wreck, but stretches of overtoned yell and ghostly shriek make it worth at least one sitting, if you can take it.

Years of school and/or being wrangled by editors has planted this voice in my head that sez I gotta give you a consumer guide, tell you if you'll "like" the records I talk about, if they're "better or worse" than others. I'm gonna keep resisting that demon though - the truth is that records like the Cherry Point's are so occupying that their relation to others is immaterial. When they're on, I don't think about other records or measuring sticks or modes of perception - I just think about how much noise there is. That's all anyone with grey matter should want/need to know.

mp3:
~~THE CHERRY POINT - "Season of the Witch" (excerpt) from Black Witchery~~

DYLAN NYOUKIS / BLOOD STEREO

2006-07-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

I doubt anyone reading this needs an intro to British idea-blender Dylan Nyoukis - suffice to say he was in the great 90's noise/sound (and brother/sister - click here and scroll down for more on that, uh, situation) duo Prick Decay (later Decaer Pinga), is currently part of Blood Stereo and Ceylon Mange, has fired neurons at like-brained skull-screwers like Carlos Giffoni, Alvarius B, T. Moore, etc., and continues to run the formidable, now 150-title strong Chocolate Monk label. The later is an imprint that I've worshipped for a while, and a glance at the entire discog is still kinda stunning - so many mind-bending releases in there (for those counting, my vote for best would be either Trumans Water's Couch of the Spastics or Richard Youngs' Motorway.) There's a new batch of great C.M. stuff out now, and three of them are Nyoukis-oriented: a 3-track solo dispatch, and two one-track live missives from the aforementioned Blood Stereo (his duo with Karen Constance).

The solo CD, Owl Tapes, is the most aggressive of the three. Using reel to reel tapes, scillator, and piles of his own distended voice, Nyoukis slices together a pretty convincing seminar on how to send poisoned darts of air from the speakers into any/all attending ear drums. The first piece, "Live at the Engine Room, Brighton, March 4th, 2006," is the most map-filling, with Nyoukis' gulps, gasps, cries, and myriad breath-dissections shooting around the stereo space like needles in search of veins. (Weirdly, one of the tracks on the new Alan Sparhawk solo CD is called "How the Engine Room Sounds," and it's a pretty great string-ironing counterpart to Nyoukis' heavy breathing.) A shorter middle track, "Interlude" (linked below), sounds mellow compared to what it's sandwiched between, but in terms of brain activity and idea displacement, it's just as harried. Owl Tapes ends with "Live Piece for Voice, Reel to Reels, and Oscillator," a super-piercing bit of treble extremity that, if pressed, I'd say sounds vaguely like a brain being fried in a pan (and not because of drugs), but Nyoukis' own description ("like if Terry Riley had down syndrome when he hooked up his time-lag accumulator") is far more accurate.

The two Blood Stereo discs are a bit different, both from Owl Tapes and each other. Both are thicker mix-wise than the former, and rely less on voice, or at least anything you can recognize as voice. For Heavy Lung, a 35-minute live recording from April 2005, is actually a five-piece performance with Julian Bradley, Neil Campbell, and Sticky Foster, and it's as solid and turbulent as those names would lead one to expect, filled with cycling noises, rising tones, some darkened sections of harrowing howl, and even a strangulated beat here and there.

An excellent disc to be sure, but I prefer The Little Creeper, an hour-long Karen/Dylan session recorded live on resonance-fm this past February. Now, I can get happily lost in the least varied, most monotonous long-form noise, but every so often it's nice to hear a lengthy piece that actually visits a range of ear-locales, and The Little Creeper is the best example I've heard in a long time. Constantly engaging, and almost OCD in its search for new sounds, it runs a pretty slick roller coaster from meditative drone to looped rhythm to random samples to vocal exhumations, all inextricably connected and mystically-timed, as if these two have some secret key to the sweet spot at which to stop hammering a sound and transform it into something new. I've been combing this all week for the best excerpt to post, and it's impossible to pick - like a great movie, each psycho-acoustic scene here begets the next so well that changing the channel is like slicing a hole in the ozone. But check out the excerpt below anyway, and then paypal some pounds to Sir Nyoukis for the whole thing ASAP...

mp3's:
DYLAN NYOUKIS - "Interlude" from Owl Tapes
BLOOD STEREO - excerpt from The Little Creeper

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (JUNE EDITION)

2006-06-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

Posting early this week to sneak a retro entry in under the June gun...lotsa good new stuff to talk about in July, including a bunch of great Chocolate Monk CD-R's that you oughta order right now...

RST - Warm Planes
(Corpus Hermeticum, 2000)
New Zealander Andrew Moon played drums in the pretty great Goblin Mix, but his solo guitar stuff as RST was his peak acheivement and this disc of heavy, subtle drones is probably his best (haven't heard 'em all, but it at least beats the very good R136a on Ecstatic Peace). I don't recall this being quite so gripping when it came out - I guess it had a lot of HermesCorp competition - but most of the drones here are suprisingly weighty, despite an odd calmness that's cleverly deceptive. In other words, the surface here is vaguely placid, but right below is a stomach-churning din waiting to pull any patient listener in, sorta like quicksand topped with sugar. There's also a weird sheen of mild crackle bubbling beneath, as if Moon has dipped his drones in water and then waved them near a wall socket. One track is even called "Voltage (Dub)," and there's definitely an otherwordly static electricity covering Warm Planes' dense, bassy meditiations. As I was saying last week, the best drones tend to slice open your middle immediately, but the strange beauty of RST's is that they take a while - or maybe they just come with their own anaesthetic, cause by the time you notice that Andrew Moon has scalpeled through to your insides, he's already closing up your sutures.

THE GEROGERIGEGEGE - Senzuri Power Up (Un-Released Studio Track 1985/1986)
(Vis a Vis Audio Arts, 1991)
I always thought of Juntaro Yamanouchi's Gerogerigegege as a living embodiment of the more scatological Boredoms song titles, and revisiting this rec of outtakes doesn't change my mind, though I am suprised at how great it still sounds. (For the uninitiated, this highly entertaining Wikipedia entry tells you everything you need to know, though I can't resist reprinting this wonderful section):

The name of the group combines the Japanese words for "vomit" (gero) and "diarrhea" (geri) with what is supposedly the sound of these actions occurring simultaneously (gegege). (It has also been transliterated to mean "barf, diarrhea, ha ha ha," although "ge" is also variously an onomatopoetic word of disgust or exasperation, making the name open to several differing interpretations.) To describe the group, Yamanouchi has used the term "Japanese Ultra Shit Band."

Anyway...the Gerogerigegege actually released some rock and even ambient stuff at points (I guess their classic is Tokyo Anal Dynamite), but noise was their, uh, "strength," and Senzuri Power Up is 24 minutes of organ-distending proof. It opens with some sample of big-band Japanese pop, but that quickly gets obliterated by a giant guitar-rape mixed with a throat-searing howl and trashaholic drums, and from there the intestinal blast-laffs never stop. (They even make a sound that lives up to the title "I Wanna Be Your Pantie.") I had no idea how much Sightings kinda sounds like this, and I wouldn't be surprised if M.Morgan & co. dig these guys, but the similarity is far from plagiary - instead think of the Gerogerigegege as the mentally-challenged older brother that still lives in the attic of Sightings' parents. Or just think of them as a head-flattening, bowel-reducing aural virus that Senzuri Power Up somehow managed to trap inside a rancid petri dish.

RAMLEH - We Created It, Let's Take It Over, Vol. I
(Pure, 1995)
Ramleh, the Brit duo of Gary Mundy and Philip Best, were a little brother band to Skullflower, in a way I'm not sure I know/care to know. Regardless, they took the more hyper sides of that larger group and strained them through a penchant for lung-killing screech, abrasive jolts, and semi-punk/metal song titles. Where Skullflower often built up their noises and drones in a gradually, kinda crafty manner, Ramleh went straight for the veins, with mixed but mostly devastating results. We Created It... is a three volume Pure set of early (mostly cassette) detritus, and I'm betting I have the other two editions, but I'm betting even more strongly that I'll never find them.

It's probably just the proximity that makes me think this, but We Created It... actually falls between RST and the Gerogerigegege - it's more solid and less hyper than the latter, building solid columns of noise not unlike RST's sandy drones, but there's enough desperate yelling to put Ramleh in the same genus (maybe even phylum) as Japan's Ultra Shit Band. I'm trying to dredge up other reference points, but they're eluding me right now, which might mean that Ramleh's combo of string-slicing noise-scapes and harrowing-yet-sorta-musical shrieking is actually somewhat unique. Not what I expected to conclude, but check out the self-titled track linked below: it seems to sounds like somebody, but let's see you name them, cause I can't. I keep waiting for a record in one of these retro entries to fall short, and Ramleh seemed like the best candidate so far, but sorry - We Created It... is a sweet stink-bomb of olfactory noise worth at least 40 minutes of alone time.

mp3s:
RST - "Wasted Magic" from Warm Planes
THE GEROGERIGEGEGE - "Anal Beethoven #2" from Senzuri Power-Up
RAMLEH - "Ramleh" from We Created It, Let's Take it Over Vol. I

JAZZFINGER

2006-06-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

Here's yet another group of whom my lack of knowledge has been an eternally festering side-thorn...I remember reading Neil Campbell's interview with British duo Jazzfinger in Bananafish #14 way back in 2000 and wanting immediate access to these guys' lo-fi take on ground-shaking drone, then I woke up six years later and hadn't done a fucking thing about it. Luckily that embarrassing craw-sticker has been quickly and painlessly yanked out by Winter's Shadow Between Two Worlds, a new CD-R composed of eight eerie, echoey, anchor-heavy Jazzfinger drones issued by the sensational Brit underground imprint Curor.

For such massive pieces, Jazzfinger's concotions are suprisingly subdued on first listen. Not that they didn't hit immediately, just that I was more transfixed by the hynpotism than the power of Ben Jones and Hasan Gaylani's sound, but not too many listens later their drones came crashing down on my cranium like tidal waves that had froze in mid-air for a few tantalizing seconds before engulfing everything below. This was most true with the longer tracks, which tend to be the best: the 13-minute "At First Wovey" is an atmospheric prayer that slowly ascends to a grind; the 10-minute, perfectly-titled "Stare at Things" turns a Spacemen 3-styled organ drone into a laser-beam of eye-dilating light; and the album's epic, the 17-minute "Shadow Moose," uses frightening voices and harrowing bursts to scare up a continent's worth of aural ghosts. Most stunning about Winter's Shadow is the track-to-track tonal deviation - jump around this CD and it's like comparing species of animals, but bury yourself in any single drone and the unmistakable, foundation-moving center is like the lifeforce that links all beings.

When I'm drooling over any drone, there's often a voice in my head nagging "yeah, good, but how good?," and to that charlatan I offer the following: for me and probably any drone-licking sucker, the concept of "good or bad" is basically laughable. Give me a long solid tone with even an iota of dedication or patience to it and I'm not gonna sit around splitting hairs about the degree to which it floors me. Yet the concept of "better" still applies, and "better" drone, be it Phill Niblock's dense skyscrapers, Double Leopards' gravelly howls , or Tony Conrad's flammable sawing (which is the kind of air-ripping drone Jazzfinger mostly closely resembles, at least on the beautifully grating track linked below), attains immediate primal contact with some kind of universal ground-zero. It's like a divining rod reaching directly into a reactive center in your gut, a hot metal stake stirring a motlen liquid core. These kind of straight-shot belly-needles are immediately identifiable and need no time or context to cut through the skin - not only do they pierce instantly, at best they even fill the resulting hole, replacing your innards with heavy gravitational sound. Jazzfinger's best moments are exactly that - a medicinal noise prescribed to fill internal voids.

mp3:
~~JAZZFINGER - "Fateful Brass Orb" from Winter's Shadow Between Two Worlds~~

AKISA

2006-06-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

Got knocked sideways by a fever, so only a short ramble this week, about another fascinating missive from Finland: a Foxglove CD-R from the odd, wailing thicket called Akisa. Lots of mystery going on with Passover, recorded five years ago and apparently the sole release from this trio led by Jarmo Saarti (though he's listed here "Saarti," alongside "Juntunen" and "Kinnunen," all of whom are credited with "instrument(s)," the "s" being a scrawled addendum to the back cover's design-less Helvetica desert). Even more mysterious than the vague band details is the fact that this has some kind of Christian theme, with titles like "In the Beginning," "Jesus in the midst of the wolves," and "Mary wept" and a clunkily Photoshopped cover depicting a church supper in which a child stares psychotically at the camera like Linda Blair daring you to come closer. Hard to tell exactly what's religious about the band's lo-fi clatter, which is mostly high-quality, sax-led free-jazz spew, but Passover contains enough fanatic cacophony to fulfill its implicit promise of spiritual epiphany/insanity.

Actually, the dichotomy of lo-fi jazz and crazed noise is so sharp it gives Passover a weirdly schizophrenic quality. I've listened to this maybe 10-15 times, and sometimes I remember it as an above average free-jazz rec in a low-rent ESP mode (even hear a few Marzette Watts-like moments here and there), other times all that sticks are the 5-to-10 abandoning moments in which choking sax, sandpapery electronics (I think), and the distorted screams of a what sounds like a half-human/half-seal create an explosion of distressed speaker-destruction. I think "Jesus in the midst of wolves" (linked below) is the best example of this oddly beguiling yin/yang, starting as an echoey piece of minimal improv, adding a few saws and creaks, and eventually building to a ear-killing din that sounds like some kind of being not having the greatest of days.

This isn't to say that the more, uh, conventional jazz passages here aren't worthy of time too - subtract the little peaks of freak-out and Passover would still be an excellent chunk of basement-locked skronk - but Passover's insane bumps jut Akisa into its own strange, toxic realm...

mp3:
~~ASIKA - "Jesus in the midst of the wolves" from Passover~~

WZT HEARTS

2006-06-10T23:09:00.000-07:00

I've heard the name of Baltimore out-sound quartet Wzt Hearts (pronounced "Wet Hearts" - there's a story behind that that I can't remember) a good bit the past coupla years, and I feel like I've seen 'em a bunch, but can only access vague memories of an Ottobar gig w/Growing, Gang Gang Dance, and Animal Collective, and a Warehouse Next Door show w/More Dogs and Stamen & Pistils. Not that my social calendar matters; I only mention this to point out that despite digging what I heard, those sets didn't really stick, and I definitely don't remember these guys being as mind-stretchingly wide and sonically fertile as they are on their CD Heat Chief just released on Hit Dat (with vinyl to come on Hoss, the label also responsible for a great split 12" featuring an Excepter track from a revelatory DC show). I'm sure this live/record discrepancy is the product of my distracted brain and not the band's now-obvious powers, but either way the combo of expansive noise and thoughtful restraint on this debut imprinted my gray matter immediately.

Based on what Wzt Hearts play on stage - electronics, mixers, drums, a laptop, etc - I'm not shocked at the sound here, just didn't expect it to be this massive and versatile. Heat Chief is kinda split into two symmetric sides, with the sequentially-named "1" and "3" being 16-minute epics filled with sound-sources including tons of live drumming, and "2" and "4" being shorter, non-percussive studies that trace narrower sonic lines. Wzt Hearts are great at both of these modes, and while the longer cuts at first seem to drag periodically due to rock-ish drums and an airy, nearly planetarium-ready prog-ness, the beauty is that without those dips, the high-flying climaxes of multi-layered noise wouldn't feel nearly as epiphanistic. Best example comes about nine minutes into "3", as mounds of filtered noise, puncturing samples, and rattling hectic-ness stun simply because the overlapping drums that buttress it all began life a few minutes earlier as rote hypnotic thuds.

Thus posting an excerpt of either "1" or "3" won't do those monumental tracks justice, so let us turn to Wzt Hearts' smaller triumphs: "4," the closer, is the album's eeriest cut, a cacophony of dislocated echoes that gradually collects sonic ghosts only to shove them down a decaying black hole - but my vote goes to "2," a slow glide up a flickering staircase of cloud-piercing noise. The track's sky-seeking effect (and nice hard-cut demise) falls somewhere between the fuzzy melodics of Fennesz and the more medititative moments in the Mirkoknytes' catalogue, but those comparisons only work when "2" is heard on its own - if you dig it, I implore you to immediately forget it and get the whole album, because it sounds even better stuffed in between Wzt Hearts' more expansive, mountain-scaling work.

mp3:
~~WZT HEARTS - "2" from Heat Chief~~

AVARUS

2006-06-03T19:50:00.000-07:00

The Finnish avant-whatever underground has been exploding for a while now, and I'll admit to blindly loving all of what I've heard so far, which would include Lau Nau, Kiila, Es, Islaja, Kemialliset Ystävät, Sala-Arhimo, and more. But nothing's hit me like the first thing I heard outta this smoldering region: Ruskeatimantti, Tumult's 2-disc collection of CD-R spew by the mysterious cabal known as Avarus. Now, all of the aforementioned outfits primarily rattle the skeletons of folk, psych/Kraut, or both, and Avarus isn't really an exception on Ruskeatimantti, which sounds mostly like a far-flung, savant-ish version of No-Neck circa their early Sound@One CDs. Still, something about the sandy textures and bubbling activity of Avarus's foggy jams gave me the skin-raised feeling that this is the one Finnish ensemble most likely to trip down the stairs into the noise basement.

Maybe they'd already done so (judging by the broadcast of their Terrastock set, they're continuing to, too), but my own first confirmation of said suspicion is Vesikansi, a four-song head-blast procured by Providence label Secret Eye. There are a few bits of Kraut-meditation and maybe even (if you look so close your eyes start to blur) melodic folk here, but mostly this is high-quality improv noise, spilling over with whining bleats, semi-electronic spew, scraping string-rape, percussive clang, and the growls of the kind of walruses that are pinned to both sides of the CD's cover art. This isn't all aggressive noise - in fact little of it is, and one track, "Löylyvesi," even sounds like a stoner jam, albeit one in which riffs and beats are replaced by a queasily undulating mix of sonic quicksand. But then the Dead C. were rarely "aggressive," and their noise - which Avarus evokes pretty often here - still stands as some of history's best. Vesikansi's not even all great, but even at its mellowest and/or weakest moments, Avarus admirably seeks answers through abstraction and confusion, never settling for a groove but instead trusting that incresasing chaos will be its own mesmerizing reward.

Well of course it will, and Avarus's swirling miasma proves that so forcefully that Vesikansi creates its own disappearing logic, the kind that collapses as soon as you identify it. This is truest on the final two tracks, both of which are called "Vissyvesi," both of which were recorded live with Philly hypno-hymnist Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa), and both of which stream from sky-scraping drones to looping din to drum-guitar climax and back, hitting the kind of multiple peaks that can only be acheived by patient willingness not to always be peaking.

They're also both too long to post, so here's "Lapsivesi," Vesikansi's most fist-forward track, which turns viola-sounding abrasion into meter-filling detonations of thundering noise, and proves that, in the right hands, "limited" recording capability is nothing but a weapon.

mp3:
~~AVARUS - "Lapsivesi" from Vesikansi~~

PBK

2006-05-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

Phillip B. Klingler, aka PBK, has concocted stunning streams of sonic lava for 20 years now, from his audio cave beneath the famously depressed town of Flint, Michigan. Even making average-sounding sludge in that unlikely spot would be an admirable feat, but judging by the amazing stuff on A Noise Supreme, Early Solo Works, 1986-89, a selection of cassette pieces resurrected by XDiedEnrouteY (the excellent CD-R label recently responsible for a great Dino Felipe slab), PBK's work is pretty miraculous regardless of locale.

Kinda pathetic that this is my first exposure to PBK - had seen his name for years in association with Asmus Tiechens, Aube, Wolf Eyes, Jeph Jerman, etc., but somehow never actually heard him. The 11 tracks of super-thoughtful sound crammed into this disc make that ignorance a jailable offense...I'm not sure comparisons are appropriate with PBK's deep noise, which certainly shares terrain with the above compadres, as well as the ritualistic horror-loops of Non, the aggressive sheen of Merzbow, and the echoing drones of Double Leopards. But PBK's been doing this for so long and has developed such an singular vocabulary using synths, samplers, effects, and turntables, that it'd be an insult to say he sounds like someone else and not the other way around.

Most impressive about PBK's cavernous racket, aside from how I find something new everytime I play it, is the way he uses familiar devices to produce unique results. Some pieces, like the clicking drone of "CNT Oct. 1910" and the dark pound of "Tribality," veer toward industrial bombast, but PBK melts the rhythmic stomp into his din rather than interrupting it or arbitrarily chopping it up. Others feel almost academic, but never in a bloodless way - only in the sense that you can hear all the thick thought behind PBK's sound, making his music feel more like layers of sediment excavated by a dirt-loving noise scientist than dry lab experiments with no gunk under the fingernails.

Every track here is a killer and I'd love to post them all, but instead I implore you to Paypal some $ to XDEY (and soon, mine is copy 34 of only 100)...and also check out mp3s at Soundclick and the Noiseambient myspace page...plus a nice vid of live improv from 2004...and finally enjoy "Fata Morgana," which I post below not only because it's a wall of harrowing hiss, but also because it shares a title with one of Werner Herzog's most insane films, not to mention lots of other random stuff too.

Tons more PBK to come (I'm most drooling at the 3-CD retrospective due on Russian label Waystyx), and some old stuff is again ownable now, so time to catch the hell up...

mp3:
PBK - "Fata Morgana" from A Noise Supreme

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (MAY EDITION)

2006-05-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

GATE - Live Boston/NYC 1994
(Poon Village, 1995)
There's really not a bad record out there by Gate (the demolishing concern of the Dead C.'s Michael Morley), but of all the ones I have, I've revisited Live Boston/NYC 1994 the least, if at all. This is due to sheer Gate volume rather than any quality issues - I've re-zoned to The Dew Line, Lounge, Golden, Monolake and even Morley solo recs like Lavender Head and Pavilion of Fools enough times that something had to get lost in the heavy plastic shuffle. This one's worth digging for, though - taken from Gate's '94 tour w/Keiji Haino and other Table of the Elements types, it has one half-hour track from Boston featuring a two-headed (w/Lee Ranaldo) Gate, plus six other short pieces from NYC w/a trio of Morley, Ranaldo, and Zeena Parkins. It's one of the few (only?) recorded examples of Morley's real-time sound-destruction, as well as his masterful ability to intertwine with other humans not named Russell or Yeats, and as such is pretty unerring stuff. The Boston cut is mostly flaming guitar battles and echoey dual-drones (plus a few sections that're too chord-y, but those are minimal). The NYC tracks are even more interesting, with a wider range of sounds and some harrowingly cave-trapped-sounding howl. Plus it's all locked in choice Poon Village screenprinted cardstock with that elastic loop holder thing, a packaging style that still stands out after 10-plus years of challengers. Though I certainly understand it, it's a shame that Mr. Morley's activity has slowed recently, as there are a lot more U.S. stages that he could be blowing people off of now than when he obviously did so in '94.

C.C.C.C. - Loud Sounds Dopa / Live in U.S.A.
(Endorphine Factory/Charnel House, 1993)
Not too much to say about this - just an unbelievably extreme noise record from one of Japan's (and Earth's) most extreme noise ensembles. I figured the years of ear-shred I've accomplished/enjoyed/endured since would make this sound softer than it did when I first hid under the table from it 13 years ago, but no chance: the two half-hour tracks here, taken from Oct 1992 shows in Oakland and Chicago, are still bone-sanding, nerve-puncturing experiences. Track one actually starts relatively mellow, but once abrasion kicks in at the three-minute mark, "relent" becomes a term that the murderous vocabulary of C.C.C.C. is painfully unfamiliary with. Sure, there's interesting stuff happening below - an infinity of turns, jolts, blasts, and even hallucinatory rhythms down there - but it's all laquered in a coat of aggressive sheen that never gets stripped away. Imagine Double Leopards if they were only allowed to play blenders and weed wackers - then imagine that you forgot your earplugs, and your way home. A pretty daunting acheivement, but my future 80-year old self is thankful for the little drops of remaining hearing that would've been long gone had I been at either of these shows. Beg me and I'll post an excerpt, but for now I'd rather protect your ear-health too.

MOSLANG / GUHL - Deep Voices
(FMP, 1977; Urthron (reissue), not sure when)
My head first got drowned by Voice Crack through their awesome collaborative LPs with heroic air-tearing trio Borbetomagus, wherein the Swiss duo of Norbert Moslang and Andy Guhl added intense audio junk using their self-described "cracked electronics" (homemade instruments like busted radios or half-alive calculators resoldered into noise-generators). Went backwards from there to 1990's Earflash, a skeleton-rattling set with drummer Knut Redmond, reissued in 1996 by the sadly short-lived O'Rourke/Grubbs label Dexter's Cigar. Then finally landed on their debut, Deep Voices, released on FMP before the duo took on the Voice Crack moniker. This is basically a jazz record, albeit an odd and often fucked-up one, especially considering it was recorded in 1977. Here Moslang plays reeds and Guhl plays bass and percussion, and though their future trash-trove is mostly absent, the lab-like devotion to mining for aural debris is firmly in place - seven tracks filled with scraping high-end (not unlike the Lacy/Parker dog-whistle battles of Chirps, also on FMP), silence-chasing restraint, and careful attention to avoiding patterns and dodging expectations. Apparently Moslang and Guhl have parted ways (there's a Moslang solo rec from a few years back that I still gotta hear), but anything with their names attached is worth sticking your head inside.

mp3:
GATE - "New York 3" from Live Boston/NYC 1994
MOSLANG / GUHL - "Gut Geschliffen" from Deep Voices

SIGHTINGS / CHAW MANK

2006-05-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

There's tons of great shit happening this decade, but my holy trinity of post-90's noise would be Sightings, Mouthus, and Double Leopards. Sightings get the Father position not from longevity (I think the Leopards win that race), but just cause they were the first I got to hear. When I caught rumblings in 2001 that Mark Morgan had a new band in NYC, I was definitely intrigued, but totally unprepared for the amazing onslaughts of Sightings (Load) and Michigan Haters (Psych-o-Path). The band's m.o. was simple enough - slobbering semi-rock "songs" with everything distorted beyond the capacity of man-made sound reproduction devices - but the sheer energy and odd unpeggability of the band's splattering sound palate gave both records a brain-destroying mania. Not to get too melodramatic, but it felt like a, uh, "new day" in noise.

Turns out it kinda was: noise and all other forms of abstract sound have steadily inclined since '01, and my own insignificant version of history sez Sightings are a (maybe even the) key. Since their first two blasts, they've found suprising nuance and dimension in their monolithic noise-walls: 2003's Absolutes added hints of dissected rhythm, leading to the chopped-up sparseness of 2004's Arrived in Gold, which proved that the band's powerful volume wasn't really about loudness, but rather unattenuated ideas and energy. Add the fact that Sightings warp brain cells live (their gig at No Fun Fest #1 was a mind-killer, particularly bassist Richard Hoffman's inhuman weight-lifting), and it's hard to think of a better band this decade.

The newest Sightings slab, End Times (Fusetron), takes four tracks from a super-limited LP (a collab with painter Daniel Richter for Italian label EN/OF) and adds five new chunks. It mixes styles from every past album - especially Morgan's drooling moans from the first two and the sharp, needle-sticking beats of John Lockie ca. Absolutes - into another mesh of overdriven beauty, and is often as harsh as the band has ever been - some parts will have you gluing in earplugs. Still, there's something uniquely, uh, human about this rec. Every song (two are available on Sightings' myspace page, and one below) seems to course with blood, and even the most desperate, brusing cuts are tinted warm red rather than cold black and blue. This might even be the best Sightings rec - I'm never gonna be objective about this band so don't trust me there - but you can trust me that, despite its ominous title, End Times proves the fertile sonic fields of Sightings are far from fully harvested.

Same goes for Mouthus, the first band since Sightings to give me such a holy-shit first-listen jolt. The two bands don't sound alike (Mouthus have a sludgier vibe, with more hypnotic, deadened (or even Dead C.-ened) drift), but it's still no big shock that they have a mutual history. In the 90's, Mouthus guitar-killer Brian Sullivan started a band with Sightings' Hoffman called Chaw Mank (they continue today with Sightings' Lockie and/or Mouthus drummer Nate Nelson), and Mouthus' in-house CD-R label, Our Mouth, has just released a thatch of Chaw Mank material called Vol. I. I've only had this a couple days and can't do it justice, but rest assured it's all you'd expect and more: dense air-tearing noise, gut-level pounding, vocals flattened into electric sheen, and the kind of wide-ranging openness to all possible sounds that Mouthus has patented. Right now I really dig the two 13-minute-plus tracks ("Days Of Air" is a funereal loop straight off of the Dead C.'s self-titled 2cd on Language), but both are too long to post, so instead here's the rec's darkest cut, a eerie crusher called "Jerk Finger"...

mp3s:
SIGHTINGS - "Bile Duct" from End Times
CHAW MANK - "Jerk Finger" from Vol. I

PEACEFEATHER

2006-05-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

Recently got a nice package full of hypnotic sounds from the exclt Philly label Honeymoon Music. The best band on this bubbling imprint is probably Niagara Falls, whose two CDs of slow-moving atmospheres and rattling noise debris clearly need more time than I've given them...but right now my ears are more fervently occupied by the mysterious gaggle called Peacefeather. Don't let the name scare you - maybe these guys are hippies in real life, but their music occupies the dark, spooky strain of Krautrock birthed by Can and Faust, extended by International Harvester / Parson Sound / Trad Gras Och Stenar, and recently split into a million hairs by No-Neck Blues Band, Davis Redford Triad, Acid Mothers Temple, etc.

Not that Peacefeather are just the sum of these influences, though I can't really say they are much more yet...but this self-titled CD-R is only their first release, and it's not like there's tons of bands doing this kind of thing this well anyway, so fuck it if they're not 100% distinct. They more than make up for it in range and skill - even Peacefeather's most predictable moments, like the happy, Neu-ish jam on the second half of "Cathode Ray,"or the sparkling beat and dreamy guitar figures on "On the Doppler," produce automatic rushes by turning gradual accelerations into mind-bending momentum.

The best stuff on Peacefeather needs no apologist: "Chrom" is an eerie black cloud of No-Neck like rattling rhythms, "Superluminal" conjures a thick mist of blurry wah and moaning croak recalling Davis Redford Triad's most mysterious moments, "Opening of the Future" slowly gathers moss like a sticky elephant lumbering across grassy plains, and the best track, "Peacekeeper," is a hall of sound mirrors with numerous drones and noises bouncing off each other in infinite loops. That latter song (available on the Honeymoon site, so I'm linking "Superluminal" instead - also check out the band's myspace page for more cuts) proves how abstract and noisy Krautrock can/should be - the reliance on rhythm and general jammy tone tends to make this style seem like "just" improv-rock sometimes, but there's tons of sound explorations and deconstructed textures inherent in Krautrock, and Peacefeather have a great chance to cut some new edges into this sound's well-worn saw...

mp3:
~~PEACEFEATHER - "Superluminal" from Peacefeather~~

D.C. BENEFIT FOR TARANTULA HILL

2006-04-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'm completely brain-broke this week, so no retro entry this month, and gonna have to even bail on writing about a new rec (lots to cover tho, so May should be full)...instead, a quick report from last night's D.C. benefit for Tarantula Hill at 611 Florida Ave. As you probably know, the amazing folks named Nautical Almanac suffered a devastating fire to their home/studio/venue Tarantula Hill last month while they were away performing at and attending No Fun Fest. Tons of benefit shows have been happening around the country, and last night a bunch of the best and dimmest D.C. noise pirates were collected by curator Chris G. and show-maker supreme Scott V. to make stupid beneficial racket. Also, Sean P. packaged a fine comp CD-R for the occasion which I'm assuming you can still get from his Sockets site. It was a pretty unbelievably insane night overall - D.C. noise is monumentally diverse and dripping with skilled sound-generating artisans right now and this show was undeniable proof. I'm constantly amazed by the amount of people putting so much time and effort into doing such a wide array of genre-defying, mind-expanding noise around here - I dare any other city right now to match us, seriously...anyway, rather than exhaust my few remaining brain cells trying to describe the immensity of each act, here's a chopped up video featuring about a minute of each performance, in chronological order...back to bed...

(Here's an alternate link for the vid if you're seeing this thru RSS...)

CHRIS CORSANO

2006-04-21T23:31:00.000-07:00

Not sure that anyone reading this needs a Chris Corsano intro, but just in case: he's a master percusser (formerly of Western Mass, now of Manchester, UK) best known as the lower half of the two-headed fire monster Flaherty/Corsano, but he's also played with tons of kings from all sides of the avant polygon (T. Moore, C. S. Yeh, E. Parker, G. Kelley, Jandek, et. fucking. al.). To call him the best/most interesting/insanest/etc drummer in the world is actually underselling him, as he's way more than a drummer - more like a big bulging collection of brain cells and nerve endings charged with endless sonic electrons, and while he's got a pretty long pedigree to prove it, all the evidence anyone could need is on his first-ever solo disc, The Young Cricketer (on his own Hot Cars Warp label).

When I ordered this from Fusetron last week, I was ready to be let down: after years of witnessing our hero deliver heart-attacking invention in various groups, I figured nothing could match my expectations of what he might do by himself...and what a shock, I was wrong. (I made the same mistake with the Corsano-Tim Barnes (aka Me'n'You Duo) disc, which ended up being worthy of way more drool than I had produced in anticipation). All 16 tracks here are stunners on their own, but taken together they're really too much to comprehend. I thought Mr. C. might dodge "drum solo" cliches by going totally abstract, or exceed them by slamming out untouchable trap-destroying improvs, but somehow he does both - often within single tracks, sometimes even in single sounds.

Weaved through his rattling poly-limbed jams are sheets of sheer noise (made mostly with horn mouthpieces attached to tubes and funnels, but also with pot lids, lamp bases, butter knives, and a "violin-string-snare-drum contraption"), waves of gravelly drone, nests of squawking air, and all other types of earth-defying sound. At one point on "How should you throw it on other occasions?" (each track is named with a question about the sport of cricket), Corsano even duos with himself, hurling spittle through a piece of horn while simultaneously pounding out a blurry beat. But that's just the tip of this massive iceberg, which drips with so many ideas and so much head-grabbing sound I almost wonder if Chris should retire now - this would easily qualify as the life-highlight of most sound-generating mortals.

Luckily there's no way Corsano's gonna stop - he currently has like 1000 shows lined up- and I'd happily bet that his next disc (a keyboard/vocals thing currently only available at shows) will be even better, but I don't even wanna think about that right now. I just wanna lose more brain cells to this unbelievable disc, which in a better world would be touted by so many (still may be, give it time) that'd I'd be embarrased to add my fanboy gush to the hype. MP3's exist in various places - four are on Corsano's aforelinked page, plus a section from the best (definitely the noisiest) track, "Are You Going To Keep Alive the Spirit of Cricket?," is playable at mimaroglumu), but I haven't seen the track I mentioned above anywhere, so enjoy:

mp3:
~~CHRIS CORSANO - "How Should You Throw It On Other Occasions?" from The Young Cricketer.~~

POOR SCHOOL

2006-04-16T15:48:00.000-07:00

Been hearing rumbles about Bryan Ramirez's new-ish trio Poor School, so I ordered two CD-R's from Killer Tree and was generously sent a third for free just cause the order was delayed by, like, five minutes. Ramirez used to slay strings (aside the drumming of current Wolf Eye John Olson) in Universal Indians, previously discussed here...he's since played with Ex-Cocaine who I still need to hear, but probably not for a while, cause Poor School might take up a lot of my forseeable time. All three discs are excellent in a way I have yet to fully absorb - Ramirez, drummer John Niekras, and saxist Nathan Hoyme obstensibly play full-tilt improv welded to tribal heavy rock, but there's so much more happening inside the thick folds of their hurtling jams that ripping them open and idenitfying the guts inside is like trying dissect pudding - eventually you just have to give up and eat it.

To me, Poor School's closest referent is the almighty Hat City Intuitive - both bands are super-deft at form and chaos, use horns that actually sing as well as skronk, and are magenetically attracted to unexpected corners - but otherwise Poor School's foggy sound is pretty peerless. 3 offers two 20-minute-ish tracks of loose, sparse improv pocked with bursts of gravitational rock. My bonus CD-R, ~~Live at the Elk's Lodge 6/6/2005~~ (sorry, just realized this is called Hickory Disc), nicely adorned with wood grain on both the cover and the CD, is 24 minutes of guitar/drum expansion (Hoyme wasn't in the band yet), with Ramirez's string ramblings generating pastoral fuzz, rubbery warble, and chunky chord strangulation, while Niekras' unruly precision suggests punk without the stiff trappings. The result is Coltrane/Ali-worthy duo sky-seeking, languid Neil Young ca. Dead Man twang, and some semi-straight riff-a-thons that threaten to become "songs" (for some reason I expected to hear Hendrix start singing at certain points) before collapsing into burbling puddles of noise.

The range of all the above is super wide, but practically monochromatic compared to The Holy Master, three tracks full of improv jams that bend the eye, sun-staring reflection that stiffen the spine, and dense fogs that numb the brain. The peak is track 2 (linked below - caution, large file), which opens with mournful horns and wave-cresting cymbal, rubs fiery sticks into Morricone-esque smoke, and then hits an insane apex: at 11 minutes in, the massive din dissolves into a hypnotic rock-climbing riff that sounds uncannily like the Sun City Girls ca. Let's Just Lounge. Somehow not done yet, the trio shifts into a heavy-riff, nearly-Sabbath mode that grinds the track into dust. This cut broke my brain the first time I heard it and 20 listens later it's still grating my cortex into cheese. Apparently The Holy Master will get "proper" release via Ecstatic Peace sometime in the not-past, but don't wait til then to e-shower Mr. Ramirez with some well-spent cash.

Also, check out an amusingly mistake-filled ("a record called Universal Indians"? Black Dice is "a hardcore eastern rock group"?) Poor School bio here.

mp3:
~~POOR SCHOOL - (second track) from The Holy Master~~

MY CAT IS AN ALIEN

2006-04-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

No time to breathe lately, but this blog has "week" in the title for a reason...so this'll be quick, and unfittingly so, as the clock-expanding work of Italian duo My Cat Is An Alien deserves reams of attentive time. These guys had been on my to-do list for way too long (esp. the stuff on Starlight Furniture and Ecstatic Peace that I inexplicably slept on); luckily I finally got to dig in via a gift of what must be their most epic work, the 3-CD Cosmological Eye Trilogy on a label familiar with epic releases, Last Visible Dog. 7 tracks spread across the 3.5 hours, and I can't think of many bands for whom such extreme durations are more necessary (there are some for whom such durations are as necessary, but few moreso)...MCIAA tracks are so beyond-time that the fact that "Into the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy" lasts 55 minutes seems fully logical yet oddly impossible - there's no way a human hour could last this short or long. In fact the entire set evokes the time-fucked aspects of space travel explored in 2001; when Bowman sees himself as an old man and then turns into a baby, time explodes in all directions, and the same goes with this duo's extraplanetry, perception-defying music.

Of course MCIAA's stuff is drenched in space references (which they explain nicely here), but they don't really play space rock - more like space noise, or heavy atmopshere - i.e. they're not making music so much as they're building environments. Each track is filled with windy drones, percussive mysteries, distant oscillations, and unidentified events, and sounds less like a collection of sounds than a document of a place, some outer region made of natural reverberations, intelligent transmissions, and unknown phenomena. The "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" moment comes on disc two's 40-minute "Into the Sombrero Galaxy," whose metallic whine is so overwhelming you can practically see Bowman's color-reflecting helmet shaking in the speakers. I wish I could further describe this set's massive weight, but I'm too bleary - just check out the track below (and some killer live footage via E.P.) and if you still need more explanation, I'm not sure I'll ever be sharp enough to oblige.

I've also been blessed with a digital version of vol. 7 of MCIAA's From the Earth to the Spheres collab series (each of which feature an MCIAA side and a guest side, the guests this time being Christian Marclay and Okkyung Lee, who provide an exhiliarating 20-minute jolt of ripped vinyl and torn strings). The LP is super limited, but apparently a CD version is coming out soon via Opax. The MCIAA side begins quietly, with two notes plucked out through a muffled haze, but eventually radio fog, screeching fuzz, and blurted feedback all emerge, culminating in a hypnotic locked groove of high-pitched skippage. An even newer CD on the mighty Important is imminent, and there's still tons of back catalogue to seek out - give them a few more years and MCIAA could easily be, like, I dunno, the Dead C. of this whatever-ish era...

mp3:
~~MY CAT IS AN ALIEN - "The Helix Nebula" from The Cosmological Eye Trilogy~~

ZUM AUDIO / D YELLOW SWANS

2006-04-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

Got a nice compilation this week from Senor G. Chen via his Zum imprint. Zum Audio Vol. 3 comes 8 years after the rock-centric Vol. 2 , and the shift to noise works mightily. I dig comps but most elude me analysis-wise due to general lack of coherence (exceptions are usually label-specific like Fflint Central's great Malpractice, or heavily thematic like the Last Visible Dog 6CD set Invisible Pyramid: Elegy Box). Not that that's bad, just makes comps kinda thought-resistant. Like, I love Deerhoof, and they're not totally out of place here, but hearing them next to Can't is a bit too schizoid for me to wrap words around. My problem and not the comp's of course, as Zum3 is clearly a fine document of left-field sound wider than any human-made paragraph could properly encaspule. I'm just not equipped to tackle it on anything other than grocery-list level. Which would include the grinding wrath of Can't, the multi-tiered drilling of John Wiese, the thick static drone of Axolotl, the Excepter-like canned-beat drool of Fat Worm of Error side project Bromp Treb, and an epic mountain-climb from the stellar D Yellow Swans (the "D" variously standing for Dove, Demos, Dreamed, etc.)

That last track (mp3 below) got me revisiting my paltry collection of D Yellow Swans stuff, which is uniformly great. I dig how this duo does all-out noise, meditative drone, industrial bombast, and even IDM-ish beat all equally well, yet never unorganically...it's never "look what we can do," but "look where we ended up." Their 20-minute collab with The Cherry Point is pure brain-bombing dissonance, while their half of a split CD-R with The Skaters surfs a wave from crackling distortion to dense dreams to engine-hum buzz. Bring the Neon War Home inserts pulsing drum-machine beats beneath the gristle, visiting waters previously charted by Wolf Eyes and even Big Black, but with dramatic timing that eliminates peer. It's closest to the demolishing show I saw them play a few years ago in Baltimore, one of my fave memories from the now fire-ridden Tarantula Hill (please help that situation if you can).

The best D Yellow Swans rec I own is Dreamed Yellow Swans on Troniks/PacRec. Layers of rubbled noise, buried vocal barbs, clicking drum machinistics, and unidentified soundscapes are all grown patiently like closeted pot, peaking in the Mouthus-like (due to what sounds like electronic drums) blast of the 20-minute, perfectly-titled "Drowning in Paradise." Weird that D Yellow Swans don't get more non-knowing press for their diverse racket, but at their prolific rate, I can still see Spin including them in a piece on underground reggae eventually.

mp3:
D. YELLOW SWANS - "Untitled" from Zum Audio Vol. 3
D. YELLOW SWANS - (untitled) from Dreamed Yellow Swans

PEEESSEYE

2006-03-26T16:41:00.000-08:00

Brooklyn trio PEEESSEYE (pronounced P-S-I) is enticingly confounding. Their CD from last year, Artificially Retarded Soul Care Operators (released under the name PSI), is pretty schizophrenic - some parts are ultra-sensitive minimalism, others are blasting chaos, but there are also warm electronic drones, confrontational live recordings, two completely different tracks with the same name, and an unclassifiable 15-minute opus in the middle brilliantly titled "We Broke the Sun." I dug it for its sheer sonic invention and diversity, but also because I could never get a handle on it. Going back to it now, I'm surprised by how few details I remembered, in that same way that the most unpredictable records leave tons of general impressions but few specific ones.

The new PeeEssEye, oo-ee-oo (burnt offering), is even tougher to peg. Instead of mutiple-personality tracks, here we get one continous 31-minute piece, the majority of which is centered around, of all things, acoustic guitar (or as their label puts it, "unamplified guitar"). It starts super-quiet and distant, with a Jandek-like open chord strummed incessantly and soon accompanied by a puzzling vocal melange that's equal parts lonely croon, cookie monster growl, and psychotic scream. The mantra-like guitar then melts into my favorite section (excerpted below) - an escalating duet with a whirring harmonium of a slightly Animal Collective-ish hue that's later fused with tons of general rattling, sawing, and scraping . From there, all sorts of crazy invention occurs - patches of silence, random metallic debris, ear-slicing bursts of whine, weird unidentifiable room noise - until a second harmonium passage emerges, in a sun-staring mode that recalls the backwoods drones of Pelt, if they were recorded in a car repair shop.

Obviously a linear description of this rec is not super difficult, but as with its predecessor, there's something going on that I just can't slot easily into the folds of my gray matter. Maybe it's the bracing acoustic guitar, maybe it's that the album should only be listened to continously in one half-hour sitting, maybe it's just that it was recorded in New Jersey - whatever, the only thing certain about oo-ee-oo (burnt offering) is that I'm gonna need a lot more time with it. See you in 100 listens...

mp3:
~~PEEESSEYE - (excerpt) from oo-ee-oo (burnt offering)~~

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (MARCH EDITION)

2006-03-17T18:59:00.000-08:00

Another month, another three old noise recs...

FAXED HEAD - Uncomfortable but Free CD
(Amarillo, 1995)
Hindsight is a killer - I remember digging Faxed Head, but I had no idea until today how much the Load Records roster owes (maybe unconsciously) to this Coalinga family's slobbering stew. The "desk-metal" project of Gregg Turkington and some of his Amarillo friends (all with the last name "Head," including part-time drummer Washington D.C. Head) seemed less important at the time than the related Three Doctors and Zip Code Rapists, but had I known how non-dated Faxed Head's brain-damage would sound years later, I would've paid more attention. Their drooling combo of busted metal riffs, goofy vox, Boredoms-style shriek-out, and harsh blast certainly echoes in the laff-noise of Load-ites like Friends Forever, White Mice, and Vincebus Eruptum - even Load's new (and greatly-titled) Fat Worm of Error CD sounds kinda like Faxed Head minus the metallics. Uncomfortable but Free has much enjoyable doofus-metal (I love how the Danzig-like "Violence Gone" seems to be sung by a gagged hostage), but also some surprisingly inventive sludge-scapes, with furry production, sharp-turns, and farting mayhem all blown in pretty unique chunks. There's actual adept metal buried beneath the vomit, which, despite the Load Klan having picked up that lopsided ball and fumbled it forward, makes Faxed Head way more singular than I ever imagined.

DESCENSION - Live March 1995 CD
(Shock, 1995)
I'm not sure what Stefan Jaworzyn is up to now (except that he recently wrote a book about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but in the 90's he was a kind of noise/improv anti-hero, and despite a rep as a curmudgeon, was always super cool to me, even letting me release some of his music (which, apparently, is still available). His gtr-drum duo Ascension with Tony Irving was a free-noise rocket in a collapsing Rudolph Grey/Ray Russell/Sonny Sharrock vein, generating blankly-titled and barely-designed records that still hold up mightily, especially Five Titles. Descension added Brit free improv stalwarts Simon H. Fell (double bass) and Charles Wharf (sax/clarinet) to the core duo, seemingly offering a jazzed version of Ascension's wall-of-grit, but really, they mostly sounded like Ascension doubled into a blur. The quartet played one particularly notorious 1995 gig opening for Sonic Youth whose bloody details Stefan recounts here; Live March 1995 isn't from that, but rather a 48-minute gig in Walthamstow and a 2-part, 30-minute show in Leeds. There's tons of non-stop aural pressure here, but I still prefer Ascension; Irving and Jaworzyn's super-human communication made their sound miles-thick yet permeable and even airy, whereas Descension's noise-wall is devoid of even the slightest crack. Still mind-blowing though, and the Leeds gig is an Irving masterpiece. His gunpowdered barrage pierces every surrounding sound, almost like Chris Corsano if he owned Neil Peart's kit.

OMIT - Quad 3CD
(No label cassettes, 1993; Corpus Hermeticum (CD reissue), 1997)
A little bit of a cheat to "revisit" this monster, as it should still be ringing in the head of anyone who truly heard it at the time. Still, I haven't actually checked in with this in a few years, and once again the real thing way outdoes my head-ghosts. Originally birthed as 2 C-90 sets, Bruce Russell somehow mathed this into a Corpus Hermeticum triple CD, but it's hard to imagine how any physical object(s) can contain so many sounds and ideas. Windy drones, rattling noise, audio-verite atomspheres, psych-rock sound-scapes: really, what's not on here? Actually there's not much straight-up noise per se, but otherwise, everything interesting about the last 15 years of improv/noise/abstraction/whatever shows up. Yet everything is glued by the oddly chilly touch of Omit (a/k/a New Zealand recluse Clinton Williams), which I suppose makes Quad slightly serious/arch - there's definitely no fucking around here - but with noise this paralyzing, what difference does it make if you're smiling or straight-faced as long as your muscles are frozen? I was obsessed with this for a few months when it came out, but renavigating its mind-washing river, I realize I should've never filed it next to anything except my brain. I pathetically have yet to hear the, uh, "comeback" record, and D.Keenan claims it might be better than Quad, but even if that's true, I think I'll keep my illusions in tact for a little while longer.

mp3:
~~FAXED HEAD - "Time to Retire" from Uncomfortable but Free~~
~~OMIT - "Resectioned from Despair" from Quad~~

DINO FELIPE

2006-03-12T23:40:00.000-08:00

One of the many amazing artists I sadly lack full knowledge of is Miami-based speaker-destroyer Dino Felipe. I dig his band Old Bombs with Carlos Giffoni, and I really really dig his duo Felipe & Forte (with Nick Forte of Christmas Decorations), who put out a mindblowing full-length of mail-exchanged concoctions last year called Shaggy Black on Soft Abuse. But I need to catch up on Felipe's solo stuff (including a new online-only thing) on Schematic, so I guess I'll be depositing e-coins into Bleep.com sometime soon.

Until then my skull is buried in the quicksand of St. John, a new Felipe CD-R on Chicago label XDiedEnRouteY. There's a good N. Sylvester review of Shaggy Black that's a tad hep/cutesy for my tastes, but its overall point - that Felipe's work hems to no patterns and provides no graspable context - is right on, and applies equally to St. John. I've listened to this about 15 times in the past week and I still can never remember what just happened or predict what's about to. Shrieking noises divebomb over viola drones, test-tone whines pierce through percussive screams, video game samples get dipped in liquid nitrogen and shattered against sharp rocks of feedback. Everything happens fast and little gets repeated, yet a thick consistency coats each millisecond, as if Felipe's bloody hands are painting everything bright red.

Still, best thing about St. John is its weird mix of moods. A lot of it is actually kinda hilarious, with absurdist turns and cartoonish swings that feel like a laptop-era update on Raymond Scott's goofball innovations. Yet all this nervous aural activity has an eerie drama, in the same way that John Cage and David Tudor's Indeterminacy can inspire chills and laughs simultaneously. Ultimately St. John is a hyper-barrage of sound that rewards both focused attention and passive acceptance, and an early candidate for 2006's Top Whatever.

Watch out for more Felipe action to come, including the awesomely-titled Album Title Ideas on Rolax, and a contribution (alongside Giffoni, Ariel Pink, Keith Fullerton Whitman, etc) to a subscription 12" series on Melted Mailbox that looks beyond awesome.

mp3:
~~DINO FELIPE - "003" from St. John~~

JESSICA RYLAN

2006-03-05T23:30:00.000-08:00

Caught the Wolf Eyes / Pig Destroyer / Whitehouse tour last Weds at DC9 courtesy of the ever-mighty Clavius. The whole night was great, though I missed about 95% of Pig Destoyer due to getting schooled outside by Connelly and Olson (if a new society arose in which musical knowledge was political currency, Olson would be its only possible king). Best suprise was the unannounced opening set by Secret Diary, the duo of Jessica Rylan and Donna Parker. Been wanting to see Rylan for a while, and the duo's quick injection of voice stretching and sound dissecting went straight to my veins.

Talked to Rylan afterwards (who told me Secret Diary had been drafted into Pig Destroyer for the next night's show, despite never having heard each other until the D.C. gig) and bought two 20-minute cassettes from her, Long Slow Changes on Far Gone, and Wiped Away on Durable Stimuli. Both are great, and pretty different. The former has two ambient side-long pieces: one offers eerie waves of oscillating tone that curve hypnotically, somehow reminding me of the undulating sections in Jim O'Rourke's underrated I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4, while the other is a robotic loop that retreats and jumps forward in unpredicatble spurts created by Rylan's volume and tone manipulations. I like how Rylan isolates and varies the loop rather than burying it under other noises or blurring it into oblivion.

The newer Wiped Away holds five pieces of more aggressive but still subtle noise. Lots of tactile, granulated sound on this one, with small, pebbly noises piled up into masses. Unlike on Long Slow Changes, Rylan's voice is a noise-source here, and it's always amazing. On one cut there's a cycle of squawking chirps and distended screams that sound like Yamatanka Eye if his vocal chords were stretched on a rack into infinity.

Best thing about Rylan's work is the way her noises become mini-themes, revisited and revised in patterns that require multiple listens. Maybe it's cause I've watched it a bunch lately, but I feel like the vibe of my favorite Kenneth Anger film, Invocation of My Demon Brother, is caught in the track linked below. There's an obvious resemblance to the engine-rev noise of Mick Jagger's amazing moog soundtrack, but there's a deeper connection: Anger's film uses a dense series of visual patterns to build a trance ritual, and whether or not Rylan intended it, the effect of her brain-freezing music is definitely the same.

mp3:
JESSICA RYLAN - track one from Wiped Away

TIM OLIVE & NISIKAWA BUHNSHO

2006-02-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

Like most noise dolts, I have a prediliction for all-out blast, but I'm rapidly growing a second soft spot for minimalist noise, or what if I was still in school I guess I'd call reductionism. I know just a few current practitioners, and only through Tim Barnes, who's played with Mark Wastell, Sean Meehan, Jeph Jerman, Mattin, etc., all of whom have fascinating takes on miniature sound and the spaces in between. This kind of low-volume audio art can get a little museum-ish, if only because you have to be almost motionless to appreciate or even hear it. But a lot of minimal noise has the same effect as meditation: the near-total lack of what overstimulated daily life calls "something happening" has a paradoxically visceral effect. I.E. the best minimal noise hits the gut as hard as a power drone or feedback screech, maybe even harder, since the responding movement is all internal.

Tim Olive is a Canadian-born guitarist living in Japan whose stuff qualifies as minimalist noise. At least his latest CD does - it's a pretty amazing untitled collaboration with Japanese guitarist Nisikawa Buhnsho, who I think runs the Gule label that this release inaugurates. Apparently Olive plays one-string bass here, and Buhnsho plays guitar and "broken record player," but as with all good noise, figuring out who's doing what is both impossible and pointless. Four tracks of ascending length (3, 7, 11, and 19 minutes), and an infinite amount of tiny, textured noises clustered into patches of restrained detail. Some of it, like the track that I'm posting below, is actually pretty busy, but elsewhere there are tons of quiet stretches and pin-prick points of nano-sound, and even the most active parts have an enticing distance and careful subtlety that totally rake the spine.

I usually tell people resistant to free-jazz that you've gotta see it performed and then decide, cause the physical feats in the playing are pretty hypnotizing. Same thing goes for minimal noise - I can listen to this stuff all day, but watching it is even more fascinating. Instead of someone pushing the limits of their energy, you get the opposite: the performer actually has to fight the impulse to fill the silence, and trust that even the smallest sounds are worth leaving alone. The resulting tension makes the tiniest moves and briefest sounds seem huge, and time slows so much that you can feel the inside of each second like a barely-perceptible breeze. I think all of that is true of Olive and Buhnsho's CD too, but I'd love to see them perform - apparently Tim is planning a US trip for May or so, so keep your eyes and ears sharply peeled...

mp3:
TIM OLIVE & NISIKAWA BUHNSHO - "iKA/Bunt is My Profession" from (untitled)

THE CUTEST PUPPY IN THE WORLD

2006-02-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

Recently got the first package ever addressed to Noiseweek, so its contents get a free pass to the top of the pile. With a name this non-funny / non-catchy / just-plain-horrible, D.C. duo The Cutest Puppy in the World has a lot to overcome, but that could be the point - a self-imposed musical challenge to make us forget the nearly-irredeemable moniker. If so, it was a wise move, because the amazingly wide Sockets CD-R FINFOLK would sound great even if Bryan Rhodes and Layne Garrett called themselves George and Bush. Taken from two shows (one on Radio CPR, the other at Warehouse Next Door), the songs here flow from near-silent minimalism to all-out din, equally capable of heart-breaking turns and ear-ripping destruction.

The first two (and longest) tracks display the band's gaping range: "Sordomutics" weaves dark, Eyes Wide Shut-ish piano dirge thru stretched horn (clarinet maybe?) and unidentified glimmer; maybe because of the D.C. association, it reminds me of the frozen chill of EBSK. "Yugen Gracehopper," by contrast, winds through bright-colored drones and air-pushing blasts, yet retains the same stark, woods-in-winter feel of its predecessor. From there, things get both noisier ("gem-de-lovely" sounds like someone sawing through the Tin Man's body to get at his heart) and subtler ("nangen cuts the cat in two"'s solemn bell-ring evokes a japanese temple at dawn), and boredom takes a hike for the entirety. I'm pretty blurry-brained due too much verbiage lately, so I apologize if I'm not fully depicting TCPITW's stellar mix of ambience, abrasion, and the tension in between. But trust me, it's better than any words (or names) could ever convey.

I should post one of FINFOLK's harshest tracks to show the extremes this pair can reach (and spare some bandwidth), but I'm too into the track below not to offer it up. Its minimalist piano and detuned guitar (I think?) hold a few cacophonous peaks, but mostly deliver truly moving sound that some silent film needs to use, and soon.

mp3:
THE CUTEST PUPPY IN THE WORLD - "Wu-Men Koan" from FINFOLK

RETRO NOISE MONTHLY (FEB EDITION)

2006-02-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

So here's a new, uh, "feature": once a month I'll pull out a few old noise recs from my dusty pile and reassess. One recurring objection to noise is that it doesn't "hold up" - i.e. why listen to any noise rec more than once? I've never thought "repeated listenability" was necessary to make something good, but regardless, this monthly exercise could be a way to prove that complaint wrong (or right, who knows/cares...)

THURSTON MOORE - Please Just Leave Me (My Paul Desmond) CD
(Pure, 1996)
I misremembered this as a more rock-y kinda solo gtr rec, expecting TM to stick some chords and notes inside the noise, but it's actually way more, uh, pure than that, and really good. One half-hour track full of test-tone-like scree, echoey ringing that's nearly Jandek-ian in its eerie all-alone-ness, plus a bonus track-ending sample of smooth jazz and TM drawling in the background: overall, a pretty extreme trip through TM's fertile mind. I can't think of another TM rec as abstract and unadorned - it'd make a great bonus track on the forthcoming Psychic Hearts reissue, just to show his inhuman range. I also dig the poem TM scrawled on the CD: "You can take everything there / It's cool I don't care / Yeh I need room / I'm sick of all those fuckin records man / Just take em yeh you know but / if you can please / just leave me / my Paul Desmond."

UNIVERSAL INDIANS - (untitled) C60
(American Tapes, 1996)
This isn't noise per se - future Wolf Eye John Olson played drums and sax for this trio, and this tape is more psych-rock and guitar-jam than noise (though the longer I do this blog, the more such meaningless distinctions are gonna blur, I promise) - whatever, it's really fucking good. Touches of Dead C. heaviness, Bardo Pond smoke, and, mostly, the fuzzy extensions of the way-underrated Marble Sheep and the Run Down Sun's Children. I remember wanting after one listen to write the band and beg them to let me put this out on CD, but by the time I woke up and remembered to think about doing that, Wolf Eyes were huge and I was thrilled that John even remembered my name. Anyway, I'm too old/tired now, but someone needs to make this digital. Until then, I'll hang onto my copy (numbered 2 of 20!) regardless of what it might fetch on eBay.

WRONG - in the WRONG 2CD
(Betley/Climax/Freedom From/Ignivomous/SunShip, 1999)
Yikes, what a monster. 33 tracks over 2 CDs by a rolling group of 22 musicians taken from 16 performances and co-released by 5 labels. Wrong were (are?) primarily John Vance and Emil Hagstrom, fixtures of the 90's Minneapolis noise scene. Their basic m.o. here is random free-improv-ish guitar + a little percussion + a ton of sprinkled-in, unidentified noise. I'm surprised by how free-improv this is - for some reason I remembered Wrong as more noise-wall-ish, but some stuff here comes pretty close to Derek Bailey territory, and stands up well to the comparison. In Opprobrium, Nick Cain noted that this is suprisingly homogenous given the participant/format variety, but still pretty good anyway, and he was right on both counts. Shortwave, theremin, and electronics eventually battle the guitars to a draw (Carly Ptak even pops up on one quick, blasting track), but it's all charged with the anticipation of improv possibility. Plus it starts with a killer piece of string-bending noise (taken from a show at NYC's The Cooler (RIP)), thus winning it a place as this entry's mp3 pick, see below...

mp3:
WRONG - "Broken IN" from in the WRONG

MERZBOW & JOHN WIESE

2006-02-07T19:21:00.000-08:00

Missed last week due to insanity, so two posts to come this week. Today's entry concerns two of the world's absolute noise gods, Japanese ultra-sound legend Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Californian dominatron John Wiese. It's hard to think of two more towering noise figures - of course Merzbow's infinite discography puts him in a separate noise-generating stratosphere (the 50-CD, $500 Merzbox is apparently still in print by the way, I dare you to buy one), but Wiese is pretty insanely prolific himself, and, as evidenced by his recent 52-track retrospective Teenage Hallucination: 1992-1999, has been making awesome noise since before he could drive. (BTW, try googling "Wiese" and "Teenage" like I did when seeking a good link to post, and check out what comes up...)

Multiplication (released by Misanthropic Agenda) is the pair's first collaboration (not counting Weise's contributions to two Merbow remix sets), and it's crammed, soaked, and bleeding with 70 minutes of typically inventive, physically altering sound. Everything was done via mail; the first six tracks are five-to-ten minute blasts produced by Weise, while the last is a 27-minute maelstrom produced by Merzbow. All kinds of tearing, obliterating noises speed by, with some like the grinding, pin-pointed "Luxor Skyship" devoted to pure drilling, and others like the waving, echoey "Spell" forging a soothing drone despite frequent jolts of assaulting spew.

There's a million things that make Multiplication highest-quality noise, but my personal fave is the album's sub-particle sense of two-man communication. You could blindfold someone and tell them this was made by just Merzbow or just Wiese and it'd be no shock, but still, there's a boggling interaction in the shooting, sifting sounds here. Bursts of hiss and darts of screech seem aware of each other, bouncing back and forth in a hall of mirrors drenched in flames. This wordless dialogue is most clear on the long final track, which starts slowly with filtered air and reverby ping-pong, but eventually travels the entire spectrum of non-note sound: fuzzy rumbles, grinding stabs, metallic whines, etc, all seeming to talk to each other and quickly respond. Multiplication might "just" be visceral, pulse-enhancing noise, but hold your head in Merzbow and Wiese's fire for a while, and you can see a stunning sub-galaxy of smoldering sound-molecules continually melt together. (Calendar check: Wiese plays Day Three of this year's No Fun Fest on Sunday, March 19th in Brooklyn...)

mp3:
MERZBOW & JOHN WIESE - "Spell" from Multiplication

THE HAT CITY INTUITIVE

2006-01-25T21:06:00.000-08:00

Saw The Hat City Intuitive play a classically great set on Saturday at the Warehouse Next Door. I'm biased b/c I put out one of their records and I'm pals w/all of them, but I knew their music before I knew them and if liking music is a bias, then objectivity's for chumps. The set started with double-guitar splatter-rock, swung through heavy chunks of sax & bass clarinet interlockings, a slice of meditative noise, and back to a great guitar-battle denouement. There were highs and lows and middles, and they were all awesome.

It's kinda stunning that after like a decade or more, the HCI are still so unique. I can't think of another band that plays a hybrid of jazz, rock, and noise so diversely. Everyone plays everything and does it really well, so that when one of them switches instruments, it sounds oddly fluid. Say, for example, that Thoroughly Atlaffed jumps from a high-end guitar scrape to a low-slung horn moan. The continuity of thought is so pure, it's like he's just switched from fork to spoon - either way he's still eating. Unlike other rock/jazz/noise blenders, HCI doesn't hide behind a continous wall of sound. They're fine with silence, pauses, ebbs, flows, stutters, etc. The way they can quickly turn moments that feel awkward or out of their control into a massive mix of crescendo and communication is pretty unreal. Basically everything that can happen does happen, and then the HCI reacts and something new happens. That's improv.

There are two new HCI albums out, both stellar. In a mag I write for, a writer I usually like slagged these records, and his points about them not coaslescing or having a "point" are ok, I guess. I can agree to disagree there, but his conclusion - "I fear that HCI won't get close to fulfilling their potential until they stop enjoying themselves so much" - is a fat load. Not only does that fuel the standard beef about this mag (i.e. too dry/academic/serious), but it sounds like he heard these records with weary ears. HCI are definitely always having fun, but they never do just one mood. They can be serious, somber, goofy, sloppy, precise, slow, fast, etc, all within one short blast of fire-seeking sound. Another writer (who also writes for the mag in question) agrees - not that it's a competition, you can like or dislike HCI, just don't say they do one thing too much, because anyone listening closely will see that you weren't. I'm sympathetic - this writer obviously had a massive stack of recs to plow thru - but he got these two wrong.

mp3:
THE HAT CITY INTUITIVE - "Ruematic" from Narrow Miss On the Chamber Pot

ULTRALYD

2006-01-21T08:09:00.000-08:00

I've slept on Ultralyd since I got their Load CD last July or so, but the disc has been beckoning from my shelf, sending out a piercing red laser light that keeps burrowing into my memory-addled brain, mostly because muscle-man Kjetil Brandsdal is involved. His lurch-metal trio (of violin/bass/drums) Noxagt are unparalleled, and he's done some great solo noise too, but if i had glanced at the back of the CD before ignoring it in favor of WSOP reruns, I would've realized that horn-torturer Frode Gjerstad is also involved, making Ultralyd a potential monstrosity that I should go to hell for avoiding even for seconds, much less months.

Situation rectified, and Chromosome Gun is a behemoth - a hyper-splurting mash of free jazz, doom metal, punk rock, and sound-spectrum demolition. At times it sounds like Last Exit boxing The Thing, other times like Branca if he was a drill seargant in charge of getting Dylan Carlson in shape. The album's frantic beauty is immediate, but only when I tried to pick out the "noisiest" track to post did I fully comprehend this record's insanity. One track would sound too metal, the next too free jazz, the next too punk, then back to the metal one which suddenly sounded too jazz, while the jazz one now sounded too, uh, i don't know, country? Such is the damage that Chromosome Gun wreaks on perceptive tissues.

I finally settled on "Pink Mood," which contains most of the Ultralyd arsenal - a deboweling bass shake, Gjerstad's proto-Stooge blurps, Anders Hana's treble-wrench, and mostly, the insane drumming of Morten J. Olsen, which splatters across the record like projectiles after a competitive eating contest. But...it turns out this is already available on Load's Ultralyd page ...so instead here's a more hardcore explosion...but don't stop there, the entire brain-breaking record is worth losing your drool to...

mp3:
ULTRALYD - "Glottality" from Chromosome Gun

CARLOS GIFFONI

2006-01-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

I sadly knew almost nothing about Carlos Giffoni before 2004's inaugural No Fun Fest, the coagulating 3-day marathon of high-quality, low-rent noise that Giffoni has single-handedly engineered for 3 years and counting. Giffoni's fist-pumping laptop duet there with Dylan Nyoukis was a vein-bursting highlight, and since then, the activity of this tireless Brooklyn via Miami via Venezuela monster (solo, with his trio Monotract, and in collabs with Nels Cline, Jim O'Rourke, Lee Ranaldo, etc etc) has been stellar. I stupidly missed a "boys-only" Monotract duo set at Amherst's Gladtree Fest (though my brother and I enjoyed a drunken audience with the other Monotract "boy," Roger), but the rock-trio set at last year's Noise Against Fascism anti-prez-inauguration fest more than made up for that mistake, providing a fractured corpse of broken rock and scattered noise that totally contrasted the trio's all-laptop set at No Fun #1.

Even more head-altering is Giffoni's arsenal of recordings, which fire discrete, even microscopic sounds into layers of compounded electronic crush, like bullets weaved into a quilt. He hit a peak last fall on Welcome Home, a nerve-combing mash of digital crunch, blurry waves, and chopping, squishing blasts. The album's unending attack induces a kind of aural coma, like being hypnotized through cranial acupuncture, making it my second-favorite noise record of 2005, just under Mouthus's Slow Globes.

Assassin's Faith, a new 3" CD-R on Chondritic Sound, is a kind of follow up, two 9-minute tracks of construction-site slobber that instantly drills holes in the skull. "Assassin's Faith 1" is more solid-core drone than anything on Welcome Home, as an initially quiet string of pointillist sounds become a haystack of crackling currents, even sounding Double Leopards-esque, but later collapsing into shards of debris. "Assasin's Faith 2" is even bloodier, an onrush of robotic noise-soldiers bathed in a echoing beat, then crumbling under Giffoni's relentless artillery of flesh-ripping sounds. The 141 copies of this 3" are supposedly already gone, but Carlos might have some at future shows, all the more reason to see you at the Hook in March...

mp3:
CARLOS GIFFONI - "Assassin's Faith 2" from Assassin's Faith

RICHARD YOUNGS & ALEX NIELSON

2006-01-05T21:02:00.000-08:00

It's a bit crushing to think it's been 15 years since one of the most out-of-nowhere discoveries ever: Forced Exposure magazine's unearthing of Lake, a twisted double-LP masterpiece of spooky noise, splattering percussion, and psychotic yelps by a pair billed as "R!!!" and "S!!!." The R in "R!!!" stood for Richard Youngs, and in the subsequent decade and a half, he's built a towering stack of amazing records both with "S!!!" (Simon Wickham-Smith), by himself (try the dramatic minimalist classic Advent first if yer uninitiated), and with others. His oeuvre is staggeringly diverse, veering from guitar noise to piano plod to near-religious vocal meditations, but it's all connected by an haunting, center-of-the-brain intimacy.

Youngs' self-made resume is boggling enough, but he also has the distinction of being part of Jandek's first-ever backing band, along with his pal Alex Nielson. The pair had made a record before that historic surprise, and the follow-up, Partrick Rain Dance, is a stunner among stunners, a true feat that might be Youngs' best record yet. There's tons of amazing details and sounds here - scraping hiss, rolling multi-layered percussion, big fat synth chords, glitchy dot-matrix printer grinding, sheer piercing drone - but the true genius is how R. and A. make it all sound like one continous, wide-open world of sound. "Mountain" is a stunning forcefield of bowed cymbal and orbiting guitar, "Noatak Beacon" is a hypnotic seance of acapella moaning (Youngs has few peers in vocal experimentation), and "Chamber" is a nearly unprecedented noise-drum jam that sounds vaguely like Hendrix grafted siamese-twin like onto the head of Haino.

Apologies for the big file, but the mastery of Partrick Rain Dance is captured completely by the unbelievable "Music of the Last Sun," so I'm posting it below. Moving from tribal jamming with flute (?) to pure noise to gut-melting melodic chant to a rainstorm of dripping chimes, it's really unfathomable, an acheivement even Youngs himself will be hard-pressed to top.

mp3:
RICHARD YOUNGS & ALEX NEILSON - "Music of the Last Sun" from Partrick Rain Dance

HIVE MIND

2005-12-30T19:00:00.000-08:00

Hive Mind is the searing creation of a Michigan resident named Greh, who also runs the stellar Chondritic Sound label. There have been 30 to 40 Hive Mind releases since 2003, mostly ultra-limited cassettes and CD-R's, the biggest exceptions being 2004's dark, 38-minute single-track Sand Beasts on PacRec/Chondritic and this year's Death Tone on Hanson, whose overhwelming attack even convinced digi-phobes B.Coley and T.Moore to briefly relax their anti-CD regimen.

The closest parallel to Hive Mind's thunder is the thick drones of Double Leopards, but where that Brooklyn quartet stays mostly murky and blurred, Greh lets thinner sounds and clearer textures emerge from his cavernous mix. I've spent the last week glued to Metallic Thaumaturgy, a Chondritic CD-R culled from a 4-cassette box set of 2004 live recordings, and after about 25 listens, it remains awesomely tough to pin down. There's practically a cinematic progression here, as Greh's ideas gradually multiply and expand for 80 minutes like ballons that can procreate, but there's something else happening that words can't imprison. Parts are echoey and actually scary, circling ears like a hurricane's eye; other sections are finely granular, with sandpaper-like texture and infinite detail. On the final two tracks, Greh mercilessly scalpels his diligent drones using bumpy glitches and warped loops that sound like blindfolded robots marching into a fire.

Hive Mind will play on the middle day of the 3rd No Fun Fest, whose lineup is now totally set. Way too many great things this year to choose from, but I'm especially peeled for White Rock (Mouthus + Double Leopards), Fat Worm of Error, Shackamaxon (Double Leps + Son Of Earth + Pete Nolan), and the ultra-rare apperance of the legendary Smegma...

mp3:
HIVE MIND - sixth track from Metallic Thaumaturgy

SEAN MEEHAN

2005-12-22T09:49:00.000-08:00

Sean Meehan is an NYC-based abstract drummer, and his mind-bending double-CD Sectors (For Constant) recalls the late-80's days of the anti-record, best documented by the great Bananafish. Anti-records were generally unplayable objects - records with out holes, blocks of unpressed vinyl, silent or broken CDs, album sleeves filled with dirt, CDs only available inside a car stereo, etc. "Sectors (For Constant)" discs aren't unplayable, but they come sealed inside two rough pieces of white paper that you have to rip open. Like others, it took me a little while to a) figure out I had to rip the paper to get the discs, and b) have the heart to demolish the beautiful package. Still, as with the crumbling, destructive aspect of most anti-records, there was something really satisfying about tearing through the skin of "Sectors (For Constant)."

The packaging matches the discs' anti-sound, which Meehan constructed using only cymbals and snare drum. Each CD has a single track, one 51:26 long, the other 48:44, and both have insanely long stretches of Cagean silence, the kind that make the quietude of something like Tom Carter's "Monument" (my favorite minimalist epic of recent years) seem hyperactively busy. Check out the graphic waveform of the 51:26 disc below (click on the image for a bigger version) and you'll get an idea of how little is objectively "happening" here.

In between all the white aural blankness, Meehan's alien noises rarely sound like drums. Test-tone ringing, scraping drones, and miniscule rumbles all approach from far off and run quickly back into the darkness. The sound is so distant and uninterested in begging for the listener's attention that it sorta calls into question the idea that "listening to music" is any different from being awake and not being deaf. Experiencing this is more like sifting for lost contact lenses in a deep shag rug than passively listening to a record.

My favorite part of "Sectors (For Constant)" is the end of the 51:26 disc (excerpted below), whose intermittent stretches of piercing tone and subconscious groan are like abstract electronics without the digital sharpness. Meehan's work is admittedly more interesting live - I saw him as part of the Tim Barnes Live Listening tour at True Vine, and the darkness of the room and near-frozen stillness of the peformers made each sound, move, and tiny reflection of light seem like massive events. Maybe Meehan's work is too "academic" to fit alongside grimier noise, but that's context, not content. In terms of the latter, "Sectors (For Constant)" is fascinating tactile art that digs into my spine as much as anything called "noise."

mp3:
~~SEAN MEEHAN - "Sectors (For Constant) [excerpt]"~~

FACEMAT / TAPE RAPE / POWER BOTTOM ORCHESTRA / ETC

2005-12-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

Lost of great subterranean noise happening in D.C. now as always, but my fave current practitioners are the revolving collective known variously as Facemat, Tape Rape, Power Bottom Orchestra, CUNTree, Saladbar, Baby Shakers, and more. Victor Salazar and his pals have popped up in a ton of places lately - I've caught Facemat at DC Nine and 611 Florida, Tape Rape at Warehouse, and Power Bottom Orchestra at Electric Possible. Never seen anything less than good from them, and lots of it great - Power Bottom played a massive wall of grime w/Victor raising his busted guitar over his head like a sledgehammer, Tape Rape had reel to reel tape passing through four different players, and the last Facemat gig I saw had a thuggish looking guest singer whose blunt political chants ("911! Katrina! Abu Ghirab!") fit perfectly in the group's blurting din.

The various CD-R's, all available from Victor at flitted01@yahoo.com (no web presence as of yet), are all interesting and pretty insanely varied. Facemat's Broken Clown is the most diverse, a wavy mix of thick drones and broken beats, at times nearing the deadened cave of Mouthus, or even the noodly rattle of Black Dice. Power Bottom Orchestra's BRC Sessions offers three tracks based around bombastic beats and shifting noise, with the huge, echoing drums of the first track (linked below) reminding me of a Glenn Branca symphony with most of the guitars erased after the fact. CUNTree's self-titled CD-R is purer noise, full of piercing whines and cutting static. Saladbar (Victor's solo thing) has a great, one-track, 20-minute 3" CD-R called All You Can, made of massive, layered, airplane-engine noise. It drifts toward Fennesz or Hecker territory in places, but much heavier, darker, and head-wrenching.

Hopefully all these guys can venture outside D.C. more, and maybe find some alter-label action (Heresee, Hanson, Chondritic Sound, etc. would all be great), but I also dig their totally self-sufficient m.o.

mp3s:
FACEMAT - "Mahogany Colored Wang" from Broken Clown
POWER BOTTOM ORCHESTRA - (track one) from BRC Sessions

HEAVY SEALS

2005-12-08T19:03:00.000-08:00

So the band name is actually spelled Xeaxx Xeaxx but pronounced "Heavy Seals" (I prefer the spelling "Heavy Seals" myself, though if this is a Caroliner-style conceit where you can fill in the blanks randomly - e.g. Death Peace or Teach Meals or Deals Peach - I'll take it), it's a duo of noise master John Wiese and erstwhile Gossip member (?) Brace Paine, and their album Jazz Bust is on the increasingly great Troniks and/or Pacrec (not sure what the difference is) label. 11 tracks of purist noise in 15 minutes, full of metallic clang, speaker-breaking distortion, filtered scuzz, and pretty much every other type of abrasive ear attack. Closest referent is the wire-cutting splatter of Nautical Almanac's most fractured stuff (i.e. not their latest, which is itself great in a much wider, weirder way), though most of the stuff here is more, uh, present - louder, closer, more puncturing, with almost no murkiness or layers - all of this penetrates the skull immediately. The thing I like about noise this good, unpredictable, and insanely busy is how you can listen on two levels at the same time - you can enjoy imagining what the hell kind of physical actions could've created these surgically destructive noises, and at the same time you can easily drool to all the brain-slicing racket like a baby watching its own hand.

mp3:
XEAXX XEAXX - "You Must Eat" from Jazz Bust

DOUBLE LEOPARDS

2005-11-17T07:12:00.000-08:00

In case you were ever thinking of using All Music as a source for anything but laughter, be advised that their entry for Double Leopards consists of one review (of the new Troubleman CD) by someone named Greg Prato, whose credentials apparently consist of having heard of Metal Machine Music. Nothing in "All Music" about any of the band's previous slabs of massive drone, which, though pathetic, is fortunate, since they would've probably gotten such incisive comments as "I could do that" or "this isn't music" or "man, this all sounds the same after one listen, I give up." How bad a "writer" do you have to be to have not gotten past the insanely tired "experimental music is just someone pressing record in a wind tunnel" argument? Stay tuned for Greg's stirring review of Jackson Pollock (preview: "someone spilled paint on the floor...")

UPDATE: The allmusic.com review referred to above has apparently been wisely taken down, thanks to Many Spaceships for the tip...

EXCEPTER

2005-11-08T07:48:00.000-08:00

Saw Excepter at Cake Shop on Saturday night, after a long day of gawking at records and those who sell them. Though I know people whose mileage has varied, I think Excepter are a fine performing act and their early-bird set on Sat. was proof. This time they were inexplicably a quartet (Caitlin Cook was there watching, and I don't think Calder Martin was there at all, though I'm still not totally straight on the who's who), and even began with a real-live drum kit, but eventually it was classic Excepter: warped pre-set beats, tremblingly distorted synth lines, and lethargic/hypnotic/trance-o-tonic vocal moans. The less murky, less layered sound of Self-Destruction continued here, as amount and volume of the sounds were more spare compared to their previous records and the previous multi-voiced, floor-crawling electro-orgy I saw in D.C. last year, but I dig the new sound just as much. There's something so geniusly simple about taking weirdly generic computer beats, tweaking them a bit here and there, and layerying woozy keyboards and zombified singing over the top - the knee-jerk way to think of Excepter(because Jeff Ryan was previously in No-Neck Blues Band) is as a digitized version of NNCK, but really, that's not that far off, and nothing but a compliment...

mp3:
EXCEPTER - "Interplay: Your House" from Self Destruction

MOUTHUS

2005-10-31T13:04:00.000-08:00

Saw Mouthus, probably my favorite current band, in D.C. on Friday as part of a Doom Metal fest that the band didn't exactly fit into, but it at least provided a non-threatened audience. Big difference from only other time I saw and shot them in a red-and-black fog at 611 Florida - this time the lights were much brighter and so was the noise wall, plus Brian and Nate had traded hair-lengths. The sound was super-splattered and ear-punching - no heavy slow sludge, just all attacking, unwavering screech. I dug Brian's mangled guitar strangulations, but Nate's plastering drumming (he uses a combo acoustic-electric setup that sounds like a he's playing with guns instead of sticks) was the best part. Not quite the epiphany that their latest album continues to be, but great nonetheless...apparently my footage from their previous DC show might end up in a Swedish TV doc on NYC Noise that will also include Sightings, Black Dice, and Gang Gang Dance...

mp3:
MOUTHUS - "Go To Freeze" from Slow Globes