Chilled as fuck, lazily flowing psychedelic Germanik autobahn musik, picking up a frenetic pace on the course of the near 14 minute krautrock journey “I N T O / We Are the Jungle”. Gently flowing between guitar-susatined ambient atmospherics and plodding sludge rock into a rainforest like foggy heat haze. The album cover is a warning. But don’t be afraid to swim in deep water. Highly recommended!
Chris Cubbison, describes the music of his solo Done project under extremely laconic terms: “drone usa”. But despite this lack of specific information, “Territories” isn’t as flat and monotonous as you might expect from a bedroom artist putting his music on the net for free. Actually, there’ s a lot of work involved: there are ofen vocals, sometimes distant and moaned, otherwise sung or at least intoned to some ghostly melody. There are some percussive sounds, some rhythm and of course some drone - sometimes it’s soft and silky, existing in the background, sometimes it grows to become harsh and unpleasant like that of Ajilvsga. Doomy slowcore meets guitar noise. Worth checking out.
The title of this curio might be the way UK’s Pascall Ansell (a.k.a. Panelak) treats his guitar in the creative process: he strips it of all dignity and forces it to crawl through the mud and the deafening clatter. Strings are violently plucked, there are violent washes of electroacoustic, noisy collages in the vein of John Wiese, and there is a whole lotta harsh drones, guitar torture and contact mic sounds that you just keep wondering where they came from. Everything is up in steam, you can barely make out the shapes, yet you know some incredible carnage is taking place.
One of the more frenetic and open-structured statements of the free improv movement, this three personnel album is a rollercoaster-like ride through jagged stabs of fractured pseudo-melody, percussion kling-klang and analog synthesizer circuitry fuckery. Abstract, aggressive, mind-boggling, transforming at a blinding, heart stopping rate. No wonder the synth somewhere on side A sounds like an ambulance taking you to the hospital. For the improverished ones. HA, get it?
(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.
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.
(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.
Abrasive, feedback-laden, unrelenting, screaming, thrashing, aggressive, but with moments of simple rock music beauty - this is the newest release by the Swedish noise rock unit ÅBE2. As they put it, their music harkens back to the best of 80’s and 90’s noise rock. And it’s true - sometimes it’s lacking almost any structure, just abusing the hell out of their guitars for the sake of abuse, however, at other times it screams “SONIC YOUTH!!!” from a mile off. 27 short pieces filled with fuzz, anxiety and emotion. Buy the cassette from Nomethod Records and let yourself drown in noise.
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!
Don’t be scared away by the excess of weirdness in the songs that begin “Better Psychics”. The self-titled cassette by Brattleboro, VT freak folkers Better Psychics (which consists of Zach Phillips and Chris Weisman) is really a nice collection of heartfelt folk/pop songs, it’s just served in a somewhat dadaistically fucked up way sometimes, throwing angular synth noises or ambient snippets out of the blue or just drowning the pieces in tape hiss or “studio” talk (hard to talk about any studio here, considering the very lo-fi and DIY nature of the tape). Challenging, but rewarding. See through the mess to see the beauty. The cassette can be bought from OSR Records, but you can also download it for free to get a taste.
