CALL FOR PAPERS: Helvete: With Head Downwards

Helvete, the journal of the Black Metal Theory blog announces a new call for papers for its 2013 volume on the subject of Inversion:

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With Head Downwards: Inversion in Black Metal

Co-editors: Steven Shakespeare & Nicola Masciandaro

‘I beseech you the executioners, crucify me thus, with the head downward and not otherwise . . . Learn ye the mystery of all nature, and the beginning of all things, what it was. For the first man, whose race I bear in mine appearance (or, of the race of whom I bear the likeness), fell (was borne) head downwards, and showed forth a manner of birth such as was not heretofore: for it was dead, having no motion. He, then, being pulled down – who also cast his first state down upon the earth – established this whole disposition of all things, being hanged up an image of the creation (Gk. vocation) wherein he made the things of the right hand into left hand and the left hand into right hand, and changed about all the marks of their nature, so that he thought those things that were not fair to be fair, and those that were in truth evil, to be good. Concerning which the Lord saith in a mystery: Unless ye make the things of the right hand as those of the left, and those of the left as those of the right, and those that are above as those below, and those that are behind as those that are before, ye shall not have knowledge of the kingdom.’
The Acts of Peter

Mazdak’s followers were planted there head down, with their feet in the air, like trees. . . . If you have any sense, you will not follow Mazdak’s way.
Firdawsi, Shahnameh


This special issue of Helvete invites submissions which consider the nature of inversion in the imagery, lyrics and music of black metal and/or deploy black metal for the theory of inversion.

Nailed at the heart of many a logo, suspended from the neck, held out in Satanic blessing: the inverted cross is one of black metal’s anti-icons. The antithesis of a revelation of light, it signifies an originary blasphemy. The elevation of Satan (in orthodox or psycho-symbolic terms) as the one worthy of adoration is inevitably cast in terms of a desecration of God and all that is divine, a celebration of impious sacraments. Forsaking ascension and mining a path towards the centre of the earth, black metal finds a satanic stain lodged at the core of being.

However, the significance of this movement is not bound by a simple reversal. The inverted cross hangs above a swarming logic of inversion: the overturning of Christianity, but also a mimesis of Christian self-desecration (embodied in St Peter’s insistence on being crucified upside down as a sign of fallen humanity); the rejection of certain forms of religion, but also of modernity’s pallid enlightenment; the invocation of strange gods of the earth, even as the earth is cursed.

When thought becomes poison, it is no longer so easy to determine which way is up and which way is down. To throw down one’s head, to push oneself into the cursed earth, to occupy the place of the inverted crucified: is this to think-by-not-thinking an unconditioned rapture beyond negation and affirmation? Is inversion other than merely turning a hierarchy upside down? A more troubling subversion? And what is the place of inversion itself? Around what point or pivotal no-place is it possible?

Authors are asked to explore the theological, philosophical, political and aesthetic meanings of black metal inversion in ways that stretch and distort the boundaries of its apparent simplicity.


Send abstracts of 300-500 words to: hideous.gnosis@gmail.com

DOWNLOAD: Lake Radio - Delta

LAKE R▲DIO
Delta
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Another excellent EP from this somewhat antagonistic artist who first rose to infamy by exiling himself right out of the Witch House scene, proclaiming himself Witch-House-by-Design and immediately inviting upon himself the wrath of the gatekeepers looming large over the scene in certain areas. There's little occult cryptology at work in this incarnation of 19 year old Illinois based Caden Moore's LAKE R▲DIO, leaving the genre-baiting a distance behind him as he concentrates instead on producing an unhurried but kinetic form of bucolic electronica that I have been posting a lot of recently. The four tracks in this Ep echoes the present-moment, shared-consciousness reminiscence of Vondelpark or Evenings styles of phosphorescent sundown slow-burn electronica, and it's a sound that I haven't been able to get enough of late, especially with the light drawing out further into the night time. Still got clap beats though, ya dig.

VIDEO: Food Pyramid - Last Shuttle to the Red Planet

New clip for 'Healing & EasyListening' band  Food Pyramid's Last Shuttle to the Red Planet taken from the current cassette titled III on nocturnal psych imprint Moon Glyph. The video has been directed by fellow Minneapolis based multimedia artist Katelyn Reece Farstad. The colour washes and FX add to the pulsing shimmer of the music, a collapsing throb of Kraut-groove nested inside hand woven circuitry ambience.

VIDEO: Blondes - Hater

God I love BLONDES, Part II.

VIDEO: Letherette - Comput

Video by the consistently excellent Synaesthesiae Films for an unreleased track from the electro-soul / disco-house / aqua-crunk-bass-wave duo Letherette. One that's hard to pin down with a few throwaway genres like that (spot The One). I'm guessing their name is taken from this, which alone is more helpful that what I just said.

DOWNLOAD: Twilight Owls - V & Spellcaster

New track from one of Moscow's finest psychedelic guitar drone improvisors; Twilight Owls. This is a relatively short but instantly atmospheric piece or harmonic post-rock drone that picks it's way about a plaintive guitar theme then rapidly builds on those flickering echoes, into a heady rush of substantiate presence.



DOWNLOAD - V



As well as that, this other track, Spellcaster was released as a cassette split with Banana Pill last year. I missed it at the time and somewhere in between it's been made free to download from Twilight Owls Bandcamp too. It's 18 minutes of visceral hypnotic bliss that piles on the weight until the end begins to produce some doom heavy motions more in thrall to The Riff than the ambience of the preceeding 12-15 minutes. Great stuff.

DOWNLOAD - Spellcaster

The Pierley/Redford Dissociative Affect Diagnostic

Totally unrelated to music in everyway, but in case you ever wanted to know what I am like as a person, this test pretty much nailed my intuitive emotional responses and awareness.  Psychologists do do real work after all.

Take yours here: http://www.hypnoid.com/psytest2.html

My diagnosis:
You have a poetic sensibility and an ability to see beyond the day to day. You often seem to be living in a higher realm, or to be not-of-this-earth. Occasionally you imagine interior lives for friends and associates that are near-complete fabrications based on your fears or hopes for the future. You are often not aware of your own feelings. You have a strong sense of right and wrong, and because of this are often disappointed. Despite what can sometimes be a destructive inward-turning anger, you are very gentle. You are sometimes a bit out of touch with the ebb and flow of modern life. If your behavior is out of synch with your moral values, a severe psychic disturbance can result. Because connectivity is so important to you, you can become quiet and sulky if you feel that others around do not understand your point of view.

VIDEO: Roll The Dice - Undertow (live)

This track and video from the Swedish duo of Peder Mannerfelt and Malcolm Pardon, Roll The Dice has been doing the blog and magazine rounds, with good reason; featuring a member of the Fever Ray live band and sounding like one of Emeralds' glittering nebulae is bound to get you noticed. At a nice full-length 15 minutes there definitely enough space for you to find your own place in the grand scheme of this piece, building to a satisfying pay-off.

Roll The Dice (shit name, but never mind) have a sold out their first 12"'on Digitalis, but album is still available on digital formats from the likes of Boomkat.

The clip is directed by Frode Fjerdingstad.

VIDEO: Asian Women On The Telephone - Poor Girl 88

Tribal chatter and rhythmic clatter conjoin in a helix of party music from the Russian Dadaist rock collective Asian Women on the Telephone.  Like an Eastern cousin to the US band Mi Ami by way of Congotronics, they blast distorted beats through ramshackle sounding amps in time to a heady body absorbing, mind expanding, consciousness expanding ego dissolving beat. Often atonal, dissonant and arhtmic in their performances AWOTT don't always cut this loose and feel this free, but while they're in this head space you should take the chace to fully follow them into it.

DOWNLOAD: GuMMy†Be▲R! - HAARP (Grey Tongue Remix)

GuMMy†Be▲R! has a new remix up on his Soundcloud from my mix cover design man and other half in Potemkjin Village - Chris Makes - under his remixer guise of Grey Tongue. Witch House meets glitch, glitch eats witch house, dances about with limbs swinging round it's head, meat hanging out it's mouth, looking all wild eyed, twitchy and lunatic. Composes itself briefly then has a roll about kicking up more carnage.

Whut?  This >>>

DOWNLOAD


Stream:



Here's the original version:




Download the excellent Oakland album from Gummy's Bandcamp for free HERE.

STREAM: DJ Dr Pizza's Beats Meets White Rainbow & Sgt Forkner in a Dark Shades Drive: Dark Prince

Adam Forkner has dropped another extended cosmic electro jam of epic proportions onto his Soundcloud, along with a host of other new tracks but this is the pick.  Worthy of the grandiose title in which he name drops three of his aliases to full effect: DJ Dr Pizza's Beats Meets White Rainbow & Sgt Forkner in a Dark Shades Drive: Dark Prince
Really needs to start pressing more of this stuff to wax.  Stream it, feel it, believe it.

VIDEO: The Soft Moon - Into The Depths

An excellently approriate video for one of the best albums of the last few months, this is The Soft Moon's Into the Depths, directed by William Joines.  Eerie, haunting, distorted, flickery it moves in and out of focus like the hallucinatory music that haunts it, a really creeped out film-noir representation of this dark and brooding track.

PREVIEW: Railcars - Big Sky (Pre-Order Hounds Of Love LP)

The mighty AmDiscs is set to release a new album from the even mightier Railcars in June and I've been listening to a preview track from it titled Big Sky. It's a Kate Bush song. All the tracks on the album are Kate Bush covers. It's going to blow your tiny mind into a glittering chandelier of smithereens that you'll blissfully lie back gaze at, your entire mental being twinkling in refracting light patterns above your transfixed physical shell.

Railcars are one of those bands that hit you right upside the head the moment you clap ears on them.  Formed in 2007, the band is the sole creation of Aria Jalali but he is joined by others for live shows.  This track is a sleeker departure from the fiery aural ambushes of the two LPs he has put out Cities Vs Submarines and Cathedral With No Eyes - both those were awesomely loud digitised rock productions, but this has a smoother, leaner sensibility, reigning in some of the spikier chaos, but leaving chaos there nonetheless. The garbled vocals spiralling around the climax of glitching keys and stuttering beats is a little vortex to suck your third eye into. An excellent omen for the impending full length.

Preorder the album from HERE.

DOWNLOAD: Honeycomb Bones - Evil Age EP

Honeycomb Bones
Evil Age EP
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Honeycomb Bones are a feral garage two piece from Hull; Michael (guitar and vocals) and Craig (bass) with drums kicked by a machine programmed .loose and fast, the only clue being the slightly tinnyr snap of the snare. You won;t care, and it's almost integral to the frantic sound.  Friends since primary school, the duo have been making scratchy lo-fi demos for a few years before starting gigging and playing a more developed garage-punk style with the added electronic element in the form of drums though there's nothing scratchy about this release, it burns fiercely with a thick smoke-warped production that fills up the space and swamps your head.  No garage band worth their salt should think of clearing up their sound much further.

The sound is a lot of Oh Sees, especially in the fx addled vocals of Forgetting Over that uses a head-rattling tremelo/delay shock treatment to awesome ends on top of an already killer riff and stomping beat. Keep Your Fever has a taut post-punk disco slash and stab the like of which Franz Ferdinand cleaned up but Honeycomb Bones bury back under its rightful place of dirty scuzzy overdriven fuzz. Going further back there's a Cramps-y ominousness in the bass boom and vibrating spaces of lead picking plus the omnipotent garage rock presence of Link Wray free-wheeling hot-blues surf-streak.

They are planning to release a cassette or a 7" some time in the future, but no firm details as to when or what it will include. I'll be sure sure to let you know where and when.

DOWNLOAD: ʄ≜uxmuℭica - No ☨ Age [Remixes] & Videos

ʄ≜uxmuℭica
No ☨ Age [Remixes]DOWNLOAD

""the concept for No ☨ Age is supposed to be a reflection on the coined-term "New Age" only maybe a more modern post-apocalyptic manifestation of such beliefs." - YORBA


Not than any one ʄ≜uxmuℭica's albums is any more conceptual than another, but this one is probably slightly more tightly focused music-wise. Seven remixes by different ESCC9 affiliates:  The Peach Tree, Haruki Tamesue, TheChurchofSynth(┼┼┼), Nattymari, TEXTBEAK and Colin Domigan. The artwork for this is even more sparse and 8-bit crushed than others and offers few cluies to the range of sounds inside it - pure witch house occult crawl, fat bass-wobble D&B with rippling hi-hats and stuttering cutback samples, screwed, warped witch made deviance and electro sutured streamlining. It's already too late to suggest it, but you might want to start with this one because the impenetrable walls of the layers of Yorba's psyche have been broken down into constituent parts and diluted with musicality to produce these platonic sonic elixirs.

Here's a selection of videos that accompany the tracks on the album:

The video to the original No ☨ Age track, with footage from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain




No ☨ Age (Haruki Tamesue's Acid Rain Mix)






No ☨ Age (TEXTBEAK st▲dtgverill▲ rmx)




No ☨ Age (Civic Radio Mix by N4TTYM4RI)




No ☨ Age (Colin Domigan Remix)

DOWNLOAD: ʄ≜uxmuℭica - THE NEW M◭50N5

ʄ≜uxmuℭica
THE NEW M◭50N5
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"THE NEW M◭50N5 is basically a statement of triangle culture and me and my friends as it's leaders and innovators ;)" - YORBA

This is a collection of tracks from previous releases, a best of almost, or as Yorba says above, more of a distilled statement of intent. There is one brand new track on it, the opening A Tree Cries (Requiem for Ingebor Bachmann), which rides in on the rust encrusted back of a killer bee sting burn. The video is below. Bachmann was an Austrain poet among whose concerns was her disillusionment with Heidegerrian Existentialism. It's the incorporation of these kinds of influences in ʄ≜uxmuℭica's music that belie some of Yorba's statements to the fact this his music (as his name suggests), are ephemeral works of meaningless noise. Existential disillusionment certainly features heavily in conversations you might have with the man, and there may come a time when he feels ready to unpack some of his cerebral challenges into lyrical form within his songs, rather than sticking with a purely music form, an event that could be his making. For the moment he uses the accompanying videos to his tracks - the vast majority of which he does produce films for - to illustrate the deeper meanings that lie within his releases. Check out his YouTube channel or the ESCC9 website for the full hit of all his videos.

ʄ≜uxmuℭica VIDEO: Haruki Tamesue - Sick

Continuing the ʄ≜uxmuℭica related week, here's a video Yorba produced for the Haruki Tamesue track Sick involving video footage from John Waters' Cecil B Demented.  Haruki Tamesue has an immense amount of music on her Bandcamp, all of which is worth checking out. She plays around with a fair range of sounds from idm to ghetto-screw to circuit bent vocal loops to deviant electronica, all with a darkened edge to them, with some killer track titles - Hey Beetlefucker (Haruki Sama's compressed stem cell slow down). To get you started, try the awesome gabba twitch of Grinch Versions and distorted vocal house of Slow Burn- lose yourself in the depths of the rest of it and follow her Soundcloud:

DOWNLOAD: ʄ≜uxmuℭica - HiFi ♮ SciFi ♮

 
ʄ≜uxmuℭica
HiFi ♮ SciFi ♮
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"HiFi ♮ SciFi ♮ is a follow up to my work in 2010 WEPOWNZ and Lofi# Scifi# and more of the scifi-noir bridled into pop music without vocals on the original pieces. i think vox are great, but they aren't for all tracks imho. i think my music served cold as death sometimes and the kinetic warmth of vocal chords ruins my chill at times so i split it into 4 original instrumental tracks and 4 remixes showing i'm doing the same thing with or w/o vox." - YORBA


The first four parts of this are the ʄ≜uxmuℭica originals, in thrall and in pursuit of global gods and monsters - Dionysus, Loki, Isis and Eris.  Disintegrating soundtrack from an F1 race, speed trials / light trails. Pop music in an exhausted quandry - does it progress to a place where it begins to challenge everything, or sit and stagnate as mere entertainment. It would take less than invoking a god to consider that conundrum but the fact that Yorba does draw down the influence and might of these four should clue you in to the power inherent in the tracks here. There's some violent frequencies deployed in here, at almost excruciating levels of dissonance - swarms of angry bees, legions of undead, deviant top and bottom ranges. The piercing synth line in opener, Dionysus winds its way towards a haunted rendition of Scarborough Fair, beats scuttling about in the leaf litter of fuzz that lies underneath.  Loki is as mischievous as the title suggests - a thumping beat, accelerating mid-range and huge wobbles at the high and low ends of the tone spectrum throb in propulsive unison.  Isis  is a more contemplative piece, moving at a slower pace, but strafing itself with some hi speed chases around it;s slowly uncoiling serpentine bass core. The album reveals its most unthreatening character in Eris; a vaulted, cavernous sounding track that is not dissimilar to all that came before but has a sense of cosmic rhythm that cruises the beats along a hypnotic course and pulls your ears into it less scorched by the dark-matter surrounding it that in the other tracks.

The remixes are are a great foil to the four intial pieces; you really haven't heard music subverted and recontextualised quite as much as when ʄ≜uxmuℭica sets his sights on it. He is canny enough to leave the strengths of the tracks where they are (within the reasoned logic of his parallel laws of physics).  I'll leave you to discover the likes of the inverted euphoria of Health's USA Boys for yourself.

ʄ≜uxmuℭica VIDEO: Rapeworm - Airplane Ear

Video directed by Yorba for Houston, TX black drone outfit Rapeworm.  Rapeworm are affiliates of ʄ≜uxmuℭica's ESCC9 collective, and Beth Howl from the band provides vocals for ☨ENDONESIA☨ from the †ʄ† FNORD †ʄ† album. Based in they are also affiliated with Cop Warmth who play a dirty, muck-raking form of garage noise-rock along the lines of Mayyors and Twin Stumps, whose eps are available to download free off their Bandacamp and are well worth it.  This is excellent all over.

DOWNLOAD: ʄ≜uxmuℭica - †ʄ† ʄnord †ʄ†

ʄ≜uxmuℭica
†ʄ† ʄnord †ʄ†
DOWNLOAD

"†ʄ† ʄnord †ʄ† is basically the old discordian precept of falsehood and distraction through mass media." - YORBA

The nine tracks of ʄ≜uxmuℭica's debut full length LP, †ʄ† ʄnord †ʄ† set out on a relatively easy in - a looping throb of a rhythm overlaid with a fluctuating pitch that forms an altered state of a melody line accompanied by disembodied female vocal upfront, and male voice intoning something indecipherable buried down into the mix.  Across the rest of the album voices appear as ghostly apparitions, computerised commanders and gruff inhuman beastly roars in The Peach Tree remixed version of HEXANE▼RAIN▼[ESCAPE]▼which is a more horrifying version of the really punchy track that appears later as a cyber-rave anthem subducted into a dense zone of molten synth chatter, urgent beats and a panic-stricken lead melody. ☨FOR GO, SHADOW☨ is a frozen glitch of circuit-degraded ambience smoothed into trance. Ambience is rediscovered for the ten minute closer ▼TrueSorcerory▼UponMontreal▼ which is an eeire soundtrack recalling many filmic sequences set out in the harsh coldness of space, slowly spinning slivers of sound bleeding in and out of the mix. The highlight of the album is ʄantasy▲ѷiolence, hammering out of it's open section on a steely ring modulated beat, nu-age-esque synth tones hovering around it slowly coalescing into a galloping bass-harried flutter that is suddenly disfigured by cryptic signal glitch.

An introduction to the world of ʄ≜uxmuℭica

“I started ʄ≜uxmuℭica around 2005 after seeing Bradford Cox with two friends perform as Deerhunter in a small club in Atlanta called MJQ. The concept was and still is "real music is not popular, so lets just drown it in noise". I had this concept before I ever met Bradford or before I ever saw him perform but it wasn't until I saw them play live that I realized how I was going to do what I wanted to do. Watching Bradford play definitely helped me realize how to add the post punk flair to ʄ≜uxmuℭica. As far as the reflection of ʄ≜uxmuℭica in terms of real music, in the notation of a musical language, is not popular so and thus has lost it's face value-- to me it has sort of added an extremely fake element to our culture and society. Hence, ʄ≜uxmuℭica; I decided to take pop music structure, which I have studied, extensively used, and broken down into a few completely new terms that have become bastardized genres, and fuse it with classical structure in the most minimalistic sense; most of my recordings never have more than 4 instruments- usually 2 analogue synth lines, a sampler, and a drum machine”   -  Yorba Zergot, ʄ≜uxmuℭica

This week I am going to present to you the hitherto unseen dark side of Witch House, an artist that has been kept out of the black light of the scene right from its inception for a multitude of reasons depending on who you talk to, or who will talk about it - silence often revealing as much as any answer, if not more. Producing some of the most cryptic, challenging and futuristic music in recent memory, the Californian based Yorba Zergot, the sole artist behind ʄ≜uxmuℭica , and leader of the multimedia collective Escape Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, should be right at the tip of any mention of occult electronica.

This is not going to be easy for you. I have been listening to this music, and talking with Yorba for months and I'm still trying to find my way in to everything. Both my understanding and appreciation for this music, along with the number of releases there are have all reached critical mass, so I am giving you a whole week of ʄ≜uxmuℭica to download, listen to and viddy yourself senseless with - or more senseful, depending on how well you connect. In a recent post on Mishka, Nattymari very succinctly nails an entire ouvre in one short article,  so go there to read that before I start stumbling around any further in reach of some profundity.

Yorba's is a wandering soul, and as much as his music wriggles free of any genre you might try and leash it to, so too does his sense of place, a physical manifestation of his art's cultural collagist qualities to stay broad and fluid. What he tells me about his movements over the last few years also echoes the confrontational aspect of his music: “I kind of got burnt out on the scene in Atlanta after getting fired from every good job I ever had in that city and kind of becoming a gypsy stealing gas and making cigarette money with tarot cards. then I left North America for three and a half years. I've lived in like four or five major metropolitan areas at this point; Atlanta, San Francisco, Portland, Bangkok”

He has made a name for himself within the inner circles of the Witch House scene by being a bit of a firebrand, making few concessions to the person on the other end of any messages he writes them. The first contact I had with him was off the back of a White Ring remix & video of his that I posted - his follow up thanks email was more like a hazing technique to see if I had what it took to keep him interested in me. It's easy to see how his approach could rub people up the wrong way. There's a harshness tinged with a slight bitterness at how the cards have played out for him. His tarot deck offering a glimpse of a future when he was signed up to Warp Records at the age of 17 in 2002, only to be dropped months later due to his inability to tour the US. “At the time I was making some fusion of downtempo, dark ambient and idm. After being dropped my initial reaction was to make dark electronic dance music rather than ambient or droney gazey music and to fuse it with pop and post punk elements into some sort of occult "anti-pop"”

As well as sniping off at a scene he saw the dawning of “I tagged myself with "witch house" and "anti-pop" in 2007 as kind of a personal joke, I think we all see what it has grown into” he can also wax extremely generously in lucid and informative fashion, as with his post about the genesis of the Witch House genre on his last.fm page.

Even the dirgiest music amongst the horror-drone and darkwave-glitch has nothing on the level of psychological challenge Yorba's music levels at the listener. As with all insularly functioning artists, the concept of listener doesn't occur until after the event: “I don't make music for mass appeal in any sense other than I have a mass appeal to good music - this to me in most cases is classical, experimental, or avant garde music - I am a huge junkie for innovation and novelty.” Despite such a credo, one of the insatiable, indestructible elements in his music is the innate sense of pop that doesn't ever allow a traditional song-form to fall apart completely. It isn't abstract or untethered music, each track is locked into it's own unique sense of rhythm, meter, verse chorus and bridge, illustrated by the arcane glyphs and sigils that form the song titles. They may not function within the same laws of musicology that the regular listener is familiar with, but give yourself enough time in the company of ʄ≜uxmuℭica's logic and your mind will fall in with it: “All of the albums are supposed to sum up some sort of urban gothic mythological motive for market placement of inferior music (666) so I sort of transmuted that into the key of the godhead (777) by adding some scifi noir and dead wood pop melodies. I always try to communicate a deep resonance of my music with, archetypes.”


Prepare yourselves, for the next few days are going to provide you with some of the most cerebrally and aurally challenging music you will have heard for some time.

Last.fm 'til I die

Weekly stats action.

the neighbour of the beast

itunes recognised my ipod! no scrobbles off it yet though, haven't plugged it back in. Good story.

01. The Raveonettes - 52

02. F≜uxmuℭica - 44

03. DannielRadall - 32

04. Fleet Foxes - 24

04. LIQUID SKULLS - 24

06. Crystal Stilts - 22

07. Silver Bullets - 18

07. The Weeknd - 18

07. Ssaliva - 18

10. Ghost Animal - 16

1 – all the albums, inspired by that thread here.

2 – gonna own my blog next week
3 – "You gonna like me 'cause i'm tight and hip, also i funk and i am pretty."
4 – don;t know if I like it
4 – love it
6 – sounds different to last stuff – more character.
7a -
7b – QUOTE TWEET: “Ate a whole pack of chipolatas. Could have been 8 or 12, wasn't counting. Soundtracked by @theweekndxo - sausage eating beatz, clearly”
7c – drug music by drug people for drug drugs
10 - http://soundcloud.com/amdiscs/ghost-animal-single-man-side-a


TOTW: http://soundcloud.com/amdiscs/railcars-big-sky-hounds-of

DOWNLOAD: Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea - What's There To Write About?

Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea
What's There To Write About?DOWNLOAD

They've been releasing records since 2009, when they first put out A Small Version of a Party but until the last 6 months, have so far kept a relatively low profile. At the end of last year local monthly music (and more) bible Source Magazine featured One Hundred Yards Into The Desert from the band's (also free d/l) It's The Falling That Counts, Not The Landing album in their songs of 2010 writers chart, and they have also been garnering praise from all ove the UK.  They follow in the footsteps of fellow Brightonian based wielders of angular punk dissonance such as Charlottefield, Everyone To The Anderson, Ack Ack Ack, Zettesaur, Illness, Projections.... That felt good listing off all those bands. This city has bred a good heritage of confrontational guitar bands steeped in the heavy melodies and dirty rush of hardcore, imbuing heavily rhythmic feral rock with an Albini-raw presence, diamond sharp turns and steely hooks and on the strength of this release alone Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea deserve to feature amongst those names.

The tracks on What's There To Write About? rarely last more than three minutes, but each manages to squeeze a dynamic shape into its abrasive structure; The storms of howling feedback in It's The Same ge lashed down onto a driving rhythm; the spacious reverb guitar line that opens Chances Scattered is suddenly obliterated by dry hoarse throated barks, the way the beat hacks into the spiralling descent of the riff in Hours In The Frame. Across the ten tracks of this album the band drop more headspinning moments of excellence than it would be possible to describe in easily readable sentences, so abrupt and profound the changes in direction - Other Places, Other People features four increasingly head-noddingly potent shifts before two minutes, one of which involves cleanly sung harmonising.  It's an attention to songwriting detail that is emphasised further by the unsubtle caustic tones they flick their guitars to when the atmospheres get a little dark and the moods shift from fist in the air to fist in yr face. 

The album is free to download now from their Bandcamp, along with several other releases. There will be a physical release bound in recycled book covers on Box Social at the start of May. 
Get it on mp3 now, and start saving your pennies for that.

DOWNLOAD: Polyverse - Polyverse EP

Polyverse
Polyverse EP
DOWNLOAD

Here's another ambient soundscapist from New York to accompany NY-based drone composer Daniel Klag who I wrote about yesterday.  Seven soundscapes of swelling psychedelic beauty and undertoned melodies; a microcosm chromatic audio-fauna locked into intimately woven helix of growth and decay, expansion and collapse.  An excellent album for drone fans.

Follow him on Soundcloud where he has a set of unreleased hypno-bliss tracks for streaming.

REVIEW: Daniel Klag - Weird Fiction

Daniel Klag
Weird Fiction
AMDISCS

Weird Fiction is the latest, and first release on AmDiscs, from New York based anti-gravity ambient musician Daniel Klag, following CDr's on Self Storage and La Station Radar.  The six tracks on this release mix multi-hued waves of lugubriously flowing drone with elemental textures, in thrall to the ethereal works of Fennesz and Tim Hecker and the prettier, unspooky, end of Boards of Canada's canon. As the tracks progress they morph and warp hypnotically, colouring themselves with emotive resonance, outlining hazy narrative arcs in their structures.  Opening track All White with the Peaks of Mountains is at once of the air and the earth, as its title suggests, drawing out a steely granite-dense centre tone that locks down lighter currents that rise off it, the whole piece exerting a shivering light headed atmosphere on the listener. At the opposite end, the closing Stone Cities Ancient and Wind Weathered is composed of similar audio substances yet emphasises the earthier concerns of decay and decomposition. 

He recently made Stadiums and Shrines blog a deep and heady mix of the kinds of artists his music is informed by, directly or obliquely which you can download here:

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00:00 Daniel Klag – “All White with the Peaks of Mountains”
04:07 Fennesz + Sakamoto – “Cendre”
06:26 Tim Hecker – “Atlas Two”
14:54 David Behrman – “On the Other Ocean”
19:53 Daniel Klag – “Ramparts”
24:30 Kria Brekkan – “Armor”
25:39 Rhys Chatham – “A Crimson Grail Pt. 2″
29:24 Jonny Greenwood – “Moon Mall”
30:25 Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. – “In D”
34:15 Experimental Audio Research – “Dusk”
37:17 Six Organs of Admittance – “Awaken”
38:44 Inca Ore with Lemon Bear’s Orchestra – “Blue Train”
40:50 Ciccone Youth – “Me and Jill”
42:34 Gas – “Zauberberg 1″
47:13 Keith Fullerton Whitman – “Acgtr Svp”


Here's a video clip from a couple of years ago, or Klag performing live.

the Ghosting Season is upon us

Ghosting Season is the new incarnation of Worriedaboutsatan.

This new teaser video is all you need to see from me, the rest you can hunt down from the announcement they made on their website yesterday HERE, then bookmark, follow and attend to the signs emanating from these areas:

www.ghostingseason.co.uk
www.ghostingseason.tumblr.com
www.twitter.com/ghostingseason

www.soundcloud.com/ghostingseason

Ghost Animal - In Your Room 7''

Psycho-summer doo-wop surf-rock band Ghost Animal release a 7" with two of the best songs from last year's Summertime In Heaven cassette. These tracks are remastered and pressed onto some pretty full-colour shellac in a limited run of 250 from the indefatigably awesome AMDISCS and/or download from Ghost Animal's Bandcamp or AMDISCS' Soundcloud.

The first side features two tracks - Single Man, and In Your Room - both unstoppably hedonistic rushes of blazing youth music; top down beach side cruising and late night after dark whisky yammering rock and roll, all bound up into the same song - one about going out and crushing it onto the girls, the other about being that little bit smoother and silver tongued, yet equally hotloined and irrepressible, if not more so in a simmeringly sensual way.  The flip side holds a lush shimmering sundazed rescrub by Golden Ages and serves as the dreamier cousin to the wide-eyed A-sides.

PREVIEW: Belbury Youth Club At The Outer Church

This month's Outer Church is something pretty special. The previous gig's have featured some incredible bands together, but this is the first time something of an event, nay happening, has occured and also the first time for many moons that Ghost Box have thrown some kind of collective jam, and this Outer Church is the convergence of these occasions -  live performances from the crypto-confusional Moon Wiring Club and the even less logical polymorphous transmutations of Pye Corner Audio, along with DJ sets and visuals from Jim Jupp & Julian House. A real Event for this night that now seems to be coming into its own, and a showcase for a label that is also getting a firm grip on hearts and minds.

To usher in the ceremony 20JazzFunkGreats posted a guest post with exclusive tracks from Moon Wiring Club and Pye Corner Audio yesterday.

Belbury Youth Club At The Outer Church

Thursday 14th April

7.30pm - 12.00 midnight

An evening of anomalous audiovisual entertainment

With special live guests

Moon Wiring Club

Pye Corner Audio

Ghost Box DJs Jim Jupp & Julian House

Plus a selection of arcane televisual artefacts, vintage Public Information Films and a screening of

Julian House's short film Winter Sun Wavelength

DOWNLOAD: GuMMy†Be▲R!/Nattymari - 100 Minutes of Foulness

GuMMy†Be▲R!/Nattymari
100 Minutes of Foulness
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Joining foces again for a physical release after their storming digital only Witch Made Knicca mix last year this tape is the new next level big hitter from screwed down space rave double team Nattymari and GuMMy†Be▲R!  Released in February on ClanDestine Records and now all sold out, it has been made available for free download to spread the foulness as far as it will reach.

An unholy mix of songs you'll recognise disfigured, screwed, glitched, stretched, chopped, reconfigured and reconstituted into ways that would appall your parents: This is club music for degenerates, degenerate music for clubs.

ẈḭṭḈḨ Ṃ4ḋḜ ḴḸḯḵḵ 4 ḸḭḞḝ ḞṌṌḼ!!!!!

DOWNLOAD: GuMMy†Be▲R! - Oakland

GuMMy†Be▲R!
Oakland
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Double whammy of Gummy for you today - this is the first, more later.  Regular readers of this blog will know how highly I rate the Witch Made Knicca king, GuMMy†Be▲R!, so it should come as no surprise that I present you with his first full length album, Oakland.  After hitting 200 paid-for downloads he donated all the money to the Japan Tsunami relief fund and has made it free for the rest of you, for the time being at least, so get in there quick.

The fourteen tracks on the album sit somewhere between the space rave of the Spectral Analysis ep, and his older more predominantly R&B influenced tunes with the new addition of a bit of glitch, double take pulse lock drops and twitches. He's stepping up his game in the production department, polishing up his sounds, honing his pieces into dynamic statements of songcraft and form. He recently made statements to the effect of declaring war on witch house - a paraphrase he probably won't be impressed with me misquoting slightly, but he can't deny it either!  The gloves are off, and with tracks like Gwap, HAARP, and My Favourite Mirage all shaking their luxuriant curves into the faces of both his peers and detractors.  The highlight and most accomplished piece is Night With No Light which features Zombelle purring velvet vocals over the most sultry club oriented beats and basslines on the album.

If a full album of cosmic trance hop wasn;t enough for you HerrGummy has also posted the two brand new tracks below on his Soundcloudin the last week, and with even more tweaked production skills than even this high watermark of a release, the next new album coming in just a couple of months, should be well worth the wait.

execute every act of thy life as though it were thy LASTFM THREAD

another week over. lets run these numbers:

It's a tie!
Three ties!!
So I pumped it up to 11.

01. Craft Spells - 34

01. Moon Duo - 34

03. The Raveonettes - 27

03. Sleeping Peonies - 27

05. Shabazz Palaces - 25

06. Fleet Foxes - 24

07 Ash Borer - 21

08. Evenings - 18

09. Bosco Delrey - 17

09. Mother Network – 17
11. Peaking Lights – 16

1a – Lovely.
1b – Mazes amazes. It's very good, blues based hypno-drone heavily vibed out on VU & Suicide. The kind of band that makes me use the V word.
3a- even though this new album isn't that exciting, it does have a killer finish , and I can't dislike anything by The Ravonettes.
3B – Listening to Sleeping Peonies romantic shoegaze black metal and then playing The Ravonettes straight after confused the shit out of me; they're really not that different. New album comes wrapped in pink lace – not your usual BM in any way, but then BM doesn't usually hail from Norfolk.
5 – I like this a lot. Seattle hip hop group. Capital 5 is immense; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_BoveoD36o

6 – Starting to like this band too.
7 – Best black metal band at the moment by far. Cosmic, captivating, expansive. Recent cassette sold out on day one, their full discography is being released as a double tape and LP in the next few months so you'll get another chance to get a copy.
8 – Thought this was lovely on first listens, now weeks later it's proving to be proper magical.
9a – Hopefully his album will light minds up like Ariel Pink did.
9b – Nintendocoregrind. Free download. Mental. http://nfrblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/download-mother-network-mother-network.html

11. Will probably never tire of this. Ever.

Solo acapella – Something by Dylan Nyoukis probably:

DOWNLOD: Servile Sect - Eternal Mind

Servile Sect
Eternal Mind
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This is a free download digital re-release of Servile Sect's 2010 cassette of techno-paranoid sci-fi black metal. Weird and unconventional sounding it combines a lot of glitchy electronic elements - crushing that digitised alien hiss of their debut Stratospheic Passenger into a mangled reconfiguration then blasting it with black drone noise.  This is 27 minutes of genuine experimental black psychic weirdness!

VIDEO: Mater Suspiria Vision - Das Haus der Hexe : Pyramids of Mu Remix & Dream Boat Remix

My confession about witch house to you is that I have always wanted and willed it to be more successful than most of its protagonists really have been. This is getting really close to blowing the top off its ceiling and reaching the next level, music and video wise.  The voice sample may be some kind of standard but that's part of the witch house way and totally acceptable.  This delivers on the visuals, the ceremony, the pomp, the beats, the HOUSE. MSV have really been ramping up their game with DVD's, the excellent Inverted Triangle ep on Clan Destine from which the original of this is taken, and the forthcoming Crack Witch album release.  This remix is part of something developing that could turn into the real deal that this whole genre has been pushing at.

Here's the original version and video for comparison.  Even more creeped out and sinister; composing it's corrupting force through a subverted Stooges riff and invokation of Raw Power - it is devious, but subtle and chilling referencing cannot be enough on its own - if only all the peaks of this disparate scene could mesh together into one all consuming entity. It could happen.





And on top of that, there's this. Dream Boat could well be my favourite witch house artists, their album Visions offered up as close to the perfect realisation of all the threads as the genre came last year and they have produced a remix to this same track that batters the senses, opening slowly like a wry seductress before dropping their trademark rippling beats, squeals and trills. It's all happening on this one piece of music.

DOWNLOAD: Mother Network - Mother Network

Mother Network
Mother Network

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Las Vegas 8-bit sonic bastardiser Jason Holmes' fourth release as Mother Network is his first contribution to the infamous nintendocore scene: 16 tracks of br00tal chiptune and grindcore based on the videogames he grew to love. These instrumentals are intended for a full album with added vocals entitled We Get Signal, due out some time in the summer.  His previous work flows through a range of psychedelic ambience, but this is his first proper booted up fingers in sockets super frazzled electro firecracker.  And it is all those things.