Review: The North - Glaciers

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(Vinyl LP, Captcha Records, 2013)

Oh dear, oh dear, why on Earth have I been missing out on Captcha Records for so long!? One of the finest experimental/psych labels around and I haven’t checked them out even once. I feel like an asshole now. Time to make up for my ignorance, starting with a stellar new record (very soon to be released on vinyl) by the Norwegian producer Snorre Snøjøst Henriksen working under the very fitting (considering where he’s coming from and the nature of his music) moniker The North. Everything around this release is made out to make the listener feel cold, even the artwork itself, filled with white and blue colors, as well as abstract, jagged shapes made out to look like the surface of a weathered mountain glacier. But despite that, and the heavy atmosphere of music, it’s not that entirely cold.

The blurb on the label’s website brags about the album’s inspiration taken from both krautrock artists and the more modern-age technoid explorers, and I’m inclined more toward the latter group when listening to “Glaciers”. In fact, I’m really reminded abou the output of the UK’s dark techno label Modern Love, especially the work of Andy Stott or Claro Intelecto, althought with a slightly more ambiental - and sometimes, indeed! - kosmische musik edge. The first track, “Serpen’t Tail” is steeped in vast, endlessly reverbing ambience, evolving toward a lethargic, slowed-down techno beat in a glacial pace. Henriksen takes pride in fiddling with textures in moods - the track is alternatively uplifting and full of light, as if the spring sun was shining at the glacier, making it shimmer beautifully; but then the dark clouds come and cut off the sunlight, bathing the music in dark basslines and thumping, cavernous industrial techno aesthetic.

Second side’s “Night Train” begins in a more oldschool, proggy fashion. Some might think of the more synthesizer driven moments of 70’s progressive rock, others’ minds will surely wander towards the oeuvre of John Carpenter. It’s certainly less dark and more dynamic, driven with classical sequencers and rhythmic analog drones, divided into several movements, some being quieter, building up the tension before finally releasing the disco fever of Giorgio Moroder’s glowing moments of fame. It’s a time travel to the past, leaving behind the cracked, icy caves of side A in lieu of hot club nights, although with a bit of darkness and mystery still staying, expressed by reverbed, moaning vocals in the back of the relentless techno beats. It’s way faster than “Serpent’s Tail” and immensely dancefloor-friendly, as if crafted to be played at house and club parties. If the first track gave an impression of an introverted, headphone-based listening experience, the second track will blow that away and make you blast it away through your speakers at top volume.

Despite its name, “Glaciers” is a hot record - at least side B. While side A does exactly what it promises on the cover, freezing the listener and sending shivers through their body with its lethargic tempo and ghostly atmosphere, side B quickly melts all the ice and snow away and raises the temperature bar dangerously quickly. One of the most surprising, and interesting records I’ve heard recently. Highly recommended.

Vampire Slayer - Psychic Hex

Shimmering, metallic drones from the Vampire Slayer, also known under his birth name Valentin Torres. Eight spells (or maybe rather: hexes) on the album shift the mood between dark and dangerous to trippy and futuristic. Mysterious, heavy echoes roll like thick clouds in the back while the leading synthesizers try to find their way through the electronic maze. The high point here is the closing “Window Peeping”, a hazy, sample-ladden deconstruction of techno that occupies the space somewhere between Actress and The Field.

Kissy Suzuki - Rubbish & Beauties

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Named after one of James Bond’s girls from “You Only Live Twice” and one of the few Bond girls to die of non-violent, natural death, sound artist Kissy Suzuki operates in the field of ambient. The most minimal, stretched and atmospheric ambient - pure background music, employing processed guitar improvisations and field recordings, “Rubbish & Beauties” is massive in its length, yet fragile in execution. In the artists own words:

“Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture. An “ideal beauty” is an entity which is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture, for perfection.”

Sungod - Crash Galactic

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Back when I posted Sungod’s “First Matter” on the Blogger based Weed Temple, it was an album filled to the brim with white hot, mind-melting stoner/space rock jams very much in the Hawkwind school of thought. “Crash Galactic”, the 2012 release by the same band, doesn’t rock as much, this time going for a more mind-expanding approach, doing less freakout jams and more droning nirvana sessions. It’s partially psych folk, partially New Age, partially kosmische musik and partially psychedelic rock free jam, but all in all it’s a 70+ minute long spectacle of cosmic powers and great, great music for trips of all kind (including the sober inner-self meditational trips). Recommended!

Review: Homogenized Terrestrials - The Contaminist

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(CD, Intangible Cat, 2012)

Don’t be mistaken by the word “Terrestrials” in this artist’s name, because little is terrestrial here, unless we add the prefix “extra” to the name, then we’re getting closer (well, further, actually) home. “The Contaminist” is both long and well-executed - Phil Klampe has spent a lot of time on creation of the album, and it can be heard from the start. It’s an exhausting compilation of tracks composed over the course of a few years with a plethora of means, both instrumental and electronic, extending out of the 3” CD-R format the label Intangible Cat got many used to, toward a full CD.

Like the super-zoomed photo on the album’s cover, “The Contaiminist” plays like an alien’s chronicle toward documenting Earth’s nature and living creation. While we, as Earthlings, know perfectly well what animal and plant is safe or dangerous (as in: which ones we can touch and which ones we should avoid like fire), it’s all completely new to a visitor from another planet. Klampe translates the human sounds and music to a hearing process of an alien, often weaving samples or found sounds in the mix. Most of the time the music sounds utterly alien and otherworldly - it’s based on ethereal, spacey ambience. Sometimes, however, some of the more “normal” music seeps into the psychedelic experience - which doesn’t make the alien ambience any less alien - in fact, it just enhances the sense of wonder and isolation from all that is known and named. Sounds of bells are reversed and glitchy. Church choirs are devoid of any religious associations, instead appearing to be chants in unknown language from an unknown, astral culture. Which is not to say that “The Contaminist” is a purposely diffucult and unlistenable. Quite the opposite - everything is new and unexplored, but friendly and welcomes further exploration.

The CD is very varied and full of different “sound quotes” manipulated to the point of becoming a guessing game - “what was that sound originally coming from?”. Klampe had a lot of fun with composing the pieces, smuggling little pieces of melody under the droning exterior. There are also moments of pure bliss, like the 7-minute “Plastic Resonance Key”, which floats on a single droning note like a liquid nirvana pointing straight at heavens. English track titles are interspersed with strange, randomly titled tracks, like “Sroa”, “Spurk” or “Forn Poclipse”. Maybe the title of the release refers to the gradual contamination of the Earth’s atmosphere with the alien matter? This album surely is contaminated with some alien matter. Recommended for all ambient fans.

Adderall Canyonly - Btonal

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This album is an approximation of what would happen if the guys from Autechre in their “Untilted”/”Quaristice” era were devoid of state-of-the-art Max/MSP software and instead left with some shitty synthesizers and/or some ancient computer software. Strangely cut-up, often abstract, yet always beat-driven pieces call to mind the “mutant techno” aesthetic - it’s rugged, noisy, but strangely danceable (even if it would require a mixture of strange drugs in order to become danceable). Scummy, acid-soaked mutations of IDM and techno music reign here, leaving the kosmische version of Adderall Canyonly far, far behind. If you enjoyed Moon Pool & Dead Band, there’s quite a chance you’ll love this one. Highly recommended!

QUICK EDIT! Turns out that it’s from a split tape between Aderall Canyonly and a Texan brain-melter Kösmonaut  (real name: Patrick R. Pärk), who delivers side B in a similarly dancefloor-friendly fashion, except with less inclinations toward noisy bleeps and bloops and more towards endlessly unfolding classic prog-electronic epic suite much in the vein of Klaus Schulze or Harald Grosskopf. Check that one out, too! Top notch!

Misled Navigator - VI

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The tag list on the Bandcamp page of the simply named “VI” album by Brooklyn’s Evan DeJesus (who makes music under the moniker Misled Navigator) doesn’t give any clues about any particular style or genre that can be expected, instead putting everything under the deceptive cloak of “experimental”. But don’t worry, there are no harsh drones or electoacoustic PhD thesis in there. In fact, “VI” is supremely laid back and relaxing, at times recalling the later albums of Blues Control (especially “Valley Tangents”) or the later, more synth-oriented wave or krautrock on the edge of 70’s and 80’s when they started mingling with synth pop. And if you pardon the minor occasional compositional slips (like the sloppy drums here and there or hitting a note slightly too late), you get an auteur compilation of urban scenes steeped in a psychedelic sauce.

Harmash - Der Golem

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The newest release from the Belarussian experimental music zine and netlabel Foundamental sees Vitali Harmash go into heavily textural and srawling ambient territories that tells the story of the Golem through dusted atmospherics and eerie bells that disappear in the thick fog. Scraps of electroacoustic music found sounds come and go, but are quickly consumed and nullified into the overwhelming sonic tapestry. Good music for silent films soundtracks. In the fact the album was used as a soundtrack to a movie:

“Album was created after Paul`s Wegener “The Golem: How He Came into the World” silent horror film scoring. Performance was hold in the oldest Minsk cinema “Raketa” at Dec12 2012 where opened a week of silent German cinema.”

Read more and download the album (both in 320 mp3 and FLAC) here.

Harmash - “Der Golem”

Merkaba - Ancient Relics

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“And now for something completely different…”

This is one of those albums that wasn’t sent to me via e-mail or discovered by me, but it was recommended to me by my friend Ramzes (that’s his nickname, not the real name, tho it would be hella cool to be friends with an ancient pharaoh). The “completely different” factor here is that it’s psytrance - not the genre I’m most familiar with (actually, not the genre I’m familiar with at all - I’ve only listened to Shpongle a few times before). Nevertheless, “Ancient Relics” by Australia’s Merkaba (nothing in common with the polish sludge/post-rock unit Merkabah I’ve once posted) is a trippy as hell (as it should be) journey through tribal moods, strange sound effects, four-to-the-floor dance rhythms and New Agey phrases uttered by sultry female vocals. Makes you think of lost civilizations, ancient aliens and astral travels. The complete psychedelic experience, in a glossy, hi-fi & sci-fi packaging.

Thanks, Ramzes!

Review: Samantha Glass - Rising Movements

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(Cassette, Constellation Tatsu, 2012)

The cassette synth scene can be divided into three basic “schools of thought”: one school follows the jagged, raw electronics of the earliest masters, providing punctured, difficult and highly abstract compositions - either with a rhythm or rhythmless. The second school follow the star-gazing Germans and New Age post-hippies in their journey to explore the inner self, with deep, sprawling tracks that often take up entire sides or even CDs. The third school follows the sunny, carefree happy synth psychedelia of Harmonia or later Cluster, making compelling, catchy, yet hypnotic poppy structures.

Samantha Glass, the alias of a Madison, WI resident Beau Deveraux, represents the third school. Despite the grim looking cover, there’s no cold, windswept ambience to be witnessed here. While I tend to fully agree with label’s descriptions of the albums they release, often praising their spot-on sense of writing, this time I have to disagree with Constellation Tatsu. The blurb on the website says: 

The abandoned lodge emerges from the dark, wet woods. It is warm and light inside – carpeted halls and wood banisters welcome your step, draw you deeper past branching rooms. What mysteries, forgotten treasure, and danger await within these decrepit walls?

 Now put the cassette in the player or play the first track from the Bandcamp page. Where are the dark, wet woods here? Maybe if we were talking about a rainforest in the summer or palm tree woods then it would make sense. But dark? No way! Actually, “Rising Movements” is one of the warmest, most sun-lit cassettes I’ve heard in quite a while. Listening to this tape is like taking a bath in the warm, calm waters during the summer evening, the soft light washing over you. The 5 untitled “movements” (named simply “Movement”, duh) are a soundtrack to a luxury yacht marina filled with relaxing, well-to-do people sipping drinks and having a great time in the hot, hot sun. And there’s nothing sarcastic or critical about this description. This album genuinely recreates the laziest, most mellowed out moments of hot summer told in a language of electronic krautrock and analog synthesizers. Fuzzed out guitar licks hover in the background, bass guitar joins the pulsing, rhythmical electronic train, the sun shines through the leaves.

To put it bluntly: Samantha’s Glass “Rising Movements” is pure, unlimited bliss. Don’t believe what the others tell you.