PREVIEW: Urfaust - Der Freiwillige Bettler

New eerie rattling fuzz from Holland's Urfaust, in advance of their new album Der Freiwillige Bettler, here's the final track Der Zauberer.  Similar sound as before, the wobbling guitars, out of focus vocals, the whole preturnaturally nauseous shifting mass of tone sliding across your aural plane, unlike any other band around. The full vinyl version comes pressed onto red wax in leatherette gatefold, 12" booklet with artwork and scripture.  If not radically different, this track at least shows they're still a band with a captivating sound, and as such it is still exciting stuff.

Tracklist:

1.	Vom Gesicht und Rätsel
2.	Der freiwillige Bettler
3.	Das Kind mit dem Spiegel
4.	Der Mensch, die kleine Narrenwelt
5.	Ein leeres Zauberspiel
6.	Der hässlichste Mensch
7.	Der Zauberer

Stalker - Iqlusion

When people say music is dirgy they tend to do so with a scowl as if that's a bad thing. WRONG! Dirge is an essential tool when crafting sounds that are intended to instill unease and sickliness in the listener, a bass scrape, a dragging of the low end across rapidly shifting freqencies, a savage pull at the gut feelings inside you that says: this will make me ill; An unflinching, unyielding pregression, a tidal wall of tone that is relentless and immutable in it's advance.

Some people can't handle the dysphoria, they think they need to run from it, to protect themselves from it.

We on this side - assuming you've not stumbled into this place unwittingly - we over here appreciate the embrace of the sickness, that damp sticky cloak which wraps itself around your head and suffocates, squeezing the air and light out until there's nothing in our conscious field but black and sound, darkness and temperature, submitting to the advance of sensory pressure, yielding until the blackness blazes into an all consuming fire before plunging into the white and cold and stillness

Here's more Stalker for you degenerate mother fuckers.

 

VIDEO: Asian Women On The Telephone

This is the first ever video pop promo for Russia's psychedelic industrial gymnasts Asian Women on the Telephone, who I wrote about last month during my heated whirwind tour of the USSR's subterranean band scene.  A martial beat acts as the spine to the track, a rigid column along which garbled vocals rattle down and sticky streams of electronics drip. The visuals are collage, animation, overlay and projection, as much The Pink Floyd as they are propoganda and their use of slow repetition and dark tones is juxtaposed with frenetic bursts of colour that refract the activity of the music, working together to draw you along wth the narrative of frost-dried shrieks. 
 

fgs someone start the LAST.FM THREAD

Weekly Last.fm/ DiSThread stats, on a Monday not a Sunday this week.

 

I don’t add to the Kanye count, but my guess is: 999, just for effect.

Half of my scrobbles came out this week, the other disappeared. So, Agalloch, LAVamps& Matrix Metals, Demdike Stare should all be on about 30, if not more.  A good week of listening this week – all those three bands missing in action would get mad props if they appeared, but they don’t so they can’t. Are they the rules?

01. Ducktails – 53
02. Solar Bears – 46
03. Dream Boat – 37
04. I†† - 31
05. Guards – 29
05. Gayngs – 29
07. Velvet Davenport – 24
08. GuMMy†Be▲R! – 22
09. Iibiis Rooge – 15
10. Ealdulf – 14

01. New album is really very good. Less heavy on the wah but is still has a pretty shimmery tropical feel with the addition of some chomping riffs that gnaw at your guts

04. Spent a lot of time with another really great EP from this dark ambient/witchhouse producer. 

05a – Cults have been signed to Columbia, but the similar sounding sister band Guards is much better imho. They do sound a lot like Arcade Fire, but I don’t think that’s a problem.

05b – why do all these end of year lists have no Gayngs? Is it sitting in a blind spot or something?

07 – Warmy Girls!  I think my passion for Velvet Davenport is probably a little uncharacteristic of me, but they’re just so easy to listen to in such a rewarding way….that I did pay nearly $30 for it.
 

08. Sad times as one of the best witch house producers PC dies taking most of his new album with it.

09. Just got the LP released in the summer. Some seriously deep and tangled psych forest trance here – like a little technicolour vortex to suck your mind out the back of itself.

10. UK Black Metal Week is starting on my blog next week. UKBMW. UKBMW!!

I don't think I do have a TOTW.

Joy Orbison - BB/Ladywell

Joy Orbison, releases his new single today on his own Doldrums label, and it continues his flawless 12" career with two more nostalgia imbued strands of smoothly flowing dubstep (for want of a better term).  Liquid basslines, rich heartstring tugging chords and ephemeral vocal samples combine in both tracks to differing effect.  BB has more of a straight forward 4/4 pulse and thrust, letting itself flex a little wilder like HYPH MNGO, then Ladywell keeps things that much more restrained, bottling up all the sexual tension into a steaming locomotion that has sensual samples of feminine coos fluttering around it, more in keeping with The Shrew. Along with James Blake I think this is about as beautiful as dance music gets right now

VIDEO: Syd Matters - Hi Life

French solo artist Syd Matters releases this track as a single today, and this is the video for it.  Looks to me to be heavily influenced by Pete Fowler 's graphic style and little else (maybe the Yellow Submarine too), but that's no bad thing at all. This is a beautiful little animation that shows evolution and the cycles of lifealong differnet potential paths.  Some really cool stuff going on here.  The music is quite Super Furries sounding too, again, no bad thing, but it's not as good as the real thing there (especially with Gruff Rhys' new song lurking around) the video thatelevates this to beign worthwhile

Melancology: Black Metal Theory Symposium II

The Black Metal Theory Symposium invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond … in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology:

Details and registration HERE

Participants and Papers (in no particular order)

Scott Wilson, ‘Introduction to Melancology’.

Amelia Ishmael, ‘Metal’s Formless Presence in Contemporary Art’.

Elliot A. Jarbe, ‘Beyond Melancology: Hüzüncology and the Thymotic ’.

Drew Daniel, ‘Towards the Re-Occultation of Black Blood’.

Liviu Mantescu, ‘Suddenly, life lost new meaning: Melancology as another new age metaphor for transcendental encounters’.

Dominik Irtenkauf, ‘To The Mountains or: rocking against melancholy.The implications of black metal's geophilosophy’.

Steven Shakespeare, ‘A Machine for Breaking Gods: Unity, Nature and Ritual in US Black Metal’.

Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Wormsign’.

Aspasia Stephanou, ‘Black Sun-Blank Metal Perversion’.

Ben Woodard, ‘Irreversible Sludge: Troubled Energetics, Eco-purification and Self-Inhumanization’.

Hager Weslati, ‘Going to Hell in Northern Deserts’

Evan Calder Williams, ‘The hot wet breath of extinction’.

Reza Negarestani, ‘ ’.

Mark Patrick Oughton, ‘Visions of Kali: Attack Sustain Release’ (Video installation)

Niall Scott, ‘Blackening the Green'.

Concluding remarks and Introduction to Abgott

Abgott (Live performance)

VIDEO: Suffer the Shards of the Lost Cult of Silence – Cult is Religion Vol. 1

Brand new VHS-only occult black metal / witch house label Video Horror Show has it's first release queued up in a run of 50 tapes. A combination of format and genre given the most back-handed compliment imaginable by my friend Bobsy from Mindless Ones who described it as "so annoying it reaches a state of near-holiness".

The first release is from duo Suffer The Shards of the Lost Cult of Silence, featuring members of USBM visionaries Woe (frontman Chris Grigg, who also plays drums for Krieg) and Absu (Matt Moore who plays in both Woe and Absu).  The full track is a 27 minute long epic piece of droning blackness, drilled into the netherworld with 240bpm double kick percussion and some acidic feral shrieking, taking turns to fork into Scandinavian graveyard thrash, cacophonous freefall and throbbing noise.  Having missed out on seeing the full half-hour video I can only speculate as to the hallucinatory effects the full distance might have when combined with the music, but the audio alone works itself into a state hypnotic out-of-body experience as the churning builds to the point where it's loosed from all human influence and climbs onto a psychedelic plane under its own momentum. The stream of the the full track comes courtesy of the label's Bandcamp.

Here's the video excerpt:

GuMMy†Be▲R! - Arizona Lights '97

Another incredible new track from GuMMy†Be▲R!, in anticipation of more new releases from him, this is Arizona Lights '97 from the Spectral Analysis ep due out on Tundra Dubs soon. Arizona has a real low-slung tribal feel to it, the percussiveness throwing a tightening circle round the nostalgic rave euphoria building in the centre, like the blissfully calm eye of a storm. He also recently put up Gurl as a preview for the same EP, both so captivatingly good.  Just can't stop flipping between these songs, each too short for it's own good, but just the right length to not tire their tricks out.  The first tracks I heard from this guy were almost jokingly excessive in their deployment of low frequencied drag and shock-horror tactics, in a way that I could really appreciate but also, I sense, were fuel to the ire of the witch house haters. The sublime development from those first demos to these two new pieces should really be enough to silence a certain cult of critic, there's too much nouse and attention to detail involved here. GuMMy†Be▲R! looks set to steal some minds.

DOWNLOAD: A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters: An Instrumental​​/​​Post​-​rock Compilation (Issue One)

A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters: 

An Instrumental​​/​​Post​-​rock Compilation (Issue One)

DOWNLOAD

ACWFST is a free download compilation put together by the guys in Flies are Spies from Hell, and it's fitting they should have one of the stand-out tracks on here. This is pure post rock so the formats of each track are pretty much the same – introductory setting slowly revealing guitar tones, riff phrasing and scene setting, so if this is your thing (and it very much is mine) then each descending wall of noise will be like manna falling from heave. The exception to the rule comes from Monsters Build Mean Robots, whose track is kept on the leash, restrained, pushing at that inevitable huge tidal crescendo but it's slow, eerily echoed lyrics and stately speed give it a poignancy that benefits from never being allowed to boil over. Other especially impressive pieces are the massive savage Rage style dropped shoulder break in Karhide's Katla that throws a malfunctioning 808 into the gears of the machine and grinds it out; the Alright The Captain track that kicks off with guitars set to full stadium-sized metallic howl; What The Blood Revealed throw in one of the longer tracks and work their way down a eye-widening corridor of noise until they tear out a closing segment of ...Fear Satan distorted riffs and finally Double Handsome Dragons' explosive electronic emboldened mayhem. That didn't leave many out, and that;s not to say the other bands aren't all great: they are.

Go get.


Tracklist

1. Waking Aida - That's Not My Trick, Michael

2. Karhide - Katla

3. Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster - Calligraphy (Live)

4. Monsters Build Mean Robots - The Witches and the Liars

5. Flies Are Spies From Hell - Great Deadener

6. Alright The Captain - Rostov Could Get It

7.What The Blood Revealed - The Corporation as We Know It is Dead, Dead, Dead

8. Goonies Never Say Die - In Space No-One Can Hear Your Silence

9. Double Handsome Dragons - Are we not the future of this nation...

10. Friend? - Take a Bath In Public

11. UpC DownC - Black Lodge

LIVE VIDEO: Barn Owl @ Art Damage Lodge, 20th November

Video of some of Barn Owl's set from Art Damage Lodge in Cincinnati last Saturday. Filmed by Jon Lorenz

DOWNLOAD: Мишка Presents The Guide to Grave Wave

You've probably already seen this as it's flown round the internet in viral pandemic proportions, but in case not here's the link to Mishka Bloglin's expansive, extremely thorough, beautifully presented ESSENTIAL, three disc and full colour magazine layout pdf of a disparate scene which they've encapsulated within the phrase Grave Wave


CLICK TO JUMP



Way more than a witch house sampler this includes the obvious names like Salem, White Ring, oOoOO then goes much deeper spreading the remit across the entire world of current darkness and occult experimentalists, pulling together such disparate strands of sound in a roll-call of bands including Nuit Noir, Oneohtrix Point Never, Diamond Vampires, Soft Metals and Xiu Xiu. 

It's a persuasive footnote to a year of compelling music which has been met with an equal amount of aggressive criticism, neatly and clearly underlining the qualities of the many bands and how they all fit together into a year that has unarguably drawn much of it's potency from a richly detailed world of darkness.

Tundra Dubs VNHOLY GROVND Volume Three :: Selected by I††

Yes that's right,  I†† again. this time not his/their own music but the third in Tundra Dubs VNHOLY GROVND mix series.  Almost a best-of the current majorly active people around the witch house scene this is an great re-entry sampler and an awesome mix in it's own right

Tracklist:

How I Quit Crack - Gone Away
fos†ercare - riot control
Dream Boat - Young & Fine
✝NO VIRGIN✝ - I wnt 2 luv u
Party Trash - Rage
SLEEP ∞ OVER - the key
Story Of Isaac - /\LL †HΞ †H!/\/6$ $HΞ $/\!D
▼□■□■□■ - Blueberry
Unison - Intimacy
Ç⋵ℜ⋻♏ð♑ℷa⇂ ╀ - murder shack
I†† - Ph▲sing
Ghoul - Watch U
Crossover - MY WAV (BLΛCK RΛ!NB0VV MashupFXpitch ED!T)
GuMMy†Be▲R! - Planned Parenthood (Nattymari Obliteration)
§ - TPWLYST-Destroy Beautiful Things (The Night ıhe Came Home)



 

LIVE VIDEO: Yawning Man @ The Constant Gallery

Someone linked me this apropos of nothing on Last.fm (I don't think it's their band).  Pretty rad chilled out cosmic instrumental stuff.  Might as well throw it up here, it kept me quiet for 5 minutes.

PREVIEW: The Outer Church w/ Position Normal & Hong Kong In The 60's

Wire magazine (and PlanB before it folded) metal/noise writer Joseph Stannard has a DJ/live band night at the Komedia in Brighton called The Outer Church.  Looks like it will be a pretty incredible night of hauntological dial twiddling.  From the blog:

The December 8th edition will witness the return of Position Normal (whose set a few months back at the Penthouse was so tremendous, I decided to invite him back for more) and the OC debut of London/Cambridge beauties and stars of the Ghost Box 7" Study Series, Hong Kong In The 60s (whose fantastic new EP you can download for free here). In addition, there will be filmic curiosities and perhaps the odd bit of spinning from myself and the marvellous Kemper Norton, whose DJ set last time was a thing of macabre beauty. Incidentally, you can download a brand new Kemper Norton EP, again for free, here.


Here's a couple of videos to feat your eyes on in anticipation:


Hong Kong In The 60's



Position Normal

Twin Shadow - Castles In The Snow (Com Truise Remix)

This is the best Twin Shadow remix I've heard yet, retaining everything about the original that makes it sublime and simply adorning it with a complimentary array of glittering accessories; twittering filters, scented trails of phaser, stuttering glitch, and ripped beats, that send it spiralling off into slightly altered dimensions of the hybrid 80's / nostalgia / electro / funk it started off as. 

VIDEO: Dream Boat - XVII

New track and unnerving new video from Dream Boat, one of the most arresting witch house associated bands around; my review of their Visions album is currently the most read thing on the blog; this band's recordings are going in my top 20, if not top 10 if the year (working on it). The footage is from Danish film Lykkefanten about a young girl's struggle to cope with an alcoholic mother. Sombre, hard hitting stuff. Just like this track. Little build up, just straight in under the uncompromising winged cloak of darkness.

PREVIEW: Torche, Dopefight & Jovian @ The Prince Albert, Friday 26th

This Friday Brighton's Prince Albert hosts one of the heaviest gigs to the city will have seen for a long time as Florida's swampy sludge rockers Torche roll up and set about decimating amps and ears.  Support comes from two of Brighton's, if not the UK's most absorbing downtuned bands; stoned doom wizards Dopefight, who Lurker described as "without doubt a band whose potency lies in their uncanny ability to write some of the greatest sludge riffs I have ever heard." and the crawl-tempoed trance inducing Jovian. Jovian are like some Brighton supergroup consisting of, but not limited to, people who do or have once played in bands such as End the Agony, Terminal Outputs, Cat on Form, Charlottefield, Plague Sermon, Falling Boy and Davidd Winter.

Here's some clips to get you in the mood.

Torche - Healer




Dopefight - Babygoatsick




Jovian - Live @ The Cowley Club

VIDEO: Jamie Woon - Night Air

This is a pretty slick video for Jamie Woon's Night Air. It's got the feel of night air on your face falling out of the screen at you, then some HD beasties to chill your spine while he croons that strange, slightly alien Michael Jackson / Philly Soul child croon into the sky. Kind of primal yet elegant and refined at the same time. Burial is involved in the production of this track and his skill with manipulating an understating emotional resonance is fully flexed.

Underneath that is a Ramadanman remix of the same track which cools the tempo down even further, droplets of condensation running down the basslines where the drums used to be.




Ramadanman Refix:

VIDEO: I†† - GêçGêåGêç

New video for I††, directed by Ç⋵ℜ⋻♏ð♑ℷa⇂ ╀

Wut? No Last.fm? Here we go then...

I seem to have picked up about 1000 new readers this week, so if you've not been reading long this is the part of the week where I dopplegang my internet presence by posting the same last.fm stats jam here and on the Drowned in Sound board. Like this >>>


Turns out I got a full house of write ups this week and my vanity is fully charged:

This doesn't count the five or six times I have listened to the new Demdike Stare album on Soundcloud. Wouldn't normally mention non-scrobbling stuff, but I want these 60-odd listens on the record. Amazing.

01. Solar Bears - 74

02. Vortex Rikers - 40

03. pyr▲mids of ▲▲ - 30

04. No Joy - 29

05. Yo La Tengo - 25

06. Luggaldimerankia - 24

06. Black Witchery - 24

08. Twin Shadow - 22

08. Gonjasufi - 21

09. Legendary Weapons of China - 20

1 - Just can't stop listening to She Was Coloured In; so much detail inside it. Super kosmische.

2 – Excellent German darkscape / witchhouse producer. Free download: http://bit.ly/vortexrikers
3 – Witchhousey in look but more ambient drone in sound – seems to be where a lot of the more innovative and immersive stuff is right now. Turns up in Fokkawolfe's top 50 albums of the year which I've had a sneak peak at. New to me this week, and worth checking out since all albums are free from the myspazz.

4 – Sonic Youth + Pixies + Shoegaze shimmer = Much better album than I'd anticipated.

5 – Have I ever told you that ...And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out is probably my number 1 album of all time?

6 – New split album with the same-person's Black Goat Skin Robe. Dual drone outfits, one much blacker and noisier than the other. Free download: http://bit.ly/blackvomit

6 – There's a new Black Witchery album out churning its Satanic battery through the same format as before. That would be that same format that got them my Number 1 album of the year a few years ago.

8 – DiS review don't quite get it.
8 – Ditto

9 – 'nother free download album, 'nother maze of psychedelic jungle groove to navigate: http://bit.ly/LegWeap

Track of the week:

Last week it was Agalloch, this week it is something very similar:

VIDEO: Com Truise - Karova

The space theme continues (I seem to be a pretty cosmic zone this week) with the new video for Com Truise's screwed vapour trail Karova, taken from the free download compilation Komputer Cast 2, a series which is now up to number 4. Go get them all!

FFFF: Necrite - Bereft of Hope

I'm not trying to post a black metal track up every time for the Fast and Furious Friday Feature, but at the moment I am being overrun by excellent releases so the temptation is too strong to avoid. This week I give you cosmic Californian misanthropes Necrite and their track Bereft of Hope from the Flenser released album Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Don't let the somewhat unoriginal title put you off, the album is unique in its mix of mid-tempo deliberation and ambient sections of obsidian darkness, this is an album of Lovecraftian galactic horror, pulling down the firmament and staring straight through its eyes. The chilling pace erupts into faster sections, like the one I have for you here.  This track doesn't cover the full range of sound the album has, nor the full emotional effect, missing out some of the trancier elements. The title track is an enormous 27 minute oddyssey that builds over 14 minutes of brewing tension and black ambience until it suddenly blasts out into a lightning fast crescendo; the final Sunn O))) worshipping doom drone track acts like a dying star's gravitational pull on the end of the album, sucking everything that went before into a terminal abyss of finality.

PREVIEW: I†† - The Lesser Keys EP

Released on Tundra Dubs next Tuesday, the new EP from I†† continues the course of events laid out in the full Preliminary Invocations album released last month. The tracks here increase the atmosphere to something more subtly filmic, eventful, almost score like.There's a further preview track I've been played, the penultimate ∇∆∇, which exudes the aura of an intensely creepy slasher film, cloaked in dread and suspense.

There's some eerie recording techniques involved in these, warped vocal feedback, the decomposed howling of guitar and electronics morphed together.  One of the more interesting artists to have emerged out of the shadows of witch house recently, joining Porn Antler and Vortex Rikers in my top 3 of recent new discoveries.

There are 7 tracks to the ep, only one of which has a remotely sensible name:

søngw▲ve
d▲rkst▲r
Ph▲sing
sitri
above a convenience store
∇∆∇
transcending virii

Listen to the two preview tracks here, then jump over to the label to order your copy now 

DOWNLOAD: Legendary Weapons of China - Molten Mirrors

Legendary Weapons of China
Molten Mirrors
DOWNLOAD

I've been meaning to write up their previous double-A single but have been sitting on it so long they've recorded and released this full length in the time its taken me to pontificate over it.  You can still get that for free (It's got one track from this and another unique to it) but now there's this fuller beast.

This band is a London based two piece whose members call themselves R-E and Shanaz Mon Zaki. They are both components of the seven strong clan that constitutes the Auspicious Numbers blog, a cabal that throws up various combinations of each others audio visual sonic artistic and text creations.  This incarnation has two of them aimed at the ears and one at the eyes - Super Sinister created the cover art for this as well as their blog and visuals for gigs.  So, Legendary Weapons. Does it sound like a bejewelled boating holiday on a creepy killer whale populated lake?  Yeah, why not.  It doesn't take long for the cosmic oscillations to get rocked by some charging percussion and all of a sudden they've cast themselves into unchartably inhospitable waters, like High Wolf  tearing open the chests of Lopatin's synths, it's an exploration between the twin spheres of the earth and sky, of swampy murk, claustrophobic heat and the galactic energies of space.  Big themes, big sounds crushed to tape. Technicolour hypnagogic carnage whirling up from storms across instruments, pieces of melody getting tossed around the crashing surface looking for something solid to get a grip of.  Enough of the analogies.

There's 5 tracks here, each one tweaking out a different shade of the bands character. Royal Herbs is the path finding foray, as you'd expect from an opening track and it sets the scene well, like I laid out up there.  By the time you're into the tribal jungle depths of High Roots there's little sky left visible over the canopy with a really meaty double kick pedal sound that pads out the bottom end, bouncing off the stick clicks and cavernous bubbles and pops of the synthnoise machines that snake their own polyrhythmic course across the percussion.  The final title track Molten Mirrors comes in just under 20 minutes, giving itself plenty of time to work through morphing grooves and pools of drone, never rushing itself and staying locked in for its entire length.

A few physical CD copies will be made available by contacting them by Email, handmade to order, if you're lucky.

Preview: Demdike Stare - Voices of Dust

Voices of Dust is the third and final part in Demdike Stare’s trilogy of albums for 2010. The album was released as a limited 12" this week, and there's probably none left already but here's every track on limited edition Soundcloud stream from the label Modern Love.  If you've missed out on all the vinyl, the triptych is due for a triple CD re-release in January on Modern Love, which should hopefully come in much less strict supply.

The album opens with an analogue tape drone that seems to suck the light out of whatever environment you might find yourself in, powering up Demdike’s machinery for the bellydance disco assault of Hashshashin Chant that follows. Repository Of Light takes another diversion, this time wading through the gaseous environs that made the MVO trio’s debut album so memorable earlier this year, before Desert Ascetic flips things over for a dusted, relentless assault on the souk. The album ends with the decaying loops of A Tale Of Sand, leaving you with a bittersweet aftertaste and absolutely no sense of closure whatsoever...

VIDEO: Twin Sister - All Around & Away We Go

The official video directed by Mike Luciano for Twin Sister's stunningly understaded yet wholly absorbing languid balaeric experience All Around & Away We Go. It's a synapse frazzling technicolour cutaway extravaganza!

DOWNLOAD: Music For Your Plants

Music For Your Plants
S/T EP
DOWNLOAD

Describing themselves as tropical lo-fi progressive witchwave, three piece Tallinn, Estonia, band Music For Your Plants at first seem like they're trying to cover too many bases, but when the album starts rolling it fills in with a whole lot more detail than even those far reaching descriptors might imply.  The biggest thing that crawls out of the self-produced swamp is a lot of Tortoise, through the cycling layers of jazz influenced post rock and the use of glockenspiels (wooden glocks always remind me of Tortoise, especially when they're struck like this) along with the tones of the guitars and the lurching, recoiling and searching way they're played, countering the drum and cymbal work in A City In The Sea like tidal surges crashing into an urban clubland in exactly the way the title suggests. It's a strange bedfellow to the occasional flourishes of dubstep and electronic throb that back it, the gently peaking chemical euphoria of Dr Mudawi breaks out into a rushing beat section, phosphorescent streaks of night drive synths lifting it into a completely different headspace to the looping guitars it drops right back into in the next track Relax With Classics that subjects some textbook crescendos and ambient passages to this albums slightly degenerate and warped interpretation of things. Then it all seems to go off on holiday, taking a little contemplative minute long interlude called Log Cabin then fetches the tropical animal noises and calypso riffs, laying them out on beach front recliners gently serenading them until the sun sets. Very abruptly.

It's pretty nuts and well worth the downloading of.

DOWNLOAD: Luggaldimerankia - Black Vomiting Mass

Luggaldimerankia

Black Vomiting Mass 

DOWNLOAD

 

British black metal can often be an inhospitable and harsh enterprise and I'm going to come back to it in a lot more detail soon, but for now, as a softner, here's a brand new album from one-man anti-cosmic noise conjuror Luggaldimerankia as a split between that incaration and his other more ambient Black GoatSkin Robe side.  There are 32 tracks in all, the seven BGSR ones being longer more meditative drone pieces while the Luggaldimerankia side - all 25 tracks of it - blaze through ideas and more violent sounds in about a minute each. It's available a a free download, and I'll leave it to the man himself Nostalggia to tell the story of why and let you in to what it's going to sound like:

"After all the bullshit with this release namely due to money issues & the quality of the tapes being so bad that most of them broke whilst the music was being transferred (a slight fuck up on bbw productions half) I am making this release avalable for free to download.

The release was an experimental one as both sides are by projects belonging to myself. The reason for making this was for me to see the difference in creating ambient music outside of the trance like state I induce when creating for black goatskin robe & using the more depressive/angry state I use in Luggaldimerankia but putting it into an ambient context then putting them side by side. To me personally the difference is very apparent & rather striking, tho I belive to many peoples ears it will all sound the same...

I have never used synths to create any of the music in BGR tho there was a slight use of them in lugg's part." 

VIDEO: Noy Joy - Hawaii

The video has a Larry Clark feel to it, the track is shoegaze by way of Goo-era Sonic Youth, which is to say it has trash-poise and rock-noise in equal measure - This is Hawaii by No Joy.  The duo's rivetting little trip of an album, Ghost Blonde, was released this week on the excellent Mexican Summer and produced by Ravonettes man Sune Rose Wagner. The stars seem to have aligned over this one with a great auspicious, the results of this combination are even greater than they might read. Remember how truly awesome Love In A Trashcan was?  Well stick the last years worth of reverb devotion and distortion wash over it and BLAM.  It's a winner baby.

VIDEO: Holy Sons - Survivalist Tales

Emil Amos of Tiebtan crime jazz instrumentalists Grails and celestial doom trio Om releases his ninth Holy Sons record Survivalist Tales this month and has got this pretty timely frostbitten trek through the wilds as a video for it. It's freezing out!

DOWNLOAD: These New Puritans - White Chords (Stalker Remix)

Right off the back of the awesome Forest Swords remix of this These New Puritans track comes another from TriAngle affiliate Witch-slasher Stalker; This guy had the best track on the Lindsay Lohan comp that TriAngle put out, it was a chilling, horrific-toned bastard of a piece and this has an element of that in it, laying the disembodied vocal out on a cold slab of nasty fuzz, crushing the air out of it between stony layers of distortion and taunting it with its guttural, dragged doppelganger. The pressure builds until it's killed just like that.

DOWNLOAD

Stream:

 


and take a ride on the unofficial video! (sorry, that was hyper obvious but...)

DOWNLOAD: Ourobonic Plague - Plague Tape

 Here's a mix that screws down jams from some well known names into disgustingly disfigured drag versions of their former selves that is not from my man Nattymari! Taking a leaf and full branch out of his book (knowingly or not) and replanting it in a more industrial setting "disenchanted rapper" Ourobonic Plague has put out this mix formed from reworkings of gangsta rap, gothic rock, and experimentaly electronica.  He's got good previous - I posted up a review of a recent album from him not too long ago which had him grappling with a good emotionally challenging mix of dark electronica and industrial strength guitars, so that;s the background from which he's raised this beast, and it's been good for it.  Check out more of his work at his Soundcloud page. For now :

Download: Ourobonic Plague - Plague Tape

Tracklist:

The Cure – A Reflection

Demdike Stare – All Hallows Eve

Ourobonic Plague – Fight Plan

Grimm Teachaz - I Getz

Wu Tang Clan – For Heavens Sake

El-P - Accidents Don’t Happen

Wacka Flocka Flame – Luv Dem Gun Sounds

Lil B – Blue Flame

///▲▲▲\\\ - Tetanus Wine

Central Services – Oxycontin

Beanie Sigel (w/Bun B) – Purple Haze

Tyler the Creator – Seven

Droop-E – I Am

Gucci Mane (w/Cam’ron, Lil Wayne) – Stupid Wild

Trae (w/Rick Ross, Lil Wayne) – Inkredible

DJ Khaled (w/T-Pain, Ludacris, Rick Ross, Snoop Dogg)

- All I Do Is Win

Worng – Oriental Table

Charles Manson – Mechanical Man

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers

Vortex Rikers
DOWNLOAD

Vortex Rikers is a witch house-esque producer from Germany whose new untitled EP is available for free download from Bandcamp now.

Mixing thickly fuzz-toned rhythms and sickly chiming melodies into backgrounds of ominously swelling overcast drone there isn't so much occult to this to land it in that territory, instead it has a (possibly) subtler grasp of sound aesthetics rooting into a less controversial electronic environment than witch house: it hangs heavy with dark and portentous atmospheres that cross into dark ambient and yr less complex Rephlex or Warp tracks, the ones that are all out tone instead of all out acid. There's a hi-pitched tubular ripple in Nightmares that reminds me of the Shadow of the Beast theme music, which I posted up after getting fully into the Ikonika album: so this is an ep that also takes in an 8-bit dubstep reference too, albeit vicariously, but it also has a similar minimal, if not quite so smoothly produced, feel to Actress' Splazsh, featuring some comparatively elegant drum machine programming in tracks Dreams and O, and again, those peculiarly cavernous drips of melody. There's a lot of crossovers happening in this and it all works in its favour.

There's a fair bit of activity around this artist; the ep is due for a re-release with extra tracks on Sweat Lodge Guru at some point in the near-ish future (along with Expo 70 and Mpala Garoo who I wrote about last month), and there are several videos up for tracks off this release, the most recent being this for Dreams using footage from At Land by 1940's-60s' avantgarde film maker Maya Deren

Silent Diane - Spell

Nice new track from Silent Diane from a couple of weeks ago that i thought I'd throw up now. Got a lot of Kate Bush in it; Witch Housey stuff could probably benefit from more of her doomed romanticism and that's what is involved here. Good stuff.

Have You Beheld the Last.fm?

Last.fm / DiS stats post.  I started it this week. Smash.

Have You Beheld the Last.fm?

01. Twin Shadow - 53

02. Gem Club - 45

03. Deathspell Omega - 44

04. Solar Bears – 39

05. Gkfoes Vjgoaf - 38

06. Wild Nothing - 31

07. Porn Antler - 29

08. Sing and Sign - 21

09. Deerhunter - 20

10. Blackbird Blackbird - 18

That was a rolling start. Here's the first lap melee:

Starting actually thinking with a pen and paper about my albums of the year this week, so twin Shadow is still getting a lot of places and Wild Nothing re-entered the top 10. Neither is going to be in the top 5. Deathspell Omega may well be, but it's too early to be sure because proximity has me all too exciteable over it, but it's a serious piece of work. Porn Antler is some new mysterious next level witch house, go go get it if you like dirty droney beats. Gkfoes is still getting better and more immersive each listen. So is Deerhunter.

Track of the week

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BXkd8_oSTc

FFFF: Satanic Warmaster - One Shining Star

This weeks Fast and Furious Friday Feature is a new track from one of the old guard of black Northern trance masters, channeling the same feral anti-cosmic violence that sheared off the mountainsides of Europe twenty years ago; a nasty, vengeful buzzing murk that blazes with intent, elevated with a primitive euphoria. This, from the album Nachzerer is Satanic Warmaster - One Shining Star:

VIDEO: LA Vampires feat. Matrix Metals - How Would U Know

Following up Make Me Over from their collaborative album on Not Not Fun, LA Vampires and Matrix Metals have another video for you in the form of How Would U Know. Sam Meringue again, addictively sludges down what remains of Amanda Brown's Pocahaunted vibe on this potent blend of hi-gloss 80's pop-rap video stylings (hands to the face gestures CHECK, split screen CHECK, glitter glasses CHECK YO' HEAD!) with very lo-fi scuzzed up VHS quality finish to the music. The 80's theme is high up in this track, but refracted through a funhouse mirror maze of warping momentum as Brown's vocals wobble in and out of focus, both in unison and against the grain of the pulsing loops that Matrix Metals sets up and rides the distance.  This is really setting me up for the album now, in no uncertain terms.

DOWNLOAD: Beko▲BOX3 Witch House + OKKVLT

Beko Records
Beko▲BOX3 Witch House + OKKVLT
DOWNLOAD
 
The third boxset compilation from the consistently excellent Beko Records netlabel is a rollcall of Witch House innovators; featuring the original and arguably one of the best protagonists Mater Suspiria Vision plus member \\\^◊^///. There's really no weak track on here - the hi-toned rippling trill, grimy drum beat and quivering melody of High Park's Childrag, then Space Odyssey 2015's ring modulating disintegrating cosmic drag; D3thplay's deeper excursion down the industrial route implodes into the centre of the boxset with WYTCHHAUSNATION and a throbbing drag remix of Above & Beyond's Can't Sleep that let's the reverbed beats drift right out of the mix to let the vocal swirl around before trickling back in over the top of them, really subtly intense. The third section acts as a kind of comedown to the more motorik tracks before it, in the abstracted noise and sound collage from Residual Prophecy with the whole thing finished off with the more trancendental drone oriented tracks of ZΘN

Not only are all the tracks on here capable of capturing your aural attention in emotive ways - right from the off with MSV's anguised yelp and deeply portentious synths-of-doom intro - but the whole thing works as an exploratory album across sounds and into the current state of Witch House and it's orbiting subgenres (or the genres which it orbits around and takes it's cues from), illustrating a genre that still has plenty of space to move and direction to head in.

VIDEO: GAMES - Shadows In Bloom

Here's the new video (probably need a new phrase to introduce videos with about now) for the incredible Dan Lopatin vehicle Games' amazing That We Can Play EP out now on Hippos in Tanks.  The visuals for this track have been produced by Weirdcore with direction from Loptain; morphing scenes from airline adverts and inflight videos together with rapid multi-language text overlays critiquing the trends in stylised glamour-centric pan-global hedonism - a perfectly consistent foil for the 80's obsessed liquid synth pop of Games.

Gem Club

Here's something totally different, a huge body-bathing beam of light amongst all the shadowy electronics and distorted guitars I've been punting at you lately. This is Gem Club, and they are a cello/piano/beautiful vocalled boy/girl duo from Massachusetts, who remind me of Horse Feathers, Beach House, Bon Iver - to varying degrees. There's a stoic grace, an exuberance and a wintery loneliness all simultaneously vying for a place by the fireside in this album, their first self-release available as CD or download; Acid and Everything. This is another excellent random find; released in the Summer I stumbled across them listening to a Last.fm radio station the other week (Wild Nothing I think), got hold of the ep from their Bandcamp and have been playing it constantly ever since.  Their minimally composed orchestrations have an understated clarity underlying the airy, soft-focus form of folk they unfurl as each song progresses. Grounded by firm and earthy piano stabs and the innocent, slightly mournful gravitas of Christopher Barnes' voice, the choruses and refrains repeat and loop like flickering dreams, gently enveloped by the drifting, slowly drawn cello of Kristen Drymala add each song with a sense of optimism as they search out each subtely different avenue of the songs' form. As soon as you press play you'll feel it connect, as familiar and novel as a deja vu trip, and warmingly so.


You can download two tracks from their Last fm:


Acid and Everything

and
Sevens

They also have a myspazz, if you must.

You'll see they are equally adept at commissioning beautifully haunting videos for their music, Three of the tracks from the album have feature promos directed by Brianna Olson; Sevens, Spine, and Animals: