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Nisennenmondai B2
‘Nisennenmondai are an instrumental trio from Tokyo, with a raw and danceable sound influenced in equal measure by post-punk, no wave, krautrock, free jazz and disco. The group is formed by Masako Takada on guitar, Yuri Zaikawa on bass and Sayaka Hime on drums and first began in 1999 taking their name from the Japanese translation of the then dreaded Y2K bug. Their visceral and unique on stage performances have won over many touring Western groups, like those of Lightning Bolt, Battles and No Age. Their dynamic live shows are 100 % human, in which the band slowly constructs their tracks with slight variations and loops. The result is crazy, so perfectly repetitive that it in many cases it can sound like techno. John Stanier (the authoritative Battles drummer) said that after seeing them perform, he felt that his own group were reduced to a bunch of idiots.’ — Sonar
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Signor Benedick the Moor Lecherous, Senseless, Debauchery
‘Signor Benedick the Moor has created an album that is cinematic in scope yet personal in feel. It’s rich, dense, political, introspective, humorous, and profound. Musically, El Negro refuses to sit still and be pigeonholed. It takes you into its world, letting you believe you are heading one way before a disorientating switch in direction leaves you disorientated yet ecstatic. Signor leads you down the rabbit hole into his warped yet magical Wonderland, always encouraging you to peep around corners and explore paths that fill you with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Lyrically, El Negro is sheer brilliance. Never falling into cliché, Signor displays an extreme intelligence, contemplating religion, modern philosophy, and modern day slavery (this is all just on the staggeringly brilliant Existential Humanitarianism as a Fashion Choice). El Negro is is another leap forward sonically and lyrically in Hip-Hop following in the illustrious shoes of Fear of A Black Planet, The 36 Chambers, and Operation Doomsday.’ — Louder than War
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Marcus Schmickler & Julian Rohrhuber Aleph 0
‘Following an hypothesis according to which “Music and Economics share a fundamental object: number”, Schmickler and Rohrhuber’s project POLITIKEN DER FREQUENZ circles around the acoustic rendering of number concepts. Inspired by Alain Badiou’s Le Nombre et les Nombres and accompanied by mixed choir, the piece attempts to question the apparent immediacy of number that allows calculation to govern today’s economy, social sciences and everyday life. “Change, flexibility, and movement are considered desirable today, while the static, rigid, and unchanging tends to be met with reservation or is implicitly opposed. Movement, perhaps even chaotic movement, or some form of change of the change of the change, appears promising: it suggests the invention of the new, rather than the discovery of the already-there, it is taken as the core of the revolutionary, or at least of the progressive. The unchanging, then, is only a brittle ladder to be used and then thrown away, a dead tool that merely points to life, or even a conservative prison of standardization. By consequence, what seems to exist in movement and nothing more, indeed appears in a favorable light: sound.’ — Editions Mego
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Locust Just Want You
‘Mark Van Hoen’s compulsively hypnotic beats and abstracted pop vocals have been hallmarks of his collected work since 1993, manipulating a global variety of samples in Celemony’s Melodyne software to weave a unique sonic tapestry, as inviting as it is intricate. Paired with Louis Sherman’s evocative synth improvisations — an immediately visceral element new to Locust — these collaborators have crafted a shattered landscape that bridges two persectives of progressive movement in electronic music under a single name. Sherman, an American from Baltimore, comes to the band armed with a vast knowledge of the history of electronic music. This, combined with Londoner Mark Van Hoen’s known musical pedigree maps the complete topography of a landscpape—its shadow and light, depth and height, mesmerizing complexity and ethereal simplicity—with a break-beating heart and alchemical ear.’ — collaged
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Gezan 癲癇する大脳たち
‘Across years of incendiary live performances, the Japanese noise lords/ bar band from hell/ death squad has amassed a cult following, and count Ruins mastermind Tatsuya Yoshida, Melt Banana shred god Ichirou Agata, and Acid Mothers Temple honcho Kawabata Makoto among their vocal advocates. The press copy for their upcoming album It Was Once Said To Be A Song, due March 25 from the ever-next-level Important Records, features a quote from Merzbow: “Gezan is awesome.” Uhhhhh ‘nuff said?’ — Tiny Mix Tapes
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Sarah Angliss Hugo
‘A composer, performer and sound historian, Sarah Angliss taps into her obsessions with scientific oddities, obsolete machines, faded variety acts and the darkest European folk tales to create her work. Sarah’s music mixes her own software patches (using Max/MSP, Supercollider, PRAAT and other tools) with her samples, field recordings and live performance on theremin, saw, recorder, waterphone, keyboard, handbells and other instruments. On stage, she’s often accompanied by musical automata – machines she’s been devising and building since 2005 as she’s been seeking a more theatrical alternative to the laptop, sampler and loop pedal.’ — sarahangliss.com
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Rustie Velcro
‘Russell Whyte’s debut album Glass Swords was all about maximalism—big melodies, high production values and sprawling, prog rock-inspired compositions. But then came “Slasherr,” which compressed that symphonic scale into a few well-timed drops. It took a page out of the mainstream EDM playbook, and it rocks dance floors of all kinds even two years after its release. That’s more or less how the Glaswegian operates on Green Language. All that chest-beating guitar excess is squished into explosive blasts of powerful pop and rap, held together by cinematic interludes. Compared to its predecessor, Green Language is a compact record, but it still finds a way to show every side of Whyte—some EDM pyrotechnics here, a bit of hip-hop there and some hints at the old days for good measure.’ — Resident Advisor
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Gut Und Irmler Früh
‘500mm is a nine-track collaborative LP from Krautrock legend Joachim Irmler and Gundrun Gut. Irmler a founder member of legend krautrock band Faust and a few years ago he sayed ““For more than a decade, I have been following a concept that merges electronics and percussion, and most of the collaborations were solely among men” and “I wanted to break with that and asked Gudrun if she would like to complement my organ improvisations”. And now duo recorded the album Faust’s studio in Scheer and they have released “Früh” track of new album 500mm and the video made by Gudrun herself.’ — Brainwashed
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Bardo Pond Without a Doubt
‘We’re all in the fine art installation field. We’re kinda installation technicians. We work at museums. John [Gibbons] has got a full-time job at a museum in Delaware. I’m working at a museum in Philadelphia as an installer and Clint [Takeda] does the same thing. He has a gig at the airport actually ‘cos they have a bunch of public art so he’s got a position over there. Isobel is also an artist and is doing this kind of work. Jason [Kourkonis] is as well. So we’re all involved in the art world. Most of us had art backgrounds and stayed in it and we found that niche and strangely enough we all ended up doing that as a day job and it’s turned into our regular jobs. It’s just reality, y’know, it’s just reality.’ — Bardo Pond
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Shxcxchcxsh Entering The S-Cloud
‘SHXCXCHCXSH’s early releases fell on the more experimental end of functional techno and a typically opaque image, but as time has worn on, it has been the music itself that separated them from the pack, more so than their rare robed public appearances and insistence on shrouding their identities. Being the most experimental producers on the Avian label is itself no small feat, and their debut album Strgths separated them from the label’s other output and even from their own previous 12″s by shifting the focus towards evolving, thickly layered sounds rather than the blackened pounding the imprint made its name with. Even compared to their debut LP, Linear S Decoded is a marked change in direction and the furthest the artist or label has ever come from the gloomy basement atmosphere that still defines much of its output. The new album still has plenty of murk and shadowy atmospheres throughout, but it is tempered with some of the first melodies ever seen on any Avian record and frequent moments of respite and beauty, again rare both on the label and the artists’ back catalogue. If the duo had previously applied their detailed grasp of layers and composition to darkly narrative tracks, here they allow the first signs of brightness in with startling results.’ — collaged
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Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet Anger Alert
‘Each of Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet’s respective discographies are so varied that this record could’ve gone many of a couple dozen different ways, but rather than forming an opinion beforehand on which direction you’d like it to take, let them guide you through The Abyss as Virgil led Dante through the Inferno. Sounds of birds in the wild. Harsh noise walls. Organs and warped tape loops. Dark, blood-stained field recordings and spine-stabbing sine tones. Glitch fests. Haunting vocals and sustained Nurse With Wound-evoking pedal effects. Barely audible bass drones. A bleakness that however subtle is gorgeous in its synthy simplicity. The harsh tearing sounds of gaff tape about to be wrapped around your head. A curious anomaly: a warped rock song appears at the threshold of hearing, then disappears, reappears, and ultimately ceases to exist forever. I wonder if everyone hears a different song. Maybe this is an echo of your own personal past. Will we ever really know?’ — ad hoc
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The Shitty Listener Walk on with Her
‘For those new to the Shitty Listener, it’s not really a band, instead it is one man, Jason Honea, from from the Jewelled Antler outfits The Child Readers and the Franciscan Hobbies, as well as the Chord Fort, the Knit Separates and Teenage Panzercorps. The sound is incredibly intimate and low fidelity. Mostly recorded on micro cassettes or handheld tape recorders, Honea incorporates tape hiss and whatever ambient sound happens to occur in the background, whether it’s a plane flying by, a dog barking, the sound of crickets, it all just becomes part of the sound. And just like old Sebadoh tapes, the ch-chunk sound of the record or stop buttons being pushed, as well as weird warbles in the tape, become as much a part of the song as the song itself. Lilting melancholy piano, gentle acoustic guitar strum, and not much else support Honea’s warbly falsetto, plaintive and emotive, always way down in the mix, a sort of drifty fuzzy dreamy melody within each song. But that’s more than enough.’ — persephassa.com
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Vessel Red Sex
‘On Punish, Honey, Seb Gainsborough aka Vessel has realised this desire for tactility. His approach to the album’s production resembles that of a Foley artist, with most of the album’s sounds created with a number of handmade instruments. But equally, the album seems to be a deconstruction of that approach. On the opening track ‘Febrile’, the first crash of cymbal comes after 12 seconds of silence: jolting and mocking us like a rimshot punctuating a joke at our expense. As the percussion comes to a crescendo, both muscle and metal are worked to their limits. In much the same way, the screeching and harsh string sounds – apparently created from handmade “harmonic guitars” – on tracks like ‘Drowned In Water And Light’ and ‘Kin To Coal’ give an immediate sense of the tension and force being applied to them. Gainsborough seems to be testing not only what his crude instrumentation can withstand, but also his listeners. For all the physical exertion though, the album sounds surprisingly sexless and apathetic at times. The suggestively titled ‘Red Sex’ turns out to be something of misnomer, the undulating pitch of its synth line rather more nauseating and sickly than carnal.’ — The Quietus
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Mister Lies Flood You
‘Mister Lies is the operational alias for producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nick Zanca. It was also the product of dorm-room insomnia, developing an odd family of friends in a city of strangers, and homesickness for places where one only feels homesick. Born in 1992 and raised by wolves in the suburban jungles of Connecticut, he learned to hunt his prey by means of basement shows and prolonged caffeine binges. Shortly after Zanca relocated to Chicago to attend school, he formed an pack with several other lone wolves aiming to create something greater. In the harshest parts of February winter in the Windy City; equipped with a laptop, several controllers and whatever instruments were lying around his congested dorm-room; he released his first EP anonymously before eventually revealing his identity making rounds across the blog circuit. In May 2014, Zanca announced via his Twitter that Brooklyn-based label Orchid Tapes would release his second album, tentatively titled Shadow, in early fall.’ — collaged
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Iceage Forever
‘Iceage used to sound like a band unloading a dump truck’s worth of sonic sludge, with Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s sulky moan presaging the apocalypse. But their newest album, Plowing Into the Field of Love, features something completely different: They’ve traded vodka for whiskey and embraced the joy of country twang, a better backdrop for Rønnenfelt to channel his inner Nick Cave against. “I always had the sense that I was split in two” is the Cave-ian opening lyric of “Forever”, which begin with a slow, swaggering progression that quickly perorates toward a barroom brawl, Rønnenfelt’s voice growling in tortured ecstasy. “If I could dive into the other, I would lose myself forever” goes the chorus, and the tension as the band starts and stops and starts again before exploding into cacophony reminds you they’re still oh-so close to the edge.’ — Jeremy Gordon
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks! Oh, that comparison with ‘One from the Heart’ is really good. Cool Bill story. Everyone, writer and many other things including Mr. E’s main squeeze Bill Reed writes a bit about the legendary Dorothy Dean right here. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Cool, yes, agreed, of course. I don’t know if you ever saw that ltd. ed. zine that Gisele, Stephen, and I made a few years back about our ill-fated (so far) maze piece, but it was kind of all about the murder castle as role model. ** Kier, Hi, K. You sound a lot better today. I’m so happy to see that! Your co-worker returned?! Well, assuming she has been suitably shamed, maybe facing that shame day-to-day is the best lesson she could get? Anyway, your her co-workers’ support is really great, and I guess learning that they support you is the silver lining in that terrible incident hopefully. Sheep get hiccups? Wow, but, yeah, why wouldn’t they? Walking shoes are the best shoes. All my shoes are walking shoes whatever their designers had in mind for them. My day was pretty good. Uh, let’s see … oh, Larry Clark was doing this event thing here, which I guess he’s done in other cities, where he puts out a huge pile of every photo he has ever taken or something, and anyone can buy one of them for 100 Euros. He did it here in Paris yesterday at David Lynch’s club Silencio. Zac and Rico, who was here from Berlin to play “the singer” in the club scene we just shot, and I went to that event. First we ate burritos at Chipotle. Anyway, the line to get into Silencio was insanely long, and we met up with Kiddiepunk and Oscar B. there and waited for, like, an hour and a half with the line barely moving. And we realized that we’d be in line for four hours before we got in, so we decided, fuck this, and left. Then we all had coffee. Then K&O; went home, and Zac and Rico and I wandered around and got macarons and stuff. Then we all went home. I worked on stuff, set up a post-shooting Skype meeting with our producer and did research on Zac’s my Iceland trip. Then Rico and I wandered around and ate Thai food, and that was the day’s end. Yeah, celebration-wise, we’re going to gather all the performers who were in the film and who are around and have a big dinner next week. But, technically, we’re only halfway through making the film ‘cos the editing is going to take months, so it feels like the end but it’s only an end, I guess. Have a great weekend, Kier, and tell me all about it, please. ** Hyemin Kim, Hi. Oh, you moved! That’s exciting, isn’t it? Although your new roommate doesn’t sound like much fun at all. Hopefully she’s quiet and private, at least. Your Barthes work sounds beautiful, or at least it was beautifully described. How was the departmental party? Wind chimes! Wonderful, wow, thank you! Have a lovely weekend. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, shit, dehydration is awful. Hopefully you’re all juiced up again now. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, the murder castle post’s proximity to the ‘TMS’ construction was no accident. YnY! Nice to see that name again, and cool about the zine fair. There are few things nicer than a good zine fair. ** Rewritedept, Hi. Were there a lot of comedies on your list? I must have been spaced. Never liked Joan Rivers but, you know, RIP. Yeah, curious about the new Shellac. Even more curious about the new Aphex Twin and Iceage and Locust. The editing will be a taxing thing, but, at the same time, very exciting, and, hey, what can you do? You really are going to take your boss to court? Wow, that sounds like the opposite of fun. But yeah. Dude sounds like he deserves it. I’m going to Stateside for the ‘Kindertotenlieder’ shows at least, and maybe otherwise, I’m not sure yet. You have a fine weekend! ** Bill, Hi, B. Sneak peek as soon as the okay happens. Awesome about the gig! Any video or audio forthcoming? ** Right. I’m filling your weekend time here with a gig. As always, there’s great stuff in there that I highly recommend to you. Have weekends of note both here and elsewhere. See you on Monday.
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