Sunday, January 18, 2009

Phantom Limb & Bison - s/t


Download

great, simple drone music. "waiting for my man" is ten lilting minutes of looping keyboard bliss and "bright yellow rays" works with big slabs of feedback and guitar. not much else to say; download it if this description sounds good and you'll like it. if this sounds bad you probably won't like it.

maher shalal hash baz

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - Blues Du Jour













Download

Maher Shalal Hash Baz is primarily the project of one tori kudo, a japanese ex-revolutionary who has since become a born-again jehovah's witness and released a string of really great, rather strange folk albums. good for breakfasts and wedding receptions.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

ghedalia tazartes

Ghédalia Tazartès - Diasporas

Download
tazartès' first record, released way back in 1970. bizarre and captivating, the only consistent features are the shredded, looped, primitivist vocal backflips of this really cool looking cat.
his entire discography is terrific but this one is like treasure

Saturday, December 20, 2008

sorry

ugh sorry about being inactive for so long. anyone interested in more posts? i've been working my way through high school for a while and haven't had the energy to do much posting especially since i want to start actually writing my own descriptions and stuff

Thursday, March 27, 2008

tim hecker

Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet

download
"For his sixth album Tim Hecker sticks to more organic, muted colours. It's a sign of creative maturity and marks a welcome move away from the Fennesz-style layered glitchscapes that have dominated his back-catalogue. It's hard to tell exactly how these drone tapestries are woven together, the granular laptop trickery of old is virtually undetectable and the source instruments detuned and dissolved to the point of blissful obscurity. Opening with the elegiac strains of 'Rainbow Blood', Hecker eases the listener into his melancholy new sound-world before launching into the curiously titled, 'Stags, Aircraft, Kings and Secretaries' with a flickering percussive urgency. Somewhere within the digital fog you can just about discern the occasional glisten of guitar strings. Next up is 'Chimeras', a real standout on the album, its slow motion synth arpeggios providing a rare glimpse of overt melodicism, a property which, though ever-present on this album, tends to be restrained - even buried. That said, filtered and faded as they may be, Hecker's compositions always manage to reveal an emotive core beneath the static. You can understand why Kranky snapped up Tim Hecker: Harmony In Ultraviolet sits comfortably next to material by the likes of Keith Fullerton Whitman, Stars Of The Lid and Loscil, while retaining Hecker's unmistakeable trademarks, that minor key grandeur atop relentless waves of crumbling sonic detritus. This is music every bit as preoccupied with the beauty of decay as William Basinski's finest material."

sounds like: drowning in gelatin

maurizio abate

Maurizio Abate - Mystic Strings

download
"Hand-made silkscreened edition of 100 copies from Abate who plays acoustic raga guitar and drones in the higher-mind style of Jack Rose and Robbie Basho. Some great aggressive, overtone-thick work here, with Abate generating whole mouthfuls of barbed microtonal teeth that sink deep into the background drones and pin em to the sky."

sounds like: one of the adventures of a sailor who travels the world

jackie-o motherfucker

Jackie-O Motherfucker - Fig. 5

download
"In America, we have monuments instead of mythology: bright obelisks and classical statuary erected as perpetually new in the place of the perpetually old. This is, after all, the New World; we dedicate these talismans against ruin across the landscape almost as if to keep history itself at bay, to keep time from catching up with us. Underfoot are bones and detritus, though, the debris of the little nameless events that are excluded from American history. It's all a rather shallow grave when you think about it.
Jackie-O Motherfucker's unprecedented Fig. 5, the group's first CD release, presents a dim and unsettling archaeology of American music. Released in the wake of the American century, it's the first unapologetically brilliant piece of experimental music I've heard this year. Somehow constructed bereft of any postmodern irony, Fig. 5 transforms a commanding grasp on the celebrated tributaries of American music-- jazz, Appalachian folk, soul, African-American spirituals, West coast surf-rock, Protestant hymns, Louisville post-rock, bluegrass, electronic noise-- into an autochthonous gospel. Jackie-O Motherfucker-- two multi-instrumentalists, Tom Greenwood and Jef Brown and the cadre of eclectic talents with whom they surround themselves-- abandoned the remix loop jazz-fusion of their first two albums (available only as LPs) and literally emerged from the basement and the soil with a masterpiece.
The gust-blown digital hum of the first track, "Analogue Skillet," underpins plucked and scraping strings, like a bow on the nervous system itself. It's buzzing neon yielding to something like a screen-door creaking on its rusted hinges behind wind chimes in "Native Einstein," a kind of front porch minimalism. There's a faint chorus of young girls counting down in the recesses, playing Double Dutch in the road. The strings sound like saws; the lone sax whines like an animal. The scene is replaced by the solemn repetition of guitar twang; "Your Cells are in Motion" is the working man's Mogwai: a funereal procession of rising guitar and faint vocals coalescing steadily into shantytown post-rock, tarnished but true. Labradford will spend the entirety of their career trying to create this song and never get it right.
The choral "Go Down, Old Hannah," performed here by the Amalgamated Everlasting Union Chorus Local #824, is a prison camp work song dating back to the turn of the century-- a plea for sunset to end the workday. "Amazing Grace," the slave trader John Newton's ubiquitous 1779 hymn to God, is barely recognizable as Appalachian free jazz: steely banjos and twittering horns that sound like bagpipes are equal parts mountain folk and Pharoah Sanders.
The lilting "Beautiful September" provides an interlude of catchy No Depression dream-rock. But the album's centerpiece is clearly the tribal 24-minute "Michigan Avenue Social Club," a track that sounds at times like dismembered Gershwin, and at other times like Cul de Sac with horns. Fig 5. fades out on the brief, chirping "Madame Curie," dissolving into the earth from which the whole work arose.
For all its disparate strands, Fig. 5 is surprisingly cohesive, constructing some ratcheted new sound with junk and memory rather than laundering old sounds with the irony and veiled contempt of other pastiche exercises. The disc itself is packaged in an oddly fascinating die-cut cardboard folio, complete with snippets of Alan Lomax's celebrated American ethnomusicology. Fig. 5 is slow and plodding like time itself. This work, again, simply has no precedents. Or rather, its precedents lie in the dusty anonymities of American musical history, instead of the proud and touted monuments of our cultural past. Listen to it once if you can. It is our secret national anthem."

sounds like: road trips, porches
please support artists by buying from them if you like their stuff and it isn't too rare or oop