DOWNLOAD: Twilight Owls - I've Never Been To The Sea

Another deeply enchanting ep from Moscow's solo drone pioneer Twilight Owls. This one is picked out a little bit more than his previous locked tone movements, as he clambers over the rockpools on his first foray to the seaside.  There's the humid air of Ducktails permeating the first part, a dense tropical twang rocking gently to the delay and reverb settings, along with that oddly East/West modal tone and sense of nostalgic aura that Real Estate creates so well too  The picked notes eventually get washed into the waves of drone that form the second track, but like the action of the tide itself they are eventually pushed back to the surface and on to the beach for the closing cycles.




He also recorded an seemingly infinite loop cover of John Maus' excellent Cop Killer:

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

VIDEO: Twilight Owls - Wakonda Auga

Last and distinctly not least in my posts from the Lautreamont RA Studios video set, Twilight Owls is probably my favourite artist from the left-field psych/drone scene out of Russia that I covered, playing as TO, in Khumry and other soundscapist bands - his solo project as Twilight Owls has some of the most beautifully sculpted sounds and effective, euphorically subtle manipulations of themes of any drone artists to have caught my ears in the last twelve months.  This mirror rippled light trailing video enhances the disorienting effect of the music as each delayed chord hangs and rocks back and forth between the next, overlapping and shifting forwards with mental hazing effect that leaves you stoned.

Follow him on his Soundcloud too, for updats on all his projects.

DOWNLOAD: Khmury - Live

More new Russian-based mayhem for you in the form of Khmury's new release; a two track, twenty minute live gig taped in nice and deep hi-fidelity.  The band includes Fedya, of Twilight Owls' fame, an artist who is getting some wider attention through his releases on Amdiscs, and deservedly so as I've said before. On his own he works in shades of drone, but this band is an entirely different beast and they start off this set with Youth Against Youth a song that stamps the rock throttle on full and drops some squealing leads closer to Guns N' Roses than Barn Owl. It's an awesome start to the instrumental set than soon yields to a decelerating passage than recalls the Twin Peaks theme, deliberately or not, lightly enough that it owns the musical passage but also with enough atmosphere to put you straight into the surreal headspace of Lynch's pine forests complete with a chilly tension.  From there the thirteen minutes swirl, pummel, soar and pound past in a pretty triumphant mix of post-rock and a range of harder stuff that feels good to bang your head into.   The second track, a brief four minute roar called Broken Bass Jam is the sound of an overdriven  amp and the most guttural Sabbath worshipping punishment capable of being dealt out by the band, with more of that savage lead guitar work crawling and scrawling across it's face.

Love this band, even more so for the fact thy keep giving it out for free:

Cut out and keep:  DOWNLOAD

Stream:

  Khmury - 01 - Youth Against Youth by twilightowls

Asian Women on the Telephone

Eastern Europe seems to be producing some pretty fine guitar music of late - not including various kinds of metal, which this wide area consistently excels at - but recently there has been a lot of shoegaze, drone, post rock, witch house; bands like The Moglass, Arabian Horses, Love Cult, PinkShinyUltraBlast, Twilight Owls, and of course Prague's AMDISCS label who I have a pathalogical need to mention at least once a week.  Add to that, this band.

Asian Women on the Telephone is a Moscow-based junkyard art punk improv noise outfit whose self-styled 'purist Dada' experimentalism is very Throbbing Gristle in feel, if not exactly sound - a shifting clanking, urban dronescape, channelled thorugh multiple pedal manipulation with all sorts of bizarre vocals shreiked, hissed, and cackled at intervals through some of the tracks. Their Bandcamp site has three albums up for free download; two from earlier this year and one from last year.  All excellent, involving single minded entities that have a sense of multi-minded purpose:

Chelsea Grandpa
Holotropic Break
AWOTT III




They also have a split casette out on Full of Nothing records with Arabian Horses, available to order HERE

Beginning as a duo in 2007 AWOTT is now a five-piece incarnation, donning constumes, masks and involving all sorts of industrial and psychedelic paraphelia in their stage shows, which in this video makes for a menacing, unpredictable and unclassifiable experience:

Twilight Owls

 
Twilight Owls is one of my favourite artists on the awesome AMDISCS label, with a free download available from their page that I've had on repeat since they posted it up. He just made a new tumblr blog with nothign on it yet, but keep your eye on it and see what happens.

He's a solo dronesman mixing song styles with outward looking tones - think Sun Araw, Barn Owl, Pocahaunted, Ducktails rolled over and dragged across the Russian tundra - he can move from subtle to raw to roar with the flick of a switch and does so compellingly across the tracks strewn across MySpace and AmDiscs in the various bands he plays in. He drums in two bands that are on hold at present, Радиолюбитель and He Called Himself Jesus, but he also has an active and very very promising thing going on in the form of Khmury; a psych collaboration with Prea Hrada, in which they take a atmospheric setting, play with the nuances of it, flexing and tensing; building up to a full on galloping charge.

Here's a download and video of them in action.

DOWNLOAD: Khmury - Jam#1