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.

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!

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.

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.

Review: VED - Spectra

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(Vinyl LP, Adrian Records, 2013)

First of all: Good God, that’s one scary cover. It kinda reminds me of that urban legend painting that was allegedly haunted or the shit from the SCP Foundation (if you haven’t heard of that website and you’re going to read it at night, don’t expect to go to sleep anytime soon). Thankfully, the music here doesn’t go in the same direction as the artwork does (which is not say it’s not a bitchin’ piece of art, but it’s pretty unsettling). Instead of muffled screams and deep, echoing noises we get floral, oriental psych-krautrock in the style of Agitation Free or Brainticket. Plus the band’s from Sweden, a country that can be always trusted upon with their psychedelic music (take Goat’s “World Music” as the latest example, even if it’s been hyped to oblivion in the last few months).

“Pushing this power, this energy out of my head…” - a monologue in English with a heavy foreign accent begins side A’s “Spectra” (the album is divided into two side-long tracks). A slowly rolling jam reads like a guitar duel: on one side there’s a snakelike, oriental guitar shamanism, on the other there are explosions of fuzzy, distorted guitar. First fighting, like melodic psychedelia wrestling with noise rock, the guitars later begin to work in unison, propelled forward by calm, slow drumming that further enhance the smokey, oriental feel of the album. The musicians keep pushing this power out of their heads in a mandala-like fashion, building the laid back jam around a few simple riffs adorned with proggy organ workouts.

The second track, “Starokorokas” begins in a similar manner, slowly, with a heavily hasheeshian vibe, with a hypnotic bass line and just as equally hypnotic flute playing, much in the vein of Brainticket’s “Celestial Ocean”. The drums grow almost tribal and the dulcimer joins the meditational parade, transporting the listener to the Garden of Eden. But not for long: after a short, almost ambient, dulcimer-driven interlude, the music suddenly, without any warning kicks into a high-octane motorik kraut-jazz jam with a screeching sax and maniacal, re;entless drumming. Guitars explode in violent, sparse chords. It’s a total opposite of the slowed-down psychedelia of side A, an ecstatic explosion of energy that lasts for almost 10 minutes. It’s just for this autobahn-friendly piece alone that this album is well worth recommending. Actually, let the music speak for itself:

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.

Review: Wes Imel - Stereophonic Mountain Man

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(Cassette, Plus Tapes, 2012)

When my girlfriend was once sifting through my cassette collection, she was getting gradually angrier and angrier at the lack of proper labeling (i.e. artist and album name) on the covers. She’s an accountant by trade, and if you’ve ever had any contact with an accountant you know they’re not the most mystic kind of people. You see, accountants LOVE to have everything neatly labelled and catalogued - alphabetically. Binders, files, organizers, archives. So browsing through a bunch of cassettes with abstract, psychedelic artworks and little (if any) information given right there in the artwork was starting to grind her gears. But suddenly she shouted: “Finally, a good, well labeled cassette!”. She showed me the copy of Wes Imel’s “Stereophonic Mountain Man” with the all the names right there on the cover. “Why can’t all those cassettes look like this?”, she added.

Maybe she wouldn’t be so entusiastic if she actually listened to “Stereophonic Mountain Man” (she didn’t). Which is not to say it’s not living to the expectations; it’s just the fact Wes Imel provides a pretty huge slab of ambient-infused psychedelia here, and psychedelic stuff isn’t exactly the most accountant-friendly music (she loves gothic rock though, so I might be a bit wrong). Wes Imel is a prime example of a totally amateurish bedroom musician (“bedroom” might be an understatement, as the liner notes state that the material was recorded in “various places” in Chicago), who doesn’t take himself all that seriously while still having a ball with making his music.  He’s not trying to break any new ground (one of the tracks is called “Copy of a Copy”), while at the same time cracking jokes at music journalism and its need to create a new name for a genre every few months - another composition is called “Postmodern Ambience” and he refers to the music he’s making as “blisswave”.

“Wes Imel has taken the laid back chillwave aesthetic, infused it with blunt smoke and transformed it into blisswave”, the blurb at Plus Tapes label’s website states. Which is rather appropriate, considering how most of the stuff on SMM sounds like washed-up chillwave devoid of poppiness and instead looped, psychedelicized and stretched out to near infinity with gentle guitar plucks or analog synthesizer patchworks. It’s blissful most of the time, yet it’s rid of “endless summer” polaroid/technicolor/instagram bullshit, instead going for a colder, more lo-fi feel. The “serious” ambient suites are sometimes lightened up by strange humor, like the speech synthesizer intro of “House Hunting With Osama Bin Laden”. 

“Stereophonic Mountain Man” is a step up from the guitar-driven ambience on “Rickshaw Driver” EP. I’m still not sure if “Stereophonic Mountain Man” can be treated as a “grown” album or rather just a compilation documenting the creative process. I’m going for the latter, but for what it is, it’s a damn good compilation. Keep makin’ music, dude.

house hunting with osama bin laden from hang on Vimeo.

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.

Blast from the Past: Swell Maps - A Trip to Marineville

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(Vinyl LP, Rough Trade, 1979)

When I was a bit younger, I always thought if I had a band or at least a solo musical project at least one of my/our covers would picture a burning house. Then I found about Swell Maps’ A Trip to Marineville, a rough deconstruction of punk and post-punk genre that would foreshadow the coming of the noise rock genre in the next decade. The picture of a stately middle-class detached house devoured by flames reflects the savage and uncrontrolled music of the album very well.

The Birmingham based trio is considered as one of the most experimental and forward-looking bands of the post-punk genre, among with This Heat. But while the music of This Heat was brooding, dark, electronically augumented and highly krautrocky in nature (peaking with their suffocating, apocalyptic masterpiece “The Fall of Saigon”), Swell Maps were quite the opposite, going for noisy, uncontrolled jolly mess of guitars, drums and aggressive vocals. Swell Maps weren’t trying to be political in their songs, they were not trying to channel some youthful alienation, they just had a “fuck it, let’s make it loud” attitude, going for a dizzying ride through fast rhythms and unpolished improvisations. And I should put a strong stress on the word “unpolished”. Because even today, A Trip to Marineville is in-the-red loud and abrasive, even if compared to modern-day noise rock and punk records. It must have been quite a feat in its day and age and it must’ve scared away (at least initially) a whole lot of rockers who considered themselves “seasoned” or “hardcore” listeners. They have already listened to punk rock, after all! But Swell Maps turned the volume up to eleven and added amphetaminic paranoia on top of it all.

The music of Swell Maps was punk rock on steroids - hyper-energetic, often hyper-kinetic and enhancing the inherent “weirdness” of many punk rockers - like in “Harmony in Your Bathroom” ripe with bathroom and water-related sound effects. “A Trip to Marineville” was also full of twisted sense of humor and a sense of having great fun while making music - these guys just seem to have churned out one killer after another, equipping the absolutely nuclear riffage with maniacal, somewhat messy drumming. It is joyous as fuck and doesn’t take itself seriously, prancing around like a doped-up prankster. We got to associate post-punk with grim-faced grittiness or social commentary, always dark and always serious. Swell Maps show us the lighter side of post-punk. They are the ray of light.