Wrnlrd - Death Drive (FSS, 2010)

Wrnlrd - Grave Dowser


Wrnlrd's new bit of what the fuck is coming out soon on FSS. Black? Sure. Metal? Mostly. Scratchy drone, static soul, and whatever else the dude wants to throw in? Obviously. It's less than 20 minutes long but Death Drive is a twisted beast that defies logic & explanation aka pure gold.

It opens innocently enough with a few tracks of buzzing black guitars, blasting & chugging drums, and inhuman Cerberus snarls. The first is pretty straightforward, nothing too out of the ordinary for weirdo black metal, but each track delves deeper into the totally fucking bizarre. There's horn n shit, sludgy grit, buried epic solos, chimes & general wonky-ness.

But by the time it gets to the fourth track, "Luster," it rips out its metal heart and goes for the delicate & dejected solo piano. Definitely not unheard of on a black metal record, but this one seems to be lacking a certain darkness. It sounds almost like it could be found on Lambent Material if Eluvium was feeling sad enough. So obviously it's awesome, just more added weirdness. But Wrnlrd saved the biggest mindfuck for the end. It starts as a droney harmonium/accordion sounding piece, bubbling up from the swamp, that shifts gears into a full blown nightmare of metal fury. It makes no sense and is totally fucking brilliant.

Death Drive is a snack size chunk of insane black metal that's off the fucking wall. Wrnlrd killed it with this new one and FSS is bestowing it upon us in the form of a sweet 10" (or digital if that's your thing (idiot)). Should be out around Thanksgiving, perfect timing for scaring the shit out of your relatives.

Will Thomas Long - Sequoia (basic_sounds, 2010)

Will Thomas Long - Sequoia


As many already know, the incredible husband-wife drone duo Celer ceased making music once Danielle Baquet-Long died last year. However, Will Thomas Long, the other half, continues creating and just released a new EP through the new netlabel offshoot of my most favoritest sites ever, basic_sounds.

Sequoia is one 22 minute track dedicated to the memory of Will's late wife. It's a minimal mournful elegy of outstanding beauty. It sounds very much like Celer, slow moving and subtle. The few tones resonate through open snow fields, intertwining amidst barely shifting air currents. It's simultaneously restrained & expansive, dense & delicate.

I'm glad Will is still making music, and that it's just as fantastic as the work he did with Celer. I'm also glad basic_sounds is taking a step towards more formal curating through a netlabel. This release is kind of a no brainer, considering who's involved and I'm really fuckin psyched to see what else both of them have coming up in the near future.

Locrian - The Crystal World (Utech, 2010)

Locrian - At Night's End Link removed by request.
Locrian - Elevations And Depths (Excerpt)


These dudes just don't know when to stop. Which is definitely a good thing for us. The world could never have too much Locrian. Especially when they get exponentially better with each new release being even more amazingly badass and in a totally different way than the last. The Crystal World (with Steven Hess of Pan American, On, etc adding some percussion & electronics) takes the blackened ambient heart of Locrian's other albums and juices it up, dropping all the metal baggage, creating a dark as fuck stillbirth of a noise record.

As much as I love Locrian's heavy riffs, even without them this might be one of my favorites of theirs and is easily the best crafted. Lots of warped vocals, like the bleak tortured screaming on numerous tracks, or the shamanistic meditation oms & haunted angelic serenades on "At Night's End," which is the most killer fucking track there is. It's a slow candle burning walk through a moonlit church until halfway through the song, the riffs & drums come crashing in and the chanting blows up, filling the entire nave with the lost hope of redemption. Plus, up until that point on the record, it's all subdued meandering darkness, nothing too loud or epic. It totally catches you by surprise and is all the more crushing because of it.

That's about as heavy as it gets on The Crystal World, though. Sure there's doomy percussion and buzzing guitars, it wouldn't be Locrian otherwise. But the emphasis isn't on the devastation, it's on the textured desolation & hidden tragedy in every day life. Swirling pianos mix with mournful riffs creating a beautiful mess of faux sweet dreams. A thick crust of crunching feedback crumbles away into a slow motion avalanche of demon alarms and rupturing stone howls. Black as fuck nightmares caused by buried hatred, the distant scars of pain & anguish fade into a massive wall of endlessly beautiful gray static.

Locrian keep outdoing themselves. I remember hearing them for the first time and thinking, "Holy shit there's no way they could get any better than this." And EVERY record is better. I couldn't have been more wrong. The Crystal World is Locrian at the top of their game but I'm not going to say they can't do better because they obviously can and will. I can't think of a single reason not to find this record as soon as it comes out and play it every day until your death.

P.S. This review is for the LP version. The 2xCD version has a second CD (duh) with an extra hour long track that Locrian didn't want to split up to make it fit on an LP.

Double Awake - Leaving Nowhere Forever (self released, 2010)

Double Awake - Drooling Tears


This dude kinda came outta nowhere in Boston. One night I went to a noise show where he was opening for Geoff Mullen & KFW which he totally owned, next thing I know he's also playing in the psych outfit Mind Yeti, booking shows as Slow Blood Music, playing live every chance he gets, and banging out screen printed CD-Rs like a motherfucker.

Leaving Nowhere Forever is Will Mayo's newest disc of synthy drone noise. Compared to his previous efforts like Infinite Classroom and Not Enough Noise In Vermont, this one's definitely my top pick. Real classy stuff, gritty & smooth, moody as fuck, waves of a static sea swirling all over each other. It's 4 tracks, 3 new "studio" pieces and a killer 28 minute live set from Problem House.

The best part of all this is he's finally got some web presence. He started up a Bandcamp page where you can download Leaving Nowhere Forever as a pay-what-you-want deal. There's only one other EP up at the moment, but the plan is to make the rest of his previous CD-R's available as well. Trust me, you want to get in on this.

Video: Kyle Bobby Dunn at First Presbyterian Church (Brooklyn)

Kyle Bobby Dunn playing live in a church with a string & brass ensemble 2 weeks ago. God fucking dammit why didn't we all go to this? Also, wait until the end... wtf is that all about?

Brandon Nickell - And If You Set This Mind Of Mine Afire Then On My Bloodstream I Yet Will Carry You (Isounderscore, 2010)

Brandon Nickell - And If You Set This Mind Of Mine Afire Then On My Bloodstream I Yet Will Carry You


Brandon Nickell is one bad motherfucker. The dude owns the incredible Isounderscore label, runs, like, 8 miles a day, puts together kickass shows, and makes ridiculously awesome noise. Also, he must never sleep.

His new poetically & cryptically tongue twisted album, And If You Set This Mind Of Mine Afire Then On My Bloodstream I Yet Will Carry You, has been in the making for years and it's finally seeing the light of day. I can 100% money back guarantee it was totally worthwhile to wait that long because this is a fucking beast of a record.

The 12 minute opener is a game changer. Album openers got a lot to live up to after this. Coupling high end tinnitus inducing bells with soothing somber organs equals uneasiness that knows no bounds. It's constantly vibrating, like a sea of electrons buzzing around a nucleus hell bent on explosion. Metal bowls, clanging chimes, a fury of burning metal that somehow manages to be highly enjoyable & pleasant.

The title track drops it down into the purest evil dronenoise I've ever heard. Maliciously relentless on your eardrums, panning and growling, screeching and crackling, this is honestly one of the best pieces this year. I'm damn near certain this is what it sounds like getting your head stuck in a hornet's nest that's being struck by lightning. Oh my fucking GOD it is so intense. The record could've just been this one track and people would still be praising him.

3 more tracks & over 20 minutes to go, you get yourself into some serious shit. Static poison blow darts knock you out so you can't run away and a pack of striped hyenas brutally assault you with cattle prods. Haunted minimalist house of glowing specters, creaking sparks, & piercing refractions. Swirling luminiferous aether, a scathing plasma seeping into your pores, taking over your body one cell at a time.

Nickell is clearly a supreme crafter of sound. And If You Set This Mind Of Mine Afire is easily one of the best noise records of 2010. The guy just totally fuckin nailed it with this record. If I have to wait another 5 years for Nickell to put out another record this insanely good, that's just 5 more years spent obsessing over this.

Video: Tim Fite - We Didn't Warn You

"We Didn't Warn You" is one of the standout tracks from Tim Fite's latest freebie Under The Table Tennis, an insanely good & bizarre hip-hop album about the current financial shithole the USA has gotten itself into. The video, inspired by Clu Gulager's short A Day With The Boys, is full of wacky kids playing Red Rover in the forest, vomiting strawberries, and burying their friends alive. You know, the usual kid stuff.

Fennesz, Burning Star Core, Noveller at The Middle East

Noveller: SWF old age ambient guitar loops, dusty tumbleweeds skipping across baked clay, hazy mirages, droplets in a well, muted sea glass shard kaleidoscope

Burning Star Core: solo rumpled silk violin drone, empty checkered floor kitchen freakout, Zorn farm animal smash, Patton porpoise whirlpool, high speed alien cartoon sputtering nonsense, Jupiter wind, scratchy atonal Burning Disco Core

Fennesz: it was fucking Fennesz, live, shiver inducing LOUD guitar drone perfection, a walking masterpiece, not enough words for that kind of beauty

More/bigger photos on Flickr.


Noveller



Burning Star Core



Fennesz

Lawrence English, Taylor Deupree, Xela at Art@12

Xela: black lazer echos in rusty warehouse, harmonic ghosts haunt drippy caves, tectonic plate shift, mouth of hell opens wide, crumbling apocalypse

Taylor Deupree: yellow leaf drone, gauzy uphill water, muffled papers shuffle, forest heartbeat, distant birds, suspended dust in a sunset lit attic

Lawrence English: eye of the tornado, glass bottles & cellar doors bash your skull, visceral static bliss, squawking puffins, waves crash, fucking loud as fuck

Xela


Taylor Deupree


Lawrence English

MP3: Young Adults - Wasting Time

Young Adults - Wasting Time


Boston's gloomy post punkgazers Young Adults are back with a legit debut release, the limited Black Hole 12" on AMDISCS, and it's fucking GRAND. All the tracks from the demo earlier this year find their way onto Black Hole but they're way more lush, full force high quality tunes that sound 10x better now. "Wasting Time" is killer, a lethargy fueled anthem made for blasting your way through Contra.

No DL link by request, sorry chums.

Video: The Station - No Homo

Two reasons I'm posting this. 1: The phrase "No homo" is endlessly funny. 2: That dude with the soul patch and emo hair is super hot.



via TDW

Woolgathering - Jamaica Plain Bedroom Recordings (self released, 2010)

Woolgathering - It's Called "Found Footage," Not "Worthless Filmstrips."


The dude over at Mango Nebula, the totally rad Boston based blog that keeps you abreast of all the new cool shit going down around town, is a sweet creator of lo-fi bedroom folk pop.

Woolgathering, which means something along the lines of absentminded daydreaming, is pretty straightforward stuff, a lonely guy singing soft with a guitar and the occasional glockenspiel. Great lyrics & voice, solid picking, and poor recording quality with lots of hiss, but for demos it sounds damn good and I wouldn't mind some of this haphazardness finding its way into a legit record.

Grab digital copy for however much you want on Bandcamp, or swipe a limited hand numbered/doodled physical copy for a mere $5.

P.S. For context, Woolgathering is also the same guy I caught bein a boss at Weirdstock playing rockabilly guitar for Cave Bears.

Linda Aubry Bullock - Ray Of Dark (Sedimental, 2010)

Linda Aubry Bullock (with MTB) - Line's Dead


The name Bullock gets tossed around here a lot. Michael T is a pretty cool dude, quite prolific. But his multi-talented wife, Linda Aubry Bullock, is an equally wondrous music maker and she's got a brand new disc on Sedimental of outstanding solo and collaborative works.

Ray Of Dark is 6 tracks totaling almost 50 minutes with 2 solo pieces, 2 with her husband (together as Rise Set Twilight), 1 with Eric Hardiman (of Rambutan/Tape Drift), and 1 with Ray Hare (of Fossils From The Sun). All 4 occasionally get together to play as Twilight Of The Century, and the first 4 tracks on Ray Of Dark are a direct reaction from one of their performances in Albany of '08. But even though this album is peppered with guests, their sound is never strong enough to dilute what is still thoroughly a Linda Aubry Bullock record.

The opener is the title track, one of the solo pieces, a perfect intro to Bullock's gritty post industrial mind. Tons of echoing & reverb, like a more chilling/less cheesy Jason Voorhees theme. People mumbling, chanting, yelling, and singing, the sounds of walking through an Arabian midnight market with electronic squawks, distant air raid sirens, creaking aluminum floorboards, & rusty buzz saws. I don't want to say that Bullock shows all her cards right in the beginning, but "Ray Of Dark" is crazy good and easily one of the best on the album. If you can get through that 11 minutes of awkward anxiety, you're a fucking champ and you'll make it to the end. Promise.

The rest of Ray is just a clusterfuck of cautious ambient doom. In every nook & cranny there's hidden terror & vertigo, each moment is paused in hesitation, waiting to raise your hackles, paranoid & filled with unnerving nausea. Of course, you're all alone while listening to this. In the dark of night, waiting for somebody to come home, clutch your cup of coffee and pull your knees closer to your chest. Crank it up, beware of "The Story Of Mike" and let the grinding engines permeate your walls & your bones.

Update: Apparently there was a little bit of confusion about the origin of some of the songs when I read the statement on Sedimental's site. Here's the factual shit straight from Mr. Bullock:

"...tracks 2, 3, and 4 were not composed by Linda, but they are all (like the title track) based on a live recording of Twilight of the Century, and they were all commissioned by Linda for this collection. So in addition to composing some of the music on the CD herself, she curated the rest of the album."

Also re: the title track: "Apparently the guy singing in the background is singing some famous French pop tune from the 70s" LOOOLL

Haiku Review: Cheb Samdoun & The Iridescent Ensemble - Cheb Samdoun & The Iridescent Ensemble (Sunrise Acoustics, 2010)

Cheb Samdoun & The Iridescent Ensemble - Nobody Understands Music


Cheb Samdoun & The Iridescent Ensemble (download)
/air vibrates color/
/pluck & thrum drone expansion/
/suspended buzz, cheers/

Bugs & Wind

The dude over at Holy Warbles posted this insect drone video and I was totally digging it, reminding me of that Sounds Of Insects LP I posted a while back and HW's own Cicadas & Crickets LP posting. Then I spent 3 seconds looking for a video to complement these bugs, found some mountain wind sounding like the ocean and BAM. YouTube Doubler.

Not sure if this embedded mashup is gonna work, so if not, click here to watch it in action.

YouTube Doubler

Tortoise, Keith Fullerton Whitman & Greg Davis & Ben Vida at The Paradise

The Paradise: newly renovated, wayyy more open & spacious, no more giant pillar in front of the stage, might actually think about going to more shows there

Keith Fullerton Whitman, Greg Davis, & Ben Vida: Arcade Ambiance style fire swamp, Jupiter basement discotheque, trans-warp glitter noise, FTL drive mechanics, dubbed out white hole, stutter static glory, massive junk rumbling sun drone, chaos bliss supreme

Tortoise: aging like Benjamin Button, getting smoother & tighter as time goes on, a band with a variety of different sounding albums that coalesce into a stupefying live experience, house lights be damned we cheered them out for a second encore, see them already, then see them again

Bigger photos on Flickr.

Keith Fullerton Whitman, Greg Davis, & Ben Vida

MP3: DJ Topcat - Folsom Prison Gangstaz (Eazy E vs Johnny Cash)

DJ Topcat - Folsom Prison Gangstaz (Eazy E vs Johnny Cash)


Apparently this was "buzzing all over the net" but I didn't see it amongst any of the circles I frequent. Thankfully my friend Steve passed this along to me.

Three fucking cheers to DJ Topcat because this mashup is INSANE. It's meshes so perfectly and honestly, I'm pretty sure we've all been waiting for an Eazy / Cash track. You wanna know how many times I hit play again as soon as it was over? TOO BAD. I lost count.

And yes, feel free to praise me for my hardcore 'shoppin skillz up there.

BOIL Mix / QRO Mag Giveaway

Album art sourced from CC image Drinking Flamingo

My pals over at QRO Mag are turning 1000 soon (in Twitter followers) and they love you all so much that they're having a contest. There are a couple ways to enter but the easiest is to just go follow them on Twitter because all new followers between 950-1000 are automatically entered (they're at about 960 right now).

The best part is the prizes are fucking sweet. There's a couple of label packages, one being from the interminably awesome Breakfast Of Champs including shit from Quilt, COP MAGNET, Total Slacker, and WITCH MTN. Hell yes! There's also a Burning Mill prize pack with releases from DOM, Golden Girls, Ape Debris, Golden Holy, and one surprise.

But then there's the mixtape part of the giveaway and that's where I come in. QRO Mag asked me and a few fellow bloggers (Cream Team, Knox Road, & No Modest Bear) to each create a mixtape for the giveaway. At first the idea was that the mix would be exclusive to the contest (at least until it was over), but they loosened up and are allowing us to post our own mixes on our blogs. So a hearty thank you & congrats to QRO Mag and all the other cool people involved with this. Way to fucking go. Now I present to you, BOIL.

You should recognize at least half of the stuff in this mix because it's culled from past reviews. The others are probably high profile enough that you'll know 'em anyway. And in case you couldn't tell, this is one hardcore noise/drone mix. It's sorta brutal. And it's sorta awesome. And it's my first attempt at a mix put together in Garage Band so I could smooth out the wrinkles & normalize it and shit, making it a single mp3. Let me know what you think.

BOIL
1. Lonesummer - "We've Lost a Day"
2. Halflings - "Burning Ambition"
3. The Vomit Arsonist - "Choke"
4. Kanin Krusete - "Veteran Plates"
5. Russell Haswell - "High Force From Above"
6. Millipede - "Surf"
7. The Conet Project - "5 Note Version ‘Czech Lady'"
8. Ultra Bonbon - "Resplendent City"
9. Wilt - "SVF"
10. Gerritt Wittmer - "Untitled 2"
11. Marinos Koutsomichalis - "Untitled 6"
12. Kouhei Matsunaga - "291107"

Video: Oval - Ah!

Matthew Barney + Carnivàle + Black Swan + new Oval = legit awesomeness aka:

WYLD WYZRDZ / Stag Hare - Antelope Island (Inner Islands, 2010)

WYLD WYZRDZ - Antelope


Utah DIY chieftain Braden J. McKenna brought a lot to the SLC scene. Lots of sweet music under various guises (WYLD WYZRDZ, his own name, etc), dozens of free releases through The Magic Goat, and general awesomeness. He's since gone to Portland, killed The Goat, and started a physical label called Inner Islands.

One of the first releases is a split seven inch mini wax with him and psych drone extraordinaire Stag Hare. Pretty much a match made in heaven. WYLD WYZRDZ puts on his fancy suit and goes to town with "Antelope." A delicately lush tropdrone, everything looped to infinity, equally perfect for a party scorcher or nap time chiller. Stag Hare's track, "Island," is a lazy shaker with faded lazers & a muted beat. The hazy guitar meanders along with echoing obscured vocals, making a supreme droney jam.

Regardless of where and when you play this, it's a sunny primer that always seems to require one more spin. Braden's got his shit together and I highly recommend grabbing this when it's officially available and then keeping your hawk eyes on Inner Islands waiting to see what's next.