VIDEO: German Army - Pulling Lashes

Vide to illustrate the proto gunk crunk German Army track Pulling Lashes, produced by Moduli TV.  Taken from the DryR ep out now on Amdiscs:

  

REVIEW: Honeydrum - Pleasures of the Sun (AmDiscs)

Honeydrum
Pleasures of the Sun
(AmDiscs)

That cover art should clue you in to the sounds of Honeydrum: a romantic clinch, mid waltz, blurred out of focus, shaking with both emotional tension, erotic release and the furtive hand of the voyeristic cameraman.  This six track album develops the band from their seven previous eps into a proposition less fierce than the likes of Ghost Animal, less murky than the handful of Beach Fossil bands yet muddier that the clear-eyed Wild Nothings, Honeydrum have a sound that is definitely of the now, with a distinct feel and tone that sets them out from their peers - in their own words; "Atmospheric mall jams". The way they shuffle their feet and hunch their shoulders gives them the air of a slouchier, grouchier Blank Dogs - by now you're getting into the references - a mix of John Hughes and John Waters films. Heavy 80's hangover.

You can download it for free, so you should probably just do that right now:  Digital version out now on the band's BANDCAMP.  Cassettes available from 15th August to order HERE

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.

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:

DOWNLOAD


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.

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.

VIDEO: Pears - Servants

The most lounge, louche and laid back of all these LRAS video posts, Pears I discovered through two AMDISCS releases last year, both still available from his page HERE.  Effervescent hypnogogic Club Tropicalia from Brooklyn by way of Cape Town, SA.  This track is a total sun drenched psychedelic rush and bodes well, if not already well worn, paths to the future.

DOWNLOAD: Ourobonic Plague - Moon Worship

Ourobonic Plague
Moon Worship
Amdiscs
DOWNLOAD


New album from Ourobonic Plague and it's his first on a label that isn't his own Theosophical Nightmares - released a week or so ago through none other than this season's blacker than black label AMDISCS (never know if it's full caps or what).  Another stunning album to add to the darkened halls of the Czech tastemakers, another excellent release from this Australian atmospheric manipulator. 

Moon Worship is one malicious sounding album, a real evolution from the last album I wrote about and a villanous presence on the AMDISCS roster; no furtive attempts at conveying a scene here, this album owns the space as soon as it starts, developing tangible narratives and threads throughout with a world of rich and detailed sounds, a grim determination gnawing into the pit of each track.


What starts off burrowing out of a hive of claustrophobic tunnels soon opens out into airier, but no less foreboding terrain. Gnosis For Ellis uncoils with ominous portent, deep misty drones thrusting forward in slowly boiling waves, bursting thickly over the stuttering pulse of a beat, the rhythmic momentum following through into Wince, Speak where frazzled filters penetrate into the higher registers, leaping out of the murky mid-bass ranges that dominate proceedings. The closing track Mana is, suitably, the eeirest of the album, crawling off out of shot like a horror film's slimy epilogue - leaving that suspense and tension hanging long after the screen goes dark.

DOWNLOAD: Beko / La Station Radar Compilation

Beko / La Station Radar Compilation
DOWNLOAD

Tracklist:

a_side

a1_ Ela Orleans - Black and White Flight
a2_ Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier - I Panema
a3_ Archers By the Sea - Leather Jacket Dance
a4_ Terror Bird - Can't Tell What's Real
a5_ Jeans Wilder - Be OK
a6_ Holy Strays  Phrenesia

b_side
b1_ Skitter - Stutter
b2_ Yves/Son/Ace - My Confusion Your Delusion
b3_ Gremlinz - I Have To Be Leaving
b4_ Dirty Beaches - Night City
b5_ Wet Hair - The Garden Room

After releasing a massive witch housey/distorto-pop double disc with AmDiscs at the end of 2010, French digital singles label Beko have teamed up with La Station Radar to bring you an eleven track psychedelic folk/drone compilation to start the year off.  The line-up on this is as incredible as the AmDiscs split, featuring names like Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier and his luminous reverie; Terror Bird's lush plucked folk;  the angelic hypnotic trance of Gremlynz; the hypnagogic neon fog of Holy Strays; yowling skiffle/skuffle shuffle of Dirty Beaches; the bubbling sweetness of Wet Hair. It reads as a list of several of the names that might rise up out of the underground over the next twelve months, a primer for the coming months, and also, for the moment, will warm you up and shine a light into the cold January darkness.  Great range of sounds across the bands in this release, proving further Beko's awesome ear for addictive and interesting artists - a label of relentless high quality.


On top of the music, La Radar affiliated band Ela Orleans have produced a video to accompany their song, the opening track; Black and White Flight.

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers – Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

Vortex Rikers

Wake Up And Smell The AshesAMDISCS
DOWNLOAD

One of the most interesting groups to have emerged from the movement of desolate electronics, Vortex Rikers drop their third release and it's a great one.  AMDISCS have offered up another arresting take on a haunting yet mechanically visceral sound, similar to Dream Boat in the bands abilities to really convey a sense of tense atmosphere and cinematic narrative over short spaces of time.  Named after the spaceship that crashes in a first-person shooter they owe it to themselves to produce an atmosphere quickly, and the opening bars of A False Prophet conjure images of industrial gothic vistas, ghostly metropolises overseen by spectral caretakers; on earthm, in Space; the origin of their sounds is kept ambiguous; there's a cosmic drift to the tracks nudged into existance by sparse yet motorik beats, the upward motion of the tracks inducing a euphoria that gently coalesces amongst the grey, earthy sense that you can roll around in the thick dirt of the drone. The final We Live As We Dream pushes down on the drums that much harder and draws the record to climax, but neither stellar nor tera firma potential is pushed too hard leaving the ultimate experience an entirely subjective one that makes these six tracks all the more compelling.

Tracklist

01 A False Prophet

02 Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

03 Vanishing Point

04 Hope Rhymes With Despair

05 Void

06 We Live As We Dream 

DOWNLOAD: AMDISCS & BEKO End of Year Double Split

AMDISCS & BEKO End of Year Double Split

DOWNLOAD DISC ONE

DOWNLOAD DISC TWO


This special festive mega-comp features 48 tracks from artists involved with two of the years' most consistently inspiring labels; AMDISCS and BEKO. If you get this, along with Mishka's GraveWave comp you'll own a huge slice of the year's most interesting music - 2010; the year something happened.  This isn't all witchyhouse/hypnogogia or whatever; both these labels take ina lot more than that, an anyone who has downloaded just a few releases from either of them will be able to tell you how on point they both are as visionary labels.

Feast your eyes on the artists this bumper set includes, in no particular order:

Jef  Barbara, C V L T S, WILD EYES, LIBRARIES, Catamaran, DannielRadall,  Wools, Golden Axe feat. Princess Chelsea, Keep Shelly in Athens, Luke  Chrisinger, Police Academy 6 + unouomedude, Kodak To Graphe, Port City,  Courtship, M∆S▲C∆RA feat. The Present Moment, Mellow Grave, Λ, Dream  Boat feat. Last Kiss, BL§§D ØU†, Elekseveneks, WALSH, Teams, Bad  Karaoke, Craig Cruiser, every, Ra Cailum, Monroeville Music Center,  Medallion, Chrome Wings, LORD BOYD, Star Slinger, Young Adults, Pariah  Carey, mediafired, Ghost Animal, Spent Man, Chat Logs…


In their own words:


From AMDISCS:

Dear friends we end this year with precious compilation that is being released on French label Beko.
Featured are 48 songs by various artists that we admire. the compilation is for free & beyond any calculable value.
 All of the artists featured, conjure up the pale light from the deep within our souls. Occult related sounds call down the spirits of future tense vernacular. enjoy the curved moon’s waning rays, and marry xmas to all of you.

From BEKO:

This compilation amalgamates artists that can be found on previous AMDISCS  releases as well exclusive upcoming stuff and marks directionz we set  to follow_ all of the artists featured, conjure up the pale light from  the deep within our souls_ occult related sounds call down the spirits  of future tense vernacular_ let thee enjoy the curved moon's waning rays  and marry XMAS_ thanks to all of the lunar-chaste artists_ AMDISCS:Futures Reserve Label

DOWNLOAD: I†† - Preliminary Invocations

 I††
Preliminary Invocations
AMDISCS
DOWNLOAD

On Monday I put up a new track from husband and wife duo I†† in advance of this: the full AMDISCS released album, Preliminary Invocations. Like I said before, it's the unrefined nature of this that really makes it, and yet again (after Dream Boat) I get to say that AMDISCS release an album with a vision, narrative and form that attempts to create something cinematic, sounds steeped in the creepy and ghoulish; but if it comes off as unrefined, it's only in the same way that early horror films seem somewhat unconvincing with their fake blood and plastic teeth - they were the best tools their creators had at their disposal, and are just a small illustrative, symbolic parts that work in unison with the greater ambition of the story they wish to convey - and that is certainly true of this album; if you pulled the mixes apart, each element wouldn't work, each sound seeming a little slight when thrown into relief - but when they work together, as one heaving, shifting mass then it really starts to bite hard into you.


Starting off as definitively witch house as you like, the violent open handed slap of the clap beats on dis†▲n† make their presence felt with a sharp and deliberately punctuated pace. Following that the shadowy presence of drag gets sucked into the mix; the digital fx of covergirl tear into glottal vocals and drop their guttural pitch shifted remains into an abyss of panning synth scree; then Golden RΔtio drags them even deeper in an oOoOO style.  The following two tracks put the screws into the distortion elements throwing eddies of caustic shortcircuiting atmospherics and outright noise into the middle of the album, backed by the 808, giving it an air of the more primordial †‡† pieces. Goetic Terra lays a darkly howling guitar tone with shades of doomy black metal under a fabric of glitching feedback and from there the album slowly winds down through a final few tracks experimenting within a different palette of supernatural tones, slowly screwing down the tempo, pushing the bass around into moaning silhouettes against the darkening shades that draw around the three final chapters until the final clanking wheeze of The Vibratory Formula of a Bast shivers to a climax.

It all makes for one of AMDISCS more gothically sinister releases, nicely timed for Halloween, and puts I†† up there with some of the better producers of the witch house genre.

Dream Boat - Visions

The internet has just lit up with the news of the debut full length album Visions from Dream Boat, released on the phenomenal Prague based AMDISCS label and available now. The label have become my highlight of the year, putting out incredible lo-fi yet hi-intensity EPs and albums that are either instantly addictive or provoke you into repeated listens that slowly crawl their way into your subconscious; the sound ranges across the current spectrum of beach-wave, witch house, hypnagogic pop and dark electronica, with a pool of artists drawn from all corners of the world. Highlights that will undoubtedly hit my end of year track and albums shortlists come from Daniel Radall,  Ghost Animal, Railcars, Pink Priest, Pears, Table, Twilight Owls, Unouomedude and Tearist.

Amazingly they release many of their artist's albums for free as well as offering them in cd and cassette form, but as big a feature as I could write about AMDISCS, this is really about one of my current obsessions; Dream Boat.

Their album contains Your Beaches from the Fevers EP which, if you've heard it, should convince you enough to part with €8 for the digital download alone - one immense track of stuttering, drum-machine groove, of claustrophic breathless euphoria kept a teasingly thin distance from total peaking; a psychological landscape of Lynchian twists and sidesteps, of Hitchcockian thrill and suspense, yet somehow that track was no one off; this album is full of the same rippling, haunted aggression and wired primitive atmospheres that characterized all their previous eps. Kissing Collar clips along with a solemn bounce, Rosary is dragged and screwed lightly enough to retain full pop glamour yet distorted enough to fetishise it's more sensual features.

The artwork too, has lost the overt provocative sexuality that defined that Jane Birkin Fevers EP cover and the mirrored nudity of True Love; although they've kept it up with the current image they're using as their band photos, this cover brings a sinister creepy edge, a black outline and blurred centre much like the music itself, all hazy visioned with steely definition. One hallmark of their sound is the gritty synth tone deployed in many of the tracks, like a subduction zone around the impact of each beat it grinds into the foreground pulling at your ears and pricking up your senses like an organic klaxon pulsing out from the deep undergrowth of the occult subgenre in which they dwell; and, it has to be said, sounds fucking badass. Along with the SALEM's epic King Knight it will become one of the defining sounds of the year for me, for the witch house genre and judging from the reaction to the release of this album, many other people too.  In tracks like No Air and Your Beaches, it ploughs a filthy furrow of noise straight down the lateral-lines, like a modern take on motorik, it's a distinctive pulse through the core of the tunes that draws the focus ofattention. Elsewhere, in Coals there's a tribal element that underscroes the sense of ritualistic primitivism in the sound, percussive drums drawn in tight circles, a clattering cacophany of ceremonial hedonism that takes over the body and leads from the outside in.

Order your copy HERE where they have 4 tracks to preview too.


All the previous ep's are still available as free downloads from AMDISCS from the following links:

Fevers EP
Dream Boat & True Love split
ARC & Dream Boat split


There's also a video to Kissing Collar directed by Kat Tedesco that is well worth disturbing your rods and cones with: