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.

ZENИTH - Ritual

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Even if it wears the dark cloak of the occult and the undiscovered, the 66-minute release from a Toulouse based duo ZENИTH allows for a ray of light to seep in through the dark clouds and into the guitar-based ambient oblivion. Heavily reverbed, often ritual-like (as the title implies), deeply atmospheric, rolling slowly over your head like the slowly coming storm that never hits with its full force, but passes through, while still making a statement with its distant thunders and barely noticeable lightnings. “Ritual” plays like an almost acoustic, more ambiental side of a black metal band. Good stuff for pagan meditation deep in the woods.

Blezna - Árbole

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Here’s something for all you field/nature recordings enthusiasts: a great, yet completely overlooked, absolutely free album from the Spanish sound artist Juanjo Palacios, who takes a totally auteuristic approach here, doing absolutely everything, from choosing samples and recordings to making the album artwork. The result is an adventurous and absolutely compelling journey through the various areas of northern Spain, from forests to meadows and little shepherd sheds, completely organic and enveloping. There are also moments of hypnotic ambience, which tends to occasionally touch on dark ambient areas with its unsettling ,slowly unfolding structures, almost cosmic in its sheer scope and vastness. Highly recommended to all fans of Francisco Lopez, Chris Watson or Loren Chasse.

Blezna - Árbole (immediate download)

Label page

Archive.org page

Binarii Weave - I

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Wow, the beginning of this album got me all freaked, with the tangled, whispered French phrases emerging from the rustling forest soil, like some ethereal nymphs who deceive you with their beauty, only to pull you underground with a thousand hands. There are brief glimpses of relief to be found here, only to withdraw and retreat, replaced again with dark matter and ominous atmospherics. The six short exercises in style combine dark ambience with field recordings and speech samples to an unsettling, confusing effect. “I” is as difficult to clearly define as its cover artwork - just what exactly is this on the cover?

Review: Jake Blanchard - Archaic Practices

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(Cassette, Feathered Coyote Records, 2012)

One doesn’t need to be a MENSA member to guess by the cover and the album title (and the label which released it, let’s not forget that) that we will be dealing with some ritualistic, deeply resonating psychedelia. Jake Blanchard (an illustrator and founder of Tor Press) seems to be reaching into the past for inspiration, and I don’t mean the 20th century. The sounds of “Archaic Practices” are, well… ancient-sounding. But what does this even mean?

The opening “Malediction” answers this question with a head-spinning clarity: the ominous, foreboding drone of the piece sounds in-human, as if it was the primeval, original music made by some sentient creatures that walked the Earth before we even stepped down from the trees. It is the sound of an unknown civilization conducting unknown rituals deep in a cave in the times so prehistoric that no trace of those creatures’ presence was left. The endless, moss-covered drone might bring to mind the longest, most pagan moments of Loren Chasse’s monumental Of project, standing in sheer contrast to his usual introverted field recording/psych folk impressions with the unpenetrable wall of sound.

The following “Envenoming” and “Wandering Djinn” retain the dark ambient atmospherics, unsettling and nocturnal and add deeply echoing, resonating bells and primitive percussive instruments to the washes of overwhelming, bassy sounds the soruce of which gets increasingly harder to describe. Some might hear nods to Starving Weirdos and their kind of cold, alienated “coastal psychedelia”, where they tried to emulate the dread of the ocean and the dark clouds over the coast. It’s equally dark here, but even more suspended and darkened.

However, a final, triumphtant moment of light comes with the closing “Faint Visitant”, which still relies on suspended, droning guitars and thick, psychedelic ambience but throws the feeling of dread, instead going for lysergic wonder and a sense of discovery of something new, intanglible and exciting. There are moments of harsh, distorted guitar feedback in here, but it doesn’t interrupt the blissful ride through multilayered drones much. Those in love with the mysterious, arcane and the occult might feel at home here.

Review: Anduin - Stolen Years

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(CD & Vinyl LP, SMTG LTD, 2012)

The broken window on the cover of “The Stolen Years” by Jonathan Lee (operating under the moniker Anduin, not to be confused with the mighty dragon Alduin) describes the unfortunate event that reflects the album title: the home burglary in 2011 in which Lee lost most of the files and instruments of Anduin. A few years worth of work disappeared in a moment, with only some of the material remaining. “The Stolen Years” is an album culled from those remnants - which can only leave us to wonder how much more work was lost as a result of that crime.

The basic building material of the album is ambient music which does everything ambient music should do: create a rich, textural atmosphere, washing over you in thick swells and hypnotize you with its smeared, hazy drones that you wish would just go on forever. But there is much more: found sounds, field recordings, irregular drums that shift in and out of the ambiental nirvana just add to the experience. But the strongest point of the album are the contributions form the jazz musician Jimmy Graphery, whose slow, delicate saxophone arrangements enhance the atmosphere, making “The Stolen Years” play like a more light-hearted (and less depressed) Bohren & der Club of Gore. Found sounds get looped and processed into strange rhythms, like on “Dyadic Twenty Seven”, where the slow-paced IDM structure is made with strange shuffling and cracking beat, like someone maniacally repeating the same activity over and over.

The process of listening (and imagining) to the album can be “aided” by a wonderful set of pictures made by Team Eight attached to the CD, with each track having a corresponding drawing.reflecting the atmosphere of music. And so, the drawing for the opening “Behind the Voyeur’s Wall of Glass” has an ominous dark figure peering through the window, while “Invisible Materials at Work” shows a picture of a single candle in front of a large, old mirror. The pictures can be just as spooky as the sounds - both are inseparably connected, making “The Stolen Years” a sort of an ambient “concept album” with a thriller/horror story told without a single word.

Borland - Thrancis

Ian Breen and Rob Gregg from Manchester, UK have created a ghostly, hazy and beautifully melodic beat-infused ambient music that occupies the space somewhere between smeared ambient techno and melancholic pop with lots of reverbed vocals and dusted atmospherics. Taking cues from such acts as Raime or Holy Other, Borland are at the same time haunting and beatiful, existing in “ surreal eternal twilight, with themes of love, loss and supernatural powers running throughout each of it’s hypnotic eight songs”. Another great find that took me by surprise. Recommended!

Review: Matthew Dotson - Excavation

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(Cassette, self-released, 2012)

Matthew Dotson’s “Excavation” is an hour long trip through experimental, electroacoustic soundscapes which don’t feel afraid to get really hardcore at times. This Chicagoist travels the world to look for new sources of sound and often accidental inspiration. Side A, for instance (both sides are untitled on this cassette, by the way), was recorded in Japan and influenced by traditional Japanese music, but thrown (temporarily) into an abyss of noise distortion. The opening minutes are filled with oriental string bliss with a melancholic, longing edge disturbed only by the recorded sounds of casual conversations - the album does not give any information whether side A was a recording of a live performance or just a skillfully arranged sampled composition. Probably both.

The melancholic plucking of a string instrument gets drowned out in the sea of increasingly brutal, glitchy power electronics that bring to mind the harshest moments of Autechre’s “Gantz Graf” stretched over the period of a few minutes. Once we’re behind this wall of noise, another stretch of experimentation begins - first barely audible, then louder and more intense, Dotson plays around with various percussion instruments - the sort of esoteric, seemingly directionless clatter Chris Corsano does so well. Then, the final “movement” of side A begins: Dotson harnesses the electronics once again, but instead of brutal assault, he makes some cold, metallic drones that gets more and more intense to the final all-swallowing dark ambience which makes everything around rumble.

Side B is slightly more accessible, with less focus put on abstract sound-art and more into drones and ambience. Gone is the people’s chatter and found sounds, this side is much less “polluted” with sound, instead focusing on the slowly expanding amorphous, bulging mass of gradually more bassy and abrasive electronics. Actually, there comes a moment when this menacing mass sounds like as if it was ready to spill out of whatever you’re listening this album on (cassette deck, computer, mp3 player etc.) and spill out into the material world as a black blob which is ready to consume anything. Thankfully, suddenly the noise is cut short and replaced with near silence, which isn’t all much better - despite being much quieter, it’s still lingering in the shadows, creeping out the listener with ghostly reverb, getting more and more rhythmical and finally becoming a maniacal, incredibly busy, glitched out IDM that could easily be mistaken for some much more famous producer.

If the previous 50 minutes of listening was challenging and diffcult, the last 10 minutes of side B provide a sort of reward for those who managed to sit through all the glitches, noise, threatening drones and found sound experiments: a very relaxing krautrock/ambient pop piece driven by bass, electric guitar and drum machine that doesn’t fall far away from “Zuckerzeit”-era Cluster or the Californian autobahn maniac FWY! A total surprise and a compelling counterpoint to all the intense, unclassifiable music that’s happening throughout the rest of the tape, which proves that Matthew Dotson feels good both at the avant-garde end of the spectrum and while making down-to-earth driving tunes. Recommended.

Sentem - Talim

Thick, deep and minimal soundscapes from the Bucharest, Romania atmospheric unit. Ominous and nebulous dark ambient structures meet glacier-like Sunnistic guitar drones and heavy sludge riffs that are less a sound from a musical instrument but a steamroller without breaks, slow but unrelenting. Music for 21st of December, 2012. In their own words:

With a minimalapproach towards deep bonds between people, nature, traditions, death and the fascination with the greater powers of the universe that, in an orderly chaotic manner, forge the world we live in.

Kalkh-In(joy) Erode - Chaos

The strangely named French project Kalkh-In(joy) Erode has already been featured on the previous incarnation on Weed Temple (the Blogger one), but this alchemist (as I described him in that previous post) doesn’t fuck around and brings us another slab of hazy-as-hell, guitar and vocal driven half-folk, half-ambient improvisations. It’s dark, rather depressing and multi-layered, like a young Franz Kafka armed with a guitar and an amplifier letting his problems devour him and subsequently recording his torment with some ghostly overdubs and reverberations added. Just like the Bandcamp page of the artist himself, the music is thoroughly dark and almost undecipherable.