False Flag
"When witch-gods collide, it might sound something like this. Six Organs of Admittance...Richard Bishop...Chris Corsano. Riders of the apocalypse, it's them vs. us. After absorbing their über-holy dynamo, you'll be prepared to join up with these wraiths, making it all of us against...well, whomever's fool enough to stand in our way. To evil! Rangda's been building up behind the scenes for some time now. As label mates and members of an exclusive mutual admiration society, Sir Rick …
Completed Rotations of the....
When one thinks of the musical centers of New Zealand, the city of Tauranga doesn’t have as celebrated a history as Dunedin, Auckland or Christchurch. Which is apt, in a way, as the artist known to us only as Rotate The Completor makes music that sounds unconnected to any scene in NZ or elsewhere. A chance encounter with an enthusiastic passerby while busking on the streets led to the receipt of a home-recorded cassette, which caught the ears of the outsider music community, although any attem…
Split
As the cassette market becomes more and more over-saturated, it’s nice to see some of these artists break out onto the vinyl format. This is, I believe, the first vinyl outing for John Elliott’s Outer Space project. Apparently John plays in some other group called Emeralds and shares a side here with like-minded artist Raglani. Both cuts on this album promise globular analog synth glory; pre-orders have started and this split LP will set your bank account back $18. Limited to 500
Hexadecagon
The Octopus Project as a performance piece meant to bring the audience into a world of total sound and image submersion, Hexadecagon is now an album. The special vinyl version of the album is a bit complicated, so I’ll let the band explain: “The vinyl is a gatefold double LP spanning three sides. The fourth contains several unique tracks unavailable on any other format, interlaced in concentric spiraling “roulette grooves,” so that the listener never knows which track they’ll get when they pu…
Mind Ctrl: Psychic
A new label (The Fader) brings a deluxification of 2009's Psychic Chasms, which now also contains the bonus album Mind Ctrl: Psychic Chasms Possessed, featuring nine exclusive remixes and cover versions by Toro y Moi, Body Language, Javelin, Bibio, Yacht, Darby Cicci of The Antlers, Twin Shadow, Dntel, and Anoraak!An elusive new project from composer Alan Palomo, Neon Indian delivers equal parts synthetic nostalgia, dream-pop lullabies, and grinding guitar noise to create something eerier t…
Olives and Orchids
Terrific stuff from Chicago's Herculaneum – a fresh, modern take on postbop and 60s avant garde jazz that's as addictive as anything the group has done to date – possibly their best yet! The group is a sextet with four horns, providing a really energetic front – with parts that give way to looser, improvistational moments, before rolling back into a tighter groove. The compositions are split between drummer and vibes player Dylan Ryan and alto sax player David McConnell – and the group…
III
I don't care how many goddamn cute hobo bands there are out there right now. Not two runny shits. There's something Hank IV knows that few other current "of interest" bands realize, and it's a painfully simple thing: guitars were meant to sound like this, not that (pick something). That's as plainly as it can be put. This is twin-guitar punk rock in a class of its own, driving more than dueling and hot-sauce-free. I'd say "power with taste" but then I'd have to kill myself. I will say that…
Black Summit
Strictly limited to 400 copies only, already sold out at source* Garden Söund is the rewarding collaboration of two hugely respected outfits: Barn Owl and Eternal Tapestry. Word of the album has spread like wildfire on a vast midwest plain, hence all 400 copies are sold out at source. 'Black Summit' finds the commonalities in Barn Owl's epic desert scapes and the crushingly potent psychedelia of Jed Bindeman's Eternal Tapestry with immeasurable success. The two characters stalk moonlit ca…
Castings
Castings is the third VHF release of lovely psych/folk by East Coast quartet Fern Knight, written, arranged and performed with their trademark quality and verve. Somewhat less fastidious than 2008's exquisitely arranged Fern Knight CD, Castings has a warm, analog feel, with looser and louder performances. Led as always by Margaret Ayre's voice, guitar and cello, the group stretches out on rockier fare like "The Poisoner," growling with fuzz, while leaving plenty of room for softer moments of bea…
Small Craft On A Milk
If you were to dig through a random neighbor's record collection, chances are you'd come across something with Brian Eno's fingerprints on it. Maybe massive-selling offerings by Coldplay or U2, the still commercially viable art-rock of The Talking Heads and Devo — or, if your neighbor is anything like a TMT reader, perhaps there are a few Roxy Music albums, the Eno-curated No New York no-wave compilation, Bowie's Krautrock-leaning "Berlin Trilogy," or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Eno's 19…
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction gathers all of the music drone metal progenitors Earth recorded in October 1990, during their earliest sessions at Portland's Smegma Studios. Earth, featuring soon-to-be Melvin Joe Preston in its second lineup, intended for those seven tracks to serve as its debut. Record label decisions interfered. Three of those tracks were released a year later via Sub Pop, on the out-of-print EP Extra-Capsular Extraction; four more were released…
Turntable History: Spin Ensemble
Arnold Dreyblatt's Turntable History: Spin Ensemble was recorded March 12, 2011 by Ernst Karel at Boston's Goethe Institut. This performance version of the original piece (released on CD as IMPREC323) provides a different perspective on the original composition. From the original studio version of the piece: Arnold Dreyblatt (b.1953) is an American composer who has studied with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier. He is a member of the German Academy Of Art. He has released wo…
Ancestral star
Returning with a brand new album of arid, dustbowl blues and slow-motion desert-scapes, Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras resume duties as Barn Owl for a third album. Previously this band has tended to court associations with the sound developed by Earth for their Hex album; the overall effect is resolutely bleak and doom-laden, yet not entirely without some grounding in the language of grassroots Americana. Ancestral Star takes the Barn Owl sound to a new level of refinement, spending much…
Unboxed
Unboxed, a collection of dissected from the Lowest Form of Life 10CD box set (on RRR) (including tracks not available in the box set) is a splash introduction to a newcomer of the L.A.F.M.S. The Lowest Form of Music is an utterly devastating set of the works of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. This tremendously obscure collective -- a loose assemblage of artists and with shared subversive musical interests (John Cage, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, The Residents, Derek B…
Live in Buffalo
Aka: the shape of (free) jazz to come. Bill Nace on electric guitar and Steve Baczowski on bass saxophone bless us with two sides of furious, raw improvised music. Their motto is easy to recognize from the beginning: total freedom, with instruments on fire moving along as if in the middle of a power electronics assault. Just a few seconds of silence, and then a small, delicate whistle starts, soon accompanied by a sinister percussive sound that introduces a sax / guitar dialogue which is …
Ante-Mortem
Astonishing new record: Ante-Mortem" is one of Ghédalia Tazartès’ major works of the last 20 years. Although simply named 1 to 23, the CD bears a collection of very diverse tracks, a couple of them connected in a thematical frame, others simply standing for themselves. What holds them all together is first and all Tazartès’ archetypical voice. One could say that "Ante-Mortem" contains some of his harshest ever tracks as well as a couple of his most humorous ones."The album’s musical palette is a…
The World's Longest Melody
The World’s Longest Melody is a collection of experimental music written for the guitar by composer/guitarist Larry Polansky (b 1954). The guitar has long been an important component in Polansky’s musical explorations, and this CD has grown from the enthusiasm for his work by the musicians of the Belgian electric guitar quartet ZWERM.
The acoustic and electric guitar are featured both solo and in small and large combinations; a few pieces not originally conceived for the instrument are also pre…
Gone
Columbus, OH two-piece horror sound unit, Sword Heaven clock in with a sweaty water boarded masterpiece of claustrophobic proportions. Fun house mirrors and stretched out faces yell from behind flaming curtains while a Neanderthal cave bat clubs your dome over and over and over. These are the sounds - the kids are not all right and that is all right. With just drums and looped vocals and samples, the train slowly leaves the station. The filthy sounds produced are both a joyous middle finge…
Entrance
To these ears, Sword Heaven’s recorded output has always strived to match the power and intensity of the band’s live performances. Due to low fidelity and the ineffability of putting live energy to tape, the ardent Sword Heaven fan is left with vivid memories of intense performances, and a smattering of tapes, CD-Rs, and vinyl that are a fuzzy, diluted representation of what they saw and heard. It can be argued that any/all recordings will suffer the same fate when compared to a live show…
Sun Circle
The most recent release on the lichen label; all releases are hand-assembled by zach wallace in his native ann arbor environs and offer of a lovely wave of art-sound, field recordings, improvisation with natural non-instruments, and, in the case of this particular title, a pair of pieces by greg davis and zach himself on farfisa, distorted vocals, and bells. the first appears to be a zonked “cover” of lamonte young’s “31 vii 69 10:26 - 10:49 pm munich from map of 49's dream the two systems of el…