Tagged: psychedelic

December 9, 2013

Deimos: scary little quartet of occult sounds taking listeners on a trance journey

Un Festin Sagital, Deimos, Black Horizons, cassette BH-72 (2013)

In ancient Greek mythology, Deimos was the god of terror and together he and his brother Phobos, the god of fear, would ride on either side of their father Ares during battle, glorying in the slaughter of soldiers as they fell from chariots or their horses, or were cut down by storms of arrows and spears. This cassette might be short at 20 minutes but the terror and fear it delivers are perhaps no less in the music’s assault on the eardrums. The style of music might best be described as a mix of blackened psychedelic free noise industrial ambient punk. If I missed anything out in that description, readers are free to suggest more labels ad infinitum.

The A-side ( “Terror Diluviano” and “La Ofrenda Danzante del Cuerpo Enamorado”) promises a real scare-fest with a short passage of deep chanting vocals counterbalanced by solemn trance-like witch voices all surrounded by strange twisted wobble effects and wisps of airy sound. A creepy lead vocal takes charge and for a few moments you wonder whether you’re hearing a real Satanic Mass being performed. We continue into a bass-like doodle that transforms into a series of berserk piano squiggles, background sigh and whoosh, and evilly grim black metal goblin vocals chanting repetitively in a strange tongue. Weird FX dive in and out of the music.

The B-side (“Deimos” and “Ni Sobreproteccion, Ni Descuido”) is more ominous and ambient than avantgarde weird. The title track is based around an original contribution by Wesley Young / Deciduous Flux who plays electronics here. (Young also modelled for the artwork by Jesse Pepper.) It consists largely of sleepy bass drone suggestive of an idling grinding machine over which a flute might play or a lone speaker might say or whisper something. Bringing up the rear is a piece that might have escaped from a long moody movie-music soundtrack: blowing wind, space synth wash, glitch rhythms, ticking percussion and glittery space-ambient tone squiggle loops will keep you guessing as to what kind of B-grade sci-fi monster flick from the 1950s is being referenced here.

Your brain will be kept in overdrive figuring out how all four tracks relate to one another and whether a theme greater than terror and fear is struggling to emerge. Track titles suggest occult references and the sequencing of the tracks might imply the performance of a ritual followed by transcendence and its after-effects. On the other hand, there might not be any relation at all among the four tracks and all that holds them in common is the effect they have on your mood and thinking.

Un Festin Sagital is a Chilean act revolving around one Michel Leroy aided by various musicians who appear on tracks 1 to 3.

November 17, 2013

Getting Through Accidentals

An astonishing outpouring of energy from Invisible Things on their Home Is The Sun (PORTER RECORDS PRCD-4069) album. The label Porter Records is often home to some far-out free jazz enterprises, but this bizarre monster has most of its clammy paws planted in the art-rock camp…the duo of American players Mark Shippy and Jim Sykes realise most of this dazzling escapade with a guitar and drums set-up, although Shippy also adds rich keyboard layers and sings, and guest player Jeff Ziegler is on hand to supply further keyboard goodiness like so much cookie dough. Drummer Jim Sykes apparently bases his work on a deep awareness of percussion methods from Sri Lanka, applied to modern instruments…given that Sri Lankan percussion traditions are said to be about 2500 years old, and at one time the culture had over 30 different types of drum, this is quite an achievement. On Home Is The Sun, there are 17 short tracks which are in fact index points for a enormous whole thing, a continual and overwhelming flying carpet of remarkable music. I think both players come from a Chicago background, with respective histories in bands Parts and Labor, Grooms, Marnie Stern, U.S. Maple, Miracle Condition, and Shorty, and have been honing this approach to their craft since they met in 2009. Impressive, and not just admirably clever; it rattles and roars with unhinged, psychedelic mayhem. Personally I far prefer this open-ended and juicy lubed-up style of playing to the tight-ass precise renditions of Om, for example. The electrifying cover art truly lives up to the music within. From 9th October 2012.

Seth Cooke realised Pneuma (LF RECORDS LF028) using just his crotales (percussion instrument, a specific type of cymbal array) on one track and a pneumatic drill on the other, hence the title. Certainly a process piece, requiring long duration; two tracks at nearly half an hour apiece; gradual shifts in timbre across continual tones. But not an infuriating piece of semi-preciousness, Cooke’s work retains a steely core of hard-edged realism and never drifts off into the clouds of ivory-tower aesthete-land, where velvet-caped fops may shower you with lilacs. If you just read about the crotales piece, it may put you in mind of soppy singing-bowl type music, but when you actually hear it it’s as sturdy as a sheet of tin; it just hangs in the air like an unyielding, brutal, fact. The drill piece is also surprising; far from the industrial noise-brutality some listeners or fans of SPK might expect, it’s an ingenious well-structured composition whose every waking moment is a vehicle for contemplation. “Drills are the aspiration of the male saga”, is all he’s prepared to tell us, by means of an obscure quote; no doubt he’s alluding to the phallic qualities of the pneumatic drill, a factor that leads most road workers to take up the job in order to cure their problems of impotence and flaccidity. There’s nothing like feeling a powerful metal shaft surging between your thighs to cure those erectile tissue problems. If Cooke can tame the savagery of this particular mechanical penis-like device, methinks he could set out a plausible plan for altering the entire mind-set of the modern world, by a combination of chemical processes and other, more occult, strategies. Given Cooke’s wide range of useful skills – he is a sound artist, percussionist who plays unusual objects, and a practising psycho-therapist – anything seems possible. From 27 December 2012.

Third release in from the Norwegian Va Fongool label, and this time we’re moving away from the high-energy high-decibel clattery rough-house parties that Eirik Tofte gravitates towards for his Oslo-based label. PGA are the duo of Jan Martin Gismervik and Fredrik Luhr Diterichson, who perform all of Corrections (VAFCD003) using just an acoustic bass and drum set, though the duo are joined by the brass players Nørstebø and Larsen for a couple tracks. Very far from jazz, music, or even improvised music – this intense, minimal stuff just creaks like broken boughs of an old oak, while sloughing its way out of the speakers like three-day old porridge. I just love the severe and sullen aspect of their sound, which makes virtually no concessions, refusing to be held hostage and turning many debtors away from its door. The pair themselves are far from being cranky old geezers though, and come to us from lively backgrounds in group playing – Moskus, Skadedyr, Sagstuen, Karokh, and the Wolfram Trio, where they both played – see here for a review of that album, also on this label. Apparently the rhythm section couldn’t make themselves heard about the blurty racket from tenor saxman Halvor Meling, so their only course of action was to have him assassinated. The Norwegian Mafia were hired to do the job, and they sealed Meling’s feet in a bucket of cement and then threw him in the Hobølelva. With “Old Hooty” out of the picture, Gismervik and Diterichson could proceed unimpeded with their new minimal plan. Sure enough, pared down to a duo of scrapey wooden and metallic noise-production using highly innovative methods, this pair have a chance to shine – or at least to glimmer like the limpid light of a pond in a heavy fog under the obscured winter sun. Arrived 23 October 2012.

We last heard from Hitoshi Kojo with his Omnimoment CD from 2012, although this unclassifiable Japanese musician is also one half of Jüppala Kääpiö, a name which betrays his likely preoccupation with modern Finnish music and its eccentric psychedelic clutter. High Tide Mirror (OMNIMOMENTO OM06 / SHINING DAY SHINE 12) contains six pieces of very accomplished layered studio working, where whatever instruments were originally used are cunningly blended and morphed into kaleidoscopes of shimmering, bustling sound. Not a surface is left unfilled in these incredibly “busy” scapes, presenting elaborate views of a colourful fantasy world. I am always deeply impressed by the surface beauty of this music at first listen, but then find my attention wandering and I begin to wonder if they really need to be nine or twelve minutes long, since little of any value is added by the duration. Instead of of 6 long tracks, it might be interesting if Kojo were to present 24 short tracks, where the intense and dazzling strangeness of his inventions could astound the listener for a precious moment, then swiftly fade away like a vanishing dream. The cover is fantastic, made of screenprinted card with a cut-out hole and a triangular flap, with sumptuous images of foliage and sealife.

November 16, 2013

Too From Tomoonttontwo

Tomutonttu
Hylyt
GERMANY DEKORDER 064 LP (2012)

Tomuuntuu
Tomuuntuu
BENIFFER EDITIONS BFF 110 12” (2011)

My enthusiasm for Finnish psychedelic music will never equal that of those fanatical folks at Aquarius Records. Not because of any audible shortcomings in what I’ve heard – quite the opposite in fact – but because I am so genuinely intimidated by the sheer quantity of product that I wouldn’t know where to begin, even if I had the time to check it all.

It helps immensely to have a small scene showcase on your doorstep. I was fortunate to be able to speak to Tomutonttu’s Jan Anderzen at one just a stone’s throw from here, last year. Flu-smashed yet hardy and pragmatic the way Finnish people often seem to be, he answered my questions, told me about his records (one of which I bought and review here) and went on to deliver a delirious AV set so pantomorphic one’s eyes could scarcely settle on a single shape. Harry Smith’s Abstractions had nothing on it. So intense was my experience of his work that it hardly surprises me that British man-flu should have been to Anderzen but a minor setback.

When he’s not delivering mass hypnotism, Anderzen trades actively under any number of guises in the Finnish scene. He’s the lynchpin of the rotating-cast of Kemialliset Ystävät, and features in and on too many groups and releases to mention here (including confounding variations on the alias under review). That’s what Discogs is for. Tomutonttu is Anderzen’s private playground, presumably providing some sort of release valve for the many ideas he has knocking around. Indeed, he makes something of a virtue out of putting discarded recordings to good use with this project, largely by applying a ‘smash ‘em together and see how it sounds’ credo, which seems to work in his favour for the most part.

Comprising a selection of ‘aborted’ releases dating 2005-11, and blended beautifully to beget an ever-morphing audio pot pourri that never dispenses the same scent twice, Hylyt isn’t just a whimsical spelling of the word that gives us ‘special moments’; it actually translates as ‘Wrecks’, which in this case refers to ‘the collective state of consciousness attained on the way to the bottom’. I’ll spare you the Stygian psychology; suffice to say that through its disparate array of mysterious landscapes (and fidelities), the music sublimely illustrates a shift from one state of collapsible horror to another, exposing something quite entrancing in its entirety. Defined by the artist as “diploma work for the University of Bananafish” (whose Dylan Nyoukis ratifies the proclamation by providing an anomalous poem insert), this could easily have graced any one of that beloved magazine’s cover CDs. In fact, it sounds rather like a mischievous reworking of one’s entire contents: speed, direction and pitch all victims to a capricious and curious little sprite; weaving in and out of passages of pastoral psychedelia, slug-speed walls-of- noise and amplified, night-time twinklefests. There are, admittedly, points at which the transitions are a little too sudden, raising moments of doubt, but I suspect this effect to be volitional. Overall, it is an approachable brand of chaos.

Of a similar species, if a little more refined in pedigree, Tomuuntuu is another restless, amorphous and entirely more streamlined beast. This attractive picture disc sports a recording assembled as a radio piece, commissioned by Aanem Lumo Festival for New Sounds, and performed at the Orion Theatre in Helsinki on the 8th November 2010. I imagine it made rather a good impression, if Anderzen’s kaleidescopic AV shows affect Finnish audiences the way they do me. Beginning as an effervescent organ over a measured, thudding gait, it is tugged by one of Anderzen’s slow, transparent howls through the mirror, into a labyrinthine Wonderland of alien tweets and twitters, zaps and flutters, before skidding headlong into an intense cartoon alternate dimension soundtracked by the kinds of tape-splicing boffins who turn up on plush multi-disc compilations nowadays. And so on. By virtue of the single side, time is precious, so great lengths are taken to maximise the zany, card-shuffling states of mind, leaving the listener a rather bewildered winner. Our insanity is clearly Jan Anderzen’s clarity.

Dekorder
Bennifer Editions
Tomutonttu’s Soundcloud page

November 12, 2013

Folk Songs for an Obscure Race: freaky combination of noise junk industrial and faux naif folk

Grim, Folk Songs for an Obscure Race, Haang Niap Records, CD HAANG-002 (2009)

A weirdo industrial junk folk record, this is a compilation of releases and compilation tracks made in the 1980s by the Japanese industrial music project Grim. This band was (maybe still is?) the baby of one Jun Konagaya who sometimes had help from a couple of other noiseniks. This album is very much in the style of industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einsturzende Neubauten and early Whitehouse: lots of bashing metal rhythms, a harsh declamatory pygmy-Hitler vocal, a screechy high-pitched siren drone, crude rhythms and song structures, and a lo-fi punk sensibility.

The recording switches from early noise-junk industrial to serene soundtrack music to harsh brutal power electronics to delicate acoustic-guitar folk ditties and back again: quite a dizzying range of music styles that bleed into one another can be found here. The contrast between severe uncompromising noise electronics, suggestive of torture, deviant sexuality and compulsive psychotic behaviour, on the one hand and an extreme faux naif innocence in the folk music stylings on the other can be very disturbing. I’m rather reluctantly reminded of some Whitehouse late-1990s releases that had tracks by Peter Sotos where he assembled together spoken dialogue recordings by girls and women who had been sexually abused. On several tracks, Konagaya’s vocal is pained and screechy, far beyond what William Bennett and Phillip Best achieved in their band’s heyday; on some of the later tracks, he could pass for Dalek Caan of the Cult of Skaro from Doctor Who.

What separates Konagaya’s music from his noisician compatriots is strong rhythms throughout the industrial pieces; the quieter folk songs have distinct lullaby melodies. The music is not at all free-flowing and the attitude behind it is very different: it’s often confrontational and hostile to the society from which Grim arises. The folk music pieces can be quite comic in their po-faced blank innocence after all the aggression that’s come before them.

All the music is very good if deranged and the tracks near the end of the album, superficially calm and child-like, are perhaps the most disturbing and freaky of all. They have a Grand Guignol air about them in their careful merry-go-round melodies and rhythms, while in the background something like a Nuremberg rally from the late 1930s might be running. Near the end, dreamy psych-folk songs sung by girl singers who might be evangelising for their particular nut-house religious cult that promises highly sanitised retro-1950s white-picket fence suburban domestic bliss salvation add another level of deranged sensibility. There’s an all-instrumental percussion piece that might have been written for a tap-dancing troupe that rounds off the album and at this point, I shudder to think that our friend Jun has been accepted into his local little trendy avant-garde artist colony that survives on government hand-outs and performance art stunts that try but fail to shock little old ladies and families with small children.

Nevertheless this album is a revelation in that there are actually forgotten Japanese acts that could more than hold their own against the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, that also didn’t fit into the classic Japanese noise improv mould. What more might there be, that have been overlooked for far too long?

Contact: Haang Niap Records, haangniap@gmail.com

November 5, 2013

Body Horror: a brooding work of heavy industrial metal dub and ambient dronescapes

Iron Forest, Body Horror, Crucial Blast, CD 020 (2013)

Iron Forest is a fairly new experimental music project by US Midwest artist Brandon Elkins that combines heavy industrial metal rhythms and riffs with drone, dub, noise and doom elements. “Body Horror”, the project’s second album, is a lavish effort: eight tracks of layers of power electronics, digital noise, warped dub, crushing machine rhythms, sharply cut reverb and space atmosphere, and elements of black / death / doom metal. The plastic case is a large DVD-style container with several postcards of pictures of mutant body parts that have a strange if repulsive and disturbing beauty.

The recording revolves around themes of mutation, deformity and transhumanism. Track 1 is a gentle introduction of reverb and fuzz, very spacey with spurts of dub rhythm, and highly atmospheric. Subsequent tracks range from fierce and threatening dub guitar-noise splatter with washes of shrieking vocals to doomy dronescapes set against an ambience suggesting post-apocalyptic industrial wastelands of polluted ponds of water and winds sweeping up fine sand mixed with industrial chemical dust. Although the music can be highly robotic and its rhythms dominated by echoing machine sounds, I always have the impression that here is a world in which biology and technology have become completely fused and to treat the two separately is an antiquated notion. All machine noises seem to come from cyborg creatures with self-awareness and cunning natures.

For music that draws its inspiration from past industrial metal heavies like Godflesh and Scorn who also included very liberal doses of dub rhythms and sounds into their work, “Body Horror” is as much atmospheric and meditative as it is harsh and grinding robot doom machine music. The surprising thing is that the music is very accessible and much less menacing than its title and artwork suggest. (The album is also much shorter than I would have liked – at least an hour would have done for this style of heavy industrial dub.) There’s a lot of murk along with the knife-sharp skittery quicksilver rhythms, the crunchy bass riffs and machine-gun synth percussion beats but the music never sounds chaotic or overwhelming. Parts of the CD remind me more of Keith Fullerton Whitman’s old Hrvatski act with the flighty rapid-fire blastbeat electronic rhythms, though without the playful attitude.

This genre of music has a lot of potential to be a mighty monster and I feel with most recordings I have that the artists are scraping just a thin layer of it. “Body Horror” doesn’t advance the known parts of the territory much but as it is, it’s quite a good work: it has a distinctive airy atmosphere in most tracks and there is a psychedelic trance element as well. Each track has enough in it that could generate a family of long remixed tracks.

October 29, 2013

Dakhmandal: a solid slab of droning sludge doom occult psychedelia

Dark Buddha Rising, Dakhmandal, Svart Records, SVR206CD (2 x CD) (2013)

Dark Buddha Rising: it’s an excellent name for a band that performs long doomy occult-themed sludge trance ritual music and the sinister logo with the thick lava-like letters matches the band’s intent, style and preference for staying in the shadows. These publicity-shy guys shun Facebook and other social networks and I consider myself lucky for stumbling across an earlier album of theirs on Youtube. “Dakhmandal” is the latest of DBR’s massive missives of darkly ominous and unsettling doom.

For this album, the band expanded to a quintet and five guest musicians also appear on various tracks. Disc 1, featuring three tracks labelled D, K and H, ranges from fairly soft and mellow music on D to hard-hitting repetitive loops of thick raw guitar slab, deep bass roar, shrill lead guitar drone solos and some rather strange gabbly gravel-toned Popeye vocals on K. Tension accumulates slowly, inexorably and unbearably on this long piece as the musicians conjure up the strange mystery ritual through the rhythms, the momentous pauses and the incantations. Release when it comes turns out to be no relief. Track H seems superfluous at this point but by itself is an imposing if sometimes relentlessly monotonous blunt-edged piece.

On Disc 2, also featuring just three tracks (this time labelled M, N and L), M is a mellow and quite trippy journey in inner space with woozy whirl-about space effects and less sludgey though still lumbering rhythms and melodies. The vocals can be more robotic than must have been intended originally and the music could be a bit softer and more subtle; at this point the repetition is quite hard to bear. Track N is heavy-going in its first half but explodes into a chaotic jam session later on. Final track L has a jazzy approach in combining irregular drumming, a repetitive rhythm and multi-tracked vocals shrouded in echo.

On the whole this double set is solid and consistent: some songs can be too repetitive and monotonous and in a couple of tracks the best part is saved for the second half or the last third of the piece after never-ending loops of head-bashing guitars-n-drums chunk. The general tone is very orderly, perhaps too much so for this kind of music which is supposed to promise release beyond the physical limitations of this world. There is plenty of space in the music which allows all individual instruments to be heard.

I’d have liked to hear more experimentation and improvisation throughout the album; a slightly more chaotic approach, teetering on delirium, would have suited the ritualistic nature of the music and added a transcendental element. As it is, DBR’s approach puts it in the same camp of psychedelic doom drone music as bands like Bong, Bongripper and early Electric Wizard.

Contact: Svart Records, info@svartrecords.com

October 10, 2013

Maru Sankaku Shikaku (Circle Triangle Square): long shamanistic rituals of free-form experimentation

Maru Sankaku Shikaku (Circle Triangle Square), self-titled, Bamboo BAM3CD7010 (2013)

Long dormant artifacts from the halcyon days of Seventies Japanese trippy hippy psychedelia, three albums recorded by a group of travelling troubadours Maru Sankaku Shikaku have been bundled into a big set and made available to interested folks beyond the shores of Nippon. Led by Sakuro “Kant” Watanabe, the band travelled around Japan in the early 1970s performing publicly as street performers and dossing down in sleeping bags and tents where need be.

The three discs convey the impression of long shamanistic rituals in which free-form and improvised music dominates. A lot of it sounds direction-less and perhaps it was intended to be. There are sometimes passages where the music seems to coalesce into something definitely rhythmic and acquires focus and purpose. In such sections, the music is surprisingly energetic and joyful, and the performers carry on and on for their lives until they’ve sucked the life out of the groove. Disc 1 in particular feels like the appetiser to the main course and dessert that will follow on succeeding discs: while certainly very active, it has the ambience of the musicians practising warm-up and preparation, and occasionally psyching themselves into their own private trances, in which they engage in mental and psychic space travel, in order to ready themselves for the main rituals. The mood is happy and exploratory, as performers experiment with various objects, some musical and others not so but pressed into service anyway, and play with them for as long as their attention is not distracted by the next toy available.

At this point it should be said that each disc, representing an individual album, is about 30 minutes long with just two tracks (each corresponding to one side of the original vinyl LP release) so it can be assumed that the music was originally intended to be continuous on each album. It could very well be that the albums are excerpts of one continuous jam session. Disc 2 begins rather alarmingly with a woman’s wordless ululations against accompanying drums and a guitar: neither instrument makes any coherent sense and both play against each other. The music is frantic with a restless animated zip: all instruments zing off at tangents and follow their individual journeys in often demented ways. Guitar especially scrabbles through a forest of blues tones and drums knock about constantly. Organ noodles and stutters about. Later a definite guitar melody develops and energy concentrates in the riffing. As on Disc 1, there is plenty of mucking about and curious experimentation for its own sake.

Disc 3 features faster, slightly more structured music as the performers get caught up in the mood of their moment and go for broke while the inspiration powers them. The singing is perhaps the most outstanding aspect here: the disc starts off with a male performer babbling away excitedly while jaunty piano follows him. The troupe is caught up in the vocalist’s mood and garbled, wordless singing continues more or less for the length of the album.

The whole set really is a musical universe unto itself; to say the performers were off with the fairies is an understatement to say the least. Probably the closest contemporary parallel would be the strange fey fairy folk ambient music scene that used to exist in Kyogle in northern New South Wales some years ago. The music takes its inspiration from free-form jazz without appearing jazzy at all. What became of the performers after they recorded their five albums is unknown but if they knew their body of musical work has survived down to the present, they would surely be overjoyed. A new generation of listeners can finally discover the performers’ strange rituals and journeys to another world for themselves.

After forty years, the music remains fresh and as loopy as it must have been at the time. My copy of the set is a digitally remastered one and the hiss and crackle of the original vinyl do not appear.

October 7, 2013

Shemonmuanay: a unique fusion of Ethiopian folk music / jazz and two generations of Western music technology

Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, Shemonmuanay, New York, Awesome Tapes From Africa, CD ATFA 006 (2013)

First released on cassette in 1985, this album is a quirky one-of-a-kind recording made by Ethiopian accordionist / keyboardist / former Ethio-jazz band leader Hailu Mergia in Washington DC after he settled in the States. The release was intended by Mergia as a nostalgic homage to the accordion music he remembered from his youth. Eleven instrumental tracks draw on Mergia’s native Amharic and Oromo folk music traditions and melodies to combine with Moog synthesiser, electric piano, accordion and rigid machine-generated rhythms: the result is highly atmospheric and evocative sinuous music that touches the ground very lightly but is, at one and the same time, exotic and smoky, futuristic and questing, fleeting and impermanent. I can see why the Buda Musique compilers of that otherwise perfect Ethiopian historic jazz music library series Ethiopiques give this album a wide berth: “Shemonmuanay” isn’t exactly bursting with fire, energy and a robustly positive attitude drinking deeply of the brief liberation Ethiopia experienced in the twilight years of the Emperor Haile Selassie in the mid-1970s – instead the album seems to look wistfully back to an age of glamour in some tracks and on others muses on the impermanence of things as they are, and perhaps of life itself.

The album begins with the title track which is a slightly sinister, sultry piece that might have been lifted from a soundtrack to a spy film set in Algeria or Morocco during World War II or in Vietnam in the 1950s (Michael Curtiz’s famous “Casablanca” film or Phillip Noyce’s “The Quiet American”?), so languid yet so bewitching and hot in atmosphere it feels. “Laloye” is an odd mix of wistful accordion nostalgia, crisp sharp electronic beats and sunny laid-back rhythms. There is something about this track and a few others on this album that may resonate with listeners from east Asian countries like China, Japan and Korea: there is a definite air of quiet “c’est la vie” resignation about things and memories that have receded into the past and which can never come back.

“Wegene” might well have arrived from the early Seventies period from a parallel Earth, in which soul, funk and psychedelia combined to produce a futuristic soundtrack for laid-back citizens of a rich sub-Saharan country, one which in our world is dirt poor and plagued by a series of Third World dictators, a humongous debt and an economy in thrall to distant foreign corporations. “Hari Meru Meru”, one of the few songs to feature vocals (even if they are wordless) is a dreamy instrumental poem of winding accordion melody, lightly boppy synth-drum beats and melancholy electric piano: if I didn’t know that it was the brain-child of an Ethiopian musician, I could have sworn it was an old Chinese folk melody because the tunes have that oddly trilling, throwaway quality.

Some later tracks are a little fussy and the drawback of using quite rigid machine rhythms and beats becomes apparent: the music on some pieces sounds like excerpts of much longer, continuous melody and rhythm pieces that have no beginning and no end. “Hebo Lale”, another track with wordless vocals, has a wonderful wide-eyed and innocent ambience that reminds me of Amon Duul’s “Tanz der Lemminge” album that I haven’t played in a while: cheery accordion melody waltzes about with skippetty electric piano and equally joyful analog synthesiser lines. The album closes with the easy-going “Shilela” which is equal parts dreamboat nostalgia, soulful funk and utopian space lounge music.

This is really very beguiling music, all the more so because it was created during a period when musicians were switching over from live instruments and analog synthesisers to drum machines and other newer studio technology and methods of creating and recording music so there was considerable overlap between two different generations of music and music recording technology. “Shemonmuanay” is a snapshot of that brief crossroad period against a background of Ethiopian pop and folk music that may have been dying out at the time as well. The album, Janus-like, looks forwards to machine-driven music and backwards to a lost time-zone of highly emotional and sultry mood music. I hope that this reissue brings some attention to Hailu Mergia and restores him to his rightful place as a music pioneer in fusion music; according to information on the CD reissue sleeve, he’s working as taxicab driver at Washington DC’s Dulles International airport. Not a great outcome for an artist who single-handedly created a minor classic but worse things have happened to other musicians and artists unfortunate enough to have come within the radar sights of tyrannical governments in their countries.

October 1, 2013

A cornucopia of fusion black metal / psychedelia / horror-film soundtrack music on the Rhinocervs label

Rhinocervs, RH-08: Untitled 1 & 2 (2011); RH-07 (2011); RH-11 (2011); RH-12 (2012), RH-13 (2012)

In early 2013, I stumbled across several bands based in southern California that belonged to a network known as the Black Twilight Circle: these groups play fusion black metal / psychedelia shot through with elements of death metal and ambient, and often inspired by aspects of Mexican indigenous cultures, in particular Aztec and Mayan mythologies and beliefs. I have done some reviews already of cassettes released by a few of these bands (Blue Hummingbird on the Left, Kuxan Suum, Muknal) which were released on the now-defunct Crepusculo Negro label. At about the same time, I became aware of another couple of guys involved with the Black Twilight Circle folks who run a music project and a label under the name of Rhinocervs (sic). All the music these two fellows perform, either singly or as a duo, and sometimes with guest musicians, under the Rhinocervs project is released through the label and the albums, issued on cassette tape, carry only the catalogue numbers as their titles. So far I’ve heard five albums, all fairly short, and often featuring cover artwork of a sinister nature, suggesting a view of the universe as something indifferent and perhaps malevolent and hostile towards humanity.

I’d say the best introduction to Rhinocervs the project and Rhinocervs the label is RH-13, a blistering and furious storm of blast-beat deathened black metal. Wildly deranged scrabbly guitar careens madly throughout and drums are just barely about to keep up banging away. The vocals, shrouded in reverb, seethe with evil and aggression: just as well I have no idea what the daemon vocalist is complaining about, else I’d be hiding in a self-made underground bunker in fear of hordes of aliens soon to descend on planet Earth to battle a resurgent army of tentacled titans from beneath Antarctica. As the tape continues on – or rather, burns a hole through your consciousness – the wild insanity ratchets up to a higher, more hyper-manic level. Quite amazing that the Rhinocervs guys can maintain such a level of intense emotion and aggression, and on top of that add some horror-movie ambience. The listening experience can be exhausting as later tracks include psychedelic experimental effects in addition to the fast-paced and brutal music; the all-instrumental final track is sure to blow most listeners’ minds through its sheer demented and dissonant drone-guitar genius. One gazes at the tape’s front-cover sleeve with its apocalyptic fireball slamming into a roof and imagines the agony denizens of the humble hut must feel on being instantly deep-fried into over-sized nuggety schnitzel pieces.

My personal favourite of the Rhinocervs tapes is RH-07, a dark creep-fest of horror-movie soundtrack black metal / psychedelia fusion. The general drift is towards a highly atmospheric and monumental epic music with choirs, frequent use of effects and a sense of tragic majesty. Tracks are often short and cut off abruptly, giving the impression of being movie-trailer pieces cut out from a long and sprawling movie soundtrack that might stretch over a trilogy of films. The range of music varies from fast blast-beat black / death to slower doomy metal with strong atmosphere and emotion. The vocals are often outstanding in their general slavering reptilian quality.

RH-11 isn’t far behind RH-07 in its magnificent if deranged perversity: blast-beat black metal, drenched in hellish inimical space-ambient psychedelia effects and accompanied by delirious drunken singing, rockets along as though black existential nihilism were about to vote itself out of existence in the next five minutes. (An entire musical industry sincerely hopes not.) The gopher-it approach is so extreme and wacky that all songs blessed by it zap off into blinding radioactive greatness and stay there forever. Tragedy, majesty, anguish and a sense of oncoming overwhelming disaster in the face of which one is utterly helpless and can’t help but be terrified can all be found here. The recording is highly immersive and if you’re a normal human being with the full range of emotions, you can’t help but be swept away in a maelstrom of high emotional drama.

It seems impossible that the Rhinocervs guys would score a hat-trick in popping out tapes of music so goofy and extreme that they fall through the back-door into essential listening but RH-12, coming right after RH-07 and RH-11 in the series (there being neither RH-09 nor RH-10 at this time of writing and RH-08 being released before RH-07), completes a trilogy of out-there fusion black metal / space-ambient psychedelia. This tape is much noisier and trance-like than its predecessors; the contrast of guitar-generated noise buzz with darkly sinuous lead guitar jewel tones can really turn a listener’s head inside out. At points throughout the recording, the singing can be as death-rattle dry and inhuman as fellow US blacksters Njiqahdda used to manage in their early career. An atmosphere of evil pervades the album as the demented music approaches speed-of-light dimensions in its pace.

Let’s roll back to the first Rhinocervs release RH-08: Untitled 1 & 2, a raw punky black metal / thrash affair with variable production; some songs are clear and others have a muddied sound, suggesting that parts of the album were recorded at different times and in different places. It’s possible that for each track, a different set of musicians features with either one of or both the regular Rhinocervs men the common denominator. Raw energy and enthusiasm power the music: on some tracks the drumming is powerful and there is a distinctive fast-paced lead guitar sound that borders on manic without falling into the extremes achieved by other Rhinocervs work. For this reason, those angels among us that fear to tread where fools have long disappeared will find this early release an ideal introduction to Rhinocervs and the Black Twilight Circle generally. As the album proceeds, the music dives into delirious space psychedelic territory with spaceship loads of energy to spare and the second half of the recording is far superior than the first half in style and variety of music.

I don’t know much about Rhinocervs apart from knowing that one of the duo also has a solo black metal project called Tukaaria. Folks interested in finding out more and ordering some of their releases and other bands’ releases can contact them at this link. As the label is small, some of the tapes may have small print runs and might already be sold out. Perhaps some time in the future, when the Black Twilight Circle bands register higher in the public consciousness than they do now, these Rhinocervs releases might be repackaged as compilations. They are certainly worth hunting down for their sheer verve and energy.

Rhinocervus Soundcloud page

August 23, 2013

Abrahadabra: a dark black metal / shoegazer pop album of despair and foreboding

Circle of Ouroborus, Abrahadabra, Kuunpalvelus, LP (2012)

One of my favourite Finnish bands, the black metal / shoegazer post-rock duo Circle of Ouroborus has been prolific over the last several years and in 2012 alone released two studio albums, several EPs, a split album and a compilation album. “Abrahadabra” is the second of the two studio full-lengths; the title is a reference to the musicians’ interest in the occult and magic, the word being made up of one vowel appearing five times and six consonants, making a total of 11 letters. (In 2011, an album “Eleven Fingers” was released.) The recording under review sees CoO in their melodic dark depressive black metal pop mode with plenty of despair expressed in the lyrics. The band’s style just about bleeds melancholy and a dark feeling of foreboding: the music is often very doomy, vocalist Antti Klemi half-sings / half-chants like a lone Cassandra warning of trouble ahead and the texture of the music and instrumentation has a forlorn air.

The sound of the album is less muddy and steamy than some of the band’s previous work and the drums are actually very crisp to the extent of dominating the music at times. Klemi’s voice, touched with reverb as ever, still sounds awkward but he hits the notes spot-on. The guitars have a slight buzzy sound but the clouds they form are light.

To be honest, no great melodies or riffs hit me on the first hearing and it’s with subsequent repeats that the album’s charms start to dawn on me. “These Days and Years to Kill” is a cry for understanding and empathy if not for help, and on this song at least Klemi finally finds an emotional depth and range in his singing that took a long time over the band’s career to coax and nurture. “Remembrance” is a slower, heavier, doomier track and might be the most metal-sounding song. “Six Hands” has an otherworldly air: Klemi’s voice is dreamy and almost floating away, and the entire song, starting with the beguiling long introduction, is urging listeners to drift away into a trance with it. For once there is a backing vocal as though Klemi’s soul has split into two and a part of it is already advancing into a realm of non-existence.

A couple of reviews I’ve seen rate “Like Silent Meadows” highly and it has a good riff in parts but otherwise it seems no different from the rest of the album. “Dementia Praecox” is the album’s longest track at 9 minutes and it’s more distinctive than the others in its rhythms and beats

I’d rate this album as fairly good but not near the band’s best. Klemi’s singing is sometimes monotonous across songs and the minimalist style of music basically serves as backdrop for the singing and lyrics. The dark melodic post-BM music rarely ventures away into another music genre. Still, CoO followers are nothing if not a devoted bunch and the band’s releases always sell very well so if TSP readers are keen on buying this album, they had better hit the Kuunpalvelus link quickly. The album cover artwork has a dreamy, mystical appearance that might have a secret message behind it.