Red Horse - Red Horse (Rel, 2009)

Check out some more of the beautiful packaging on Flickr.

Red Horse - Side B (untitled)


Red Horse is a band that has gained a mysterious cult appeal, at least in the Boston area. The duo of Eli Keszler and Steve Pyne rarely do live performances and they've been around for years before they finally released their self titled debut just a few months ago. There have been plenty of people (not so) patiently waiting this record. Well, if you had any expectations of this album, I assure you now that they have been surpassed. Red Horse is brilliant.

Half of the fun of listening to this is figuring out wtf the sounds are coming from. Pyne is a regular DIY engineer, crafting "massive hand-constructed string instruments, motor-automated resonances, homespun multi-layered Leslies, speaker arrays and sculptural electronics." And then Keszler's got his bowed percussion and drumming the shit out of anything within arm's reach. So before you hear any of the music, Red Horse already has an appealing aesthetic behind it.

But the music is so much more than novelty, which could easily be the case with whacked out home made instruments. Red Horse walk the delicate line of nonsense noise and the freest jazz your brain can imagine. There is a cohesive form that works it's way into the skittery droning realm that Keszler & Pyne have firmly planted themselves in. They take the dabbling of your regular basement freak's CD-Rs and BAM take it up a few dozen notches.

Red Horse is so much more than I ever could have hoped to have on a Red Horse record. Listening to Keszler go all spazzlike with his drumming that sounds like the endless rain of Kerplunk marbles is pure heaven. And I can only assume that it's Pyne who's throwing down that positively disturbing drone.

The two of these guys are like fucking heroes. Anyone who has any dreams of making avant garde/experimental/noise/ear fuckkking music should start taking notes. And start practicing. 'Cause Red Horse have brought the fucking thunder.

Ghost Grass - Hydrogen (Wire Sounds, 2009)

Ghost Grass - Side A (untitled)


Ghost Grass is the guise under which Max Lord records. I had the opportunity to see him do a live collaboration with Karlheinz and that was the first I'd heard of either of them. Lord blew my mind with his furious drumming and I knew I had to hear some of his recorded work asap. Sadly, I procrastinated in my quest for his tunes but eventually a copy of his newest tape Hydrogen came my way and man was it worth the fuckin wait.

Hydrogen is basically a synth/electronics tape with lots of live drums. In other words, TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. The A side begins with all out retro sci-fi mainframe meltdown for about 4 or 5 minutes until it coalesces into something your open minded jazz loving dad might call "music." It goes from more noise/less music and vice versa until it ODs on sedatives and morphs into an organic synth drone with a pulse. Absolutely beautiful, washes of thick hypnotic waves and hidden piano. A true standout of a piece unlike anything else on the tape.

Turn it over and you're welcomed by some more electronic mayhem with hardly any live percussion to speak of. I wouldn't quite call it power electronics but it's pretty damn close. When it slows things down, it turns towards the dark side with unsettling tones and menacing rumbling. In time, the pace quickens with the addition of Lord killing his drum kit and some electronic squawks all the while remaining just as foreboding but it again returns back to the minimal scariness sans drumming. The tape finishes off with the most spare and terrifying sounds offered.

I don't know if Hydrogen is anything like the rest of Lord's recorded output. But if it is, you can guarantee that I'll be picking up some more of his ridiculously limited and rarely distributed albums. Right now, this tape is only available through Lord himself at shows or you could probably contact him and ask nicely. If you give him some money I'm sure he'd send you one.

Maniacs Dream - Zanzibar (Arbor, 2008)

Maniacs Dream - Side A (Untitled)


All hail the Finnish super group! For real, Maniacs Dream features members of Avarus, Kemialliset Ystävät, my personal favorite, Fricara Pacchu, making some seriously fucked tunes so this definitely counts as a super group.

Long has it been since I've listened to a band whose name was as accurately descriptive of the music. I bet you heard the name Maniacs Dream and didn't really think too much about it. Just another name. GUESS AGAIN FOOL.

Zanzibar sounds, quite literally, like a maniac's dream. Asynchronous percussion, atonal squeals, blown out static, almost every sound seems like it's trying to break free of the "music" label. If I didn't know better, I'd say a bunch of idiots got trashed in someone's basement one night, grabbed a bunch of non-instruments, and recorded the slop that came out. But these are highly respected musicians that made Zanzibar so that means it's genius, right?

All jokes aside, this record is flat out awesome. Not especially accessible, but fucking rad nonetheless. Total free electronic tribal folk noise with little sense of direction but plenty of depth. Listen to it a dozen times and you start hearing things that weren't there to begin with.

This is a review of the vinyl reissue of the 2006 tape on Lal Lal Lal. I don't think there was any re-sequencing or added tracks or anything but I just thought I'd throw that out there. Oh, also, it's pressed on light blue vinyl with super slick packaging and limited to 450 copies so get on that shit.

Malinalli - Path Of The Fruit (Cloud Valley, 2009)

Malinalli - Side A (Untitled)


Malinalli seems to be a mysterious dude(s). I can't come up with anything on Google that seems to be related to the same Malinalli that made Path Of The Fruit. All I got is the Cloud Valley Myspace that links to Dream Safari in the description of Path. And the DS page has as much info as Google does on Malinalli so that doesn't help much. Does Dream Safari = Malinalli? Who knows, man. Those are just minor details, though. All that really matters is how fucking crazy amazing Path Of The Fruit is.

As soon as you hit play, it sounds like you entered a much less epic Temple Of Doom. I don't think there's any vocals, but the sounds created have that chanting monk like quality to them. It's a gorgeous blend of tones that are both unnerving and relaxing. It's a very confusing piece, the kind that fucks with your head a bit.

The B side is just as monk like, only this time it has a much stronger vocal feeling to it. Totally weird stuff. I just keep coming back to the Temple Of Doom thing. Like I went spelunking in a deep uncharted cave in the middle of Peru and stumbled upon some long lost almost inhuman tribe and this is the language they use. Nothing too religious or anything, just loooooong drones, like these people have lost all concept of time and communicate in the slowest way possible.

Path Of The Fruit is an enchanting listen. It might only be appropriate for very specific times in your life (like when you have your parents over for dinner) but when that time comes, this tape is gonna be fucking perfect.

Cannibal Frequencies - Untitled

Cannibal Frequencies - Untitled 2


This was supposed to be one of those "mysterious" tapes. The kind of thing that, for whatever reason, has an obviously fake story about it's origins. Label Gods Of Tundra said, "I found this master buried underneath the dirt in the woods next to my building. It was covered in mud and mostly rotted. Turns out Mike Shiflet recorded this, dug a hole and threw it in there 2 years ago. Now its been unearthed and its time to for the rot to soak into your stereos." So, yeah, this is a tape by Mike Shiflet under the moniker Cannibal Frequencies and it's fucking brutal.

Two sides, 15 minutes each, both consisting of an almost totally unwavering static buzz. They're absolutely relentless. I had two co-workers come in and hear this tape and they ended up being spot on with their descriptions. One of them side of the A side, "This sounds like something from Close Encounters, you know with the UFO." I kind of doubt a real spacecraft would sound like this, but a Hollywood UFO? Definitely. I think this is more like what the radio would sound like if a UFO was flying by, disrupting the frequencies.

The other friend said the B side sounded like "the stampede of a thousand horses." So true. If you just close your eyes and imagine yourself trapped in a canyon with a herd of horses (bulls might be a more appropriate animal), I'm pretty sure this is what you'd hear. Completely static, the sound only wavering as much as a stampede would. Amazing.

This isn't really the kind of stuff I'd recommend listening to at work. My colleagues seemed a bit weirded out by it, giving me some strange looks, but they were for the most part OK with it. My guess is not all people would be as forgiving. Most might ask you to turn it off. And in this particular case, you probably don't have a really good case for keeping it on.