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.

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.

Sunn O))) on Bandcamp!

This might be (a few days) old news for some, but might be a great message for the others. Stephen O’Malley, the 1/2 of the legendary drone doom outfit Sunn O))) has made the band’s entire discography available via Bandcamp. Every demo, studio album, live album, collaboration and remix they have ever released is now available in digital format for just 8 dollars. Take the chance and buy their music!

Sunn O))) Bandcamp

Kevin Greenspon - Paradise A.D.

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This exhaustive (65 minutes!) compilation of music from 5 cassettes shows the ideas and the creative processes of the West Coast’s ambient explorer Kevin Greenspon, who effortlessly slaloms between somewhat sandpaper-like synthesizer based textures and gentle, subtle guitar-driven vistas in the likeness of the great ambient masters of the decades past. “Paradise A.D.” is a gallery of moods crafted for every occasion. Recommended! If you like this, buy the CD from the artist himself.

We Are the Wooden Houses - Murrain Pica Mast

A 30 minute long jam broken into two 15-minute pieces from the Cumbrian wilderness (that’s in the north of the United Kingdom, for the less geo-savvy readers) based label Treehouse Orchestra Recordings. The first track is a sitar-tinged, Easterny psychedelic folk jam which picks up the pace with some cleverly sampled and looped live drums for a full-on psychedelic freak out (well, maybe not that amplified, but still very trippy!). The second track is steeped in angelic, krautrock-influenced guitar ambience that spreads into infinity - think Manuel Gottsching and his modern-day equivalent Mark McGuire and you’re pretty much spot-on. You can also buy the cassette if you like - it’s got some beautiful packaging!

Download via Mediafire

Bus Gas - Six Movements in Four Hours

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One of the finest releases from the generally all-killer no-filler catalogue of Sweat Lodge Guru, “Six Movements in Four Hours” by this ghost drone band from the dusty nowhere of Lincoln, Nebraska (US of A), combines the slowest, most molasses-flood like post-rock of GY!BE or Tarentel, haunted psychedelic desert music of Barn Owl and the haziest, most othewordly moments of Low and you’re getting close to describing the sound of the Bus Gas quartet. Heavy, trippy, beautiful and pregnant with emotion. Birth. Re-birth. Cosmic reunion. Slowcore? More like the slowest core. Highly recommended.

Fluorescent Heights - Vendetta in Paradise

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Sweden’s Henrik Stelzer a.k.a. Fluorescent Heights loves playing around with mangled tape loops, New Age aesthetics and ancient drum machines to create a sungazing, tropical vista reminiscent of Dolphins Into the Future, although slightly less sleepy and narcotic and instead focused on drifting, crystalline melodies that rise and fall together with the waves of the gentle, warm sea of some unnamed rather-close-to-the-equator island paradise. Music for sungazing while falling asleep on a hammock. Make sure to have your drinks ready when this comes on, cause you’re gonna be too zoned out to do anything once this starts playing. 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.

Review: Caligine - Anomia Mediterranea

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(CD-R, A Beard of Snails, 2012)

Freak folk was never dead for the Italian freak folkers Caligine. Or maybe rather good ol’ psychedelic folk, before it became the domain of music journalists and critics trying to push it as just another another bandwagon-jumpin’, hype-creatin’ music trend squeezed between one genre and another somewhere toward the end of the previous decade. The psychedelic folk is alive and kicking, even if it exists way below the radar of the tastemaking moguls, now replaced by some other style of aesthetic, only to be exploited, milked out and left to rot. Caligine just don’t give a flying fuck about trends and keep on doing their thing, and to a great effect.

A Beard of Snails, the label that releases “Anomia Mediterranea”, describes the album as an “absolute tour de force”. And of course, a record label desciribing the album they’re releasing with anything else than a glaring praise would be nothing short a suicidal, they’re pretty damn right with this one. Caligine are known to fuse the new with the old, and the catchy with the more experimental. And so, the opening “Καλύπτειν” starts with what appears to be a traditional folk song in Greek that fades away, to be replaced with healthily feedbacked electric guitar drones and a mysterious tapestry of overlapping, whispering voices. This is just the intro, though. The next songs show that Caligine are took much inspiration from the American Primitivists, both old and new - there are echoes of Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho and Ben Chasny almost everywhere on the album, from the beautiful musical poem “La Grande Ferita del Cuore č Questa Esistenza”   or the fingerpicking raga “Cani di Paglia Divorano Tigri di Cartapesta” complete with deep Eastern drones rolling gently in the background. The album tends to descend into some weirder areas, occasionally bordering on noise music, with overblown, harsh drones and noise rock guitar explorations, like the closing “丹田”, which starts with echoing classsical music samples only to be replaced by a menacing black cloud of guitar feedback and reverb, which kinda sounds like a Fushitsusha jam without bass or drums, only the screeching strings remaining.

But apart from the occasional harshness or sound experiments, the new Caligine offering is a thoroughly beautiful and beatific affirmation of folk music ideals, a series of musical paintings with great semi-whispered, semi-spoken narrations in Italian and a stellar acoustic guitar technique, heartfelt and sensible. So if you’re into psychedelic folk and you believe that psych folk/freak folk is NOT dead, get it immediately. You won’t be disappointed.

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.”