Warm fuzz that adds weight to your eyelids when the sun dips out of sight at the end of a day on the beach or the comfort of hiking up the collar of your winter coat on a peaceful walk home on the first cold, crisp night.
Showing posts with label 2008. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2008. Show all posts
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Dirty Beaches - Horror LP (2008)
"Grainy nightmare drones and clanks creeping out of a radio tuned to somewhere we’re not supposed to know about" - Warren Ellis on "In Dreams"
Monday, September 13, 2010
AC / DP - Thunderstruck (2008)
If you are wondering if i lost my mind and changed my taste to cheap rock 'n' roll you are wrong... this is a collaboration between Andrew Coltrane and David Payne. Possibly if you are into good old rock music, you don't have anything to do with this site and you have mispelled for another group... bb...Monday, September 6, 2010
6Majik9 - Black Sattva (A beard of snails records 2008)
Breathing sattvic fire, floating on a mystic lake of pseudo-jazz, everyone's favourite mostly anonymous Australian conspirators deliver the goods on their Scandinavian debut. Mellow and weird, this 4 track, 43-minute opus of percussive wyrld jamz, intricate improv, abrasive rawk and laid back lunacy is presented in a gatefold cover with hand painted/stamped abstract imagery inside. *A Beard Of Snails Records
Monday, June 28, 2010
Until The Light Takes Us (2008)
The homely but homey, longhaired and black-leathered Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell of Darkthrone, one of the progenitors of Norway's indigenous, extreme-heavy-metal subgenre black metal, is a likeable, articulate, working-class musician. Varg "Count Grishnackh" Vikernes of the one-man project Barzum and a founder of the seminal 1980s band Mayhem, is a clean-cut, goateed boy-next-door—who until his parole earlier this year was nearing his 16th year of a 21-year sentence for murder and multiple arsons. It would be stretching things to absurdity to call them the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X of the music, but between their two viewpoints lies the entirety of a niche whose influence outweighs its popularity. As Nagell says early on in the doc Until the Light Takes Us, he went further into the music and Vikernes further into the politics.
Those politics are the standard-issue leanings of a paranoid megalomaniac—he uses the former term specifically, and the latter just naturally arises from his talk of being god-like and having followers—and Vikernes' boyish mien recalls nothing so much as Timothy McVeigh or maybe Charlie Starkweather. Embodying the extreme of the black metal subculture, where the deliberately discordant, Goth/KISS, emo-on-amphetamine vibe takes a decided backseat, he champions an ultra-nationalism in which "Christianity, the U.S., NATO, Norwegian democracy" are all instinctively wrong.
Vikernes and a shocking number of others like him took this as license in the early 1990s to burn down churches—and worse. One interviewee, Olve "Abbath" Eikemo of the band Immortal, applauds a fellow black metaler's 1992 knife murder of "this fucking faggot back in Lillehammer." The Norwegian press made sensationalistic hay of such crimes, misinterpreting them as the work of musical Satanists rather than what they were: domestic terrorism by ultra-right-wing xenophobes. Like some deranged Idaho survivalist, Vikernes talks about having stockpiled weapons preparing for—hoping for—World War III, since "to build something new, you have to destroy the old first."
Vikernes speaks from the remarkably dorm-like Trondheim Prison, which he shrugs off as "a monastery" and from which he was released on May 24, 2009, despite being convicted of four church arsons and the knifing murder of influential band-mate Øystein "'Euronymous" Aarseth. (Another influential musician, Mayhem vocalist Per Yngve "Dead" Ohlin, pulled a Kurt Cobain; a photo of him with his brains blown out appears on the 1995 bootleg live album Dawn of the Black, shown here.)
Throughout all this, the cautiously amiable Nagell tries to be an ambassador of sorts for the music itself, describing his influences and the impetus for black metal's creation as a deliberately depressing, starkly anti-commercial expression of Norwegian nihilism. Snippets of several songs reveal a sometimes hypnotic blend of 1970s Black Sabbath meets Windham Hill by way of John Cage. We see bits of concerts in which performers cut their arms and bleed profusely—knives seem to play a big role in Norway—and artist Bjarne Melgaard's black-metal-influence paintings.
Hearing from fans and music critics would have been nice, as would a videographer without apparent Parkinson's. But for all the amateurishness of San Francisco filmmakers Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, the Alice-Cooper-to-the-nth subculture they document has a lurid fascination that pulls you along.
Those politics are the standard-issue leanings of a paranoid megalomaniac—he uses the former term specifically, and the latter just naturally arises from his talk of being god-like and having followers—and Vikernes' boyish mien recalls nothing so much as Timothy McVeigh or maybe Charlie Starkweather. Embodying the extreme of the black metal subculture, where the deliberately discordant, Goth/KISS, emo-on-amphetamine vibe takes a decided backseat, he champions an ultra-nationalism in which "Christianity, the U.S., NATO, Norwegian democracy" are all instinctively wrong.
Vikernes and a shocking number of others like him took this as license in the early 1990s to burn down churches—and worse. One interviewee, Olve "Abbath" Eikemo of the band Immortal, applauds a fellow black metaler's 1992 knife murder of "this fucking faggot back in Lillehammer." The Norwegian press made sensationalistic hay of such crimes, misinterpreting them as the work of musical Satanists rather than what they were: domestic terrorism by ultra-right-wing xenophobes. Like some deranged Idaho survivalist, Vikernes talks about having stockpiled weapons preparing for—hoping for—World War III, since "to build something new, you have to destroy the old first."
Vikernes speaks from the remarkably dorm-like Trondheim Prison, which he shrugs off as "a monastery" and from which he was released on May 24, 2009, despite being convicted of four church arsons and the knifing murder of influential band-mate Øystein "'Euronymous" Aarseth. (Another influential musician, Mayhem vocalist Per Yngve "Dead" Ohlin, pulled a Kurt Cobain; a photo of him with his brains blown out appears on the 1995 bootleg live album Dawn of the Black, shown here.)
Throughout all this, the cautiously amiable Nagell tries to be an ambassador of sorts for the music itself, describing his influences and the impetus for black metal's creation as a deliberately depressing, starkly anti-commercial expression of Norwegian nihilism. Snippets of several songs reveal a sometimes hypnotic blend of 1970s Black Sabbath meets Windham Hill by way of John Cage. We see bits of concerts in which performers cut their arms and bleed profusely—knives seem to play a big role in Norway—and artist Bjarne Melgaard's black-metal-influence paintings.
Hearing from fans and music critics would have been nice, as would a videographer without apparent Parkinson's. But for all the amateurishness of San Francisco filmmakers Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, the Alice-Cooper-to-the-nth subculture they document has a lurid fascination that pulls you along.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Lee Ranaldo - Maelstrom From Drift (2008)
Lee Ranaldo's "Maelstrom From Drift" provides an excellent snapshot of his entire solo career, collecting tracks recorded over the span of a decade plus and with numerous different sorts of collaborators.
From the album's start with a track from Ranaldo's Glacial project with David Watson (bagpipes) and Tony Buck (drums) to it's conclusion with the multi-layered guitar din of the title track, "Maelstrom From Drift" is a highly focused work providing the listener with numerous different aural styles, each ready to engage and challenge the listener.
Lee Ranaldo proved himself long ago a musician comfortable in any number of settings, but on the unpredictable procession of these nine tracks, it’s the more focused music that finds him at his best.
From the album's start with a track from Ranaldo's Glacial project with David Watson (bagpipes) and Tony Buck (drums) to it's conclusion with the multi-layered guitar din of the title track, "Maelstrom From Drift" is a highly focused work providing the listener with numerous different aural styles, each ready to engage and challenge the listener.
Lee Ranaldo proved himself long ago a musician comfortable in any number of settings, but on the unpredictable procession of these nine tracks, it’s the more focused music that finds him at his best.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Gorman - Alum Creek (2008)
Gorman was Jordan Spencer, the man that runs Cabin Floor Esoterica. Gorman is now a defunct pseudonym but in his two years he got releases out on Blackest Rainbow, Tired Trails Collective, Housecraft and Reverb Worship, alongside his own labels, Open Range Records and Cabin Floor Esoterica.
There is an underlying drone to Gorman releases but I think ambient is much more appropriate. It's a bright melancholy - if you'll allow me that juxtaposition. Is the distortion digital from the tape to CD transfer? At times it certainly sounds that way, yet somehow it adds to the recording. It gives you that sense of your windows rattling without needing to check if your ears have begun to bleed.
This is still available from Reverb Worship so please consider buying a copy if you enjoy it.
1. Rock Skipping, Olentangy River (12:15)
2. Stepping Into Early Fog (10:00)
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Stephan Mathieu - Radioland (2008)
Radioland fulfills the cardinal principle of ambient music; you can play it for pleasant background sound, but it richly repays close listening. It is a close kin to Rafael Toral’sWave Field. Both discs back up breathtaking surface appeal - in other words, you don’t have to be totally warped by noise to find the music really beautiful - with layer upon layer of essential details that change radically depending on how loud you play the thing and yield endless rewards to attention paid. Take “Raphael,” the opening track. In the course of a few seconds, orchestral woodwinds slide over static like a glacier in a hurry. While the horns build and swell, different strains of electronic noise filter in and out of hearing; they’re there and then gone like white-caps in a choppy sea. Musical performances, conversations, and the hiss and crackle endemic to shortwave bandwidths all come into play, but most of the time they’re so processed that it’s the timbre and texture, not the provenance, of Mathieu’s material that stands out. He has a knack for snatching and transforming sounds, like the bobbing high tones on “Eine Promenade” and the shimmering midrange early in “Licht und Finsternis zum Auge,” so that they seem unchanging even though they’re in constant flux.
Radioland is the most beautiful ambient record and the most immersive piece of drone I’ve heard all year, but to leave it at that would still be damning it with faint praise. This is simply one of the loveliest wall-to-wall sounds around.
Radioland is the most beautiful ambient record and the most immersive piece of drone I’ve heard all year, but to leave it at that would still be damning it with faint praise. This is simply one of the loveliest wall-to-wall sounds around.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Tartarus - ΧΑΟΣ (private 2008)
ΧΑΟΣ in ancient Greece meant the initial state of the universe, and by extension space, darkness and abyss.
Those are the exact words that can describe ΧΑΟΣ by Tartarus. This cd-r (limited to 50) recorded in a cloudless night at the winter of 2008. The Mastermind behind this medieval creation is Tefkros who performed all of the instruments in this release as he recorded also the whole album by himself. The sound is bleak and raw as the creator of this discribes it as Supreme Hellenic Black Arts. If you are into obscure you should check Tartarus... if not... your loss... Brother Ray will sure wait to hear some more works from Tefkros in the near future.
Tracklisting:
1.From The Past
2.Pagan Massacre
3.Chaos
4.Reaper (Hellhammer cover)
5. S/M (sadistic mass) *bonus
A video for the track "From The Past" here
Download (artwork included)
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