School of Seven Bells have taken the lead track from the slightly streamlined new incarnation of A Place To Bury Strangers' Onwards To The Wall EP and given it an even sleeker, smoother, dreamier edge. Pulling the track closer to their own version of shoegaze, blurring out the focus to a matte finish, setting the action a little ways back in the distance and dropping it into a echo chamber, works nicely, the finished piece turning out to be more satisfying than anything from SoSB own new album. I guess they work best with ballsier source material. Maybe APTBS could return the favour by detonating a piece off Ghostory
Been a fan of Glasgow's I Am Blip since the early days of NFR, regularly playing his smoothly exhilirating electro-techno out our club nights and featuring them on our monthly mixes. Here's a brand new live set to give you a taster of what he's currently coming up with.
Four tracks from a mysterious US producer from Chicago uploaded to Soundcloud within the last two weeks and already picking up over a hundred plays each. Something very interesting happening here. Gorgons makes wintery, claustrophobic snowstorm beat ambience. Possibly like Burial would sound if he were from the Windy City, a soundtrack to a lost Guy Maddin film. Four considerably different pieces of music; The mst recent, The Midnight Trail / A Dark Token, a huge swelling disturbingly creepy wall of consuming noise; elsewhere, icy enchanted vocals drift hazily through the shadowy groove of Red Cloud; a deep resonant bass tone thrums through the heart of Films at 11-02's dark nightscape, beset by muted explosions of beats that sound like shoes softly crunching through snow, evoking a lonely isolated vista that leads to the pure snow-storm white-out drone of Models. All tracks are beautifully produced pieces with texture and detail.
The last song True Womanhood released was called Nite Prowlers and it did just that, slinking along under cover of darkness it flowed along a similar earthen or subterranean track; deviant rhythms twisted and bent off course just as they begin to settle into themselves; a skewed pop sensibility similar to bands like Blank Dogs, Ghost Animal and others proponents of this years evolution in no-fi skuzz and noize. This new one Grey Man, probably won't have you bleeding from the eyes in response, but it does get more fucked up as it goes deeper into itself, starting off with some probing bell chimes that could go in any direction; ominous clangs and a well oiled beat lock in then the vocals start and begin to draw things back inside, inverting the momentum of the track by shifting focus onto their inverted Thom York sighing -drawled strung out vowels mutating in the wake of the grim rhythm ploughing forward - starting that melting slide of the music that starts to blur all the clean lines that preceeded it and pull the final moments of the track down on top of itself. Interesting self destructive stuff.
Bradford Cox releases MORE awesome Atlas Sound material on his blog and it's a Christnmas song! He's made five different vesions available, each one diffent enough to warrant your attention. Great stuff, as ever, and another chance to get over to his blog and get those four brilliant Bedroom Databank albums if you haven't already.
DOWNLOAD
Work tapes for a song I made for my roommate David's annual Christmas compilation. Lockett also made a song, as well as David and Colin's band Hollow Stars and a bunch of other rad people. I think David is releasing it in the next few days.
Instrumentation: Electric Bass and Jazzmaster through Fender Super Reverb, Drum Kit, Maracas, Weird African Tambourine, Xylophone, Metallophone, Piano, Acoustic Guitar, Moog Rogue Synthesizer, Vocals
Gkfoes Vjgoaf is Sean Conrad; a US based New Zealander who has been producing a kind of sunburned psychedelic folk of increasing detail over the last couple of years, slowly teasing and pulling at the strands of ideas and trains of thoughts until arriving at his current sound of slowly repeating cycles of sighing drone and shimmering ambient beauty. Like his previous albums there is an air of the retro about Light Weaving, of a distant psychedelia, but one that is resolutely of the now with it's submersion into a transcendental state of repetition and vibration. This is as much for the hypnagogic pop voyager as it is for fans of rough hewn folk. The kind of freaky fried sounds of Skip Spence and Rocky Erickson time-stretched to the current era of Peaking Lights, Amen Dunes, Lucky Dragons and a large pasrt of Finland's Fonal folk-drone roster; these bands all share a similar ramshackle texture and organicly happened upon feel as Conrad's work, but where an album like Imaginary Falcons had a close playful human intimacy, this communes with nature in a similarly tender fashion, until all passions are unleashed in the final track CelebrationInto The Light that layers up one of the most shapely and resonant riffs of the album into a post-rock crescendo of blinding magnititude, just as the title implies.
In his own words;
"Light Weaving is a way of imagining the universe. It is the oneness of all things and the constellations that we use to engage with the world. The music of Light Weaving is building things into nothing. Ebb and flow. These are autostereogram-like sounds for all seasons, unfocus your ears and take in what's really happening... Specifically though, it is a set of live instances recorded in my parents' living room and reorganized on tape in June 2010."
Here's the highly anticipated screwjam from Blissed Out, straight from the incredible AMDISCS.
L8V3 +H3 W47 U L73 is a mixtape we made sitting on a porch in Crenshaw, Los Angeles, California. The free download of our dj software runs up tonight. It features reinterpretations of a lot of the radio bangers we have heard touring out to California over the past two weeks: Far East Movement, Katy Perry. It also has a track from How I Quit Crack mixed in that we picked up after playing with her last week in Austin. We played the Smell on Saturday and Showcave this coming Friday and during downtime we have been working on new material. L8V3 +H3 W47 U L73 is a song we made that features vocals of Taylor Momsen from Gossip Girl covering Rihanna and the XX at the same time.
Cannot get enough of Holy Other at the moment, in particular this track: Yr Love. The Berlin based producer has sewn together the loose strands of current electronic music incorporating (consciously or not) hypnagogic pop, witch house, drag and ambient minimalism to create a 7" with a physically magnetic allure.It's such a beautiful slow-motion space-walk, like a Detroit street party held in orbit; layers of cosmic synths trails piling up on each other, blown to the solar winds as the soul vocals softly collide together. This video reminds me a lot of the recent Forest Swordsvideo for Rattling Cage, it has the same washed out leached sepia tones and detached atmosphere that complements the music perfectly; as well as the religious overtones - more pertient here, what with the astral sounds of the music alluding to the glorious all-pervasive euphoris besowed upon us humalings by everyone's favourite sky friend.
Witch House looks like it is becoming a tangible genre about to whip into a full eldritch storm when the TriAngle twin release and SALEM albums drop in September. Best not be sitting on the Hate side of the fence when that hits. This has taken me ages to do and I’ve surprised myself by missing out some of my favourite tracks from massive scene shiners like White Ring, TEARIST, Passions, SLEEP∞OVER and others, but I wanted it to be a tight, focused & fully effective freak of a mix instead of a full primer style overview, which I think it is now; but trust me, it hurt to do it. Someone already told me I should do another one with just the hits. Maybe.
So much to say about this; such little inclination to decry the negativity at this point; if you keep up with the blog you’ll have read my opinions and know my position. This is a sound I’ve been waiting for for years – it’s been in my head forever and if you’ve heard about Witch House / Haunted House / Spook / Ghost Drone / Drag or whatever it’s getting called on the blogs you read you’ll have the gist of the genre – multi-roomed subterranean crypto-occultism with an indecipherable debased aesthetic.
Listen to this mix and tell me there’s not meat to chew off them bones
Tracklist:
De/Void – The Spooning Couple (Self-Release)
†‡† - gOth bb (Self-Release)
SALEM – King Night (King Night, IAMSOUND)
No strangers to the world of fucked-up, screwed-down internet mixtapes, Salem has just released their I BURIED MY HEART INNA WOUNDED KNEE set of weird-sounding shit, which you can download here. No tracklist, no description, no nuthin'. Just some rope.
Nute Records just added another spankin C60, Putetiden -II
All sorts of quality toonage from Shaolin Wooden Men, Thomas Dinger, Tones On Tail, among others:
The Horror Factory - Intro
Shaolin Wooden Men - Brother Ray (On The Radio, Joe!)
Silo - Those Adopted By People
Whirlywirld - Window To The World
Telex - Pakmoväst
The Cosmic Nanou - The Miraculous Intervention
Thomas Dinger - Ballgeflüster
World Of Skin - Breathing Water
All About Eve - Some Finer Day
Suicide - New City
Piratio - Boil Into UV
Children Under Hoof - Tactical Assault 2
Thread Pulls - Cycle Path
Ollie Olsen - 00:09:26
Tones On Tail - Rain
This fourth Not For Resale mix has been a while coming (though not as long as last month’s John Dwyer one!), so much so that it may have already missed the boat; although that’s not to say that Chillwave’s star is descending just yet, it definitely has a lot of plateauxing to do as it gathers new fans and many of these records of been holding my fascination for over a year. Considering the amount of blogging that’s been devoted to it I am surprised by the number of people who have never come across any of these artists. Strange to think that a genre I consider so devoutly Pop that has been so central to my life for the last year is so alien to others. So, I figured, not only did I want to make it for the fun of it, but that there could be some kind of demand for an immediate history lesson of the genre in one tidy mix - with some newer impending artists for the future thinkers. It surely is time for such a thing.
Tracklist:
Universal Studios Florida - Soft White Watts / Sun Glyphed Comanche Kissed (Ocean Sunbirds, Permanent)
Memory Tapes – Bicycle (Seek Magic, Acephale)
Bye Bye Blackbird - Happy High (Happy High ep, Self-Released)
Small Black - Despicable Dogs (Washed Out Remix) (Split 7”, Jagjaguwar)
Weird Tapes - The Walking Dead (Self-Released)
Ducktails – Landrunner (Landscapes, Olde English Spelling Bee)
Tassels - Bird of Prey (Self-Released)
Matrix Metals - Flamingo Breeze (Flamingo Breeze, Not Not Fun)
Yoga - Fourth Eye (Megafauna, Holy Mountain)
The Samps - F.X.N.C. (Mexican Summer Sampler)
Neon Indian - Should Have Taken Acid With You (Psychic Chasms, Lefse-VCR)
Ariel Pink - Reminiscences (Before Today, 4AD)
Toro Y Moi – Blessa (Causers of This, Carpark)
Nite Jewel - Weak For Me (Good Evening, Human Ear)
Teej - Out (Thirst, Self-Released)
Washed Out - New Theory (Life of Leisure, Mexican Summer)
Memoryhouse - Lately (Troisieme) (The Years, Arcade Sound/Inflated)
The Inn-Sect - Let Me Tell You About the Things I Need
Nurse with Wound & Stereolab - Trippin' With The Birds
Acid Eater - Road Of Ecstasy
Birchville Cat Motel - 55,000 flowers for the hero
Iibiis Rooge - How To Make A Flower
Whirling Hall Of Knives - Untitled
Boris with Merzbow - Rainbow
Peter Wright - River Lea Time Lapse
Planetary Assault Systems - Surface Noise
Inner City - Ahnonghay (Dave Clarke Mix)
Drexciya - Red Hills Of Lardossa
Various Artists - Chain Reaction 02 A1
Demdike Stare - Ghostly Hardware
Sun Araw - Beams
Teenage Fanclub - Baby Lee
Beak> - I Know
The Majority - One Third
Thors Hammer - I Don't Care
Here's the third mix in our continuing series, and it's a pretty special one, especially if you're into Garage Rock.
This mix coincides with the release of John Dwyer’s Nth record release as Thee Oh Sees, but that’s just coincidence. I started this almost a year ago, got sidetracked, and now I've managed to come back and finish it - Just in time for Warm Slime. Still, I make it sound easier than it was to track all this stuff down. The internet offers gratuitous providence at the best of times, but even so, tracking down some kind of recorded output from each of the bands within the man’s hyper-prolific trajectory has been pretty difficult – I even turned up the listing ‘Owes Rick Money (Thief)’ which I’m pretty sure isn’t a band and some kind of in-joke I’m not privvy to. There’s also something called Darkthrone that I could never find, but as far as I’m concerned that’s just Fenriz and Nocturno Culto and I’m happy to leave it at that; though if Dwyer was to pop up on their next album playing flute I wouldn’t be surprised. Only Superpit truly eludes me. From all I can find they might have been his high school band with only a couple of practices to their name let alone any recorded output.
So what this compilation features is 19 tracks from 16 bands including a couple of alternate monikers for the same group, plus a couple of live duets and a load of interview samples that hopefully colour in the character of the man a little further outside the boundaries of the music. Buckle up.
To expound on each group with dates, members and discographies would be gratuitous and detract from the kinds of spontaneity, creativity and chaotic artistry that a career spanning Doom through Garage Rock to Teutonic Electro alludes to.
So here’s to him – Keep on crushin’ Dwyer!
Thanks for downloading. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
Yikes - Carol Ann (Whoa Comas - Blood Bomb, Kill Shaman)
Pink & Brown - Messy Bessy, Get Undressy (Shame Fantasy II, ToYo/Load)
One of my all time favourite most ridiculous bands ever released an anniversary best-of a little while back; compiled by Izedis (vocals and bass player of the band) in 2009 to celebrate their 9th year. It was released by Xul Creations last month as a free digital download. You can get it here:
Enbilulugugalmake some kind of horrorcore power electronics form of black metal. There's not much buzzing trance, more ferociously blown out industrial noisegore and as such, seem to be pretty hated amongst a lot of black metal fans - their Metal Archives page has only 3 average scores of 33%, 75% and 30%. Still, one suspects they couldn't give a forty-fingered nun-fuck as this career(ing) best of should attest to, what with song titles such as Vomitous Orgy of Mutilated Catholic School Girls and Slicing the Blood Clotted Cunt of the Rotting Virgin AngelSlut and albums called things like NunTwat Armageddon.
Plus the artwork for Cultivating Goat Vomit attests to something not totally sincere either:
AMAZING!!
They have a whole host of albums and split eps lined up for the next year, so if you like this - and why the hell wouldn't you? - then you won't have to wait long for the next fresh release of goatserpent obsessed satanic filth to come rolling along.
NFR absolute current favourites (jointly with loads of others of course, but they're up there!) Sleigh Bells have put out a free track from their upcoming album Treats due out on May 11th on Mom + Pop Records. They also play the Concorde 2 at Brighton's Great Escape Festival on Saturday 15th May
Until then; tease yourself senseless with this official free track Tell 'Em DOWNLOAD
Type Records have just posted a new podcast of 'modern electronic music' from Yellow Swans' Pete Swanson. Immediately dense, psychedelic and all consuming there are as many vody rockign beats as there are cable thick strands of fuzz und drang. Incredible stuff.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Star Garden
Operative – Pulse
Rene Hell – X.O. Lucifer
C Section 8 – Music Box
Bulbs – Channels
Miracles Club
Mouthus – Where the Bridge Was Found
BORG – Track 1 from IA!
Axolotl – track 2 from Of Bonds In General
Angel Rada – Carillion
Golden Retriever – Canonic Horizon
Nerve Net Noise – Smoke From Past
Caboladies – Caught In Cradle Fly Paper
Pete Swanson – Work In Progress
We had our third amped up SwännS))) rehearsal on Monday; a big 4 hour session working on distilling the ideas from the previous sessions and restructuring them into different songs. We have a 20 minute ‘set’ piece we’re trying to get together and a few other ideas that won’t fit so, so in all we had about 10 song/pieces.
In this track we were working on a bit of a darker bass riff, trying to creep ourselves out with some sinister electronics – so it’s called Avian Argento; Download from Last.fm or Bandcamp:
For the second in our new series of monthly downloads I've made a deep droney psychedelic trip that dusts you up a bit before spitting you on your way. For some reason I am really struggling to explain why this mix is and exactly what is does. It’s meditative, the tracks are generally long psychedelic repetitions of cycles, earthy and connected to natural rhythms, animals, totems. These could be the sounds of nature fetishists, people in thrall to the dual enormity and insignificance of being, recordings with a sense of scale that draw the listener up in their mass, or reduce them to a speck. Or it could just be my ode to the Microphones In The Trees blog.
Thanks for downloading. Enjoy!
MxBx
Tracklist:
Barn Owl - I (Smoke Loom Ceremony, Blackest Rainbow)
Cabinet of Natural Curiosities - Glass (Searchlight Needles, For Arbors For Satellites)
UlaanKhol - Untitled 3 (I, Soft Abuse)
Blues Control - Good Morning (Local Flavor, Siltbreeze)
SunAraw - Canopy (Geneva Hits, Mental Groove)
PartliCloudi - Tantum (Rotten Wood, Folkwaste CDr)
Pocahaunted - Singing Color (Rough Magic, Blackest Rainbow)
High Wolf - Parallel Vision (SupermodernTemple, Krayon)
BenFrost - Híbakúsja (By The Throat, Bedroom Community)
Infinite Body - Dive (Carve Out The Face Of My God, Post Present Medium)
Order of Samples:
ClaireKremen: Honey Bee Pollination Crisis
JohnCale - Circa 1979: A Signal to Noise (Tuned To The Hum)
JohnCale - Circa 1979: A Signal to Noise (Saturnalia Again)
BillDrummond - Battle of Ideas: Turn That Racket Off
We first came across ihopeyousuffer, an American solo post-rocker through free-download netlabel Pocket Change Records, when they released his first album This Is A Collection Of People To Ruin and he was amongst our favourite artists from that label. There was a sense of alienated brooding that darkened the tone of the first album, giving the usually expansive sound of post-rock a more claustrophobic form that really intensified on the second release Gold, Oil And Drugs with the track I Could Move Mountains For You - a brewing violence raging within it's boundaries like a churning storm cloud. All appropriatly evocative imagery to suit the post-rock tag, but a description that well fits the sound, and the solo artist form. The restraint charges the music with a greater presence that it might otherwise have it it went all out for the crescendo.
For his third release, the eponymous ihopeyousuffer, this characteristic remains unchanged but the mood has lightened somewhat. The first song - immensely titled Beware When The Great God Lets Loose A Thinker On This Planet - starts with a keening tone and near-audible sample of a rugged male voice bemoaning the lack of intoxicating pills (maybe more listens will make more sense of it), then a spirited beat kicks in speeding off with guitars and bass in tow creating that giddily emotional rushing sensation that makes this kind of music so addictive.
It's free to download, with, if you haven't caught our beat, 4 essential pieces of highly evocative instrumental music. There's no reason not to let it get you.
