Tagged: psychedelic

February 28, 2013

Go Back to the Sirius: voyage into multi-dimensional psychedelic realms

3841355101-1 — “A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops…”

VagusNerve, Go Back to the Sirius, Utech Records, URCD073 (2012)

Are they serious? No way would you want to return to the “serious” world of reality after travelling to Sirius with these space travellers. VagusNerve is a Chinese-based duo of guitarist Li Jianhong and laptopper Vavabond and this is their second release for Utech Records. Initially this seems like just another very long and trippy psychedelic voyage into the deep inner space in our heads until the musicians turn on the full radioactive force of blaring guitar feedback and electronic drones, dolphin whistles, low-end buzz and ghostly phantom voices. In the background, coelenterate UFOs float, land on planets, arise and hover in the atmosphere, their fragile tendril-like tentacles wafting behind them. Barking seal voices reverberate in the black clouds and extended guitar drones reach out in all directions from an unseen singularity. A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops: perpetual motion engines hum furiously, anti-matter drives are on the verge of exploding/imploding, thrumming vibrations and rapidly spinning energy vortices howl and wobble on the edge of chaos and diffusion through all the galaxies.

That was “The Memory of Light” alone and second track “The Exiled Life” is a bit more subdued but no less disorienting in its swerving highs and lows. Vocals are much less blurry and more forward in the track but still very watery and distorted as though Li was speaking to us from a multi-dimensional plane and our particular inadequate space-time continuum was cramming all the different dimensions into its own crude tunnel. This can still be a noisy piece but it appears less exuberant and more restrained in character.

However it’s the third and final track “Go Back to the Sirius” which is as hard-edged, penetrating and searingly hot as it is deliriously expansive and cosmic in scope and ambition. Laser death rays of attack guitar pass through all defences and scan all the cells in living organisms while faint background droning probes and collects fragments of DNA for future experimentation. Eerie and sinister alien communications pop in and out, sinuous effects flutter into view before disappearing quickly into the ether, and faint phantasms bark and whine while Li’s increasingly stuttering guitar drones command all our attention with their insistent howls and yelps. Eventually this work passes to another plane of existence and calms down considerably yet retains a hysterical edge.

This is a wondrous work if heard loudly late at night when the mind is relaxed and submerging into semi-conscious mode; at other times, the music can sometimes seem monotonous and single-minded, even cantankerous in its insistence on commanding your full attention. I have a sense that “Go Back to the Sirius” might win cult status for this act in years to come, not so much for the music but for its ambition and vision, not to mention the duo pushing their instruments and imagination to the utmost.

Contact: Utech Records

February 18, 2013

Apocryphal Stories: grim tales of descent into avant-black metal / industrial / noise world

"Utarm...finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos..." — “Utarm…finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos…”

Utarm, Apocryphal Stories, Handmade Birds Records, CD (2012)

Good thing Utarm called his album “Apocryphal Stories” as I’d hate to think the five songs here were for real. Judging from the continuous demented wailing and screaming, and the twisted theatrical Satanic stylings of the music, you’d think the Utarm man has spent all his life in Arkham Asylum, that mental institution hell-hole beloved of Lovecraftian short stories and Batman graphic novels; and some would say perhaps he has indeed spent all his life in a bizarre mental institution – for isn’t our entire planet one insane asylum where the most severely disturbed and psychotic inmates are those in charge of all our major political, economic and religious institutions, claiming to know what’s best for us? “Apocryphal Stories” certainly plays as if, having awoken one day and realised his nightmare was not only for real but was also never-ending, the Utarm man decided to record an album detailing his horror and anguish at being permanently trapped with 7 billion crazies on Planet Apokolips right here on Earth.

Opening track “AltEtende Skaper” might capture the moment when the Utarm fella wakes up and finds himself sliding into an internal psycho-chaos: it begins with a slowly expanding universe of warped music-box melodies, spooky ghost lullabies and the guy’s own cries of inner torment. There’s a definite air of disorientation as if he’s waking up from a drugged state and he can barely talk and stand. Voices come out of his brain but he knows not what they are, what they’re saying, where they’re coming from or even if they’re his and not artificial implants. Full realisation hits him about the 6th minute in a huge blow-out of distorted metal guitar fuzz, pounding industrial percussion and howling vocal despair. The whole thing is gut-wrenching, heart-breaking and soul-destroying though there’s a campy edge to the destruction.

The torment doesn’t lessen with “Of Rape, Solitude and Bliss; the Triangle of Flesh”, a creepy suspenseful blackened drama of solo operatic singing, more disorientation with a shaky tempo, and a strange stage-like ambience as though a medieval play about the Black Death was playing out before us. We watch the central character tortured by sights and visions in his mind while beings of ether swirl around his head, baiting him constantly. Again, quite late in the song, there’s new existential pain as a wobbly guitar melody, distorted static buzz and something that sounds like a demon cow mooing and sitting on top of the singer drown out his screams.

And so the album plays out like a twisted Ingmar Bergman film of soul-searching amid desolate soundscapes of bristling, buzzing guitar noise, gently swirling and trilling guitar melodies, tortured screeching and always that strange atmosphere of blissful and serene yet deranged black trance. Layers of sound and noise are at once warm and soothing, and filled with agony and derangement. No matter how bombastic or demented the album gets, there’s always a very strong sense of direction; the songs could easily have gone all over the place and become totally overpowering but it’s to Utarm’s credit that the music is intense and focused throughout the album. The result is that compared to similar blackened metal/industrial/noise acts like Gnaw Their Tongues, Utarm comes across as epic, bombastic and even majestic without becoming overwhelming. There is a core of trance-like bliss in the music that’s reminiscent of drone doomsters Nadja.

Well … the avant-black metal/industrial/noise torture continues all the way to and through outro track “Above Death” with more whooping screams and howls, a strange echoing hover-drone as if our man had been dumped in an underground wind tunnel lined with metal sheets and high-pressure industrial white hiss is pissing through it. Severely damaged freak-out power electronics are being churned out of a sausage-mincing machine; the manufacturers would collapse and die in horror at the way their choppers and mincing grilles were being used here. (Especially if they were the ones strapped to the conveyor belts.)

This collection of grimmer-than-grimm fables and fairy-stories is freaky and intense … the music is scary and noisy, anguished and tortured, yet at times strangely peaceful, trance-like and blissed-out at its centre … a deranged genius is at work here.

Contact: Handmade Bird Records

December 21, 2012

Epidemics of the Modern Age: harsh noise drone that morphs into a greater psychedelic drone monster

Brennendes Gehirn, Epidemics of the Modern Age, Ordo Pestilentia, CD ORDO001 (2012)

Debut release by what looks like a band from some distant snowbound part of Iceland but which is the brainchild of one Matt Harries, this CD is a stunning panorama of bleak post-apocalyptic blackened ambience and digital industrial soundscaping. I wonder if Harries really does know of some part of Iceland or a similar region in his country where blizzards blow continuously and carve out odd landscapes with metal scythes, perpetual-motion chainsaws and geothermally powered hacksaws.

Opening track “Chorea Imaginative Aestimative” is one of the strongest pieces: a blistering storm blows continuously throughout, laying waste to everything in its path, sweeping up machinery and the odd hapless soul whose pitiful cries for help can just be heard above the whirling chaos before it is swallowed up completely. Rotor blades, torn off a rescue helicopter, circulate through the winds, cutting up the noise, and chunks of metal fly off into the churning clouds of debris. “Over Man and Beast His Flaming Sword” follows in a similar path but the recording really lifts its game with the delirious and trance-like “Annihilation (Awakens New Life)” with steely, on-edge silver metal-teeth keening and a continuously echoing loop of a female yogi chanting an ecstatic mantra against a gloopy black and malevolently stirring atmosphere. Suddenly a portal is opened, as if the whole time a ritual was being enacted to summon up a demonic spirit, and harsh, bubbling rhythms explode repeatedly. The track eventually settles down to a drunken sitar-playing sequence and a hilarious spoken voice recording that suggests a scolding Japanese Buddhist sensei.

“Elegie Für Clemens Scheitz” is a snaky reptilian piece with a sleazy pulsing grime-encrusted bass rhythm edged with caustic metallic noise. Again there’s a trancey, drugged-out, drunken feel to the track and sure enough in the distance a deep masculine voice chants a mantra or hymn over and over. Closing piece “Chorea Sancti Viti”, clocking in at 20 minutes, is a mind-warping experience that slowly and continually evolves from nondescript shimmer drone to an enormous, protean, mutating monster chorus of reverberating sound whose forms are limited only by its own imagination and consciousness which are far more vast and complex than humans can conceive.

The entire recording is very like a journey through what seens like familiar noise / drone / black ambient territory on a burnt-out Earth until about halfway through where an encounter with a strange ritual, perhaps through discovery of the remnants of a long-dead civilisation, the tiny products of which are imbibed by our foolish explorers (kin to those silly scientists in Ridley Scott’s mash-up of a film “Prometheus”) who then experience the brain-blowing effects of the hallucinogens and are left lying in small scorched pieces, to be consumed by the storms that go screeching around the planet. It’s an album to hear out at your own peril: true, your head will feel pleasantly clean and clear after the final scorching blow-out but that will be because your head literally IS clean and clear inside, all nice squeaky-clean blank space all round that the amazed doctor doing the autopsy can rub a gloved finger against.

Contact: Ordo Pestilentia

December 7, 2012

Gossamer Albatrosses

The Tower Recordings

Subterraneanact is the duo of Henk Bakker and Jelmer Cnossen, and their debut Subterraneanact (Z6 RECORDS Z6399699) is an unusual piece of studio assemblage created in Rotterdam. The album is a distillation of recordings made in the studio. The recordings have been edited, mixed and remixed; then subjected to further sampling, remixing, and rebuilding processes. At all times the duo were working to their own private sets of compositional and improvisational rules; the aim seems to have been to transform the sounds of their respective instruments as far as possible, resulting in an “atmospheric and expressive sound environment”. Considering the source material was mostly acoustic, i.e. clarinet and drums, it’s a truly extreme example of what intensive reprocessing can do to taped sound. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a purely electronic album on the surface, although there are printed credits for live electronics and sampling using the “Ableton” device. Despite the wild, crazy and sometimes ugly remanipulations of sound, the original clarinets and drums continually show their growly, thumpy faces at various portions in the entertainment, surfacing like live deep-sea fish in a well-cooked bouillabaisse, and about as welcome. The clarinettist Bakker studied his instrument in Utrecht some 20 years ago, has an interesting history of performing, composing and doing radio, and is now associated with WORM in Rotterdam. Cnossen the drummer (also known as Malorix and JC) has drummed in a variety of bands and, of the two, seems more conversant with the sound-recycling process represented here – most of his Malorix work is executed through his personal take on the laptop-plunderphonic-meltdown approach, utilising discarded music from old compact discs and tapes. The screen-printed cover unfolds into an unsettling perspective of an impossible iron tower being built under the earth’s crust, gradually poking its long neck out through a mineshaft opening. This image emphasises the “constructed” nature of the music, but also its sheer impossibility – what we hear sometimes defies rational thought. It’s not that it works by juxtaposition of shocking sounds, but by a form of reworking that feels almost manual when you listen to it. The composers are kneading dough and working plasticine between their fingers. A very hand-knitted and cottage-industry approach to electro-acoustic, resulting in loud, primitive and lumpy musical forms. Arrived 13 April 2012.

The Premature Burial

Subterraneanact create a “virtual” underground space through their studio work. We could say that the American death-metal industrial project T.O.M.B. take things one stage further on UAG (CRUCIAL BLAST RECORDS CBR94), by putting themselves physically into bleak and hostile environments to realise their music. The basic tracks were recorded in assorted locales of horror – abandoned sanatoriums, asylums, morgues, and deserted crypts. It seems they did everything but lock themselves in a cemetery in pursuit of their art. Granted, the music has been reworked in a studio after the fact, but it’s the recording in that selected psychic zone that adds the extra dimension of sheer black terror. Once inside their chosen sanctum, T.O.M.B. would play back their tapes and field recordings at loud volumes to allow reverberant shocks to vibrate from the cold walls, and progress the ritual through drumming exercises, often hammering on the very walls themselves. UAG, an acronym for Uncovered Ancient Gateways, thus assumes the proportions of performance art, as though the CD were a document of unholy and extremely morbid rites; the theme is extended visually in the enclosed booklet of monochrome photos, providing absurdly dramatic reimaginings of these lugubrious seances. Their track titles make multiple references to the grim delights of the “bone orchard”, spicing things up with snippets of witchcraft, bloodletting, moon worship, and various invented ritualistic procedures; and the whole package is topped off with that lurid green-tinted cover art with its fearful symmetry, its runic letters, its hints of sado-masochistic costume, and inverted liturgies. But sonically, this is all quite some way from conventional black metal or industrial death music, and T.O.M.B. (whose name unpacks into Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) serve up strangely compelling and powerful atmospheres on this album, eschewing anything to do with song form in favour of continual tones of abstract oppressive noise, underpinned by frenzied and horrifying drumming. While undoubtedly satisfying to bloodthirsty fans of the respective genres it inhabits, this grisly and claustrophobic record works equally well as extreme experimental noise. Was released in January 2012, I think we may have got our copy in April.

The Senors of Seek

Sent to us by Murray Ward of Cardiff is a splendid split cassette (HI/LO029) by The Failed NASA Experiment and Ø+yn, and it’s released on a terrific micro-label called The Lows and The Highs Records. Their website contains further oddities which look worthy of investigation also. The Failed NASA Experiment turns out to be Murray Ward himself playing solo music with occasional help from Euan Rodger, Alex Williams and Matthew Lovett. Mysterious electronic tones, clattering percussion and random noise bursts, plus extremely heavy psychedelic drones and circular riffs, where the amplified distortion and sense of relentless forward-chugging motion has prompted comparisons with the Faust of the 1970s. TFNE presents a delirious and acid-fried experience, with many puzzling moments inserted into and between the tracks, and concluding the suite with a pastoral acoustic guitar riff that almost makes this tape a lo-fi update on any given Pink Floyd album. The track titles are lyrical and beautiful. This music has the refreshing Celtic tang of well-crafted Welsh magic, enacted by drawing chalk markings on the floor of black-timbered chapels in the hillside.

Ø+yn are an Argentinean five-piece of underground noisemakers, with Cinco Cantos a la Virgen de Satrostramocha on their side of the split. Superficially they may seem to be questing after the same hallucinatory and revelatory states as Mr Ward and his chums, but they pursue their quarry in a much more mysterious way. It’s an offbeat and delirious form of trancey acoustic drone-folk, featuring violins, guitars, percussion and whiney solo lines made with a nasal chanting and wailing voice or equally nasal wind instruments of some sort; many non-western harmonic scales and modes emerge from the improvisations, and at times the music could almost be mistaken for an ethnic oddity from the Folkways catalogue. In some ways this might be seen as a variant of the sort of loopy thing the Finns used to do so well, except Ø+yn are nowhere near so cluttered musically nor (thankfully) as eccentric in the vocal department. Instead, the instrumentation is pared to bone, the recordings are intimate and private, and even the trance-rhythm patterns are rough-hewn and occasionally wobble off the path like a less sure-footed mountain goat. The team may have cinematic aspirations, building their albums in line with the logic of a Jodorowsky film, and even sample a snippet from a Roman Polanski movie for one track. The excellent artworks are collages by Murray Ward, with overlay drawings by Ian Watson. Quite delightful all round; many thanks to Murray for sending this.

December 6, 2012

Windhand: in danger of becoming a Sabbath clone, and a tired one at that

Windhand, self-titled, Forcefield Records, CDGRIMM25 (2012)

A sure sign that Windhand traffick in no-nonsense straight-ahead retro doom metal is the album cover of a rural scene in black silhouette, the branches of trees drawn in such a way as to suggest spidery fingers stretching outwards, against a purple background; this recalls Black Sabbath album covers of similar minimal two-toned design and a pastoral scene. The album is solemn riff-heavy doom with a powerful sound that contrasts with a clear high vocal, courtesy of one Dorthia Cottrell who is set somewhat far back in the mix so the lyrics are rather hard to make out unless the album is played very loudly.

“Black Candles” leads off with a slight ambient intro into the track proper which is mostly repetitive riff loop with a touch of echoing effect to give the song an occasional psychedelic feel. Although the riff is very strong, the song as a whole feels very enervated; the bland singing doesn’t enliven it much. Likewise, “Libusen” is steady-as-it-goes with a heavy riff that repeats over and over without much variation while Cottrell wails at close to the high end of her range far into the distance. It’s a graceful song, slow and majestic, and if it were a bit slower with more drawn-out droning tones and icy-cold space ambient effects, it would be an excellent song indeed.

“Heap Wolves” perks up with more melodic riffs and Cottrell’s siren vocals sounding off over the sinister roiling music and oily lead guitar. It’s clear that this lady is not only Windhand’s best asset but has the potential to be Queen Bee of female doom metal vocalists if the band can raise its profile higher among the US doom metal community and beyond; on all tracks, Cottrell commands attention even though her vocal range barely strays from the higher end and her style is basically a wailing one. If she can experiment with her style more and use the lower, deeper end of her vocal range on future songs, she is sure to go a very long way.

Individual songs are quite good without being outstanding but when put together, the album feels very tired for some reason. Part of the problem may be that Cottrell’s vocals are so far back in the mix in most songs and are so restricted in the range of sounds that for some listeners she can sound the same from one song to the next. The singing is bland and needs an injection of aggression to roughen up the tone now and again. Songs tend to be much the same in basic structure, all dependent on repeating riffs and time-keeping drums with the obligatory lead guitar solo; they rarely vary in pace and mood. There is a danger that Windhand will fall into the category of Sabbath clones of which there are far too many already. Outro track “Winter Sun” suggests in some instrumental parts that the musicians aren’t averse to improvising and playing about with their sound and upsetting people’s expectations of what a doom band should do. Some individual members in the band have talent that should be stretched a lot further.

It’s quite possible though that with this debut, Windhand are playing a bit safe and perhaps on the second album they will show us what they’re really made of.

Contact: Forcefield Records

November 18, 2012

St Francis Duo: dark and moody, unpredictable and fiery, mesmerising and absorbing

Steve Noble and Stephen O’Malley, St Francis Duo, Bo’Weavil Recordings, CD weavil47 (2012)

A thrilling barrage of thunderous drums heralds the arrival of this collaboration by two members of the Aethenor project Steve Noble and Stephen O’Malley, and it’s a mighty meeting of psychedelic rock, free jazz, free noise and abstract improv. The recordings on this album were recorded live at Cafe OTO in London over 18 – 19 August 2010. The two musicians could have tried to blast each other off the stage with either heavy tribalistic drumming or long sonorous subterranean guitar drones but instead choose to rampage together through quite dark psych / noise / improv territory in a way that reminds me of Keiji Haino’s work with Fushitsusha but without that man’s vocal gymnastics. The result can be very intense and deep, and O’Malley at least reveals unexpected skill and ability in conjuring up many different and subtle moods with his guitar; as for Noble, I’m not familiar with what he’s done over the past 30 years but here he really immerses himself in collaborating with O’Malley with exuberant, energetic and sustained drumming.

The album tends to be more of a showcase of Noble’s percussion talent than of O’Malley’s work, though the guitarist is very busy throughout the recordings: it’s just that O’Malley chooses to scrabble away on the strings with wild chords and shredded riffing, and shadows Noble’s playing as a foil. The Sunn0))) man has certainly learned a lot about playing heavy moody psychedelic guitar with the Sensei of the Dark Sunglasses. Although all of the music here is unpredictable and often fiery, the first track seems more consistently unpredictable and volatile than the others which have some very long quiet passages. Compared to track 1, track 2 is more restrained and slow-burning at times but is no less energetic and lively. In later tracks the duo appear to find themselves trapped in too-quiet trance passages when they should just let the music surge forth like powerful death rays but there is no denying that they enjoy playing together and are totally absorbed in the moment.

I’d very much like to see Noble and SOMA continue together as a duo and see how far they can take their brand of free noise improv / psych rock / jazz. One might assume purely on the basis of their past experiences together and separately that they might invite guest musicians (Haino as DJ on synthesisers comes to mind) to perform with them on future outings but it might be an idea for them both to keep performing live and in the studio just as a pair (allowing for some inspiration from others) just to see how far they can go.

Contact: Bo’Weavil Recordings

September 30, 2012

Zond: free-form noise rock / punk that defies easy pigeon-holing categorisation

Zond, self-titled, R.I.P. Society Records, CD RIP012 (2010)

Not quite a noise band nor a rock band, not quite free-form improv but not peddling definite songs either, yet noisy and rocking out and sounding structured and unstructured at the same time throughout, this is the Melbourne-based psych-rock-noise outfit Zond. At least Zond consists of four musicians playing guitars, bass, drums and FX anyway so we can pin them down as a quartet of sorts in that respect. The band’s style might be described as a barrage of howling feedback guitar riffs and drones and repeating melodies on the verge of break-down against rhythms inspired by old Seventies punk / new wave. There’s something vaguely post-punk / post-rock / post-metal about the music and yet it’s possible the guys don’t take any influences from these genres at all.

After early tracks showcasing the music at its most chaotic and noise-guitar unstructured, the fellas allow some radiant ambience to shimmer gently in “Stupid Gods” before returning to whirlwind guitar battery and woozy vocals in “Dunvegan Castle”, a stupendous head-cleaning slab of sandstorm scree if ever there was one. Some semblance of rock returns in “Six” and “Blind” which have a very rawk-n-rawl punky style – or at least there is some semblance to rock before the feedback vacuum hose gets set on reverse cycle. Bringing up the rear is “Apis”, again a seemingly normal garage-punk kind of track with barely intelligible vocals – but it turns out to be an intense psych-rock spiral in which each rotating loop represents a level much deeper in derangement and sonic architectural dissolution.

For all the noise and apparent near-collapse though, there is something oddly soothing and calming in the album most times: the chaos is never truly chaotic, the insanity can be lucid in parts and no matter how far gone from the planet the listener feels, return to safe and secure ground is only a step away …

Contact: Zond, R.I.P. Society Records

September 29, 2012

German Oak: claustrophobic bunker music is a trip into deep black inner space and time

German Oak, self-titled, Flash Back, FBCD1001

Originally released in 1972 and only selling eleven copies at the time (according to the Aquarius Records website) due to its meditation on Nazi German rule and World War II, this self-titled album by a German five-piece band has a very cold, strange and dark echoing sound: all the music had been recorded in a bunker. The album consists of extended rock-jazz instrumental jams with weird and very abstract rhythms dominated by blunted guitars, ghost drums and percussion, and other wailing instruments, some of which are identified as simply “noise”.

The atmosphere is very claustrophobic and the musicians play as though for their lives before the encroaching darkness crawls over their heads and shoulders, covering their eyes, mouths and ears, rendering them helpless and immobile and permanently entombed in the black bunker. There is quite a lot of tension especially in the suitably named “Down in the Bunker” where the very air, cold as it is, could be cut with a knife and the knife shudders briefly and freezes rock-solid.

The CD release consists of four tracks lasting just under 40 minutes and an extra three tracks including “Swastika Rising”. Of the four original tracks, “Raid over Dusseldorf” sounds the most psychedelic and trance-like, no doubt due to its driving rhythm loop and the dreamy, wobbly guitar tones that set up a swirling, spiralling ambience in which lead guitar melodies, tapping cymbals and a drumming groove take listeners on an extended trip through a time-tunnel vortex. This is a very delirious and mesmerising piece in spite of the underground conditions; come to think of it, the bunker studio setting enhances the music as each tone, riff or melody appears on the track as if emerging from unseen rabbit holes, to disappear back there once done, and so an element of surprise always seems to be hovering over the musicians’ jam.

“Swastika Rising” is notable for its creepy organ drone, electric guitar meanderings and its unfortunate ending (the tape cuts out) which lands us straight into a sample of a Nazi rally at which Adolf Hitler rants at the microphone, followed by a mellow-toned lead guitar solo over a surging yet choppy rhythm accompaniment. Contrary to its name, “The Third Reich” is a trippy, funky, mesmerising wander through inner space: probably not the kind of track folks on the Stormfront.org website will be discussing and dissecting any time soon. “Shadows of War” is a very muted track of organ drone followed by fragments of found sound, flotsam and jetsam effects: this piece lands the band close to the outright experimental and early industrial music territory inhabited by Throbbing Gristle, Monte Cazazza and SPK.

A very intriguing and remarkable album of dark, sinister ambience and moods, this deeply underground recording is worth finding and holding onto as much for its historical context and place in German ’70s rock / pop music as for the music itself. The LP version apparently doesn’t contain the bonus tracks so the CD version is preferred.

September 10, 2012

Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water: a varied album of dark folk, apocalyptic visions and unexpected toughness

Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat, Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water, Zeal, zealcdee 029 (2010)

It took me a long while to get a review of this album up on TSP but finally I did it. A very stark and darkly melancholy recording this is too, brimming with feeling too deep to fully express, and what is not expressed directly in the vocals, the printed lyrics or in the spare acoustic guitar melodies is present in the silences behind the music. KTAOABC is the child of one Stef Heeren, a Belgian musician who makes a lot of his own instruments but usually relies on his voice and acoustic guitar; indeed the title track gets by on just voices and guitar for most of its length as do several other, mostly short songs.

The first three songs on the album set the pace: “Hewers of Wood …” is a simple yet emotionally dark and deep piece that might contain a serious morality tale about the failings of human nature in its apparently simple nursery-rhyme lyrics. Heeren is a surprisingly strong singer with an urgent, almost wailing style and the music matches the feeling in his voice: robust rhythms, a distinctive melody with a force and vitality all its own in most songs, and equally intense moods enhanced by sinister organ or other keyboards played by various guest musicians. “Argonaut and magneto” strains at its leashes, yearning to burst out in full agonised cry but Heeren keeps it in check though the lyrics suggest a kind of Southern Gothic rural murder mystery somewhere in the remote Appalachians.

Some songs have a whiffy exotic foreign or psychedelic influence as though Heeren had spent a childhood or adolescence backpacking around India and Southeast Asia and spent most of his nights at temples listening to travelling musical troupes playing droning sitar ragas and thumping tablas at all-night jam sessions. “Veneration” feels like such a song in its rhythm. Other songs may be possessed of an apocalyptic vision (“Feathers of the wings of the angel Gabriel”) in lyrics and twangy bluegrass tunes that would raise the hairs on the back of Nick Cave’s neck.

For a dark folk album, the music is varied and surprisingly tough, even aggressive, at times and would suit a metalhead as much as it would an audience brought up on Comus, Nick Cave and his various bands, and Six Organs of Admittance. I also sense some kinship with some of those eccentric acts like Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood that made up the Kyogle avant-country music scene that I reviewed some years ago and which were on the Music your mind will love you label. Now that KTAOABC have jolted my memory, I wonder what became of them all – the MYMWLY label has shut down indefinitely.

Contact: Zeal

September 9, 2012

Nazoranai: a gripping and terrifying debut from Dark Overlord Keiji Haino’s new trio

Nazoranai, self-titled, Editions Mego / Ideologic Organ, CD SOMA009 (2012)

No sooner had I heard of Keiji Haino’s revival of Fushitsusha and his Fushitsusha-for-foreigners band featuring Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi with their album “Imikuzushi” than news loomed ominously on the far distant horizon that the Dark Overlord had yet another Fushitsusha-like project called Nazoranai boasting Stephen O’Malley on bass and Oren Ambarchi on drums! Before we all endanger ourselves running for the fire exits in terror at the thought of the sheer volumes of sonic blackness and heaviness we presume will billow out of the speakers and surely engulf the entire universe in one dark drone blast, I must advise anything where Keiji Haino headlines is completely under his dominance and all others, even SOMA himself, have to bow to Haino-san’ s austere musical and artistic philosophy, evident in the near-existential titles of the four tracks, the gatefold sleeve layouts and the album artwork. So, no booming bass drones along with Haino’s agonised screams which may be a good thing for the continued existence of the planet – but then, a bad thing in a sense, no?

In truth, this self-titled debut plays like a typical Fushitsusha / Haino album: the dark one sticks to guitaring throughout (so no fiddling with a theremin or DJ-ing which would have provided some variety) and SOMA and Ambarchi are content to be backing men almost interchangeable with other backing men who have served Haino in the past. At least the bass can be heard clearly on this recording and SOMA and Ambarchi have an intuitive understanding of one another’s strengths so they play as a tight unit on their own, allowing Haino to soar high above with the flimsiest of connections to Planet Earth. This makes for a very heavy and intense recording.

The surprise is that the album is not more thunderous than it is – there is plenty of black space and the mood is very deep so the potential is there – but the musicians had other things in mind for this release. The third track can be very repetitive and intense to almost breaking point and the first and fourth pieces have very sparse and quiet introductions. The second track begins very noisily before turning into a slinky mood piece enhanced by SOMA’s bass which at times vies for more attention than Haino’s playing does.

Overall this is a gripping and sometimes quite terrifying album in its deep black silences and its severe artistry. Ambarchi keeps the drumming basic and tense and SOMA demonstrates his skill at low-end melodic understatement while Haino … basically does Haino.

Contact: Editions Mego, Ideologic Organ