Review: Artur Rumiński - Untitled

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(Cassette, Wounded Knife, 2013)

It seems that we’ve got some friendly rivalry to the already pretty well-known Sangoplasmo label on our small, yet fertile Polish experimental scene. This time it’s the Warsaw based imprint Wounded Knife, beginning modestly (like almost every brand new label), yet impressively with two hazy, drone-laden cassettes with some very nice packaging.

The very first release is a solo recording by Artur Rumiński, a guitarist from Sosnowiec - that’s in Silesia, a part of Poland known for its numerous coal mines. It’s actually a really lovely area with some rich nature, but some people tend to think it’s a bleak industrial wasteland where not a single sunray touches the earth, unable to penetrate through thick smog and soot. And Rumiński’s untitled tape makes us think so. He plays the guitar in experimental black metal/noise unit THAW, so his solo work won’t fall that far from that, except with a far more drony edge. The two side-long compositions, “Allen K. Drone” and “KBOw” are dark, atmosphere-heavy excursions through thick, cold guitar sludge, looped and ambientalized with some paganistic drumming scattered all over the place. It’s a bit like a darker, more pessimistic version of High Aura’d. Listening to this tape is like crawling through a seemingly endless tunnel filled with cold muck with just a tiny spot of light at the end. You just keep crawling toward the light, because the tunnel is so tiny that you just can’t turn around. You feel that the light won’t bring the escape; even worse - that the light is something evil, malignant. But you have no choice. The ordeal just goes on and on.

Echoes of Sunn O))) strike all over the album, setting the frozen guitar ambience against sparse, yet powerful guitar strums, almost tectonic in nature. Cymbals crash in the darkness, giving an illusion of rhythm once in a while, only to dissolve in the fog. Just like the mysterious light keep drawing you in, despite you knowing the consequences very well, “Untitled” will keep you listening, despite the unwelcoming, unhuman environment. Recommended.

Rag Lore - Sabah el Mitragyna Reveries

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Almost 60 minutes of purely American primtive lapsteel guitar magic from Matthew Boteilho, who’s about to make a big move to Cairo, Egypt from Houston, TX. Lengthy, healthy improvisations where the shamanic string licks meet eternal drones and psychedelic atmospherics to fill your head with cascading aural orgasms that just keep coming and coming. Available on cassette from Space Slave and on CD from Dying For Bad Music. And also in digital form, completely free from Bandcamp. Highly recommended.

Clipping - Midcity

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Ow, my ears! Los Angeles trio Clipping take off where Dälek landed. Harsh noise rap. Is this even possible? Everything is. Angry lines over fragmented, mangled and mutilated glitches and walls of hyperdistortion. Sounds like bullshit? It’s not. Despite taking influence from the most unwelcoming, anti-musical genre there is, “Midcity” is brutal, yet strangely melodic (at least sometimes) and it doesn’t make you turn the music off after 30 seconds. Probably because it uses noise as building blocks for some bitchin’ beats. Recommended, and truly unique.

Review: Noseph Janner / Levvels - Destroyed Minutes / Levvels of Death

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(Cassette, Metaphysical Curcuits, 2013)

The first release from the brand new label Metaphysical Circuits, a sort of the next venture after the end of A Beard of Snails label, presents the “split” cassette between the two different solo projects by Owen McLean. Both sides present radically different approaches to raw, analog electronics. One is a glistening ride through komische school of progressive electronic, the other is much more raw and abstract, with leanings to the academic experimentations of early synthesizer vanguards.

If you’re a more “melody-friendly” type of person, you should fall in love with the Noseph Janner side. The short tracks are more like impressions, brief vignettes than fully realized songs, something like short exercises in synthesizer bliss. Moods and atmospheres change at a kaleidoscopic pace, leaving the analog territory for some more “live” instruments, like the lazy, piano-driven “Solar Surfer” which sounds like a loose cover of Readiohead’s “Pyramid Song”. Cosmic and New Age imagery permeates both the music and the track titles (like “Satellite Soul Vision”, “God Vision”, “Star Ocean”, “Planet of Sirens” etc.) - many tracks have the word “vision” in them, making them into transmissions from the subconscious or psychedelic experiences. That was the visionary side.

Now the abstract side by Levvels. “Levvels of Death” is almost completely anti-melodic, with McLean pushing his synthesizer(s) to the limit with noise-laden, thick and often harsh walls of pulsing, wailing, droning sounds. If Noseph Janner was the more beautiful side of space with colorful galaxies and shining stars, Levvels is the sound of coldness, vastness and emptiness of cosmos - imagine you’re an astronaut and some part of your space vessel begins malfunctioning. Levvels is the soundtrack to the space travel gone wrong and the fear.

Review: Ashan - Ancient Forever

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(Cassette, Inner Islands, 2013)

Sean Conrad has been exploring his way through different shades of psychedelic folk over quite a few years now, first starting the adventure with wonderfully randomly-named Gkfoes Vjgoaf, going through a number of different projects, currently stopping at Ashan. There is a certain New Age ideology connected with all music of Sean Conrad, and that of the Inner Islands record label, with the short description of “Ancient Forever” being “exploring the deep energies of the Earth”, among other pursuits.

The music of Ashan often sounds psychedelic, but there are no implications of drug use or any invites to use them - in other words, Sean Conrad might be a beardo but he’s no weirdo. Instead of running into strange, trippy collages or improvisations he opts for clarity and crystal quality of his music, made with simplest instrumentarium around (mostly acoustic guitar and wordless female vocals, moaning and humming away). Conrad takes the peaceful, folky tunes and transform them into looping, enthralling tapestries, stimulating the imagination and filling the air with kind spirits. Harmony with nature is the key here; leaving the civilization and embracing the wilder side is the key.

Both Sean Conrad and the Inner Islands label reject the (anti)social media (i.e. Twitter or Facebook) - sure, there are websites, but they function just as a tool of prividing some basic information and a mean of purchasing the albums. But they really don’t give a shit how many “likes” or “followers” they have. They decide not to waste their time trying to build a “fanbase” or whatever it’s called in the social media technobabble these days. Instead, they just make music that makes them (and the listeners) happy and re-discover what many people lost, surrounded by gadgets and hi-tech machinery. They go out, to explore the wilderness and gain happiness from it. We should probably follow them - the summer is coming, after all!

Naomi Chomsky - Iron Bird Meditation

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Man, I could’ve been driving past this beatnik’s house last summer when I was in the UK. The provocatively named Naomi Chomsky may be coming from London or its whereabouts (I don’t really care), but his music is way beyong the urban congestion and urban leanings of that city. Instead, we get an exhausting, sun-gazing psychedelic ruminations that bring the brilliant beings of Alan Watts or Sandy Bull to mind, lulling you into a trancelike state with motorik guitar semi-improvisations and trippy minimalism. It comes from England, it sounds like a lost gem from the late 50’s/early 60’s Cascadian/Californian forest, recorded in lo-fi conditions with a healthy aid of the then still legal LSD-25 or a nice dose of psilocybin mushrooms, back when nobody has heard of terms like “psychedelic” or “trippy”. Primal and authentic, Recommended.

UUUUUU - Cossacks in Fields of White Roses

Following the smeared, disintegrating loops of William Basinski, Scotland’s ambientalist Derek McArthur’s newest work focuses on piano at its quietest and most introverted: it takes emotional, sad pieces and loops them over and over; overlapping, modifying, amplifiying, silencing and re-shaping the original experience in different manners. Ambience meets conceptualism.

Sunken Seas - Null Hour

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From the exotic & prolific New Zealand soil comes the feedback-laden psychedelic blast from the dynamic trio Sunken Seas. Rising from its post-punk beginnings, the members of the group gaze at their footwear while remembering to wear flowers in their hair. “Null Hour” is a blasting, fuzzy and healthily amplified collection of alienated anthems and soaring jams with some post-rockish space to breathe every now and then. A slow burner, sinks in slowly. Highly recommended!

Machweo - No Way Out EP

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Indian Gold Records starts to become one of my favorite netlabels, not only because of the quality of music they offer (first SLZR, then Rancho Shampoo), but also because of how open they are to the music from outisde the designated “psychedelic” comfort zone. “No Way Out” EP from the Italian electronic youngster Machweo is not psych rock, but might be just as trippy. It treads the ground somewhere between slowed down, deconstructed hip-hop filled with dark undertones and field recordings to the cavernous, star-gazing minimal techno in the vein of Pantha du Prince. Plus lots of scary, super-echoing vocal samples, Holy Other style. The two remixes are ace too. Recommended!

Review: Ill Professor - Wire & Air

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(Cassette, Constellation Tatsu, 2013)

The Chicago based band Zelienople have always appeared to me as an overlooked, always a little under the radar musical mystery (and a gem) of the 2000’s. Their combination of drone music, slowcore and dusted, slow jazz gave psychedelia a new meaning; full of dark corners and foggy mazes - perfect listening for the more introspective, melancholic moments. The band enhanced this image of mystery and melancholy through their black-and-white, often blurry, album artworks.

Ill Professor is not very different - this side-projects sees two thirds of Zelienople combining forces. Brian Harding works with Matt Christensen here, evoking the ghostly spirit of Zelienople, expect in a less song-like, “fully grown” way, but rather as a set of anti-studio, bedroom-friendly sketches and lo-fi loner ballads bordering on ambient and drone music rather than the jazzy, slowish psychedelia of the full band. If the cover photograph is any indication, no explosions of joy or moments of sudden energy are expected to happen here: it’s a slow, lethargic ride through that strange mid-state between waking life and dream world, where everything seems strangely real, yet blurry and heard as if it were a mile away; the highway here would be the smeared guitar ballad “Slate Line”, the piece most similar to Zelienople in its full line-up, with the string plucking leaving distant echoes, pregnant with melancholy. There are moments of slo-mo narcotic bliss, like in the ambient-ladden super slow “Saturday End of September”.

Everything here is in sepia. Everything is a remnant of an emotion or an event that happened a long time ago, maybe even in the previous life. Zelienople (and Ill Professor, naturally) have built their trademark sound as an attempt to capture those small, fleeing emotions or to give a new life to the scraps of memory hidden deep in the unconscious until now. It’s a bit clashing that an album like “Wire & Air” gets released in the Spring - because it seems like a perfect late autumn listening album. When everything around comes to life, these guys want to cover everything in snow, with only small bits of life remaining, but remaining on the verge of falling into hibernation. It’s almost painfully introvertic and inner-self gazing music, but it works. It bears a load of emotions. When the cold, rainy autumn days come in a few months, I’ll remember what to listen to.