Phantom Limb & Bison - s/t


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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.

tim hecker

Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet

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"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

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"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

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"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

the taj mahal travellers

The Taj Mahal Travellers - August 1974

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"The four sides of August 1974, each about 20-minute long (the length that fit on an LP side), present the Travellers at their most sophisticated. The first jam is a concert of cosmic hisses that ebb and flow, distortions that scour the abysses of the psyche, sinister wailing and rattling that create a metaphysical suspense. At first, it straddles the line between Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine and Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, but then it becomes more and more abstract, recalling Sun Ra's extraterrestrial jazz-rock. Percussions are used sparingly. Violin, harmonica, bass, tuba, trumpet, synthesizer, mandolin duet in a subliminal and obscure manner. There is no melody, there is no logic. Just "voices", both subhuman and supernatural, that resonate with a universal inner voice. The second jam is a cacophonous gathering of timbres and gamelan-like tinkling, over which Tibetan chanting and droning intone a demented psalm. Halfway into the piece, the band seems to lose interest in playing, so the rest of the track is a rarified wind of tenuous sounds. The third track continues this silent journey into the unknown, with odd percussive patterns and random dissonance. As the chaos increases and exuberant voices join in, the bacchanal turns into a surreal pow-wow dance. The last jam continues the program of eerie noises and unlikely counterpoint in an atmosphere that is both dreamy and austere. We are transported to a floating zen garden, traveling on a flying saucer. A wavering harp-like melody invites to meditation, and, for a while, the spiritual mood prevails. Then the percussions break the spell, introducing the usual element of indeterminacy and heresy, and the trip ends, one more time, in the resonating depths of distant galaxies."

sounds like: floating

william basinski

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops

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"It's impossible: no one could create a script this contrived. Yet, apparently, it happened. William Basinski's four-disk epic, The Disintegration Loops, was created out of tape loops Basinski made back in the early 1980s. These loops held some personal significance to Basinski, a significance he only touches on in the liner notes and we can only guess at. Originally, he just wanted to transfer the loops from analog reel-to-reel tape to digital hard disk. However, once he started the transfer, he discovered something: the tapes were old and they were disintegrating as they played and as he recorded. As he notes in the liner notes, "The music was dying." But he kept recording, documenting the death of these loops.
These recordings were made in August and September of 2001. Now, this is where the story gets impossible. William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate. He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another. As I said, it's impossible. The music, however, is beautiful, subtle, sad, frightening, confusing, and ultimately uplifting. What's he created here is a living document: a field recording of orchestrated decay. It sounds like nothing else I've heard, yet, at its core, it's the simplest and most familiar music I can imagine.
The four disks comprise six unique works. There is some overlap on the different disks; in fact, the first work (which Basinski calls "D|P 1") begins on disk one and ends on disk four. Some of the works are very long ("D|P 1" is over 90 minutes), while some are relatively short ("D|P 4" is only 20 minutes). However, each of the six works employs a different, repeating loop that slowly deteriorates into oblivion. The loops are very simple: a lush string or synth melody backed by atmospheric arpeggio countermelodies. The melodies are, as Basinski notes, pastoral: lush, simple works intended as idealized representations of nature and beauty. In theory, then, this is ambient music: music designed to set a mood, evoke a feeling (like a cinematic score), but one that is not designed for deep listening. That, I'm sure, was Basinski's initial design when he first created these loops in 1982.
But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What's more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been.
As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. "D|P 3," for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise. By contrast, the longest piece, "D|P 1," because it is split into three distinct parts ("1.1" on disk one; "1.2" and "1.3" on disk four), actually dies three separate deaths. Each one begins as soft, warm halos of sound, which then slowly mutates into muddled fragments. And then there's "D|P 4," the smallest work. It begins as a full-fledged melody but slowly devolves into chaos: silences slowly spreading across huge gaps in the loop, while the muddled melody struggles on, barely perceptible, until it, too, is silenced into oblivion.
This is not ambient music; this is not one melody played over and over to fill the background space of a Japanese restaurant. This is natural music: music created from the elemental forces of life and as a testament to those forces. This is the sound of entropy, the sound of life as it decays and dies before our ears. And like all living things, these sounds struggle and claw for life with their last, dying breaths. Their deaths are a memorial to Basinski's past. That he dedicates these works to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is fitting. I can think of no better tribute, no better response to a tragedy of that magnitude than a work as beautiful and as fragile as this one."

sounds like: time passing

emeralds

Emeralds - Servant
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sounds like: looking through crystals

lotus eaters

Lotus Eaters - 4 Demonstrations

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very limited cd-r

sounds like: islands, cliffs

yellow swans

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"In an effort to describe the visual work of Shirazeh Houshiary, it was suggested that it had a "presence," like light, which required experience in order to be comprehended. This also holds true for Yellow Swans’ newest release, At All Ends. With this, their second album for Load Records, Gabriel Salomon and Pete Swanson present a work exquisite in the weight of its melodic presence and brutal in its devastating beauty. It is a work that seeks to assert itself beyond the limitations set upon it by its recorded form.
"At All Ends" begins the album with a series of passages, looping and dissolving in absolute reflexive response beneath their own counterclockwise fallout. These motifs move at the pace of hallucinatory trailings, in constant progression toward their final end, succumbing to an aggressive flare of guitar strum and feedback. This final sequence brings to full view the primary foundation from which their work is birthed: noise. And while sonic explorations that fall within this practice are often considered lacking in expressive qualities, this couldn’t be further from what’s on play here. Building upon this infrastructure of noise, Yellow Swans have fused elements of shoegaze, wherein the melodic basis of the record finds root. This component elevates the proceedings beyond what could have potentially been a fixed exercise in dissonant scree and feedback.
"Mass Mirage," a blur of somber guitar harmonics submerged in audio grain and rubble mixed with Pete’s obliterated vocals, is a prime example of this influence. It’s not difficult to hear the influence of Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, or Loveliescrushing fixed within their open-mouthed, skyward-eyed noise, nor is it a task to hear the influence of the archetypes — dream pop and space rock — of shoegazers in the cathartic extremes. "Our Oases" is similarly invested in this celestial gazing, with expansive, divinity-invested ambience buried beneath seething guitar figures and vocal phantasma. And while shorter by half, the transcendent effect is undeniably achieved. Deconstructed in comparison, but no less entrenched in metaphysical otherness, "Stretch the Sands" is a panorama of scorched undulation laid bare before your eyes. The album reaches a final transcending moment through the slow, unfolding melody of the somber guitar on album closer "Endlessly Making An End Of Things," which radiates outward from a shadow in majestic climb; spiritual absolutism perhaps, but profoundly affecting.
With At All Ends, it’s clear Salomon and Swanson are progressively moving toward an openly pronounced use of melody, which will assuredly continue to alienate them from noise die-hards. Conversely, their decisive use of noise will alienate listeners easily frustrated by the squalls of feedback and electronics. It would be a shame, however, for any listener, regardless of their biases, to be lost on this record. Indeed, their melding of ideas induces an "unknown knowing," coaxing the listener into an absolute state of self akin to the work of Francisco Lopez and John Duncan. The element of "noise" is transcended, becoming an unobtrusive extension of the achieved infinite state. Records capable of provoking such psychotropic transitions come along very infrequently; do not miss out on this one."

sounds like: an empty desert

religious knives

Religious Knives - It's After Dark

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hey btw these folks are coming to seattle on the 15th, go see them
"It was always going to be tough following up a record like "Remains." For me the Religious Knives trio of Double Leopards' Maya Miller and Mike Bernstein and Mouthus stick-man Nate Nelson were at the top of their game with that disc, bringing to mind the finest elements of early Popol Vuh and blending that with a roominess, a sense of outsider bliss which was impossible for me not to fall in love with. It was the sound I'd always wanted from Double Leopards welded seamlessly with the kind of percussion that wouldn't be out of place on a Sublime Frequencies collection, and in that the Knives had become almost their own sub-genre. Strangely then for their second long player the band have tripped almost headlong into a world of heroin-soaked fuzz-rock - a sound not too many hops, skips and jumps from a Morrisson-less Doors or even The Stooges.
Those of us who managed to lay our grubby mitts on the stunning "In Brooklyn After Dark" 12" last year will already have an inkling at the sound they're approaching, and indeed that track pops up as the extended introduction to "It's After Dark." Grimy, fractured and primal, this is music that sounds as if it's been recorded in a basement as a near psychotic Abel Ferrara frustratedly attempts to daub oil on canvas in the room above. There are plenty of links here to the trendy and recently re-emerged no-wave scene Sonic Youth so proudly represent, but somehow the trio manage to sidestep this faddishness. It was a track that surprised me at the time simply for the fact that it was so different from their previous work, but a track that has elevated with each play, and one which sounds infinitely better when you crank the amps up to eleven. From this extended introduction however the Knives' sound creeps and crawls mutatedly around the psychedelic rock genre with dashes at smudgy, drugged out half-tempo balladeering, fat organ-led grooves and even nods toward the rock-pop flourishes of the equally genre-bending Magik Markers. It doesn't always work either; occasionally the single-mindedness we became so accustomed to on tracks such as "Bind Them" is fractured to give way to a rare fragility. The fog breaks for a moment
and our suspension of disbelief is broken, the band become mortal for a second - vocals cracking and silence becoming dead air. This is however exactly what makes "It's After Dark" a totally different beast from it's predecessor, a brave record which almost resets the band in my mind at least giving them a set of rock 'n roll credentials they possibly never had before.
"It's After Dark" is precisely that, music to sit awkwardly in-between you and that nerdy girl in the over-washed X-Ray Spex tee shirt as you sip on a cheap bourbon and give out wry, uncaring smiles, music to accompany you as you wander alone back from the show wondering silently whether she even gave a fuck. It is music for mixtapes and heartbreaks and exactly the kind of noise the tiresome blogosphere needs to replace their ill-founded adoration of the Animal Collective or Grizzly Bear. Don't believe me? Flick over to "It's Hot" and play it three times. you can almost imagine Iggy Pop himself crawling around the corner, limbs flayed as he dribbles a chemical-rich saliva over your new rug. Give the ten-minute epic "Noontime" some airing and you'll be sinking hopelessly into the whirling synthesizers and chanted vocals with scant regard for the consequences, and it's around this time you realize that there's simply nobody else like Religious Knives. Fuck the genres; New Weird America? Noise? Psychedelia? This is good, old fashioned American rock music, and sure, the band might not have got it entirely right - but that's what makes them so damn good and what forces you to remember why you fell in love with music in the first place. Just remember this ain't an album for the attention deficit generation, you need to listen more than once - trust me, in about six months this will have gone from 9/10 to 10/10."

sounds like: rainy spring weather where the air is heavy

the skaters

The Skaters - Untitled
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the skaters are so wonderful and mysterious that i could not find anything about this album
enjoy

sounds like: large spans of human history in secluded parts of the world, levitation

teotihuacan

Teotihuacan - Live Smokeshows from Inside the Ciguri Cave Hazed Diamonds with Windswept Hair

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another side project by james ferraro of the skaters. i'll up some skaters soon enough.

sounds like: rituals being performed on the other side of a jungle valley

snake figures fan

Snake Figures Fan - s/t

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"Another mysterious new project from James Ferraro of The Skaters, this is the first volume of three audio documents of a four month travel through Mexico and is a beautiful mix of sweeping Klaus Schulze-style Kosmiche synth, padding drums, Tangerine Dream scale teleport tone and washes of barely-there phase. Highly recommended, limited run."

sounds like: aztec ruins, hypnosis, moss, forests, fanning snake figures

the white star line

The White Star Line - s/t

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sounds like: the album cover

tim hecker

Tim Hecker - Atlas

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"You put music by Montreal's Tim Hecker on the headphones and go for a walk around your neighborhood, and all of a sudden your other senses are heightened. The colors of the leaves are more vibrant; the stench wafting from an alley dumpster has an extra note of pungency; the sunlight on your face feels a little warmer. His music is designed for immersion, and it has a tendency to transform the space in which it's heard. The first time I listened to last year's Harmony in Ultraviolet I was riding on a bus, sitting in back, feeling the rumble of the engine beneath my seat. The windows had a plastic coating of some kind that gave everything an orange tint. As we idled at the corner, the glass shook and warped and it looked like a huge, brightly-colored earthquake outside, and the music reinforced the idea that the ground would rupture at any moment.
So anyway. I've missed Tim Hecker a bit this year, but he returns with a vinyl-only 10" EP later this month. Atlas consists of two tracks, each in the ten-minute range. Here we have the A-side, "Atlas One", which combines shifting drone, feedback, and plenty of digital crackle with random-sounding clusters of guitar harmonics that sound like they're being played by a gusty wind. Rather than building to a big peak, as he sometimes does, this track feels more like one of his dense travelogues, a steady unspooling of richly-textured tone and color. The pictures to go with it are up to you."

sounds like: glaciers. fuuuuuck, man

keiji haino

Keiji Haino - Tenshi No Gijnka


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"Tenshi No Gijinka finds Keiji Haino solo and without guitar. Focusing entirely on percussion and vocals, Haino builds a unique, meditative space out of drones, cymbal smacks, rings, and reverberations. Bizarre yet also beautiful, Haino creates a personalized and esoteric ritual that alternately serves as repeated tension release and representation of the inner sounds of existence. The result is a captivating immersion in sustains and overtones."

sounds like: monk rituals, animals in nature documentaries

grouper

Grouper - Cover the Windows and the Walls

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"Moving on from the vocal-and-tape-delay of “Way Their Crept” to the inclusion of guitar and piano on “Wide”, Grouper has already proven to be a project that had a signature sound from the beginning but was always expanding the horizon of what is essentially a musical landscape ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs perceived or envisioned by Liz Harris herself. The tracks on “Cover the Windows and the Walls” still have her choral vocals drifting over reverb from afar with a somewhat drowned ambience fluttering and dancing in the breeze. At some point you become aware that Grouper’s music actually IS the breeze, gently creating an atmosphere you feel you could touch."

Grouper - Way Their Crept

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"'Way Their Crept' was originally released back in 2005 but the folks at Type Records have managed to re-release it on vinyl and mp3 and it's high time. Although since the album's release there has certainly been a lot of interest generated in Liz Harris's Grouper project, we've always felt that more people needed to get hold of this album. Maybe that's down to the construction of the tracks - deceptive in their simplicity, on the first play you are almost encouraged to think that there's nothing to it; it's just vocals and tape delay, right? That's where you'd be wrong, Harris's voice is submerged beneath layer upon layer of dense noise and tape saturation, looping into a degraded whirlwind of cascading sound and on every play you wipe away another layer and discover something more. There are comparisons I could possibly make, the original press release compared 'Way Their Crept' to Arvo Part and William Basinski, but while there are similarities (Basinski's use of slowly degrading tapes, Arvo Part's sense of harmony and stark minimalism) Liz Harris is an artist I can safely say is out on her own. A Grouper album simply sounds like a Grouper album, you can spot her tracks a mile off - that voice, those slowly-shifting waves of audio, and to have a sound that characteristic is truly amazing. For me, 'Way Their Crept' is like watching a film, once you've started it's hard to stop; you've got to go through it in one sitting, taking in each track as if it were a scene in a movie, analysing it carefully before coming to the breathtaking conclusion, and when you finally reach the end you're well aware that you've sat through a very special experience indeed. Personal, emotional and packed with that priceless stuff missing from so much contemporary experimental music; substance, this is a stunning record and one which I'm certain we will be able to listen to many years from now and it won't have dated at all. These productions are totally out of time and out of place in the world, and rather than feeling like an alien experience listening to it, it feels like you are learning something about music, something about subtlety and restraint. An absolutely bumper recommendation."

sounds like: the bottom of the ocean, bioluminescent creatures that live at the bottom of the ocean, jellyfish

pukers

Pukers - Beach Cop

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"”Where are you going, what are you doing, you’re doing a bad job, you’re doing a bad job.” Lyrics like these – and song titles like “Look at Me” and “Don’t Look at Me” – are what elevate Pukers’ meta-thrash into an even wilder arena of high art internal debate. Beach cops aren’t the only law enforcers brought to task on this savage C32; bike cops and park cops get equally brutalized. Since semi-temporarily relocating to Culver City/LA, Pukers have ditched the dead dog worship for a more conceptual crowd-surf across the polluted waters of stream-of-songciousness. The results are sick and blazing. Especially seeing as how the A-side finds Britt sitting in on electric axe for a session while the B stars Manda’s intuitive six-string synergies. This is some supergroup shit."

sounds like: napalm death drowning, stubbed toes, living next door to an underground wrestling ring

tim hecker

Tim Hecker - Norberg, Sweden

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"Recorded at the Norberg Festival (Sweden) amidst the mineshafts and cluttered buildings strewn throughout parts the city, this 21 minute live piece summarises much of what makes Tim Hecker’s music so vital and compelling.
Adept at counter-pointing the most ferocious of distorted platters with smooth beds of ambient sound and potent melodic overtones, Tim Hecker creates music with a vast depth. On Norberg, this depth seems almost endless, as layer upon layer of sound are compiled into a swelling and all together visceral oceanic sound wave."

sounds like: cliffs, orbit, being under a bridge, looking out of plane windows when it's just cloud or ocean outside

hototogisu

Hototogisu - Chimärendämmerung

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"Chimärendämmerung is the 3rd Hototogisu release on Destijl and the 5 untitled walls of vertical viola drone / overtone, lapped by shifting electronic waves of feedback, blackened guitars, rhinegold cast deep into dying rivers, an instrumental cycle of conflict, of the birth of a supreme aristocratic beauty into a fallen world, and its inevitable conflagration, then a glimmer of hope of escape from the cycle, in tune w/ the breath of the cosmos, like a glacial reimagining of van der graafs 'a plague of lighthouse keepers', and it represents a current plateau for the duo."

sounds like: 1000 years, polar bears, cement